Содержание выпуска: Xmas 2023 — Edge

This month our 30th anniversary celebrations continue with a calendar featuring a year’s worth of classic game artwork. (If you’re reading the digital edition, here’s the opportunity you’ve been waiting for to double up on the old-fashioned physical version – it’s worth it.) As we looked back across the decades to pick out a series of iconic visuals, we also discussed how the game industry might have turned out differently. Where would Sega be nowadays had it stayed the course with hardware production? How much healthier would Microsoft’s console business be had 2013’s Xbox One reveal not been such an abject disaster? (Would it still feel compelled to scrabble together $69bn to acquire Activision Blizzard? Would Phil Spencer even be running the show?) And what about if that Sony and…

For those who appreciate the classics,there are more ways to play games from past decades today than there ever were at the time. Recent years have delivered a dizzying number of new retrofocused machines, among them capable offerings such as the Analogue Pocket and the MiSTer project, each of which uses an FPGA-based approach that brings impressive accuracy, in return for a considerable investment of funds or effort. Alternatively, you might set up a ROMpacked Raspberry Pi rig, or simply buy a low-rent thirdparty ‘system on a chip’ emulation console – options that might get your more games for your buck, but at the cost of frequent controller mapping issues and inconsistent emulation quality. And this is without mentioning diminutive retro machines such as the Neo Geo Mini, or the…

Game This Is Spinal Tap Manufacturer Homepin If you thought pinball only appeals to Men Of A Certain Age, well… the release of This Is Spinal Tap, based on the 1984 mock rockumentary of the same name, isn’t about to change your mind. We’re not sure quite how many customers exist for some silver-ball action with such a specific theme, but it isn’t messing around, with a 27-inch backglass LCD monitor and a cabinet constructed of “100 per cent AA-grade plantation-grown eucalyptus plywood”. Crucially, it doesn’t skimp on the small details, with “exploding drummer” listed among its features. For just £4,000 you can discover for yourself how well it all negotiates that famously fine line between stupid and clever.…

Aficionados of Hideo Kojima’s Twitter feed will notice that he regularly retweets moody photographs that people have taken within Death Stranding. A photo mode, first introduced in games by Gran Turismo 4, works on several conceptual levels. First, it signals that the developer has confidence in the photogenic charm of their environments, and enhances the illusion of those environments’ reality by providing a second-order way of experiencing them. Second, it enables a kind of free, peer-to-peer advertising of the game, as players share their favourite snapshots. Most abstractly, it deepens and complicates the relationship, or knotty equation, between videogames and art. Like other modern photo modes such as that of Ghost Of Tsushima, the one in Death Stranding, which Kojima went so far as to claim before the game’s launch…

One year ago, deep into the development of Dragon’s Dogma 2, the sequel to 2012’s chaotically loveable action-fantasy romp, director Hideki Itsuno sat down to stream a playthrough of the game to his colleagues. The pandemic months had pushed Capcom’s staff out of their Osaka office, and while Japan had started to tentatively reopen for business, many of Itsuno’s colleagues still worked from home. He put on a head mic and, with the determination and glee of a Twitch streamer, began to play through an early build, commenting on what was occurring on the screen as his team attentively watched his exploits while taking notes. Itsuno crested a hill together with his pawns – hired AI companions that fight alongside the game’s protagonist, healing one another, and shouting archaic…

Developer/ publisher Phantom Coast Format Origin Release PC The Netherlands TBA 2024 Muscle memory is a powerful thing. There hasn’t been a new Tony Hawk’s game for the best part of a decade – nor a worthwhile one for considerably longer still. And yet, within minutes of sitting down with Steve Swink – who “a million years ago” worked on Tony Hawk’s Underground – and his game, our fingers are dancing their old patterns, chaining grinds into grabs into manuals and tapping out the input for a varial heelflip. Thwack. A thick chain, crackling with green magic, darts towards our skater and sends him flying. It’s a rude awakening from old habits, as Helskate reminds us that this is not only a game about skating, but combat, too. While face…

