Edgeの September 2019 の目次

An active imagination is part of being young. Misfortune’s is particularly vivid: in dark choice-based comedy adventure Little Misfortune, she’s headed into the forest on a quest to “beat the game” and win eternal happiness for her mother. Indeed, its art style is Natalia Martinsson’s own explorable version of her childhood passions. “I wanted to feel inside of those children’s books I loved so much when I was a little girl,” she says. Misfortune’s bobble head and big eyes play up her cuteness, while her grey-masked mother has more realistic proportions: “Differences in the textures and pen marks give a deeper feeling to an item or character.” Killmonday Games is contrasting a sweet, childish perspective with a scary world of grown-ups – but your disembodied friend Mr Voice may be…

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: LINK’S AWAKENING Developer Grezzo Publisher Nintendo Format Switch Release September 20 Fittingly, it feels like a half-remembered dream. Granted, a lack of sleep does tend to make your memory pretty fuzzy. But as we play through the opening of Grezzo’s remake of the Game Boy favourite, it all starts flooding back. Waking up in Marin’s house. The owl. The Octoroks. Pushing urchins with your shield. Grabbing your sword from the beach. The cave with the cracked floor. Trading the mushroom for magic powder to sprinkle on that pesky raccoon. Sure, the crane game in Mabe Village might now have realistic physics, but our unfortunately limited time with this E3 build is summed up by that Chain Chomp tethered outside. What was once a startling surprise –…

Game Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order Developer Respawn Entertainment Publisher Electronic Arts Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release November 15 There is nothing so satisfying in games as a perfectly timed parry. Anticipation, reaction, execution; defence turned into attack, momentum reversed in an instant. It is everything we love about action games distilled into a single button press: high risk and high reward, a move that makes you feel like a god when it comes off and might just kill you if you get it wrong. It’s a surprising foundation for a Star Wars game, but there’s a lot that’s unexpected about Jedi: Fallen Order. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Respawn Entertainment’s first foray into the action-adventure genre would be a straightforward linear romp, and that its hack-and-slash combat would…

Developer Brace Yourself Games Publisher Nintendo Format Switch Release Out now Oboe, maracas, glockenspiel and bass guitar: Cadence Of Hyrule’s unusual selection of musical instruments says a lot about the kind of game it is. And no, we don’t mean it’s the equivalent of an insufferable covers band performing twee versions of Zelda standards – which, in fairness, it could so easily have been. Rather, it understands how a series that’s always marched to its own beat could still benefit from a fresh sound and a change of tempo. Delightfully (and rather damningly for Nintendo) it’s also the first Zelda game where you can play as the princess from start to finish. Well, almost – a short prologue casts you as Cadence, whose working-class-hero credentials are established by her weapon…

Developer/publisher SNK Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now Samurai Shodown is a game in which you think you’re doing okay, then look at your health bar and realise you’re about to die. In this wonderfully attractive and vividly animated game, even light attacks look like they hurt. And they do, to a point. But medium slashes hurt more, and heavies even more than that. Then there are dashing slashes, and counter-hits, and a variety of other ways to increase the damage output of a certain attack. You can spend 40 seconds chipping away at an opponent, playing the match perfectly, at least in conventional fighting-game terms. Two heavy hits later you find yourself fighting for survival. This is jarring at first, but it’s no bad thing. You’ll…

Developer XD Network Inc Publisher PeroPeroGames Format Android, iOS, PC, Switch (tested) Release Out now There are some things about Muse Dash that we understand perfectly: the loading screen, for instance. Rather than, say, a shot of our heroines’ faces, we’re repeatedly confronted with a close crop of their groins and legs. Lest we assume that this bright, two-button DJMax-a-like is all about rhythm heaven, this is a reminder that a large portion of its intended audience is simply here for the waifu factor. Which, you know, fine, if that’s your thing. But it’s sad to see Muse Dash so blatantly place itself in an adult category (the attention lavished on its character select screen’s pendulous animations is astonishing) while also doing so much for the younger crowd. A rhythm…

Developer/publisher Bungie Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release 2017 Bungie can’t lose at the moment. Six months on from its split with former publisher Activision, the Destiny maker has the rare ability of being able to blame all the things players don’t like about its game on its former partner, while pitching all the good stuff as the product of its new-found independence. In fairness, there’s much more of the latter around at the moment than the former. Indeed, as the clock runs down on Destiny 2’s second year, the series has never been in better shape. The groundwork was laid while Activision was still around, with last September’s Forsaken introducing a new approach to content releases in between the major autumn expansions. The Annual Pass has added new things…

