After a tease last month, we have confirmation: Lollipop Chainsaw will receive a full remake in 2023.

Announced by publisher Dragami Games – which is led by the original game's producer, Yoshimi Yasuda – the game will arrive worldwide next year, although a formal title or platforms have not yet been announced. It will be developed by "a combination of development staff from the original version, including Yasuda as producer, and new development staff from Dragami Games."

The game will aim to recreate the original, but Yasuda explained that the remake will feature a couple of key differences. Due to the power of new-gen hardware, the new game will feature "a more realistic approach to graphics." Less welcome for fans will be the news that music licensing issues means that, as opposed to the first game's 16 licensed tracks, in the remake, "aside from a few licensed tracks, the soundtrack will consist of new music."

Yasuda teased that the game would make some kind of return last month, to celebrate its 10th anniversary. The cult action game was released in 2012, and saw game director Suda51, movie director James Gunn and Yasuda collaborate to present the story of Juliet Starling – a high school cheerleader caught amid an outbreak of zombies.

Writing about the original game's creation and its new return, Yasuda explained: "Unfortunately, various factors resulted in things making it so that fans can no longer easily play Lollipop Chainsaw, and it has been some time since players have not been able to access the game on current consoles.

"We, the original development staff on Lollipop Chainsaw, think of the game as very precious to us, and did not want to leave it in limbo, where players who want to play it cannot. As such, we purchased the Lollipop Chainsaw intellectual property from Kadokawa Games, and decided to develop a remake. We have already contacted Warner Bros. about development, and are being supported by them in this endeavor."

The game picked up a cult following but in our 5/10 review, IGN said: "Lollipop Chainsaw doesn’t even attempt to differentiate itself from the genre, and most of what it does try new in the realm of its characters and writing ultimately ends up taking away from an incredible-on-paper action game."

Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].

A brash blend of lightning-quick platforming, fast and frantic combat, and a peculiar, card-based resource system, Neon White is a slick and special speedrunning FPS that’s simple to understand but hard to put down. Think Doom Eternal’s platforming sections, only replace the grim hellscapes with the floating architecture of an abstract heaven and you’re part of the way there. Add a little of Trials HD trying to ride the perfect route over the corpse of Mirror’s Edge and you’ll be even closer. With its precise and elegant controls and its uncanny ability to make even an average shooter player feel lithe and lethal it’s extremely easy to get lured into Neon White’s loop, even if the story stitching it all together immediately overstays its welcome.

Neon White’s oddball premise – which sees sinners plucked from purgatory to serve as parkour pest-exterminators, clearing out a demon infestation in heaven as part of an annual contest where the winner gets to remain there – certainly sounds interesting on paper. In practice, however, it makes a large portion of Neon White a young adult visual novel where a bunch of brightly-coloured, dead millennials reminisce about their past lives and argue a bunch. I do appreciate the effort to slow down and add context to the 12 chapters and 97 levels developer Angel Matrix has built here – rather than just machine-gunning them directly into our veins non-stop, that is – but overall Neon White’s slightly over-assertive blend of pop-punk Christianity and off-brand anime didn’t grab me. You can fast-forward through it, but it’s always there.

God Squad

This makes for a lot of chat to wade through outside of the otherwise impeccable puzzle platforming, delivered by a cast of goths, gym bros, and cloud-riding capsule toys that are as irritating as they are horny. There’s the titular White, a spindly-legged man who wears three belts – none of which appear connected to his trousers – and who likes to stand with his shoulders pulled back and his crotch thrust forward. Then there’s Violet, a knife-wielding pixie with an infantilised voice that’d open a remote garage door, and who seems like the kind of woman who’d dot the i’s on her ransom letters with love hearts. There’s also a cigar-chomping cat, a BDSM redhead in a collar, and a spiky-haired meathead. It’s like the first page of a Deviantart search up in here.

If this is exactly what you’re after, you’re in luck. For me, I honestly can’t tell whether the dialogue is deliberately bad or accidentally bad – but I guess it’s probably immaterial, because there’s no real difference in the end result.

Repent, Repent, Repeat, Repeat

Despite the fact there are vast slabs of this visual novel regularly wedged throughout Neon White, it’s a testament to the quality of the action itself that it’s well worth enduring. Inside the levels themselves Neon White takes on a completely separate identity, where the hokeyness is elbowed aside for some absolutely razor-sharp FPS action.

The objective? Kill all enemies and reach the exit as quickly as possible. The catch? Each level is a parkour puzzle, and reaching the end within the allotted time limits requires judicious juggling of the finite weapon and ability cards. Why are they cards? Other than allowing White to briefly look like an edgy street magician in the intro movie, I don’t know – but it works. Each card grants White the limited use of a weapon, alongside the use of a one-time secondary ability. The pistol turns into a double-jump, the rifle a high-speed air-dash, and the machine gun a destructive grenade that doubles as a vertical boost. Shotguns turn White into a sailing fireball, rocket launchers become grappling hooks, and SMGs become devastating ground pounds.

