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Welcome to Video Games Weekly on Engadget. Expect a new story every Monday or Tuesday, broken into two parts. The first is a space for short essays and ramblings about video game trends and related topics from me, Jess Conditt, a reporter who’s covered the industry for more than 13 years. The second contains the video game stories from the past week that you need to know about, including some headlines from outside of Engadget.

Please enjoy — and I’ll see you next week.

June has passed me by in a haze of air travel, mild illness, protests and Pride, and it’s now officially time to close the book on Summer Game Fest 2025. around this year’s show and they’re all worth a read, but before moving on for good, I wanted to highlight a final batch of games that I can’t stop thinking about. This week, I present three mini previews straight out of SGF 2025 — and only two of them are horror games, which is a stupendous display of growth on my part.

Crisol: Theater of Idols

Crisol: Theater of Idols wasn’t on my radar until I sat down and played it at the Blumhouse booth, but now it’s pinging loud and clear, as if the booms were emanating directly from the blood-soaked bowels of Hell. It’s a first-person survival-horror action game set in a demented version of Spain that’s filled with monsters of modern folklore. Murderous marionettes and giant, ornately adorned skeletons hunt you through dark streets and towering gothic buildings, lamplight glinting off of every gross 3D detail. The whole demo felt like getting lost in a terrifying, nightmarish carnival, and I enjoyed every bit of it.

In Crisol, blood is your source of ammunition, and you drain the corpses of humans and chickens to refuel your health bar as well as your guns. Crisol is tense and gorgeous, reminiscent of Dishonored or Resident Evil Village, and enemies are both robust and tricky to evade. Crisol is the debut game from independent Spanish team Vermila Studios, which received an for the project in 2020. It’s being published by Blumhouse and is due out this year on , PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

Grave Seasons

There’s something deeply wrong in Ashenridge, the idyllic rural village where Grave Seasons is set. At first glance, Grave Seasons is a cute, narrative-based farming sim with detailed pixel art, juicy romance options and layers of home-maintenance mechanics. You spend time planting, watering, harvesting, crafting items, picking up trash and chatting with villagers — and then you dig up a severed hand. Pilar, your flirty neighbor who runs the tailor shop down the road, says something ominous about the fate of your house’s previous owner. The vibe shifts; the shadows start to look sinister. Night falls and the real horror is unleashed, sudden, violent and all the more shocking in such a peaceful setting. A supernatural serial killer is on the loose in Ashenridge and, in between planting crops, it’s up to you to investigate (and maybe date) the murderer.

Grave Seasons is a game that will live or die by its tone, and so far, developer Perfect Garbage has absolutely nailed the vibe of nefarious, creeping dread. Ashenridge is a beautiful little town with tons of people to meet and activities to complete, and the character avatars are sexy, sweet and super intriguing. A paranormal murder investigation is simply the cherry on top of a competent farming and dating sim, and I’m eager to take a bite out of the full game. At SGF 2025, developers said the complete Grave Seasons experience should take about 20 hours. Grave Seasons is being published by Blumhouse, and it’s scheduled to hit and consoles in 2026.

Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School

Escape Academy is of the past five years and I am inordinately stoked for the sequel, which turns the school into an open world of puzzles, riddles and cringey puns. With Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School, developer Coin Crew is going all-in on the student roleplaying vibe, and the entire campus is littered with mysteries. It’s also playable as a split-screen, couch co-op experience, which is one of the series’ greatest strengths. Frantically screaming solutions at your friend just feels better in person than over a Discord call, you know?

I played the original Escape Academy with a local partner, so that’s how I tried out the sequel at SGF 2025. I dragged Engadget EIC Aaron Souppouris to the iam8bit booth and we dove in, starting in a classroom covered in sneaky environmental clues. In Escape Academy 2, the assignment is simple — get out — but the execution is complex, and we were soon throwing out names, dates and math problems, trying to solve a series of tricky, interconnected puzzles and leave the room. After getting just one hint from the developers, we made our way to the hallway, which was lined with locker-based riddles, and eventually reached the headmaster’s office, which was a contained playground of puzzle gaming. We had to use a pen and piece of paper to keep track of a few sections, and overall, our interactions felt fresh. Coin Crew isn’t just rolling out the same problems with different solutions for the sequel, and the new riddles were clever, innovative and super satisfying. (The same can’t be said about all of the puns, but that’s part of the charm.)

Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School features both local and online co-op, so you’ll be free to yell at your friends in whichever format you prefer. Coin Crew is still working on the game and there’s no release date yet, but it’s available now to .

The news

The only thing worse than not disclosing AI use in the creation of a video game is not disclosing it and then deploying it so sloppily that players immediately notice. Indie developer and publisher 11 Bit Studios learned this lesson firsthand with The Alters, a futuristic base-building game starring an astronaut and his alternate-reality clones. Within a week of the game’s release on June 13, posts started and showing AI-generated text in the game, across multiple languages. On June 30, 11 Bit released a statement confirming its use of AI in developing The Alters, saying it was utilized only in background text and to help with last-minute localization efforts. “No matter what we decided, we should have simply let you know,” the studio wrote.

I’d really love to stop writing headlines like this. Microsoft is preparing to lay off a large number of Xbox employees this week, as part of a planned 3 percent reduction in staff across the company. That’s a loss of roughly 7,000 jobs in total, and according to , Xbox leaders are expecting “substantial cuts across the entire group.” The firings follow a round of at Xbox in January 2024, another , and last year’s of Arkane Austin, Alpha Dog Games and Tango Gameworks (the latter of which lives on under Krafton). Meanwhile, Microsoft reported a net revenue of $25.8 billion in the first three months of 2025, with an 8 percent yearly increase in revenue from Xbox content and services. Congrats?

Netflix started beefing up its video games division around 2021, with the Night School and the rollout of an in-app gaming library offering popular mobile titles at no extra charge to subscribers. Netflix currently supports more than 100 games, including Death’s Door, Hades, The Case of the Golden Idol, The Rise of the Golden Idol, Braid Anniversary Edition, Katana ZERO and the Monument Valley series — but these are disappearing in July. A total of 22 games will be deleted from Netflix at various times in July, and the culling follows similar cutbacks in the company’s interactive division, including the recent closure of an .

Because we know you’re going to get something — what are you picking up at the Steam Summer Sale this year? Share your spoils in the comments! If you’re overwhelmed, allow me to humbly suggest , , or .

On a related note, don’t forget to check out (the nearly complete) Playdate Season 2.

… but it’s definitely not any more. Resident Evil: Requiem producer Masachika Kawata and director Koshi Nakanishi clarified that their new game is an offline single-player experience, but they said that early in development, the team seriously considered making it online and open-world. This experimentation fueled rumors about Requiem introducing a new direction for the Resident Evil franchise, but it turns out the final product will be a with the ability to swap between first- and third-person views. Spooooky.

Newswise — In a new study published in Nature, researchers at the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center explore a surprising phenomenon in which high doses of radiation cause growth in existing metastatic tumors that weren’t directly treated with radiation.

Scientists previously observed that radiation can cause distant tumors to shrink after radiation, known as the “abscopal effect.” The UChicago researchers therefore dubbed the new, opposite response the “badscopal effect,” as a play on words for when unrelated metastatic tumors grow after radiation. They believe this unexpected response happens because high dose radiation increases the production of a protein called amphiregulin by tumor cells that are directly treated with radiation. High amounts of amphiregulin weaken the immune system’s ability to fight cancer and make cancer cells better at protecting themselves. The findings point to promising new therapeutic strategies that could lead to more effective treatments for metastatic cancer.

Radiotherapy: a double-edged sword?

Radiotherapy is often used alone or in combination with surgery and chemotherapy to control localized tumors. More recently, radiotherapy has been used to treat cancers that have limited spread, termed “oligometastasis.” Scientists believe that radiotherapy activates the immune system, producing regression in tumors at distant sites that are not directly treated with radiation (i.e. the abscopal effect). However, many patients who receive radiation for oligometastasis or as part of an immunotherapy regimen fail to respond to treatment because of the progression of distant metastasis.

“Our lab postulated that high doses of radiation might actually promote tumor growth at unirradiated sites under certain conditions, potentially accounting for some of these failures,” said senior author Ralph Weichselbaum, MD, Chair and Daniel K. Ludwig Distinguished Service Professor of Radiation and Cellular Oncology at UChicago Medicine.

Uncovering the ‘badscopal’ effect

“Studies from the 1940s suggested radiation might cause tumor spread, but that never made sense to me because radiation is a highly effective anti-cancer agent within the tumor bed,” Weichselbaum said. “However, the communication between the irradiated site and distant metastatic sites is fascinating.”

