Innehållsförteckning för #60 från Wireframe Magazine

Before Smalland, there was ‘Smalland: the Indiegogo campaign’ – a 2017 effort to crowdfund a survival game about tiny people scratching out an existence in a huge, hostile world. As is often the case with original ideas on crowdfunding platforms, though, Smalland failed to reach its minimum goal of £36,876. Its concept, however, soon caught the eye of British studio Merge Games. “The project was originally owned by a very small team,” the game’s head of production, Ben Averley, tells us. “They realised there was something about the concept that really engaged people, and it generated a load of interest in the community, but the team was clearly struggling… At the time, it was very much a prototype, but Merge Games had a lot of faith in it.” One IP…

Cosiness: a state of contentment, warmth, and security. As the pandemic swept the globe in 2020 and 2021, a growing number of gamers sought cosy alternatives to the outside world – which goes some way to explain how Animal Crossing: New Horizons turned a series that has existed for 20 years into a sales phenomenon. In the midst of Covid, Animal Crossing became a refuge, where players could come together in a candy-coloured world filled with friendly characters and low-stakes tasks to complete. Other cosy games came to the fore around the same time: 2021 alone saw the release of such gentle, pleasurable delights as Unpacking, TOEM, Chicory: A Colorful Tale, and many more besides. “Harvest Moon could be regarded as the archetypal cosy game” Not that gentle, laid-back games…

Is there anything more tiresome than having something you already understand explained to you? In media, nobody likes characters who monologue their way through extensive flashbacks to events you watched a few episodes ago. “I already know this!” you silently scream. “Release me!” But I’d say that when games do this it’s especially annoying, since the player’s role is as the master of pace. Players set the tempo in most games, by choosing difficulty in The Last of Us, choosing the song in Beat Saber, and choosing whether to blast through Fallout rabidly or take the time to wander every dusty road. So as soon as the game limits the player to the dialogue option “Who are you?” with a character they already know, it has failed. The player, trained…

How many times have you played a game and wish you’d done the last move differently? In 2008, Braid answered thanks to designer Jonathan Blow’s ingenious time-reversal mechanic. If you jumped at the wrong time and fell down a hole, you could rewind time and try again. Braid’s graphics were created by artist David Hellman, who’s generously made the artwork available for download from his website at wfmag.cc/hellman – we’ve used these to recreate the Braid time mechanic with Pygame Zero. There’s also a Game Developers Conference video where Jonathan Blow describes how he coded the time reversal part of the game (see wfmag.cc/braid-blow), so we have a good idea of how to approach this challenge. We’ll just make a small section of the game here, but it could easily…

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The beauty of OlliOlli World is that it could really be about anything. It happens to be about skating, of course, but it’s the purest distilled abstraction, the essential oils of skateboarding injected into a high dexterity forced-scrolling platformer. You don’t have to understand or care for the subject matter to get it, just like you didn’t have to care for motocross to get Trials, yet the results are similarly moreish. With a grasp of the basic physics of riding a wheeled plank – momentum, smooth surfaces – you begin divining perfect lines and executing controller gymnastics to squeeze in tricks. If you’ve got the head for it, you might never stop. Roll7’s latest embraces abstraction more than previous OlliOllis, in fact, and elopes with it to a land of…

Absolutely massive game. New feature overload. Small word count. Third series entry. Three-word sentences? Let’s try it. Eight asymmetrical factions. One dying god. Sprawling strategy sandbox. Real-time battles. (Total War, yeah?) High fantasy prose. British gallows humour. Demons, humans, ogres. Prevent the apocalypse. Bring the apocalypse. Eat the apocalypse? Typical Warhammer silliness. Easy to love. Detailed, varied playstyles. Slavic, hardy Kislev. Polar bear cavalry. Serious ranged firepower. Staunch, regal Cathay. Fantasy ancient China. Immovable defensive bulwark. Alluring, barbed Slaaneshi. Nimble glass cannon. Metal album Khorne. Armoured berserker rush. Pustulent, ponderous Nurgle. Slow but tanky. Tricksy sorcerer Tzeentch. Serious firepower, fragile. Ravenous Ogre Kingdoms. Siege weapons? Fists. Welcome comic relief. Unleash devastating plagues. Seed pleasure cults. Invoke winter winds. Spin celestial compasses. Kill a bear. Ride a bear. Worship a bear.…

Was there a formative title that got you into gaming? What are your memories of it? Though my gaming life began in the arcade and at home on an Atari 5200, one genre that really moulded my love for video gaming is the platformer. Super Mario Bros., DuckTales, and several other NES side-scrolling platformers of that era piqued my interest, but the game that truly sparked my love for gaming was Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog. If you could only play one game for the rest of time, what would it be? I want to say Dance Dance Revolution because it’s my favourite game of all time and it basically changed my life, but to play that for the rest of time seems like it wouldn’t end well for my body,…

