EdgeApril 2026的目錄

Henry Driver did not set out to become a game designer. Growing up in rural Suffolk, he was split between the earthly pleasures of farming, his mother’s biology studies and his own artistic inclinations, but “fell into” the latter. “I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do. I wanted to do architecture, furniture design, fashion – I never, ever thought of games. Even though I played them, I had no idea where they came from.” Nonetheless, as early as the first year of his Fine Art degree, he worked them into his projects, turning deconstructed death scenes from GoldenEye 007 into abstract visual environments, and riffing on Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds to highlight the beauty of Star Fox’s celestial backdrop. Even before he switched his focus to themes of…

FILM Iron Lung bit.ly/ironlungfilm Funded by, directed by and starring Mark ‘Markiplier’ Fischbach, this adaptation of David Szymanski’s horror short is a little protracted – at over two hours, it’s actually longer than the game. The pace sags in the middle thanks to some extraneous worldbuilding, and the central performance strays towards the am dram – a professional actor would do Fischbach’s script better justice. But there are some great practical effects and a couple of good scares, and you can tell the production team have real affection for, and knowledge of, the source material. That alone distinguishes it from almost every other videogame movie. It may not be the complete package, but, like the blood-soaked submariner at the centre of the story, Iron Lung might be remembered as a…

Developer/publisher Poncle FormatPC, PS5, Switch, Xbox Series OriginItaly Release 2026 Perhaps the biggest question mark we have after going hands-on with this unlikely spinoff from Poncle’s extraordinary breakout release is its title. It transplants turn-based deckbuilding systems into the body of a classical firstperson RPG, drawing from the likes of Eye Of The Beholder and Shining In The Darkness, according to its creator. As in those games, you advance step by step through multiple floors of a labyrinth stuffed with enemies, secrets and loot. By genre definition, it’s a dungeon crawler, but both exploration and combat are conducted at a clip that defies that description. On paper, it seems an odd choice to follow that BAFTA-winning debut. Yet, Luca Galante says, when he set about this task, this specific idea wasn’t on…

Back in the early 2000s, thanks to improvements in 3D graphics rendering and stronger Internet connections, the world was suddenly inundated with a peculiar array of eccentric games. There were wonkily earnest vehicle simulators, oppressive, uncaring firstperson shooters, and Germanic RPGs whose developers were apparently less concerned with story and turn-based combat than designing complex patrol routes for NPC guards. Divided by genre and country of origin, all these games nevertheless shared a distinct quality: they were examples of creative ambition stretching beyond technical proficiency. Accessibility didn’t matter as much as the depth and the authenticity of the simulation. Cutting-edge game engines and production-design wizardry were secondary in importance to an obsessive level of mechanical detail. Eventually, a generic term was coined for these games: ‘Eurojank’. Like ‘Doom clone’ and…

Developer/publisher Koei Tecmo (Team Ninja) Format PC, PS5 (tested) Release Out now After its recent sojourns in Three Kingdoms-era China and Bakumatsu-period Japan, Team Ninja’s return to the series that established its Soulslike pedigree perhaps required more familiar territory. While Nioh 3 begins several decades into the Edo period, casting you as Shogun-to-be Tokugawa Takechiyo, a new threat that plunges the nation into hell contrives a way to pull you back into the Sengoku era that oversaw the first two games. Yet coming back to these churned battlefields and besieged villages shows how Nioh has changed during its sabbatical. Self-contained locations and missions have been abandoned in favour of lands that spread far and wide. The gulf between your current position and the next objective marker on a blank map…

Developer/publisher THQ Nordic (Tarsier Studios) Format PC (tested), PS5, Xbox Series Release Out now The opening moments of Reanimal suggest that Tarsier Studios is refusing to stray far from Little Nightmares: the child protagonists (a boy and a girl); the towering scale of the world around them; the use of light and murk to usher you in the right direction. So familiar does it feel that it makes you start when one of your charges speaks. “I thought you were dead,” the boy states blankly after pulling the girl from the sea onto a small boat. It’s a feature that’s used with restraint throughout, but one of many which reveals that Reanimal is no mere retread. Another change is that these kids appear to have been in this sun-choking hell…

