Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2021 i Edge

At the beginning of the year, with VR support on its new console rather shaky, it looked like Sony might have followed in the footsteps of many tech firms before it and simply given up on its VR ambitions. As it stands, playing PSVR games on a PS5 requires ordering an adaptor from Sony and, in some cases, separately installing the PS4 edition of a game alongside its current-gen equivalent. With that in mind, it’s understandable that PSVR releases have been thin on the ground in terms of brand-new dedicated VR titles, with ports of older games from other platforms and VR modes in games such as Star Wars: Squadrons feeling like meagre compensation. In February, though, the mood changed, with the confirmation of a next-generation PSVR system. Since then…

Sony’s partner in the acquisition is RTS, a new esports company set up by Endeavor, a hybrid media company and talent agency whose roots go back to the formation of the William Morris Agency in 1898; today it owns the UFC, Miss Universe and Turkish Airlines, among numerous others. Less is known about RTS’s intentions, but the pedigree is certainly there. CEO Stuart Saw was director of strategy at Twitch, and led Endeavor’s work on the 2019 Fortnite World Cup. If it all goes south somehow, he can always call on the old hands: Evo founders Tom and Tony Cannon are staying on in advisory roles.…

Across Choi’s projects, Nintendo remains a constant. “I’m a huge fanboy,” he laughs. From his days as a high-school student poking at DS’s touchscreen technology, the company’s products helped Choi decide to become an engineer. “That’s such an enormous part of my inspiration. Nintendo is always doing something really weird.” His favourite product of recent years is Labo. “It’s one of the most ambitious things they’ve done,” he says. In how it explores the Switch hardware, it could inspire the next generation of hardware hackers. “Labo totally has the spirit of trying to teach younger kids how to think about engineering.”…

WEBSITE Island Tour Creator bit.ly/crossingcreator Given the astonishing success of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, it’s a surprise – pandemic holdups notwithstanding – that it’s not been more widely supported by Nintendo beyond its rather limited DLC updates. Still, with this new site, you can transfer screens and videos from your Switch to your smartphone to create special promos. Upload a 30-second video, and you can draw attention to your island’s best bits, whether your forte is creative terraforming, or inspirational design ideas and layouts. More straightforward is the option to make a custom poster using a screenshot. All you need to do in this case is think up a strapline – though in truth that proved rather too much of a busman’s holiday for us this month. continue Indie demand…

The silver lining of lockdown is that I have gone a whole 12 months without having to answer innocently phrased questions about my thoughts on “violent videogames”. These conversations are most difficult because I’m never quite sure what I actually think. Easy enough for me as Mr Indie Story Games to dump on Call Of Duty and take the moral high ground. But do I want to? With other media I’m the first to leap to the defence of violence, artistic or otherwise; I’ll quote David Cronenberg talking about A History Of Violence and how he needs to mediate his relationship to the violence that exists in much of the world. But are games different? In the absence of dinner-party chat to hash it out, this topic has been on…

Developer Variable State Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin UK Release 2021 London, 1982. Teenage schoolkids Sam and Pete run through a Tube station, laughing. Pete dons the bobby’s hat he’s just stolen, as its owner and another officer give chase. Trapped on the platform, the young pair sprint down the tunnel, diving through a maintenance-access door just in time as a train hurtles by. Yet as they catch their breath, they realise they’re not alone. A mysterious man tells them they’re late, before ushering them towards a door: “Either you’re coming, or piss off” As it opens, the screen fills with a dazzling green light. Hearing the voices of their pursuers getting closer, Sam boldly heads through, yet Pete hesitates. As the police catch up…

On occasion, you’re presented with alternative dialogue options while talking to Beth, though Crawshaw explains that it’s not part of a branching story. “It’s for flavour,” he says. “We experimented with the [choices] having an effect, but it always felt like we were adding them just for an excuse to have that kind of variety and influence.” He doesn’t mind saying that his story has a definite beginning, middle and end, in other words. “I don’t want people to veer off too far. You do get a flavour of their characters and personalities depending on what you ask, and it gives a little extra insight. But I’d prefer to tell one story really well than water it down just for the expense of, you know, getting more playable hours.”…

