Enter the MagSafe Accessory World

I have been testing MagSafe accessories for years, and you should totally take advantage of the vast ecosystem with your new Pixel. Whether you want a magnetic wallet or phone tripod, we have plenty of WIRED-tested recommendations in our guides. Most of them should work without fail on the Pixel 10 series. Here they are:

Other Screen Protectors to Consider

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Zagg Glass Elite, Glass Elite Privacy, and XTR4 for $60: I have tested these screen protectors from Zagg on the Pixel 10. Zagg has a streamlined installation process that’s very easy to apply; my application was perfect. The Glass Elite uses aluminosilicate glass that isn’t too thick nor terribly thin, and the edges are rounded so they don’t feel sharp. (They don’t quite extend all the way past the bezels.) I don’t love the notch for the selfie camera because it stands out quite a bit. The Glass Elite Privacy is a two-way privacy screen protector, meaning folks on either side of you on a train can’t see what you’re looking at (though someone standing above you can). Text can look a bit fuzzy if you look closely with this protector, and you take a small hit to overall screen brightness, but it’s an otherwise solid option. Finally, the XTR4 covers more of the display, uses a stronger tempered glass, and strips away blue light (though whether that’s really helpful isn’t set in stone). Sadly, for all of these, you only get one in the box.

Spigen GlasTR EZ Fit Tempered Glass Screen Protector for $20 (2 Pack): This is the best bang for your buck when it comes to screen protection. Spigen gives you two in the box, and its application tool makes it impossible to make a mistake when installing the tempered glass protector. There’s even a squeegee tool to push out air bubbles. All that for $20.

UAG Glass Shield Screen Protector for $40: UAG includes the usual wet wipe, dust removal sticker, and microfiber cloth, and there’s a plastic shell you place on top of your Pixel to use as a guide when applying the tempered glass screen protector. It’s not the easiest method I’ve tried, as there’s room for some error (and potential to get grime or a smudge on the underside as you apply), but it was fairly quick and painless, and the air bubbles disappeared quickly.

Other Cases We Like

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Bellroy Pixelsnap Leather Pixel Folio for $75: A serviceable folio case for the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, this case spruces up your folding phone with leather in various colors. There’s a slot on the inside of the flap that lets you store a credit card or two, and the flap magnetically sticks to the front edges of the Fold to stay shut. It’s an elegant look, but the bend when you flip the folio open is a bit too thick and makes holding the phone feel a bit wobbly. Using it with the phone fully open isn’t too bad, but the whole thing doesn’t feel that protective.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Casetify Impact Magnetic Case for $52: Casetify still leaves a bad taste in my mouth after it was caught stealing artwork from Dbrand and JerryRigsEverything. Its cases are still solid, with a thick and grippy bumper and clicky buttons. It is one of the few places that offer an insane amount of design options for Pixel phones (if you can trust they weren’t stolen).

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Casetify Pixel 10 Pro Fold Impact Magnetic Case for $60: This case is more protective than the Bellroy above, but the lip around the screen is a little too thick for my taste. It makes it hard to swipe in from the edges of the screen. If you don’t mind that, then you’ll appreciate that Casetify doesn’t use adhesives all over the case, but only in one spot (it provides extra stickers in the box if it comes off). It’s one of the only folding case options with dozens of fun designs to choose from. The $60 price is cheaper than many of its peers, and there’s a magnet for Pixelsnap wireless charging. It’s a shame the clear version Casetify sent me attracts so much dust and lint.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Zagg Crystal Palace Lite for $30 and Crystal Palace Snap for $49: A super-simple, no-frills clear case, this Zagg option will do the job. There are two versions of the case. If you don’t care about the Qi2 magnetic function of your Pixel, go for the Lite, as it doesn’t have magnets baked into the case. (No Qi2 magnetic accessories will stick to it.) I’m not sure why you’d want to kill that functionality, especially since you can get magnetic cases for less than $20. Alternatively, you can buy the Crystal Palace Snap, which adds the classic magnetic ring on the back. It also has textured edges for better grip. Either way, the buttons are responsive, the edges are nicely raised over the screen, and the clear back shows off your Pixel’s color. I still think Dbrand’s Ghost Case 2.0 is the better clear case, because the Snap seems to pick up scuffs easily.

