Innehållsförteckning för April 2020 från Edge

As the sun begins to set on a generation of consoles, our thoughts inevitably turn to its legacy. The era of PS4 and Xbox One was one of unprecedented change. Walls that previously felt unbreakable came tumbling down as cross-platform multiplayer became a reality. Midgeneration hardware refreshes came with hefty power increases; consumer VR actually happened. Brick-and-mortar retail was rendered as good as irrelevant by the rise of digital sales, with frequent storefront discounts crushing the secondhand market. And the concept of the gameas-service dramatically increased a title’s staying power. Yet for all the forward progress made, it was also a generation defined by nostalgia, in which we proved to developers and publishers our undying eagerness to revisit the classics again and again. That’s certainly something Yu Suzuki, who stars…

Game Bust-A-Move Frenzy Manufacturer Raw Thrills These are fertile times for the coin-op scene. The rise of payper-play VR installations has breathed new life into the humble arcade, while the launch of the Exa-Arcadia platform has given small independent teams a route into an industry that was previously reserved for those with the contacts or financial muscle to put cabinets into production. Not all is new and exciting, however, and the coin-op cognoscenti are still fretful about ‘redemptification’ – in which classic games are reborn as redemption machines, spitting out tickets that can be exchanged in great sums for physical prizes. Debate swirls over whether they should be classed as gambling machines – since they’re notionally skillbased there’s no legislation on average payout, as there is in the casino variant.…

One thing that was never foreseen by the early cyber-boosters of the 1990s was that in the long run, all the ‘new media’ institutions that supposedly disrupted the landscape – the tech giants, the social networks – would actually want passionately to become old media: specifically, television. Apple and YouTube are joining Amazon in the linear-narrative content game, jostling to compete with Netflix and the rest. The videogame industry too increasingly aspires to be television. Not just in the way firms are devoting larger budgets to unskippable FMV sequences so that better-known actors can read out sophomoric lines that would be blue-pencilled by any HBO exec. And not just in the way that the IP borders between games and TV are increasingly permeable: witness the rapturous reception rightly accorded to…

Developer/publisher Sega (RGG Studio) Format PS4 Origin Japan Release Out now (JP), 2020 (EU, US) Having thoroughly trounced a room full of thugs, we witness a familiar sight as a larger, better-armed group of toughs bundles through the door. Ordinarily, this would be the time for Kazuma Kiryu to crack his neck, loosen his shoulders and raise two clenched fists in preparation for taking them down single-handedly. But Ichiban Kasuga is no Kazuma Kiryu, and this is no ordinary Yakuza game. Kasuga isn’t even alone, in fact – and yet he takes one look at the uneven odds and, perhaps sensibly, decides to get the hell out of there. Despite their differences, the series’ new lead has plenty in common with his predecessor. Both are orphans, raised by surrogate father…

Developer People Can Fly Publisher Square Enix Format PC, PS4, PS5, Series X, Xbox One Origin Poland Release Winter Though nearly a decade has passed since its release, the game most of us think of when we think of People Can Fly is still Bulletstorm. Which is remarkable given the Polish studio worked on Fortnite, back in the days when it was a long-brewing tower-defence shooter rather than one of the biggest games in the universe. At the time, it was part of Epic Games, a satellite studio helping out on Gears Of War and other properties that didn’t offer much chance for the developer to imprint its own personality on the final product. “We worked with Epic and it was a great collaboration, but we were working on their…

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Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Developer Piccolo Studio Publisher Techland Origin Spain Release 2019 Piccolo Studio’s enchanting debut begins with an end. As the flames of a funeral pyre burn brightly against a starry sky, the old man resting in peace on top subsequently awakens or rather arises in a pristine, white limbo. Over the next four or five hours, he looks back on his life across a series of fantastical vignettes some hopeful and happy, others quitethe opposite. In some ways, it mirrors the journey its creators took to get it made. That, too, began with an ending of sorts, and a period of reflection. It was four years ago, and for three fortysomething Spaniards, working in the advertising industry had become just another job. After 20 years…

We expect games to tax the brain and test the reflexes, but only rarely do they tickle the funnybone while they’re at it – not for the right reasons, anyway. Yet this month’s Play crop yields a selection of games that not only make us laugh, but also remind us how hard a thing humour is to get right in a medium where the player can’t help but get in the way. If, as they say, timing is truly everything in comedy, delegating control to an uncooperative thirdparty is simply asking for trouble. In Lair Of The Clockwork God (p120), developer Dan Marshall returns to the classic point-and-click adventure stylings of his early Ben and Dan games. This was one of the first genres to really get humour right, and…

