Innehållsförteckning för Xmas 2020 från Edge

Playables’ founders are interested in bringing games back to the web. “When Flash was still big, there were a lot of people doing web-based things,” von Rickenbach says. “And now everybody is so serious [...] There are not so many of these toy-like experiences.” The web is underrated in terms of being a good space for experimentation, he says: indeed, we imagine it’s a useful neutral territory in a world of platforms taking their cut. Devs looking to strike it rich might be disappointed, however. For a very short while, Playables actually ran a cryptocurrency miner in the background of Cain. “It made us maybe 70 cents,” von Rickenbach grins.…

Many people have discovered in this strange year that in challenging times videogames can be a kind of comfort food for the brain, a way to go travelling during lockdown and dream of better futures for us all. And this is particularly true, perhaps, for videogames that remind us of a better past: hence the popularity of the new Animal Crossing. Just as a cosy Agatha Christie-style murder mystery on TV can rinse present stressors from a troubled mind, so can a videogame that is not about actual history, but about the history of videogames themselves. And so, in the autumnal lull before the next-gen consoles arrive and we can all get on with admiring the fabulously detailed eyelashes of the next emo mass murderer we are invited to inhabit…

12 Minutes PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series The premise of this time-loop thriller still intrigues, as does its cast. Working with David Cage hasn’t stopped Willem Dafoe from making his videogame comeback; safe to assume the script is better than Beyond: Two Souls. Super Meat Boy Forever PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Having just finished Disc Room, we’re ready for more buzzsaw blades to chop us into bloody chunks. Our fleshy hero has gained a bash, a dash and a diagonal dive – after a ten-year wait for a sequel, we’re itching to use them. Witchbrook TBA Details of this magical school life sim – now sporting a gorgeous isometric pixel art style refresh – are scant. We’re having to comb design docs for info. It sounds Stardew-esque: if Chucklefish…

At the start of a round in Due Process, players need to choose and pick up their guns. They’re not loaded: you then have to identify the right ammo, pick it up, load the gun, then pick up the extra mag you now have room for after the animation. It’s a bunch of busywork for what seems to be no good reason, and bespeaks a bigger problem at the heart of the game. It has real potential. But it also feels like a game that has been made for the same 20 people who’ve been playing it for the past four years, and the experience reflects an assumption that players will instantly understand its more ornery elements, when they may just be a clumsy and fiddly turn-off.…

Developer Corey Martin Publisher Draknek & Friends Format PC, consoles TBA Origin US Release Spring Corey Martin’s previous puzzler Hiding Spot was all about boxing yourself in, repositioning pieces of furniture to build a safe space you could huddle inside. Now Martin is heading outdoors in a quietly melancholic game about gathering up your belongings and setting them on fire. Whether it’s wanting to hide yourself away from the world or the contrasting desire to burn it all down, both games are a big 2020 mood. Yet Bonfire Peaks is now coming out early next year. “There was definitely a version of this game that I was planning on releasing in the spring,” he tells us. “And it just got bigger and bigger. I thought: hey, why rush it out…

One of Phasmophobia’s beauties is that it is unpredictable. Sometimes a job that can seem very casual turns into something else when one of your friends decides to investigate a corner, goes in with the Spirit Box alone (which lets you talk to the ghost) and dies unexpectedly. When a player is killed, which does happen (though less often than you might think), the dead player observes the game world through a blue hue; they have better perception of the ghost but cannot communicate with former comrades. For such an otherwise brilliantly thought-out game, it’s a pity that dead players can’t use the Spirit Box to speak with their former comrades.…

Backwards compatibility is a core part of the Xbox approach to the next generation: while Sony struggles to explain the varying versions and prices of its cross-gen titles, Xbox is making much of keeping the process of playing your games across Xbox-adjacent platforms as simple as possible, even promising backwards compatibility with Xbox 360 titles, which dynamic resolution scaling on Series X and S will boost. “There’s no other media, whether it’s music or movies, that when you choose to upgrade your TV or device, that you have to go back and buy all that content again, or that content is not accessible to you,” Ronald says. “Your game library, your friends, your gaming history should all move forward with you. And we took that to the next level with…

