Table of contents for September 2021 in Edge

FORMAT PC is the clear winner in what we might have once called the platform wars. Just 32 of the titles shown over E3 week are console-only, compared to 115 which list PC as their sole format – though we’d expect many of those to make their way to one or more of the consoles in time Despite a good showing from Microsoft, the week yielded just 29 Xbox console exclusives Switch has the highest proportion of exclusive titles: 48 (including games that will also release on PC) Naturally, Sony’s absence had an impact on the showing of PlayStation exclusives – totalling just eight…

STARFIELD Developer Bethesda Game Studios Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release November 11,2022 Perhaps the two most important words of Microsoft’s showcase came just a few minutes in, at the end of a teaser for Bethesda’s next open-world epic: ‘Xbox exclusive’. It wasn’t the only time we would see them, but this was the moment it became crystal clear that Microsoft would never have spent $7.5bn on the studio behind Skyrim and Fallout if it didn’t plan to keep at least some of its output to itself. Granted, it may be denying itself millions of pounds’ worth of business from PlayStation owners. But a chunk of Sony’s audience may now be wondering if they made the right call – and considering a Game Pass subscription.…

Put aside for a moment the fantasy setting, and the brace of swords and spears – if you want hard proof that Naraka: Bladepoint is doing things differently to most battle royale games, you need look no further than the very beginning of a match. There is an island, yes, and there are 60 players all trying to survive within its ever-shrinking circle, but it’s missing what must be the genre’s single most iconic moment: the drop. There’s no plane or bus to jump from here, just a simple gridded map with players claiming squares like this is some massively multiplayer game of Minesweeper. Once spots have been picked, and the countdown reaches zero, players are magicked over to the island in a shower of bright petals. Instead of entering…

Developer Midgar Studio Publisher Dear Villagers Format PC (tested), PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Out now (PC), Q4 (consoles) Within minutes of being introduced to Edge Of Eternity’s spiky haired protagonist Daryon, a friend mocks his oversized sword, before calling out another companion for her “clingy girlfriend routine”. Not long after, this self-aware camaraderie is cut brutally short when most of your starting party is wiped out by an invading alien force – and that’s before you discover your other comrades are being sacrificed by the religious Sanctorium, which is supposed to be protecting humanity. Right from the outset, then, it feels as if Edge Of Eternity is consciously subverting the genre it purports to be inspired by. While we’re uneasy about a game by a non-Japanese developer…

Developer EggNut Publisher Raw Fury Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release Out now Of all the detective offices in all the world, she had to walk into yours. A missing husband. Late nights, suspicions of infidelity, booze on his breath and something herbal underneath it. A black-and-white photo, and a promise made by one deadbeat to the wife of another: you’ll track the missing man down, one way or another. Backbone’s is a distinct shade of noir, one that pays its dues to Raymond Chandler in its opening act but isn’t content to sit within traditional confines for the duration of its story, instead opting to freewheel through genres and themes with reckless abandon in its latter stages. The same goes for developer EggNut’s approach to interactivity: this…

Publisher Mixtvision Developer Studio Fizbin Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release Out now A world on the brink of collapse, where an airborne threat is having a devastating effect, while people protect themselves with face coverings – apart from one who believes that they alone can fix the problem. No, we didn’t expect Minute Of Islands to be such a stark reflection of the past 18 months, either, but this narrative-led puzzle-platformer manages to burrow beneath its charming comic-book stylings to unearth unsettling imagery and quietly upsetting scenes. Young mechanic Mo is tasked with maintaining ancient machines that keep a toxic fungal spore at bay from her archipelago home. When they all break down at once, she embarks on a desperate journey to fix them. But coming to…

The 2021 incarnation of the greatest show on gaming Earth – the place where technical envelopes are traditionally pushed, where we expect the bleeding edge of interactive entertainment to be annually redefined – began with 1bit graphics on a 400x240 display. Yet the notion of Playdate opening the festivities at what we will charitably call E3 2021 was not as inappropriate as it first appeared. This was never going to be your dad’s E3, of course; COVID-19 saw to that. But so did the avalanche of publishers, media organisations and event companies that saw an opportunity to muscle in on a disrupted timetable, and hog a little of the biggest spotlight in games. The result was the busiest public schedule E3 has ever seen – and, at times, one of…

