Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2026 i Edge

The world of filmmaking in 2025 is full of writers and directors who grew up playing videogames, including some of the most talented people in their field, such as Alex Garland, Neill Blomkamp and Dan Trachtenberg. Not so long ago, though, it was difficult to find anyone in Hollywood who would speak positively and knowledgeably about games. Steven Spielberg might pay lip service occasionally, but let’s keep in mind that he personally signed off on Atari’s ET, which may not be as awful as its reputation suggests, but not by very much. One of the many reasons why Robin Williams stood out was his passion for games, and seeing someone of his status speak in this way about the things we enjoyed was a strange feeling, and an energising one.…

While it moved into gaming a decade ago, Amazon has yet to have any real impact on videogames. Almost all of its in-house titles have been cancelled before (or, in the case of Crucible, shortly after) release. The curse finally seemed to have been lifted with New World, a WOW-like MMORPG that, while hardly spectacular, managed to retain a playerbase for four years. This October, however, the retail giant announced that development of New World was ending, part of a “difficult decision to halt a significant amount of our firstparty AAA game development”, according to a staff memo from vice president of gaming Steve Boom. As part of this shift in priorities, Amazon announced 14,000 layoffs across its business. In that light, the relaunch of Amazon Luna at the end…

BOOK The History Of Sega  bit.ly/history-of-sega When the Dreamcast platform was discontinued in March 2001, it marked the end of Sega’s long battle to control the console market. Joe Douglas’ book arrives just ahead of the 25th anniversary of that pivotal moment, and charts the history of Sega from its beginnings as a slot-machine manufacturer right up to the launch of the third live-action Sonic movie. The account is perhaps a little too generous to be called a fair history, with optimistic retellings of notorious Sega failures, such as the 32X and Sega CD Mega Drive addons, backed by charitable interpretation. More illuminating is an insightful chapter on the horror-story development of Sonic X-Treme, which was plagued by technical problems and clerical errors, and nearly killed two of its creators.…

After more than a year, with over 400 hours on the clock, I think my time with UFO 50 might finally be up. Almost immediately after putting the game down, though, I start missing it. So imagine my delight on hearing that Jon Perry, one of its core designers, has something new out. A new way to get my UFO 50 fix. Said game, Hot Streak, even has a direct connection to Mossmouth’s retro opus. It’s a once-removed relative of UFO 50’s Quibble Race (itself a remake of a Windows game made by Perry and Derek Yu), with a single common ancestor: a game made by Yu in high school, on his TI calculator. These are, essentially, all horse-race betting games, of the kind you’d find at fairgrounds or pier…

Developer One More Level Publisher Lyrical Games, One More Level Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Poland Release 2026 We wake up in a forest grove surrounded by the corpses of French soldiers. We do not know when or who we are, nor what our purpose is, but we hear Napoleon’s voice in our head, urging us forwards. If the characters in War And Peace had nightmares, they may well have looked like this. “It’s hard to tell whether you’re still alive or dead,” says narrative lead Bogdan Graczyk. “You start as a soldier, and, as you experience the game, from tiny pieces of evidence you will piece together your backstory.” Your first goal is to find other survivors, but what of Napoleon’s voice? “It could be a manifestation of…

Developer/publisher HeartLoop Games Format PC Origin Canada Release TBA Just when we thought every conceivable genre had been given the Roguelike treatment, along comes Poly Fighter. Here it’s the turn of the traditionally competitive fighting game to fit the format, switching stance to focus on solo play but with more replayable variations than the average arcade or survival mode. Creative director Osama Dorias has had the concept in mind since the Roguelike became a multi-genre venture, he tells us: “I’ve been Googling it for over a decade and just never found one.” Having spent that time at triple-A studios, including WB Montreal and Blizzard, he, along with a “small but mighty” team, decided it was time to take the challenge on for themselves, forming HeartLoop Games last December. Like many…

FREE DIGITAL BOOKAZINE PRINT + DIGITAL DIGITAL ONLY INCLUDES 150+ BACK ISSUES REASONS TO SUBSCRIBE ■ NEW PRINT SUBSCRIBERS RECEIVE A FREE THE STORY OF ZELDA DIGITAL EDITION ■ DIGITAL ACCESS TO 150+ ARCHIVE ISSUES WHEN YOU SUBSCRIBE TO PRINT* ■ EXCLUSIVE SUBSCRIBER COVERS ■ HUGE SAVINGS ON YOUR FIRST SIX PRINT ISSUES ■ NEVER MISS AN ISSUE ■ DELIVERED DIRECT TO YOUR DOOR OR DEVICE THREE EASY WAYS TO SUBSCRIBE www.magazinesdirect.com/EDG/DJ87Z 0330 333 1113 and quote DJ87Z Terms and conditions Offer closes December 31, 2025. Free digital edition of The Story Of Zelda, which will be delivered via email, is for new print subscribers only. Please allow up to six weeks for the delivery of your first subscription issue (up to eight weeks overseas). The full subscription rate is…

