Innehållsförteckning för November 2024 från Edge

If you offered a game developer of a certain age the choice of any classic movie property as the basis for their new game – with zero restrictions on budget or schedule – how many might land on Indiana Jones? On the face of it, Lucasfilm’s series has everything we need for a sure-fire videogame smash. There’s travel to exotic locations, where ancient secrets await discovery. An endless supply of bad guys, of course, that can be punched or cut down with volleys of lead, with some outliers that could easily be repurposed as bosses. There are vehicle chases by the hangar-load, and traversal by road, sea and air. Puzzle-like diversions provide respite from the exhilarating action elsewhere and provide a little extra depth, while a bundle of likeable companions…

Game Lemmings Manufacturer Data East, TRC If you’ve never heard of Data East’s arcade version of Lemmings, that’s no surprise, since it never saw the light of day. Originally coded in 1991 at DMA Design, home of so many other versions of the game, it was forgotten about until recently, when Lemmings creator Mike Dailly dug out a prototype PCB and shared it with The Retro Collective in Stroud, UK. Then the fun began. Most arcade prototypes have their ROMs dumped and archived, but in this case the Retro Collective team designed and built a cabinet from scratch in an attempt to realise what the game might have looked like had it actually made it into production. The result – a genuine one-of-a-kind treasure – is now on display at…

What goes into a videogame? Creativity, intellect, art, humour – sure, but also exploitation, injustice and despair. Many of the so-called ‘rare earth’ minerals used in modern electronics – including game consoles – are mined under appalling conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Consoles and peripherals are then built by Chinese megacorps such as Foxconn, notorious for treating their workers poorly. Games themselves are developed by relatively privileged people in the rich world, but their employers are hostile to labour unions and they are routinely expected to work insane hours to hit the release deadline for Come To Honor: Final Headshot 11. It doesn’t have to be this way, Marijam Did proposes in her passionately argued new book, Everything To Play For. The author might be shaky on her…

You can never recreate something, not truly, no matter how faithful you are to the original. By definition, a recreation enters a world in which an original already exists, with everything that it’s influenced and the baggage of expectation. The more iconic the original, the heavier the baggage. It’s with such thoughts that we approach a pair of high-profile Konami remakes, especially Silent Hill 2, since much of the reverence for the 2001 sequel feels tied to a certain time and technology and conception of survival horror, even the rough edges that produced its uniquely serrated texture. In terms of atmosphere, our induction to the opening hours suggests Bloober Team has got a lot right. Whether it can balance that with the larger appetites of modern players, though, and resist…

Developer Bloober Team Publisher Konami Format PC, PS5 Origin Poland Release October 8 Over the past two decades, the reputation of Konami’s cult-hit horror has only grown, spread by wistful critics, by word of mouth and, latterly, by a handful of influential devotees on YouTube. As the game itself passes into myth, its opening monologue – a reading of the letter that draws James Sunderland to the town of Silent Hill – has taken on the quality of a mantra. “In my restless dreams, I see that town,” Salóme Gunnarsdóttir’s Mary intones, like vocals sung along to Akira Yamaoka’s wistful score. “You promised you’d take me there again someday.” Gunnarsdóttir (the third actor to play the role – the original cast was controversially replaced for 2012’s HD Collection) lends the lines a fresh naturalism. But,…

“We didn’t just pick a random colour,” Proulx says of Splitgate 2’s vivid palette. “Every shooter kind of looks the same. Dark. Grey. The pinkish-red conveys that fun, carefree vibe that we’re going for, but also it stands out, right? You don’t see a lot of shooter games that are that bold in their colour choices. And it’s a very recognisable brand versus Splitgate 1.” That game’s art direction, he admits, was very much the product of the simple formula “Halo meets Portal” – something 1047 is trying to move away from in the sequel. “We’re true to the gunplay of Splitgate 1, but we’re really trying to carve out and head in our own direction.”…

Developer/publisher Minskworks Format PC Origin UK Release TBA Greg Pryjmachuk is worrying. “It feels like culture isn’t moving at the minute,” says the MinskWorks founder. “All the good old music is back because of TikTok. Movies don’t have the DVD market any more so everyone’s banking on big numbers. And games are just remastering stuff because it’s easy, safe money. To an extent… we’re doing that as well.” It’s unlikely anyone would look at Honcho, a game about becoming a vending-machine tycoon during the economic boom of 1980s Japan, and see a quick cash grab. But it was a project born more from pragmatism than creativity – harking back to the studio’s cult-classic debut, Jalopy. “We wanted to revisit old ground,” Pryjmachuk says. “But I didn’t want to just do…

