Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2025 i Edge

“When Valve first floated the idea of selling Garry’s Mod on Steam, I said no because who would pay for that? Well, 18 years later, it turns out that 25,560,290 people would. Glad to have been wrong on this one.” Garry’s Mod creator Garry Newman there, reflecting recently on how the digital sandbox exceeded any of his expectations. We’d argue, though, that perhaps he should’ve seen it coming, because when hasn’t physics-powered experimentation been a dependable source of entertainment, in games and otherwise? (Especially when things go wrong. We still occasionally return to the video of the guy attempting to build a fireplace in Minecraft that went viral in 2010, particularly for his commentary as he watches his lovingly constructed home, bookcases and all, turn to ash: “What the hell…

“When they told me I was going to play two Robotniks, I was delighted – until I realised I was doing twice the work for the same pay.”If Jim Carrey faced this dilemma with Sonic 3, just imagine Eddie Murphy’s reaction to his Coming To America paycheque “It was a fight to get the Sony name on the machine – they didn’t want to be associated…”Shawn Layden recalls the tricky PlayStation birth process “Striking the right balance between AI and preserving the human touch will be crucial.”Sony’s Herman Hulst is holding off on mass layoffs for now “These demos are basically just burning up computing resources in order to make a shitty copy of a real videogame, and nothing more.”Will DeepMind’s Genie 2 technology turn game creation on its head?…

What does a 14th-century visionary female hermit have to do with videogames? Julian of Norwich was an anchoress: she lived in a stone cell attached to a church and devoted her entire life to elaborating upon a series of religious visions she experienced at the age of 30. “For all our life consists of three,” she writes at one point, drawing a parallel to the Trinity rather than to the number of lives often given to the player in early arcade games. Indeed, it would seem that the ultramodern sensual hedonism of videogames is something like the opposite of the intellectual asceticism of the Christian hermit. The question nonetheless arises while reading the philosopher Simon Critchley’s enjoyably idiosyncratic and fascinating new book, On Mysticism. It is a history of famous…

Back when Edge launched, the racing game was one of the great system sellers, the performance of the simulation a direct indicator of the power of its host machine. Now, the genre almost feels like a hobbyist niche, barring a handful of names – Forza, Gran Turismo, Mario Kart – that cover a lot of ground. Perhaps it’s because, as hardware has advanced, there’s less to differentiate one generation’s drive from the next, while the act of driving – steer, accelerate, brake – is largely fixed. Vehicles and transport are such a key part of our lives, however, that they return to games in different forms. This year’s Pacific Drive (see p92) is as good an example as any, in which a car becomes a means of survival as much…

Developer / publisher Megagon Industries Format PC, Xbox Series Origin Germany Release 2025 One of the biggest influences on Megagon’s sequel to Lonely Mountains: Downhill is popular demand. Among all the outdoor pursuits the studio might have focused on this time around, one in particular excited fans. “We first tried to do a prototype for a kayaking game,” Megagon co-founder Daniel Helbig explains, “but it was clear that a skiing game was the thing the community wanted, so we pivoted to that.” Fortunately for Helbig, he already knew a thing or two about skiing, having first hit the slopes at five years old. In that respect, Snow Riders marks something of a role reversal between Helbig and fellow co-founder Jan Bubenik. As a mountain biker, Bubenik guided the feel of…

Developer / publisher Team Artichoke Format PC Origin UK Release TBA As far as Mythmatch’s Greek legends are concerned, Artemis is not yet the goddess of the hunt; she’s still trying to prove herself to receive such divine responsibility. And her ascent to Olympus is frustratingly elusive, not least next to the experience of twin brother Apollo, who’s waved inside without a second thought. It’s a pointed example of gatekeeping, made literal as this immortal realm resembles the lobby of a fashionable tech company, with a lift that denies Artemis access to every floor – not quite the warm welcome you might expect in an ostensibly cosy community sim. The community building in fact happens in the mortal realm, once you’re unceremoniously booted down to the island town of Ithaca,…

Change, whether invited or incurred, has been the defining theme of Red Candle Games’ first decade of existence. From an uncertain start, the Taipei-based studio became a household name within its home country, apparently solid ground that was ripped from beneath it by the ire of a neighbouring superpower. Then, having made its name as a developer of narrative horror, it returned to the spotlight with a hardcore Metroidvania action game. It’s a seemingly disproportionate number of seismic shifts for a modest indie developer that has been in existence for a relatively short amount of time. Then again, the studio itself was founded amid change – for the Taiwanese game industry, and for Red Candle’s six co-founders, all of whom had to make life-upending decisions. Many of them left jobs…

