Innehållsförteckning för June 2018 från Edge

Videogames are built, fundamentally, to entertain. But anyone who wants to have a lasting impact is in the business of making memories. Developers are becoming master engineers of each part of the cycle of nostalgia, and much of what fills this month’s Edge concerns it: the creating, fading, and resurfacing of memory. Labo, Nintendo’s hot new Switch peripheral fashioned from cardboard and string, is part time machine, the sensation of the material in your hand recalling childhood days spent piloting DIY spaceships. And, judging by the highly selective press events, Nintendo hopes Labo will be a parent-child bonding exercise, helping to make a few memories of its own. Elsewhere, the theme continues. God Of War recontextualises the brutish Kratos in a father-son tale that knows when to bring up the…

You’ve heard the tale countless times: of a band of veteran developers tiring of the big-budget, mega-publisher grind and deciding to strike out on their own. Yet rarely does the resulting startup come with quite the pedigree of Sharkmob. This is a supergroup, comprising much of the senior team that made Tom Clancy’s The Division at Ubisoft Massive – its executive producer and creative director, its head of comms, the engineer who spearheaded the making of the Snowdrop engine and the art director who brought it to life, among others. This was no mass walkout, we’re told – rather, CEO Fredrik Rundqvist felt it was time for a change, and his former colleagues joined up one by one. Again, it’s a common story: with work on The Division complete and…

Casual observers would be forgiven for thinking that Eugene Jarvis’ Raw Thrills was the last company to be truly flying the coin-op flag, but Adrenaline Amusements would beg to differ. The Quebec company is on something of a flyer at the moment, working at frightening pace with some of the biggest names around. It’s made Rabbids Hollywood for Ubisoft, and is the studio behind a surprise new Rampage release, a tie-in to the new Dwayne Johnson film. If you’re spotting a certain cinematic theme there, well done: it’s also responsible for Tomb Raider Arcade, which went on limited release alongside Lara Croft’s latest assault on the silver screen. That required some concessions, admittedly – the game that rolled out across US chain Dave & Busters had only a single level.…

Ode to joy I was slightly disappointed to read that Steven Poole has written Nintendo Labo off as merely another assembly toy. I don’t blame him, mind, because Nintendo has kept the killer feature of Labo somewhat under wraps. That feature? The ability to program the Switch and Joy-Con to make your own creations. I had the privilege to attend the Nintendo Labo launch event at the London Science Museum with my family in February. In addition to making and decorating our own RC Cars (and even getting one of our creations in the top ten) we had a demonstration of what else was coming. We got a glimpse of what it must be like to be a game journalist when having the release ‘toys’ shown to us via carefully…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar People seem to have moved on from flavour-of-the-month tech and features. Gone was the obsessive focus on VR What is the purpose of a game conference in 2018? When I first attended one around 2002, they all had pretty clear roles. E3 was a tradeshow directed at retailers and press, where you showed the latest software and tried to get some early coverage on your game. GDC was a show for developers only where you tried to take deep dives into tech and design issues. Gamescom and PAX didn’t exist, so there was no real consumer show on either continent; TGS was the one you fantasised about but never managed to go to; and SIGGRAPH was the weird one that you sent your lead graphics engineer to every…

Developer/publisher Inkle Format iOS, PC, PS4 Origin UK Release TBC Videogame archaeologists, as Inkle co-founder Jon Ingold rightly points out, don’t actually do much proper archaeological work. Nathan Drake and Lara Croft might technically investigate ruins, but often that involves shooting people, jumping between conveniently placed handholds and dangling from crumbling masonry while yelling PG-rated curses. A lot of games, he says, invite you to embody characters before giving them tasks that are at odds with their characterisation. “Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn is obviously a badass robot dinosaur hunter, but she spends a lot of time picking flowers,” Ingold tells us. “As game players we accept it, but as a designer it’s really hard to build that game and not feel faintly embarrassed about what you’re doing.” A studio…

To Hope County, Montana, the latest stop for Ubisoft’s globe-trotting festival of death and flame. Far Cry 5 (p112) is set in one of the biggest, most beautiful, and most believable game worlds Ubisoft has ever made. It is filled with things to see and do; things you’ll want to simply poke around at and explore. Yet you can’t have even a moment’s peace. If you’re not being yanked forcefully into a story beat or set-piece, you’re being set upon by infinitely spawning enemies or wildlife. It’s a playground, sure, but one that insists you play by its rules, and at its pace. Sea Of Thieves (p108) takes – apologies in advance – the opposite tack. Rare has built a vast watery playground into which you are dropped with barely…

