Innehållsförteckning för February 2022 från Edge

At last, here it is. Analogue Pocket, a handheld console which natively runs cartridges for Game Boy and Game Boy Advance, and supports Game Gear cartridges with an adaptor. With future support promised for Neo Geo Pocket Color and Lynx, Pocket will soon cover much of handheld gaming history up to DS and PSP. But once its doors open to developers to add other systems to its roster, it will be in a position to cover much more of gaming history, including 16bit consoles and potentially beyond. And it should have been released months ago. But such is the reality for any company trying to manufacture electronics during the pandemic. “One day I will tell the story of the nightmare spectacular of what we have gone through to get this…

As a member of the Recording Academy, Rosen self-nominated the arrangement, with Silverman’s permission. He had no expectations (“worst case scenario, it’s on there and maybe a couple of people listen to it as they’re voting”) but was understandably proud of his band’s work. He believes videogame music is overdue appreciation from award bodies. “Film scores, Broadway cast albums and songs from shows, the Great American Songbook – we have these bodies of works that have been recognised as canons of musical material for years and years,” he says. “It seems high time we give this vocabulary of musical works the same professional treatment and adoration, and love and respect to these composers who have defined the sound of our generation, like those composers did for generations past.”…

Game Men In Black Manufacturer Sega What is the cost difference between licensing a movie property at the very height of its powers versus when its sheen has faded somewhat? That question may have been tossed around Sega’s coin-op division a few times recently, with its Mission Impossible cabinet now followed up by a Men In Black lightgun game. Using a ‘Tri-Barrel Plasma Gun’ mounted on the machine – with support for a co-op partner by your side – the action sees you taking down aliens across locations recognisable from the movie series. As a redemption game, it’s not the most sophisticated experience to have ever emerged from Sega’s labs, but if you’re on the hunt for tickets, it’s a lot more entertaining than Big Bass Wheel and its ilk.…

One of the finest examples of corporate euphemism in cinema comes in Jurassic World (2015): “Ladies and gentlemen, due to a containment anomaly, all guests must take shelter immediately”. “Containment anomaly”, of course, is PR speak for “the dinosaurs have escaped”, just as Elon Musk’s talk of a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” was an ironic acknowledgment that one of his rockets had blown up. The word ‘anomaly’ itself comes from the ancient Greek for “against natural law”, so – and I’m sure the screenwriters intended this nuance too – the whole of Jurassic Park was an anomaly from the beginning. There have, I regret to say, also been many containment anomalies during my time with Jurassic World Evolution 2, while I was forgetting that raptors can climb fences or distracted by…

Moss: Book II PSVR The biggest problem with the original Moss was that it finished just as it seemed to be hitting its stride. The promise of more of the same is welcome, then, as Quill – one of the most adorable videogame heroes of recent years – finds herself hunted by a winged tyrant. Gran Turismo 7 PS4, PS5 With Forza Horizon 5 winning plaudits and awards aplenty, Sony’s flagship racer has its work cut out as it finally nears the starting grid. Not long to go now: here’s hoping Kazunori Yamauchi and Polyphony Digital make it as exciting a finish as Hamilton versus Verstappen. Triangle Strategy Switch Fresh from the outstanding Dungeon Encounters, we turn our attentions to another Ronseal-titled Square Enix RPG. With its deeply tactical position-based…

As the Rusty Lake universe grows, game by game, it must surely become harder to keep track of where everything fits. Doesn’t resurrecting a character introduce extra headaches, not least when you’re dealing with two time periods? “We have timelines on paper and in our heads, where [everyone] is at certain moments,” Looise says. “And time – the past and the future – is always a bit of a theme of Rusty Lake, and very interesting for game mechanics.” But he admits that he and Ras are also reliant on their community on occasion. “There’s this online fan-made wiki, which is really useful for us,” he adds, admitting “it’s better and more extensive” than the studio’s own. “More than 200 pages!” Ras enthuses.…

