ty jdy e4trh d by robertcal46

THE HOT 100 FROM ELDEN RING

TO METROID DREAD: THE BEST GAMES OF E3

NARAKA BLADEPOINT MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER MELEE: INSIDE THE QUEST TO REDEFINE THE BATTLE ROYALE

#361

SEPTEMBER 2021

Never mind the virtualised micropolygons, here’s Roblox

If you want to make a triple-A game developer depressed, ask them why they bother spending so many late nights agonising over fiddly features barely anyone will ever notice when instead they could be cranking out Roblox concepts to an audience of millions of young people ready to reward them with hard cash in exchange for stupid-looking digital hats. Once upon a time, it was a kind of law that kids played Nintendo games, with all of the Nintendo quality guarantees built in, but the landscape has long since changed, and it doesn’t pay to be too Principal Skinner about it. For a new generation of players, the classic, supposedly critical ingredients – an engaging story, cunningly structured environments, and mechanics so polished you can see your face in them – sit way down the list of priorities, giving fledgling designers the chance to find success with fumblingly created executions that often make up for with heart what they might lack in creative flair. The scale of today’s DIY scene is staggering, helped along by Fortnite’s Creative mode, the existence of Roblox and Rec Room on mobile devices, and of course with Minecraft somewhere near the centre, defined as it is by the process of making things. To encompass it all would require an entire magazine, but for this issue we’re placing the spotlight on Roblox (p84), a phenomenon that doesn’t often get its dues. One key differentiator between Roblox and some of the other gamemaking packages eyeing its audience size enviously is that it is multiplayer by definition, making it resonate with a young audience more inclined to social play than many of their older peers. Naturally, support for multiple players is only going to grow, and nearly a third of the games showcased at E3 2021 featured some kind of social aspect, as you can see in this issue’s analysis, beginning on p8. And if it’s multiplayer action you want, our cover game, Naraka: Bladepoint (p66), is overflowing with it. Or maybe you’re looking for something else entirely – in which case, take your pick from this issue’s E3 Hype special (p30), featuring 100 new games.

Exclusive subscriber edition

games

Hype@E3 32 Xbox

Starfield, Redfall, Forza Horizon 5, Somervil e, A Plague Tale: Requiem, STALKER 2: Heart Of Chernobyl, Halo Infinite, Psychonauts 2, Planet Of Lana, Replaced, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, Party Animals, Atomic Heart

38 Switch 38

The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild 2, Metroid Dread, WarioWare: Get It Together, Mario + Rabbids: Sparks Of Hope, Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, Shin Megami Tensei V

42 Multiformat, PlayStation & PC

Explore the iPad edition of Edge for additional content

Elden Ring, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction, Tunic, Citizen Sleeper, Immortality, Trek To Yomi, Riders Republic, Far: Changing Tides, Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, Unpacking, Salt & Sacrifice, Mechajammer, Pioner, Venice 2089, Walk, Happy Game, Arcade Paradise, Far Cry 6, Unbeatable, Soup Pot, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, Passpartout 2: The Lost Artist, Signalis, Black Book, Phantom Abyss, Death Stranding: Director’s Cut, Inkulinati, Aragami 2, Kil er Auto, Life Is Strange: True Colors, Two Point Campus, Evil Dead: The Game, Demon Throttle, Wizard With A Gun, Stranger Of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin, A Musical Story, The Big Con, New World, Grime, Elec Head, Bear And Breakfast, Sable, Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora, Norco, Echoes Of The End, Fracked, Despelote, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt, Dordogne, Jurassic World Evolution 2, No Longer Home, Conway: Disappearance At Dahlia View, Death Trash, Death’s Door, Crossfire: Legion, A Little To The Left, El Paso Elsewhere, Dolmen, Terra Invicta, Lost Ark, The Wandering Vil age, Slime Rancher 2, Steelrising, The Anacrucis, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania, Axiom Verge 2, Behind The Frame: The Finest Scenery, TOEM, Metal Slug Tactics, Babylon’s Fall, Battlefield 2042, Inscryption, The Last Oricru, Despot’s Game, They Always Run, Silt, Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator, Schim, Unsighted, Sephonie

Play

104 Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings Of Ruin PC, Switch

108 Edge Of Eternity

PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series

112 Griftlands

PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One

114 Scarlet Nexus

PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series

116 Backbone

PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One

118 Mario Golf: Super Rush Switch

119 Umurangi Generation PC, Switch

120 Minute Of Islands PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One

121 Strangeland PC

123 Ynglet PC

Follow these links throughout the magazine for more content online

104

sections #361

SEPTEMBER 2021

Knowledge

Dispatches

The highs – and occasional head-in-hands lows – of an E3 wrestling with a new identity

Edge readers share their views; one wins a 12-month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription

8 The show must go on

16 Artisan crafts

Build a better world out of wooden miniatures in soothing 3D puzzle game Woodo

20 Soundbytes

Game commentary in snack-sized mouthfuls, featuring the comedic stylings of Epic’s Tim Sweeney

22 This Month On Edge

The things that caught our eye during the production of E361

24 Dialogue

26 Trigger Happy

Steven Poole considers the evolution of zombies, all the way to the bleakest of ends

28 Unreliable Narrator

Sam Barlow explains why Hitchcock’s Psycho promo is the perfect videogame trailer

Features

66 Secret Weapon

How Naraka: Bladepoint is delivering a long-overdue shake-up to the battle royale

74 Collected Works

From Disney to Dead Space and beyond: Glen Schofield reflects on 30 years of big brands, blockbusters and... Barbie?

84 Built To Last

Inside Roblox, the DIY gamemaking system defining digital play for a new generation

94 The Making Of...

How Inkle built a nebula of ancient civilisations and lost languages in archaeological adventure Heaven’s Vault

98 Studio Profile

From a pair of platforming pals to making Friends around the industry: it’s Playtonic Games

124 Time Extend

Revisiting the bold, fascinating, flawed experiment that was the original Assassin’s Creed

129 The Long Game

Can Spiritfarer’s bonus episodes finally give Stella’s heart-rending story the ending she deserves?

EDITORIAL Tony Mott acting editor Chris Schilling deputy editor Alex Spencer features editor Miriam McDonald operations editor Andrew P Hind art editor CONTRIBUTORS

Sam Barlow, Nathan Brown, Grace Curtis, Ian Evenden, Malindy Hetfeld, Phil Iwaniuk, Andy Kelly, Andy McGregor, Emmanuel Pajon, Jeremy Peel, Dominic Peppiatt, Steven Poole, Alan Wen, Mark Wynne

SPECIAL THANKS

Gaspard Augé, Gary Burns, Pieter Van Hulst, Japanese Breakfast and the good folk at Morley’s

ADVERTISING

Clare Dove commercial sales director Kevin Stoddart account manager (+44 (0) 1225 687455 kevin.stoddart@futurenet.com)

+44 (0)1225 442244 edge@futurenet.com

SUBSCRIPTIONS

Web www.magazinesdirect.com Email help@magazinesdirect.com (new subscribers) help@mymagazine.co.uk (renewals/queries) Telephone 0330 333 1113 International +44 (0) 330 333 1113

CIRCULATION

Tim Mathers head of newstrade +44 (0) 1202 586200

PRODUCTION

Mark Constance head of production US & UK Clare Scott production project manager Hollie Dowse advertising production manager Jason Hudson digital editions controller Nola Cokely production manager

MANAGEMENT

Angie O’Farrell chief content officer Matt Pierce MD, games, photo, design & video Dan Dawkins content director, games Tony Mott editorial director, games Warren Brown group art director, games, photo & design Rodney Dive global head of design Dan Jotcham commercial finance director Printed in the UK by William Gibbons & Sons on behalf of Future. Distributed by Marketforce, 2nd Floor, 5 Churchill Place, Canary Wharf, London E14 5HU. All contents © 2021 Future Publishing Limited or published under licence. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be used, stored, transmitted or reproduced in any way without the prior written permission of the publisher. Future Publishing Limited (company number 2008885) is registered in England and Wales. Registered office: Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA. All information contained in this publication is for information only and is, as far as we are aware, correct at the time of going to press. Future cannot accept any responsibility for errors or inaccuracies in such information. You are advised to contact manufacturers and retailers directly with regard to the price of products/services referred to in this publication. Apps and websites mentioned in this publication are not under our control. We are not responsible for their contents or any other changes or updates to them. This magazine is fully independent and not affiliated in any way with the companies mentioned herein. Reminder: the answer to the question “Hey, how about some infographics?” should always be “no”. If you submit material to us, you warrant that you own the material and/or have the necessary rights/permissions to supply the material and you automatically grant Future and its licensees a licence to publish your submission in whole or in part in any/all issues and/or editions of publications, in any format published worldwide and on associated websites, social media channels and associated products. Any material you submit is sent at your own risk and, although every care is taken, neither Future nor its employees, agents, subcontractors or licensees shall be liable for loss or damage. We assume all unsolicited material is for publication unless otherwise stated, and reserve the right to edit, amend, adapt all submissions.

