Índex per July 2022 a Edge

Many years ago, at an Edge-hosted industry roundtable discussion in front of an audience, one of the topics involved the rise of multiplayer RPGs, and how players in the future might be encouraged to perform in specialised roles, giving them the opportunity to carve out unique areas of expertise, perhaps even forging reputations that might one day be spoken of far and wide. It prompted a memorable question from one attendee: “But who wants to be the cook?” The suggestion was that standing around a kitchen chopping carrots all day might not be as exciting or fulfilling as roaming the lands brutalising goblin heads with an axe blade the size of a dustbin lid. And it was a fair point: it’s no coincidence that, in all of the games produced…

Putting serious effort into the 2D shooter genre as a player can feel like a deconstruction of the form – unearthing arcane mechanisms and dissecting scoring systems that lurk below the visuals very much a process of unpicking the work of game designers. In their most purebred form, unembellished by narrative acrobatics or any meaningful moments of downtime, 2D shooters present an experience where playing can feel something like direct interaction with the code itself –a dance with intersecting multipliers and numerical gauges played out as a flight through dangerous skies. All of which means that playing a shmup can sometimes feel close to the process of making one. Spend time in an arcade community, and you may well hear 2D shooter players ponder how different scoring systems in hypothetical…

Back in 2006, Jeff Han gave an astonishing demo at the TED conference of a new touchscreen technology called ‘multitouch’. You can watch the video online: as Han uses both his hands to zoom, rotate and pan through a stack of photos, the audience applauds. A year later, Steve Jobs would demo the first iPhone, with the Photos app’s ‘pinchto-zoom’ multi-touch gesture debuting to cheers from the faithful. It might seem like old hat now, but the reactions were genuine. Multi-touch wasn’t just a cool piece of technology, it was instantly intuitive. Han tells the audience: “The interface just disappears here. There’s no manual – this is exactly what you’d expect, especially if you haven’t interacted with a computer before”. Within a few years, players of Galcon and Cut The…

Developer Tendershoot, Noble Robot Publisher No More Robots Format PC Origin Germany Release TBA 2023 Goodbye Hypnospace, hello Sleepnet Jay Tholen’s follow-up to his captivating vision of an alternative late-’90s Internet takes place four years on, with a new sleep-time computer network having taken over, allowing users to log on as they nod off. Yes, we’ve moved into the 21st century: the era of Flash, LiveJournal, Evanescence, My Chemical Romance and, here at least, the Czech Republic-Japan anime war. The gap makes sense in narrative terms, letting Hypnospace creator Merchantsoft rebrand itself (and subsequently lobby for the tech to return) while allowing Tholen and his collaborators to concoct a fictional history of events for the intervening years. But just as importantly, it makes for a distinctive new look. “Any closer…

When Daniel Mullins took to the stage at March’s Independent Games Festival Awards, amid all the usual family members and collaborators thanked during his four acceptance speeches for awards for Inscryption was a more surprising name: Mike Kasprzak. At least, it was a surprise to Kasprzak, who is a fan of Mullins’ debut game Pony Island but isn’t sure he has ever actually met or spoken to the man. At the time of his IGF cameo, Kasprzak was busy preparing for the 50th instalment of the Ludum Dare game jam, an event that marked its 20th year. And it’s this which secured Kasprzak’s place in the acceptance speech. Inscryption started life as a Ludum Dare game, as did Pony Island. On the night, Mullins was fairly clear about its importance:…

STILL PLAYING A Joke That’s Worth $0.99 Playdate Three guys are sitting in a bar when a great fairy appears. So begins, as the theme tune would have it, “the longest joke in the world”: it certainly feels like it, since to hear it all you’ll need to twist Playdate’s crank to bounce a tiny person up to awkwardly positioned stars in order to continue the gag. Is it just us, or does the narrator sound more exasperated after we fail? Either way, this is an amusingly maddening bit of stuff and nonsense from Song Of Bloom creator Philipp Stollenmayer. OutRun 2 SP Arcade A spur-of-the-moment trip to Arcade Club in Bury gives us the chance to get reacquainted with some old favourites, as well as a handful of more…