Developer MachineGames Publisher Bethesda Softworks Format PC (tested), Xbox Series Release Out now Clearly, it’s time we rewatched Raiders Of The Lost Ark. It takes us way too long to realise that the opening sequence of Indiana Jones And The Great Circle isn’t merely a callback to that of the 1981 film, but a near shot-for-shot recreation. There’s the location card that simply reads ‘South America’, as if the entire continent was one big jungle, the intimidating statue that sends one of Indy’s guides racing away in terror, the abandoned camp of a rival explorer. We also note that chief guide Satipo looks a lot like a young Alfred Molina. As he and Indy approach the trap-laden path to the golden idol, John Williams’ masterful score is twinkling through the…

Developer / publisher Nintendo Format Switch Release 2021 Stand by the bell and look east. Across the still, silvery water lies Fort Flaptrap, an island with a squat stone building at its centre. Look closer and, if your eyes are sharp, you can just make out a little more detail. Scuttling up the side of the stone building’s closest face is a series of blue and red platforms arranged like steps. Because this is a Mario game, most players will know that the colour coding indicates that these platforms are rigged to flip back and forth with every jump they take. But because this Mario game is also Bowser’s Fury, you get to experience something slightly unusual at work here too. In short, you can stay right where you are,…

Once upon a time, there was a traveller – a seasoned sort, if prone to anxiety, who journeyed regularly from town to town, peddling little wares he kept stitched into the lining of his fine black coat. In a village so small it lacked a true name, and was only known to its residents as ‘Northerly’, he sold a diamond ring for such a flush of money that he determined to head to the city in the south to enjoy wine and other such delights as that port might offer. Between the village and the sea was a wild forest, crisscrossed with paths cut by the villagers when they went to hunt or to visit the canny outcasts living within the trees. The people of Northerly warned him to travel…

Developer/publisher Variable State  Format PC Origin UK Release TBA Any aquaphobes may want to look away now. Variable State, known thus far for interactive stories Virginia and Last Stop, is heading into survival-horror territory with Deepest Fear, and the primary source for its scares is H 2 O, courtesy of both its naturally lethal qualities and more disturbing imagined ones. Staying out of the water isn’t an option, either – stuck in a navy base on the ocean bed, you’re surrounded by the stuff. Lyndon Holland, game director and one of Variable State’s founding trio, takes the controls to guide us through an early demo. Playing in firstperson, you are Danni, a character who’s just arrived at the facility not entirely sure what job she’s required to do, only to find…

Developer / publisher Moonrise Studios  Format PC Origin US Release TBA As we prepare to board our starship, a quick word from the man we’ll be calling captain for the next 30 minutes. Into The MAW’s technical director, Sarek Lee, makes clear that this is a co-op experience in which everyone has vital duties, so any dead weight leads to a dead crew. “We’ve seen games where a couple of people who have no idea what they’re doing ruin the game and you can’t accomplish anything,” he says. “But when they’re really competent, people are working together, it goes so smoothly.” Sadly, we’re total rookies at this stage, so we apologise in advance. In this space shooter, four team members (captain, engineer, pilot and gunner) must combine their skills like…

Coming after one of the all-time great years for videogames releases – although we’ll have to put aside what was going on behind the scenes – 2024 was always going to have intimidatingly big shoes to fill. But while its releases might not have been able to match 2023’s twin crown jewels of Baldur’s Gate 3 and The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, no year that yields an Edge 10 can exactly be considered a letdown. And our detail-obsessed in-house statistician (allowed a temporary reprieve from their cage) reveals that the two years actually delivered exactly as many games scoring an 8 or above. More than enough, certainly, to have us arguing over the contents of our top ten up until the very last minute. What might be…

NEAR MISSES Short Trip PC While the game’s opening explains that it was handdrawn over five years, the title is accurate in that Short Trip takes minutes to play. As the feline driver of a single-car tram, your job is to stop at stations and pick up bipedal cats dressed in long coats. In Classic Mode there’s no time pressure, so you’re free to enjoy the pencil-sketched surroundings. Scheduled Mode asks you to halt as close to the centre of each platform as you can, on time, with points for accuracy. A minor distraction, but a pleasing one. LOK Digital PC This computerised reimagining of Blaž Urban Gracar’s puzzle book landed a little too late for review this issue, but we’re already poking away at its letterbased conundrums. Like a…

For a long time, licensed games were regarded as things to be treated with caution, if not outright derision. It’s a reputation that can be tracked back a long way, to the games-of-the-films of the 1980s; a time when developers had little chance of creating experiences that resembled their source material in any meaningful way, and publishers often cared more about a quick cash-in than a bona fide classic. That has changed – the sheer quantity of film- and TV-licensed games these days means there are probably more good ones out there than we tend to recall – but still, a quick rack of the brain only yields a handful of top-class results. There’s GoldenEye 007, of course, the Batman: Arkham games, Spider-Man, some of the many iterations of Star…

