Innehållsförteckning för August 2021 från Edge

Remember 2011? Not a bad 12 months for games, that. Big hitters such as Skyrim, Portal 2 and Dark Souls. Indie delights including Bastion and Frozen Synapse, plus Limbo’s arrival on PC/PS3. And not forgetting one of the year’s most singular treats, Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, a pixel-art fusion of music and interactivity that felt like the arrival of an important new talent on the game-making stage. It took nine long years to find out what Superbrothers would deliver next, when Jett: The Far Shore broke cover as part of Sony’s E3 2020 showcase. And now, a year on, we’re playing the game for the first time, and talking to its developers about navigating “unexplored genre space” during the creation process. As Steven Poole notes elsewhere this issue, humankind…

Supergroups can be risky propositions. Whether in music or in games, it’s easy to think of examples of people who’ve done great work in the past forming groups that add up to less than the sum of their parts. But for Tim Longo (pictured), CEO of Twin Suns Corp, it’s not so much the projects the members of his new Seattle-based studio have worked on that are important (though it’s certainly a fine list, encompassing Halo, Tomb Raider, Hitman and Gears Of War) but the fact that they’ve worked on them together. “I use this silly phrase of ‘getting the band back together,’” he tells us, “but it really does feel that way.” Longo describes himself as the “common denominator” of the team. Before his time at 343 Industries, where…

Endwalker’s most welcome additions include letting players travel between Data Centers, the MMORPG’s terminology for its localised servers, allowing players to roam the globe. Meanwhile, players in Australia and New Zealand, who currently have to put up with lag while connecting to servers in North America or Japan, are finally getting a dedicated Oceania data centre. Given the comfort people have taken in MMORPGs to stay connected during the pandemic, it’s about time, though Yoshida clarifies this has been planned for years. “I had gone to Australia about five years ago and found everyone had a passionate demand for their own data centre, but we would need Final Fantasy XIV to grow first before it could become feasible,” he explains. “It’s something that we have been working on together with…

Issue 359 What about Bob? Robert Frazer’s angry dismissal of my blithe dismissal made me curious. Firstly, I agree with Robert’s point about digital landlordism. I don’t actually own much of my games library, because Nintendo and Microsoft can do whatever they want with it at any time. They can modify it without my consent or even knowledge. And I don’t have the freedom to sell it as I would wish. I think this move to digital should be questioned and critiqued because it is at the confluence of so many issues. Robert’s reference to ownership is one of them, and I am in complete agreement with his misgivings. This is another issue around games preservation which is something that this publication does commendable work to unpick, along with important…

Videogames put us right at the centre of their worlds, often positioning us as the most important person within them. Yet even in the most traditional power fantasies, playing as a self-appointed ‘Chosen One’, we’d rarely get anywhere without assistance. Tempting though it can be to go it alone, knowing when to ask for help is an important skill to learn. In Beast Breaker, the debut game from Threes creator Asher Vollmer’s new studio, you play a tiny mouse tasked with chipping away the armour of a succession of colossal monsters. To even those mismatched odds, the courageous Skipper will be able to call upon friends to forage ingredients in preparation for battle, and to interrupt a beast once the fight starts to prevent it from launching a rampage. The…

Our hero is equipped with a kind of spiritual sonar that she can release to highlight key environmental features and trigger objects such as crystals. One simple early puzzle sees her command the Rot to reposition a crystal so this limited-range pulse can activate three at once, causing a stone door to roll aside. Alongside shrines, you’ll find more Rot tucked away from the critical path, those aforementioned hats, and meditation spots where you can permanently increase Kena’s health. These tend to be placed at attractive vantage points (granted, it’s easier to contemplate your place in the world when it’s at its prettiest) as an incentive to explore more precarious paths. But if you’d rather stay on the beaten track, they lie beyond bosses as a bonus for victory.…

