Innehållsförteckning för November 2025 från Edge

Sometimes analysts come up with insight that retunes your perspective on a particular aspect of the videogame industry. But then there will be something that makes you think, well, yes, we could’ve told you that if you’d asked – there wasn’t really any need to spend all that time and money studying it. This came to mind recently when Emmanuel Rosier, director of market intelligence at research firm Newzoo, discussed the company’s findings from looking into Xbox player behaviour. “There is so much offering in Game Pass,” Rosier said, “that if you’re not getting hooked on the game very quickly, you just go on another one, and you try another one until you find the one where you will get hooked.” The real head-scrambler was that this observation seemed to…

“If people play a game for hundreds of hours they shouldn’t even be able to leave a fucking negative review.” The Outsiders creative director David Goldfarb has a simple proposal for an update to how user feedback works on Steam “Discovered I could actually study videogames, and the rest is history.” Battlefield 6 producer Alexia Christofi says: don’t worry about crappy A-level results “Even if they are 30 per cent better, they are 200 per cent more expensive. The math just doesn’t work.” Fantastic Pixel Castle’s Greg Street on the problems US-based studios face signing new projects in 2025 “The Japanese are the best at game design… I am surprised the west hasn’t taken more lessons from them.” Has Shawn Layden missed what feels like hundreds of Soulslikes over the past few…

For many years, a small cult of ‘existential risk’ thinkers has been worrying itself half to death in San Francisco about the possibility (or, as they see it, the very high probability) that a future artificial superintelligence will destroy all humans. I guess it’s nice that they have a hobby, but have you seen ChatGPT 5? Shouldn’t we be more worried about the actually-existing robotic dogs? There is something genuinely unnerving about what has become the default design of the canine robot: headless, with spindly legs, but extremely agile and strong. The general look was laid down by Boston Dynamics, which calls its robot dog Spot in a blatant attempt to make it seem less terrifying. If you acquire a taste for robot-dog videos, as I did recently, you can…

Developer PlatinumGames, Team Ninja Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Japan Release October 21 Even in the early sections of Ninja Gaiden 4, Team Ninja and PlatinumGames’ intentions are made clear. Yakumo, the latest recruit to the Hayabusa clan, advances along the roof of a rattling freight train. Waves of enemies leap aboard to halt his progress. He spins and sidesteps, countering attacks, severing limbs and finally executing foes with a deep, lunging katana stab. As arterial spray rains down, Yakumo holds a sleek, arching pose like an Olympic gymnast waiting for applause. But he’s interrupted by a pair of futuristic gunships. Missiles streak through the air. Bullets make glowing orange holes in the sheet metal around Yakumo’s feet. As the gunships fire a climactic fusillade, the eponymous ninja…

Developer Alt Shift Publisher Dotemu Format PC Origin France Release TBA Memories of the most recent TV version of Battlestar Galactica may have faded in recent years, but not for Alt Shift. Indeed, when the studio created its 2019 space strategy game Crying Suns, it already had the adventures of Commander Adama and co in mind. “When we created Crying Suns, our fantasy was to make a game where you can embody the role of Adama,” Frédéric Lopez, Alt Shift’s CEO, explains. “We didn’t have the licence, so we created another universe. Now we’re able to do the game we wanted to do.” Working with Dotemu, Alt Shift now has the seal of approval from Universal Studios. The result is Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes, a Roguelike RTS that gives you…

Game 2XKO Developer/publisher Riot Games Format PC, PS5, XboxSeries Release 2025 The genesis of 2XKO can be traced back to 2015 and a mostly forgotten game called Rising Thunder. Despite a strong gimmick, whereby complex moves were mapped to simple inputs, and a playable alpha, when developer Radiant Entertainment was bought by Riot Games in 2016, Rising Thunder fell by the wayside. Radiant was gone, but its founders, Tony and Tom Cannon, who also created Evo, the world’s biggest fighting game tournament, still had ambitions. Now employees of Riot, they wanted a new challenge. The result was Project L, a fighting game based on Riot’s immensely successful MOBA, League Of Legends. On paper it was an exciting prospect, one of the world’s biggest and most established developers experimenting with a…

