Innehållsförteckning för #59 från Wireframe Magazine

That samurai warrior staring out from this month’s Wireframe cover? It was made with a combination of MetaHuman Creator and Unreal Engine 5, but it isn’t a video game: rather, it’s AKUMA, a forthcoming short film from Dimension Studio. The Londonbased firm has long mixed traditional filmmaking techniques with game engines to create a variety of content, from VR experiences to short films, and AKUMA – an atmospheric, ten-minute story about a “samurai meeting his demon” – is the latest showcase for its talents. With its feudal Japanese setting and elaborate costumes, AKUMA is the kind of film that would’ve required an impractically huge budget had it been shot with real actors and sets; but using performance capture and digital filmmaking meant that director Rob McLellan could realise his film…

We’re not bored of them yet, so as long as folks keep making retro throwback FPS games, we’ll be playing them. And Beyond Sunset is quite the sight to behold – a mix of classic first-person shooting alongside some RPG elements peppered throughout; it’s a neon-drenched world of chaos by way of DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D, all stemming from creator Patrick Pineda’s fondness for tabletop role-playing games. Oh, and synthwave. “In 2015, I was hosting a campaign for some friends,” Pineda explains. “The campaign had been going for about a year and I was getting a bit tired of it; I wanted to try exploring something new. I knew I wanted to create something cyberpunk-y for my players.” Fast forward through a love of cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, forged…

GAME Martha Is Dead DEVELOPER LKA RELEASE 24 February 2022 WEBSITE lka.it Wireframe’s issue 49 cover star, Martha Is Dead’s a dark period drama set in 1940s Tuscany. It follows Giulia, a young woman grieving for the death of her twin sister – the titular Martha – and trying to uncover exactly how it happened. During development, Italian studio LKA began using MetaHuman Creator for some key sequences in Martha Is Dead’s narrative, as creative director Luca Dalco explains. “We first became aware of MetaHuman some way into development… we were able to use the technology in the parts where Giulia speaks directly to the player, in the foreground,” he tells us. “Using MetaHuman this way enabled us to develop a greater sense of empathy for the character.” Using MetaHuman…

We’ve all played our share of games about rescuing princesses or saving entire fantasy kingdoms from shadowy villains. But what about an adventure where you’re fighting to establish your own identity? That’s at least part of the premise in FROGSONG, an upcoming action-RPG that’s as much about the internal struggle of its central character as it is about a larger external quest. “Chorus is a frog who’s trying to fight for the right to be who they are,” says the solo developer behind it, Canada’s Brandon Braun. “They want to be a warrior, but everyone else just wants them to be a holy scholar like all the other tree frogs. A lot of other frogs have really negative reactions to this – confusion, anger, dismissal – and they have to…

And just like that, video games changed. With 1994’s original PlayStation, that is – Sony’s entry to the video game hardware market and a kick up the jacksie the likes of which we wouldn’t see anything close to a repeat of until, arguably, the Xbox 360 in 2005. After disrupting the market with such assuredness, such ferocity, upsetting the balance of console power that had held for nearly a decade, and making gaming cool and stuff you did at raves, and advertised with drug references, it’s fair to say expectations were high for the PlayStation 2. First of all, Sony would have to do something about that name. PlayStation 2 made it sound dull and uninspired, so of course the name would be changed. And early designs showed off something…

OUR SCORES 1–9 Trash. Unplayable; a broken mess. 10–19 A truly bad game, though not necessarily utterly broken. 20–29 Still awful, but at a push could be fun for two minutes. 30–39 Might have a redeeming feature, but otherwise very poor. 40–49 Adds in more redeeming features, but still not worth your time. 50–59 Average. Decent at best. ‘Just about OK’. 60–69 Held back by glitches, bugs, or a lack of originality, but can be good fun. 70–79 A very good game, but one lacking spit and polish or uniqueness. 80–89 Brilliant. Fabulous fun. Everyone should at least try it. 90–99 Cutting edge, original, unique, and/or pushes the medium forward. 100 Never say never, eh?…

