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Players’ Choice: Vote for March 2025’s best new game

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Last month we saw quite a few adventure games spring into action. What game from last month’s lineup was a fresh start? Some of the big new releases included Assassin’s Creed Shadows, MLB The Show 25, Hitman World of Assassination (PS VR2), and Split Fiction. 


How does it work? At the end of every month, PlayStation Blog will open a poll where you can vote for the best new game released that month. After the polls close we will tally your votes, and announce the winner on our social channels and PlayStation.Blog. 

What is the voting criteria? That’s up to you! If you were only able to recommend one new release to a friend that month, which would it be? Note: re-released games don’t qualify, but remakes do. We define remakes as ambitious, larger-scale rebuilds such as Resident Evil 4 (2023) and Final Fantasy VII Remake.

How are nominees decided? The PlayStation Blog editorial team will gather a list of that month’s most noteworthy releases and use it to seed the poll. 


Official PlayStation Podcast Episode 511: High Five

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Email us at PSPodcast@sony.com!

Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or download here


Hey, everybody! Sid, Kristen, Brett, and I are back this week to discuss the new take on Pac-Man Shadow Labyrinth, the wonders of hand-tracking in PlayStation VR2, what it’s like to learn how to walk in Baby Steps, and their most played games on PlayStation.

Stuff We Talked About

  • Next week’s release highlights:
    • Koira | PS5
    • Croc: Legend Of The Gobbos Remastered | PS5, PS4
    • The Last of Us Part II Remastered | PC
  • Shadow Labyrinth — Release Date (July 18 for PS5)
  • Into Black (PS VR2) — Announcement Blog (coming soon)
  • Masters of Light (PS VR2) — Hand-tracking update
  • Baby Steps — Hands-on report
  • Our top five most-played games on PlayStation
  • PlayStation Plus Monthly Games April
    • RoboCop: Rogue City | PS5
    • The Texas Chain Saw Massacre | PS5, PS4
    • Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth – Hacker’s Memory | PS4

The Cast

Share of the Week: Assassin’s Creed Shadows

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Last week, we asked you to take a leap into Assassin’s Creed Shadows and share epic moments of dual protagonists Naoe and Yasuke using #PSshare #PSBlog. Here are this week’s highlights:

TakaSanGames shares Naoe in traditional Assassin white, in front of the Hidden Ones symbol

Evo_Pixel shares Yasuke striking with his katana in the rain

domo_vp shares Naoe framed by candlelight

Yuric83 shares Yasuke in ornamental armor emerging from shadows

calisarah1998 shares Naoe approaching a large red gate

Milz_VP shares Yasuke wearing a samurai mask in the morning fog

Search #PSshare #PSBlog on Twitter or Instagram to see more entries to this week’s theme. Want to be featured in the next Share of the Week?

Baby Steps: hands-on report

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Baby Steps was first revealed to the world in June 2023, and upon first viewing it, I didn’t know what to think. Surprises are few and far between when you have been gaming for over 30 years, but the reveal trailer left me with perplexing emotions. I was in a mental tug-of-war between, ‘I’ve never quite seen something quite like this’ and, ‘Does this concept really have a leg to stand on?’ Well, after about an hour of playing the game, I was ten toes down.

The game starts with a snippet of exposition. You’re a grown man named Nate living at home, and without warning, you’re thrown into the game world. You’re taught how to walk and tasked with making it out of a cave that serves as the tutorial area, and then you take the first steps into the open world, with one goal in mind: make it to the mountain in the far off distance.

To the ends of the earth 

This wasn’t a mountain separated by cut-scenes and different hub areas, but a specific geographical goal I would have to advance to in real-time, creeping closer with every step. This realization swept me off my feet. 

“It started on a much smaller course,” Said Bennett Foddy, one of the creators of Baby Steps. “But just as a test, I made a level that was 100 meters wide, and it was immediately clear to us that that was going to make for much more interesting gameplay, involving strategic route-finding as well as tactical foot placement. And surely it wouldn’t be that hard to make an open-world game!”

Step-by-step

Once the shock of the world’s scope wore off, I instantly bypassed the direct route for something more interesting that caught my eye and headed for what appeared to be a carousel in the distance. Since there is no map or waypoints here, where you go depends on you as the player. With campfires in the distance serving as markers for the ‘true’ direction you should head toward. As I walked through mud, puddles, sticks, and stones, the DualSense controller features began to shine, as every texture was met with the appropriate sensation and the oddly satisfying crunch of the earth and other material under my feet. 

