Innehållsförteckning för April 2024 från Edge

Considering the scale of its influence in more modern times, Rogue made only a minor splash in the world of videogames when it arrived in 1980. Despite its profile, though, the adoption of procedural generation in its level design was controversial enough to inspire the Great Game Designer Revolt of 1981, played out across bulletin boards as developers railed against the threat of machines taking level-making jobs meant for humans. Except there was no such thing, of course. Rather, machine-authored initiatives have permeated throughout games ever since, to the extent that nowadays there exists an entire subgenre of shooters, ARPGs and more besides whose construction is defined at least in part by code acting in a design role. Along the way, production tools such as SpeedTree have emerged to remove…

Almost two years ago, Astra Fund listed six ‘thinking games’ for which it would be providing financial support. The selection included music-themed puzzler Rytmos, foldable-space adventure Paper Trail and a then-untitled project from Zach Gage and Orta Therox, which would become morning mainstay Puzzmo. Just as the catch-all term for titles of this ilk has changed, Astra Fund has become Astra Logical, an “independent publisher of premium thinky games”. That term is worth exploring. What is a thinky game? The term s been minted relatively recently, perhaps coming to greater prominence with the advent of thinkygames.com, a website and community hub set up by Warp Door co-founder Tim W with support from Astra Games. Per the blurb, thinky games "ask you to carefully reason your way through puzzles and challenges;…

Back in October 2021, Facebook rebranded to Meta, reflecting Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse-shaped destination for the company. This bold new future was laid out a year later, in a feature-length Meta Connect keynote co-hosted by an eerie virtual marionette version of the CEO. Now, a year and a bit on from that, the hardware meant to power all this – Meta’s Quest 3 – is sitting on my desk, waiting for an excuse to be slipped back on. I’m curious, then: what exactly does Horizon Worlds, the beachhead of this promised Meta-verse, have to offer? The first step is making an avatar, using a character creator that recalls The Sims and Mii Maker – specifically their original, nowancient incarnations. Scrolling through the clothing menu screen, it’s nice to see a variety…

Developer Sunset Visitor Publisher Fellow Traveller Format PC, Switch Origin Canada Release TBA 2024 S unset Visitor’s narrative-driven adventure begins with an end. We’re confronted with a startling glimpse into a cryptic future we don’t yet understand: an act of betrayal, a shattering of devotion, and a violent outburst all collide in one of the most dramatic openings of any preview build we’ve encountered in recent memory. It’s a genuine shock to the system, the kind that makes you sit bolt upright and pay attention to what’s in front of you – almost immediately suggesting a must-play for anyone in the mood for a stylish science-fiction mystery. The game’s set – perhaps unsurprisingly – a thousand years into the future; we’re thrust into a world where humanity has been completely…

Foamstars PS5 Splashing down on PS Plus just before deadline, Square’s gaudy multiplayer foam-’em-up doesn’t exactly give off the best of first impressions. We suspect some curious players may well have tapped out by the end of the tutorial, between its infuriating staccato structure and the nails-down-blackboard voiceover of host Bublo Espuma. An even more irritating MC welcomes you to the gaudy surrounds of Bath Vegas, while an attempt to limber up for the messy online matches via a few solo missions reveals the singleplayer component to be somewhat of an afterthought. Still, some surreal flourishes, a hint of self-aware humour and a few conceptually intriguing touches means we won’t write it off entirely just yet. Chronique Des Silencieux PC In a quieter month we’d doubtless have found more time…

The Dragon Of Dojima is dying, and for real this time. Having faked his death at the end of Yakuza 6 in order to protect his loved ones, there was already a sense that Kazuma Kiryu was living on borrowed time. Now cancer will do what all those boss fights could not. It may feel like RGG Studio trying to have its cake and eat it. Having sold one game on the promise of Kiryu’s dramatic end, it has now managed to eke out at least two more: Infinite Wealth and The Man Who Erased His Name, the 2023 side-story that depicts Kiryu’s missing years. (Spoiler alert: this alleged time of discretion was spent loudly kicking hundreds of men in the stomach.) You could be forgiven for approaching these developments…

What is your longest-term relationship with a piece of technology? It could be an old PC that has been upgraded component by component, the microchip-of-Theseus effect in action. A final-generation iPod, stubbornly maintained in rebuttal of music’s streaming age. Or just an old workhorse of a car – perhaps the one in which you learned to drive – for which every MOT is cause for nervous pacing. Whatever the specifics, you’ll surely recognise the way the initial arrangement of convenience tilts towards symbiosis over the years, and the gathering sentimentality that tends to follow. Rarely, though, have we felt so committed to any machine quite as immediately as Pacific Drive’s station wagon. When you first meet, both parties are in sore need of help. You’ve ended up on the wrong…

