EdgeSeptember 2022的目錄

CREATOR Saints Row Boss Factory bit.ly/saintsrowboss We’ve all been there: you get a new game, clear some time to start it, and then spend it all in the character customiser. To build awareness for its forthcoming reboot, Volition has allowed players to get a head start: the Boss Factory lets you create and save your own protagonist, ready to bring them into the game when it launches on August 23. That will, we’re told, include more options but it’s hardly lacking for them here, giving you impressively granular control over body shape and facial features, with several new features designed with inclusivity in mind. There’s a range of prosthetics, with options for vitiligo, prominent veins and body hair. And, this being Saints Row, you can also give your boss…

This was a summer of few genuine surprises, which meant that the games that did make us sit bolt upright and lean into our monitors seemed all the more exhilarating. Such was the case with Roll7’s future bloodsport, an instantly striking combination of Rollerball, Jet Set Radio and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater – with perhaps just a hint of Vanquish – set in an alternate universe where Sable rejected empathy and introspection and instead embraced ultraviolence. For around 80 seconds or so (other developers, take note: your game trailers don’t need to be several minutes long), we were absolutely rapt. Even without its Moebius-like art and retrofuturist setting, this would have grabbed us with the thrilling pace and fluidity of its action. This is a…

We’ve still no idea how far off PSVR2 is, but already it has a potential system-seller of an exclusive. Horizon was always likely to be a good fit for VR – Guerrilla’s technical expertise would make it a visual showpiece even without the obvious allure of towering robot dinosaurs. Still, you can’t spend your whole time sightseeing. As Ryas, a former Shadow Carja Warrior just released from prison, you’ve been asked to scale the titular peak to find out why the machines are attacking. Using Ryas’s bow, you tackle Watchers, Glinthawks and even a Thunderjaw, but the mountain itself is your deadliest opponent: you must use pitons and your bare hands to make your way up. Think Crytek’s The Climb with mecha-pterosaurs and even more gobsmacking views. Fingers…

You’d struggle to imagine a game like Pentiment getting a prime slot at a Microsoft summer showcase as recently as five years ago; it says much for the shift in perception of the Xbox brand that we barely batted an eyelid at its presence here. We did, however, shift forward in our seats at what looked like a fascinating indie game, rendered in an art style inspired by postmediaeval manuscripts and woodcuts – our eyebrows lifting when the trailer revealed that this was developed by Obsidian. Or, more accurately, a small team within the studio. This is a passion project for veteran designer Josh Sawyer who, with artist Hannah Kennedy, is paying tribute to his German ancestry with a tale set in 16th-century Bavaria, a time of social upheaval.…

Roughly every other day, it seems, a press release containing the terms ‘Lovecraftian’, ‘Metroidvania’ or ‘Soulslike combat’ lands in the Edge inbox. Plot Twist’s chiller isn’t the first to combine all three, but looks more than the sum of its parts – not least in the form of its protagonist, a Jonathan Harker type investigating a mansion that seems to be linked to the underworld. After our hero finds his father’s body inside, a malevolent presence (a kind of spectral Venom) offers to guide Fox through his memories – a mutually beneficial arrangement which gives the demon a host and Fox a set of purple tendrils that he can use to swing over gaps and toss aside enemies. Gorehounds should note it seems closer to Luigi’s Mansion than,…

Just as an insect exits its pupal state in a very different form to that when it enters, the opening text revealing we are about to see the new game from the lead gameplay designer of Inside and Limbo sets expectations that the subsequent 90 seconds delight in subverting. This is not, then, a side-scrolling puzzle-platformer set in a bleak hellscape; rather, the debut game from Jeppe Carlsen’s Geometric Interactive is a top-down adventure that casts you as a kind of humanoid butterfly, ferrying around orbs with the power to transform the world around them. One type activates bridges; another generates solid matter beneath your feet; a third brings a set of robotic limbs to life to open a gate, and that’s before we get to the surrogate…

You had to feel for Davide Soliani and crew when Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle was leaked before its grand unveiling at E3 2017. A strategy game featuring Nintendo’s mascot (not famed for his tactical nous) and those rowdy associates of Rayman? It didn’t exactly sound like a match made in heaven. Then came that triumphant turnaround. First, the touching moment when Shigeru Miyamoto, turning his twinkly-eyed charm up to 11, showed up on stage and nodded to the visibly moved creative director. And second, the game itself: a handsome, inventive and gleefully irreverent Mushroom Kingdom XCOM that overflowed with clever ideas. Four years later, and lacking that element of surprise, Sparks Of Hope has big shoes to fill. As such, like all the best sequels, it…

Had we been asked to guess the publisher of this co-op adventure halfway through its debut trailer, we’d have gone through a fairly long list of names before stumbling across the right answer. It does, admittedly, share a handmade aesthetic with Gearbox’s most successful series, though this wintry wonderland has been drawn in pencil – all expressive lines for its characters and soft shading for its pillowy snow. Casus Ludi’s game promises “an emotional tale” about a wolf cub and a fawn, both separated from their respective families. The unlikely friends are forced to co-operate to get by, in puzzles that look familiar – the cub can squeeze through narrow spaces, while the fawn can jump to high ledges, or boost its pal up by lowering its neck and letting…

After what feels like a lifetime of watching Nintendo Directs as the chat feed pings over and over with cries of “Silksong when?” it was Microsoft that finally answered them. In part, anyway. We still don’t know exactly when Team Cherry’s second game is due, at least not with any degree of accuracy greater than (given the theme of the entire Xbox showcase) at some point in the next 12 months. The game was notably absent from the handy roundup diagram that divided Microsoft’s current slate into 2022 and 2023 releases. There seems to be a fresh speed to Hornet’s movements as she bounces between obstacles Anticipation for Silksong, though, has now built to the point where confirmation that the game still exists is cause enough for celebration. And rarely were…

There was little Geoff Keighley could do about the glut of science-fiction horror games at Summer Games Fest, but he might have spread them across the running order a bit. Between The Gory One (The Callisto Protocol) and The One That’s Been In Development For A Decade (Routine), we got The One Where Troy Baker And Roger Clark Have A Fight. Clark stars as Jack Leary, a maintenance engineer at a Martian mining post, while Baker is medical officer Wyatt Taylor and Julia Brown (not present) completes this taut three-hander. Despite the gloomy lighting, Baker suggests it’s more thriller than horror. An intriguing minute of footage gave little away, but Baker says the game’s main verbs are “exploring, discovering and traversing”. And, apparently, brawling: the two face off in a…

Once upon a time, there were two new System Shocks in the works. A belated third entry in the series, led by Warren Spector, seems to have been abandoned, which leaves just this ground-up remake of the first, from Nightdive Studios. Short of Spector himself – who has taken a loosely defined advisory role on the project, and appeared alongside the latest trailer to, essentially, give his blessing – it’s hard to think of a more worthy inheritor. Nightdive was founded as a result of CEO Stephen Kick being unable to get his old System Shock 2 CD-ROM to work on a modern PC, and has already worked on an enhanced rerelease of the original 1993 game. So it’s no surprise that this remake looks just the ticket, with…

