Edge的December 2025目录

Sometimes the most effective way of advertising is simply to show your product. It’s a technique that seems to be working for Tassei Denki with G’AIM’E. Here’s a chunky plastic gun. Here’s a classic gun game in Time Crisis. Point and shoot. For those who fondly remember the heyday of the lightgun and lament its demise, G’AIM’E is an easy sell. There’s no sensor bar to set up, no need to lock yourself behind a VR mask. All that matters now is: does it actually work as promised? Our initial tests prove positive. A small black console sits beneath the TV, with ports for an HDMI cable and the system’s peripherals (the detection, the guns aren’t wireless, sadly, but the three-metre cable pointing, is done should serve most setups). Depending…

BOOK The Art Of Warhammer Videogames  bit.ly/art-warhammer Written by Andy Hall, Creative Assembly’s narrative designer for the Total War: Warhammer series, The Art Of Warhammer Videogames is a compendium of concept art, sketches and character portraits, and also an informal history of Dawn Of War, Space Marine, Gladius, Boltgun, Age Of Sigmar and more. As both a Warhammer writer and a game developer, Hall is able to provide insights into their creation, as well as highlighting designs that have defined Warhammer. In some cases, abstraction and embellishment were more important than high resolution and fidelity. On other games, the art had to flesh out a world that had never been drawn before. The book is aimed at Warhammer devotees, but doubles as a behind-thescenes look at game creation. FILM Sky:…

Developer Sad Cat Studios Publisher Coatsink, Thunderful Games  Format PC, Xbox Series Origin Belarus  Release Spring 2026 Not far into our demo session with Replaced, we’re getting flashbacks to the opening of Playdead’s Inside. Jogging along a 2D plane, we’re stalked from the background by a powerful beam of light emitting from an ominous, tram-like vehicle. Get caught in it and a sniper’s bullet will follow, thanks to the Termites – a raider gang – on board. “They terrorise local communities. They kidnap people, use them as slaves, or eat them,” Sad Cat Studios co-founder Igor Gritsay informs us. The prospect of instant execution seems like a relative mercy, then, as we duck into cover between sweeps of the orange light. Tension aside, though, we’re equally captivated by the play of…

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NEAR MISSES Everybody’s Golf: Hot Shots PC, PS5, Switch Worryingly, we spend our first couple of hours with Hot Shots dipping into settings as much as sinking putts to reduce the impact of new features. We mute the cacophony of character barks, and set cutscenes in World Tour Mode to auto-skip to escape inane dialogue. The stamina system, which can cause your shot meter to fade in and out of existence? Disabled. And finally, classic controls replace a limited new system. Even then, erratic AI and bland presentation remain, but once it’s stripped back to its essence, the robust charm of the old three-tap system enables Hot Shots to just about make par. Kirby And The Forgotten Land + Star-Crossed World Switch 2 Nintendo once considered the player the final…

Developer/publisher SIE (Sucker Punch Productions)  Format PS5  Release October 2 You don’t need more motivation for revenge than watching your family members slaughtered while your home burns. That’s the case for Atsu, with further salt rubbed into the wound by cruel perpetrator Lord Saito, as he pins her to her homestead’s gingko tree while one of his masked outlaws sets the blaze. We take control of Atsu 16 years later, a toughened-up survivor. And Ghost Of Yotei wastes no time letting us exact retribution on the first of the Yotei Six, the killers whose names she has written on a sash worn around her waist, each to be crossed out in their own blood. It’s a stirring and urgent introduction that quickly refreshes us on sword-fighting fundamentals largely carried over…

Developer/publisher Bloober Team Format PC (tested), PS5, Switch 2, Xbox Series Release Out now While it means a mechanical penalty – since you have to restart from a previous save spot and track back to where you were – dying in a horror game also represents a strange kind of emotional reprieve. Once the screen goes black, the tension dissipates; you can crack your knuckles, take a breath and steel yourself for another attempt. When they kill you for the first time and you just come back to life, the respective invincible monsters of Outlast, Amnesia and Alien: Isolation lose a lot of their power over you. Nothing is more frightening than your own imagination. After you’ve died in a horror game – once the game has done to you…