Zagg Rainier Snap Magnetic Case for $70: Also available for the Pixel 10 Pro XL, this rugged case has two pieces. Plop your Pixel into the thick back piece, and snap the front polycarbonate frame over it. It feels very rugged and protective without adding too much bulk, but the design leaves a lot to be desired. (Just a bit too tactical for me.) There’s a sizable lip over the screen for great glass protection, even if it means swiping in from the edges is a bit trickier. The buttons are responsive, but require a tiny bit more force to press. At least there are built-in magnets, so you can take advantage of Qi2.

Mous Clarity Pixelsnap Case for $65: This is my second-favorite clear case after Dbrand’s Ghost 2.0. There’s a thick bumper around the phone to absorb impacts, a solid magnetic connection, and a nice lip around the screen to keep it off the ground. The buttons are clicky, too.

OtterBox Symmetry Clear Pixelsnap Case for $42: This is a nice, clear case that’s also Pixelsnap-certified. The cutouts are accurate, the edges are slightly raised over the screen, and it offers a decent grip. If you prefer a completely clear case without a separate bumper, this will satisfy.

Spigen Parallax, Nano Pop, Tough, and Liquid Air Pixelsnap Cases for $19: I’ve tried several Spigen cases, and the Rugged Armor is my top pick. These other options have different designs, but they’re solid cases for the money. I found the Parallax slippery, and the sides also felt a bit cheap. The Nano Pop had a decently grippy texture on the edges, but the Liquid Air is one of my favorite Spigen designs. The buttons are just a little stiffer than I’d like. The Tough has a built-in kickstand that’s nice, although it can be a little tough to pop out if you have short nails. These are minor nitpicks, though. They’re great cases for under $20, especially considering they’re all Made for Google–certified.

UAG Pathfinder Pixelsnap Case for $60: Someone probably likes how this case looks. That person is not me, but clearly, there’s a market for this styling. If you fall in that camp, there’s not much to complain about the Pathfinder, except I found the buttons slightly stiffer than usual. It checks off all the other boxes, with a raised lip over the screen, but I just don’t find it that attractive (sorry).

Burga Tough Case for $50: This is one of the few nonmagnetic cases I’ve tested for the Pixel 10 series. If you absolutely don’t care for Qi2 and magnets in these phones, this is a perfectly fine case, and Burga has tons of designs you can choose from. The exterior is a hard plastic shell, but the phone is wrapped in a soft rubbery shell that absorbs impacts. The buttons are fairly clicky—not the most responsive—and there’s a solid lip around the screen.

Poetic Guardian, Poetic Spartan, and Poetic Revolution Case for $25: One thing to note is that Poetic includes a screen protector that embeds itself into the case, like old-school cases that offered full protection. You can opt not to use it as the case will work with or without it. The Revolution doesn’t have any magnets but has a built-in kickstand and a cover that can completely protect your cameras; I find this a little extreme, so I don’t care for it. It also, in my humble opinion, looks hideous. The Guardian looks much better, with a thick bumper, raised edges, and a covered port. The buttons are a little stiff, but at least it has built-in magnets for Qi2 (not certified). Finally, the Spartan (for Pixel 10a) has a built-in MagSafe ring stand that lets you use MagSafe accessories, grip your phone securely, and prop it up in kickstand mode. The buttons could be more responsive, but it’s an option worth considering if you want a sort of multitool phone case.

Avoid These Cases

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Peak Design Gnar Case for $60: I have historically liked Peak Design’s cases, but that hasn’t been true with the Gnar case for the iPhone 17 range and the Pixel 10. The edges of the phone feel way too slippery, and they also push in a little too much into the front screen, which disrupts my screen protector and creates a small air bubble. The lip around the display is also very lackluster, and I find it a little too hard to pull out the flap that protects the USB-C charging port. I don’t love the two-tone material choice on the back; it feels cheap and dull. The SlimLink square adds an extra layer of security for the Pixelsnap magnetic attachment, but you’ll have to pair it with relevant SlimLink docks and mounts to get the most out of it. I think you should just stick with the Everyday Case if you want to make use of Peak Design’s mounts.

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The United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has sanctioned Xinbi, a Chinese-language online marketplace that sells stolen data and satellite internet equipment to scam networks in Southeast Asia.

The Telegram-based marketplace Xinbi is also believed to have helped North Korean threat actors launder cryptocurrency stolen in large heists from companies and individuals worldwide.

