Table of contents for February 2021 in Edge

Locksport is the art, science and YouTube phenomenon of unlocking security devices that were meant only to be opened by keys. It’s a transgressive and geeky hobby, and so perhaps it’s no surprise that videogames have attempted to represent it for decades. Since August, Dim Bulb Games’ Johnnemann Nordhagen has been updating a playable museum of lockpicking, which you can visit for a price of your choosing on dimbulbgames.itch.io. What was the impetus for the project? Natalie Clayton, one of the writers for Rock Paper Shotgun, just tweeted ‘a museum of virtual fishing mechanics’, or something like that. And I said, this should absolutely exist. It would be wonderful if there was one for conversation mechanics, and lockpicking, and hacking – that would be so useful for developers. I chose…

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 Y you do dis? Dear Nintendo, There are millions of gamers like me (I checked) who, knowingly or not, like their control stick to mimic head and neck movement – ie, push forward to look down, pull back to look up, just like airplane controls. How you could barbarically excise this option from Switch Super Mario Sunshine beggars belief. It’s obviously to dumb it down for the ‘casual’ Switch gamers, which is ridiculous considering the large number of games on there that already have an ‘invert Y axis’ option – you could just as easily have added more explanation for the poor, confused things. I…

A change, it’s often said, can do you good. Tempting though it may be to stay within our comfort zone, it undoubtedly benefits us to embrace new challenges. Accepting change is, after all, how we learn and grow; it makes us more adaptable; it allows us to re-evaluate what’s important to us; it provides us with new opportunities and experiences. In short, change makes our lives more interesting. As this month’s Hype crop proves, the same applies to games. (If it didn’t, we’d all still be playing Spacewar! – and with all due respect to Steve Russell, no one wants that.) The curious canines of Wobbledogs cocoon themselves when it’s time for a change, emerging with anything from a different-coloured body to more legs: the result of each metamorphosis is…

This extended handover period between console generations is a strange time to launch any game, especially one with a mode exclusive to PSVR (a technology that seems to have been a little left behind in the PS5 upgrade.) We shouldn’t expect much in the way of new-gen bells or whistles from Hitman 3. “It is a cross-gen game,” Engström says, and IO prioritised parity between all versions. But there’s one aspect of the new consoles he reckons is a perfect fit for Hitman: the move to SSD, and the fast loading times it enables. After all, he says, “the basic core concept of the series is experimentation, trying things out in the sandbox and failing and reloading.” Proof, if any were needed, that the man truly does understand the Hitman…

Developer/publisher ColePowered Games Format PC Origin UK Release TBA The first thing we do, in our pre-alpha build of Shadows Of Doubt, is delete the entire world. On starting a new game, you’re given the option to generate your own rainy cyber-noir city, with size and population density sliders to choose exactly how big a haystack you’ll search for your murderous needle in – but project lead Cole Jefferies suggests we begin with the provided demo world (four blocks by five, population: 146). Which, with a single stray keystroke, we remove from existence. Oops. This accident does, at least, give us chance to generate a new world. A loading bar spools through tasks – lays out blueprints, creates life, plants evidence – and in doing so, weaves an entirely new…

Inscryption is the work of many hands, but remains one person’s vision. “Anything 2D, like the card portraits or textures, I can do, but not the 3D models,” Mullins says. “So I’ve worked with contractors, but I don’t really have them all together in a Slack or a Discord coordinating.” As in Pony Island, there’s a sense the antagonist is a game designer, struggling to stay ahead of an unruly player, though this doesn’t reflect Mullins’ mood about the project. “I’m more confident in this game than I have been in any game before. I really like card games, too, which is helpful!” One recurring collaborator is composer and sound designer Jonah Senzel, whose score mixes uneasy guitar notes with noises such as creaking hinges.…

On our adventures around Pharloom, we spot one gatherer-type bug with something unexpected in its clutches: a distressed flea. They function much like the first game’s grubs, although instead of being trapped in jars, “these fleas have gotten themselves into various scrapes – they’re more complicated than the grubs, in that they’ve got various different ways of being in trouble.” Once we’ve rescued the puppyish little creature, it leaps away, home to its caravan of fellow fleas. “It travels around the world and expands,” Gibson says, “so it’s a real troupe. And it’s almost like – I probably hadn’t really put it together until now – but it really does act like a travelling town, like a Dirtmouth that’s on wheels. So yeah, you’ll see them at different places throughout…

