Table of contents for October 2022 in Edge

One of the joys of being a kid was visiting a friend’s home and getting to play with their toys – especially if they happened to have a wealthy parent who’d converted an entire attic into a playroom and set up a vast four-lane Scalextric circuit, complete with C450 Sound Track module for realistic crashing audio effects. (Side note: as tempting as it is to recreate such memories via the magic of eBay, it’s a folly that should generally be resisted.) For videogame developers, being given the opportunity to mess around with Nintendo’s monumental assortment of properties must inspire similar feelings. Not many people outside of the Kyoto corporation itself get to do so (horrendous Philips CD-i game Zelda’s Adventure probably didn’t help grease the wheels in that respect), but…

Kultura Ex Machina CEO Yarden Yaroshevski is rhapsodising about the democratisation of art and how he hopes to achieve that with free-to-play MMO gallery game Occupy White Walls, when suddenly he stops himself. And, entirely casually, drops what might be one of the most tantalising questions we’ve ever heard in an Edge interview setting: “Have you heard about the time we pulled off the biggest art heist in history?” It began with Yaroshevski’s admiration for London’s National Gallery. For its collection of art, its iconic architecture, but most of all for the fact that – unlike most museums and galleries, which display less than ten percent of their total collection – over half of its collection is on show at any given time. The OWW devs had contacted the gallery…

“Some of these people are my favourite people in the world to fight with – they’re the most beautiful and pure, brilliant people. They’re also some of the biggest fucking idiots.” ”It’s definitely not NFTs. Definitely not. You can’t trade them… It is not leveraging blockchain… and definitely not NFTs.” ”I naively took a joke for information… I was wrong not to check before sharing. My apologies to Hideo Kojima…” “I’m going to start with an apology. My word choice was crude. I am sorry. am listening and I will do better… I have great respect for developers. The work they do is amazing.”…

Reboot culture is now the dominant form of entertainment. Whereas rebooting your artistic expression in popular computer used to be an annoyance, something you were forced to do by Windows misbehaving, a ‘reboot’ of a popular movie franchise implies a froth of originality and innovation, even though it simply enables you to ignore all past iterations and do it again, slightly differently, but fundamentally the same. And so The Batman is exactly like previous Batman films, but sulkier. The Force Awakens is exactly like A New Hope, but more childish. And the forthcoming remake of The Last Of Us will be exactly like The Last Of Us, but with better blood-spray physics as you senselessly murder everyone. What’s interesting is how quickly nostalgia is catching up to the present. The…

Developer/publisher Capcom Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Japan Release 2023 Lose a match in Exoprimal and the game’s AI host Leviathan will bid you a cheerful ‘goodbye!’ as a pack of raptors converges on you, ready to tear you limb from limb. You wonder if it’s not some kind of metacommentary on the chances of survival of any multiplayer game – not least when the first news story we see after our hands-on is about Ubisoft potentially cancelling Roller Champions, just five months after launch (the company has since denied the report, while accepting the game’s shortcomings). And the reward for success? Per Leviathan’s post-match missive, you’re afforded “the right to continued existence.” Lucky us. Quality alone doesn’t necessarily have a bearing on whether a multiplayer…

Developer Twin Drums Publisher TBA Format PC Origin Germany Release Summer 2023 From Tolkien to D&D, the fantasy genre is primarily rooted in European influences, which makes The Wagadu Chronicles, an MMORPG set in a world inspired by precolonial African culture, an enticing prospect. But as studio founder and CEO Allan Cudicio explains, it’s a world that has had to be built entirely from scratch. As a small team, Twin Drums is relying on procedural generation to create Wagadu, a purgatory formed from several archipelagos that its players fall into at the outset, and that shrinks and grows in accordance with its population. Cudicio takes us on a tour, pointing out each biome’s influences from different regions of Africa, stressing how everything here is new: an indie developer working on,…

Developer/ publisher Joe Richardson Format PC Origin UK Release 2023 When you’re making games about Renaissance paintings, it makes perfect sense to create a triptych. Joe Richardson’s first foray into manipulating medieval art, 2017 point-and-click adventure Four Last Things, made a minor splash – but 2020 sequel The Procession To Calvary was a big hit, partly thanks to being featured on Game Pass. “By the time I was working on Procession, I already knew there was going to be three,” Richardson says. “I initially envisaged this to be another short game, like Four Last Things size. So, like a Bosch triptych, it would be small panel, big panel, small panel. But this one’s got out of control – I’m pretty sure it’s going to be the longest of the three,…