Cosy origins This month’s cosy games theme got me thinking about the earliest days of the form. Stardew Valley, Unpacking, and Spiritfarer are all modern examples of interactive cosiness, but where did it all begin? Video games have, after all, had war and conflict baked into their system almost from the start – the clue’s right there in the titles of Spacewar! and Space Invaders. Even Pong has a less-than-cosy competitive angle. Perhaps the cosiness at least began to set in around the year 1980, when graphics had advanced to the point where cartoon-like titles such as Pac-Man and Donkey Kong began to emerge – the former arguably being the first game expressly aimed at female gamers. Even then, those games were aggressively difficult, with Donkey Kong in particular offering…

TAITO / 1988 / ARCADE In the early days of racing games, one of two things tended to happen when you rammed your car into another. The first was that your vehicle would instantly slow to a crawl, as if it had driven directly into a colossal cushion, rather than struck another ton-plus of metal barrelling along a road. Occasionally, a game might have your car spin or dramatically flip. The other option had your car explode in a way real-world cars in the real world seldom do: the slightest touch from a rival in Pole Position, for example, instantly turned your race car into a raging inferno. Then Taito rocked up with Chase H.Q. and all bets were off. This arcade classic was an antidote to racers obsessed with…

If you’re old enough to have lived through the eighties or early nineties, you may recall that arcade machines used to turn up in the most random places. It wasn’t uncommon, for example, to spot a battered Space Invaders cabinet standing in the corner of a fish-and-chip shop, covered in a film of grease, or to stumble on a Double Dragon machine at the back of a café, its buttons lightly melted by cigarette burns. Nosebleed Interactive founder and CEO Andreas Firnigl is certainly old enough to remember that bygone era of ubiquitous coin-ops: he still recalls the first arcade he ever visited, tucked away in the “grotty back room” behind a VHS rental shop. Arcade Paradise, then, is a management game steeped in Firnigl and his team’s memories of…

A famous game development quote from id Software veteran Jay Wilbur is: “Level design is where the rubber hits the road”. This means that it doesn’t matter how cool your weapons, how stylish your graphics, or how deep your story is, if your levels fail to deliver those elements to your players in an engaging way. In effect, levels are the bridge between the content you make and the people playing your game, so it’s worth ensuring each level is delivering exactly what you need it to. To help with this, we’re going to run through a wide range of tips to help in creating fun and focused levels for the sort of 3D environments you might find in first-(Counter-Strike) or third-person (Zelda) games. We’re going to focus on single-player…

Look, we all needed something to play during the dark days of early lockdown. Me and friends wanted to duke it out competitively with one another without breaking the bank, you see, with another layer of complexity added on by the fact that none of us owned the same console. The question was then: what cross-play games – which are still few and far between – catered for our oddly specific need? We’d tried Rocket League and kept hitting the post, floated around the idea of bundling into the Fortnite bandwagon briefly but… oh, what’s this? A free-to-play FPS that looks and plays a lot like Overwatch but is definitely not Overwatch? Paladins it is. In fairness, Paladins ended up being a lot better than any of us initially gave…

From the plains of Shadow of the Colossus to the post-apocalyptic USA of Death Stranding, video games are uniquely placed to make us feel alone in vast, hostile environments. To that list we can add Naut – an upcoming adventure positively dripping with a lonely, foreboding atmosphere. About an astronaut fighting for survival on a windswept planet seemingly bereft of life, its most striking image is that of a tiny figure almost lost in a hazy landscape. There’s a distinctly cinematic quality to Naut – which makes sense when you consider that Wolverhampton-based developer Vorn is first and foremost a filmmaker. It was when Vorn first saw Media Molecule’s user-friendly development platform, Dreams, that Naut first came about. Initially, Vorn thought he’d use its toolset to make an animated feature…

It’s not unheard of for a composer to spend several years on one project, but the last few years have been anything but normal, least of all for Richard Jacques. Perhaps best known for his work on the likes of James Bond 007: Blood Stone and Mass Effect, the past four years have seen Jacques focusing pretty much entirely on the Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy universe. As projects go, it’s been an all-consuming affair, but for an industry stalwart, that’s nothing new. “There have been a lot of long hours and hard work, but that’s part of being a composer,” he laughs. “You expect those hours. It’s a personal choice, and if I’ve got the time, I’m going to make sure it’s as good as it possibly can be.” LEAVE…

