Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2024 i Edge

Way back in the mid-1990s, when most videogame consoles needed additional hardware in order to support four players simultaneously, some of the sharper corners of Edge’s trickier deadlines were smoothed off with a round or two of International Track & Field. Konami’s PS1 sports sim was hardly the most in-depth multiplayer pursuit of its day, but that simplicity was fundamental to its appeal: anyone, from junior designer to wizened sub editor, could pick it up and get involved. We’ve never really found another sports game that stands up to that original IT&F experience, and were looking for ward to being regaled with what would surely be equally fond memories from its director, Keiichiro Toyama, in this issue’s Collected Works (p78). So we were a bit disappointed to discover that his…

Something changed I’ve been gaming from a very early age, receiving a ZX Spectrum 48K to share with my siblings aged four, then moving on to an Atari ST. It was several years later, though, visiting my auntie and uncle who had just purchased a new videogame console, that I truly discovered the love of gaming that continues to this day. ‘What’s this?’ I thought. ‘Can’t be as good as a computer.’ Connect to the TV, slot in a cartridge, turn on the power, and bam: instant gaming. It was the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and I was about to discover the magic and magnificence of Nintendo. Super Mario World, Super Tennis, Super Mario Kart, F-Zero. Instant playability,creativity and ingenuity. Then,slightly later, Yoshi’s Island and Donkey Kong Country. All before…

When talking to developers, particularly those who’ve spent years making one game, we’re sometimes moved to ask what possessed them to get into this line of work in the first place. When the clock strikes midnight on December 31, Riv Hester’s Pepper Grinder will enter its ninth year of existence in some form, the idea having originated in 2016. But the seed was planted long before that, when Hester and his father played Donkey Kong Country together. “One of the stages looked like Mayan ruins. There’s a really deep parallax background in that one,” Hester recalls. “My dad and I talked about how we wished we could go back there and explore the rest of the world outside the scope of the game.” Considering how that might be achieved was…

Developer Blackbird Interactive Publisher Gearbox Publishing Format PC Origin Canada Release February Our resource controller, a slice of Homeworld’s utilitarian but sleek geometry, floats near a debris field. Smaller resource collectors swarm around it, their orange beams siphoning material that will feed our research and build queues. They are guarded by interceptors, mainstay of this series’ dogfights for nearly 25 years. We hit the spacebar, listen for the thrum as the view pulls back into the sensor overlay, and survey the tactical map. Enemy icons have appeared. We scramble our interceptors. Engine trails dance against the glow of a nebula, as the unit chatter grows urgent and Paul Ruskay’s score transitions from synths to percussion. Perhaps more than its genre-defining space combat, full 3D, intuitive UI or persistent fleets, Homeworld…

Developer Odd-Meter Publisher 11 Bit Studios Format Origin Release PC Russia/ Kazakhstan Q1 2024 The debut trailer for Odd-Meter’s second game – following firstperson VR shooter Sacralith: The Archer’s Tale – could hardly do a better job of announcing that this is no ordinary thirdperson narrative adventure. It’s there in its unusual visual presentation, from claustrophobic close-ups of the eponymous nun that recall nothing quite so much as Darren Aronofsky’s Mother to sudden freezeframes and eccentric camera angles: one shot looks up at Indika from a swaying bucket as she carries it through a courtyard. And it’s glaringly apparent in its soundtrack, which begins with jittery percussion, before incorporating off-kilter brass parps and shrieking, horror-movie strings. It’s a purposely unsettling watch for what promises to be a intense experience. Which,…

SNATCHER Developer/publisher Konami Format Mega CD Release 1994 INTERNATIONAL TRACK & FIELD Developer/publisher Konami Format PS1 Release 1996 SILENT HILL Developer Team Silent Publisher Konami Format PS1 Release 1999 FORBIDDEN SIREN Developer Project Siren Publisher SCE Format PS2 Release 2003 FORBIDDEN SIREN 2 Developer Japan Studio Publisher SCE Format PS2 Release 2006 GRAVITY RUSH Developer Japan Studio Publisher SCE Format Vita Release 2012 SLITTERHEAD Developer Bokeh Publisher TBA Format TBA Release TBA 78WSNATCHER There might be no single videogame director more keenly associated with Japanese horror than Keiichiro Toyama. His directorial debut, the fogchoked Silent Hill, introduced a cloying, small-town-gone-bad aesthetic that remains urgent and immediately recognisable today. And while the Siren series – designed by Toyama once he had recovered from the ordeal of making Silent Hill – is…

STILL PLAYING/ NEAR MISSES A Perfect Day Switch Previously featured in E363, Coconut Island’s sliceof-life tale finally gets an English-language release. Set on the final day of the 20th century, it follows 11-year-old Chen Liang, who hopes to use an unexpected day off to give a belated Christmas card to a classmate upon whom he has a crush. Waylaid by circumstance, he finds the day looping over and over; each 24-hour period yields fresh information, new plot threads to follow – and steadily untangle – and items that, unlike the protagonist’s memory, persist between loops. With limited time slots in which to fulfil his needs (and those of friends and family), a prevailing theme is the futility of the pursuit of perfection. It’s repetitive by design but richly detailed, the…

The first announcement of a ‘Remedy Connected Universe’ arrived just as its biggest precedent was in full swing. A few months before Control’s release, Avengers: Endgame had managed to pay off a decade’s worth of interconnected storytelling in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, breaking box-office records in the process. Naturally, given how Hollywood operates, every film studio with a faintly applicable property on its roster was trying to get in on the action. Warner Bros launched efforts with its own superheroes in the DC Extended Universe, while also smashing Godzilla and King Kong together to form the terribly named MonsterVerse. In videogames, though, this approach has been a lot rarer. Plenty of developers have snuck Easter-egg nods and winks into their catalogues, of course, and there’s no shortage of spinoffs from…

During the final scene of Starward Industries’ firstperson narrative adventure, we encounter a bug. It speaks to the qualities of this thoughtful piece of science fiction that we instinctively wonder if it’s actually a feature, pondering the implications of a bold but apparently intentional decision that certainly reflects the concluding choice we’ve just made. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve been wrongfooted by the debut release from this Polish studio, which clearly isn’t afraid of diverging from conventional game design wisdom. As we look out across the surface of Regis III through the eyes of astrobiologist protagonist Yasna, several minutes passing by without incident, we finally concede that something might have gone wrong. Even so, we’re happy just to sit and enjoy the view. There are plenty more jaw-slackening…

Since its Japanese debut, Like A Dragon has been released near-annually on home turf – such that it’s easy to consider it Japan’s equivalent to Assassin’s Creed. Coincidentally, in the latest entries in both series things are pared back to their foundations – in this instance reverting from the previous game’s turn-based RPG mechanics to realtime brawling, with Kazuma Kiryu returning to the spotlight. But, as the title’s suffix suggests, this is a side story, told in parallel to the events of Ichiban Kasuga’s recent adventure. With most instalments set in the same year as their release, the fact that Gaiden is set in 2019 is telling: this isn’t a course correction from RGG Studio, but a nostalgia trip. There are limits imposed by the narrative, though. Now serving as…

You can tell Studio Folly’s debut release is no ordinary word puzzler from the second step of its tutorial. As a helpful hand gestures us to follow its lead by placing a pair of two-letter tiles on the board – SE and AR, in that order – we’re about to do likewise when a mischievous thought strikes us. The game doesn’t just accept our alternative word, but responds in a way which makes it clear the developer expected – nay, hoped – that some players might choose that particular option. That’s typical of the puckishness with which Gubbins has been put together, its playful attitude reflected in the creatures of the title and the disruptive effect they have on your game. It’s simple stuff at heart: you place tiles of…

John Carmack has never been one to bite his tongue. Since his resignation from Meta last year, however – accompanied by an internal announcement, leaked to the press, that he “wearied of the fight” – he has had no reason to hold back with his opinions on its strategies. In late September, as his previous employer prepared to ship the first Quest 3 units, with MR (mixed reality) the headline feature, Carmack took to Twitter. “I remain unconvinced that mixed reality applications are any kind of an engine for increasing headset sales,” he wrote. “High-quality passthrough is great, but I just don’t see applications built around integrating rendering with your real-world environment as any kind of a killer app. I consider it [an] interesting and challenging technology looking for a…

When Dene Carter released Moonring in September, a few days before his 25th wedding anniversary, he’d spent four and a half years working on it. His Ultima-inspired RPG had attracted so little attention in its early-access form that his expectations were low: “I honestly thought it was just going to die without a trace.” He’d even begun to put plans in place for his next project, having supported himself over the prior two years of development through freelance scriptwriting jobs on other games. “Then it kind of blew up.” It helped that Carter released the game for free. “Life is hard, COVID sucked, everyone’s poor and stressed,” he said in the comments of YouTuber Splattercatgaming’s Let’s Play video, which he credits as being one of the biggest factors behind its…

Has Mario gone woke? That, at least, was the opinion of some furious Twitterers, through whose gimlet eyes it appeared that Nintendo had dialed down Mario’s masculinity in favour of a more feminised version. Nothing, fulminated one, could “excuse making a traditional man appear cute and feminine”. Lucky, then, that at least his black fluffy cloud of a moustache has remained, or incels would have been rioting in the streets. And despite the change of voice actor, his voice is still that reassuringly gruff baritone, er, squeak, that we all know and love. But who is Mario anyway? I would submit that, although the artist originally known as Jumpman is nominally a plumber – the most perfectly masculine of trades, of course; women don’t even know what pipes and washers…

Developer/publisher Paradox Interactive (Paradox Tectonic) Format PC Origin US Release March (early access) Once head of The Sims, Rod Humble seems set on belying his surname with his latest project. The pitch, after all, is essentially the world’s most popular life sim, but bigger, broader and more detailed. As Humble and senior designer Hannah Culver talk us through an extended demo, it feels of a piece with the series Humble left behind, but with a few crucial differences. Paradox is promising an open world with extensive customisation and emergent storytelling, and on this evidence, Life By You has the potential to let players create deeper stories. “As a game designer, one thing I enjoy so much is working with a game that clearly shouldn’t have any victory conditions,” Humble says.…

Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Developer Obsidian Entertainment Publisher Xbox Game Studios Origin US Release 2022 Your first act in Pentiment is a simple one, yet loaded with layers of deeper meaning. The game begins with the camera zooming in on a thick book, propped up against a large wooden board. Suddenly, it flips open to reveal a page of Latin text – at which point a smooth, ovalshaped stone appears, inviting you to press it down against the page to erase the printed words and images. Even without any additional context, the process feels taboo – effectively charging you with rewriting history. It’s tied to the game’s title, too: like a palimpsest, it refers to visible traces of a prior work, scraped away or covered up by fresh…

But what ultimately defines the next two dozen pages is range. Consider the breadth of genres: alongside puzzlers (existential firstperson and word-based) and narrative adventures (one set on a distant planet, the other in the Scottish Highlands), other categories include survival horror, FPS, turn-based tactics, realtime strategy, action RPG, narrative adventure and city-builder. Then there’s the categor y-defying Thirsty Suitors, which mashes up turn-based RPG battles with arcade-style skating and QTE-powered cookery. That particular game – from a creative team whose director is based in Seattle but hails from Sri Lanka and whose lead writer was born in Bangalore but operates out of London – brings about another realisation. The US and Japan, the two dominant territories throughout the history of videogames, are represented here, yes. But we also have…

You get what you pay for. And if recent Bloomberg reports are anything to go by, Activision has paid about half price for this entry in its shooter series.Modern Warfare III was reportedly cobbled together in record time to fill a gap in the publisher’s schedule, forcing lead studio Sledgehammer to put its name to a singleplayer campaign that represents just 16 months of work. Call Of Duty general manager Johanna Faries told Bloomberg TV that suggestions of a shortened development time are “wholly inaccurate”, but the results certainly appear to bear the bruises of a game shoved roughly through Activision’s pipeline. Modern Warfare III is lacking much of the polish that usually marks out Call Of Duty even at its most creatively bankrupt. That’s evident in the details of…

Moira McKinnon breaks into a sprint, accompanied by a whoosh as if a tailwind were hurrying her along. For once on this 15-yearold’s solitary journey to the sea (born and raised in the Scottish Highlands, she’s never been) at the behest of her uncle Hamish, she’s got company. Moments ago, a deer appeared before her, this quadrupedal sherpa seemingly ushering her to follow it. As it accelerates into a gallop, she matches its tempo, hopping between and over rocks with taps of X and Y as the fiddles and accordions of a Celtic folk soundtrack briefly dispel the rain and thunder. Our teenaged protagonist whoops with delight, her cries sporadically becoming anxious yelps as missed cues see her stumble and wobble. Yet as the strings recede, giving way to the…

Atlus certainly knows how to get the most from its biggest series. As such, after dabbling in rhythm action with Persona 5: Dancing In Starlight and collaborating with Omega Force on Persona 5: Strikers, its decision to explore turn-based tactics for this latest spin-off is less of a surprise than it might otherwise have been. With these offshoots, P-Studio has proved it can successfully adapt the elements that make the core game so recognisable, from the way Personae are used in battle to the satisfying All-Out special attacks. Tactica is another attentive adaptation of the Persona 5 formula, but, as with Strikers, in endeavouring to offer something for everyone it feels like a game that may not fully appeal to anyone. Tactica follows on immediately from the finale of Persona…

This June marked the 75th anniversary of the Empire Windrush docking at Tilbury, Essex, bringing with it the first post-war migrants from the Caribbean to the UK – a symbolic beginning of modern multicultural Britain. Windrush Tales director Chella Ramanan, though, had begun thinking about creating a game to commemorate this event long before – a year prior to the 70th anniversary, in fact. She was keen to tackle the topic in part because it had never been done before in the medium. “There aren’t that many Black British Caribbean developers working in indie,” says Ramanan, whose father and uncle came from Grenada. Fortunately, she found someone who fit the bill: Corey Brotherson, at the time a copywriter and producer for Sony who also had experience writing screenplays and comic…

“Super Mario Bros was made by a team of five people, 38 years ago.Of those five people, four of them worked on Super Mario Bros Wonder.” Has Bungie’s Max Nichols finally cracked The Nintendo Difference? Perhaps working at as many studios as possible isn’t the key to success “We’re looking over our shoulders at our competitors.We’re terrified at all times, or we’re not doing enough.” ”Imagine announcing this in a year where the games industry has laid off 6,000+ people.” “We must take the risks of AI as seriously as other major global challenges, like climate change…We can’t afford the same delay with AI.” ARCADE WATCH Keeping an eye on the coin-op gaming scene Game Air Strike Manufacturer Game Art Thanks in part to so many of today’s up-and-coming manufacturers…

The Outer Limits will eventually take us somewhere other than warehouses in London, I promise, but they are its natural home, the kinds of spots where the column was conceived: under railway arches and in basements and unloved corners of industrial estates. Spaces that, having outlived their original purpose, will welcome just about any tenant at a knockdown price. I’ve been frequenting such places for a decade now, since a rainy day in Budapest led me down the stairs of a ruin pub’s cellar and into my first escape room. (The world’s, too, though I had no idea of that at the time.) All this goes through my head while I watch Punchdrunk: Behind The Mask, a Sky Arts documentary about the famed immersive-theatre company that opens with footage of…

