EdgeApril 2021的目錄

Though traditional game-based arcades have largely died out, recent years have seen the growth of new kinds of social gaming venue. The US craft beer chain Barcade established one expression of modern arcade gaming when it opened its first venue in Brooklyn in 2004, and the concept has proliferated throughout most North American and European cities since. There’s also been the growth of free-play arcades such as Arcade Club, which has three permanent UK venues charging one-off entrance fees for unlimited plays on the classic machines inside. Setting themselves out as family-friendly, many are led by enthusiasts and collectors, but COVID-19 has hit this category especially hard, with several, such as Retro Arcade in Warrington, announcing their permanent closure.…

Collaborator Sam Chiet – previously best-known for the Desktop Goose app – is the “delightfully empathetic madman” behind the game’s unlikely Kinect functionality, Nelson tells us. During development, he’s also managed to get the game working with a DDR mat and a Wiimote. So, given the Market Crashers influence, we suggest, how about a 3DS port? “I literally cannot say which platforms aren’t possible, because who knows any more?” he laughs, before pausing momentarily. “The stylus would work really well for tapping between things really fast. But don’t give me or him ideas, please!”…

Death. The undiscovered country from which no visitor returns. Unless you’ve played a videogame, in which case you will have returned plenty. I was thinking about which game mechanics stood out over the past year and the one that had lodged in my head was how Amnesia: Rebirth tackles player death. Player death is a tricky thing in all cases but is perhaps most tricky in horror games, a genre whose primary concern is mortality. Telling a story is first and foremost about making an audience believe in some fictional things. The stakes are what we use to hack our body’s survival mechanisms (especially ‘the imagination’) into caring. The threat of death is the most primal of all threats, and if we get the imagination thinking that we’re in a…

Gaynor considers the various buildings you’ll poke your nose around as the game’s main levels, with the journeys in between as evocative interstitials. “They aren’t so fleeting that they’re not an important part of the game,” he says, but they offer a useful breather from “exploration and finding all these things that you’re having these deep back and forth discussions about.” They’re useful as a pacing device, he adds, providing a natural ebb and flow to the story. “We asked ourselves: what are the parts of the road-trip experience that crystallise the memory of what it means? It’s not Desert Bus, it’s not a literal representation of it – it’s finding that balance, while making it feel like we do justice to the driving part of a road trip.”…

Developer/ publisher Autoexec Games Format PC Origin Canada Release Q3 2021 Helping others, it’s often said, starts with helping yourself – a maxim to which Autoexec Games’ latest firmly adheres. For protagonist Teagan MacPhee, it begins with a glimpse of someone who looks uncannily like her, looking down from a nearby hilltop. She’s sprinting away from a ravening horde when this doppelgänger intervenes, hurling a sparkling projectile at one before targeting a gnarled oak tree with a different curse – one that sees it bend over and reach down with its branches to scoop up a few of these snarling creatures. Her saviour, it turns out, is Teagan herself – and there’s a spine-tingling moment to come soon after, when you get the chance to act out the miraculous event…

The hub from which you access the various worlds is effectively a Chao Garden by another name – only here you’re invited to look after the Tims, a group of tiny, adorably pudgy critters that are hungry for the gems you bring back. You’ll scatter these among like-coloured flowers for the diminutive pets to scoff, before leading them to a kind of hamster wheel that they’ll leap aboard, spinning it to unlock the first part of the Tower O’ Tims, which appears to be a miniature playground of sorts. The more they interact with it, the more it grows; whether it’s purely decorative or it leads to somewhere new and exciting isn’t immediately apparent, but watching them hop around the place is a cute distraction nonetheless.…