Between supernatural neo-noir shooter El Paso, Elsewhere, satirically self-explanatory point-and-click An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs, and sinister motel-set adventure game CLICKOLDING, the Strange Scaffold back catalogue is remarkably diverse. And yet the studio remains prolific: despite many of its games being weird, idiosyncratic and potentially tough to market, Strange Scaffold nevertheless develops and releases multiple titles each year. “It didn’t start with anything so grand as the idea of starting a studio or a label,” creative director Xalavier Nelson Jr recalls. “The traditional structure and narrative of what a studio can be, and who gets to build a studio, were still something that I fully believed were entirely out of my reach.” The conventional studio system was “valid”, Nelson Jr says, in the sense that it could…

Developer Hangar 13 Publisher 2K Games Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Release Out now Try to change Enzo’s outfit at the start of a mission in Mafia: The Old Country, and you’re given the option to “disable story outfits” – to use costumes that you might have obtained by purchasing the Deluxe Edition of the game or that are specific to other set-piece levels, such as the helmet and jodhpurs Enzo wears in a motor race. As in Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption and the other open-world (or quasi open-world) games that partially inspire the new Mafia, you can dress your character how you like. But here, it comes with a warning. Disable story outfits and you are told “your appearance may not match the tone of the story”.…

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No sooner have we entered Alex Johansson’s Sheffield hackspace – perhaps the closest equivalent to Emmett Brown’s workshop we’ve yet encountered in the real world – than our host offers to make coffee. One problem: his kettle’s broken. The switch doesn’t work, he says; it flicks back up as soon as it’s pressed. If he weighs it down, though, it’ll boil over. No matter. He grabs a knife, balancing its handle against the edge of a shelf, the tip of its blade resting on the switch, just enough to keep it down. A few minutes later, the switch flicks up, and the knife clatters onto the worktop. The coffee’s terrible, but we’re getting a picture of a man accustomed to solving problems with unorthodox solutions. Johansson is every bit the charismatic…

Playing detective is a common enough fantasy, one that’s been well served by all kinds of games, but what of those other parts of the justice system similarly dedicated (at least, in their most idealised form) to peeling away untruths, but which lack the attractive glamour of sleuthing? What I mean is: who ever fantasises about being called up for jury service? Well, apparently enough of us to support the continued existence of Jury Games. These interactive show-trials debuted online in 2020, before making the move in 2023 to in-person performances at London’s Theatre Deli. Admittedly, in order to make it more appealing than receiving an actual summons, a few liberties have been taken with the real legal process here, bringing it more in line with the traditional detective role.…

Developer/publisher Capcom Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Japan Release February 27 What defines Resident Evil? After almost three decades, the answer to that question remains joyously changeable. These aren’t games beholden to any single setting, hero, monster or genre, to the extent that, in the late 2010s, its identity split cleanly in two. While the seventh instalment introduced a new firstperson approach to survival horror, a parallel track of releases hewed closer to tradition, revisiting earlier games in the style of the series’ first big reinvention: the muscular over-the-shoulder action introduced by Resident Evil 4. That clear divide was muddied a little by 2021’s Village, which put its gunplay so front and centre that at times it essentially became an FPS. Meanwhile, the latter track of releases reached the game that…

Developer Bleakmill Publisher Headup Games Format PC Origin Germany, UK Release TBA There’s a reason the first Industria ends so abruptly. Inspired by the post-Soviet aesthetic and physics-based puzzles of Half-Life 2, Bleakmill’s debut was initially going to be separated into shorter, successive episodes – also in the style of Valve’s shooter. But David Jungnickel and Steve Chapman, the studio’s founders and the core of its small development team, decided there was enough material to justify a complete, standalone release. It just meant packing all the narrative payoff into one sequence. “We messed up a little with the ending of the game,” Jungnickel says. “You get a lot of information, very fast.” While not a big hit (“It’s a seven out of ten, you know?” Jungnickel says), if you played…

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Romance is a strange thing in games. In Cyberpunk 2077, if you want to begin a romantic relationship with Pan Am, you need to choose the right lines of dialogue at key points during her respective side missions. Astarion, in Baldur’s Gate 3, can only be successfully seduced if you finish his companion quest and – again – make certain decisions at certain moments. Even the most standoffish of Stardew Valley’s singletons is yours once you’ve worked out what gift they might appreciate. Go back further. You can only pair up with Fallout 4’s Piper if you consistently perform particular in-game behaviours in front of her. To win the hearts of the various girlfriend characters in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, you have to make sure that your CJ has the…