Developer Greylock Studio Publisher Digerati Format PC, PS4 Origin US Release Summer (PC), TBA (PS4) Matt Larrabee had been teaching computer science to middle-schoolers for years when he came up with the idea for Severed Steel. Having picked up an assortment of development skills over time, he began to think about “what my dream game would be,” considering elements from a variety of games he’d loved since childhood. Now we’ve played it, it’s hard to credit the notion that it all came together while Larrabee was on a long, leisurely bike ride; the action here is lean, exciting and blisteringly fast. This is a short, sharp shock of an FPS, one that clearly benefits from having been stripped back from its original form. Formerly called Impact – until Larrabee realised…

Tokens dropped by elite enemies and at the end of dungeons can be used to upgrade individual abilities – reducing the cooldown on the Ranger’s dodge, for example, or letting you regain more mana from your quick attack. The money you earn, meanwhile, can be spent on a wide range new abilities and passives. One can make the magician’s rabbits (or tigers) explode when their health is low, damaging nearby enemies; in another slot, you might plug in an ability that gives you an attack boost for killing familiars. “You’re constantly unlocking new abilities on all your forms and buying new ones,” Smith says, “and that gets you thinking about all these cool synergies that you can pull in to make your characters more and more powerful.”…

Developer/ publisher Studio Zevere Format PC, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin US Release Late 2021 Waking up in your apartment, which is dimly lit as if underwater, you step outside, following the corridor until it leads you into a dungeon. A disembodied voice guides you. You’re handed a weapon to use to defend yourself against shadowy entities, which quickly fall. Then you reach a room with a mysterious, apparently invincible figure. “Sweet dreams,” they mutter – but just as they deliver the finishing blow, you’re back in your room. Of course it was just a dream. Right? As creator Davionne Gooden explains, all of this pseudo-8bit RPG – which has Mother in its foundations, while taking inspiration from Persona and real life – takes place within the dreams of…

While Lemnis Gate doesn’t have any kind of narrative-driven campaign, there’s still a story behind all its battles, Anderson explains. “Humanity is facing extinction, and the Lemnis Initiative is a project to construct a massive interplanetary particle accelerator, which, when activated, will displace Earth backwards in time and avert the extinction.” Only one Earth can be saved, though, so each team represents a parallel universe trying to be first to activate its accelerator. There’s talk of “a rich lore” but it seems Ratloop will be keeping that in the background for now, rather than forcing it on players who just want to enjoy the action.…

To get started with a MiSTer, you only absolutely need one thing: a Terasic DE10-Nano, which costs around £120 from a specialised electronics merchant such as Digi-Key. After flashing its supplied 8GB mini SD card with Mr Fusion, the MiSTer installation image, and running it, most systems will simply work. Exceptions such as the Neo Geo core require the 128MB SDRAM add-on (£53). Most cores won’t need it, but a £13 heatsink and fan are recommended for the most demanding use cases, such as the ao486. If you want to output to a CRT display, you’ll need an I/O board with VGA and audio ports, and to avoid needing to plug a USB hub into the DE10-Nano’s single USB port, there’s a neater MiSTer USB board. For purists, SNAC adapters…

One thing that all multiplayer social stealth games seem to have in common is a decompression phase. With matches kept short and victories sudden, players are immediately able to share their thoughts and suspicions. “Players love to explain how they knew a character was not a robot, whether it’s a weird movement or more in-depth behavioural analysis,” Unspottable’s Gwé Limpalaer says. The game’s designers deliberately reduced visual noise during the hunt to ramp up the tension, then introduced strong feedback for the winning box on the nose. “That difference tends to spark up laughs and conversations between games.”…

The advent of a new console generation represents a beginning and an ending. With the release of Nioh: Complete Edition earlier this year, Team Ninja marked PS5’s birth by bidding farewell to the series that has defined its recent past. Franchise director Fumihiko Yasuda has previously said that Nioh’s story is over, but he’s keen to clarify that he doesn’t necessarily mean for good. “The Nioh team will continue to support the games through updates, but after that the team will take on the challenge of developing other new titles,” he tells us. “I don’t know when it will be, but I want to utilise the experience the team gains from these new titles in order to create a sequel that will surpass both Nioh and Nioh 2.” For now,…