Picture, if you will, an alternate reality where Nintendo had issued a press release before the Labo reveal video went live. Imagine for a moment that it had somehow tried to explain the precise nature of this strange new venture in words. We’d think this venerable company, having enjoyed the most extraordinary creative and commercial recovery during Switch’s first year, had suddenly lost its mind. You can imagine the tittering responses – indeed, there were still a few of those once Labo had been unveiled. This so-called ‘new way to play’ was all about cardboard? How wilfully obtuse. But then people lost their minds in a different way. Yes, it still seemed slightly silly, but it was also rare, strange and undeniably exciting. And categorically, unquestionably, a new way to…

Cissy Jones is a voice actor for videogames. While perhaps best known for her BAFTA-winning role as Delilah in Firewatch, she’s also been cast in Telltale’s The Walking Dead adaptation, the Dishonored series, and Life Is Strange, in which she voiced Chloe Price’s waitress mother, Joyce. A former Silicon Valley operative, here she tells us how she moved from the boardroom to the sound booth. How did you get into voice acting? I used to work in corporate in Silicon Valley for ten years – venture capital firms, startup companies – and I hated it. I just always felt like there was something else out there. Then I was listening to the radio one morning and I heard Nancy Cartwright [the voice of Bart Simpson] talking about what a great…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar If games are a form of speech like other kinds of artistic expression, our discussions about them need to grow up There’s no such thing as freedom of speech, and it’s a good thing too. So runs the title of a classic 1992 essay by the American scholar Stanley Fish, which remains evergreen in its relevance to modern arguments about racist cartoons, university no-platforming, and the like. And it comes to mind again when considering a couple of recent examples in which videogames have been refused some market access. In March, Sony blocked the PS4 release of a game entitled Super Seducer, a training game in ‘pick-up artistry’ (PUA) that, with its dialogue choices combined with live video of poor acting, recalls nothing so much as the glory…

Whoever said ‘talk is cheap’ must be feeling pretty silly in the age of the narrative adventure game. Telltale Games has cleaned up with its series of Difficult Decision Simulators – the knowledge that even a single word can change everything is a thrilling prospect. Take Neo Cab (p40), for example, in which you play the only human taxi driver left in a world of fully automated vehicles. Creative lead Patrick Ewing has taken his experience creating Firewatch’s dialogue system and ran with it, having players encourage passengers to warm to them so they can extract information about a crime, while managing their character’s changeable emotional state in order to avoid sabotages of their own efforts. Likewise, Afterparty (p44): created by the Telltale alumni and Oxenfree developers at Night School…

Developer Sectordub Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC, Switch Origin France, UK Release Autumn “I love to discover new mechanics, but I’m not a hardcore gamer at all” W hat a lovely day in the village: the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and its bewhiskered citizens are rolling over one another while going about their day. It’d be idyllic, were it not for the nagging feeling we’re being watched. Indeed, as we walk past a billboard advertising ‘Free Money!’, a CCTV camera pops out from behind it. We turn back, but it’s already gone. Pikuniku is an odd game, a silly physics based puzzler that looks like it was created in Microsoft Paint and that tasks you with uncovering a deep state conspiracy. One minute, we’re rolling down hills…

Developer Santa Monica Studio Publisher SIE Format PS4 Release Out now The sense of impact found in previous games’ cinematic close-ups and quick-time events are now ever-present Conflict is the bloody, beating heart of any God Of War game, but within this Norse-themed reboot you’ll find a very different kind of battle. It’s a tug-of-war between restraint and excess, essentially, informed by the history of the series and its furious protagonist: past form has taught us to expect Kratos to rip apart enemies many times his size with his bare hands (at least when he’s not cleaving them in two), and Santa Monica’s game certainly delivers on that front. But this also wants to be the tender story of an absent father reconnecting with his son, a coming-of-age tale for…

Come January 2019, 12 years after its launch, the server switch for the Wii Shop Channel, Nintendo’s first attempt at establishing a digital shopfront for indie games, will be flicked, and the shop will fizzle from existence. It is less of a loss than you might imagine. The Wii Shop’s shelves are relatively sparse: Nintendo has lagged far behind its contemporary rivals when it comes to courting and keeping indie talent. For a few golden years between 2008 and 2013 scores of game-makers, through an indefinable combination of luck and talent, made their fortunes with indie titles. None did so, however, thanks to Nintendo and its afterthought of a digital storefront. However, Switch, that diminutively disruptive force of nature, has changed all of that. While the shelves of Sony and…

