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The Hugo Awards began honoring video games for the first time back in 2021. This week, the organization revealed the list of six finalists for the 2025 awards ceremony. Its a cornucopia of critically-acclaimed titles from the past year or so. Lets go over the nominations. Two AAA titles are up for the award. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom and Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Echoes of Wisdom changes up the franchise formula, casting players as the titular Zelda. The gameplay involves summoning monsters and items to solve puzzles and do battle. Its pretty awesome. We especially loved Dragon Age: The Veilguard, calling it "BioWare at its best." The graphics are fantastic and the gameplay is more action-oriented than previous entries in the franchise. It continues the story of the decade-old Dragon Age Inquisition. The Hugos are also honoring a spate of smaller titles. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes got a nom, and this was one of our favorite games of 2024. Its a near-perfect puzzle game that subverts the genre at every turn. We said it was the perfect game "for fans of puzzles, narrative twists and David Lynch." Caves of Qud is an incredibly deep and lore-heavy roguelike set in a fantasy realm. It was actually in early access for a full 15 years before getting an official release last year. 1000xRESIST is a sci-fi adventure game that was praised primarily for its engaging story. Finally, Tactical Breach Wizards is a turn-based RPG starring, you guessed it, wizards. Some reviews have called it the best strategy game since XCOM 2. The final winner will be announced at the 83rd World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle on August 16. Previous winners include Hades and Baldurs Gate 3.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/2025-hugo-award-game-finalists-include-zelda-echoes-of-wisdom-and-dragon-age-the-veilguard-171135638.html?src=rss
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Google is bringing AI Mode to more people in the US. The company announced on Monday it would make the new search tool, first launched at the start of last month, to millions of more Labs users across the country. For uninitiated, AI Mode is a new dedicated tab within Search. It's essentially Google's answer to ChatGPT Search. It allows you to ask more complicated questions of Google, with a custom version of Gemini 2.0 doing the legwork to deliver a nuanced AI-generated response. Labs, meanwhile, is a beta program you can enroll your Google account in to gain access to new Search features before the company rolls them out to the public. In addition to bringing AI Mode to more people, Google is unlocking the tool's multimodal capabilities. Starting today, you can snap and upload images to AI Mode, allowing you to ask questions about what you see. The feature brings together AI Mode with Google's Lens technology. "With Gemini's multimodal capabilities, AI Mode can understand the entire scene in an image, including the context of how objects relate to one another and their unique materials, colors, shapes and arrangements," Google explains. "Using our query fan-out technique, AI Mode then issues multiple queries about the image as a whole and the objects within the image, accessing more breadth and depth of information than a traditional search on Google." AI Mode's new Lens integration is available through the Google app on Android and iOS.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/google-ai-mode-rolls-out-to-more-testers-with-new-image-search-feature-160054334.html?src=rss
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HBOs The Last of Us took a riveting action game bolstered by intimate human moments and made a richly human drama supported by terrifying action. In returning for season two, and now using the sequel game as source material, showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann had quite a bit more work cut out for them. The first season greatly expanded the emotional depth and breadth of Joel and Ellies cross-country journey while also fleshing out the stories of many others they meet along the way, and the cast (led by Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey) was outstanding. That was over two years ago, and now its encore time. Season two premieres on HBO this Sunday, April 13, and I am once again happy to report that the show does a faithful job of capturing the first part of a complex story while also fixing a few of the minor complaints I had about the first season. [Editor's note: this story discusses season two broadly but avoids specific plot details and spoilers. There are spoilers for season one.] The show picks up exactly where season one (and the first game) concluded. Joel and Ellie return to the settlement of Jackson, Wyoming, where Joels brother Tommy is part of a peaceful, well-fortified commune a rare oasis of relative safety in a destroyed world. This comes about a year after the Fireflies a militia group searching for a cure for the zombie infection tasked Joel with smuggling Ellie across the country. Over the ensuing journey, Joel bonds with Ellie and comes to treat her as a surrogate daughter, replacing the one he lost at the beginning of the outbreak 20 years prior. Ellies immunity to the infection gave the Fireflies hopes she holds the key to finding a cure but when Joel learns it would kill her, he wipes out a whole platoon of soldiers and the doctor who was trying to carry out the procedure, before fleeing with Ellie back to Jackson. As far as she knows, there was no way to make a cure and Joel rescued her when raiders descended on the Firefly complex. Kaitlyn Dever in HBO's The Last of Us season twoPhotograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO We immediately learn that Joels rampage against the Fireflies is going to have major repercussions right from the jump, as we meet Abby (played with furious intensity by Kaitlyn Dever) and her small crew of young Fireflies in Salt Lake City in the days following the massacre. Things then jump forward five years; Ellie and Joel are well-integrated into the Jackson community and living a relatively normal life though Joels therapy sessions with Gail (the wonderful Catherine OHara) show that he and Ellie have had some degree of falling out. Whether its just her being a 19-year-old or something deeper remains to be seen. Without spoiling anything, the sequel game, The Last of Us Part II, is a far less linear affair than its predecessor. Events are shown out of order through multiple flashbacks. Perspectives shift. The playable character changes at various points. Ive spent much of the last year wondering exactly how Mazin and Druckmann would translate that structure to TV what events would be shown in what order, and what things might get cut or expanded on? But surprisingly, the show closely mirrors the games chronology. The core of the season remains Joel and Ellie, the fallout from season one and how it affects everyone around them. A handful of events, including an infamous town festival in Jackson and the reveal of Abbys motivations throughout the season, are moved up sooner in the series to give viewers more context for why things are happening. Its a change the creators said was made to compensate for the change between the interactivity of playing characters like Abby and Ellie versus watching them. Pedro Pascal and Catherine O'Hara in HBO's The Last of Us season twoPhotograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO The seasons structure worked the multi-pronged plot didnt ever feel hard to stick with, and I think the show did a better job this season at balancing out action and drama. As the cast and creators have alluded to, Ramsey and Pascal dont get as much time together as they did in season one, which is a shame given their absolutely fantastic chemistry. But both actors make the most of Joel and Ellies fracturing relationship, and they also do wonderful work with other scene partners. Both Joel and Ellie spend significant time with Dina (Isabela Merced), who ends up being something of another daughter to Joel and a best friend / love interest for Ellie. She brings a completely different attitude to these scenes like anyone in the world of The Last of Us, you know shes seen her fair share of horrible things, but she combines a cool confidence with vulnerability in a way that keeps Ellie delightfully off balance. One of the key new events in the show that didnt take place in the game is a massive siege of Infected attacking the town of Jackson (something you see in the shows various trailers). At first, it felt like an on-the-nose response to complaints that the Infected didnt feel like much of a threat in season one, but the way the large-scale battle is juxtaposed with a much more intimate threat in the same episode plays out perfectly. That episode was followed by one that was far more peaceful and character-driven, a cadence I appreciated after the sieges intensity. Naturally, things ramp up as the season draws to a close, but the balance feels measured and thoughtful. Isabela Merced and Bella Ramsey in HBO's The Last of Us season twoPhotograph by Liane Hentscher/HBO Overall, the Infected are more present in this season than the last, and theyre as deadly and terrifying as ever. In the game, the player might think nothing of taking on five or six in one go, but in the show even a one-on-one encounter feels fraught with danger. Of course, as in season one, the humans are the more unpredictable and threatening part of the world. Other new characters and events, like the fate of Gail and her husband Eugene (played by Joe Pantoliano), once again serve to enrich and enhance the world of The Last of Us
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