Developer The Pixel Hunt, IKO Publisher Arte France Format PC Origin France Release 2022 Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition has fired the imaginations of writers and the public for more than 170 years. The explorer left England in 1845 on a quest to find the fabled Northwest Passage, but neither he nor the 130 or so crew members on his two ships returned. The Victorians were gripped by newspaper reports of search parties sent to look for the men. Tantalising clues slowly emerged. Three makeshift graves were found on Beechey Island in the Nunavut territory of Canada. In 1859, a cairn was discovered with a note saying that the ships had been locked in ice for two years, and the remaining crew members were attempting to walk inland. Human remains…

Toadhouse has already released two vignettes set a year before the main game, with two more planned. Each focuses on NPCs you’ll meet in Fernweh, such as Sophia, a transfeminine arcade owner learning about what it means to be a confident woman. They originated from character exercises Linayre felt were too good to waste, but there were other reasons for releasing them. “I wanted to show people that they could trust me to address heavy subjects like self-harm and anxiety in a very respectful but authentic manner,” she explains. These hour-long games were also quicker to release, helping to fund the full game – since Linayre knew a visual novel focused on LGBT and mental-health issues would be, in her words, “a risky project”.…

FromSoftware has been making stepwise progress toward Elden Ring’s calibre of open-world immersion for over a decade. Miyazaki and his team have done this by gradually peeling away the contrivances that games have been forced to rely upon to work around their technical limitations. The method by which players access the unique locales tucked behind Demon’s Souls’ Archstones wasn’t fundamentally different from selecting discrete levels from the overworld map of an 8bit classic such as Super Mario Bros 3; in contrast, observe the way that Elden Ring removes the fog-gate contrivance from its boss encounter with Flying Dragon Agheel. As you gallop across a waterlogged marshland in central Limgrave, an orchestral prologue breaks the silence. Then a guttural screech from overhead as you notice the scaly menace soaring to earth,…

After a few weeks digging into the average game, we’re accustomed to the tip of our shovel clattering against bedrock. Yet there is so much complexity to metabolise in the Soulsborne games that it’s possible for enthusiasts to devote years of their lives to mining them for raw material and not exhaust them – or the curiosity of their audiences. Elden Ring appears set to offer a motherlode even more abundant than its predecessors. If FromSoftware, historically gun-shy about spoilers and keen on preserving the mystique of its games, felt perfectly comfortable stuffing more than ten boss fights into Elden Ring’s closed beta, how many climactic fights await in the final release? As a few players noted, Elden Ring’s network test felt as though it had more to offer than…

Fizbin loves telling stories. The studio’s name itself is inspired by one, about a card trick called the ‘Fizbin drop’ – so difficult, legend has it, that magicians might break their hands performing it. Since it set up in 2011, the German studio has spun plenty of its own yarns, with five commercial releases, including three this year (Minute Of Islands, Say No! More and Lost At Sea), that offer a diverse mix of character studies and satire. It’s a range that reflects the company’s commitments beyond game development – and the backgrounds of its three founders. The first story they told together, though, was quite traditional: The Inner World, a point-and-click adventure born when the trio met as students at an inter-university workshop. Game director Sebastian Hollstein and Mareike…

Developer/publisher Xbox Game Studios (343 Industries) Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series (tested) Release Out now Welcome to Zeta Halo. Well-worn dirt tracks giving way to tall grass, slate cliffs topped with rows of pine and, off in the distance, towering alien structures silhouetted against the gentle sunlight of a mild winter’s day – it looks, well, a little familiar. This setting, in all its Pacific Northwest beauty, is just one of the many ways 343 Industries is directly quoting Combat Evolved, as it attempts once more to recapture the glory of Xbox’s most-lauded shooter. Gone is any suggestion of Spartan Locke or the Prometheans; in its place, a classic adventure that puts an AI in your head and a well-rounded pistol in your hand. It all feels like an…