To investigate this tumor-to-tumor interaction, the research team analyzed biopsy samples from a clinical trial in which patients with diverse histological types that were treated with high dose focused radiotherapy known as Stereotactic Body Radiotherapy (SBRT) and checkpoint blockade (Pembrolizumab). That clinical trial team, led by Steven Chmura, MD, PhD, Professor of Radiation and Cellular Oncology and Director of Clinical and Translational Research for Radiation Oncology at UChicago, found that tumors at preexisting metastatic sites increased in size following SBRT, suggesting radiation might promote tumor growth.

To understand how radiation at the primary site affects distant tumors, researchers led by András Piffkó, MD, a post-doctoral fellow in the Weichselbaum lab, conducted gene expression profiling of patient tumors before and after radiation treatment. They discovered that in tumors that had been treated with radiation, the gene encoding for a protein called amphiregulin was significantly increased.

Amphiregulin binds to epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), a widely expressed transmembrane tyrosine kinase, and activates major intracellular signaling pathways governing cell survival, proliferation, migration and cell death.

The researchers then studied this effect using animal models of lung and breast cancer. They found that while radiation reduced the number of new metastatic sites, it increased the growth of existing metastases. Radiotherapy significantly upregulated amphiregulin in tumor cells and blood. Blocking amphiregulin with antibodies or eliminating its gene in the tumor cells using the gene editing technology CRISPR reduced the size of tumors outside of the radiation field.

“Interestingly, the combination of radiation and amphiregulin blockade decreased both tumor size and the number of metastatic sites,” Weichselbaum said.

The role of immune suppression

To explore the mechanism further, the researchers analyzed blood samples from a second clinical trial conducted by Chmura, in which lung cancer patients received SBRT either following or at the same time as immunotherapy. They found that failure to decrease amphiregulin following SBRT in the serum of patients was associated with an adverse outcome. Additionally, they found an increase in myeloid cells with immunosuppressive characteristics was associated with metastasis progression and death.

In a previous study published in Cancer Cell, Weichselbaum and team demonstrated that ablating immunosuppressive myeloid cells reduces both the size and frequency of metastasis in animal models. By contrast, in the current study, they saw an increase in immunosuppressive myeloid cells in animals where amphiregulin was highly expressed in tumors and blood following radiation but not in tumors that did not express amphiregulin. Amphiregulin appeared to block the differentiation of myeloid cells, leading to an immunosuppressive phenotype.

In collaboration with Ronald Rock, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at UChicago, the team discovered that amphiregulin and radiation upregulated CD47, a so-called “don’t eat me” signal on tumor cells that blocks the ability of macrophages and myeloid cells to engulf tumor cells.

Blocking amphiregulin and CD47 in combination with radiotherapy resulted in highly effective metastatic control in animal models. The study results indicate a paradigm shift for the use of radiation therapy in patients with locally advanced and metastatic tumors, in which molecules upregulated by radiotherapy could be detected and neutralized. This in turn could lead to a new type of personalized radiotherapy, especially in patients with metastatic disease.

“These results open a whole new way of thinking about the systemic effects of radiotherapy,” Weichselbaum said. “Based on these findings, we are planning to conduct a clinical trial to further explore and validate the results.”

The study, “Radiation-induced amphiregulin drives tumor metastasis,” was supported by the National Cancer Institute, Ludwig Foundation, the Chicago Tumor Institute, generous gifts from Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Foglia and the Foglia Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. David Kozin and Mr. and Mrs. James Weichselbaum.

Additional authors include András Piffkó from the University of Chicago, USA, and the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany; Kaiting Yang from the University of Chicago, the Ludwig Center for Metastasis Research, and South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, P.R. China; Arpit Panda, Janna Heide, Katarzyna Zawieracz, Leonhard Donle, Ernst Lengyel, Ronald Rock, and Everett E. Vokes from the University of Chicago; Krystyna Tesak, Jason Bugno, Chuangyu Wen, Emile Naccasha, Dapeng Chen, Steven Chmura, Sean Pitroda, and Hua Laura Liang from the University of Chicago, and the Ludwig Center for Metastasis Research, Chicago; Chuan He from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago; Liangliang Wang from the University of Chicago, the Ludwig Center for Metastasis Research, Chicago, and Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P.R. China; Yanbin Fu from the University of Chicago and Weill Cornell Medicine, New York; Douglas Tilley from Temple University, Philadelphia; and Matthias Mack from the University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany.