EdgeDecember 2018的目錄

This industry ticks along to a certain rhythm, and the longer you spend in it the more you learn to keep time with it. GDC turns into E3, then Gamescom and, this month, Tokyo Game Show; still to come amid the rush of autumn review code is PlayStation Experience. Then we put our feet up for a bit and ring in the New Year before the cycle begins anew. Only rarely does something come along to disrupt it. New hardware yanks the industry out of its comfort zone, certainly, but still in a very organised, controlled and collaborative way. There might be the occasional new event – PS4 was unveiled in New York; Xbox One, disastrously, in Redmond – but by and large a new hardware year is much the…

Founded in June 2017, Dangen – a contraction of the English words ‘Dandy’ and ‘Gentlemen’ that also happens to mean ‘conviction’ in Japanese – is an indie-game publisher that is run like a small record label, promoting independent games that have some kind of unifying quality. The six-person outfit, based in Osaka, specialises in signing western games that it believes will appeal to Japanese audience, a demographic that has, company co-founder Nayan Ramachandran claims, historically shied away from western indie games. “The Japanese resistance comes from western games being so different for such a long time” Ramachandran’s job title is ‘content connoisseur’, but his role is perhaps best-described in music industry terms: he acts as an A&R manager, signing games that he believes fit the label and its fans. In…

“There are so few women recognised in gaming, let alone esports, and an organisation that claims to champion women should be the first to celebrate their success. Frankly, it’s a slap in the face.” Esports host Elle Osili-Wood puts it mildly after a Women In Games Esports award goes to… a man, obviously “Currently, we do not have any plans regarding a new handheld device. We will manufacture PlayStation Vita until 2019. From there, shipping will end.”SIE Asia boss Hiroyuki Oda drops the guillotine on what feels like Sony’s last handheld “I have decided to take an extended leave of absence and give my mind and body the time they need to properly mend… I’ll be back.”Legendary Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu takes time to recover from a recent illness.…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a year’s subscription to PlayStation Plus, courtesy of Sony Interactive Entertainment Fort knocks For gamers of a certain age, “cross play” refers to the feelings experienced whilst trying to get off Level 5 of Manic Miner. These days, the words usually appear in sentences including “Sony”. As a resolutely singleplayer gamer, I’ve been ambivalent about Sony’s stubborn stance. That was until my kids’ pester power got me into Fortnite. Great game, but no local co-op – unless you have multiple devices in the same room. Imagine our family’s excitement to learn of Fortnite coming to Switch! Picture the scene of father and daughter booting up the PS4 and Switch to play together…

You probably missed it in the endless churn of the videogame news cycle (more on that later) but Typhoon recently announced that we have signed with the lovely people at 505 Games to publish our first game. This is monstrously huge news for us, and while probably not that interesting for most, it prompted more than a few questions from friends in the development community. Most prominent amongst them was why we would sign with a publisher at all. Why not just self-publish? Doesn’t a publisher just take a percentage of your income in the new world of self-publishing and online distribution? Couldn’t you just eat ramen noodles, move back in with your parents and make a game without any interference at all? What could a publisher offer you that…

Developer/publisher Techland Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Poland Release TBA Don’t think of Dying Light 2 as a zombie game, or a survival game, or even an open-world game in the usual sense. Think of it instead as a playable map editor, an exercise in sculpting the human and physical geography of a pestilent European metropolis – not with a cursor, but with a flying kick. Set a few years after its predecessor’s undead apocalypse, the game is built once again around the three principles of “natural movement” (Mirror’s Edge without the linearity), first-person melee (Mirror’s Edge with squelchier combo finishers) and a day-and-night cycle that alters the threat level. But it places a much greater emphasis on story, and that story is not so much told as embodied…

Mizuguchi’s work since the formation of Enhance Games has been as much about looking back as forward. He is righting old wrongs, making the Rez game that always existed in his head and, now, making a game he first dreamed up over a decade ago (he couldn’t get the licence, and Lumines was born). When will we see something truly new from him? “Personally I feel free from a lot of technical limitations. Engines are getting better, and so is hardware. Ten years ago, 20 years ago, if we had an idea, it was hard to make it real. Now it’s easier. We can be artists… pure creators.” Macdonald points to the lessons learned in Enhance’s games to date, too: Rez Infinite was about figuring out VR and experimenting with…

Developer/publisher Blitworks Format PC, PS4 Origin Spain, US Release 2019 After Derek Yu shipped Spelunky for Xbox 360 and PC in 2012, he took a big break from making games. He’d just become a father, and he was also recovering from the stresses of remaking his freeware GameMaker game with programmer and fellow designer Andy Hull. But Yu wasn’t exactly idle. For a start, he had to look after his new daughter, but he also started writing a book about Spelunky’s development and design, a way for him to unpack his thoughts about its creation. And in it lay the seed for a sequel. “I was essentially doing research on my own game,” Yu tells us. He spoke to everyone involved in its development, and finally read what had been…

The soundtrack is predominantly EDM and chiptune, and features less-known artists such as Tokyo Machine, Hyper Potions and Kitty. “Both of us weren’t into the more old-fashioned kind of music until we played Guitar Hero and were like, ‘This is really cool’,” Curro says. “So we’re hoping for Spin Rhythm to have that effect too.” While many of the artists are with record label Monstercat, licensing other music has been a challenge. But Super Entertainment has a plan to sidestep the legal issues that games such as Beat Saber and Osu have had. “Our goal is to have you log into Spotify or Apple Music or whatever, and you can stream any track you like and make a level to it, and then share it with people. We haven’t really…

Sohei Niikawa graduated from Tokai university, where he studied history, in 1996, and his first job was at the then three-year-old Nippon Ichi Software – though had any of the game pitches he sent to other companies been accepted, he would never have joined this small tabletop-game maker based in unfashionable Gifu. Initially responsible for sales and marketing, his first design job was a mahjong game, but his career took the turn he’d long sought with Rhapsody, a musical RPG that launched in 1998. The game that has defined his career, the revered strategy-RPG Disgaea, is Nippon Ichi’s most successful series, and Niikawa was duly promoted. After being named managing director, overseeing all development, in 2008, he was given the role of company president in 2009.…

Nick Rudzicz Programmer How do you pronounce Gnog? We pronounce it 'nog' as a short for 'noggins'. Originally, it was called Gnah, but at some point we got a cease-and-desist letter from a retail and distribution company that was also named that. I'm always fond of saying their letter had an embossed letterhead, so we knew that we were out of our depth. So we batted around ideas, and Gnog came up as another onomatopoeia. We realised, that makes sense – it’s a gnoggin. But where did Gnah come from? It related to how the levels were ending: every time you solved a puzzle, each head would open its mouth and you would go inside to another level, and it would make this sort of 'gnaaaaaah' sound. But then we…

In this era of games as services – we do wish the industry could come up with more elegant ways of phrasing these things, by the way – publishers want us to see their games not as playthings so much as pastimes. They want us to live within these worlds for months, and ideally years. In certain cases, we’re happy to oblige. But this is a two-way street, and our continued engagement, if these games are to have it, must come at a price. As this current trend continues, it is perhaps time to establish some ground rules. First, if we are to return every day, you must give us something different, and worthwhile, to do. A colossal world is great; a busy one, even better. But if all you…

You might remember Datto from E317, when one of YouTube’s most prominent Destiny creators told us he was starting to consider a career change. The changes Bungie made in the transition to Destiny 2, in a bid to have the game appeal to a wider audience, had put him in quite a tough spot. The game simply didn’t require the guide videos on which he’d made his name, and which paid his bills. There were far fewer people to watch them anyway, as players turned their backs on Destiny 2 in droves. It’s early days for Forsaken, but the tide already appears to have turned. Over the course of his first run at the new raid, Last Wish, Datto’s Twitch subscriber numbers doubled. When the end boss finally went down,…

A short way into Wandersong, you’ll encounter a young woman who seems more of a traditional hero type, partly because she’s referred to as such. Yet The Hero doesn’t always seem, well, heroic: her goal also involves visiting the Overseers, though her plans are rather less diplomatic. Yet one short sequence in which we step into her shoes feels like a jarring misstep. This is, after all, a game that consciously adopts a gentler approach than most, even as Miriam suggests using her powers for a more forceful solution to confrontations. For a brief time, the right stick becomes The Hero’s sword arm, and there’s nothing remotely musical about what follows. Giving the player no option but to partake in the violence undermines its pacifist stance.…

Amid the tangles of wires, flashing hardware, scribbled scientific formulae and slightly over-egged mood lighting, we catch glimpses of a regular household. It’s not a big place – all boxy rooms, claustrophobic hallways and locked doors – and so you’re rarely far from the item you need to advance the story. Even so, a couple of moments are poorly signposted, while it’s not always easy to distinguish key items from clutter, temporarily breaking the game’s spell as you try to figure out what you’ve overlooked.…

To help raise the profile of its games, Dangen has borrowed a marketing technique more usually associated with the book publishing and fashion industries: the celebrity endorsement. The company has carefully targeted some of the titans of the Japanese videogame industry, such as Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night creator Koji Igarashi, with its first run of games. Even if the celebrity doesn’t offer up a quotation that can be used on the box, sometimes just the effect of having a well-known creator play one of the publisher’s games at a public event is enough to build word of mouth among Japanese players. It’s also a clever way to connect western indies with their heroes.…

Street Fighter belongs in arcades. It’s where it all began, of course: those of you of a certain age will remember just what it was like to walk into an arcade in the early ‘90s and be immediately assaulted by those loud, booming special-move vocal samples. Capcom’s decision to restrict Street Fighter V to home consoles was puzzling to start with, and if we’re honest we’ve never quite seen the logic in it. A well-placed fighting-game-community source once opined to us that Capcom was doing it to try and make the Street Fighter competitive scene a bit more interesting. Until Street Fighter V came along, Asian players were dominant, thanks in part to their thriving arcade scenes; when you knocked off work for the day you could head down to…

There are plenty of things to enjoy about the new videogame exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, although its actual title is a bit annoying. ‘Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt’, it says. What if I don’t want to disrupt, but just want to shoot some bad guys in the face from a very long distance while crouching in a prickly shrub? Disruption is, of course, the great unexamined virtue of our age, a rhetorical import from Silicon Valley, where every new startup must boast of how it is going to ‘disrupt’ the laundry business, or higher education, without first having bothered to understand how the system already works in the first place. That aside, the exhibition demonstrates brilliantly how much sheer artistic craft goes into modern videogames, with a rich…

Very few people are good at something from the get-go. True mastery can take hours of practice, dedication and even some sleepless nights – and that’s just magazines. Videogames can be just as demanding. Plenty are purposefully designed not to offer shortcuts to victory: if you want to be the best, its creators say, you’ll earn it by the sweat of your brow. But this month’s clutch of Hype games offer a helping hand to motivate you in your quest for finesse. You catch more flies with honey, after all. Sometimes the allowance is a mechanical touch, as in slick and silly shooter My Friend Pedro (p40). Fresh from working on LittleBigPlanet and Tearaway, its creator wanted to develop his next game for a smaller subset of players determined to…

Amid all the talk of Dying Light 2’s faction rivalries it’s easy to forget about the zombies, who now slumber indoors at day and roam the city by night. Their nests often contain rarer varieties of loot, so you may wish to visit after the sun goes down. Techland won’t budge on additional details just yet, as it wants to keep the focus on the social sandbox and zombies, naturally, don’t make for exciting interpersonal relationships. Smektala promises, however, that the game will still contain plenty of horror. Zombies are faster and more aggressive this time once roused. Thankfully, you can use UV lights to keep them at bay, though access to those lights may depend on who you’re friends with.…

In the place of the original’s strangely lonely atmosphere, Yu wants to establish a warmer, more nurturing vibe in the sequel. He wants new players to better feel they can overcome Spelunky’s challenges, which, he assures us, will be just as demanding as ever. “Part of that is me naturally injecting my life into my work,” he says. “It’s something I’ve done in previous games but it’s going to come out more now I’m a parent versus being a bachelor.” He recognises the similarities between teaching players and teaching his daughter. “There’s a temptation to step in, but if I do, they’ll always depend on you and won’t grow to be independent.” If Spelunky 2 has a message, it’s that life is tough, but you have family and friends to…

Developer A Brave Plan Publisher Bossa Studios Format TBA Origin UK Release TBA Growing up in Austria in the ’80s, game director and A Brave Plan founder Georg Backer is no stranger to conspiracy. “I remember the Cold War towards the end – it was everywhere,” he says. us. “We were close to West and East Germany, it was in the daily news. It was just one of those things; it was just there. Disinformation, and all that stuff during the Cold War, was really intriguing.” Thus began a lifelong fascination with conspiracies. “I’m not one of those people who says, ‘Oh, the moon landing was fake’,” he says. “But I do often wonder what goes on behind the curtains of big institutes.” The ex-Lionhead developer’s latest casts you as…

We are all of 30 seconds into Red Dead Redemption 2 when we realise that Rockstar is burying the lede again. When we think of its predecessor, we remember the glorious sunsets, the sun-parched grass of the New Austin frontier, the baked-clay plains of Mexico. In the Red Dead of our memories, there is rarely a cloud in the sky. We did not expect to begin Rockstar’s first game in five years, one sold on the promise of another adventure in the harsh burning sun of the old west, trudging through a storm in snow that comes up to our waist. Rockstar also did this in Grand Theft Auto V, you may remember. The opening prologue was a quick tutorial heist set in overcast, snow-driven countryside, meaning players had to…

Elite packed a galaxy into just 32K of memory, the BBC Micro’s heavy hardware constraints inspiring some pioneering invention from two self-taught Cambridge University undergraduates, Ian Bell and David Braben. After parting ways, Braben continued to apply his programming ability, fascination for science and technology, and keen commercial insight. He founded what’s become one of the UK’s largest independent studios, Frontier Developments, makers of an eclectic range of games, including Kinect-powered playthings such as Kinectimals, detailed management games such as Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 and colourful platformers such as LostWinds, while also embarking on projects like The Outsider, which were just too big for their time. He also helped to launch Raspberry Pi. Now, with 35 years in the industry behind him, Braben remains just as ambitious as when he started…

Founded 2009 Employees 13 Key staff Jake Kazdal (founder, CEO), Raj Joshi (studio director) URL 17-bit.com Selected softography Skulls Of The Shogun, Galak-Z: The Dimensional, Galak-Z: Variant Mobile Current projects TBA Not many success stories start with a betrayal. Yet that’s precisely how 17-Bit began. Jake Kazdal was the art director at Zombie Studios, the Seattle-based developer on Blacklight: Tango Down. In his spare time, he’d been working on something – something that, eventually, would lay the foundations of a studio he’d been talking for years about setting up with one of his best friends. He’d taken the Zombie gig after leaving his job at EA in Los Angeles so he could be in Seattle, where the pair intended to set up shop. Then, the friend – if you can call…

Developer Bungie Publisher Activision Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now Blow out the candles and call off the vigil: Cayde-6 is very much alive. Sure, he pops his clogs early on in Forsaken’s campaign, but his death at the hands of Uldren Sov is the spark for a thoroughly entertaining space-western revenge tale. His little cubby-hole in the Tower social hub, from which he spent Destiny 2’s first year selling treasure maps, handing out Flashpoint rewards and quipping like it was going out of fashion, stands empty. And his fellow NPCs speak in saddened tones about the ally they’ve lost to Destiny’s latest big bad. But dead? That’s impossible in a game built on repetition. With the campaign completed and our comrade avenged, we load into one…

Unfortunately, Frozen Synapse 2 is one of the most bug-infested games we’ve played in a while, at least in the days before launch. These stretch from relatively minor niggles with pathfinding to game-breaking issues. The procedurally generated maps can spit out rooms that trap a soldier behind an errant piece of level geometry, while some of our multiplayer matches loaded in to permanent black screens or forced us to replay the same turn while our opponent ploughed ahead unaware. In a game of such ambition and scale, these problems are perhaps understandable – but after an extended development period that included a delay of two years, we wouldn’t necessarily recommend holding your breath in the wait for a fix.…

Your hospital has its own needs. As well as providing a place for your staff to unwind, you’ve also got to consider their career advancement in some detail – training is a much more detailed concern, here, than it was in Theme Hospital. You can also run marketing campaigns to do everything from enhancing overall perception of your hospital to attracting patients suffering from specific illnesses: a good way to play to your diagnostic strengths. You are continually presented with challenges by your staff, external referees and even players on your friends list: succeeding requires forward planning and an ability to adapt on the fly. Both, in turn, rely on your ability to ensure that – whatever you’re working on – you’re generating a profit.…

Developer Capybara Games, Superbrothers Publisher Capybara Games Format iOS, Android, Windows, Switch Release 2011 To play Sword and Sworcery is to wrestle with its myth. Not just the myth that unfolds within it – the tale of a nameless Scythian, whose search for an old forbidden tome unleashes a vaporous evil that can only be banished by gathering the pieces of a triangular artefact, the Trigon Trifecta – but the myth the game surrounds itself with, its theatrical and combative sense of its place within the evolution of an artform. Witness the declarations of intent offered by its credits screen – a blend of stridency and spaced-out self-deprecation redolent of a 20th-century poetry manifesto – which labour to situate Sworcery’s innovative, music-led design against its adoration for canon-toppers like Zelda.…

Created in partnership with Alaskan tribes, 2015’s Never Alone was a powerful attempt to preserve and celebrate indigenous culture through the mechanics of a platform game. Following its release, publisher E-Line Media received a call from an unexpected quarter. The BBC had enjoyed Never Alone’s handling of documentary materials, and wondered if the company might do something similar for the forthcoming second series of Blue Planet. “They invited us to sort of shadow the production,” E-Line’s CEO Michael Angst says. “To look at the huge library of footage they’d put together, speak to the scientists and see if we could mine that for an original story, but sort of continue from where the last episode talks about the future of the ocean.” As its creators acknowledge, Beyond Blue is a…

SERVICE Nintendo Switch Online bit.ly/nswitchonline After enjoying over a year of free online multiplayer, we now have the pleasure of paying for it. There are a few extras: immortalising game saves in the cloud was long overdue, but you’ll have to stay subscribed to retain access, as well as to the handful of the NES games included. Members also get special offers, including exclusive items such as the new NES Joy-Cons. It’s reasonably priced at £17.99 a year, and the value proposition improves further if you plump for an eight-person family membership. Still, it’s a shame that much of the younger playerbase that’s sprung up on Switch now finds itself on the other side of a paywall. Fortnite is an exception to the rule – a smart move, that –…

You need to start with a bang. As an editor, a thing I impress on writers is the importance of the humble intro. We can talk about tone, angle and flow later on, but if your first line doesn’t grab me then it’s not going to grab the reader, and we might as well all pack up and go home. It’s a dying art, the intro, especially online, thanks to Google’s tacit insistence that opening paragraphs should be tailored to search algorithms first, and reader engagement second. The opener is one of print’s few remaining luxuries. It’s vital we get it right. This is a universal principle across all forms of entertainment. There is a reason, for instance, that Bond flicks start with an action sequence. It’s critical that games…

Call Of Duty: Black Ops IIII PC, PS4, Xbox One We missed the beta, but are eager to find out whether the fuss around Blackout is justified, or merely the standard new-release hype that always surrounds COD’s multiplayer somehow. A polished, big-budget BR mode should be a winner. Dark Souls Remastered Switch One day, we assume we’ll finally get bored of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s masterpiece, but it won’t be before we’ve played it on Switch. After a painful delay, an October release date is sub-optimal for a remaster, but in a quiet winter for Switch-owning grown-ups it may yet sell as well as it deserves to. Diablo III: Eternal Collection Switch Long rumoured and leaked months ago, belated confirmation of this during the recent Nintendo Direct was nonetheless like manna from…

Pedro the banana started as a way to deliver a tutorial and draw attention to Ågren’s Flash game. “Curiosity’s a powerful thing. When you put a gun next to a banana… Looking at Flash sites, there’s hundreds of games of varying quality releasing every day. I needed something that can stand out.” When he decided to create a more fully-featured game, however, the banana suddenly became a bit of a head-scratcher. “It became this interesting thing where I had to think, ‘Why a banana? Why this and that, and how can I justify all this stuff now?’” At least, after having signed a publishing deal with Devolver Digital, he doesn’t have to worry much about drumming up interest in the game: “People know that if it’s Devolver, it’s good stuff.”…

Developer/publisher Super Entertainment Format PC, Switch, Android, iOS, PSVR, Vive Origin Australia Release 2019 Super Entertainment is really leaning into the DJ fantasy. For one, we’re playing Spin Rhythm on real DJ equipment – our left hand thumping a Roland SPD One kick synthesiser, our right twirling a Casio XW DJ1 wheel. For another, we’ve just somehow pulled off a move too flashy to be true, following up a wild spin of the wheel by stopping it expertly on the correct colour note to continue the song. It’s a brilliant bit of fakery, the game detecting our on-beat tap on the wheel and autocorrecting the landing. All we’ve done is hit a note in time, as in any other rhythm game – but it feels so thoroughly cool. Part of…

Thanks in large part to Backer’s Bafta connections, The Bradwell Conspiracy boasts a star-studded cast, including Assassin’s Creed Origins actor Abubakar Salim as the voice of the AI guide, and Jonathan Ross, who lends his distinctive tones to the induction’s narrator. The role of Dr Amber Randall was a long casting process, Backer says: “She needed to be funny, she needed be authoritative. Holly and I were so clear about the character that we were like, ‘How are we going to find this person that’s so in our heads?’” When Rebecca LaChance walked in for the last audition of the second casting call, however, they knew they had their actor. “She walked in and read the first few lines, and I was like, ‘Holy shit!’ It was such a relief.”…