Alx Preston’s health issues are well documented, not least by his previous game. If Hyper Light Drifter’s story was about disease, Solar Ash seems to touch upon treatment – those syringe-like protrusions on Dregs and Remnants suggest a painful reminder of what recovery can entail. Its storytelling, however, veers between saying too much and too little. Sure, Drifter’s tale could feel opaque at times, but its wordless narrative, heavy on visual metaphor, left room for player interpretation. Solar Ash’s story seems purposely vague until it suddenly isn’t; interjections and observations from Rei and various NPCs puncture the atmosphere of mystery, while the identity of Echo (a huge, almost deific figure who meets with Rei between Remnant encounters, and ‘rewards’ her by destroying part of her shield) is rather heavily telegraphed.…

Littered among the standard fights, as well as the obligatory text events, you’ll find a few objective-based missions. These might task you with protecting a cowering ambassador who can be pushed and kicked out of danger’s way without taking damage, or taking down every member of a gang except the undercover informant, who is also attacking you so as not to blow their cover. These are technically optional, with bonus rewards for pulling them off (something every fight has – normally just a case of finishing in a set number of turns or killing enemies a certain way). Still, in these cases, it’s hard not to prioritise the mission, not least because – a bland ‘pick up the briefcase’ mission format aside – they are wonderfully characterful set-pieces.…

These 99 floors host an extensive menagerie: ectoplasmic wyverns, spectral ninjas, slavering werewolves and a great many more. Each may be contained within a tiny box, but Ryoma Ito’s portraits are remarkably rich and vivid – as, indeed, are the brisk bios of the various dungeoneers. From a grief-stricken vassal to a faithful hound and a greying warrior deferring retirement one final time, backstories and motives are detailed in a few short paragraphs – snapshots of characters that feel finely drawn in every sense.…

Dap’s story elements are deliberately abstruse: between levels you see cutscenes where a large cloaked figure wearing a deer skull apparently plots against you. Meanwhile, you’re spirited away to the safety of a celestial hub, where you can use the resources you’ve gathered to plant and grow trees. Once they’re large enough they can be pollinated by dap spirits, with a strange, horned ally encouraging you to grow them all - this seems, indeed, to factor into the ending you get.…

Toem’s camera is nowhere near as sophisticated as the one offered by Umurangi Generation but – like jumping from a good SLR to a cheap disposable camera – the results hit a much more consistent baseline. There are a mighty two camera attachments to unlock here: a horn for getting subjects’ attention, and a tripod that opens up the kinds of photos you can take. The latter is one of the most gratifying unlocks we’ve encountered this year; a couple more wouldn’t have gone amiss.…

Whether due to issues with the original text or differences between the translations used for the English-language patch, the manual and the various guides, terminology in Frame Gride can be inconsistent. While the mecha are usually referred to as knights, there are several places in the fan-created patch where ‘knight’ is used for the player and the mecha is called a squire – a term that is more typically used (including in the patch) for the independent support drones that can be summoned during a duel. While not much of an issue in the long run, it does highlight the importance of good localisation work, even in games with little text. Just one or two vital phrases being mistranslated can create headaches.…

When it comes to acquisitions, 2021 brought nothing on the level of last year’s Bethesda buyout. In fact, Microsoft made no gaming acquisitions at all, leaving Sony to pick up the slack. In March, Sony took joint ownership of Evo, the fighting-game esports organisation, and followed it with the acquisition of five studios: Housemarque, Bluepoint, Nixxes Software, Firesprite and Fabrik Games. There’s a difference in strategy from Microsoft’s purchases here, with Sony bringing allies closer. Housemarque and Bluepoint have made some of the only true PS5 exclusives in Returnal and Demon’s Souls, while Firesprite and Fabrik, responsible for PSVR’s The Persistence, are studios built from the ashes of Studio Liverpool. How many people can say they’ve been bought by Sony twice?…

Taber sees Analogue OS, Pocket’s operating system, as a separate platform that will open the doors to playing classic games with save-state management, game databases and much more. It will feature in its future products, such as Analogue Duo (PC Engine), and may be back-ported to older ones, such as Mega Sg and Super Nt (Mega Drive and Super NES). It will also exist as a PC and Mac app which Pocket can connect to via its USB-C port for managing thirdparty cores and sharing save states and settings.…

