Innehållsförteckning för July 2021 från Edge

The climate crisis will affect all areas of our lives, whether that’s in the form of the changes we make to mitigate its worst effects, or in the consequences we’ll face for a lack of action. The way it impacts on our experience of videogames, and how it will reshape the industry, is one small part of that picture. The Green Games Guide, a resource produced by UK videogame trade body UKIE in collaboration with Games London and Playing For The Planet, is part of a nascent attempt to help the UK videogame industry do its part. The guide doesn’t pull any punches when laying out the threat that climate change poses and the scale of the challenge we face in addressing it. However, in an era when even fossil-fuel…

While you will sit in the chair as Ghosts’ producer, your role is set to be more than that of a passive observer. Each of the five presenters wears a heart-rate monitor that will warn you of impending danger, giving you the chance to call them to the safety of a Big Brother-style diary room – or, to look at it another way, it can alert you to a potential money shot. Audience figures provide a fail state almost as grave as letting your presenters die, and the challenge will lie in balancing the two. “You’ve got to keep them alive. Look out for the Long Lady. Keep the show afloat,” Shepherd says. And then there’s the matter of the strange noises in the van around you……

The topic of wildlife preservation aside, We Are The Caretakers rejects the stereotypes of African countries and cultures often found in western-made games. Art director Anthony Jones is a veteran of Blizzard, whose games often lean heavily on caricatures of ‘primitive’ races (the studio has, admittedly, attempted to address this heritage with 2016’s Overwatch, whose Africa-set Numbani map is a utopic labyrinth of gleaming skyscrapers). Like Marvel’s Black Panther movie, Jones’ Afrofuturist designs mix complex machinery with indigenous motifs, architecture and dress, not just rebutting the association between African culture and ‘primitiveness’, but challenging western conceptions of what ‘cutting-edge’ technology is and what role it plays in daily life.…

Brainwash Gang has adopted a horizontal structure, meaning all decisions and income are shared equally between all of its members. “It’s pretty easy being horizontal if you have basically nothing,” Verz says, in his typically self-deprecating way. “It’s easy to split that money when it’s zero.” Perhaps more important is the fact that everyone gets a vote in every decision, creative or otherwise. For this hierarchy – or lack thereof – to work, he says, it’s essential that everyone in the company trusts each other fully. “It’s like a polyamorous relationship,” Verz laughs. The one downside is that it slows down the decision-making process. Surely not that slow, we suggest, given Brainwash is showing off seven games at once? “Imagine if we were faster,” Beícoli says. “We would have 20!”…

At one point in Christopher Nolan’s 2020 film Tenet, lead actor John David Washington’s character complains at being left out of the loop to arms dealer Priya Singh. “I’m the protagonist!” he objects. “You’re a protagonist,” Singh replies dismissively. This is a truth that videogames usually try to hide from us: each player wants to feel that they are the world-altering hero of the story, even though many thousands of other people playing the same game are the world-altering hero of exactly the same story. If someone tells you they saved Termina and restored the moon in Majora’s Mask, it makes no sense to respond: “No, I did!” The word ‘protagonist’ first appeared in English in John Dryden’s preface to the first printed edition of his play An Evening’s Love,…

Dragon Age IV PC With Mass Effect: Legendary Edition now upon us, our attentions turn to what BioWare’s up to next. A concept-art tease all but confirms the Grey Wardens are returning for the studio’s fantasy RPG series – which is enough to make 2022 suddenly seem an awfully long way off. Biomutant PC, PS4, Xbox One Truly unknown quantities are increasingly rare these days, which makes Experiment 101’s action-RPG all the more exciting. Its premise is intriguing, and it boasts one of the most distinctive post-apocalyptic settings we’ve seen in some time, but at the time of writing, no one seems to know much about it. Review next month. Judgment 2 PS5, Xbox Series A few years back, the idea of a detective-themed Yakuza spin-off being released in the…