According to blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, Xinbi has processed over $19.9 billion between 2021 and 2025, facilitating everything from unlicensed OTC trades and money laundering to the sale of stolen personal databases.

Today’s sanctions also target #8 Park (a massive-scale scam compound linked by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic to the Prince Group crime ring) and Legend Innovation Co (the operator of #8 Park).

“Today the government has stepped up its fight against these scam centres, targeting the owners and operators of a recently identified facility known as ‘#8 Park,’ believed to be Cambodia’s largest scam compound, with capacity to accommodate 20,000 trafficked workers,” the FCDO said on Thursday.

“The UK is also the first country to sanction Xinbi, one of the largest illicit marketplaces in Southeast Asia, which provides cryptocurrency-based services to scam centres – including #8 Park.”

FCDO’s sanctions aim to isolate Xinbi from the legitimate crypto ecosystem, disrupting its operations by making it impossible to send or receive cryptocurrency payments, as happened when the Byex Exchange cryptocurrency platform shut down after being sanctioned by the U.K. last year.

Scam centers across Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos are criminal-run operations often operated by Chinese crime syndicates that coerce people (many of them foreigners) to become accomplices in large-scale criminal operations that target victims worldwide in cryptocurrency investment scams, also known as pig butchering or romance baiting.

They usually contact targets through social media, messaging apps, and dating sites, using stolen information bought from dedicated online platforms like Xinbi, to lure victims into fake investment schemes. However, the scammers steal the money by moving it into accounts they control rather than investing it.

“Our sanctions today send a clear message: We will not allow British people to become victims of these dreadful scams or tolerate the awful human rights abuses perpetrated in these scam centres,” said Stephen Doughty, the U.K.’s Minister of State for Europe, North America and Overseas Territories.

“We must keep up the pressure on dirty money and those who benefit from it. At the Illicit Finance Summit in June, the UK will drive international action to tackle the ways in which ill-gotten profits are laundered and moved around the world.”

Today’s action follows another wave of seizures, asset freezes, and the shutdown of hundreds of scam centers in October 2025 after the FCDO and the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) jointly sanctioned the Cambodian Prince Group crime ring and its leader, Chen Zhi. The U.S. Department of Justice also seized $15 billion in bitcoin from Zhi, who remains at large.

Automated pentesting proves the path exists. BAS proves whether your controls stop it. Most teams run one without the other.

This whitepaper maps six validation surfaces, shows where coverage ends, and provides practitioners with three diagnostic questions for any tool evaluation.

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A new info-stealing malware named Infinity Stealer is targeting macOS systems with a Python payload packaged as an executable using the open-source Nuitka compiler.

The attack uses the ClickFix technique, presenting a fake CAPTCHA that mimics Cloudflare’s human verification check to trick users into executing malicious code.

Researchers at Malwarebytes say this is the first documented macOS campaign combining ClickFix delivery with a Python-based infostealer compiled using Nuitka.

Because Nuitka produces a native binary by compiling the Python script into C code, the resulting executable is more resistant to static analysis.

Compared to PyInstaller, which bundles Python with bytecode, it’s more evasive because it produces a real native binary with no obvious bytecode layer, making reverse engineering much harder.

“The final payload is written in Python and compiled with Nuitka, producing a native macOS binary. That makes it harder to analyze and detect than typical Python-based malware,” Malwarebystes says.

Attack chain

The attack begins with a ClickFix lure on the domain update-check[.]com, posing as a human verification step from Cloudflare and asking the user to complete the challenge by pasting a base64-obfuscated curl command into the macOS Terminal, bypassing OS-level defenses.

The command decodes a Bash script that writes the stage-2 (Nuitka loader) to /tmp, then removes the quarantine flag, and executes it via ‘nohup.’ Finally, it passes the command-and-control (C2) and token via environment variables and then deletes itself and closes the Terminal window.

The Nuitka loader is an 8.6 MB Mach-O binary that contains a 35MB zstd-compressed archive, containing the stage-3 (UpdateHelper.bin), which is the Infinity Stealer malware.

Before starting to collect sensitive data, the malware performs anti-analysis checks to determine whether it is running in a virtualized/sandboxed environment.