Every year, on Internet forums and social media, in website articles and comment sections, and even in the bars and restaurants around the Los Angeles Convention Center, people debate who has ‘won’ E3. It’s always been a facile question – the real winners are the ones who get to spend a week in the sunshine playing games and drinking free cocktails, obviously – and the very notion of one company beating another plays into the often troubling tribalistic relationship that videogame lovers have with the companies that make their favourite games and systems. But it’s always been instructive in a broader sense: only by weighing up the relative merits of various publishers’ and platform holders’ endeavours can we form a broader picture of where the industry is, and where it…

Getty/Saul Loeb “The videogame industry made $43 billion in revenue last year. The workers responsible for that profit deserve to collectively bargain as part of a union.” It seems US presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders is a secret Edge reader. We can’t find any tweets from him about new handheld Playdate, weirdly “[Lootboxes] are what we look at as ‘surprise mechanics’ … they’re quite ethical and fun and enjoyable to people.” EA’s vice president of legal and government affairs, Kerry Hopkins, gives a parliamentary committee a masterclass in spin “I wish Sony was here. E3 is not as good when they’re not here.” We agree entirely, Xbox boss Phil Spencer, but are you really supposed to say that sort of thing out loud? Getty/Theo Wargo “Team-killing is for assholes, and talking…

STREAMING Antstream Arcade bit.ly/antstream Now in early access, Antstream Arcade lets you play over 400 officially licensed classic titles on a range of devices (Mac, PC, Xbox One, Android, Nvidia Shield and Amazon Fire Stick, with other platforms coming soon) with features such as challenges and leaderboards, for a fee of £7.99 a month. This is the ’Netflix for games’ model we assumed Stadia was going for (we now know you’ll have to buy games individually, on top of paying to stream). There are knots to unpick for the team of industry vets: it’s keen to compensate devs fairly, but tracking down retro game creators can prove tricky in 2019; sometimes, licensees are unaware they even own the rights. Still, we’re glad to see someone making bold, quantifiable strides into…

FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE Developer/publisher Square Enix Format PS4 Release March 3 When you rework one of the most influential games of all time, there’s a range of expectations, all of which are so far through the roof they’re practically in orbit. To hold the attention of a contemporary audience, Final Fantasy VII needs more than a facelift. Equally, when you’re revisiting the source of a generation’s love of videogames, you have to tread carefully. And yet, here we are: breathless, mid-clash, suspended between the past and the present. Indeed, it’s a particular kind of suspension – Cloud’s Buster sword slicing through the air in super-slow-motion as sparks graze his perfectly rendered cheek – that is key. Final Fantasy VII Remake’s combat system comprises two separate modes. The first is…

Format PC, Switch Developer/publisher Hempuli Oy Origin Finland Release 2019 As a game that encourages you to break or rewrite its rules, it’s fitting that the idea for Baba Is You should have come about under strictly controlled conditions. Arvi ‘Hempuli’ Teikari arrived at Nordic Game Jam in April 2017 intending to work on pre-existing projects. When the theme for the jam (“not there”) was announced, Teikari wasn’t particularly struck by it. But, partly inspired by his affinity for puzzle games such as Snakebird and Stephen’s Sausage Roll, he suddenly had an epiphany: what if the word ‘not’ could somehow be used to defy the laws of nature? What if a block of ice could somehow survive contact with a pool of lava? “The initial idea was kind of like…

Nostalgia is a powerful marketing tool, especially in games – but it’s important to tread carefully when you’re digging up the past. Some things, after all, are better left in the ground. It’s a point proven ably this month by The Sinking City (p114). Frogwares’ open-world detective game draws heavily on the works of HP Lovecraft, an author whose impact on horror has been legendary, but who held certain views that, by modern standards, are similarly horrifying. Frogwares gets out in front of the problem to an extent, opening the game with a warning about the prejudices of Lovecraft’s era. Perhaps that doesn’t go far enough – this was Lovecraft’s problem, and it cannot be blamed solely on the world around him at the time. But going for it warts…

Developer DeadToast Entertainment Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC, Switch (tested) Release Out now Reality can be a downer. For instance: would you rather admit to your deeply ingrained emotional issues, and a weakness for bloodshed that leads to the slaughter of hundreds of security guards just doing their jobs? Or would you prefer to blame your problems on a talking banana, who gives you the power to control time and hypes up your every kill with exclamations of “lovely” and “snazzy”? No wonder My Friend Pedro’s masked protagonist spends so much time ignoring the real world: there are no high scores in therapy. The trouble is that you can only get away with doing so for so long before it all catches up with you. So it proves here. This…