A big part of Road 96’s unveiling has been tied up in its soundtrack, with a new contributor revealed on social media every fortnight. Taken as a whole it’s an eclectic selection, stretching from French folk-pop to Swedish synthwave. “I went a bit crazy on that aspect,” Fanise admits. “And I know my producer, sometimes she hates me for that.” There’s a single artist assigned to each of the game’s cast. Survive, best known for its Stranger Things score, is lending its ominous synths to creepy taxi driver Jarod, while the mournful tale of young game dev Alex is accompanied by the “minimalist acoustic guitar” of Daniel Gadd, who Fanise discovered from his soundtrack to the Spanish movie The Girl From The Song.…

Developer Bunnyhug Games Publisher Coatsink Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin UK, Canada Release 2021 The waters of Moonglow Bay teem with life: a fortune’s worth, in fact, for any competent fisherman. But the people here do not fish. Suspicion, grief and the good old-fashioned ravages of time are working together to smother this quaint Canadian hamlet. But it’s never too late to get better – not as long as one person still cares. When hunting for the core of their fishing game, Bunnyhug founders Lu Nascimento and Zach Soares found it by stripping back. The most successful prototype was the simplest: a brisk back-and-forth loop of fishing on the sea and cooking on the shore. “People sat down and played this thing for like 15 minutes. They were…

The clay cast at the core of Harold Halibut is split into two unofficial factions: those who want to escape the Fedora, and those content to live out their days in isolation. It’s a premise that feels uncomfortably relevant, and we’re told players will need to form meaningful connections to bridge that philosophical divide while also contending with mysterious “external forces” that come into play. “You have professor Jeanne Mareaux who’s spearheading leaving, a bit like how you have some people now in the pandemic bursting to get back out into the real world,” Salfield Wadeson explains. “Whereas some people have gone, ‘You know what, I’ve been living in this little cocoon, and maybe escaping is more trouble than it’s worth.’” Perhaps we’ll all find post-COVID catharsis in the deep.…

Developer/publisher Anomaly Games Format PC Origin Germany Release 2021 The paradox from which this takes its name asks the question: “Where are all the aliens?” In the 1950s, physicist Enrico Fermi suggested a contradiction between the number of stars and probable Earth-like worlds in the universe, and the lack of evidence of any intelligent, spacefaring civilisations other than our own. However, in Anomaly Games’ choice-driven narrative game, you’re given the opportunity to prove Fermi wrong and bring distant civilisations together – even if doing so results in their destruction. It’s essentially a strategy game on a vast scale, where the consequences of decisions echo through aeons. The developer describes your role in The Fermi Paradox as a “galactic gardener”. Your job is to shepherd organic life from its single-celled beginnings…

Game Solar Ash Developer Heart Machine Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, PS4, PS5 Release 2021 The Old City Wyrm is one of the biggest videogame bosses we’ve seen in quite some time. This behemoth is a Remnant, in the parlance of Solar Ash, but its name hardly does it justice. Imagine a cross between the serpentine Leviathans from the MCU and the 13th colossus, and you wouldn’t be too far away – but if anything, its size is more imposing than either. By comparison, player-character Rei is the equivalent of a gnat, scuttling up its fins as they trail through a sea of pillowy clouds. She heads towards a series of strange protrusions spread across the Wyrm’s body (which don’t look like weak spots so much as release valves) and strikes…

One of Hyper Light Drifter’s many strengths was its brooding synth score from Rich Vreeland, perhaps better known as Disasterpeace. His work here is a little lighter in tone, but still bears his signature style, while ramping up the drama of the Remnant encounter. Still, scoring a pseudo-open-world game with more freedom to explore must represent a different challenge to a more conventional adventure such as Drifter? “I mean, the short answer is yes,” Preston says. “With Drifter, Rich and I worked closely, really directing that experience and going into every nook and cranny to build out the audio experience to match what was happening in the level design and the combat.” The sheer scale of the world and the procedural systems that Vreeland and audio designer Troupe Gammage have…