Developer/publisher Edmund McMillen & Tyler Glaiel Format PC Release Out now Despite its significance to the indie explosion of the early 2010s, The Binding Of Isaac never received a proper followup. Conceived as a distraction to while away the time while Super Meat Boy was garnering accolades, it quickly overshadowed its predecessor, its exuberance – the way it gleefully broke its own rules to produce wildly unbalanced results – providing a blueprint for the modern action Roguelite. In the decade and a half since, Edmund McMillen has worked on several modest releases, but The End is Nigh and The Legend of Bum-bo always felt like asides from the ongoing project of polishing his magnum opus. Mewgenics, on the other hand (despite the fact its inception predates Isaac), represents a genuinely…

Developer/publisher Square Enix (Square Enix, Hexadrive Inc) Format PC (tested), PS5, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox Series Release Out now Adventure is a big deal in Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined. Its would-be hero, a mute teenager in a green tunic and oversized cap, looks out across the ocean from his home in a small fishing town and longs to explore. His best friends are the daughter of the town’s mayor and the son of a regional king, both of whom hatch plans to escape the confines of the worlds they’ve been born into. These characters are all desperate for a proper adventure, and say so often. They long for an opportunity to discover a dramatic purpose in life. Throughout Reimagined, the hero and his friends receive a chance to do just…

The team at Polish developer Plot Twist has a long-standing fascination with voxels, according to Bartłomiej Lesiakowski, director of the studio’s next game, open-world Roguelike Erosion. “For years, we’ve been following voxel artists and admiring the detail they can pack into such a small, structured form,” he tells us. When the studio started developing this Western-themed adventure, it felt like the right time to explore what these building blocks could offer – “not just visually,” he adds, “but as a core part of how the world behaves and reacts to the player.” Most conspicuously, it has allowed Plot Twist to make its world extremely destructible, a factor to consider during both combat and exploration. Still, not everything here obeys the laws of physics, since there are mysterious forces at work…

Game No Law Developer Neon Giant Publisher Krafton Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Sweden Release TBA The year is 2026. Deus Ex has been cancelled, and Arkane Austin lies dead. The immersive-sim genre is kept alive only by scattered groups of rebels building lo-fi throwbacks to Thief and System Shock. Triple-A has turned its back on the genre, hoping to eke out a future by appeasing the masses with the safe and straightforward. But beneath the ice in Uppsala, Sweden, something stirs… Our story begins in a Scandinavian airport where, in a sub-zero environment, the work never ends. Jets are hosed down with de-icer by chunky red guns mounted on cherry pickers, the kind of function-first aesthetic James Cameron might dream up. The snow is scraped from runways into…

Joshua Edwards, better known by his streaming name Joshimuz, was on the last part of the last mission in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, when Sweet leaps off the back of the moving fire engine and you have to catch him in the passenger seat of your car. Not only was he on pace to set a new personal best time, he was about to become the fourth-fastest San Andreas player in the world, based on the official leaderboards. To paraphrase one of the most famous lines of dialogue that Rockstar ever wrote, all he had to do was follow the damn fire truck. But, with Sweet’s feet dangling mere inches above his convertible’s windscreen, the game suddenly cut to black. When it faded back in a second later, there…

NEAR MISSES Relooted PC, Xbox Series While it arrived a little too late to slip into this issue, we’re still keen to sneak our way through Nyamakop’s game of relic repatriation. Early forays suggest that it might actually benefit from waiting in our queue a little while, with one or two technical wrinkles still to be ironed out (although we’re not entirely ungrateful when a couple of the game’s more exacting achievements unlock erroneously in the opening hour). But once we get into the process of breaking into museums and parkouring out the other side, there are signs that the promise of this smart concept will shine through. Reigns: The Witcher Android, iOS, PC As Dandelion the bard, your aim is to become world famous by spinning yarns of Geralt’s…