Despite the efforts of the genre’s leading names to broaden audience appeal in recent years, the one-on-one fighter still hasn’t quite managed to break out of its niche. It is a bold decision, then, for such a game to deliberately leave the past console generation behind – albeit one in keeping with the spirit of a series that has never lacked courage. And that choice may well pay off. Not since 1998, when its third entry paired elegant motion capture with some of the crunchiest action PS1 could handle, has a new Tekken felt like quite such an evolutionary leap forward, nor such an essential part of any fighting-game enthusiast’s lineup. True, compared to its most celebrated forerunner, Tekken 8’s accoutrements are less grand. Where bonus modes were once the…

Poker commentator Jesse May once suggested that conventional wisdom about getting good at the game had it all back to front. “People think mastering the skill part is hard, but they’re wrong,” he said. “The trick to poker is mastering the luck.” Balatro might lack the psychological dimension of outbluffing a human opponent – or, for that matter, the effect money has on the mind games involved. But it is about learning how to respond to (and in some cases pre-empt) fortune’s whims, favourable or otherwise. And, for that matter, accepting that sometimes, as in life, there’s not much you can do when the fates deal you a bad hand. In some ways, that’s surprising. This is, after all, a game about cheating – juicing your deck in various ways…

Developer José Hernández, Draknek & Friends Publisher Draknek & Friends Format PC Release Out now The latest headscratcher from Draknek & Friends revolves around combining atoms into molecules – a process that neatly reflects the act of creative fusion that spawned it. Inspired by Alan Hazelden’s Cosmic Express and Sokobond, José Hernández’s Itch path-builder Subatomic Wire asked players to turn a nucleus into a stable atom by creating routes for it to pick up a given number of protons and electrons. Hazelden subsequently offered the budding designer an opportunity to collaborate on a quasisequel to both games, and this typically elegant, minimalist puzzler is the (belated) result. Unlike in Sokobond, walls are nothing to worry about as you assemble steadily more complex arrangements of atoms. Rather, you need to concern…

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 Grand scheme It’s not often that the arrival of a new videogame elevates my anxiety levels, but the release of the latest trailer for GTAVI does fill me with a sense of unease that we’re about to embark on another era dominated by alpha-male gaming. My experience of having anything remotely critical to say about GTAV a decade ago on social media or online forums in terms of its depiction of minorities was not a positive one, and although things have changed since then, I do wonder to what extent. I get that Rockstar has made some progress in recent years, but it’s often only been in response…

Today I played a game that wanted to teach me about Viking history and culture while I walked around doing odd jobs. It was Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s excellent Discovery Mode, which has evolved from the tour-guide NPCs of Odyssey into the highest-budget indie game ever. But while I enjoyed the storyline, I found myself skipping past all the fact-panels about figurehead designs and such – which was odd because I’m generally pretty interested in history, culture and ships, as anyone who’s played any Inkle game could probably guess. The shadow of edutainment looms large, it seems, with a curse that’s curiously peculiar to games. In contrast, I don’t mind when I’m watching Horrible Histories with my kids that the jokes are often thinly veiled fact-delivery mechanisms. (“Are you sure you…

Format PC Developer/publisher Kinmoku Origin Germany Release 2023 Almost as much as actually playing the things, an important part of loving videogames is often being part of the communities that grow up around them. Indeed, finding a way to discuss this shared passion with strangers plays a major part in many of our formative online experiences. That might mean scrolling through social media or comment sections, or lurking on a forum or even – for those of us of a certain generation – a bulletin board. While its story might take place in 2003, Videoverse speaks to a more universal experience by being set in its own digital world, one that exists separately but adjacent to all these real virtual spaces. You’re cast as 15-year-old Emmett, a big fan of…

Over the past few weeks we’ve been thinking about synergy. Steering individual atoms into the path of others to form molecules inside the pristine labs of Sokobond Express feels like a pure expression of the idea of collective power. But we’re really talking about alchemy rather than chemistr y: those sometimes unlikely combinations of disparate elements that result in a strange kind of magic.  Take the lurid surroundings of Ultros, for instance. This cosmic sarcophagus initially seems like a hostile place, not least since it regularly returns you to the start, robbing you of the powers you’d previously unlocked. But over successive loops you learn to work with rather than against its flora and fauna, nurturing the land to produce a more virtuous (and mutually advantageous) cycle. In Banishers:…

