Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2023 i Edge

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…

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…

“Then it’s over and you’re like, ‘Yes, I won!’ And immediately I’m like, ‘What have I done with my life?’ And so I decided I’m never going to do that again.” “The ball is in your court to deliver this line-up on time and at the expected level of quality.” ”They want to take your guns. They want to take your gas stoves. And now they want to take your Xbox. What’s next?” “Sony is the console market leader and it would defy business logic for us to exclude PlayStation gamers from the Call Of Duty ecosystem.”…

Long before people who knew nothing about videogames referred dismissively to “playing Xbox” or “playing Nintendo”, it was the much-storied company Atari whose name provided videogames’ first proprietary eponym. Like Hoover or Sellotape, Atari was, for most of the 1970s, the popular name for its entire genre of product, and your correspondent has fond memories of going to a friend’s house to spend weekend afternoons “playing Atari” on his miraculous 2600 console. It came as a surprise to me to learn that the company – or, at least, not the original Atari Inc, founded by Nolan Bushnell, but a company using the much-bought-and-sold brand name, with the blessing of Bushnell himself – still exists. Not only that, but it recently released probably its first important game since 1985’s Gauntlet. And…

Developer/publisher Thunderful Publishing (The Station) Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Release Sweden 2023 Our first question for Brjánn Sigurgeirsson, Thunderful co-founder and SteamWorld universe and franchise director, is simply, ‘What took you so long?’ SteamWorld games have turned up like buses every couple of years since 2010, but the most recent, SteamWorld Quest, was released some four years ago, in 2019. “It’s like we forgot one game in the middle somewhere, right?” Sigurgeirsson laughs. Most of the team at Image & Form had been preoccupied making The Gunk, he adds: “But there’s a lot of stuff in the works.” SteamWorld Build is being developed by The Station, a studio that was purchased by Thunderful in 2020. So why isn’t Image & Form developing a new…

Developer/ publisher Ironwood Studios Format PC, PS5 Origin US Release 2023 At some point in the recent past, something weird happened along the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States. Now there are strange phenomena among the tall pines: clusters of rocks that bob in mid-air, unnatural glimmers of golden light emerging from the earth, stone pillars that rise from it seemingly of their own volition – and these are the examples with less obviously hostile intentions. This space has been designated the Olympic Exclusion Zone. And you’re trapped on the far side of it, with only a beaten-up station wagon to get you home. In order to do that, you’ll first need to map out the Zone, one trip at a time. It’s split into smaller areas, each containing…

Developer/ publisher GoldFire Studios Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin US Release 2023 Above all, a good mystery story needs to raise questions; in its introduction alone, GoldFire Studios’ game poses several. It’s 2062, and en route to a supply drop at a remote location in Alaska, your plane is sheared in half by unknown forces. You survive the crash and set off through the snow to search for your co-pilot, who bailed out before impact, as well as to uncover the cause of the crash. Oh, and your only companion is an earnest court-mandated therapy bot. Perhaps the most intriguing mystery of all is that last one: why has a court ordered protagonist Kai to be followed by a therapy bot? Alfie, the robot, could either…

Developer/publisher On-Line Systems Format Apple II Release 1980 WIZARD AND THE PRINCESS Developer/publisher On-Line Systems Format Apple II, Atari 8bit, C64, FM-7, PC Release 1980 (Apple II) MISSION ASTEROID Developer/publisher On-Line Systems Format Apple II, Atari 8bit, C64 Release 1980 (Apple II) TIME ZONE Developer/publisher On-Line Systems Format Apple II, FM-7, PC Release 1982 KING’S QUEST Developer Sierra On-Line Publisher IBM, Sierra On-Line Format Amiga, Apple II, ST, Macintosh, Master System, PC, Tandy 1000 Release 1984 (PC) MIXED-UP MOTHER GOOSE Developer Sierra On-Line, Coktel Vision Publisher Sierra On-Line Format Amiga, Apple II, ST, Macintosh, FM Towns, PC Release 1987 PHANTASMAGORIA Developer/publisher Sierra On-Line Format PC, Saturn Release 1995 COLOSSAL CAVE ADVENTURE REMAKE Developer/publisher Cygnus Entertainment Format PC, PS5, Quest 2, Switch, Xbox Series Release 2023 HOUSE During these times of…

Over the past decade and a half, Wadjet Eye has carved out a cosy niche as a purveyor of point-andclick adventures, including the fivegame Blackwell series and the supernaturalthemed Unavowed. It’s a relatively tiny market, but one filled with dedicated fans, and founder Dave Gilbert has kept the company going by deliberately keeping it small. Indeed, for much of the studio’s early history, he was the sole full-time employee. “For a couple of years, I had a full-time designer on staff, and that was a little stressful,” he explains. “Not because of him – he’s great – but having to earn enough to pay another fulltime salary to someone was very stressful. The more people I pay, the more I have to make sure the games earn. And I think…

