Edgeの March 2022 の目次

In the beginning, bigger was always better, mostly because we had so little to start with. To a kid trying to persuade a computer with 1K of RAM to play games in the early 1980s, 32K felt like an outrageous luxury, 64K almost beyond the realms of understanding. If your machine could display eight colours, you envied the rival with 16, while on the audio side there was little shame to touch that of those with just a solitary blooping channel to their names. It was a numbers game, with entire marketing campaigns built around scale. In 1984, Mike Singleton’s acclaimed strategy adventure The Lords Of Midnight was hailed for the 32,000 possible “views” it was capable of generating. (Just three years earlier the original Donkey Kong’s four unique stages…

Following up on 2009 puzzle masterwork Drop7 is no small task. Frank Lantz’s elegant game has arguably never been surpassed in its genre, but an idea born from the mind of his son and collaborator James Lantz is having a run at it regardless. Glance at Babble Royale, and it looks every part like a playful subversion of the very form from which it takes its name. To a degree, that is exactly what it is. Ostensibly a blend of the conventions of Scrabble and PUBG: Battlegrounds, the game has arrived as the latest work from family-run studio Everybody House Games. When it was revealed by Lantz Sr on Twitter in the closing weeks of 2021, Babble Royale appeared almost to be a joke told in game form – a…

Hepburn has other ideas relating to his work that he’d like to explore in interactive form. “Some of the records are quite outlandish, and quite clearly dramatising stories and picking out salacious stuff. So when historians use them, they’re very cautious in what they use. So I had an idea of creating a game where the player is one of these 16th-century chroniclers. They look at that material and have to decide how they’re going to write their chronicle, taking into consideration the political events or other contextual things of the time. Putting the player into a historical setting and having them do the work of a historian would be quite interesting.”…

Game Rush Manufacturer Stern Pinball If you’re going to make a pinball table themed around a band, it’s not a bad idea to go for one whose fanbase has a bit of loose change sloshing around – especially if you’re lining up a special edition costing $11,099. This is Stern’s approach for its new Rush tie-in, which immediately caused a stir among moneyed fans of the Canadian rock band, who snapped up all 1,000 within days of its unveiling. If you’re an arcade operator rather than a collector, the Pro ($6,899) and Premium ($8,999) models are still available, and though they won’t deliver the Limited Edition’s Expression Lighting System™ (with 96 “intelligent” RGB LEDs), like their swankier brother they include 16 songs, custom speech from band members, and exclusive concert…

At the end of Tom Stoppard’s 1990 film of his own 1966 play, Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, the heroes are standing with nooses around their necks. “That’s it then, is it?” asks Rosencrantz (Gary Oldman), with puzzled resignation. “Done nothing wrong. Didn’t harm anyone, did we?” Indeed they didn’t. “There must have been a moment at the beginning when we could have said no. Somehow we missed it,” muses his mate Guildenstern (Tim Roth). “Well, we’ll know better next time,” he adds. “Till then!” cries the mysterious Player – and we cut to the last scene of Hamlet, with the announcement that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the prince’s blameless childhood friends, are, inevitably, dead. Again. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are, in other words, NPCs who have become self-aware enough to realise…

Developer Bokeh Publisher TBA Format PC, Consoles TBA Origin Japan Release 2023 Bokeh founder Keiichiro Toyama promised a theme of “everyday life being shaken” for the studio’s debut, and his team certainly achieved that with its reveal trailer. Amid the splashy gore and horrifying multi-limbed monsters – all bone, sinew and grasping, mantis-like forelegs – it’s the closing moments that arguably prove most disturbing. A long shot of a figure on a balcony garden in a rundown apartment block shows a figure in what appears to be an unusual hat. We zoom in closer and its face resembles an exotic flower; closer still and no, it’s actually a giant maw with large teeth and two writhing tongues flicking outward. Those fleshy ‘petals’ then slowly retract to form the smiling face…