Developer/ publisher 17-Bit Format PSVR, Quest, Rift Origin Japan Release Q3 2021 Since picking up Oculus dev kits on day one, Jake Kazdal has been “blown away” by VR. So much so that when it was time to plan a new game after launching 2D shooter Galak-Z, 17-Bit was eager to pivot towards a medium that felt truly next-generation. “It’s been a long haul – we’ve really watched the beginning of all these different games coming out,” Kazdal says. “I really learned a lot about the differences between a videogame that’s got a lot of standards and templates and something that’s very unknown and different.” His team had to adapt to COVID-19 conditions, making it difficult for this prehistoric-themed survival adventure to get wider feedback – 17-Bit would ordinarily have…

Despite the science-fiction premise, what we see of Icarus – the game and the planet – feels earthbound. The woodlands and waterfalls, bears and deer – it’s all very idyllic, and the map we play on stretches from parched desert to arctic climes, but this is hardly unusual for a survival game. “It’s very deliberate,” Hall says. “We want to start the player out in the familiar so that they adjust to it, and then take them to the unknown.” The plan is to release Icarus in episodic ‘chapters’, the first staying on terra firma and later instalments taking players to the outer wilds of the game’s fiction. A good share of the concept art is given over to horned megalodons and giant, barbed slugs. We’re keen, if not a…

Developer/ publisher Frogwares Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Ukraine Release 2021 The island of Cordona bulges with curious cases, but the one that leaps to mind is that of Benjamin Button. With each outing, Frogwares’ Sherlock grows younger and sexier. A fusty Jeremy Brett-alike became the smouldering Jon Hamm clone of The Devil’s Daughter, who now swaps his Inverness cape for a leather waistcoat and cheekbones that could launch a thousand Instagram stan accounts. He’s now so youthful the game even predates his relationship with Watson and partners him instead with ‘Jon’, who resembles a Peaky Blinders extra and offers boisterous banter amid the brutality. The pair visit the Mediterranean to lay Holmes’ mother to rest, but simply checking into the hotel sees a body found.…

Skipper isn’t alone on their beast-hunting quest: as you progress you’ll meet characters with a variety of abilities that can help during the preparatory stages and the battles themselves. Dandy (or Lord Dandelion Gladiolus du Fritillaria, to give him his full title) can send his retinue to a settlement to help you craft things without you having to spend a turn there, for example. In combat, meanwhile, they’ll step in when a beast’s Rampage counter reaches zero, launching a special move to reset the gauge and buy you more time. “Dandy, for example, fights with a warhammer, so he does a bunch of big slam attacks,” Vollmer explains. “And your cousin Poppy loves to cook, so she throws out food on the field that you can collect to heal yourself.”…

Establishing a base camp is one of the earliest and most important goals. Since it’s a place you’ll return to time and again throughout the game, Adams was keen to make it more than just a functional setting. This is, after all, the anchorites’ new home – so why not make it feel like one? When Sam Bradley came on board in 2019 to contribute visual concepts and art direction, he says many of the fundamentals were already in place. “Between Craig and [environment art lead] Flaminia Grimaldi, there had been enough work done at that point to establish what the tone and flavour of the space would be.” That included one particular feature that took him by surprise. “There were these big, thick, heavy curtains all over the place.…

Piotrowski pays tribute to Capy programmers Jon Maur and Frankie Leung, who he says “made every single thing in that game on the technical end.” It was, he says, Leung’s first job. “He was barely out of school when he started working at Capy, and then he was suddenly working on the craziest game ever.” And in a game where the stars often seemed to be aligning, there was one more serendipitous coincidence: Maur and Adams had been at college together. “The very first pixels that Craig ever made and put to a little game demo, he [did] with this Jon Maur. Fast-forward ten years later, he ends up sitting right beside him working on Sworcery at Capy, having taken completely different paths to the same location.” Vella, meanwhile, credits…

China’s preference for mobile doesn’t mean its playerbase has been limiting itself to certain types of games. Indeed, with premium franchises getting the touchscreen treatment, from Call Of Duty: Mobile to the forthcoming Diablo Immortal, as well as the China-exclusive Devil May Cry: Peak Of Combat, there is a clear demand for triple-A quality on mobile. “There used to be a very clear separation of what platform you were developing for, but in the future that won’t be the case any more,” Yang says. “The border is getting blurry – it’s getting blurry from development teams and from gamers, so I can picture the platform mattering less. But the thing that will matter more is the quality.”…

