absurd thought exercise: what if games had a label for how long it would take to play, but like a hello fresh recipe, they’re only estimating the shortest possible time frame and most skilled user. so it’d be like: hollow knight silksong, don’t worry this only takes 59 minutes elden ring, eh 4 min

fun life hack I’ve discovered: drinking decaf coffee late at night for fun

two things that are kinda sad or infuriating: 1) if something is cool, you usually hear someone say they saw it on TikTok. can’t we just have nice things without this qualifier? 2) if something looks too glossy and fake, we now often suspect it was AI-generated. this is just getting exhausting

I’m finally playing league of legends ranked again and I gotta say, maybe this is the season I leave behind duo bot to go mid. queuing up with randoms who aren’t willing to support me can only get me so far

Here’s my massive interview with Dispatch’s writer Pierre Shorrete - touching on superhero fatigue, the nature of choice in narrative games, how it started as live action, how it became a “far greater” succes than expected, and what’s next www.inverse.com/gaming/dispa...

rip the penny! it was already being rejected by so many store owners when I tried to include it in a payment, that it became slightly embarrassing to even bring it up

great get from @solfleet.bsky.social today about former Telltale devs' game Dispatch, how it previously contained sex scenes, which got deleted in production but may one day see the light of day again. still, they say, Dispatch "is not a gooner game." www.inverse.com/gaming/dispa...

Full Dispatch interview will be up tomorrow. But here's a bit I pulled out of my chat with writer and AdHoc co-founder Pierre Shorette - where we talk about the "ravenous" response to the game's romances, and yes, that includes some planned sex scenes that were cut. www.inverse.com/gaming/dispa...

friendly reminder I’ll be attending the Game Awards in Los Angeles this year for Inverse! we are already planning out our extensive social video presence there :) and newsletters of course! get in touch: [email protected]

trying to watch the blue jays and dodgers game on live stream and it’s all just guys playing MLB The Show, seriously?? 😭😭😂

stayed in tonight but have a Halloween K-pop demon hunters TikTok from me

hi all, the awaited day has come: I'm looking for freelance writers to pitch Inverse Gaming for end-of-year coverage! namely, I'm looking for someone to contribute our best of RPGs this year list ($350), and pitch us on some year-end lookback essays ($500+). please pitch me: [email protected]

belatedly caught up on the NaNoWriMo (November's National Novel Writing Month) saga. tl;dr: the organization behind came out in support of AI and caught tons of flak. it then shut down. now a few replacement events have sprouted up. RIP nanowrimo, you were once really fun

I'm glad they're still trying this stuff! Jackbox has made a couple of previous attempts at social deduction over the years, and they've been kind of hit or miss.

i just played some Among Us with friends. but we were dogs, not astronauts. and the setting was film noir, not outer space. it was actually jackbox party pack 11, i'm not even joking. woof dunnit, as they say www.inverse.com/gaming/jackb...

I just choose duckduckgo as the search engine since it allows you to disable AI overview and filter out images (for the most part)

i'm so late to this but today I learned you can just type "-AI" minus AI on each google search to hide the AI overview. incredible

I stayed home instead of going to twitchcon this year, but based on my previous years' experiences, I can say that internal security within the building always looked a bit lax 😬

just came across Anthropic’s Claude merch and… I’ve never seen a dumber pun 🙈

mortifying that the Nintendo alarmo has two processes you need to clear to make sure the alarm is set, so that’s something you always have to keep in mind, especially the day after the weekend

best way to spend a Sunday night: super smash figuring out how to beat out the npcs

started watching veep on hbo max tonight for the first time and it’s so interesting to see how the show has aged since 2012, and how much it ends up predicting

got this ad today in the App Store, not sure why hello kitty is on the ground?

by the way i don’t know who needs to hear this, but this meat buns package doesn’t actually contain any meat, despite the photo… I just opened up the bun and was severely disappointed

happy mid-autumn festival to those who celebrate! and thanks to @theloniusly.bsky.social for this timely round-up! www.inverse.com/gaming/mid-a...

Was great getting to talk about this fantastic game with Shannon, and starstruck to be quoted next to the fantastic Kishonna Gray! Thanks for writing this piece Shannon! And everyone check it and Consume Me out

the NYT story on Jenny Jiao Hsia’s game Consume Me is up! “Consume Me nods back to the confessional style of YouTube videos from the early 2000s, and also contains skill-based gameplay in its six-hour run time, adapting scenes from Jiao Hsia’s life in inventive ways.” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/a...

I rode up the rickety Eiffel Tower elevator with trepidation… it was time to play Pokémon Legends: Z-A for an hour. Read more here: www.inverse.com/gaming/pokem...

you may not know this because I sure didn’t, but love is blind france is like roughly 75% Asian. it’s my new favorite Asian drama 😌

here's our borderlands 4 review from a day ago, by the way. just to note, after talking to other journalists, it seems like I just lucked out and played the one class and skill tree that let me solo all of the major bosses with some amount of ease. www.inverse.com/gaming/borde...

writing a new york times article for the upcoming indie game "consume me," and i'm looking for academics who can speak to the gender politics and history of games! I know the school season has just started again, but I'm really hoping to hear back this week before I must fly out. my DMs are open.

i am deep into borderlands 4 now, so if you haven't heard from me in a while, that is quite possibly why

Breaking news: More than 450 Diablo game developers just voted to unionize

World Premiere alert! Inverse got to feature Borderlands' latest exclusive trailer on our site and Hayes interviews the Marvel directors behind the video clip.

I’ve done it now

back on my game, better than ever

NEW: 180 Blizzard workers just unionized today.

ok i rewatched kpop demon hunters because everyone told me to and the first time i watched it i had been too engrossed in mahjong. it's actually very good! I stand corrected

NEW: Call of Duty workers just voted to ratify their first union contract with Microsoft, marking the end of nearly 3 years of negotiations. The two bargaining members speak to me about everything that went into it, and where they go from here. shannonliao.substack.com/p/3-years-la...

death stranding 2 irl

Hope you haven't been waiting too long. My exclusive newsletter featuring my unpublished Hideo Kojima interview insights will be sent to my paying Substack subscribers in a few hours: open.substack.com/pub/shannonl...

didn't know the app where i get most of my going-out clothes from did games journalism now but this rules www.ssense.com/en-us/editor...

ChatGPT has done many destructive things to society, but perhaps the most annoying on a personal level is making me very self-conscious about my love of the em-dash.

sometimes you just have to give yourself grace and say, I can’t possibly respond to everyone I’d like to respond to, but I truly wish I could 🥺

interesting gaming x ai story from the times yesterday, which builds on some of my reporting from 2023: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/a...

Called Visa today. The phone operator was a self-described gamer. When I said I had a complaint about ‘policy’ he immediately knew what it was about, told me the call was recorded, said there was an extremely large volume of calls about the issue and he hopes that it will make a difference

This happens to a lot of Star Wars: Outlaws players when they discover Kessel Sabacc and the main game ceases to exist.

It's way easier to fight human scrubs on your level than it is to fight the Yakuza AI, haha. Those guys cheat. :V

okay, confession time: i actually lost a whole week to mahjong in july, playing yakuza 0 on the nintendo switch 2. what a wild rabbit hole. my friends are actually coming over tomorrow to learn in person! if you're curious too, here's the guide: www.inverse.com/gaming/how-t... #mahjong #yakuza0

I talked to Abubakar Salim about Dead Take. How it embodies the clashing of money and creation, building a modern FMV game, and how the games let’s them the studio have its say. This one looks special. www.inverse.com/gaming/dead-...