Developer Frogwares Publisher Bigben Interactive Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release Out now (Switch TBA) Unknowable gods who dwell in the deeps; strange dreams that bleed into reality; an accursed seaside New England town, the waves slowly eroding its sanity. There’s a whole lot of HP Lovecraft in The Sinking City, which gleefully mashes up elements from numerous short stories – the half-ape people of Facts Concerning The Late Arthur Jermyn And His Family bumping up against the Innsmouthers, whose ancestors are Deep Ones from beneath the ocean. But for each disparate element it pulls in, developer Frogwares is careful to get the details right. “Bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain’t quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of their necks…

Hardware Voxon Z3D Manufacturer Voxon Photonics How appropriate that, in a month where we put a Star Wars game on the cover, some hardware appears which could play a decent game of Dejarik, the chess-like game played on the Millennium Falcon during A New Hope. First unveiled at last year’s Tokyo Game Show but now available for purchase, Voxon Z3D is that rarest of things in 2019: an arcade cabinet the likes of which we’ve never seen before. The fourplayer cocktail-style cabinet uses volumetric lighting to create, essentially, 3D holograms inside its central dome. The system projects individual slices of light at 4,000 frames per second onto a moving screen, and the naked eye parses the results as a single 3D image, without the need for any head-mounted peripherals. Four…

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD 2 Developer/publisher Nintendo (EPD) Format Switch Release TBA That surely won’t be its title. But either way, the next mainline Zelda will be a sequel to a game that remains Switch’s finest hour. There were enough clues in the accompanying snippets of what looks awfully like the game’s opening cinematic that the closing 15-word caption (‘The sequel to The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild is now in development’) was hardly needed. Nevertheless, in an already packed Direct, it comes as no great shock that this was the moment that provoked the most excitement. Telling, too, that Nintendo deemed it worthy of its final surprise – breaking its habit of waiting to show off games until they’re reasonably close to release.…

You can tell that My Friend Pedro was mostly made by one person. For a start, the credits are very brief: above a handful of musicians, publishing and PR staff, and those responsible for testing and porting the game, there’s just one name next to a lot of jobs. Victor Ågren handled the design, art, code, story and sound design of My Friend Pedro. We can’t imagine he’s slept much over the past four-and-a-half years. But as a result, the game has remained resolutely Ågren’s creation from start to finish. It all began with his 2014 Newgrounds game of the same name: in the 2019 version, the homebrew spirit of the thing is preserved and, at times, elevated – even the 2019 Pedro’s final boss fight retains the essential absurdity…

Developer Jo-Mei Games Publisher Electronic Arts Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now Sea Of Solitude mixes dream with autobiography to create a vivid, but deeply dissatisfying, tale of trauma and transcendence. It takes place on a shimmering tropical ocean, with protagonist Kay waking in a motorboat to find herself transformed into a beast. Not far below the water’s surface lies a city – a half-remembered, half-imagined labyrinth of pastel bricks, thickly moulded domes, wave-lapped conservatories and plazas. The city has no inhabitants, but it does harbour plenty of thoughts and memories, each as monstrous as Kay has become, with inky-black feathers and glaring crimson eyes. Some of these phantoms take the form of spiteful children, shoving you back from doorways as you explore those parts of the…

Developer/publisher Hi-Bit Studios Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release Out now Our story begins in mesmerising style. A subway train crawls across a flickering switchboard cityscape. The train pulls into a station, a gaunt figure in jeans alights, and suddenly we are playing Streets Of Rage, or something close to it, crushing punks with our fists and feet. Half visual novel and half retro compilation, 198X tells the tale of a moody ’80s teen through five snazzy homages to classic arcade genres. Each component game models a moment of personal growth – such as a high school crush or a family row – using cherished vintage design elements and motifs. It’s an engrossing premise, a life refracted through the amber chambers of software. If only the Kid’s story…

Developer/publisher 3909 LLC Format iOS, PC, Vita Release 2013 Almost six years after its release, playing Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please is still a unique, at times even revolutionary experience. Sure, its influence can be felt in a handful of political titles such as PanicBarn’s dystopian Brexit bouncer simulation Not Tonight, but for the most part, it’s been left unemulated. It’s not hard to see why. It’s an uncomfortable and oppressive game, its genre-blend of work simulation and puzzle game exactly tailored to its biting political satire. It’s not the kind of game that lends itself to spawning its own sub-genre. In light of the last couple of years’ political events, however, its subject matter is as relevant today as it was at the time of its release. Papers, Please, a…