Squint and Charles Cecil, the managing director of Revolution Software, looks a little like the young globetrotting reporter Tintin. There’s the same tuft of hair, the same open, cheerful face. And for the past four decades, Cecil has helped create games that often feel like Hergé-penned adventures: Inca Curse, Espionage Island, the Broken Sword series. Beginning in the early ’80s, Cecil has built a reputation for combining obscure, ancient history with contemporary conspiracies; exotic locales with layered point-and-click puzzles. Broken Sword is probably the best-loved of all Cecil’s works – such is the series’ popularity that right now, some 28 years since it was originally released, a new 4K remaster of the second game, The Smoking Mirror, is in development. But when we meet with the veteran designer to reflect…

Mario Kart World, released this year, costs £75 for players in the UK – that’s £30 more than the launch price of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, published in 2017. Be it Konami’s survival horror game Silent Hill F, its 2025 remake Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, or Activision Blizzard’s Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7, the standard versions of new games from major studios now typically cost £70. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have all increased the prices of their consoles this year, often citing market conditions. Even the price of Microsoft’s Xbox development kits is on the rise, from roughly £1,140 to £1,520. Meanwhile, both Sony and Microsoft have raised the rates for their respective subscription services. Game Pass Ultimate used to be £14.99 a month; now it’s £22.99.…

Issue 417 Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins an exclusive Edge T-shirt Game of death In a Japanese street-poll video, a young man described Elden Ring as “a death game”. He was eager to explain how he understood the words: “The enemies are really strong. Your character is very weak, but you have to beat the enemies”. It reminded me of an Edge editorial from a few months ago, lamenting the lack of imagination in modern English game genre names, always defaulting to naming the pioneer game by title and adding the simple ‘-like’. I feel even more animosity towards the‘-like’ mania than the editorial’s author! I’ve always found it disappointingly cheap. You know stuff can be done…

Adventure games with tailored stories are generally singleplayer experiences. Versus fighters are primarily geared to competitive multiplayer. These statements hold for obvious reasons. When you’re asked to engage with a story, especially one that involves making decisions that affect the plot, only one choice can count at a time. In fighting games, AI opponents are limited compared to humans. Yet one of the joys of design rules is their exceptions. DigixArt wants to find different ways to tell interactive stories, and in Tides Of Tomorrow offers a solution for a kind of group storytelling that registers and reflects the choices of every individual. You follow another player, experiencing a world that’s been influenced by their decisions, while your decisions create ripples for anyone who follows you. It’s not multiplayer in…

Developer Crowbar Collective Publisher Team17 Format PC Origin US Release 2025 You spawn. You get a kill. You die. You spawn again. At its core, there is something uniquely bleak about the competitive multiplayer shooter. It might look like you’re playing as part of a team, but XP and progression systems mean that everybody, ultimately, is in it for themselves – at some level, it’s all just a grind. Crowbar Collective, once a loose team of volunteers, now a studio with 16 fulltime staff, has a vision of a different kind of online FPS. This might seem like a strange second project for the maker of Black Mesa, but spiritually Rogue Point feels true to Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament and the other quickfire shooters of the Half-Life era; if Crowbar Collective forged…

Developer/publisher Subtales Studio Format PC Origin Portugal Release TBA Filipe Rodrigues is keen to parade his influences even before you’ve laid eyes on his game. The splash screen for his one-person outfit, Subtales Studio, reimagines the iconic poster made by Saul Bass for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. And, as in that 1958 classic (plus the host of other thrillers and films noirs that have inspired him), the developer puts a protagonist struggling with his inner demons and an increasingly shaky grip on reality at the centre of a disorienting narrative. As Gloomy Juncture’s nameless, alcoholic janitor, we plunge into a world of perpetual darkness, swirling fog and neon signs pointing to establishments of dubious repute. We hobnob with mafia enforcers and bar-stool philosophers, before becoming embroiled in a crime we know…

PREFER THE PRINT EDITION? SEE PAGE 50 Terms and conditions The free trial is only available to new subscribers, and only through the Apple App Store, Pocketmags and Amazon. If you have previously subscribed to Edge, payment will be taken immediately. You can cancel at any time during the free trial period and you will not be charged: simply turn off auto-renew in your account subscriptions page at least 24 hours before the auto renew is due. Payment will be charged to your iTunes, Pocketmags or Amazon account at confirmation of purchase. No cancellation of the current subscription is allowed during active subscription period. This does not affect your statutory rights. Any unused portion of a free trial period, if offered, will be forfeited when you purchase a subscription.…