Developer People Can Fly Publisher Square Enix Format PC (tested), PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Out now Nobody listened to global-warming advice, so humankind has to pack itself into spaceships and tear off through the cosmos in search of a new home. A ragtag group of space cowboys makes first contact on the new terra firma, and while repairing some uplinks to transmit planetary data back to the other colonists following behind, they realise the planet’s home to mysterious hostile forces, such as a strange black goo that gets into one member’s airways and incapacitates them. Before the team drag him back to the ship, though, a fierce storm breaks out. The mission descends into chaos. These overwhelmed space cowboys must send a message back to the…

With VR video having fizzled, games are going to make up the vast majority of paid VR content – Omdia’s forecasts have gaming revenues sitting an order of magnitude higher than video through until 2025. But this isn’t the only measure of success. VR seems to have a more stable footing in the enterprise market, where the technology can be used for everything from training simulations to 3D modelling. And even on the consumer side, more mundane applications could be what finally convinces the public to buy in. “One of the reasons smartphones took off was that they figured out a lot of really simple day-to-day apps that you would actually use,” Kelly says. For phones, maps were the transformational use case. VR still has to find its equivalent –…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a 12-month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate membership A little bit of politics I’ve never played World Of Warcraft, or Hearthstone, or indeed any of Blizzard’s time (and money) black holes since the first Starcraft, which is why I was surprised to see in my tailored newsfeed an article on Activision Blizzard hiring controversial Republican Brian Bulatao as CAO. This comes despite laying off presumably thousands of employees in their European restructuring, each almost certainly more invested in gaming and the company than said businessman (how much says he has no clue what a murloc is?). I shared this with my Hearthstone-playing friend, and also read a few tweets on the subject, and…

Whether it’s an authentic recreation of a real place or a fictional realm brought to life by the imaginations of its designers, a good videogame setting isn’t just captivating while we’re in it, it becomes firmly lodged in our memories when we’re not. The very best endure well beyond the end credits, the recollection of being there akin to remembering a favourite holiday destination, albeit one available to us from the comfort of our sofas. Switching its game’s original US setting to London – and not the tourist hotspots we usually see in games, but rather Zone 2 and beyond – has helped Variable State establish an authentic voice for its fantastical anthology Last Stop. The convincing kitchen-sink drama grounds the supernatural and sci-fi themes, while we find ourselves lingering…

It’s not all walking and talking – some conversations keep your thumbs busy, too. Aside from the aforementioned target practice, you’ll engage in simple interactions – nudging the stick to scroll through photos on a mobile phone, while a quarter-circle movement spoons cereal into your mouth. If that Quantic Dream-style approach rings alarm bells, fear not: this is David Cage with a sense of humour. Take the second story, in which we play Meena, a tough professional with a complex personal life. At work, you’ll look through her eyes to analyse a rival, scanning them for weaknesses like a corporate Terminator. And a sex scene is anything but leery: we go from pre- to post-coital within three shots.…

Developer Black Matter Publisher Team17 Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Australia Release 2021 Conventional WWII shooters have the player inhabit Tom Hanks’ Captain Miller – the Saving Private Ryan protagonist who, through a combination of gumption and dumb luck, is witness to meaningless death but never its subject (well, not until the very end, at least). Black Matter CEO Max Rea likes to say that Hell Let Loose newbies are the men standing behind Hanks on the D-Day landing craft – the ones who take a bullet the moment the ramp hits the beach. “Normally, I think people’s first or second game is an extremely overwhelming and bewildering experience that’s largely just terrifying,” he says. “Things are exploding incredibly loudly around you, you wonder how you’re alive still, and…

“I’m always surprised by how much players like smaller levels,” Larrabee laughs, as we remark on how compact and focused these voxel-based environments feel. “Like, I’ll make these big sprawling monstrosities, and the playtesters will be like, ‘OK, delete two of the floors – it doesn’t need all this.’ So part of what I’m doing now is going back and slicing them up into multiple smaller levels. Which really shocked me – I assumed people would just want these giant arenas. But that’s not what the testers are finding.” That said, if you fancy building your own, the game will come with a level editor – Larrabee is working on Steam Workshop integration so that players can share their creations.…