Like the Tank in Left 4 Dead, the Ogre has its own soundtrack. Back 4 Blood is great with a headset, especially if you have a mic to talk to teammates. Through a background noise of ambient distant screaming and the screeches of the enemies in front of you, sound is used to communicate what’s going on. Friendly comms cut through with clarity, and the mutant zombies are recognisable from their barks alone. Precise directional sound also helps, along with barks from your characters pointing out enemies or ammo. Puddles of hissing acid are still indicated with pop-up text, but that’s more of a tutorial mechanism, and the relatively uncluttered Ul leaves the centre of the screen clear for targeting.…

Oli Clarke Smith Creative director, Kaizen Game Works How and when did you come up with the idea of the trials for the game’s payoff? They weren’t in at the start, but we realised that in order to have a satisfying mystery narrative, you needed a way to express that back to the game. We knew we wanted interactive characters, and that meant we needed to have dialogue mechanics – and as soon as you start putting that in and allow the player to start keeping track of the mystery and what they find, they need a way to say, ‘This is what I think happened’. We kicked around a few ideas – we briefly considered if there was any way we could do a text parser, where the player writes…

The lines between good and evil were clearly demarcated in the first videogames: you always knew which side you were on. But as technological barriers have come down, it’s no longer a simple binary affair – that divide is becoming blurrier all the time. These days, there’s nuance on both sides. Take Persona 5 Strikers’ Monarchs, for example: these characters’ destructive choices may have come at a human cost, but in each case they’re a response to personal trauma. Granted, you end up fighting a demonic Shadow form that represents their darkest impulses, but the upshot is a pep talk that encourages them to change their ways; the humiliating contrition that follows is deemed punishment enough for their sins. Talking of both sides, Tim Sheinman’s political satire Conspiracy! aims its…

Little Nightmares 2’s best level changes the rules entirely by making the threat pervasive. It’s difficult to say how without spoiling things, but suffice it to say that it’s all about hiding in plain sight. Though not quite as distressing as the original’s banquet level, the area is a minor horror masterclass with great foreshadowing and some wonderfully unpleasant animations and sound design. This level also sees Tarsier experimenting with combat – there are smaller foes you can thwack with blunt objects, given good timing and a sixth sense for whether your character is pointing the right way. We could have done without these moments, but the checkpointing is generous enough to ease the pain.…

The ebb and flow of chatter and teamwork remains A Plague Tale’s most endearing trait, Hugo’s wide-eyed credulity is the perfect starting point, enabling Amicia to explain the ins and outs of the French countryside as we experience it with him for the first time. Then, as older children filter into the gang, that opens space for deeper ruminations on society, and the back and forth of plans and strategies intensifies. Incidental conversations are rapid and sharp, a means to prick at those class complexes, whether it’s Rodric’s displays of humble gallantry or Melie mocking Amicia like a sarcastic servant. All the while the group bonds through doing and achieving, advising each other as you coordinate routines of turning cranks and pulling switches.…

Nothing illustrates Cyberpunk 2077’s rushed and overloaded development more horribly than the inclusion of light sequences that risk triggering epileptic reactions, as reported by Game Informer reviewer Liana Ruppert, who experienced a grand mal seizure during one of the game’s ‘braindancing’ episodes. The developer has added a new “risk of seizure” warning but, at the time of writing, it is still devising a “more permanent solution”. In the meantime, people affected are invited to stop playing. The incident reflects both developer failure and a lack of legal oversight. In the US, there is no regulation requiring games to be tested for such triggers, nor a requirement to include a warning of potentially seizureinducing material.…

At a time when the game industry’s operational practices are under closer scrutiny than ever, how refreshing it is to talk to someone who’s seemingly hit upon a much healthier, more efficient, more enjoyable way to work. Xalavier Nelson Jr is in buoyant mood as he gives us a glimpse into the making of his studio’s next game, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator. “You’re getting direct access into The Matrix,” he says. The concept was very loosely inspired by the 3DS game Market Crashers (or StreetPass Trader, as it’s known in Europe) and is, in Nelson’s words, “a combination of long-term market dynamics and fast-paced organ trading action.” Your goal is naturally to buy low and sell high where possible, while fulfilling the requests of a range of clients who…

