The biggest night on Broadway is almost here. Find out what channel the 2025 Tony Awards are airing on and how to watch live here.
The biggest night on Broadway is almost here. Find out what channel the 2025 Tony Awards are airing on and how to watch live here.
Immigration raids sparked mass protests across Los Angeles and now the National Guard has moved in. Find out what’s happening and more here.
Immigration raids sparked mass protests across Los Angeles and now the National Guard has moved in. Find out what’s happening and more here.
The actor made Broadway history by presenting his Broadway debut on television, the first play to be televised live.
The actor made Broadway history by presenting his Broadway debut on television, the first play to be televised live.
Ask me what I’m reading at any given moment and I’ll probably rattle off at least three titles, not to mention comics and the occasional textbook I may also be chipping away at in the background. Reading multiple books simultaneously might sound chaotic (at least, people always tell me it is), but there is a degree of organization to it all: each book in my pile of current reads is in a different format. I’ll have one physical, paper book, an ebook and an audiobook in progress at a time, so I always have something on hand to read no matter where I am.
While I used to carry around a dedicated ereader, I’ve shifted more toward using my phone for the job these days, especially since getting a foldable. Consequently, I’ve tried out a bunch of different apps for reading and logging my books. These are the ones I like most.
Audiobooks have really grown on me over the last few years, almost entirely replacing podcasts as the thing I’ll throw on when I’m cleaning, taking a walk or going for a long drive. While I tried to make do at first by only borrowing audiobooks from the library, I quickly found that the extremely limited selection from my library system coupled with really long wait times just wouldn’t cut it if I wanted to stay up on new releases. After researching all the options, I settled on Libro.fm, an audiobook platform that shares a portion of profits (about half, according to a 2022 interview) with independent bookstores. And even better, you get to pick which bookstore to support with your purchases.
I wasn’t expecting to find my favorite local bookstore — a tiny shop in a small town in New York’s Hudson Valley — on Libro.fm, so I was pleasantly surprised when it turned up in the search. With that, and the fact that all audiobooks from Libro.fm are Digital Rights Management (DRM) free, so you can actually download the files and do with them as you please, I was sold. You have a few options for buying audiobooks through Libro.fm: you can subscribe for $15 per month, which gives you one audiobook credit and a 30 percent discount on all purchases; you can buy credit bundles to save on purchases without a subscription; and you can purchase individual titles at their full, non-member price. There are also plenty of free books to choose from.
The moment I found out that Bookshop.org had launched ebooks and an app to read them on, I made the site my sole destination for buying digital books and haven’t looked back. Just like Libro.fm, Bookshop.org lets you choose a local bookseller to support with your purchases. It’s been doing this for physical book sales for the last five years — and according to its tally has raised over $38 million for independent bookstores in that time — but until now, there hasn’t been a similar option for ebooks. The new app is a no-frills ereader app where you can browse the Bookshop.org catalog to save titles to your wishlist (purchases have to be made on the site) and read all the ebooks you’ve bought. There are some things I’d love to see it gain in the future, like comics and the option to display pages side by side for reading book-style on a foldable, but it’s a great start as it is, especially if your primary concern is supporting small businesses.
Right now Bookshop.org’s ebook service doesn’t sync with any of the mainstream ereader devices, so you’re locked into reading on Android, iOS or a web browser, but the company said it’s working on Kobo integration and we could see that happen before the end of this year.
Libby, aka the library app, is my app of choice for older, less in-demand ebooks and audiobooks, or for when I don’t have anything particular in mind and just want to browse the catalog to see what jumps out at me. It lets you link multiple library cards, meaning you potentially have a huge pool to pull from, and since you’re borrowing books rather than buying them, it’s entirely free. Libby also connects with Kindle, and you can have your titles automatically sent to your ereader. Some Kobo devices support OverDrive (the distributor behind Libby) too.
