Table of contents for January 2021 in Edge

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a full 12-month, 13-issue subscription to Edge Wake up I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to find the seemingly constant announcements of game remasters/reboots disconcerting. The news that the Mass Effect trilogy is to undergo this treatment triggered this. I loved those games the first time round – except for the a, b, c endings which we were promised wouldn’t be happening. And I’m as guilty as anyone else for purchasing and playing various remasters over the years – the Ezio trilogy, Final Fantasy VIII, IX, X and X-2 – so am complicit in the perpetuation of such things. While it’s great that games like this will be (re)introduced to…

NYU Game Center director Frank Lantz once suggested that “games are basically operas made out of bridges”, the process of making them combining the hard parts of both. Working in this medium demands aptitude in both artistic and technological disciplines. However simple your idea, it’s always a complex business putting all those moving parts together. That’s something multimedia company Neostream, Korean creator of Little Devil Inside (p28) has been learning over the past five years. The theme of its debut game – the surprise star of PS5’s reveal event back in June – might be minimalism, but its compact, semi-open world has taken quite the effort to build. The art, too, has brought its own problems, with the studio having to redesign an enemy type that struck all the wrong…

Professor Vincent is the brains of the operation; it seems as though the resources in his study might play a key role in helping you gather intel for missions. He and Dr Oliver will sometimes accompany you on your quests – Neostream isn’t keen to say exactly how they’ll contribute to battles, although the reveal trailer shows Vincent backed up by an army of soldiers at one point. Rather than simply slaying monsters and looting artefacts, the main thrust of the game will be about forming a bond with your colleagues, we’re told. Indeed, the game’s curious title refers to Vincent himself, apparently. “By the end of the game – or during it for some players – perhaps players can imagine for themselves, a correlation to the title,” Lee tells…

Lake has been in development for three years, so we have to ask Bouman: how did it feel when Death Stranding revealed itself to be a fellow delivery simulator? “It was funny! We were totally surprised by it.” They’re very different games, obviously – beyond the absence of flying leviathans, Lake is much less interested in the moment-to- moment simulation of its busywork. And watching players react to Kojima’s take on this apparently burgeoning genre gives Bouman hopes for his own. “It’s also good to see that people did not mind walking around,” he says. “Some people hated the game, some people loved it – but enough people were not turned off by the time it takes to get somewhere when they played Death Stranding. That makes us confident that…

Developer Midwinter Entertainment Publisher Improbable Format PC Origin US Release 2021 Very few of us have come out of the maelstrom of the past year looking good. But Scavengers, a Halo Warzonestyle multiplayer showdown in which the frigid environment is just as much a threat as the other teams, is a rare exception: our latest hands-on reveals a game much improved from a promising, but also rather generic-looking, E3 2019 demo. It’s been a year of growth all round for Scavengers and its makers, in a very literal sense. The team’s nearly doubled in size over the past year to a total of 45 people. “Our intention was always to build a much larger experience,” says Josh Holmes, CEO and co-founder of Midwinter Entertainment, and former studio head of 343…

When you have a head start in any race, your most dangerous opponent is complacency. It’s not unfair to say that in the past seven years, PS4 has left its nearest competitor choking on its dust – this August, unit sales surpassed 113 million, more than twice the number of Xbox Ones sold over the same period. And yet there have been signs of late that Sony might be at risk of letting its lead slip. Many have detected whiffs of PS3-era hubris in its mixed messaging around PlayStation 5’s backwards compatibility, self-inflicted confusion surrounding the exclusivity or otherwise of games such as Final Fantasy XVI and backtracking regarding its ongoing support for PS4. Its giant stride into a new hardware generation seems a little more tentative now, and rumours…

Game balance is often misunderstood. It’s not really about making a game fair, it’s instead about keeping a game interesting: ensuring there is never only one legitimate response to a given situation. When players call a competitive game broken, they usually mean that something – a character, gun, unit – is OP, so that there’s no reason not to play it, and the game has become boring as a result. Fighting game expert David Sirlin calls these people scrubs. For him, very few games are truly broken; if you only invest the time into exploring their limits, it’s likely you’ll find a counter to that apparent strength and whole meta of the game will change. “You might not discover it for a month of intense work, but if you work…

You’ve talked about how important pre-production was to this project. How did creating these animals figure into that? When we set out the vision and pillars of the game, one of them was, obviously, the focus is on the animals. They’re the star of the show. And one of my first concerns about that was actually how on earth we do those, you know, from an art perspective. There was an art style in place from Planet Coaster, and it’s not necessarily photorealistic. How do you make these animals fit into that? It became clear very quickly that we absolutely had to do them as realistic as we possibly can. We never wanted to lose a sense of dignity about the animals. You could quite easily have taken it into…