Malwarebytes’ analysis of the Python 3.11 payload uncovered that the info-stealer can take screenshots and harvest the following data:

• Credentials from Chromium‑based browsers and Firefox
• macOS Keychain entries
• Cryptocurrency wallets
• Plaintext secrets in developer files, such as .env

All stolen data is exfiltrated via HTTP POST requests to the C2, and a Telegram notification is sent to the threat actors upon completion of the operation.

Malwarebytes underlines that the appearance of malware like Infinity Stealer is proof that threats to macOS users are only getting more advanced and targeted.

Users should never paste into Terminal commands they find online and don’t fully understand.

Automated pentesting proves the path exists. BAS proves whether your controls stop it. Most teams run one without the other.

This whitepaper maps six validation surfaces, shows where coverage ends, and provides practitioners with three diagnostic questions for any tool evaluation.

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Photo credit: Sarang Sheth | Yanko Design
A recently uncovered Sony patent shows how users could connect a smartphone directly to the DualSense controller. The entire concept revolves around connecting two pieces of hardware that most people already own and using them to create a seamless gaming experience directly into PlayStation. Some drawings included with the application show a phone simply placed on top of the controller’s analog sticks and triggers. A magnetic thingy holds everything together, so you can simply plug your phone in and it transforms into a single, compact handheld item.

The console will automatically detect the connected phone, and games will begin to instruct the controller to use the buttons and sticks while simultaneously accessing all of the phone’s functionality. So developers have fast access to almost the entire phone, including the touchscreen for taps and swipes, the built-in motion sensors for tracking movements and orientations, the camera for quick snaps, and the position data for extremely precise steering hints.

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A no-brainer benefit is how information appears during gameplay, as the phone screen can handle all of the extra information, such as maps, gear lists, or side views, whilst the TV focuses on the main action. You can also tap on the phone screen to pick settings in a far more straightforward way than fumbling through menus with the sticks alone, and tilting the entire device, smartphone and controller, makes steering or aiming really simple.

Even character creation has been easier, with the phone’s camera capturing a fast facial photo or an item photo and inserting it directly into your in-game avatar. The motion sensors can detect even the smallest motions of the combined device, offering up entirely new possibilities for puzzles that respond to how you hold it.

Sony developed this concept around the idea of leveraging hardware that almost everyone has in their pockets, and they are not the first to try this. Yes, there have been phone clips that attach to controllers for years, but this idea does far more than just mount the phone; it instructs the game engine to use the phone for genuine control data rather than merely mirroring a feed.

Sony attempted to experiment with phone pairings with older controllers a few years ago, but they ran into time and connection quality concerns. In comparison, phones today are far more advanced, with crisper screens, quicker CPUs, and more dependable sensors – and consoles are far more capable of handling all of these additional input streams without issue.

The real question is if it’s worth it; do game developers care enough about this to begin producing games that make use of the extra controls? A racing game might employ phone tilt for steering, whereas an adventure game might use the phone screen for item listings. Overall, the configuration provides a lot of flexibility without requiring you to buy any additional gear.
[Source]

Last year, Garmin introduced a Pro version that incorporates the inReach’s satellite communications savvy. Not only does it cost at least $400 more than the Apple Watch Ultra and $200 more than the regular Fenix 8, but you also have to pay for the inReach subscription plan, which has several tiers and ranges from $8/month to $50/month depending on whether you want features like unlimited texting or sending photo messages.

What you get for this mind-boggling price is a sports watch that can do anything and everything. It has best-in-class battery life (every Fenix can last for weeks on a single charge, and up to a month with solar charging) and features like the depth sensor from Garmin’s Descent line, which means this watch works as a full-on dive computer for scuba and free diving. It has a microphone and speaker for basic voice commands (although no onboard cellular connectivity), the surprisingly useful built-in LED flashlight, and Garmin’s signature built-in topographic maps, 24/7 health monitoring, and tracking for over a hundred different activities.

I’ve taken the 51-mm version on pretty much every outdoor sport—snowboarding, trail running, mountain biking, and rock climbing. Every time I use it, its capabilities far outclass my own. I have irritated many a fellow climber by attempting to track route difficulty, duration, and falls while integrating my Body Battery metrics and so on. The danger is always that you’ll spend more time fiddling with your Garmin Fenix 8 than you do with your actual sport. I have the version with the sapphire glass face and the titanium bezel, and have smashed it into rock faces with nary a scratch. If you’re up for paying the price and want a good-looking watch that will last forever (I have friends who are still wearing their Fenix 5s and 6s, and honestly, they’re fine), this is the one to get.

