I’m playing Silk Song on my Switch 2 these days. The long-awaited 2D action adventure released yesterday at 10am ET, immediately crushing online game shops. Steam was down briefly, and I got three server errors from Nintendo’s eshop before I could pay $20 for the game.
I’m about four hours into Silk Song, having managed to make my hero Hornet effectively leap her way through a few of the game’s gorgeous underground insect-infested zones, battling beetles and other bugs with an upgraded needle. Best perk I found so far: Hornet can now walk on lava.
I put the game down this morning after several failed attempts to defeat a tricky sword-fighter named Lace:
By mid-day yesterday, more than half a million people were playing Silk Song on PC alone, with others on Switch, PlayStation and Xbox.
And they played it aggressively. Yesterday, when I checked the game’s Steam achievements, about 30% of its players had defeated Lace. This morning, that number was 48%. A few hours later, it’s up to 51%.
Silk Song plays well and looks beautiful. It sounds even better. The ground crunches underfoot. Overhead, bells ring. Entering a new room, I can hear chatter or singing from distant, yet-unseen enemies, an aural hint of the encounters to come. The gentle soundtrack by Christopher Larkin is also among the year’s best.
But that’s a game for me. I don’t think my 8 ½-year-old twins will also be playing Silk Song. Not quite their thing. Oh, but what is their thing? Would you believe…
My son’s game: Drag x Drive
One of the worst-reviewed Nintendo-made games in ages has become an obsession for my son, who asked me a week ago why there was an icon for a basketball game on the Switch 2. He’s now hooked.
Drag x Drive is a three-on-three game of wheelchair basketball, in which players wield each of the Switch 2’s controllers in mouse mode, dragging them back and forth on the seat of the chair they’re sitting on, as if propelling a real wheelchair. Then, lift a hand and flick to shoot the basketball.
Like many reviewers, I found Drag x Drive’s controls uncomfortable over time. My son does not. He doggedly swipes away for fast breaks, scrapes a single controller for a quick pivot, the fate of our couch cushions TBD. He’s comfortable, even energized by the controls.
Note: Drag x Drive has presented us with our second big physiological Switch 2 surprise. The first was that Donkey Kong Bananza makes my son nauseous. We realized this after we had to stop three separate play sessions over the course of a couple of weeks, due to him feeling unwell. The game, which does not make me queasy, was the only common factor. Apparently it’s not just him: 12% of respondents to this poll of nearly 3,000 people called Bananza nauseatingly “unplayable.” I asked Nintendo a month ago if they were aware of this issue or had any recommendations. No response yet.
The other knock on Drag x Drive from reviewers is that there isn’t much to it. There are some mini-games, but it’s mostly just three-on-three wheelchair basketball against humans or bots. And this….this is a great thing for my son and for me. He loads up Drag x Drive, enters the game’s “park” lobby and can simply play a match. His other sports gaming obsession, MLB The Show, on PS5, is full of menus and microtransaction promotions. With Drag x Drive, he can just play, without distraction.
He does get frustrated in offline matches against bots. Drag x Drive’s level 8 bots never miss a shot!
Against human players, however, he’s mostly having a good time. He’s even starting to score some style points with his baskets in the heat of competition.
I was not expecting this to grab his attention, even more-so than Mario Kart World, which he hasn’t touched in weeks. Who knew??
My daughter’s game: Is This Seat Taken?
Ever since she professed a preference for the dungeons instead of overworld exploration as we played The Legend of Zelda: Links Awakening, I understood my daughter to be a puzzle and strategy gamer. I don’t necessarily think she’s going to do cartwheels over playing the next Paradox game (not that she needs an excuse to do cartwheels), but when a new indie game arrives that requires a lot of thinking, especially about spatial placement, I call her over to give it a try.
This girl loves Unpacking. She loves A Little to the Left, too.
So, okay, it’s not a huge surprise that she’s been grabbing the Switch to work out the interactive seating arrangements in Poti Poti Studio’s Is This Seat Taken. But I’d been on a cold streak recommending games to her, so I was happy that this one kept her interest.
Each level of Is This Seat Taken presents players with a limousine, movie theater, train or some other space with lots of empty chairs. Flanking those vacant seats are people who have preferences. You need to seat them and, ideally, make them all happy.
This guy wants to sit alone.
This child wants to sit near another kid.
This guy will be watching the movie while wearing a view-obstructing hat.
She wants to steal someone’s popcorn.
He can’t bear sitting near anyone smelly.
Etc.
You don’t have to seat everyone perfectly, but if you do, you get special stars that unlock more levels. My daughter nailed the movie theater missions and unlocked a wedding.
The game controls with sticks/buttons or with touch. It plays on the old Switch, too. On PC, it runs well on Steam Deck.
It’s a superb debut game for Poti Poti, and a delight for my favorite cartwheeler.