Using an ability to clear a gap, breach an obstacle, or destroy an enemy burns the card that granted it – but there’s always another. The beauty of Neon White is that the precise assortment of cards you’ll need to nail a level is always there – it’s just up to you to gather and execute them all in the perfect spots. This ended up being a lot less intimidating than I’d feared as there’s a very well-considered visual language at work within Neon White. With sharp and simple graphics and very deliberate use of colour, Neon White usually makes it quite clear which direction you need to travel, the barriers you can smash, and the gaps you need to leap. It’s remarkably intuitive, seeping its way into my brain before I’d even realised it. There were definitely instances where I’d find myself jumping into a void during a first run through a level and dying without a clear idea of where I was supposed to be headed, but these were exceptions.

As a result, Neon White boasts not only a marvellous sense of momentum, but also a fantastic ability to flatter you. There were certainly many occasions during Neon White where I felt like the greatest dead parkour assassin in the universe; breathless moments where I’d reached the end of a level and picked up my trophy by bounding and blasting by the seat of my pants, and playing the footage back felt like watching someone else playing. Someone much better than me. For an entirely unexceptional shooter player, Neon White’s capacity to make you feel like you look good playing it is a real credit.

Better still, the faster you go, the more it encourages you to keep improving – first by giving you your own ghost to chase, and next by revealing new shortcuts to you. After mastering the moves I found myself searching for other hidden jumps and bits of level geometry that could be scaled or exploited. It hooks you into its just-one-more-try loop. Levels can take between 10 to 20 seconds to a few minutes, although the sweet spot seems to be around a minute-or-less. The longer levels and boss battles towards Neon White’s end do introduce a potent new card and some new traversal techniques, but I found these pretty tiresome on account of their punishing lengths. With no mid-level checkpoints by design (and extremely limited health) the longer levels are honestly just more frustrating than fun.

This story contains spoilers for The Boys on Prime Video and the comics.

The Boys Season 3 is rapidly approaching its finale, and it looks like there could be a whole lot of bloodshed on the horizon. While any number of our series regulars could be on the chopping back before the finale, all eyes are on Jack Quaid’s Hughie Campbell as he goes down a troubling path of addiction and self-inflated masculinity. Now, fans are asking whether we’ll be going into The Boys Season 4 without the series’ golden boy.

Will Hughie Die In The Season 3 Finale?

Since Hughie and Starlight (Erin Moriarty) first hooked up, the former has felt a sense of inadequacy dating a Supe. This has boiled over in Season 3 thanks to the V24 serum that gives you temporary powers. Leaning into the darker side of addiction, Butcher and Hughie are becoming increasingly obsessed with their new-found powers.

Episode 7 hammers home that something is wrong with Butcher and Hughie, but it’s doubtful that The Boys would kill off Billy Butcher just yet. When Hughie says to Butcher that his brain is “leaking,” it mirrors a scene in Episode 6 where Hughie fishes some black goo from his ear. It originally looked like this could’ve been a side effect of Soldier Boy’s radioactive qualities, but now, it’s clear it’s a reaction to V24.

In "Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed", Starlight attempts to give Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) her powers back by securing Compound V from Vought Tower. While rummaging through some paperwork, Starlight finds notes on V24 and a warning that it can be deadly in three to five doses – turning your brain into “f*****g Swiss cheese.” The episode ends with Starlight relaying this information to Butcher, who decides not to tell Hughie about these potentially lethal doses.

Episode 7 also makes comparisons between Hughie and Lenny Butcher (Jack Fulton). Giving Billy Butcher his own tragic backstory, we finally get to see what happened to his younger brother when Butcher is under Mindstorm’s (Ryan Blakely) control. Like in real life, Lenny takes his own life with a gun, but not before reiterating that anyone who gets close to Butcher dies. Saying Hughie is next, Lenny adds, “When he dies, and he will, then no one can stop you.” Butcher wakes from his vision and mistakes Hughie for Lenny.

There has been a lot of foreshadowing that Hughie isn’t long for this world, with a recurring mantra of him trying to “save” Starlight. Even though Starlight says she doesn’t need saving, it's this arrogance from Hughie that could see him perish during an inevitable showdown between Homelander and Starlight. In Episode 7, Homelander warns Starlight that if she doesn’t take back everything she said, he’ll do the same to Hughie that he did to Supersonic. Homelander ominously says “You walk, that’s next,” before Starlight reveals she’s been streaming him to her 190 million followers and steps into the elevator… walking away.

Does Hughie Die In The Comics?

Kripke and co. play fast and loose with the comics. Away from Soldier Boy being revamped from Homelander’s lapdog who is abused to get into The Seven, the arc of Hughie taking V24 is different from the source material. In Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s comics of the same name, The Boys start taking Compound V almost immediately, while Butcher injects Hughie on their first mission against Teenage Kix.

