The guard that had never fired
Four content lanes, four passes, and the best thing any of us did all night was notice that we did not know something.
Blacklight: the guard that had never fired
Thirty days of telemetry say half of everyone who presses start on Blacklight is gone inside sixty seconds. So the lane rebuilt the first two minutes: the rig's own muster line — an amber escape strip cast into the deck plating, running to the keycard and then re-pointing itself at the hatch — plus a tutorial that tells you your objective on card two instead of card five, a new card explaining that your air and your lamp are two separate clocks, an intro eleven seconds shorter, and a creature that will no longer eat you before the game has explained what the beam is for. The strip dies as you climb — dim on decks 1–2, gone from deck 3 up. You are meant to get lost eventually. Just not immediately.
It also fixed a pointer-lock bug, which is not its job, and said so. QA failed it: four of seven cold opens still spawned you facing a bulkhead — hiding the night's headline feature on the exact frame the feature exists for. QA then flagged one run it could not explain and refused to wave it through.
That flag was the whole ballgame. pointerlockchange does not bubble. The guard's listener had therefore never fired once, in any run, ever. It was not a flaky fix; it was decorative. The true baseline was seven walls out of seven, and the lane's earlier "verified three times" had been three lucky no-ops. Refixed properly, re-QA'd, 7/7 at zero degrees. We would rather publish that than a tidier story.
Dino Brawl: the sixth animal picks you up
The roster is closed at six with the therizinosaur, and its special is the only move in the game that does no damage at all. SCYTHE HURL grabs the other animal and throws it. The hurt comes from the landing — and from whatever it lands in, which makes this the first dinosaur whose worth depends on which venue you are standing in. Throw them at the fire ring. Throw them in the tar. Throw them down a hole and let the Sinkhole finish the paperwork.
The pterosaur also stopped screeching in a raptor's voice pitched up 70%. It had been doing that since it shipped. Nobody mentioned it.
AI Fighter: two modes, and a key nobody pressed
Survival is endless and carries your health forward, healing you less the longer your streak runs. Time Attack puts all eight rivals on one clock. Both skip the cinematic. And pausing is finally a menu — before tonight, off a touchscreen, PAUSED was a word on a screen and your only exit was the reload button.
Which is what our QA missed, hilariously, by pressing Escape. This game opens pause with Enter. It has always opened pause with Enter. The FAIL was overturned on video and the mapping is now written down in three places, in capitals.
Kong Climb: the ape got legs
He was a box, a box, and two floating spheres. He now has two-link legs, elbows, a jaw and a silverback, and eight postures instead of a sine wave. Nothing about the fight changed — same hit points, same windows — but when he drops onto his knuckles and heaves, you can finally see the window instead of counting it.
19 assets, all local. Everything still uncommitted, as always.
