Table of contents for #62 in Wireframe Magazine

Info GENRE Demon murder sim FORMAT PC, XB S/X, XBO PS4, PS5 DEVELOPER Damage State PUBLISHER Kwalee RELEASE 2022 SOCIAL @ScatheFPS Just as Housemarque’s Returnal fused the third-person roguelike with the danmaku shoot-‘em-up genre to award-winning effect, so Scottish studio Damage State’s upcoming SCATHE aims to take players to its own particular plane of bullet hell. Trapped in an infernal labyrinth, you’re confronted by an army of grotesque and deadly enemies – many of them capable of firing complex waves of fiery projectiles. Look at SCATHE in still images, and you’ll likely think of recent entries in the DOOM series, but programmer and Damage State co-founder Chris Dawson argues that his game’s mix of non-linear level design, drop-in, drop-out co-op, and its enemies’ aggressive attack patterns make it a markedly…

01. Sora us coming During a digital event celebrating the 20th anniversary of the series, Square Enix went ahead and officially announced Kingdom Hearts 4. This was surprising seeing as series director, Tetsuya Nomura, last year made it seem like the next entry would be years away. The fourth mainline instalment in Sora and gang’s Disney-driven adventure is real, though, and set to look prettier than ever thanks to the jump to Unreal Engine 5. The first trailer introduced a new location called the Quadratum, which Square Enix described as an “expansive city set in a gorgeous, realistic world unlike anything ever seen before in the Kingdom Hearts series”. 02. Toss a coin Hot on the heels of Cyberpunk 2077’s PS5 and Xbox Series X debut, developer CD Projekt Red…

In 2005, a new game let players live out their rock star fantasies. Having already made specialised game controllers for Konami, American firm RedOctane enlisted the help of Harmonix to help them create Guitar Hero: a game where the aim was to play along with a music track by hitting the right buttons on a guitar-shaped controller. The game was an instant hit, spawning over 20 sequels and spin-offs over the course of around five years. The guitar controller featured five coloured buttons representing different notes, a strumming bar that had to be hit in time with the notes being played, and a whammy bar to change the pitch of the notes. The buttons corresponded with a scrolling display of coloured circles that moved down the screen as the music…

HIGHLIGHT While playing Janitor, your field of view is locked on the cabinet, meaning you can’t turn around when you hear a sudden thud from behind or see a reflection moving on its screen. These moments, with your back exposed to the shifting darkness, are easily the tensest in the game. Two years after joined-at-the-hip anthologies Haunted PS1 Demo Disc and Dread X Collection coalesced into a rallying cry for horror developers, the popularity of their nostalgiafuelled nightmares shows no signs of abating. An irresistible combination of moody, low-poly visuals and out-there concepts that would be summarily dismissed by any sensible higher-end studio, some of the ideas presented in nascent form therein have inspired longer, standalone versions by their creators. Such is the case of Janitor Bleeds (first appearing in…

Info GENRE Action-adventure FORMAT PS5 (tested) / PS4 / XB S/X / XBO / Switch / PC DEVELOPER Traveller’s Tales, TT Games PUBLISHER Warner Bros. Interactive PRICE £49.99 RELEASE Out now VERDICT It’s not just the LEGO bricks themselves that shine brighter than ever. The Force is strong in almost every aspect. 86% HIGHLIGHT The voice cast features a good mixture of talent from both the movies and TV shows, with the likes of Anthony Daniels (episodes I-VII) and James Arnold Taylor (The Clone Wars) returning as C-3PO and Obi-Wan Kenobi, respectively. Liam Neeson as Qui-Gon Jinn is absent, but Harrison Ford’s voice double is uncanny. Did you know that Tantive IV, Princess Leia’s personal starship that Vader boards during A New Hope’s opening scene, has a coffee machine in…