TUNIN'GLUE Developer NanaOn-Sha Publisher Bandai Digital Entertainment Format Pippin Release 1996 PARAPPA THE RAPPER Developer NanaOn-Sha Publisher Sony Computer Entertainment Format PS1 Release 1996 UM JAMMER LAMMY Developer NanaOn-Sha Publisher Sony Computer Entertainment Format PS1 Release 1999 VIB-RIBBON Developer NanaOn-Sha Publisher Sony Computer Entertainment Format PS1 Release 1999 RHYME RIDER KERORICAN Developer NanaOn-Sha Publisher Bandai Format WonderSwan Release 2000 PARAPPA THE RAPPER 2 Developer NanaOn-Sha Publisher Sony Computer Entertainment Format PS2 Release 2002 MAJOR MINOR’S MAJESTIC MARCH Developer NanaOn-Sha Publisher Majesco Entertainment Format Wii Release 2009 Asa young child, Masaya Matsuura, the Japanese musician widely hailed as the inventor of the rhythm-action game genre, struggled to find a place and identity. Born in Osaka City, his father worked for a shipping company, while his mother kept the family home. Matsuura…

Finding your community is vital for any developer, large or small. And for beginners, that process often begins with seeking out likeminded collaborators – something that, for Deconstructeam, began in the game dev section of an online forum back in 2012. It was a branch of the website that game designer and writer Jordi de Paco started himself, where a handful of Spanish indie developers discovered a shared interest in creating avantgarde games. “It was a gathering of friends and artists,” says Deconstructeam artist Marina González. “We were experimenting and trying this new thing that none of us knew how to do.” At the time, the Spanish indie scene was booming, thanks to Indie Game: The Movie, with its story of small developers making it big. “Lots of people quit…

Wait a minute. Mario’s an elephant? This might not be the plumber’s most startling metamorphosis to date – the one to which we similarly referred at the start of E312’s Super Mario Odyssey review would lay strong claim to that title – but the first power-up on the opening level of his new game indicates a readiness to play fast and loose with series convention. Even before we’ve had our first interactive encounter with the magical bloom referred to in the title, it’s clear we’re in new territory, and we’re not just talking about the change of kingdom (from Mushroom to Flower). For starters, Peach hasn’t been kidnapped; she’s here alongside Mario, Luigi, Daisy, two Toads, a gaggle of Yoshi, and the enigmatic Nabbit in the playable cast. Bowser’s Castle…

There’s a strange atmosphere hanging over your first couple of hours in Forza Motorsport. You clear a sequence of introductory races, bookended by cutscenes that wouldn’t feel tonally out of place in a Microsoft Flight Sim, and then you look for the next big thing to chip away at. The automotive Everest to climb, the challenge that’s going to put the meaning into the 500-strong car collection. And then you realise: you’re going to have to define those parameters yourself. Turn 10’s eighth release in Forza’s stately, Polyphonybaiting Motorsport series handles like the figments of Clarkson’s fever dreams. It’s a feast of vivid, violent interactions between you and the vehicle, the best it’s ever felt to drive. But it’s so conservative about how it packages that wondrous physics model and…

Climbing is one of the most physically demanding activities a human being can do. Yet in the triple-A videogame space it’s become one of the most straightforward. Think of how Assassin’s Creed reduced it to pushing upwards on the analogue stick, Ezio Auditore and his ilk traversing vertical and horizontal spaces with similar ease. Or consider Nathan Drake, whose technique of smoothly moving between conspicuously marked handholds, with a grip suggesting self-chalking palms, has been copied by many other blockbuster adventurers since. Indie games have taken things to the opposite extreme: Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, essentially an upwardly mobile QWOP, asked you to conquer a mountain with unconventional apparatus and no safety net. Only Up might be more about jumping, but the viral masocore platformer is defined by…

When engine specialist Unity announced in September that it was going to leverage a runtime fee, making a charge to developers every time one of their games was installed, a PR omnishambles ensued. Developers were quick to highlight scenarios where the fee would be unworkable, or even ruinous. What about free-to-play games? What about subscription services such as Game Pass? What about charity bundles? What if a single purchase was installed on multiple devices? What about uninstalling and reinstalling the same purchase? What if the runtime fee was used to target vulnerable developers, with malicious individuals reinstalling games multiple times to rack up fees? And how would Unity even track installs? That these problems hadn’t been considered before the announcement was met with disbelief. Unity scrambled to address the issues.…

ANTHOLOGY Super Rare Mixtape: Horror Edition bit.ly/deadtape Horror games are ten a penny on Steam and particularly Itch, so during a mid-October store trawl it’s probably harder to find something that doesn’t Apocryphauna go bump in the night. It’s a rare treat, then, to find a properly curated selection of scares in the form of Super Rare’s latest mixtape, which includes 30 hand-picked indie games and eight demos (with extras such as developer interviews, OSTs and concept-art galleries), all contained within a cassetteshaped USB drive. Each of the games we’ve sampled so far is at least unusual and at best genuinely worth your while. Card-collecting adventure offers an affecting mix of earnestness and humour, while the seemingly wholesome Bonnie’s Bakery isn’t quite as out of place among this haunting company…

