Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2025 i Edge

Even though Elden Ring: Nightreign (p30) contradicts some of the root principles that have defined FromSoftware’s most acclaimed games over the years, it’s easy to imagine how it was given the green light. Having spent so many years meticulously constructing a setting as expansive as The Lands Between, it must be difficult to push it out to the world and then, one solitary DLC expansion excepted, simply leave it all behind. Why not revisit this place, taking all of that work and remixing it for another run, albeit from a slightly different angle? Clearly it cuts down on development costs, which no one is going to resist in this day and age, and it also means that FromSoftware fans don’t have to wait as long for another fix. If Nightreign…

Sitting down to talk to Aran Koning, Ruben Naus, Tijmen Tio and Tom van den Boogaart, lined up across a single Google Meet window, feels like interviewing game development’s equivalent of a boy band. Indeed, the quartet from Utrecht are all so fresh-faced, it’s hard to believe they have over 100 completed games under their belts. In part, that’s been possible because they started young, each toying with computers and game-making tools as kids, before they got to know each other through social events and game jams over a decade ago. But it’s also because Sokpop, the collective they formed in 2017, stuck for several years to a subscription model that promised a game a month. And people liked the results, and kept coming back for more. Sokpop emerged after…

“How they managed that brand and the story going forward is not my fucking fault… This narrative around being more powerful is not helpful today.”He’ll take the rap for the original Duke controller, but Xbox pioneer Seamus Blackley has to draw the line somewhere “I think what makes our games special are things that I haven’t seen any AI replicate.”Obsidian’s Carrie Patel does not fear the rise of the robots “Journo: ‘Oh my gawd, you guys are letting people go? I’ll write an extensive piece on that!’”Henrique Olifiers wonders: how about writing about our games? “Moving from firstparty to indies? Well, I had no choice. When Jim asked me to do the indie job, the choice was to do that or leave the company.”Shuhei Yoshida reveals that former PlayStation boss…

Ever felt as though the rich and powerful treat the world like a game? You’re in good company: Bruno Maçaes,-once Portugal’s European affairs minister and now a jetsetting analyst and consultant, argues as much in his new book, World Builders: Technology And The New Geopolitics. ‘World building’ is here defined as the way in which the system we all live in is manipulated at the levels of technology, energy, trade, and finance. Of course, this is not new in principle. Sulla, the first Roman to march with an army upon the seat of the Republic itself, spent his few years as dictator rewriting the constitution of Rome in order to streamline the offices of power to which people could aspire. He revised the rules of the game of politics, ostensibly…

Developer FromSoftware Publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Japan Release May 30 For all the challenges FromSoftware has presented over the years, rarely have we had to worry about punctuality. In Elden Ring: Nightreign, though, as night literally draws in, a deadly blue flame encroaching from the edges of the map, it’s imperative to stay one step ahead, making a dash for a small circular haven that will become the only unaffected spot. Arrive late and – in more typical From fashion – you may as well prepare to die. It doesn’t help that Nightreign’s network test, which allows us to spend several hours dipping into one of the maps, is by nature a time-limited format, nor that the network fails its test on our first…

Developer Snapshot Games Publisher Arc Games Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Bulgaria Release Spring We were just wondering what Julian Gollop had been up to recently. Well, now we know, and honestly we’re a little surprised. With the release of Phoenix Point five years ago, a spiritual successor to his X-COM series, Gollop showed no desire to diverge from his turn-based tactics roots. And given his pedigree in the genre, it seemed reasonable to expect his next game to follow suit. But no. “I wanted to do something a bit different,” he tells us. Hence Chip ’N Clawz Vs The Brainioids, an odd, brightly coloured hybrid of RTS and Ratchet & Clank-style platforming and combat. The big-eared cat robot Clawz even looks like a crossbreed of Insomniac’s duo, plus…