GENRE ORIGIN freevectormaps.com TITLES Across the game names on show, ‘world’ and ‘lost’ are the most commonly used words, each featuring in six titles DEATH GAME SIMULATOR BLACK WORLD STORY SHADOW LOST SEQUELS 2 is by far the most common number for a sequel; no game shown went above 6 Sheltered 2 King’s Bounty 2 STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl Jurassic World Evolution 2 The Outer Worlds 2 Aragami 2 Dying Light 2 Stay Human Passpartout 2: The Lost Artist Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings Of Ruin Psychonauts 2 I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy & The Liar Project Warlock 2 The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild 2 Slime Rancher 2 Red Solstice 2 Shadow Warrior 3 Age Of Empires 4 Rune Factory 5 Forza Horizon…

Arcade The Pixel Bunker Location Milton Keynes, UK We don’t get the opportunity to talk about new arcades opening in the UK very often – and business has been difficult for established operators over the past 18 months – so it feels good to report that The Pixel Bunker, based at Milton Keynes’ National Film & Sci-fi Museum, made its successful debut on June 4. The arcade hosts nearly 100 machines, with a good spread across genres and time periods. Vintage pioneers such as Karate Champ, Galaxian and Asteroids nudge up against mid-’80s classics including Commando, Shinobi and R-Type, as well as a selection of driving games such as Buggy Boy, Power Drift and Ridge Racer. It’s great to see Atari’s 720°, Toobin’ and Peter Pack Rat in the same…

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD 2 Developer/publisher Nintendo (EPD) Format Switch Release 2022 As Nintendo’s own press site calls it, Sequel To The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild cannot have its official title unveiled just yet, because it might give too much away – a clue to something significant about this much-anticipated successor. There’s no danger of that in its latest teaser, which has been precision-designed to answer very few questions while raising many more. That is part of the business of building hype, of course: show just enough to hint at new mechanics and story elements while inviting speculation as to what they mean. And with no one at Nintendo prepared to say anything more about it – save producer Eiji Aonuma suggesting it’s…

Developer/publisher Klei Entertainment Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release Out now Developer Klei’s knack for identifying a popular genre and making its own distinctive mark on it has long been one of its greatest strengths. From Don’t Starve’s quirky, Tim Burton-esque take on survival sims to Mark Of The Ninja’s elegant sidescrolling stealth, the studio’s games elevate established genres with craft, imagination and style. Science-fiction adventure Griftlands continues this trend, taking the Roguelike and the deck-builder and giving them a Klei spin. While narrative is often pushed to the side in these games, Griftlands places it front and centre, using randomisation, character relationships and player choice to construct some brilliantly dynamic, interactive stories. And underpinning everything is a slick card battler, where you use your ever-growing deck to…

Developer Camelot Software Planning Publisher Nintendo Format Switch Release Out now Plenty would argue that the Mario sports games’ N64 debuts were their peak and they haven’t reached the same level since, yet Camelot remains Nintendo’s go-to when it’s time for the plumber and his Mushroom Kingdom friends to hit the court or the links. With a few exceptions (such as Wii U’s painfully slender Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash), it has been a safe pair of hands, but it has let its normally reliable grip slacken and well and truly shanked this one. It’s rare to play a Nintendo game that feels so fundamentally misguided. Outside a round of Standard Golf, the game’s big feature is that you play at the same time as your opponents. Once you’ve taken your…

Developer Wormwood StudiosPublisher Wadjet Eye GamesFormat PCRelease Out now The title ‘Strangeland’ openly promises something weird, and the setting of Wormwood Studios’ (Primordia) twisted point-and-click adventure, made in collaboration with genre vet Wadjet Eye Games, delivers on that pledge. In this murky otherworld, a thin path over a yawning abyss leads to a circus entered via a sinister clown’s gaping maw, its tongue your welcome mat. Later you meet a giant cicada which acts as a fast-travel system, a talking furnace, and an acid-spitting cosmic horror abomination in a glass case – and that’s not even the most disturbing creature you’ll encounter. It’s cut from a similar cloth to Cyberdreams’ adaptation of I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream, while its eerie, dreamlike quality and moments of body horror…

Spiritfarer Developer/publisher Thunder Lotus Games Format PC, PS4, Stadia, Switch, Xbox One Release 2020 With half a million copies sold to date, Spiritfarer has undoubtedly struck a chord. This is a game of great emotional ambition, with real teeth behind that serene Disney-Pixar smile. But there were more than a few notes of criticism mixed in with the warm initial reception. It can be frustrating, both by accident and design. And while it’s never cruel, it can be brutally affecting. Chief among those problems is its ending, a quiet, lonely anticlimax that seems to go against the central theme of companionship at the end of life. ‘We heard it loud and clear,’ Thunder Lotus noted on its website, referring to fan feedback. ‘We really gave it our all to make…