Developer Dark Lord Publisher Daedalic Entertainment Format PC Origin Poland Release Q2 2021 Grand Theft Auto has made roadkill of almost every challenger over the years – True Crime: Streets of LA, Sleeping Dogs and APB all lie flattened on the highway of history. The trick, as a plucky would-be-mimic, is to choose your target carefully – and Glitchpunk developer Dark Lord has picked GTA2, the half-forgotten 1999 sequel. Back then, the series was still in top-down 2D, and experimenting in the realm of dystopian sci-fi. “I was surprised during pre-production that not many games looked in this direction,” says Maciej Karbownik, Dark Lord’s founder and lead developer. “All the personal nostalgia aside, I consider the core gameplay loop of GTA2 an example of genius simplicity, that incorporates my favourite…

She Dreams Elsewhere began as a high-school project, which Gooden originally envisioned would take five months to develop, although at the same time he was also invested in theatre, photography and filmmaking. The game only really became a full-time endeavour in 2018, through “bootstrapping”, with friends pitching in every now and again. Although the game is set to launch on Xbox Game Pass, he clarifies this doesn’t provide development cashflow: “It’s basically a carrot on a stick – you’ve got to ship the game first, that’s pretty much how it works.” Investment fund Kowloon Nights has proved more helpful – Gooden made an application at the end of 2020, which was finalised in February, ensuring funding all the way to completion.…

Between Deathloop, Returnal, 12 Minutes, Quantum League and Lemnis Gate, 2021 is looking like a banner year for time loops, not to mention the cinematic and televisual incarnations of the trope. It would be convenient to look at our current circumstances for explanation, but that would be ignoring the realities of game development. We have to ask, do the Lemnis Gate team have a theory of their own? “There was that Tom Cruise movie a while ago, Edge Of Tomorrow – I think that might have got some people thinking,” Anderson says. “Remember, when you launch a game, your influences are from four or five years before that – so a lot of what was happening and coming out five years ago affects the games we’re seeing today.”…

Developers launching publishing arms is very fashionable at the moment – where do you think this growth is coming from? The democratisation of development has lowered the barrier to entry and fuelled an explosion in the number of games being made, but especially those nearing triple-A production values. Engines are becoming more powerful and intuitive, social media has created communities for anyone to instantly get answers to a problem – making a game has never been more accessible for aspiring developers. There were over 10,000 titles released on Steam in 2020, and that’s just one platform, so with such a huge supply, and with so many success stories over the years with huge returns for small teams, it’s understandable that these projects are attractive to larger, more traditional publishers. While…

Because cores aim to model the actual components in a computer, they can often be broken down into the same parts as the original hardware. The HDL Jotego wrote for one Yamaha sound chip can therefore be reused in other projects (“When you can, use an off-the-shelf thing someone else has written because it’s a massive win,” Nullobject says), and when a new core for Sharp’s X68000 computer was released a year ago, other cores that also have a Motorola 68000 CPU got an immediate accuracy upgrade. This inherent modularity also raises the idea of core designers creating idealised machines made from the very best components of their times. “Shane Lynch [an engineer on Xbox One and Series X] was talking about building his own version of the Genesis,” SmokeMonster…

While SpyParty was originally built using characters from The Sims, that changed when it became a commercial project in its own right. For a long time, while Hecker focused on design, ugly in-progress mannequins stood in for socialites decked out in early-20th-century finery. After 15 years of development, however, the guests have started to resemble Sims again. A makeover from former Maxis animator John Cimino transformed them into Cluedo-style caricatures who make charming, exaggerated flourishes. In tribute to SpyParty’s origins, however, Security Agent Damon and Toby The Waiter are still angular and grey, resplendent in their original brutalist forms.…

Nex Machina PC As our excitement for Returnal (review next issue) reaches fever pitch, we dip back into Housemarque’s blistering twin-stick shooter. The fingerprints of collaborator Eugene Jarvis seem even more apparent this time: sure, at heart, it’s effectively Robotron with bells on, but what bells they are. Clap Hanz Golf iOS With the Easter holiday coinciding with deadline week, the last thing we needed was a flood of new games to arrive on Apple Arcade. Despite releases from Mistwalker and PlatinumGames, it was this that occupied those few precious moments of downtime. No surprise, really, since it’s essentially Everybody’s Golf under a new name; the first, indeed, not to launch on a Sony platform. Quite the coup for Apple. Monster Hunter Rise Switch To paraphrase an old meme: friendship…