One way of defining games is that they’re teaching machines. Before they can transport us to new worlds, after all, they must put across basic principles of interaction and motivate players to apply them, whether in the form of a literal tutorial or as part of the narrative. “That’s something we know that games are great at – that onboarding and introducing you to how to play,” Minecraft Atlas general manager Deirdre Quarnstrom observes. In the age of lockdown, this quality has attracted educational organisations struggling to reach children sheltering at home. At Ubisoft’s Keys To Learn conference this winter, a few of those educators came together to discuss ways of turning games into teaching platforms. There have been some dazzling pedagogical experiments, many preserved as lesson plans on Minecraft’s…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a full 12-month, 13-issue subscription to Edge Let’s get physical There is a lot of talk about what dematerialisation and ‘gaming as a service’ means for the consumer, most recently due to the failed attempt by Microsoft to double the price of the Xbox Gold subscription. Most commentators interpreted this as a move to make Game Pass a more attractive value proposition, which would have taken us another step closer to the seemingly inevitable demise of the physical copy. Of course, I share the concerns of fellow gamers about what this means for us. I do not worry so much about no longer being able to resell a game after playing it…

The second half of probably the most (mis)quoted review from Edge’s very early days rarely gets as much attention as the first. “Perhaps you could try and make friends with them, form alliances… Now, that would be interesting.” Granted, asking for the opportunity to exchange pleasantries with Doom’s creatures was maybe a little optimistic, but many games since have heeded the call for a little more conversation, a little less action. This month’s Hype crop seems especially keen to allow us to get to know others better — in doing so, perhaps we can also learn something about ourselves. Take Fullbright’s Open Roads for starters. As teenager Tess, you embark upon a road trip with your mother Opal, digging into the past to uncover truths about two generations of your…

Capcom has stated that Village will be “much larger” than RE7 in terms of its playing area, but that isn’t particularly surprising given that the previous game centred on a family dwelling while this new adventure has a considerably larger scope. Sato has spoken about the team’s desire to surprise players by allowing them to explore areas that initially seem out of reach, and we wonder how the map is laid out, and how much emphasis is placed on the castle itself. “You can think of the castle as being part of the village, which is both the title and setting of the game,” Sato says, before concluding in a manner we should have seen coming. “How the castle relates to the village, and how the gameplay is spread across…

Developer/ publisher Team OFK Format PC Origin US Release Spring Time to break kayfabe: during our interview with Teddy Dief in E355, we played along with their notion that OFK is a real band, and talked about the story of Itsumi, Luca, Jey and Carter in-fiction with them. The point was to illustrate something that gets to the heart of We Are OFK: a crucial part of its development has been that narrative investment in the reality of the band, and the extensive lore that has been constructed around the members. It’s almost eerie how easily Dief rattles off their backstories, but this is precisely what we meant when we referred to the fusion of art and performance. It’s clear the idea has been in their head for a while,…

Trigger your Soulsight ability to hover above Hogendale’s wildlands and you’ll see each cluster of enemies represented by a single, huge figure – imagine a 16th-century Attack On Titan – with a number representing the size of the group you’re looking at. It’s another of Wicca’s many smart choices, giving you a clear strategic overview of the biggest threats and where you need to focus your attention first. Stalling them with a rocky obstruction rather than launching an all-out assault is sometimes the most sensible way to start, particularly in the second story level where you’re asked to hold off waves of Bone Walkers until sunrise. With your enemy more resistant to regular projectile spells, you must adapt your approach to survive the night.…