Developer/publisher Paper Cult Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch Release Out now Revenge is a dish best served cold, which makes ultra-violent Weird West action game Bloodroots positively frosty. The first minutes see you, as the hulking Mr Wolf, running through a village strewn with corpses, before the perpetrator – the terrifying Black Wolf – brings down a hatchet upon your head. By some miracle, you survive, and set out on a quest to avenge Tarrytown. And, for a game from an indie studio we’ve never heard of before, there’s an unexpected richness to almost everything – animation, sound and level design in particular – that inspires an insatiable bloodlust. That might all sound rather sanguinary, and it is. But Bloodroots’ sense of style and slapstick humour affords it a wonderful…

Developer Bonus XP Publisher En Masse Entertainment Format PC, PS4, Switch (tested), Xbox One Release Out now We’re only in February, but the ‘unlikeliest tie-in’ category for this year’s Edge awards has surely already been sewn up. Following its effortful adaptation of the third season of Stranger Things, Bonus XP is back with another game based on a Netflix original, in this case the lavish prequel to Jim Henson’s ’80s fantasy classic. But where Stranger Things 3: The Game launched mere hours after the series’ premiere, this is a spin-off whose story runs parallel to a show that debuted six months ago; one that, despite glowing reviews, never quite seemed to capture the cultural conversation. And while Stranger Things’ 16bit style was in keeping with the series’ retro fetish, it’s…

Developer/publisher Gungho Online Entertainment Format Switch Release Out now (JP, US), TBA (EU) Boy, does this one sting. At various points over the past seven or so years we’ve wanted to shout from the rooftops about our love of Puzzle & Dragons. Yes, it wants your money. Yes, the waifu-collection aspect is off-putting. But it’s one of the all-time great puzzle games, one of unrivalled strategic depth and flexibility. A colossal hit in Japan, it’s never quite stuck overseas, and we’d hoped that PAD Gold, the series’ Switch debut, would remedy that. In the unlikely event it has any effect at all, the opposite seems more likely. In fairness, this is not quite Puzzle & Dragons. The chief sources of inspiration are the moderately successful spin-off anime, and Puzzle &…

Two months in to 2020 and news of the next generation of consoles is tantalisingly thin on the ground. By this time of year in 2013, we’d already had our first look at PS4; as we send to press, at least, Sony is still saying nothing of substance about PS5, and it appears nothing is imminent (though rumours of an imminent Wired cover continue to circulate). Microsoft is similarly keeping its powder dry until, current betting suggests, the week of GDC. Both companies are getting much better at keeping secrets – the bulk of the developers with whom we’ve had quiet words of late are also in the dark – and there’s an element of brinksmanship at play, each side wary of giving the other an advantage by showing its…

COMIC Assassin’s Creed: Bloodstone Volume 1 bit.ly/acbloodstone The Assassin’s Creed games’ forays into the modern world tend to divide opinion – into ‘meh’ and ‘put it in the bin’, in our experience. Still, the first volume of Assassin’s Creed: Bloodstone, translated from French to English, takes a valiant swing at making Animus lore engaging. The story revolves around hacker Tomo Sakagawa as he sifts through the memories of fellow Assassin and CIA operative Aleksei Gavrani. The chilly blues of current-day Tokyo and the khaki greens of war-torn Vietnam background darker themes – the adverse effects the Animus can have on its users, for example. Complex stuff, then, and not all of it successful, but we hope Ubisoft is paying attention to the depth that these comics draw out of an…

Hello! I’m Sam. I make videogames, most recently the literal videogames Her Story and Telling Lies. With the latter I showed terrible foresight by committing to a game name that would later become one of the more excruciating memes of the 21st century. No, papa. For this first column I thought I’d take on the persona of True Detective’s Rust Cohle, and observe that time is a flat circle. It’s often assumed that game stories are on a curve that arcs ever upwards, their complexity increasing along with CPU power. But such a graph excludes many forgotten attempts to do bold things with our medium. As an illustration, and a fun get-to-know-you icebreaker, let’s kick off this column with a brief tour of attempts to push the envelope for interactive…

Developer Atlus, P Studio Publisher Sega Format PS4 Origin Japan Release March 31 We’ve never been so happy to hear trumpets. After sliding between cover spots in Kamoshida’s palace, we ambush a patrolling Shadow, and Persona 5 Royal’s wonderfully brash battle theme kicks in. ‘Take Over’ is a perfect addition to Persona 5’s acid-jazz soundtrack, an audible strut of a tune that might well trump ‘Last Surprise’ (just as Persona 4 Golden’s ‘Time To Make History’ upstaged, er, whatever the other one was). Then again, after having heard the same song for 100 hours on our original playthrough, almost anything else would be music to our ears. Royal is the next refresh in a series tradition, an enhanced edition of the turn-based-battler-slash-life-sim which adds a wealth of things to see…

