Sommaire pour May 2022 de Edge

One thousand. That, give or take, is the number of digital-exclusive games estimated to become unavailable for purchase once Nintendo’s 3DS and Wii U digital stores are shuttered. For everyone except those who already own affected games – a situation soon to present challenges of its own, given that credit card and eShop Card functionalities will be disabled in May and August respectively – they will effectively vanish in March 2023, unable to be downloaded ever again. Nintendo has argued that the move is part of the “natural lifecycle for any product line as it becomes less used by consumers over time”. In a now-deleted statement, the company pointed to the availability of over 130 “classic games” on its subscription service Switch Online as “an effective way to make classic…

The clone wars, it seems, are far from over. The practice of copying the essence of a popular game and repackaging it for financial gain has been around almost as long as videogames, but it’s become a particular problem in recent years on mobile platforms. Not only can this be dispiriting for creators, in the worst cases, clones can overshadow an original game’s performance on storefronts – as in 2018, when Hole.io, a knock-off of Ben Esposito’s Donut County, shot to the top of the iOS App Store before Esposito’s game was even released. Sometimes, developers even find themselves competing with copies of copies, as in the case of Threes, the puzzle game which was copied as 1024, then not one but two games called 2048. At the beginning of…

RGB-Pi’s menus were already spellbinding in OS2 despite being just layers of low-res pixel art made by fans of classic games. Filtered through a CRT, they turned emulation into transportation, bridging not just the hundreds of ROMs but also technologies made decades apart. OS4 takes things to the next level, with chunky bitmap fonts sitting atop loving recreations of scenes from Sonic, Galaga, and Tomás’s own imagination. The system is once again skinnable, which, based on past performance, means a host of user creations are just around the corner. Now, would anyone have a sprite sheet for The New Zealand Story lying around?…

“The people in the space, though, tend to be involved in a lot of criminal activity… they’re just not people you are really wanting to be doing business with.” Gabe Newell doesn’t have a problem with blockchain technology, just the terrible people it tends to attract “Women have been harassed, bullied, marginalised… Leaders who fall short of basic standards must go.” EA COO Laura Miele doesn’t need to name names for everyone to know who she wants to see get the boot “‘Ooh, it were all Jet Set Willy back in my day. You didn’t have Bluetooth headsets. And the games were whittled from corned beef.’” Comedy writer Joel Morris isn’t convinced that everything was better in the old days “A developer makes a game, a studio films a movie,…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a year’s subscription to Edge. Mona Lisas and mad hatters All the rightly sceptical discussions of NFTs in recent Edge issues have had the unfortunate consequence of making me think more about NFTs. Specifically, why do they seem (at least to me) so completely devoid of cultural or social value? No doubt it’s partly because of the horrible ‘cryptobros’ that swarm them, the anarchocapitalist undertones, and the negative environmental consequences, but there must be something more fundamental. Obviously I don’t have the full answer, but it seems to do with a combination of factors: effort and skill, constitution, and ultimately a preoccupation with the marketplace over the thing that’s being marketed. Most…

Billy Basso, creator of Animal Well, the most absorbing Metroidvania we’ve played in some time, admits that he’s bad at pitching his game. “I’m very confident in it,” he begins. “I’m making a game I like and trying to make it as high quality as possible.” Trying to describe it? That’s a bigger challenge – particularly when people view certain elements of it as instant red flags. “People are like: ‘Pixel art: boring’, ‘2D platformer: boring’. I have to jump all these hurdles to actually get people to pay attention.” There’s the rub: the dominant currency in our always-online world is attention. When everything is vying for visibility, how do you convince people to take notice of the thing you’ve made? To that end, Basso contacted former Nintendo alumnus Dan…