Developer Gearbox Software Publisher 2K Format PC (tested), PS5, Switch 2, Xbox Series Release Out now There are many things about the island of Kairos to make a Vault Hunter sweat, the promise of alien treasures and untold plunder hidden in its hostile tropical landscape being the foremost. Similarly stimulating are an overlord called the Timekeeper, who’s implanted mind-control devices in the island’s denizens, and the opportunity to lead a resistance movement which overthrows him. There’s also a host of returning characters who’ve never delivered a line at anything less than a bellow, and aren’t about to start now – one way or another, that’ll raise your blood, too. But there are even more disquieting elements on Kairos than microchipping despots and the orange glow of legendary loot. Borderlands 4…

Developer Bandai Namco Studios Singapore, Bandai Namco Studios Malaysia Publisher Kakehashi Games Format PC (tested), PS5 Release Out now Any game that makes a virtue of paper is starting from a position of strength in our view. Then again, there’s no shortage of games to feature paper folding, whether as a systemic focus or simply as presentational flourish. Hirogami, then, must find new ways to explore the transformational power of this ancient craft, or at least ensure that neither the intricacy of the technique nor the delicacy of the result prove a hindrance. Sadly, its failings here are twofold. It begins with Hiro returning home to find everything’s been struck by a mysterious blight. An entertainer by trade – ordinarily capable of morphing into different creatures but prevented from doing…

The bow and arrow might be an ancient piece of technology, but in VR it’s practically cutting edge. In April 2016, Holopoint and Valve’s The Lab launched alongside HTC Vive, together demonstrating how perfectly the essentials of archery translated into firstperson motion controls. By the time Meta Quest 3 and PSVR2 arrived in 2023, their big launch titles – Asgard’s Wrath 2 and Horizon: Call Of The Mountain respectively – featured bows based on those same interactions: reaching over one shoulder to grab an arrow; notching it; pulling back the bowstring with one hand while guiding the stave with your other. This is just one of a few mechanics that have cropped up repeatedly during the past decade of VR games (see also: manually reloaded guns, hand-over-hand climbing, and body-mounted…

When your game is based on a comic-book series, why not go for a similar look? That’s the thinking behind developer Rock Square Thunder’s adaptation of Image Comics’ I Hate This Place. While the game features its share of dark locales, its visuals are less murky than those of most survival horrors, with sharp colours – not least red – that recall the game’s origins. “Our artists created handpainted textures and used a specific retro colour palette,” game producer Miki Majka explains. Hand-drawn inked lines and crosshatching were also employed, along with cel shading to “flatten” the 3D models. The game’s freakish monsters certainly pop, whether it’s the scuttling, spider-like ‘brains’ or the deer-skulled corpses they attach to and reanimate. There are also more physically imposing creatures, all quite capable…

Game 007: First Light Developer/publisher 10 Interactive Format PC, PS5, Switch 2, Xbox Series Release March 27 Until recently, James Bond was dead. 2021’s long-delayed No Time To Die put an end not only to Daniel Craig’s record tenure in the role, but also Eon Productions’ six-decade stewardship of the series, being the company’s last Bond film before it sold the rights to Amazon. 007 himself was also killed off, blown up by a missile after contracting a manmade super-virus. For any other character, this would all be rather final – but we’re talking about a man who, quite famously, lives twice. The rumour mill is still churning over the identity of the next actor to star as Bond, but the director’s chair for movie 26 (27, if you insist…

Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Developer Dogubomb ublisher Raw Fury Origin US Release 2025 While Tonda Ros hasn’t yet achieved his dream of making movies, his story already has a Hollywood ending. Ros moved to Los Angeles in 2005 to break into the film industry, and found work as a cinematographer on “very low budget films”, and then commercials, which led to the foundation of Dogubomb, his own studio, where he directed ads and music videos. It was a solid living, but not the entanglement with feature films that he’d envisaged. What this tale needed was a plot twist. It came in 2016 when, “on a whim”, he decided to explore game development. Ros initially assumed that the hurdles to learning a game engine would be much higher: “I felt…

Ezo was not yet part of Japan in 1603, when Ghost Of Yotei’s story takes place, which feels an appropriate analogue for Sucker Punch acknowledging itself as a non-Japanese studio making a culturally Japanese game. While there had been scrutiny and scepticism with Tsushima, the game was received favourably in Japan, where Like A Dragon creator Toshihiro Nagoshi praised its attention to detail in Japanese culture, despite expressing regret it had not been made by a Japanese team. And with AC: Shadows coming from Ubisoft Quebec this year, perhaps the national origins of developers aren’t as significant as they may sometimes appear. Still, there’s a fine line between cultural appreciation and fetishisation, and Sucker Punch arguably stumbles across when it purports to pay tribute to Japanese cinema. In Yotei, besides…

