Innehållsförteckning för October 2023 från Edge

Why are other people’s dreams so boring? Probably it’s because, in the process of sharing them with someone else, you break the contract that is made between storyteller and recipient, which is to follow through on the narrative promise. Tell a friend that you heard an awful screeching in the garden last night, so you went out to investigate, and they will rightly expect to then discover what you found out there, tying everything up. If the incident was in a dream, the story would likely transpire differently, failing entirely to deliver the next steps of a traditional story cycle. “So I stepped outside and suddenly my arms turned into lengths of garden hose, and I was trying to pick things up but I couldn’t, and then my old maths…

On June 2, 2023, the Immaterial Plane ceased to exist. This wasn’t overly unusual by Blaseball standards: it had already been sucked into a black hole once. Yet this time was different, with the disappearance accompanied by a blunt message from its creators: “The cost, literally and metaphorically, is too high”. Blaseball was shutting down. This mashup of videogame, spectator sport and collective storytelling project is so unusual that it could only have been created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Having released its debut, Where Cards Fall, in 2019, The Game Band was working on what studio founder Sam Rosenthal describes as an “atmospheric, singleplayer narrative game” before the onset of COVID led to that project’s cancellation. After downsizing and pivoting to contract work, they went all-in on Rosenthal’s…

“For the youngest, it leads to a kind of disconnect from reality. They are acting out the videogames that have poisoned their minds.” As French citizens show Emmanuel Macron just how much they don’t really care for cold-blooded murder, it’s games to blame, not the police “I wish Microsoft had used that $69 billion to keep me and my fellow coworkers there employed.” Former Coalition technical producer Shayna Moon sticks a bit of perspective onto things ”My kids announced in kindergarten and elementary school that ‘My daddy is a professional bank robber!’” Katsuhiro Harada’s Payday 2 obsession may be out of hand “It feels like stumbling on a mechanic that has never been seen in a game before… Every part of me wants to tell you everything about it.” Peter…

Issue 387 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 Word up I’ve been thinking a lot about narrative games lately, specifically with regard to how obvious it is when a game is made with narrative systems at the very top of the dependency chart. When narrative comes first, or is treated with equal reverence to other disciplines like art and design, that’s how we get some of the (in my – correct – opinion) best games of all time: Return Of The Obra Dinn, Hades, Heaven’s Vault, Ghost Trick, Ace Attorney, What Remains Of Edith Finch, and more. It’s just rare that we see this narrativefirst approach in western triple-A games these days, even though…

Our cover game this issue trades in duality – two characters, two settings, the real world and the realm of fiction – so it’s only fitting that Hype should follow suit. The pair of games heading up this issue’s selection deal with blighted worlds: in one instance a fantasy universe, in the other a bleak vision of post-apocalyptic Earth. And they share another common feature: in both cases, there’s plenty more going on under the surface. We revisit Lords Of The Fallen – which has lost a definite article since E381’s cover story – and its dual-world setup still intrigues. Granted, you could say it’s merely a bells-and-whistles version of the kind of concept with which we’ve grown familiar since Nintendo pulled a similar trick in A Link To The…

Developer Dinogod Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin US Release Early 2024 Arriving in a new town, a stranger with a troubled past hopes to make a new life for themselves. They hope in vain; they’re forced by circumstance back towards the kind of violence they’d hoped to leave behind. Even before you hear its subtitle – The Morose Tale Of Graveyard Clem – it’s clear that the story of Dinogod’s debut game is steeped in classic Western fiction. Studio founder and creative director Ben Ruiz says it’s more about harnessing the mythology of the whole genre than any individual book or film. “I saw so many of them as a child because my family liked them,” he says. “I kind of appreciate…