If it sometimes feels like The Anacrusis has forgotten it’s supposed to be a science-fiction game, then the best remedy is finding one of the pickups scattered around by the Director. Grenades offer a choice of pink goo and time-slowing stasis bubbles as a way of holding up enemies, as well as a throwable dome shield to hunker down within. Even the basic explosive – the Vortex grenade – comes complete with a neat singularity effect, pulling all nearby bodies in, then flinging them outwards. There’s also a slot reserved for limited-use special weapons: an auto-turret, a laser beam that cuts through whatever it touches, and an arc rifle that does the aiming for you, sending over bursts of electrical energy at anything that gets too close. Expect arguments over…

After raising CAD $1.6m via Kickstarter, Sabotage finds itself with over 25,000 backers keeping tabs on development. A daunting proposition, we suggest, although Boulanger seems to take it in his stride. “We’re not receiving any frustration or any hate or anything,” he says, noting the studio’s analysis of other Kickstarter projects before launching its own. “They just want us to take our time and get it right”. Indeed, with Sabotage reinvesting 100 per cent of profits from The Messenger into Sea Of Stars, simply having in-built validation from the audience was crucial. “That’s the main thing we were looking for, more than funding: a resounding ‘yes, we want it’,” Boulanger says.…

Developer/ publisher Crafting Legends Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Germany Release TBA You wake from an apparently successful operation to learn your citizenship has been revoked. You’re free to wander the surface wasteland as you please, your robot overlords say, but you may never rejoin civilised society. Oh, and don’t reproduce. Those are the two rules you live by now: stay out and keep your filthy genes to yourself. Not that the world outside is likely to be much of an aphrodisiac, what with the boulders of raw flesh everywhere. When struck with a weapon, these split apart into organs and hunks of meat, ready to be scooped up into your inventory and eaten, providing some health but also increasing your level of infection. That’s…

Jack Falejczyk is one of the admins who keeps AudioGames.net running. A blind player himself, he places The Vale (“a gateway drug into the world of audiogames”) within a larger movement, driven by “grassroots efforts”, including audiogame developers and the modders making games such as Hearthstone playable without visuals. When it comes to improving accessibility in mainstream videogames, he says, developers could benefit from a better understanding of the audiogame scene. “A point-and-shoot might sound revolutionary on paper, but we may have several iterations of that in audio form. Whereas an already ambitious game like The Last Of Us Part II becoming accessible is a major milestone, the likes of which has never been seen before.”…

CIVILIZATION III Developer Firaxis Games Publisher Infogrames Format PC Release 2001 SID MEIER’S SIM GOLF Developer Firaxis Games Publisher Electronic Arts Format PC Release 2002 SID MEIER’S PIRATES Developer Firaxis Games Publisher Atari Format PC Release 2004 XCOM PROTOTYPE Developer Firaxis Games CIVILIZATION REVOLUTION Developer Firaxis Games Publisher 2K Games Format 360, DS, iOS, PS3, Windows Phone Release 2008 XCOM: ENEMY UNKNOWN Developer Firaxis Games Publisher 2K Games Format 360, Android, iOS, PC, PS3, Vita Release 2012 XCOM 2 Developer Firaxis Games Publisher 2K Games Format Android, iOS, PC, PS4, Xbox One Release 2016 MARVEL’S MIDNIGHT SUNS Developer Firaxis Games Publisher 2K Games Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release March XCOM soldiers bounce from cover to cover, clinching victory against superior odds through constant reassessment of…

The masked protagonist of Ghostrunner lives dangerously. Their single hit point means a single mistake can be the difference between life and death in levels that present as daunting gauntlets, sprinkled with trigger-happy enemies waiting to cut your life short. “It’s an interesting dynamic. Yes, you’re gonna achieve a lot, you could topple the regime, you can defeat everyone if you’re good enough. But at the same time, at each and every moment, you’re just one step away from failure.” For a second, we almost forget that narrative designer Jan Gasior is talking about Ghostrunner, rather than the journey of its creators. Well, regime-toppling aside. After the poor commercial performance of its first original game, God’s Trigger, Kraków-based developer One More Level found itself walking a knife edge. However, a…