The developers seem fairly certain that there’s an MMORPG playerbase ready for the idea of skipping the levelling-up grind, with senior staff familiar with community chat both as players and creators. “A lot of people have been playing these games, like us, for 20 years now, [and] it’s a constant conversation,” Bode says. Fellowship may be a case of supply meeting demand, then, and perhaps at a good time, he adds, as these conversations have been coming to a head for a while. Yet it’s still an unknown of sorts, potentially showing players whether what they’ve been discussing is really what they want after all. Bode, for one, is keen to find out. “We’re excited to see if they agree with what we’re doing.”…

For longterm players of Troy Baker blockbusters, it’s been eerie to hear his familiar inflections turned towards a spot-on impersonation of Harrison Ford’s performance. The team made time for extensive preparation before their mocap shoots, “to make sure that we nail down the tone and feel of Indy’s character,” says Tordsson-Björk. “Troy’s feedback during these sessions has been extremely helpful, since he is the one who is going to channel the same Indy we know and love. He’s also incredibly invested in the character and has done tons of research for it. It’s been a help for me to see him bring Indy to life, as I’ve been able to use that when writing, imagining hearing Troy say the lines and using that as my guide.”…

80 DAYS Developer/publisher Inkle Format Android, iOS, PC, Switch Release 2014 SUNLESS SEA Developer/publisher Failbetter Games Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release 2015 HORIZON: ZERO DAWN Developer Guerrilla Games Publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment Format PS4 Release 2017 THIS WAR OF MINE: STORIES – THE LAST BROADCAST Developer/publisher 11 Bit Studios Format Android, iOS, PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release 2018 SUNLESS SKIES Developer/publisher Failbetter Games Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release 2019 FALCON AGE Developer/publisher Outerloop Games Format PC, PSVR, Quest, Switch Release 2019 SABLE Developer Shedworks Publisher Raw Fury Format PC, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release 2021 THIRSTY SUITORS Developer Outerloop Games Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release 2023 That so many developers still contract out their games’ writing…

Mark Webley, co-founder of Two Point Studios, is clear: “It was Gary’s brainchild, really.” Webley and Gary Carr had worked together on Theme Hospital at Bullfrog Productions in the 1990s, and both had gone on to roles at Lionhead, working on games including Fable and The Movies. By 2013, however, Webley had become disillusioned following Lionhead’s change of focus under new owner Microsoft, which saw the studio put to work on Kinect games and live-service productions. “I’d kind of had enough of games,” he recalls, “because I had nothing to do with making games any more. It was just an exec job.” Webley quit the industry, while Carr found himself in charge of an incubation department within Lionhead. “I had a little team of no more than about eight people…

Developer/publisher Mossmouth Format PC Release September 18 The marketing slogan for LX Systems (later UFO Soft), as relayed during UFO 50’s bootup screen: “Play Forever”. And honestly? We rather suspect you could. Where most real retro compilations exist as a sampling platter, dipped into just long enough to tickle a dormant memory or satiate some old curiosity, the games of this fictional compilation manage to hold us in their grip for days, transfixed until the wee hours. That’s time enough to get to grips with all 50 games in the collection, but not nearly enough to turn every one of their cartridge icons golden, let alone cherry-red. And we haven’t even touched multiplayer – this one package includes more opportunities for couch play than we usually see in the space…

When Humble Games laid off 36 employees this July, amid the general sense of unease and distaste was something more specific: déjà vu. Humble’s downsizing came just days after the launch of its latest game, Bo: Path Of The Teal Lotus, a situation painfully reminiscent of Embracer’s closure of Versus Evil late last year, which left Broken Roads developer Drop Bear Bytes without a publisher weeks before its planned release. Meanwhile, Humble owner Ziff Davis labelling the move as “restructuring” brought to mind the fate of the Take Two-owned Private Division, which remains in flux after most of its employees were laid off in April. It hasn’t been an especially good few months for indie game publishing, then. But is the situation completely – as Mike Rose, founder of publisher…

