Indholdsfortegnelse for March 2021 i Edge

Developer Arkane Studios Lyon Publisher Bethesda Softworks Format PC, PS5 Origin France Release May 21 Arkane Studios has spent the past few years establishing itself as one of the most consistent and fascinating triple-A developers around – but in that time, its games haven’t quite managed to find an audience commensurate with the label. Its flagship series, Dishonored, is currently “resting” after the sequel’s sales dip – and that has cleared the floor for its latest, and most convincing, effort at breaking into the mainstream. Deathloop spans many of the themes we cover elsewhere this issue. Arkane has taken its immersive-sim heritage and applied a Roguelike twist to it, courtesy of the game’s time-loop plot – please mark your 2021 bingo card accordingly. In practice, this means playing as Colt,…

The star item in Microsoft’s recent studio-buying spree was Double Fine, one of the oldest and greatest independent game developers. Over its 20-year history it has produced a wild array of games spanning different genres, platforms and scales, but they’re all very Double Fine, united by a weird sense of fun. As studio head Tim Schafer described its output: “I think our whole thing is making stuff up.” So it’s exciting to have a new release for 2021 – Psychonauts 2 (pictured), sequel to the 2005 game about an eccentric mind-explorer – which for over a decade looked unlikely to be possible. Frankly, it’s looked fairly shaky since its 2015 crowdfunding campaign. It was originally planned for a 2018 release but has been plagued with warnings about budget issues threatening…

When Remedy Entertainment celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2020, the Finnish studio was able to boast one of the most consistent back catalogues in videogames, if not, necessarily, one of the most well-stocked. It’s produced seven titles in that quarter-century, with stretches of five years and more passing without a single release. But no longer. “The last few years have been about a lot of change at Remedy, becoming a multi-project studio,” communications director Thomas Puha says. The company’s attention is now divided between multiple games, letting Remedy close the gap between releases without having to sacrifice its perfectionist tendencies. “I think the times when Remedy was quiet for years on end are gone,” Puha says. “It will not be a quiet year for us.” Confirmed for 2021 is the…

Developer Beethoven & Dinosaur Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format iOS, PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Australia Release 2021 Two things stand out about The Artful Escape: the sensationally rock’n’roll name of Beethoven & Dinosaur founder Johnny Galvatron, and the game’s sublime E3 2017 demo that still reverberates in our ears three years on. That’s rather apt given this is a tale of a young musician out to cement his place in rock history by embarking on a cosmic quest to discover his musical identity. Think Bowie between personas, with a bit more double-jumping involved. Francis Vendetti’s journey manifests as a mix of 2D platforming and chattier encounters in the vein of Kentucky Route Zero in the way they encourage expression without derailing a linear tale. But it’s the instrument-powered athletics…

Developer White Owls Publisher White Owls, The Irregular Corporation Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Origin Japan Release Summer 2021 After the lovable disaster of Deadly Premonition 2, a game that made Cyberpunk 2077 look polished, Hidetaka ‘Swery’ Suehiro’s typically bizarre take on country living has the potential to be an irresistible return to form. You’re Naomi Hayward, a New York photojournalist and aspiring alcoholic who’s been sent to the rural English town of Rainy Woods to investigate a mystery. (The notion of an American newspaper with the budget to do that is a puzzle itself.) There’s murder afoot, but we’re more intrigued by why the town’s inhabitants turn into cats and dogs at night. You’ll use your feline/canine powers to aid your investigation, jumping around the rooftops or sniffing…

“We thought Paradise Killer was going to be one and done,” Rachel Noy, Kaizen Game Works’ art director, admits. Creative director Oli Clarke Smith and technical director Phil Crabtree exhausted their savings making the game, with Crabtree only half-joking when he says he expected “about ten people would play it”. Yet critical acclaim and a glowing audience response meant that while, in Clarke Smith’s words, “no one’s buying a yacht”, neither co-founder will have to look for another job just yet. Indeed, Kaizen Game Works is already working on a new project. Crabtree says Paradise Killer’s success has been validating. “Way more people have been into this than I ever expected. It’s made me think we can definitely do it – that our philosophy of designing a game we love,…

The little console with the crank remains one of the most exciting hardware developments in recent times – and we’re not just saying that because it was revealed via this very tome. Rather, it’s the fact that it offers something out of the ordinary: Panic is releasing a bespoke handheld at a time when even Nintendo is out of the portable-only market. Indeed, Playdate promises to offer something akin to the creatively fertile period of those early days of the DS, that little wind-up handle on the right side of the console opening up new forms of interaction in the same way as the combination of stylus and touchscreen did in the mid-noughties. It’s not that Playdate is a return to more accessible controls or simpler times – anyone with…