“ONCE WE DECIDED, ‘OK, WE WANT TO JOURNEY THROUGH THE PLANETS’, IT CAME QUITE EASILY TO USE SOME GALAXY ELEMENTS” Game Mario + Rabbids Sparks Of Hope Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Ubisoft Milan, Ubisoft Paris) Format Switch Release October 20 Fifteen years ago, Nintendo decided it was time Mario left the Mushroom Kingdom behind – at least for a while – and sent its beloved mascot into space. We needn’t remind you of the result. Now, Ubisoft is looking to repeat the trick with its turn-based strategy sequel, although as in 2017’s Kingdom Battle, the plumber has some rambunctious company. “In Kingdom Battle, we were in a twisted version of the Mushroom Kingdom, so we thought: how can we expand the universe?” associate producer Cristina Nava begins. The answer: by going into…

New Blood Interactive CEO David Oshry has a dream: to release a game worked on by all of the studio’s core creatives. What that game might look like is anyone’s guess. While it has been celebrated as a purveyor of ’90s-styled shooters, that’s only part of the company’s story. Its output is increasingly varied, a perhaps inevitable result of the way New Blood operates: less as a traditional studio than a hectic meeting of like minds, each pursuing a very particular hobby horse with the informal assistance of the rest. Accordingly, then, New Blood’s current lineup runs the gamut. Yes, there’s Ultrakill, a sort of Devil-May-Quake-’em-up, but also stealthy gaspunk sim Gloomwood and Fallen Aces, which looks like Condemned: Criminal Origins through a graphic-novel filter. Also incoming: an untitled car…

Developer Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid Publisher Half Mermaid Format Android, iOS, PC, Xbox Series Release August 30 Action. Cut. Everything in between. Some of what comes before. A little of what happens after. And plenty more besides. Immortality presents us with a cache of footage, taken during the filming of the only three movies ever made by model-turned-actress Marissa Marcel, none of which was ever released. Finding out why would be an intriguing mystery in itself, but there are bigger questions to be answered – the yawning gap between 1970’s Minsky and 1999’s Two Of Everything being one, Marcel’s subsequent disappearance the other. But having suggested a few potential narrative threads to follow, Sam Barlow – and an expansive cast and crew of collaborators – sends us spiralling down a…

About 30 hours into our time with Xenoblade Chronicles 3, curiosity leads us to check the tips menu, just to see how many times our adventure so far has been interrupted by a tutorial window. Nudging the analogue stick downwards as it rapidly scrolls through them takes us around 20 seconds, covering more than than 150 individual tip categories – several of which have more than one page to read. That might sound terribly off-putting, but we’re simply stating the facts rather than complaining. We’ve long grown accustomed to the traditional Japanese approach to tutorials, particularly in JRPGs and the like, so the frequent interjections are nothing new to us. Spread out over such a period of time, it doesn’t feel nearly as irritating in practice as it might seem…

Developer Interior Night Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series (tested) Release Out now The debut game from London-based studio Interior Night opens on a young woman at the bottom of a pool. It’s the kind of start you might expect from a boilerplate crime thriller, but this is no waterlogged corpse; Zoe Walker is very much alive and simply trying to hold her breath for as long as she can. It’s only here, we discover, that she’s able to find an elusive moment of inner calm; we then flash back 14 years to find out why she needs to do this. Split into two three-chapter books, As Dusk Falls makes a tacit commitment to explore a pivotal moment in the lives of two families, and then…

When Diablo Immortal brought Blizzard’s infernal ARPG series to mobile in June, the free-to-play game was roundly criticised for its methods of monetisation, especially after systems came to light that seemed to favour players who’d splashed out on the game’s loot boxes. In Belgium and the Netherlands, however, this wasn’t a problem – because in these territories, Immortal was simply never released. The former nation has banned loot boxes outright, while in the latter a cross-party motion called for similar legislation, just a few months after EA successfully overturned a 10m fine issued after The Hague in 2020 ruled that FIFA’s Ultimate Team had broken the country’s gambling laws. In May, meanwhile, a study on loot boxes from the Norwegian Consumer Council turned its eye to that same game, producing…

Of remember most vividly is the journey to everything in Skyrim, what I the Throat Of The World, the tallest mountain in the realm. Early in the game, you’re told to travel the pilgrim’s path up to the monastery of High Hrothgar, where you’ll learn… well, some important things about magic and dragons. The journey to the summit is meant to be hard, but not that hard, given you’ve only just started playing. But I quickly found myself turned around on the way there, probably because I ignored the quest marker for the start of the path of the inaccurately-named Seven Thousand Steps and blithely attempted to run straight up the mountain. It didn’t work. Unlike the exquisitely designed rock faces in Nintendo’s Breath Of The Wild, which are always…