At the heart of Like A Dragon: Ishin is an ingenious idea that doesn’t have any real precedent in videogames – or at least it didn’t upon release in 2014, before Immortality and The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story featured real-world actors playing multiple roles. In both of those cases, though, that was within a single game. Just about all of Ishin’s main cast have appeared in other titles in the series, playing key roles in those games – but, since this is set in the 19th century and the rest in the 20th or 21st, entirely different ones. Freed from the constrictions of the mainline narrative, these established characters are effectively cosplaying as historical figures, with major liberties taken with their real-world activities and personalities, partly with a view…

Flanked by two officers, Alfre Holland shuffles into the courtroom, cuffs around her wrists and a chip the size of Rockefeller Plaza on her shoulder. In front of her sits a high-school diploma next to her arrest and prosecution record – a rather clumsy shorthand for squandered potential. You could say it’s a fitting metaphor for Forspoken itself; certainly, its list of flaws is easily as long as Frey’s rap sheet. But just as the scene ends with an act of clemency on the judge’s part, it would be unwise to overlook the evident strengths of an open-world action game that’s at its best when it refuses to follow the rules. Not that such leniency was forthcoming prior to Forspoken’s release, as Luminous Productions’ game became – largely thanks to…

We’re only a few minutes into Motive Studio’s respectful remake when we encounter its first major departure from the original survival horror: previously silent protagonist Isaac Clarke has found his voice. It doesn’t come as a great shock – after all, it’s the same one with which he spoke in the series’ later instalments – but quickly sets the tone. His shift from totally mute to merely laconic is exactly the kind of judicious alteration we find popping up time and again, fleshing out what was previously lacking. Welcome back, then, to a refurbished but not totally revamped USG Ishimura, the doomed ‘planet cracking’ mining vessel that Clarke and his comrades have been sent to fix: a repair mission even newcomers will sense is about to go awry. Sure enough,…

A soutlined in E381, ‘fewer incongruous rhythmaction interludes’ was first on our wishlist for this sequel to The Great War. In hindsight, expecting that of a story that focuses largely on The 369th Infantry Regiment (better known as The Harlem Hellfighters), who brought ragtime to Paris, was perhaps unwise. Excepting their curious cadence, which involves you tapping the screen at a tempo that doesn’t quite seem to match the music, these sequences are a more natural fit for a wartime tale that otherwise shares similar strengths and weaknesses with its predecessor. Its multi-stranded story is a little more grounded, with less of the unwelcome bombast that soured the original. No boss fights involving church organs and zeppelins, in other words – although there are flying sequences where Allied pilot George…

J eff Minter’s typically kaleidoscopic take on a lost Atari arcade game (a wider rollout of which was scrapped after test audiences in 1982 found it too difficult) punishes those with itchy trigger fingers. In that regard it’s deliberately counter-intuitive: as a fixed turret in the middle of a platform suspended in space, your instinct is to fire at will. Instead, you’re rewarded for precision and careful timing. A tap of the fire button drops a bomb on the surface; its shockwave ripples outward, destroying any enemies it touches, which in turn creates further shockwaves. As such, a single, wellplaced bomb can create a sustained chain reaction that takes out new enemies as they spawn in without further input on the player’s part. Holding your fire is often key to…

When I was 15, I made a decision I would come to bitterly regret: I bought a Nintendo 64. To be clear, I loved zooming through F-Zero X and jetting around in Pilotwings 64, and there are few games I’ve had more fun playing with my friends than GoldenEye 007 and Star Fox 64… but at what cost? Nintendo 64 games cost around £50 in 1998, or £90 in today’s money, according to the Bank Of England’s inflation calculator. I could only afford one or two new games per year, or maybe more if I got lucky when scouring the used games bins at Electronics Boutique. My PlayStation-owning friends availed themselves of cheap pirated games (note: don’t pirate games, kids!) while I looked on in envy. All of this is…

Developer Frame Break Publisher Amplifier Game Invest Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Sweden Release Spring (Early Access) Or Armored Corn, if you prefer. Farming with mechs is an instantly appealing pitch, even before you see what Swedish developer Frame Break has done with the idea: think of how many farming games have you painstakingly watering individual grid squares of crops, taking up a sizeable chunk of each working day, and then imagine hopping into the cockpit of a vehicle with a spray attachment that lets you hose the entire patch within seconds. “We call it a ‘farming power fantasy’,” CEO Joakim Hedström says. “Giving the player all these mighty abilities to work on a larger scale.” From the very beginning , Hedström tells us, the studio knew it…

