Table of contents for Xmas 2022 in Edge

Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg’s particular view of the future, an awful lot of money is sloshing around the world of virtual reality at the moment, mostly because of the tech investment community’s unending appetite for anything that can be tied into whatever the Metaverse is this week. Naturally, all this makes Meta an even bigger target for opprobrium than usual, with criticisms landing on its social-centred Horizon Worlds initiative in particular. It has put some advocates in the VR community, including Rolf Illenberger, CEO of enterprise-focused software company VRdirect, into defensive mode, demanding more patience from the community at large. “We’re trying to land on the Moon,” he said recently, “and people are complaining that the coffee machine’s not working.” It’s a fair point on one hand, but the problem…

At GDC 2016, two Italians somehow found themselves at a party for New Zealand game developers. The first was Marco Bancale, whose 2D strategy sidescroller Kingdom had just been hailed at the IGF Awards. “A guy asked me, ‘Are you Italian?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, I’m Italian, are you?’ ‘Yes.’ So we started talking.” This was Patrick Corrieri, developer of bridge-building game Poly Bridge. “And then the day after we met, we pitched to each other the idea for our next games – and we found out that it was basically the same game,” Bancale says. “So we were like, OK, either we do it together or we compete, and competing doesn’t make much sense.” The result of that meeting was Plasma, an ambitious engineering playground that promises to…

“I confess I have dabbled in Minecraft myself… Surely we can turn the Minecraft-crazed kids of today into the skilled staff the resources industr y need for tomorrow?” ”I’m not afraid of a non-disclosure agreement. I can’t even afford to run a car – what are they going to do, take my clothes?” ”I do know about Solid Snake… He wrote me. I think he wrote me in lieu of the company paying me any money whatsoever.” “We have demonstrated that a single layer of in vitro cortical neurons can selforganise activity to display intelligent and sentient behaviour when embodied in a simulated gameworld.”…

Videogames often hinge on an unrealistic yet satisfying balance of restriction versus freedom. Too much freedom and there is no challenge, no friction on the way to satisfying the player’s desires; too much restriction and there is no pleasure in grimly following the rules. The first problem afflicted many of the first forays into ‘open-world’ videogame styles, before developers figured out clever narrative and other funnels to enhance a sense of progression; the second may rear its head when you are sent on one too many fetch quests. But there is no one ideal place on this spectrum: different games can make different, equally successful choices. High levels of restriction are often a feature of puzzle games, which explore and dramatise the creative freedom that can still be afforded within…

Developer Amplitude Studios Publisher Sega Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin France Release 2023 As we clump around its abandoned and infested space station, Endless Dungeon conjures the air of a gung-ho twin-stick shooter. While its scenery and layouts hark back to 2014 turn-based tower defence game Dungeon Of The Endless, our trigger finger does most of the early work. Once into the nittygritty, though, there’s plenty of the old DNA left. Like that reversal in the title, Amplitude Studios is playing with many of the same ideas here, just switching the order and emphasis. We take direct control of our space-station survivors this time, and aim our own bullets, yet the Roguelite structure, resource allocation systems, and tower defence elements remain. As before, your fate…

The Last Of Us: Left Behind PS5 Still, we’d argue, the best The Last Of Us has ever been, this two-hour (plus change) side story has lost little of its emotional kick in the intervening years. There’s real poignancy in its playfulness: the scenes where Riley and Ellie try on a range of silly Halloween masks and engage in an impromptu windowsmashing contest are all the more affecting because you know how their story ends. Splatoon 3 Switch With Turf War frequently putting us on teams with Splat Charger users who can’t seem to shoot straight, and the campaign mop-up barely taking an hour, we retreat to Salmon Run – which at times risks being as exasperating as the competitive modes, particularly when your entire team dunks their bombs in…

Like XCOM, but with Nintendo characters. That was always the shorthand for Mario + Rabbids, but it’s really only half the story. While the original game stuck close to the format established by Firaxis in battle, that still leaves the question of what you do in between. For Firaxis, this took the form of the base building and research queues of the Geoscape strategy layer, itself adapted from the blueprints laid out by Julian Gollop and co in the ’90s X-COM games. This has always been the weakest part of 2012 reimagining Enemy Unknown’s design, in truth, but it plays an essential loadbearing role in providing a break from the turn-based action – even if what replaces it is just another variety of chin-stroking. Of course, that approach was never…

