Sommaire pour December 2019 de Edge

We were rather caught on the hop this month. We knew Apple Arcade was coming, and we knew it would have a large launch line-up. What we were not prepared for, however, was just how good it would be. Thanks to Apple’s ability to keep its secrets – we wouldn’t mess with an NDA sent over by a trillion-dollar company either, in fairness – we were stunned by a launch roster containing many of Edge’s favourite developers, many of whom had made games we didn’t even know existed. As a result, this issue has a rather atypical shape. Knowledge has been condensed and focuses heavily on Arcade; a feature has been sacrificed to make room for the largest Play section we’ve run in years; and honestly we still feel bad…

“I made the mistake of picking a charity I was advised [to] instead of picking a charity I’m personally passionate about, which is 100 per cent my fault.” Alt-right pin-up Felix ‘Pewdiepie’ Kjellberg cancels a planned $50,000 donation to the Anti Defamation League after a fan backlash. This is fine “Surround yourself with people who love and support you, but will correct your nonsense, challenge your flights of ego and call you, privately and publicly, on your bullshit.” The auteur complex is finely dismantled by Mike Bithell “No office, just a tiny room, no staff, no machines – nothing. All I had was a logo, notepad and pen, and my own PC. I had a dream and a connection, that’s all.” Multimillionaire Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima struggles on…

Preorders are live! You can now put in an order for Journey To The Savage Planet and guarantee yourself a copy on day one! Of course, if you don’t want a physical copy you could guarantee yourself a copy on day one by just buying it on that day, but let’s not dwell on that. In our defence, we will give you a digital bobble head that is pretty funny. But still, this step in the road from concept to retailer to living room is feeling more and more like a vestigial limb on a creature that has long ago evolved beyond needing it. In years gone by, preordering made sense: it guaranteed you a copy without any hassle, and you didn’t have to worry about your local game store…

LE PACTE Developer Éric Chahi Publisher Loriciels Format Amstrad CPC Release 1986 DANGER STREET Developer Éric Chahi Publisher Chip Format Amstrad CPC Release 1987 PROFANATION Developer Éric Chahi Publisher Chip Format Amstrad CPC Release 1987 FUTURE WARS Developer/publisher Delphine Software Format Amiga, Atari ST, MS-DOS, NEC PC-9801, Sharp X68000 Release 1989 ANOTHER WORLD Developer Éric Chahi Publisher Delphine Software (Europe), Interplay Software (North America) Format Amiga, Atari ST Release 1991 HEART OF DARKNESS Developer Amazing Studios Publisher Infogrames, Interplay, Ocean Format PC, PS1 Release 1998 FROM DUST Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Montpellier) Format 360, PC, PS3 Release 2011 PAPER BEAST Developer/publisher Pixel Reef Format PS4 Release 2019 Éric Chahi had an early start in games. When he was just 15, he made two games, Frog and Carnaval, for the Oric-1, a British-made…

This,” Charles Cecil gestures with a sweep of his hand, “is The Shambles.” Happily, he’s not delivering a withering assessment of the studio he’s been running for close to three decades. Rather, he’s referring to the York street that runs down one side of Revolution Software’s offices – and which is thought to have been the inspiration for Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley. The buildings here are centuries old, the eldest dating as far back as the 1300s. Inevitably, some of them are a little uneven; Cecil is grateful to the previous owners for having flattened out the floors, though there’s one room, he says, that leans so obviously to one side as to make you feel slightly seasick when you enter. We decline his invitation. It’s a fairly modest office,…

Developer The Coalition Publisher Microsoft Format PC, Xbox One (tested) Release Out now Gorgeous, gigantic and frustrating, Gears 5 is theoretically a story about people but in reality, it’s the story of their weapons. One of these is the Hammer Of Dawn, the orbital death-ray cannon from the original game. Besides continuing the adventure of Kait Diaz, now pursuing a family connection to the underground Swarm menace, you’ll spend much of Gears 5 trying to reactivate the Hammer array, a quest that takes you from a tropical island base to a vaguely Eastern European desert. Another starring weapon is Jack, the robot handyman who has been an indispensable ally ever since Marcus Fenix and co first ran into a busted door back in 2006. In Gears 5, he’s the vehicle…