Format PC, PS4, XBox One Developer Hidden Fields Publisher MWM Interactive Origin Switzerland Release 2021 This is a game of grey areas. Figuratively, in the mystery and cloudy morals of its horror-filled spaces, but also very literally, given that each of its vistas has been sketched in with pencil. Other games incorporate manual crafts into their aesthetic, from Plasticine models to paper cutouts, but Mundaun stands out because it finds the friction in this encounter. Its rural weave plays in the smudges between artisanal application and digital trickery, between everyday reality, whispered folklore and sheer fantasy. It’s not surprising, then, that its creator has his feet planted in both old and new media. Michel Ziegler studied computer science and worked as a software engineer but, finding himself more and more…

Stonefly PC Flight School’s followup to Creature In The Well always seemed like a quick turnaround. While the concept is promising - tiny mechs hopping from branch to briar and riding on the wings of enormous aphids - and realised with visual flair, actually piloting these machines proves to be a bit of a drag. In a busy month for releases (at last!), we couldn’t justify giving it any more page space than this. Well, at least it’s appropriately miniature. The Wild At Heart PC Also narrowly missing the cut, Moonlight Kids’ hand-drawn adventure borrows from Nintendo but looks beyond Zelda and Mario. It’s an indie Pikmin, essentially, in which two kids harness the power of the diminutive Spritelings to overcome environmental obstacles, while being sure to reach safety before…

You can squeeze another six hours from Rift Apart by mopping up collectables and finishing the handful of side missions. Three tiers of arena battles await below Zurkie’s bar, while Spybots give you a potted history of the area in which they’re found and those familiar gold bolts offer new skins for Rivet’s hammer and Ratchet’s wrench, as well as unlocking an option to have RPG-style numbers fly out from enemies when you hit them. There are also pocket dimensions to discover, each hosting a platforming challenge, at the end of which lies a piece of armour: collect the full set and you’ll multiply the effectiveness of the perk they offer. Finally, a challenge mode, unlocked upon completion, ramps up the difficulty while multiplying the bolts you gain.…

Longo leaving his role as Halo Infinite’s creative director grabbed headlines in 2019. So how does it feel to watch the game’s gradual unveiling from the outside? “It’s a bummer to not be a part of it, but I’m excited for them.” He says he can see “a lot of the glimmers of hope I always had about that project” in the footage that’s been released since his departure. “They have a lot of challenges, and it’s been a rough road - and I was there for a lot of that - but it’s a good team, and I still believe in the vision.”…

Discs are perhaps not the best medium for an evolving MMORPG, and given 85 per cent of Shadowbringers’ sales came digitally it’s no surprise that Endwalker marks the end of Final Fantasy XIV expansions being sold at retail. Nonetheless, Square Enix is releasing a physical edition for collectors. Exclusively available on its online store, the Collector’s Box bundles a digital code for the expansion with a wealth of trinkets, including a figurine of the Warrior Of Light as a Paladin; a mini plush of a Loporrit (a new race); and a collection of frameable mini artwork. All copies have already been snapped up.…

Recently, a headline in a scientific publication announced ‘Dark matter might enable exoplanets to glow’, which is more or less equivalent to saying ‘Thing we know nothing about might be able to do cool stuff in a way we don’t understand’. Still, the reaching beyond our current limits of ignorance is itself exciting. There are more things in heaven and earth, as Hamlet chided Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. (He wasn’t, by the way, accusing Horatio of being especially closed-minded: here, ‘your philosophy’ essentially just means ‘science’.) The romance of space travel has been around at least since Lucian’s second-century Greek satires on travellers’ tall tales: in his True Story, the narrator and his friends are blown to the Moon by a whirlwind, where they encounter strange…