Asobo’s sprawling sequel feels like the response to a customer survey asking what players wanted to see more of from a successor to A Plague Tale: Innocence, returned with every box ticked. There is more bonding time between protagonist Amicia de Rune and her younger brother Hugo, still afflicted with the ‘macula’ disease that allows him to control rats, whose swarms here swell to biblical proportions. The game’s stealth palette has expanded, too, and Amicia’s arsenal with it, leading to a broader range of ways to evade capture and to take down guards in gruesome fashion. Environments are more attractive, more detailed and larger in scale – with the side-effect that its puzzles ensure you’ll spend perhaps an hour of the 20-plus it takes to reach the credits (almost twice…

Bodies are just machines. This idea, at the centre of Alien artist HR Giger’s work, becomes the thesis of Scorn, a firstperson survival-horror puzzler that borrows liberally from Giger’s distinctive biomechanical surrealist designs. Here, you interface with machines via orifices, devices made of bone are grafted onto flesh, and weapons are fuelled by blood. Serbian developer Ebb Software brings this unsettling world to life with real aplomb, rendering everything organic as a resource for a nightmarish factory. It’s just a shame that what lies beneath that strikingly grisly exterior feels so worn-out and familiar. Scorn does at least put its best foot forward. A smooth transition from the main menu takes you immediately into this strange world, casting you in the role of a mute humanoid awoken in a decrepit…

Pity the poor awards voters. Yes, From Software’s Elden Ring will surely win Game Of The Year just about everywhere, but what about all the other categories? Anyone doing a halfway-decent job at judging this year’s best narrative game or the best debut game will still have to spend hundreds of hours to get through the longlist. And while you might not sympathise with the plight of those poor game industry voters who get to play dozens of games, the practical impossibility of judging puts the entire notion of game awards into question. I’ll focus on one of the most well-known awards bodies: the BAFTA Games Awards, which I’ve been part of for over a decade. Each year, perhaps a couple of hundred games are up for consideration across multiple…

Developer Cardboard Sword Publisher Plaion Format PC Origin UK Release 2023 Well, ‘stealth Metroidvania inspired by Prince Of Persia’ is quite the elevator pitch. But The Siege And The Sandfox’s development journey really began with some beautiful concept art created by artists and twin brothers Ed and Keith Duke-Cox, who left Frontier Developments to join northern English studio Cardboard Sword in 2016. “We looked at it and we were blown away,” the studio’s chief executive, Olly Bennett, recalls. “It was stunning pixel art. Bear in mind, this is the first pixel-art game project they’ve ever worked on. And we saw it, and we were like, ‘Well, this is fantastic. We’ll turn this into a game’.” “You should not be killing indiscriminately, otherwise you’re just a mass murderer” From the outset,…

Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Developer Deck Nine Publisher Square Enix Origin US Release 2021 Anyone could be forgiven for suffering from franchise fatigue – or expandeduniverse exhaustion, perhaps – in recent times. Not least because the handful of monolithic corporations which exert something of a strangehold on modern pop culture seem intent on prolonging the dominance of a single genre. It’s refreshing, then, to hear Philip Lawrence, senior narrative designer on the Life Is Strange series, insist that it isn’t interested in telling a superhero story. Its protagonists might well be able to call upon otherworldly abilities, but “we never want to stray into that kind of territory.” That shouldn’t come as a surprise, though – since day one, Life Is Strange has been created…

We’re often asked how we determine what goes into the Play section, given the increased volume of games released nowadays, particularly around this time of year. Fourteen reviews might be a little more than we manage in an average issue, but it’s around half the number of new titles that launch on Steam every day. The process isn’t an exact science, and we don’t want to get too insidebaseball about it, but there are a few basic guidelines we tend to follow. Obviously there are the games for which regular readers are rightly expecting a verdict in these pages: the first four releases featured in this issue (each of which earns a different score; if you’ve resisted reading ahead, see how many you can guess) being prime examples. Beyond that,…

