This year's best April Fools' Day gaming gags: Bears, bugs, and 97,000 floppy disks

Over the years I've devolved from a fun-loving scamp into a crusty curmudgeon—practically a coot at this stage—when it comes to April Fools' Day on the internet. Most April Fools' jokes are… they're lies, right? It's just lying. We already get plenty of disinformation the other 364 days of the year, so a day dedicated to even more online BS feels pretty unnecessary.

But when it comes to gaming's April Fools' Day pranks, there's a lot more creativity than the usual pointless fakeouts. Sometimes the jokes really are funny (or at least cute) and often an impressive amount work has gone into them. Plus, some of the gaming pranks are real modes you can play, and over the years a few jokes have become actual games (like Conan Chop Chop) because fans liked the idea so much. 

Here are the best April Fools' jokes we've spotted this year:

Swole-y moley

Bandai Namco teases an Elden Ring expansion… and wow, no joke, it really is expanding.

Terra-flop

CD Projekt releases a limited time edition of Cyberpunk 2077 on 3.5" diskettes. 97,619 of them. That's an estimated install time of two months.

Dusk De-master

Dusk HD is getting a downgrade to Dusk 1D: it's now a cardboard dungeon crawler.

Killer update

Dead by Daylight celebrates with My Little Oni, a limited time feature where Oni is anything but little.

Emoti-con

NYT's daily puzzle game Connections is all emojis today instead of words. Kinda fun, actually.

Buggin' Out

Deep Rock Galactic's loot bug is a real creature discovered in the deep sea near Barsebäck Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden. 

Watch your step

House Flipper 2 becomes a first-person platformer with a new "The Floor is Lava" mode. Not just a joke, either, it's a real thing.

More than just pals

Every year some game pretends it's now a visual novel about dating, and this year it's Palworld.

Oops, All Bears

Survival city builder Farthest Frontier has a new bear-based beta you can opt into that appears to turn all your hard-working citizens into bears.

American McGee finally gets his way

Last year, McGee said that the Alice series was definitely over, but he must've spoken too soon, because now he says that EA is dying to fund a sequel to his cult classics.

Rusty Lake AI

Handcrafted indie adventure studio embraces the future with the revolutionary  Dale-E AI: "Powered by our state of the art Lake-water cooled quantum computing for near instant speed replies, you too can become a smash hit viral indie video game developer." It's a joke, but it actually works. Sort of.

Overwatch 3 just dropped

Blizzard released a list of ridiculous changes to every Overwatch hero, like giving Bastion shotguns or D.Va the ability to fly backwards. And you can actually play with all of them in a week-long Arcade mode called "Balanced Overwatch."