The Wolf Among Us 2 is staying true to the comic-book aesthetic of the first season, though what we’ve seen of it so far is noticeably sharper and smoother. “We knew right from the beginning that the first real gameplay we showed had to be from the new engine and demonstrate significant advancement,” Ottilie says. What it doesn’t tell us is whether any significant changes have been made to the way investigations or action scenes are handled. On that front, Ottilie is playing coy for now. “It’s important that Season Two maintains the gameplay and feel of what players loved about Season One. We really don’t wish to say too much about the gameplay yet, but players will make many more of the difficult choices familiar to The Wolf Among…

Developer Angel Matrix Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, Switch Origin US Release TBA Heaven, it turns out, has Sega-blue skies. Just as we always hoped. What we could never have anticipated, though, is that the rest of the scenery would follow suit. Floating walkways that curve like a section of OutRun track; a marble staircase leading straight to the head of a bulbous demon, just waiting to be jumped on to launch us upwards; impossible airborne canals where water flows upwards, providing a handy speed boost in the process. This is all good news for your protagonist, who finds himself in paradise on a temporary visa. Heaven has a demon problem, and he’s one of a host of recently deceased sinners with potentially transferable skills who have been shipped in…

No golden-age murder mystery is complete without a lounge of suspects and a showboating detective, and Ito agrees that “it’s really fun to write these scenes”. In The Centennial Case confrontations revolve around using a process of elimination and lateral thinking to narrow down the group, before going head-to-head with a killer while they poke holes in your reasoning. But for Ito the real art lies in ensnaring killers in verbal traps. “Holmes, Poirot and Kogoro Akechi will annoy their suspect with topics that seem to be completely unrelated at first – until you look back, and you realise that their deduction has been absolutely elegant, with not a single word wasted. My goal is to create a game where you can experience that kind of enjoyment for yourself.”…

Developer/publisher Shared Memory Format PC, PS5 Origin US Release Late 2022/early 2023 There is nothing particularly special about the development journey of Billy Basso’s solo debut. Working at a series of big studios, he grew tired of making the games other people wanted him to make and opted to go it alone with one of his own. Five years ago, it was a hobby project; now it is a full-time job. The details may be different, but we have heard dozens of stories like this before. But that doesn’t matter: having now spent several hours with (or should that be down?) Animal Well, we’re happy to report that the game is the special part. Yes, if you want to be reductive, it’s another pixel-art Metroidvania. But it evokes a very…

As much positive change as Chen has seen over the past decade, he feels that the emergence of mobile phones as gaming devices marks a step back: “To me, it’s really unfortunate because I was thinking that in the console world people are really starting to dive into the realm of art; even with triple-A games like God Of War and The Last Of Us, people are trying to tell stories that are meaningful for adults.” Despite the sheer number of people that they’ve brought to gaming, and Sky: Children of Light’s own success on mobile platforms, he feels they encourage simple mechanical experiences, such as match-three and gacha, over innovation and emotion. “That’s why we’re still struggling trying to evangelise games as an artistic medium,” Chen says. “The fight…

Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Developer/publisher Bandai Namco (Bandai Namco Studios) Origin Japan Release 2021 Since its Super Famicom debut in Japan, over a quarter of a century ago, there have been two constants for the Tales series: anime characters as colourfully distinct as their hair, and a realtime combat system, going against the grain of a genre still largely tied to the turn-based traditions. Tales Of Arise, the series’ first new mainline title in five years, didn’t shed either aspect of its identity to win over a wider audience. Nonetheless, while Arise producer Yusuke Tomizawa wasn’t personally dissatisfied with the direction the series took in the last generation, he was conscious that it would need reinvigorating if it was to break out of its niche. (Something…

NEAR MISSES Onde PC Situated at the intersection of Bit Generations: Orbital, Hohokum, Sound Shapes, Flow and Electroplankton, this abstract platformer (oh, Ynglet, too) has you negotiating its world via soundwaves. Your avatar resembles a deepsea organism with four eyes representing the face buttons: you tap these to create sounds that radiate outward, though you’ll perish if you don’t find another to latch onto before its resonance fades. It’s strange and at times hypnotically beautiful, but after a while its central mechanic doesn’t add up to much more than a cumbersome way to get around. Sol Cresta PC Conceived by Hideki Kamiya as a belated sequel of sorts to Nichibutsu arcade favourites Moon Cresta and Terra Cresta, PlatinumGames’ vertically scrolling shoot-’em-up has clearly been a labour of love. The main…

