Innehållsförteckning för #65 från Wireframe Magazine

Info GENRE Sandbox adventure FORMAT PC, PS4, PS5 DEVELOPER Awaceb PUBLISHER Kepler Interactive RELEASE Early 2023 SOCIAL @awaceb Is it possible to be too ambitious as an indie developer? Certainly, French studio Awaceb hasn’t taken the easy route with its sophomore project, Tchia. A physics-based, open-world adventure that takes in a diverse island setting, multiple modes of traversal, combat, and lots more besides, it’s a considerable step up in scope from the outfit’s first game, the 2D platformer Fossil Echo. Indeed, the sheer wealth of ideas in Tchia are of a scale you’d expect from a major studio – and yet the team behind it amounts to only a dozen or so members. “It’s fairly small for the scope of game we’re making,” admits game director and studio co-founder Phil…

01. Back from the DE3d After E3 sat it out earlier this year, the ESA has now announced it’s partnering with ReedPop (the event organiser behind PAX, Star Wars Celebration, and more) to produce 2023’s in-person show. “We’re going to build a world-class event to serve the global gaming industry in new and broader ways than we already do,” ReedPop president Lance Fensterman boasted. The question now becomes: can a physical event maintain the same relevancy in an age when publishers have recognised the value in digital showcases? Either way, it’ll be nice to have announcements whittled down to just one week, rather than several. 02. Ragnarök (and roll) This year’s holiday release calendar was looking a tad sparse in the wake of Starfield slipping and Square Enix’s Forspoken being…

We can’t imagine there are many people on this Earth who Shigeru Miyamoto – the creator of Mario himself – would reach out to for advice. In the early 1990s, however, seeking a way to get a full 3D engine running on Nintendo’s upcoming SNES hardware, 17-year-old Dylan Cuthbert was one of them. Cuthbert worked for a studio called Argonaut Software at the time, an outfit with a reputation for breaking hardware and getting it to do cool things, particularly in the 3D space. A chief example of this came via an early prototype for the Game Boy, which presented a rover driving around the moon’s surface from a first-person perspective. This demo is what caught the attention of Nintendo during 1991’s CES conference as a result of Argonaut CEO…

Info GENRE Beat-’em-up FORMAT PC (tested) /PS4 / XBO / Switch DEVELOPER Tribute Games PUBLISHER Dotemu PRICE £22.49 RELEASE Out now What’s the purpose of a beat-‘emup outside of the arcade? It’s an existential question the oncedominant genre has evaded for the last three decades. Whereas other relics of the eighties saw their templates evolve to accommodate modern tastes (such as the numerous twin-stick shooters inspired by Robotron: 2084), most contemporary 2D brawlers are not fundamentally different from Double Dragon. This often presents a challenge on how to best judge them. Shredder’s Revenge peddles the same kind of nostalgia that prompted the resurrection of the Streets of Rage and River City franchises two years ago, but does so even more unashamedly. A two‑hour riot of colourful backdrops, fluidly animated violence,…

Welcome to the St. Dinfna Hotel, Mr Leite – we hope you enjoy your stay. You may find your experience here a little familiar if you’re a fan of other, higher-budgeted creepy establishments, yet nevertheless there’s a small slither of value to glean from carefully exploring these dank and dreary halls. We’ve had plenty of investigative journalists visit us throughout the years. Could you be the first to make it out alive? That entirely depends on your ability to solve all kinds of logic puzzles and mysteries. Alas, not to worry, there’s a handful of tools we’ve set aside to help you. Many have deemed the most useful one to be this humble camera. Because while it works well to illuminate the way whenever the hotel experiences a power cut…

Collector’s edition As I sit down to type this, Nintendo’s just announced a collector’s version of Bayonetta 3, which comes with an art book and some alternate game sleeves. Special editions like these are so ubiquitous these days that most gamers must have at least a couple cluttering up their shelves; while the industry’s rapidly heading towards an all-digital future, there’s still an appetite for physical keepsakes related to our favourite games. I was recently reminded, though, that the idea of packaging a game with a lot of extra, semi-related stuff is far from a recent idea. Gamers of a certain vintage will no doubt remember all those eighties and nineties games that came with posters and other bits and pieces; publisher Psygnosis crammed a T-shirt into Shadow of the…

