Índex per March 2025 a Edge

It’s easy to forget, but ‘firstperson shooter’ wasn’t always the label applied to games such as Call Of Duty. In the wake of Doom arriving in 1993, it was common practice in certain circles to simply call anything that followed suit a ‘Doom clone’. Back then, most people didn’t spend as much time thinking – and talking – about games as they do today, which restricted how the associated vocabulary evolved, but even so, the word ‘clone’ as part of any descriptor isn’t much use at all. It must also be discouraging, because who would want their creation written off in such a way? Could we have even missed out on some good ideas in those formative years simply because of this kind of limp, dismissive shorthand? Nowadays, of course,…

GAME Solitomb bit.ly/solitomb A new year, and a new digital card game to threaten our spare time. Following in the grand tradition of familiar games given a Roguelike reinvention, Jakub Wasilewski’s Pico-8 banger takes as its basis not poker or Magic but solitaire. You drag and drop cards into stacks based on their number, but with extra attention paid to the suits: sword, shield, potion or monster. Play of-a-kind cards into the arena and combat will ensue, the former suits adding to your attack and defence totals (with bonuses incentivising you to score out larger hands), before the enemy cards have a crack. There are plenty of elite monsters and cards that add new mechanics to discover, not to mention the hero classes and difficulty settings. It’s already playing with…

Sam Crane stands on a beach in the rain, dressed rather unseasonably in a sleeveless vest, his head bisected by a pink streak of hair. “To be, or not to be,” he recites, into the tall waves, before his soliloquy is interrupted by a motorcycle pulling up. The vehicle and its rider are translucent spectres, the visual shorthand GTA Online uses to indicate a player in passive mode, unable to kill or be killed. It’s 2021, and Crane is an actor forced out of work by the pandemic, filling his days in lockdown as many of us did, by playing games online. In this stranger’s arrival, Crane sees the thing he craves most: an audience. Before he can finish asking for feedback on the performance, though, the stranger speeds off,…

Developer/publisher Dreams Uncorporated Format PC Origin Colombia Release TBA With 2021’s Cris Tales, Dreams Uncorporated displayed an eye W for style and a love of Japanese RPGs. It was a shame, then, that its big idea – switching between three time periods, even in battle – petered out in the execution. To an extent, that may have been down to a shortage of genre experience and confidence. As a Colombian studio dabbling in a Japanese genre, “we were so afraid with Cris Tales,” COO Jeff Cardenas tells us. Yet that project only kindled the team’s desire. “We are all in love with that genre,” Cardenas says. “We all want to travel to Japan sometime.” In Prisma, focus shifts from high fantasy to the contemporary, in the vein of Persona and…

Luca Galante remembers clearly the first time Vampire Survivors was copied. “It was immediate,” he says. “Even before the game got popular.” At the time, he took it as a compliment. After all, this was a game made years after Galante had given up any hope of working in the game industry, and one he’d prototyped over the course of a single afternoon. It was inspired by auto-shooter mobile games, which he was playing a lot at the time. “These games had something interesting about them – the auto-attacking, the very simple controls – but they were terrible,” he says. “They were superfrustrating to play because they were full of advertisements. You had to play very short rounds, and then immediately they would try to sell you something.” And so Galante…

Having made his fair share of tactics games over the years, it’s no surprise that Chris Rogers, creative director and studio lead at Harebrained Studios, approaches the subject of his studio’s recent history with tact. “Let me choose my words here,” Rogers begins, before opting for restraint. “Going into the launch of Lamplighters League, we knew that there wasn’t a lot of energy on the Paradox side.” Strategy-game publisher Paradox Interactive had acquired Harebrained in 2018. 2023’s The Lamplighters League – a blend of XCOM and 1930s pulp adventures – was to be the first product of that union. Three months before its release, however, Paradox laid off most of the studio’s staff, leaving it with just nine people to complete the game. “It was a busy time,” Rogers says,…