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KNOWLEDGE E3

The show must go on

The industry rallied to deliver some kind of E3 2021. But was it too much?

he 2021 incarnation of the greatest show on gaming Earth – the place where technical envelopes are traditionally pushed, where we expect the bleeding edge of interactive entertainment to be annually redefined – began with 1bit graphics on a 400x240 display. Yet the notion of Playdate opening the festivities at what we will charitably call E3 2021 was not as inappropriate as it first appeared. This was never going to be your dad’s E3, of course; COVID-19 saw to that. But so did the avalanche of publishers, media organisations and event companies that saw an opportunity to muscle in on a disrupted timetable, and hog a little of the biggest spotlight in games. The result was the busiest public schedule E3 has ever seen – and, at times, one of the dullest. Indeed, Playdate’s 15-minute broadcast was one of the week’s highlights, snappily paced and bringing only good news to those eagerly awaiting Panic’s charming – and charmingly silly – handheld. The first ‘season’ of games has doubled in size, from 12 titles to 24; among those now developing games for the system are Papers, Please and Obra Dinn creator Lucas Pope. The breezy, browser-based development platform was shown off for the first time, and there is a dock with a pen holder, because of course there is. There are those who find Playdate, and the Portland-based Panic, just a little too hipsterish, and indeed, the broadcast had a ‘we can pickle that’ sort of energy to it. Mileage naturally varies with this sort

Forza Horizon 5 brought the Xbox showcase to a close, though Microsoft was far less dependent on its traditional big hitters than it has been in recent years. Predictably, it looks great

KNOWLEDGE E3

The newly unveiled Playdate Stereo dock acts as charger, Bluetooth speaker and pen holder, and like the handheld itself has been designed by Sweden’s Teenage Engineering. Naturally, it’s bright, sunny yellow

winkingly tantric tease for the will-theywon’t-they appearance of Elden Ring, which popped up at the end and looked predictably wondrous. But there were plenty of other delights elsewhere, from studios of all shapes and That is not quite to say sizes. There was also the it was all downhill from It was just as well now-mandatory there, but E3 2021 appearance of Keighley certainly ended up closer indies were there bestie Hideo Kojima, on to sea level than it was to pick up the hand to announce Death at the start. It’s almost Stranding Director’s Cut always like this, slack, given the for PS5, and muse airily admittedly: reality is rarely a match for fanboy fever travails of some of about future projects. back, Keighley dreams. But at least in the bigger hitters mayLooking wonder how the tone normal circumstances a of the broadcast got so bad E3 is over quickly, a dark at points. Kojima went off on one tight three-day schedule of press conferences ripping off the Band-Aid. This about 9/11, while Giancarlo Esposito reeled off the names of history’s great time, with every company and its dog despots in discussing his role in Far Cry carving its half-hour or hour out of the 6. But the host must be largely satisfied schedule over the course of a whole with how it went on the night – and even week, it seemed to go on forever. more so once the curtain had dropped on Early on, though, optimism reigned. E3 as a whole, placing his show in an Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest broadcast, the kickoff event for a season- even more flattering context. Keighley may be an easy target, but there’s no long programme of events designed to questioning his commitment, nor the celebrate both the magic of videogames graft he puts in. His shows tend to hit and the continued existence of Keighley more than they miss, and in the wider himself, was well stocked with exciting context of this week-long festival of titles. Yes, for FromSoftware fans the rolling apathy, that is some victory. whole thing was little more than a of thing, but the innovation, creativity and simple joy on show here was a fine way to set the tone, even if what followed would struggle to match it.

A recurring theme in Keighley’s shows, whether at E3, Gamescom or The Game Awards, has been his willingness to give indies plenty of time in the spotlight, rather than cosseting them away into two-minute sizzle reels the way platform holders often do. This year, the rest of E3 caught up with him. This was a happy consequence of the relentless schedule – Summer Game Fest segued smoothly into Day Of The Devs, for example, and so the latter inherited a chunk of the former’s viewers. While Double Fine’s show was the highlight as expected, there were fine showings from Guerrilla Collective and Wholesome Direct, among others. Yes, it resulted in an absolute avalanche of games being shown off over the course of the week, the vast majority of which were swiftly forgotten. But for all that the format was overwhelming, it meant some small games, from tiny teams, have got in front of potential customers and future fans. It was just as well the indies were there to pick up the slack, given the travails of some of the industry’s bigger hitters. Gearbox’s stream had no surprises: Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands had already been unveiled on Keighley’s stage. Those tuning in were treated, if you can call it that, to Randy Pitchford on the set of the Borderlands movie, interviewing cast and crew. Later, Capcom would spend half an hour talking with cultish enthusiasm about updates to games we already knew about. Bandai Namco handed over 15 minutes of its presentation to an interview about the latest episode of The Dark Pictures Anthology. On it went. Square Enix had plenty of new games to talk about, at least, though it still managed to under-deliver. Life Is Strange: True Colors stuck in the mind only for the narrator playing up the protagonist’s “psychic power of empathy”. There was an update on Babylon’s Fall, the PlatinumGames action title announced at E3 2018, which looks like it was actually announced ten years earlier, and is now a live-service game to boot.

Also unveiled were Eidos

Montreal’s Guardians Of The Galaxy

Elden Ring looks spectacular, and more familiar than expected. The game builds on Dark Souls 3’s weapon skills, offering around 100 unique options

GONG WRONG

When does a winner not really feel like a winner?

Hideo Kojima – who, in case you missed it, is a friend of Geoff Keighley’s – was tight-lipped on his future projects, but Giancarlo Esposito was happy to get stuck into Far Cry 6 (left)

Babylon’s Fall didn’t set the pulse racing, but Platinum’s track record means there’s still room for optimism – providing you overlook the existence of Anarchy Reigns

Also absent from proceedings this year were the Game Critics Awards, organised by the omnipresent Geoff Keighley, in which a pool of global media, us included, nominate the best games that were playable at the show. In its place came the official E3 Awards, and in keeping with the broader theme of this year’s E3, they paled against what they were meant to replace. Winners were chosen by just half a dozen participants, with categories limited to the ‘most anticipated’ game shown by each company that held a presentation under the official E3 2021 banner. The most anticipated game overall? Forza Horizon 5, despite Halo: Infinite winning the Xbox/Bethesda category.

KNOWLEDGE E3

tie-in, which had been leaked in advance of the show; a suite of ‘pixel remasters’ of the first six Final Fantasy games; and Stranger In Paradise Final Fantasy Origin, whose trailer provided E3 2021’s most memorable moment. It was a disaster, instantly securing its place in E3 history alongside Ravidrums, Giant Enemy Crabs and all the rest. An instantly forgettable name; a hateful, 360-era protagonist ranting incessantly about his need to ‘kill Chaos’; a downloadable demo that didn’t work for two days – you couldn’t script it. The demo reveals it to be a perfectly serviceable Souls homage from Nioh developer Team Ninja. A vital reminder of the importance of setting aside the budget and time for a decent trailer. While the supporting cast at E3 2021 was larger than ever, those games and studios were never going to draw too much focus away from the traditional headline acts. E3 is a moment in time, an annual snapshot of the industry’s present state and probable future, driven largely, if not entirely, by the performances of the three platform holders. Sure, this year there were only two, with Sony opting to stay away again. But we still learned plenty, despite, and perhaps even from, PlayStation’s absence. Microsoft’s showing was confident, resolutely on-message and suggesting that the acquisition spree of the past few years is finally starting to bear fruit. It has 14

Little was shown of Starfield, but there were few finer elevator pitches throughout E3 than ‘Skyrim in space’. A Guardians Of The Galaxy game seems like a no-brainer too, but after Marvel’s Avengers, the jury’s out

been firmly positioning Game Pass as the main driver of the Xbox value proposition for years now, but never has it felt this convincing. Of the 30 games shown off, 27 are heading to the subscription service. There are valid concerns around Microsoft’s business model: consolidation has implications for consumer choice – a subscription service for the very concept of ownership. But Game Pass has been good since launch, has only improved from there, and is now so central to the ecosystem that, if you don’t have Game Pass, do you really have an Xbox? This wasn’t just a showcase for Game Pass, admittedly. It was also another hint

at Xbox’s future in the cloud – something Microsoft is moving towards commendably slowly, no doubt mindful of Google’s attempt to give the world something it wasn’t yet ready for with Stadia. PC owners were looked after, too: every single Xbox game shown is also heading to Windows, and in most cases to its incarnation of Game Pass, no longer the awkward cousin of the console version.