Game Builder Garage Switch Some Edge readers will already be tinkering away with this, but Nintendo’s increasingly secretive MO means we’ve not seen it at the time of writing. Still, while it effectively sounds a death knell for Labo, we’re intrigued to see what lessons one of the world’s finest game-makers has in store for budding creatives. Exomecha PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series With everything from its characters to its vehicles and guns seemingly plated in gleaming chrome, this Titanfall-baiting indie F2P shooter boasts one of the most inadvertently hilarious stealth-kill animations we’ve ever seen, plus some frankly ludicrous explosions. If it plays anything like it looks, it’ll be a riot. Hindsight iOS, PC, Switch The uncanny ability of objects to transport us in time is explored in Annapurna’s newest…

Developer Roll7 Publisher Private Division Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin UK Release Winter Attempting a trick is one thing; nailing the landing quite another. Wonderfully punishing and equally rewarding, 2015’s OlliOlli 2 proved that a 2D skating game could be just as deep and compelling to master as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater at its peak. And Hawk’s was, at the time, a long way from it – that same year, Pro Skater 5 landed an Edge 2/10. OlliOlli World’s timing is less fortunate. Skate City on iOS has proved a 2D skating game can work with touchscreen controls, while last year’s remaster of Pro Skater 1 + 2 did wonders for restoring that series’ tarnished legacy. The hardcore skateboarding game niche OlliOlli once had all…

Kazdal didn’t want Song In The Smoke’s prehistoric setting to fall into the usual caveman clichés (“there’s no sabretoothed tigers or woolly mammoths”), which is why he enlisted artist Katsuya Terada, whose celebrated works include illustrations of The Legend Of Zelda, to come up with the game’s unusual fauna. “He’s been a friend for a long time, and this game was just perfect for him,” Kazdal says. The result is some bizarre reimaginings of evolution, such as the first concept art Terada sent over. “It was like this weird fox-deer hybrid, and it was green. I was like, ‘What the hell? Yes!’ We don’t need to go super-traditional, we don’t have any promises to anybody, we can make this prehistoric space unique with creatures you can’t really account for.”…

Developer Radiangames Publisher TBA Format PC, consoles TBA Origin US Release Q4 2021 Luke Schneider has plenty of experience in building things up just to knock them down again. He spent five years as lead tech designer on Red Faction: Guerrilla, a game fondly remembered for its destructible scenery if not necessarily much else. Since striking out on his own under the banner of Radiangames, Schneider has spent the past decade releasing mostly arcade shooters and physics puzzlers. His most recent was Speed Demons, an Apple Arcade launch title that’s essentially Burnout seen from a Micro Machines perspective, and it seems all those motorway pile-ups reawakened Schneider’s appetite for destruction. “That’s where the whole basic idea came from,” he says – an urge to return to his roots and do…

Not all clues wait politely to be plucked from the crime scene. Mystery substances are identified in an equation-balancing minigame, while eavesdropping on residents enables you to sift through snippets of idle chatter to find vital nuggets, some revealing sidequests in the wider city. One such distraction, a robbery at a tailor’s, acts as a tutorial for disguises as you festoon Sherlock in garish togs and cosmetics to jog a witness’s memory of their attacker. Later costumes will endear you to other corners of society. And should you hit a dead end, you can visit police or city hall archives to cross-reference hazier facts and unearth tangible leads. Between them, this spread of deductive mechanics gives the sense of harnessing a city’s resources against its criminals. Who needs the Baker…

The pull of the unknown is powerful indeed. But the excitement of setting off on a new adventure is often tinged with sadness: every departure means leaving something, or someone, behind. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where that could be more pronounced than a journey into space, not least when it’s clear the goodbye is going to be permanent. The new game from Sword & Sworcery creator Superbrothers, made in collaboration with Pine Scented Software, hits you with that just a minute or two in. Looking through the eyes of protagonist Mei, you step out of a yurt to a sea of faces, at once sombre yet expectant, all looking directly at you. Beyond mum, dad and older sister lies the low-altitude vehicle of the title, the one you…