Has wood ever been this good? As a child, Julia Prohorova was fascinated by dolls’ houses, but the one she coveted was too costly, so she crafted her own instead, using fabric, paper and whatever other suitable materials she found about the house. That desire to build tiny sets and scenes never left her. “Now I can afford to create any tiny houses or worlds I like,” she says. And what a delightful place she’s built in Woodo, a 3D puzzle game in which you slot in wooden pieces to assemble dioramas bit by bit. Prohorova painstakingly renders individual objects using Blender to see how they look in a scene, before making assets out of each in Unity. The process can be tedious, she admits; the results, however, speak for…

SOFTWARE Game Builder Garage bit.ly/gamebuildergarageThe premise alone is exciting: who better to teach lessons in game-making than Nintendo? Game Builder Garage offers a series of playful lessons built around an intuitive visual programming language: you’ll create seven very different games (from a straightforward game of tag to a side-scrolling shoot-’em-up and eventually a 3D platformer) by placing anthropomorphic nodes representing a variety of game elements and connecting them with wires. The ability to flip between the game screen and its behind-the-curtain workings provides instantly tangible results of your tinkering, though its approach to problem-solving can be surprisingly exacting. It’s nowhere near as flexible as Dreams, of course, but as a cheerfully accessible way to grasp the basics of game creation, this is hard to beat. VIDEO Making a Greggs in…

ELDEN RING Developer FromSoftware Publisher Bandai Namco Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release January 21 When we heard, around the time of its announcement, that Elden Ring was going to be essentially “open-world Dark Souls”, we weren’t entirely confident in the summary. Because isn’t that precisely what Dark Souls fans would ask for? And when did get fans get what they want? (And, in the rare cases that it happens, when have the results stood up to close scrutiny?) And yet here we are looking forward to one of 2022’s biggest games delivering pretty much everything Dark Souls devotees yearn for: screen-filling bosses, endlessly rewarding character builds, secrets by the sackful – plus magic, multiplayer and a whole lot more besides. Because it delivered so comprehensively on…

Developer/publisher Capcom Format PC, Switch (tested) Release Out now Could there be anything more guiltily satisfying than carving an animal apart with a weapon made from its own brethren? Pacifying a monster that was just going about its business in its natural habitat and stripping it down for parts before kitbashing your spoils into something more powerful and doing it all again has been at the core of the Monster Hunter series since its inception. Though it’s masked with cartoon skin and more accessible systems, Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings Of Ruin brings the foolproof formula back for another outing. Capcom would be foolish to discard it. The incremental approach to powering yourself up, and the laser-focused specificity of the maths that determines drop rates for materials, is catnip. But…

Developer BaNdai Namco Studios, Tose Publisher BaNdai Namco ENtertaiNmeNt Format PC, PS4, PS5 (tested), XBox One, XBox Series Release Out now Psychokinesis may well be the quintessential videogame power. Certainly, games are uniquely placed to communicate the physical exertion involved in controlling objects with your mind, and that particular sensation is at the heart of Scarlet Nexus’ wildly entertaining combat. As the aloof Kasane (one of two playable protagonists you choose between at the start; she gets the nod ahead of the blandly heroic Yuito on our first playthrough), we lift and throw barrels, boxes and even cars. By holding the right trigger, we automatically launch these at our target. With a longer squeeze of the left, we pull up a stone statue before thumbing the left stick downward to…

Developer/publisher Origame Digital Format PC, Switch (tested) Release Out now Call it a long exposure. Umurangi Generation first arrived on PC last year, attracting a cult following and a nomination for the IGF’s Seumas McNally Grand Prize. Now it has arrived on Switch, complete with its Macro DLC pack. It’s a move that has helped many indie darlings break through, and in some ways Nintendo’s console feels like a natural home for this photography-focused game. In handheld mode, with motion controls activated, the screen in your palms makes perfect sense as a viewfinder, as you’re dropped into each of the game’s levels – a hangout spot, a protest, the frontlines of a war – with a beaten-up SLR, a time limit and a shot list of objectives. You might be…

Publisher Triple Topping Developer Nifflas Format PC Release Out now Nifflas’ latest is a bundle of fascinating contradictions and juxtapositions. In Ynglet, the line between safety and peril is only ever a few pixels thick. You control a creature that feels by turns graceful and clumsy, weightless and heavy. You can be plummeting one moment and soaring the next. Its world is a top-down map presented as a side-scroller, in which microscopic organisms navigate spaces the size of city districts. Wonderfully abstract yet somehow oddly personal, it’s calming then exhilarating, both a mellow exploration game and a challenging twitch platformer (that isn’t really a platformer at all). And it’s entirely up to you how you experience it. Confused? You won’t be. This is a strange game on the surface, but…