Table of contents for September 2020 in Edge

Quite often in the business of videogames, it’s not what you do that counts, but the way in which you do it. Indeed, as we continue the lead-up to the next generation of consoles, there’s growing scepticism within the industry as to whether we might be reaching a point of diminishing returns when it comes to what new tech can reasonably do for the latest era of games. Gone are the days, after all, when fresh hardware enabled as obvious and dramatic a jump as the one from 2D to 3D. Are slightly more realistic puddles really all we can expect in the years to come? There are some who, in the wake of Sony’s PS5 reveal event, would posit exactly this. (And they might tell you the puddles didn’t…

A comet is on course to destroy a tourist town in Backwoods Entertainment’s intriguing Resort. While its thematic twists echo Twin Peaks, the game’s striking use of colour, with deeply hued sunsets and dramatic mountain mists, also recalls Firewatch. “Firewatch is so iconic in how it managed to combine the beautiful, illustrated style of Olly Moss with a 3D world and great narrative,” says illustrator Matthias Nikutta, though he admits the low-poly style is down to his inexperience working in 3D. “We had to choose a style I felt comfortable making, but that would work in delivering the story. A stylised look seemed the right fit, so we could get away with hiding our weaknesses or turn them into a feature!” Prepare to investigate Resort in 2021.…

CLOTHING BlackMilk Pokémon Collection bit.ly/pokemilk BlackMilk, known purveyor of high-quality leggings, damn near broke the internet when it revealed its latest collaboration to be a Pokémon-themed clothing collection. Any enthusiast knows how difficult it is to find fashionable videogame-centric pieces; suddenly, here was a wardrobe’s worth. We’re particularly taken with the Magikarp short overalls, which play with a Hokusai-style print: turn the top down, and you’ll find Magikarp’s evolution, Gyarados. The standout items, however, are the Eevee Evolution floral bomber jacket and matching cuffed pants, which combine to make a printed co-ord that wouldn’t look out of place at Paris Fashion Week. The first wave sold out in record time – sign up to be notified about restocks, and cross your fingers. VIDEO FreeDVDBoot: PlayStation 2 Exploit Demo bit.ly/ps2exploit Super…

There is an uncelebrated literary form that lurks in the genesis of many of your favourite things. Unlike valued blueprint texts such as the screenplay or the libretto, this form is rarely glimpsed in public, instead discarded with the other debris left behind in the creation of a videogame. I’m speaking of the ‘Example Walkthrough’. Less fashionable now, this was once the bedrock of publisher pitches, selling the dream in the absence of anything playable. In celebration of this form, here is an example walkthrough for Charles Dickens’ PS4 classic Great Expectations. The player has completed the tutorial and taken Pip across the marsh to the churchyard. In the corner of the screen a mission objective reads: “Visit Parents’ Grave.” They push up on the left stick to creep towards…

Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Montreal) Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Canada Release Summer How wonderfully French of Ubisoft to nonchalantly roll up halfway through 2020 with a battle royale shooter. Yes – long after most of the other big studios have had their fun with the hottest genre of 2017, Ubi Montreal has finally arrived with its own offering. On paper, this free-to-play effort makes total sense: Ubisoft’s expertise in live-service games is not to be sniffed at. Nor, indeed, is Montreal’s pool of design talent, which gave rise to Rainbow Six Siege, one of the best tactical shooters in recent memory. It’s a combination that seems set up for success. So why is Hyper Scape only just happening now? For senior producer Graeme Jennings, it comes down to the studio’s desire to…

Developer/publisher Systemic Reaction Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X Origin Sweden Release TBA Jurassic Park got it so wrong. Just when we’d started to think of dinosaurs as majestic, even lovable, creatures, we find ourselves overwhelmed by terrifying hell-beasts intent on razor-clawed murder. Awaiting extraction at the end of a mission, waves of mutant dinosaurs besiege our position and we are finally overwhelmed as a vicious pack of velociraptors makes short work of our three-person team, picking us off one by one. Clever girls. “There has been a kind of defanging of dinosaurs,” explains Second Extinction lead producer Brynley Gibson of his desire to “bring the terrible lizard back”. Dinosaurs are indeed the stuff of nightmares in Systemic Reaction’s online multiplayer FPS. They have taken over the Earth, and…

Game director Control clearly pulls from a lot of different influences. How does the inspiration process begin for you? I play a lot of games, watch a lot of movies, read comic books and so on – it’s a huge part of my life. And when you do that, there are tonnes of things that leave this little lingering thought of something behind in your head. What were some of the key inspirations you looked to when developing Control? Me and Sam spent a lot of time talking about New Weird as a genre. We read the same books and talked a lot about those books. That was the initial inspiration. But at the end of the day, it’s a rich complex world, a universe within a building, and I…