Fetch quests have you crisscrossing the overworld, and there are plenty of other asides, from surviving a minute in a pit with continually spawning waves of enemies to a bit of literal horseplay. Boosting your magic is perhaps the best reason to probe every corner of the map, though the fairies here are a far cry from Zelda’s: one type behave as if they’re dealing in illicit substances, surreptitiously opening their cloaks to reveal flasks of mana. Elsewhere there are nests to which you can bring your egg form to be warmed by a giant bird, eventually hatching into something much more powerful. Even before it’s cracked, it affords you one of the most useful abilities: an incubator light that lets you spend mana to recover health.…

Should you get stuck, you can spend coins you’ve earned from completing puzzles to unlock hints. These simply display a succession of single screens, separated into categories such as ‘first motion’, ‘the green record/restore’ (the colours denoting the film rolls) and ‘final look’ – with the latter showing you where everything should be as you approach the exit, from which you may need to reverse-engineer the lead-up to it. It’s a thoughtful solution in a consistently elegant game.…

Surprise shadow-drops during Nintendo Directs have become the norm, with Dungeon Munchies presented much as any new indie release would have been. Yet strictly speaking it isn’t fully finished: on PC, it’s still in Early Access, and updates are incoming for the Switch version. That perhaps explains some of the rough edges – the lack of wall-jump animation and repeated performance issues, to name but two – but it’s concerning that Nintendo should fail to advertise it as such.…

The Lantzes’ ultimate ambition for Babble Royale is for it to attract players who stay for a long time, investing hundreds or even thousands of hours in it – something the original Scrabble has obviously achieved without a drip feed of updates and tweaks. James and Frank are keen not to meddle with Babble Royale’s form too much as they bring players fresh ideas. They talk of tournaments, custom lobbies, potential squad modes, hypothetical themed maps, and their admiration for Rocket League’s approach. “We’re not sure, of course,” Frank concludes, with a glint in his eye. “Part of the fun of this is seeing where it goes.”…

Having co-developed powerful text-based adventure Bury Me, My Love, The Pixel Hunt is shifting to a more filmic form of storytelling for its latest game. The Wreck tells the story of struggling screenwriter Junon, who relives a car crash through memories attached to the various items left strewn by the roadside. Art director Alexandre Grilletta says the aesthetic has been inspired by a blend of ’70s French cinema and ’90s anime, with characters animated in stop-motion. “There are almost no textures in the game,” he says. “We use a combination of low-poly 3D modelling and vertex painting.” This movie-poster-inspired key art, meanwhile, comes courtesy of Korean artist Yejin Park, who has captured the game’s blend of the dreamlike and the mundane. The Wreck is due to launch on PC via…

GAME Wordle bit.ly/wordledge If you’re not playing, you surely can’t have failed to notice the green and yellow squares in your Twitter feed. But on the off-chance you’ve somehow dodged the phenomenon, Wordle is a no-frills word game that essentially offers a twist on the code-breaking puzzler Mastermind. Each day, every player has the same single word of five letters to guess within six turns: green squares signify a letter in the right place, while yellows represent a letter that appears elsewhere in the word. Its elegant, spoiler-free social media integration has doubtless helped it go viral, while introducing an element of gentle competition and encouraging friendly discussion about optimal starter words. How delightful to see something so straightforward succeed without any grubby extrinsic hooks; playing Wordle daily is its…

This column has been running for two years now, which matches up neatly with this whole pandemic thing. So rather than look back and reflect on the work I’ve done and the way the world of games has changed in that time, it’s increasingly hard to not just ask, instead: what is the point? I was thinking about how the comedians from my childhood are starting to show their age and rage against ‘cancel culture’. Perhaps their fear comes from the realisation that the Great Comedy they created might not last forever – that like most media it was a product of its time and… might not even be funny any more? John Cleese made some of the most influential and brilliant comedy television and so perhaps had assumed his…

In a recent interview, Toyama expressed his admiration for Red Candle Games’ Devotion and Kojima Productions’ PT, though he admits he doesn’t really play games for study or research purposes, preferring “relaxing works such as puzzles or [racing games] without any story.” That changes as a game goes into development, he says: “I feel there are genuine ideas to take in the essence from different things and connecting them to new imaginations.” The idea for Slitterhead’s central monster, he says, came from outside games. It stems from influential 18th-century fantasy anthology Strange Tales From A Chinese Studio – more specifically a story called Wild Dog, in which decapitated corpses suddenly rise up to prevent the titular canine from eating their brains.…