“There’s a cutting-edge experimental music system that works in sync with the walking sim,” Foddy said. “I think we’ve woven a pretty thought-provoking story from Nate’s situation as well. And the game is packed full of other surprises.” 

Since I breezed through the earlier tutorial and started making tracks through a bizarre, seemingly desolate carnival, I spied a mysterious object atop the carousel, which led me

Masters of Light: Hand Tracking update available now on PS VR2

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The wait is over! Masters of Light is now one of the first games to introduce full hand tracking on PlayStation VR2, pushing the boundaries of immersive gameplay like never before. As the creator of Masters of Light and co-founder of Coven, I’m beyond excited to bring this revolutionary update to PlayStation fans.

Learn specific gestures to teleport, block meteors and fight!

Harness magic with your own hands

Imagine stepping into the world of Masters of Light and casting spells with nothing but your hands—no controllers needed. This is the power of PS VR2’s new hand tracking technology, allowing you to unleash beams of light, summon shields, and control energy like a true celestial warrior. Every flick of your wrist, every precise movement, translates into real-time spellcasting, making battles feel more intuitive, immersive, and exhilarating than ever.

Masters of Light features high energy first person combat where focus, timing and strategy are keys to victory.

A new standard for immersion

When we first envisioned Masters of Light, our goal was to make players feel truly empowered. From the very beginning, we built our combat system around fluid, natural gestures—inspired by self defense moves. Now, thanks to PlayStation VR2’s advanced tracking capabilities, players can experience the game as we originally imagined: with pure hand movement, free from controllers.

Frantic hand tracking moves will keep you physically engaged in the fights. You WILL break a sweat!

The evolution of Hand Tracking in VR

At Coven, we’ve been developing hand-tracking games for years, pushing the technology forward with every project. Bringing this feature to PS VR2 was an incredible

Into Black announced for PS VR2

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Picture yourself stranded alone on an alien planet. With no-one around to help, and no-one coming to the rescue, your only salvation lies in the endless darkness of a sprawling cave system. Would you dare face the dangers that lurk in the dark?

Welcome to the world of Into Black, a VR action/exploration game about a deep space scavenger trying to repair his ship and escape a mysterious alien planet. You scour the caves for resources to upgrade your gear and rebuild your ship, all while fighting off hordes of deadly alien creatures.  

And while the game features a fully voice-acted story campaign, playable solo or in co-op with up to 3 friends, as well as a standalone battle royale mode, the true heart of Into Black is the sense of exploration as you navigate the darkness and uncover wonders and dangers beyond reckoning. 

PS VR2 owners will soon get to experience this sense of exploration first hand, but rest assured, this is no mere port. By utilising the power of the PS VR2 hardware, we’ve been able to reshape the world of Into Black into something truly next level. 

Let there be light

As the name implies, so much of Into Black is about the interplay of light and dark as they explore the underground expanse, so much so that one of the first items we give players is a torch. That exploration is now much more vivid and alive with the use of real-time shadows. 

Sweep your torch over a prowling insectoid grunt, and see its spider-like silhouette thrown up against the cave wall behind it. Observe inadvertent puppet shows as your co-op crewmates dash around, each with their own torch throwing its own shadows. The immersive feel of shadows stretching out and parallaxing along the ground as you pass by cave openings, swinging your torch side to side as you look for valuable resources, is second to none.

And of course, the other side of this equation is the darkness itself. New HDR lighting and volumetric effects, as well as the deeper blacks of the PS VR2 OLEDs, adds a richer sense of foreboding to the depths of the caves, and makes exploring them a true journey into the unknown.

The Devil is in the details

But what is the point of ultra-realistic lighting if there’s nothing to see when lit? That’s why the world of Into Black has also been given a full visual overhaul. 

Read more

Pac-Man-inspired action platformer Shadow Labyrinth launches July 18 on PS5

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Shadow Labyrinth is the forthcoming 2D action platformer from our team at Bandai Namco Studios where players will control Swordsman No.8, summoned to a mysterious planet by the enigmatic Puck to complete a mission where others have failed. The two will discover secrets and battle huge bosses in their struggle to survive. The concept of a dark Pac-Man game is bold new ground for the brand, delivering a unique experience that existing and new PAC players will be excited to dig into. Shadow Labyrinth emerges from the darkness on July 18.

Gamers may have noticed that Puck looks quite a bit like Pac-Man, and there’s the amazing visual of a huge foreboding and dark Pac-Man chomping down on the body of a downed foe. But Shadow Labyrinth’s inspiration from Pac-Man is more than skin deep, our team worked to build from the ground up with careful consideration of what it means to be a Pac-Man game.

