Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2020 i Edge

On the surface, it all looks so simple. “I’ve been working in this ‘clear line’ art style for over a decade, so it’s what comes naturally,” artist and illustrator Jean de Wet tells us. “Having said that, we’re definitely paying a nostalgic homage to the early ‘visually limited’ video and computer games from the ’80s.” But Haunted Garage has layers. It’s an adventure game set across multiple dimensions, where exploring one world summons unusual instruments to tinker with in another. “The contraptions are inspired by electronic musical devices from the ’70s,” de Wet says. “Analogue synthesisers and drum machines are an inspiration in terms of functionality and aesthetics – but always with a slightly humorous element.” Fiddle with buttons, knobs, switches and strings and you’ll find yourself creating a bespoke…

APP Half-Life: Alyx – Final Hours bit.ly/halfgeoff A few months back, industry hype man Geoff Keighley dropped into the Edge inbox with a request. He was putting the finishing touches to the latest in his line of ‘Final Hours’ articles, which would be presented as an interactive Steam ‘app’, and cover Half-Life: Alyx’s development. Due to the pandemic, he and his team hadn’t managed to make it out to Valve. Would we share our photography from our visit for E344’s cover feature? We were happy to. It forms a small part of a 25,000-word piece that includes an interactive timeline, original illustrations, 3D renders, and videos of prototypes. While the article is illuminating, it’s wonderful to see a fresh way of presenting the long read: it’s the sort of thing…

MARVEL’S AVENGERS Developer Crystal Dynamics Publisher Square Enix Format PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, Xbox One X Origin US Release September 4 BOMB RUSH CYBERFUNK Developer/publisher Team Reptile Format PC Origin Netherlands Release 2021 MUNDAUN Developer Hidden Fields Publisher MWM Interactive Format PC Origin Switzerland Release 2021 MECHINUS Developer/publisher Huey Games Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X Origin UK Release TBA SHADOW WARRIOR 3 Developer Flying Wild Hog Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC Origin Poland Release TBA…

The more we think about it, the grumpier we get. Halo aside, this should have been the big talking point at the end of Microsoft’s show, the kind of ‘one more thing’ reveal that sets Internet forums and social media platforms abuzz with excited chatter. It really wouldn’t have taken much. And somehow Microsoft delivered even less, with a teaser trailer that told us precisely nothing of any use about one of the worst-kept secrets in videogames. We’ve known Playground Games has been making a next-gen Fable for a while, well before it started hiring for an unnamed “AAA Open-World Action RPG” last year – by which time, most people could take an educated guess as to which dormant franchise that might be referring. Surely we’d get something of substance,…

Two games we’ve reviewed this issue arrived with us in a very different state to that in which they’ll be received by most players. That’s nothing new, but Beyond A Steel Sky and Deadly Premonition 2 have given us pause, as we consider how to cover games with the kind of issues that are likely to result in significant discrepancies between our play experience and that of our readership. Beyond A Steel Sky is the more straightforward of the two. Its technical issues were plain and frequent enough to affect our playthrough and warrant mention in our appraisal. A patch from Revolution arrived just prior to our issue deadline, and would seem to have addressed the more glaring problems. Our criticisms of the game aren’t invalid, not least since many…

Developer Polygon Treehouse Publisher United Label Format PC (tested), Switch Release Out now Fairytales in modern fiction often serve as projections of a character’s turmoil, the magical realm a mirror in which some tricky emotion assumes a fixable form. Sometimes this results in greater poignancy and intrigue, but the potential drawback, as in the earnest but clumsy Sea Of Solitude, is a fantasy that’s nothing more than metaphor, emptied of enchantment. Röki, thankfully, has enchantment to spare. Drawn from Scandinavian folklore, its setting may be the means by which a young girl works through the loss of her mother, but the game takes that world seriously, as a body of traditions, fables and creatures that are fascinating in themselves. This is a place that intersects with the everyday struggles of…

Developer/publisher 3-Fold Games Format PC Release Out now Cultural depictions of dementia usually evoke a mix of fear, revulsion and gloom. It’s portrayed as a heart-wrenching brand of illness that eats away at one’s identity, evoking fears of losing ourselves to our own deteriorating minds. As a tale centred around someone suffering from early onset dementia, a brilliant scientist named Sunita, Before I Forget doesn’t stray far from these representations. But rather than painting her as passive to a frightening illness, the game centres on something much more significant: Sunita’s eventful life. Before I Forget has you rummaging through Sunita’s belongings, scattered about the apartment she shares with her spouse, Dylan. As Sunita, you begin by searching for her glasses, her blurry vision focusing on the Post-it notes reading ‘Find…