Developer/publisher Superstring Format PC Origin UK Release TBA 2021 Chatbot use has spiked during the COVID pandemic. As businesses adapt to the digital shift, many have been deployed to handle customer queries. But increasingly they’re helping tackle loneliness, too – reportedly half a million people downloaded digital companion apps last April alone. As such, Superstring’s follow-up to ambitious FMV adventure Headspun seems especially timely. The idea behind Acolyte, however, has been percolating in creator Jamin Smith’s head for years – ever since he played 2015 mobile game Lifeline, in which you exchange text messages with a stranded astronaut. “I was blown away by it,” he tells us. “The scope of that game is tiny, but it achieved so much with so little. I wanted something that was more manageable after…

When John Salwitz [co-creator of coin-op classic Paperboy] left Atari, he had a T-shirt made saying ‘Golden Boy’ and gave it me as a parting gift,” Ed Logg says, grinning. “I think he started that. And when I was at Tengen, I was heading to my first CES and they said I needed a business card. They asked what I wanted as my job title and I said I didn’t care. A producer, Howard Lehr, suggested ‘Super Duper Game Guy’. I said, ‘Fine.’” Monikers to be proud of, indeed, but then when you’ve created Atari’s bestselling coin-op, Asteroids, along with such iconic titles as Gauntlet and Centipede, they are perhaps to be expected. It didn’t start out like that, though. When Logg joined Atari in 1978, he was assigned to…

Developer/publisher 10 Interactive Format PC, PS4 (tested), PS5, Stadia, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series (tested) Release Out now There’s this feeling that settles in quickly, playing Hitman 3. Perhaps it hits immediately, as you look out from the world’s tallest building, sunlight bouncing off its exterior, a hot-air balloon bobbing along at eye level. Or maybe while you’re elbowing your way through another of the densest crowds we’ve ever seen in a videogame. It might even take until the second or third time the game upends the rules of how a Hitman mission can operate. Once it does, though, it’s hard to ignore the sense that IO Interactive is showing off. It’s earned the right to. Starting with 2016’s reboot, the studio took a series with as much life in…

The Medium’s spirit-realm aesthetic is influenced by the surrealist landscapes of Zdzistaw Beksinski, a Polish painter who was murdered in 2005. Beksinski’s paintings, some of which he described as “photographs of dreams”, make good fodder for a horror game. They show buildings apparently eating themselves, columns heaped with red fungus, and skeletal figures locked in a huddled embrace. Among Beksinski’s fans is Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro, who compared his art to medieval paintings about the fragility of the flesh. Beksinski himself, however, claimed that much of his work was designed to be optimistic, even funny. We’d certainly be intrigued to play a comedy game set in worlds like these.…

Risk-reward design is everywhere in Gods Will Fall. It’s in the gamble of which god’s realm to try next; in the choice between rushing to the boss fight or hunting down every vassal to chip away at the god’s omnipresent health bar. But most all, it’s in the Bloodlust mechanic. This builds with each successful hit and parry, offering a chance to recover damage and temporarily boost attack. The twist is that it uses for its meter your empty health pips, meaning you can only tap into Bloodlust’s power once you’ve been hurt. Along with the exponential way the meter fills, this encourages riding the lower end of the health bar as long as you dare, only squeezing the trigger and unleashing a roar once it’s maxed out – or…

Crowded spaces filled with the roar of engines, guns and dozens of surging music tracks; people gathered around cabinets; player after player handling joysticks and buttons as they vie for the leaderboards: COVID-19 has made arcades seem even more distant in space and time than their general decline had already made them. But while the need to preserve arcade history remains important, the museums that are leading it are experiencing intense pressure in the face of the pandemic. Publisher Team 17 has stepped in to launch a campaign to raise funds for arcade preservation programmes at three museums: The Strong in Rochester, New York; the National Videogame Museum in Sheffield; and Museo del Videojuego Arcade Vintage in Alicante, Spain. Called Saving The Arcade World, the campaign will donate a portion…

From its title to the traders’ bios, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator has a delightfully twisted sense of humour. That extends to the game’s backend, thanks to the decision to add a feature that draws random quotes from a selection of absurd things posted in the team’s chat channel. “When I open up my game editor, I’m reminded of the community that has made this game possible,” Nelson says, reading one comment aloud. “‘Fifi is a solid manifestation of hate’? I don’t even remember saying that.”…