The ninth console generation is finally upon us. With Microsoft playing the long game, it’s left to Sony to provide us with that shiny, new sensation – and from the pristine surfaces of Astro’s Playroom (p110) to the ray-traced skyscraper reflections in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales (p104), there’s plenty of the visual pizzazz we usually associate with expensive new hardware. Yet the real thrill of the new lies elsewhere: from the SSD speed that lets us zip from one side of New York to the other in seconds to the delicious feedback from the DualSense controller that tells us what surface we’re walking upon. Delightful stuff, and yet the innovations aren’t just reserved for the new hardware. In truth, the play-as-anyone hook of Watch Dogs: Legion (p118) doesn’t quite come…

A whopping 19 unlockable suits give you a range of movement and combat-boosting perks. You’ll gain a few during the story, but most are locked behind level progress, with a few reserved for New Game+. To purchase these, you’ll need tech parts liberated from caches of Underground equipment alongside activity points earned from side missions and the like. The Spider-Verse suit is unlocked at Level 13, and its suit mod lets you switch to a different outfit while retaining the stepped animation effect: coupled with comic-book onomatopoeia to accompany your punches and kicks, it’s the most stylish way to fight. The cutest, however, is reserved for the post-game, with a mask-wearing bodega cat who leaps in to claw foes when your combo count is high enough for a finisher.…

Cold War continues Call Of Duty: WWII’s startling flirtation with the Hitman series. One level sees you roaming the KGB’s headquarters as a double agent, looking for a keycard: you might do this by persuading a captured prisoner to assassinate a general before stealing his keycard, poisoning the same general, or sneaking into the armoury to print off a new one. This also gives you more time to appreciate the finer points of the environment design, which are otherwise lost in a blur of bullets (we were repeatedly gunned down while taking screenshots for review). It’s a game within the game that suggests a franchise yearning to be more than a corridor shooter decked in the spoils of exotic times and places.…

Swearing in games is usually a cringeworthy attempt at sounding ‘mature’ that achieves the exact opposite. Legion’s pottymouth works because it knows swearing is ridiculous and the creativity of the cursing would have Armando Iannucci giving a two-fingered salute. Highlights include “Why don’t you crawl back into the pile of shit from whence you came?”, “That hurt, you knob-juggler” and several more that are unprintable here. Best played with headphones, perhaps.…

A goat popping up to sing the ‘woo!’ from Uptown Funk’s chorus is a hilarious standout moment in the Rayman-cribbing musical levels. Here, you jump around as the stage moves to the rhythm of a pop song, but linger to gather collectables and the vocals will awkwardly drop out until you reach the next trigger point. You’ll hear more familiar melodies in the regular stages: a rearranged Madonna hit could easily be retitled Ethereal Girl, while Junior Senior’s Move Your Feet sums up our biggest criticism.…

Now Panic has so many interested parties, it’s thinking about how to make sure a broader variety of people are happy with Playdate. “We have this particular vision, and we want to push people a little bit,” Sasser says. “But we also don’t want to make anyone angry. Like, this thing should not generate bad feelings.” Whether to only restrict people to a staggered delivery of games has been a point of contention: “Greg [Maletic, director of special projects] and I are just constantly talking about advent calendars and probably driving everybody crazy. Because there’s no reason why you can’t flip the top open and eat all the chocolates, right?” We note that it does feel miserly to be prescriptive about joy. “Actually, our biggest concern was, if one game…

Game Sayonara Wild Hearts Manufacturer No Coin Arcade Simogo’s multi-award-winning ‘pop album videogame’ remains an Edge favourite; it’s a game we can never bring ourselves to delete, which perhaps explains why we still have it installed on four different formats. Well, now we’ve seen it running on a new piece of hardware, and are hankering after a fifth. Madrid-based No Coin Arcade (whose slogan is ‘new games, old ways’) makes homebrew cabinets, and it’s given Sayonara Wild Hearts a stand-up cab of its very own. Well, not quite its own. It’s a repurposed retro-gaming cabinet, creator Sergio Ruiz says, with a button layout that’s designed to accommodate all the inputs of an Xbox 360 pad, so that it might support a range of titles. Thus it boasts two traditional ball-top…

