Vikingak
In these days of shrinking attention spans, the success of a game is too often determined by its overture: you either capture the audience during those crucial early minutes, or you never get another chance. Developer Bethesda understood this quite some time ago, and since 1992, dramatic openings have been one of the most notable […]
A game’s opening moments are make or break, especially in an age when people can quickly bounce from game to game on subscription services like Xbox Game Pass. Those opening moments, whether they’re action-packed or character-driven, have to grip you before you move on to the next game in your backlog. This weekend, Polygon is […]
With a live-service game like Diablo 4, it can often be hard to sort the wheat from the chaff of the community’s outrage cycle. That’s especially true when observing it from the outside, or even from the semi-inside if you’re an occasional, on/off player (as I am with Diablo 4). Excitement at new content and […]
There’s nothing more frustrating in Magic: The Gathering than falling prey to blue’s most annoying gimmick: the Counterspell. Blue’s entire color identity is about controlling the flow of play and manipulating both the battlefield and players’ hands with magic. For a relatively low cost, someone playing blue can counter almost any spell, regardless of how […]
Starting with the very first episode of Stranger Things, the series creators Matt and Ross Duffer used Dungeons & Dragons to both foreshadow the show’s biggest villains and explain their powers. The protagonists refer to themselves as “the party” and the metaphors have been laid on so thick there was even speculation the series finale […]
[Ed. note: This article contains full spoilers for the series finale of Stranger Things.] Something has seemed wrong since, let’s say, some time in 2016. Whatever your political, economic, or religious affiliations, there’s no denying our world has veered down a polarized path in the last decade, one that most people never saw coming in […]
Why throw something away if you can reuse it? Where some might apply this philosophy to food packaged in glass or ceramic containers, it’s also applicable to Pokémon card tins. As such, trading card aficionado Nicole just wanted to show off how she was giving her Pokémon tins a second life on social media. Instead, […]
Avatar: Fire and Ash left me thinking about Shakespeare. Not because James Cameron’s dialogue is up there with the Bard’s (sorry, Spider), but because it was full of the same harrowing drama as Hamnet, the least obvious Avatar comp of 2025. An adaptation of one of the most beloved books of the decade, and now […]
Stranger Things fans are waiting in suspense until New Year’s Eve, when the final episode of the hit Netflix series will be released, bringing an end to the story of the unlikely heroes of Hawkins, Indiana. In a virtual roundtable Polygon attended, series star Noah Schnapp said he was just as anxious to read the […]
Movement is something we might take for granted in games. Characters are expected to move in certain ways, and controls are often similar across games (an A button to jump, clicking in a left stick to sprint). Some of 2025’s best games disregarded expected movement mechanics to challenge the player to think differently in the […]