While using an app may not be quite as satisfying as perusing the stacks IRL, I really like Libby’s tag system, which lets you organize your borrowed books and To Be Read titles in whatever way works best for you. You can have a dedicated TBR tag, or create several different tags to group things by genre, mood, etc. Libby is also a great place to find magazines.
Moon+ Reader is the best app I’ve used yet for instances where I have the actual file for a book or document. It supports a ton of different file types — including ePUB, PDF, AZW3, MOBI and many more — and allows you to highlight and annotate text, in addition to offering auto scroll and text-to-speech so the text can be read aloud to you. It’s really customizable, too. You can choose things like font, font color, background, margin width, line spacing and more for each document, and save the final build as a theme so you can use it again later. Designwise, the app feels almost like a relic of a bygone digital era, organizing all of your books in a skeuomorphic virtual bookshelf, and I love it. There are a few style options for the bookshelf too, or you can turn off the bookshelf and just see your books in a standard grid.
There’s both a free and paid version of the Moon+ Reader, and this is a situation where getting the paid version (Moon+ Reader Pro) is actually worth it. It’s a one-time purchase of $10, and going that route will get rid of ads and open up more customization options. In addition to importing your own files into the app, Moon+ Reader has Project Gutenberg integrated so you can directly access that library of over 75,000 free books.
Naturally, I need a way to keep up with all the reading I’m doing, and that’s where The StoryGraph comes in. The StoryGraph is a data-focused app for keeping track of everything you’re currently reading, everything you’ve read and the ever-growing list of titles you want to read. It even allows you to mark books as “did not finish.” I love that I can have five in-progress books logged at a time, and can even update each entry to note how far along I am, which is nice for those I’m dragging my feet on completing.
When you leave a review, you have the option to be really detailed about it, going beyond a star rating and a blurb. Reviewers can indicate whether the book would appeal to readers who like a particular mood, with over a dozen options. You rate the pace and answer basic questions about the plot and characters, like whether there’s character development or if the characters are even likeable. There’s also the option to add content warnings.
Where The StoryGraph really shines, though, is in the stats. There are tons of actual graphs built into the experience to show you a comprehensive breakdown of your reading habits, from the genres, moods and pacing you prefer, to how much fiction you’ve read versus nonfiction. You can set challenges for yourself, like a yearly reading goal, and you’ll be shown a Reading Wrap-up at the end of the year. It’ll tell you how long it takes you to finish a book on average, and compare your reading stats to previous years.
There is a mild social component to the app, but it’s tucked away in its own tab and not shoved in your face, which I appreciate as someone who tends to shy away from those things. If you want, though, you can participate in or create readalongs, start buddy reads and book clubs (and even write out a code of conduct for the latter) or just see what other people with similar interests to yours are reading. The StoryGraph team also really seems to take users’ feedback into consideration, and is constantly adding new things to the app and tweaking existing ones to improve the experience, which is always nice to see.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/the-best-apps-for-reading-tracking-and-listening-to-books-120047705.html?src=rss
During a showcase at Summer Games Fest, developer Dinosaur Polo Club announced that it will be adding a creative mode to Mini Motorways. The new mode will be available in a free game update coming to Apple Arcade, Steam, and Nintendo Switch on August 26, so you can get imaginative on whatever platform you’ve been playing this excellent strategy game.
Like its predecessor Mini Metro, the core gameplay of Mini Motorways has a lot of calm, meditative elements in the experience of placing those first few roads. But as your city grows and the street network gets more convoluted, things can turn hectic real quick. And if you’re like me, you’ve definitely run out of road tiles because you just couldn’t stand making painfully illogical city plans. Creative Mode offers the welcome option to focus on aesthetics, letting players recolor, move and pivot houses and destinations to develop a city with more order. Or with more chaos, you do you!
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/mini-motorways-is-getting-a-creative-mode-233031208.html?src=rss
Coco won her first French Open title in June 2025. Find out how much money she has nowadays and learn more about her career.