Best Running Watch

The Garmin Forerunner series launched in the early 2000s and has become the quintessential runner’s watch. Like all Garmins, the Forerunner comes in a range of price points, each offering different features. Last year, Garmin released the Forerunner 570 ($550), a midrange model with no LED flashlight or onboard maps, and the Forerunner 970 ($750), which is the premium version. Before I go into detail about why the Forerunner 970 is the best option, I should also say that I have tested many previous Garmin Forerunners at various price points. If you’re not a triathlete, the older Forerunners are still worth considering, and the entry-level $200 Forerunner 165 is aimed explicitly at runners, instead of including triathletes as the more expensive models do.

We’re all familiar with mixing red, yellow, and blue paint in various ratios to instantly make all kinds of colors. This works great for oils or watercolors, but fails when it comes to cans of spray paint. The paint droplets can’t be blended once they are aerosolized. Consequently, although spray cans are great for applying even coats of paint to large areas very quickly, spray-paint artists need a separate can for every color they want to use—until now.

Back in 2018, when I first saw professional spray artists lugging dozens to hundreds of cans to their work sites, I was inspired to start noodling on a solution. I’ve worked at Google X, Alphabet’s “moonshot factory,” as a hardware engineer, and I’m now building a startup in mechanical-design software. I’m no painter, but I know my way around mechatronics.

I wanted my solution to be inexpensive and simple enough to build as a DIY project and functional enough for an artist to use, without breaking their flow. So I began prototyping a system that combines base colors while they are still in pressurized form from off-the-shelf cans.

This new rotary pinch valve can be opened and closed in tens of milliseconds and prevents backpressure from clogging lines.James Provost

I tried a few approaches where pres-surized paint from the base-color cansfed through tubes into a mixing channel, before emerging from a spray head. To control the ratios, I decided to borrow a trick that would be familiar to anyone who’s ever had to control the bright-ness of an LED using a microcontroller: pulse-width modulation. Initially, I used electronically controlled solenoid valves to release the paint from the cans. The paint would flow into a mixing channel for a relative duration that corresponded to the ratio of the base colors required to make a given hue. However, this failed because different cans never have the same internal pressure. Whenever two valves were open at the same time, the pressure difference would make paint flow backward into the lower-pressure can.

As an alternative, I removed the mixing channel and tried making the paint pulses from each can sequentially converge into a tube so that no more than one valve would ever be open at a time. Surprisingly, this worked perfectly. The backflow was eliminated, and it turned out that the natural turbulence of the flow was sufficient to mix the paints. Let’s say you want to produce a clementine orange color. This requires yellow and red paint in a ratio of 1:2, so the yellow valve opens for a period of time, and then the red valve opens for twice as long. The system then keeps repeating this cycle of pulses in a rapid pace to instantly create the spray-paint color you want.

The theory is straightforward, but making this work in practice took quite a bit of experimentation. First, I had to determine the actual durations of pulses that would produce evenly mixed colors, not just their ratios. I also needed to work out the size of the tubing (too narrow and you’d get low spray force; too wide and you’d have paint accumulating in the tubes). Eventually I settled on a maximum pulse duration of 250 milliseconds and a tube diameter of 1 millimeter.

Inventing A New Valve

Even though the system worked, the solenoid valves I used constantly clogged up. Designed for water purifiers, the valves didn’t prevent paint from entering the mechanism, where the paint would harden. Moreover, when the valves were turned off, they could stop backflow only if the inlet remained pressurized. So disconnecting a paint can from the system would cause instant leaking. Other off-the-shelf valves I tried couldn’t cycle fast enough and were too expensive.

I had some spectacular failures along the way of the sort that only pressurized paint can provide.

So I created my own mechanism: a high-speed, electronically controlled, rotary pinch valve. It has a stepper motor that rotates a lever with a rolling bearing to constrict fluid flow inside a flexible tube. This concept isn’t new—there’s something like them in every peristaltic pump. But I added a spring to firmly hold the lever in the closed position against any back pressure when the motor isn’t powered, making it a normally closed valve that isolates the attached can. Additionally, the valve is fast enough to be open for as little as 30 milliseconds.