US-based organisation Girls Who Code has found that games can be a powerful platform for student activism, especially when students make the games themselves. “Our teachers are supporting our students to create games that combat anything from bullying to educating communities about gender equality, climate change and Black Lives Matter and a host of other important social issues,” vice-president of programs Andrea Jordan says. “[They’re using them as an] opportunity to educate other students in their schools about these issues.” She adds that “we see our teachers learning alongside their students, and providing opportunities for students to help facilitate lessons.”…

Game Twin Tiger Shark: Not The Same! Developer Mikael Til lander To a lot of people, a serious home arcade project might involve bodging together a MAME setup via a PC or Raspberry Pi inside a repurposed cabinet of old or even a home-made shell fashioned to resemble the classics of yesteryear. And, sure, these tinkerings have their place. But they can’t help but pale in comparison to the work of Swedish arcade enthusiast Mikael Tillander, whose latest project is a complete hardware platform of his own design that works with any JAMMA-compatible cabinet. Tillander describes his hardware specs as “somewhere between the Mega Drive and the Neo Geo”, offering a resolution of 320x224, with 4,096 colours and 128 simultaneous sprites. The system will debut with a revamped version of Twin Tiger…

Animal Crossing: New Horizons may have been the game of the first national COVID lockdown, but the game of lockdown three is, surely, Hitman 3. Even murder tourism might seem an attractive alternative to the present reality of seemingly interminable house arrest. The fact that the gleefully brutal culmination of IO’s trilogy is released into a world of enforced quarantines, where casual foreign travel seems like a science-fictional mass consensual hallucination, makes the game read more richly than its predecessors from merely normal times. It arrives as a kind of time capsule of a world that once was. As one’s besuited avatar wanders calmly through a swish cocktail reception on the upper floors of the Burj Al-Ghazali (standing in for the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa) in Dubai, it…

Genesis Noir PC, Xbox One The Steam Game Festival tempts us back to the demo version of Feral Cat Den’s captivating cosmic noir — an abstract combination of point-and-click adventure and musical plaything. Jazz improv at the Big Bang? Don’t mind if we do. Guilty Gear Strive PC, PS4, PS5 Bandai Namco’s staggeringly handsome fighting game returns — this time with a title we can actually pronounce. Xrd: Sign earned a 9 in E276, supplementing its deep action with best-in-class tutorials. Could Strive perhaps go one better? Neo: The World Ends With You PS4, Switch Between Persona 5 Strikers and the Yakuza Remastered Collection on Game Pass, we’ve been enjoying a spot of virtual tourism in Japanese cities while the real thing is off the table. This follow-up to the…

“Every element of the project evolved out of the people that we brought into it,” Dief says, explaining how the game’s distinctive aesthetic came to life. “Our art director Jenny Yu is a painter, she’s worked in animation and the gallery world, and she does these beautiful paintings that are both grand and also intimate – like I can kind of see into these characters’ eyes that they can feel a loneliness, but also a hope.” That’s vital for a game with a firm focus on visual storytelling, in which each chapter seeks to represent different emotions. Fellow art director Nafisah Tung helped determine the band’s look and style. “They’re really into fashion, and having them on the team defined the flavour of how the characters express themselves in clothing,”…

Developer Square Enix, Arzest Publisher Square Enix Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Japan Release March 26 One thing you can count on from any Yuji Naka game is a sprinkling of magic. Since he left Sega 15 years ago, the career of Sonic’s creator has been mixed, but as producer at indie studio Prope he’s overseen a range of smaller games, each shot through with summery charm and vibrant colour. Five years ago he seemed to have run aground with the inexplicably awful Rodea: The Sky Soldier on Wii U – yet that was a bastardised version of a Wii game that turned out to be much better. We hoped, then, that his reunion with Nights Into Dreams director Naoto Ohshima might be a return…