As a sequel to a game that was released a quarter of a century ago, and existing in a subseries of a subseries of Shin Megami Tensei, Soul Hackers 2 has its work cut out for it, especially in the west. But then, at one time similar could have been said of Persona. The surplus of style in those games is equally evident here, and it has a similar visual-novel-meets-dungeon-crawler structure, but aged up. Rather than high-school students, Soul Hackers follows a group of colleagues, whose Social Link-equivalent bonding sessions generally take place over a beer. Oh, and it should be noted that their jobs involve hunting and battling demons. With that blend of relatable day-to-day and larger-than-life stakes, it’s easy to see why Atlus might be…

When we ask Aaryn Flynn, formerly GM of BioWare, now CEO of Inflexion Games, why this studio of RPG veterans is making a survival game, his answer is surprisingly direct: resources. Not of the kind you’ll be harvesting but of the human variety – the number of people required to build something like a Mass Effect. But there is, Flynn argues, a throughline from those games to this, in the importance of worldbuilding. In Nightingale’s Victorian ‘gaslight fantasy’ setting, magic emerged during the renaissance and developed alongside art and science until humans discovered how to build portals to magical realms. What they find there, it seems, is an opportunity for Inflexion’s concept artists to cut loose. Rangy orc-like berserkers with cages around their heads; ornately decorated automata with their necks…

One of the benefits of Summer Game Fest’s compact, even sleepy Play Days showfloor is that it’s entirely possible, in gaps between demo appointments, to wander back over to Capcom’s cluster of demo pods and drill combos until a fellow journalist taps us on the shoulder to request the next dance. And what a dance it is. The four fighters we sample feel as muscular as they look (which, if you’ve seen the new Ryu design, you’ll know is high praise indeed), while the mix of the traditional combo gauge and new parry-powered Drive encourages a rhythmic back-and-forth. It’s easier to learn the steps, too, thanks to a couple of vital additions. The new commentary feature not only helps players interpret the action but also sneakily makes suggestions to them…

Given its story follows a skateboarding slacker facing down a league of exes, it’s difficult not to bring up Scott Pilgrim when discussing Thirsty Suitors. But we’re reminded of Edgar Wright’s old line that, where in a musical characters might break out into song, in his film they broke out into fights. Here, characters break out into JRPG-style turn-based battles, translating the back-and-forth of a difficult conversation into attacks and taunts. Which is, admittedly, the kind of thing you can imagine featuring in Bryan Lee O’Malley’s comics. But in the specifics of these moves, it’s clear that Thirsty Suitors has its own personality. As protagonist Jala takes on old boyfriend Sergio, she flutters her eyelashes in time with our button presses to inflict a ‘thirsty’ status effect, causing him…

The unlikeliest feelgood story of the summer begins with Geoff Keighley waxing lyrical about a game’s score shortly before a trailer containing no music whatsoever. Still, perhaps he’s as pleasantly stumped by what comes next as us. It may sound strange to call it uplifting: after all, this menacing teaser opens with grainy footage of a koi carp flopping around on the floor attached to a thick cable and ends with a tall robot grabbing the player-character by the throat, their other arm twitching in readiness to deliver a fatal blow. But then comes the twist: this startling science-fiction horror isn’t a new game, but one we first saw ten years ago. Somehow, Routine has returned. In an industry littered with abandoned games, it’s heartwarming to see a studio…

As it’s coming from Telltale veterans, it’s no surprise to discover that Resurgence isn’t focused on the ‘divert power to weapons’ or ‘set phasers to stun’ aspects of Star Trek so much as the bits where people stand around in futuristic rooms and have a conversation. Our demo goes from staff meetings on the bridge of the USS Resolute to diplomatic discussions on a planet where two alien species vie for supremacy. The kinds of weighty choices that defined these developers’ previous games are more obvious in the latter section, as we’re asked to weigh in on the balance of power between the brutish Hotai and haughty Alydians (though, one having enslaved the other until recently, it’s hardly the chewiest dilemma), while the office politics of the former strand…

It’s a surprise, really, that this doesn’t happen more often. Having painstakingly assembled a richly atmospheric and lavishly detailed cyberpunk city, voxel by voxel, it would have been a real waste for Ion Lands to leave the Blade Runner-inspired metropolis of Cloudpunk behind. So it hasn’t: the city of Nivalis is now home to a slice-of-life sim in which you trade delivery runs for the chance to run your own business. You get to choose how you make your way in this world, whether it’s by buying and cooking ingredients as a restaurateur or ramen-stand owner, or mixing cocktails for partygoers at a nightclub. With extensive design tools you can build the store and home of your dreams, or take a break to enjoy a spot of fishing. Cloudpunk’s…

There’s never been much doubt about which game Sonic’s latest adventure might be, ahem, taking inspiration from. Nonetheless, you have to admire the sheer barefacedness of naming its collectible plant-critters ‘Koco seeds’. But accepting – as Sega is clearly happy to – that this is very much a post-Breath Of The Wild game, the question remains: what exactly can a speedy hedgehog bring to that format? The answer, as it turns out, is platformer navigation puzzles. Those Korok – sorry, Koco – seeds are just one of many pickups tucked away in its open world, and reaching them often requires identifying the right chain of jumps between bumpers, grind rails and boost rings. It’s a chance to exercise the broad moveset granted to Sonic for this outing. He’s…

Should you find yourself – as we did – almost nodding off while playing Naiad, that’s no bad thing. That soporific feel is a pleasant side-effect of a game that represents a break from the chaos of the real world. We’re reminded of the opening line of Tomorrow Never Knows: turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. As a water nymph, you drift along a painterly river, as fish – delicate dabs of orange – congregate around you, and ducklings gently quack for their mother. We chase a frog in that way kids run after animals for the fun of the pursuit, unsure what to do when they catch up. We deliver a flute to a blonde-haired fellow dipping his toes in the cool waters. Words occasionally ripple…

Has any publisher got as much mileage from one work of fiction as Koei Tecmo has from Romance Of The Three Kingdoms? Evidently several dozen musou games haven’t quite covered it all. In this case, the Later Han Dynasty is used as the backdrop to a story of a soldier fighting for his life in a demoninfested world; think Warriors Orochi but with Nioh-adjacent combat. With FromSoftware alumnus Masaaki Yamagiwa joining the latter game’s Fumihiko Yasuda on production duties, don’t be surprised if you detect a hint of Bloodborne, too. Whether your nameless hero is battling human or otherworldly opponents, the combat system features a number of styles based on the Wuxing: a Chinese philosophy of five ‘phases’, materials and elements that either ‘interact’ with one…

