Innehållsförteckning för August 2024 från Edge

It’s been a while since Microsoft somehow managed to steer the Xbox bus as if Rishi Sunak was behind the wheel by deciding to shut down Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin, and the shock has dissipated a bit, even if most of the pain hasn’t. We’re left with a lot of questions. We’re told, for example, that Microsoft is still looking to fatten its roster by buying up even more developers, but which studio owner would even entertain such an approach at this point? How much damage has been done to the company’s reputation within the industry? And what on Earth does a Microsoft-owned game studio have to do in order to survive in 2024? What do Microsoft’s flailing actions say about Game Pass? Is the Great Videogame Subscription Experiment…

Game NBA Superstars Manufacturer Raw Thrills As an unofficial followup to the legendary NBA Jam, NBA Superstars is one of the most traditional-feeling new coin-ops we’ve seen in an age. Supporting up to four players, with action displayed on a 75” screen, the game is laser-focused on what made the original edition such a smash on so many platforms during the 1990s. That means fast-paced, foul-friendly hoops between two teams of three, drawing from a roster of 120 players across 30 teams, including even the highest-profile names in the sport, such as Stephen Curry and LeBron James. Crucially, NBA Jam commentator Tim Kitzrow has been drafted in for audio duties, while staff from the original team at Midway have been involved with the production at developer Play Mechanix. And of…

Long-distance Nazi-faceshooting might be a pleasure exclusive to the modern age, but the roots of the military-entertainment complex go back further than we might suppose. Of course there is the example of chess, a symbolic wargame, skill in which was required of Renaissance princes and generals. But the symbiosis between games and war really began in earnest with the Prussian tradition of kriegsspiel, or wargaming. This is explained in a fascinating new book by the neuroscientist Kelly Clancy, Playing With Reality: How Games Shape Our World, which thankfully is not a hymn to ‘gamification’ but about the cultural and political uses to which games, and thinking about games, have been put throughout history. In the late 18th century, the German mathematician Johann Hellwig created a version of chess that was…

If you follow the game industry, sometimes it’s hard to view the future with much optimism. Between January and May, there have been more than 10,000 layoffs, already trumping last year’s tally. The media sphere is shrinking, too, with sites shutting down and others being bought out, prompting further layoffs. Rising budgets at the top end are leading to dwindling profits, forcing publishers toward ever-safer bets or more exploitative monetisation. And discoverability is an ongoing problem for smaller teams, with more games than ever but fewer outlets to cover them. Yet there are always signs of hope – and often it’s the games themselves that provide them. Kaizen Game Works’ Promise Mascot Agency, a game in which you run the eponymous organisation from a rundown former love hotel (while soliciting…

What are the benefits of hand-drawn animation for a game such as this? I try to set the animation style in the game, and what I try to do is put my style in the gameplay. That’s why Ikumi contacted me – she wanted something that’s not realistic. My animations, they’re quite exaggerated, not only for creatures, but also for humanoid characters. There are a lot of studios that still use keyframe animation, but some will use motion capture and tweak it a little bit to exaggerate timing. We don’t want to limit ourselves or our creativity, so I prefer to directly start with handkey animation. Is each yokai hunter given their own set of specific, unique animations? And what sort of movesets should we be expecting? We are still defining…

STILL PLAYING/NEAR MISSES Animal Well PC With the majority of reviewers having drifted away from the dedicated Discord channel, we feel a gentle yearning to be back among them once more, sharing discoveries (both meaningful and meaningless) and enjoying the various attempts to identify some of the less obvious creatures: to us, the timid groundhog will forever be known as ‘cave wolf’. One particularly tricky bit of platforming later and the third layer’s reward – and it’s a good one – is duly obtained. Then, suddenly, the main Discord happens across another cipher, and the most devoted few return to discuss theories. Just when we thought we were out… Deep Beyond PC This cheap and cheerful diving-themed firstperson adventure baits us in with its unusual aesthetic (not dissimilar to squirrel-surveillance…

Rob McLachlan entered The Chinese Room in 2018, carrying a healthy portfolio of horror game design, including the Silent Hill series (Origins and Shattered Memories) and the highly acclaimed Alien: Isolation. Initially joining the team that created action platformer Little Orpheus, he then stepped up to the role of lead designer for Still Wakes The Deep. Here, he discusses finding the balance between horror, realism and the games of The Chinese Room’s past. What were the crucial lessons you learned from your previous experiences with horror games in terms of what makes them effective? Horror is both a subjective and objective thing, and it also depends on your stage in life and your life experiences. There are things that other people find horrific, but may not interest me as someone…

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We’ve dealt with some sweaty interviews in our time – awkward questions, tiny conference rooms, and so on – but never before have we been offered a towel to mop our brow partway through asking a question. Here, though, it’s a sign that Quell is doing its job properly. We’ve just played a demo of its debut game, Shardfall, a PC/Mac firstperson Roguelike mixing exploration and melee combat, played using Quell’s Impact peripherals, a collection of motion controllers, body sensors and resistance bands. The result is the most intense workout we’ve had playing any game. It’s no great surprise, then, to hear that Quell – founded by four friends, none of whom with any prior experience working in videogames – began with the question of fitness. “Everyone knows they should…