There are no new ideas under the sun, as the old saying goes, but there are certainly new ways to implement and express them. This issue’s selection may draw from a range of sources, but several of them manage to be much more than the sum of their influences. Valorant (p96) is as good a place as any to start, since of all this month’s games it surely has the biggest boots to fill. Actively welcoming comparisons with Counter-Strike and Overwatch is a heck of a gamble for any game, but Riot’s shooter walks the walk, boasting the character and tactical depth to earn a place alongside those giants. In spite of the toxicity of its player base, it’s a runaway hit – and its momentum looks likely to continue…

Developer/publisher George Batchelor Format iOS Release Out now Stressed? Join the club. The human response to stress has always been at the heart of game design: for many years, interactive entertainment has worked on the assumption that we all react to adversity with either aggression or fear. Bird Alone is the latest game to foreground not our fight-or-flight instincts, but the inclination to ‘tend and befriend’ our way out of hardship. Okay, there is some flight. This is, essentially, a philosophical Tamagotchi on your phone – but instead of an egg, you’re looking after a desperately lonely parrot. Unlike a Tamagotchi, you won’t have to regularly feed it or clean up its effluent (that’d be too much of a busman’s holiday for many, we imagine). But it’s a needy thing…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins an SN30 Pro+ controller, compatible with PC and Switch, courtesy of 8BitDo Atrocity exhibition I realise joining the chorus of criticism of The Last Of Us Part II feels like something of a pile-on, for players if not reviewers, but having just completed the 20 gruelling hours, I have to second Anand Modha’s letter (E347) on what a waste of talent the whole enterprise is, in so many ways. What lesson are we exactly supposed to learn from a piece of art – and it is visually stunning – that essentially fetishises brutality, particularly when it seems to be telling you how bad killing is before forcing you to do it over…

By now – and especially given the events of this increasingly hellish year – we’re all well aware that with great power comes great responsibility. None more so, perhaps, than some of the games featured in this month’s Hype section. Increasingly, videogame developers are concerning themselves with the true nature of power – not wielding machine guns or throwing bolts of lightning, but using one’s influence to meaningfully affect the lives of others. Cris Tales (p40), for instance, puts the consequences of your spacetime-altering actions on glittering display, dividing the screen into thirds showing the past, present and future. Your every action changes the world around you in realtime; whatever you do in the present visibly ripples into both the past and the future. In combat, you can weaken enemies…

Developer/publisher Codemasters (Cheshire) Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X Origin UK Release October They do say we Brits are obsessed with the weather, but it’s more than small talk when it comes to Dirt 5. Haring around a Norwegian fishing village in a VW Touareg, muscling our way through the pack, the sky suddenly darkens and the weather takes a turn for the apocalyptic. Snow lashes the windscreen while our traction gets decidedly hairy – we lose sight of the track completely until a god-level burst of forked lightning illuminates the scene so shockingly, it makes us drop our controller. Most motorsport sims attempt to replicate varied driving conditions, but if this weather is anything to go by, Codemasters’ claim that the latest Dirt game will be…

While exploring the Undead Burg less than a week after Dark Souls’ launch, Patrick Todd found something weird – a docile creature that resembled a semi-hatched egg with insect legs. It stood there as if waiting to be slain, white tendrils atop its head lilting like seagrass. Though Todd had passed that exact location many times, he’d never spotted a creature there before. “I was kind of like, ‘What the hell is that?’” he recalls of that first Vagrant encounter. “It was just such a weird, baffling moment. I didn’t fully appreciate Vagrants until later on. It just stood out as a rare event. Their design is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, you might call it ‘cute Lovecraft-ian’. The Good variety looks like an egg with legs. There’s a…

Luck, the old saying goes, is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. So while Coffee Stain Studios’ breakthrough came early, it would be wrong to think of it as simply good fortune. Formed by nine students from Skövde – a small town whose university’s comparatively large game development programme attracts students from all across Sweden – the studio’s first game was conceived while they were all in their second year, and launched less than six months after the company was founded. “Basically, half of us graduated and half didn’t,” CEO Anton Westbergh laughs. It’s easy to understand why they were so ready to drop out. Sanctum, a firstperson shooter/tower defence hybrid, started life as a mod for Unreal Tournament. The group entered it into Epic’s Make Something Unreal contest, and…

Developer/publisher SIE (Sucker Punch Productions) Format PS4 Release Out now For the second time in as many months, we wonder how our Share button is still with us. Tsushima is a virtual photographer’s dream; in fact, the island feels as if it’s been built with its own photo mode in mind. This is quite simply one of the most picturesque game worlds we’ve ever seen. It’s beautiful even before the wind whistles across its pampas grass and through its shrine gates, but when the breeze whips up a storm of maple leaves, sakura petals and more, it’s wondrous to behold. Elsewhere, you’ll duel beneath waterfalls and next to crashing waves, under an autumnal canopy, inside a cave amid floating lanterns and in fields of purple chrysanthemums and red spider lilies.…

When they made Shadow Tactics, the team at Mimimi Games created a tribute to beloved games of their youth, resurrecting a genre niche that had all but fizzled out. Its success let the studio take the reins of one of the series it was paying homage to in the first place – and try to bring it to a whole new audience, borrowing from and responding to games that have emerged in the years since. With this kind of game having all but disappeared in the early 2000s, it seems likely a lot of players will be coming to Desperados III from turn-based tactics games like XCOM. The realtime element means there’s a lot more to juggle – how do you keep from overwhelming new players? People who play tactics…

