Review: Kernal Hearts Is a NieR-like Roguelike

Part of my goal in putting together Guiding Key, Kotaku’s year-long Kingdom Hearts book club, is to interrogate how much the memes about Square Enix’s supposedly convoluted Disney and Final Fantasy crossover series have distorted what it actually is. That means seeing just where it is in this 25-year-long journey that Square Enix decided Kingdom Hearts was going to be more than just an anime-inspired jaunt through Disney worlds, and was instead going to become a decades-long epic. And now that I’ve started replaying the original Kingdom Hearts, I want to call out something that was disorienting and even perhaps frightening to me as a child: the tutorial. Immediately after the still-stunning opening cinematic set to Utada Hikaru’s “Simple and Clean,” Sora, our plucky protagonist, falls into an abyss, landing on a giant stained-glass platform adorned with Snow White’s likeness. At this point, Sora hasn’t met her, and won’t meet an actual Disney character for many hours, but he and his allies would return to places that looked like this many times throughout the series. This is the Dive to the Heart, which is essentially a physical space that symbolizes one’s heart.

Image: Square EnixFamitsu has shared the latest look at the Japanese physical gaming charts, and there's another newbie on the podium. Despite not even reaching the podium in the UK, Kingdom Hearts Collection [I~III] nabbed the top spot in Japan, with just 23,411 units to its name. Not all that many sales for a debut, but it was a pretty quiet week out there, with Rhythm Heaven Groove landing in second and last week's champ, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve flying into third.

They say that happiness equals reality minus expectations, and, unfortunately for these eight Switch games, reality landed nowhere near what was expected. It’s hard to blame the critical and community reception for some of them, but not all of them are bad. Some just aren’t what people were hoping they would be. So we’ve ranked them by the size of the gap between promise and result, from the mild letdowns to the ones that stung most or didn’t justify for the cost. Consider this your reminder to check your expectations at the door. Expected: A showstopper. Got: A chill, easy stage show Here, Peach takes the lead in a theater full of costume-themed stage plays, including a detective, a mermaid, and a swordfighter. If you love Princess Peach and enjoy dressing up dolls — which, same — this may sound like a good conceit. Critics largely enjoyed the charm of the outfits granting Peach various abilities, but found that as a gaming experience it was “pretty, if shallow.” Others found that the game was short, without offering much of a challenge to justify its $60 price tag. Princess Peach: Showtime!

Picture this. You're me, and you boot up the demo for Rain98, an incredibly blue-looking, rainy visual novel set in Tokyo, 1998, about a woman who refers to herself as the Angolmois, a world-ending reference to the predictions of good ole Nostradamus. At one point you have to light this woman's cigarette in a lightly stylish sequence. You get to a bit where you're asked to put your name in, and you put it in because like its predecessors, this is surely a self-insert kind of situation. Only you get a Steam achievement for getting a game over for putting your name in. Rude! But curious, so you, and of course I mean I, pressed on. In Rain98, you play as a nameless Generic Man who is deeply troubled, if not outright suicidal (of which this game has strong themes of) by the state of the world as it is in our present day. It's a fair stance to take! I would not exactly say things are good right now. But they weren't great in 1998 Japan, the year that Generic Man is somehow transported back to, finding this young woman, Reina Amehara, the Angolmois, in what he thinks is his apartment.

Updated: Oct 17, 2026 9:28pm UTCThe Battlefield 6 team has responded after players took aim at a few controversial cosmetics added in Season 5. Battlefield Studios took to its official Discord server to offer background information on two skins that caused a stir with the launch of Battlefield 6 Season 5 this past week (via MP1st). The full text confirmed at least one of the issues has a fix in the works, while the other will seemingly remain the same. The cosmetics – one with what appeared to be a typo in the word "security" and another featuring infantry sporting a whopping five pistol holsters – were officially added October 13 and almost immediately drew ire from fans. It's that pesky misspelling, which took the shape of the non-existent word "security" on the armband of a McNeil skin, that the developers say will be fixed when Battlefield 6 Season 5 launches in November. Secuty 😭 It's AI #Battlefield6 https://t.co/8DVphghCSU— Battlefield Intel (@BattlefieldInte) October 13, 2026 "You called it out clearly, and we hear your concerns," the message, acknowledging the memes and conversations surrounding the new skins, said.

Underground horror director Jeremiah Kipp has passed away, according to his partner Lindsay Katt. Confirmed through The Long Island International Film Expo, Kipp released his largest movie just earlier in the year, an adaptation of the hit indie horror game The Mortuary Assistant. “Jeremiah was a gentle soul who was always generous with advice and sharing his knowledge of cinema,” writes the Film Expo, “he leaves behind many friends and an important legacy.” Based on the 2022 video game, The Mortuary Assistant follows Rebecca (Kingdom Heart’s Willa Holland), a down on her luck woman hoping her new job will pave the road to recovery. Working grim but seemingly benign shifts at the morgue, she suddenly finds herself subject to strange visions. That’s when her employer, Raymond (Boardwalk Empire’s Paul Sparks), delivers the bad news. It seems a demonic spirit hitched a ride on one of the cadavers, and Rebecca will need to follow specific rituals to rid herself of the entity. 15 years ago Jeremiah Kipp made my dreams come true. I had a very dark and personal story about Suicide and he believed it needed to to be told. I got to write and produce "Crestfallen" as a film along side him.