Almost three decades’ worth of 3D platformers have taught us that any plucky hero is only as good as the magical item they carry with them. In Scarf’s case, the game’s given away right from the off, with the titular attire being your primary means to whoosh through a trio of deeply atmospheric locations – all in the effort to (hopefully) elicit some heartfelt emotion. Much of the time this works beautifully; your wispy blue wanderer handles with grace as they launch between caverns or push blocks needed to solve the next puzzle laying before them. Other times, though, this relatively breezy adventure can feel a lot like a “baby’s first outing” in the genre, even if it is still a fun ride. Scarf wastes no time sweeping you up…

Shroom and Gloom TeamLazerBeam / Name your own / wfmag.cc/shroomgloom Ah, mushrooms. Truly the Marmite of the Earth. Not a fan? No worries. You’ll get plenty of chances to stab and set fire to dozens of the adorable soil-dwellers in Shroom and Gloom. Broadly, it’s Legend of Grimrock meets Slay the Spire. Rogue-lite first-person dungeon-crawling gives way to card-based battles against ferocious fungi, with deckbuilding meta progression. The trick here is using specific cards to finish your foes off in order to ‘roast’ them for some health back. Speedy and smart, with a colourful and charming papercraft style. Tad short currently, though. Spore’s the pity. HRANA Buldozer / Name your own / wfmag.cc/hrana The German-Bohemian borderlands are reimagined as a pulsing, dreamlike landscape in this short audio-visual piece. Negative space…

Disco Elysium / 94% (Issue 28) Smarter and deeper than anything else; truly an RPG in a class completely of its own. Hades / 94% (Issue 44) Proving ‘roguelike’ isn’t a dirty word, learning-and-dying is a joy from start to finish. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey / 93% (Issue 1) The point where Ubisoft realised over-the-top adventures were the right direction. Telling Lies / 92% (Issue 24) This FMV mystery asks more of the player than most, with rewards to match. If Found / 92% (Issue 44) A compelling and beautifully illustrated narrative, as moving as it is memorable. Yakuza: Like a Dragon / 90% (Issue 45) A bold, brash, and joyous rebirth for the long-running gangster series. Tetris Effect / 90% (Issue 4) The question is ‘how do you better Tetris?’…

The fame of Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli has only continued to grow since it won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature with 2001’s Spirited Away, and game developers have increasingly drawn inspiration from its output in that time, too. Case in point: Lost Twins 2, a platform-puzzler with a look and feel we can only describe as ‘Ghibli-esque’. About two youngsters traversing a gentle yet vibrant fantasy world, it mixes 2D animated characters with 3D backgrounds, creating a world that feels not unlike Ni no Kuni – a series of games which, of course, began as a collaboration between Level 7 and Studio Ghibli. Where the Ni no Kuni games were typically sprawling RPG epics, however, Lost Twins 2 is altogether more intimate. Its levels are small puzzle boxes…

01. Ah. Right. Well, that one certainly came out of nowhere, didn’t it? Microsoft purchased the entirety of Activision Blizzard for a piddling £50.4 billion, bringing the likes of Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Candy Crush under the Xbox banner. The deal needs regulatory approval and will take some time to complete – the Bethesda purchase took six months, as a clue – but, if it is all approved, this will mean… er, things are a bit different in video games. Specifics of the deal were largely under wraps at the time of writing, though a few snippets had slipped through. Embattled CEO Bobby Kotick is to stay on at the helm, apparently until the deal is closed, when he will be given a golden parachute and sent…

Difficulty used to be simple. Some games offered a selection of predefined settings to suit different skill levels; some offered nothing. Many were intentionally punishing – either because they were made for coin-hungry arcade machines, or because they weren’t very big, and wouldn’t last long if they didn’t keep sending you back to the start. Anyone who didn’t fancy their arbitrarily defined challenges would have to admit defeat. As much as gaming has evolved since its primitive beginnings, its conceptions of challenge often still have a foot in the past. Most games are more customisable now, and are at least designed to be finished. But until recently, few have moved beyond traditional difficulty levels to explore how challenge affects our engagement, or consider more effective ways for players to balance…