Not everyone has the time, patience, or inclination to pick up a soldering iron and start tinkering around with an old console. Still, there are an increasing number of options available to people who want to modify their old hardware without having to worry about things like flux or capacitors (or indeed flux capacitors). One of the simplest yet most effective mods you can do to an ageing system is simply replace its shell and buttons; for the past few months, for example, I’ve had a tired-looking Game Boy Advance sitting in a drawer. Its shell is scratched and dull, its buttons discoloured from years of use. But by rehousing its innards in a shiny new exterior, it’ll immediately look like a new piece of hardware again – and all…

Hypothetical video game ‘demakes’ are a trend I’m constantly fascinated by. Not just because it’s fun to imagine what a modern experience would look like if it was rendered in pixels rather than polygons, but because it’s further evidence that at the heart of every beloved game is a great idea, not just great graphics. YouTube channel 64 Bits recently cemented this belief by reimagining BioWare’s seminal 2007 space opera Mass Effect as a GBA title from the early 2000s. Crewmates like Liara, Wrex, Tali, and even Commander Shepard are all chibified, with combat playing out Advance Wars-style from a top-down view. In other words… a tactics spin-off I never knew I needed. Only in the last issue did I wax lyrical about how Game Boy Advance throwbacks and homages…

Calling Travis Touchdown video gaming’s biggest loser seems a little harsh, even if it is apt. After all, this is a slouch that’s worked his way up through a rogue’s gallery’s worth of cartoonish villains not once, not twice, but three times now. And if third time really is the charm, then No More Heroes 3 most definitely sees this loveable deadbeat go out on something of a high. I say this as someone who enjoyed the original two slash-’em-ups back on the Wii a lot, even if Suda51’s ambitious scope vastly dwarfed the technical ability of Nintendo’s pre-HD console. So here I am, revisiting Santa Destroy ten years later once again and oh, environmental pop-in is still this city’s single defining feature, huh? At least there’s plenty of bosses…

Info GENRE Puzzle, narrative, first-person adventure FORMAT PC / Switch DEVELOPER Cosmonaut Studios PUBLISHER Secret Mode RELEASE 2022 SOCIAL @Cosmonaut_Info A shared house in the north of England mysteriously burns down, killing the six students trapped inside. As 43, a time-hopping operative sent from the future, it’s your job to prevent the tragedy from happening. It’s a task matched in its ambition by the one Eternal Threads developer Cosmonaut set for itself: to somehow tie this butterfly effect-style story together in a way that made sense. “Our initial efforts became a much more supernatural experience,” says creative director Paul Johnson. “Then, we had a crazy idea… What if the entire story was open from the start? What if the player was free to go to any point in time and…

Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly Coffee brewing once again meets heart-to-heart conversation in Toge Productions’ long-awaited sequel to its hit 2020 visual novel. Set in an alternate version of Seattle populated by humans, orcs, elves, and the like, there’s seemingly no personal issue that can’t be resolved using a splash of lo-fi latte art and the simple willingness to listen. Bliss! Capcom Fighting Collection Capcom’s celebrating Street Fighter’s 35th anniversary in style. There’s a sixth entry on the way, but before that we’re getting the Capcom Fighting Collection. No less than ten pixel-art fighters make up this compilation, stretching beyond Street Fighter with series like Darkstalkers, Vampire Savior, and Cyberbots all making an appearance. With button customisation and adjustable CPU difficulty, it’s a love letter to a bygone…

8BitDo Pro 2 Find out more at 8bitdo.com/pro2 Free 8BitDo Pro 2 Bluetooth controller with a 12-month subscription to Wireframe WORTH £40 Those lovely, lovely people over at 8BitDo are offering a FREE Pro 2 controller for UK subscribers. Simply take out a twelve-month subscription to Wireframe magazine and you’ll receive one of these fabulous Bluetooth pads, compatible with Nintendo Switch, PC, iOS, Android, Raspberry Pi, and Steam devices. With custom profile switching, an ultra-comfortable design, and a rechargeable battery that will last for 20 hours, the 8BitDo Pro 2 is a versatile controller for gamers of all kinds. Here’s all those specs in more detail: Two Pro-level back paddle buttons Custom Profile switch button, three profiles, switch on the fly Mode switch button (Switch, Android, D-input, X-input) Ultimate Software…