Unseen hands push me down into the beanbag, making sure I’m nestled deep into its folds. Then, from the dark, a reassuring American voice. “Just relax,” it says. “You’re about to have a mushroombased experience.” I spend the next ten minutes floating through forests, tracing lines of white light with my hands, watching explosions of pudgy molecules like fireworks made of clay… before coming back down to earth. Specifically, a repurposed warehouse along the banks of the Thames – the natural home, surely, of such happenings. Today, this warehouse is home to the London Film Festival’s Expanded programme, a collection of VR, AR, MR and other ‘immersive storytelling experiences’ that don’t neatly fit into any of those neatly initialised buckets. On one hand, there’s Forager, the aforementioned mycological VR trip;…

W hile Kamurocho and the iconic red arches at its entrance have become synonymous with Like A Dragon during its almost two-decade history, it’s also true that plenty of instalments have taken place across other locations in Japan. Still, it’s uncanny to see the series uprooted from its native turf entirely as Infinite Wealth takes charismatic underdog Ichiban Kasuga and his friends to Hawaii. But if there were any fears that the growing global appreciation of a once-niche property has eroded its identity, the Pineapple State appears to be the perfect environment for RGG Studio to double down on Like A Dragon’s zaniness. While Kasuga’s reason for coming to Hawaii is to find his birth mother – previously assumed to have been murdered by the yakuza – the plot…

Developer LocalThunk Publisher Format Playstack PC Origin Canada Release 2024 Roughly two hours into what we had assumed would be a ‘quick go’, we wonder whether Edge might have to temporarily rebrand as Balatro Monthly, such is the grip exerted by LocalThunk’s deckbuilder. Little wonder the naturally private developer behind it would rather we refer to them by their nom de plume: they are aware that this is going to bring plenty of attention their way. The buzz is gathering pace; the Discord community is growing. Ordinarily we’d resist parroting the party line, but it’s hard to disagree when PlayStack’s Wout van Halderen notes, “It’s overwhelming enough to make a game that is gonna change your whole life, right?” The reception might have been more overwhelming still had LocalThunk gone…

Visiting IO Interactive’s Copenhagen headquarters, Agent 47 is a constant presence. At reception we’re greeted by a life-size model, helium balloons bobbing against its glass case, celebrating the same anniversary that has brought Edge here. Across the room, looping clips from Animal Crossing: New Horizons follow a villager whose bald head, suit and red tie make us fear for the life of Tom Nook. Even in the bathroom you can’t escape him, those cold blue eyes peering out of picture frames on every wall. It can feel, at times, like walking around a shrine. Not that we’d blame anyone. Since the release of its debut game in 2000, IO has been synonymous with Hitman. And without Agent 47, the studio might well never have seen its 25th birthday – nor,…

STILL PLAYING/ NEAR MISSES Storyteller PC Offering effusive praise for Daniel Benmergui’s puzzler in E384’s Trigger Happy column, Steven Poole reminded us of the important truth that the devil is all in the detail. Well, now he’s in the game, too, mischievously interfering with existing tales to provide a generous helping of bonus objectives. After such a long gestation, we found Benmergui’s opus a little on the slender side; an update coinciding with its release on other platforms resets our completion percentage to around half of its former total, inviting us to fulfil variants on previously completed levels and complete brand-new ones besides. With a stamp collection incentivising further creative storytelling, it’s now arguably the game it should have been on its initial release. In ‘Friedrich Takes Revenge’, meanwhile, it…

To anyone who’s been playing Mario games for a long time, Wonder’s cheerfully subversive spirit might not come as too great a shock. Certainly, it is far from the first Nintendo game to take a sideways look at the conventions of the series. The Mario & Luigi and Paper Mario RPGs, for instance, have regularly poked fun at the plumber’s platforming adventures, offering irreverent commentary on ideas that might make sense within the games themselves but have little truck with real-world logic. Yet they do so from a position of relative safety: as spin-offs, they’re not bound to the same kind of restrictions we associate with mainline entries, and are thus free to take as many liberties as they like. In other words, they’re not proper Mario games, and as…