A year unlike any we’ve experienced – and hopefully will ever experience again – all but demands a fresh approach to handing out awards. The idea came as we gathered together for our annual argument, this time via video conference, to thrash out a top ten. With tempers naturally a little frayed, picking out an order resulted in even more heated debate than usual. Then came a moment of exasperation followed immediately by a sudden, collective epiphany. It is a minor miracle that anything came out this year. To attempt to rank anything under such circumstances felt, well, a little uncharitable. We settled on a new way of doing things. This will – we hope – be a one-off (though if you feel differently, do let us know). But for…

Developer/publisher Nintendo (EPD) Format Switch The latest version of Nintendo’s gentle life sim will forever be inextricably bound to 2020. Already one of Switch’s most-anticipated games, its delay brought it into the world at what could be described as both the worst possible time and the best. As Covid’s spread forced us to self-isolate and locked us away from the outside world, here was a peaceful sanctuary: a glimpse of a fairer, happier place, free from real-world anxieties. Games are about more than just escapism, of course, but New Horizons delivered the ultimate getaway precisely at the moment we all needed it most. At times, it almost feels as if Nintendo somehow knew what we were in for. New Horizons gave players a sense of structure and routine at a…

Developer/publisher Echodog Games Format PC Echodog Games’ captivating debut feels just like one of the hand-carved ornaments you’ll find at the local market stalls on your travels within the game. It’s a small and delicate thing, made with love and care, lying there somehow ignored or undiscovered by most people. And then you open it up to reveal that it’s so much more than just an attractive tchotchke, it’s really a contraption of rare and beautiful intricacy. To talk to other characters, you need to place cards with geometric symbols attached, focusing on ensuring they match up with the previous card so you can continue the conversation. A circular symbol means your responses are empathetic or observant, while a triangle stands for diplomatic and logical conversation. At first, it seems…

Developer Dreamfeel Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, Switch We were spoiled for fantastic debuts this year: Paradise Killer, Necrobarista, Röki, Signs Of The Sojourner and HoloVista among them. The future looks bright indeed. But the brightest star of all was undoubtedly Dreamfeel’s interactive graphic novel If Found, which follows a young transgender woman as she tries to reconcile her present with her past. Her strongest instinct is to destroy the latter – and so you’re presented with her hand-illustrated and annotated diary, and find yourself erasing it sentence by sentence, sketch by sketch, page by page. This mechanic alone is immediately evocative of Dreamfeel’s creative convictions as a studio: simple and satisfying, yet layered with meaning depending on the context it’s placed in, it is handled with the utmost care…

Format iOS, PC, Switch Developer/publisher SFB Games Origin UK Release 2019 Our interest in delving into the making of Tangle Tower stems largely from one thing: the sheer luxuriousness of it. From the sumptuously drawn backgrounds to its snappy script, detailed animation, vibrant designs, rich soundtrack and award-winning vocal performances, everything in this murder mystery visual novel is presented immaculately. How has indie outfit SFB Games achieved it? One look at the folder of sketches and notes we receive, full to bursting with flowcharts, scribbles and iteration upon iteration of character designs gives us our answer. They probably didn’t need to do all this, we suggest, although that is exactly what makes the game so striking. “Scope?” technical director Tom Vian grins at us. “What’s scope?” Tangle Tower is far…

Kind Words PC Right now, it’s hard to put a price on somewhere you can anonymously get your biggest concerns off your chest and receive an encouraging letter or two in return. Or to fold up a positive message of your own into a paper plane and feel sure it will have helped someone, somewhere. Even if you’re uncomfortable about howling into the void or answering a stranger’s cry, those blissfully calming beats are the perfect way to wind down after a stressful day. Lonely Mountains: Downhill PC The sometimes brutal daily runs are fast (though perhaps that’s the wrong word given how cautiously we play) becoming a habit. We’re not bothered about challenging the top of the leaderboards, you understand – just finishing each course gives us the dopamine…

Filling your garage with cars and bikes is the closest thing Cyberpunk has to an endgame, its map covered in high-value purchases long after the story missions have wrapped up. What to do with said fleet in a crime-free world is a mystery, though there’s undeniable pleasure in discovering their distinct handling models (steering throughout hits a nice arcade sweet spot) and ogling minutely detailed dashboards. The MaiMai is our pick of the bunch, a truncated number that resembles a seat on four wheels and has big Game Boy Advance SP energy. Of course, Johnny Silverhand gets the shiniest toy: a ludicrously pretty 1977 Porsche 930 Turbo. Sometimes it pays to have a preening rockstar in your brain.…