With nearly 50m copies sold, the Street Fighter series is one of the biggest in game history. Unusually for such a storied franchise, though, the original 1987 game wasn’t the one that caught fire. It took 1991’s follow-up, Street Fighter II, to really capture the imagination of arcadegoers worldwide, ensnared by a combination of super-detailed visuals, a selection of characters with distinctive personalities and abilities, and endlessly rewarding play in both singleplayer and versus matchups. An even bigger success, though, followed in 1992. A basic concept on the surface, Champion Edition was, essentially, a response to player criticisms. Adding mirror matches and playable bosses was the sort of idea that would pop up in arcades, on school playgrounds and in game magazine reader mail sections. Tracking down how it all…

NEAR MISSES Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On iOS The original 3DS version of Game Freak’s curious solitaire/horse-riding hybrid certainly has its fans, many of whom have been raving about this fresh take, released via Apple Arcade. And there is no denying that there’s something about it that compels us to play on – each victory, whether via a final-furlong burst to win by a nose or a romping triumph by several lengths, is one to be celebrated. Yet this appealing conceit doesn’t quite translate to a satisfying game: the result of early races seems predetermined, and after a while you realise fortune’s role in proceedings is ultimately decisive. An unfortunate deal, a fluke collision, a store owner failing to open up shop for that crucial item that could make the…

We’ve seen plenty of rhythm-action games recently that put the emphasis more heavily on the latter half of that genre label, but perhaps none so much as Hi-Fi Rush. A surprise release from Tango Gameworks, it departs from the studio’s horror output to pick up threads from the other side of founder Shinji Mikami’s gameography: PN03, Viewtiful Joe and Devil May Cry. Aspects of each are blended into a combo-driven action game, where you’re constantly rated on your performance in battle, and which moves like a cartoon and puts music front and centre. In Hi-Fi Rush, hero Chai snaps his fingers to the soundtrack, laying out the time signature that will dictate your every action. Jumps and dodges are synced to the beat, as is every strike of Chai’s weapon,…

As much as we try to resist the pull of nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, it’s hard to deny that there are certain things consigned to the dustbin of videogame history that still occasionally inspire a sense of longing. The kinds of singleplayer B-games that filled out the release schedules of the early ’00s, for example. Games that, in lieu of the polish that came with larger budgets, offered pleasures of a frequently disreputable nature and stuffed in as many influences and ideas as possible, in the hope that at least some would stick. It’s a longing clearly shared by the maker of Wanted: Dead, Japanese developer Soleil, and 110 Industries, the newly formed publisher that commissioned its creation. They don’t make ’em like this any more, the thinking seems to…

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…

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…

Rinse and repeat I’ve recently been torn in a two-way decision for my next purchase. The choice: Atari 50: The Anniversary Collection or the Dead Space remake. On the surface, these two titles have little in common, but both approach the concept of nostalgia, albeit in two very different ways. Whilst Atari 50 presents older games as they were, with context, interviews and a real desire to give a feel for the era in which they were released, Dead Space follows that intriguing idea of updating the game so it feels “as you remember it”. This is a trick that Halo employed with the remakes of the first two entries (although they did, of course, offer the shock value of switching to the That’s not to say Atari’s method is…

“I feel like there’s no blueprint for what I’m trying to make,” Sam Eng says of his forthcoming Devolver-published game, Skate Story. Eng has been influenced by a variety of games, from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, which first encouraged him to take up ’boarding for real, to EA’s Skate in its control scheme, via Sayonara Wild Hearts and Hyper Demon. But at heart, it’s not trying to capture the feeling of skateboarding so much as the anxiety of falling off – that human fragility represented by its protagonist, who is made of glass. He’s got a point – there is no prefabricated template for that. Similarly, there is no roadmap for vehicular Roguelike Pacific Drive. Well, not metaphorically, at least. You do have an in-game map, but when you first…

Developer Plot Twist Publisher Rogue Games, Inc Format PC, Xbox Series Origin Poland Release Spring A screative director Bartek Lesiakowski tells it, The Last Case Of Benedict Fox became a Metroidvania almost entirely by accident. When development began around three years ago, this Lovecraft-inspired adventure about a “self-proclaimed detective” had a keener focus on story. Then the idea of exploring the human psyche was mooted, and the environments they built became more maze-like. Gradually, the game took on a new shape. “After a few months, we were like, ‘Oh, we have a Metroidvania on our hands’,” Lesiakowski recalls. “So let’s go all-in on that.” That organic shift makes sense: Metroid has a lot of common with a detective game; certainly, they feature many of the same verbs. In both cases,…

Developer Rogue Sun Publisher Wired Productions Format PC, PCVR, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin UK Release April 20 We learn to play before we can walk in Tin Hearts. Staring down at a workbench, our task is to guide a string of marching windup soldiers from their box to a magic door. To make this happen, we need to alter the direction of their single-file striding , which involves the simplest of toys – atriangular block with a T-shaped hole bored through its centre. We rotate and slide it over a matching peg standing in the soldiers’ path. They bump off the 45-degree angle, diverting towards the exit. Tin Hearts thus begins as a reworking of the classic Lemmings concept, but it doesn’t stay still for long.…