THREES Of course my love for Undertale is well-known, and I have very strong memories of my son watching me fight the final boss of the game on TV. He was so afraid of it that he told me he didn’t want to go to bed alone, because the monster might show up in his room. But the game that’s stayed with me the longest this generation is Threes. It’s not just that I love puzzle games, but also that the game managed to create such an incredible, weirdly dark atmosphere with its voices and haunting music. It’s the only mobile game I’ve ever played where I actually want to fully immerse myself in it with headphones when I play it on the train. It’s also one of the few…

Most studios, in the wake of their breakthrough hit, tend to expand. But then, Motion Twin isn’t like most studios. Headcount at the studio’s Bordeaux office has fluctuated pretty much constantly since its founding in 2001, but the number peaked at 17. That was in 2010, years before Dead Cells’ unexpected success changed everything for the studio. Today, Motion Twin consists of just six people. This is, at least in part, down to the thing that makes Motion Twin unusual: since 2005 it has operated as a workers’ co-operative. (Occasionally the words ‘anarcho-syndicalist’ are thrown into the mix, at least in part as a nod to Monty Python And The Holy Grail.) This means a flat hierarchy where each employee is equal. “The salary is equal, the time off work…

Though there are secrets hiding even in the upper levels – head left rather than down at the beginning and you may well find a surprise or two – Noita reserves some of its best toys for the lower biomes. As if recognising that some players might give up before they get there, Nolla Games considerately gives you a chance to get your hands on the good stuff with a daily practice run that starts you off from a random point with randomised items. The trade-off is that these runs don’t count towards any of your tallies, whether you’re aiming to beat your deepest depth or most gold. But these glimpses of raw, untrammelled power – and the various otherworldly horrors to use it on – provide extra impetus to…

Certain buildings have maps of their own, which you’ll need to rearrange to pass between rooms. At one point you head underground, too, forming tunnels for yourself and a hungry worm. But going deeper underground affects your map-remixing powers: around a luxury mountain spa, you need to shift tiles at ground level to form subterranean routes. Elsewhere, you pay repeat visits to a maze-like chalet, where various combinations of floors, doors and stairways yield fresh revelations. It’s a particularly clever combination of story and systems, not least with the inclusion of a magical tome that pre-empts your next move. If that gives you something to look forward to, other books give you a chance to look back, with new stories detailing the further exploits of characters to whom you’ve waved…

Carmen’s world is realised to an impressively granular degree. Tap on any name in her social media feed and you’ll bring up their full profile, with details of everything from favourite books to hobbies and worst fears, while you can tap the heart icon next to your friends’ posts to ‘like’ them (albeit to no discernible effect). It pays to study those lavish surroundings, too, since they’re the key to unlocking private thoughts that Carmen isn’t prepared to share with her followers.…

“Murder is off the table,” warns one NPC, and for a while, Death Stranding really seems to have the courage of that conviction. Early weapons and hand-to-hand combat merely stun people. If you do resort to murder, you’ll soon find the cons far outweigh the benefits, as corpses can lead to a ‘voidout’ which destroys a chunk of the world permanently. Pushing you towards a pacifist playstyle works nicely with the game’s theme of rebuilding America. A pity, then, that multiple late-game boss encounters force you into dull shootouts with soldiers in environments unrelated to the world you’ve been piecing back together. Variety is nice, but these sections are about as thematically coherent with the rest of the game as a song-and-dance number.…

Duo is Analogue’s first hardware with a CD-ROM drive, ready to play CD-ROM2 disks, alongside a slot for PC Engine’s perfectly formed HuCards. All Analogue’s machines are designed to run original games, but with Duo it faces the issue that secondhand PC Engine games are more expensive than its existing consoles – most hover around the £20 mark. But Taber isn’t too concerned. He says that on the launch of the NES-based Mini Nt, he bought the entire Mega Man series on cartridge and then sold it on. “I’m not a collector,” he says. “Choose a game and the pass it on. It’s a better way to play, and these games hold their value, especially after we do a system.” Yes, he claims that Analogue’s consoles can have an effect…

BOOK Virtual Cities: An Atlas & Exploration of Video Game Cities bit.ly/gamecitiesbook Game urbanist Konstantinos Dimopoulos knows a lot about places that don’t exist: he’s consulted on the construction of videogame cities for many years. His new book is a fictional travel guide to some of the most iconic cities in videogames, and testament to a career spent pinning down how the best can feel like real spaces. Among its pages, you’ll set off on guided illustrated tours across a dazzling range of locales, including Half-Life 2’s City 17, the twisted streets of Bloodborne’s Yarnham, Clock Town in The Legend Of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, A Mind Forever Voyaging’ Rockvil – and Edge’s spiritual home and the true star of Yakuza 0, Kamurocho. Preorder now for its November 10 release –…