You’re joined on your quest by a tiny Guardian sent back from the future to warn of the impending Calamity. It looks like a robot egg on legs, while its whistling ‘voice’ makes it sound like one of the Clangers. But as well as fulfilling a key narrative role, it’ll helpfully point you in the right direction when you’re looking at the top-down map of Hyrule between story missions. Sometimes it’ll recommend short asides designed to acclimatise you to specific weapons or abilities, while at others it’ll remind you to fuse weapons to increase their power, or fulfil villager requests to unlock stores and training facilities. Happily, you can unlock it as a playable fighter, though it’s a time-consuming process – and you’ll need to finish the campaign first.…

Nope. Only one of you gets to control the gliding in co-op, leaving the other player to use the right stick to pick up any rust they miss. It’s awkward, and not worth the compromise of locking the camera in place. Surely split-screen would have been better? Because when there’s no rust to collect, you’re watching your partner play alone. Combat makes more sense because it requires constant communication, but it’s the only part of Haven that feels like it was designed with co-op in mind. Cooking forces you both to choose ingredients from a menu, which is just adding unnecessary steps to a dull process to justify two players. Imagine choosing options on a McDonald’s electronic menu side-by-side, only less involving or romantic.…

With a few notable exceptions, it hasn’t been a strong year for blockbuster games – although Covid played a part in that. Unlike triple-A developers, which faced logistical challenges in arranging remote working for hundreds of staff, indie studios (many already accustomed to working without offices, or working with outside contractors) were able to adapt quickly, and saw little disruption to their routines. There were still holdups for non-blockbusters (Annapurna Interactive’s late-year triumvirate of The Artful Escape, Last Stop and 12 Minutes slipped into 2021, for example) but 2020 was a year in which the independent scene continued to thrive, as reflected in our year-end awards. With the likes of our cover game, Playdate’s launch and – with a fair wind – new games from Simogo, Fullbright and Heart Machine…

By releasing the project, Nordhagen hopes to inspire others to build their own niche museums of individual videogame mechanics. As for himself, the developer harbours ambitions to establish both hacking and fishing minigame collections at some point. “Fishing is the most requested one by far, but that’s a lot to bite off,” he says, his face betraying no hint that the snappy pun is intentional. “There are a lot of different fishing games, they have very different interfaces and stuff, and a lot of them are 3D. So there’s a lot more time, effort and potentially money that would go into a museum like that than lockpicking.”…

Game DoDonPachi True Death Exa Label Manufacturer Exa-Arcadia We take our good news stories where we can get them right now, and word of a new Cave arcade game certainly fits that bill. There’s something heartening about the continued existence of the bullet hell maestro, particularly during this year with arcades struggling to stay in business. True Death Exa Label is based on the 2012 arcade game DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou – the first of its four modes is the game in its original form, while X Arrange Mode is the 2013 Xbox 360 version, which was remixed as a result of feedback. The fourth mode sees you face off against boss character Inbachi, but it’s the third that sets this new version apart: Exa Label Mode features adaptive difficulty, helpful for…

As if 2020 had not been bad enough, right towards the very end of it Facebook released an experiment in ‘interactive storytelling’ called Rival Peak. It was marketed (and obediently reported in the mainstream press) as an “AI”-driven cross of reality TV show and videogame, in which animated contestant characters competed to avoid being voted off by the human audience. What, in a way, could be more zeitgeisty? We had all binged our way through Selling Sunset on Netflix but little new reality content was being filmed during the plague year, for obvious reasons. Maybe artificial intelligence could plug the yawning gap in our locked-down souls. I for one was thrilled to find out whether it could. Happily, in a way, it turned out that no artificial intelligence was harmed…

Exo One PC, Xbox Series “An arthouse sci-fi Tiny Wings” is a heck of a pitch, and we’re still not bored of the time-limited Steam prologue. All the same, we’re itching to see more storm-lashed alien planets in Jay Weston’s none-more-atmospheric game of serene exploration and exhilarating flight. Ghostwire: Tokyo PC, PS5 Archipel’s fabulous Shinji Mikami doc has us excited afresh for Tango Gameworks’ distinctive supernatural action game. A J-horror Ghostbusters produced by the man behind Resident Evil and God Hand? We’re confident that this will end up as one of 2021’s cult favourites. God Of War: Ragnarok PS5 An interview clip of Christopher Judge on his performance as Kratos is a reminder of how he humanised a character who’d previously seemed like a one-note killing machine. We’re definitely up…