As the rare example of an overtly political game with big publisher backing, Watch Dogs: Legion benefits in terms of development resources and audience reach. But it’s not all positive. “With that reach there are also trade-offs,” Hocking says. “The broader the audience, the wider the range of tastes, preferences and sensibilities you need to be able to appeal to. It’s critical as creators that we deeply understand the political implications and statements being made by our games and our content so we can be confident we are addressing our themes responsibly and respectfully.” With this in mind, it’s understandable that indie developers with political intent may be wary of signing publishing deals – although neither Kan nor De Fault rule it out entirely. “We have had some lovely conversations…

Director, Necrobarista The Terminal is effectively a character in itself. Was it mainly a pragmatic choice to keep to one location? Absolutely. Budget was the primary concern – we knew we couldn’t have ten different locations. That being said, The Terminal did end up quite large and there are quite a lot of separate scenes, some of which will be seen in upcoming DLC, that expand the location aspect quite a bit. In terms of characterisation, we set out to make the most Melbourne-y game possible, and I think cafés are an embodiment of that kind of hipster laneway culture. So it was very important to us to ensure that the Terminal had a lot of individuality – that it was small enough to fit in our budget, but also…

There’s a distinctly nostalgic feel to this month’s review selection. Let’s start with Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, a disarming throwback from its pixelart aesthetic to a title that wouldn’t have looked out of place during the early Britsoft era. Yet with its contemporary sense of humour and offbeat twists to action-adventure formulas, it serves up a fruitful blend of old and new. But not every game nails that balance. Oddworld: Soulstorm revisits 1998’s Abe’s Exoddus, yet its ‘2.9D’ perspective muddies the recipe, while cludgy controls and questionable physics mean it lacks the original’s precision in its exacting puzzle-platforming. Mages’ Famicom Detective Club remakes on Switch have the opposite problem: the visual overhaul is certainly welcome, but they’re otherwise too faithful to the originals archaic designs. Yet Nintendo gets it…

Developer Bandai Namco Studios Publisher Nintendo, The Pokémon Company Format Switch Release Out now Given the prevalence of videogame photo modes, perhaps the most surprising thing about this followup to the much-loved N64 spin-off is that it didn’t happen sooner. But then New Pokémon Snap, like the original – and, for that matter, its publisher – moves at its own cautious pace. The roots of this FPS (that’s firstperson point-and-shooter) are in the lightgun genre, only instead of taking potshots at heavily armed goons, you’re taking snapshots of creatures in their natural habitat. If the tempo is different – you trundle along in a vehicle attached to an invisible rail, as if on safari while riding the world’s slowest rollercoaster – you still need a keen eye, a good aim…

Developer Granzella Inc. Publisher NIS America Format PC, PS4 (tested), Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Out now R-Type Final 2 has only one substantial new offering over its PS2 predecessor, and that is a sense of joy. Where the previous game opened with an excerpt from a ship’s log as your spacecraft entered a quiet, sombre ruin, the sequel opens with the anticipation of your launch into battle and some distinctly upbeat music. The reveal of Dobkeratops at the end of the first stage will undoubtedly bring a smile to the faces of old timers, and the way you blast through ice to unearth the boss is a less-than-subtle visual metaphor - just like the fearsome foe turned familiar friend, the R-Type series is finally back in action, having…

Developer Innerspace VR Publisher MWM Interactive Format Index, PSVR, Rift (tested), Vive Release Out now Much has been made of PS5’s SSD speeds allowing us be in two places almost at once: in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, indeed, we’ll soon be playing a game for which that is the USP. Yet this comparatively modest VR adventure achieves a similar feat with neither fuss nor fanfare. One minute, you’re standing on shimmering sands, scaling a windswept peak or winding your way through a tangled swamp; the next, you remove your mask and you’re back in a craftperson’s workshop, shelves and pigeonholes stuffed with useful paraphernalia, readying your tools to assemble another vizard. It’s a fitting theme for a transportive medium such as VR, and MaskMaker’s story duly explores the idea…