Developer Simogo Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, Switch Origin Sweden Release 2024 When we first talked to Simogo about its ninth game in E355, it went by Project Fuzzy Optics. That name comes back to us during its latest opaque teaser, which comprises a slow zoom out from a CRT television set featuring context-free snippets of footage and a voiceover that alludes to both creator and publisher, while outlining the game’s two primary mechanics: interpreting patterns and solving puzzles. Still, there’s a sense that it’s withholding as much as it gives away. The better part of three years on, the picture – by design – remains a little unclear. Time, then, to investigate why. “Much about Lorelei And The Laser Eyes is about perspective and ambiguity,” the studio’s creative linchpin,…

Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Developer Blackbird Interactive Publisher Focus Entertainment Origin US Release 2022 When in E349 we first wrote about Blackbird Interactive’s science-fiction simulation during its time in Early Access, we couldn’t help but think of Tim Curry’s Anatoly Chedenko in Red Alert 3 talking about escaping to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism. Bad luck, Chedenko – even in space, there is no escaping the unyielding grip of the megacorporation. In Hardspace: Shipbreaker you’re pressed into indentured servitude for the iron-fisted Lynx Corp, tasked with slicing up derelict spacecraft in the hope of paying off an exorbitant debt. It’s fitting, then, that the game originated from an initiative meant to give its makers more independence from their publisher paymasters. Having shipped Homeworld: Deserts Of…

On paper, Exoprimal seems to have been designed with the express purpose of indulging our basest (terrible) lizard-brain instincts: to supply us with cascades of dinosaurs and hand over the ordnance with which to dispatch them as swiftly as they arrived. On that front, Capcom’s latest immediately delivers. Here is a game built, apparently, to provide instant, on-tap fulfilment. After a couple of hours of the same missions (Dinosaur Cull again, is it?) on the same maps battling the same prehistoric opponents, though, its stubbornly singleminded approach begins to wear thin. But the patient player will subsequently discover that Capcom has been playing the long game: this is a game of delayed gratification, deeper, broader and more intriguing than its repetitive opening hours make out. It’s partly a matter of…

Momentum is king in the world of Atlas Fallen. Where many games incentivise players to string actions together with combo meters or score trackers, here developer Deck13 positively demands it, whether you’re dashing across vast canyons or battling sand wraiths. Yet stop to smell the roses – or get smacked out of your flow state by an enormous crab – and the veneer begins to wear thin. An abrupt introduction establishes you as the de facto chosen one, wielding a gauntlet containing the spirit of the god Nyall to lead a rebellion against tyrannical deity Thelos. Vast rock structures created in the aftermath of conflict between these divine entities tower over deserts, arranged into vistas ripped straight from a Roger Dean album cover. Empowered by Nyall, your gauntlet allows you…

Jumping into Remnant II as a solo player, it’s gratifying to discover that Gunfire Games is still keeping us in mind. The first three of its character classes gesture strongly towards co-op play, between them mixing long-range, melee and support specialisms. A fourth, however, the Handler, comes with a buddy in tow – afaithful German shepherd. This evolution of the original game’s Very Good Boy weapon mod provides constant companionship, including healing and even reviving you once when down, as well as plenty of bite to go with its bark. While Final Fantasy XVI may have beaten Gunfire to the punch here, using animal companionship to replace a party of its own, our canine pal feels like a refreshing and considerate inclusion. Such features demonstrate a willingness from the studio…

Every good song needs a hook, and Summerfall Studios’ visual novel – or should that be musical novel? – has a strong one. Protagonist Grace (an outstanding Laura Bailey), rudderless after leaving college, gains the power of a Muse, giving her the ability to influence those around her to sing about their feelings. That influence extends to shaping the songs: your choices affect melody, instrumentation and lyrics, effectively giving you the power of conductor, composer and co-writer as the performance adapts seamlessly. That you get to do all this with Greek gods and goddesses (this lot are every bit as dysfunctional and attractive as their counterparts in Hades) makes it more appealing still. Likewise that it’s built around a murder mystery. After an impromptu duet in an empty rehearsal hall,…

