Edge的October 2025目录

In his Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows, author John Koenig coined the term anemoia, meaning “nostalgia for a time you never experienced”. The concept has since been expanded to include nostalgia for a time that didn’t even exist – feelings that power those slightly weird corners of Facebook that celebrate a black-and-white era in which you could buy a round of drinks with a rusty old penny and still have change left over for fish and chips on the way home. We have seen a variation bleed into videogames in recent years, pixel art used as a direct line to consumers’ nostalgia centres, promising to recreate the wonder of the old days, even though games from back then looked quite unlike these tributes, with their transparency effects, freely rotating sprites and…

Truly new ideas, in games as elsewhere, are hard to come by. “The design process is often seeing something someone else has built and going, ‘That’s cool, but wouldn’t it be cool if [you changed this]‘,” says Ste Curran, creative director at ‘digital toy’ developer Magicave. A genuinely original game is “the dream”, he admits. “But that’s often unattainable.” No wonder Curran remembers the moment he stumbled across his own Holy Grail. “I was looking after my daughter one morning, and she was playing with some Duplo.” He began idly sorting the figures by component parts, into columns. “‘Here are all the ones with yellow dresses, here are all the ones with brown eyes…’ But, of course, these categories overlap.” The first realisation: “What I need here isn’t columns –…

“We should create destinations that players want to return to instead of simply updating existing content.” Live-service overload? Former Avalanche boss Christofer Sundberg says the answer lies in “fewer vending machines, more visionaries” “Essentially, AI is going to be a cheat code for people who want to take advantage of it.” For this episode of the great AI debate, we have Gabe Newell in the red corner “Leaving a computer to spit out generic malformed gibberish just smacks of not giving a shit.” And in the blue corner, please put your hands together for Duke Smoochem creator Dan Douglas “You buy the game and you get the whole thing. There’s no online component. There’s no live service…” Ken Levine confirms Judas’s old-fashioned approach, while promising “no diss on any developers”…

Reboots used to be events, and announced as such. Now we’re just stuck in an endless reboot loop. Who’s Batman this year? Ben Affleck? R-Patz? Derek Zoolander? Doesn’t matter: you’ll sit through yet another slightly different retelling of Bruce Wayne’s origin story and everyone will coo and drool over how unprecedentedly “dark” and “moody” the new director has made it, compared to the cartoonish frivolity and lightheartedness of Zack Snyder’s efforts. Reboots, remakes and ‘remasters’ litter the field of videogames, too, with all the various Dooms, Wolfensteins, Tomb Raiders, Princes Of Persia, Calls Of Duty and whatnot. (The idea of remastering is taken from the final stage of music production: mastering sets the final tonal balance and loudness. Lots of classic 1970s rock music was horribly remastered in the 2000s…

Developer Three Fields Entertainment Publisher THQ Nordic Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin UK Release 2025 For those who’ve spent the past 17 years paying repeat visits to one of Burnout Paradise’s many iterations, blitzing around its open world and daring to contemplate what a modern equivalent might look like, Wreckreation may have some answers. This game from Three Fields Entertainment, a team formed by members of Criterion (already responsible for spiritual successor Dangerous Driving), quickly convinces us that every effort has been made to recapture the petrolfumed highs of its inspirations. And if the racing sparks nostalgia as soon as we hit the asphalt, there’s an added layer of creativity to dig into as well: as the name implies, this is a game of building and destroying. Constructed around a sprawling fictional state…

HYPE Developer 17-Bit Publisher Cult Games Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Japan Release TBA Kyoto-based 17-Bit has tried its hand at different genres and platforms, but one of CEO Jake Kazdal’s ambitions has always been to make a Zelda-style action adventure. Indeed, Nintendo’s series has been formative for Kazdal, who discovered the NES original after a skateboard accident kept him housebound one summer holiday. And yet the influence isn’t immediately apparent in Awaysis’ arcade-oriented mission structure, in which diminutive fox Auro journeys to the titular floating island to battle evil goblins. 17-bit is labelling Awaysis a dungeon brawler, a reference to its physics-based combat and the knockabout mayhem that comes from double-handing a large weapon and swinging it at an enemy at the edge of a platform, or a…