I honestly started out this monthly dive into online gaming with one intention: to find a game I actually wanted to play online, repeatedly, over an extended period. That goal sort of got away from me a bit as I swiftly realised so very many modern online titles don’t appeal beyond the odd match here and there, with their mechanics too obtuse, the reaction times required too snappy for these old hands. I never did expect Rocket League to emerge from the shadows as the standardbearer: the only game I got, that I could play OK, and that I would return to repeatedly with a genuine urge to play more, more, more matches. Early in January, I ended up winning a tournament as part of a three-person team. The specifics…

“Maybe it’s just me,” I thought, warding off the pangs of disappointment at the end of my introductory session with Mechajammer. It wasn’t an unreasonable hypothesis. I’d enjoyed Whalenought’s previous isometric RPG, Serpent in the Staglands, but I remembered the bugs, the fiddly combat, the all-pervasive cantankerousness of a game so adamantly old-school they might as well have slapped a MicroProse sticker on the box and called it ‘Darklands 2’. “Maybe I’ve grown soft in the meantime. Maybe I’m playing it wrong?” But there was more to it: a niggling sensation that all of that game’s vices had been turned up to eleven in Mechajammer, while its rough-hewn charm had vanished, sucked through a crack in the pavement and carried by the sewers that riddle the bleak city of Calitana.…

Playing through The Gunk is the process of reversing an oozing allegory for the climate crisis; of sucking up the corruption that plagues a dying planet and returning it to unique and brilliant life. Early on in developer Image & Form’s first foray into 3D platforming, space truckers Rani and Becks arrive on a dark and barren planet. They’re running low on fuel for their ramshackle spaceship and just as low on funds. So Rani, the more adventurous of the pair, sets out to find something – anything – they can use to reverse their fortunes. As Rani explores this new planet, her mission becomes a quest to quietly save the world. Almost immediately, our heroine encounters a strange and damaging globular substance which she dubs – you guessed it?…

Just Juice One of the most common – and justified – criticisms levelled at the Sega Game Gear was its ravenous appetite for batteries. If you were lucky, a set of six AA batteries would last you about 120 minutes – a far cry from its contemporary, the Game Boy, which could make four AA batteries last for around a dozen hours. The Game Gear’s chief selling point was also its Achilles heel: its colour LCD screen, backlit by a fluorescent strip light, was the hidden vampire that sucked all those batteries dry. Various solutions have helped remedy this in recent years, of course. Screen modifications get rid of that hungry strip light, while replacement power boards like RetroSix’s CleanPower GG mean you could use, say, a USB-C battery bank…

Giving players plenty of tasks to do in a game is one thing. Actually making those tasks feel enjoyable – and actually worth doing – is quite another. For every game where we’ve felt compelled to complete every side quest or grab every collectable, there are surely several dozen other instances where it’s all begun to feel like pointless busywork. Did anyone genuinely enjoy, say, collecting all 100 feathers lying around in Assassin’s Creed II? TOEM: A Photo Adventure, on the other hand, creates a world of genuinely pleasurable errands to run and oddments to find. Its brevity certainly helps: its monochrome world of paper cut-out characters and boxy 3D houses can be appreciated in about two or three hours; even completionists probably won’t take too much longer to cross…

LOOKINGGLASS TECHNOLOGIES / 1994 / PC, MAC The actual concept of the audio log is almost 30 years old now, which is… surprising. Given it required developers to be able to include extended recordings of real speech to be played at the discretion of the player, it’s not something you’d get much of on floppy disk or cartridge. Of course, the CD-ROM was making waves in PC gaming by the early 1990s, and 1994’s System Shock was all too happy to take advantage of this gigantic bump in storage space. Notes and written diaries – cutscenes, even with voiceovers (or real actors) – were all standard by 1994, of course, so being told a story in a game that wasn’t just a printed ‘Are you a bad-enough dude’-style introduction wasn’t…

here aren’t enough toy-based games. There are loads, of course, but it always feels like there aren’t enough – after all, what’s a better setting for video games than to bring to life the toys of our childhoods? Nothing is better. Probably. Anyway, Tin Hearts sees you guiding a troop of tiny (tinny) soldiers through levels riddled with puzzles in a modern-day Lemmings by way of Toy Story. But likely with not as much taking pleasure in the death of our wee charges. “Back in 2016 when Rogue Sun was forming,” explains Kostas Zarifis, the studio’s creative director, “as one of various micro studios to spring to life out of the ashes of Lionhead, one of the items on the agenda was, of course, what our first game should be.…