Simogo multi-hyphenate Simon Flesser is responsible for the direction of Sayonara Wild Hearts’ art, sound and music, as well as level and character design. Here, he discusses the five-year journey behind the studio’s most ambitious game to date. You started out with a different genre of music in mind. When did you realise that pop was a better fit? We were going for this ’50s, ’60s vibe mixed with more mysterious elements – we were experimenting with blending surf rock with more world-music stuff. Daniel [Olsén, sound designer/instrumental composer] lives and breathes taiko drums, so we were trying to include those, too, as well as Ethiopian-inspired elements. Basically, I was just playing the prototype – we had a playlist of pop songs on in the background, and we just changed…

Developer House House Publisher Panic Format PC, Switch (tested) Release Out now Depending on your particular belief system, the goose is either nature’s way of keeping us humble, or God’s best mistake. Whether it was a curious series of evolutionary events or some butterfingered deity, somewhere along the way the misanthropic soul of a wasp got transplanted into a big duck. Who could have predicted that this would eventually gave rise to one of gaming’s greatest antagonists? Only House House, it seems. Untitled Goose Game casts you as one such feathery malcontent, and tasks you with terrorising a sleepy English village in increasingly specific and hilarious fashion. And while the game’s non-title – a placeholder that, thanks to sheer Internet notoriety, is now official – feels like a gag taken…

Developer/publisher Bloober Team Format PC, Xbox One (tested) Release Out now Love or hate it, on its 20th anniversary The Blair Witch Project feels as much of a one-off as it did back in 1999. Despite a slew of imitators, a sequel, a reboot and a variety of expansions across various media, it stands alone: a never-to-be-repeated phenomenon built around a brilliantly orchestrated marketing campaign that convinced some its story of three student documentary makers going missing in the Burkittsville woods was real. Yet despite provoking such a violently polarised reaction (and despite its cast spending most of their time bickering, snivelling or shrieking) it’s defined by its restraint: this is the rare horror film that’s almost entirely gore-free, that works precisely because of what it chooses not to show.…

Developer/publisher Ustwo Games Format iOS Release Out now What’s in a name? Plenty, as it turns out. From those very first words on the download screen, Assemble With Care projects itself as a game about treating things gently and purposefully – whether you’re helping fix beloved objects or relationships. It’s a thoughtful concept that, sadly, is marred by an oddly cynical-feeling execution. That’s not a criticism that could be levelled at Assemble With Care’s visual presentation. Energetic daubs of colour form the faintly Parisian streets of Bellariva and its citizens. As restorer Maria, you’re visiting to ply your trade in bringing treasured, broken things back to life. Each object tells the story of its owner in some way: a rotary telephone, the main means of communication for two sisters, with…

Peter Molyneux’s Bullfrog years were littered with successful game launches, but as the studio’s relationship with EA matured the creator felt stifled. Lionhead, named after co-founder Mark Webley’s hamster, would be a vehicle for greater creative freedom, and its founders knew the first game they produced had to demonstrate that in no uncertain terms. What followed after Black & White’s release was a curiously safe release strategy, though: an expansion pack a year after the base game, then the announcement of a sequel. It was 2004’s Fable and 2005’s The Movies that really showcased Lionhead’s kitchen-sink approach to game making, the former an RPG that revelled in tiny details and the consequences of player actions, and the latter a management sim with staggering granular detail that documented cinema’s evolution, letting…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins an SN30 Pro+ controller, compatible with PC and Switch, courtesy of 8BitDo Master and servant I too felt a sense of ‘fresh air’ when reading that Disintegration (E337) would not have a multiplayer progression system. Later on in the Fantasy Strike review (another game without progession systems), you mention that it’s heartbreaking to find so few players offline. As much as this saddens me, I have to admit, I am a hypocrite. Another excellent David Sirlin game is Puzzle Strike. A few years ago, you could buy characters for a small price, or grind through 100 games or so to earn one. One day that system was replaced with a full purchase.…

Relationships take work – but any fool will tell you that if you treat yours like point-scoring exercises, it won’t be long before you’re out on your ear. Yet the majority of relationships in videogames are still reduced to stat spreadsheets, carefully and methodically filled out in hopes of a tactical advantage or a flash of two-dimensional ankle. Happily, many of this month’s Hype selection have one heartening thing in common: an altogether more nuanced depiction of relationships, whether it’s with a partner, your family, yourself or even the world around you. Haven (p30), for instance, is an interstellar love story with a twist: our intrepid couple have already met before the game starts. As such, their relationship features all the familiar ups and downs – and playfights over hogged…