Developer Nameless XIII Publisher Dear Villagers Format PC Release Out now Reaching the end of our journey to the Dome Of Domes, humanity’s last bastion in Ashwalkers’ monochromatic volcanic wastes, we’re offered a summary screen. It shows which of the 35 possible endings we landed on, names our playstyle based on the choices made along the way, and informs us that 60 days have elapsed in-game, translating to just under three hours of our own time. There’s a step count, too: 9,625 paces taken. And honestly? We felt every last one. It would be inappropriate to expect a trek through a climate cataclysm to be much fun. But we certainly expected our band of four explorers, in search of a new home, to be in more of a hurry. They’re…

Celeste came into being in 2016, built in rudimentary form for the PICO-8 ‘fantasy console’ – a fittingly basic format for a game about coping with limitations. A PICO machine containing Madeline’s first blocky journey can be found tucked away in the laundry room of Celeste’s resort hotel, and makes for a tightly designed challenge in its own right. Better yet, there’s now a sequel in the form of Celeste Classic 2, created to mark Celeste’s third anniversary. This return to PICO, subtitled Lani’s Trek, features a new protagonist armed with a grappling hook to traverse its three short chapters. As you’d expect, it’s a tricky but flexible mechanic, employed in torturous layouts that soon get you recalling lessons learned from the main game.…

The Playing For The Planet Alliance, one of the organisations behind the Green Games Guide, is a partnership of more than 30 game companies that have made commitment to take climate action. Sam Barratt, chief of youth, education and advocacy for the UN Environment Programme, which facilitates the Alliance, tells us where it plans to go next. “This year we’re looking to build the Alliance out in China as well as reaching a collective monthly active userbase of one billion through this year’s Green Game Jam. Last year’s jam led to the planting of thousands of trees, raised funds for wildlife conservation, and secured commitments from players to change the way they light their homes. Currently, members are working on new decarbonisation tools that we aim to roll out industry-wide,…

Perhaps the most striking thing about Ghosts is that it can only be played once a day, at 10pm local time. This limit can, of course, be circumvented, using external means that will be familiar to Animal Crossing time travellers, or using an in-game setting hidden behind a puzzle. What’s important, though, is what it signifies for players. Shepherd invokes the concept of “event television”, mentioning the buzz Lost garnered in its day. “That sharing of information made the show richer,” he says. “I want that. If you fail, then tomorrow you’ll be able to do it again, but with more information you can research throughout the day.”…

We Are The Caretakers makes use of consultation with scientists and enforcers at the Wildlife Conservation Network. Ten per cent of revenues from the game’s early access release are being donated to the WCN’s Rhino Recovery Fund. According to the latter, there are only 25,000 rhinos remaining in Asia and Africa, their numbers devastated by habitat loss as well as poaching (rhino horns are prized as art objects and folk remedies). The consultants aren’t just knowledge sources, but a basis for characters. “We’ve pieced together a variety of experiences, and tried to use those all as inspiration,” Brodie says.…

Think about the act of looking. Videogames are a visual medium and, for sighted players at least, revolve primarily around looking at things. We have given over the right analogue stick on the standard game controller to looking. Yet, despite this, very few games have gamified the act of looking. Sure, some have weaponised the gaze: the firstperson shooter adds a reticule to make our attention deadly. But take the gun and trigger away and our eyes become impotent again. A game story is told through what we see and what we do in response, and yet when it comes to telling stories in games we like to grab the player’s eyes and force them to look at things. On my list of the most disgusting trends in modern games…

Your gord’s residents gain experience as you play, but they also age. “Units that are older have more items, better stats, more experience points – but also, usually, more Burdens,” Just says. “So the better they get, they’re also riskier to actually use.” It’s a neat counterbalance to the old XCOM problem, where you can become over-reliant on a handful of untouchable warriors. And even if your favourite lives a blessed life, dodging the ill effects of the Burden system, they’ll eventually die of natural causes – the average lifespan is about an hour, we’re told. Luckily, the town can be repopulated by taking in strangers who come to your camp seeking shelter, freeing them from prisons in the wilderness, or the old-fashioned way, with special items handed down as…

Developer/publisher SoapyMan Format Android, iOS, PC Origin Kazakhstan Release TBA The Driver Syndicate’s developer has taken a safety instruction – to please keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times – and made it a mantra. While the Driver games eventually enabled players to take to the streets on foot, this homage plants a thumb firmly on your car’s key fob and locks all the doors with you inside. There’ll be no shooting or hacking here – you’ve only your wheel and two pedals to assist in escaping the authorities. As Thief successor Gloomwood has already shown, there’s a kind of reverse-punk to be found in nostalgia with the rose tint turned off. Rewards await those who reject genre best practice, eschew the comforts of modernisation and…

Moonglow Bay has a five-act structure: five chapters, five biomes, five bosses. In return for completing missions and generally making yourself useful, the townspeople will give you equipment and upgrades for your ship. The boat acts as a metaphor for the widowed heroine slowly gathering her strength, as over the course of the game the good ship Two Cats evolves from a dinghy into a robust floating home. The town also undergoes a glow up. As its centenary (and bankruptcy) approaches, Moonglow Bay is taking part in a civil beautification project, a sort of in-universe Canadian equivalent of Britain In Bloom. It’s a last-ditch effort to prove its worth to the rest of the world.…

Developer/publisher Dietzribi Format PC Origin Israel Release 2021 Toodee takes a leap of faith, the trajectory of the little blue creature’s jump clearly doomed before their feet leave the ground. It’s the kind of missed jump we know from a million restarts in platformers past. But this time, it’s not the result of misjudged timing or poor reaction times. Toodee’s hop into the abyss is all part of the plan. At the tap of a button, time freezes and the perspective shifts, revealing Toodee to be exactly what their name suggests: a flat sprite. The hills and clouds of our former backdrop are now underfoot, a mosaic on the tiled floor we shuffle across as Topdee, a green creature only glimpsed from above but wrapped in what appears to be…

Despite featuring war, conquest, natural disasters, famine, climate collapse and all manner of harrowing apocalypses, The Fermi Paradox also has a sense of humour. This is most evident when dealing with the human species. Random events often reference our own history, such as the moment when we’re told a new kind of music called ‘punk’ has emerged. We’re given several options to decide how this provocative new artform will affect our species. Does it lead to a sudden rise to youthful rebellion, but eventually fade away into irrelevance? Or does it impact Earth so fundamentally that it becomes a new way of life for our species, and The Sex Pistols blast from every radio on the planet?…

A few areas invite you to slow down and take a breather – one interior in which there’s a tiny waterfall beneath a large tree is particularly striking. Yet we also spot a couple of corpses lying nearby: Preston says Solar Ash won’t be as oppressive or bleak as Hyper Light Drifter, but he adds that his games are always likely to carry a tinge of sadness. “Working through trauma is a core element of this story,” he says. Elsewhere, we see a hidey-hole in which Rei discovers rolled-up documents detailing a dangerous plan to set an explosive device, while the Remnant encounter leads to an exchange between Rei and a tall, ghostly figure. “It’s another way to engage players,” he says. “Silence doesn’t have to be the Heart Machine…

David Crane is a towering presence among videogame developers – and not only because he stands six feet five inches tall. He co-founded Activision in 1979, kickstarting the notion of thirdparty publishing on consoles, and across a long career has produced more than 90 games across two dozen platforms. His degree in electrical engineering and two years working at National Semiconductor proved a solid grounding for working with so many different technologies. “It was very helpful to know how the hardware worked when you came to write games for it, especially considering how limited it was,” Crane says. “I did take a television theory class as part of my degree and that was useful when I started work on the Atari 2600. That console can display one scanline. That’s all.…

Back in March, an unusual unboxing video was uploaded to YouTube. It showed developers from The Game Kitchen rooting through mysterious packages that had arrived at their various homes. Inside, they discovered framed plaques congratulating them on Blasphemous, the Seville-based studio’s second game, selling its millionth copy. With some emotional reactions, the video is a touching celebration of an impressive milestone – but the journey to that million was anything but easy. CEO and producer Mauricio García started programming aged six. He remembers using a microcomputer his parents bought him. After school, García joined a consultancy company as a developer, where he met Enrique Cabeza. They both hated it. “I did a lot of website development, application development… basically a lot of boring shit,” García laughs. The pair really wanted…