Aspin-off from what’s widely regarded as the greatest movie ever made was always going to be a tall order. With Vertigo, Pendulo Studios attempts to dissect a timeless classic for themes and preoccupations it can repurpose into something completely new. Chief among them is the 1958 thriller’s interest in psychoanalysis, the plumbing of subconscious depths to uncover repressed memories, and how the vulnerable individuals tormented by such can be manipulated by unscrupulous acquaintances. Both protagonists suffer from a fear of heights, though Pendulo sets its story in the present day and substitutes James Stewart’s cop with Ed Miller, a young novelist whose guilt leaves him bedridden after an accident in which his family plunged off a cliff. Two things of note: first, the circumstances of the tragedy replicate another accident…

Towards the end of my time with Dying Light 2 Stay Human, my biceps disappeared. I tried exiting to the menu and reloading my save. Nothing. Closing and reopening the game. Nothing. Restarting my PS5. Nothing. These tricks worked when I encountered other bugs in Techland’s zombie parkour game, like when an error caused dialogue to blip by unreadably fast, sans audio. But, not for my biceps. My biceps remained stubbornly invisible. Right or wrong, this is basically what you expect from a game like Dying Light 2, an open-world RPG that prioritises choice to the extent that when I tried to discuss its story with another reviewer, we couldn’t find any recent events in common. There are story-gated moments that all players will see. You’ll always be Aiden, the…

The games for… BIG ADVENTURES Assassin’s Creed Odyssey / Ubisoft / 93% (Issue 1) Yakuza: Like a Dragon / Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio / 90% (Issue 45) Amnesia: Rebirth / Frictional Games / 87% (Issue 46) Death’s Door / Acid Nerve / 87% (Issue 55) The Last Campfire / Hello Games / 86% (Issue 47) Resident Evil 2 / Capcom / 86% (Issue 7) Journey to the Savage Planet / Typhoon Studios / 84% (Issue 33) The Outer Worlds / Obsidian Entertainment / 84% (Issue 28) Eastward / Pixpil / 84% (Issue 57) Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom / Game Atelier / 84% (Issue 6) The games for… REPEATED PLAY Hades / Supergiant Games / 94% (Issue 44) They Are Billions / Numantian Games / 88% (Issue 20) Sekiro:…

I know most players can probably take or leave the crass sense of humour Borderlands so often touts, but it’s hard to deny just how satisfying the core acts of shooting and looting both feel in Gearbox’s trademark series. By the time of The Pre-Sequel’s release in 2014, this formula had been well established. That’s why, when returning to this zany, space-based spin-off now on Nintendo Switch (in advance of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands’ release later this month), gunning down endless legions of crazed psychos and scavs is still second nature. ‘Pop. Pop. Pop’ each of their heads go after falling victim to my fire-equipped pistol. Oh yes, it’s good to be back hunting vaults. Of course, helping to separate it from any entry that came before, Pre-Sequel places much more…

The Last Worker In the near future, a gigantic online retailer – which definitely isn’t Amazon – has largely replaced its workforce with AI machines. The sole remaining human, toiling away in a warehouse “the size of the sunken city of Manhattan”, is Kurt, a grizzled chap who’s tasked with fulfilling the sea of orders rolling in every day. Ultimately, The Last Worker’s a game about the promise of rebellion: you can sneak into areas of the facility you shouldn’t enter, avoiding the patrolling machines; then there’s SPEAR, a group of anti-automation activists. Do you join them, or stick with your corporate master, who definitely isn’t based on Jeff Bezos? The Last Worker is the game debut from filmmaker Jörg Tittel, its unique look is courtesy of Judge Dredd artist…

A ‘slice and dice’ mechanic can be used in all kinds of ways in your projects, from chopping up food to adding a more visceral edge to your swordplay. Here, we’re going to create a system loosely based on Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance’s Zandatsu mechanic to learn all about Procedural Meshes and how we can chop them up. The key to a mesh slicing system in Unreal Engine is something called an imposter. The idea is, we take a mesh, create a procedural version of it, and from there, use that data to alter the visuals of said mesh to achieve our slicing effect. For the purposes of this guide – and to keep it simple to explain – we’ll be starting with the First Person sample project, which you…

After years of making mods and levels for games like Liero and Super Mario World, it was only natural that my first commercial game – Abacus – took the form of a retro 2D shooter-platformer. I decided early on that I wanted Abacus to have multiplayer capabilities. This decision had widespread consequences for the codebase – every action now had to go through the server – but it also raised an important question: how could I effectively test the multiplayer gameplay? THE LOGISTICS OF PLAYTESTING Testing a multiplayer game solo is a lonely business, and it can only get you so far. When it comes to pushing the game to its limits, assessing the balance, and most importantly, making sure it’s fun, getting more players involved is a must. The…