Between Zoom, Tiger King and hand sanitiser, the COVID-19 pandemic created some unusual must-haves. With entire populations stuck indoors, all trying to find fresh ways to pass the time – and to ease the tensions of social distancing and isolation – Jackbox’s party games also, suddenly, got huge. “We sort of became famous as ‘that game we played during the pandemic’,” chief creative officer Allard Laban admits. Originally designed to be played in a shared living room, Jackbox’s games proved adaptable to webcams and screen sharing, their sociable silliness a tonic in those locked-away times. Laban recalls a common sentiment: “‘Thank you so much. You really brought our families together when we couldn’t connect’.” According to a 2020 Bloomberg report, during the earliest days of the quarantine Jackbox’s sales leapt…

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 Knocked out I got to the end of your Mario Kart World review (E413) and was aghast at the complete absence of any mention of the Knockout Tour mode – in my opinion, the highlight of the latest instalment and a mode I’ve been playing regularly online with friends every Sunday evening since launch. I then turned the page and discovered an entire Post Script piece extolling the virtues of this superlative mode, which went some way to appeasing me, but also left me wondering: do you consider the Post Script to be part of the review? I’d always viewed it as additional information that focused on an…

The beginning of our trip into Resident Evil Requiem has us feeling a little disoriented. Protagonist Grace is bound and hanging upside down, and if that would normally make the blood rush to her head, here it’s being siphoned off through a primitive-looking IV needle wedged in her arm. In games, we’re used to seeing blood in sprays, as a kinetic particle effect. In Requiem, as we empathise with Grace, we’re left to contemplate the light-headed, crawling terror of seeing our blood outside of our body in an alarmingly substantial quantity. Blood is synonymous with horror, as a signifier of violence, mutilation and unnatural death. It’s also synonymous with ‘mature’ (in a specific sense of the word) action games, symbolising similar things for very different purposes. In horror, blood is…

Developer The Chinese Room Publisher Paradox Interactive, White Wolf Publishing Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin UK Release October Take a cursory glance at Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 and you might think the game is in thrall to the cinematic universe of John Wick. Here is another violent, noir-adjacent adventure filled with dapper murderers and delicate alliances. It’s set in a world in which a complex network of secret organisations exists beneath the polite urban layer that the rest of us navigate every day. And yet, if you go back to 2004’s Bloodlines, not to mention the tabletop RPG game it’s based on, all this is in there too. When he was first approaching development on Bloodlines 2, Alex Skidmore, the game’s creative director at The Chinese Room, did indeed go back to…

Developer Outerloop Games Publisher Outerloop Games, Outersloth Format PC Origin US Release 2026 The fishing village we arrive at in Dosa Divas would be quite idyllic were it not for all the billboards spoiling the scenery. Nor does it bode well that the villagers have lost the ability to sustain themselves on the region’s natural produce. It’s all the result of Lina’s Meals, an unscrupulous company that has got the village hooked on its ‘efficient’ fast food in toothpaste-like tubes, and is now threatening to withhold the supply unless it is given control of the fisheries. Fortunately, sisters Samara and Amani aren’t merely capable of clearing out the corporation’s soulless suits, they’ve also got the skills and tools to whip up delicious dishes, starting with the South Indian street food…

Format iOS, PC, Switch Developer/publisher Inkle Origin UK Release 2025 Tiny, Cambridge-based indie studio Inkle has been making narrative-focused games for well over a decade. While the Jules Verne-inspired 80 Days and sci-fi archaeology title Heaven’s Vault were both received with plenty of enthusiasm, it was murder-mystery visual novel Overboard that became one of Inkle’s biggest hits. Not every Inkle title has been so successful, however. Narrative director Jon Ingold says the studio rushed out Overboard because the company’s previous game, 2020’s Pendragon, had performed so badly. “People didn’t like it,” he says, “and so for the first time since 2012 or something we were genuinely worried about the company’s future.” Nevertheless, when Overboard was launched in June 2021, having had no prior announcement, it went down like a tonic…

The headline acts of this month’s reviews cast us in the familiar guise of the daring hero (or antihero). We’re fresh from roleplaying a rampaging ninja, a rising mafioso prodigy and a certain tactical espionage master (with a strong stomach). That the games they feature in are a remake, a revival and a prequel to a longstanding series is testament to the ageless appeal and stability of such protagonists. With the types of games they guarantee – very much action and adventure – they won’t disappear or fall out of favour any time soon. Scan down this section’s contents list, though, and you’ll find some very different characters. Here is a resurrected cult leader who must solve their own murder; here a traveller who uses a sword not as a…