Developer/publisher Fuzzy Ghost Format PC Origin Australia Release TBA Landlords dropping in unannounced, repeated emails trying to get your deposit back, and mould that spreads faster than you can say ‘Cillit Bang’. Given how depressing the housing market can be, the throes of renting are virtually universal. With that in mind, Aussie developers Pete Foley and Scott Ford decided that the topic would be perfect for their forthcoming horror-comedy game, especially since they too have been through the anxieties of tenancy. “The game is set in a house we lived in for seven years in Sydney,” Foley says. “We ended up moving out because under the carpet we found that the floorboards had been eaten away by black mould.” In Janet DeMornay Is A Slumlord (And A Witch) you play…

Format PC, Switch Developer Sunset Visitor Publisher Fellow Traveller Origin Canada Release 2024 Hekki Allmo. Six to one. Hair to hair. Sphere to square. These are just some of the cryptic phrases you’ll encounter in 1000xResist. As nonsensical as they might initially appear, picking up the vocabulary of this dystopia becomes a key part of the game’s appeal, tapping into the inherent fun of learning a new language. That goes for real-world dialects, fictional jargon or – if we open up the definition to include not just words but rules and systems – the twin languages of game design and development. In these, only one of the four members of Sunset Visitor’s team was fluent, or even conversant, when they started making 1000xResist. Studio founder and creative director Remy Siu…

How much gaming has matured as a medium is still difficult to say conclusively, and this month’s crop of releases don’t make it any easier. One thing’s for sure: producing a game such as Split Fiction or Monster Hunter Wilds requires a certain maturity, in order to direct the talents of many towards a highly polished, clearly defined end. Conversely, if maturity is a matter of creating gritty, unflinching portraits of reality, there’s little of that to be seen overtly in our lineup, nor on commercial gaming’s wider release slate. Look again, though, and you’ll see that our lead reviews, along with the likes of Expelled, Two Point Museum and Wanderstop, while delightful in their presentation, all dig into social ills in their own ways, whether that’s the entitlement of…

Developer/publisher Capcom Format PC, PS5 (tested), Xbox Series Release Out now The great dragon Arkveld is one of Capcom’s most formidable creations. It’s huge, it’s majestic, and it’s certainly wild. As we whittle down its health, it only becomes more ferocious, walloping us aside with difficult-to-read barges and smashing the ground with chain-like appendages that conjure bursts of deadly white energy. This is the uber-predator around which much of Monster Hunter Wilds’ plot revolves. Signalled early on as a late-game challenge, your eventual showdown is built up over hours. It seems strange, then, that you may have got used to fighting Arkveld during Wilds’ beta test, or watched YouTube footage of skilled players slaying the beast before the game’s release. In the context of the full game, such familiarity is…

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The strike is beginning to bite. In the US, members of the SAG-AFTRA actors’ union downed tools in July 2024, and during the past few months we’ve started to see it having a definite impact. In January, Bungie announced that the Destiny 2 episode Heresy would launch with voiceover lines missing, while Hideo Kojima announced in December that two forthcoming games from Kojima Productions, OD and Physint, would be held up as a result of the strike action. But why exactly are videogame actors striking? The answer can be condensed to a couple of words, or even just two letters: AI. Sarah Elmaleh is chair of SAG-AFTRA’s Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee, and has starred in games such as Gone Home, Gears 5 and Fortnite. The union has been negotiating…

Can art be games? Longtime readers of this column might remember my fondness for fiddling with the parameters of that hoary old question. This time last year, after attending the Now Play This exhibition at Somerset House, I was interested in how videogames function in the context of an art gallery; this time, though, let’s flip that on its head. How do art galleries hold up when they’re put into videogames? The thought is prompted by The Zium Exposition, the latest instalment in an ongoing series of pay-what-you-want Itch.io games. Released every couple of years or so, each new Zium collects a fresh selection of digital art in a virtual gallery space, built in Unreal Engine and explored in firstperson, strafing and bunny hopping. Quake meets the Tate. This time…

Developer/publisher Tactical Adventures Format PC Origin France Release TBA What’s that under the ocean? Blink and it’s gone, but it was huge and surprisingly quick. The ground shakes. The water bubbles as a swift shadow slips by. Then again, if the camera had been pointing in the wrong direction – if you’re zoomed in on a party member or tilting up to scan the craggy cliffs that border the shoreline – chances are you’d miss it. After being revealed in a video at last year’s Game Awards, Solasta II is resurfacing with a demo. Here are two hours of RPG adventuring across a rocky island, where strange tremors spook the locals, giant shapes move under the waves, and rumours inland tell of a dragon causing trouble. It’s a fine setup…