One of the great triumphs of the Arkham games was how satisfying Batman felt to control. The greatest moments of joy found in Rocksteady’s erratic thirdperson shooter, however, come when the thumbsticks are in neutral. Kill The Justice League’s cinematics are regular high points, from King Shark offering to relay stories of the “hammerhead conflicts of my youth” to Captain Boomerang delivering dad jokes to the groans of his companions, and Lex Luthor mulling over potential “workplace applications” of the killer mutants running about Metropolis. The gags come thick and fast, and we find ourselves often smiling through a story in which the world’s greatest defenders of justice are murdered by a ragtag group of violent criminals. We enter after arch-villain Brainiac has invaded Metropolis, turned its inhabitants into purple…

For banishers Ruaidhrigh ‘Red’ mac Raith and mentor-turned-romantic-partner Antea Duarte, business is booming. Unfortunately, their business is a grim one. Spirit hunters by trade, they’ve been packed off to the eponymous community (one to add to the long list of ironically named videogame settings) to deal with a spate of hauntings. Malevolent spectres in inhuman form can be swiftly dispatched via the sharp end of their swords, but it’s the others that prove most bothersome: those that linger because someone in the land of the living can’t quite bring themselves to let go. An unspoken truth or regret, a promise unkept, a love curtailed, a desire for forgiveness: in these ‘haunting cases’, it’s up to Red and Antea to investigate what’s causing these ghosts to stick around, and then decide…

Mammon, biblical representation of greed, has sent us a DM. “A Modest Proposal”, in the demon’s own words: “The Mountebank must be indemnified against all outcomes.” As we wrestle with four other Archfiends for the spot left vacant by Lucifer’s recent disappearance, Mammon suggests not war but a contract. To secure his protection, all we need do is sign away any sole claim to the throne of Hell should we come out on top, Mammon suggests, before signing off with a nod to the old line about “death and taxes”. There is a surprising amount of the latter to be found in Solium Infernum’s vision of Hell. More surprising still: this is a very good thing indeed. Every interaction between these demon challengers is governed by a set of rules…

Nostalgia is powerful. How else can we explain today’s constant flow of videogame remakes and remasters, updates and ports, and the rapturous receptions they routinely receive? Look at Metacritic’s aggregated review scores since 2020, and among the 25 highest-rated videogames you’ll find six rereleases. Square Enix is no exception, but the manner in which the publisher has approached remaking Final Fantasy VII, the jewel in its crown, is unlike any other. Yoshinori Kitase was director of the original game; on Remake and this year’s Rebirth he’s in the role of producer. “A producer from one of the other teams came to me and said, ‘You’ve kind of changed the bar and definition of what a remake should be’,” Kitase tells us. “’And that’s making it a lot harder on everyone…

“We have found ourselves at a loss as our competitors continue to produce new products, leaving us feeling having achieved nothing.” “It is a blessing that videogames are direct purchases. Never let it go.” ”You could bake spherical muffins that are ‘all top’ by just floating a ball of dough in the oven…” “I think mass layof fs should come with mandator y cuts in salar y for senior executives, not bonuses for ‘making the tough decisions’.” ARCADE WATCH Keeping an eye on the coin-op gaming scene Raw Thrills’ take on the mighty Godzilla solicits bonus points for originality by asking players to sit with their backs to the screen. It’s not as unusual as it first appears, though: this is a VR game viewed from within a headset, and…

Any graduate student in linguistic or literary studies looking for a neglected corner of prosaic endeavour on which to work could do worse than embark on an analysis of the humble manual. A washingmachine manual; a hi-fi manual; a videogame manual. The primary purpose of a manual, of course, is to convey practical information, but the best of them do far more than that. The higher purpose of any manual, really, is to employ literary and visual devices to thrill the user before they even experience the product. This is true whether it’s a manual for a Sony MiniDisc recorder, a hi-tech coffee machine, or a videogame. You can ignore it and dive right in, but aficionados prefer to delay the gratification, and experience an extra kind of gratification in…