Developer/publisher Techland Format PC (tested), PS5, Xbox Series X/S Release Out now After the mixed results of Dying Light 2, Techland returns to basics with Dying Light: The Beast. The latest entry in the open-world zombie survival series casts off the lofty narrative aspirations and frustrated faction dynamics of its predecessor, focusing instead on looting, booting and rooftop scooting that feels as satisfying as possible. In doing so, Techland rediscovers the verve of the first game, even if it does little to move the series forward. The Beast resumes the story of Kyle Crane, the original protagonist absent for the events of Dying Light 2. Crane has spent the interceding years as an unwilling lab rat for a slimy scientist called the Baron. Imbued with Hulk-like superpowers by the experiments,…

Developer White Owls Publisher Cult Games Format PC (tested), PS5, Xbox Series Release Out now Having made his name filing the serial numbers off Twin Peaks with rough gem Deadly Premonition, Hidetaka‘Swery65’ Suehiro deals in playful yet earnest pastiche. He treats his characters and settings with a big-hearted humanism no matter how bizarre, how grotesque, how obvious of a knockoff. Take, for example, the first boss of Hotel Barcelona. A flagrant Jason Voorhees parody named Jacob, he’s similarly draped in sports equipment and driven to murder a series of camp counsellors. Jacob, though, is far more committed to his sports gimmick, with his face obscured beneath an umpire’s mask and his vicious, flailing attacks using not a machete but a baseball bat and a catcher’s mitt. You beat him, he…

Developer Lululu Entertainment Publisher Popagenda, Lululu Entertainment Format PC, PS5 (tested), Switch Release Out now They may literally be half a head, but Henry’s ability to truly inhabit their world (or at least the objects within it) proves they aren’t defined by what they lack. This game’s hook – if you can see it, you can be it – is inherently alluring, and developer Lululu Entertainment taps deeper into the foundational input/response appeal of the medium via a voiceover that serves as narrator and audience. Early on, a set of four alphabet blocks can be rearranged several ways, with a line to accompany each word. Mischief is anticipated, and thus incentivised: there’s more joy in getting up to no good when you know it’ll prompt a reaction, your guide adapting…

Developer Jenny Jiao Hsia, Violet W-P, Ken ‘coda’ Snyder, AP Thomson, Jie En Lee Publisher Hexecutable Format PC Release Out now Described as a‘narrative-strategy’ game about dieting, Consume Me is really about feeling out of control. Main character Jenny, the semi-autobiographical persona of creator Jenny Jiao Hsia, is overextended, pulled in different directions by her crush, her mother and the pressures of college applications, not to mention her own negative self-image. What’s a stressed-out teenager to do? In Jenny’s case, she decides to start a weight-loss regime, and in five chapters and various minigames it’s your job to help her stick to it. The story is told through a cohesive blend of medium and message. Making choices for Jenny in her daily life quickly reveals the incentive structures inherent to…

Gears Of War: Reloaded Developer Epic Games, The Coalition  Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Original release 2006 Something may be lost in the translation between the original 2006 version of Gears Of War and the considerably prettier, brighter and more sharply textured Reloaded. A solemn, grimy place, where endless battles over scarce resources have resulted only in ever-larger piles of corpses, the world of Gears is perhaps most suitably rendered via the fuzzier, grey-brown colour palette of the first Xbox 360 release. Especially for Marcus Fenix and co, war is hell. You might argue that it ought to look like it. And given that you can do it in The Master Chief Collection, released all the way back in 2014, it’s a shame that Gears Of…

The rhythm game genre didn’t beginwith Guitar Hero, but RedOctane’s series, between 2005 and 2010 in particular, represents its point of peak popularity. In retrospect, Guitar Hero couldn’t have arrived at a more auspicious time. Bands such as Muse, The Killers and Arctic Monkeys dominated the mid-’00s charts. MySpace provided garage bands with a platform for sharing their music while an emergent YouTube served as a showcase for videogame players’ personal highlight reels – the speedrun, the Halo 2 frag compilation and the flawless performance of Through The Fire And The Flames are all icons of the age. If you liked rock music and videogames, and you were a typical adolescent, eager to show off in front of your friends – and maybe the Internet – there was Guitar Hero.…

