Innehållsförteckning för September 2025 från Edge

RESIDENT EVIL REQUIEM Developer/publisher Capcom Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Release February 27 Even from our seat near the middle of the YouTube Theater, we can see Geoff Keighley’s devilish grin clearly as the Summer Game Fest host teases an announcement for Resident Evil… only for Capcom’s Jun Takeuchi to tell us to expect further announcements in the near future. If the wind has been taken out of attendees’ sails, though, it’s replenished during the show’s finale, as Keighley channels his inner Columbo to remind us about one last announcement. We meet FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft, assigned to investigate the outbreak of an unidentified disease at a derelict hotel, the same location where her mother was murdered almost a decade previously. As the camera zooms in on a broken gate…

Every work of art begins with a sheet of blank paper, and every sheet of blank paper offers one fundamental choice: portrait or landscape? For the past few generations, videogame developers have often chosen landscape, setting their adventures across sprawling maps that you can navigate as you choose, concentrating on the narrative or scattering to the distant hills just to see what might be hiding there. These are open-world games, and together we’ve spent millions of hours in places like this. We’ve collected Agility Orbs, stolen cars from strangers (and then backed over them), climbed towers to synchronise our viewpoints, and faced penalties for leaving the mission area – and really, could you judge us for that? Open-world games have showcased design at its most luxurious, extravagant and intoxicating. They’ve…

We tend to think of each new Mario Kart as an experiment, tweaking the variables in some new way. Motion controls, two-wheelers, dual drivers, gliders, anti-grav tracks: the most successful of these stick around, to become a permanent part of the formula. But laid out like that, don’t they seem like such small deviations? No wonder 8 Deluxe was able to package up practically every track from the series’ history. We don’t point this out to complain but rather to emphasise how, when the essentials are carved into our synapses by repetition, even a minor change is felt keenly. Ridiculous as this might seem, it takes us a while to get over the fact that solo shells now orbit your kart without requiring you to hold down the trigger, increasing…

Developer/publisher Remedy Entertainment Format PC (tested), PS5, Xbox Series Release Out now Often when evaluating shooters we’ll talk about ‘gunfeel’ – how satisfying it is to use your weapons for their intended purpose. But what of the targets lined up in their sights? There are certain qualities that tend to make for a good FPS enemy: mobility, a balance of predictable behaviour and capacity for surprise, and (perhaps troublingly) a humanoid, or at least bipedal, shape. These boxes are all squarely ticked by the Hiss, lifted from the telekinetic thirdperson action of Control and repurposed for a co-op FPS in the mould of Left 4 Dead or Vermintide. Firebreak retains some of the more unusual mutations of this threat – such as the Elevated, who bob around in flying office…

Developer/publisher 1047 Games Format PC, PS4, PS5 (tested), Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Out now Valve first had people considering portals back in 2007. Given the videogame industry’s tendency to propagate any new and popular idea with a speed and aggressiveness that quickly renders it background noise, it’s somewhat remarkable that it took 12 years for another game, the original Splitgate, to take that idea and run with it. As this sequel demonstrates, however, taking a great idea and finding the right fit for it are two very different things. A firstperson arena shooter with portals remains a strong foundation. Splitgate places no restrictions on how far apart two portal gates are, nor how far you may be from a compatible surface when you shoot a gate onto it. Therefore,…

Developer/publisher Nintendo Format Switch 2 Release Out now Like us, we imagine that your first goal on setting up a new console is not to sit and read about its features but to play with them. And yet the first exhibit we land on in Welcome Tour is a series of information boards explaining the ins and outs of Switch 2’s new mouse control, followed by a quiz in which we regurgitate the information just fed to us. This is an oddly dry and clinical package in many ways. As you trot around giant renditions of the console – outside and in – Nintendo’s public mask of cheery characters and fantasy worlds dissolves, baring the businesslike workings beneath. Any enthusiasm here feels inauthentic, forced through the mouths of NPCs in…

Opening on a clinically lit chamber, its plain grey walls suggesting some kind of scientific facility, music with accentuated drums suggests that we are about to witness something important. A transparent cuboid is suspended in midair. Now there are hands holding it and it’s beginning to change shape, angular edges melting away as it reconfigures into a more palm-friendly form. A new controller, perhaps? No – an entirely new videogame console, which no one tuning into the Xbox Games Showcase on June 8 was expecting. Yes, everyone knew that Microsoft had a handheld Xbox in development, but was it really ready to show it off? Yes, it turns out that it was. Except it wasn’t an entirely new videogame console, after all, but a reconfigured version of Asus’s ROG Ally…