Item 2: In brief…
🚫 Layoffs: Take Two’s revered Civilization strategy-game studio Firaxis has laid off a “dozens” of workers, Game Developer reports, impacting employees at multiple levels of the studio (Take Two/2K said Firaxis is “restructur[ing] and optimiz[ing] its development process for adaptability, collaboration, and creativity.” Take Two recently raised its financial projections for the year.); Dreamhaven, the studio founded by Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime, is laying off an undisclosed number of workers, mostly from its publishing team, per Morhaime’s LinkedIn, following tepid sales of its first games.
🎮 California: In December, I reported that nearly a third of 2024’s approximately 15,000 worldwide game industry job cuts that year were in California, according to Farhan Noor, a game developer who has been tracking industry layoffs.
This week, The Game Business featured an interview with industry layoff-watcher Amir Satvat, who shared an even more dire calculation: “over 50% of the cuts globally have been in California. California AAA is like the epicenter of the difficulty.”
California has a high amount of AAA developers, so it’s more susceptible to job to cuts. And the costs to develop games and employ people in the state are relatively high. Despite California’s deep talent pool, game companies are looking beyond the state for workers they can pay less.
As I noted in December, California’s government appears to be focused on tax credits for TV and movie productions. It doesn’t offer any special boosts for the games industry.
🏀 College basketball: Despite teases and hints, EA has decided not to make a college basketball game; 2K is proceeding with a college basketball “experience.”
The EA reversal was reported by Extra Points, citing a memo from an EA Sports exec that said the decision was based on some schools choosing to partner with 2K.
Extra Points reports that “2K would evaluate the viability of a standalone college basketball title, depending on the financial performance of college basketball DLC.”
👀 Roblox: Company leaders kicked off the annual Roblox Developers Conference with its own take on the game development ecosystem.
On Roblox, the company said, “thousands of independent creators globally [are] earning full-time job equivalents in their region” and that “we believe the majority of the top 1,000 experiences [in Roblox] were built by some of the smallest teams in the industry (with, on average, fewer than 10 people).”
Upcoming, newly announced features for Roblox’s user-developers include:
generative AI tools for Roblox creators to use to create interactive in-game objects. (The example given: “The user or creator can provide the prompt—“a sleek, futuristic red sports car”—and our API provides a functional, interactive car that can be driven.”)
…and AI-driven real-time translation of in-game voice chat, initially across English, Spanish, French and German.
Roblox is also improving the exchange rate for developers who cash out Robux into real money by 8.5%. The old rate: $0.0035 for every Robux earned. The new rate: $0.0038 per Robux.
💡 Nintendo: Bloomberg interviewed developers who used to work at Nintendo’s Japanese studios, to learn more about how the company makes great games. Here’s an excerpt from a developer who told Bloomberg he “secretly built a level for Pikmin 3 that was good enough to be adopted in the final game :
“The company culture, or whatever you’d call it, embraces people taking initiative,” [Ken] Watanabe, now an independent game creator, said. “For example, it’s not unusual for someone to secretly work on something without telling their boss — like, ‘I made this in secret’ — and then it turns out to be interesting, so it gets turned into a real product.”
🤔 Switch 2: The narrative around the Switch 2’s controversial Game-key Cards—physically sold Switch cartridges that just contain a key to unlock a downloadable copy of a game—took a twist this week, after a Ubisoft developer explained why his company chose to use a key card for the physical version of the new Switch 2 port of 2024’s Star Wars Outlaws, Kotaku reports.
Outlaws was originally made to run off of solid state drives in Xboxes, PlayStations and PCs, where game installation is mandatory these days and nothing runs right off the disc. During development of the Switch 2 version, Outlaws didn’t run well enough when streaming from a cartridge, Ubisoft’s Rob Bantin explained. For the desired quality, the game needed to run off of the Switch 2’s internal drive, they said, thus the key card approach that forces a download to the system’s drive (Apparently, Outlaws’ performance on Nintendo’s relatively weaker console is impressive.)
Side note: Thanks to gameplay patches mostly issued last year and the fact that it gets way better the more you play, Outlaws is highly recommended here at Game File.
Item 3: The week ahead
Tuesday, September 9
Little Problems (PC), a mystery game that looks to be The Curse of the Golden Idol minus the murder, is released.
Wednesday, September 10
Star Birds (PC) a base-building/planet-mining strategy game from Toukana Interactive, the studio behind the acclaimed and very chill Dorfromantik, is released. (I played the Star Birds demo and liked it a lot!)
Play Acclaim, an online showcase of upcoming games from revived game publisher Acclaim, will air at 2:30pm ET on YouTube.
Friday, September 12
Borderlands 4 (PC, PlayStation, Xbox; out later on Switch 2) and NHL 26 (PlayStation, Xbox) are released.
I would not have thought Bananza would have that nauseating effect. My wife and I were both done in by AstroBot last year. We thought there was a gas leak the way we were feeling! But nope. Just AstroBot.
Every studio has a developer working in secret on something cool. Those are often the best ideas, some of them are acts of defiance against production realities.