But here, the focus was squarely on

Xbox, and in particular the newest ones. This was the real coming-out party for the Series line, whose next-gen appeal had previously been dulled by the need for

ANNOUNCEMENTS 273

362 GAMES SHOWN AT E3

ORIGINALS

…OF WHICH

PRE-EXISTING PROPERTIES

REMAKES

SEQUELS

SPIN-OFFS

ADAPTATIONS

TABLETOP

TOYS

WERE NEW REVEALS

MOVIES

FORMAT

9 1

CONSOLE ONLY VR

PC ONLY

Not included in our counts: the 45 trailers for already-released titles and 20 for updates

ILE MOB & C P LOUD PC & C

OTHER

320 PC

TBA

MOBILE

117 109 XO SWITCH

PC & CONSOLE Despite a good showing from Microsoft, the week yielded just 29 Xbox console exclusives

PC is the clear winner in what we might have once called the platform wars. Just 32 of the titles shown over E3 week are console-only, compared to 115 which list PC as their sole format – though we’d expect many of those to make their way to one or more of the consoles in time

Switch has the highest proportion of exclusive titles: 48 (including games that will also release on PC) Naturally, Sony’s absence had an impact on the showing of PlayStation exclusives – totalling just eight

94 XS

96 PS4

74 PS5

OTHER

17 PC VR, 15 OCULUS, 8 iOS, 11 STADIA, 7 ANDROID, 9 PSVR, 5 PLAYDATE, 3 LUNA 15

KNOWLEDGE E3 software to also run on the comparatively weedy Xbox One. Leading the line for Series exclusives was Starfield, Bethesda’s spacefaring RPG. Little was shown in a CG trailer, and Todd Howard might have chosen his introductory words a little more carefully: “Now, for the first time in over 25 years, we’re creating a new universe” wasn’t quite the flex it may WarioWare: Get It Together heralds the long-overdue return of one of Nintendo’s rather more hidden gems. have looked on paper. But Starfield is The new character-focused setup is concerning, but after so long since the previous one we shouldn’t moan more than just a game – it proves a point, too. After leaning far too heavily on Halo, is Nintendo’s fault. The Direct broadcasts Japan Studio, and its messaging: making have shown that you don’t need to join in God Of War: Ragnarok and Horizon for Forza and Gears in the Xbox One era, PS4 as well as PS5 makes sound Microsoft finally has a big-ticket, exclusive with a big event or employ traditional business sense, but it’s hard to square media channels to get eyeballs on your new IP – and plenty more coming down products. Unsurprisingly, other companies with the emphasis Sony execs put on the the pipe. The future looks bright. importance of generations in the run up to have decided to have a go, and thanks Nintendo is an old hand at prerecorded broadcasts, and so expectations to COVID-19, E3 saw that concept taken PS5’s launch. Sony’s no-show gave us no opportunity to interrogate any of this, but to its logical extreme. Certain firms, you for its showing were high. Speculation then that was a recurring theme. This was that its E3 line-up would have been hit by fancy, will be hoping for a return to a week in which developers and normality next year. the pandemic, given Japan’s wellpublishers spoke directly to players, with Exactly where PlayStation sits in all publicised struggle to adjust to working the critical filter of the press corps cut this is hard to ascertain. It is difficult, from home, proved largely wide of the almost entirely out of the picture. By and perhaps even unfair, to mark. If anything was hurt it was the Breath Of The We now have two decry Sony for deciding its large, the media was only involved if it future lies away from E3. It was putting on its own broadcast. Wild sequel, which was So, where does this leave us? There may appear to have erred confirmed for 2022 by a years’ worth of are a couple of key themes. The first is in clearing the floor for cheerily apologetic Eiji clear evidence that Microsoft to give its best E3 that we now have two years’ worth of Aonuma. Despite that, the clear evidence that a year with no E3 is Switch schedule looks busy a year with no E3 showing in years, but it is still selling PS5 consoles as worse than a year with one. Second, the enough in 2021 – only the is worse than a value of the press’s role at this time of quickly as it can make hardest of hearts could find year in sorting the wheat from the chaff them, and will continue to cause for complaint in a year with one cannot be understated. You have seen do so. And, as blandly year that heralds the return corporate as its State Of Play broadcasts what happens in its absence. Third, of Metroid, Advance Wars and having fought Sony for primacy ever are, the Horizon Forbidden West WarioWare. Zelda aside, the lone sour since its entry into the videogame showcase has, at the time of writing, note was the non-appearance of the business, Microsoft has finally found in 6.8 million views on the PlayStation rumoured Switch Pro hardware revision. Game Pass its blue ocean – a way to Its time will come: Nintendo is less reliant YouTube channel alone. By comparison, gain market share without going toe-to-toe on E3 than its peers, given the success of Microsoft’s repost of its Xbox showcase with the market leader. currently sits at just over 2 million. (A its Direct broadcasts. An August The three major platform holders have number that, in fairness, does not count hardware announcement will get just as very different ideas of what videogames any of the many co-streams.) much attention as one in June. mean in 2021. For Microsoft, it is an allThere are concerns over Sony’s Indeed, there’s an argument that access subscription service that, over everything you didn’t like about E3 2021 activities, in particular the closure of time, will become almost completely device-agnostic. For Sony, it is exclusive, $100-million blockbuster games. For Nintendo it is, well, whatever Nintendo feels like doing, from the strange to the sublime. E3 2021 may have spent an awful lot of time telling us not very much at all. But one thing is clear: we are in for a fascinating generation. We’re hoping for the opportunity to examine it from a Speculation is rife that this isn’t actually Link falling from the sky (left) – and it’s the reason Nintendo isn’t much tighter zoom at E3 2022. n naming the Breath Of The Wild sequel yet. There’s no question about the star of Metroid Dread, however 16

S OH RETO

ACTION

A EVDCA N T T I ERUNO

ARTS YGET

MIS EFIL

TNEMEGANAM

OTH ER

ORIGIN

TURE

N ADVE

ELZZ

S SPORT RPG ION ACT R ME OR F T PLA

SINGLEPLAYER

SINGLEPLAYER AND MULTIPLAYER ONLY

RAC M ING RHYT MO HORR HM OR PARTY PUZZLE PLATFORMER SURVIVAL

EVIT ARR

MULTIPLAYER ONLY

260

GENRE

GPR

SINGLE AND MULTIPLAYER

moc.spamrotceveerf

94 US 40 JAPAN 36 CANADA 35 UK 24 FRANCE 16 POLAND 16 SWEDEN 12 CHINA 12 RUSSIA 9 ITALY 9 SPAIN

These are the 11 leading countries of origin by quantity. Games from 32 further regions also featured

TITLES

Across the game names on show, ‘world’ and ‘lost’ are the most commonly used words, each featuring in six titles

DEATH

GAME SIMULATOR BLACK WORLD STORY SHADOW LOST

SEQUELS

2 is by far the most common number for a sequel; no game shown went above 6 Sheltered 2 King’s Bounty 2 STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl Jurassic World Evolution 2 The Outer Worlds 2 Aragami 2 Dying Light 2 Stay Human Passpartout 2: The Lost Artist Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings Of Ruin Psychonauts 2 I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy & The Liar Project Warlock 2 The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild 2 Slime Rancher 2 Red Solstice 2 Shadow Warrior 3 Age Of Empires 4 Rune Factory 5 Forza Horizon 5 Far Cry 6 17

KNOWLEDGE WOODO

ARTISAN CRAFTS

Has wood ever been this good?

As a child, Julia Prohorova was fascinated by dolls’ houses, but the one she coveted was too costly, so she crafted her own instead, using fabric, paper and whatever other suitable materials she found about the house. That desire to build tiny sets and scenes never left her. “Now I can afford to create any tiny houses or worlds I like,” she says. And what a delightful place she’s built in Woodo, a 3D puzzle game in which you slot in wooden pieces to assemble dioramas bit by bit. Prohorova painstakingly renders individual objects using Blender to see how they look in a scene, before making assets out of each in Unity. The process can be tedious, she admits; the results, however, speak for themselves. Prospective players will have to match Prohorova’s patience, since a platform or release date isn’t yet set, although we’d be surprised if it doesn’t debut on PC. n

Woodo is the imaginary friend who offers guidance so you don’t feel alone, Prohorova explains: “The main goal is hidden not in the game but in the players. Along with the game world, they build confidence and calmness inside themselves”

KNOWLEDGE TALK/ARCADE

Soundbytes

Game commentary in snack-sized mouthfuls

“There’s a clear difference between Nineteen Eighty Fortnite and Apple’s openplatforms-are-tools-of-thedevil PDF. One is a creative work of fiction. The other’s a Fortnite video!”