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VALVE STEAM DECK CPU 7nm AMD APU GPU AMD RDNA 2 8 CUs RAM 16GB LPDDR5-5500 Storage 64GB/256GB/512GB Display 7-inch LCD Resolution 1280x800 OS SteamOS Weight 669g Price From £349 VALVE STEAM DECK OLED CPU 6nm AMD APU GPU AMD RDNA 2 8 CUs RAM 16GB LPDDR5-5500 Storage 512GB/1TB Display 7.4-inch OLED Resolution 1280x800 OS SteamOS Weight 640g Price From £479 ASUS ROG ALLY X CPU AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme GPU AMD RDNA 3 12 CUs RAM 24GB LPDDR5-6400 Storage 1TB Display 7-inch LCD Resolution 1920x1080 OS Windows 11 Weight 678g Price £799 MSI CLAW AI 8 + A2VM CPU Intel Core Ultra 7 258V GPU Intel Arc 140 RAM 32GB LPDDR5X-8533 Storage 1TB Display 8-inch LCD Resolution 1920x1200 OS Windows 11 Weight 795g Price £899 LENOVO LEGION GO CPU…

Overcome with emotion, Thierry Boulanger sat and cried. It was a series of firsts for the Canadian: his first time in Japan, his first time at Kyoto’s BitSummit festival, and the first time meeting his childhood heroes. It was earlier on, while Boulanger was snacking at a food truck, that he had received the text: the creator and composer of Ninja Gaiden were playing the demo of his new game, The Messenger. Right now. “I probably littered – just threw my food on the ground and left,” Boulanger laughs today. Both Hideo Yoshizawa and Keiji Yamagishi were taken with the game, even asking Boulanger to pose for a photograph at the booth (hence the ugly-crying in the bathroom). Indeed, Yamagishi would eventually contribute two pieces of music for The Messenger,…

Developer Hazelight Publisher EA Format PC, PS5 (tested), Xbox Series Release Out now Zoe and Mio are writers – both young, unpublished genre enthusiasts hunting for their first book deal. So, when that hunt brings each of them to the doors of Rader Publishing, you might expect them to bond over just how much they have in common. Not so. Zoe loves fantasy, Mio science fiction, and this forms an apparently impassable barrier between the two. Neither is thrilled, then, to find themselves trapped with the other inside a kind of isekai recreation of their own stories. The ‘Publishing’ part of Rader’s name, it turns out, is something of a misnomer. It is in fact a rapacious tech giant, responsible for a machine that swallows creatives’ ideas so it can…

Whatever the shape or size of a target in Monster Hunter, one thing is guaranteed: a successful hunt is one in which you’ve reduced the beast’s hit points to zero, or close enough that you could capture them. And to ensure the fight feels sufficiently epic, those HP pools are massive. Victory is a matter of death by a thousand cuts, or perhaps a hundred hammer blows. In Wilds, as ever, there’s no visible health bar revealing how much work remains before you can claim your prize, but if you keep attacking, the damage numbers keep pouring out, and you know you’re heading in the right direction. Such systems are employed by other games that feature combat as part of their experience, adding up to a rather large number themselves.…

Physical relationships I wanted to share some thoughts on the resurgence of retro gaming and, more specifically, the growing desire for physical media in an increasingly digital world. While emulation has made classic games more accessible than ever, it often lacks the tangible, nostalgic experience that comes with owning a physical copy – whether that’s a cart, a disc, or even just the box art. Much like the revival of vinyl records, where music lovers crave the warmth and ritual of playing a physical album, many gamers are rediscovering the joy of physical media. There’s something uniquely satisfying about browsing a shelf of retro games, carefully selecting one, and holding a piece of gaming history in your hands. The act of inserting a cartridge, hearing the disc spin up, or…