Developer/publisher Square Enix (Luminous Productions) Format PC, PS5 Origin Japan Release May 24 Watching Forspoken in action, it’s hard not to shake the impression that you’re looking at a tech demo for thirdperson movement in an open world with a game awkwardly bolted onto it. Perhaps that’s because we’re not too young to recall 2012’s Agni’s Philosophy, a Final Fantasy-themed showcase for Square Enix’s Luminous Engine, with which Forspoken shares one or two obvious similarities. And perhaps part of it is down to a curious presentation promising an “in-depth” look that doesn’t really live up to the billing. Instead, we get a lengthy introduction to protagonist Frey Holland, involving two writers and a performance-capture director – none of whom seems entirely at ease – with no input from Ella Balinska,…

Frying Jelly is also working on RingRacer (above), a racing game inspired by Wipeout, UniRacers, rhythm games and skating sims. Players ride a winding metal rail, rotating freely around it as they pick up weapons and leap hazards. You can expect a mix of hand-designed and procedurally generated courses that react to your behaviour in unspecified ways. The tone might seem worlds away from 99 Fails, but as Pachniewski hints, there’s an overlapping interest in levels as grand metaphors. Each course is built around a concept, which “can be absolutely anything like infinity, singularities, or Egypt, or life and death. We will try to bring those concepts to life in the background and the way tracks are shaped. We really believe in holistic design.”…

Developer Digital Kingdom Publisher Thunderful Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Switzerland Release Summer Making a shoot-’em-up without any shooting feels like a bold move, but it makes a kind of sense: after all, bullet-hell shooters have always tilted the balance towards avoidance. The emphasis is less on where you’re firing and more on jinking out of tight spots, threading your vulnerable ship through a colourful onslaught of glowing death orbs and pulling through by the skin of your teeth. Swordship focuses purely on that adrenaline rush of survival: staring down death and then deftly swerving it at the last possible moment. It’s little surprise, then, that developer Digital Kingdom prefers to call it a “dodge ’em-up”. Your yellow speedboat is constantly assaulted on all sides by mines, cannons, bombs…

After around half a decade of development, Hövelbrinks released an Early Access version of Death Trash in 2021. “I was struggling for years with the decision,” he admits. “So many other Early Access games have a lot of replayability.” After considering a Kickstarter campaign and speaking with publishers, he decided this approach suited him best. Open development was appealing to Hövelbrinks (since that first tweet, “the whole development process is basically public on Twitter”), and getting player feedback has helped quell his concerns about living up to expectations after such a long wait. He’s not sure how far the game is from v1.0 (what’s currently available represents around a third of the campaign, with some systems polished to final standard and others barely present) but, after selling 60,000 copies, he…

The Maze and Other represent an unusual kind of AR, one that doesn’t involve, as artist and designer Tom deMajo puts it, “QR codes and things hovering in the foreground.” Biome’s approach means you don’t have a screen acting as a constant intermediary. “We thought getting people to separate themselves from their environment by looking at their phone was the wrong way to go about it.” Instead, he thinks back to being a kid with a Walkman; the experience he’s interested in is like going for a walk with an album in your headphones and letting it soundtrack your surroundings.…

Format PC, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Developer Witch Beam Publisher Humble Games Origin Australia Release 2021 When we invite Wren Brier and Tim Dawson to talk us through the origins of Witch Beam’s narrative tidy-’em-up, they tell us how it all started in the kitchen. You might know that already – this, after all, was how their game went viral. In 2018, fresh from accelerator program Stugan, the pair posted a GIF of the one level they’d built so far: a short time-lapse replay of various items (mugs, plates, glasses, tea towels, a kettle, a microwave, a cookie jar) being taken from cardboard boxes and placed neatly on marble worktops and wooden shelves. The response was enough to convince them that their apparently niche project could “appeal to a…