Guthrie makes an appearance in the game, plucking away on a string instrument in a grove next to a sprite circle. The song he’s playing is And We Got Older, a bonus track on the album which has proven one of the most popular of all Sworcery tracks. And ‘older’ is the operative word for a track that existed for 15 years before the game’s release. “It was actually on a cassette that I released in 1997,” Guthrie says. “I recorded that song in ’96 on a four-track.” Though having lost the tuning of the ukelele he played it on, he hasn’t been able to play it since. “It’s almost like improvising a delicious chocolate cake, but you don’t write down the recipe and you can never recreate it,” he…

Even after the end of the console ban, Chinese consumers still opt for importing via the grey market simply because there’s very little incentive to invest in official consoles that not only arrive late but come with too many restrictions: Xbox One is region locked with no access to Game Pass, for example. Even as newgen consoles finally launch in China, the lack of confidence in these official platforms may explain why developers such as Game Science, 24 Entertainment and Next Studios are circumventing potential complications by targeting Steam first.…

Founder, Hidden Fields Are there influences from other games in Mandaan? I didn’t look at specific games for inspiration but there are for sure elements in Mundaun of games I loved in the past. The rural setting and atmosphere of Resident Evil 4 always resonated with me. Some of my favourite moments of that game were the quiet sequences of exploration and taking in the nature and scenery. There is some Half-Life 2 in Mundaun, I guess, what with driving a vehicle along a road, stopping to investigate a hut and then driving on. And maybe the dark, magical undertones I felt early King’s Quest games had when I played them as a child. Did you always plan for Mundaun to be a full-length commercial release? Yeah, I definitely started…

Any game that gets finished is a minor miracle. Developers often say that 90 per cent of a game comes together in the last ten percent of development time: just this month, Nathan Vella tells us that Sworcery would not have been the success it was without a five-month delay. In many cases, a studio won’t know whether something is working until the 11th hour. And not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to postpone launch if it isn’t. That explains why we get games with great ideas that don’t always capitalise on them. So it is with Hood: Outlaws & Legends, whose robust stealth game is spoiled by the structure of its multiplayer heists, tempting players towards its weaker action elements. And sometimes you can see a developer…

The Ratchet & Clank games have always been unusually chatty blockbusters, largely by dint of keeping their two heroes together for the duration. Both have someone they know well to bounce off, whereas their triple-A peers tend to favour lone heroes – and when they’re afforded temporary company it’s often for the sake of exposition. The easygoing camaraderie between the pair has always been a big part of the series’ appeal, so when Rift Apart’s plot contrives to separate the titular friends for the bulk of the game, it reduces opportunities for a bit of good-natured badinage. Yet if the script might be a few gags short of Insomniac at its breezy best, the cinematics aren’t the problem here; rather, it’s what Rift Apart has to say for itself outside…

In Spirit Tracks, Link’s magical musical instrument is panpipes played with the DS microphone. The tunes are terrific, the cutscenes when you play them with legendary train conductors (complete with Zelda’s spirit dancing along) are a delight - and it’s all ruined by how consistently irritating they are to perform. You have to use the touchscreen to move down different coloured pipes while blowing into the mic - fine for puzzles that require only a few notes, but a nightmare during duets that require note-perfect playing for long lungsapping stretches. What should be a high point of the adventure leaves us deflated, in every sense of the word.…

Seeing gaming concepts defined shakily in a court of law has, broadly, been a source of comedy during Apple and Epic’s trial. But the mischaracterisation of Itch.io has made for difficult listening. The indie storefront was welcomed into the Epic Store as an app earlier this year, a fact Apple has sought to weaponise, suggesting that the presence of alternative app stores on iOS would open the door to depravity. The “so-called adult games” on Itch.io are, Apple claimed, “so offensive we cannot speak about them here.” It’s true that Itch.io has different moderation standards to both the App Store and Epic Store - but that’s precisely the quality that makes it a haven for marginalised developers. Apple’s own squeamishness about creative expression is one solid argument against its stranglehold…