Racing back to the start Thank you for the PlayStation 30th anniversary calendar – what timing! If I had to pick one game from PlayStation history that felt like it was missing, I would go right back to the start, with Ridge Racer. I remember playing it on a wealthy friend’s Japanese import machine at launch and trying to work out how they had squeezed a massive, state-of-the-art arcade machine into such a small package. It felt like witchcraft. My beloved SNES suddenly felt horribly outdated – as much as I enjoyed Stunt Race FX, it looked like a finger painting next to Namco’s tour de force. Sadly I would have to wait until the UK launch for my own PlayStation, and by then of course there was Wipeout, too.…

Join me in imagining an envelope on a plinth. Now picture yourself breaking the wax seal, and unfolding the stiff card. “Name the most prominent, prolific game designer of the past decade. Your time starts now.” Knowing that the Taskmaster generally rewards unexpected answers, I dodge-roll around Hidetaka Miyazaki and towards a man who presents his design work to an audience of millions on a weekly basis: Alex Horne. This at least adds up within my household. Horne, who has come up with the vast majority of the UK show’s 789 tasks (not counting those that are filmed but don’t make it to broadcast, or those created for the many, many spinoffs), is working in a very strange design space. After all, his intended playerbase – the five comedians taking…

Developer Messhof Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin US Release TBA Leaving behind delightfully silly sidescrolling sword battles for the unruly wilds of open-world 3D hasn’t been the easiest pivot for Nidhogg studio Messhof. “We started this game wanting it to be a more narrative-focused, slightly more serious game, and that’s just not the style we are comfortable making, gameplay-wise,” explains co-founder and creative director Mark Essen. “As the years have gone on, we’ve iterated on the story and now it’s much happier, light-hearted and goofier, which I think plays to our strengths.” That’s reflected, perhaps, in the name change: first revealed as Ghost Bike, the studio’s cycling odyssey will now launch under a fresh moniker. The story’s stakes remain high – as Kat, you’re bound to…

Developer / publisher YCJY Games Format PC Origin Sweden Release 2025 Somewhat appropriately, YCYJ’s game about driving for days has had a long journey, beginning way back in 2016. “It sounded like a neat little idea,” explains Christopher Andreasson, one half of the Swedish two-person studio, “and now we’re here in 2024 and it’s still not done.” To be clear, YCYJ has produced several other games in the interim, but Keep Driving has required a lot of redesign and tinkering under the bonnet to become roadworthy. At first it was structured more like The Oregon Trail, with a large number of minigames and different systems but no single focused direction, Andreasson tells us. “It was too complicated for us to make at the time.” Taking the wheel of the latest…

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When we last spoke, you were still trying to imagine how UFO 50 might be received by players. How has the reality compared to expectations? Jon Perry Before the game came out, I still didn’t know if people were gonna get it, at least in these numbers. We had testers that got it, but I’ve seen people say it’s making them reevaluate their taste in games. Derek Yu Yeah, I’m hearing a lot of people say, “Oh, I played this game in UFO 50, and it’s my first time playing something in this genre, or that’s like this. What are other games in this genre that I could try?” There was one player who was born in the 2000s but said this got them interested in retro games – like,…

Where did the ideas for the anomalies come from? We almost always started with gameplay first. Richard [Weschler], our designer who worked on all of the anomalies, would look at all of the different ways you could interact with a car, and would spin up these prototypes. Then it became a creative discussion around, ‘OK, what is the [narrative and aesthetic] wrapper that makes sense for that?’ One of the things that I love about the zone story genre is that anomalies can be all kinds of stuff. Like in STALKER – hey, this weird piece of junk has magical properties. Is ‘zone story’ an established genre? You’re asking the wrong person! I’ve been living it for years now. It’s not as broad or large as, you know, ‘post-apocalyptic’ or…

You wait months for a notable Xbox exclusive, then three turn up at once. With Hellblade II carrying the weight of the brand for much of the year, there’s a pervading sense that Microsoft’s various partners and subsidiary studios have pulled it round at the last with Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and STALKER 2. To an extent, we agree, but some technical failings suggest that it’s not always smart to arrive late. It should surprise nobody that STALKER 2 isn’t in perfect shape, and given the problems faced by Ukrainian developer GSC, it’s a relief to see it at all. As much as we enjoy re-entering the Zone, though, we can’t ignore the bugs and faulty systems that greet us among the other anomalies.…

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