Coco won her first French Open title in June 2025. Find out how much money she has nowadays and learn more about her career.
It’s early June, which means it’s time for a ton of video game events! Rising from the ashes of E3, Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest is now the premium gaming event of the year, just inching ahead of… Geoff Keighley’s Game Awards in December. Unlike the show it replaced, Summer Game Fest is an egalitarian affair, spotlighting games from AAA developers and small indies across a diverse set of livestreams. SGF 2025 includes 15 individual events running from June 3-9 — you can find the full Summer Game Fest 2025 schedule here — and we’re smack dab in the middle of that programming right now.
We’re covering SGF 2025 with a small team on the ground in LA and a far larger group of writers tuning in remotely to the various livestreams. Expect game previews, interviews and reactions to arrive over the coming days (the show’s in-person component runs from Saturday-Monday), and a boatload of new trailers and release date announcements in between.
Through it all, we’re collating the biggest announcements right here, with links out to more in-depth coverage where we have it, in chronological order.
Epic hitched its wagon to SGF this year, aligning its annual developer Unreal Fest conference, which last took place in the fall of 2024, with the consumer event. The conference was held in Orlando, Florida, from June 2-5, with well over a hundred developer sessions focused on Unreal Engine. The highlight was State of Unreal, which was the first event on the official Summer Game Fest schedule. Amid a bunch of very cool tech demos and announcements, we got some meaningful updates on Epic’s own Fortnite and CD PROJEKT RED’s upcoming The Witcher IV.
The Witcher IV was first unveiled at The Game Awards last year, and we’ve heard very little about it since. At State of Unreal, we got a tech demo for Unreal Engine 5.6, played in real time on a base PS5. The roughly 10-minute slot featured a mix of gameplay and cinematics, and showed off a detailed, bustling world. Perhaps the technical highlight was Nanite Foliage, an extension of UE5’s Nanite system for geometry that renders foliage without the level of detail pop-in that is perhaps the most widespread graphical aberration still plaguing games today. On the game side, we saw a town filled with hundreds of NPCs going about their business. The town itself wasn’t quite on the scale of The Witcher III‘s Novigrad City, but nonetheless felt alive in a way beyond anything the last game achieved.
It’s fair to say that Fortnite‘s moment in the spotlight was… less impressive. Hot on the heels of smooshing a profane Darth Vader AI into the game, Epic announced that creators will be able to roll their own AI NPCs into the game later this year.
Another company getting a headstart on proceedings was Sony, who threw its third State of Play of the year onto the Summer Game Fest schedule a couple days ahead of the opening night event. It was a packed stream by Sony’s standards, with over 20 games and even a surprise hardware announcement.
The most time was given to Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, a new PlayStation Studios tag fighter that fuses Marvel Superheroes with anime visuals. It’s also 4 versus 4, which is wild. It’s being developed by Arc System Works, the team perhaps best known for the Guilty Gear series. It’s coming to PS5 and PC in 2026. Not-so-coincidentally, Sony also announced Project Defiant, a wireless fight stick that’ll support PS5 and PC and arrive in… 2026.
Elsewhere, we got a parade of release dates, with concrete dates for Sword of the Sea (August 19) Baby Steps (September 8) and Silent Hill f (September 25). We also got confirmation of that Final Fantasy Tactics remaster (coming September 30), an an all-new… let’s call it aspirational “2026” date for Pragmata, which, if you’re keeping score, was advertised alongside the launch of the PS5. Great going, Capcom!
Rounding out the show was a bunch of smaller announcements. We heard about a new Nioh game, Nioh 3, coming in 2026; Suda51’s new weirdness Romeo is a Dead Man; and Lumines Arise, a long-awaited return to the Lumines series from the developer behind Tetris Effect.
There were absolutely no Summer Game Fest events scheduled on Thursday. We assume that’s out of respect for antipodean trees, as June 5 was Arbor Day in New Zealand. (It’s probably because everyone was playing Nintendo Switch 2.)