Videogame awards season is here – the time of year when I hunker down and play through the year’s big games in a marathon crush for various jury duties. For a few weeks I live like a game reviewer, overwhelmed by how damn long games are. Flashback to the year when a fellow juror told me: “You really need to play at least 70 hours of this game to understand why its narrative is so special!” Normally this makes me grumpy towards bloated triple-A blockbusters and my heart soars when I hit a short and unique game. However, this year the triple-A blockbusters are pandemically thin on the ground and so I am left to get grumpy at the short and unique games. This is not the kind of behaviour…

Alas, the build we receive for the opening episode doesn’t feature the music video for the already-released single Follow/Unfollow, in which Itsu finds herself looking around LA for her phone. These animated sequences are more reactive to your input, as we see during a short glimpse of a couple of later videos. In one, moving your mouse pointer creates a trail of destruction across a vast dining table, then shatters sculptures as Jey strides through a museum exhibit. An upbeat synth-pop track, meanwhile, sees Carter imagine themselves on an idyllic beach, as you scatter palm trees around them and sweep away clouds. A subsequent scene, in which they surf through a violet-hued dreamscape, could easily be an offcut from Sayonara Wild Hearts.…

Developer/publisher Casa Rara Format PC Origin Canada Release Q1/2 2022 During the early stages of the pandemic, many of us found ourselves with time on our hands, and set about finding ways to fill it, often in the form of new hobbies. Syd Lazarus, comms manager of Montreal-ased indie studio Casa Rara, says a lot of their friends started playing games or finding something tactile with which to occupy themselves. “I wonder what it is about those times when you’re left to your own devices, how you start just creating,” they say. “Or maybe it’s about no longer fearing that judgement of what the outside world thinks.” For Mini Maker: Make A Thing creative lead Ruben Farrus, this “wonky workshop simulator” was as much about highlighting the joy of creativity…

Maurin says the Franklin expedition was an important focus at the start of production, but this changed. “After spending a lot of time chatting with Inuits and exchanging about what the game was going to be, we realised they didn’t find the Franklin expedition as interesting as we did, because that’s a very colonialist way to consider this part of the world – only being interested in northern Canada because of the Franklin expedition. You overlook the civilisation that was here for centuries before European people ventured into those territories. So the Franklin expedition lost some of its weight in our story, in favour of other elements that were more Inuit sourced.”…

The commercial imperative of making a game that appeals to the widest possible audience would seem to be incongruent with the Soulsborne formula of demanding players achieve technical mastery or die – and die and die – trying. The closest thing to a conventional easy mode in the Dark Souls series has always been the magic build. Like bringing a gun to a knife fight, there is a guilty pleasure in spamming Soul Arrows from range while a hollowed undead stumbles in vain toward you, unable to close the gap before dying. Elden Ring offers an even wider tray of options for the cheese connoisseur who finds close-quarters combat overly stressful. While perched atop Torrent, gallop within range of an earthbound footsoldier and let the magical blades of Glintsword Arch…

Format Android, iOS, PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Developer/publisher Night School Studio Origin US Release 2016 Most cousins, it’s probably fair to say, aren’t quite as close as Night School co-founders Adam Hines and Sean Krankel. Bound by a shared love of films and games, the two have spent nearly their entire lives together, sharing a dream of making games that is almost as old as their friendship. While Oxenfree wasn’t the first game either worked on, it was the first they’d worked on together. The road there – as is often the case in the videogame industry – involved many detours. For Hines, in fact, it led through a shoe shop. His graphic novel Duncan The Wonder Dog introduced him to many writers in different industries, but success was…

Big Brain Academy: Brain Vs Brain Switch Clearing that pile of shame sometimes means neglecting newer, shinier games, and there were several for which we didn’t quite have the room (or time) this issue. While few would have bet on Nintendo’s other brain-training series matching Dr Kawashima for longevity, Brain Vs Brain makes a reasonably convincing case for its existence via its online Ghost Clash mode. Here you compete against the ghost data of other players in a series of mental races: sure, it was probably a kid of primary-school age we just trounced, but we take these wins where we can get them. Nix Umbra PC This brisk, intense firstperson occult horror sees you stumbling through a pitch-dark forest, seeking refuge from barely glimpsed terrors. Trees suddenly burst into…