These days, the world ‘cloud’ conjures up a certain image: of servers humming away in basements, of high-powered tech evangelists building castles in the sky. Indeed, back in 2013 when Stefán Gunnarsson founded and named Solid Clouds, he found it hard to get out from under that assumption. “During that time, anything that was cloud-based was supposed to be the magic solution or whatever,” he laughs. But he hadn’t named his new studio in reference to remote mass-computing power. Rather, he’d named it for the personal journey he was about to undertake. “I was brainstorming, and I imagined just when you’re daydreaming and looking at the sky, and you see something, and it kind of becomes solid and real.” In a previous life, Gunnarsson was a mechanic by trade –…

Developer Typhoon Studios Publisher 505 Games Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now We’ve been unsure about 505 Games for a while, to be honest. The Italian publisher has a fine eye, no doubt, but after the deal has been signed its games have always seemed a little underpromoted. At E3 last year, Control was one of the big hits among the assembled press, but it was quietly tucked away in a meeting room upstairs; the eventual torrent of end-of-year awards that rained down on Remedy’s game had little to do with how much it was, or rather wasn’t, promoted. Yet the messaging around Journey To The Savage Planet has been pitch perfect. When we first touch down in Typhoon Studios’ debut, we know exactly what to expect…

Back in 2014, Raphaël Toulouse and his friend and collaborator Michaël Emond founded Montreal studio Paper Cult. They were looking to prove themselves: Fat Mask was their first game, a basiclooking but mechanically inventive arcade puzzle brawler that won them the government grant they needed to set their sights higher. Bloodroots is the result. Here, Toulouse discusses making the switch from filmmaking to indie dev, and the dangers of wearing too many hats We weren’t aware of Paper Cult as a studio before Bloodroots. What’s the history there? Before being in videogames, I was working in cinema for about five years. And I always had in my mind that I would switch to videogames at some point. I was fed up: you need a giant team to make a big…

Developer One-O-One Games Publisher Daedalic Entertainment Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now Let’s start with that title. Pretty much everything you need to know about The Suicide Of Rachel Foster, good and bad, is right there in those five words. Take the peculiarly specific naming convention it adheres to: one that places it alongside The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter and What Remains Of Edith Finch. Firstperson adventure games, their stories led by mystery, set in the northern states of the US, where you do a lot of walking around… The game very much does what it says on the tin. More importantly, though, there’s the matter of the S-word. There is certainly room for thoughtful handling of the topic within videogames, but advertising the suicide aspect up…

The esports machine of today is unrecognisable as the janky engine that powered the scene back in the ’00s. These days, maintained by Blizzard and Riot, its pistons fire with practised efficiency. Yet the rattling part of the contraption dedicated to player recruitment is in need of replacement. Like the claw crane of an arcade machine, it picks up too little from a pool brimming with potential. “There’s no clear path to pro right now,” Excel Esports director Kieran Holmes-Darby says. “If you play football, you can enter a Sunday League, get promoted, and theoretically make your way to the Premier League. In esports, there’s no clear link between grassroots tournaments and the pro tournaments.” You might wonder why esports needs grassroots support at all. Where would-be footballers might struggle…

“Instead of the story being ‘this game looks neat,’ it became ‘this is the game with the ‘woke bro’ trying to push his hacky politics on us’.”Cliff Bleszinski gets all revisionist about the failure of Lawbreakers. Hurry up with those memoirs, old stick “We have a ton of respect for [Nintendo and Sony], but we see Amazon and Google as the main competitors going forward.”Quite right, Xbox boss Phil Spencer. Amazon and Google don’t have any firstparty exclusives either “Honestly, it’s been a bit of a hard week. Our community has come to expect really amazing things from us and we’ve heard from them that we did not achieve that bar.”Blizzard boss J Allen Brack cops to the miserable launch of Warcraft III: Reforged “Diversity isn’t a nicety – it’s…

A proportional response Although not by any stretch a perfect game, Life Is Strange 2 felt to me like one of the most important I’ve played in a long time and I felt Edge’s review (E341) perhaps underplayed its significance. It’s not unusual these days for games to be softly political, although there’s still a sense of trepidation from most publishers – look at Ubisoft going through contortions last year to avoid the semblance of having any views on anything. But so many videogames still tell stories which are only abstractly connected with the world and how the current climate affects people, particularly if you happen to be part of a minority. Maybe that’s not surprising – part of the appeal of playing is being able to escape the horrors…