Remember those Skyrim and Resident Evil mods where, instead of dragons or a fedora-wearing tyrant, you’re pursued by Thomas the Tank Engine? Two Star Games clearly does, having spun the concept out into a survival horror game in which you are pursued by the eponymous engine, equipped like all good forms of public transit with spider legs and more sharklike teeth than can fit into its mouth. Initially it takes the form of a rail shooter, in the most literal sense, as you ride around in a heavily armed train emptying belts of ammunition to keep the beast at bay – but in order to defeat it for good, you’ll need to collect artefacts from parts of the open world not served by this particular line. Cue a lot…

By now, we should be sufficiently accustomed to licensed games bearing scant resemblance to their source material that news of an asymmetrical multiplayer game based on Tobe Hooper’s 1974 movie should inspire little more than a shrug. But there is something particularly misguided about this. For proof that it misunderstands the original, look no further than its Steam page, which warns that “this game regularly depicts violence and gore”, when the film’s most grisly acts are implied rather than shown – and all the more horrifying for it. The homestead setting may have been recreated with attention to detail, but it is merely a backdrop for a Dead By Daylight clone, while borrowing Hooper’s “based on true events” – a purposeful lie, designed to satirise government misinformation – feels…

Hearing that this adventure game from a lone Tokyo-based developer started life as an illustration comes as no surprise at all. Every frame could have been lifted from a sketchbook. Through these snatches of Japanese landscape run a fox-eared girl and bipedal frog, both rendered in blocky polygonal fashion. There’s a playfulness to the way the game blends traditional art with digital elements, complicating the Spirited Away comparisons for which we reach at first. A woozy tilt-shift effect causes the watercolours to bleed; a wall-filling Noh mask that in one scene is hand-drawn transitions in the darkness to a 3D model as it comes to life, its mouth opening to reveal a row of sharp teeth. The actual game is a way off yet, it seems, but it’s one to…

Rytmos takes place across various solar systems, each comprising several cuboid planets. On each of a planet’s six sides is a simple maze: your goal is to draw a path from the start point, passing through nodes that emit musical sounds, before returning to the start to form a loop. Trapdoors that open and close and tubes that roll back and forth give you something to think about, but in each case the solution comes fairly quickly, not least since there’s usually more than one route back to the start, and you needn’t pass through every emitter. With each loop adding to the soundtrack, sometimes it pays to revisit an earlier loop and adjust the route. Once all six sides are complete, the planet bursts open to reveal another…

Capturing the mixed feelings of excitement and apprehension that come with leaving home, this top-down puzzler is reminiscent of the underrated Carto with an origami twist. It’s about manipulating the world to find a path forward: the part of the map you occupy can be folded, filling in gaps in wooden walkways, or forming alternative routes to bypass obstacles. Occasionally, it feels like a longwinded way to solve otherwise straightforward puzzles, particularly in one or two challenges involving pushing boulders. Yet it’s underpinned by robust logic – if you’ve folded a piece up from the bottom, for example, then the left and right sides are locked, but you can fold the top corners in diagonally – so you’re never left floundering. With a haunting score lending an ambience of…

A man – Jan Dolski – wakes, confused. Barefoot, still dressed for bed, he steps through the hallways of what looks an awful lot like the Nostromo from Alien, arriving in a mess hall to the sound of ’80s Polish pop and a dead body laid out on the table. The body is dressed in a spacesuit, the visor smashed to reveal the frozen face of – pause for dramatic effect – Jan. In fact, all the people crowded around the body have Jan’s face too, styled in a variety of ways. These are his alters, the versions of himself from the other side of the multiverse’s sliding doors, Jans who made different life choices, all somehow here together, stranded on an alien planet. We’re no closer to understanding how…

One of two games about South Asian cooking in this year’s Tribeca lineup, Venba isn’t taking the kitchen-sink approach of Thirsty Suitors, but rather staying over by the stove, with all its mechanics focused on the details of preparing idlis and vadas. The puzzles stem both from the smeared cookbook that Venba has inherited from her mother and our own unfamiliarity with these recipes, so that keeping the batter from sticking in the steamer is a process of gentle trial and error. Outside the kitchen, meanwhile, Venba tells a broader family story, about a young Indian-Canadian couple asking whether their new home has provided a better life, and whether they should stay, when Venba discovers she’s pregnant. The two aspects – cookery and narrative – are fairly disconnected…

POWERWASH SIMULATOR ACTUALLY BEGAN LIFE AS AN IMPROVISED SELF-CARE TOOL FOR INTERNAL USE AT FUTURLAB What are the mental health impacts of landing a headshot in a firstperson shooter? If you go by tabloid headlines – or, more reasonably, the studies that indicate shortterm correlations between certain game mechanics and aggression – you might say it cultivates and rewards bloodlust. But you could also argue, citing research into the causes of clinical anxiety, that a headshot fulfils a more innocent, albeit macabre desire for closure. “Your task is done, you no longer need to worry about that part of the world, and you can move on to the next,” as FuturLab founder and CEO James Marsden observes. While no scholar of mental health himself, Marsden feels that much the…

As we attempt to pin down the character of a weeklong period of game announcements and demos, there’s a tendency for the collective memory to settle on a single line. “You’re breathtaking”, or “My body is ready”, or “This is how you share your games on PS4”. It’s perhaps appropriate that the equivalent words in 2022 weren’t uttered on any conference stage but rather on a Twitter audio livestream, before the sprawl of events and showcases had even begun: “Manage your expectations”. A stark warning, especially from Geoff Keighley, a man whose name has become synonymous with hype. And when Keighley’s Summer Game Fest kickoff show airs a week later, it’s clear just how much he meant it. There’s the unmistakable impression of a show struggling to fill the two-hour…

Sink into a good book in this hand-drawn puzzle adventure A playful, Amanita-like adventure game being developed by “two dreamers”, Bioid explores the idea of books being portals to new places. Taking place in a galactic library that sits at a crossroads between worlds, it casts you as Little Bit, who can metamorphose into other forms to solve surreal conundrums. These tomes drag them into strange new realms, all hand-drawn and brought to life through dynamic animation: from gravity shifts to telekinetic powers, each presents fresh challenges. “Stylistically, this is a confrontation between white and dark, and many shades of grey in between,” artist Pagurus tells us; in addition to Miyazaki and Moebius, they’re inspired by the work of Tomorrow Corporation’s Kyle Gabler and the creators of Adventure…

“Sometimes I wonder if things will ever be normal again.” Et tu, Eternights? It’s no great surprise that this summer’s videogames should reflect our current preoccupations, though there was a clear schism between the triple-A and indie approaches. By and large, bigger games were keen to leave Earth behind (only to find it’s awful in space, too) while smaller studios encouraged us to look after the planet (Stardew Valley has a lot to answer for). This ‘dating action game’ offered a third solution: why not stick around for the apocalypse and try to find love? This Persona-adjacent adventure gives you deadlines to beat dungeons, with perks for developing relationships with your allies. But rather than turnbased fights, it offers realtime combat with anime-style flourishes, including a glowing…

