Indholdsfortegnelse for July 2023 i Edge

In the old days, when videogame consoles were styled to look as though they were made partly out of wood, we didn’t worry about framerates too much. We didn’t have to. The most popular console of the era, 1977’s Atari VCS, generated its visuals in such a way that they sort of had to run at 60fps, and the entire gaming community benefited by not being distracted by tedious arguments over which version of the newest game managed to fit in two or three more frames per second than the other. In the arcades, the original Star Wars coin-op of 1983 even managed to display full-blown 3D fluidly – in colour, no less. Back then, we didn’t consider a future when games weren’t presented smoothly. They could only improve from…

Back when Fellow Traveller was still known as Surprise Attack, the Australian publisher exhibited at a lot of game shows, from PAX East to Gamescom. “We were out at these events three or four times a year, as well as doing stuff here in Australia,” says founder Chris Wright. “So a large part of our marketing spend was doing these events.” Each trip, Wright says, would cost around $20,000, including travel and hiring a booth. “Increasingly, we were just saying: ‘Is this really where we should be spending our money?’” It’s a question that is particularly pertinent in 2023, in the wake of the cancellation of E3 – once the firmest fixture in the videogame calendar – as many of the major publishers move instead towards online showcases. But for…

We live, or so it is routinely claimed, in an age of misinformation. Fake news, Russian trolls and antivax conspiracies flood communication channels. Even reasonable people can fall prey to misinformation, defined as false information that is distributed naively, or disinformation (originally coined after the Soviet Russian equivalent), which is false information deliberately spread in order to mislead an enemy, whether foreign or domestic. Elon Musk’s response to this problem is, it seems, to deliberately make it worse, by promoting the mad and/or abusive tweets of paying blue-tick people in any conversation and leaving it difficult to figure out whether an account claiming to be from a trusted organization, which formerly would have been ‘verified’, is genuine or an impostor. Of course, in the age of social media, the news…

Developer Red Soul Games Publisher Raw Fury Format PC, consoles TBA Origin Spain Release 2023 Roman Koyasu is a true everyman, of the kind you rarely see starring in videogames. He wears a literal bluecollar work shirt, tucked into faded jeans in a manner that doesn’t exactly flatter his belly. His hair and beard are greying at uneven rates, the weight of his years visible in his face too – not just in the odd line and wrinkle of the skin but the way it hangs, gravity taking its slow but inevitable victory. He’s an outlier among player-characters, perhaps, but Roman is the kind of person you can easily imagine passing on the street, a face you’d be unlikely to pick out of the crowd. And there’s a good reason…

Developer/ publisher Universal Happymaker Format PC Origin US Release 2023 On the main menu of Universal Happymaker’s oddball narrative management sim is a button marked ‘What have you done?’ Clicking it brings up a list of your accomplishments, yet it’s impossible not to read it as an accusation. Particularly since, as the new director of the Flaustrian Royal Space Academy, we already have some dubious ‘achievements’ to our name. Such as hiring a recruit fuelled exclusively by funnel cake. Agreeing to a test of loyalty involving a suspect and a cage of mongooses. Telling the press that a cadet, found confused and trouserless in an alley while clutching a match and a litre of gasoline, was lighting a bonfire to warm the homeless, having donated their nether garments to a…

Down by the old canal in Central Yharnam, past the shambling crows and the groaning, curfewbreaking villagers, there is a window that wriggles with candlelight. You can’t enter; iron bars and taut chains hold back the city’s tide of filth. But approach in good faith and you may talk to the girl who sits, unseen, on the warm side of the pane. She doesn’t tell you her name (eventually you’ll see it’s kinder that way), but she does share with you her problem. A while ago the girl’s father sharpened his axe and, like you, set out to join The Hunt: a vigilante effort to rid Yharnam’s streets of the infected souls that keep daughters locked indoors. When he did not return, the girl tells you, her mother left to…

Explore the iPad edition of Edge for extra Play content STILL PLAYING/ NEAR MISSES Melon Journey: Bittersweet Memories Switch ‘Travel to Hog Town, where melons are illegal’ is one of the most memorably surreal promo lines of recent times, and but for a glut of life-stealing titles this issue we might have had the chance to discover whether this ‘story-exploration game’ could live up to it. Certainly its early stages are engaging: though, as the genre descriptor suggests, it’s light on mechanics, we’re quickly won over by its viridescent presentation (it essentially resembles an emulated Game Boy game) and amusing interactions. Investigating the whereabouts of missing colleague Cantaloupe, we’ve already fallen in with a gang of local thieves and outed a hamster popstar as a lip-syncing fraud by unplugging his…