Developer Ustwo Games Publisher Ustwo Games, Netflix Format Android, iOS, PC, Switch Origin UK Release TBA 2022 Your childhood art teacher – the one you always liked but suspected was disappointed in you, especially after she walked in on that impromptu life-drawing class – is aiming a rubber ball in your direction. As soon as she gets an opening, she’ll fling it and knock you out of the game. You haven’t got a ball, alas. But that friend from your clubbing days, the one who kept partying long after you lost the energy for it, who you worry might think you’re boring these days? He does. He passes the ball, and you ping it off a wall to strike your teacher on the back of the head. And then the…

Developer/ publisher Suspicious Developments Format PC Origin UK Release 2023 Suspicious Developments’ current project started as a joke. When he worked for PC Gamer, Tom Francis remembers, he’d laugh about self-serious military games with the other members of the team. “It was somebody’s idea that it’d be funny if they were all wizards,” he recalls. “Everything else is the same: they still have military tactical equipment, and they’re still breaching these hostile situations full of people with guns, but they’re just wizards.” Cut to 2017, when Francis found himself getting frustrated with XCOM 2. “I love XCOM,” he says, “but I just have a million problems with it, in terms of nitty-gritty, technical things, like ‘Can I shoot that guy or not?’ or ‘If I move here, will I be…

Developer BlueTwelve Studio Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, PS4, PS5 (tested) Release Out now When you’re seeing the world from a cat’s perspective, everything seems so big. The slums of Walled City 99, which serve as Stray’s first hub, are really just a couple of streets wide in each direction, but they’re so expertly knotted, and hemmed in by buildings tall enough to block your view, that we have to trace their lines many times before realising. For the longest time, it really feels like you’ve arrived in the big city, bustling with sights and souls. Later you arrive somewhere bigger still – amoment to rival The Lands Between’s most eye-widening vistas. These places are dotted with strings of Chinese lanterns, trees that poke through in unexpected spots, gold-plastic lucky…

Soon after Iwan Serrurier conceived the Moviola as a projector in 1917, it became clear that its cost was prohibitive for home use. When it struggled to sell, a friend suggested he repurpose it as a device for film editing. Seven years later, the adapted Moviola was released, quickly becoming an indispensable cutting-room tool. It continued to be used throughout the industry even as new models took over; while digital editing effectively sounded its death knell, 21st-century films such as Spielberg’s Munich were still cut with a Moviola (editor Michael Kahn was nominated for an Academy Award for his work). From being designed for passively watching films, to actively aiding in their creation: the Moviola’s evolution makes it the perfect interface for a game that sits at the intersection between…

Developer Square Enix, Historia Publisher Nintendo Format Switch Release Out now The title track’s rousing fanfare is a fittingly grandiose introduction to a game for which most of us have had to wait three decades. Never released outside Japan until now, Live A Live could easily be mistaken by the uninitiated for a brand-new game: it feel refreshingly modern, partly because its influence can be felt in a number of contemporary JRPGs, including Square Enix’s own Octopath Traveler. Both games use the company’s patented HD-2D aesthetic, with narratives structured around multiple protagonists. The key point of difference is that, where Octopath strains to make a story set across a single continent feel cohesive, Live A Live’s heroes are separated in time and place – and the resulting anthology of tales…

Developer Coin Crew Games Publisher Iam8bit, Skybound Games Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series (tested) Release Out now T he first message you see upon starting up Escape Academy, where you might otherwise expect a warning about flashing lights or the perils of forgetting to keep the controller strap attached, is a spot of friendly advice: “Keep some paper and a pencil handy”. It’s as much a promise as a tip, really, calling to mind all those notebooks sacrificed on the altar of The Witness’s crunchiest puzzles, pages filled with roughhewn glyphs able, years later, to transport us back to picturesque landscapes and winding trains of thought. Don’t expect anything of quite that order here, however. Escape Academy explicitly presents its puzzles as part of escape rooms, your…

When Suntory Hall opened its doors in October 1986, it made history as Tokyo’s first dedicated concert hall for classical music performances. And within that first year came another landmark – because on the night of August 20, 1987, it wasn’t the music Beethoven or Mendelssohn that waltzed its way through the hall and out onto the streets of the Akasaka district. It was Koichi Sugiyama’s overture for Dragon Quest, and many more of his melodies arranged for the Tokyo Strings Ensemble, at the Family Classic Concert – the world’s first videogame concert. Of course, since then there have been thousands of concerts in the same vein. Perhaps you’ve attended some, whether it was the Commodore 64 Concert; Final Fantasy’s Distant Worlds and The Legend Of Zelda’s Symphony Of The…

Keep on pushing I am old. So old that my glasses have more of a bearing on my experience of gaming than any powerful console or PC. However, it did get me thinking: one thing I used to love about the older generations, before we got caught up in mid-cycle product refreshes, was how developers got better and better at using them. Look at the first games released for the SNES versus those at the end of its lifecycle. Same with the Xbox 360 or the PS2. However, now, with our new cycles, we never see hardware pushed in interesting ways. We don’t see programmers performing miracles on things that shouldn’t be able to do them. Instead, we just get janky versions of new games, which play better on the…