BOOK Perfect Organism bit.ly/alien-kelly When you really love something, as far as sometime Edge contributor Andy Kelly is concerned, you write a whole book about it. This companion to Creative Assembly’s indelible survival horror – a director’s commentary but written by a superfan, as Kelly puts it – oozes with enthusiasm. It’s also a comprehensive exploration, revisiting Isolation’s development background and the history of the Alien series in games before getting stuck into a mission-by-mission analysis. As a fan book, it’s short on original quotes and anecdotes, and some of the observations may match your own, but Kelly clearly knows his xenomorphs, drawing in trivia from the wider Alien universe and beyond as he recounts each scene. Above all else, Perfect Organism is testament to the lasting passion a game…

Ever since Nintendo announced the film adaptation of Legend Of Zelda, I – like most right-thinking people – have been dead against the idea. More than the iconography, certainly more than the story, each of those games at its best is a new box of toys shipped over from Kyoto. Zelda is so natively a thing of play that it’d be like adapting… well, Hollywood’s post-Barbie gold rush has made it rather hard to find an appropriately hyperbolic analogy (an Uno movie, really?), so let’s just say: like adapting something that should not be adapted. Or so I thought. Please notify Shigeru Miyamoto, and everyone in Hollywood, that I have changed my stance. There can be a Legend Of Zelda film, as long as it’s directed by Mike Cheslik. Cheslik’s…

Developer Warhorse Interactive Publisher Plaion, Deep Silver Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Czechia Release February 18 As Freddie Mercury might have put it, given the chance: is this the real life of central Europeans circa 1400, or is this just fantasy? Historical accuracy has been the beating heart of Kingdom Come: Deliverance since its original 2018 release, and although questions were rightly raised about the ethnic composition of that game’s population, nobody cast doubt on developer Warhorse’s ability to conjure a place from the farthest reaches of time and paint it as vividly as the medium’s ever seen. That remains the most captivating element of this sequel, though it’s joined by a raft of refinements. The most surprising of which, given the dour setting, is comedy. But even setting aside the laughs, Kingdom Come:…

While the streets of Silent Hill are instantly recognisable, things start to change once you’re indoors. Not least because you can now poke into more of the buildings – one reason, presumably, for those extended fetch quests. But even familiar locations such as the Wood Side Apartments have been reworked, growing new floors, many initially blocked off by obstacles. Some of these are more convincing than others: we spend far too long trying to find a way over a shinheight stack of paint cans on a fire escape before accepting it’s an impasse. To fully explore this place, you’ll need to exit into the courtyard and re-enter the building from its far side – a surefire way of disorienting the player, though we can’t be sure the effect is intentional.…

Developer/publisher Konami Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Japan Release TBA Konami is very much in its greatest-hits reissuing era. The past few years in its release schedule have been dominated by compilations of old games (Castlevania, MGS, Contra, TMNT), but it’s now finally ready to do something new with these series. Well, new-ish. Where Silent Hill 2 is a remake very much in the mould of what Capcom has been doing with Resident Evil, if perhaps a little more conservative in its changes, our time with Delta confirms this is more strictly a remaster – the exact same experience, camouflaged as a modern game. It is, however, an awfully convincing disguise. Its Unreal Engine 5-powered jungle is a marvel, with volumetric god rays breaking through the jungle canopy, while…

It may be set on a different continent, but Honcho’s core loop is inspired by Euro Truck Simulator. In the game’s earliest stages, you’ll take delivery jobs and be rewarded with cash. “You want to feel like you’re the young upstarts struggling for fuel and parts,” Pryjmachuk says. Once you’ve gathered enough money, you’ll start to purchase property, in which you can install your own vending machines. Finally, in the very late game, you’ll start to automate these tasks. “With Jalopy, it was only ever the early game,” Pryjmachuk says. “With Honcho, we’re making sure we have an endgame loop that offers a lot of satisfaction. Eventually you’ll have a fleet of drivers and trucks, and use your money to buy unique upgrades to the cars. Like a bored old…