“They didn’t treat their developers like numbers on a spreadsheet. They didn’t treat their players as users to exploit.” How did game developers achieve award-winning success in 2024? Here are just two theories from Larian’s Swen Vincke ”We switched when it became clear the PS2 was going to be the dominant console.”In the mood for a sliding-doors moment? GTAIII tech director Obbe Vermeij reveals that it started life on Dreamcast ”We want to deliver something new, otherwise we’ll become history.”No, you will not be getting a miniature Saturn console, says Sega’s Shuji Utsumi “My body is filled with both a cautious surprise that this is not a dream and a joy that cannot be described in words.”As he returns to the world of Okami for a sequel, Hideki Kamiya channels…

Issue 406 Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins an exclusive Edge T-shirt Subscription remodel The suggestions to remedy gaming’s woes in E406 were varied, creative and, at times, provocative. To address one of the main issues, profitability, we had proposals to improve costs (Shawn Layden, Alex Hutchinson) and revenue through demand (Caroline Marchal, Dan Adelman, Jörg Tittel) and, as alluded to by Sam Barlow, pricing. But is there more to this latter point? It’s hard to believe that optimal pricing is based around a few ‘standard’ price points, some of them legacy, and some basic, broad subscription services, given that there will be differing demand and a varying willingness to pay across a multitude of customer segments. To combine…

So I wrote a column in Edge over this past year, and I’ve gone the whole time without talking about generative AI, which is good, because it’s a topic with little that’s interesting to be said. But this is my final column, so I thought I’d better scrape the bottom of the barrel before I close. There has, for the whole time I’ve been working in games, been a productive push-pull between the two forces who want to drive the bus of the thing we call narrative. The first force is the artist: the pure-snow writer, who sits behind a desk plucking words like flowers from the meadow of their mind, binding them into bouquets and stabbing them through with a pin! This writer produces the script for their game…

Developer Redemption Road Games Publisher TinyBuild Format PC Origin US Release 2025 We find it hard to know what not to expect in Kingmakers. This is a game, after all, in which refugees from a dying future return to the distant past to change history. One where players face off against medieval armies using anachronistic weapons that range from rocket launchers and miniguns to pickup trucks and attack helicopters. Given that pulpy muddle of ideas, what could provide a shock? We didn’t expect this, though. Five minutes into leading us through a demo, Daniel Balazs, technical director at developer Redemption Road Games, finds himself in a tight spot. His aim is to mount an assault on the ancient settlement of Oswestry, yet while he’s deep in the trees, assault rifle in hand, dozens…

Developer Uvula Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, Xbox Series Origin Japan Release TBA Uvula’s latest colourful experiment is not the only game to explore the manifold pleasures and mysteries of brushing your teeth. As is often the case, WarioWare got there first. But To A T throws in a novel complication that makes everyday activities such as this feel unexpected and difficult. The game’s protagonist, a 13-year-old named Teen, is permanently stuck in a T-pose, arms spread out on either side of their body. Brushing teeth requires both a bespoke tool in the form of a long-handled brush and a back-and-forth dance of precision movements as the brush is loaded with paste, passed between hands, and brought up to the head, which must lean in and tilt before cleaning can…

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F-ZERO Developer/publisher Nintendo Format SNES Release 1990 THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: A LINK TO THE PAST Developer/publisher Nintendo Format SNES Release 1991 STAR FOX Developer/publisher Nintendo Format SNES Release 1993 STAR FOX 64 Developer/publisher Nintendo Format N64 Release 1997 THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: MAJORA’S MASK Developer/publisher Nintendo Format N64 Release 2000 STEEL DIVER Developer/publisher Nintendo Format 3DS Release 2011 TANK TROOPERS Developer/publisher Nintendo Format 3DS Release 2016 OMEGA 6: THE TRIANGLE STARS Developer Takaya Imamura/Happymeal/Pleocene Publisher Clear River Games Format PC, Switch Release 2025 The origins of some of Nintendo’s most iconic characters can be traced back to a sliding-doors moment in the late 1980s. There may not have been a Star Fox, at least as we know him, if another game company had been a little quicker to offer…

For all of the gaming technologies that have come along in the time since its introduction, several thousand years ago, sometimes you can’t beat a good old-fashioned die. This object, which takes a concept as abstract as probability and condenses it down into something concrete and knowable – just six faces and 21 pips, small enough that many can fit within your palm at once – so that you might be fooled into thinking it can be mastered. It’s an incredibly versatile tool for which game designers, millennia on, are still discovering new opportunities. For a time in videogames’ evolution, though, dice were treated as objects of shame, to be hidden away behind the scenes. That’s now changing, with the likes of Baldur’s Gate 3, Disco Elysium and Citizen Sleeper…