Leave it to the director of Siren and the original Silent Hill to go through 2020 and decide what the world needs is to be more horrified. Keiichiro Toyama has left Sony Japan Studio to go independent, founding Bokeh Game Studio with Junya Okura (lead designer on Gravity Rush) and Kazunobu Sato (lead designer on Edge favourite The Last Guardian). A glimpse of some monstrous concept art appals us in a good way. For years Toyama’s been saying spiralling development costs are antithetical to good horror game design. Indeed, the likes of World Of Horror and Phasmophobia prove his point: low-budget horror is enjoying something of a renaissance. We’re probably in for something less esoteric here, with Toyama suggesting he’s focused on delivering “a broader entertainment experience, rather than a…

Developer Mode7, Bithell Games Publisher Ground Shatter Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin UK Release Early 2021 As any good action hero will tell you, beating the bad guys is only half the battle. Looking good while you do it? That’s how you secure your place on the dorm-room walls and DVD shelves and YouTube compilations where real heroes are remembered. And this is something that Fights In Tight Spaces knows all too well. Developer Ground Shatter is taking cues from the likes of Mission: Impossible, Oldboy and John Wick to bring that brilliantly what-it-says-on-the-tin title to life. Think lifts, bathrooms, corridors, the back of a van – any confined space just big enough for the kind of tightly-choreographed collisions of muscles and sweat that end up clipped from…

Approaching its fourth year, Xbox Game Pass continues to tighten its grip on the title of Best Deal In Videogames. Provided, of course, that you’re a very particular kind of player: hungry enough to justify the monthly subscription, unfussy enough to accept whatever’s on the buffet. But even if you don’t fit the profile, there are still indirect benefits to the ways Game Pass is rewriting Microsoft’s strategy. For one, it’s finally given the company a means – and a motivation – to catch up with Sony and Nintendo when it comes to getting indie games on its consoles. The financial heft of Microsoft being pointed at smaller developers, including deals that fully cover production costs without demanding platform exclusivity, according to Xbox head Phil Spencer, is an appealing prospect.…

Virtual reality’s growing pains are still uncomfortably apparent. Just when it seems to be hitting its stride, with games such as Phasmophobia, Paper Beast and The Room VR, it trips over its own feet with disappointments such as Medal Of Honor: Above And Beyond and Oculus Quest 2’s mandatory Facebook connectivity. Not to mention Sony’s apparent step back from the technology with PS5: a new headset may well be in the format-holder’s plans for this console generation, but not in the immediate future. VR cheerleaders will point to the two-million-plus sales of the outstanding Half-Life: Alyx – a number that certainly isn’t bad given the system requirements of the flagship title for Valve’s Index headset. However, compare that to the 26 million units shifted by Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons…

The success of Sayonara Wild Hearts must have been a double relief for Simogo given the time it had taken to pull the game together; it’s easy to forget this was effectively the studio’s make-or-break moment. It could have been forgiven for keeping things simple for its next game, then – but that was never really on the cards. The Swedish duo has always marched to the beat of its own drum, and its next release, codenamed Project Fuzzy Optics, is no different. Which means, of course, it’s extremely different. If Sayonara was an upbeat crowd-pleaser, this is its more challenging counterpart. It’s a response, the studio’s co-founder Simon Flesser explains, to a growing sensation that videogames are becoming increasingly safe – “not made to express a unique vision from…

Developer Tango Gameworks Publisher Bethesda Format PC, PS5 Origin Japan Release October When the godfather of survival horror says he’s in love with an idea, you know to sit up – or cower behind a pillow. While his bloodied Resi fingerprints are visible all over The Evil Within, Tango founder Shinji Mikami told documentary makers Archipel that for him the appeal of Ghostwire: Tokyo was in stepping back to support an original vision from his younger staff: “It was love at first sight and it didn’t come from me. I just want to bring it out there.” The world in question is Tokyo’s Shibuya, where 99 per cent of the population has vanished. Great news for PS5 stock, less so for the ghostbuster purging angry spirits from the district’s landmarks.…

Developer/publisher Capcom Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Japan Release 2021 Elsewhere in this issue, Siren creator Keiichiro Toyama suggests that large budgets are at odds with what makes for good horror – though there are always exceptions that prove the rule. That said, Resident Evil has been more of a horror-inflected action thriller for a while; the Southern Gothic-themed Resident Evil 7 was supposed to be a return to the series’ spine-chilling roots, but even that couldn’t resist bringing out the big guns. Capcom is taking that game’s canonical ending (in which naïve everyman Ethan Winters and wife Mia both survive their ordeal at the Baker plantation) as the starting point for this new adventure. The couple aren’t able to put their traumatic past behind them for long, with…