Madison Karrh was not in the best of places when she started developing Birth. Having moved to Chicago just as COVID-19 was forcing us all indoors, she spent the better part of a year alone. Happily, she has since found love, and was so delighted at the response to her game’s Day Of The Devs showing that she’s postponed its planned release from late summer to next year so she can develop it further. But back then, making a macabre point-and-click adventure about loneliness, she decided her game needed a bit of levity. Karrh thus introduced a number of physics-based elements that add a certain human clumsiness to the puzzle solving. Pouring a cup of spiders and teeth could well seem unsettling, but it’s hard not to laugh when you…

eveloper Roll7 Publisher Private Division Format PC, PS4, PS5 Origin UK Release August 16 Having welcomed a wider audience with open arms in OlliOlli World, Roll7’s latest feels like the metaphorical equivalent of slamming the door in their faces – perhaps even on their fingers. This violent future-sport action game is ferociously tough, not unlike trying to play Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater while snipers take potshots at the Birdman. If that sounds faintly exasperating, that’s because at times it is: you’re rarely more than a few seconds away from the red aiming line of a sharpshooter’s rifle trained on your position, or several red triangles warning you of incoming missiles clustered around your heels. And that’s before you face the scything blue lasers and bleeping proximity mines, invariably lobbed directly…

Developer Madison Karrh Publisher Madison Karrh, Wings Format PC Origin US Release January There is a fine art to evoking the particular churn of emotions that accompany a major life event, and Madison Karrh’s macabre point-and-click adventure perceptively captures the nervous excitement, trepidation and, above all else, loneliness that comes when you move to a big city alone. Its protagonist, however, hits upon an unusual solution to their solitude: they’re going to build themselves a companion from various human bones and organs. It begins with a moment of relatable routine, as you slot a tape into a cassette player and pour a pot of tea: examples of the sort of pleasurably simple, tactile interaction you’ll find throughout. You then get to define your protagonist’s look in the mirror. You pick…

Format PC, PS4, PS5, PSVR, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Developer/publisher Firesprite Origin UK Release 2018 When development began on The Persistence back in 2016, there were few VR games in existence, and even fewer that went beyond the kind of short experience to which Firesprite had contributed in The Playroom VR, the Nintendo-style minigame collection that accompanied PSVR’s launch. As Firesprite took its first solo foray into VR, co-founder and game director Stuart Tilley and his colleagues were determined to leverage their initial experience in order to create something considerably more intense – and ambitious. “Stu and [Firesprite co-founder Chris Roberts] had this crazy idea for an intense horror experience in a procedurally generated playspace,” art director and fellow co-founder Lee Carus recalls. “It gathered lots of momentum from…

Before you ever meet B-12, the hovering drone that will be your companion through Stray, he speaks to you through the dead city. First, the neon letters of an old chapel flicker on unsteadily– or rather just enough of them to spell out ‘HELP’. If we’re initially unsure whether this is a diegetic occurrence or the game blurring the lines of UI and level design, any ambiguity is quickly washed away by the next sight: a bank of televisions that show a clipart icon of a cat’s face and the instruction ‘Follow me’. We obey, and thus so does the cat. After reaching B-12 – aprocess that requires finding the drone body, downloading his consciousness and powering it on – he speaks to us directly, the way people often do…

Developer Monolith Soft Publisher Nintendo Format Switch Release Out now Not many games are as invested in the messy business of human connection as Monolith Soft’s fourth Xenoblade game. It’s set in a world where two nations (Keves and Agnus) are locked in conflict, yet spends a lot of time thinking about what binds us, with characters examining the impact of their words and actions on those around them. Party members might struggle to untether themselves from the mistakes and regrets of their past selves; others become fixated on the thought of what comes once they’ve left this mortal coil. And if that sounds solemn, this is still a game in which a group of heroes swing huge swords at colossal robots and sneering anime villains, while announcing their next…

Developer/publisher Team OFK Format PC (tested), PS4, PS5, Switch Release August 18 Given everything that’s going on in the world right now, a story centring on the anxieties of a group of twentysomething creatives in sunny Los Angeles might not seem wildly tempting. Not least since the lives of the burgeoning collective soon to be known as OFK appear to be fairly cushy: they all live in enviably roomy houses, able to trade quips in boba cafés for hours on end and to drink in clubs without balking at the cost of a round. Yet this ‘interactive EP’ is as much about the messiness of relationships in the social-media/dating-app era as the difficulty in breaking through the glass ceiling of the music industry – though it carries enough of the…