Narrative choice skeptic? That’s me. Yes, I love characters with inner lives, and stories with subtext, but when the game mechanic involves literally printing that stuff up on screen as text I struggle to suspend my disbelief. My instinct is to grok the mechanical consequences of the choice rather than really live the story. But choices don’t need to be about action and consequence. There’s a rich seam of choices that function essentially as personality quizzes for the player. I feel affection for those bits in Mass Effect where players eavesdrop and then pass judgement on a range of moral quandaries. I particularly like games that use this data to personalise themselves for their players. I did, in fact, make a game built around this idea. It scored 6 in…

Developer/publisher Deep Silver (Fishlabs) Format PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, Xbox Series X Origin Germany Release 2021 Like many space sims, Chorus is a feast for the eyes. Unlike many space sims, its astral vistas have a psychological undertow. Your enemies in the game, members of a religious cult known as the Circle, are partial to a spot of brainwashing. Their space stations are instruments of domination, red-on-black monoliths that impose on the viewer at any distance. As lead artist Kareem Leggett tells us, these structures take loose inspiration from fascist architecture in being designed “to affect the psychology of people who live in the area”. The Circle have more direct methods of mind control: they can paralyse vessels with psychic attacks, bloating their hulls with cuboid matter redolent…

Automata takes place in the same universe as Replicant, albeit several millennia after the events of its uncompromisingly bleak fourth ending. This, then, perhaps represents an opportunity to make the connection between the two more explicit. So does Taro feel a strong desire to surprise players, or does he believe it’s more important to stay faithful to the original? “I always want to put in new surprises,” he says. “I once said that I wanted to make a game like Farmville with Nier, but they rejected that one. I also proposed that we sell random endings for Automata like loot boxes, but that got shot down, too.” He emphasises that both these stories are wholly true. “But nobody listens to my opinions, so what can I do about that?”…

Developer Dillon Rogers, David Szymanski Publisher New Blood Interactive Format PC Origin US Release TBA When we speak to Gloomwood lead developer Dillon Rogers, he’s just coming off the back of two months dedicated to finessing the game’s inventory. Which might sound absurd, but the result could be the most lavish version of this familiar system we’ve ever encountered: a doctor’s bag with a mechanical dais which, when the bag is opened, pops out and rotates. On one side, a quick précis of your equipped weapons and keys. But flip it over, with the whirr of two cogs, and you’ll find a game of inventory Tetris waiting – a grid of tiles where items have to be placed manually, health syringes, ammo boxes and wheels of cheese all fighting for…

Martin and Hazelden are a puzzling dream team: the two have been friends for five years, and Martin says his publisher’s criticism has been a gift. With Hazelden having just released his most immediate game to date in A Monster’s Expedition, has that had a direct influence on Bonfire Peaks? “It’s been hugely inspiring, particularly the way that it’s accessible without compromising anything,” Martin says. “I find it almost irritating the importance that people place on difficulty in these games; it’s peripheral to what makes them interesting. I want people to feel like the game isn’t being antagonistic. It wants you to solve these puzzles and see as much as you can.”…

With big tech firms such as Google and, more recently, Amazon moving in on the world of game streaming, we imagine Microsoft’s conversations around its own game streaming service are growing ever more urgent. But Decker is confident in the advantages of xCloud over the other big players. “What resonates with our fans is that choice and that flexibility,” he says. “You have access to this library, and you can play it on Xbox Series X, you can play the games on PC, you can stream them in the cloud to your Android device. It is, I think, the most compelling content portfolio. Those games are sold through the Xbox app, they’re sold through the Windows Store, and a lot of those games are sold through Steam on PC. If…

Format PC, Switch Developer/publisher Supergiant Games Origin US Release 2020 Hell hath no fury like a protagonist scorned. So if there seems to be something personal in the way Theseus seeks to stop you progressing beyond Elysium, if you detect an undercurrent of bitterness in the way he talks, there’s a very good reason for that. The arena champion was set to be the star of Supergiant’s fourth game, you see, only to eventually be usurped by his more charismatic (and better-looking) counterpart. That resentment, then, is very real – and delightfully meta, too. Yes, Hades began as a very different kind of Greek myth: based on the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, it was to be set in the Labyrinth on Crete. “The structure would have been about…