BOOK Everything To Play For bit.ly/dideogames Subtitled How Videogames Are Changing The World, Marijam Didžgalvyte’s impassioned, fiercely intelligent, proudly left-wing tome has the quality of a manifesto. Which is to say that How Videogames Might Change The World would perhaps be more accurate. Didžgalvyte’s early promise to interrogate “this boundless, fascinating, grotesque industry” is an invitation to strap in, as she outlines her formative experiences with the medium before briskly, approachably outlining what games and the surrounding culture are getting right and wrong. Pertinent points about misogyny, the industry’s environmental impact, how it remains snagged in the machinery of capitalism and more are made, while the author notes that games are an inefficient way to make a political statement. You would struggle to say the same of this. WEBSITE Simogo…

With hindsight, it was inevitable that I’d reach the Backrooms eventually. As per the original coining, in a 2019 4Chan thread, this is where you end up if you “noclip out of reality in the wrong areas”. Taking the form of mundane, anonymous ‘liminal spaces’ – passed through but never truly inhabited by humans – Backrooms are made creepy by the absence of life, and by the impossibility of their dimensions, familiar scenery cut and pasted, Hanna-Barbera-style, into infinity. We’ve touched on the idea of imagined realities that exist alongside our own in this column already, and I should note that ‘liminality’ was the theme of the Now Play This event discussed in E398. (As I say, inevitable.) But still Backrooms managed to remain out of view even as they…

Developer/publisher Kaizen Game Works Format PC Origin UK, Japan Origin Release 2025 Often, the easiest way to describe a game is to compare it to others: if you liked X, then you’ll love Y, and so forth. For Kaizen Game Works’ followup to Paradise Killer, that’s no easy task – even after playing it for several hours. It certainly possesses the freewheeling, experimental spirit of a game from the PS2 or even early PS3 eras. When, afterwards, we talk to creative director Oli Clarke Smith, he says he’s recently been drawn to “the kind of PS2 game where you just hang out and do stuff” – rattling off titles such as Irem’s Disaster Report and Steambot Chronicles, along with Acquire games such as Way Of The Samurai. While playing, we make…

Developer Don Yasa Crew Publisher Kakehashi Games Format PC Origin Japan Release Q3 Kakehashi Games might be the biggest indie publisher you’ve never heard of. For the past decade it has provided localisation services, marketing and publishing support to western developers seeking to bring their games to Japanese audiences. In recent years it’s worked on Neon White, Hindsight, Storyteller and Cocoon for Annapurna Interactive alone, and it has a strong partnership with Devolver Digital, having delivered games such as The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, Gunbrella and The Talos Principle 2 to more adventurous players in its homeland. Now Kakehashi is seeking to take Japanese indies in the other direction, and it’s not unfair to say that one of its first projects owes more than a small debt to one Devolver favourite. You’ve probably…

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What are the challenges of writing a protagonist described as a “trashfire in human form”? When we decided that everyone Jala was going to battle with was going to be an ex, at that point you kind of have to be a bit of a trashfire to have six exes who hate you by the age of 22 [laughs]. But it was important that both parties had wrongs on either side, or it would start to feel really one-sided and potentially uncomfortable or abusive. Another running theme seems to be conflict between cultural and national identities. Why was that important to you personally? Time Magazine once called me British-Indian, and I was like, thank you, but I much prefer to be called Indian! [Laughs.] That’s a plot point at the end of…

Do more realistic graphics really make for more immersive games? True, a certain level of fidelity can help you more fully connect with a videogame world, but it’s seldom the whole story. The Chinese Room’s Still Wakes The Deep draws from archive documentaries for its convincing recreation of a 1970s oil rig, but it does at least as much with its groaning, creaking sound design – and especially its dialogue – to get under our skin. The volley of profanities let out by Caz McLeary when under threat makes him a more credible lead than the sort of tension-killing wisecracks that emerge from many of his contemporaries. On the subject of gruelling (and spectacular) ordeals, the binaural audio of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II places you inside the head of its…

At 72, Argentinian musician Gustavo Santaolalla can look across a remarkably varied career, from forming his first band at the age of 17 to producing alternative Latin music, then coming to prominence with his work in film, winning the Academy Award for Best Original Score with both 2005’s Brokeback Mountain and 2006’s Babel. To many, though, he is better known for his score for The Last Of Us, its sequel, and the HBO TV adaptation. Here, during a trip to the UK to perform the series’ music in concert, he tells us how he approaches his work. What was your experience with videogames prior to The Last Of Us? I’m a terrible gamer, but I’ve always enjoyed watching people play. I love watching the guys in my band, Bajofondo, playing…