Like everything else, co-op has been overhauled in Elden Ring. While you can still drop your summon sign in front of boss doors, new staging posts send your sign to all summoning pools in the local area, speeding up matchmaking. Yet co-op isn’t the silver (golden?) bullet it always was. Sure, a friendly player with a pocket full of high-level sorceries, or a club the size of a small car, can still tip a tough fight in your favour. But now calling for help involves a tradeoff. Your Spirit Ashes become greyed out, likewise the whistle with which you summon Torrent – which we find out to great cost in a boss battle where a mount is essential. Further complication comes from invasions, which are only possible when you’ve summoned…

Tunic is very much an exploration game with combat in it. In other words, you’re unlikely to be impressed the first time you get into a fight. Swipes with your stubby sword often fall short of the target, while the dodge roll is unresponsive enough to have us double-checking performance settings. Things start to improve when you acquire the shield, and get better from there, as your options open up. Special mention must go to the game’s customisation system, which turns out to function much like Hollow Knight’s Charms. There are some borderline game-breaking combinations to be found here – which is of course all part of the fun. It stands to reason that the best part of combat would involve exploration of another kind.…

The game’s story involves Kirby rescuing Waddle Dees, who have been kidnapped en masse by a group of antagonists known as The Beast Pack. You’ll retrieve a handful by following the critical path to the end of a stage, but getting them all requires side missions to be completed, while unlocking an area’s boss requires picking up more than the bare minimum. The Waddle Dees you’ve saved populate a cheerful village hub, opening up new facilities that allow you to take temporary buffs or health items into a stage, or to spend the coins you’ve earned to amass a collection of capsule toys. There’s the usual colosseum besides, and a handful of simplistic minigames of the play-once-and-never-again variety.…

The puzzles might not put up much of a fight, but Norco doesn’t lack interactivity – it’s just that the focal point is the choices you make in dialogue. While conversations will sometimes circle back to the same point regardless of your input, some dialogue options can open up whole new avenues, including miniature subplots and locations to explore. Like Kentucky Route Zero, the game also occasionally presents you with the opportunity to reshape prior events or how a character experienced them – creating a convincing illusion that you’re actually a collaborator in the writing process. Occasionally, though, your co-writer pushes back. “I remember…” you might suggest. The game counters: “You only think you do”.…

Beating the Wii game to market, De Blob’s iOS incarnation was a top-down scrolling paintathon more akin to the original demo than the console version, with Blob controlled by either tapping the screen or tilting your phone. It was developed by a separate team – Universomo, a Finnish studio closed by THQ in 2010. The Colour Underground characters are nowhere to be seen, but there are mechanics not included elsewhere: you might need to use water to shrink to fit through tight spaces, or grow to break barriers. It remains a fascinating artefact from this experimental time in mobile gaming and a monument to THQ’s ambitions for the series – but one that, between the publisher’s closure and over a decade’s worth of iOS updates, is now inaccessible via the…

This isn’t the first time Broken Rules has experienced one of its titles disappearing from a digital storefront. The studio’s debut title, And Yet It Moves, was released on iOS in 2015 as Yet It Moves, distributed by Japanese publisher DeNA, but is no longer available. A WiiWare version was also lost to the closure of that console’s digital store in 2019. “We have one old iPad 2 in the studio that’s only there because it still has the game on it, because it’s the only way to still play on an iPad,” Bohatsch (above) says. “We just try to preserve it for ourselves, at least.”…