Developer Gearbox Software Publisher Sierra On-Line Format PC, PS2 Release 2001 Alyx Vance isn’t Half-Life’s first female protagonist. Nor is she its second. In fact, the VR heroine follows in the hazmat boots of Gina Cross and Colette Green. Like Gordon Freeman, both are Black Mesa scientists who discover a sudden and vital talent for shotgunning aliens. It was Cross who developed the HEV suit that Freeman wears, and trained him in its use; it’s her detached voice that intones “major lacerations detected” when the rake-like claw of a zombie connects with Freeman’s shoulder. Don’t judge yourself too harshly for not knowing their names: gaming’s most famous pair of doctors remain Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, the co-founders of Bioware. Cross and Green, by contrast, have faded over time, like…

One of the curious consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the enormous explosion in popularity of an esport that is also one of history’s most venerable games: chess. In March, the royal game started becoming hip on Twitch, thanks to the sterling efforts of elite grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura. As quarantine took hold around the world, Nakamura streamed for hours, performing party tricks such as playing blindfold (calling out moves without ever seeing the board), or solving hundreds of tactics in ‘puzzle rush’ mode. He managed to get streamers such as Overwatch guru xQc hooked on the game too. Quite bizarrely for fans of this normally sedate sport, on May 18 Nakamura was the top English-language streamer on the whole of Twitch. What had just happened? In the meantime, it…

Hollow Knight: Silksong Switch After leaving a trail of clues on Discord, Team Cherry afforded us a tiny glimpse of a new NPC, The Huntress, who fancies feeding our insides to her hungry brood. How relatable – we’re devouring every scrap of info about the sequel to one of the best Metroidvanias ever made. Returnal PS5 Having officially put battle royale game Stormdivers on hold, Housemarque will follow Nex Machina with this thirdperson roguelike shooter, in which a middle-aged space pilot battles bullet-spewing aliens. By PS5’s launch, we may even have stopped wincing at that title. Star Wars: Squadrons PC, PS4, Xbox One This dogfighter promises to be the best thing since Rogue Squadron. 5v5 multiplayer and a story set after the Battle Of Endor means no time to party with…

Developer Dreams Uncorporated, SYCK Publisher Modus Games Format PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X Origin Colombia Release November With the world perhaps finally waking up to its responsibility to work towards a better future, Cris Tales’ premise seems particularly apposite. Protagonist Crisbell can view the past, present and future simultaneously, and hop between all three, providing a means to alter events and improve the lives of those around her. This dazzling time manipulation mechanic is presented within the familiar framework of a side-scrolling JRPG, but given its own identity with lavish 2D hand-drawn art that reflects the people and culture of the developer’s native Colombia. It’s also the device by which its creator has been able to add layers of depth and social commentary to the game without it coming across…

Developer/publisher Strange Scaffold Format PC Origin US Release 2020 Xalavier Nelson Jr had become somewhat cynical about game development. Having taken on a succession of parachute jobs, he’d begun to wonder whether making games could be enjoyable any more. When NYU Game Center asked him to contribute to its annual No Quarter exhibition, then, the approach came at the perfect time: “If someone says, ‘We’re going to give you money to do basically whatever you want at whatever pace you want, just have it ready by a certain time’, you do it!” Yet it wasn’t until he found himself gazing up at an eight-foot-tall Jack Russell terrier asking if he’d like a ticket to Uranus that Nelson Jr experienced the “spark of creative joy” that convinced him that yes, making…

STILL PLAYING Super Smash Bros Ultimate Switch It was only a matter of time before Switch’s second-best fighting game took a cue from the numero uno. Yet perhaps professional jealousy has got to Sakurai: it’d explain why Min Min is arguably the weakest of the DLC fighters, and nigh-on useless at close quarters. Maybe we just need a bit more practice: her unparalleled range gives her a decent distance game, albeit mainly against slower, heavier characters. Either way, she’s far more at home in the Ramen Bowl, to which we soon return. Bioshock Switch In unfamiliar times, it’s familiarity that appeals most. And so, in the midst of a hectic move, we return to Rapture for the umpteenth time. The Switch port doesn’t skimp on visual flair, including the realtime…

Jin Sakai is a forward-thinking kind of samurai. He instinctively understands that a principled approach isn’t going to work against such a dishonourable opponent. He’s ahead of his time in other ways, too: he has, after all, managed to invent the haiku some four centuries before it actually existed and six before the term was coined. Anachronistic as its poetry may be, Ghost Of Tsushima’s moments of reflection are welcome: culturally and thematically meaningful if not historically accurate. And they’re a rare point of difference in a sandbox game that too often falls back on familiar ideas – with familiar shortcomings. To give the developer its due, it has at least attempted to put its own spin on established open-world tropes. Take that guiding wind, for starters. Swipe upwards on…