The demoness Madama Butterfly has been Bayonetta’s right-hand woman since 2009. Indeed, all her limbs have been at Bayonetta’s disposal, bursting from portals to swat choirs of angels and stamp on celestial ogres with spear-length stilettos. But you’ve never seen her strut her stuff like this. In Bayonetta 3, the forces of heaven and hell give way to invaders from parallel dimensions – creatures of bone and emerald, led by a gloating Thanos-style spectre who is killing off all Bayonetta’s alternate selves (read: wardrobe changes) in order to blend every universe into one. Bayonetta’s pet devils aren’t under contract to devour these newcomers, so rather than conjuring them as QTE finishers she must summon them fully and take control – aconcept gleaned from Platinum’s Astral Chain and the abandoned Scalebound,…

Reviving a series with a spin-off is a move that defies convention, if not common sense – lest we forget Nintendo’s decision to bring back Metroid Prime with much-derided 3DS co-op shooter Federation Force. A shift away from the 2D/3D hybrid approach of the original Valkyrie Profile games for the series’ first home console entry in 15 years, however, makes sense for modern platforms, with Elysium’s turn-based tactics having been swapped for realtime combat. This is more a character-action game than an RPG, then, and to Soleil’s credit the spectacle sometimes comes close to matching a certain Japanese studio’s lustre. Yet perhaps inviting such comparisons isn’t wise with the queen of the genre returning to her throne within weeks – and if you’re seeking a story rooted in Norse mythology,…

The first sight that greets you at War Games, a new exhibition at London’s Imperial War Museum that bills itself as the UK’s first to examine the relationship between videogames and real-life conflict, doesn’t have anything to do with games. Rather, it’s a quick-cut montage of war films and television: flashes of Dunkirk, of The Hurt Locker, of Dad’s Army. “We wanted to set the scene by placing videogames within our broader cultural consumption of war,” curator Chris Cooper explains. “Why does war fascinate us so much? Why do we tell stories about war?” That it starts this way is indicative of an introductory tone that runs throughout the exhibition – “we’re hoping to appeal to as wide an audience as possible,” Cooper says, which requires making the topic approachable…

Game Golden Tee PGA Tour Clubhouse Edition Manufacturer Incredible Technologies According to manufacturer Incredible Technologies, Golden Tee is “the most successful arcade game ever made”. Such an audacious claim feels more digestible when you consider that it relates not to a single release but a series – and one whose first edition was released way back in 1989, with new iterations arriving annually since the launch of Golden Tee 3D Golf in the mid-’90s. Given its enduring popularity, especially in the US, it’s surprising that it’s taken until now for Incredible to produce a cabinet for the home. Modelled on the PGA Tour coin-op unit, Clubhouse Edition is available in two options: standard ($5,299), which requires you to provide your own 4K display, and deluxe ($6,599), which ships with a…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins an exclusive Edge T-shirt. Physical unfitness? In E376 Robert Frazer continues a line of discussion with a number of other readers, and, like any good keyboard warrior, I felt it was time to stick my oar in. My main line of disagreement is the combination in his mind of purchases from a store and subscriptions – and they’re not the same. Publisher behaviour when it comes to licences we’ve outright purchased does need to change. Any game purchased outside of a subscription should remain in the owner’s library in perpetuity – or at least until that console generation has ended. Removing your access to older software is not acceptable. Even Apple, which…

Videogames often have the quality of a palimpsest. Look carefully enough and you can spot vestiges of what has gone before. Sometimes those remnants reveal the tastes of the designers, references – conscious or otherwise – of older games they have played and loved. And sometimes they come in the form of digital remains: particularly when it comes to sequels, you can detect examples where existing code has been reused or repurposed, assets and animations that have been recycled. With remakes, this phenomenon is all but inescapable – even when a game has been rebuilt from the ground up. Behind the contemporary patina, glimpses of older incarnations always show through; the past in conversation with the present. It’s an exchange Capcom is actively encouraging in Resident Evil 4. The original…