I went through four major prototypes of the system before reaching a working version, and I had some spectacular failures along the way of the sort that only pressurized paint can provide. The final version uses four base colors—red, yellow, blue, and white—with the color mix controlled by four knobs attached to an Arduino Nano and a small display. The flow of paint is triggered by a push button placed above the spray head, similar to a spray can’s nozzle.

Cans holding base colors (A) are attached to valves (B). An Arduino-based control panel (C) opens and closes valves to mix paint before it is aerosolized (E). By quickly opening and closing valves with varying durations in sequence (D), you can mix paint in specific ratios to create desired colors.James Provost

The length of time a base color’s paint valve can be open is one of eight values between 30 and 250 ms. This means that the entire system—which I coincidentally dubbed Spectrum—can create hundreds of distinct spray-paint colors instantly. It produces less than 8⁴ (or 4,096) colors because duration ratios that are a multiple of each other will produce the same color—for example, 2:3 and 4:6. I added a force sensor to the push button, which allows for a gradient: Two color mixes can be dialed in, and as I increase my thumb’s pressure on the button, the paint mix shifts from one color to the other.

Spectrum’s various fixtures are 3D-printed, and project files and videos are available through my website at https://www.sandeshmanik.com/projects/spectrum. Preprints of technical descriptions of the rotary pinch valve and mixing methodology are available on TechRxiv. The total cost for the bill of materials is less than US $150.

Working on and off on the side for about seven years, I finally finished developing my system and writing the documentation in late 2025. After I posted a video to social media, I was heartened by the immediate positive response from spray-paint artists around the world. I’m now creating step-by-step instructions so that nontechnical people can build their own Spectrum paint sprayer. I look forward to seeing what creations artists out in the wild make!

Welcome to our latest roundup of what’s going on in the indie game space. As ever, we’ve got some new games for you to dive into this weekend, and a glimpse at some upcoming titles. But, first, a look at indie studio Albatross Interactive’s take on a multiplayer mode from a much-loved blockbuster.

Terminal War is a 4v4 third-person shooter and it seems like the small team of developers is trying to keep things grounded. Ammo and supplies are scarce, and there’s an emphasis on melee combat with the promise of “brutal executions.” The action is set in the late ’90s, a few years after a global war, with three factions battling for control and survival in a collapsed version of the United States.

Albatross Interactive isn’t shy about the inspiration behind Terminal War. “They canceled The Last of Us Factions 2,” the team wrote on X. “So we’re building it [sic] our version.”

In September 2019, nine months before the game’s eventual release, Naughty Dog confirmed The Last of Us Part 2 wouldn’t have a multiplayer mode. At the time, it told players “you will eventually experience the fruits of our team’s online ambition.”

That still hasn’t exactly come to pass. The studio formally announced The Last of Us Online in June 2022 and canceled it 18 months later. As such, the Factions mode in 2014’s The Last of Us Remastered for PS4 remains the franchise’s only remaining multiplayer mode.

Albatross Interactive, which says it’s building Terminal War from scratch, plans to reveal more gameplay soon. The game is slated to hit Steam in early access as soon as this summer.

The team expects Terminal War to remain in early access for around 12-18 months, though it noted that “we’re a small studio and we’d rather take the time to get it right than rush to a finish line. The timeline will ultimately be shaped by community feedback, the scope of content we deliver, and the standard of quality we hold ourselves to.” The studio plans to bring the game to consoles as well.

New releases

I’m into the current iteration of Acclaim as an indie publisher (albeit one with a plan to revive its own historic franchises). Its latest title, GridBeat from Ridiculous Games, is a rhythm-based dungeon crawler in which you’re trying to escape from a corporate network after pinching a trove of valuable data. Malware and security protocols are on your tail. Navigating the mazes, interacting with objects and boss battles are all synced to a beat.

GridBeat is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch. It typically costs $20, but there’s a 10 percent discount on Switch until April 2. It’s 15 percent off on Steam until April 9.

Given how much time I spent playing Football Manager 26 last year, Nutmeg is right up my alley. Getting veteran commentator Jim Rosenthal to pitch the soccer management sim in the launch trailer certainly doesn’t hurt.

This is a card-battler take on soccer management and it’s set in the ’80s and ’90s. You can start out in the lower divisions and can work your way up to the top of the English soccer system. You’ll hire and fire staff, and select your team and formation before taking on an opponent. Completing challenges and doing well in training will earn you more card packs.