By now, we’ve become accustomed to live events being cancelled and replaced with awkward digital substitutes. But still, the show must go on. After cancelling its 2020-2021 world tour, including what would have been a London stop this year, Final Fantasy XIV’s first Digital Fan Fest spared no expense (reportedly several hundred million yen) to bring the MMORPG’s developers and community together over two days streamed live from the Tokyo Garden Theatre. We imagine that in-house band The Primals would have rather been playing its metal covers of the game’s songs in front of a rapturous, glowstick-waving crowd instead of a giant display of YouTube chat overlooking an empty auditorium. But if conditions were far from ideal, it didn’t seem to dampen spirits, with producer and director Naoki Yoshida having…

continue Pony up With sales approaching 7 million, Valheim’s devs bought a horse Gabe Boy Advance Reports suggest Valve is working on a Switch-style portable gaming PC Vee-Haw Red Dead Redemption 2 virtual-reality mod saddles up for early access Dig it “Several” new Steamworld games are apparently due in the next two years quit Sealed Vault Borderlands 3’s planned crossplay support won’t be coming to PlayStation Hard sell Unlocking Johns Rambo and McClane in COD will set you back nearly £35 Stumbled out Mediatonic accidentally leaks Fall Guys’ source code in a Steam update Empty Stadia Should Google really need to specity that its streaming service is “alive and well”? WEBSITE Savoy Ballroom Google Doodle bit.ly/savoydoodle Nominally marking the anniversary of the placement of a plaque in 2002, the date…

Last year I wrote a column about Quibi, the company that was going to reinvent television for the millennial generation. I can safely say that in the 52,000 Quibis that have passed since, I have been proven right. But I’ve been talking with other ‘TV people’ and have been thinking about this world again. I tend to get excited in these meetings because I feel that we are on the edge of revolution. But invariably the conversations go something like this: Hi, I’m Brad TV, vice president of development at Mega TV. This is my assistant, Jane. We are losing mucho eyeballs to gaming so we wanted to take this general meeting and ideate with you. Here, have a bottle of water. Thanks! Look, with your digitally native platform you…

Developer/publisher Ember Lab Format PC, PS4, PS5 Origin US Release August 24 Whatever the opposite of nominative determinism is, it certainly applies to the Rot. In a setting such as this, the name suggests some kind of unwanted presence – a group of antagonists, perhaps, or some corrosive phenomenon choking the life out of a once-flourishing forest. Not so – although, as it turns out, these adorably squat little creatures were enemies in an early version of the game. Resembling sentient chunks of licorice, the Rot have since been recast as allies, and you’ll find 100 of the blighters scattered throughout this Eastern-inspired world. You can deck them out in a range of hats you pick up over the course of your adventure, too. And they’ve got a little more…

World’s unobtrusive narrative involves you going on a road trip with four oddball skaters. Skateshop owner ‘Dad’ is our favourite, since he boasts a weakness for horrible puns – fitting, from the studio that subtitled its sequel Welcome To Olliwood. There’s some fun dialogue and it’s undeniably charming to have a crew of pals cheering you on whenever you finish a level. But Roll7 is smart enough to know that a lot of people don’t come to a skating game to be told a story, and all but encourages you to skip it. Half of the dialogue options in cutscenes seem designed to shut down the conversation as fast as possible, with ‘JUST LEMME SKATE!’ being a particular highlight.…

Developer/publisher RocketWerkz Format PC Origin New Zealand Release TBA There’s a catch of panic in Dean Hall’s voice that has to be genuine. The New Zealander gained a level of celebrity in the early 2010s as creator of ARMA 2’s DayZ mod, before leaving development of Bohemia Interactive’s standalone game in 2014 to found his own studio, RocketWerkz, back on home turf. Today, Hall is acting as our tour guide on the planet of Icarus, answering questions about his latest take on the survival game, when he suddenly interrupts himself: “Oh god, I think I hear a bear.” This is a false alarm, as it turns out, but it’s an early taste of the threats that await us on Icarus. There’s none of the player-on-player tension of DayZ to be…

