Technologies

Cozy Horror Game Grave Seasons Is Stardew Valley Plagued by a Serial Killer

At Summer Game Fest, we tried a goth farming simulator inspired by Dredge and Cult of the Lamb.

At Summer Game Fest, I tried a game that was bold enough to ask: Why doesn’t Stardew Valley have more murder? Grave Seasons, due out next year, is a cozy farming sim with a morbid edge: It’s about all the friends (and romantic partners) you make along the bloody way to stopping a serial killer.

A little bit into the short demo of Grave Seasons, I took to the fields to clean up the run-down farm I’d broken into and decided to adopt, only to find a severed hand. It’s fitting for an indie title published by Blumhouse Games, a division of Blumhouse Productions, which, with the gaming unit, began expanding beyond its work in horror films to publish titles like last year’s Fear the Spotlight.

Grave Seasons is a cozy horror game that seems like it will deftly mix the serene and gruesome, appealing to fans of Dredge and other calming games tinged with the sinister. Players take on the role of a prison escapee who breaks into, and adopts, a farm in the town of Ashenridge, only to find that it’s riddled with dark secrets.

But it wasn’t just occult labs in the basement and body parts unearthed from the fields that made the game feel delightfully grim. After I’d made some early friends, my demo ended with a shocking twist: One of my new pals, who asked me to join them for a midnight walk in the nearby woods, got ambushed by a hideous monster and brutally murdered. Even the game’s charming sprite graphics didn’t spare my eyes from the ick of dismemberment.

«We are huge fans of games that blend that sort of coziness mixed with a sense of unease,» said Emmett Nahil, narrative designer at studio Perfect Garbage, which developed Grave Seasons (Blumhouse is the publisher). Nahil cited games like Dredge, Into The Woods and Cult of the Lamb as inspirations.

In Grave Seasons, these murders happen seasonally, said lead programmer Nicky Armstrong. But you have enough time between sowing crops and cleaning up your farm to figure out what might be happening. You can try to befriend the many people you meet around town, and even discover who the killer is.

But if you’re playing Grave Seasons alongside real-life friends, don’t worry about them spoiling the killer’s identity for you — the game’s inspired design randomly assigns the murderer from a subset of the approximately 40 characters you encounter in the game. Like any good cozy farming game, you can romance many of them, including the hunky Hari that I met first in the demo. And in an even better twist, the person you’re romancing might end up being the killer, too.

Beyond video games, Nahil cited folk horror and monster films as inspirations that led to Grave Seasons’ unique tone.

«The original Wicker Man is actually a huge inspiration for me,» Nahil said. «We have some really cool events [in Grave Seasons] that tell you a bit more about the lore of the world. Obviously, creature features like early Hammer Horror are a huge one for me, where you get to see different monsters, different creatures, and there’s a sort of sense of pathos that goes along with those creatures.»

Another design quirk that sets Grave Seasons apart is starting the game with a protagonist on the lam from prison — a departure from Stardew Valley and other farming sims where it’s good vibes from the get-go. Instead, in this game players start with a sense of tension, since they can’t go to the cops about the serial killer prowling around town.

«It helps place the player in the idea that they are on their own and have to use their wits, and really focus on their skills to help the town and themselves — or hinder the town and help the killer,» Nahil said.

In other words, a playthrough of Grave Seasons can go several different ways depending on the randomized killer and the choices players make. That was a design choice for Perfect Garbage, which wanted to divert from the indefinite playtime of Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon games in order to tell a story.

«We really want you to experience the narrative that we’ve crafted and play the game to its conclusion … whether that is a positive or a negative conclusion,» Armstrong said. «We still want you to experience it to its end and have a really good time with one playthrough of the game, and then we’d love for you to play it again and experience a different story, a different killer, a different outcome.»

That storytelling applies to the killers, too. Whether romanceable or not, all characters have a backstory to discover as you befriend and get closer to them. The potential murderers have motivations and storylines that the player can dig into, which will change elements within the world that they might discover and ask around about.

But in closing, I asked Armstrong and Nahil perhaps the most important question: Which of the game’s 40 or so characters would they date?

«Oh, my boy Hari is right there in the demo, yeah,» said Armstrong.

«He’s not in the demo, but Noah, honestly,» Nahil said. «Our buff fisherman is my romance of choice.»

That’s amusing to know, but it also shows that the game contains multitudes. Many other farming sims have the cozy part down, but Grave Seasons seems like it’ll let the discomfort of morbid effects and murder be a counterweight tension that complexifies the comforting monotony of farming. Amid alternating between growing life and fearing for your own, why wouldn’t you find someone to date?

Grave Seasons is scheduled to come out on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch in 2026.

Technologies

Google races to put Gemini at the center of Android before Apple’s AI reboot

Google is using its latest Android rollout to position Gemini as the AI layer across phones, Chrome, laptops and cars.