Game Perfect Pour Manufacturer DSM Arcade What’s the best use of four joysticks on the front of a new coin-op? A twoplayer, twin-twinstick update of Robotron, perhaps? Or is it actually Perfect Pour, which assigns each one to a pump at a bar, from which you dispense drinks to a procession of thirsty customers? If you’ve been following coin-ops since the old days, you can perhaps understand DSM Arcade’s approach here, given the popularity of Midway’s similarly themed Tapper – complete with official Budweiser branding – in the mid-’80s. Perfect Pour is a more static affair, and in terms of complexity resembles what you might expect from a touchscreen mobile game. The joysticks make the difference, of course, and it’s executed with some instantly charming pixel art. Importantly, the cabinet…

Towards the end of 2024, something strange began happening in the skies above New Jersey. People reported seeing airborne objects resembling SUV-sized drones trundling around above them in the skies, and also glowing orange or white “orbs” dancing around. The media was alerted. Sheriffs and then legislators were on the case. It went on for weeks. But what it was that was going on was a mystery. Some people saw lights emerging from the ocean and performing manoeuvres impossible for any manned aircraft; some said they were government drones searching for a dirty bomb. Drones flew with impunity over US Air Force bases and were unaffected by their anti-drone defences. The White House spokesperson said these were definitely not drones built by an “adversary” such as China. President-elect Trump said…

Power fantasies have always been a natural fit for videogames, whether it’s standing out among the UNSC marine corps as Master Chief, swinging through Manhattan as Spider-Man, or literally playing god. In Hype this month we explore one of the more comically raucous progenies of the tradition – Kingmakers’ medieval ‘what if’ scenario lets you bring a machine gun to a sword fight, and various modern artillery besides (although, with whole armies to battle, you won’t have it all your own way). Of course, games often make us vulnerable as well, whether through sheer difficulty or in survival-horror scenarios. Holstin has you covered on that note, placing you in hostile territory as an ordinary individual. With To A T and A Week In The Life of Asocial Giraffe, however, we…

Developer/publisher Sonka Games Format PC, PS5, Switch, Xbox Series Origin Poland Release TBA Rafał Sankowski says that there’s a common misconception about his favourite subgenre: “I feel like survival horror is about combat, but we collectively have to pretend it’s not.” Purists may already be inclined to object, but the Sonka Games CEO and director of Holstin has a perfectly sensible, nuanced explanation for that incendiary opening gambit. The reason for the confusion, he argues, is that the best examples of the subgenre manage to implement it so seamlessly that, rather than an end in itself, as is the case with more action-oriented titles, combat becomes “a way to introduce you to a concept or a feeling”. Little wonder, then, that Sonka put so much thought into that aspect…

Developer/publisher Quail Button Format PC Origin US Release 2025 Elevators in games can be dangerous. In Metal Gear Solid, for example, what if you call one and there’s an enemy inside, who triggers a state of alert? What if an apparently empty lift is actually full of invisible gunmen? In A Week In The Life Of Asocial Giraffe, the risks are more mundane, but no less potentially fatal. The lead character is so socially awkward that any idle chit-chat from strangers causes paralysing embarrassment, a red surge climbing his neck to his head, which swells and explodes. The stakes made clear, we learn in the opening scene to wait for an empty lift. Asocial Giraffe grew from its lead designer’s love of Animal Crossing, which stopped at having to chat…

The concept of an exclusive review seems quaint these days – a relic of a time before embargo dates and downloadable game code, when videogame magazines were far more numerous on newsagents’ shelves. Still, we take the opportunity when it arises, and if you’re reading this issue on publication date, it will be your first chance to dig into reviews of Citizen Sleeper 2 and Eternal Strands. Exclusives such as these, when they happen, are generally a matter of publishers accepting the vagaries of our print schedule, with the only alternative to a slightly early review being a late one, four more weeks down the line. As much as we like to be timely, though, how important is it that reviews should be available before a game’s release date? If…

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