Ladies and gents, Epic’s Tim Sweeney is here all week

“With this partnership with Sony… we can fearlessly create and innovate and be groundbreaking.” Dave Anthony, whose CV includes Call Of Duty 2, 3, World At War and Black Ops I and II, relishes a fresh start with Deviation Games

“I can confirm I resigned from Square Enix at the end of April. I can’t tell you why right now, but I hope to be able to tell you when the time comes. As for my future… I’m already 55 years old, so I might retire.” Sonic creator Yuji Naka’s pension plan must be in pretty good shape 20

“I woke up excited because I could watch a match from a Call Of Duty tournament… A team that I follow had played the night before.” US Open winner Jon Rahm reveals the first thing on his mind when he woke up on the final morning of the tournament

ARCADE WATCH

Keeping an eye on the coin-op gaming scene

Arcade The Pixel Bunker Location Milton Keynes, UK We don’t get the opportunity to talk about new arcades opening in the UK very often – and business has been difficult for established operators over the past 18 months – so it feels good to report that The Pixel Bunker, based at Milton Keynes’ National Film & Sci-fi Museum, made its successful debut on June 4. The arcade hosts nearly 100 machines, with a good spread across genres and time periods. Vintage pioneers such as Karate Champ, Galaxian and Asteroids nudge up against mid-’80s classics including Commando, Shinobi and R-Type, as well as a selection of driving games such as Buggy Boy, Power Drift and Ridge Racer. It’s great to see Atari’s 720°, Toobin’ and Peter Pack Rat in the same place, too. The arcade is currently open from Tuesday to Sunday, with three play sessions of three hours each per day. The team recommends that you book in advance in order to secure a slot via the arcade’s website (www.thepixelbunker.com).

KNOWLEDGE THIS MONTH WEB GAME SpookWare

SOFTWARE Game Builder Garage

bit.ly/gamebuildergarage The premise alone is exciting: who better to teach lessons in game-making than Nintendo? Game Builder Garage offers a series of playful lessons built around an intuitive visual programming language: you’ll create seven very different games (from a straightforward game of tag to a side-scrolling shoot-’em-up and eventually a 3D platformer) by placing anthropomorphic nodes representing a variety of game elements and connecting them with wires. The ability to flip between the game screen and its behind-the-curtain workings provides instantly tangible results of your tinkering, though its approach to problem-solving can be surprisingly exacting. It’s nowhere near as flexible as Dreams, of course, but as a cheerfully accessible way to grasp the basics of game creation, this is hard to beat.

VIDEO Making a Greggs

in Far Cry 5 bit.ly/farcrygreggs Far Cry 5 may be as American as apple pie and lax guncontrol laws, but there is one corner of Hope County that will be forever British. Edinburgh-based artist Mojo Swoptops has been using the game’s astonishing map editor to recreate both real-world and fictional locations for some time now, but this convincing rendition of the bakery chain may be their magnum opus. Assuming, that is, you don’t look too closely: with fruit rather than sausage rolls and pasties lining its shelves, this Greggs offers a rather healthier menu than its real-world counterpart.

bit.ly/spookware With WarioWare’s imminent return on our mind, we go looking for indie alternatives to hone our reflexes before the real thing shows up. With ten microgames, this horrorthemed variant is short but… well, sweet probably isn’t the word, given grisly vignettes in which you saw a leg in half with a chainsaw (accompanied by the caption “dinner is served”) or load shells into a shotgun before taking aim at an encroaching zombie. It’s uneven in its challenge – you’re given precious little time to frantically wheel your fingers across the arrow keys to close a garage door before a lank-haired Sadako-like crawls through it. Still, we’re left wanting more, and we’ll soon get it: a full game of the same name, which folds hundreds of microgames into a story of three skeletons on a road trip, is due out in autumn.

THIS MONTH ON EDGE When we weren’t doing everything else, we were thinking about stuff like this CLOTHING

SuperGroupies Yakuza series bit.ly/yakuzagear From a series with some of the sharpest tailoring around, you’d expect a higher class of gaming apparel. So it proves with the Ryu Ga Gotoku collection from Japanese fashion brand SuperGroupies, which includes watches, backpacks, leather jackets and wallets inspired by protagonists Kazuma Kiryu, Goro Majima and Ichiban Kasuga. There are some delightful details across the range: the Majima sneakers feature both faux-crocodile skin and python patterning, plus a map of Sotenbori on the insoles. The Kasuga jacket, meanwhile, comes with a fabric replica of the bloodstained counterfeit bill from his suit pocket. Inevitably, preorders sold out fast; resale information can’t come soon enough.

continue quit

Relief package Itch.io’s thousand-game bundle for Palestinian aid raises $900k in just a week

Poorly scoped Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts 2 marks a new low for gaming press events

It Takes £2m Congrats to Josef Fares, as Hazelight’s co-op cracker proves a very palpable hit

Breaking protocol Marvel’s Avengers patch temporarily reveals players’ IP addresses on PS5

Not so Secret Producer Masaru Oyamada reveals a new Mana game is currently in development

Conspiracy of Silents Tinfoil-hat theories force Abandoned dev Blue Box to again deny Kojima connection

Patched up Sony allows Cyberpunk 2077 back on the PlayStation Store as CD Projekt Red celebrates “satisfactory” stability…

Unready to go …yet SIE still says the PS4 version is “not recommended”. So… perhaps it shouldn’t be back on the Store?

DISPATCHES SEPTEMBER The modern things

Issue 360

Dialogue

Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a 12-month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate membership

We live in the interesting transitional period between console generations, when some of us were lucky enough to grab a PS5 or Series X/S (constantly refreshing Twitter would be my tip), and others are still happily gaming away on now last-gen machines. Now, I understand why new-gen games are becoming more and more pricey and harder to justify splashing out on, but what strikes me as odd is how, as new games continue to be released across generations, free upgrades are still on offer for people to capitalise upon when they finally get their hands on an elusive XboxStation 5. Yet why are these different iterations priced differently? Surely I’m not the only broke cheapskate who, having spent most of his budget on the console, is buying the PS4 version of, for example, Judgment, and cheekily upgrading immediately for free, saving a considerable amount of money over the PS5 copy in the process? I’m no businessman, but it hardly seems like a profitable venture. This price difference seems exclusive to physical media; the PS Store commonly bundles both versions into a single price. My question is, how long before retailers wise up to this exploit, or is it left to our consciences to refrain from such skulduggery? Free upgrades surely won’t be around forever, so, much like a gamebreaking money exploit, isn’t it best to make the most of this cheat before the inevitable patch comes out? Jake Mellor

On and ever onward

I have been thinking a lot lately about how games can provide therapy to those who play them. I had a nervous breakdown in 2014, and have struggled with mental illness since then, usually in the form of anxiety and paranoia. Great art – and I do certainly believe that videogames are art – outlives the critical response. After a time, who really cares that Joe Hack thought Citizen Kane didn’t reach his standards? Especially when that art is connecting with countless persons in a meaningful way. This is not to dump on the profession of criticism, but instead to affirm the value of a direct relationship with a piece of art. I considered suicide, seriously and often, after my breakdown. When my father asked me, after a particularly bad bout of paranoia, what I wanted to do that I could not do, I responded: “Play BioShock Infinite.” BioShock Infinite got a lot of bad press for various dubious reasons that had little to do with what the game was about, which is the redemption of a soul who failed those he loved. This is not a pseudo-intellectual affair, it is an emotional and a spiritual one. Its politics may be “wrong” but it remains a considerable achievement in videogames, eight years after its release. The beauty of Columbia and the pain and growth of Booker DeWitt resonated with me when I considered ending my life. It was not only a world to escape into, but a chance to reckon with myself and my past and to see the value in living. So let us sing praise for the “wrong” games, which nonetheless have a powerful artistry to them, which give us hope in our darkest times. The relationship with a game, which occurs over many years,

“How long before retailers wise up to this exploit, or is it left to our consciences?”

Spending your money wisely hardly feels unscrupulous. If you’re prepared to put in the effort to wangle a free upgrade, more power to you. As you say, these offers won’t necessarily be around too much longer – although given the continued 24

rollout issues with new hardware, it’ll probably still be worth seeking out these bargains for a little while yet.

DISPATCHES DIALOGUE

is surely the most important thing, and not its Metacritic score. Let us detach from the concept that we need permission to enjoy a piece of art, and instead take it head on, feel the thrill and the affirmation of life and keep on going. Paul Casey Joe Hack? That guy’s the worst. You don’t even want to know what he thinks of Paddington 2. But thank you – we’re always happy to discover stories about videogames’ power to help through difficult times. A year’s worth of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate will give you a few more games worth getting stuck into, no permission required.