Controlling your creations is currently a little too clumsy (something Schneider assures us he’s working on), but that frustration can also be a source of comedy. An early experiment with thrusters has us howling as our vehicle launches directly into the sea, while repeated attempts to cross a narrow destructible bridge are like one of those drawn-out jokes that starts funny, becomes tedious, and eventually pivots back to hilarious. Instruments Of Destruction is seemingly designed for playing to an audience, and Schneider is ready to take advantage of that. “I just need to get it into streamers’ hands,” he says. “If you watch someone play the game, you don’t necessarily think, ‘Oh, I’ve seen it all’ – you want to get in there and make your own thing with it.”…

Straka’s previous games were on iOS, but he’s made the leap to PC and console for Loot River – and is frank about his reasons for shifting. “The mobile sales for premium games started going down like this” – he mimes a crashing aeroplane, with accompanying sound effects. “No one buys these games any more.” The problem, he says, is Apple Arcade – great for those few games that get curated into the library, less so for everyone else. “So unless I get my game on Arcade, making [this game for iOS] would not make sense financially. And not just financially, as in to get rich or whatever, but to actually survive and keep making games.”…

The human voice is one of the most crucial components of Rohrmann’s score and sound design. It partly stems from the use of Sacred Harp singing – a type of religious choral music originating in North America, but which through missionaries has become traditional among Pacific Islanders – from the soundtrack of The Thin Red Line. As Rohrmann began to dabble with synthetic voices, Adams became keen to find a way to them more prominent. “It seemed like it was definitely part of Jett’s DNA,” Adams says. “That this technological science-fiction story should have this heartfelt spiritual dimension. And we told ourselves for years, if we ever have any money, we should spend it to upgrade the voice aspects somehow.” Familiar with their work on Bandcamp, Rohrmann contacted Priscilla Snow…

The game was not always called Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. “The working title for the game was Poopsock,” Piotrowski says, laughing. “It was a term for a game that you sit down and play until it’s finished. And what allows you to do that is…” well, we’ll leave the rest to your imagination. “Obviously we had a mandate to replace that with something else.” The Conan The Barbarian influence explains the ‘sword and sorcery’ part. As for the extra ‘w’, Piotrowski believes it was his idea. “Though I’m not going to court defending it. But it [otherwise] would have been way too generic and didn’t fit with the unique flavour of the project,” he explains. “We also knew it would make the game more searchable,” Vella adds. “What we…

How much of a part do western studios operating in China play in shaping the Chinese game industry? Since being founded in 2008, Ubisoft Chengdu has been primarily a support studio, working on games such as Scott Pilgrim Vs The World. However, the studio has taken a step onto the international stage with Immortals Fenyx Rising, where it led on the development of the game’s Ancient China-themed DLC. It’s also the developer of the Rabbids party game made exclusively for the Chinese version of Switch. Not the most glamorous title, perhaps, but a fully self-developed game for a console is a sign that Chengdu, and studios like it, may have a bigger role to play in the future.…

Connected universes have been taking over the pop-cultural landscape for the past decade but, early teases of Remedy’s effort aside, the concept has yet to reach videogames. Part of the reason, no doubt, is that games are slow-moving behemoths even by cinematic standards, making it all but impossible to corral multiple projects. The solution, then, is simple: you just make 15 of the things, plus a short film and a graphic novel, in the space of six years. This is exactly what Maarten Looise and Robin Ras have done with Rusty Lake – a name that can variously mean the studio they founded together, the games it produces, and the setting they all share. The decision to build their own universe was, at least in part, a pragmatic one. The…

Developer/publisher SIE (Insomniac Games) Format PS5 Release Out now Something goes wrong in the opening 15 minutes of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. That in itself is not a surprise: it’s how videogame stories often begin, after all. But this development is particularly unexpected. During a lavish ticker-tape parade to celebrate our heroes in Megalopolis, Clank presents a gift to his Lombax partner: it’s a gadget called the Dimensionator, designed to open rifts to other dimensions. He gives it hoping to enable Ratchet to meet more of his kind. We’ve seen the Dimensionator in previous games, so it’s no great revelation that it should turn up here. Nor that it should find its way into the wrong hands. Nor that those hands belong to returning antagonist Dr Nefarious. But during…