You Suck At Parking Most driving games involve hurtling around tracks at ludicrous speeds rather than grinding to a halt, but as its title implies, this is precisely what you’re asked to do in You Suck At Parking. Viewed from a (sort of) isometric perspective, it’s a fizzy little action game where you guide your boxy vehicle around twisty, bite-sized courses, before bringing it to a graceful stop in a parking space at the end. Or, equally likely, you’ll miss the parking space entirely and careen sideways off a cliff. Either way, it’s the kind of simple, novel action title that’s likely to keep us absorbed for hours. If you like the sound of all this, there’s currently a demo available to download at wfmag.cc/parking. VELONE If you like puzzle…

GAME Lost Twins 2 DEVELOPER Playdew RELEASE 2022 WEBSITE playdew.com When it came to creating its relaxing, picturesque platform-puzzler Lost Twins 2, developer Playdew looked to the similarly serene animated movies of Studio Ghibli. The result is a game with a playfully surreal tone and some gorgeous hand-drawn characters – a look that took its team time and experimentation to perfect. “The art is all done digitally,” Playdew tells us. “We started by developing mood boards and concept art for the characters and the environments, then we discussed among the team and selected what we thought would best represent the overall mood and feel of the game. The characters are hand-drawn, and all the animations are done in Spine 2D. For environments, we used a mix of hand-painted and procedural…

Someone’s been mixing their Orwellian dystopias. White Shadows takes the grim retro-industrial sci-fi of 1984 and fills it with Animal Farm’s bestial hierarchy, except here the wolves are in charge, demoting the pigs to play the role of downtrodden workers. Still, at least they have it better than the birds, the underclass in this metaphor for capitalistic inequality, stripped of all rights and demonised by the powers that be. Unsurprisingly, you fill the shoes of one of these feathered lumpen, trying to escape a monochrome city. As dark satire goes, with billboards extolling the virtues of a drug-like consumable ‘light’ to the porcine citizenry, and all-caps signs shouting ‘All animals are equal’, it’s a bit square on the snout. And it’s not only the Orwellian themes that are well-worn either…

You can see what this gigantic Metroidvania is aiming for. A Symphony of the Hollow Knight, mixing Alucard’s Gothic strolling with the scale and stiff challenge of Hallownest. All good things. But Aeterna Noctis is a little too hung up on difficulty. Even its easier setting (patched in after launch) only turns the harshness down a little, and then at the cost of disabling achievements – a hint that developer Aeternum is more concerned with the integrity of its grand design than whether it’s as fun as it might be. Still, there’s no denying it’s a fine piece of work – a sprawling fresco of 2D artistry, spanning devastated cities plagued by wandering spirits, fire-damaged churches, and crystal mines teeming with goblins. The layouts of its lavish halls are painstakingly…

PLAYSTATION 2 METAL GEAR SOLID 3: SNAKE EATER The point where MGS really started becoming what it ended up as, Snake Eater is so rich a world, so utterly riddled with ideas, I was enamoured in every single one of my many playthroughs. ACE COMBAT: SQUADRON LEADER It looks great, it plays as a fine arcade plane-’em-up, but it was the story that hooked me in Squadron Leader. Melodramatic overblown nonsense it might be, but it’s incredible melodrama. SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS A wonderful example of a game that manages to rise above both being a bit clunky and having lots of pretentious idiots waffling on about how good it is, SotC is one of my absolute faves. WWE SMACKDOWN! HERE COMES THE PAIN You’ve already seen it if you’ve…

All these months over all these years, and I’ve been lying to you. I say I’m ‘now playing’ something or other – and I do play whatever it is, sometimes a lot – but my heart’s never been in it. Because my heart belongs to Stardew Valley, as it has since 2016. This was no more apparent to me than all the way back in issue 14 – May of 2019, five-point-seven billion years ago – when I realised I’d accidentally started living out Stardew in my real life. That didn’t last. Two things – got a dog, married to a space genius who likes dungarees – remained, but living on a farm in the countryside with plentiful gardening (‘weeding’) and growing my own produce went the way things do…