Rules, they say, are made to be broken. And so, for one issue only, we’re bucking tradition by turning our attention not to the games featured within this section but one obvious absentee. We’re talking about Palworld, the (at time of writing) 19-million-selling phenomenon whose Early Access launch managed to spark some of the most depressing discourse in living memory. Until the arrival of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, at least. Some declared it a brazen Pokémon ripoff, with claims of plagiarism and generative AI use supported and debunked. Others were overly keen to praise this plucky upstart – which, suspiciously familiar creature designs aside, isn’t much like Pokémon at all, but rather a robust sur vival game which just happens to contain creatures to battle, capture and train.…

Developer René Rother Publisher Format Devolver Digital PC Origin Germany Release 2024 The first time you lay eyes on Children Of The Sun is something of a Rorschach test. Peering through the scope of the provided rifle, marking guards and tracing the patterns of their patrols, you might identify the outline of a Hitman, Sniper Elite or Far Cry. The stark lighting and lurid colours could equally remind you of Superhot, Killer7 or ’70s giallo movies. But after a couple of hours with it, we find ourselves settling on a rather more unexpected resemblance: to billiards, snooker or pool. The movement of your avatar – a young woman who has escaped a cult, armed with the hunting skills and telekinetic powers it bestowed upon her – is fixed to a…

Developer Franek, Max Cahill, Bibiki, Fáyer Publisher Panic Format PC Origin Australia, Mexico, Poland, Spain Release TBA 2024 At some point, we all reach that age when our home no longer holds the appeal it once did. The daily routines of village life have become boring to the ambitious Itzae; she’s even grown tired of hunting and sparring with her peers. So when her uncle offers her the opportunity to complete her warrior trials, she seizes the chance. After two successful skirmishes, when the third and final trial comes along, he asks her simply to observe two other fighters. Itzae’s hackles rise; she hasn’t been training all this time just to watch. Impulsively leaping into the fray, she expects her uncle’s praise after defeating both opponents – but instead he’s…

Crammed into a computer shop in Rotterdam, Benjamin van Hemert waits anxiously. It’s February 2017, and over a hundred people have arrived for a launch party, celebrating the culmination of six months’ work on a game design course. Van Hemert and his team are all still students, but they’re proud of what they made and are keen to put it out into the world – and specifically onto Steam. The team have opted for a free release, in the hope that the low barrier to entry will help net them the 1,000 downloads needed for a passing grade. Less than two hours later, Van Hemert’s mind has been blown – We Were Here has already racked up seven times their target. “That’s when I started feeling, OK, maybe I should’ve…

What is a Yakuza game without yakuza? That’s the dilemma facing RGG Studio after the events of Yakuza: Like A Dragon, in which protagonist Ichiban Kasuga aided the dissolution of the warring Omi Alliance and Tojo Clan. Bad news for sellers of cheap suits, great news for cleaners paid to pick teeth from Kamurocho’s gutters. More noticeably, Yakuza was dropped from the series’ subsequent western titles. Its replacement, Like A Dragon, is both the series’ traditional Japanese label and the life philosophy by which all its heroes live (one which still hinges on cheap suits and shattered molars). But it also gives the creators a chance to interrogate an idea rarely explored in RPGs: what happens to heroes after they save the world? Ichiban and his schlubby companions are no…

Acquiring the inevitable double-jump ability in a Metroidvania these days tends to feel simultaneously reassuring and disappointing. Yes, it’s a simple, reliable technique that instantly opens tracts of the map for exploration, but it’s also a mark of conventional design. It’s to the credit of Hadoque, then, that it presents a guileful solution in Ultros, introducing that extra leap as expected, then at intervals taking it away again. This simple piece of tinkering suggests the developer knows both what makes a Metroidvania tick and that the genre needs freshening up. But it’s merely the beginning. Few would guess from that gesture alone quite how deep Ultros’s subversive roots spread. Indeed, the truth of Ultros takes time to emerge. On first impression, while it would be trite to describe it as…

Any RPG is typically only as good as the company you keep in it. In Granblue Fantasy:Relink, you’re spoilt for choice. Starting with six characters, and with a dozen to unlock, your options might amount to a fraction of the full roster in the mobile title from which this has spun. But when each is drawn with a painterly aesthetic faithful to its original art, and animated with the panache of a characteraction game, it feels like a generous selection. Even as you’re fighting goblins, dragons or mighty warriors, this airborne archipelago is a pleasant place to be alongside your fellow skyfarers, journeying aboard the Grandcypher (all the more so without the interruption of gacha pulls). Since this is a standalone tale set in a previously unexplored sky kingdom, newcomers…