From above, Hyrule looks calm – or perhaps it’s just that this place feels so peaceful. The wind seldom gets above a whisper, the sparse score a calming accompaniment to the gentle chime of a bell marking the start and end of each workday for the automata that serve as stewards for the Temple Of Time and the islands surrounding it. It’s beautiful up here, too, with sumptuous skyboxes that are a comfortable match for anything on more powerful hardware. Little wonder, then, that we quickly realise we’re in less of a rush to get back to ground level than we ever anticipated. We do, however, find a quite delightful way of getting there. As we explore, we discover a mysterious object: a thick piece of slate adorned in decorative…

When considering what makes a good sequel – and, just as pertinently, what absolutely does not – there might be no richer case study than Star Wars. So it’s only natural that, in crafting its follow-up to Fallen Order, Respawn would look to a few of the series’ better examples. In classic second-act fashion, there are flashes of real darkness and loss in Survivor’s story, with a few beats borrowed almost wholesale from The Empire Strikes Back. But perhaps the finest tradition it picks up is allowing a little time to pass – enough for characters to grow, and their situations to develop, in a way that suggests a life outside the snippets we get to see on screen. As we pick up with Cal Kestis, he’s evolved from the…

Like so many game developers of this generation, the films of Studio Ghibli have had a significant impact on the work of Swedish studio Wishfully. The studio cites Spirited Away as a key inspiration behind its debut – and even if you didn’t know this before playing, it wouldn’t take you long to notice the resemblances. In these vibrant hand-painted vistas, foliage sways in the breeze, strange little creatures scurry about in the woods, and a resplendent orchestral soundtrack ushers you through a rural idyll. Yet the appeal of a Ghibli film extends beyond its art style, typically exploring environmentalist themes. Where lesser games would merely borrow the aesthetic, Planet Of Lana is clearly keen to tackle these broader ideas, and does so in a remarkably sophisticated way – using…

We’re always a little wary of fabricated genre names. Hybrid labels cooked up by studios to describe their creations often tend more toward the aspirational than the descriptive. But if they’re taken as statements of intent, Mojang Studios’ positioning of Minecraft Legends is an intriguing one. Meshing the base building and resource gathering of realtime strategy, the mob stomping of MOBAs and Pikmin-like minion management, ‘action strategy’ seems on first impression a decent label. It’s also something of a misnomer, and one we can only imagine is intended to euphemistically describe this mash-up that wobbles under its own porous weight. Ultimately, we’d suggest ‘monotonous turtling’ as a more apt description. Ditching the typical strategic birds-eye view, you’re brought down to earth to take control of a squareheaded hero and defend…

Cast your mind back to 2020. As Sony and Microsoft promote their forthcoming consoles, which in some respects seem to represent the smallest graphical leap yet between generations, one feature stands out among all the talk of SSD storage and ray-traced reflections: a move to 60fps. Some games will even run in 120fps on these new machines, we’re told, a feat beyond even many gaming PCs when it comes to running contemporary blockbusters. With such assurances in place, it was easy to imagine that this smooth, fluid gameplay would characterise the next generation. In 2023, then, there was a certain dissonance to the news that Redfall would launch in its Xbox Series incarnation with only a 30fps ‘quality’ mode, its 60fps ‘performance’ mode arriving at some point down the line.…

We’ve seen game-inspired needlecraft before, but never anything quite as striking as French artist Marine Beaufils’ interpretations of Geoff Crammond’s classic, starkly rendered 3D puzzler The Sentinel (pictured right). “The ZX Spectrum version of The Sentinel uses its palette of eight colours in duo, with black or blue as a common denominator, and this masterful use of colours fascinated me,” Beaufils says of her attraction to honouring the game this way. “I hadn’t planned on making a series – embroidery is a long and tedious process – but it was impossible for me to choose among the 13 different duos of colour, so I decided to make them all!” Beaufils says that her “strongest motivation is the feeling that every videogame is a complex flux of images with many unseen…

One of my favourite T-shirts was created to promote The Lost Arcade, the 2015 documentary that told the story behind the closure of New York’s Chinatown Fair arcade in 2011. I never visited Chinatown Fair, but its story of friendships found and lost amid the merciless tides of technology and commerce summed up the dismal fate of arcades worldwide. When I was growing up in the ’90s, arcades were already on the downswing. Outside of my visits to the Trocadero in London and entertainment complexes in the US, it was slim pickings for anything but the most popular arcade games in British cinemas and bowling alleys. I’d scour Internet forums to find the closest Dance Dance Revolution machine, and whisper tales of Konami’s fullbody motion-tracking lightgun game Police 911 to…