Big time sensuality

It’s Pride month, and seeing all the gay representation in the current state of videogames makes me very happy. I’m proud of the many battles that have been won. But before making a note here with ‘huge success!’, I want to point out that there’s still a lot to do. As part of the sex-positive community, I’ve learned that sexuality is so much more than being attracted to certain genders. Sexuality is something people do, and honestly, how it’s done is not represented in videogames that well. Now, I understand that there are a few barriers. Most obvious is how hard it is to translate expressions of love into digital commands. The best I have come across is in Ladykiller In A Bind, which is simply choosing branching texts. Dragon Age: Inquisition is probably the best mainstream example; while being very limited, it at least has Iron Bull explaining the importance of consent. Oh, and please don’t mention Heavy Rain’s attempt. If I’ve missed better examples, please let me know. Which brings me to the second point: people get squeamish about sex in games. Probably because it leaves us vulnerable. However, if you look at the stories written in fanfic communities, and

game journalists to stop people from buying it. The YouTuber then tried to position themselves as a fan and not, as they actually were, another reviewer. Coming off the back of an E3 which saw influencers and fans host the big summer marketing shows, it struck me how much fandom is now openly used as a marketing tool. I suppose it’s been this way for a while, but until now I’d been able to separate games marketing activity from thirdparty fan community stuff. Nowadays, that’s not the case. Influencers, directly or indirectly, are becoming that much more influential in selling a game. Game companies, both publishers and developers, seem totally happy with this, of course. An overexcitable community will buy and advocate for your game, and be cheap at doing so. It doesn’t even matter if the game is rubbish. Any lingering sentiment towards There is indeed a long way to go. Quantic critical reviews can just be written off as Dreams’ attempts to map intimate moments ‘negative hype’. to button and stick inputs (we still shudder Maybe I’m being a bit cynical, but I’m at Fahrenheit’s analogue-stick thrusting) finding it harder than ever to watch or read might be misguided – and in light of recent about games without it explicitly selling me events their inclusion feels a little more something. Fortunately, I still have Edge to awkward – yet few other mainstream games give me an insight into the videogame are even attempting to grapple with sex and landscape that isn’t predicated on me being sexuality. The recent Apple-Epic court case handily demonstrates the puritanical attitudes a blinkered super-fan for whatever game it’s discussing. Particularly in the Hype section of most major platform holders and of the mag! publishers, what with Apple using the presence of the Itch.io app on the Epic Game Conor Clarke Store as a stick to beat its opponent with – Ah, let’s not be too harsh on influencers. decrying the presence of “so-called adult After all, those gaming chairs don’t pay for games” that were “so offensive we cannot themselves. Actually, hold on, they do! But speak about them here”. Naturally, if you’re you’re right, the changing landscape of game looking for examples of sex-positive games, promotion throws up all sorts of problematic we strongly recommend you head there to issues. On the one hand, why shouldn’t scratch that, er, itch. super-fans be given special treatment in the run up to the launch of a game that holds An echo, a stain I recently saw a YouTube review of Dungeons particular interest for their followers? It’s a simple, low-cost solution for game-makers & Dragons: Dark Alliance, in which the reviewer referred to the poor reception of the looking to reach a captive audience. On the flip side, with barely any regulation in place, game as ‘negative hype’ – implying that the the world of YouTube game reviews still poor reviews were not a critical look at feels like the Wild West, some 16 years in. n the game, but simply an attempt by ‘biased’ the artistic endeavours shared in sex-positive corners of the web, there’s the complete opposite of a feeling of shame. Indeed, we’ve already felt how wholesome it can feel to be more than just heterosexuals in games. But there is simply so much more fun to be had! (Case in point: how disappointed were you in Dream Daddy when everything was so limited to talking?) One day, we will have beautiful lovemaking in games and the playerbase will want to share their enthusiasm. I predict the usual backlash – ‘Think about the children!’ ‘The gay agenda is being forced upon us!’ ‘Feminism is ruining games!’ – you know the drill. Please do not let this inhibit you. Share how you express your love in games! Be proud of what you enjoy in them! Robert August de Meijer

DISPATCHES PERSPECTIVE

STEVEN POOLE

Trigger Happy

em.emusnok noitartsullI

ow fast should a zombie go? The oldschool pop-culture conception of zombies as slow-moving was in its way quite scientific. A zombie’s muscles and sinews are in a state of decay, because it is dead. Stands to reason, then, that if a zombie tried to run fast its body would simply fall apart. The shambling gait familiar to us from deathless films such as Dawn Of The Dead is a rational means of self-preservation, to the extent that a zombie has a rational self to preserve. As the zombie godfather himself, George A Romero, once put it: “I don’t think zombies can run. Their ankles would snap.” Your classical zombie, then, is terrifying precisely because of its slowness: it is also relentless, and a horde of them will overwhelm much more agile prey. In this way, although the first zombie videogame is usually said to be Sandy White’s Zombie Zombie (Spectrum, 1984), a good argument could be made for Robotron 2084 (1982) as the first to really capture the claustrophobic dynamics of fighting zombies, even though the enemies are nominally robots rather than corpses. And so Housemarque’s sublime twin-stick co-op shooter Dead Nation (2010), which is essentially Robotron with zombies, satisfyingly completes the circle. The old zombie-velocity consensus, however, eroded over time like rotting flesh, until the new thing became fast zombies like those in the films 28 Days Later (2002) and World War Z (2013, even though in the original book the zombies were classic shamblers). Modern zombie games, too, inevitably include fast zombies along with your basic cannon-fodder slow zombies, to ramp up the adrenaline and difficulty, even at the cost of the game becoming essentially just another Call Of Duty faceshooter, but with zombies, and even though COD literally has zombies too, since World At War (2008). Thus, based on an ever-expanding menagerie of undead species, the zombie game arrives at Capcom’s Resident Evil Village, featuring lycans (werewolves), gruesomely 26

Shoot ﬁrst, ask questions later

As the zombie godfather himself once put it: “I don’t think zombies can run. Their ankles would snap” engineered Soldats, various zombie-esque villagers and giants, a very hungry baby, and of course a giant female vampire. None of these seems to be officially a zombie at all, which is one way around the issue. Instead, the game raids the horror myth-kitty with aplomb in a beautifully unwelcoming snowcovered rural setting. By contrast, the undead in Zack Snyder’s Army Of The Dead are definitely zombies, but divided again into classical shamblers and fast, athletic ‘Alphas’. The ruling Alpha zombie of this movie understandably gets quite annoyed when someone gruesomely

beheads his “Zombie Queen”, who has hitherto been writhing around in an unnecessarily revealing outfit. By contrast, Resident Evil Village’s representation of extremely tall vampire woman Lady Dimitrescu (the subject of much erotic speculation from a peculiar subset of fans before the game’s release) is remarkably restrained, harking back to golden-age Hollywood with her floor-length gown and cigarette holder. A purist might worry that the lines between vampires, zombies, and other undead forms are these days becoming uncomfortably blurred. But the clear distinction is itself a relatively recent invention. Romero’s first film, Night Of The Living Dead (1968), was partly inspired by a vampire novel, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), as memorably filmed with Will Smith (and a happy ending) in 2007. But Matheson’s vampires, in his novel, were the result of an apocalyptic plague, a novel kind of bacterial infection, and subsequent popular fictions about pandemics producing monsters have more often made the victims zombies than vampires. The pseudo-zombies in 28 Days Later, indeed, are known as “the Infected” after the lab leak of a mutated Rage Virus. And so, of course, the zombie genre speaks all the more powerfully to modern concerns in a time when people are speculating about a possible lab leak of a pandemic virus. Its most despairing message has always been that, deep down, we are already the zombies, milling around in shopping malls like in Day Of The Dead; Army Of The Dead takes this even further by showing how the zombies, who display honour and loyalty, are morally superior to the humans, engaged as always in their frenzied orgy of betrayal and backstabbing. The zombie fiction is now the only genre of entertainment that is allowed to have a totally bleak ending, and in that way it is the last outpost of true literary realism. Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy 2.o is now available from Amazon. Visit him online at www.stevenpoole.net

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DISPATCHES PERSPECTIVE

SAM BARLOW

Unreliable Narrator

Exploring stories in games and the art of telling tales

em.emusnok noitartsullI

s I write this, I’ve just released a teaser trailer into the maelstrom of hype that is this year’s online E3. It was intense. Partly because I happened to be in LA at the time and could not convince my body that I wasn’t supposed to be on stage somewhere: even as the teaser aired I was expecting a panicked call from an irate show manager. But also because seeing hundreds of trailers and announcements going head-to-head over a handful of days was a reminder of the desperate Darwinian nature of putting a game out right now. I distracted myself by thinking about the usefulness of all this hype. Hype is part of selling a game, sure. The sales pitch. The marketing that gets built around a game has to get people excited enough to mash the wishlist button – which, by the way, is physically connected to the nucleus accumbens of its developer. And, yes, hype sometimes has to be weighed up against setting correct expectations. It is possible to create too much hype – infamously, No Man’s Sky promised an infinite game and created infinite expectations. BioShock Infinite promised infinite realities, but shipped with only one. Perhaps a rule of thumb is to just not promise infinity? But, if we ignore the sales and marketing aspect, there’s a much more important thing happening here. I’ve spoken before about Hitchcock and his understanding of the storytelling that happens outside the experience. He knew that the marketing for his movies was part of the story. That it was preparing the audience for the movie, that it was in effect the real first act. Watch the trailer for Psycho. In it, Hitchcock walks the Bates Motel set. He talks about the events of the movie as if in their aftermath. He points out where the film’s murders happen, showing the audience the main staircase and describing how the second murder happens there. What a spoiler! Then he cheekily explores Mrs Bates’ bedroom and talks about how creepy she was, even indicating where she slept on her bed and talking about her