STILL PLAYING Chicory: A Colorful Tale Switch The best version of our number two game of 2021? Perhaps it’s the influence of Zelda and EarthBound that initially makes Chicory feel particularly at home on Switch, but the controls – thoughtfully adapted for handheld and docked mode – seal the deal. Those splats of paint look particularly vibrant on an OLED model, while finger-painting via the touchscreen makes up in immediacy what it lacks in precision. And on the big screen, split Joy-Con controls are a revelation – as long as you remember to recalibrate every so often. The Pedestrian Xbox Series X Arriving on Game Pass at the same time as Gorogoa feels a little unfair on any puzzler. But while Jason Roberts’ astonishing creation is the one we’d recommend…

Endwalker introduces two new jobs, Sage and Reaper, the latter entirely new to the series and a great pick for DPS players who like to get in close while having the option to teleport away. Both, however, start ten levels lower than the requirement to begin the expansion’s story, meaning they’re not ideal for players who want to get stuck in straight away without some serious grinding first. Of course, sticking to your current job is just as viable, and you can learn more abilities by partaking in Role Quests, first introduced in Shadowbringers, which replaced the class-or job-based quests. The stories told here are also a worthwhile excuse to revisit old comrades. For example, the ranged DPS’s quest takes you back to the kingdom of Doma from Stormblood.…

Easily the best reason to play with bots is that it gives you full leisure to piece together GTFO’s engrossing backstory from terminal logs. Without spoiling too much, the lore involves a global pandemic (see Post Script for discussion of real-world parallels), nasty corporations, and a long-buried artefact it probably wasn’t a good idea to uncover. It sounds like a mishmash of ideas from Dead Space and Half-Life, but GTFO fashions something distinctive from the fragments. The writing is also cleverly entwined with the task design – you’ll find a log complaining about the nonautomation of security scans and data entry, for example. If these activities are left to human hands, the author notes, “our operative fail rate will skyrocket”. Our time with the game certainly bears this out.…

By the fourth colossus, most SOTC players will have experienced pangs of doubt or regret about the nature of their mission. At the same stage here you’re halfway through your quest, and will surely feel no such compunction. The story is told so poorly as to be borderline irrelevant: there’s some waffle about an endless winter “choking the life” from the world, your warrior the latest in a line of would-be heroes hoping to reverse this cataclysm. But without SOTC’s personal stakes, or any sense of inner conflict, it’s hard to feel anything for what happens in the cinematics. You’re occasionally aided by a wolf that drags you back to base between bosses: it has a brief cameo in the final fight, but unlike Agro, it’s impossible to care about…

Completing chapters either with all diamonds retrieved or without dying once yields achievements for each, yet the real replay value is likely to come from speedruns. Where many platform-puzzlers are about meticulous timing, players completing to shave split-seconds from their personal bests, the tether lends a degree of looseness and flexibility to many sections. Arguably the most enjoyable of the four chapters to replay is the second, The Cardinal’s Grail – the slingshot mechanic allows for a few thrilling, time-saving tricks.…

While Sony’s second PSVR headset was announced in 2021, CES was used to reveal technical specifics, placing PSVR2 as a rival to higher-end sets on the market today, with a resolution of 2,000x2,040 pixels per eye and a 110-degree field of view. Valve’s Index may improve on the latter point, but Sony is nevertheless committed to considerable performance, alongside refined accessibility, with a single cable connecting the unit to a base PS5. Eye tracking is perhaps PSVR2’s standout feature, although efforts underway with Meta’s Project Cambria headset suggest that it will include similar functionality. Where Meta may not match up to Sony’s approach is with the PSVR2 headset’s feedback mechanism, which is based on the lauded rumble technology used in DualSense controllers, albeit powered via a single motor rather than…

Historical games can be educational, whether or not they’re designed to be, but rarely are they this relatable. As the opening of Strange Sickness puts it, “You’ve read the stories of kings, queens, knights and bishops. You’ve heard tales of the battles they fought, the schemes they spun and the castles they built and defended. But this is not one of their stories.” It is, in fact, taken from Aberdeen’s ‘common book’, a record kept for hundreds of years that documents the lives of ordinary people and the impact of events on their day-to-day existence. In this case, taking us back to the 1490s, and the imminent arrival of the Great Plague. And it’s impossible not to see the parallels between what follows in this absorbing piece of interactive fiction…

