Reviewed on: PC
Platform: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, PC
Publisher: Skybound Games
Developer: Nice Dream
Release: November 11, 2025
Rating: Teen

Webcam games carry some baggage, thanks to years of novel but shallow experiences. 2021's Before Your Eyes shook up the tedium with an emotional story you blinked through. The same team returns for Goodnight Universe, an interactive experience that reads your face and reacts accordingly. Goodnight Universe is a joy to play through and has at least a few moments that might linger, especially in the way they incorporate you, the player, into the story.

In Goodnight Universe, you play the role of Isaac, a child born to a seemingly normal, middle-class family. The only problem is, you're anything but normal; you've got the inner monologue of someone much older, and if that wasn't enough, you've got an arsenal of psychic powers like telepathy and telekinesis.

The idyllic family life is quickly shattered, as Isaac's – your – strange abilities become apparent, and start to stretch out a family that's quietly tearing at the seams. A tech company gets involved, a mystery ensues, and there's plenty of action along the way. 

Goodnight Universe is a story about families, and how one's upbringing can shape who they become later in life. The parents of Goodnight Universe struggle with their responsibilities, trying to provide guidance for children who seem uncontrollable. It's a short story, clocking in around five hours, but packs a lot of emotion into the runtime. While the story gets side-tracked in certain sections, in ways that blur the thematic drives it's aiming for, I still enjoyed what Nice Dream crafted in this sci-fi adventure.

 

There are controller options, but the best way to play Goodnight Universe is with a webcam. Though you'll still need some inputs for specific moments, you also get some of the blink-based controls carried over from Before Your Eyes. Blinking at a light can flick it on or off, for example, and closing your eyes over certain areas lets you rearrange them and open your eyes to a new structure, like reassembling building blocks into a tower.

My favorite use of the eye controls is the telepathy mechanic, where you "tune" into people's minds by closing your eyes and turning your head like a radar dish to search for a signal. Once it locks in, you listen to their internal monologue. The effect of tuning in and hearing the voices works incredibly well with webcam detection and headphones, and makes for some really memorable instances of storytelling you can’t get in other games.

However, the emotional detection options were a little more finicky. At certain moments, the player is prompted to express joy or sadness through their facial expressions, once again powered by the webcam if it is turned on. I learned quickly that I had to over-exaggerate my smile and frown for the camera to tell the difference, and those moments didn't make a significant impact for me compared to other fun baby-psychic-power segments.

Most of Goodnight Universe is spent watching the world play out around you, and reacting accordingly, occasionally nudging the virtual stage play along using your psychic powers. Some choices allow you to add context and texture to your story, and what your character is feeling in the moment, but it’s ultimately a linear tale. Still, it made some of the larger emotional moments hit harder by prompting me to engage with them; determining how I thought Isaac felt, or how I felt through Isaac, created an interesting dynamic in what would otherwise have been just a digital play happening around me.

The voice acting is also stellar, with the family and supporting cast putting on dynamic performances. Goodnight Universe's sound design is powerful, from the aforementioned psychic "tuning" moments to subtle bits of foley or synth soundscapes that help communicate the story around you.

While it doesn't land with quite the impact that I felt from Before Your Eyes, Goodnight Universe still shows there's an impressive range of story and interactivity to explore in this space. Its hardware requirements and format justify themselves well through how the game utilizes those tools, creating truly moving moments through interactivity that you just don't see often. Goodnight Universe is a wonderful exploration of what's still possible with a simple webcam.

Score: 8

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The nominations list for the 2026 Grammy awards dropped recently, renewing the fierce yearly debates over what should win, what should lose, and what was snubbed entirely. In the gaming space, this is no different, as this year marks the fourth time soundtracks for video games and other interactive media are eligible for their own category. If you haven't seen the full list yet, here are this year's nominees.

• Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora - Secrets of the Spires (composed by Pinar Toprak)
• Helldivers 2 (composed by Wilbert Roget, II)
• Indiana Jones And The Great Circle (composed by Gordy Haab)
• Star Wars Outlaws: Wild Card & A Pirate's Fortune (composed by Cody Matthew Johnson & Wilbert Roget, II)
• Sword of the Sea (composed by Austin Wintory)

If you've been paying attention to the games industry this year, there are a few elements of this list that feel off. The first is the release dates; three of the five games (namely Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Helldivers 2, and Star Wars Outlaws) fall squarely out of the typical nomination window, which includes releases between August 31, 2024 and August 30, 2025. The catch, however, is that Avatar and Star Wars games got nominations for their DLC packs, which were released more recently – each base game was already nominated last year. As for Helldivers II, a game released in February 2024, my guess is that it's eligible because of its Xbox port this past August. 