The bounty of ventilation shafts should clue you in to Shadows Of Doubt’s immersive-sim credentials. In particular, the Deus Ex lineage: there are sticky notes with password reminders, emails to read, and some of the most lovingly-presented locked doors we’ve ever bumped up against. You can knock, try the handle, or move your cursor down to peer through the crack at the bottom. Each handle has a lock percentage, indicating how hard it is to pick, and a strength value in case you decide to apply a shoulder to it. And some doors are sealed with keycodes – though we fail to find a single one that opens to ‘0451’. These procgen algorithms, they’ve got no respect for the classics.…

Developer/publisher Animal Uprising Format PC Origin US Release TBA As much as we love dogs – which is a lot – we don’t always feel great about what humanity has done to them. Specifically, the physical features that make dogs’ lives harder than they need to be. The brachycephalic wheezing caused by those adorably squashed pug faces; hip dysplasia in larger breeds; the assorted spinal complaints of the dachshund – all intentionally bred in the pursuit of ‘pedigree’. Which is a rather heavy thing to be thinking about while playing a pet management game starring pups that look as though they’ve been assembled out of pink erasers and the contents of a school tuck shop. But Wobbledogs gooey surface conceals a sharper edge. “I am not super-interested in making, like,…

Hollow Knight composer Christopher Larkin returns with a typically atmospheric score for Silksong – heavily based on string instruments, naturally. You can head to YouTube for a sample of the wonderfully frantic accompaniment to the boss fight against Hornet’s rival, Lace. “There’s a really funny process that we’ve had with Chris, where for some tracks for some sequences, we’ve talked to Chris about, say, the lore or the narrative of a moment,” Gibson says. “And it’s often the other tracks where nothing is really talked about other than the most basic idea, that end up being the strongest.” Lace’s theme was simply a boss track Larkin had been independently working on; Gibson and Pellen feel their deep familiarity with what’s going on in the game can almost cloud Larkin’s creative…

Developer Media Molecule Publisher SIE Format PS4 Turns out they can come true, after all. Media Molecule’s astonishing toolkit is a giant leap for this small studio, elevating its ‘play, create, share’ ethos to unprecedented new levels. Little wonder, then, that it’s taken an entire console generation to come to fruition, arriving at the end of the PS4 era to deliver a vision that promises to last throughout PS5’s lifetime, too. And, who knows, perhaps even beyond that – this incredible piece of software has the potential to transcend hardware cycles, spearheading a new generation of creators across a huge range of disciplines. Dreams works its magic by gamifying the creative process. It offers fun, tangible rewards for each player to personalise their cosy Homespace, alongside the less obvious ones…

Developer/publisher Valve Corporation Format Index, Quest, Rift, Vive The only thing more surprising than getting a new Half-Life game in 2020 was the catch that came along with it. Dipping back into Gordon Freeman’s universe (or rather, Alyx Vance’s) didn’t just require the powerhouse PC we might have expected, but also a VR setup. Ideally, Valve’s own Index – a remarkable bit of technology with a price tag about as steep as City 17’s infamous Citadel. So, yes, it’s a shame that one of the year’s best games is also one of its most inaccessible. We still can’t quite believe that ending passed by with so little comment (and if you’re still unspoiled, please do try to stay that way until you get a chance to experience Alyx for yourself).…

Developer/publisher Kaizen Game Works Format PC, Switch At first, the 24th Island Sequence is overwhelming. But that’s exactly what it’s been designed to be. The vaporwave stylings of this place – in which a heinous murder has been committed, and it’s your job to find out whodunnit – are all-consuming. Unapologetic, even. This is lo-fi in the extreme: palm trees stand uncannily still against creamsicle skies, polygonal buildings almost seem folded into shape, and enigmatic 2D suspects turn towards you wherever you walk like seductive billboards. From the off, as Barry ‘Epoch’ Topping’s sublime city pop soundtrack throbs in the ears, you’re buried in all manner of strange concepts: a council formed to protect against demonic possession; wily gods with hidden agendas; a goat-headed pop idol and a skeleton barman;…