As a component of fractal geometry and a programming technique, recursion has been a fundamental part of games for a long time – though it’s only in the past few years that creators have started to really explore how it might work as a core mechanic. Manifold Garden’s infinitely repeating architecture is one striking example, while Innerspace VR’s escapepuzzler A Fisherman’s Tale presented worlds nested within worlds, like a particularly complex Russian doll. The concept was recently explored by game developer and YouTuber Sam Hogan, who released free 16-level puzzler Game Inside A Game on itch.io (available at bit.ly/hogan_recursive): here, you jump into and out of square rooms to grow and shrink, with gravitational twists, infinite staircases and double recursion enabling you to make multiple copies of yourself. This year,…

Developer/publisher Amanita Design Format PC, Switch Origin Czechia Release Spring There’s something subversive about Amanita Design announcing a psychedelic horror game during a Nintendo Direct. This is miles away from the gentle shivers of Creaks: Jaromír Plachy’s follow-up to Chuchel is gory and genuinely disturbing. Was challenging expectations part of the appeal of making it like this? “I’ve always enjoyed the idea of making Happy Game right after creating the poetic Botanicula and cheerful Chuchel,” Plachy tells us. We’ve had the chance to play roughly two-thirds of an early build and it is explosively weird. Happy Game tells the story of a young boy whose pathetic whimpers are unsettling even before we get to the part where we’re dragging a doll’s arms to detach its own head, or using a…

Developer Shedworks Publisher Raw Fury Format PC, Xbox Series Origin UK Release 2021 It captured us from its first appearance in November 2017: a tweeted GIF of a hovering craft kicking up a trail of dust across green terrain under a purple sky, all picked out in pastel planes and sharp outlines. The tweets continued as the game, which would later be named Sable, took further shape: the craft became a hover bike and gained a delicious sense of momentum as it zoomed across expanses of open land. A character wearing a movement-expressing red cape was added, expanding the game’s premise as a thirdperson open-world adventure game. Scenes followed of platforming and exploring, all within a graphic world of crashed spaceships and vistas punctuated by weathered rock formations and giant…

Developer Luis Antonio Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin US Release 2021 If you’ve played The Witness, you’re already acquainted with Luis Antonio’s work. As an artist on that game, he helped shape an entire island, modelling ruins and planting carefully-chosen vegetation to create one of the most memorable locations in videogames. In his new game, his first as lead designer, he’s working on a much smaller canvas. Twelve Minutes takes place in and around a single apartment, within the narrow timeframe suggested by the title. The cast is similarly compact: just your character, his wife, and the intruder who bursts into their lives a few minutes into the game, claiming to be working for the police and accusing the wife of murder. Out of these…

Among today’s swathe of cloud gaming platforms, Amazon’s Luna doesn’t have many ideas of its own. That’s especially when you compare it to Google’s Stadia, from which Luna has taken the concept of connecting an official (albeit optional) Luna Controller (pictured) directly to its server, rather than to the device you’re using to stream the game, to reduce latency issues. Similarly, Ubisoft is offering its games on Luna (what new gaming platform is complete without day-one support from Ubisoft?). And then there’s Twitch, which is integrated into Luna so that you switch from watching a game being played to playing it yourself instantly, rather like Stadia’s mooted State Share feature, which does much the same with YouTube. But just as Google’s global infrastructure and ownership of YouTube is the reason…

Bringing the Mushroom Kingdom into the real world always seemed like a matter of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’, and after a few delays and false starts, that ‘when’ is now pretty much upon us. Super Nintendo World opens its doors at Universal Studios Japan while this issue is on newsstands, and it promises to be gaming’s equivalent of Disney’s Magic Kingdom, to which millions are likely to make a pilgrimage – once travel restrictions are lifted. Nintendo has already offered an early look, via a Nintendo Direct hosted by Shigeru Miyamoto, grinning as he introduced himself as “Mario’s dad”. From a warp pipe entrance into Peach’s castle lobby to a recreation of Super Mario 3D World’s Mount Beanpole, complete with animatronic Thwomps, Goomba towers and Yoshis, everything seems precision-tooled to…

With the constant distraction of social media and a seemingly ever-increasing number of streaming services vying for our attention, it’s no wonder that Microsoft and Sony are prioritising speed and convenience as a new console generation begins. PS5 and Xbox Series S/X may not revolutionise our free time, but they’ll certainly let us squeeze more into it. Which, ironically, should mean less squeezing for videogame protagonists: those narrow gaps (and, for that matter, tedious elevator rides) that have so often been used to mask load times in blockbuster games should be surplus to requirements from now on. While Microsoft’s Quick Resume feature is a godsend for those who like to have several games on the go, PS5’s solid-state drive certainly has the edge in raw speed. That’s reflected in the…