It’s fair to say that previous Summer Game Fest opening night streams have been… whelming at best. This year’s showing was certainly an improvement, not least because there were exponentially fewer mobile game and MMO ads littering the presentation. Yes, folks tracking Gabe Newell’s yacht were disappointed that Half-Life 3 didn’t show up, and the Silksong crowd remains sad, alone and unloved, but there were nonetheless some huge announcements.
Perhaps the biggest of all was the “ninth” (Zero and Code Veronica erasure is real) Resident Evil game. Resident Evil Requiem is said to be a tonal shift compared to the last game, Resident Evil Village. Here’s hoping it reinvigorates the series in the same way Resident Evil VII did following the disappointing 6.
We also heard more from Sega studio Ryu Ga Gotoku about Project Century, which seems to be a 1943 take on the Yakuza series. It’s now called Stranger Than Heaven, and there’s a (literally) jazzy new trailer for your consideration.
Outside of those big swings, there were sequels to a bunch of mid-sized games, like Atomic Heart, Code Vein and Mortal Shell, and a spiritual sequel of sorts: Scott Pilgrim EX, a beat-em-up that takes the baton from the 2010 Ubisoft brawler Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game.
There were countless other announcements at the show, including:
Troy Baker is the big cheese in Mouse: P.I. for Hire
Here’s a silly puppet boxing game you never knew you needed
Killer Inn turns Werewolf into a multiplayer action game
Out of Words is a cozy stop-motion co-op adventure from Epic Games
Lego Voyagers is a co-op puzzle game from the studio behind Builder’s Journey
Mina the Hollower, from the makers of Shovel Knight, arrives on Halloween
Wu-Tang Clan’s new game blends anime with Afro-surrealism
As always, the kickoff show was followed by a Day of the Devs stream, which focused on smaller projects and indie games. You can watch the full stream here.
Escape Academy has been firmly on our best couch co-op games list for some time, and now it’s got a sequel on the way. Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School takes the same basic co-op escape room fun and expands on it, moving away from a level-select map screen and towards a fully 3D school campus for players to explore. So long as the puzzles themselves are as fun as the original, it seems like a winner.
Semblance studio Nyamakop is back with new jam called Relooted, a heist game with a unique twist. As in the real world, museums in the West are full of items plundered from African nations under colonialism. Unlike the real world, in Relooted the colonial powers have signed a treaty to return these items to their places of origin, but things aren’t going to plan, as many artifacts are finding their way into private collections. It’s your job to steal them back. The British Museum is quaking in its boots.
Here are some of the other games that caught our eye:
Snap & Grab is No Goblin’s campy, photography-based heist game
Please, Watch the Artwork is a puzzle game with eerie paintings and a sad clown
Bask in the grotesque pixel-art beauty of Neverway
Pocket Boss turns corporate data manipulation into a puzzle game
Tire Boy is a wacky open-world adventure game you can tread all over
After Day of the Devs came Devolver. Its Summer Game Fest show was a little more muted than usual, focusing on a single game: Ball x Pit. It’s the next game from Kenny Sun, an indie developer who previously made the sleeper hit Mr. Sun’s Hatbox. Ball x Pit is being made by a team of more than half a dozen devs, in contrast to Sun’s mostly solo prior works. It looks like an interesting mashup of Breakout and base-building mechanics, and there’s a demo on Steam available right now.
Then came IOI, the makers of Hitman, who put together a classic E3-style cringefest, full of awkward pauses, ill-paced demos and repetitive trailers. Honestly, as someone who’s been watching game company presentations for two decades or so, it was a nice moment of nostalgia.
Away from the marvel of a presenter trying to cope with everything going wrong, the show did have some actual content, with an extended demo of the new James Bond-themed Hitman mission, an announcement that Hitman is coming to iOS and table tops, and a presentation on MindsEye, a game from former GTA producer Leslie Benzies that IOI is publishing.