Developer Dreamfeel Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format iOS, PC Origin Ireland Release 2020 Reading somebody else’s diary feels illicit enough as is, but If Found takes it a step further – you’re erasing it. Technically, it’s your own diary: you’re cast as the artistic Kasio, who has filled her journal with all manner of sketches, musings and scribbles about her life. And, for reasons currently unknown, is now taking an eraser to the lot. Creating a game set in a notebook had been on the minds of artist Liadh Young and creative lead Llaura Ash McGee ever since they first met in 2014. “Early on, we had this idea for a witch’s spellbook,” McGee tells us. “I was obsessed with marginalia, like writing in the sides and all that kind of…

STILL PLAYING The Legend Of Zelda: Link’s Awakening Switch In the mood for a bit of nostalgia tourism, we sit down with Grezzo’s remake, though reliving those fuzzy memories leaves us with a headache. That toy-town look is quite beautiful, but it’s come at a cost: we’re not usually the type to carp over framerates, and perhaps we’ve grown too accustomed to Nintendo games running immaculately, but the regular fluctuations between 60 and 30fps here are a jarring distraction from an otherwise charming throwback. Hollow Knight Switch There’s something satisfying about matching your life circumstances with those unfolding in a game. As such, a miserable two weeks of antibiotic treatment and enforced rest has one member of Team Edge returning to Hallownest to get the ‘true’ ending and rid the…

Chainsaw takedowns aside, the first Gears Of War was unusual among shooters both for the richness of its fantasy world’s history, and its ability to convey the bulk of that history via its architecture. Even today, its grubby, collapsing urban backdrop is a spellbinding blend of building traditions: the heyday of European empire joined at the hip to the heavy-metal machinery of fascism. One of the quieter achievements of Gears 5 is to explore the history players have hacked out for themselves within all that history, with many chapters set in locations familiar from the Xbox 360 games. The corpse of the Riftworm whose guts you tore open in Gears 2 has become the basis for a small wasteland ecosystem, picked clean of minerals and fat by refugees. One of…

Developer Gearbox Software Publisher 2K Games Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now When Borderlands scorched its imprint onto the landscape in 2009, it did so as an inspired proof-of-concept: a loot-powered shooter. Ten years later every game is a Skinner Box, coiled and ready to shower colour-coded nonsense on its players in a coolly calculated drip-feed. And every game is an RPG full of skill trees and stat screens, from Far Cry to FIFA. Borderlands 3 couldn’t possibly make the same impact, could it? Instead, Gearbox goes about making it all so slick and hypnotically enjoyable that you don’t care you’ve played it all before, three times now. It polishes the established experience to such a sheen you could see your own disaffected face in it, if…

Developer/publisher Ichigoichie Format Switch Release Out now Back in the superclub era, it was the music journo’s job to come up with names for the new subgenres of electronic music that were endlessly springing up around the UK. Needless to say, not all of them stuck. A show of hands, please, for those who fondly recall witch house, hardbag, terrorcore or speed garage. It’s a dilemma with which we find ourselves presented as we try to explain Hexagroove to you. It is at once a rhythm-action game, a music sequencer, a DJ tool and a nightclub simulator. We’re afraid we’re going to have to get back to you – this may take some time. Hexagroove starts out straightforwardly enough, but within a few hours nothing really makes any sense and…

Developer/publisher Capcom Format iOS Release Out now Nintendo could have its work cut out with the next Metroid if other developers continue to refine its formula so well. Capcom’s undersea action-adventure is yet another case in point. It borrows the structure of Metroid II: Return Of Samus (and its underwhelming 3DS remake), although here it’s water pressure gating your descent beneath a frozen planet. It captures that feeling of splendid isolation of the best Metroids, too, its beautiful setting inspiring a kind of trepidatious awe. But it has enough ideas of its own – alongside a few pinched from elsewhere – to feel distinctive, and not just because it’s a mobile game that feels, in the best way, like a high-quality console release. Its premium feel is soon apparent: unlike…

Logan Marshall-Green is an actor and director known for starring in The O.C. and 24, as well as starring in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and horror-thriller The Invitation. Here, still buzzing from his first videogame acting role in Sam Barlow’s Telling Lies, he talks all things games. What’s your earliest memory of games? My first introduction to videogames was Berzerk on Atari – I remember the insane sound that happened when you touched the walls. And I remember where I was when I first saw Nintendo: down in the basement of Pat Shelton’s house with all of his brothers and sisters, all surrounding this box in this dark basement. And just the silence and the desperation to be next in holding these wired controllers! It had a huge effect on me.…