Working under the alias QNTM, Sam Hughes has made a number of videogames over the past few years that are as likely to make you feel frustrated as much as pleased. There’s Hatetris, a version of Tetris in which you can always rely on receiving the worst possible tetromino, and Absurdle, an “adversarial” take on Wordle, in which the game only begins to shuffle through a pool of potential answers once you are already guessing. But Hughes isn’t a developer or a designer, at least in the traditional senses. Rather than creating actual games, the majority of his work is perhaps better described as ‘game adjacent’ – his written fiction attempts to illuminate the nature of videogames as a medium from the outside. Hughes’ 2020 novel, There Is No Antimemetics…

“It’s like the dance remix of a classic song that skips the intro and the bridge and just thumps the chorus over and over.”Jaime Griesemer, designer of Halo during its Bungie heyday, has seen Halo: Campaign Evolved, and it’s fair to say that he is Not Having It “I absolutely love where this is going. The game looks and feels genuine.”Original Halo art director Marcus Lehto, on the other hand, is on the hype train “We realised: ‘Hold it – it’s 3:20am!’ We just played it for like seven hours.”Frank Skinner remembers the FIFA session that forced him to give up videogames “We got seasons one through five before we got GTAVI… But I’d rather it be good. Take that time.”Rockstar shows Stranger Things’ Gaten Matarazzo how it’s done when…

James Boswell’s Life Of Samuel Johnson (1791) recounts how he and the great man once emerged from Church arguing about Berkeley’s doctrine of philosophical idealism, according to which physical matter does not exist but is only an invention of the human mind. “I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it,” Boswell recalls. “I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus’.” So runs the most famous starring role of a rock in literature, though others might put in a word for the philosopher’s stone (JK Rowling), or the stone that had the sword in it (TH White). Normally, though, rocks…

Developer DigixArt Publisher THQ Nordic Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin France Release February 24 Wherever you decide to go in Tides Of Tomorrow, one thing’s certain: you’re following in someone else’s footsteps. As for who that person is, well, they could literally be anyone. After a creditable attempt at procedurally generating narratives in Road 96, DigixArt is now ready to tell a different story, this time turning to asynchronous multiplayer. In this dystopian adventure, you’re always operating in the wake of another player, impacted by their decisions, their successes or failures, which determine the state of each location when you arrive there. In turn, your own behaviour will alter the game world for anyone who picks you as their forerunner. For DigixArt, this is the latest foray in its mission to innovate…

Developer/publisher Square Enix Format PC, PS5, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox Series Origin Japan Release February 5 Few fanbases’ nostalgia is catered to better than that of Dragon Quest. With players still gorging on HD-2D remakes of Quests I–III, Square Enix is reheating yet another Yuji Hori-helmed classic. Originally released in 2000, Dragon Quest VII didn’t make it to European shores until the 3DS remake Fragments Of The Forgotten Past. With that effort now also a fading memory, here we have a second do-over, imbuing the 25-year-old RPG with even greater quantities of spit and polish. So why skip to Dragon Quest VII after remaking the first three games? In part because it never felt like a direct continuation. “The story is quite unique in the fact it’s basically structured as…

HALO: CAMPAIGN EVOLVED Developer/publisher Xbox Game Studios (Halo Studios) Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin US Release 2026 For anyone who’s stuck steadfastly to Sony-branded hardware for the past quarter of a century, here, finally, is a chance to see what all the fuss was about. A little like seeing Sonic The Hedgehog being propelled by Nintendo hardware for the first time, PS5 Halo sounds a little odd, but we’ll surely get used to it. Campaign Evolved is being built in Unreal Engine 5, with remade cinematics and voice recordings, plus mechanics and weapons shipped in from later episodes. Splitscreen co-op also makes a welcome return. Would we say it’s essential? Perhaps not. But if Halo Studios can sort out the Library, it might yet win us round. LOULAN: THE CURSED SAND Developer/publisher ChillyRoom Format PC,…

When he was seven years old, Failbetter CEO Adam Myers had only one ambition: to become a self-sufficient farmer. He grew vegetables and collected books about how to preserve fruits through the winter. “In a fit of extreme short-sightedness, I planted six courgette plants,” he recalls. “I didn’t realise that each of them would produce three or four courgettes a day and that I might be called upon by my parents to help eat them.” Although he won a local vegetable-growing competition, with the home freezer now half full of the cylindrical green gourds, Myers decided he actually detested courgettes. The farming dream was dead and has yet to return. “I quite like making videogames,” he says of his current passions. And so, while Failbetter’s next game, a rural life…