These sorts of timeline shenanigans aren't unheard of with Grammys, even in major categories. For example, Wildflower by Billie Eilish was released on an album in May 2024, but because it was re-released as a single in February 2025, it's up for Record of the Year and Song of the Year at this year's awards.

The other way this feels off, however, is the relative impact of each soundtrack across video game culture. Star Wars and Avatar feel out of place in this regard as well, as both games are relatively well-regarded but didn't have the same impact among gamers, and that sentiment extends to their soundtracks. Neither was nominated for best music at last year's game awards, for example. But less egregious than their inclusion means the exclusion of other huge games, most notably Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. It's a big enough deal that nominee Austin Wintory called it out on social media, even offering to trade his place for the smash-hit RPG. While we do think it's an oversight, Wintory's inclusion is no surprise, as he's currently tied for the most nominations in the category since its first year. You can read more on his background and approach to composition in this interview from earlier this year.

The other video game-specific news from this year's Grammy nominations is that The 8-Bit Big Band, a jazz group that does covers of video game music, has been nominated in non-gaming categories for the third year. Its recent album, Orchestra Emulator, is up for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album, while the song "Super Mario Praise Break" is up for Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella. While it's very exciting to see video game soundtracks get recognized in a dedicated category, it's also exciting to see classic game songs break into more mainstream categories.

You can read the full list of nominees for this year's Grammy Awards here. The ceremony will air on Sunday, February 1, on CBS and Paramount+.

Which soundtracks do you think should have been included in this year's Grammy Awards? Let us know in the comments!

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined is the second time Square Enix has remade the original Dragon Quest VII, which launched in the U.S. on PlayStation in 2001. The first remake happened on the Nintendo 3DS back in 2016, and while it featured considerable visual upgrades, it was by and large a faithful remake of the original. Reimagined is faithful in some respects, but Square Enix has been very clear that it's meant to be a more streamlined way to play through the 100-plus-hour story of Dragon Quest VII, and it does so by streamlining the main scenario to take considerably less time to complete. 

The team is also doing some interesting things in combat to bring the play clock down a bit, but for this feature, let's dive into how Square Enix is reshaping the story of Dragon Quest VII to be more digestible. Contrary to what you might think, the Reimagined team didn't start by figuring out what to cut. 

Streamlining

"We didn't really have specific discussions about which parts we wanted to remove from the game," Reimagined lead scenario writer Sayaka Takagi tells me within Square Enix's Shibuya, Tokyo, offices, a day after I played through roughly two hours of this remake. "We actually never had any discussions, or like proactive discussions at least, about which parts we wanted to remove from the game, but we did have an extensive discussion about which parts we wanted to keep in the Reimagined version."

Takagi says one of the big themes of Dragon Quest VII's story is how it depicts these characters – like Hero, Prince Kiefer, Aishe, Maribel, Ruff, and Sir Mervyn – as facing significant adversity. "But another core theme of the story is that it also portrays the humanity of people in its characters, so with these two core elements in mind, we tried to understand all the essential stories of Dragon Quest VII that we wanted to keep." 

If you haven't played a Dragon Quest VII version before, the game certainly has an overarching story, but it's divided into subplots or arcs, if you will. Those "essential stories" Takagi is referring to are the game's various arcs and how they weave in and out of the main story. With this in mind, Takagi and the team asked other staff members developing the game and throughout Square Enix to lay out their ideas, favorite story moments, and more. "There were a lot of people saying, 'When I was playing this as a kid, I didn't really understand what the story was,' or, 'I don't really understand what the themes are, but for some reason, it's stuck in my head because it's very memorable,'" Takagi says. "So we laid out a lot of them, a lot of these story moments that fit this description, that criteria, and worked toward keeping those stories in the Reimagined version."

She adds that in this process, the team also identified many story moments that didn't align with Square Enix's vision for Reimagined. Narratively, that vision includes giving players some choice in determining how they tackle the story of Dragon Quest VII. In the original release, the island-hopping story is quite linear, but in Reimagined, players have some options to shape which direction they go. 

"They get to choose which island they want to go to next, and in the original release, it wasn't really like that; the story moments were dependent on the order," Takagi adds. "[Because of the original's fixed story order], some of the story moments didn't make sense if we were to keep that in Reimagined [...] because in the Reimagined version, we allow players to choose which story they want to move forward with." Those story moments that didn't make sense were lowered in priority and eventually cut from Reimagined. 