The jokes write themselves. Smash Bros booted off the main stage to make way for PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale; likewise Killer Instinct for Battle Arena Toshinden. Sony and Daigo Umehara negotiating visitation rights for Justin Wong, since both of them now own him. As is often the case when big news breaks, the meme machine span into overdrive when Sony announced it had acquired the Evolution Championship Series (Evo), the largest fighting-game tournament in the world, through a joint venture with new esports company RTS. But memes were pretty much all there were – plus one recurring question. Why? For Evo, at least, the motivations are clear. A business based on in-person events has been devastated by COVID-19. The brand has suffered too, after Evo co-founder Joey Cuellar was accused…

As one of the few people who has tested the Labo Fit Adventure Kart Kit, could Choi imagine it ever becoming an official product? “I have no doubt in my mind that they already have a bike at Nintendo that connects to Mario Kart and have decided, ‘This is not good – we’re not going to release this’.” Referencing Nintendo’s infamous eagerness with cease-and-desist letters, he jokes: “I’ll let you know when they take down the video, because then we’ll know they’re working on something like this.”…

Red Candle is currently working on its third game, a 2D action platformer that looks worlds away from its first two horror titles (take a look at @redcandlegames on Twitter for a brief teaser video). It might be too late for Devotion, but the studio hasn’t rejected the possibility of releasing future titles on digital storefronts such as Steam or GOG. “As a game company and developer, we never limit ourselves to certain types of selling channels,” Yang says. “All we want is to share our works with a worldwide audience, and at the same time be successful financially so we may keep making new [games].”…

Like all artforms, videogames can transport us back to happier and more innocent times. The effect is the stronger, of course, if they do so in a self-consciously neo-retro way. Just as a modern writer might choose to compose a historical novel in a pastiche of 18th-century prose style, a modern videogame might employ and play with tropes from 1970s and 1980s classics for purposes both straightforwardly nostalgic and ludically paratextual. All of which, impatient reader, is one “Parklife”-worthy way of saying: look, they rebooted Ghosts ‘n Goblins! As someone old enough to have actually played Capcom’s arcade classic in the chip shop, as well as the ZX Spectrum port and the much better (it pained me to accept it) C64 port as a friend’s house, I am also old…

Forspoken PC, PS5 Luminous Productions’ Project Athia has a new name, and a new star: Charlie’s Angels’ actor Ella Balinska plays protagonist Frey, whose acrobatic movement around this sprawling open world makes Link look positively sluggish. The Ascent PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Almost a year on, it’s high time we caught up with E346’s cover star, which looked better than ever during Microsoft’s ID@Xbox showcase. Even at its most frenetic, its co-op twin-stick action runs smoothly: this is one cyberpunk game that appears refreshingly glitch-free. Mario Golf: Super Rush Switch Deadline-week palate cleanser Clap Hanz Golf has us eager to spoil more good walks this summer with Camelot’s latest. Indeed, you won’t be doing much walking at all in the realtime Speed Golf mode, as you race to the…

Rea was a moderator in DayZ’s original forums, and is almost certain he played Project Reality in the same circles as Dean ‘Rocket’ Hall – since Rea is Australian, and Hall a New Zealander. “The line in the sand where traditional wisdom for gameplay pacing got destroyed was DayZ in 2012,” Rea says. “The popularity of it showed everyone that players didn’t need to be caught in a 30-second loop – they could be given that tension and that time. It was like seeing Project Reality go wide-scale.” DayZ ultimately birthed battle royale, which in turn gives players the framework to understand Hell Let Loose. “The narrative that games like PUBG gave people is what was so exciting: tedium for 30 minutes, and then one car chase for 45 seconds.”…

Developer/publisher DrinkBox Studios Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Canada Release TBA 2021 An injection of chaos is the making of DrinkBox’s latest. You can see it in the art style of this top-down dungeon-crawler which has the anarchic, slightly unsettling edge of a late-night cartoon (it’s no real surprise when the studio mentions Ren & Stimpy as an early visual reference point). It’s present in the unusual combinations of characters and abilities you discover as you tool around with different loadouts: a bow-wielding turtle, anyone? And it’s particularly apparent when you rummage around inside your magician’s hat for a rabbit and produce something, well, a little more dangerous and toothsome. A ‘familiar but different’, if you will. That, of course, is pretty much the DrinkBox MO. Rather than…