For the first time, Master Chief has to earn his toys, by collecting Spartan Cores from around the map and spending them in a skill-tree menu. Although ‘tree’ implies branches; rather, this is five independent rows of upgrades, one for each of the abilities accessed during the campaign. Expanding the Grappleshot’s functions feels right, the new capabilities opening up in step with our growing dexterity, but we’re less enamoured of the 15 per cent boosts in shield capacity. These aren’t tangible in play, and worse still, having stubbornly refused to push a single point in their direction, we’re left wondering whether failures are our fault or a result of the game being unable to balance its encounters for varying amounts of health.…

Beyond the mysteries of this planet – the answers to which won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has ever consumed any stories about lost alien civilisations – the real driving force of The Gunk’s narrative is the relationship between Rani and Becks. Space explorers more in the vein of the Nostromo than the Enterprise, they’re a pair of labourers wrestling with worries about money, regrets from the past and cheap second-hand tech. In other words, they’re easy to relate to – and thus to like. There’s a classic dynamic to the partnership, with one hothead explorer and one fretting pragmatist, which provides exactly enough fuel for a few hours of conflict, leaving us rooting for them to kiss and make up.…

The eventual decision in the Epic Games v Apple case fell in favour of Tim Cook’s company rather than Tim Sweeney’s, on all counts but one: the judge ruled that Apple cannot prohibit iOS developers from linking players outside of their apps to alternative payment mechanisms, a small but significant victory for Epic’s stated mission to let developers avoid the App Store tithe on every in-app purchase. After its initial appeal was denied, though, Apple was then granted an indefinite stay, on the eve of it needing to change the App Store’s rules. Epic has yet to respond; maybe a parody of the old iPod ads this time?…

Tony Award-winning composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Charlie Rosen has certainly seen his fair share of orchestral arrangements. But when Jake Silverman gave the NYCbased band leader the chart for his version of Meta Knight’s Revenge, Rosen was taken aback. First and foremost, he was impressed with Silverman’s work – with one caveat. “I remember looking at the chart and being like, holy shit, this is so hard to play,” he laughs. Rosen tried to rebalance the arrangement, and make it easier for the jazz orchestra he leads, The 8-Bit Big Band. “Still, everybody was like, ‘This is the hardest chart I’ve ever played.’” To which Silverman bursts into laughter. The two are unsurprisingly in good humour as we talk to them over Zoom, with Rosen currently working in London and…

“While this can seem trivial at first… it changes the videogame industry by introducing concepts like uniqueness and control, and thus value distribution in our game worlds.” Yikes. Ubi is serious about blockchain, as product director Baptiste Chardon attests at the launch of Ubisoft Quartz “It’s always tough for me because I have to be Switzerland now… It’s always tough when a game gets nominated and people get annoyed at me.” No man is an island, although Geoff Keighley is a country “Although the results are terrible, sadly I don’t think it will be a great surprise to a lot of industry professionals.” The WGGB’s Samantha Webb captures a mood as a survey reports that 53 per cent of game writers have seen or experienced bullying at work “We are…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a 12-month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate membership Across the universe Reading your article on NFTs [E365], I found myself agreeing with the sceptical tone. NFTs in games seem daft at best: a solution looking for a problem, or potentially the worst innovation to come at the worst time; pointless, environmentally damaging tech bobbins for grifters to hype while we’re looking down the barrel of potential climate catastrophe. That said, I couldn’t help but try to think of what an interesting use case might be, and I think I’ve found one: NFTs should be a curse. What about a scenario where, if you’re killed or invaded in a Dark Souls-type game, ownership of…