Google is using its latest Android rollout to make Gemini less of a chatbot and more of an operating layer across the phone, browser, car and laptop, just weeks before Apple is expected to show its own Gemini-powered Apple Intelligence reboot at WWDC.
Ahead of its Google I/O developer conference next week, the company previewed a number of Android updates, including AI-powered app automation, a smarter version of Chrome on Android, new tools for creators, a redesigned Android Auto experience, and a sweeping set of new security features.
Alphabet is counting on Gemini to help Google compete directly with OpenAI and Anthropic in the market for artificial intelligence models and services, while also serving as the AI backbone across its expansive portfolio of products, including Android. Meanwhile, Gemini is powering part of Apple’s new AI strategy, giving Google a role in the iPhone maker’s reset even as it races to prove its own version of personal AI on the phone is further along.
Sameer Samat, who oversees Google’s Android ecosystem, told CNBC that Google is rebuilding parts of Android around Gemini Intelligence to help users complete everyday tasks more easily.
“We’re transitioning from an operating system to an intelligence system,” he said.
As part of Tuesday’s announcements. Google said Gemini Intelligence will be able to move across apps, understand what’s on the screen and complete tasks that would normally require a user to jump between multiple services. That means Android is moving beyond the traditional assistant model, where users ask a question and get an answer, and acting more like an agent.
For instance, Google says Gemini can pull relevant information from Gmail, build shopping carts and book reservations. Samat gave the example of asking Gemini to look at the guest list for a barbecue, build a menu, add ingredients to an Instacart list and return for approval before checkout.
A big concern surrounding agentic AI involves software taking action on a user’s behalf without permissions. Samat said Gemini will come back to the user before completing a transaction, adding, “the human is always in the loop.”
Four months after announcing its Gemini deal with Google, Apple is under pressure to show a more capable version of Apple Intelligence, which has been a relative laggard on the market. Apple has long framed privacy, hardware integration and control of the user experience as its advantages.
Google’s Android push is designed to show it can bring AI deeper into the device experience while still giving users control over what Gemini can see, where it can act and when it needs confirmation.
The app automation features will roll out in waves, starting with the latest Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel phones this summer, before expanding across more Android devices, including watches, cars, glasses and laptops later this year.
The company is also redesigning Android Auto around Gemini, turning the car into another major surface for its assistant. Android Auto is in more than 250 million cars, and Google says the new release includes its biggest maps update in a decade and Gemini-powered help with tasks like ordering dinner while driving.
Alphabet’s AI strategy has been embraced by Wall Street, which has pushed the company’s stock price up more than 140% in the past year, compared to Apple’s roughly 40% gain. Investors now want to see how Gemini can become more central to the products people use every day.
WATCH: Alphabet briefly tops Nvidia after report of $200 billion Anthropic cloud deal

Technologies

Waymo recalls 3,800 robotaxis after glitch allowed some vehicles to ‘drive into standing water’

Waymo issued a voluntary recall of about 3,800 of its robotaxis to fix software issues that could allow them to drive into flooded roadways.

Waymo is recalling about 3,800 robotaxis in the U.S. to fix software issues that could allow them to “drive onto a flooded roadway,” according to a letter on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s website.
The voluntary recall is for Waymo vehicles that use the company’s fifth and sixth generation automated driving systems (or ADS), the U.S. auto safety regulator said in the letter posted Tuesday.
Waymo autonomous vehicles in Austin, Texas, were seen on camera driving onto a flooded street and stalling, requiring other drivers to navigate around them. It’s the latest example of a safety-related issue for the Alphabet-owned AV unit that’s rapidly bolstering its fleet of vehicles and entering new U.S. markets.
Waymo has drawn criticism for its vehicles failing to yield to school buses in Austin, and for the performance of its vehicles during widespread power outages in San Francisco in December, when robotaxis halted in traffic, causing gridlock.
The company said in a statement on Tuesday that it’s “identified an area of improvement regarding untraversable flooded lanes specific to higher-speed roadways,” and opted to file a “voluntary software recall” with the NHTSA.
“Waymo provides over half a million trips every week in some of the most challenging driving environments across the U.S., and safety is our primary priority,” the company said.
Waymo added that it’s working on “additional software safeguards” and has put “mitigations” in place, limiting where its robotaxis operate during extreme weather, so that they avoid “areas where flash flooding might occur” in periods of intense rain.
WATCH: Waymo launches new autonomous system in Chinese-made vehicle

Technologies

Qualcomm tumbles 13% as semiconductor stocks retreat from historic AI-fueled surge

Semiconductor equities reversed sharply after a broad AI-driven advance, with Qualcomm suffering its worst day since 2020 amid inflation concerns and rising oil prices.

Semiconductor stocks fell sharply on Tuesday, reversing course after an extensive rally that had expanded the artificial intelligence investment theme well past Nvidia and driven the industry to unprecedented levels.

Qualcomm plunged 13% and was on track for its steepest single-day decline since 2020. Intel shed 8%, while On Semiconductor and Skyworks Solutions each lost more than 6%. The iShares Semiconductor ETF, which benchmarks the overall sector, fell 5%.

The sell-off came after a key gauge of consumer prices came in above forecasts, and as conflict in Iran pushed crude oil higher—prompting investors to shift away from riskier assets.

The preceding advance had widened the AI opportunity set beyond longtime industry leader Nvidia, which for much of the past several years had largely carried the market to new peaks on its own.

Explosive appetite for central processing units, along with the graphics processing units that power large language models, has sent chipmakers to all-time highs.

Market participants are wagering that the shift from AI model training to autonomous agents will lift demand for additional AI hardware. Among the beneficiaries are memory chip producers, which are raising prices as supply remains tight.

Micron Technology slid 6%, and Sandisk cratered 8%. Sandisk’s stock has surged more than six times over since January.