Being a superhero must be exhausting. We’re feeling a degree of cognitive overwhelm ourselves as we swing above New York’s streets, rarely more than three seconds away from some new distraction. If it’s not pulsing signals from stray Spider-bots, it’s swirling sands marking a crystallised memory of Flint Marko, better known as Sandman, the subject of the game’s opening scrap. Green lights lead us toward Quentin Beck’s Mysteriums, augmented-reality experiences that need debugging by completing combat encounters in specific ways. Pink-purple outlines Prowler stashes, hidden by Miles Morales’ uncle. Other icons let us know we’re in the vicinity of Hunter Blinds, the cloaked rooftop hideouts of antagonist Kraven’s PMC underlings, while later on we’re charged with clearing out Symbiote Nests. Pop-ups deliver alerts of nearby street crimes. If it’s not…

For the first time, the arrival of a new generation of Counter-Strike heralds the death of what came before. With this latest incarnation released as a mandatory update for the wildly successful CS:GO, the beloved prior entry has been rendered all but inaccessible on PC. As release strategies go, it’s a bold gambit that would represent an astonishing act of hubris on the part of almost any other developer. After all, if one lesson should have been learned from Blizzard’s recent attempt to revitalise interest in Overwatch with Overwatch 2, it’s that mandating major changes to a long-established formula risks not only failing to attract a new audience but polarising even the most dedicated playerbase. In Valve’s case, however, it is clear that this confidence was well-founded. Counter-Strike 2 is…

Zach Gage plays Apex Legends “almost every day”. (He’s a Bangalore main, if you’re curious; hence his development partner Orta Therox chipping in with “Lifeline!”) That fact might seem tangential to the developer’s latest project, but it’s key to how it all began, with Gage thinking seriously about games that have become more than games; the kind that become habitual. “Minecraft or Roblox or League Of Legends – these are all games that have really substantial platforms,” Gage begins. “They’re a social space you can go to and interact with people. Roblox in particular is a place you go to hang with your friends, and there happens to be games there.” He considered how he might create something similar for the type of game he makes: puzzlers such as Knotwords,…

“We have to get our act figured out… The problem is that the ante keeps getting upped... It’s an arms race that is unwinnable and is destroying people.” Perhaps raising the bar by shooting for such ambitious production values with the Uncharted series was a mistake, Amy Hennig admits “For a while now, we’ve been spending way more money than we earn…” Yep, time to bin off 830 staff, Tim Sweeney concedes as he looks at Epic’s bank statement ”There’s an evident lack of comparable reduction in total compensation packages for executives.” As belts are tightened, IDG Consulting’s Emilie Avera can’t help noticing a disparity “Make things so amazing and innovative that people forget about guys like me… Don’t settle for rehashes… Show me things I’ve never seen or done…

Push the bloat out Something that often goes unremarked upon is the unspoken pact between player and game developer. The pact says, ‘If you pay X for this game, you will have fun. It will stimulate the joy receptors in your brain, and release the fun hormones’. But as games sprawl ever wider, I have found myself more and more apprehensive of starting a new game. Not because I don’t enjoy the genre or the developer, but because do I really want to spend 100+ hours in one world, in one game space, cycling through the same rote actions? Starfield is a prime example. Do I want to play a game that forces me into busywork? Do I want to play a game where people tell me that actually it…

MOST WANTED LocalThunk, the pseudonymous developer of poker-themed deckbuilder Balatro, swirls their mouse pointer over a card as they share their screen with us during a Zoom call. “A lot of new players are very confused by this card,” they say, referring to a joker that means all cards in your deck are considered face cards. On its own, they explain, it doesn’t give you any points. It doesn’t boost your multiplier. It doesn’t help you score any more chips or earn any extra money by itself. But in conjunction with others… “It’s a facilitator,” they say, a degree of triumph in their voice. They sift through their card collection and pick out another. “Scary Face: all face cards give +20 chips. So put those two together and now all…

Developer Publisher Ironwood Studios Kepler Interactive Format Origin PC, PS5 US Release TBA 2024 hen we first laid eyes on Pacific Drive last year, we were shown W one climactic way in which a run through this vehicular Roguelike can end. We watched from the back seat, hands-off, as our designated driver sped through a supernatural storm, bouncing over terrain as the world closed in – and escaped to safety, seemingly without a second to spare. It’s a moment that lingers in the memory, but one we put down to well-directed demo choreography. It’s certainly not representative of how our first hands-on ends. Dropped straight into the Olympic Exclusion Zone (STALKER meets Annihilation, but with all the conifers and fog suggested by the game’s title), we ignore the urgency of…