Developer/publisher Capcom Format PC, PS4, PS5 (tested), Stadia, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Out now You can tell a lot about someone from their hands. This is as true of videogame characters as anyone: what could be more Doom than Doomguy’s spiked knuckles, or more Dishonored than Emily Kaldwin’s aristocratic fingers? Resident Evil Village – a glamorous but underwhelming instalment with shades of Resident Evil 4, tossed with chunks of Dracula – stretches this idea to its limit. Save for the odd tangent about prophecies and bioweapons, it’s a cautionary tale about the terrible things that can happen to a pair of hands. It starts with a nick from a barbed-wire fence, as the previous game’s protagonist Ethan Winters bumbles into the village of the title, searching for his abducted…

Dweveloper/publisher Oddworld Inhabitants Format PC, PS4, PS5 (tested) Release Out now The sound of hard rocks slapping against bloody, wet meat. The vicious barks of ancient, feral creatures rending flesh from bone. The pneumatic march of machine legs patrolling dank prisons and factory floors slick with grease. These are the sounds you may remember of Oddworld – an oppressive state where capitalism seems to have almost reached its logical, doomed conclusion. A world where the proletariat is worked to death, ground up into food and then served the ruling class. Where the slaves quite literally feed the system. Or they would if it weren’t for Abe, who overheard the baddies’ plot to turn the proles into profiteroles back in Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee in 1997 and its shot-for-shot remake Oddworld: New…

Developer Snoozy Kazoo Publisher Graffiti Games Format PC (tested), Switch Release Out now What do an anthropomorphic vegetable and Doomguy have in common? Both have ‘rip and tear’ on their to-do list - though only one of them has hands. Still, that’s not enough to stop Turnip Boy, who understands that the best way to avoid the attentions of a corrupt government’s HMRC equivalent is to get rid of the evidence. He’s not taking any chances, either: anything from autographs to lunch receipts, diary entries to old newspapers, handed to him by a range of sentient foodstuffs, is fair game. At a time when videogames are presenting us with increasing amounts of expositional lore, there’s something cathartic about pressing a large button to dismiss it. It’s sometimes used to amusingly…

Developer/publisher PlatinumGames Format iOS Release Out now PlatinumGames’ newest antihero has a troubled past, to put it mildly. Having been recruited by demon king Shuten Doji to murder the guardians of his tomb (the logistics of a character without a head delivering orders aren’t entirely clear), young warrior Onimaru, no longer under his evil master’s yoke, is now the only one who can stop him. Which first means convincing the formerly peaceful yokai to join his fight – and, this being a PlatinumGames joint, your chosen method of persuasion is the sharp edge of your blade. While Onimaru is effectively pretending to be something he’s not, so is his game. World Of Demons was originally developed in partnership with DeNA as an F2P title; after a soft launch three years…

Developer/publisher Extremely OK Games Format PC, PS4, Stadia, Switch, Xbox One Release 2018 You may well wonder why Madeline wants to climb Celeste Mountain. It’s clear from the moment we meet her that she is no mountaineer; she’s hardly even the outdoorsy type. She arrives at the base of Celeste because she feels conflicted, without quite knowing why or what about. Madeline is snappy and irritable, suffers from panic attacks, and needs to get out of her own head. Her chosen task feels almost masochistic, more like self-punishment for her sense of inadequacy than a healthy challenge. Which raises another question: if Madeline seeks out Celeste because she feels conflicted, what does that say about why we seek out Celeste? Celeste is a game about coping with anxiety and depression,…