As the industry rumour mill turns, we’reused to seeing major players doing all they can to avoid getting caught in its wheels, with Sony and Microsoft as deft as any at keeping their secrets. We have to confess to a certain sense of schadenfreude, then, when Microsoft’s court date against the US Federal Trade Commission, in which the latter requested a preliminary injunction blocking Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, briefly forced the two platform holders to expose themselves. There’s nothing like a court case to get people telling tales, often by accident. And while the pertinent point here is that Microsoft ultimately won, clearing the way for its plodding buyout saga to reach an affirmative end, some of the titbits of info we pocketed along the way can help in…

Game MotoGP VR Manufacturer Raw Thrills From mid-1980s pioneers such as Sega’s Hang-On and Enduro Racer to more contemporary examples that have emerged from Chinese manufacturers, the appeal of the motorbikebased arcade machine is easy to fathom. Here is a type of game that gets a lot closer than most to what it’s trying to simulate simply by offering a near-fullsize replica of the real thing. It’s a formula that worked well for Raw Thrills and Play Mechanix in 2015 with the release of the popular MotoGP, and now the cabinet has been revived in VR form. Though at heart MotoGP VR has a lot in common with the original, it includes ten updated circuits and 12 new bikes and riders to choose from. Crucially, dangling from the front of…

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once recommended philosophising with a hammer. This tool would be used to test whether great idols of culture were truly worthy of admiration, or false gods that rang hollow when struck with said implement, initially used as a kind of “tuning fork” rather than to bludgeon something to smithereens. Perhaps John Romero of Id Software was not thinking of Nietzsche when he first conceived of the game design in Quake, but he was definitely all about a massive hammer. As he reminds us in his fascinating and delightful new memoir, Doom Guy, Quake was originally intended to be a medieval action RPG with spells, in which the protagonist wielded such an enormous tool. “Imagine completely obliterating something, smashing it and hammering it to gibs,” Romero remembers…

Developer Publisher Format Origin Release CI Games Hexworks PC, PS5, Xbox Series Spain, Romania October 13 Though its knightly get-ups remind us of the Arthurian tone of Dark Souls, and its gothic environments carry the miasma of Bloodborne’s Yharnam, it doesn’t take long for Hexworks’ Soulslike to spill beyond the mould in which it’s been set. When we misjudge the reach of our flail in an early scuffle, we’re met with a flurry of fatal blows and fall to the ground defeated. But rather than seeing a taunting death screen as we’ve come to expect from the genre, we receive something all the more encouraging. As a second chance, we are instantly resurrected – rising from the same point we fell, albeit not quite in the same place. The world…

Developer Brainwash Gang Publisher Thunderful Publishing Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Spain Release 2023 Having bested a giant mechanical worm during a chase through an enemyinfested cavern, protagonist Laika confronts the cowardly miner who, moments earlier, had assured us that an army of eager allies was waiting inside. With the survival of Laika’s settlement riding on the recruitment of new reinforcements, suspense is high as the interrogation begins. “Then why you lured me into this?” she asks. The tension slackens. Laika: Aged Through Blood’s grand narrative ambitions stumble in an early script littered with similarly jarring grammatical errors, but the foundations of an absorbing tale are here. At heart, this is a sombre story of a diligent mother trying to protect her young daughter from…

Forthe better part of two decades, Media Molecule has been in the business of breaking down creative boundaries: not just by placing game development tools in the hands of its audience, but by finding ways to actively encourage players to become makers. As such, it’s hard not to view the opening of Tren – the studio’s last major release for Dreams, as it turns its attentions to a new project – in metaphorical terms. As a diminutive wooden train finally manages to burst free of its box, breaking open the cardboard flap holding it back, it’s only natural to think of Toy Story, and the familiar notion of an old plaything coming to life when no one is around. But as polystyrene curls are sent scattering, we see instead a…