As we release trailers and talk about the game, I know that this isn’t just marketing. It’s the first act of our story clothes, this “maniacal woman”. Throughout the rest of the trailer he points out important objects and beats of the movie. He finishes the trailer in the bathroom and talks up the violence that takes place there (“You should have seen the blood!”). It’s a masterclass. Hitchcock is not just hyping the audience, but he’s setting them up for the specific suspense game he has planned for them. He’s building up the anticipation, prepping audiences so that when they watch the movie and they see the characters go up the stairs, when they see Marion Crane running her shower, they are primed – they know what is coming. That’s

suspense. He’s also cleverly misdirecting the audience in order to set up his big twist. His trailer is part of his storytelling toolkit. It’s a perfect videogame trailer. When I started out as a videogame storyteller I hated trailers because I felt they were full of spoilers. All my careful narrative work, all the joy of discovery being undercut by just putting it all out there! But now I consider the ways a trailer can help with the most challenging part of game development – the opening hour of the game. The first hour of a game is where the player must learn the basics, how to even control their character. We must teach them what they can do, but even more importantly what they can’t. We establish the rules of the universe and the constraints within which players can act. How do I move? Who am I? What abilities do I have? Can I jump over waist-high obstacles, or not? If I attack quest NPCs, will it be game over or game on? Can I kick down flimsy doors, or do I need to go find the Ornate Key to do so? Every time a player is forced to test out these questions, they risk losing their immersion. A mismatch between the rules of this fictional universe and their assumptions is a glitch in the Matrix. So think on what our overexposure to hype and trailers can do. It primes the pump! When I got to play Breath Of The Wild for the first time, I had already inhaled a few hours of trailers and E3 demo footage. So I knew about climbing, gliding and the core Sheikah powers. In effect, I had already been ‘tutorialled’. I was ready to go. But I’d also allowed myself to dream about what I wanted to do in the world; I had a list of stuff I was champing at the bit to go do. I was already playing the game! My phantom stage fright has almost dissipated. And as we release trailers and talk about the game to press and fill out websites and social media, I know that this isn’t just marketing. It’s the first act of our story. You’re already playing our game.

Sam Barlow is the founder of NYC-based Drowning A Mermaid Productions. He can be found on Twitter at @mrsambarlow

#361

HY P E AT E3 THE GAMES IN OUR SIGHTS (NOT IN LA)

XBOX 32 34 35 35 35 35 36 36 36 37 37 37 37

Starfield Redfall Forza Horizon 5 Somerville A Plague Tale: Requiem STALKER 2: Heart Of Chernobyl Halo Infinite Psychonauts 2 Planet Of Lana Replaced Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes Party Animals Atomic Heart

SWITCH

38 The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild 2 40 Metroid Dread 41 WarioWare: Get It Together 41 Mario + Rabbids: Sparks Of Hope 41 Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp 41 Shin Megami Tensei V

MULTIFORMAT, PLAYSTATION & PC

42 Elden Ring 44 Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction 44 Tunic 44 Citizen Sleeper 44 Immortality 45 Trek To Yomi 45 Riders Republic 45 Far: Changing Tides 46 Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy

47 Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands 47 Unpacking 47 Salt & Sacrifice 47 Mechajammer 47 Pioner 47 Venice 2089 47 Walk 47 Happy Game 47 Arcade Paradise 48 Far Cry 6 48 Unbeatable 48 Soup Pot 49 The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles 49 Passpartout 2 49 Signalis 49 Black Book 50 Phantom Abyss 51 Death Stranding Director’s Cut 51 Inkulinati 51 Aragami 2 51 Killer Auto 51 Life Is Strange: True Colors 51 Two Point Campus 51 Evil Dead: The Game 51 Demon Throttle 51 Wizard With A Gun 52 Stranger Of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin 52 A Musical Story 52 The Big Con 52 New World 53 Grime 53 Elec Head 53 Bear And Breakfast 54 Sable 55 Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora 55 Norco 55 Echoes Of The End

55 Fracked 56 Despelote 56 Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt 56 Dordogne 57 Jurassic World Evolution 2 57 No Longer Home 57 Conway: Disappearance At Dahlia View 57 Death Trash 58 Death’s Door 59 Crossfire: Legion 59 A Little To The Left 59 El Paso Elsewhere 59 Dolmen 59 Terra Invicta 59 Lost Ark 59 The Wandering Village 59 Slime Rancher 2 59 SteelRising 60 The Anacrusis 60 Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania 60 Axiom Verge 2 60 Behind The Frame: The Finest Scenery 61 Toem 61 Metal Slug Tactics 61 Babylon’s Fall 62 Battlefield 2042 63 Inscryption 63 The Last Oricru 63 Despot’s Game 63 They Always Run 63 Silt 63 Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator 63 Schim 63 Unsighted 63 Sephonie 31

HYPE@E3

STARFIELD

Developer Bethesda Game Studios Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release November 11, 2022

erhaps the two most important words of Microsoft’s showcase came just a few minutes in, at the end of a teaser for Bethesda’s next open-world epic: ‘Xbox exclusive’. It wasn’t the only time we would see them, but this was the moment it became crystal clear that Microsoft would never have spent $7.5bn on the studio behind Skyrim and Fallout if it didn’t plan to keep at least some of its output to itself. Granted, it may be denying itself millions of pounds’ worth of business

from PlayStation owners. But a chunk of Sony’s audience may now be wondering if they made the right call – and considering a Game Pass subscription. Despite what some commentators would have you believe, from a platform holder’s point of view it’s surely the smart call. If at this stage what the game represents is more significant than what it is, that’s because the latter remains ill-defined. “For the first time in over 25 years, we’re creating a new universe,” Todd Howard said,

a statement that presumably was supposed to be exciting but merely made the developer appear remarkably conservative. From a more generous standpoint, you could say it’s been so successful by sticking to what it’s good at. Speaking to the Washington Post, Bethesda’s Ashley Cheng likened Starfield to a “Han Solo simulator”. But Howard’s own description is probably more instructive: “Skyrim in space.” There is an understandable pressure on a game whose teaser reminds us that Bethesda’s first journey to the stars has been a quartercentury in the making. So it’s no great surprise that neither Howard nor the teaser were prepared to give much away. “What you’ve found… it’s the key to unlocking… everything,” a woman’s voice says. “This is all we’ve been working towards,” she continues, breathily. “We’ve

come to the beginning of humanity’s final journey.” No shortage of grandiosity, then, but barely anything in the way of specifics. What we do know is that it’s set more than 300 years in the future, and that you’re part of an organisation called Constellation, whose insistence that you’re “part of our family” suggests corporate speak hasn’t changed much in three centuries. They’re still searching for answers to the great mysteries of the universe, though by the look of things they won’t find many on the drab grey rock of the teaser, in which an astronaut makes his way through a bulky spacecraft, putting his weapon down in the crew quarters as he heads through to the cockpit to prepare for launch. It’ll be almost 18 months until Starfield itself is ready for lift-off, but after 25 years, we can wait a little longer. 33

HYPE@E3

REDFALL

Developer Arkane Studios Publisher Bethesda Game Studios Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Summer 2022

omething to remember about Arkane: it’s not armed with a magic umbrella and a shimmering just one of the world’s best studios, it’s two of purple gateway that puts us in mind of the Void them. While the Lyon office has been House ability that was cut from Dishonored 2. showing off Deathloop, staff at its opposite number (One of the plumpest fruits of our freeze-frame over in Austin have been at work on something rewatch: a shot of her telekinesis being used to new. This is the team behind the underappreciated reload her shotgun hands-free.) With team tinkerers Devinder and Remi Prey, headed up by Dishonored and Deus Ex director Harvey Smith – so, regardless of the actual introducing stake launchers, daylight lasers and a contents of the trailer which closed Microsoft and two-legged robot assistant to the mix, and team sniper Jacob donning an invisibility Bethesda’s co-branded showcase, cloak, it seems Arkane is taking the it’d probably have our attention. Arkane is taking kinds of tools it normally puts in one Which is fortunate, because learning that this team is working on the kinds of tools it player’s hands and sharing them an open-world co-op shooter with normally puts in around the group. It sounds like each character’s options will be broad vampires is frankly disappointing. There was no shortage of Left-4- one player’s hands enough to let players customise their Dead-alikes at this year’s show and, and sharing them loadouts – we’re already preparing our jaw for the YouTube supercuts of at first glance, it doesn’t seem like a structure that plays to Arkane’s around the group wildly inventive combos that will inevitably follow. strengths. But then we consider that We’re less sold on the setting. Half the draw of the Austin team’s previous project was Mooncrash, a Prey expansion that pushed the immersive sim an immersive sim is a world that’s worth immersing into Roguelike territory – not to mention Deathloop’s yourself in. Between the New England location exciting experiments with multiplayer – and Redfall and the paperback thriller Ellison telekinetically makes sense as an evolution of this lineage, rather leafs through in the trailer, Stephen King seems like a key influence, but Redfall so far appears to lack than simply a comfortable repetition. The trailer in question is a five-minute cinematic, an aesthetic as distinct as the whalepunk London of but poring over it again, finger on the pause Dishonored or military-fashion-industrial complex of button, an actual game starts to suggest itself: one Deathloop. Still, something has to be held back for that boasts all the usual Arkane powersets, times the game’s next showing. For now, we’re happy to four. The clear star is Layla Ellison, a psychic take it on faith – Arkane has earned that.