One of the issues with cloning in recent years, according to Ali, is that “cloners are getting smarter”. Where before they would directly rip a game and release an exact copy onto the market, they are now copying the code and creating altered ‘lookalike’ versions from it in order to avoid detection. “They do this by making a subtle change, like tweaking the name of the game, but will refer back to the game they’re cloning by using a marketing asset – such as a screenshot or trailer – in the listing or referring to the original game name in the metadata to make sure they show up in search.”…

Universal lightgun support is a marquee feature of RGB-Pi OS4 – but if embracing the displays for which they were built sounds like a silver bullet for those troublesome peripherals, think again. RGB-Pi’s weapon of choice was Namco’s GunCon2, but after so many years of LCD-imposed exile, little had been done to make one work with Linux. “This guy called Beardypig had managed to reverseengineer a GunCon3,” aTg recalls, “but that model required a sensor bar like the Wii Remote, which means constant calibrations.” An eventual collaboration yielded open-source GunCon2 drivers – now available to any project.…

Game Jumanji Manufacturer Sega From Star Wars’ yoke-styled controller to Paperboy’s lifesized handlebars, innovation in videogames often happened in terms of how we interacted with arcade machines, but it feels as though those days are long gone, with most big new cabinets centred on steering wheels and lightguns. Step forward Jumanji from Sega, a minigame-powered multiplayer affair with a control scheme (below) offering more than initially meets the eye. Each player has a single button, but it’s set in the centre of a disc that can be rotated in order to control one of the four selectable characters – steering their vehicle, for example, or moving left and right to balance on a see-saw. It’s all in the name of ticket redemption, and the minigames seem on the flimsy side,…

Are you part of the ‘Nintendo generation’? I only ask because the Pentagon recently dissed videogamers in these terms by saying they have fragile bones. Army Major Jon-Marc Thibodeau was quoted in an official press release as saying: “The ‘Nintendo Generation’ soldier skeleton is not toughened by activity prior to arrival, so some of them break more easily.” As literally everyone pointed out immediately, this is rather anachronistic since the last generation to grow up when ‘Nintendo’ was the prevailing synecdoche for ‘videogames’ are now middle-aged and quite unlikely to be showing up at boot camp for basic infantry training so that Major Thibodeau can attempt to break their skeletons. Or, as one commenter on the DoD PR website put it, unimprovably: “It’s not Nintendo Grandma, it’s called a PS4.”…

Forspoken PC, PS5 We were about to say May was already looking barren by 2022 standards, and then Square Enix delayed its not-especially-anticipated open-world actionadventure to October. What we saw of the game a few months back looked in need of a spit-shine, but its unusual blend of parkour and magic still intrigues us. Stray PC, PS4, PS5 Annapurna, if you’re listening, see above: the next couple of months would be a good time to release E365’s cover game. Barring cat-astrophe – apologies – BlueTwelve’s feline adventure is shaping up to be one of the year’s highlights. We’d just rather play it sooner, is all. Silt PC, PS5, Switch, Xbox Series One of the Edge brood unwittingly disturbs a late-night session with the Next Fest demo of this intense deep-sea…

Developer/publisher Inkle Format PC, Switch Origin UK Release TBA Hopping from stone to stone, a teenage girl narrowly avoids the splash of the stream below. Next she rushes down a slope, momentum carrying her forward. She scrambles up the side of a crag, careful not to lose her grip. At the top, as the girl finally stops to catch her breath, the camera pulls out to reveal the Scottish Highlands around her – then out farther still, demonstrating just how alone she is in this beautifully bleak landscape. There’s not another soul for miles. After the crowded cruise-ship setting of Inkle’s previous release, the contrast is clear. “We’ve had a bit of feedback since announcing the game of, ‘Oh, this doesn’t look like a usual Inkle game’,” director Joseph Humfrey…

