It's unlikely that the fate of a company as large as Ubisoft will hinge on the success of one tentpole single-player game. But the company cannot afford another major error anytime soon after the likes of Star Wars: Outlaws and XDefiant failed to set the world alight. Ubisoft desperately needs a big hit (and for the Rainbow Six Siege X overhaul to go well). The good news for the company is that Assassin's Creed Shadows is poised to deliver on that. On the surface, it's exactly what you'd expect: a massive Assassin's Creed game that takes dozens of hours to beat. There's so much to do beyond the core story, given all the missions and sidequests that the game constantly points you towards.

I've been wondering why everyone seems so hyped on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. It's the debut game from Sandfall Interactive, an independent French studio with fewer than 30 employees, and it's attracted massive partnerships in video games and film over the past five years. Expedition 33 has a high-profile cast of voice actors, including Andy Serkis, Charlie Cox, Shala Nyx and Jennifer English. It received an Epic MegaGrant in 2022, it was picked up by Pacific Drive publisher Kepler Interactive in 2023, and it was a tentpole of Xbox's first showcase of 2025. Even though the game isn't out until April, Story Kitchen has already signed on to turn it into a live-action film.

It's no secret that the video game industry is struggling. The last two years have seen more than 25,000 redundancies and more than 40 studio closures. Thanks to game development's spiralling costs (blockbuster titles now cost hundreds of millions to make), overinvestment during the Covid-19 pandemic, and a series of failed bets to create the next money-printing "forever game", the pressure for blockbuster games to succeed is now higher than ever. It's a predicament that feels especially pertinent for Ubisoft. Employing in the region of 20,000 people across 45 studios in 30 countries, its most recent big licensed games Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws underperformed commercially.

At the close of Metal Gear Solid 4, just after Snake pulverises Liquid Ocelot, there is series of cutscenes that never ends. It does end – after 71 minutes – it's just that I've never watched that far. I understand that the game's director Hideo Kojima is a committed cinephile who has drawn much of his inspiration from movies, but I don't care. Those are minutes of my life I'll never get back. I think it's time we retired the whole convention.

Many ideas start on paper, few go on to be made of it. Yet, when brothers Henry and Fred Hoffman, the duo behind Norwich-based Newfangled Games, sketched their level ideas for a new platformer and then began manipulating the A4 sheet in their hands, Paper Trail was born. The top-down puzzle adventure employs a spatial manipulation mechanic, allowing you to fold its planes and merge its sides to solve puzzles. You play as Paige (get it?), "We were thinking of ways we could manipulate the world, and randomly, we tried folding the paper," says Henry Hoffman, CEO and designer.

If the recent Jumanji film reboots have taught us nothing else – and they haven't – they have demonstrated how much fun there is to be had with dropping characters from our familiar world into outlandish fantasy settings. Forspoken has the same potential: its protagonist Frey is accustomed to the harsh realities of surviving in the scruffier corners of Hell's Kitchen, New York, and her problems gravitate around harbouring debts to petty criminals and remembering to feed her cat. So when Frey puts on a bracelet in an abandoned tenement for reasons best not examined too closely and she's transported into the quasi-medieval world of Athia, you think to yourself: here we go. It's a great fish-out-of-water setup that allows for witty observations about video game fantasy worlds and the bizarre tropes within them that we generally don't bat an eyelash at. And with a writing team including Uncharted's Amy Hennig and Rogue One co-writer Gary Whitta, expectations are pitched high.

Cutscenes form an integral part of many video games, but their creation is costly, time-consuming, and requires skills that many game developers lack. While AI has been leveraged to semi-automate cutscene production, the results typically lack the internal consistency and uniformity in style that is characteristic of professional human directors. We overcome this shortcoming with Cine-AI, an open-source procedural cinematography toolset capable of generating in-game cutscenes in the style of eminent human directors. Implemented in the popular game engine Unity, Cine-AI features a novel timeline and storyboard interface for design-time manipulation, combined with runtime cinematography automation. Via two user studies, each employing quantitative and qualitative measures, we demonstrate that Cine-AI generates cutscenes that people correctly associate with a target director, while providing above-average usability. Our director imitation dataset is publicly available, and can be extended by users and film enthusiasts.

The Oldest House is a maze of concrete and paperwork. It's a building full of secrets, stuffed top to bottom with government bureaucrats, some of whom are now host to an interdimensional plague. The Oldest House is an office building in the heart of New York City, but it's also a portal to everywhere and all the spaces between. It's a place where office drones file paperwork. It's a place where the U.S. government researches the "paranatural."

For 99 percent of people, Valkyria Chronicles 4 might as well be called Valkyria Chronicles 2. The first game was a captivating war story that blended top-down strategy with third-person movement and gunplay. The second, admittedly decent title was stuck on the PlayStation Portable and the third instalment never made it to the West. Sega tried to revive the franchise last year with Valkyria Revolution, an action-focused spin-off, but it was panned by critics and fans alike. A true successor to the 2008 original, has been an awfully long time coming. Based on a two-hour PlayStation 4 demo, I can say that Valkyria Chronicles 4 delivers on that simple goal.

Welcome back to Gaming IRL, a monthly segment where several editors talk about what they've been playing in their downtime. Gaming IRL is part of a broader series in which you'll find stories from all of the areas we cover: gadgets we use every day, the apps and services we adore, what we're watching and the music and podcasts we can't live without. Today is all about gaming. E3 is done and dusted for another year, but every year there are dozens of great games released, all of which are available right now. Fittingly, our picks this month range from a 1997 sim all the way up to a game that was released just today.