Although Hughie is angry at Butcher, he soon comes to accept his powers (which are permanent) of improved strength and durability. There’s also a heightened sense of intelligence, which differs drastically to his TV counterpart. When jacked on V24, TV Hughie has strength and the ability to teleport.

The Boys’ comics come to a close in bloody style when Billy Butcher is revealed as the big bad and goes on a killing spree in his quest for vengeance against Supes. In 2012’s “The Bloody Doors Off” comic, Butcher kills Frenchie, Mother’s Milk, and the Female (Kimiko), before taking on Hughie in a final battle atop the Empire State building. Butcher falsely claims he’s killed Hughie’s family and forces Hughie to drive a metal pipe through his chest.

Jump forward to 2020’s “Dear Becky” comic, Hughie and Starlight are trying to live their lives when he’s sent the diary of Billy Butcher – documenting his life before the death of his wife, Becky. Along with Starlight, Hughie Campbell is one of the few characters to survive the comics, so to kill him in Season 3 would be a major departure.

Can Hughie Break the Cycle?

Butcher is a master manipulator in both the comics and the series, and knowing he’ll need all the help he can get to take down Homelander, Hughie is just another pawn in this game. The threat of Homelander is likely a contributing factor to why Hughie continues to take V24, and although Homelander was nearly bested in “Herogasm”, it took a trio of Butcher, Hughie, and Soldier Boy to hold him down. Whether killed in battle with Vought’s bad product or a V24 overdose, it’s not looking good for Hughie.

Namely, it's hard to see what's next for Hughie and Starlight. If either of these died in a finale fight, it would catapult the series into its own endgame. If it worked for Game of Thrones with Season 3’s Red Wedding, it can work here. Flipping the whole thing on its head, at least Episode 7 ends with Starlight promising to save Hughie… even if he doesn’t want her to. With so much of the comics still to go through, and Quaid’s status as The Boys’ very own Jon Snow, chances are, we haven’t seen the last of Wee Hughie just yet.

Warning: Spoilers Ahead for Stranger Things Season 4!

Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer have revealed that while Season 5 will likely be shorter than Season 4, it very well may have a "Return of the King-Ish" ending.

Speaking with Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the Duffer Brothers shared that they don't expect Stranger Things' final season to be quite as long as Season 4's 13-hour runtime as there won't be as much of a ramp-up this time around "before our kids really get drawn into the supernatural mystery."

“The only reason we don’t expect [Season 5] to be as long is because, this season, if you look at it, it’s almost a two-hour ramp-up before our kids really get drawn into the supernatural mystery," Matt Duffer said. "You get to know them, you get to see them in their lives, all while they’re struggling with adapting to high school and so forth … Steve’s trying to find a date. All of that.

"None of that, obviously, is going to be occurring in the first two episodes of this. I mean, this is, for the first time ever, we don’t wrap things up at the end of 4. So, it’s going to be moving, I don’t know if it will be moving at 100 mph at the start of Season 5, but it’s going to be moving pretty fast. Characters are already going to be in action, they’re already going to have a goal and a drive, and I think that’s going to carve out at least a couple of hours and make this season feel really different."

While the beginning of the season may get off to a quicker start, the Duffer Brothers have every intention of taking their time with the ending of the series. Alongside saying they expect the series finale to be similar in length to the two-and-a-half-hour-long final episode of Season 4, Matt Duffer also said "it’s going to be Return of the King-ish with eight endings.”

While some took issue with the way the final Lord of the Rings film ended, or seemingly never ended, Matt Duffer thinks it is all worth it to give the characters a proper send-off.

"If you just watch Return of the King, it feels like too many endings," Matt Duffer said. "If you watch all of them back-to-back, which I’ve done multiple times, it’s exactly right. If it were any shorter, it would feel cheap and wrong."

The Duffer Brothers also chatted about how having all our heroes together again in Hawkins will "streamline things naturally." Furthermore, the team plans on bringing the story "full circle."

"It’s going to feel a lot larger-in-scale than Season 1," Matt Duffer said. "We want to go back to a lot things we did in Season 1 and a lot of the original groupings and pairings that we had in Season 1. There’s something nice about coming full circle. So, it’s going to feel bigger than Season 1 and much more massive in terms of the stakes and the scale, but we want to revisit a lot of things we did."

In closing, Matt Duffer warns that anything can change while they work to bring Stranger Things to close, so it's important to take his words with a grain of salt.

"We’ll see," Matt Duffer laughed. "If you would have talked to us at the start of writing [Season] 4, I would have told you it was eight episodes and they were about an hour-long each. So, I wouldn’t trust a word that comes out of my mouth."

For more, check out our review of Stranger Things: Season 4 – Part 2, the burning questions we have after the season finale, and our chats with Vecna actor Jamie Campbell Bower and Eddie actor Joseph Quinn on the biggest moments of Season 4.

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

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