GTA2 was soundtracked by AM-style radio stations, with bass-boosted DJs and bizarre adverts that washed in and out of signal. Dark Lord has recreated its peculiar vibe with the help of South African musician and “man of a thousand voices” Mark Allnutt. Allnutt has recorded, mixed, and provided all the female voices on the radio to date. Karbownik outlined the scripts, which were fleshed out by co-designer Aleksander Janiak. The results sit somewhere between ASMR and surrealist comedy – somewhat reminiscent of Chris Morris’ classic Blue Jam radio series, only with more religious innuendo. “Mark makes Glitchpunk come to life,” Karbownik says. “The moment we put the radio in the game was one of the best in my dev career.”…

Lemnis Gate’s developer isn’t the only studio to bear the Ratloop name; there’s also Ratloop Asia, best known for the Rocketbirds games. The two are separate entities, but share a common ancestry – the original Ratloop, founded in 1997 by Anderson, Pete Gonzalez, Sian Yue Tan and Lucas Pope, of Papers, Please and Obra Dinn fame. Hailing from various parts of the world, they met online as teens, and formed the studio after collaborating on Malice, a popular Quake total conversion mod which, Anderson says, still has something of a cult following today. When the time eventually came for the four to part ways, Yen explains, “they told each other that one day they would either meet again and work together, or each start their own Ratloop.” It’s a promise…

Most core developers have set up Patreon accounts for their work on MiSTer, where they’ll often give patrons access to beta cores as they’re in development before releasing them publicly. This method has worked well for Nullobject and Jotego, the latter particularly prolific with 1,700 patrons. He finds paying followers a good motivator: “It gives meaning – it means that you’re not alone doing things that people won’t use.” Sorgelig doesn’t gate any of his work behind his Patreon on principle, and also because, as he says, “in reality it’s mostly hidden and dirty work which doesn’t bring many Patreon followers.” Kitrinx doesn’t have one for more personal reasons: “I feel like it should completely be a matter of my passions as to what I work on. I don’t want…

Games have often been described in the language of acting, with the player taking the lead role in a piece of interactive theatre. That’s rarely felt more fitting than in the context of social stealth games, where the primary challenge is to modify your behaviour to suit the situation. Assassin’s Creed in particular has asked for different etiquette depending on who it is you’re playing. As a Black woman in Liberation’s version of the 1770s American South, for instance, an expensive disguise is necessary to pass in high society. Origins, meanwhile, doesn’t require crowd blending: cast as an Ancient Egyptian policeman, you have no business hiding.…

Composer, Streets Of Rage 4 Working with some of the most legendary Japanese game composers – Yuzo Koshiro, Motohiro Kawashima, Yoko Shimomura, Keiji Yamagishi, Harumi Fujita – how did you decide who would score what? We needed to create a coherent feel throughout the game and it came very quick that we should split the vibe into two parts: on one hand the levels which I handled myself, and on the other hand the boss fights. Each boss is supported by a different composer to give it a really unique feel, to create a momentum. The levels have more of a story arc attached to them. However, we really wanted the first half of the first level [theme] to be written by Koshiro-san, not only as a mark of respect…

We often hear complaints that games don’t reflect the real world. To a point, that’s true, but it’s an attitude that can betray snobbery towards science fiction and fantasy. These genres often address contemporary themes through allegory – for children and adults alike, these stories can offer a safe place to confront our anxieties, leaving us better equipped to handle them beyond page or screen. Filmmakers in particular have regularly taken us to outer space to explore their characters’ inner space, from 2001 to Gravity and First Man. The gripping Gnosia (think Among Us, if it were a singleplayer visual novel) might be a sci-fi horror at heart, but it treats its doomed spacefarers with real compassion as it probes the human condition. Nier Replicant, meanwhile, establishes distance in terms…

The main game is split across three acts, each with a forking path of regular fights; ‘elite’ minibosses that drop relics; events; treasure chests; and campfires at which the player can either rest to restore a little health, or upgrade a card in their deck. A boss, drawn from a possible pool of three, awaits at the end of each act. To fight the Corrupted Heart, you must unlock the hidden fourth act by collecting three coloured keys, each of which requires you to shoulder even more risk by declining opportunities to make yourself stronger. One comes from fighting a souped-up elite, one from a chest (leaving the relic behind), and the last from a campfire, in lieu of a rest or upgrade. Make it through and you’ll face another…