Steven Spielberg once told the New York Times that Raiders Of The Lost Ark was a James Bond film without the hardware. It’s a description that resonates with Tordsson-Björk. “Well, they are both experts in what they do, right? Indy is an expert archaeologist, Bond is the expert spy – they both save the world in their own ways.” Where Bond has his gadgets, Indy only has his academic knowledge, whip and revolver. “They’re both savvy and charming as hell, but Indy can be a bit more goofy and grumpy,” Tordsson-Björk says. “And they’re both superheroes without superpowers, sometimes stumbling through high-stakes situations, surviving through sheer luck.” (In the same 1981 interview, Spielberg also said that he shares his character’s fear of snakes, which didn’t stop him assembling 6,000 live…

Did you ever consider making the game without including Harrison Ford’s likeness, perhaps making him more like Troy Baker, who provides the character’s voice? Jerk Gustafsson No, Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones, and his portrayal of the character that the world fell in love with is the character we wanted to build our story around – and for players to step into the shoes of – in The Great Circle. How have you modelled Ford’s likeness from the 1980s? John Jennings It was important for us that we recreated Indy as he appeared around the time of his first screen adventure. For most of the main cast we used 3D scanning techniques, which are commonly used in videogames, but obviously 3D scans of Harrison from the early 1980s don’t exist,…

STILL PLAYING/NEAR MISSES Spelunky 2 PC While waiting for UFO 50, we pick up a years-long conversation with one of its makers’ other games and can’t help but identify a commonality in the way enemies in both bounce around the screen: perfectly logical yet utterly maddening. Which, taking our own lesson across the page, probably means that Derek Yu had nothing to do with those bits of UFO 50. I Am Your Beast PC With its release date pushed back at the last minute, our early review code turned out to be not quite the final version, but that hasn’t stopped us enjoying Strange Scaffold’s hectic FPS. As ex-COI agent Harding, you really, really don’t want to take that one last job, and the more your bosses send agency goons…

Definitions are essential to LOK, so let’s begin with one. LOK is a puzzle book – a lovely little 104-page spiral-bound A6 thing first released by Slovenian multihyphenate artist Blaž Urban Gracar in 2022. But ‘LOK’ is also a magic word – the first you encounter within that book’s gridded puzzles of letters and blank spaces. Connect its letters all in a row, in order, and something happens. But discovering things for yourself is also essential to LOK. Rather than attempt to explain how it works any further, we’ll instead direct you to the facing page, where you’ll find five bespoke puzzles Gracar has created for Edge. While four are entirely brand-new, the final puzzle has technically been ported from screen to paper. Because this word now has yet another…

“I used all the tools available in the market in order to organise the cables. Also… it’s not only to play – it’s like a museum.”With 444 hooked up, Ibrahim Al-Nasser earns a Guinness record for the most consoles connected to a single TV. (No wonder he can only afford one telly – imagine how much all that hardware cost.) “My movies were rated R and made more money than this.”The Borderlands movie’s paltry $8.8m opening doesn’t impress genre warhorse Uwe Boll ”So excited that videogame adaptations are not good again. Nature is healing.”Sam Barlow can rest easy now that order is restored “Man, I would love to build a studio… where creatives can work and thrive at a reasonable pace instead of needing to fuel an insatiable lust for…

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 Platform games Shawn Layden, as quoted in E400’s Soundbytes, posits a reality – or perhaps a future – in which there is only “one standard home console technology”, and positions the much-touted platform war as an explicit hindrance to the industry. I have some thoughts. There is certainly merit in the claim that far too much attention is shone on the two platforms (Xbox and PlayStation, assuming Nintendo fits into its own niche) and their efforts in one-upmanship: the Xbox One and its failings perhaps still stand as the best single example of this. The argument that exclusives are inherently detrimental to the consumer experience is also a…

So I was working on a game today which includes that most old-fashioned of systems: morality. A staple of RPGs from the early medieval times, a morality system allows you to define your character using binary choices with easily grokkable moral values. Will you murder the leprous peasant or take him to hospital? Will you feed the cow to the starving child, or feed the child to the starving cow? Reform or Green? The problem is, given a range of obvious moral binaries, players feel compelled to choose good options, against their own best interests and even against what’s interesting. Such binaries must be clear to feel fair, but in being clear they actively remove choice. (This is why more modern versions of this idea tend toward nihilism, offering a…