Players can actually see a new, never-before-seen conclusion as a result of these new choices present within Reimagined's scenario, too. 

Rebuilding

All this said, Square Enix tells me the core of Dragon Quest VII's story remains intact in Reimagined. In fact, Takagi says the scenario is the one piece of Reimagined that wasn't built from the ground up. 

"While our goal was to reimagine everything and revamp everything from the ground up, [...] it was never our intention to put forth significant changes to the story from the original work," she says. "Obviously, we wanted to respect and honor the original work, and we wanted to kind of maximize how amazing it was. So yeah, we remade everything from the ground up, but as for the story, it was more like rebuilding, taking it piece by piece. We never started from zero." 

I ask if that means putting the original script on a desk and taking what the team likes and leaving behind what it doesn't, to which Takagi says no. "It wasn't really like putting the original dialogue or original scenario side-by-side and going off of that," she says. "What we did was we started with the overview of the plot – the shorter version of the entire scenario of Dragon Quest VII – and laid out some ideas of what we could do to make the story more interesting."

She says it was like creating a puzzle that the team then had to build, and it did so by switching up the order of story sequences, rewriting dialogue, reshaping plot points, and more. Each time it made a change —like switching the order of a story sequence — it required the team to examine how that affected dialogue and other aspects of the scenario, which led to cascading adjustments. 

I try throughout this conversation to get some specifics, but Square Enix largely keeps its cards close to its chest. However, Reimagined producer Takeshi Ichikawa, who you can read more about here, tells me one key thing: the first battle in the game will arrive considerably faster. 

"The amount of time it takes to get to the first battle in the game is much shorter this time around," Ichikawa says, as we both joke about how it takes far too long in the original.

Fortunately, we don't have to wait long to learn specifically how streamlined the story actually is, because Dragon Quest VII Reimagined launches on February 5, 2026, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2, Switch, and PC. 

In the meantime, check out this article breaking down everything in the Dragon Quest VII Reimagined issue of Game Informer, and be sure to subscribe here if you haven't yet so you can access the Dragon Quest VII Reimagined cover story, our deep dive into Dragon Quest history with creator Yuji Horii, and so much more. Here are some other stories to check out: 

• Dragon Quest VII Reimagined Will Have A New Never-Before-Seen Conclusion
• Who Is Takeshi Ichikawa, The Producer Of Dragon Quest VII Reimagined?

What story elements of Dragon Quest VII do you hope remain in Reimagined? Let us know in the comments below!

Developer Bethesda Game Studios announced The Elder Scrolls VI more than half a decade ago, at E3 2018, but according to executive producer and game director Todd Howard, the game is "still a long way off." Howard told GQ this in a new interview, where he also teased that, when TES VI is ready for release, the company might shadow-drop it. 

GQ mentions Bethesda shadow-dropping The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered back in April, and asks if the company could "actually do that with" TES VI. Howard says, "You might say that was a test run. It worked out well." 

While not definitive, it sounds like shadow dropping TES VI is a possibility one day, but given Howard also told GQ the game is still a long way off — more than seven years after its initial reveal — it will be a while before we see anything like that happen. 

Elsewhere in the interview, Howard says Bethesda has "hundreds" of people working on the Fallout franchise right now, between Fallout 76 and "other things we're doing," but notes that TES VI "is the everyday thing." 

While waiting to learn more one day, read about some TES VI location theories, and then check out the latest TES VI update prior to today. After that, read Game Informer's Starfield review. 

[Source: GQ]

When do you think Bethesda will release The Elder Scrolls VI? Let us know in the comments below!

PlayStation has announced that it will hold a State of Play Japan broadcast tomorrow – Tuesday, November 11 – at 2 p.m. PT/5 p.m. ET, and it will run for more than 40 minutes. However, it's a special episode of State of Play focused on games created in Japan and across Asia, "alongside a few other exciting updates." 

The show will be in Japanese, but a version with English subtitles will air on the PlayStation YouTube channel. The PlayStation Blog post announcing the State of Play says, "From beloved series to distinctive indie creations, the show [...] will be packed with great games, interviews, and new looks at anticipated titles." 

As for what those titles might be, PlayStation doesn't tease or indicate anything specific. However, this State of Play will differ in another way because Japanese voice actor Yuki Kaji, who voices Eren Jaeger and Shoto Todoroki, amongst others, will host the presentation. 

State of Play Japan airs tomorrow at 2 p.m. PT/5 p.m. ET. 

What do you hope to see during the State of Play Japan tomorrow? Let us know in the morning!