SMASH Game C-Smash VRS Developer Wolf & Wood Interactive Publisher RapidEyeMovers Format PSVR2 Release 2023 Few people played Cosmic Smash, a futuristic, intergalactic sports game that arrived in 2001 during the twilight months of Sega’s tragi-glorious Dreamcast saga. But for those who did, the memories have lingered. You played as a translucent man, his crunching, stretching wireframe skeleton visible while you chased a molten-red rubber ball around a space-age court, racquet in hand. The rules were enviably succinct: squash meets Breakout. The far wall was constructed from Atari-issue blocks, which vanish on impact. Destroy all blocks before the timer runs out. Ten matches. Final boss (maybe). Welcome to Cosmic Smash. Rez’s lithe, athletic cousin, Cosmic Smash launched a few weeks ahead of Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s trance masterpiece. Both games matched their…

With this thorough, if not comprehensive, refurbishment of 2014’s formerly Japan-only release Ryu Ga Gotoku: Ishin, the recently retitled Like A Dragon series might just have found the most ideal expression of its dual personality. This is, after all, a game that has blended violent drama with broad comedy from day one – and Ishin duly delivers the bloodiest fights so far, while putting forward a strong case for being the funniest entry to date. Born in the late-PS3 era, finally making its western debut two console generations later, it has the visual hallmarks of an expensive cut-and-colour several weeks on: from a distance it can look spectacular, but its greying roots are showing through. More significantly, it tells a story that demands its hero adopt an alter ego to…

As aposter child for the current state of Xbox, Hi-Fi Rush is a slightly unusual pick: a second project from a studio Microsoft owns at two steps removed, via the Bethesda acquisition, with a breezy presentation that invites you not to take it too seriously. And yet the circumstances of its arrival mean we can’t help but think of it in terms of the bigger picture – one that’s not quite as pretty as the game itself. Hi-Fi Rush was announced and immediately released at Xbox’s inaugural Developer Direct, a showcase that promised to put the spotlight on the people who actually make these things. Which comes as a rather bitter irony, given that the event came in the immediate wake of Microsoft announcing it would be laying off 10,000…

With space travel, as with all human endeavour, momentous achievement inevitably leads to the question of what’s next. Landing on the Moon may have been a giant leap for mankind, but it was only ever going to pave the way for more far-flung ambitions. Keoken clearly follows the same line of thought: after delivering us the Moon with its debut, its instinct is to go farther and bigger, this time targeting the red planet. Yet as much as the Dutch studio expands its scope, it does so without the taint of ego and hubris that accompanies certain real-world space pioneers. In Deliver Us Mars, it’s the personal stories that make the journey worthwhile. The biggest evolution from its lunar predecessor, in fact, is the physical presence of people. Where the…

Of all the unsettling sights on this gruelling polar expedition, perhaps the most ominous of all is nowhere near the ice. Rather, it’s in The Pale Beyond’s menu, where the narrative branches of this choice-driven adventure are clearly laid out. Most are fairly short, ending at points where key decisions took us down a different path; points from which we are able to continue should we choose to turn back. But the one we are currently heading down, more than 30 weeks in, is terrifyingly long and straight, each previous week represented by a padlock that tells us we cannot go back from here. Several of our crew are freezing; a few are malnourished; a handful deeply demoralised; two are no longer with us. Yet even with barely any food…

Time to add a new verb to the videogame lexicon. To spacedive, in Mojiken’s slice-of-life tale, is to leap inside the mind of another person, in order to figure out and then help solve the problem that’s ailing them. It’s a fresh term for a familiar sort of conceit, then, particularly if you know the Psychonauts or Persona series – and these pixel-art inner worlds likewise offer imaginative visual or mechanical twists each time. One involves you sneaking past werewolves that represent the aggressive facade its insecure host hides behind. Another pitches you into an Ace Attorney-style courtroom drama where you’re tasked with gathering and then presenting evidence to debunk the accused’s claims. And so a game whose opening content warning suggests a maudlin drama about heavy subject matter transforms…

Madison Karrh’s puzzle adventure begins with a classic morning routine. Put on a cassette of soothing music, pour yourself a cup of coffee, take one last look at yourself in the mirror – and, of course, grab a broken spine off the shelf, remembering to insert the loose vertebrae before stuffing it into your backpack and heading out. Karrh’s previous game, Landlord Of The Woods, saw a young woman grappling with the anxieties of falling behind her peers, and this comes from a similar place of emotional unease. While it’s explicitly about the loneliness of moving to a big city – that spine is the first part of the protagonist’s quest to Frankenstein herself a partner, a grim but strangely wholesome DIY solution to solitude – Birth might also, by…