What they made last time: Twin sisters fighting Nazis

Revisiting the awkward, prior game from the celebrated studio behind next week's Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Screenshot: MarchineGames/Arkane, captured by Game File

BREAKING… Right as this edition of Game File was set to go out, Ubisoft announced the closure of its would-be free-to-play Call of Duty competitor XDefiant.

From Ubisoft PR…

Ubisoft announced that it will discontinue development on XDefiant, its free-to-play first-person shooter title. As a result, half of the XDefiant team worldwide will be transitioning to other roles within Ubisoft. This decision also leads to the closing of our San Francisco and Osaka production studios and to the ramp down of our Sydney production site, with 143 people departing in San Francisco and 134 people likely to depart in Osaka and Sydney.

Ubisoft has recently been denying that the game was facing closure, amid declining player numbers.

Originally scheduled newsletter follows…

This week, I’m playing one of 2024’s final major video games, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. But I can’t yet write what I think about it.

I can write about something else, though: the game that came before it, a 2019 oddity called Wolfenstein Youngblood, the previous big release from MachineGmaes, the studio behind the new Indy adventure.

It’s a time capsule of a time capsule.

Youngblood is an alternate-history game set in a 1980s Paris that’s been overrun with high-tech Nazis. And it’s a game encased in gaming trends—one of them thankfully all but abandoned in 2024—from a half decade ago.

I played Youngblood this morning, for the first time in four years and was most impressed with its irrepressible verve.

You see, it’s a first person shooter starring twin armor-clad 18-year-old sisters who cheer each other on while machine gunning Nazis.