Developer Ahr Ech Publisher Devolver Digital Format Origin PC, Switch US Release Q1 2024 Here’s a tip for indie developers seeking a publishing deal. Put an unconventional weapon in your game, one that also serves as a method of traversal, and there’s a fair chance Devolver Digital will be interested. To the likes of Olija, Boomerang X and Gunbrella we can add Riv Hester’s platformer, in which prospector Pepper uses her drill Grinder to get around and defeat the enemies guarding her stolen treasure. Which isn’t to say that it was a conscious consideration on Hester’s part. “That might have had something to do with why they were so excited about signing me on,” he smiles. “But I don’t think I’m that smart about strategising.” It helps, too, if you…

Nicklas ‘El Huervo’ Åkerblad is perhaps still best known for the art he produced for Dennaton Games’ Hotline Miami. As such, it’s no surprise when he invokes perhaps its most famous quote, in which the game’s protagonist – and, by extension, the player – is confronted with an uncomfortable question: do you like hurting other people? “Violence talks to us in a weird, weird way,” he says. But when developing the debut game from Hadoque, the studio Åkerblad set up with Mårten Brüggemann six years ago, he began to consider a less destructive alternative for progressing through this psychedelic world. If most videogames aim to provoke one of two types of physiological response – either ‘fight or flight’ or ‘tend and befriend’ – Ultros presents a space at which those…

When we speak to Team Reptile’s co-founders, the pair have just recently returned from TGS, where the studio was invited to join the Netherlands Pavilion to exhibit Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. It’s something of a full-circle moment for founders Dion Koster and Tim Remmers, given the inspiration their latest game takes from a certain Sega cult classic, itself set in an alternative version of Tokyo. We avoided naming that title in our review, and Koster is similarly keen for audiences not to rely on the comparison. Team Reptile is conscious that nostalgia for Jet Set Radio is a large part of why the game’s announcement, back in 2020, made such a splash online. But Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Koster insists, was born not so much from a desire to remake that game…

The darkness may conceal many things. In a horror story, most obviously, it’s where dangers lurk. And there are plenty of those here: muttering cultists, forest-stalking wolves, deadly shadows that reach out and grab you by the throat. For a certain stripe of horror movie, the dark might also be a way to disguise rough edges – cheap sets and men in rubber suits – and on occasion we can’t help but wonder if that might be one reason Alan Wake 2’s world is seen mostly by torchlight, a succession of tight illuminated circles like portholes in the centre of a mostly black screen. But then it turns up the lights and all scepticism is burned away. Remedy might not have the budget of a firstparty production to work with…

What is society? Is it a form of stewardship, to protect ourselves and the planet on which we were born? Is it a vehicle for us to expand our consciousness as far as possible? Or is human progress inherently doomed? Such questions are part and parcel of playing The Talos Principle 2. Its philosophical conundrums tug constantly between realism and optimism, myth and history, curiosity and punishment, as an android society grapples with the legacy of its self-destructive human past – all while trying to determine its post-human future. In the 2014 original you were placed within a simulated garden of Eden, tasked simultaneously with completing puzzles and grappling with the concept of free will – eventually defying the garden’s overseer, Elohim, to prove your readiness to enter the real…

When Bartolomèj Kvapílek is killed during one of Last Train Home’s first missions, we immediately reload to see if we might save him. Described as a ‘drunken bard’ in his biography, he has the Chaotic and Charismatic traits, but beyond that it’s difficult to let go of any soldiers so early in our journey. Twenty-five hours later, we barely flinch at leaving Leona Hráblová behind. She may be an excellent medic and a veteran of almost every deployment, but she has become Weak, Self-conscious, Scarred, Impaired, and Agitated – debuffs that collectively make it impractical to keep her on the train when there are others eager to join, even if it would be the moral thing to do. Our sentiments speak to Last Train Home’s two greatest strengths. On the…