Having already invited us to put our fingers on famous paintings in Please, Touch The Artwork, Thomas Waterzooi now wants us to examine them up close. In contrast to the hands-on playfulness of his previous title and its sequel, this time he wanted to make something “horror-ish”, he explains, and turned to the dour and disconcerting work of Edward Hopper. “Hopper is famous for his depictions of loneliness and urban isolation,” Waterzooi says. “[His] paintings are often voyeuristic and we’re culturally taught that it’s impolite to look into people’s private lives, hence we feel strange doing so. I wanted to amplify these feelings by adding animation, sound and some form of overarching narrative.” That narrative casts you as the night watch at the magical Museum Of Animated Modern Art, where the…

LUMINES ARISE Developer Enhance, Monstars Publisher Enhance Format PC, PS5, PSVR2 Release Autumn Concluding our Lumines Arise demo session on a couch in the middle of a crowded venue, it takes a few seconds to remember where we are, as we readjust to a reality that is not dictated by falling blocks and pounding rhythms. For the past 15 minutes, we have been utterly spellbound. It won’t surprise anyone to learn that this effect was achieved by Enhance, the studio founded by Rez designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi. This latest fusion of music and play builds upon the foundations of Tetris Effect, Enhance’s 2018 reimagining of the classic puzzle game as an audiovisual extravaganza. We fill up a grid with two-by-two squares, each segment of which is one of two colours, as…

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Format PC, Xbox Series Developer/publisher GSC Game World Origin Ukraine Release 2024 The original STALKER, released in 2007, occupies a unique place in the history of game development. Despite multiple delays and technical shortcomings, it cast a long shadow over its peers. A punishing hybrid of shooter, RPG, survival and horror set in the enigmatic Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, with innovative systems – sophisticated enemy routines and persistent NPC behaviour (the so-called A-Life), dynamic lighting, and authentic ballistics model – it has been endlessly borrowed from, but never quite matched. Perhaps more importantly, it also put Ukrainian game development on the map with a splash big enough to warrant a series. It was a difficult legacy to live up to, however. After two unnumbered followups that refined the gameplay mechanics and…

NEAR MISSES Fast Fusion Switch 2 With Mario Kart World already dominating our driving time, it’s a real shame that Switch 2’s other notable exclusive launch title was also a racing game. Fast Fusion does offer a change of pace in the literal sense, though, with its craft hurtling at ungodly speeds, while its rechargable boost meter adds tactical dimensions to your racing lines. More than anything, though, it triggers a hankering for a game of Wipeout or F-Zero. Borrowing elements from both, it’s half as cool as one, not as finely tuned as the other, and visually it lacks the extra punch that brand-new hardware deserves. Irem Collection Volume 3 PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox Series We don’t normally put retro collections here, but Irem has us at ‘Heli’. That’s…

Developer/publisher 11 Bit Studios Format PC (tested), PS5, Xbox Series Release Out now Sometimes your life changes in a moment, and as much as you want to pause time and retrace your steps, the world moves on into the following hours and days, and takes you with it. This is the world builder Jan Dolski finds himself in when he is the only survivor of a crash on a mission to find the world-changing element rapidium. It’s his job now to operate the mobile base and return to Earth – and hopefully finish the mission, too. There is no time to lose: come sunrise, the intense radiation will mean game over. A day in The Alters counts down in realtime, and can be split between performing activities on the base…

Developer/publisher Funcom Format PC Release Out now Progress in Dune: Awakening can be divided into two distinct parts: before and after flight. As though dragging your way through human history, you have to work your way up from hunter-gatherer status for the privilege of being airborne. The pre-flight era is dominated by solo exploration, mining for resources, crafting and PvE combat within the Hagga Basin. In Frank Herbert’s novel, the Basin is the area of Arrakis most populous with cities and villages, including those of the hardy Fremen, who are (relatively speaking) native to the planet. In Awakening’s alternate timeline, the Fremen are missing, driven away by the pogroms of the Imperial elite troops. Without their cleansing influence, the Basin is infested with riff-raff: scavengers, slavers, smugglers, cultists. Other players…

Developer/publisher IO Interactive Format PC, PS4, PS5, PSVR, PSVR2, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox One, Xbox Series Original release 2021 When your job is bumping off terrible people with too much money and power, you’ll never be short of work. Indeed, Agent 47 has been kept busy for the best part of a decade now, first by a trilogy’s worth of oligarchs and gunrunners, and then a regular supply of Elusive Targets, including celebrities. That’s the case with Hitman’s latest time-limited mission, which returns IO to where it all began while also gesturing forward. We’re back in Paris, the Palais that hosted 2016’s fashion show now redressed as a casino featuring Mads Mikkelsen’s Le Chiffre. Following the main Mission Story thread here is a glimpse of how First Light’s Bond might…

