Edge July 2022

Many years ago, at an Edge-hosted industry roundtable discussion in front of an audience, one of the topics involved the rise of multiplayer RPGs, and how players in the future might be encouraged to perform in specialised roles, giving them the opportunity to carve out unique areas of expertise, perhaps even forging reputations that might one day be spoken of far and wide. It prompted a memorable question from one attendee: “But who wants to be the cook?” The suggestion was that standing around a kitchen chopping carrots all day might not be as exciting or fulfilling as roaming the lands brutalising goblin heads with an axe blade the size of a dustbin lid. And it was a fair point: it’s no coincidence that, in all of the games produced…

The codename for Sony’s revamped subscription service, Project Spartacus, always had a certain irony about it. Like the most famous scene in Stanley Kubrick’s biopic of the rebellious Roman slave, platform holders and publishers from Amazon to Ubisoft have stood up in turn to announce that they are Spartacus, the leaders of the subscription revolution, while Sony itself has continued to sit quietly. When in late March the Japanese company finally decided to speak up and join the chorus, revealing the new direction for its PlayStation Plus and Now services, the result was akin to a mumbled “it’s complicated”. Plus’s reincarnation in June will come in three flavours: the vanilla Plus subscription and two higher tiers, Extra and Premium, that fold in elements of PS Now and other bonuses. Extra,…

Ona grey wall in one of The Zium Gallery’s many rooms hangs a triptych of paintings by Baltimore artist Evangeline Gallagher. They’re captivating – portraits abstracted into swooshing lines, Francis Bacon by way of an enormous inky fingerprint – but what really makes them striking in this space is their size. The paintings tower over you, inviting you to take a step back – and perhaps a seat on a nearby bench. Do so, and you’ll find yourself inside another exhibit, ‘Rain Room’, from two of the developers behind 2021 squirrel surveil-’em-up Nuts. The piece borrows that game’s rain effects in order to create a storm, localised within a transparent cube that sits in the middle of the room, among the pictures in their frames. This collision of possible and…

Putting serious effort into the 2D shooter genre as a player can feel like a deconstruction of the form – unearthing arcane mechanisms and dissecting scoring systems that lurk below the visuals very much a process of unpicking the work of game designers. In their most purebred form, unembellished by narrative acrobatics or any meaningful moments of downtime, 2D shooters present an experience where playing can feel something like direct interaction with the code itself –a dance with intersecting multipliers and numerical gauges played out as a flight through dangerous skies. All of which means that playing a shmup can sometimes feel close to the process of making one. Spend time in an arcade community, and you may well hear 2D shooter players ponder how different scoring systems in hypothetical…

Glancing at this image, you probably wouldn’t guess that the story being told is one of intergenerational Holocaust trauma. Drawing from the experiences of creative director Máté Tóth Ridovics’s family, and his wife’s, the game applies a fictional filter in order to “respect our relatives’ ownership over their stories,” Tóth Ridovics says. The result is a game whose “narrative and visual language is magical realism,” he explains – not to soften the blow of historical facts at all, but rather to get at the reality of how this feels for protagonist Áron, the grandson of Holocaust survivors. Here, for example, Áron is preparing for a conversation with a plant which grows out of a cabinet that his grandmother always keeps closed – just one of the metaphorical monsters “who help…

“I’ve often described how seeing Star Wars in 1977 essentially rewired my 12-year-old brain… I’m elated to be working with Lucasfilm Games again…” Having suffered the cancellation of a Star Wars project with EA in 2017, Amy Hennig is taking another run with Skydance New Media. Never tell her the odds, indeed. “I’m really sorry that I released the unfinished work Balan Wonderworld… I think Square Enix and Arzest don’t care about games and game fans.” Yuji Naka’s postman faces a quieter Christmas this year ”Indie games trying to make me meditate on loss. I WILL NOT DO IT. You cannot make me. I will simply jump about.” Alasdair Beckett-King saves his contemplation for triple-A, press-F-to-pay-respects loss “This is Miyamoto… we decided to move the release to Spring 2023 –…