Something very strange happened in Pokémon Go today at the conclusion of a scheduled community day event: A mysterious, never-before-seen Pokémon spawned in the game, leading to confusion and speculation about what it means for Niantic and The Pokémon Company’s mobile title. In the Asia-Pacific region, at 3 p.m. in Japan, Pokémon Go’s community day event focused on the Pokémon Chikorita came to an end. Kecleon caught by players simply turn into Ditto. It could be another herald of forthcoming Ge

Madden NFL 19 delivered more improvements to its career mode, but they were largely of a technical and presentational nature. The first chapter of a narrative mode may have made its title seem like a breakthrough — Madden NFL 18 was our sports video game of the year for Longshot alone. Mike Young, the Madden creative director and co-writer of both Longshot chapters, was not sure his baby would get a second chapter when Madden NFL 18 launched. Every year these games include a story mode only hard

And it’s ironic that Shadow of the Tomb Raider doesn’t manage to do it, because 2013’s Tomb Raider did it perfectly. Your ethical maxim is “I deserve to live.” But Tomb Raider goes a step further than that, even. Tomb Raider shows you that all the island’s castaways get tossed into these caves, along with not enough food and not enough weapons. You can’t make your bad guys bad solely through collectible text files. And it made me miss the days of booting up Tomb Raider to feel like a consequence

Every Tomb Raider game plays with how tight it can get underground, and those previous games have all spiked my claustrophobia in a delightfully limited way, like watching a scary movie with a friend. Reader, I’ve had to take more than one break while playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider. It’s just one of the many times in the game that Croft has to navigate through an incredibly tight space while also being underwater. But you can’t stop and take a deep breath when you’re underwater. (And, if you

Earlier this month, The Hangover director Todd Phillips kicked off production on his still-untitled standalone Joker movie by revealing a photo of star Joaquin Phoenix — but it wasn’t your typical comic-book character unveiling. The image showed Phoenix in plain clothes, staring deadpan at the camera. On Instagram, the writer-director — who co-wrote the Joker film with The Fighter and The Finest Hours screenwriter Scott Silver — dropped another dispatch from set: screen test footage showing Phoe

This week’s The House With a Clock in Its Walls marks a departure for director Eli Roth, whose usual horror movies lean towards the bloody, R-rated gorefest genre. But The House With a Clock in Its Walls, based on a 1973 book by John Bellairs, isn’t without its scares, they’re just calibrated for the younger audience. The House With a Clock in Its Walls ditches bloody body parts and violent showdowns for a spoopier form of suspense. At the heart of it all — at the heart of most spoopy movies — i

Battle royale games are all about randomness. But as it turns out, that’s part of the fun of battle royale. Some of the most strategically demanding survival elements that add tension to battle royale games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds are completely absent here. Battle royale is at its best in these moments when the line between slapstick comedy and incredible skill is razor thin. This isn’t a fact exclusive to one battle royale game or another, they’re the chaotic excitement that makes t

In the end, Assassination Nation is a blistering yet effective exaggeration of our real-life dystopia in which self-professed young women are indicted because they challenge edicts that proclaim they should be maidenly and accommodating. note: This article contains mild spoilers for Assassination Nation.] Assassination Nation piles triggers on the audience while also forcing them to reckon with an agitating theme: that empowered young women are subsequently victimized. Assassination Nation build

The time is right for a live-action Bleach movie. The anime adaptation came to a similarly abrupt close in 2012 and, despite 300-plus episodes, was unable to cover all the source material. So while the Bleach heyday has long passed, nostalgia and curiosity make it the perfect discovery for Netflix, where Warner Bros. Japan’s live-action Bleach movie has now premiered. Bleach joins the Japanese Fullmetal Alchemist and the American whitewashed Death Note for questionable adaptations of good, popul

Most of Tokyo Game Show 2018’s big AAA announcements — like the reveal of Sony’s PlayStation Classic — happened ahead of the show. With few new demos from the big-name publishers, the show’s indie games have rightfully grabbed the spotlight. Rival Megagun is the most fun we had at Tokyo Game Show 2018 — even though it wasn’t technically on the show floor. If you’re looking for something to play right now , check out Polygon Essentials — that’s our collection of persistently updated lists of the

