Edge April 2023

For TV and film, the worlds of the reboot and the remake are precarious places, eyed with caution even in the best circumstances. Just ask John Cleese, whose decision to bring back Fawlty Towers has been received by many commentators as being about as welcome as a punch to the throat, even despite Rob Reiner’s involvement. The world of games, however, is a very different place, where news of a corpse being dragged out of the vault and dusted down for another run is generally received with bags of enthusiasm (so long as it was a good-looking corpse in the first place). It’s partly a matter of histor y creating expectations. Hollywood’s track record with remakes, from The Wicker Man to The Pink Panther, is quite wretched, while in games…

When thinking about PSVR2, it’s easy to get caught up in the question of its success – or indeed, lack thereof. After all, there’s been no obvious buzz in the lead up to its launch, and in recent weeks Sony has had to deny reports that soft preorders led to it halving production numbers of the hardware. But we can save all that tealeaf-reading until after launch, when the picture starts to become a little clearer. For now, let’s focus on whether it deser ves that success in the first place. Having now played over a dozen games on PSVR2, is this a hardware upgrade worth getting excited about? For anyone who got serious use out of their PSVR1, this is admittedly something of a moot point. Sony has more…

As the co-creator of both Dune II and Command & Conquer, Joe Bostic is tangentially responsible for the packed build queue that produced so many RTS games during the ’90s and early ’00s. But you won’t find him taking ownership of the esports boom that followed. “I’m not really a multiplayer fan,” he says. “C&C is up my alley, but if it gets too stressful, I like to hit pause and get a cup of coffee and strategise.” His latest release, The Great War: Western Front, is a reflection of his tastes, then, taking on a slowmoving conflict in a way that plays with imbalanced odds and rewards patience. Westwood is best remembered for the Command & Conquer games, but it wasn’t a one-genre studio. Did it feel like an…

An AI dreams. But first, it needs to know what to dream about. We press the microphone button, and speak the first words that come to mind: “the human heart”. Project Electric Sheep drops us into a freshly baked dreamworld, where a roughly sketched medieval castle sits in the dark and the rain, surrounded by the occasional igloo and torii gate. If there’s no obvious link to our chosen topic in the setting, then we have considerably more luck with its denizens. A woman called ‘Angina Pectoris’ tells us that we have a black box in the middle of our chest, “full of wonder and beauty and pain”. When asked what her heart is like, she reveals that – in a cruel stroke of nominative determinism – she suffers from…

When more videogames than ever before are being developed and released, it can be a challenge to grab people’s attention. A distinctive aesthetic is certainly one way of doing it, and this strategy game from designer Nic Tringali and publisher Bithell Games has already attracted praise for its stylish, diagonally oriented graphical user interface, which presents the universe you explore aboard the titular Vault – “a city-sized gothic monastery” – as a tilted space map. Two eye-catching visual styles, though? Well, that’s just showing off. Tringali has asked illustrator Andrey Garvin to produce a series of artworks depicting events throughout the story. His art, Tringali says, is designed to “evoke the scale of the world, as well as an overall harsh and tragic tone”, reflecting a game whose watchwords are…

Game Ice Cold Beer Manufacturer Retro Arcade It’s one thing to recreate the arcade experience of yesteryear by stuffing a bunch of ROMs into an old cabinet, but quite another to rebuild a mechanical game that relies on moving physical parts to provide the entertainment (just ask anyone involved with maintaining old pinball tables). But that’s the mission of Retro Arcade, whose Ice Cold Beer remake is now shipping. Though we don’t recall seeing the game in the UK around the time of its original release, Taito’s Ice Cold Beer was a hit in the US where it lured punters with simple controls and action. Using two joysticks, you raise and lower the edges of a horizontal bar on which rests a metal ball that must be moved up the…