Soundfall READ MORE turn to page 18 In keeping with the variety of its soundtrack, Soundfall opts for a vibrant colour palette that also reflects the bombastic stylings of its top-down action. True, coating everything in neon has been a popular proven strategy for twin-stick shooters before, yet here it’s a visual flourish used to heighten the natural characteristics of Symphonia’s ten distinct areas, as opposed to a crutch. “[They] were designed with a genre of music and a family of instruments in mind,” says creative director Nick Cooper. “For example, we have a metal-and-drumming-centric volcano level, and a techno-and-computers-centric cityscape level.” Such creativity also translates to the five playable Soundfall characters you can see here, which also sport luminous weapons and attire based on their instrument of choice. GAME…

If the screenshots dotted around these pages make you think of the Super Nintendo era – a time that brought us such 16-bit gems as Super Mario World and A Link to the Past – that’s because Massachusetts-based developer Willem Rosenthal has consciously modelled Pompom on that system and its games. “My goal was to have it fit perfectly as an early SNES game,” Rosenthal says of his 2D platformer. “I took a lot of visual inspiration from the SNES games from 1990 to 1993, with Super Mario World by far being the biggest visual inspiration. I wanted it to feel like a game made by the same art director.” Rosenthal’s affection for the SNES era goes beyond its visuals, too. Long before complex 3D worlds and detailed character models…

Japanese firm SNK has taken on many guises – and several variations on its name – since its founding in 1979. But while SNK’s video game output has spanned genres from sports titles to puzzles to military shooters like Metal Slug (see box on page 86), the company’s arguably best known for its array of competitive fighting games. From 1991’s Fatal Fury: King of Fighters onwards, SNK blazed a trail with some of the tightest, most vibrant fighters ever made. For these, we partly have Takashi Nishiyama to thank – one of the key figures working at SNK in the early nineties, and a developer who’d helped transform the fighting genre in the previous decade. At Irem, Nishiyama created the groundbreaking brawler, Kung-Fu Master, in 1984; moving over to Capcom,…

Info GENRE Zelda-like, action-adventure FORMAT PC / XBO / XB S/X (tested) DEVELOPER Andrew Shouldice PUBLISHER Finji PRICE £24.99 RELEASE Out now SOCIAL @tunicgame From the moment you wake up on the beach of a mysterious island, TUNIC looks and feels like a dream, or perhaps more like déjà vu. The low-poly aesthetic, soft pastel colours, and serene music hints at a cosy time, though the comfort is also down to familiarity as the adorable little fox cub you’re controlling evidently reminds you of someone else who sports a similarly iconic green tunic. Sure, the perspective may be isometric rather than top-down 2D, but you could be fooled that you’re playing a lost bootlegged Zelda game, all the more so given this is not on a Nintendo platform (yet). Those…

Info GENRE Point-and-click adventure FORMAT PC (tested) DEVELOPER Geography of Robots PUBLISHER Raw Fury PRICE £11.39 RELEASE Out now SOCIAL @roboticgeo VERDICT A sublime point-and-click adventure with this year’s finest writing. 80% HIGHLIGHT Although NORCO stands strong on its text alone, that doesn’t mean the gimmicks of minigames in-between don’t make for a welcome break for the eyes. Activities vary from manoeuvring a motorboat through the Louisiana bayous via a top-down map to a memory-based QTE-style combat system, which has hilarious results on a store owner’s cat you’re just initially trying to pet. After five years on the road, your rebellious runaway protagonist Kay returns to her oppressively bleak home following her mother’s death from cancer. It might sound like the start of a noughties contemplative tragicomedy and all the…