Issue 358 Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a 12-month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate membership Leave them all behind The first two letters in E358, about abandoning fandoms and losing saves, got me thinking about what we really take from our attachments to particular media. If we can walk away from a ubiquitous corporate media entity because one or more of the important people turned out to be a shit, were we already looking for an excuse to let go? I too know the mind-emptying thud of realisation that you’ve just lost a precious game save, and the peace that follows. Was I ready to find a new fixation and just hadn’t realised it? As series, franchises, episodes…

There’s no place like it, or so the saying goes. It’s where the heart is – although being cooped up there for the past 12 months or so have tested that theory for some of us. Whether or not you’ve grown tired of your four walls lately, there’s no denying a virtual home can feel as comforting as a real-world abode. We still have fond memories of the rustic residence in which we settled down in Fable II’s Oakfield. And over the past year, our Animal Crossing island has become a home from – and within – home. Harold Halibut examines both sides of the coin. In this extraordinary claymation adventure, the inhabitants of a city-sized spaceship trapped underwater are split into two very relatable factions: some are happy to…

Consider for a moment the devastating psychological impact of having to relive such a traumatic incident over and over, and you could be forgiven for thinking Twelve Minutes is a bleak old time. Yet the trial-and-error nature of your attempts to break the cycle results in a natural tension and release, while the unsettling atmosphere is regularly punctured by moments of dark humour. At first, your wife is amused by your flustered attempts to explain the time loop: “Excited to have my mind blown,” Ridley snorts, as you produce a range of items, none of which quite seem to convince her. Meanwhile, some of the dialogue options are amusingly blunt. “How’d your father die?” McAvoy blurts out. “Wow, that’s a fun conversation,” Ridley deadpans.…

Developer/publisher DigixArt Format PC, Switch Origin France Release 2021 We’re in the sidecar of a motorbike, helping out a pair of ski-masked bank robbers by throwing their proceeds at the windscreen of a police car in pursuit. We’re lifting a set of car keys and the credit card of a petrol-station owner who earlier threatened to call the authorities on our teenage runaway. We’re playing a riff on ’70s arcade game Tank on a makeshift laptop, offering feedback to the child prodigy in our passenger seat, who tweaks the game on the fly in line with each of our design suggestions. These are the kinds of anecdotes you can expect to bring home from a road trip across the fictional country of Petria – and better yet, not every traveller…

The Driver Syndicate has a bombastic theme courtesy of Allister Brimble, the composer who gave the first two Driver games memorably bouncy soundtracks on PlayStation. “Allister brought it to life,” Shurumov says. The collaboration was the result of a community crowdfunding effort, and Brimble has kindly allowed the developer to use his remastered versions of the original two OSTs. Shurumov, for his part, designed the cover art for both albums, which you can find on Brimble’s Bandcamp page. It’s worth noting that Driver on PC had an entirely different soundtrack, which played straight off the CD and was made up of licensed funk and soul music dating back to the ’70s. Which particular accompaniment you prefer depends chiefly, we suspect, on which of the two you grew up with.…

The game can be played in co-op, with one player controlling Toodee and the other Topdee. But with puzzles designed around moving one character and then the other, you’ll essentially be taking turns at the controls – a slightly formalised version of the way the Gutholtz brothers played through singleplayer games such as Celeste on a shared TV in their old apartment, “where one of us watches while the other one is playing, and then one of us rage quits and the other one takes over”. There are settings to decide whether only the active player can switch perspective, handing over to their partner, or whether both players can wrest control at any time, an option Gutholtz describes as “chaotic”. But then what game isn’t, when played with a sibling?…

It’s often said that you can tell when a videogame camera is working well – it’s when you don’t notice it. We do notice this one is good, however, largely because as Rei skates, dashes and leaps across the back of the giant Wyrm, we’re reminded of certain boss fights where we spent too much time wrenching the right stick to frame the action better. “There’s a lot of under-the-hood custom tech to make this happen,” Preston says. Camera positions have been carefully chosen and art-directed but the transitions have been made to look seamless, Hash adds. “There’s just a big underlying value system we had the whole time, which is to use procedural and technical systems – not to autogenerate these experiences, but just to enhance our craftsmen,” she…