FORZA HORIZON 5

Developer Playground Games Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release November 9

No new console generation can truly be said to have begun until the cars show up – a piece of accepted wisdom that Microsoft seems to have taken to heart. The closest thing Xbox Series X has is Playground’s prior Horizon title, its chassis given a next-gen buffing. Happily, Horizon 5 features even shinier cars, and it’s arriving in time for the console’s first birthday. The open-world racing series is headed for Mexico, a setting that has the benefit of environments running from desert to jungle and volcanic peaks. Cars nose around the tight streets of a seaside town, send a flock of flamingos scattering to the rainforest canopy above, and skid off a dirt

SOMERVILLE

Developer/publisher Jumpship Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release 2022

It’s a shame Playdead’s Dino Patti and Arnt Jensen have parted ways, but if there’s a positive to be taken from the split, it could effectively mean we get two games as good as Inside. Certainly, Somerville is cut from a similar cloth to the Danish developer’s extraordinary thriller, as a puzzleplatformer with a focus on visual storytelling featuring vulnerable characters thrust into perilous situations – in this case two parents trying to keep their young child (and pet dog) safe from an otherworldly invasion. Cue frantic sprints to safety, heavy objects to push and murky waters to swim through with an eerie green flare to light your way (and, no doubt, to illuminate something horrible beneath the surface). Director Chris Olsen is an animator and previs artist by trade, and it shows in the cinematic framing of Somerville’s action and the nuanced movements of its human cast.

track and onto solid tarmac just in time to join a race. Rarely has a studio’s name been so well earned. This enormous playground is littered with distractions: a dozen Horizon Arcade minigames that challenge you to, for example, track down and pop piñatas dropped from the sky; a new version of battle royale mode The Eliminator; and Expeditions, missions which promise a more exploratory approach to driving with the help of a local guide. These look to tap into exactly what makes the Horizon titles so appealing – they’re tourism simulators just as much as they are racing games, and Mexico could prove the perfect destination.

A PLAGUE TALE: REQUIEM

STALKER 2: HEART OF CHERNOBYL

Given the indefinite article and colon of the title, a Plague Tale sequel was perhaps always to be expected. The first game was a kind of miniature The Last Of Us that told its story well, but also showed off Asobo’s technical nous – something we’re now much better acquainted with after the studio’s work on Flight Simulator. The stars of the original are back – Amicia and Hugo, yes, but also the swarms of photophobic rats – now transplanted to what looks like the Mediterranean coast. It’s an opportunity for beautiful scenery and even denser waves of rats, apparently not dissuaded by the sunshine. Despite its place in Microsoft’s showcase, this is a multiplatform title, and it’s telling that the Switch version is being delivered via cloud streaming – expect another technical showpiece, and one of the first real thirdparty efforts of the new gen.

The half-life of STALKER has proved longer than anyone could have anticipated. It’s an unlikely game to have spawned its own E3-friendly genre, but, having watched trailer after trailer for surreal miserabilist Soviet sci-fi shooters and RPGs, that seems to be exactly what has happened. Still, there can only be one official sequel, and there’s at least one factor that puts it ahead of the competition: surprisingly enough, its production values. A rare new-gen exclusive for Xbox, STALKER 2 seems to have shaken the series’ reputation for jankiness. Anomalies look gorgeous, the promise of a seamless open world has been a long time coming, and the faces and acting are convincingly human (though our lack of fluency in Russian might be doing some of the work there). The only part that looks a little flat is the shooting. Well, it’s good to see some traditions never die.

Developer Asobo Studio Publisher Focus Home Interactive Format PC, PS5, Switch, Xbox Series Release 2022

Developer/publisher GSC Game World Format PC, Xbox Series Release April 28

HALO INFINITE

Developer 343 Industries Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Q4

The reaction to the first showing of Infinite’s campaign last summer was – putting it politely – mixed. And for good reason: the two singleplayer offerings 343 has given us have been decent but unspectacular. When it comes to multiplayer, though, the studio has a lot less to prove, and its confidence was on full display in the reveal of the game’s competitive side. Every bit of footage shown (and between various broadcasts, there was plenty of it) demonstrates the studio understands the moment-to-moment ballet of Halo multiplayer. The near miss of a vehicle roaring past, the crunch of melee interrupted by an explosion, the throaty yell of the

PSYCHONAUTS 2

Developer Double Fine Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release August 25

We’re not sure we quite believe it, but the game we said in E349 had been 15 years in the making is out in a matter of weeks. Over those 15 years (16 now), Tim Schafer has had a lot of time to think about the Psychonauts universe, and the result digs deep into every corner, expanding character backstories, the Aquato family history and the origins of the titular organisation. To which end, Raz will visit the Motherlobe, aka Psychonauts HQ, near to which is The Questionable Area, a place with upward-flowing waterfalls and other strange phenomena. But the weirdest sights are inside people’s minds: an experiment turns the new Psychonauts chief’s brain into a casino hospital where you smash gambling machines and hop across X-rays. Even if the rest is more Meat Circus than Milkman Conspiracy, we’re willing to bet the wait will have been worth it.

announcer. There’s a lot of talk of the “sandbox” and “toys”, and it looks like the new ones are going to slot in just fine. The grappling hook is the obvious draw – we see it used to land a no-scope hit in mid-air – but we’re bewitched by the placeable energy shields which get chipped away square by square. There’s no need to be polite about the reaction this time around. With Microsoft now shouting about multiplayer being free-to-play, and with no loot boxes and a more player-friendly battle pass system, the narrative online seems to have shifted to ‘return to form’. Microsoft is probably just relieved it has moved on from ‘What’s wrong with that alien’s face?’

PLANET OF LANA

Developer Wishfully Publisher Thunderful Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release 2022

If Hayao Miyazaki directed a science-fiction Limbo with art by Bob Ross, it might look something like this “off-Earth odyssey”, in which a young girl and her adorably round pet thing investigate when a series of satellites crash-land close to their idyllic woodland home. Apparently unaware of what curiosity did to the alien cat, the pair soon find themselves in danger, though it’s not all hiding in bushes as strange robots and creatures scuttle by: the two work together to solve puzzles, and engage in Another World/Flashback-style platforming. It seems the bots might not be as hostile as they appear, and could even be friendly. On the other hand, a giant, multi-limbed, multi-eyed beast with large fangs probably isn’t. As a publisher, Thunderful has chosen its development partners well so far, and all evidence suggests this is another shrewd pick.

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REPLACED

Developer Sad Cat Studios Publisher Coatsink Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release 2022

We’re not sure we’ve seen pixel art do this before. Replaced blends traditional jagged sprites with what appear to be 3D environments and realistic lighting. The trailer swings the camera (an unusual concept for a 2D game) around darkened arcades and accentuates a finishing move’s arm-breaking crunch with a Dutch tilt lifted straight out of action cinema. The game’s premise involves an alternate history that branched off at the Trinity nuclear test in the 1940s, a corporation-run town and an AI mind stuffed inside a human body. (The action on show suggests it doesn’t take long to adjust to its meat peripherals, to borrow a phrase from Gabe Newell.) Really all of this is an excuse for a synth-drenched ’80s future, something for which Cyberpunk apparently hasn’t drained our collective enthusiasm. Style over substance? Possibly. But what style.

EIYUDEN CHRONICLE: HUNDRED HEROES

Developer Rabbit & Bear Publisher 505 Games Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release 2023

This turn-based RPG from Suikoden creator Yoshitaka Murayama and writer-designer Junko Kawano is something of a spiritual successor to the beloved PlayStation series, and cleared £3m during its Kickstarter campaign last year. Despite being some way off, you can understand why Microsoft gave it a prime slot during its showcase. Stylistically, it’s reminiscent of Octopath Traveller but with smoother sprites – their pixelated edges only appear when scaled up during the visually dynamic battles, such as when a ranger positioned close to the camera fires upon an enemy crustacean, the action zooming in to follow the arrow. And if 2023 seems too far away, there’s a spin-off coming next year: Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising is an action-RPG with realtime combat and city-building elements that’ll delve into the backstories of Hundred Heroes’ cast.