The trailer reminds me of collecting Panini stickers as a kid as well as the smell of my friends’ Subbuteo figures. I would have said my favorite thing about this is that everything takes place at an era-appropriate desk with a TV that shows results and standings in the style of Teletext and an old computer that has some retro mini-games you can play. However, Sumo Sheffield and Publisher Secret Mode are donating a small portion of every sale of Nutmeg to charity, which is a nice gesture.

Nutmeg is out now on Steam. It’ll usually cost you $25, but there’s a whopping 40 percent discount until April 2.

Devil Jam is a metal-themed spin on the roguelite formula that Vampire Survivors popularized with a dash of Hades-esque characterization mixed in. It’s been out on Steam since November and it hit consoles this week. It costs $8 on PS5 and Switch, and $7.59 on Xbox Series X/S.

You’ll wield a cursed guitar as you battle demonic enemies and bosses. As ever with this type of game, it’s all about finding fun, powerful builds by synergizing abilities. You can put those together in a 12-slot gear system. I dig the art style and animation in this game from Rogueside too. I especially love that one character dashes by powersliding on their knees.

A couple of months after its debut on Steam, Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator landed on Xbox Series X/S for $20 this week. The latest game from prolific studio Strange Scaffold is a stock market simulator in which you speculate on the “simulated lives of babies” and how successful (or not) said alien sprogs will be in the future. It takes aim at real-life prediction markets where people can gamble on everything from the Time Person of the Year to nuclear tests.

Upcoming

Here’s another game you can actually check out this weekend, as a playtest is taking place on Steam until March 31. Salvation Denied is a co-op construction sim/tower defense game from Firevolt and publisher Digital Vortex Entertainment.

You can get together with up to three friends to build experimental structures at the behest of a foreman who looks like he’s stepped right out of Team Fortress 2. You’ll have tools like a gravity gun, foam gun and jetpacks on hand to help you form these structures, along with heavy machinery that can move or recycle sections of the build. Coordinating with proximity voice chat could be critical as you and your buds deal with natural disasters like acid rain and meteor showers.

I’m almost always going to be on board with a game that’s all about chaos, so I’m interested in checking out Salvation Denied. It’s set to hit Steam this fall before landing on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2027.

Someone has stolen the sun. Reclaiming it is your goal in Light Dude, which is from solo developer Ramy of Dergham Games. It’s an action game in which the lights go out when you move, so you’ll need to figure out your approach to each level and how to avoid hazards before moving forward. There’s a first-person mode here too.

Light Dude is slated to hit Steam sometime this spring. A demo is available now.

Solo developer Mateo Covic (aka ZoroArts) is looking to follow up on the success of Paddle Paddle Paddle with another friendslop game. Covic said it took just four weeks to create Cool Story Bro. Up to four players each have five minutes to write a short story that includes four words. These are picked at random or taken from a pool of player suggestions.

Special items appear throughout each round, such as a revolver, which can take another player out of the game for 10 seconds, and one that swaps everyone’s stories. If you’re the first player to type an item’s name, you can use it.

After everyone has finished writing their story, players take turns to read theirs out for the rest of the group. The others vote on whether they liked the tale. If you really hate someone else’s short story, you can blow them up with a rocket launcher. If only I had that option at some of the poetry readings I’ve been to.

This seems fun and silly, and the kind of thing that could easily blow up on Twitch (there’s an integration that allows viewers to suggest words). Cool Story Bro is slated to hit Steam sometime in April.

Fittingly enough, it’s been a long time since Third Shift announced its debut project, Forever Ago. Six years, in fact. The game re-emerged this week during the Xbox Partner Preview showcase. Publisher Annapurna Interactive is bringing it to Xbox Series X/S, PS5, Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox on PC, Steam and Epic Games Store this fall. It’ll be available on Xbox Game Pass (and Xbox Cloud) on day one.

This is a road trip adventure in which you take on the role of Alfred. Following a personal tragedy, he ventures north in his minivan to seek redemption. With an instant camera in hand, Alfred will meet new people and explore forests, deserts and mountains. It’s another narrative-heavy game from Annapurna, which appears to be leaning heavily into nostalgia this year given that Mixtape is only a few weeks away.