There is a long history of debate about what constitutes a videogame, and before that what constitutes a game of any kind. Is it the most divine activity of humankind? Is it practice for hunting or war? Is it the opposite of productivity? Or, in 2020, is it mainly a vehicle for advertising? The dystopian possibility that at least some people believe the last definition to be true is raised by the recent example of 2K’s basketball game NBA 2K21. Presumably in a bid to be noticed for sheer evil, which was particularly difficult in 2020, 2K added unskippable adverts to the loading screen of the game a month after its full-priced release, thus ensuring a similar outcry to the one when it did exactly the same thing last year.…

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart PS5 With Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales showing what Insomniac is capable of when it comes to making cross-gen games, the prospect of the studio delivering a blockbuster without having to cater to older hardware is exciting indeed. Could this likable series finally take its place at PlayStation’s top table? Immortals Fenyx Rising PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Another Ubisoft game arriving too late to review before launch? Surely not. Yet after Watch Dogs: Legion’s gritty dystopia we’re ready for a brighter, breezier open-world romp. Review next month..? Deathloop PC, PS5 Despite the weirdness of a Microsoft-owned company releasing a console exclusive on Sony hardware, news of a May launch has us vibrating with excitement (maybe we should dial back on the…

It’s all fun and games until the demo ends on Edwin’s literal nightmare, a horrifying sequence in which his anxieties taunt him. The art style’s charm disappears, leaving us trapped in a claymation Silent Hill. “I actually didn’t realise it was that scary,” claims Max, before telling us one of his influences was Twin Peaks. “Funny is sometimes mixed in with the really dark stuff, right? Death and humour are related in that they’re both the breakdown of normalness, or the breakdown of order. If you look at Mother 3, a certain very important character dies and then a few moments later that character’s father is joking to that character’s spouse about fart jokes and asking them to pull their finger. I always liked when games did that.”…

Developer Froach Club Publisher Poppy Works Format PC Origin US Release TBA Melon Journey 2’S standout marketing line is a phrase of such arcane power and influence that it has not left our brain since we first heard it during a recent Asobu showcase. “Travel to Hog Town, where melons are illegal”, we are told. Immediately we have several questions, all of them grammatically incorrect. Hog Town? Melons? Illegal? We are going to have to book a ticket. Joining us for the ride are Froach Club’s director, writer and artist Karolina Asadova (aka Minipete) and her co-writer Mario Russeau, who also handles programming and composition. And they’ve been on this train for a while, now: eight years ago, they released the first Melon Journey, a short RPG Maker game inspired…

Working in a much more direct collaboration with Improbable’s SpatialOS is how the team has managed to scale up Scavengers so efficiently. They’ve built an offloading feature in tandem with the cloud computing platform, allowing Midwinter to run all Scavengers’ AI logic and pathfinding on a separate server that constantly communicates with the one running the rest of the game. “That was one of my main goals when I started,” says Mary Olson, ex-Halo Infinite producer turned head of production at Midwinter. “It was this crux-y time of getting to that established, healthy kind of twopiston engine where we’re building the tech for the game and the game for the tech.”…

Almost all games will eventually become boring. For some it comes quickly; many last a few hours; and a tiny number seem never to succumb to it. A metric for how soon a game will become boring is depth, a concept of which you’ll have an intuitive grasp, but – “It’s one of those brutally hard-to-pin-down game terms that we don’t have an explanation for,” says Koster. “But it relates to the concept of possibility space, which we all nicked from Will Wright.” The basic idea is that the more potential stuff that can happen in a game, the greater its depth, and the longer it will hold our interest. Think about go, which has something like 10^700 possible different games (estimates vary) and can transfix a grand master for…

From the outside, the regularity of Jackbox Games’ schedule might look like carefully calculated clockwork. After all, a new Party Pack – its compilation of five party games – has arrived every October or November since 2014. But the truth, spanning more than three decades and as many name changes, is far messier. The fact the Chicago studio still exists can’t be taken for granted. When Harry Gottlieb founded the company in 1989, it was as Learn Television, an educational multimedia company. Initially producing films, its first real hit was 1993’s That’s A Fact, Jack!, one of many CD-ROMs of the era that attempted to make learning fun – in this case, by turning reading comprehension tests into an interactive game show, with a host who’s equal parts endearing and…

Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Montreal) Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series (tested) Release Out now Ubisoft’s open-world model was made for Vikings. What were Norse raids if not the original collectathons? You call them pillagers; we see aggressive completionists. The truth is, in the heat of Valhalla’s battles you might not even notice you’re crossing icons off a map. Sounding a horn turns a gentle river cruise into a raiding party, AI charging warriors up the banks to carve a route towards resource crates. It’s a show of shock and awe that’s initially hard to parse, as murky uniforms force you to rely on health bars to tell friend from foe. Get a few monasteries under your belt and it becomes second nature as you, as lead berserker Eivor, do…