Game Grounded 2 Developer Obsidian Entertainment Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, Xbox Series Release Out now (early access) As we step out into Brookhollow Park for the first time, we get goosebumps. The sound of synthesisers swells as we take in enormous grass stalks and mushrooms towering over us, while ladybirds rumble across the soil like carapaced giants. It’s a moment reminiscent of Sam Neill and Laura Dern’s iconic introduction to Jurassic Park, but merely serves as the first of many wonders we encounter during our demo of Grounded 2. Just as in the first game, we take on the role of a teenager shrunk to diminutive proportions by tech corporation Omnient – this time we’re exploring the park in the aftermath of an explosion. We make our way…

There’s a certain joy in one of the later sublayers of Bananza that hits differently from all the rest. Looking out over a part of the world we’re about to traverse, we see not an open playground but an abstract construct of pathways, arranged horizontally and vertically into a kind of assault course. There are carefully placed enemies down there amid tests of platforming skills and even a puzzle element as we’re required throw rocks at moving switches to bring bridges in and out of existence. This is an extended, self-contained sequence built around a single idea – in old money, what we might have called a ‘level’. In its 3D platformers, Nintendo has largely rejected the notion of the level since Mario 64, when it served up ‘courses’ instead.…

‘The story within videogames is that esports is on the rise. Or at least that’s been the narrative line for the past decade, helped along by gold-rush tales of six-figure crowd sizes and teenagers winning millions of dollars for outplaying other competitors. But after its initial boom, and then the dizzying highs of the COVID era, when everyone was stuck at home and needed something to watch, commercial competitive gaming has been hit with significant setbacks. Major teams such as 100 Thieves and SoloMid have been downsized. The Overwatch League has collapsed. As big-name partners have successively backed out, the entire esports world has been hit with a realisation: you can’t prop all this up on sponsorship deals alone. There have to be other, better ways of making esports make…

The body is a splatter on the sunhardened ground, staining both the courtyard and reputation of the Elysium wellness retreat. It once belonged to Harry Kennedy, a local property developer whose pride came before a fall – and, before that, a gardening fork to the chest. If you have no interest in finding Harry’s killer, turn to p30. If you do… well, I suppose you’d need to buy Can You Solve The Murder? But first, read on. This book is the latest from Antony Johnston, writer of both videogames (Resident Evil: Village, Dead Space) and murder-mystery novels and comics (The Dog Sitter Detective, The Fuse). For such a veteran of the genre – Johnston is a former vice-chair of the UK’s Crime Writers’ Association – the mystery within is surprisingly…

Developer Alkimia Interactive Publisher THQ Nordic Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Spain Release TBA Listen carefully and you may hear the buzz. It’s a little more distant than it is for many remake projects, but it’s there. Gothic, Piranha Bytes’ 2001 action RPG, is loved more in its native Germany than elsewhere, mainly for its intricate worldbuilding and an ambitious approach to player autonomy. Despite never quite breaking through internationally, it did well enough to garner sequels and spinoffs, and more recently the interest of THQ Nordic, which acquired and resurrected the fading IP. A playable teaser for a remake was offered up in 2019, and shocked fans by reworking many of the series’ mechanics – a response that, it turns out, the developers very much wanted. “To provoke…

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While sales broke records, the Switch 2 launch lacked a certain excitement that we’d usually associate with new Nintendo hardware. The timing was part of that – the console arrived just as we all turned our collective attention to LA for the annual festivities – and the relatively low-key lead up to release. (That media outlets didn’t receive units in advance didn’t help.) Yet it was also partly because of the machine itself, largely presented as an upgrade to what we already had, with a launch title in Mario Kart World that hit the spot but mostly felt like a natural expansion for the series. For a month or so, then, we’ve been in a state of ambivalence: pleased to have the new machine while slightly concerned about the conservatism…

Cancelled games are meant to stay cancelled. As for fan-based attempts to recreate them? They’re meant to be hit with cease-and-desists. Yet in the case of Paragon, Epic’s short-lived thirdperson MOBA, something unprecedented has happened. Paragon was closed down in 2018, but Predecessor, a game built from its design, is now celebrating its first birthday. Predecessor has a growing audience, 70 developers working on it daily, and – crucially – Epic’s blessing. On top of that, this is the first game many members of the team have shipped. So what went right? “I’d never really made a game before,” laughs Robbie Singh, CEO and founder of Omeda Studios, the company behind Predecessor. He was at university when he first encountered Paragon. Eager to become a content creator on YouTube, he…