Witnessing how the visual language of videogames evolves is fascinating. A brief glance at Salt And Sacrifice’s in-game menu screens tells you that this is not just a Soulslike, but a full-on homage to Dark Souls. It primes you for what is to come, despite the shift in perspective from thirdperson 3D to side-scroller. The bonfire-style checkpointing; the measured combat, with its careful stamina management; the fragmented lore and the branching routes to explore: all are present and correct. It’s ironic that FromSoftware’s work, showing a desire to rip up the rulebook, should inspire so many to follow its template so closely. Who knew that seeing a list of stats written in white on black in an uneven, handwritten-style font could generate a feeling of comforting familiarity? Salt And Sacrifice’s…

Anyone who dabbled in Toukana Interactive’s pastoral puzzler during its Early Access period should appreciate its meditative qualities.Accompanied by a gentle soundscape of lullaby melody and lowing cattle, it’s the kind of experience you tend to plug away at half-focused, selecting where to lay its hexagonal tiles with one side of your brain while the other slips into a daydream. Yet Dorfromantik is no idle clicker; it’s more like a kind of zen Tetris, densified by dozens of randomised playing pieces, but minus the urgency and spatial limitations. The result is something almost oxymoronic –a relaxing challenge. It’s equally soothing and stimulating, although not quite as one with the universe as it may initially seem. In Classic Mode, the main attraction, you’re given a stack of 40 tiles to place…

Missing stairs Oh, you had to go and do it, didn’t you, Edge? The old “This isn’t a game!” debate around walking simulators. Before we embark on this hike together, I am the kind of person who can happily sit through slowpaced thrillers, who prefers to seek out new music rather than repeat the same playlists, and who ever increasingly leans towards indie games rather than triple-A blockbusters. I wholeheartedly welcome invention and stimulation alongside what we’ve already seen before. So, according to Wanderlust (E370), I should be fully in favour of anything that thinks it’s a game being able to be called one. Yet I am resolutely not – and that’s not because I’m only interested in shooting things in the face, hate change or am an emotional infant.…

During an entertaining chat with Supermassive Games’ Will Byles about The Quarry, we suggest that horror seems to be a particularly good fit for the studio’s approach to interactive storytelling. “That kind of ‘spoke’ story system comes from a lot of writers,” he admits. “Stephen King writes in that kind of way – where it goes from person to person to person and then comes back to the original person. It works very well when people are placed in an environment and a situation outside of their normal lives and everything goes extreme, and again horror is very good for that.” Talking of unfamiliar situations, is the studio happy to stick to horror, or is there a desire to move into other genres? “I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily say we…

Developer Florian Veltman, Baptiste Portefaix Publisher Arte France Format PC Origin France Release TBA 2022 Do you remember Miffy? For some, the cute white rabbit created by Dutch author and illustrator Dick Bruna always had something of an unsettling air, with her tiny, black, unblinking eyes. And are those whiskers, or has her mouth been stitched shut? For Florian Veltman and Baptiste Portefaix, one Miffy book in particular has been something of a key text in the creation of How To Say Goodbye. As we talk, Veltman fetches Dear Grandma Bunny, a Miffy tale in which the character bids a heartfelt farewell to her grandmother. He shows us the startling image of Grandma Bunny nestled in her bright yellow coffin, eyes closed. It’s a remarkable picture, a juxtaposition of warm…