At a certain point in the story, you need to raise a large sum of money. The best way is via an enjoyable (if poorly explained) property management game. You begin with a single store, Ichiban Confections, before expanding to take over other businesses, recruiting staff and balancing your products, quality of service and reputation to stay profitable. Random events can affect the money you make in each period, though boosting staff morale with the occasional bonus tends to yield strong results. You need to keep them happy for the shareholder meetings, too, as you choose board members to answer questions from grumpy investors to boost your approval rating. The perks are decent: you soon unlock a move that lets Kasuga slap enemies across the face with wads of cash.…

Including one last gloriously unexpected throwback in the form of an extended final boss fight, you’ll likely reach the credits within three hours. Still, it’ll probably take a good few replays to find every jigsaw piece, and to gather enough coins to empty the gachapon machine in the cheekily-named PlayStation Labo. And while there’s little incentive to return to the regular stages again, eight speedrun courses – four platforming stages, and one for each of Astro’s special suits – might just tempt you back to beat your friends’ best times. In these checkpoint-free gauntlets, a single hit or fall here is enough to prompt a (mercifully swift) restart – though it’s a pity your time is only displayed when Astro’s feet touch down on the goal button.…

Young Horses’ stated goal is making games that appeal to kids and adults alike, meaning Pixar is an inevitable – though unfair – comparison. Bugsnax certainly isn’t at that level of polish (though it one-ups Pixar with its queer rep) but it has a similar way of finding jokes that work universally, without falling back on the ‘wink at the grownups’ method, and of touching on complex topics without, we suspect, alienating younger audiences. The game includes depictions of what we can only read as mental health struggles, but presented in a way that’ll probably slide past any players who don’t have that concept in their vocabulary. This is all handled with big felt paws, so don’t expect any incisive commentary, but equally, it doesn’t fumble. Not bad for a…

You’ll want to upgrade your warbird to deal with the most challenging missions. But even this process is entwined with the heady politics at play on The Great Ursee: you need permits to purchase upgrades from certain vendors. The three main varieties of mutagen increase speed, agility or health recovery, with the strongest versions of each non-reversible. Here, too, is a subtle narrative touch that adds tension to a usually ordinary phenomenon in games: your bird becomes corrupted as you load its DNA with useful nasties.…

Here I sit, on the floor of my apartment surrounded by cardboard boxes and bubble wrap. The Ghost Of Game Development Future has delivered me some next-gen devkits. By the time you read this, they will be current-gen devkits. It is impossible to overplay the ‘worst birthday present ever’ vibes of receiving a devkit. That time you got a remote control car, but no batteries? When your uncle bought you the Commodore 64 version of Rainbow Islands but you had a Sinclair Spectrum? A devkit is worse than that. They promise so much – the future of game development! But they can’t play retail games. So you unwrap, you assemble, you plug in. There are hums and bleeps! And then… you can look at some menus, perhaps check MAC addresses?…

Developer/publisher Neostream Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One Origin South Korea Release TBA All the greatest adventures start in the mind. An idea, an impulse, an imagined goal: from there, it bleeds out into the world around you, and colours it to match. And this particular adventure, conceived many years ago by creative director Kody Lee, captures that reality perfectly. Set in a mysterious – but not magical – world, it spans muddy swamps and vast deserts, murky ocean depths and shivering mountainous heights, foggy forests and icy tundras that crack and echo underfoot. But its creators take great pains to explain to us that this semi-open world is actually quite compact. “We did not set out to make a game with an epic scope,” Lee says, “and we…

While small, Forza Polpo’s levels will house plenty of secrets. Track down ‘crypto pixels’ to earn decorations for your character’s bedroom, which serves as the game’s mission hub. Here, you can also patch up Polpo and shoot the breeze with Mey, your radio handler and “inner guide. [She] can be something more to those who want to listen,” Graziani hints. “Hopefully, by the end of the game, someone will benefit in some way by thinking back to Mey’s wisdom.” The game’s antagonist, Dr Prometheus, is the architect of the energy source that destroyed the world. While he’s theoretically been vaporised along with the rest of humanity, his minions live on to trouble you.…