Founded 2014 (previously 1999 as Free Radical Design) Employees 183 Key staff David Stenton (game director), Adam Duckett (design director), Dan Evans-Lawes (technical art director) URL www.dsdambuster.com Selected softography TimeSplitters, Homefront: The Revolution, Dead Island 2 Current projects Dead Island 2 Free Radical Design’s final project was its 2008 office Christmas party. Not that the majority of its staff were aware. “The guys who ran the company knew it was in serious trouble,” Dambuster technical art director Dan Evans-Lawes remembers. “They were like, ‘Well, we’ve paid for the party anyway, so we might as well go out with a bang’. Everyone had a great time.” A few days later, the staff arrived at work in Nottingham to find a locked door and a sign directing them to a nearby hotel.…

Quentin Aalbers introduces himself as a professional treasure hunter, but he gives the impression of a market trader trying to flog dodgy goods. Perhaps that’s who he was, in the days when he was alive – but that all was a long time ago. These days, Aalbers has to carry his own head around with him. If, indeed, the gold-plated skull with precious stones in each eye socket even is his, in any sense other than possession being nine-tenths of the law. Either way, out here in the Lost Caribbean, having a shiny detachable skull proves to be rather useful. It can be lobbed into the path of an incoming guard, its glint drawing them from their patrol route and distracting them from the shadowy figure sneaking up behind with…

The most breathtaking expanse in The Banished Vault is the one between its premise and how enjoyable it is to play. Developed by Lunar Division, this space strategy promises a melancholy adventure in the void, as you guide a floating monastery through a doomed galaxy succumbing to an entity known as the Gloom. Unable to stop the destruction, your devout pioneers instead dedicate themselves to memorialising the cosmos that is being consumed, inscribing a record of their journey as they travel from star to star. It’s a scintillating setup, the kind that would power a literary space opera. Yet in practice The Banished Vault is far less interested in words than it is in numbers. Playing isn’t so much about recording the story of a fading universe as it is…

Graffiti, in Sludge Life 2’s diseased world, feels not so much a radical act of rebellion against the corporate machine as a way of simply proving you were there at the end. Making your mark doubles as a method of showing where you’ve already explored in this compact, sinuous sandbox – no larger than the original’s island maybe, but denser, stuffed with more secrets and hiding spots and NPCs. There’s an overriding sense of hopelessness here: you may start in a luxurious hotel suite, but your quest to locate missing rapper Big Mud ahead of an important promo shoot begins with you waking up in the bath after a heavy night. Everyone you stumble into has given in to some form of vice to cope with their circumstances, from alcohol…

For those who play videogames as often as we do, it’s easy to forget that a certain degree of skill with an input device, generally a controller or mouse and keyboard, is required to enjoy them – and to grow frustrated with tutorials that reintroduce conventions we’ve seen a hundred times before. But that familiarity is testament to just how brilliant games, with their escalating level of challenge, are as tools and motivators for developing those skills in the first place. And it’s these properties that led assistive technology provider Smartbox to create its latest product, a collection of 38 minigames called Look Lab. Smartbox’s software allows people with limited mobility to operate a computer by looking at the screen, through which they can communicate and gain greater independence. As…

The TV show Lost has been doing the rounds again lately among nostalgic millennials and curious Gen-Zers. As I rewatched my favourite moments from the pilot, I caught a glimpse of Daniel Dae Kim’s Jin-Soo Kwon. Jin wasn’t the first Asian person I’d seen on TV, but he was one of the first I’d seen in a show I loved this much. I was 22 when Lost first aired. It sounds strange, maybe even a little adolescent, to think that such a small gesture of representation would matter to anyone – but it mattered to me. While it was a balm to see someone who looked a bit like me on TV, albeit with abs that I could only dream of possessing, I grew cautious as Jin’s backstory was revealed.…