Not content with making a shooter-platformer mashup, Esposito’s also mixed visual novel elements into Neon White. You can chat with your fellow Neons, uncovering their backstories, and level up relationships by presenting them with gifts found in the far reaches of each level. (While most conversations have a flirtatious energy, this isn’t strictly a dating sim – Esposito is keen to clarify that the final reward isn’t “what you might imagine”.) It might sound like an unusual combination, but these elements are intended to solve a specific design problem, Esposito says: “Speedrunning games are exhausting. They take all of your mental energy, and you can get burned out really quickly.” Taking a moment to chat provides a natural break, as well as a chance to appreciate Neon White’s stylish (and…

Developer/publisher Nintendo (EPD) Format Switch Origin Japan Release April 29 This is going to hurt a bit if you’re an Edge reader of a certain vintage – sorry. There is no escaping it: people get nostalgic about Wii Sports now. Just as some of us experience warm, fuzzy feelings when thinking back to the 8- and 16bit eras, so many players’ rose-tinted gaming memories involve swinging a Wii Remote to play tennis with their families. For a generation of players, it is as much a foundational text as, say, Super Mario Bros is to another, sparking an interest in videogames that has since become a consuming passion. How else to explain the response to Nintendo Switch Sports? As many people did, we watched the Direct announcement and figured: about time.…

Inspired by the likes of VVVVVV and You Have To Win The Game, Animal Well’s flick-screen approach might be unfashionable, but it works beautifully here. Basso says a moving camera didn’t align with his design goals for the game: “There’s lots of benefits to this camera system. One, it makes you focus on the screen and gives you more of an opportunity to let your eyes wander around and think of each screen as a single piece. It’s presenting all the things you have to work with, and lets you [wonder] what could be hidden. Plus, it’s more relaxing for your eyes to focus on things if it’s not moving around.” That has motivated him to add animations, lighting and particle effects to make the world feel more alive: indeed,…

Daring to be different is often met with suspicion – something that’s as true in videogames as it is any other part of life. Unfamiliar concepts may be turned away by overzealous gatekeepers, or interrogated in the belief they hide unseemly motives. That was never more true than ten years ago, when the indie boom brought a wave of games that seemed to reject established rules of genre and interactivity in favour of more contemplative experiences. Some were derided as ‘walking simulators’, or accused of failing to meet arbitrary standards of what constitutes a game. But like them or not, these titles capsized old debates about games’ ability to tell stories or evoke emotional responses – and the pivotal year in this shift was 2012, when a trio of developers…

Pinchbeck sees the period between 2011 and 2013 as a kind of “indie bubble” when a lot of shifts in the industry took root. It was a heady mix of debutants, such as him, whose first games were being catapulted to success thanks to a thirst for experimental titles, and industry veterans who had moved towards indie development. “It would be you and a bunch of other people all going, ‘What do we do now?’” he says. “Then you’re rubbing shoulders with Tim Schafer and Amy Hennig and people you’ve been idolising since you started playing games.” Perhaps because the territory was so uncharted, he thinks, a lot of newcomers either burnt out or soon moved on. “It kind of bowled people over a bit,” he says. “It was a…

Minoru Iwamoto Art director How did you ensure Arise’s characters feel distinct from the genre’s archetypes? In the Tales series, character design begins with making the ‘narrative role’ and ‘weapons and combat performance’ visually understandable. Then, in order to convey the character’s personality more easily, I add and subtract elements to the design while adding a sense of fun. For example, Alphen, as a subjugated Dahnan, wears tattered clothes at first, and he has a sword of fire that scorches its user, which he can handle because he has no sense of pain. Shionne, as the dominant Renan, wears graceful clothes such as the frame armour. She cannot be touched by people due to her curse of thorns, so I decided she keeps her distance with a gun. It is…

At a time when many of us are in particular need of distractions, the videogame industry is delivering like never before. We’re struggling to recall a year whose opening months were quite this packed – indeed, it’s left us with little free time for anything else. This issue alone, we’ve spent 60 hours with one game, and almost 50 in another. Our current save in a third has just passed the 35-hour mark, while after being told a fourth would last us a dozen hours, we find ourselves still captivated by its world after a dozen more. We’re feasting, as they say. But while just one of these would be enough to fill many a long evening, we don’t all play one game to the exclusion of all others. Having…