How did you go about finding your IndieCade awardwinning voice cast? Kimlinh Tran trained as a casting director, and I gave her the voice briefs – each character had some drawings and some sample lines of dialogue. And because the music got recorded quite early on, we even sent out character themes to the actors so they could hear the vibe of the character. And also their bedrooms, as Catherine had painted a lot of that. So I gave it all to Kimlinh, and she collected a lot of auditions for each character. What’s your criteria for who gets a role? The most important factor, I think, is who is the best actor – just in terms of being able to emote in a nuanced, believable way. If it’s not…

Depending on when you’re reading this, it’s either the very end of one year or the beginning of another. It’s usually a time to look back or forward – and, now that we have the Edge Awards wrapped up for 2020, we can’t wait to get on with the latter. As we sit expectantly on the cusp of 2021, it’s fitting that several of this issue’s Play selection find themselves straddling past and future. Cyberpunk 2077 finally arrives with a vision of 57 years hence (56 to you latecomers) that feels like a thrilling glimpse of the kind of visual complexity we should expect across games in general in the near future – or from those with comparable budgets, at least. Yet its satire is firmly stuck in the past,…

If Breath Of The Wild’s mounts were wasted on a Hyrule that rarely required you to saddle up (particularly once you finished the DLC and unlocked a faster way to get around), Immortals makes its steeds more valuable. Even the rarer ones are relatively easily tamed: simply crouch and walk slowly toward them to avoid scaring them off, and they’ll soon acclimatise to your presence, with one button press enough to win them over. They can be summoned instantly, too – one of Immortals’ greatest joys is the way Fenyx leaps up and lands astride their mount in a single fluid movement. You’re not limited to horses, either: within a few hours we’re riding around on a beautiful blue unicorn, with three stamina bars letting us gallop some way without…

At the outset of a new game, you’re offered a choice of 14 factions and bosses. Some, like Capone and Daniel McKee Jackson, are real figures of the Prohibition era; others are inventions to help diversify the cast a little. One – Elvira Duarte – is actually lifted from Romero family history. Each provides their own buffs to the management side of the game, but it’s the unique combat abilities that really distinguish them. We start out as Duarte, before leading Capone to victory (after reloading following that unfortunate poisoning incident) thanks to unlocking an ability that makes it possible to chain kills together ad infinitum, and a borderline magical machine gun, turning the first turn of each combat into its very own St Valentine’s Day Massacre.…

Watch Dogs 2 pulls few punches when it comes to criticising one of Silicon Valley’s most notorious weak points – its race problem. Holloway gets in an early jab at the issue of face recognition tech, its algorithms built by and trained on white faces, not recognising darker skin tones. Later, he and fellow Black DedSec member out to the campus of tech company Nudle, and Holloway’s ”Nobody looks like us… They see two of responses to the portrayal of POC characters were mixed but largely positive: it’s well worth checking out thoughts from Vice’s Austin Walker and Tanya DePass via Polygon.…

Thanks largely to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Switch sales in the UK were the best for any single format in a decade, while Hyrule Warriors: Age Of Calamity became the biggest-selling Warriors game ever within four days of launch. Yet Nintendo would surely have been hoping for a stronger Christmas slate to compete with Sony and Microsoft’s headline-grabbers – though it’s clear Covid-19 has had a particularly severe impact on the company’s way of working. Still, a small team managed to put together a delightful little freebie while working from home: fingers crossed we see more small experiments like Jump Rope Challenge from Nintendo in 2021.…

Our entertainment masters have identified the enemy in their efforts to connect us to a smooth-flowing, never-ending pipeline of content. That enemy is: friction. The roughage in our gaming diet is bad because it might cause us to turn off or tune out. At first glance, this sounds reasonable. I tell stories and don’t I want to tell the whole story? Developers are painfully aware of the statistics that show that only the minority of players ever complete a given game – and many of the new system-level initiatives are aimed at the frustrations that apparently cause this. Sony’s Activities feature neatly breaks its games into convenient chunks of fun, packaging up the objectives and tasks available and teleporting you right into the action. In Spider-Man, this cuts out the…