Now you’re all caught up. We’re expecting a lot of news this weekend, mostly from Xbox on Sunday. We’ll be updating this article through the weekend and beyond, but you can find the latest announcements from Summer Game Fest 2025 on our front page.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/everything-new-at-summer-game-fest-2025-marvel-tokon-resident-evil-requiem-and-more-185425995.html?src=rss
Monument Valley 3 is finally coming to more platforms, after being a Netflix exclusive since December. The game will be released on July 22 for PC, Switch, PS4, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Remember, Switch games are playable on Switch 2, so it should also technically be available on Nintendo’s new console.
Monument Valley 3 is considered a solid entry in the franchise, with plenty of fresh puzzles that play with perspective. You navigate a character through bizarre mazes and strangely-designed levels.
These games are partially inspired by artists like M.C. Escher, as the pathways don’t necessarily follow the laws of physics. It’s a whole lot of fun, and sort of plays like a more psychedelic version of the Switch exclusive Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker.
The third entry in the franchise brings in a new gameplay mechanic in the form of a sailboat that freely moves between sections. The vibes are top-tier, with gorgeous art and a great ambient soundtrack. We don’t have a price yet, as Monument Valley 3 was free with a Netflix subscription, but Monument Valley 2 ranged from $5 to $8 depending on the platform.
This news comes from today’s Wholesome Direct livestream, which happens during Summer Game Fest. The announcements are coming in fast and hot from SGF, so stay on top of things right here.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/monument-valley-3-breaks-free-from-netflix-on-july-22-170002131.html?src=rss
The egg-cooking roguelike Omelet You Cook is officially available for PC via Steam. It was shadow-dropped during the Wholesome Direct livestream, which falls in the middle of Summer Game Fest. This quirky title was first revealed last year, but now we can get our grubby little paws on it.
The game looks like a good combination of chaos and strategy, casting players as a line cook at a middle school cafeteria. There’s a bit of Overcooked here, along with the narrative-focused cooking sim Venba and the sushi minigame part of Dave the Diver. It looks really fun.
It’s not just a chaotic minigame. Players can add and prep ingredients between rounds, and there are rare relics that provide power-ups. There’s even a hungry dog that hoovers up unwanted ingredients.
This is an early access release, so folks should expect updates and changes as the months roll on. Developer SchuBox Games is also working on a football sim that stars chickens called Dicey Birdball, but that one didn’t get a surprise drop today. That team sure does love poultry.
This news comes from today’s Wholesome Direct livestream, which coincides with Summer Game Fest. The announcements keep coming in from SGF, so stay on top of things right here.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/the-breakfast-making-roguelike-omelet-you-cook-was-just-surprise-released-on-steam-170024208.html?src=rss
There’s a new shop management sim in town. Discounty will be released on August 21 for PC, Switch, PS4, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. The game tasks players with managing a discount supermarket in a bustling town.
The core gameplay loop reminds me of the shopkeeper portion of Moonlighter, but Discounty lets folks freely organize the shop’s layout. It’s also more than just a management sim. Players can walk around the town and “get caught up in small-town drama” while attempting to strike lucrative trade deals.
There’s a story here, as the tight knit community of Blomkest will react to how well the shop is doing. Getting too popular could ruffle feathers in the town, so players will have to manage sales expectations against the needs of the community. A tagline asks “will you pursue endless profits, or find a way to benefit everyone in Blomkest?”
First time developer Crinkle Cut Games promises that the game holds some kind of dark secret, and we are dying to know what it is. Do capitalistic ghosts come out at night to haunt the town’s residents? We’ll find out this August.
This news came to us via the Wholesome Direct livestream, which happened right in the middle of Summer Game Fest. Follow all of the SGF happenings and trailers right here.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/the-cozy-management-sim-discounty-arrives-on-august-21-170037206.html?src=rss