“NFTs seem to me just a way for artists to get a little piece of the action from global capitalism… How sweet – now artists can become little capitalist arseholes as well.” Brian Eno has been working in the music industry long enough to know shitehawk chancers when he sees them “THINGS I DON’T WANT TO DO IN VIDEOGAMES. Business. Work. To view other players I might meet as ‘business opportunities’…” Don’t harsh Jeff Minter’s mellow with NFT talk, OK? “Every NFT guy looks at videogames and thinks ‘what if you could own Mario’s hat’ and everyone else goes ‘are you fucking stupid and high?’” Highlight Reel’s Chris Person gets to the bones of it all “I realise that some people who ‘play to have fun’ and who currently form…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a year’s subscription to Edge. QUEST It’s seven years ago to the month I sent in a letter, for which I was handsomely rewarded with a pair of SteelSeries headphones – which I still happily use to this day. I wrote in at the start of what was then the new console generation lamenting the twin opposing forces of increasingly padded games and the length of time it took to complete them, against the increasingly reduced available time to play due to general adulting and growing up. During the years since I’ve observed with interest the ongoing trend of other letters on the same theme, most recently with Phil Galloway and Daniel…

Body horror is discomfiting in any medium, but it’s arguably at its most effective in videogames. This is, after all, a medium where these grisly violations and unnatural mutations occur to someone we’re controlling – or even inhabiting. Think of the squirm-inducing moment when Dead Space: Extraction fully lives up to its subtitle by having you mimic a sawing motion with the Wii Remote to hack off your own arm. Or Resident Evil Village, which takes the idea to almost farcical extremes given how frequently terrible things occur to Ethan Winters’ poor hands. Few creators have such extensive experience with the theme as the man who wrote and directed the Siren games and the original Silent Hill. Slitterhead, the debut production from Keiichiro Toyama’s new studio, Bokeh, features grotesque monsters…

Developer/publisher Stray Bombay Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin US Release TBA (Early Access out now) Technically speaking, they’re not zombies. The disaster that has struck aboard The Anacrusis’ retrofuturist starship is really more of a facehugger situation, allowing the game to have its hordes-of-undead cake while also dressing it up in ’70s science-fiction kitsch. Still, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that this fourplayer co-op survival shooter finds itself in the most crowded marketplace since Dawn Of The Dead’s shopping mall. The Anacrusis arrives in Early Access only a few weeks after GTFO exits it, and precisely one week before Rainbow Six Extraction presents its triple-A take on the formula, with the likes of Redfall and Warhammer 40,000: Darktide also on the horizon. What The Anacrusis has that…

There are four types of magic: purple, red, blue and green, colour coded to represent the types of spell you use. As you’d expect, green spells harness the power of nature to heal and harm (one sprouts a crop of flowers that can fling nearby rocks at enemies) while blue varieties are water-based. You can invest mana in upgrading these, and Frey’s gear also has an effect, the cloaks and necklaces she sports coming with various perks. She can strengthen spells further by painting her fingernails with different patterns, amplifying their effects using Break Shards – such as damage boosts based on the number of spells learned. Equippable buffs are hardly new in games, but at least this is an unusual variation on the theme.…

Developer/ publisher Sabotage Studio Format PC, Switch, other consoles TBA Origin Canada Release Q4 We’ve encountered plenty of games that have been long in the making, but this might take the biscuit. Sea Of Stars’ world has been gestating in the mind of creative director Thierry Boulanger since elementary school, when he would roleplay as characters from his own stories. “I guess I was seven or eight, with my ninja comic book that I was making,” he recalls fondly. “I just kept on building that in my head.” This universe was first given life in The Messenger, Sabotage Studio’s 2018 debut. Sea Of Stars serves as a prequel, casting you as two Children Of The Solstice, using moon and sun magic to explore a vibrant archipelago and put an end…