Developer/publisher IO Interactive Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Denmark Release January 20 Endings: a topic in which we’d imagine Agent 47 is uniquely well-versed by now. He’s certainly delivered enough of them in his time – via the medium of piano wire, silenced pistol, tumbling stuffed moose. And now, with IO Interactive putting another besuited amoral agent in its sights, it seems 47 is about to get one of his own. An ending, that is. Not a stuffed moose. “We are going to put it to rest for a while, the franchise,” game director Mattias Engström tells us. “We have the live tail, and there’s going to be some cool stuff coming there” – he means the kind of extra missions and Elusive Targets which…

The DualSense controller’s speaker and haptics have a significant impact on many of the game’s more emotional scenes. “The relationship between haptics and audio is so important, and is a big part of how we think about things,” Dabbous says, calling back to Rez’s Trance Vibrator as one of the early leaders in helping players to understand an emotional state. “So we can give that to our writers and be like, ‘Hey, in your script, you can specify your heart rate, if you want to ― you can specify if a choice will increase or decrease your heart rate, and have that be reflected in the controller. And by pulling our writers into becoming so intrinsic to the design of the game, we increase our collaboration.”…

Developer/ publisher Daniel Mullins Games Format PC Origin Canada Release 2021 You are sitting at a candlelit table in a wooden cabin. You are playing cards. You can’t make out your opponent’s face in the darkness – only its large, hungry eyes and the masks it puts on and takes off with enormous, leathery fingers. The card game – summarised by Inscryption’s creator Daniel Mullins as “a deck-building Roguelike in the vein of Slay The Spire” – sees you lining up cards to inflict or block damage, as measured by a pair of golden scales. Cards have a blood price: more powerful varieties require you to sacrifice others for points. Between card battles you move a figurine around a dotted parchment map. It’s not clear what you’re playing for, but…

Wobbledogs is an unusual title, but Astle names various reference points: Sonic Adventure’s Chao Gardens, the Petz and Creatures games, the humble Tamagotchi. “I should mention The Sims as well, having worked on that series.” It wasn’t his intent to make a Sims-like game, but the influence is clear. The dogs have needs meters, and the game is broken up into three modes: live play, paused design and build. But the biggest link is in how quickly the game gets out of the player’s way and lets them decide how to approach it. “One of the things I took away from my time on The Sims is that they really stressed there are different types of players who engage with that game. People want different things out of experiences like…

Much like the first game’s Geo, Rosary Beads – sometimes found strung up and hanging from the ceiling around the caverns, moving gently as Hornet brushes past and scattering when hit so you can collect them – are the main currency of the world. Pellen finds a Frayed Rosary String of four beads in a secret spot. You can break strings at any point to use the currency: useful if you find a bench that you must pay in beads to unlock, since you don’t have to trek back to town to liquidate your assets. While strung, the beads remain yours if you die. “You can kind of use them as a bit of a banking system sometimes,” Pellen says, and Gibson adds: “And some vendors will string them up…

With development on Silksong starting even before the release of Hollow Knight, there’s been very little time for the devs to stop and take stock of things. Does Team Cherry plan to take a break after the release of Silksong? “Well, we have that non-Hollow Knight game that is due to be made,” Gibson says. “It’s been left to lapse, which is just fine. But I think we’re both excited to jump into that.” We’re intrigued: when did development begin on this? “They’re just documents that get expanded as each new idea comes in,” Gibson says. “So they’re good in a way, because once the document exists, every month or few months, it gets slowly added to in the background.” The new game is currently one shared Google Doc, and…

Developer/publisher Supergiant Games Format PC, Switch The magic of Supergiant’s greatest game is that, despite dying over and over again as you attempt to fight your way out of Hell, you never feel stuck in a loop. Make no mistake: a good videogame loop is a brilliant thing, a carousel designed to keep you engaged and entertained. It’s precisely what Roguelikes are built on. The very best disguise it. Yet Hades goes one step further ‒ it makes the loop mean something. Zagreus, prince of the Underworld, sets about his quest of self-discovery with a frequently comedic stubbornness. He’s compelled to defy his father and reach the surface by any means necessary: pummelled by club-carrying louts and lasered by angry crystals, turned to stone by Medusa heads and poisoned by…