After all that, it’s just a game. Having been announced as little more than a logo in 2018, and resurfacing last year with, essentially, a CG sizzle reel, the sense of deflation that followed Starfield’s big reveal was perhaps inevitable. This is, as Phil Spencer billed it in his intro, “one of the most anticipated games in Xbox history”, and as the years have passed it’s been enough of an unknown quantity for people to fill it up with their own expectations and hopes. Of course, in the event, Starfield looks like exactly what it is: another Bethesda RPG. Which is no bad thing – the studio is capable of making brilliant games in this mould – but these aren’t games that necessarily shine in a hands-off demo.…

A few key themes resonated across the summer showcases. A trend in indie games was farming, while it was hard to avoid the preponderance of space games among the blockbuster crop. Lightyear Frontier – or Titanfarm, as we’ve taken to calling it – deftly combines the two. Whoever came up with the idea of repurposing a mech as a piece of agricultural hardware (there’s a tractor-beam gag in there somewhere) deserves a pay rise: with its various attachments it’s an efficient way to harvest resources, water and fertilise crops, pull down trees and construct buildings as you establish a home on a suspiciously peaceful planet. It can roll around on tracks for exploration, leading you towards evidence that you’re not the only intelligent life here. You needn’t face danger…

The problem with dialogue in any firstperson shooter is that you’re somewhat dependent on the player looking in the right direction. Some games seize the camera to force you to look characters in the eye; others cast them as disembodied voices on the other end of an intercom. The elegant solution here is to put your conversation partner’s face on the one thing that’s always in front of you: your weapon. It’s the only part of High On Life you could accuse of elegance. Coming from Rick & Morty co-creator Justin Roiland, this Savage Planet-looking comedy shooter features hyperbongs, teddy-bear fight clubs, aliens that resemble unsavoury parts of the human anatomy, and, of course, that one irritating voice Roiland does. Switching to a shotgun not for any tactical…

The STALKER games have always existed in conversation with their real-world context: GSC Game World is headquartered in Kyiv, not far from the fringes of the Exclusion Zone that inspired the series’ irradiated wasteland. With the studio now chased from those offices by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that context was put front and centre in Xbox’s extended showcase stream. Amid the onslaught of marketing, this could have come off as tacky or insensitive but, piecing together footage from developers who were unable to flee Ukraine, the mini-doc segment was deeply moving. Talking to camera, developers explained the conditions in which they are working – in makeshift hallway and bathroom ‘offices’, in between sirens and sprints to the nearest bomb shelter. All this somewhat overshadowed the footage of STALKER 2…

When we most recently spoke to Simogo, for E355’s Look Forward special edition, the Swedish duo had just started work on a new game codenamed Project Fuzzy Optics – pitched as a darker, more twisted contrast to the poppy crowdpleaser that was Sayonara Wild Hearts. That title, indeed, is something of a deep cut: Simon Flesser released a four-track EP called Lorelei seven years ago, while it’s also the real name of Sayonara’s protagonist – unearthed from the game files. Though Flesser insists that there is “zero connection” between the two games “in any way”. It’s pitched as a darker, more twisted contrast to the crowdpleaser that was Sayonara Wild Hearts That’s not entirely true – which is in keeping with a story in which…

Going back to any series after a long break is fraught with risk, especially when it’s one as beloved as Monkey Island. Though a few fans of 2009’s Tales Of Monkey Island will have their own opinions, it’s those who cut their adventuring teeth on the first two games in particular who are, well, particular about what a new entry should look like. It’s fair to say the initial response to this was mixed, with Rex Crowle’s angular art style the main bone of contention. We’re not too young to remember people getting up in arms about the cartoonish aesthetic adopted in 2001’s Escape From Monkey Island. Our two penn’orth? It works a treat, especially now we can see how it looks in motion. Ron Gilbert is…

To the bean-counters at least, Diablo’s F2P offshoot is a roaring success. Within two weeks of launch, Immortal had been downloaded eight million times, and raked in three times that figure in dollars. Yet with many players uneasy about its microtransactions, its Metacritic user score dropped to the lowest in the site’s history. Series GM Rod Fergusson took to Twitter to assuage concerns that Diablo IV would be similarly affected. “D4 is a full-price game built for PC/PS/Xbox audiences,” he said, highlighting “an incredible breadth” of postlaunch support, including story addons and optional cosmetic items. You’ll be paying to look good, in other words, not to win. Indeed, the game itself is handsome – if that’s the right word for a lavishly detailed but bleak world. It’s…

Ignore the obnoxious vowel-swallowing title – this blend of Hypnospace Outlaw and Narcos might be the most unusual demo on the Play Days showfloor. Set in an alt-history 1980s where the Internet is a public commodity, you play an undercover police officer who has gained entry to the offices of a Miami drug cartel’s ‘legitimate business’ operation. Most of the action plays out on an ‘Amigo OS’ computer, which pings with tasks from both your police handler and cartel bosses. To appease both, you need to multitask, sifting through databases, answering emails and keeping an eye on CCTV footage, while making sure you don’t max out the machine’s meagre processing power. This might be vintage hardware, but there’s a modern stress to the way the open windows and constant…

The very first thing Time Flies does on startup is ask which country you call home. Not to cue up the appropriate user agreement or anything of that nature, but so it can assign you the current lifespan. In the UK’s case that’s 81.2 seconds, one for each year of our life expectancy. But there’s no time to dwell on that, because the fly you’re embodying has an enormous house to explore and a bucket list of goals to tick off. What follows is something like Untitled Goose Game through the lens of a Flash game, with the lo-fi presentation and acidic sense of humour you’d expect from the latter half of that equation. Spotting “get drunk” on the list, we head straight for a glass of wine, only…

If the trailer for Cocoon subverted the expectations set by its opening words in a good way, this action-strategy spinoff delivered the opposite. “A new game from the creators of Minecraft” created a murmur of excitement throughout the auditorium, giving way to a sense of deflation as what followed looked, well, a lot like Minecraft. This, it turned out, was just a cinematic – and if there’s such a thing as an audible wince, that was what greeted the visual dip for the snippet of gameplay shown at the end of the trailer. Still, as you strive to save the Overworld from piglins, it appears that, amid the rudimentary hacking and slashing, you’ll be able to build strongholds and destroy bridges. That’s one thing it has over…

As fourplayer coop successors to the Arkham games go, Gotham Knights is the Lee Carvallo’s Putting Challenge to Suicide Squad’s Bonestorm. This situation has been exacerbated by delays – its original release date last year would have left a little more breathing room – but it’s hard to watch any footage of it and not find ourselves thinking about Rocksteady’s next assault on the DC universe instead. For Knights’ appearance at Summer Game Fest, the baffling decision is made to put a solo spotlight on Nightwing, a hero whose acrobatic abilities look just as solid now as they did when he was introduced as an Arkham City DLC character back in 2011. Perhaps that sense of overfamiliarity will rub off as we get to…

