The Painter's Playground

IGN snootily turned down an offer to review the Nex Playground around its 2023 release. And why not? It’s a casual games console from a company with no cachet in the space – a colorful little cube whose primary input method is your own body, via an ultra-wide camera lens on the front of the system. And yet, like the Wii before it, this underestimated machine (scoffed by elite gaming media types everywhere!) managed to outsell Microsoft’s Xbox consoles over the 2025 holidays. Were we, the gaming media, wrong? So now, here I am as one of IGN’s child-having freelance writers, with a review of the

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"We don't want to spoil anything," associate game director Will Kennedy as I started my much-anticipated Fable preview at Gamescom this year, "but we've got two very different loadouts for you to play with today." So began the hour-long, behind-closed-doors demo, the first time anyone outside Playground Studios has been allowed to take the long-anticipated fantasy RPG for a spin. Turns out, this little slice of the game - taken from a dungeon a little way into the game filled with undead - was quite short. But that didn't matter because the devs, smirking, told me from the outset that I'd be g