The iconic maze is second only to Pac-Man himself when considering the core factors of a Pac game. We wanted to apply that principle to our game where the characters are just as important as the place where we find them. Arcade Pac-Man’s maze is immersive, and we wanted to bring that to life on a broader scale. The map of this mysterious planet when viewed zoomed out is itself a massive maze, and like the original Pac-Man, you must get familiar with the maze to best your enemies. The original arcade game’s maze was set upon a background of darkness, Shadow Labyrinth takes this one step further by having our story take place in the depths of outer space on a dark and mysterious planet where survival means tougher challenges in deeper levels. You either reach the end or are consumed trying.

When you approach a Pac-Man arcade machine you are greeted by a joystick, so we thought, controlling Pac-Man is quite simple, right? It’s just a joystick. But as you progress through each level the on-screen action of dodging Ghosts gets intense. Shadow Labyrinth gives players a variety of actions and weapons to use, but we wanted the player inputs to feel natural, not overwhelming – like that simple joystick. We also wanted to give the player as much choice as possible, letting them choose which direction they would like to explore first. Like original arcade Pac-Man, the action in Shadow Labyrinth gets seriously intense and we felt that an approachable control scheme and the flexibility to explore the directions they’re curious about would help deepen player immersion similar to the original arcade game.

There are in fact 3 modes of play in Shadow Labyrinth. Controlling Swordsman No.8 is all about weapon use and artfully dodging, and Mini Puck mode is all about exploring hidden and out of reach pathways. These in themselves feel very Pac-Man, but the 3rd mode of play is effectively Shadow Labyrinth’s version of a Power Pellet: GAIA, the robotic giant with devastating force. Using GAIA, players can damage enemies that might have otherwise been too strong, break through barriers (a reference to the arcade game Super Pac

Verdansk returns in Season 3 of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Warzone on April 2

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The Battle Royale map that started it all is back! Prepare to drop into Verdansk in a huge launch event celebrating the return of the map. Featuring authentic, back-to-basics gameplay with the latest in fan-favorite mechanics, there’s a wide variety of features coming to the game.

Season 3 begins on PS4 and PS5 with Multiplayer and Zombies content coming to Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on April 2 at 9AM PT, followed by the launch of Verdansk in Call of Duty: Warzone  24 hours later on April 3 at 9AM PT.

Verdansk returns in Season 3 of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Warzone on April 2

Verdansk, rebuilt from the ground up

Like we never left: 150 players. The original announcer. Shooting during freefall. Original Infil cinematics. All before you hit the ground running. 

Original game mechanics: Original Supply Boxes, Floating Loot, Armor Satchels and Buy Station menus, coupled with current Loadouts and Perks, with High Value Loot Zones across the map where some premium loot resides.

QOL updates: A variety of quality-of-life updates also hits Call of Duty: Warzone, including Squad Redeploys at Buy Stations, Attachment descriptions during Weapon Inspects, detailed death recaps in game, a HUD flag so you know exactly when your Loadout is available to buy, and more.

Game modes, events, rewards

Game modes

Play a variety of modes including returning favorites and new ones:

  • Battle Royale
  • Plunder Quads
  • Bootcamp

Plus, get in on the brand-new Battle Royale Casual playlist at launch, featuring 28 players and up to 120 bots, the perfect arena to warm up before the main event.

Return to Verdansk launch event

Reassemble the Squad and drop back into your former stomping grounds for an exciting homecoming. The Return to Verdansk Event takes the form of a series of challenges scattered across 12 distinct zones within Verdansk. Crack all 12 safes to earn the infamous Kali Sticks melee weapon.

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PlayStation Plus Monthly Games for April: RoboCop: Rogue City, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth – Hacker’s Memory

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Protect the streets of Detroit, survive a family of horror icons, and turn digital detective with April’s PlayStation Plus Monthly Games lineup. RoboCop: Rogue City, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth – Hacker’s Memory will be available to PlayStation Plus members from April 1. 

Let’s take a closer look at the games. 

RoboCop: Rogue City | PS5 

Become the legendary part man, part machine, all cop hero and bring justice to the dangerous, crime-ridden streets of Old Detroit. With your powerful Auto-9 or one of a range of weapons available, eradicate criminals thr

Gran Turismo 7 update 1.57 available today

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Gran Turismo players! Update 1.57* for Gran Turismo 7 available as of Wednesday, March 26 at 10:00pm PT / March 27 at 5:00am GMT / 2:00pm JST. 

Gran Turismo 7 update 1.57 available today

Three new cars added this month

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