As the late, great Terry Pratchett once wrote, “Only presumptuous fools plan. The wise man steers.” Videogames rarely match a creator’s original vision entirely: radical shifts of approach during development are not uncommon, often causing unforeseen delays. Someone may come up with a brilliant idea that changes everything, or a combination of circumstances may force a developer to adapt. In the case of Ruben Farrus, creative lead on Mini Maker: Make A Thing, the first seed of an idea suddenly sprouted as he was leaving for GDC to pitch an entirely different game – one that has since been canned. By the time he returned from the event, his team had assembled a prototype: “It was really, really bare bones,” he tells us. “But already, I saw a spark.” The…

“We’re very lucky to be able to choose small ‘wow’ moments to highlight while holding back things we know are even more bombastic,” Maja Moldenhauer says about the studio’s approach to teasing new additions – which explains why Studio MDHR is largely keeping the new weapons and charms under wraps. Jared, though, says sharpeyed viewers will spot a few in the latest trailer and suggests they’ll open up new strategies. “They were a really fun design challenge, as we wanted to ensure we were thinking outside the box and surprising players who knew the original game’s weapons and charms inside out, while not pushing them in the direction of being gimmicky,” he teases.…

Developer/publisher Rusty Lake Format Android, iOS, PC, Switch Origin Netherlands Release Q2 2022 The Rusty Lake series has always had something of the uncanny about it. These may be single player games, but their eerie ambience provokes a sensation of being watched: when you play them, you feel you’re never entirely alone. This time, that extra presence is very much corporeal: The Past Within is a puzzler made for two, the first of the series designed solely for cooperative play. In one sense, it’s not actually all that new: transmedia project Cube Escape: Paradox was part game, part live-action short film, two worlds colliding in one game. This feels like a natural extension of that idea, as one player investigates a large cube with various buttons, switches, symbols and dials…

The sheer range of parts that you can attach to your creation, which grows as you progress, naturally makes this a highly replay able game. But to further mix up challenges, you can deploy different types of cards. There are perks that give you more time or remove the ticking clock entirely. Some let you include an extra piece family for an individual task, while ‘mood cards’ might, for example, let you “build on a beach at sunset”, Farrus says – “or with a different soundtrack”, Lazarus interjects. There are gold cards that twist the rules: piece roulette demands you include five specific parts, while there’s a speedrun option, too. It’s about providing a bit more structure for those who thrive when limitations are imposed, Farrus says.…

Developer Toadhouse Games Publisher Team Toadhouse Format PC Origin US Release 2022 Not every visual novel is a dating sim. While some, such as Hatoful Boyfriend and Doki Doki Literature Club, subvert this expectation, it’s hard for the uninitiated not to assume the genre is predominantly romance-based – or something more explicit. It’s a stigma that Toadhouse Games founder, lead programmer and writer Alanna Linayre often finds herself having to explain: “I have a visual novel. It’s not sexual, it’s about friendship. Not that type of friendship!” But games have a tendency to reduce the bonds of friendship or romance to quid-pro-quo interactions, where giving sufficient attention or saying the right thing is enough to become best friends, or more. Linayre is also disappointed in the genre’s tendency to focus…

Elden Ring’s creative director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, is hunkered down in his office at FromSoftware’s Japanese HQ, bundled up in a black padded winter vest. Despite a perennially youthful face, his demeanour this evening is unmistakably sober, alert. Behind his desk are shelves lined with the colourful spines of books he has no time to browse, the gap between his shelves and the ceiling stacked with board games he has no time to unbox and play. Crunch has arrived. There are just over two months left before launch, and pressure is mounting. Miyazaki’s crowning achievement up until now, Dark Souls, was recently honoured via public vote as The Ultimate Game Of All Time at the Golden Joystick Awards, besting nominees such as Super Mario 64, Tetris and Half-Life 2. The Dark…

Though Breath Of The Wild inspired awe with its bristling grassy plains and beckoning faraway peaks, the existence (and necessity) of its paraglider testified to how much of the game’s sprawl was content to remain flyover country. And the emptiness of Fallout 3’s Wasteland was at least thematically appropriate given its post-nuclear predicament. The density of Elden Ring’s world furnishing, by contrast, boggles the mind. The Lands Between pulse with life, the drama of a world teeming with motion prior to your arrival. You join in medias res. The fine-tuned pacing of Elden Ring’s exploration, discovery and conflict cause the hours we spend with it to evaporate as if minutes. It’s not just that engaging moments are packed tightly together; it’s the wider spectrum of variety and duration. Groveside Cave…