Whether they’re small, contained match-three puzzlers or big, open-world action RPGs, all games are governed by rules of some kind. Those rules can be hidden behind big guns, even bigger explosions, or captivating graphics or soundtracks, but they’re seldom too far from the surface. This is especially true of The Sojourn, developer Shifting Tides’ first-person puzzler released in 2019. It takes place in a soft-focus, surreal world of ancient, abandoned cities and towering double doors that creak open as you approach. Its soundtrack creates an atmosphere of quiet contemplation, while the aphorisms you find in scrolls or above exits (“A collage of corruption is still corruption”) add to the philosophical tone. But while The Sojourn’s world may be dreamlike, its puzzles deal in cold, hard logic. The game’s split into…

Info GENRE Shared-world, crafting, survival FORMAT PC DEVELOPER Inflexion Games PUBLISHER Inflexion Games RELEASE Q4 2022 (Early Access) SOCIAL @PlayNightingale Following a 17-year tenure at BioWare working on storied franchises like Mass Effect, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Baldur’s Gate, Aaryn Flynn is determined to get another game out the door. With a résumé like this, you might assume it a relatively easy prospect, yet already Inflexion Games has had quite the journey. Having originally secured funding from British tech start-up Improbable, which wanted to support studios working on cool things, plans quickly changed. Improbable went in a different direction with its Spatialize technology stack and, therefore, so did Inflexion, finding another investor in Tencent, which was happy to support its in-development survival game while simultaneously giving Flynn and…

Goat Simulator 3 The caprine sandbox mischief continues, this time with four-player local or online multiplayer, an assortment of new minigames, and the added ability to customise your goat with a selection of horns, hooves, and other accessories. If you’re wondering whether you missed Goat Simulator 2, then don’t worry – developer Coffee Stain Studios says its latest outing “skips the sequel and goes straight to the third game.” We might be wrong, but we’re starting to get the impression that the studio isn’t taking this series all that seriously. Anger Foot We have fond memories of People Can Fly’s 2011 opus, Bulletstorm, so any modern FPS that lets us blast villains or kick them clear across a room has our vote. Anger Foot is, if anything, an even more…

GAME Ship of Fools DEVELOPER Fika Productions RELEASE 2022 WEBSITE shipoffoolsgame.com The ability to strategise and keep a cool head are key in Ship of Fools, Fika Productions’ upcoming co-op rogue-lite in which you and a friend scramble to protect your vulnerable boat from the hordes of enemies that assault it from all sides. It’s an enjoyably chaotic game concept, and it’s up to art director Vincent Rochette and his team to ensure that the action remains legible even when there are dozens of monsters crowding the screen. “In a fast-paced game, designing simple and readable characters is essential,” Rochette tells us. “This is usually done by creating distinctive silhouettes; having solid value contrasts can help a lot as well. It’s also important to keep visual noise to a minimum,…

Are you a solo developer working on a game you want to share with Wireframe? If you’d like to have your project featured in these pages, get in touch with us at wfmag.cc/hello You’re prowling through the halls of an abandoned university, video recorder in hand. It’s 1998, and you’re meant to be investigating reports of strange activity in a building that was closed months earlier due to a gas leak. But as you poke around the empty classrooms and peer into dusty corners with your torch, it gradually becomes clear that there’s something far scarier afoot than a leaking gas pipe… These are just the few opening moments in The Building 71 Incident, a short, quietly disturbing found-footage horror game from Brazil. What’s fascinating is how much it does…

My time on Frog Island was full of surprises. But then I didn’t expect much when I washed up, shipwrecked on its shores with only a sleeping bag and a potted plant for company. The first thing to mention: there are literally no words. The cast of amphibians only communicate with grunts and pictures in speech bubbles. This bothered me at first, as some images didn’t make a lot of sense. “What’s this little spiky crystal thing?” I found myself asking. After spending some time exploring, however, things started to click. I went in expecting Time on Frog Island to be an indie take on Animal Crossing, but New Horizons it is not. In reality, it’s a journey of exploration, trading, and finding uses for the many objects scattered around…

Wireframe CERTIFIED HOT Info GENRE Action adventure FORMAT PC (tested) /PS4 / PS5 DEVELOPER BlueTwelve Studio PUBLISHER Annapurna Interactive PRICE £24.99 RELEASE Out now SOCIAL @HKdevblog It’s me. A cat. I’m following my new robot mate to an apartment. The clumsy, inefficient biped is naturally much slower than me, and so I’m gently leaning my thumb on the analogue stick to keep pace. Remember how exciting it was when The Witcher 3’s NPCs matched the player’s movement speed? That’s because this stuff is usually a real snooze, full of awkward stops and starts, or waiting for your companion to play catchup. But Stray? Well, you’re a cat. More importantly, you’re a cat animated with such love, such satisfying sleekness, and perfect padding, that just walking feels like play. It feels…