“It’s incredibly irresponsible for the Army and the Navy to be recruiting impressionable young people… via livestreaming platforms. War is not a game.” US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aims to prohibit the use of funds for recruiting via gaming platforms. Nobody tell her about World Of Tanks “I’m going to bring new eyes to their service, they’re going to bring new money to my bank account, and – I’m just kidding.” American rapper Logic retires from music, then signs a seven-figure exclusive streaming deal with Twitch. Not quite the Bahamas, is it, but it’ll do “Imagine a town that only allowed Target, and disallowed any other stores. That’s totally un-American and uncompetitive. That’s exactly what Apple does.” Given who’s running the country these days, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, it honestly seems…

Developer/publisher Glumberland Format PC, Xbox One Origin US Release TBA Ooblets doesn’t want to take on Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, or any of the other games it’s so often compared to. It doesn’t want to be just another ‘time-killer’ game, another easy-going RPG that you can pump hundreds of hours into without breaking a sweat. No, Glumberland’s life sim doesn’t care for competition. Developed largely by a two-person studio in the United States, it values what those more established games have been increasingly moving away from: communication, glibness, silliness. On the surface, it’s part farming game and part creature-collecting RPG. But dig a little deeper and you start to realise Ooblets actually defies such easy categorisation. The eponymous beings themselves add a dynamic to the game that most other…

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To us, the message was clear. There were those who, following the Xbox Series X firstparty game presentation, seemed confused: if this was to be our first real look at Xbox’s next-gen offering, where were the bombastic graphical showcases, the displays of processing power? Answer: PlayStation’s offering. Xbox has a different idea of what “the next generation in videogames” should mean. Phil Spencer put it succinctly at the start of the show: “We believe that how you find and play your games is as important as the device you play them on.” Game Pass, is an ecosystem Microsoft hopes will address the growing problems of curation, accessibility and the increasing reality that success as a gaming platform is less about hardware than it is about service. When everything’s multi- and…

Edge, it is fair to say, did not enjoy Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. Granted, Ninja Theory’s depiction of a Pictish warrior’s fight against her inner demons was never intended to be fun. The studio succeeded in having the player experience something akin to Senua’s psychosis for themselves – auditory hallucinations, visual tricks that cause you to question reality, even paranoia in the form of an in-game promise (which would later turn out to be provably false) that if you died, your save would be wiped. But it was weighed down by clichéd writing, poor level design and awkward combat – and, ultimately, soured by the unfortunate presentation of mental illness as a kind of special superpower that helped you solve tedious puzzles. We approach the prospect of a follow-up with caution,…

Developer/publisher Revolution Software Format iOS, PC (tested) Release Out now Old habits die hard for Charles Cecil and Revolution Software. In many ways, that’s no bad thing: within minutes of starting this followup to the studio’s other best-loved game, we’ve got the makings of a cracking mystery involving a corpse, a kidnapping and a fearsome mechanical quadruped. By the time it’s over, we’re reminded that Cecil knows how to craft – and, just as importantly, pace – a three-act story with a proper beginning, middle and end. The witty dialogue, fondness for puns and love of regional accents with which we associate the studio are there in abundance. And yet despite promising an evolution of the point-and-click adventure, too often it leaves us grumbling about its puzzles – not least…

Developer Lightbulb Crew Publisher Focus Home Interactive Format PC, PS4 (tested), Switch, Xbox One Release Out now Here in the torrid midnight realm of Othercide, past selves are cannon fodder. The protagonist is an immortal warrior known as Mother, stripped of her flesh after failing to avert a cataclysm wrought by a supernatural Child. Now a frail ember hovering against a spiral of butchered architecture, she sculpts memories into Daughters, sending them to battle the minions of a being called Suffering. Reflections of the Child’s torments in life, the enemies are a grotesque bunch – fleshy gargoyles, beaked plague doctors and bloated clerics with keyholes for hearts. The Daughters are more horrifying still, each the same woman caught in a cycle of selfdivision. Sorted into four combat classes, they are…

Developer Team Bondi Publisher Rockstar Games Format PC, PS3, PS4, Switch, Xbox 360, Xbox One Release 2011 As it swaggered onto consoles in 2011, LA Noire did so on a red carpet laid down by Tinseltown itself. This was a game that wanted to be a movie star, with a glamorous cinematic ambition that held a mirror up to its Hollywood setting. Seven years in the making, Rockstar’s detective drama was one of the most expensive games ever created, with investment enough to fund a modest movie, and with a cast of 400 actors, every nuance of whose performances were captured by 32 cameras via the same MotionScan technology used in Avatar and Lord Of The Rings. It was as close to a movie as any videogame had ever come.…

Game Pengo! Online Manufacturer Sega Once the beating heart of the arcade experience, the idea of friends crowding around an arcade game is, for now, a thing of the past. To counter the need for arcade-goers to socially distance, manufacturers are adopting online multiplayer to allow players to compete with others on separate machines in arcades across the globe. Sega’s release this month of retro reboot Pengo! Online serves up not just nostalgia for a classic game, but goes some way towards sating our need for a good old-fashioned multiplayer experience. Pengo, released in 1982, was Sega’s first ‘mascot’ game and riffs on Pac-Man’s theme of a hero chased by monsters. The ice-blocks that form the game’s maze are pushed by the titular penguin to squash the chasing sno-bees, which…