GROUNDED 2 Developer Obsidian Entertainment, Eidos Montreal Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, Xbox Series Release July 29 (Early Access) How do you go about creating a bigger, better sequel when smallness is a vital part of a game’s appeal? The developers of Grounded 2 have taken an admirably simple approach. The first game followed a group of children who had been shrunk and lost in a back yard, a place where grass suddenly towered overhead and usually harmless insects became apex predators. For the followup, the kids are back and they’ve been shrunk once again, but this time they’ve been dropped into a new, wider space. Brookhollow Community Park is roughly three times the size of the map in the first Grounded. But this sequel is not just about…

Game Pragmata Developer/publisher Capcom Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Release TBA ew things are quite as intriguing as a delayed project. As hype builds for long-awaited games such as Silksong and Grand Theft Auto VI, it’s hard to resist the temptation to comb over trailers and screenshots, piecing together clues in an attempt to guess what the final production will look like. Capcom has had us on the hook for five years now, ever since it released the first trailer for Pragmata, giving us a brief but tantalising window into its futuristic world. Clearly an awful lot has happened since then, including a global pandemic, the rise of generative AI and the launch of a new console generation, to name just a handful of events. Through all of this, the…

Developer/publisher Nintendo (Nintendo EPD) Format Switch 2 Release Out now Has the Mushroom Kingdom ever made sense as a coherent world? Certainly that’s never been the priority of Nintendo’s designers over the previous decades, laying its foundations over various series, genres and generations. So it’s a joyous surprise to drive from one end of World’s incarnation and discover how natural it all feels to have this place, these places, presented as a single landmass. Starting out from Peach’s castle and heading north, the pastoral flats begin to sprout rocky terrain and then signs of industry: pylons, railways, green-pipe bridges. By the time we’ve crossed the river, the skies have begun to darken with clouds of volcanic ash – a literal foreshadowing of the lava colossus of Bowser that looms, spitting…

Developer Build A Rocket Boy Publisher IO Interactive Format PC (tested), PS5, Xbox Series Release Out now There are big problems in Redrock, MindsEye’s techbro-infested near-future analogue of Las Vegas. Some of them are authored deliberately and satirically by developer Build A Rocket Boy – this is a narrative-led open-world shooter set in a city run by CEOs in baseball caps and self-interested government officials, and as you look around at malfunctioning AI robots and palatial tech company headquarters, you’re reminded that it feels a bit close to home. Other issues, however, appear accidental, but still by chance serve to exaggerate the big-tech dystopia MindsEye depicts. Take the way Redrock citizens tend to drive into each other and cause horrific, fiery car accidents on practically every block, or the way…

Developer Sloclap Publisher Kepler Interactive Format PC (tested), PS5, Xbox Series Release Out now Rocket League without the wheels – what will they think of next? For its first foray into sports-sim territory, fighting-genre specialist Sloclap has borrowed liberally from Psyonix’s vehicular mutation of football to mould its own highly idiosyncratic hybrid: six-minute matches, no fouls or offsides, physics tweaked for maximum on-pitch chaos. Yet, paradoxically, Rematch’s exaggerated heroics, breakneck pace and flagrant disregard for the rules of the sport may capture the essence of the beautiful game far more accurately than the endlessly iterated template established by FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer. To create an accessible, replayable football sim, Sloclap has homed in on a simple fact. Even prior to Rocket League, some of the most fondly remembered examples…

Developer Sassy Chap Games Publisher Team17 Format PC (tested), PS5, Switch, Xbox Series Release Out now Perhaps this is what Marx meant when he talked about the commodity fetish. Date Everything is a game in which you more or less do as the title says. A mysterious benefactor grants you glasses that transform every object in your house, from the microwave to the smoke alarm, into a sort of human being. Then you get to know them and influence them to like, love or hate you. There is an overarching plot, detailing the motives of your benefactor, but you’ll spend most of your time talking to objects (and solving a few puzzles in the explorable house). All the talk means the game lives or dies on the strength of its…

Developer Respawn Entertainment Publisher EA Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release 2016 Today’s triple-A game industry is so in thrall to the live-service model that we have become accustomed to central play mechanics changing after launch, limited-time events staged to ensure that you remain engaged, and digital stores placed front and centre, pushing constantly updated carousels of premium cosmetics. The transition to this way of doing business was so swift that few games exist that straddle the divide between the old and the new. One rare example is Respawn’s Titanfall 2. It’s not clear how profits from live-service successes trickle down directly to low-level employees, but it’s easy to imagine the process happening slowly. A wrangling over bonuses, in fact, indirectly birthed the original Titanfall. In 2010, Vince Zampella and…