Developer/publisher The Game Bakers Format PC, PS5 (tested) Release Out now Few tutorial levels are as captivatingly intuitive as that in Cairn. Before setting out to ascend Kami, the unconquered mountain, you’re ushered towards some indoor climbing walls. Approach one and enter climbing mode and you’re given control of one limb at a time. Direct the hand or foot, press a button to set it down, then it’s onto the next limb. The body of your avatar, Aava, shifts into (mostly) plausible shapes as you pull her legs and arms around. In no time, you’re planning routes, scouring bumps and cracks to consider where she might anchor her weight on a toehold or gain enough purchase with her fingers to drag herself up. It’s an exercise of fine analogue control,…

Developer/publisher Riot Games Format PC, PS5 (tested), Xbox Series Release Out now Any attempt to enter the viciously contested arena of Japanese-style fighting games may strike you as either foolhardy or sacrilegious. This is, after all, a form that even its principal architects, Capcom, SNK and Arc System Works, have struggled to sustain in recent years, amid the long decline of the arcade. Fighting games have survived, even flourished at times (buoyed by tournament spectacle and streaming culture), but they remain stubbornly resistant to mass appeal, weighed down by arcane terminology, punishing demands, and a social Darwinism that can make newcomers feel like interlopers. But Riot has never been a company content to mind its own borders. For more than a decade, the creator of League Of Legends has experimented…

Developer Vermila Publisher Blumhouse Games Format PC (tested), PS5, Xbox Series Release Out now Just as Resident Evil’s Raccoon City is an abstraction of modern America, Crisol’s world is a grotesque of Spanish culture. Take the finely crafted statues of Semana Santa, or Holy Week, for example. In reality, they represent Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Here, though, the sculptures have come to murderous life, staggering towards you with knives in hand, their eerily expressionless faces flopping backwards and forwards atop creaking wooden bodies. The only thing that can kill the monstrous effigies is your own blood, which has been blessed by the sun lord. You are Gabriel, a soldier of the Order Of The Sun, sent by your god to the island of Tormentosa to depose and murder a…

Developer Douze Dixièmes Publisher Focus Entertainment Format PC (tested), PS5, Switch, Switch 2, Xbox Series Release Out now This new Metroidvania arrives in what is, to say the least, an extremely crowded space. The genre has never been so in vogue, and never a more difficult place in which to stand out. MIO rubs shoulders not only with copious also-rans but, mere months removed from new Hollow Knight and Metroid games, the direct objects of its inspiration. Yet stand out MIO does, as much as it reasonably can when working from a blueprint so firmly established. It has atmosphere to burn, driven by mystery and loss and discovery aboard the Vessel, a derelict spaceship inhabited only by listless robots. There were humans once, but no longer – not murdered in…

Developer/publisher Sega (RGG Studio) Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch 2, Xbox Series Original release 2010 Hawaii may have been the most recent destination for Like A Dragon, but it wasn’t thefirst time the series travelled from its familiar stomping ground of Kamurocho to a more sun-kissed locale. Yakuza 3 saw former Tojo Clan chairman Kazuma Kiryu start over in Okinawa, running an orphanage overlooking a beach on the island, although the past and local political-criminal machinations inevitably pulled him back in. It was, in truth, the leanest and creakiest mainline entry, but for that reason the most worthy of a Dragon Engine remake. Expectations set by sprawling later instalments featuring multiple protagonists perhaps explain why Kiwami 3 shares the title with Dark Ties, a new story starring the game’s antagonist,…

FABLE Developer/publisher Xbox Game Studios (Playground Games) Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin UK Release Autumn Playground Games’ reboot really does appear to be a current-gen reimagining of Lionhead’s RPG series, to the point that the developers seem to have inherited Peter Molyneux’s enthusiasm when talking about the game. One thousand unique NPCs will react to you based on a reputation built from your many decisions, including the way you dress and property you own as well as any heroic deeds. What that amounts to beyond singing your praises in the streets or disliking you because you’re “a rich twat”, as one example shows, is unclear. If it combines into something meaningful, though, there’s potential here for some real magic. LIFE IS STRANGE: REUNION Developer Deck Nine Publisher Square Enix…