Developer/publisher Format Origin Release Far From Home PC, PS5, Xbox Series Poland TBA Stranded on an Earth coated in toxic dust, we take whatever food we can get. From our position atop a creaking metal tower, one of a smattering of structures tall enough to keep their heads above the murk, our only recourse is a kind of fishing winch fitted with a lure, which we lower through the cloud to attract whatever dwells below. Invariably, the delicacies we pull up are manky dust cabbages and dust moths, or if we’re lucky a fat dust moth – lucky because it’s more filling, so we won’t have to reach back into the polluted larder quite so soon. Whatever emerges, though, Forever Skies has us queasily wondering what the hell else is…

Developer Julián Cordero, Sebastián Valbuena Publisher Panic Format PC, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Ecuador Release 2024 W hen the time came for Julián Cordero to cast the parents of Despelote’s protagonist – a loosely fictionalised version of his eight-year-old self – he knew the perfect candidates. Having given collaborator Sebastián Valbuena photos from the early ’00s to use as reference points for the game, he contacted his mother and father to ask if they’d lend their voices to it. There was just one small problem. “My parents are divorced,” he says. “They get along really well, which I feel very lucky about. But it was interesting to ask them to pretend it was this time when they were still together and they were raising me.” It’s the most…

NEAR MISSES Baldur’s Gate 3 PC Quite the rollercoaster, this one. First, we hear it’s coming out a month earlier than anticipated, so we adjust our schedule accordingly, with review code imminent. Then we’re told Larian needs a little longer after all, so no critics will get their hands on it until – what’s that? – two days after Edge deadline? How convenient. We’re kidding, of course: it’s not often we’re this optimistic about a forthcoming game’s quality, and this way we can take our time putting this apparently gargantuan RPG through its paces. Review in E389, further hiccups notwithstanding. The Expanse: A Telltale Series PC It might well be common practice for TV reviewers to cover a selection of episodes delivered in advance – indeed, in the past we’ve…

Alarmingly, it’s been 11 years since Shigeru Miyamoto told Edge he couldn’t work out how to “create a surprise” with a new F-Zero, the unspoken suggestion being that innovation is vital when it comes to Nintendo sequels. Perhaps such rules are relaxed for Miyamoto’s pet projects: thus far, it has struggled to determine the defining feature for Pikmin 4, instead outlining a string of minor additions. A lowerslung camera to emphasise scale. A canine helper named Oatchi. A newly customisable protagonist. Two extra species of Pikmin. Perhaps these would prove sufficiently transformative to justify a fourth entry? In the event, Pikmin 4 does – for better and worse – feel distinct from the previous three. After a charming introduction, the early game gets bogged down in interruptions and explanations –…

At the heart of Haemimont Games’ tactical mercenary manager is a certain ambiguity. The chance-to-hit calculations that have long been a staple of turn-based tactics – responsible in equal measure for whoops of joy at probability-defying wins and groans of irritation at point-blank misses – are kept hidden. Every shot of a rifle, toss of a grenade or disarming of a landmine is thus a test of intuition. Each enemy cowering behind cover becomes a challenge. And every favourable weather condition, shrewd weapon switch, or carelessly protruding arm turns into an invitation to try your luck. You’ll only know if you gambled right, of course, by pulling the trigger, committing to the invisible throw of the dice. That playfulness is central to the shootouts of Jagged Alliance 3, in which…

Since Sony made a great deal of noise about PlayStation 5’s SSD speed allowing players to travel between worlds in an instant, it feels as if game developers have been lining up to prove that such hardware is unnecessary: all you really need is technical knowhow and a lot of imagination. Following the likes of MaskMaker, Immortality and Hindsight, Sad Owl Studios’ puzzler affords you even greater power. Pick up a 2D Polaroid or blueprint or painting, hold it in front of you and squeeze the trigger, and what was in the flat frame now exists before you in three-dimensional form – taking with it a piece of the world you placed it inside. It’s constructive and destructive, then. Just as you can turn a nearby floor into a chasm-spanning…