PLANET OF LANA II: CHILDREN OF THE LEAF Developer Wishfully Publisher Thunderful Games Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Sweden Release 2026 The artistry and atmosphere of Wishfully’s 2023 platform puzzle game was never in doubt, and this sequel looks to double down on those qualities while adding greater breadth and depth to a fresh adventure. This continuation of the first game’s story has you traversing the wilds once again with cat-like companion Mui, directing the animal to chew through wires as required or possess other amenable forms of wildlife. Blue skies and forests are joined here by snowy peaks, cold metal labs and deep dives under water, while puzzle construction appears to be that bit more intricate and daring this time around. MARIO TENNIS FEVER Developer/publisher Nintendo Format Switch…

After the ARC Raiders tech test ended in April, something unusual happened. Despite knowing the game’s temporary servers were closed, we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to delete the shortcut from our PC’s desktop. As a matter of fact, from time to time, we’d still click on it, trying to boot the vanished demo in the futile hope of another quick game. The fact that ARC Raiders managed to work its way into our brain like this reflects the pedigree and history of its developer. Embark Studios’ founders splintered off from EA DICE at the tailend of Battlefield’s golden era. The studio’s debut release, The Finals, was an inventive, technologically outstanding variation on the team deathmatch shooter, though it was actually conceived after the original design meetings for ARC Raiders, becoming…

Developer NeoBards Entertainment Publisher Konami Format PC (tested), PS5, Xbox Series Release Out now The horror starts with the gored remains of a bird. A teenage girl named Shimizu Hinako leaves her house, descends the narrow streets of her eerily quiet mountainside hometown, and encounters an idling truck with something crumpled and wet beneath its side door. She steps on it, leaving a foul red smear on the pavement, and we see a mess of feathers, rotting meat, and outstretched talons. The mundanity of this macabre scene – a fledgling, maimed in its attempt to leave the nest – sets the stage for what’s to come in Silent Hill F, the latest entry in Konami’s long-running series. It’s an appropriate image to precede the following dozen or so hours. Hinako,…

Developer Rogue Factor Publisher Nacon Format PC (tested), PS5, Xbox Series Release Out now When we played Hell Is Us for E412’s preview, we left with two lingering concerns. On the one hand, we were uneasy about its central thesis that, to quote the game’s Steam page, “human violence is a perpetual cycle fuelled by human emotions and passions”. Even given a Stoic interpretation, accepting emotions as judgments that carry more complex information about the world than mere feelings, it felt reductive. But we also wondered if the combat might be overly narrow, too, and unable to sustain the entire game without feeling repetitive. The finished game neither fully realises nor allays those concerns. Hell Is Us is set in 1993 in the fictional country of Hadea, closed off to…

Developer Marvelous First Studio Publisher Marvelous, XSeed Format PC, PS5, Switch 2 (tested), Xbox Series Release Out now Sometimes, even the most expansive game needs a moment when things are pared back a little. Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion is a case in point. Here is an open-world mech RPG with a huge map and frankly dizzying customisation options, which clearly aches to be vast in every aspect. From a central hub, missions will send you miles across the echoing alien planet that makes up the game world. In addition to hundreds of weapons and armour parts, all with their various and numerous attachments to consider, you can dig deep into your character’s DNA, unlocking skills by combining the genes you’ve collected in battle. And yet the brightest idea here…

Developer Bad Viking Publisher Iceberg Interactive Format PC (tested), Switch Release Out now As a game about occult powers and dark magics, Strange Antiquities feels a little more on-the-nose than its predecessor. Running a store that sells sinister amulets and totems rather than the plants of Strange Horticulture, its eldritch themes are now underlined from the start. But in selecting a more obvious receptacle for this tale, Bad Viking has given itself considerably more scope to work with, and fleshes out its winning concept with confidence. The setup is almost as amusing as it is disconcerting. Situated in the fictional Lake District burg of Undermere once more, you must step into the shoes of the local thaumaturge, minding his shop of enchanted curios with a worrying lack of training or…

Developer/publisher Toby Fox Format PC Release 2015 Be it the pummelling of soft, fleshy faces or the crushing of bones and sinew, games are often marked by a startling degree of violence, led by military shooters and the action-adventure genre in particular. Causing violence of some kind is one of the de facto ‘base’ interactions in videogames, something that feels as fundamental as jumping, collecting items or using the main menu. But not in Undertale. When it was released in 2015, the RPG’s explicit message of pacifism may have felt, at least at first, anomalous amid gaming’s routine brutality. Described by its creator, Toby Fox, as the “RPG where you don’t have to destroy anyone”, rather than simply killing them, Undertale allows you to spare the monsters that you meet…