STILL PLAYING Hades Switch You’d think two years of our contributing editor banging on about Supergiant’s new Roguelike would convince the rest of us to fire up the Early Access version. Alas, as usual it’s the Switch release that proves the deciding factor – and now our esteemed colleague finds himself mentoring a bunch of baby Zagreuses. First step? Trying to wean us off our beloved Divine Dash. Dreams PS4 With our Game Of The Year awards on the horizon, it’s time to jump back in. There’s too much brilliant new stuff to fit into this small section of the magazine: Media Molecule’s own All Hallows’ Dreams event featuring a haunted house made up of community-created rooms, VR support and a glut of new titles with it – and Anthony…

If, like Luke Skywalker, you trust the Force more than your targeting computer, you can disable the game’s fairly unobtrusive HUD and try to navigate using cockpit instruments alone. Just be aware that in VR, the lower resolution makes it trickier to identify vessels at a distance. Don’t forget to use your ears, too: Squadrons’ glorious VR functionality is backed up by great 3D audio design. Even if you can’t see a pursuer, you can work out where they are and what they’re packing from the timbre of their engines and the pitch and tempo of incoming shots. Swoop too close to an exploding foe, meanwhile, and you’ll hear the tinkle of debris on your fuselage.…

You slowly gain access to a range of minor upgrades, only a handful of which you’ll have room to slot into your suit’s subsystems matrix. Several come with a penalty: you can dash twice albeit with increased cooldown afterwards, or use a focus ability twice but wait longer for the meter to refill. Still, a few make a real difference, such as one perk that outlines enemies in red, making them easier to spot in the visually busy outdoor areas. These become available after visiting a virtual-reality construct called the Cyber Void, in which you’ll find a range of tedious, irritating, time-wasting puzzles, including a sequence aboard a rotating structure that’s like an even more profanity-inducing take on Super Mario Sunshine’s infamous sand bird level.…

Away from the story, Skirmish mode lets you choose up to four of the eight available crews to play with. But it’s with Countdown mode that The Solitaire Conspiracy comes to life. Here, you’re playing against the clock, each card successfully retrieved gaining you three seconds. Trying to recall each team’s special ability at speed makes it less instinctive than regular solitaire, however, while it’s not quite clear enough at a glance which agents are active and which have been expended.…

The first time we come across Atsushi Wada’s sit-up simulator My Exercise is in a video of a GDC gathering. In it, Hidden Folks creator Adriaan de Jongh grips a tablet, pressing the screen to make the cartoon protagonist haul his torso up and plant his face into the side of a dog. When he draws his finger away from the screen, the boy returns to the floor. Peering over de Jongh are any number of indie scene luminaries, all of whom are hooting uproariously. It’s an image that has stuck in our minds for years. We were delighted, then, to see My Exercise finally release this summer – but what really caught our eye was its publisher. Playables, co-founded by Michael Frei and Mario von Rickenbach, has been on…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a full 12-month, 13-issue subscription to Edge Years of war Your brilliantly written Knowledge piece in Edge 351 confirmed my position on the upcoming systems. At launch, it seems there is no real need to buy the new hardware, besides wanting to have the latest and greatest tech in your entertainment setup. Xbox’s commitment to Game Pass across new and old platforms, and PS5 delivering big titles to the previous generation, suggest that day-one benefits are few and far between – besides new controllers, faster loading and games that look a little prettier or have a sharper frame rate in 4K, neither of which I care for. There is an exception: Bluepoint’s…

As the world continues to fight an unseen enemy, this month’s selection of forthcoming games shows that developers are increasingly realising that what you don’t know can hurt you. That’s a heck of a thing to try in a visual medium, but cooperative early access hit Phasmophobia (p46) has plenty of tricks up its spectral sleeve to scare the wits out of you and your friends – from a UV light that shows up supernatural footprints to unearthly whispers in your ear. Don’t forget: in team chat, everyone can hear you scream. In space, of course, your yelps of terror will go unanswered. We don’t normally expect psychological horror from a space shooter, but Chorus (p30) gives us chills thanks to its mysterious antagonists, whose mind-control tactics are their deadliest…