There was a time, not that long ago, when Frontier Developments boss David Braben was extremely vocal about the pre-owned video game market. He didn’t like it. Not at all. He’d scorn the lack of action taken by the industry to nip the high street sales of used games in the bud. He’d also point out that pre-owned games were eroding sales of new copies, and went as far as to say the flogging of used titles was keeping the prices of video games high. As if to underline the issue, he took to Twitter in 2017 to point out that British retailer GAME had “just tried very hard to sell me pre-owned instead of new”. This aspect of the pre-owned market has long been a bugbear of publishers –…

For most, learning a new language isn’t easy, but there are a growing number of games that make the process surprisingly fun – when it comes to Japanese, for example, there’s Hiragana Pixel Party, a bouncy infinite runner that helps you to memorise hiragana and katakana characters as you hop over obstacles. In a similar vein, the upcoming Shashingo is a photography game that helps build your Japanese vocabulary (hence its subtitle, Learn Japanese with Photography). With your trusty camera in hand, you wander the streets of a Japanese city, taking photos of the local sights; with each click of the button, you’ll get a picture of what you’ve captured, complete with a caption beneath in Japanese and English. If you’re really after a challenge, there’s also a mode where…

Like pretty much everyone these days, I’ve just had a bout of Covid. Thankfully it wasn’t too bad, but it did mean me and my kid were trapped in the house for a whole week. What does any responsible parent do in these situations? That’s right. They buy a ton of LEGO™, four big cakes, and a new video game. The game in question was Pokémon Legends: Arceus – an adventure guaranteed to absorb every waking, snuffly hour we gave it without threat of completion. Despite being only six, and precisely because her father isn’t a proper adult, this is my daughter’s fourth Pokémon game, following Let’s Go, Pikachu!, Pokémon Sword, and the original Pokémon Red. How is it? Well, not only does Arceus fail to improve on the graphics…

Without fanfare, you begin in a large, dimly-lit room. What light there is comes from the panels above the exhibits, shining down on names like Mass Effect, Splinter Cell, and the all-important three-for-one: Thief / Deus Ex / No One Lives Forever. As a sign explains when you enter, this is the Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking, an interactive historical document collecting 24 different approaches to the art of cracking locks for players to peruse. The museum’s split up into three wings, with RPGs in one, immersive sims in another, and everything else in a third. This holistic approach means that familiar takes from modern triple-A games like Skyrim sit alongside less well-known attempts from older games like Hillsfar, and down the hall from recent indie innovators like Jenny LeClue: Detectivu.…

The night spoke our names Ludipe / Free in browser / wfmag.cc/spoke-names A compact but clever dice drafting/resource management game, TNSON is simple enough to run in your browser, but incredibly rich in decisions and atmosphere. Winter looms, and your tiny group has ten short days to gather enough wood and supplies to last out its bitter chill, and perhaps something more sinister lurks in the darkness. Roll dice each day, then spend the results on immediate gains or investments for the future. A haunting soundtrack completes this excellently fraught distillation of traditionally sprawling genres. Bloodborne PSX LWMedia / Free / wfmag.cc/blood-psx I’m a great fan of the idea that graphical fidelity is temporary, while art direction lasts forever. As so many excellent demakes become more common, and we move…

1 Disco Elysium / 94% (Issue 28) Smarter and deeper than anything else; truly an RPG in a class completely of its own. 2 Hades / 94% (Issue 44) Proving ‘roguelike’ isn’t a dirty word, learning-and-dying is a joy from start to finish. 3 Assassin’s Creed Odyssey / 93% (Issue 1) The point where Ubisoft realised over-the-top adventures were the right direction. 4 Telling Lies / 92% (Issue 24) This FMV mystery asks more of the player than most, with rewards to match. 5 If Found / 92% (Issue 44) A compelling and beautifully illustrated narrative, as moving as it is memorable. 6 Yakuza: Like a Dragon / 90% (Issue 45) A bold, brash, and joyous rebirth for the long-running gangster series. 7 Tetris Effect / 90% (Issue 4) The…

As a critic, there are certain games you’re supposed to have played. Many of the big names, of course, but also the celebrated small ones, the quirky boundary-pushers, and the arty award-winners. It’s almost embarrassing to admit you haven’t, but there’s always a few that slip through the net like, say, a salmon that should have wound up in an American fish cannery. These are games you often hear about, but somehow never reach the top of your in-tray, as a march of new releases sweeps you along. Yes, even some that are only two hours long. And on Game Pass. Fine, I have no excuse. But that was me and What Remains of Edith Finch. What’s worse is that Edith Finch is one of those games that everyone seems…