Developer Naughty Dog Publisher SIE Format PS4 Writers are commonly advised to kill their darlings; clearly, Neil Druckmann took the advice to heart. Together with co-writer Halley Gross, Druckmann turned in the darkest, most challenging big-budget sequel in living memory: a tale about cycles of violence and their horrifying repercussions that made for one of the most harrowing blockbusters of this or any other year. In what has hardly been a vintage 12 months for triple-A games, this was comfortably the boldest of them all. You only need look at the online reaction to understand the risks Naughty Dog took here. With Joel’s death alone, it enraged a not-insignificant portion of its audience. Having brutally dispensed with the first game’s protagonist – and so early, too – it then dared…

Developer Cardboard Computer Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One At the beginning of the year, Cardboard Computer’s episodic pilgrimage finally reached its destination. Seven years after ageing delivery driver Conway was first tasked with transporting a package to the seemingly mythical Dogwood Drive, we finally arrived there without him. That absence ripples throughout a final chapter that feels less like a climax, more an elegiac coda. It doesn’t tie things up with a neat bow – though why would it, when life is so rarely tidy like that? – but it’s as definitive an ending as any ongoing journey can ever have. Yet as a depiction of America that became increasingly hard to disentangle from real-world developments, Episode V perhaps felt overly optimistic back in January. And…

Shruti Ghosh and Ian Maude, two of the co-founders of Nodding Heads Games, are exhausted. Fatigue is etched on their faces, clearly visible even through the grainy video footage of our Skype conversation. In the background, a dog yowls off-camera, while a few others slump onto a sofa, soon dozing off under the hot and humid weather in Pune, India. Both developers, sometimes accompanied by the studio’s third co-founder Avichal Singh, joining the call remotely from his place, have been out most nights feeding over 200 stray dogs on the streets. This is in addition to the work they’ve put into their game: Raji: An Ancient Epic. “There’s always rescue cases and accidents, and all these we have to take care of as well, because we just love them a…

Developer CD Projekt Red Publisher CD Projekt Format PC (tested), PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Out now Keanu Reeves is inside your head and going full John Wick on your psyche. To quote the man himself: bogus. You are V and he is Johnny Silverhand, a long-deceased rocker taking a joyride in your skull and finishing the work that dropped the curtain on him all those years ago. A devil on your shoulder, then, but also a convenient tour guide for Night City, albeit one who spouts as many c-bombs as restaurant recommendations. Think Ocarina Of Time’s Navi from the wrong side of the tracks. As a character, he’s the embodiment of Cyberpunk 2077’s most abrasive impulses; as a device, an ingenious method of tying even the…

This is a very pretty game in places, overcoming its technical limitations to produce delightful sights. We might roll our eyes a little when Norah gushes “What a beautiful mountainous landscape!” while peering through a hole in a carved figure, but she’s not wrong: the stylised aesthetic combined with the almost total absence of UI means some views look like hand-painted postcards. There’s plenty of environmental diversity, too, particularly as we head inland: indigenous idols are juxtaposed with colossal basalt formations that don’t seem entirely of this world, while fantastical late-game sequences create dreamlike imagery from everyday surroundings. It’s only a pity we can’t admire all this without being told how to feel.…

The predominantly teenage heroes often seem wise beyond their years. They’re certainly capable of taking life-changing revelations in their stride – and talking cats, for that matter – though they’re less experienced in matters of the heart. Exchanges between male and female characters often result in red-cheeked embarrassment, and while the order in which we tackle the stories plays a part, during one session we witness no fewer than three spluttering declarations of love from the male cast. Sometimes these seem to come out of nowhere, but a few are obvious pairings from the off. Pompadoursporting hard man Nenji Ogata and sarcastic Tomi Kisaragi have that Bogart/Bacall dynamic, their bickering clearly belying a strong attraction on both sides.…

“Saving the environment in Pinar del Mar is not a chore but an opportunity,” we’re told by the developers. The game is full of positive, encouraging verbs such as ‘raise awareness’, ‘support’, ‘fix’, ‘clean’ and ‘heal’, a distinct element to Alba’s warmth. But behind the feelgood message is a genuine desire to effect change – the credits list organisations you can join to get involved with rescuing wildlife yourself, and its maker has committed to planting one million trees.…

Tenderfoot Tactics is partly the result of system designer Badru’s interest in cellular automata, chaos and complexity theory, as discussed in Stephen Wolfram’s book A New Kind of Science. In a Medium essay, Badru draws attention to the “indescribable behavior of complex systems like fire, clouds, steam, water, where you can tell intuitively there is some pattern or logic to the motion, but it is so chaotic and unpredictable it almost feels like you’re looking at another thinking being.”…