How do you make sequels meaningful? Japan’s game industry is a past master at this sort of thing, home as it is to some of the longest-running videogame series around, but its answer to this oldest of questions is often a conservative one. Sometimes, you make them bigger; if you’re lucky, they’ll be better. Often they’re just more of the same with some tinkering in the margins. This month’s Hype crop shows how, for all that Japanese game development has seen a welcome resurgence over the course of the current generation, it finds those old habits tough to kick. That should not necessarily be seen as a bad thing: the reason sequels exist is because people want more of something they liked. And Nioh 2 (p36) is precisely that, a…

Developer Tomas Sala Games Publisher Wired Productions Format PC, Xbox One Origin The Netherlands Release 2020 Around five years ago, Tomas Sala experienced a period of terrible burnout, brought on not just by overwork but the stress of being part of a team. “I realised that I’m shit at working in groups, and I’m not a good leader,” he says. “I’m always the guy who does feature creep, who can’t get the focus. That led to a lot of conflict.” Some of Sala’s turmoil found expression in a “very dark” solo project, developed during his recovery. But as he put his life back together, finding new love and becoming a father, the darkness gave way to something hopeful – the image of a bird, swooping and plunging across the water.…

Developer Crema Games Publisher Humble Bundle Format PC Origin Spain Release TBC Someone, somewhere, was bound to make it at some point: Crema Games, an indie team from Madrid, has gone ahead and done it. Temtem is, to all intents and purposes, a massively multiplayer Pokémon game playable on your PC. Its developer isn’t shy about its main inspiration, invoking Nintendo’s super-franchise on every bit of promotional material out there. But our first clue that this monster-collector may not be exactly what we’re used to is when we choose our starter Temtem, as Professor Konstantinos tells us how he acquired each creature. As we study Meleetype monkey Smazee, the professor proudly announces: “I won it in a pub brawl.” Nintendo fans, we’re not in Kanto any more. Still, much of…

Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale and current joint holder of the Booker Prize, told Time magazine in 2012 that storytelling was “built into the human plan.” “You’re never going to kill storytelling,” she said. “We come with it.” And as it survives, it adapts. Since Atwood first won the Booker Prize in 2000, videogames have, for many people, become the primary route into other worlds. A January report from the Entertainment Retailers Association showed UK consumers spent nearly £3.8bn on games in 2019, more than the country spends annually on books. Yet videogame narratives languish behind their counterparts in print. Novels sell on the strength of their plot, characters and writing; in games, story is often secondary to action. For every Life Is Strange, there’s a Fortnite. For…

STILL PLAYING Mario & Sonic At The Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 Switch Sega’s tie-in for this summer’s festival of sport is, to put it politely, an absolute stinker, so when a member of the Edge brood asks for help with a certain troublesome event, we rather wrinkle our nose. It’s the long jump. The game is full of baffling control schemes, but this adheres to Track & Field house style; within minutes we’ve put the kid on top of the leaderboard. He’s in raptures. The battery trick’s going to blow his mind. Hades PC Well, so much for that New Year’s Resolution we made to kick Roguelikes. We thought we knew what to expect from Supergiant’s first foray into the genre, and those expectations have certainly been delivered. But the…

He may have quit his Edge column after selling Typhoon to Google, but we managed to persuade Alex Hutchinson to talk to us one last time before he disappears into the motherbrain to help drive Stadia’s firstparty efforts. Here, Typhoon’s co-founder and creative director talks about how a group of gamedevs go about making something funny. Comedy is subjective. Could a game like this get made in the approval system of, say, Ubisoft or EA? I really don’t think so. Even with 505 Games we had discussions about, you know, is it funny? ‘I don’t find this funny. I ran it past the French team, they didn’t find it funny, but the Germans did.’ It’s the death of comedy, to overwork it. Trying to keep that sense of spontaneity was…

Developer/publisher Rebellion Developments Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now From Romero to The Walking Dead, zombie stories are hardly ever actually about the threat of the shambling horde. They’re about the threat of us, the ways we turn against each other in times of crisis. Man is the real monster, and all that – and rarely is this more evident than when you’re knee-deep in a multiplayer session of Zombie Army 4: Dead War with a squad of people you would previously have called friends. Dead War is nominally a cooperative game – the four of you are fighting back the same waves of enemies, working towards the same end-of-level objective – but there’s not a huge amount of teamwork involved. Perhaps this stems from Zombie Army’s…