As a camera sweeps across vistas of half-built pyramids, processions of early motorcars, and Benjamin Franklin doing his thing with the key and the kite, the reaction in the Microsoft auditorium seems unanimous: a whisper of “Is that Civ?” It isn’t, it turns out, but the audience has picked up the hint that’s being dropped. Oxide Games was founded by members of the Civilization V team, and with Ara it’s focusing on the alt-history aspects of the grand strategy game. Look again: those pyramids are capped with snow, the cars putter along against a backdrop of modern skyscrapers, and Franklin’s kite flies over Stonehenge. It’s a comedown, then, when actual footage is revealed days later and it looks a lot like Cities: Skylines with the odd Great…

Keoken Interactive’s followup to 2018’s Deliver Us The Moon – the studio might want to rethink that naming convention should the series extend to our solar system’s seventh planet – looks like a step up in ambition. Set ten years after the events of the first game, with humanity teetering on the brink of extinction, it follows the story of astronaut Kathy Johansson, whose mission to recover the stolen colony ships that would secure our continued existence goes awry. At a time when many developers are embracing procedurality, it’s refreshing to see a studio emphasising that every element of its game has been hand-crafted. And if the original is anything to go by, this sequel will offer something more cerebral than your typical science-fiction actioner – though there are…

Developer Madison Karrh tells us that showing Birth in public feels a bit like putting her insides on display. She means that it’s a deeply personal work, of course, but she could just as easily be talking literally. In this Rusty Lake-inspired point-and-click, every character you meet is missing their skin, and almost every item you collect is of an anatomical bent, all in aid of gathering enough bones and organs to build yourself a pet in an attempt to soothe your loneliness. We can perhaps see why Karrh might feel exposed, then, but in general Birth is characterised by a tantalising opacity, both in terms of its storytelling and puzzles. The latter are better approached via fuzzy intuition rather than attempting to apply solid logic and,…

Having informed the look, feel and sound of almost the entire Id output, heavy metal is surely the native musical genre of the firstperson shooter. But Hellsinger brings music and metal closer together than ever. The game’s concept art appears to have been lifted from the design on a T-shirt – a world of red skies, pointy architecture and horned skulls marked with sigils, where you play the demon girlfriend of Troy Baker’s narrator, determined to rescue him from hell. Doing so involves blasting through demon after demon in a manner that takes its cues from Id’s most recent output. Fights play out in huge arenas, with health recouped by pushing in for melee finishers. Where Hellsinger goes further, though, is in roping in a squad of revered…

Desta is a sports game. But it’s one made by Monument Valley developer Ustwo, so – as game director Danny Gray tells us during our demo – it has to be wanky about it. So, naturally, this turn-based tactical spin on dodgeball plays out in the dreams of its main character as they grieve for their dead father and look back over a lifetime of difficult relationships. Each encounter is in effect a replayed conversation; every hit taken the memory of saying something you shouldn’t have, every success the moment of clarity about what you should’ve said. Win a few matches and you’ll have a breakthrough, able to turn your opponent to your side for future runs. Because, yes, this is also a Roguelike, each run representing a…

Golf Club: Wasteland, the previous game from Demagog, was anything but par for the course, seeing the player heading from their home on Mars for a spot of golf among the ruins of human civilisation on Earth. For this followup – one of two, with Highwater – the developer is holding onto that game’s setting and concerns but hopping genre to cinematic platformer. This time we play as one of the few Earth natives left, a Mowgli-like orphan who, as our demo begins, is being pursued by a spacesuited child catcher. They throw traps in our path and train a laser on our position, making sure we never linger in the same spot for too long. This is problematic, as The Cub embraces the kind of trial-and-error puzzle-platforming that…

With the fourth season of Stranger Things having wrapped up and Persona 6 some way off, Necrosoft Games’ latest is well-positioned to fill the ‘teen schoolkids battling demons’ void. The central foursome here are Faye, Destin, Namako and Knute, who will have to work together to survive. Isometric grid battles allow you to take time to plot each character’s movements, before ending your turn and watching your plan play out. Since dashing into enemies or objects can move them, you can set up devastating chain attacks: Faye can barge a demon into the path of Destin, for example, who is handy with his fists. There will be 15 characters to build relationships with, which in turn will have an effect on how the story ends; given the size of the…

Some advice for anyone planning to unveil a new game at one of these showcases: unless there is something world-shatteringly unusual about the story you’re telling, do not waste your debut on a bland cinematic. When Stormgate arrives during a run of lifeless short films during Summer Game Fest, its mash of science-fiction and fantasy tropes is almost enough to make us reconsider our excitement about the prospect of a new RTS from ex-Blizzard talent. But let’s try to talk ourselves back into it again: Stormgate promises to be a robust free-to-play strategy game, built in Unreal 5, that offers a co-op campaign, assorted competitive options and built-in esports support, from a respectable number of the Starcraft 2 team and at least one Warcraft 3 veteran.…

The online response to Exoprimal is a reminder of how deeply attached fans can become to even long-dormant series: 30 years, it seems, is not enough to dampen passions. If you spend enough time in certain corners of the Internet, you could be convinced this isn’t so much a Crisis as a Dino Catastrophe: some observers drew comparisons to BioWare’s ill-fated Anthem. Yet to us its thirdperson PvPvE action looks more like Lost Planet meets EDF – a combination that only becomes more thrilling when thousands of raptors are thrown in. Each game takes the form of a combat test, set by an AI known as Leviathan. The main mode, Dino Survival, pits two teams of five players alongside each other as they compete,…

Between the obvious shifts towards science fiction and farming, a few minor trends emerged this summer. Indie developers, what did doors ever do to you? Tom Francis has previous in that regard: the designer of Heat Signature and Gunpoint is clearly of the opinion that the only good portal is one that’s been blown to bits. And he’s extended his antipathy to windows. This is a masterclass in the art of tactical defenestration: why waste rounds when a single shot can send your opponents falling to their deaths from several floors up? When you’re not rejoicing at the sound of shattered glass, you’ll follow the story of a small team of witches and wizards as they pool their meagre resources (and spellcasting abilities) to take on a multimillion-dollar…

This ‘reverse city-builder’ involves taking a barren land and transforming it into a flourishing ecosystem, using machines to turn brown and grey into green and blue. Then, once it’s self-sustaining, your job is to get out of the way, removing any evidence that humans were there. It’s more an environmental puzzle than a strategy game, as you figure out how to sustain a natural equilibrium. An Excavator, for example, creates a riverbed but in doing so poisons the land around it; an Arboretum, meanwhile, uses ash to create forests, but you’ll first need to burn down one of your buildings. It’s a refreshing antidote to the genre’s usual colonialist approach, though we wonder if, in its haste to remove humanity from the equation, it might fuel the wrongheaded notion that…