Developer Deconstructeam Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC, Switch Origin Spain Release 2023 The new game from the creator of cyberpunk narrative adventure The Red Strings Club demonstrates the value of lateral thinking about the language we use to describe videogames. This is not by any means a deck-builder in the traditional sense. And yet, setting aside the connotations of the term, it could accurately be described as such since the act of construction (as opposed to collection) is firmly at the forefront. Fortuna, a young witch, has been exiled to an asteroid for 1,000 years for doom-laden fortune readings that left her coven in disarray. The conditions of her banishment preclude her from using her tarot cards. And so, with the assistance of a familiar named Àbramar, summoned from…

Format PC, Switch Developer Nerial Publisher Devolver Digital Origin UK Release 2022 Misdirection is hardly an alien concept to games. We pay for the artifice, after all, knowing that the worlds we enter are built to immerse us in their scenarios and stakes, obscuring the machinic calculations that make them tick. Card Shark, though, holds misdirection unusually close to its heart. Its characters are impostors and liars, its visuals draw attention to their unreality, and its card tricks lay bare their component parts before your eyes. With that insight comes one of gaming’s oldest and greatest superpowers: the ability to cheat. It’s no surprise to learn, then, that the concept for Card Shark was conjured after artist Nicolai Troshinsky took up card magic as a hobby. “In the process of…

From a developer’s point of view, follow-ups can be a particularly precarious balancing act. There’s a pre-existing fanbase to consider, but you also want to attract new players. As such, you need to try to provide something that feels fresh, but doesn’t paint over what people liked about the first game. Change too much and you risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Too little and players might as well just replay the original again. ‘More of the same’ is a misleading term: the elements that drew punters in the first time are unlikely to have a similar impact the second time around. From our point of view, analysing a known quantity is in some respects easier; scoring them, though, is a thorny business. If we only rewarded novelty…

Early on in your mission to drive the vampire occupiers from the New England town of Redfall, you’re approached by the local doctor. He presents you with a pocket watch that once belonged to his mother, and asks you to leave it on his father’s grave. A thematically vivid setup, certainly – but for an activity that, in the event, proves to consist entirely of walking up to a trigger point, pressing a single button, then schlepping back to base. At which point he hands you another mission of the exact same variety, and then another. These are not side quests, we should stress, but mandatory steps along the critical path. As Arkane missions go, it’s not exactly A Crack In The Slab. It’s indicative of the kind of minor…

Among all the variables in Redhook’s gruellingly brilliant sequel, the one that truly elevates it is hope. That nagging sense that the world could be better, even when it’s gone to the eldritch gods, manifests here in a vehicle and a flame. A lone horsedrawn carriage called The Last Hope transports you towards a claw-like mountain to save the world, mounted on its roof a dwindling torch representing all that remains of the precious resource. Should you die before reaching your destination – and you will, often – the flame lives on in candles awarded for your efforts that you exchange for upgrades, passing a little extra hope to the next band of heroes. This simple metaphor is a spur to resistance that feels appropriate. Faced with a land decaying,…

“We know what times to call. We know exactly who to call and when. We know who has a higher propensity to be more susceptible to our call.” “That first inning ended with the crypto crash last year, so now we’re in the second inning…” ”This #BlockTheBlue pressure campaign are losers and goons. They’re the cool kids from junior high who worked to exclude we nerds…” “It does more to shake our confidence in the future of the opportunity to grow a technology business in Britain than we’ve ever confronted before.”…

A real achievement As a father of two children who are now starting to find their own way in the world, I wanted to say thanks for publishing all these letters from other parents struggling to balance an abundance of games with a lack of time. It’s a tale very familiar to me, but I want to say that it does get better over time. Maybe not in terms of recapturing those hours spent in a dark room absorbed in a single game, but certainly a reconnection with gaming across people and generations. Even if I’ve not been able to bask in open worlds for more than a few hours a week, gaming has become interwoven into my own family relationships. Sometimes it’s the hilarity of Heave Ho or Gang…

Perched on her windowsill, gazing out into the infinite void of space, soothsayer Fortuna, star of Deconstructeam’s The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, sighs. Now into her 200th year of a millennium-long sentence, having been exiled to an asteroid for causing chaos with her ominous prophecies, she begs for a curse to “break this immortal isolation”. Answering her call is Àbramar, a powerful Behemoth who has sympathy with her plight, having been imprisoned for 5,402 years. Fortuna decides to perform a reading for this otherworldly being. “You feel alone,” she says. “You want to find beings with whom to share your existence.” That idea naturally reminds us of Madison Karrh’s wonderful Birth, a game that seems to have opened the levee for indie games that deal, directly or otherwise, with the pandemic…