Developer Polyphony Digital Publisher SIE Format PS4, PS5 (tested) Release Out now Has it really been 25 years? Back in 1997, PlayStation’s flagship racing sim felt groundbreaking, sophisticated, even cool: that intro cinematic, with its then cutting-edge graphics, featuring high-end cars screaming around snaking bends set to The Chemical Brothers’ remix of Everything Must Go, is seared into the collective imagination of a generation. Yet Polyphony Digital’s series has not aged especially gracefully, failing to scale the heights of the PS2 years since, with Microsoft’s Forza Motorsport overtaking it in the HD era. What a pleasant surprise, then, to find that Gran Turismo has rediscovered its mojo. This isn’t just a nostalgic anniversary jamboree, but an approachable introduction to the series, and a full-throated celebration of cars and car culture.…

Destiny 2 has always walked a fine line between engrossing science fiction and high camp in its scripts. This chapter leans hard on the melodrama, and many of its plot beats would fall flat without some sterling vocal performances. While she gets surprisingly few scenes, voiceover veteran Debra Wilson delivers Savathûn’s soliloquies with gleeful relish. Ian James Corlett, the first English voice of Dragon Ball Z’s Goku, gets a major role as Fynch, a rogue Ghost with anxiety issues providing comic relief and exposition in similar measures throughout. Surprisingly, there’s no voice credit for whoever was cast as the excellent Immaru, Savathûn’s own Ghost, who growls orders to the Lucent Hive with a tone that’s equal parts drill sergeant and doting father.…

It’s often impossible to take Warhammer seriously, and this game’s writing leans into the fun, with a gorgeous variety of styles and tones between races. Kislev is melancholy, as you’d expect from an ice-locked society founded on the border of Hell – its backstory sometimes reads like an ode to Frostpunk. Demon dialogue is more often played for laughs, be it the amicable Chaos Undivided general promising to not torture you quite as much, or the Tzeentch Lord who has already foreseen the move you’re going to make. The voice acting is excellent, and the writing is nicely woven into the campaign: there are ample lore codices, but you can glean plenty from the remarks your lords and heroes make as you move them across the board.…

Occasionally CrossfireX dares to break free of its straightfaced military trappings. Spectre mode gives one team cloaking suits and serious asthma, with heavy breathing that risks revealing your position to opponents, and the campaign is at its best when it toys with a similar idea. Elsewhere in multiplayer, you can spend XP accrued during a match to gain the hilariously unbalanced ‘Boogieman’ perk, which multiplies your health by six, then equips you with dual gold-plated SMGs and blades.…

Though it’s set in the ’70s, there’s a hedonistic Summer Of Love vibe to the storytelling – it’s no surprise, then, that the rock’n’roll should come with a side of sex and drugs. There’s a disappointing inevitability to the way the frontman’s excesses derail the band, their increasing influence represented in lysergic interludes involving cartoon crows, which steadily grow more disturbing. By contrast, the sex, which begins with a tasteful nude acoustic duet, is handled rather more delicately.…

Pennington (above) says it’s generally easier to approach smaller developers about preservation, noting that the Museum’s relationship with Gang Beasts developer Boneloaf facilitated an exhibition of the game’s design documentation. The VHS hopes to inform developers about what materials are most susceptible to being lost during development. “Making sure that those works are preserved is, in a way, preserving the game,” Pennington says. “It’s just not preserving its playability.” When we put this idea to Bohatsch, he admits to being “data messy” but says Broken Rules does hold onto its development materials: “I try to not throw these things away.”…

With English as a second language, Spanish electronics engineer aTg – he prefers we use the handle by which the community knows him – spends a lot of time apologising for things that get lost in translation. The irony of this is that if his product RGB-Pi does one thing almost flawlessly, it’s solve the decadeslong problem of how to bring the joy of retro gaming intact into modern homes, all via emulation, with almost zero faff. One of few Pi distros geared for CRT displays, its hardware comes in three flavours: a GPIO-SCART cable for TVs; a JAMMA adapter for arcade cabs; and a DIY board for arcade-stick housings, bartop machines, or whatever else you might solder it into. But it’s the OS, built over “several thousands of hours”…