Historical recreations of Bohemia on this scale might be a rarity, but Czechia itself makes regular appearances in games. Several racing series have recreated the brilliant Brno circuit in the country’s southeast, including MotoGP and TOCA. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided treated us to a particularly air-vent-filled depiction of near-future Prague. The lesser known of the Vampire: The Masquerade series, Redemption, also visits Prague, this time in the 12th century. Least likely to get a mention from Prague’s tourism board is the improbably gory Soldier Of Fortune II: Double Helix and its opening mission, while the surrealist nightmare gong must go to Spytihnev’s HROT, set in an alt-history Czechia where an unspecified disaster in 1986 turned the nation into an incredibly satisfying corridor shooter.…

Developer/publisher 1047 Games Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin US Release 2025 Don’t be fooled by the hot-pink gloss. The developers of Splitgate’s successor may have slapped on some colour and reimagined it as a class-based shooter, with a reveal trailer that foregrounds three pinup heroes, but at heart Splitgate 2 is very much of the old school. The same was true of its viral-smash predecessor, which not only married Halo with Portal but did so while delivering the neat loadouts, tight maps and fast, meaty gunplay that caused so many of us to imprint on this genre in the first place. Unlike many of its contemporaries, the first Splitgate was delightfully indifferent to how much time you had to spare it. Yes, your K:D ratio would benefit from a bit…

“Based on Metal Gear Solid 3.” These are the first words you see after starting a new game of Delta – rather an understatement, perhaps, but also highlighting Konami’s reluctance to use that number. (As for the choice of replacement, ‘Delta’ is very nearly a brilliantly clever replacement, given its triangular shape and the word’s geographical connotations. It’s just a shame that delta is the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet.) The most obvious conclusion, surely, is that Konami plans this as the beginning of a series of remakes. Which would make sense narratively speaking – it’s the first game in the timeline – but if it does intend to follow this chronology, won’t the mechanics of the first MGS seem rather primitive after this and Phantom Pain?…

Developer Chief Rebel Publisher Arc Games Format PC Origin Sweden Release TBA Describing Fellowship entails a blocky mouthful of initialisms – ARPG, MOBA, MMORPG – so it’s no surprise that developer Chief Rebel is hoping that its own neologism, MODA, takes root, if only to save time. And as this ‘multiplayer online dungeon adventure’ pulls together genres, the new Stockholm studio has also pulled together a team with illustrious CVs, including staff who’ve lent their talents to World Of Warcraft, Diablo IV, Helldivers and The Division. When it comes to online games, they should certainly know a thing or two. So what is a MODA? The aim, as far as Fellowship’s leads are concerned, is to get to their favourite part of an MMORPG, the post-game co-op dungeon experience, right…

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What did the core MachineGames team learn from its first breakout project, The Chronicles Of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay? “Attention to detail,” Tordsson-Björk says. “Even if it’s something as small as having a reason for someone writing something in a letter that is totally optional, not a major thing for the plot. All of these small things contribute to the player’s immersion into the game world. If I read something that is more of an aside, really, it should feel like I’m reading someone’s actual letter and not something that was planted there to expose parts of the backstory to the player. And I feel like that kind of attention to details is something that is part of the culture here at MachineGames.”…

Chants Of Sennaar is a game with a huge visual impact, and yet you didn’t produce concept art or sketches during preproduction. How did the design start to come together? It’s the fruit of a very small team. Thomas and I were in charge of the entire conception – writing, gameplay, art direction – and 90 per cent of the production. I was pretty much the game’s sole artist, and Thomas the sole developer. As a result, we hardly ever had to create documents, guidelines or concept art to convey our ideas to other collaborators. Everything went almost directly from our brains to the screen, with just the occasional sketch in between. In fact, the most well-documented part of the project was the gameplay aspect, on which we worked together,…

Does it matter who made a game? It’s a question critics have long asked, at least as far back as Barthes and Derrida – for a slightly different value of the c-word, admittedly. Recognising some of the names at work behind the scenes might provide some fresh insight into a work’s meaning, or it might just be a way of imposing an easy narrative. The answer is clearer in the cases of some of this month’s games than others. Tom Francis has never been shy of his fondness for defenestration, nor for XCOM and its kin, and Tactical Breach Wizards is built around both. In the new Famicom Detective Club and World Of Goo games, meanwhile, we’ve got developers returning to home turf after a long time, leaving us to…

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