Since it was founded in 1999, Arkane Studios has built a reputation for crafting deep worlds and systems, but Deathloop has proved something of a breakout hit. Game director Dinga Bakaba discusses how our game of the year differs from its precursors, and how that affected its reception both publicly and internally. Congratulations on Deathloop landing the top spot in Edge’s 2021 Awards – we’re sure this won’t be the only such recognition it receives. How has the game’s reception felt on your side? We are super happy that the game is recognised like that. If we were to go back and tell Dinga of three and a half years ago… he wasn’t cynical enough to laugh, but he would have been surprised. Not because we didn’t want to make…

How would you describe the Oxenfree soundtrack? Nostalgic, but for an ephemeral thing or occurrence, or somewhat undefined point in time. What kind of pitch did Night School give you? There wasn’t so much of a solid pitch as much as there was a mutual discussion about what style would fit and what influences might be appropriate. The more I came to know about the game, the more that glitchy, static-y textures seemed like a perfect fit. We looked at both historical scoring from the likes of Tangerine Dream and John Carpenter and also to contemporary artists who mine some of those same influences. Folks like Boards Of Canada, Bibio and Pye Corner Audio. When you’re essentially making a soundtrack full of noise, how do make sure a track doesn’t…

It’s early December as we write this, which means alongside our regular helping of reviews, it’s also time for an annual catch-up. We’ve spent a few delightful hours lately with charming photography game Toem, framing our subjects with great care to get the perfect picture. It’s had us thinking about where videogames place their focus – this month we’ve got examples that pull back to offer a broader scope, and others that zoom right in, paying closer attention to the fine details. This issue’s blockbusters are inevitably thinking about the bigger picture, though Battlefield 2042 can be too much of a sprawl. Doubling the player numbers has meant expanding the warzone – and when there are no vehicles in the vicinity, it can be a long old walk to where…

Battlefield V had an answer to PUBG with Firestorm; this year’s entry is in conversation with Hunt: Showdown instead. The result is Hazard Zone, a mode in which several four-person squads compete with each other and defending AI to retrieve and extract data drives. Their reward for doing so? Currency to fund better gear for their next run. Permadeath contributes some tension, but there’s nothing as characterful as Hunt’s monster bosses here, and maps reused from the other modes add to the sense that Battlefield 2042 is a barebones release. That said, Hazard Zone’s squad setup makes your small victories seem larger, and it’s the one place where the game’s climate-change premise can be seen to rumble overhead, the storms inexorably sweeping in.…

Heavenly Bodies takes an inventive approach to difficulty settings, with three options that don’t change the tasks but tweak the control scheme and physics. Assisted adds the ability to point your astronaut’s arms in a direction, Superman style, and kick their legs to swim through space – a useful accompaniment to the breaststroke technique that saves us many times in Regular mode. Newtonian disables all that in favour of more slavishly loyal physics and an even stricter challenge.…

As a rule, the larger the lifeform in The Eternal Cylinder, the more disturbing its design. Indigenous beasts appear almost familiar yet impossibly alien; giraffe-like necks peel to reveal huge tongues, and great clamping molluscs hunt from beneath the sand. These are joined by the servants of the cylinder, Hieronymus Bosch-style hybrids of recognisably human parts and machinery. And what of the colossal snakes twisting down from the heavens? They’re all part of a hideously beautiful work.…

Boss fights are highlights, pitting you against aggressive mecha as smaller enemies keep you on your toes. While there’s a recommended order to tackling them, subsequent playthroughs encourage you to experiment – whether by starting afresh with all items intact, sequence-breaking using your knowledge of Arcadia’s shortcuts, or tackling late-game enemies right away. Combined with hidden movement and combat mechanics revealed via experimentation, secretive text logs or in one case via an Achievement hint, it’s flexible enough to reward return visits.…