The games for… BIG ADVENTURES Elden Ring / Bandai Namco / 95% (Issue 61) Assassin’s Creed Odyssey / Ubisoft / 93% (Issue 1) Yakuza: Like a Dragon / Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio / 90% (Issue 45) Amnesia: Rebirth / Frictional Games / 87% (Issue 46) Death’s Door / Acid Nerve / 87% (Issue 55) The Last Campfire / Hello Games / 86% (Issue 47) Resident Evil 2 / Capcom / 86% (Issue 7) Journey to the Savage Planet / Typhoon Studios / 84% (Issue 33) The Outer Worlds / Obsidian Entertainment / 84% (Issue 28) Eastward / Pixpil / 84% (Issue 57) The games for… REPEATED PLAY Hades / Supergiant Games / 94% (Issue 44) They Are Billions / Numantian Games / 88% (Issue 20) Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice /…

The bottle sits on a table in the marketplace, practically begging me to nick it. If this were Alice in Wonderland, the bottle would probably have a label with “Steal me” written on it. But still, I hesitate: in the strange underground city I’ve found myself in, my choices have deadly consequences for everyone else. If one person sins, everyone is mercilessly hunted down by living statues, shot with arrows, and turned into lumps of solid gold. But then I ponder on why I’m thinking about pilfering the bottle in the first place: there’s a desperately ill woman in the city who needs the medicine contained in it. The problem is, the guy who owns the bottle, a scheming merchant named Desius, wants to sell it for a cripplingly exorbitant…

Evidence of the singularity, or the point in time when technology advances far enough to negate the need for humans, seemingly surrounds us more each day. It’s there whenever you Google a question on your smartphone or scan something using a supermarket’s self-service checkout. Even then it’s still a struggle to imagine our fridge ever gaining enough intelligence to, say, want to put in a nine-to-five shift at the local Tesco Direct. The Last Worker, however, lets players inhabit a hypothetical vision of the future where society has already travelled far beyond this point. The robots are no longer taking over – they’ve already won. And now it’s your job as the titular worker to ensure things run smoothly. At first glance, the incredibly colourful, cel-shaded warehouse that is the…

Info GENRE Rhythm, loot-shooter, dungeon crawler FORMAT PC / Switch / PS4 / PS5 / XBO / XB S/X DEVELOPER Drastic Games PUBLISHER Noodlecake RELEASE 2022 SOCIAL @SoundfallGame he debut title from Drastic Games is a head-bopping isometric shooter unafraid to move to its own groove, largely because it forces players into the exact same position. Soundfall casts you as Melody Harper, an audiophile-turned-weapons expert whisked off to a far-off land, the player has ample opportunity to keep an army of enemies at bay using creative gunfire in the endless pursuit for loot. So far, so expected. But there’s more to this synth-infused dungeon crawler than first meets the eye. Because in the rhythm-driven domains of Symphonia, your ears prove an equally important tool, as you must shoot, move, and…

In 1987, Konami released Castlevania (known in Japan as Akumajō Dracula) for the Famicom Disk System. The side-scrolling adventure about monster hunter Simon Belmont and his quest to kill Dracula became one of the company’s most beloved games, inspiring countless sequels, spinoffs, and even a Netflix TV show. But strangely, to this day, fans know very little about the man who created it: Hitoshi Akamatsu. Akamatsu didn’t give many interviews during his career in the games industry. There are barely any photographs of him, and his list of credited projects is frustratingly incomplete. This has given rise to a number of rumours about his time at Konami, though barely anything has actually been confirmed. We therefore set out to clear up some of the mysteries and misconceptions surrounding the developer,…

GAME SCATHE DEVELOPER Damage State RELEASE 2022 WEBSITE playscathe.com SCATHE READ MORE turn to page 12 If you like your first-person shooters draped in fire, gore, and ornate metalwork, look no further than SCATHE. Developed by Damage State, it offers a bullet-soaked journey through hell, with the central aim being to blast every demonic entity that crosses your path. Here, programmer and studio co-founder Chris Dawson explains how he and his collaborators, art director and cofounder Tim Hay and character artist Manu Lopez, designed SCATHE’s nightmare landscape of monsters.…