A newcomer to consoles, Fishlabs is enthusiastic about PS5 and Xbox Series X but equally focused on getting the most out of current-gen machines. “It’s amazing what the next gen brings in terms of power, especially the SSD stuff, but we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg right now,” Tobias Severn says. “I think we’re currently experimenting with more physical debris, trying to bring ray tracing to the table, which is really cool [...] but in the end we want to provide the same experience on all platforms.” Nextgen development has been “a smooth run” thus far, he adds. “Both Sony and Microsoft have learned a lot over the last decade about how to provide tools, making it comfortable for developers to use the hardware.”…

Gloomwood’s style might be thoroughly old school, but it’ll still be taking full advantage of early access – shareware isn’t really an option these days, after all. Szymanski admits he’s no fan of early access as a player, but feels feedback is necessary to hone a game like this. In the past, New Blood’s solution has been to portion out games like Dusk, releasing individual episodes with polished mechanics. With the nature of Gloomwood, though, this poses more of a challenge. As Rogers says: “You read postmortems for Thief and it’s like, ‘six months before release, we rewrote the entire AI system’.” The plan, as it stands, is to unlock one district of its city at a time – with the understanding that the underpinning systems could change dramatically by…

Developer/publisher Kinetic Games Format PC Origin UK Release 2021 Horror videogames, with few exceptions, have always had a problem with interaction: what agency do players have, and how can that be used to scare them? The default answer, exemplified by Resident Evil, is to tool the player character up and make the monsters bleed. More ingenious ideas, however, have come from the likes of Fatal Frame, or even more recently PT, where engagement is focused on the environment – opening a door slowly, or exploring repeated rooms with minor variations. With a few caveats, Phasmophobia sets a new bar for the latter category. This is a spook-’em-up where the ghosts are for the most part ineffable, where the beating heart of the experience is both environmental and human interaction, and…

Writing/design, Hades The characters seem to be getting some players hot under the collar. Did you expect that sort of reaction coming out of early access? It’s been really heartening that players have fallen in love with these different characters, because why would we want to put characters in our game if not for players to find them interesting? Jen Zee, our art director, was very excited to render the Olympians as well as these Chthonic gods. Part of what was cool to us about the whole concept was that we get to leverage these household names like Zeus and Athena to then introduce these relatively little-known characters, such as Nyx or Thanatos or Megaera. Jen is very good at painting beautiful-looking characters. In this one, being a game about…

Einstein is widely (and probably wrongly) credited as having said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Given our recent exchanges with a certain publisher, we’re inclined to agree. Old Albert would have been no fan of Roguelikes, then, though as a keen chemist as well as a theoretical physicist, perhaps he’d have made an exception for Noita (p106) and its alchemical playground – where the E in his most famous equation stands for Explosions. We’ve been repeating ourselves a lot this month, and not just in relation to perpetually delayed review code. In satirical Roguelike Going Under (p120), you venture into the bowels of failed tech startups, each one replicating the mistakes of the last – though here the inevitability of…

Rebirth’s narrative poses a familiar ethical dilemma: whether your or a loved one’s survival is worth a larger atrocity. However, while there are a couple of fateful-sounding decisions to make, the plot doesn’t actually branch till the final encounter, which has several outcomes. The writing has some baleful resonances (one lore document echoes the factory farming lobby in talking about how to manage public perception) and piecing together the bigger picture is a gruesome thrill. Rebirth is too fanciful to do all this full justice, however. While it gives you less agency, The Chinese Room’s Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs is more gripping because it draws more explicitly upon real-world oppression and inhumanity.…

Developer/publisher Aconite Format IOS Release Out now Our phones can be windows into another world and mirrors that reflect our own. Or, as in Aconite’s slow-burning mixed-reality chiller, both at once. Subversive and strange, HoloVista brilliantly twists the hidden-object game into a kind of existential horror, in which twentysomething architect Carmen is recruited by a highly-regarded company, only for her dream job to steadily turn into a nightmare. There’s something uncanny about this world from the start, but then you are using a phone within a phone. In the opening scene, you look around Carmen’s apartment – the first in a series of pre-rendered environments with a glossy, hyperrealistic sheen – through her phone camera’s viewfinder, using motion controls and pinching to zoom as though you’re photographing your own surroundings.…

Going Under’s satire mostly extends to nodding towards issues like union busting and toxic bosses, but there’s the occasional barb. The sharpest of which is that, by going on these fetch quests, you’re contributing to a burnout work culture. The game never does that Spec Ops thing and tries to make you feel bad about this (it’s made clear that the alternative for your character is unemployment) but that’s almost worse. There is no ethical dungeon-crawling possible under capitalism.…