Developer/ publisher Bohemia Interactive (Bohemia Incubator) Format PC Origin Czechia Release 2023 As Martin Melicharek tells it, Silica needed a decade-long gestation. When he began toying with the FPS-RTS hybrid in 2008, he was, by his own admission, a little too ambitious. “It was meant to have a multitude of locations and feature a campaign that spanned several planets,” he says. “I was developing it on the Doom 3 engine as a mod, but was inexperienced at the time, being 21, and the project did not go far.” After restarting development five years ago to tinker with it in his free time, Melicharek is still, perhaps surprisingly given its size, the project’s only developer (barring music duties). And while his improved technical chops have helped him to bring his idea…

Developer The Curiosity Engine Publisher Wadjet Eye Games Format PC Origin UK Release 2023 This started as a homage to one of Richard Cobbett’s favourite games. “I’d always loved Vampire [The Masquerade]: Bloodlines,” he says. “I had joked about the idea: wouldn’t it be awesome to have Bloodlines but in Fallen London style? And so that seemed like a fairly obvious thing to make.” Cobbett began his career writing about games for publications including Edge and PC Gamer, before contributing to games such as Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies. Creating his own text-based RPG seemed like a natural next step. At first it was something he experimented with as he learned how to use Unity, but then White Wolf, owner of the Vampire: The Masquerade IP, got in touch…

There aren’t many studios that, more than a decade after their founding, have only one game to their name. At least, not many you could consider a success. But when League Of Geeks’ founders quit their jobs to chase a dream, a single project was all they really had in mind. “We never came together to build a studio – we came together to build a game,” director and co-founder Trent Kusters tells us. “And we always knew that, once the game shipped, then we would go, ‘All right, do we want to actually start a studio?’” There was no guarantee, then, that they’d ever release a second game. And in the years since, there have been at least two moments when it truly looked like they might not. The…

With great power, evidently, comes great irresponsibility. Shortly following an episode we’ll call The Cartwheeling Raft Incident – not forgetting that poor Korok, seeking only to be reunited with a friend, last seen gliding toward the horizon glued to a contraption we abandoned mid-flight after the balloon fell off – we find our latest wonky dirigible trapped behind a waterfall. Rather than leave this one behind, we embark upon a foolhardy retrieval mission. The river bank is just within swimmable distance, but not quite within reach of Link’s new Ultrahand ability. No matter. The next five minutes sees us rummaging through our inventory; first, we try a long spear, pushing it close so the pointy end can glom onto it. That’s not enough, so we Fuse two sticks and a…

Shigeru Miyamoto exploring the forests and caves of his hometown, a childhood landscape that would later form the contours of Hyrule; Hidetaka Miyazaki at the school library, poring over fantasy books in a language he couldn’t fully read; Pokémon creator Satoshi Tajiri’s youthful enthusiasm for catching insects, so feverish that he was nicknamed ‘Dr Bug’. It’s easy to see why these origin stories have passed into videogame myth, seeming to present a key to the work and minds of some of our most important developers, a rare concrete answer to the age-old question of where they get their ideas from. Redfall co-director Harvey Smith has one of these origin stories too, but it’s rather less wholesome. As a teenager, Smith and two friends broke into an abandoned house in Texas.…

Among Humanity’s many assets, the Goldy might just be its secret weapon. These statuesque figures resemble sentient Academy Awards and function like Super Mario stars: you needn’t necessarily go out of your way to collect them all, but unlocking each chapter’s ultimate challenge requires you to have gathered a certain number. And in Tha’s spellbinding puzzler they quickly become an obsession, transforming the way you play. Ostensibly cast as a benevolent god, you’re tasked with guiding crowds of mindless humans to a light marking the exit from a stage, taking control of a luminous shiba inu that drops commands in their path, each turn and jump order issued with a bark. But bringing these gilded automata with you often demands you lead the humans into harm’s way. You might neglect…

Unlike most Metroidvania characters, Benedict Fox can’t double jump. He is, however, fused with a ghostly demon called the Companion, which can use its ethereal tentacles to give him an extra boost. When Benedict jumps, a second button press sees the octopoid appendages shoot out, stick to a nearby surface, and yank him up again. Which, to all intents and purposes, is a double jump after all. Except it isn’t, quite, in ways that really matter. No, in keeping with the game’s Lovecraftian themes, this slimy leg-up is more like the double jump corrupted, as if someone took the simple reliability of this genre staple and subjected it to foul experiments, driving it to madness with the impregnation of those tentacles. Now it’s horribly deformed. When you press the jump…