That title might sound like a straight-to-VOD crime drama, but no low-budget Brit flick has fight choreography this tight. As antihero Babyface, charged with taking down an army of criminals, you take on dozens of goons with fists, feet, weapons and environmental features. The isometric brawls have a thrilling flow and sense of weight, in no small part thanks to motion-captured animation courtesy of stuntman Eric Jacobus. You move seamlessly from punches and kicks to dodge-rolls, hurling chairs, boxes and batons dropped by opponents. Mixing it up pays, with your final score rewarding efficiency and variety. It’s almost a shame when guns show up – though you’ll need them for the operatically violent set-pieces. Brutal but not brainless, this has the whiff of a future cult favourite.…

We sometimes wonder if Amanita Design announces games as an incentive to finish them off. Famously meticulous in its craft, the Czech studio has assembled possibly its most ambitious project to date in Phonopolis: a world physically built from corrugated fibreboard that has been animated to produce a 12fps stopmotion effect. Moreover, it’s the developer’s first overtly political game – although Amanita says it’s aiming to keep the tone “playful and light-hearted”. The titular city is in danger, with an authoritarian leader planning some sort of mass mind-control experiment, of which the populace is unaware. Apart, that is, from Felix, who must save Phonopolis via a series of puzzles that are tense, comedic and surreal by turns. Amanita hasn’t announced a release date; let’s hope that by the time it…

E ver since we first heard rumblings of a new science-fiction FPS from the Alien: Isolation team – or, at least, what remains of it at Creative Assembly – we’ve had a rough notion of what that game might look like. It’s fair to say that Hyenas couldn’t be much further from those imaginings. In fact, it’s unexpected in pretty much every way: an aggressively colourful space-heist hero shooter where teams of players dressed in a mix of NASA spacesuits and rubber Nixon masks compete to steal popcultural artefacts. The game is saturated with Walkmans, Rubik’s cubes, Sonic keyrings and other ephemera from both within and without Sega’s usual licensing purview. This could add up to simply another nostalgiatickling Easter egg hunt (and, given the plans for Hyenas…

Klei is no stranger to side-scrolling hack-and-slash, the Shank beat-’em-ups having been a success for the studio a decade ago. Its return to the genre with Rotwood highlights what has and hasn’t changed about the developer in the meantime. It hasn’t lost the knack for crisp cartoon visuals: Rotwood’s ogres and canine warriors look as though they could have been plucked from the better class of modern children’s television. A brief trailer puts the emphasis on the game’s fourplayer co-op element – inevitable given the success of Don’t Starve Together – before ending on an Early Access date that flutters playfully back and forth between years, surely a wink to the meandering path Griftlands took to its release. And it seems the studio isn’t done…

“I’ll confess, I’ll sometimes buy it because it’s a lot more fun if suddenly your character has a lot more great stuff that would take you six months or a year to build up.” With his approach to in-game purchases, Texas senator Ted Cruz just wants all the benefits others have to earn “They didn’t have Mario Kart, so I bought a Sega Genesis and they had the Senna game and I thought, ‘This is perfect’.” If you have any crusty old 16bit racers to offload, give Lewis Hamilton a shout ”We are a studio and franchise that is committed to inclusivity where everyone is welcome and supported to be their true self.” 343’s Bonnie Ross is given the clean-up job after Halo Infinite’s…

Sony’s State Of Play broadcast seems to have largely avoided direct comparison with its closest rival’s showcase – indeed, it’s hard not to think that was a key consideration in choosing to position the event at the very beginning of June. It’s quietly telling that PlayStation 5’s biggest draw was a game not published by the platform holder itself: a fact that will surely have caused some internal consternation at Sony, if not embarrassment. Either way, any firstparty surprises would have struggled to top Final Fantasy XVI on spectacle alone. Its realtime combat is fast, dynamic and apparently framed with visual dazzle in mind: with counters, staggers and air juggles, not to mention the ability to switch styles mid-battle, it more closely resembles a character-action game. Which makes perfect…

As Estelle coasts downhill on her bicycle, the first in a generation to leave the safety of the mountain village she calls home, everything seems peaceful. Yet something ominous is on the horizon, the presence of soldiers heralding some kind of world-changing event. Her job, then, is to document this place as it is – and as it is soon not to be – for future generations, taking snapshots, recording sounds, talking to others and even playing music to cows. In doing so, she fills a journal that shows her perspective on this beautiful but eerily desolate place. The shadow hanging over development can’t be avoided either, with the studio’s creative director having been suspended indefinitely following accusations of toxic behaviour. DualSense haptics will allow us to feel the terrain…

L ast year’s announcement didn’t tell us a huge amount about Redfall, beyond it being a new game from Arkane Studios. Reason enough to be excited, at least for a certain kind of player, but it did leave a few misconceptions to be cleared up. First and foremost that, despite being a fourplayer co-op shooter with a horde of supernatural foes to be chewed through before they can chew on you, this isn’t the Left 4 Dead-like many of us had it mentally filed as. (Having dominated last summer’s showings, incidentally, that trend seems to have receded significantly since.) In fact, it seems Redfall will offer a relatively traditional campaign structure, and one that can be tackled entirely solo. Without other players’ attention spans to worry about,…

With Assassin’s Creed focusing ever more on open combat and Splinter Cell still MIA, there’s a gap in the market for a stealth-action game where there’s a clear benefit to staying in the dark. In Baby Robot Games’ debut, protagonist Ayana (voiced by Firewatch’s Cissy Jones) can avoid the searchlights of her mechanised pursuers by turning into black smoke, although she can only remain in this form by sticking to the shadows. That sometimes means snaking along the ground before popping up behind your targets and jamming your blade into their skulls. But you’ll also hare along walls, dodging wandering beams and following the silhouettes of moving objects to stay hidden. Some things, though, must be brought into the light: namely Ayana’s past, which provides the narrative…

“Desolate and decayed,” growls Doug Bradley – and that was just us after 20-odd showcases. Getting Pinhead himself to talk through Ebb Software’s grisly nightmare was a smart move on the part of Kepler Interactive, though this particular strain of body horror, not to mention its biomechanical environments and grotesque enemies, seems less Clive Barker than HR Giger. With no dialogue, Scorn’s story is largely told through your frequently gory interactions with this repulsive world. It’s more deliberately paced than we might’ve anticipated, with a greater focus on exploration and puzzling than action. In the sporadic encounters you’ll need to make every shot count: weapons require you to manually slot bullets into the chamber, lending extra tension to the fraught atmosphere supplied by a percussive score from noise-rock outfit…

There’s an amusing irony to the way the videogame industry tends to showcase advances in visual technology by focusing on imperfections. We get to see less than 30 seconds of racing before Turn 10’s camera loses interest in the cars, instead pausing for a lingering look at tyre marks, dust, and cracks in the tarmac of fanfavourite circuit Maple Valley. Later, there’s talk of individual scratches on car bodywork and wheel abrasions. Frankly, the only other time we’ve heard such emphasis placed on the words ‘dirt buildup’ is in adverts for stain remover. The eighth Forza Motorsport – well, when the number in the title has hit seven, it’s probably past time for a reboot – is certainly a looker. Yet while this may be, as series GM Dan…