Frankly nightmarish Microsoft/Bethesda special “What’s the point of working your ass off, succeeding at creating a game that everyone loves and is financially successful, only to get fucking vaporised to juice some stocks?”Cyan’s Harrison Pink has a question to add to our list “Closing Arkane Austin is an act of vandalism, ring-barking a decade-sold tree of game design knowledge.”Narrative designer Katharine Neil surveys Microsoft’s trail of destruction ”Making game studios publicly traded companies is the worst idea to ever happen to videogames.”Art director Lisette Titre-Montgomery picks one option from a crowded field “Microsoft’s grand strategy was to ‘spend PlayStation out of business’. Sadly they now seem to have spent the entire videogame business out of business.”Indie dev Jörg Tittel gets to the agonising detail: Microsoft bought studios to block competition…

Issue 398 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 Laser eyes It’s fantastic to read that teenagers such as Callum Muir are still discovering Edge – and for the same reason I got into it 25 years ago! Ironically, though, I’m here to defend the hype. While I’d rather play Capcom Vs SNK 2 or Fantasy Strike, the fighting games I would currently recommend are Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8, simply because that’s where the competition is at. Why are they so popular? Surely the story modes help, but I like to believe it has a lot to do with marketing. The truth is, it’s the casuals that determine which fighting games are the…

So I was working on a game today which simulates a storyworld with multiple characters. They have agendas, interests and timetables. They intersect and affect each other. (The game’s holding page on Steam, by the way, is entitled Miss Mulligatawney’s School For Promising Girls.) We’re using code from 2021’s Overboard!, which we’ve polished from a hacky Rube Goldberg machine mess into a pretty good system for efficiently railing, derailing and colliding motivated NPCs. But the results are, sadly, not instantaneously magical. It’s like playing the 1980s text adventure The Hobbit: a panel of text pops up to say “Gandalf wanders in, chewing his beard” until a second panel informs you that he has muttered something and gone away. Sure, it’s reassuring to see the escapement tick, but, as with all…

Developer Blue Manchu Publisher Maximum Entertainment Format PC, PS5, Switch, Xbox Series Origin Release Australia Origin Release 2024 Don’t let the Bastards trip you up. Blue Manchu’s latest game might be another firstperson shooter-strategy hybrid with a smattering of Roguelike elements and sharp-edged cartoon visuals, but it’s far from a simple cowboys-and-aliens reskin of Void Bastards. Not that we’d baulk at such an idea. As creative director Ben Lee tells it, though, that’s just not in the studio’s nature. “Historically, our first game was Card Hunter, our second game was Void Bastards,” he says. “There was almost nothing in common with those, apart from the people working on them.” For the third game, a similarly huge leap was considered, Lee adds: “A lot of team members had different ideas. I don’t remember…

Developer/publisher Pounce Light Format PC Origin Sweden Release Q3 Construction in videogames often feels like making a model; at its best, digital building evokes the satisfaction of snapping together a Lego set. Creating bucolic dioramas in Tiny Glade, however, feels closer to painting – but using magic brushes that read your intent and embellish your strokes. Trace a path with your mouse pointer and the grass parts to let it through; keep going as you approach a wall and an arch forms, so the path can continue around the back. We reach for another brush, and dab patches of purple and white flowers into existence as if we were Bob Ross. Indeed, the game’s mellow ambience is as soothing as the late painter’s soft-spoken words of encouragement to his viewers. Tiny…

When we visited Ikumi Nakamura in E394, it was just prior to her appearance to officially announce Kemuri at the Game Awards in Los Angeles, a high-profile event of a similar stature to the one that catapulted her into the public limelight at Bethesda’s E3 presentation in 2019. A lot changed between those two appearances. No longer under a big publisher’s yoke, today she is her own boss at Unseen Inc. While the studio is based in Tokyo, its staff, up from 50 to 60 people since we previously visited, are located across the globe. The crossregion, remote-driven approach to game development is the picture of modernity, but the group’s debut project sees Nakamura looking into the past. Kemuri is an action game combining the kind of freewheeling urban parkour traversal…

When you’re young, reality needn’t interfere with your dreams. So it was for Mateusz Makowiec and Michał Tatka when they met at school in 1999 and began making games together, at the age of 15. Their first project of substance – working with another friend, Mariusz Sajak – was an RTS. “We thought we could compete with Age Of Empires, just the three of us,” Makowiec recalls. But reality soon bit. “After two years, we realised we had like five per cent of Age Of Empires,” Tatka says, “and it’s really not possible to compete with big studios.” It’s a realisation that, in many ways, has defined the story of Teyon ever since. The studio was founded in Krakow in 2006 by Tatka (CEO), Makowiec (COO), Sajak (VP) and two…

Developer The Chinese Room Publisher Secret Mode Format PC (tested), PS5, Xbox Series Release June 18 Leaving the subtitles settings on their default ‘English’, we quickly discover that they apply a filter to the script. As Glaswegian protagonist Caz McLeary ponders how much he misses his ‘weans’ on the mainland, for instance, the text replaces the word with ‘kids’. Our first instinct is that this feels heavy-handed, sucking flavour from speech that strives to manifest a specific sense of place and time. Yet we soon realise that it’s not only optional (you can select a one-to-one transcript instead) but also likely essential for those less familiar with the game’s Caledonian dialects. It’s one of a few areas, in fact, where Still Wakes The Deep makes small compromises so that it…