Acts of generosity and sportsmanship are not especially common in competitive videogames. Perhaps, then, that’s why we’ve been so charmed by Nintendo Switch Sports’ new avatars. Befitting their name – Sportsmates – they’re a friendly, welcoming bunch, their cheerful demeanour helping to soothe the sting of defeat. Lose a game of volleyball, for example, and your partner may place a consoling hand on your shoulder. And after scoring an unfortunate own goal with ten seconds left of an end-to-end game of football, we’re rather touched when one teammate tentatively offers their fist for a commiseratory bump. There is something affecting about moments of kindness and connection that arrive when you’re least expecting them. Sure, in Moss: Book II, it’s your job as a benevolent Reader to help rodent hero Quill…

Haven’t you been here before? It’s a question you’re liable to ask many times after starting Rogue Legacy 2, particularly if you’re familiar with its 2013 predecessor. As in that game, each new run at the castle’s rearranged battlements and dungeons is presented as an inheritance, as you select one of three randomly rolled characters to pick up the mantle from your last. But while the selling point of Legacy’s gimmick is that each generation can be wildly different from the previous one –a vampiric, flatulent chef begetting a gunslinger with anxiety and clown makeup – the family resemblance between the two games is unmistakable. Early on, your family tree will consist mostly of Knights, Mages and fus-ro-dahing Barbarians: familiar faces from the first game, albeit with varying degrees of…

As videogame developers chase ever more pristinely rendered worlds, the concept of destructible environments has been left in the dust somewhat. It’s a wrong that Teardown is keen to set right–that much is obvious the first time you step into one of its handsomely blocky playgrounds, with a sledgehammer in hand and a pocketful of nitroglycerine, and discover that the place can smashed down to the very last voxel. Everything operates by specific laws of physics, so that structures can be held upright by a lone connecting block, but once mastered, you’ll marvel at a world that crumbles and topples at your touch. Raytraced to within an inch of its life, and with some of the best explosions in the business, this is an incredible technical achievement, especially from a…

Ona grey wall in one of The Zium Gallery’s many rooms hangs a triptych of paintings by Baltimore artist Evangeline Gallagher. They’re captivating – portraits abstracted into swooshing lines, Francis Bacon by way of an enormous inky fingerprint – but what really makes them striking in this space is their size. The paintings tower over you, inviting you to take a step back – and perhaps a seat on a nearby bench. Do so, and you’ll find yourself inside another exhibit, ‘Rain Room’, from two of the developers behind 2021 squirrel surveil-’em-up Nuts. The piece borrows that game’s rain effects in order to create a storm, localised within a transparent cube that sits in the middle of the room, among the pictures in their frames. This collision of possible and…

“I’ve often described how seeing Star Wars in 1977 essentially rewired my 12-year-old brain… I’m elated to be working with Lucasfilm Games again…” Having suffered the cancellation of a Star Wars project with EA in 2017, Amy Hennig is taking another run with Skydance New Media. Never tell her the odds, indeed. “I’m really sorry that I released the unfinished work Balan Wonderworld… I think Square Enix and Arzest don’t care about games and game fans.” Yuji Naka’s postman faces a quieter Christmas this year ”Indie games trying to make me meditate on loss. I WILL NOT DO IT. You cannot make me. I will simply jump about.” Alasdair Beckett-King saves his contemplation for triple-A, press-F-to-pay-respects loss “This is Miyamoto… we decided to move the release to Spring 2023 –…

Readers will be relieved to learn this month that I successfully saved the planet, even if not quite in the way I wanted to. It’s perhaps no surprise that I wasn’t offered the option of banning cars completely and forcing everyone to travel by tandem bicycle, or simply outlawing cows, those tasty methane-emitters. But it felt more significant that I was unable to mandate a greater share of electricity production for nuclear power. And for some reason when I, as the global-warming minister for an allpowerful world government, ordered that henceforth all dietary protein should come from eating insects, the sheeple complained and I got sacked. I have been playing, of course, the FT’s Climate Game, a Web-based edutainment that offers you a series of multiple-choice questions as you attempt…