Ana’s not a natural conversationalist just yet – though given she’s an AI, even the odd generic reply doesn’t shatter the illusion. “It almost gives you a get-out-of-jail-free card for any weird responses,” Smith says. “You’re not talking to a human like you are in Lifeline, so you kind of get away with it a little bit more.” But the beauty of releasing an early prologue is that Smith can use player data and feedback to make Ana a more capable chatbot. “You’ve got a potentially infinite number of ways players can interact with her,” he says, acknowledging his own playtests can only go so far. “There are ways that people have interacted with Ana that I hadn’t even thought about.”…

Dedicated collectible card games and deckbuilders have enjoyed huge success recently, as we’ve seen with CCGs Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering, along with the excellent deckbuilder Slay The Spire. Things get tricky when developers add card systems to other genres. The idea of drawing from a pool of cards is easily readable, but the notion of playing cards sits uncomfortably in some settings. It makes sense that Geralt would stop at an inn for a game of Gwent, but it’s strange to think of applying upgrade cards to your wall-running futuristic warrior in Titanfall. It will be a challenge to perfect the Ul and presentation of the card system in Back 4 Blood so it’s easy for the entire team to read yet fits the game’s blood-soaked aesthetic.…

Format PC, Switch Developer Kaizen Game Works Publisher Fellow Traveller Origin UK Release 2020 For player and developer, the story of Paradise Killer begins with a bold leap into the unknown. The game opens with disgraced investigator Lady Love Dies finding out her eternal exile to the luxurious Idle Lands isn’t quite forever after all: after three million days, she’s called to investigate the murder of the titular island’s ruling council. But there’s only one way back, and that’s down. After unlocking the gate separating her from the world beyond, it’s time, as she puts it, “to fall into a pit of crime”. And so, to the strains of Barry Topping’s glorious city-pop score, she steps off. Cue title screen. It took similar courage for Kaizen Game Works’ technical director…

STILL PLAYING Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales PS5 After a bug forces a factory reset of our PS5, we anxiously return to Manhattan’s streets to check whether our hard-earned progress has been wiped. Thank heavens for cloud saves. With no little relief, we discover that we still only have a bit of mopping up to do, and so we set to it – while being reminded of perhaps the most purely pleasurable traversal mechanics this side of the mighty Super Mario Odyssey. Ring Fit Adventure Switch Well, it’s high time we shifted some of this lockdown weight, after all. Revisiting Nintendo’s fitness game is a chastening experience at first (how on Earth did we get through that many squats last year?) but that soon turns to admiration of its design and…

With Project 007 on the horizon, it’s impossible to play Hitman 3 and not hear the stings of that John Barry theme. It’s not just the dinner jackets or speedboat escapes, or even the sprawling underground lairs, but a sense that IO is focusing its lens on more cinematic ambitions. The closing set-piece in particular is lifted almost wholesale, but this narrows the game into something more linear. The new cold opens are more successful – each mission begins in a prologue area which tells its own miniature story, with Dubai’s skydive and Berlin’s creep through the woods playing like homages to very different traditions of Bond. But vitally, these can be shaken off after the first visit, so there’s no loss of freedom. It’s a balance we hope IO…

Each Jail has its own theme and gimmick – in frigid Sapporo, for example, you push ice blocks into enemies or else use them as platforms to reach high ledges, while in brief snowboarding sequences you barge through groups of enemies as you glide downhill. There are basic puzzles besides, the solutions to which are all but spelled out, and the odd bit of mandatory stealth where you need to avoid being spotted. All feel like half-hearted additions for the sake of variety, with the nadir being the clumsily implemented side-view platforming sequences in which you must dodge searchlights and other hazards. The best we can say about them is that they’re short and easy; that being the case, we wonder why they’re present at all.…