Swordship began life as a driving game in which the player was being pursued by enemies. “We spoke about movies, and we were thinking Star Wars when Han Solo avoids asteroids or James Bond when someone chases him,” designer Basile Perrenoud tells us. Other inspirations included Mad Max: Fury Road and the Burnout series, with Swordship’s slowmotion cutaways a nod to Criterion’s games. At first the viewpoint was set behind the ship, then it was switched to a top-down camera, but the team settled on a frontal view. “We realised that actually in those movies, when they want to show you the enemies and some action, they reverse the camera so you can see both cars,” Perrenoud says.…

Working with the blind and low-vision community, Evans learned a lot about audiogame design. He gives the example of signalling the character’s walk cycle. “Visually, if when a character goes to walk forward or the screen starts to move, you get a sense of that exactly when movement starts. But there’s often not an audio cue attached to that, until the first footfall.” That means there’s no feedback on the player’s input until they’ve already committed to the movement; The Vale needed to let players know the game was responding to their commands instantly. Overall, though, Evans’ biggest realisation was that “I was probably going to over-design”, trying to reinvent basic concepts that the community had accepted long ago.…

When you’re making a game that puts sound front and centre, Keane says, “then the audio needs to be incredibly good, bespoke and unique and characterful”. Which is why, on Unknown Number, he’s working with music producer Easyfun. As a founding member of PC Music, Easyfun’s work is often characterised by emphasised artifice – but here, Keane says, “we spurned digital and premade sounds wherever possible”. Instead, the game’s foley was recorded in a cabin, “surrounded by weird old tools and big hunks of metal”. At one point, they even miked up and staged a hug “in an attempt to get some sort of audio authenticity”. The result was as subtle as you might expect. “Totally pointless,” Keane laughs.…

Wren Brier & Tim Dawson Creative director/designer/artist & technical director/designer, Unpacking Did you make any items that didn’t appear in the finished game? Wren Brier We had stockings in the game, which is not very exciting. It’s just that they were hard to recognise. And we weren’t that attached [to them] anyway. We also cut a couple of pairs of jeans that belonged to the boyfriend. Because she’s got jeans as well. And if he’s got jeans, they were actually hard to tell apart, like who they belong to. So we’re like: let’s give him chinos. We also made a bottle of tomato sauce and ended up not making it a placeable item, because you can’t open the fridge, and people were extremely scandalised that they couldn’t put it in…

Videogame designers are problem solvers by trade – but there’s alchemy involved in the role, too. Throughout the creative process, they must conjure up pragmatic or imaginative solutions to the obstacles they face. The very best games, of course, tend to involve a combination of the two. Sometimes those problems aren’t really problems, but rather alternative ways of looking at a concept: a ‘what if’ reimagining of a familiar scenario. Take Drinkbox’s Nobody Saves The World, for example, an action-RPG that gives your blank-slate avatar the opportunity to choose between multiple, wildly different character builds at the wave of a magic wand. Some encounters might call for a bow-wielding rat; alternatively, you might prefer to switch to a horse that can kick enemies to death and then bring them back…

As well as being a 2D technical marvel, Windjammers 2 represents an outstanding example of IP rights negotiation on the French developer’s part. Even though the original game was released for its systems, SNK never owned the rights to Windjammers, so the company was unable to commission rereleases as it had done with the King Of Fighters and Metal Slug series. When Data East closed in 2003, its employees took the rights with them as they moved on to different companies. Part of Dotemu’s work in preparing the ground for this sequel was to track down these employees in Japan and to convince them to collaborate, both on the Windjammers remaster and this eventual sequel.…

No Final Fantasy tribute is complete without a Nobuo Uematsu soundtrack, and since the ex-Square maestro had shifted to freelance work in 2004, he was on hand for the job. While rarely as striking as the music of FFVII, Lost Odyssey’s playlist captures the game’s juxtaposition of old and new, while hinting at the Final Fantasy heritage in its similar-but-not-quite victory fanfare. The Uhra capital theme sees electronic beeps intrude over classical piano chords, for example, while the world map tune – Never Ending Journey – takes a turn from Latin American-style pan pipes and strings to electric guitar if you let it play long enough. And to finish, Howl Of The Departed, a finalboss synth-rock opera that smashes its elements together in spectacular fashion.…