Developer/ publisher D-Pad Studio Format PC, Switch Origin Norway Release TBA Sometimes the simplest ideas are the ones that endure, and Vikings On Trampolines is a case in point. The concept started bouncing around inside the head of D-Pad Studio co-founder Jo-Remi Madsen 20 years ago – but, with a desire for accessibility at its core, has arguably only become more relevant since. “This is essentially a game I designed for my little sister,” Madsen says. “We used to play games like Mario Kart and Smash Bros and she would quit early because she was like, ‘I can’t understand the controls’, so I wanted to make a game where the only control used is the joystick.” Back then, Madsen built a prototype, and another a decade later when he and…

TH E ULTIMATE DOOM Developer/publisher Id Software Format PC Release 1995 STRIFE Developer Rogue Entertainment Publisher Velocity Inc/Studio 3DO Format PC Release 1996 QUAKE Developer Id Software Publisher GT Interactive Format PC Release 1996 QUAKE II Developer Id Software Publisher Activision Format PC Release 1997 QUAKE III ARENA Developer Id Software Publisher Activision Format PC Release 1999 DOOM 3 Developer Id Software Publisher Activision Format PC Release 2004 RAGE Developer Id Software Publisher Bethesda Softworks Format 360, PC, PS3 Release 2011 DOOM Developer Id Software Publisher Bethesda Softworks Format 360, PC, PS3 Release 2016 QUAKE CHAMPIONS Developer Id Software Publisher Bethesda Softworks Format 360, PC, PS3 Release 2018 WARHAMMER 40,000: SPACE MARINE 2 Developer Saber Interactive Publisher Focus Entertainment Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Release TBA A mateur modding has…

So, how did you meet?’ It’s one of the most common questions when interviewing any creative partnership. In the case of Fictiorama’s three founders, though, there’s not really much mystery to it. Luis Oliván met Alberto Oliván when the latter was born; Mario Oliván completed the trio a few years later. They are, in case this is not completely obvious, brothers. “When we were kids and teenagers, we loved to play text adventure games together, and then point-and-click games,” Luis says. In those early days, at home in Madrid, they dabbled with DIY software 3D Construction Kit and in making simple animated shorts in EA’s Cartooners, but nothing serious came of it, and eventually life got in the way, as it does. “We stopped playing together as we grew older,”…

The first Mario + Rabbids was something of a surprise attack. We’d heard rumblings of the coming offensive, but Miyamoto charging the stage at Ubisoft’s E3 2017 conference, weapon held high, was another matter entirely. But the biggest surprise, of course, was how well it all worked. A company crossover between two sets of characters right at opposite ends of the ‘beloved videogame icon’ spectrum? An attempt to bring the tactical complexities of XCOM: Enemy Unknown to players of all ages? Mario, entrusted to a developer other than Nintendo, and they give him guns? It should have been a disaster. And yet. Kingdom Battle was a triumph: a robust, streamlined take on a tricky genre that managed to leave us feeling more warmly towards the Rabbids themselves. The very nature…

Since it was announced in 2019, Overwatch 2 has been a strange old proposition. The success of the original game was such that Blizzard could theoretically have continued creating heroes and maps, turning it into a perpetually growing, evolving platform. That is, after all, the route many of its competitors, such as Apex Legends, Valorant and Fortnite, have taken to date. Yet Blizzard opted to create a sequel: an attempt, apparently, to recapture the game’s former glory as arguably the best competitive hero shooter in existence. Yet on the face of things, not a great deal seems to have changed: many of the maps here are reused, only three new heroes are introduced, and the promised PvE campaign is now slated for a vague 2023 window. In many ways that…

The walls are shifting, as in one of our favourite Roguelikes. But here in this haunted Sardinian village, we get the rare opportunity to watch it happening. Where most games reshuffle their procedural pack invisibly, Santa Ragione wants to show you it’s not faking anything: should all its playable cast be captured (or worse) by the creature that stalks Gravoi’s streets, you’ll see its buildings smoothly rearrange themselves as if gliding on runners, like 3D tiles within some colossal mechanical sliding puzzle. This is a fate worse than death: you will, in all likelihood, have spent several hours trying to commit the previous layout to memory. Now you no longer know where everything is – where the various resources needed to boost your chances of survival are located, and where…