Illustration konsume.me I think this is the true marvel for storytellers: not that players get to step into our worlds, but that we get to step into theirs This is my last column for Edge, and I am ready to pass the torch and head off to break the Internet with my new game, Immortality. Such an occasion makes me feel reflective, and I wonder if I should dig for some deeper truth that I have yet to impart. This column is supposed to be about storytelling in games and I think I have been fairly true to that, even if I’ve meandered a little here and there. I could be cute and point out that, consciously and subconsciously, Immortality is my fullest effort at a deeper inquiry into storytelling.…

Developer Telltale Games, AdHoc Studio Publisher Telltale Games Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin US Release 2023 Plenty has changed in the world of Fables during the six months between The Wolf Among Us and its sequel. It’s now winter. Snow White has replaced her former boss as deputy mayor of Fabletown. Bigby Wolf has been temporarily relieved of his duties as town sheriff, and forced to attend an angermanagement group, as the result of a violent altercation with a certain tin man and a scarecrow. It’s at this point that he meets a non-fable (or “mundy” as they’re known here) detective called Faye, who asks him for help on a case. “This time around, New York City plays a much bigger role in the game,” Telltale…

With such a sparsely populated setting, the writing in A Highland Song is less focused on conversations with strangers and more the ones that happen inside your own head. While you won’t be picking the next thought on Moira’s behalf (Inkle experimented with this but found it felt too “stuck on”), this doesn’t mean her inner monologue is any more predictable than the dialogue. “It’s not linear,” Ingold says. “It’s massively contextual. It’s reading off where you are, how you are, what’s going on, what you’ve seen, where you’re going, what you’re about to see…” This is particularly important because A Highland Song is designed to be played multiple times. “The dialogue you get in your second game should be substantially different than in your first game, because it’s keeping…

Developer/ publisher Square Enix Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch Origin Japan Release May 12 After the critical drubbing handed out to Square Enix’s previous FMV venture, The Quiet Man, the company’s decision to produce a live-action mystery adventure evokes less a whodunnit than whymakeit? For director Koichiro Ito, it’s a chance to tap into Japan’s appetite for detective novels and mystery television dramas, but one that benefits from flesh-and-blood actors. “I think that having real people play the characters in the story adds a sense of depth to it,” he says. Enlisting Yasuhito Tachibana as the cinematographer and scenario director also avoids pitfalls – with a hit Netflix show, The Naked Director, to his name, he brings the production nous to avoid the hackier B-movie vibes that often plague the…

Had Nintendo invited us to pick a discipline from Resort, we’d have chosen either Table Tennis or Air Sports, but Swordplay is probably the smart option, even if its presence is a reminder that Wuhu Island hosted 12 events – twice as many as we’re getting at launch here. Chambara’s duels feel much like they did: two competitors face off on a platform, trying to send each other tumbling into the pool below. Guard perpendicular to your opponent’s strike and they’ll wobble back, leaving them open to attack. Grab another Joy-Con and you can wield twin swords, while a charge sword encourages a more defensive approach with a gauge that’s effectively the reverse of Sekiro’s posture meter: guarding builds up energy that can be released in one swing.…

If the term ‘walking simulator’ was initially meant as a pejorative, it quickly lost its sting. “Now, it’s just a funny term we have,” Dallas says. “It’s nice that it’s a term a lot of people are familiar with, which implies that it’s become part of the cultural landscape.” Whether it’s an accurate descriptor or not remains up for debate – as Dallas points out, it’s not an especially welcoming or appealing genre tag for those not already familiar – but it does have its uses. “Genre is a useful tool for players to find the games they like and to avoid the games they don’t,” Pinchbeck says. He thinks, though, the phrase has lost its relevance over the years: “It’s probably more useful as a historical term than anything…