Over the course of a few weeks, we’ve watched enough scenes of characters tending rows of crops to last a lifetime. But Square Enix’s glossy blend of farming and JRPG-style dungeon-crawling – as if the publisher saw the disappointing Rune Factory 5 and decided to demonstrate how this sort of thing should be done – comes with a twist. (And one that, had this been an indie game, would have disqualified it from Wholesome Direct contention.) It’s a riff on your typical Final Fantasy spinoff setup, really: an imbalance between the giant crystals that control the seasons has led to a phenomenon known as Quietus. Which means between spring, summer, autumn and winter, we get the ‘season of death’, in which deadly airborne particles mean people can’t…

Between State Of Play and Capcom’s own showcase, this was a productive summer for Resident Evil fans. The forthcoming DLC for Village offers several incentives to return, with an expanded Mercenaries mode and the ability to play through the campaign in thirdperson, while story expansion Shadows Of Rose looks to be shaping up nicely. A lingering low-angle shot of Lady Dimitrescu, meanwhile – heralding PSVR 2 support for the game – suggests that the publisher knows its audience. We’re already steeling ourselves for a fresh round of excessively thirsty tweets. But there was no doubting the headline act. In the debut trailer for the remake, Leon S Kennedy looks at a picture of Ashley Graham and sighs. “This time it can be… different,” he says hesitantly, before…

With Tony Hawk now in his mid-50s, it’s surely time for a new generation of skateboard heroes. In videogames, the animal kingdom has stepped up to replace him: last year we had Skatebird, while this summer’s Wholesome Direct introduced us to Olliefrog: Toad Skater. Sam Eng, however, has put forward an alternative: a demon “made of glass and pain” is the star of the summer’s hippest game, whose approach to skating leans towards the grounded trickery of Skate. Which isn’t to say verisimilitude is its goal: its underworld setting does have real-world elements, but also floating planetoids and diamonds, the latter shattering as you perform a kickflip within their shimmering glare. The sense of weight and impact is thrilling, while the vibe is immaculate. So what if…

The centrepiece of the Summer Game Fest showcase, the seven-minute slice of Modern Warfare 2’s Dark Water mission was welcome in at least one regard – it was about as close as the showcase got to that increasingly old-fashioned concept of a live demo. What those seven minutes actually contained, though, was a little harder to get excited about. As a special-forces infiltration of an oil rig and then freighter, taking place on a rainy night, the footage recalled both Crew Expendable, the first mission proper of 2007’s Modern Warfare, and The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday, from the 2009 sequel with which this reboot-sequel shares a name. Along with the return of Soap, Price and Ghost, it gives the feeling that this series hasn’t come very far…

There were few honest-to-goodness surprises throughout the many summer showcases. Plenty of known quantities made a reappearance and looked promising, while several unknown ones charmed and delighted us. News of Routine’s unlikely return was an eye-opener. We marvelled at the ingenious conceit of Time Flies. We found ourselves pleasantly repulsed by Scorn; made appreciative noises at Pentiment and Cocoon; downloaded Poinpy instantly and knew within seconds that we had to review it (see p122). But gasps of wonderment were nowhere to be heard. And then Devolver walked us into a child’s messy playroom, opened a storybook and proceeded to scramble our brains. We immediately warm to its initial conceit: the game apparently takes place entirely within the pages of this book, as if its…

The retrofuturist utopia in which 28-year-old account manager Trevor Hills lives hides a dark secret – but rather than tease out the mystery, Out Of The Blue quickly gives the game away. American Arcadia opens with Hills giving a police interview, before rewinding two days. Just 48 hours before, he lived in ignorance of the fact that his life was part of a reality TV show, and that he was about to be killed off for being a turn-off. He suspects foul play when workmate Gus wins a trip to Fiji – acheeky nod to Truman Burbank’s dream destination – before a hacked billboard confirms his friend’s fate: Gus is dead. Arrows appear on nearby monitors, guiding him to a backstage area, where a woman’s voice tells him he’s in…

A puzzle game about tidying up, created by a real-life couple, featuring recreations of items from their actual home – might we be witnessing the birth of videogames’ most specific genre? A Little To The Left isn’t really anything like Unpacking, though, instead presenting you with a handful of items arranged on a flat plane. Your job is to figure out how they should be sorted. Smallest to largest? Colour-coded? By lining up their grooves and indents? What seem like trivial tasks open up as the game introduces multiple possible solutions to each puzzle, encouraging you to reconsider your first thought and spot another pattern, and then another. And this is before the game introduces a miniboss: Rookie the cat, whose paws add a degree of twitch reflex…

Not since Ape Out – another Devolver joint – has a game made us feel so powerfully furious. Free Lives’ boot-’em-up is a single-minded addition to the burgeoning breach-and-clear subgenre (Rico, Severed Steel) with the grubby milieu of a firstperson Hotline Miami. Your job, in short, is to take out the trash: you move from room to room, punting doors so hard they fly off their hinges, wiping out any goons immediately behind them. Then you clear out the rest, kicking their faces in, swiping their guns (and throwing those away or at the nearest ne’er-do-well when you’ve emptied the chamber) and shooting them before they can fire back. It’s all set to a throbbing soundtrack that only dulls once a room has been de-thugged. There are…

While Game Freak’s fully embraced three dimensions, it’s clear some smaller developers aren’t ready to leave the pixellated look of earlier Pokémon games behind. This monster-battling RPG boasts exceptional sprite work, while its central conceit seems to have been borrowed from Pokémon Fusion, the website where you can input the names of any two Pokémon and a strange (and frequently hideous) chimera will emerge. Here, the hybrids are a little more controlled. So whether you’re combining a Pomeranian and a raven or splicing a rattlesnake with a salamander, the results will look good – or at least consistent with the game’s nostalgic aesthetic. In an intriguing twist, rather than battling with these monsters, your trainers become them, the transformation triggered by pressing play on a magic Walkman.…

Like The Plucky Squire, Splashteam’s cheerful adventure combines 2D and 3D styles in one world, though here it’s a purely visual flourish – the environment is three-dimensional while shrunken hero Milo is rendered as a flat cartoon. We’re reminded of Skip’s Chibi-Robo, with household objects made to feel gargantuan to our ant-sized hero: a rucked-up rug becomes a tunnel, while the inside of a guitar serves as a bar for the local bug population. But it’s most redolent of Pikmin: the titular critters, hatched from slimy eggs scattered throughout the rooms, follow you around, pushing objects, triggering mechanisms or, in the case of the explosive red ones, blowing up obstructions. They also fetch and carry items, including the parts you need to assemble a spaceship to get home.…

Yo Fujii quit his job at a well-known Japanese developer to develop his own game a year ago, and his anxieties about making a go of it are reflected in the quasi-autobiographical Goodbye World. Across a series of vignettes, it tells the story of designer Kanii and artist Kunade as they develop their debut game together, taking on part-time jobs in an attempt to make ends meet while agonising over whether this joint project will sell well enough, or even if it’s any good. In a charming twist, you get to play that game between the story sections: it’s a puzzle-platformer in which you smash blocks to pocket them, placing them elsewhere to negotiate obstacles and reach the exit. Kanii and Kunade needn’t worry about the quality, then –…