Staring into the Eye I have just renewed my Edge subscription for another two years, even though it takes me ages to read a single issue cover to cover. Two small children at home tend to get in the way of things like that. Long gone are the days of lengthy gaming sessions like back at university. In fact, even this letter had to be translated by an AI from my native German, because I simply don’t have the time. As a result, unread issues pile up, with four currently waiting for me in the stack. But there is a silver lining to this peculiar reading lifestyle: while most Edge readers find themselves waiting forever for the releases teased in your Hype or feature sections, chances are these games have…

In its new game, Awaysis, 17-Bit wants us to get together with friends to muck around and have a laugh. It’s a nice reminder of gaming’s most enduring goal: fun. If only the industry at large could remember it more often. It would also have been nice, for example, if alongside Awaysis we could have previewed The Initiative’s Perfect Dark reboot this month, but instead we now know that we never will, thanks to Microsoft’s latest jobs cull. In the name of efficiency – one of capitalism’s great qualities, we’re often told – Xbox has cut the cord on an investment of untold millions, seven years after it created the studio for the purpose of making the game, which doesn’t sound very efficient at all. And even assuming that Perfect…

Developer/publisher AdHoc Studio Format PC Origin US Release  2025 During a recent interview, James Gunn, director of the latest Superman reboot, was asked about the spectre of superhero fatigue. The problem, he argued, wasn’t superheroes, but rather the fact that so many superhero movies have decided to tell the same story. The makers of Dispatch, which you can view as a game about superhero fatigue – it’s definitely about fatigued superheroes – clearly agree with Gunn. In Dispatch, a down-on-their-luck superhero crashes out of the costumed world and goes to work as a telephone dispatcher for other heroes. The game is filled with outlandish characters with wild powers, but many of them are working in a drab call centre and dealing with the petty injustices of office life. So, when it comes to…

Developer Snapshot Games Inc Publisher Arc Games Format PC Origin Bulgaria Release TBA Turning a boardgame into a videogame is no mean feat, but when it came to adapting the rulesets, monsters, character classes and scenarios of tabletop favourite Frosthaven, the team at Snapshot Games found themselves in a fortunate position. The brainchild of game designer Isaac Childres, the Frosthaven boardgame was the subject of a staggeringly successful crowdfunding campaign. Yet, as it turns out, Childres originally had other plans. “He really wanted to make a videogame,” game director Hristo Petkov reveals. “That’s why the boardgame feels like a videogame. He didn’t have the knowhow or the resources to create a videogame, which is why he created the boardgame.” While alterations are still required in the digital translation, then, it’s been…

WE FIND A STUDIO DRIVEN BY A DESIRE TO ACTUALISE DREAMS FORGED DURING TEENAGE D&D SESSIONS Game The Outer Worlds 2 Developer Obsidian Entertainment Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Release October 29 To recount the history of Obsidian Entertainment is, in many ways, to tell the story of modern roleplaying games. Cast an eye across its back catalogue and you’ll find games including Knights Of The Old Republic II, Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars Of Eternity. Examine its roots, meanwhile, and you’ll see the fingerprints of its founders on Interplay classics such as Fallout. For all of this lineage, though, 2025 feels like a marquee year for the company. Grounded 2 and The Outer Worlds 2 both represent direct sequels to in-house IPs, while the release…

The Japanese expression that inspired Ichigoichie’s name can be roughly translated as ‘once in a lifetime’. It would be an apt description for how David Ventura got his foot in the door in the Japanese videogame industry. After a summer college internship in Kyoto where he used robotics to teach children music, he had his heart set on working in Japan full-time. “I had a really hard time because I didn’t speak any Japanese and I didn’t have any titles shipped, so companies like Sony kept telling me to go back to the States, ship some titles, learn the language and try again,” he recalls. Through persistence and at his own expense, however, he eventually managed to land interviews by networking with two studios, FromSoftware (during its Armored Core days)…

Developer/publisher Nintendo (Nintendo EPD) Format Switch 2 Release Out now Everybody knows the smart move when they begin a platform game: turn away from the adventure to check for secrets in the opposite direction. Not so in Donkey Kong Bananza. Placed on its first screen, you’ll instead stop to smash it all to pieces. Straight jabs with the Y button knock dents, then holes, into walls and lumps of gold cascade out, which DK (as folks here call our simian hero) collects. It’s a beautifully feral and gratifying action, placed exactly where you’d expect it on the controller. Yet the same can’t be said of jumping, the platforming fundamental that normally occupies the B button by default. Tapping B here takes you down instead of up, DK pounding at the…

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