ANIMATION Persona 5: The Animation bit.ly/watchp5 If you enjoyed Persona 5’s stylish look and soundtrack but didn’t fancy pouring a hundred hours of your life into crawling its dungeons, then the new animated adaptation is for you. Persona game openings are notoriously slow, but this first episode gets the story going quickly. Indeed, we’re at Kamoshida’s palace by the end, where a hair-raising ‘awakening’ sequence for our protagonist comes close to outshining the original. There are nods to the game, including lacklustre recreations of the iconic UI – but subtle additions to key scenes and two new songs are nice extras. The proof will be in the serialised pudding, though: this gang isn’t half as likeable as Persona 4’s, and we’re not sure their personalities will hold up if we’re…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar I know Fornite inside out, but I’m not getting any better at it. This, I suspect, is because I’ve never actually played it You can ask me anything about Fortnite. I am the Fortnite guy. I can tell you all about the guns: that a blue-rarity burst rifle is better than a legendary assault one; that you should drop whatever you’re carrying for a bolt-action sniper of any colour; that your prospects of success in the battle-royale arena depend largely on how early you find a pump-action shotgun. I know all about building strategy, too – of how you have to ensure your structure has a sturdy base, of how to look down and then jump to build a ramp beneath you, of how important it is to…

Developer ZA/UM Publisher Humble Bundle Format PC Origin Estonia, UK Release 2018 For a cop, there are many ways to investigate a putrefying body hanging from a tree. Close inspection requires the ability to resist the stench, but it might lead to clues that’ll reveal the time of death. It’s also useful to be able to apply knowledge to recognising the model of the armour the cadaver is wearing on its legs. Then you might get leads on where to investigate next. Perhaps you’ll notice the patterns of footprints on the frozen ground underneath. That’ll hint at how many people strung the body up, and if you’re extra observant, shoe sizes might point towards suspects. But what about the ability to intuit a conversation with the body’s spirit? Not an…

“WE THINK THAT THESE NEW, EME RGING MEDIUMS WILL NOT ONLY BE THE NEXT MAJOR COMPUTING PLATFORM, BUT ALSO THE NEXT MAJOR ARTFORM” Wolves In The Walls is a virtual reality adaptation of a Neil Gaiman story about a girl, Lucy, on the hunt for the prowling monsters that she perceives in the liminal spaces of her home. You are embodied as her imaginary friend. She ‘draws’ your eyes, allowing you to see, and later your hands, allowing you to help with the hunt using a torch and Polaroid camera. But ultimately this is not your mystery to solve, but Lucy’s; Wolves In The Walls is an example of the emerging form of VR cinematic storytelling, a medium coming into focus as the headlong momentum of this new technology’s early…

You’d think that, if you were leaving your cushy job to start your own studio, you’d be confident in making it work. But Bossa Studios was built on the assumption that it would fail. “We said, ‘Look, we’re going to go bankrupt – there’s no question about that’,” co-founder Imre Jele says. “‘So how can we have the maximum amount of fun, and impact, before we go bankrupt?’” He’d met Henrique Olifiers at Jagex – Jele was heading up Runescape, Olifiers unreleased sister project Mechscape – and the two had run out of excuses not to start their own company. Olifiers knew Roberta Lucca from his time at Brazilian TV broadcaster Globo TV, who with her broad entertainment industry experience was a great fit for the founding team. 2010 was…

All this is par for the course with modern action games, but it’s also part of a dangerous obsession with size Back in Edge 291’s Time Extend, we suggested that an action game with the wild variety and perfect pacing of Resident Evil 4 could never really happen again. That might sound like a defeatist attitude, but it was tinged with optimism: we weren’t exactly daring developers to match it, but we hoped that someone might try. Two-and-a-half years on, and we’ve still not had reason to revise our opinion. It says much for God Of War that it’s come closer than pretty much any other game to changing our mind. Even so, we found it hard not to wince a little when we hit the Options button and saw…

The loop is irresistible. Dig down to find precious minerals before your lamp dies, then return to the surface to sell them and buy a better pickaxe or lamp. Then you go back down, steadily progressing farther into the ground, finding more valuable minerals to sell and buying more effective gear. SteamWorld Dig taps into one of the most satisfying power fantasies in videogames, a sustained balance of reward and risk as your abilities grow in lockstep with ever-deepening challenge. Rusty, your little robot miner, will need to travel farther in the dark of the below and face more dangerous enemies, his achievements only presenting greater hurdles, and as his upgrades rise in cost you’ll need greater winnings from deposits that can only be found even deeper. It’s a game…