If farming sims thrive on the fantasy that you’re building something from the ground up, then Roots Of Pacha takes that to its logical extreme, transporting you back to the Stone Age to build the very concepts on which agriculture is founded. There’s an extra kick from not simply acquiring tools but discovering them, even if the process involved isn’t hugely dissimilar to what you might do in Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon: gathering resources, speaking to fellow villagers, and so on. Some attention has been paid, though, to making each task distinct. While taming an animal with your flute triggers a rhythm game, spear-based fishing is closer to stealth, requiring you to train your cursor on a target without moving too quickly, lest the ripples scare…

If Street Fighter 6’s presence at Play Days is a source of poorly disguised rivalries between journalists, then Escape Academy delivers the exact opposite experience, bonding us to a stranger in the space of 20 minutes. Escape-room-influenced cooperative puzzle games aren’t so rare nowadays, but this one has an added touch of authenticity – developer Coin Crew’s background is in making the real thing, before the pandemic forced it to pivot. And the challenges here really do feel like the kind you’d encounter in the better class of Hungarian basement (Budapest being the escape-room capital of the world, you understand). And so two people who hadn’t spoken a word beforehand are forced to develop a puzzle-solving shorthand on the fly. Such are the joys of local multiplayer. After the…

You sense Glen Schofield is as tired of the words ‘Dead’ and ‘Space’ as he is of being reminded of his first ever game credit. Striking Distance Studios’ director is clearly torn between his role as a creative and his duties as a man who would like his game to reach the largest possible audience. So, yes, The Callisto Protocol looks quite a lot like Dead Space, as you would reasonably expect from a science-fiction survival horror built by many of the same team. Schofield insists there is more to it than that (again, as you would expect) while in the same breath emphasising that players who enjoyed Visceral Games’ debut will surely find a lot to like in his new studio’s first release. While Jacob wields…

‘Stick together’ is good advice in any co-op shooter, but when everyone in your squad has magnets for legs, it’s all but mandatory. In Glitch Busters, your team of four can stack atop one another, their legs growing or shrinking as required to squeeze through gaps or create a roving vantage point from which the player on top can shoot. It’s also possible to walk up metallic walls, pull armour casings from enemies, and automatically home in on teammates by holding a button. All logical extrapolations of the basic properties of magnetism, then. What we’re less sure about is how that connects to the theming of the rest of the game, which tasks you with cleaning up the Internet, here caricatured as a city of server towers, app icons…

When we spoke to Phil Fish for E373’s return to Indie Game: The Movie, he rejected the idea that Fez has had much impact on videogames, the odd adventure about brave little foxes where you collect pages of an in-game manual notwithstanding. Between Animal Well and this, he may have to eat his words. Lucky Luna is a vertical platformer that shares a trajectory with Downwell, but a mood that recalls Polytron’s biggest hit. Inspired by Japanese folk story The Tale Of The Bamboo Cutter, it’s a rare platformer without a jump button; rather you slide your finger left and right to guide Luna, the speed of your swipes determining their momentum. If it looks familiar, that’s because it’s not actually new: it originated as Cerulean…

The exact nature of Overwatch 2 has always been a puzzler. Is it a sequel? An oversized update? A new PvE game that has a refreshed version of the PvP experience attached? As the October launch date approaches, only one thing has become clearer: this isn’t exactly the same game that was announced in 2019. First, the big reveal of Xbox’s showcase: Overwatch 2 will be free to play. Not the most perfectly timed announcement, given how Diablo Immortal is going down, but it’s a change that seems to inform everything else about the game. Like the fact that its launch will overwrite the original game, for all players – something that surely wouldn’t be possible if it was price-gated. This will come hand-in-hand with the transformation…

Soto specified the number of games, but now we it’s a trilogy, then. Square’s ambitious plan remake Final Fantasy VII never previously know that the story will be concluded in a third, as-yet-untitled game, which – at least if the gap between the first and middle chapters is anything to go by – could yet be another four or five years away. For now, all we have is a trailer that is firmly playing to the gallery: those who didn’t play Remake will surely have been left baffled by all the wafty allusions and cryptic teases. That, of course, is precisely the point: these are words designed to have fans analysing and debating their meaning, as they endeavour to figure out exactly what kind of story this is.…

Sitting on a damp log at the halfway point between Proteus and Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is where you’ll find this gentle firstperson wetland adventure, which evokes sensations of a childhood day spent among nature, one that seems to go by in a blink. (It’s also the kind of place to which we can imagine Mord and Ben from Wide Ocean Big Jacket going on a date.) Armed with only your curiosity and a bug-catching net, you must creep up to fireflies, frogs, spiders and more before swiping to document them in your journal. But there’s much more to discover here, with poems found in bottles bobbing in a brook, campfires to warm your hands, and stones to skim. Before you know it, the sun has set…

The first time we return to the surface, we’re greeted by a chilling sight. Either side of the dome that represents a safe haven on this hostile planet, two shadowy creatures are smashing their heads against the glass barrier. Already its integrity is compromised; we’ll either need to fix it before the next attack or boost our defences – and the clock is ticking. This tense mix of mining game and tower defence tasks you with digging into the dirt and rock beneath your dome, gathering ore to bring back to base in exchange for a variety of upgrades. It’s a game of tough choices that must be made quickly: do you power up your dome’s laser (which you control manually to zap the monsters), or focus on more efficient excavation…

Though we struggled with The Cub over a choppy Parsec stream, we assumed this fellow Tribeca nominee wouldn’t be similarly affected. We were wrong. For 20 infuriating minutes, audio hiccups interrupt dialogue and Scntfc’s moody score: two of Oxenfree’s biggest assets. Even so, we’re captivated. Opening captions explain that protagonist Riley has gone back to her hometown to investigate odd radio signals. Yet things have gone, as two words in blood-red type inform us, “horribly wrong”. With a portal having opened above Edwards Island, Riley and co-worker Jacob must trek to activate three transmitters to beam a signal and stop this phenomenon. It’s a brisk setup for a spot of exploration, though early on plot plays second fiddle to the joy of simply walking and talking. The interactions…

Only moments into our demo session of A Plague Tale: Requiem, we realise something already feels different from the previous game. Roaming around the limestone buildings of an unidentified market town, the scattered civilians we encounter are neither running for their lives nor hunting us with sharpened tools. This is the first time since young protagonist Amicia de Rune left her cosy mansion estate and its friendly servants at the beginning of A Plague Tale: Innocence that we’ve seen ordinary folk simply going about their business. The fact that we can’t converse with them is frankly a relief – it’s nice to find that there are people in this world so utterly detached from Amicia and her woes. Because, of course, some things don’t change: Amicia still has…