Swery and publisher Arc System Works brought the game to Tokyo Game Show, where we played a trio of levels together. Swery and his studio White Owls are injecting some of the developer’s signature quirks into The Missing. Throughout the game, J.J. will have conversations over text message with her stuffed animal F.K. It’s a simple set up for what appears to be a very strange game that feels steeped in Swery’s peculiar sense of style. The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories is out s

So far, the lead-up to Fortnite’s sixth season feels a bit more sedate than the events that brought us season 5, but it’s also nice to have a big, bouncy lake in the game now. Either way, Epic Games has confirmed that season 6 will begin next Thursday, Sept. 27. That’s a nice incentive to play some matches over the weekend. The game’s lore seems like it has slowed down a bit this season, but new mysteries could pop up at any time between now and the launch of the new season. Players who are tryi

Battlefield 5’s open beta wrapped up 10 days ago, and developers from EA DICE today discussed how feedback from it will help them adjust the game’s multiplayer before the game’s launch in November. For starters, attrition — this is where players have limited ammunition and cannot fully regenerate health — will need tweaks to what players start with on spawn, developers said. Developers are considering more ammunition and a medpack on spawn, and a higher maximum ammo capacity to help users last l

The livestream platform Twitch is no longer available in China. After a surge in popularity last month among esports fans, this week the Twitch app was abruptly removed from the iOS App Store in China, leaving fans in the lurch. Twitch has confirmed to Polygon that it is aware of the situation. At least one popular game, Monster Hunter: World, had its license revoked days after launch. Tencent’s stock price fell dramatically on the news that Monster Hunter’s license had been revoked, while NetEa

WWE 2K19’s career mode will more resemble the career mode of its NBA 2K sibling, in that players will start out with a long preamble chapter telling the story of their wrestler’s rise before embarking on a more open-ended performance schedule. The latest trailer from 2K Sports does a great job of setting expectations for this improved career approach, which includes fully voiced characters and meaningful drop-ins from WWE names. WWE 2K18 launched with similar promises for its career mode, but re

Telltale Games, developer of licensed adventure games such as the Walking Dead series, Game of Thrones and Batman, has laid off most of its staff, with the intention of closing down the studio. The final season of the Walking Dead game launched this year. The studio was built from the DNA of LucasArts, another studio that led the way in making games with quirky, meaningful storytelling. Despite the highs of The Walking Dead seasons and The Wolf Among Us, recent superhero retellings and other pro

The Eternals are a relatively obscure group of Marvel Comics characters. But the Eternals have one major tie to the current Marvel Cinematic Universe: Thanos. Jim Starlin, who created Thanos, admits that he was heavily inspired by Jack Kirby’s work on the New Gods. Thanos was written into Marvel Comics as a member of the Titan race while Kirby was working for DC. After he returned and created the Eternals, Starlin’s Titans were retconned to be a splinter group of Eternals who left Earth to live

Final Fantasy 13’s name turned out to be surprisingly prophetic, at least for director Hajime Tabata. Initially, he served as director on Final Fantasy Agito 13 (which eventually shipped as Final Fantasy Type-0), then he moved along to take lead on Versus 13 once it became 15. “The end of Final Fantasy 15. I’ve never heard of anyone playing a live-action RPG version of Final Fantasy 15, so maybe that’s a cause for concern. Or the entire Final Fantasy franchise, for that matter.”LARPing would cer

We’d gotten a number of requests to turn our Final Fantasy 7 oral history feature into a book, and we thought it seemed like a fun experiment. Since then, we’ve been churning through the details, putting together what we’re calling 500 Years Later: An Oral History of Final Fantasy VII. And as of today, we’re happy to announce that the book is done, starting to arrive into backers’ hands and available for purchase. Final Fantasy 7: An oral history Today, it sits above a Doutor coffee shop a few d

Polygon: The Dragon Prince team has spoken about the importance of building an inclusive fantasy world. Did you set out to ensure you had a deaf character in this universe, or how did that come about? And she’s a deaf character — we wanted it so that understanding what she’s communicating here is for the deaf audience. Devon: Because we didn’t initially have Amaya as a deaf character, Gren was originally a lieutenant—and looking back, we had made him maybe more comic relief than we should have.