Licence to thrill I’ll admit I had my doubts when first pressing play on the new GoldenEra documentary, mainly because I was instantly met by Miyamoto’s infamous quote about rushed versus delayed games. You know the one. Corny as it may be, however, the film makes a great case for Rare’s seminal FPS as being the prime example of what excellence can be achieved when a developer is given enough time to execute on its vision. Because sure, while the eight-person team responsible for the Nintendo 64’s multiplayer masterpiece delivered it twoand-a-half years late, look at the legacy GoldenEye 007 has since left behind. It’s this legacy that director Drew Roller chooses to explore in roughly 97 minutes, with a little help from industry veterans, insatiable fans, and the people…

When I originally reviewed Deliver Us The Moon for this here magazine way back in Wireframe #28, I called it “one giant leap of a thoughtful space adventure”. Revisiting it three years on – largely as a result of its upcoming sequel gloriously gracing last issue’s cover – this sentiment firmly remains. More impressive now, however, is just how singular it continues to be in both its vision and execution – even compared to a lot of space-set games released since. This is a hard sci-fi title uninterested in dazzling players using rote cinematic tricks; instead it’s intent on keeping them immersed in the confines of its grounded, near-future depiction of what humanity’s lunar voyage amongst the stars might entail. KeokeN Interactive’s debut does all this and still finds time…

Be it cards, stamps, or 1980s action figures, collecting is a pastime that humans can’t seem to escape from. That’s why, when we were first asked to “catch ’em all” some 30 or so years ago, we bought into the craze like wildfire and then never really stopped – Pokémon GO still has many of us seeking out cutesy monsters in the real world to this day. Cassette Beasts is an upcoming turn-based RPG that wears the influence of Game Freak’s classic series on its sleeve, hoping to tap into the same wholesome energy while offering some serious tweaks to the format. Fusing creatures together is at the core of the experience here, with Bytten Studio’s spin letting you record the essence of its capturable critters and get creative with…

Info GENRE Turn-based, adventure, strategy FORMAT PC DEVELOPER Demagog Studio PUBLISHER Rogue Games, Inc. RELEASE December 2022 SOCIAL @demagog_studio Contrary to how it’s presented in a lot of dystopian fiction, ecological collapse won’t see the Earth consumed in a ball of flame. Rather it’s wet. Really wet. So envisions Demagog Studio, whose upcoming game Highwater was one of the standout showcases during Summer Games Fest earlier this year; its vision of a world consumed by harsh flooding against a pastel colour palette was truly a unique sight to behold. Scenes of skyscrapers and islands engulfed by high tides were a regular occurrence, all as a lowly boating crew try and sail their way through it in search of safety. With small-scale indie hit Golf Club: Wasteland already under its belt…

It’s impossible to ignore The Beatles’ influence on both music and film. The Fab Four were responsible for some of the most influential albums of all time, from Abbey Road to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and starred in several important movies, including A Hard Day’s Night, Yellow Submarine, and Let It Be. Their music and films have inspired generations of artists, and led to countless books – all of which aim to document their impact on pop culture at large. But one aspect of Beatlemania that has always remained somewhat underexplored is their influence on video games and their creators. From hobbyists to professional studios, many developers have paid homage to The Beatles over the decades, but much of that history remains either buried or forgotten. We recently…

Aeons ago, when the Earth was young and dinosaurs still roamed its surface, magazines like Your Sinclair and Commodore User regularly put audio cassettes on their covers. These often contained a mix of full games and demos of upcoming releases, giving readers a broad cross-section of the new, the old, the eagerly anticipated, and the unfamiliar. Of course, not all of the games on those tapes were great – and, as the magazines became more reliant on the cassettes for sales, the publications themselves got thinner – but at their best, they provided an affordable means of exploring an often bewilderingly broad video game landscape for a relatively small outlay. It could be argued that, with dozens of indie games appearing on such platforms as Steam and itch.io each day,…

Famine was headline news around the world in the 1980s. But as the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Ethiopia became apparent, Rod Cousens of British publisher Quicksilva resolved to do something about it. “The pictures were harrowing,” Cousens recalls. “To sit idly by was not an option. Watching Bob Geldof mobilise the music industry into action led me to believe the video game industry could be similarly galvanised.” Thus began his work in launching the charity compilation Soft Aid for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, released in 1985. “There was widespread willingness to help,” says Cousens, “so it became a logistical process involving rights holders, software publishers, developers, platform holders, retailers, distributors, magazines, manufacturers, printers, accounting firms, etc. And in rapid time we were able to get everyone on board.”…