Yes, some will dismiss it as nothing more than force feedback with bells on. But you only need look at the ecstatic response to Astro’s Playroom to see how many people have been bewitched by the DualSense’s haptic-feedback qualities. As a showcase for what the controller can do, it sets a daunting standard for other studios to live up to, however, and few other launch games come close: the combination of the controller’s speaker and haptics adds subtle differences to the likes of Dark Souls and Miles Morales, but neither game suffers significantly for their absence when you turn them off. Yet the efforts of thirdparty studios suggest that it won’t just be future firstparty games that make meaningful use of the tech. The implementation in Call Of Duty: Black…

Developer/publisher Nintendo (EPD) Format Switch Origin Japan Release TBA Last year Nintendo coasted to record-breaking Switch sales, largely off the back of Animal Crossing: New Horizons becoming the quintessential lockdown game. Yet the COVID pandemic otherwise contributed to surely its weakest software lineup in many a year, as it struggled to adjust its traditional methods of operation to accommodate working from home. Not that any Breath Of The Wild sequel was ever seriously likely to be released before the end of the year (though, decent as it may have been, a new Hyrule Warriors can’t have been its original strategy to deal with the twin threat of fresh, attention-grabbing hardware from Microsoft and Sony). While at the time of writing Nintendo has yet to show its hand for 2021, there…

We’re not huge fans of the term (‘Metroid-like’ would be our preference), but we’ll recognise that ‘Metroidvania’ has long since passed into the gaming lexicon. The fact that it’s so commonly used and understood says a lot about how many of the blighters there are these days. But that underlying structure continues to endure the test of time. The gradual sense of empowerment. The steady unfurling of a world as the player character’s new abilities allow them to see more of it. The opportunity to face once-dreaded opponents with the confidence of the overpowered. The shortcuts and the secrets. Little wonder, then, that we’re going to be awash with them in 2021 – the flipside, of course, being that the level of saturation is such that some of these games…

Developer/publisher Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment (TT Games) Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin UK Release Spring If there’s a common criticism levelled at Lego’s world domination over the past decade or two – the eco-friendliness of its chosen medium aside – it’s that creativity has been squeezed out in favour of studiously following a template. And the same has increasingly been true of the videogame adaptations. In 2005, Lego Star Wars: The Video Game managed a minor miracle, spinning family-game gold out of the prequel movie trilogy. The formula was refined by its followups, and has been adhered to ever since, with each year bringing at least one new Lego game. Until 2020, that is, when the annual churn finally paused to allow for a ground-up…

Games have long understood the appeal of the open road. Often it draws us to some important goal. But in 2021, it looks like we’re due a rash of games more interested in what happens along the way: the unexpected stops, the detours, the conversations that only start when there’s a long, blank stretch of tarmac ahead. This isn’t exactly new, of course. From Jalopy to Final Fantasy XV, plenty of games have decided it’s the journey that really matters, not the destination, in recent years – but when Open Roads, Season and Road 96 (pictured) were all announced on the same day in December 2020, it was clear that something was in the air. All these games look wildly different, which as it should be (the road movie, after…

Growing up in the ’80s, Tommy Tallarico’s favourite console was Mattel’s Intellivision. It was a passion that never really went away, to the extent that many years later he pulled a Victor Kiam (ask your parents) and bought the company. The result is that now, in 2021, a new Intellivision console, Amico, is preparing for lift-off. Having worked as one of the most prolific musicians in games, hosted fan-favourite TV shows including Electric Playground, and toured his acclaimed Video Games Live concerts around the world, Tallarico has a track record of delivering the goods, so if someone was going to resurrect one of the most fondly remembered brands from gaming’s formative years, why not him? His starting point was to create something for a “forgotten” gaming group: the family. Thus,…

Developer/publisher Sega (Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio) Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Japan Release January 28 (3–5), March 25 (6) Microsoft may have repeatedly scotched rumours that its next big acquisition would be Sega, but the two companies have certainly become chummier of late. The most eye-opening evidence of this blossoming relationship came in November, with Yakuza: Like A Dragon making its new-generation console debut on Xbox Series X four months before its PS5 counterpart. This was a startling development for a series with such a long-standing association with PlayStation, even given the prior arrival of Yakuza 0, Kiwami and Kiwami 2 on Game Pass. By the end of March, the whole of the mainline series will be available on the service – so whether you own an Xbox…