Developer/publisher EA (Motive) Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Canada Release October 2 Nothing is quite so true to the spirit of Star Wars than pinching things from the past. This latest entry in EA’s oeuvre is a firstperson starfighter simulator that casts an eye back to the ’90s heyday of the X-Wing and TIE Fighter series, and centres on the giddy delight of being thrust into a dogfight – illuminated by distinctive green and red lasers that streak across the cockpit, soundtracked by angry squeals from Imperial TIE fighters on your six. More importantly, it echoes a past when what you bought was what you got. So yes, this feels like a reaction to Battlefront II’s troubled launch. It’s focused and intricate in a way that Star Wars games haven’t been for a…

Game Psychonauts 2 Developer Double Fine Publisher Microsoft Game Studios Format PC, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X Release 2021 The shock of the new is important to Tim Schafer. “The challenge when making a Psychonauts level is coming up with something that makes you feel like you haven’t seen it in a game before,” he says. In that regard, we’d say what we’ve played is a qualified success. It begins at a music festival called Feast For The Senses, and that’s a tacit promise on which Double Fine fully delivers. Via a kaleidoscopic transition, we’re transported to a woozy, substance-fuelled brainspace that makes us feel lightheaded. With a psychedelic rock-inspired soundtrack noodling away in the background and shrewd use of chromatic aberration giving the world’s angular lines and edges…

Whenever a game is referred to as a ‘spiritual reboot’, it’s more or less an admission that in recent times the series has struggled to stay relevant. Halo originator Bungie may itself have had a hand in drawing players away from Halo with Destiny, while Halo 5’s campaign was decent but failed to set the world alight. With Halo Infinite, 343 Industries is bullish in its admission that it is indeed trying to win back older fans, and recapture the feeling players first experienced stepping onto the Ring in Combat Evolved. Infinite’s campaign focuses solely on Master Chief, and from the moment he pulls up the classic MA40 assault rifle, dispatches a handful of Grunts, pummels an Elite in the face and jumps into a Warthog to drift around that…

Developer Toybox Inc Publisher Rising Star Games Format Switch Release Out now Routinely mislabelled as ‘so bad it’s good’, Deadly Premonition remains one of videogames’ most fascinating enigmas. It is, in fact, both: wildly flawed, with archaic controls, poor graphics and some questionable design and narrative choices, it’s also ambitious and inventive with an absorbing, surreal mystery at its heart, and features one of the medium’s great protagonists. Brash, arrogant and deeply tactless, but with an infectious enthusiasm for his work and ’80s-slash-’90s cinema, FBI agent Francis York Morgan is Hidetaka ‘Swery’ Suehiro’s crowning achievement to date. Another game in his shoes would seem to be an appealing proposition, then. And yet, as Morgan notes (and the subtitle suggests), appearances can be deceptive. Yet at first, we’re not actually playing…

Developer Phobia Game Studio Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC (tested), Switch, Xbox One Release Out now We don’t know about you, but with the year we’ve been having, there’s something cathartic about a game that lets us be the monster. Perhaps it’s just nice to be the one dismantling civilisation for once, rather than forces out of our control, viral, governmental or otherwise. This might, in a strange way, be the right moment for Carrion – but most of the credit has to go to the game itself, and specifically how good it feels to steer its unlikely hero. As an amorphous glob of teeth, tendrils and bubbling surplus DNA, you don’t navigate spaces so much as flow through them. Squeeze into a tight gap and your entire mass will…

Developer/publisher Wales Interactive Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release Out now Déjà vu is an unsettling feeling, and one that’s perfectly at home in a horror game. Maid Of Sker doesn’t explicitly use it as a horror device, yet we can’t escape the feeling that in spite of its compelling narrative premise, which draws on Welsh folklore and presents music as a powerful force for both good and evil, we’ve played this game many times before. Based loosely on the tale of a woman whose spirit is said to haunt the real-world location of Sker House, Maid Of Sker is less a ghost story than a rescue mission, with the player infiltrating a monstrous cult in a remote Victorian hotel. The game’s protagonist is summoned there by his…

Six years after we put Skyrim back in its box and began adventuring in the online Tamriel, a return to Solitude should feel like coming home. Yet at first we find Greymoor underwhelming. Here and there, though not quite game-breaking, are short-cuts and rough edges: near-broken missions such as a library where pulling an emote to face-plant a bookshelf is the only way to find a secret passage; identical, bald vampire victims; shorter multiplayer dungeons. Even the region itself is smaller than previous updates. While 2018’s Summerset felt fresh and breezy, with a fairytale colour palette and a sense of mischief that made it seem like one long summer Saturday night, Greymoor’s caverns and dour settlements feel like a wet, wintry Wednesday. It feels unloved – rushed, even. With The…