Are you a solo developer working on a game you want to share with Wireframe? If you’d like to have your project featured in these pages, get in touch with us at wfmag.cc/hello Domènec Claret is a Spanish solo developer who’s been on almost as big and bold a journey as the protagonist at the heart of his upcoming 1-bit Metroidvania. Having grown up dabbling with computers like the ZX Spectrum and MSX2 – where he enjoyed games like The Maze of Galious – his love of old tech, simple visuals, and Metroidvanias should come as no surprise. However, it was towards the end of 2019 when all these passions coalesced, where, with a little help from online tutorials and GameMaker, he started work on the monochrome intergalactic adventure now…

Info GENRE First-person action-platforming speedrunner FORMAT PC / Switch (tested) DEVELOPER Angel Matrix PUBLISHER Annapurna Interactive PRICE £19.99 RELEASE Out now SOCIAL @PlayNeonWhite Wireframe CERTIFIED HOT If speedrunning is the purest expression of gaming skill, then games designed with speedrunning in mind are the path to enlightenment. Neon White goes further than that. For players who marvel at speedrunners but feel hopelessly incompetent, or even those who can’t see the point (let alone joy) of being able to exploit a glitch that shaves off milliseconds from a run, then this is the best game to introduce you to its highs. It may even get you hooked in the process. It’s also a leftfield proposition from Annapurna Interactive, usually better known for games driven by narrative rather than skill-based mechanics with…

Info GENRE Visual novel FORMAT PC (tested) /Switch / PS4 / PS5 / XB X/S / XBO DEVELOPER LCB Game Studio PUBLISHER Chorus Worldwide PRICE £6.79 RELEASE Out now SOCIAL @lcbgamestudio It’s amazing what you can do with nine colours. LCB Game Studio deliberately limited the colour palette it used when creating Mothmen 1966, and the results are incredibly striking. Every screen presents a new piece of gorgeous pixel art crafted from a handful of shades, evoking classic 1980s DOS games or the golden age of the ZX Spectrum. It’s a calculated move to hit you right in the nostalgia glands – and it works, acting as a reminder that some of the most memorable and unique pieces of art are produced under the strictest of constraints. Here, there’s also…

Bat Likes Kobold Nyeogmi / Free in browser / wfmag.cc/kobold What if tic-tac-toe (or noughts and crosses, if you’re a painfully literal English person) involved hidden information, poker style? Noughts are bats, crosses are kobolds (lizards), and you play against an AI. So far, so simple, but the trick here is that each side has an alternative win condition, kept secret from their opponent, whether that’s to let the other side win, force a draw, or old-fashioned victory. I absolutely love the idea of cross-pollinating two simple, time-tested, elegant systems together and seeing what blooms, and the results are just as minimalistically moreish as you’d expect. CANINE PuKoGames / Free / wfmag.cc/canine Fair warning: there’s an absolute soiler of a jump scare buried in this first-person horror demo. Although, in…

1 Elden Ring / 95% (Issue 61) A game of massive scale, packed with intelligence and mystery. A towering achievement. 2 Disco Elysium / 94% (Issue 28) Smarter and deeper than anything else; truly an RPG in a class completely of its own. 3 Hades / 94% (Issue 44) Proving ‘roguelike’ isn’t a dirty word, learningand-dying is a joy from start to finish. 4 Assassin’s Creed Odyssey / 93% (Issue 1) The point where Ubisoft realised over-the-top adventures were the right direction. 5 Telling Lies / 92% (Issue 24) This FMV mystery asks more of the player than most, with rewards to match. 6 If Found /92% (Issue 44) A compelling and beautifully illustrated narrative, as moving as it is memorable. 7 Yakuza: Like a Dragon / 90% (Issue 45) A bold, brash, and joyous rebirth for the…

TECHNOS JAPAN / 1987 / ARCADE It took until 1987 for a game developer to first think, “What if the player could pick up an oil-drum and throw it at a bad guy?” Or, more enticingly still, “What if the player could punch an enemy, causing them to drop their baseball bat, then let the player pick up the bat and pummel the enemy around the head with it?” Thank goodness for Double Dragon. Looking back, it’s remarkable just how quickly the beat-‘emup genre evolved. Irem’s Kung-Fu Master came out swinging in 1984, it being the first game to establish the generic staples of a lone martial artist walking along a bit, kicking or punching a bad guy in the face, then walking along a bit more. Just two years…