Developer/publisher Grasshopper Manufacture Format PC (tested), PS5, Xbox Series Release Out now Every game establishes a contract with its players at the start – the terms of agreement as to the tone, genre and quality you can expect. In Romeo Is A Dead Man, that begins at the title screen, where a miniature solar system floats inside a fishtank. A large, inanimate carp slowly warps from one side to the other, and an offbeat Japanese rap tune tumbles along. The hotchpotch continues in a delirious opening that revels in sci-fi buffoonery. There’s no doubt about what you’re signing up for: an absurdist fantasy that intentionally resists coherence. The universe has been fragmented thanks to a clash of singularities in the town of Deadford. Our hero, state trooper Romeo Stargazer, relates…

Developer/publisher Wildlight Entertainment Format PC (tested), PS5, Xbox Series Release Out now Highguard’s development pedigree is clear the moment you begin a match. The cast of elemental superheroes could easily blend into the roster of Apex Legends – though that perhaps betrays the blandness of their designs. The tertiary, neatly observed mechanics and button presses that made Titanfall feel so tactile are here in spirit, too. If you want to mine gems used for buying weapons and armour, for example, you have to time the swing of your pickaxe with an on-screen prompt – chain several hits together and your axe becomes supercharged, allowing you to smash the next batch of precious rocks with one whack. There’s a tension around reviving downed teammates, too – if the enemy gets to…

Developer Ice-Pick Lodge Publisher HypeTrain Digital Format PC (tested), PS5, Xbox Series Release Out now The Pathologic series has become a set of constants and variables. There is always the remote Townon-Gorkhon, with the impossible geometry of the giant Polyhedron perched over it like a signpost for the strangeness to come; there is always the plague; there are always 12 days to survive and hopefully stop it. But each entry has become a retelling, which warps around the constants to offer its own take on the narrative. Pathologic 3 is the story of the Bachelor Daniil Dankovsky, a medical researcher from the capital city – aloof, analytical, assured, above day-to-day concerns, and obsessed with finding the key to immortality. If Dankovsky’s story is a prism for this particular retelling, then…

Developer Rock Square Thunder Publisher Feardemic Format PC (tested), PS5, Switch, Xbox Series Release Out now Raised on a haunted farm, right next door to the headquarters of a Satanic cult, Elena has beenbattling demons, ghosts and gigantic spiders her entire life. But the typical terrors of her upbringing are spiralling out of control – the cult’s goat-faced god is gathering power, and her best friend, Lou, is missing. If you lived on Elena’s ranch, you’d hate this place too. During the daytime, the world of I Hate This Place is comparatively tranquil and you’re free to scour the wilderness to find crafting components and story clues. When night comes, however, so do the monsters, and while this means tougher and more plentiful encounters, the witching hours are also when…

Developer Shaun Inman Publisher Panic Format PC (tested), Switch Release March 5 Games designed for idiosyncratic hardware seldom feel suited to new platforms. Consider how, without the DK bongos, Jungle Beat’s animal intensity was subdued, or how downsizing to a single screen made The World Ends With You feel less, well, singular. Triumphs – Simogo’s Year Walk thrived in the move from a pair of mobile apps to two Wii U displays – are far rarer. But there is another category of port: where what’s absent shifts attention toward strengths that may previously have been overlooked. So it is with Racheteer DX, an accomplished lo-fi game in the Zelda vein with winter-apocalypse theming and a SteamWorld-like affection for blue-collar tools. There is no prize for guessing how its Wrench Sword…

Developer Dennis Caswell Publisher Epyx, US Gold Original format C64 Release 1984 Here is a memory that has audio files attached. If you mention the 1984 platforming game Impossible Mission to people of a certain vintage, the chances are good that you will receive the following in reply: “Another visitor. Stay a while. Staaay forever!” Forty years have passed since players first heard that line and the handful of others that accompany it. And yet time has not dulled the thrill of the game’s static-riddled synthesised speech in the slightest. It still feels like an absolutely audacious use of primitive home computer technology. It still invites astonishment. A Commodore 64 can speak? But let’s put easy nostalgia aside for a moment and give this a little more thought. Is that…