Developer Nitroplus, Chime Corporation Publisher Format NetEase PC, PS5 Origin Japan Release 2024 When considering which creatures are most likely to inherit a postapocalyptic Earth, the humble rabbit isn’t exactly the first to spring to mind – though perhaps their insatiable reproductive habits have given them an edge in terms of sheer numbers. Either way, when Nitroplus’s game is first revealed to us alongside its protagonist, a gruff middle-aged rabbit called Stamp that pilots a robot known as Junkster, our first question to creator Gen Urobuchi is: why rabbits? And what compelled the writer, perhaps best known for magical girl series Madoka Magica, cyberpunk thriller Psycho-Pass, and light novel Fate/ Zero, to develop an action game? Urobuchi is only too pleased to share with us the original inspiration, holding out…

Much like The Alters, there’s a driving question at the heart of Frostpunk 2. It’s just a single word apart, but that makes all the difference. “The big question,” says design director Jakub Stokalski, “is: what now?” It’s something the developers are asking of the first game’s Frostlands setting, and the people who inhabit it – who, as Stokalski points out, have by the end of the original Frostpunk essentially survived the end of the world – but also of themselves, as they attempt to follow up the first game’s enormous success with a pair of new directors at the helm. This is a moment the studio has been preparing for, however. Przemysław Marszał, who was that game’s co-lead and art director before becoming CEO, explains that it was specifically…

Format PC, Xbox Series Developer Tango Gameworks Publisher Bethesda Softworks Origin Japan Release 2023 The rhythms of the triple-A videogame hype cycle are now so firmly established that anything that disrupts them is bound to stand out. But even if not for the remarkable nature of its arrival – revealed and launched at January 2023’s Xbox Developer Direct – Hi-Fi Rush would surely have made a splash. Here was a game that applied blockbuster production values to something other than photorealism; a character-action game that was also a rhythm-action game; and a Tango Gameworks release that seemed a world apart from the most famous works of its soon-to-be-former CEO, Shinji Mikami. But then Hi-Fi Rush was born from a desire to do something different. Very different. John Johanas had graduated…

When developers start crafting a game world, one of their earliest considerations is how players will navigate it. This month’s Play selection features all manner of different traversal mechanics. In The Fabulous Fear Machine your choices determine the spread of paranoia and terror, represented by a purple inkblot that metastasizes outward. And if Strange Scaffold’s El Paso, Elsewhere is effectively a one-way descent into hell, you’ll spend a good deal of that trip diving backwards in slow motion. The elevator might be more efficient, but it’s not nearly as stylish. Serendipitously, our review code for Jusant arrives after we’ve spent 20 hours with Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, juxtaposing two distinct approaches to a familiar game activity: climbing. In Ubisoft Bordeaux’s game, reaching a Baghdad rooftop is in some ways even more…

The brightest idea in Lords Of The Fallen is also its darkest, like something itching beneath the skin. Its name: the Umbral, a ghoulish alternate plane that lingers parallel to the everyday dimension of Axiom. You can peer into it with the aid of a magic lantern, cross to explore it voluntarily, or fall down dead and resurrect there with a last chance to destroy whatever killed you. From inside or out, the Umbral’s presence remains an admirable achievement in HexWorks’ mission to produce, in the words of creative director Cezar Virtosu, a “Dark Souls 4.5” (E381). If only it wasn’t joined by other creeping irritations. The Umbral itself is a conceptual rerun, of course, most notably of Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver. But the active simultaneity of its existence…

Sitting in the central bazaar of ninth-century Baghdad, we watch children playing in a fountain while merchants hawk their wares, sheltering from the sun at cloth-covered stalls. Later on, we walk through the Great Bimaristan, its courtyard teeming with plants and butterflies, before hijacking a boat to travel to the hammam along a river, drinking in the urban landscape surrounding us. Such moments of historical tourism prove a highlight of Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, and represent a course correction for Ubisoft’s longrunning series, stripping away many of the action-RPG and open-world elements of recent entries in favour of urban exploration and stealth combat. Returning to these fundamentals is refreshing. Yet in its dedication to tradition, Ubisoft Bordeaux has inadvertently highlighted just how shallow the roots of this series are. We assume…

Die Gute Fabrik’s narrative adventure wastes little time in delivering its boldest gambit, a plot development and design choice that informs almost everything about the deliberately meandering voyage that follows. On Njarfie Roust – a cold, wet and deeply insular island – it introduces its cast, a band of misfits about to be left behind by their charismatic but capricious leader. Maja’s absence is keenly felt by her friends and loved ones who, confused, set out aboard their ramshackle boat to discover the reasons behind her departure. Just as significantly, it’s also expressed through the narrative structure. Where the studio’s previous game cast you as a single character helping a community, here you’re in charge of the collective – speaking and acting as the crew of the De Kelpie, making…