Far Few Giants has found that it’s not a problem to attract people to play its games – especially through Itch.io, which, De Fault says, genuinely cares about challenging and unique games. Yet with the very short games he’s created, it is difficult to generate sales revenue. “People have been willing to pay what they want, increasingly so as we release more games and people are returning for their second, third, fourth taste of our work, and begin to feel that we’ve earned a tip,” he says. “But this is very small compared to the actual costs we’ve incurred over the production time.” With The Sacrifices, the studio tried crowdfunding to gather costs in advance, but it didn’t work out, and so only three episodes of the planned seven were…

Format iOS, PC Developer Route 59 Publisher Coconut Island Games, Route 59 Origin Australia Release 2020 The Terminal is the kind of coffee house we can imagine ourselves frequenting. Or at least we could were it not occupying a liminal space between life and death. Here, the recently deceased get to spend one last day among the living as they come to terms with their departure from this world. It’s a place that grapples with the concept of time as a currency, whose patrons gamble in the hope of extending their stay, and whose owner has accrued a temporal debt that needs to be called in. Which feels particularly apropos when it comes to Necrobarista, a game that was approaching its own development terminus when its time was suddenly extended.…

Vanquish PC Because we’re gluttons for punishment, one rock-hard shooter a month just isn’t quite enough. In truth, the barrage of projectiles in PlatinumGames’ electrifying action game can’t quite compare to the bullet hell of Returnal, though they’re cut from a similar cloth – both forcing you into the open and built around intelligent riskreward mechanics. It does leave us wishing Serene was equipped with Sam Gideon’s slo-mo-triggering exosuit, mind. Inertial Drift PC There’s something to be said for a game that does one thing extremely well. So it is with the drift mechanic of this focused, cel-shaded racer, which uses the right stick to enable you to fine-tune the angle at which you glide around corners. It takes some getting used to, but before long you’ll learn to negotiate…

Developer Housemarque Publisher SIE Format PS5 Release Out now We die, and our next run begins before our body’s hit the floor. Returnal is, in many senses, the first truly next-gen game on PS5: its production values are off the scale, its use of the DualSense is remarkable, and in its best moments it is like nothing we’ve seen or played. But PS5’s SSD might just be Returnal’s star, making an already compulsive game even harder to put down by throwing you back into the action in seconds. Ultrafast storage isn’t just a hardware feature, it’s a design tool in its own right. Returnal is at its best when played at similarly high speed. There are times when the screen is filled with deadly enemy ordnance, you’re low on health…

Developer Nintendo, Mages Publisher Nintendo Format Switch Release Out now Given the current craze for relitigating murders of yesteryear, the decision to dust off cold cases from the Nintendo archives makes perfect sense. Admittedly, these are not the salacious didtheydoits of Serial or Making A Murderer, but the cut-and-dried events of two Famicom visual novels previously untranslated in the west. Released in 1988 and 1989, the duology contributed to a wave of digital detectives (begun by Yuji Hori’s The Portopia Serial Murder Case in 1983) and pushed Nintendo down an uncharacteristically murky path. A world of stabbings, suicides and – gasp – smoking is far removed from the Mushroom Kingdom; it’s telling that Famicom Detective Club was the work of Nintendo R&D1, the home of the haunting Metroid and the…

Developer Orbital Express Publisher Playism Format PC Release Out now Gentle, unassuming, straightforward: the kind of adjectives that best apply to this easygoing (there’s another) adventure are the sort you’d rarely see on a game’s Steam store page. But then Tasomachi’s modesty is a virtue: there is an appealingly unpretentious feel to the debut game from multihyphenate Nocras, an experienced artist credited on the likes of Final Fantasy XIV and Breath Of The Wild. Inevitably, there’s a bit of both games here. Many of its tasks are akin to MMO-style collection quests, while a series of shrine challenges are essentially Zelda if it were a 3D platformer, with composer Ujico supplying a score that could easily be titled Lo-Fi Beats To Jump Gaps To. Effectively, it’s five to six hours…