Developer Supermassive Games Publisher 2K Games Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin UK Release June 10 T aking a break from the shortform scares of The Dark Pictures Anthology, Supermassive Games’ latest is looking to offer something a little lighter. Only a little, mind – this spiritual follow-up to 2015’s Until Dawn still has its feet firmly planted in the horror genre, though as its trope-laden prologue makes clear, this is more of a playful homage. The vibe, director Will Byles says, is “teen horror”, but it takes in a whole melange of influences – from slashers such as Friday The 13th to s0-called ‘hick flicks’ such as The Hills Have Eyes, creature features and ghost stories besides. Which means, in other words, that there are a…

Developer Massive Monster Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin UK, Australia Release TBA 2022 There aren’t many games that can cite both Stardew Valley and Midsommar as inspirations. And this is only the beginning of the names rattled off by Cult Of The Lamb art director James Pearmain as he explains this “dungeon-crawler base-builder mashup with Roguelike elements”. Frostpunk and Rimworld are in the mix, he says, as are animations Happy Tree Friends and Salad Fingers, plus Devolver stablemate Enter The Gungeon. “We took all these different games that we really like,” Pearmain says, “and tried to smash them into this weird eldritch creation.” The non-interactive elements are perhaps most obvious here. The game takes Pearmain’s lively cartooning, seen in previous Massive Monster…

Lucas Assislar has a bone to pick with the Halo series. A software developer from São Paulo whose projects include retro VR homage Pixel Ripped 1989, Assislar grew up playing Microsoft’s flagship shooter, but has since fallen out of love with it thanks to Halo 5: Guardians’ lack of offline co-op support. “[My friend and I] played through the entire series together, like, oh my god, Halo 1, Halo 2, Halo 3, ODST – it was an amazing experience,” Assislar says. “When Halo 5 released without splitscreen, that was like a smack in the face.” This shift is indicative of the current fortunes of splitscreen multiplayer. Once all but expected of any massmarket release, it has been wiped from the feature sheets of all but a handful of blockbuster games…

Echoes Of The Eye, the expansion to the planet-hopping adventure Outer Wilds, was praised when it launched in September 2021. But behind the scenes, developer Mobius Digital was suffering. A repetitive motion injury in early 2020 left co-creative lead Alex Beachum unable to use a mouse and keyboard for much of the pandemic, so he could only work in a pair with a remote colleague. Loan Verneau, Mobius’s other lead designer, caught COVID-19 early, and long-term side effects lingered. “Half of the pandemic I spent struggling to stand up and stay conscious,” he says. It wasn’t just the team’s health that took a hit. Remote working dented the ideals they’d built during the four-plus years developing 2019’s Outer Wilds, which started as a scrappy student project and became a triple…

Keep it simple, stupid. Credited to aircraft engineer Kelly Johnson, the KISS design principle – or, presumably, a politer version of it – is one to which Nintendo has evidently subscribed since it began making videogames. Simplicity and approachability are constant goals: it designs by subtraction, reducing concepts to their fundamentals, cutting unnecessary waste, making the complicated feel intuitive (a process that in itself is often deeply complex). This was at the heart of what made Wii Sports a phenomenon 16 years ago; as such, it should be no surprise that it has adopted a similar approach for its successor. Still, we’d be lying if we didn’t admit to feeling underwhelmed at first. We recently revisited 2009’s Wii Sports Resort, the summery follow-up designed to showcase the greater fidelity of…

Even the most die-hard optimist would have to concede that the opening stages of Citizen Sleeper are rather bleak. You take the form of an emulated consciousness known as a ‘sleeper’, an artificial worker created and owned by a vast corporation. You were supposed to spend your days in indentured servitude: instead, you have escaped to a crumbling space station known as Erlin’s Eye. But the corporation won’t let you go that easily. Thanks to a tracker implanted in your body, the corporation is still hunting you – and your obsolescence has been planned for, ensuring your body decays over time. Living out of a storage container on the station, you take any work you can get, eking out an existence on the edge of a broken capitalist society. With…