Garish neon lighting. Musclebound action stars wielding guns. These are just some of the clichés commonly associated with the 1980s – a decade synonymous with excess. Stock-markets surged. Shoulder-padded suits were cool for reasons long since lost to time. Bigger was better, and that ethos extended into every aspect of culture: economies, fashion, movies, music, and video games all coalesced into a dizzying spiral of materialism. The 1980s is widely regarded as an era stuffed full of splashy, shallow thrills, so it’s little surprise that so many high-profile games set in that decade tend to highlight its shallowness. Such games as 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and, at the other end of the budget spectrum, 2012’s Hotline Miami, were both big hits, serving up depictions of the era that…

Hardware limitations have long forced developers to come up with creative workarounds, with the horror genre being a particularly fertile ground in the days of PlayStation and Nintendo 64. Titles like Shadow Man, Nightmare Creatures, and the original Resident Evil used their host platforms to haunting effect, with technical restrictions such as poor draw distances, long load times, and low-resolution textures all adding to their scares. It’s exactly this vibe that solo developer Jonny Richards has tapped into for his suite of short horror games. His latest is Fish Cymophis, a sinister fishing simulator where you explore a lake full of deadly wildlife. “I really liked the concept of a horror game that takes the guise of a different genre and uses their mechanics in clever ways,” Richards says of Fish…

Info GENRE First-person stealth FORMAT PC (tested) DEVELOPER Four Circle Interactive PUBLISHER Fireshine Games, Sold-out Software PRICE £13.99 RELEASE Out now SOCIAL @FourCircleInt VERDICT A well-conceived plan that doesn’t quite come together. 50% HIGHLIGHT The most entertaining mission is also the most macabre, as a shady NPC asks you to collect blood samples using a jar of leeches. Cue a session of knocking out unsuspecting victims, chucking a parasite at them, and waiting for it to have its fill before collecting the engorged result. It’s a brave move for an indie studio to create a first-person immersive sim, with all the complex systems that entails. Especially, as in the case of Abermore, when its industrial-fantasy fiction seems intent on inviting comparisons with Dishonored. Four Circle Interactive (previously responsible for the…

HIGHLIGHT Part way through the campaign you should unlock the Eternity Tower, an extra game mode that represents the Orbital Bullet experience at its most distilled. Trimming out the minor exploration element of the main game, you blast your way to the top of 50 floors or simply survive in Endless Mode as long as you can. Orbital Bullet has you running in circles, but that’s just fine. As a squat cyberpunk mercenary, you hunt killer robots around cylindrical towers, like skirting a giant oak tree, letting fly with bullets that follow the curve. Each stage of your oil-soaked, rogue-lite rampage is divided into bite-sized floors with a simple aim – destroy all machines. Fittingly, it’s all very neatly executed. Squint a little, in fact, and you could almost be…

1 Elden Ring / 95% (Issue 61) A game of massive scale, packed with intelligence and mystery. A towering achievement. 2 Disco Elysium / 94% (Issue 28) Smarter and deeper than anything else; truly an RPG in a class completely of its own. 3 Hades / 94% (Issue 44) Proving ‘roguelike’ isn’t a dirty word, learning-and-dying is a joy from start to finish. 4 Assassin’s Creed Odyssey / 93% (Issue 1) The point where Ubisoft realised over-the-top adventures were the right direction. 5 Telling Lies / 92% (Issue 24) This FMV mystery asks more of the player than most, with rewards to match. 6 If Found / 92% (Issue 44) A compelling and beautifully illustrated narrative, as moving as it is memorable. 7 Yakuza: Like a Dragon / 90% (Issue…

Time Crisis. Point Blank. The House of the Dead. These three lightgun games were arcade royalty when I was growing up, with the latter, in particular, scaring the living bejeebers out of me every time I passed by it; this was much to the dismay of my mum, who only sent me off to get a quid’s worth of coinage for the 2p machines. Sega’s ghoulish rail shooter from 1996 now rears its undead head back into the conversation by way of a Nintendo Switch exclusive remake. And, well, it’s all rather cheesy, isn’t it? Not that there’s anything wrong with gunning it past cowering men in white coats, muscular flesh-eaters, and literal bat men in a bid to rescue the girl. I encourage it, even. It’s just taken me…