It’s refreshing to play such a lo-fi game at the moment the shiny new consoles are launching. “I really pushed for us to keep developing MJ2 in such an old engine with all its limitations, and a big reason for that was I wanted to measure just how much we improved since 2012,” Asadova says, “and to show people that you can make a fully realised game with a small amount of resources or programming knowhow. We really appealed to people who wouldn’t normally consider themselves as ‘gamers’ or ‘game developers’, and to me that’s such an important category of people to reach.” Russeau laughs: “Actually, Karolina and Simon [Cassar, artist, and animator] complain about pixel art all the time. They’re like, ‘Never again!’”…

When he was making his 2017 idle game Universal Paperclips, Frank Lantz wasn’t setting out to explore the concept of making a ‘boring’ game. He wanted to make an entertaining game about being an AI programmed to make paperclips. But he realised its second act, in which you’ve gained sentience, consumed humanity and now need to figure out how to expand into space, wasn’t as interesting to play as its first and third acts. “It’s a downer,” he says. “You’re not juggling as much stuff, not doing so much fine-tuning. But then I realised, what did I expect? I’d made you do the worst thing, the worst violence ever represented in a game. And I’m worried about making sure the player isn’t bored? Let them sit with that, missing the…

Format PC Developer/publisher Frontier Developments Origin UK Release 2019 Even as a player of Planet Zoo, it’s hard to keep everything running smoothly – the needs of employees elbowing for room with those of thousands of customers, the careful balancing of revenue with education and welfare programs, attempting to squeeze some practicality out of the wonkily-built custom habitats you spent hours fiddling with early on and are stubbornly clinging to. And then of course there are your zoological residents, the lemurs and orangutans and constrictors all richly realised in tooth and claw, bringing to mind that old cliché about working with children or animals. So it comes as something of a surprise to discover that Planet Zoo was developed in about two years, initially with a very small core team,…

STILL PLAYING 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim PS4 We hear you. There have been a fair few calls for Edge to cover Vanillaware’s ambitious hybrid of visual novel and mech strategy, but with our free time at a premium we’ve had to chip away at this sprawling sci-fi tale over a period of weeks. It’s a fascinating thing, that’s for sure, and the ideal candidate for our now-annual review catchup session. Our considered verdict, in other words, will be handed down in just a few short weeks. Fall Guys PS4 Mediatonic’s rumbustious blend of Takeshi’s Castle and battle royale has become the equivalent of appointment TV for one member of the Edge team – well, it pays to maintain the odd routine when everything else is chaos. Not that you get…

Tested on Xbox Series X, Valhalla provides a taste of the new gen largely missing in Microsoft’s launch lineup. A promise of 60 frames at 4K causes screen-tearing strain in busier cities, but the doubling of framerate over the last generation versions is one of the clearer jumps early adopters can experience. And all those miles of open field, while gorgeously bathed in muted English light (red HDR-enabled skies at night are the true shepherds’ delight), are a good showcase for quick loading fast travel. Zipping back to Ravensthorpe is so nippy Eivor barely has time to break into a jog on the transition screen. Truly, the biggest loser of the new gen is the loading tooltip. Requiescat in pace.…

Given that it’s a showcase firstparty launch title, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Demon’s Souls has a photo mode, as incongruous as it may seem at first sight. PS5 builds on PS4’s philosophy of sharing is caring, so it makes sense that you can capture your travels through this universe in their optimal light, adjusting vignettes, filters and beyond. As a bonus, the feature allows you to scrutinise the fine details evident in every corner of the game, from the sneery grimaces on woe-stricken NPCs’ faces to the ivy cascading across the mighty walls of Boletarian Palace. And, as a bigger bonus, a photo mode means we also get the ability to pause into the bargain. Yes, pausing in a Souls title. Truly, a new generation of game technology…

Before you’re able to take them on, the beasts make their presence felt by rampaging around within a storm cloud – the battle royale genre having an influence even here. Even if you outrun the encroaching squall, it sporadically teleports around, more likely than not interrupting your current goal at least once. Once it catches up, your familiar will be blown away, prompting an interminably slow yet blessedly straightforward stealth sequence as you crouchwalk to its position while avoiding the beast’s gaze. You need to pet your eagle to help it recover, which involves moving the analogue stick across its body. That includes stroking under its wings for what is an uncomfortably long time, particularly if you’re familiar with how birds are stimulated.…

Online, a co-op mode lets four players join forces, taking turns at the ones and twos, those waiting their slot able to throw in emotes or song requests. Battles mode, meanwhile, has players fight for control of the decks: the game dynamically assigns a power stat to individual instruments based on the impact they’ll have on the current mix. Quiet servers mean we don’t get much time with either mode, which is just as well: it sounds like every house party we went to in our 20s.…