BATTLEZONE Developer/manufacturer Atari Format Arcade Release 1980 BRADLEY TRAINER Developer/manufacturer Atari Format Bespoke Release 1981 SNAKE PIT Developer/manufacturer Sente Format Arcade Release 1984 BLASTEROIDS Developer/manufacturer Atari Games Format Arcade Release 1987 S.T.U.N. RUNNER Developer/manufacturer Atari Games Format Arcade Release 1989 STEEL TALONS Developer/manufacturer Atari Games Format Arcade Release 1991 WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP RACING Developer/publisher 3DO Format 3DO M2 Created 1997 (unreleased) Designer and programmer Ed Rotberg has some wise words for those planning a career in videogame development. “Panic early and often,” he suggests. “That was always my mantra, and it’s why most of my games were delivered on time and within budget.” The philosophy served him well during his four decades of making games. Rotberg joined Atari in January of 1979 and began work on Baseball, a mod kit for…

Founded 2011 Employees 10 Key staff Andrew James, Ed Orman, Ryan Lancaster (co-founders & directors) URL www.uppercut-games.com Selected softography Epoch, City Of Brass, Submerged: Hidden Depths Current projects TBA When Andrew James, Ryan Lancaster and Ed Orman walked away from their jobs at 2K Australia, they had spent the previous seven years making the same game. Forming Uppercut Games in 2011, with just eight months’ worth of money to fund their debut, they were determined to go the opposite way. And they did: by the time that former project eventually released in 2013, as The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, Uppercut already had three releases under its belt and was approaching its first major pivot. A somewhat breakneck change of pace, perhaps, but it’s not hard to see why this might have appealed.…

Developer FromSoftware Publisher Bandai Namco Format PC, PS4, PS5 (tested), Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Out now We’re sure this map used to be empty. Sixty hours in, though, it’s every bit as cluttered as your average Ubisoft collectathon. In the far northwest, we’ve dropped a marker to remind us that thar be dragons – and that one of them is five times the size of the others. In the deep southeast, an aide-memoire for a boss battle we knocked our heads against for two days before taking the hint. Elsewhere there are dungeons to come back to when we’re stronger, merchants to revisit when finances are more liquid, places we can see but not yet reach, and questgiving NPCs to return to down the line. Mostly, though, our map…

Between the battle, exploration and dialogue phases, you spend most of your time in your party’s encampment. Here you can talk to allies and upgrade them, using items to buff individual stats and unlock new abilities. For some items you’ll need more than money: each battle awards kudos points for certain feats, such as attacking from safe zones, backstabbing enemies, or performing followup attacks (achieved by flanking an enemy on both sides). But the bulk of your time here will be spent on mock mental battles to beef up your squad. These are hardly optional – without completing them you’ll leave yourself woefully underprepared and underlevelled for the fights to come – but they’re an enjoyable way to experiment with new tactics away from the story.…

As in The Town Of Light, the setting carries a ring of authenticity. The villa and surrounding area might take longer to explore than we’d like, but it’s beautifully realised. Away from the shock tactics, this feels like a convincing portrait of ’40s Italy: from the newspapers to the songs on the radio, the period detail is impressive. Given the game’s more outlandish elements, however, a third-act development that directly ties the story to Volterra psychiatric hospital (whose own horrors were explored in LKA Games’ debut) feels distasteful. There is a level of craft here that suggests the Italian studio has a great game in it – though it’s equally clear that Martha Is Dead is not that game.…

While individual quests may not be particularly engrossing, one of Smilegate’s smarter innovations is how it structures zones to carry you through them as efficiently as possible. Quests you pick up from one NPC will often resolve with a different character deeper in the zone, helping push you toward its climactic dungeon. In addition, each zone has multiple ‘triports’ – circular stone devices that, when activated, can be teleported to from any location, minimising travel time on those rare occasions when backtracking is required.…