Does the game industry ever really sleep these days? There is a brief lull either side of New Year, but certainly by February the machine is in full gear again, rattling games towards us like bullets from an automatic weapon. Indeed, not for the first time in recent months we’ve expanded our Hype roundup section from its usual single page to two, in order to capture a decent selection of the month’s eye-catching demos and reveals. With the arrival of a chunky Sony State Of Play this cycle, we could easily have devoted the entire section to its (mostly multiformat) highlights, but with a Steam Next Fest arriving in its wake, it would have been remiss for us not to acknowledge a few of its delights too. Indeed, Next Fest…

Developer Dotemu, Guard Crush Games, Supamonks Publisher Dotemu Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch Origin France, Canada Release 2025 After Streets Of Rage 4 set a new gold standard for scrolling beat-’em-ups, we wondered what long-dormant IP its collaborators would work their magic on next. While Lizardcube deepens its partnership with Sega, overseeing the return of Shinobi, Dotemu and Guard Crush have set their sights on something less proven. As we sit in the former’s Paris office watching the announcement trailer, hand-drawn cinematics with thick outlines show first an ominous tower, then a dim interior where soldiers attack helpless villagers, and we instinctively attempt to parse the silhouette of the duo who arrive to save the day. But the penny drops that these aren’t familiar faces such as Blaze Fielding or Gilius Thunderhead. Absolum may take…

Developer/publisher Electric Saint Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin UK Release TBA Have you ever wrestled with the concept of a quarter-life crisis? If so, you have something in common with Anna Hollinrake. After honing her skills as an art director in the triple-A frying pan, the former Fall Guys art lead is plunging into the world of independent development with Crescent County, a witch-tech life sim that pulls on her experience of bouncing around the UK for work. “I remember reading something about how the first indie game you make is always way too personal,” she jokes. Crescent County stars Lu, a flirty freelancer who arrives on the moon-shaped cay in need of a found family. A past worth running away from is hinted at as she makes…

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KGB SUPERSPY Developer/publisher Codemasters Format Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum Release 1989 PAINT & CREATE Developer/publisher Europress Software Format Amiga, Commodore 64, PC Release 1993 MAGIC CARPET Developer Bullfrog Productions Publisher EA Format PC, PS1, Saturn Release 1994 DUNGEON KEEPER Developer Bullfrog Productions Publisher EA Format PC Release 1997 BLACK & WHITE  Developer Lionhead Studios Publisher EA Format Mac, PC Release 2001 FABLE Developer Big Blue Box studios/Lionhead Studios Publisher Microsoft Format PC, Xbox Release 2004 RAG DOLL KUNG FU Developer/publisher Mark Healey Format PC Release 2005 LITTLEBIGPLANET Developer Media Molecule Publisher SIE Format PS3 Release 2008 DREAMS Developer Media Molecule Publisher SIE Format PS4 Release 2020 MASTERS OF ALBION Developer/publisher 22cans Format PC Release TBA Videogames that double as creative toolsets are an essential feature of the modern landscape, with…

What was the design thinking behind the Nitro Blaze 11 form factor? Well, as you know, [displays] in this market are typically around seven to eight inches in size, but we’re thinking of scenarios more like the iPad Pro, except you can’t really play games on that machine. The Blaze 11 is about having a place where you can play but also work. If you detach the controllers, then actually you’re shrinking the size into more of a tablet format, around ten inches, and you can use it as a tablet. It also has a stand on the back, so you can use it that way. That’s one scenario, but you also have an iPad Pro kind of scenario where you attach a keyboard to it and then you have…

Josef Fares’ first real foray into games – 2013’s Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons – bought him enough of a reputation to found his own studio, Hazelight. After a wobbly debut with A Way Out, a game Fares acknowledges“was a little bit rough around the edges”, Hazelight found its form on It Takes Two, which went on to sell 20m copies and won The Game Awards’ top prize in 2021. Speaking to Fares just before Split Fiction’s launch, we find him as charmingly garrulous as his reputation, and games, suggest. Hazelight has become known as the developer of modern shared- and splitscreen co-op games – is that something you’ve committed the studio to for the long-term future? Doing [A Way Out] made me realise that there’s so much to…