STILL PLAYING Fortnite Switch The new Soaring 50s mode makes for a refreshing change for the necessarily clunky Fortnite. While the 50v50 setup ensures the real fight begins quickly, the ‘soaring’ component means rounds play out like cartoonish Titanfall skirmishes. The sense of momentum is uncharacteristically sublime, as we chain grapples, bounces and glides to fling ourselves in and out of danger at speed, elusive as a buttered stoat. Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp iOS With 2019’s Switch instalment miles off, we return to find Nintendo’s maligned iOS excursion has come along quite nicely since launch. There’s a garden to tend, and fishing tournaments to participate in. Even the animals feel less like soulless material-vending machines, referencing real-world events such as the Harvest Moon appearing in the sky. The new fortune…

Another headline addition is Gambit, a new mode in which Bungie tries for the first time to bridge the divide between PvE and PvP. Two teams of four load into separate PvE instances and compete to kill enemies, summon a boss and be first to defeat it; to complicate things, opponents can also invade each other, which becomes especially awkward in the final stages of a match – the boss gets a chunk of health back whenever the invader scores a kill. It’s a bit confusing, and can be tremendously irritating, especially in solo queue. But it’s great fun, and the most novel addition to the Destiny formula since Trials Of Osiris.…

The game’s persistent grimness proves wearing, with Eidos Montreal putting Lara through an ordeal that feels discomfitingly sadistic in places. Her trials range from being viciously mauled near the beginning to near-drownings, and a sequence that sees her crawling over the bodies of freshly sacrificed locals – yes, we’re exploring tombs, but the corpse count here puts Kratos to shame. It has a soundtrack to match its nastier edge, too: Brian D’Oliviera’s score could quite comfortably slot into a contemporary horror film, generating a chokingly tense atmosphere whenever Lara heads underground, without offering much light to balance the shade. These tombs should provoke feelings of trepidation, yes, but also a sense of awe. This manages the fear factor, but that’s your lot.…

While each new season brings stark visual differences – tumbling leaves in autumn, misty fog in spring and the crisp blue of an August sky in summer – it’s when the swirling winds of winter arrive that the race action changes most drastically. While rain naturally affects handling and braking zones, it doesn’t have quite the same impact as snow and sleet does. Every surface suddenly becomes a skittish dance with death and you have to consider more than just on- and off-road portions of the map, as a deep freeze opens up new roads to race on. In case you were wondering, no, there’s absolutely no point taking a Ferrari Enzo for a skate on the newly iced Derwent Water.…

That watercolour art style is prettier than ever, with lots of delightful little flourishes: we’re particularly enamoured with the delicate pencil marks you can glimpse at the edge of the frame beyond the painted area. If budgetary limitations are apparent in the narrative interstitials, they’re still well-presented, with animated conversations captured within comic panels. They’re certainly far less static than Revolution, in which characters stood perfectly still to talk at one another, and much shorter, too. There may be a lot of these scenes – and there’s more beyond the central narrative – but they’re cut into manageably brief chunks, selected from a diary-cum-scrapbook which serves as a touching memento of your journey so far. Skirmishes, meanwhile, are preserved as a rudimentary top-down map.…

Whoever’s responsible for curating Life Is Strange’s soundtracks ought to be given a raise. The music used in Roads is note-perfect, from the bouncy opening of Phoenix’s Lisztomania to The Streets’ On The Flip Of A Coin thumping from Sean’s sound system in his room: in a lovely touch, he’ll sing along with the chorus as you wander about looking for party supplies. Composer Jonathan Morali returns to accompany the contemplative moments – a rest on a bench, a cloud-watching session – with bittersweet swells of acoustic guitar.…

Sword & Sworcery may have embraced Twitter at release, but seven years on Capybara’s feelings have soured in the face of fake news and harassment. The Switch version notes that, “Social networks have proven to be catastrophic for society, so we now encourage isolation and regretful reflection.” Creative director Kris Piotrowski observes more baldly that, “In the year 2018, Twitter is a vat of toxic waste and we want nothing to do with it,” a sentiment that rings rather hollow for being tweeted with appropriate hashtags. Sword & Sworcery thus stands as a bookend for the fad of social media integration in games. Where once it treated tweeting as a cheeky extension of its mythology, now it can only throw up its hands in despair.…