The slogan for Apple’s freshly minted Arcade subscription service is “Play Extraordinary”, which is presumably a deliberate update of the old adverb-agnostic slogan “Think Different”. It was peculiar, then, that one of the games proudly shown off at the launch was a version of Frogger. Seriously? Guide a frog across a road, avoiding traffic, in 2019? Most potential customers won’t even remember the original. Well, perhaps the whole thing is quite cleverly demographically targeted. Maybe Apple Arcade is aimed deliberately at ageing Gen Xers (and, at a pinch, older millennials), for whom the faint memory of Frogger recalls blurry childhood memories of lurking in videogame arcades during rain-lashed summer holidays. After all, people who are really into videogames (eg readers of this very august organ) already play the games they…

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How did you guide players when they had so much freedom to explore? We tried really hard not to make a gap between when you learn a piece of information and when it’s needed. One of the goals was to make Curiosities almost like a question. Our job is to make it where if they want to find the answer to that question, they can explore in a very directed manner that pieces it together. So when you find one of the escape pods, you can go find all the other escape pods. Each one has a clue, you put the three clues together, and you find The Vessel. Did early playtesters pick up on the hints? We tried to strip everything back. So every single thing you’re reading in…

Last month, we used this page to pay tribute to the developers who, late in the console generation and with installed bases reaching their likely peak, were throwing off the shackles of risk aversion and trying out new things. This issue, things are rather different; instead, we find developers showing – or learning – the benefits of sticking to what you know best. Admittedly, some are cautionary tales. Take Gears 5 (p92), in which The Coalition seeks to broaden the scope of a series that has always been at its best in tight spaces. Unfortunately, it still is, the inclusion of pseudo-open-world zones diluting a once-potent formula. There’s none of that in Borderlands 3 (p100). Gearbox clearly has no desire to even disturb the mould, let alone break it. The…

Developer Simogo Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format iOS, PS4, Switch (tested) Release Out now That difficult eighth album? Five years in the making, Sayonara Wild Hearts is comfortably the longest we’ve had to wait for a Simogo game. You’ll quickly realise exactly why it took so long, and yet it bears the weight of its developer’s hopes and the expectations of critics and players with remarkable grace. It’s positively sprightly, in fact – its suit of cups overflows with ideas, yet it’s the opposite of bloated. Its 23 stages each cover a bewildering amount of ground in a matter of moments, with new themes, mechanics and even perspective shifts introduced and cast aside, frequently leaving you gasping for more. Even its controls are reduced to the barest essentials: a stick and…

Developer/publisher Capy Games Format iOS Release Out now We stare at the board for a little too long, probably, double- and triple-checking we’ve optimised our route. We take a final look to ensure we’re going to finish up in a safe spot, tapping on enemies to see their attack ranges, since we’re down to our last heart and quaffed our last potion a few moves earlier. We’ve been on this screen a little too long, drawing the aggro of more and more of the cutesy little beasts that litter the grid. When we’re finally certain we’ve got it right, we tap ‘Go’, and the payoff commences. Our avatar cuts a vicious swathe through each enemy in sequence, getting faster as the chain continues, letting out a primal roar as the…

Developer/publisher Finji Format iOS (tested), PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release Out now The apocalypse is so three years ago. Back in 2016, when the world was properly going supernova and Overland was just two years into development, Finji’s procedurally generated, turn-based permadeath road trip felt thoroughly of the moment. But booting it up in 2019, it’s clear that something’s changed. It’s not the game itself – that has remained resolutely minimalist and unrelentingly bleak, with only small but considered changes arriving as a result of its period in early access – but the world around it. And, as any apocalyptic tale will tell you, adaptation is key. If you can’t keep up, you’re going to get left behind. Much like Vernon. On our sixth or seventh run of Overland,…

Publisher DeNA Co Ltd Developer The Pokémon Company Format Android, iOS (tested) Release Out now Nintendo’s tepid streak on mobile platforms continues at leisure with this beautifully presented, mildly diverting new Pokémon game. A cheerful ARPG with realtime three-on-three battles, it’s a rare F2P game that gives you several easygoing hours of lightweight fun before insisting you pony up or grind your way to glory. It is a marked improvement on Dr. Mario World – though that, admittedly, is to damn it with the faintest of praise. On the man-made island paradise of Pasio, catching’em all doesn’t refer to Pokémon alone but rather their trainers – or, in the game’s parlance, Sync Partners. Each comes with a single monster and they’re all rather attached to their favourites, such that you…