PARTY ANIMALS

Developer Recreate Games Publisher Source Technology Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release 2022

Last issue we looked at the current state of games being made in China, and questioned whether the country’s reputation for producing clones was really fair in 2021 – something further challenged by our cover game this month. Into this debate stumbles Party Animals, a game from Beijing-based Recreate Games which looks so much like a Gang Beasts reskin we had to triple-check its provenance. Still, Recreate has improved on the formula in one way: the jelly-baby fighters have been replaced with corgis, bunnies and other cute animals. This has the side effect of making it even more darkly hilarious when one of them gets sucked into an aeroplane propeller or flops to the ground shuddering after being tasered. Which raises an important question: will you play as your favourite animal, or the one you most wish to see suffer?

ATOMIC HEART

Developer/publisher Mundfish Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release 2021

Cards on the table: we’re still not convinced Atomic Heart is a real game. At least, not one that will ever come out in the form that’s been shown. Mundfish’s other game, Soviet Lunapark VR, released in Early Access before being pulled from Steam, nominally so the studio could focus on development of Atomic Heart. That was in 2018. In the meantime it’s faced allegations of mass layoffs and other internal difficulties – claims the studio has denied. But it’s hard to shake the sense that Atomic Heart never looks like quite the same game from showing to showing, aesthetically or mechanically. At various points it has looked like the heir apparent to BioShock, STALKER, Fallout…

It’s a hard game to pin down, and the footage shown during Microsoft’s conference didn’t do much to change that. It opens with a strange Lego-looking robot with a head full of fruit, before jumping between a parade of player powers, spectacular architecture, a driving segment and killer crash-test dummies. All set to a painfully catchy Eurotrash soundtrack, the cuts are incredibly – not to say suspiciously – quick. The truth is, we’d love to be proved wrong about Atomic Heart. If everything that’s been shown is accurate, it should add up to one of the most broad, ambitious and unusual games we’ve ever seen. Maybe by next E3 we’ll finally know for sure.

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD 2 Developer/publisher Nintendo (EPD) Format Switch Release 2022

s Nintendo’s own press site calls it, Sequel To The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild cannot have its official title unveiled just yet, because it might give too much away – a clue to something significant about this much-anticipated successor. There’s no danger of that in its latest teaser, which has been precision-designed to answer very few questions while raising many more. That is part of the business of building hype, of course: show just enough to hint at new

mechanics and story elements while inviting speculation as to what they mean. And with no one at Nintendo prepared to say anything more about it – save producer Eiji Aonuma suggesting it’s “aiming for a 2022 release”, and we needn’t highlight the operative word there – the conjecture is likely to continue for at least another year. On with it, then. It’s worth remembering that this is the first new Zelda game to be designed with the Switch hardware primarily in

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mind; the original was, of course, intended to be a Wii U exclusive. Link’s Sheikah Slate was designed as a Wii U analogue, and the separation between the two displays naturally factored into some of Breath Of The Wild’s design choices. With Switch providing a more seamless transition between portable and big-screen play, it’s only fitting that Link’s powers should be more organic in this new Breath Of The Wild. His arm, which has apparently been corrupted by the tarlike Malice from the first game, can be seen harnessing the power of the Stasis rune, as it shoots a chain of spiked balls to bowl over a line of enemies – seemingly without having to strike it first. And the presence of islands in the sky above Hyrule, between which Link can apparently travel by turning into a water droplet (and, presumably, reversing the flow of gravity), would suggest a more direct connection

between puzzles and the environment, as opposed to their compartmentalisation in the original. That airborne archipelago nods towards Skyward Sword – Link’s changed appearance perhaps hinting at a connection with a story at the beginning of the Zelda chronology – yet the streamers trailing behind his paraglider suggest wind direction will be involved, with exploration more akin to a skybound Wind Waker. And if the sight of Zelda falling into an abyss is a sign that she won’t be the deuteragonist (as many had hoped after the first teaser two years ago), a bit of mischievous misdirection isn’t beyond Nintendo. But perhaps the most encouraging sight is that of Link sporting a flame-breathing dragon attachment on his uncorrupted left arm: playable Min-Min, anyone? Look, it’s hardly going to be the wildest theory out there for the next 18 months… 39

METROID DREAD

Developer MercurySteam, Nintendo EPD Publisher Nintendo Format Switch Release October 8

here’s something about Metroid games that identified as a worthy heir. Hence, the first truly seems to mean they disappear for years on new 2D Metroid game in almost two decades. The concept Sakamoto was unable to realise end. Samus Aran is celebrating her 35th anniversary this year. In all that time, there have all those years ago is on full display: an enemy been just four entries in the mainline series. that pursues Aran relentlessly, and can’t be hurt by Meanwhile, Metroid Prime 4 has existed as anything in her normal arsenal. Taking the form of nothing more than a promise since its first tease at sleek white robots, these foes patrol their territory E3 2017. Even the fan-made Prime 2D took over until you attract their attention. Make a sound and they’ll switch into pursuit mode; the broken-backed 15 years to bear any fruit. way they scuttle across platforms is One of those absences, at least, unnerving, the one-hit kills they deliver was addressed during Nintendo’s Not only is it if they catch you are worse. (The E3 showcase – and not the one we might have expected. Spelled out the first new story tension is only slightly undermined by letter by letter in stark white text, the 2D Metroid has the choice to name them all EMMI, a moniker that comes off less words ‘Metroid 5’ appeared, before the reveal of the game’s actual title: seen in 19 years, terrifying than probably intended.) introduces a stealth dynamic Dread. There’s a lot of history there. it’s also billed to theThisseries: you can evade capture You might recognise the name as an ending using the new Phantom Cloak from the early 2000s, when it was optical camouflage, or by standing first floated as a DS title. According to series co-creator Yoshio Sakamoto, who’s acting still and staying quiet. If all else fails, you can as producer on this latest instalment, the concept simply run for your life, taking advantage of Aran’s was put on ice because the hardware wasn’t up to improved mobility – she slides under obstacles and the task. A second attempt, around 2008, proved bounces off walls with a newfound fluidity. Not only is Dread the first new story 2D similarly abortive. What changed, apart from the technical Metroid has seen in 19 years, it’s also being billed upgrade offered by the Switch hardware (not as an ending. Not for Aran, you’d have to something we often get to say), was a partnership imagine, but for the broad story arc that has been with Mercury Steam Entertainment. The Spanish running for some 35 years now. And if nothing studio collaborated with Sakamoto on Samus else, it’ll bring closure to a development story that Returns, the 3DS remake of Metroid II, and was has encompassed over half that time. 40

WARIOWARE: GET IT TOGETHER

Developer/publisher Nintendo (EPD, Intelligent Systems) Format Switch Release September 10

It seemed for a while that Nintendo might have all but abandoned handheld-scale games. Its positioning of Switch as a home console you can take on the move, combined with its more conservative recent approach to software, suggested some of its lesser lights might be put out to pasture. So news of a new WarioWare was greeted with both surprise and relief: in these chaotic times, it’s only right that Nintendo’s most anarchic character should get to be a headline act once more. There is cause for both optimism and concern here. The one-word commands – Squeeze! Peel! Unplug! – remain in these espresso-shot challenges, but rather than push a button

MARIO + RABBIDS: SPARKS OF HOPE Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Milan) Format Switch Release 2022

Ubisoft hasn’t run the tightest of ships lately, but it must have been particularly galling that it kept the lid on one of its most exciting announcements only for Nintendo to jump the gun. We’re muddling our metaphors a bit there, but that’s apropos for the followup to a game that delighted in shaking up the Mushroom Kingdom order. Ubisoft Milan is breaking free from the original’s grids, offering greater freedom of movement and more strategic possibilities, with realtime factors exemplified by explosive Bob-ombs, and the Sparks (Rabbid-Luma hybrids) supplying elemental attacks. The world between combat arenas is more open, with shortform battles kicked off by bumping into enemies in the field, puzzle elements and mysteries to uncover. If Rabbid Peach was the original’s surprise star, we’re betting on the sleepy-eyed Rabbid Rosalina being Sparks Of Hope’s comedic breakout.

or press a stick, you control one of a series of returning characters. Choosing a team of three for each set of microgames, you might manoeuvre Ashley on a broomstick to shoo flies away from a cake, or guide MC Jimmy to hit a coin block in Super Mario Land. Though we’ll miss the Pavlovian immediacy upon which the series was founded, the disparate abilities of each character add an element of light strategy, not to mention greater variety when it comes to replaying familiar microgames. There’s a range of co-operative and competitive games for two players, too. And besides, where else are we going to pluck armpit hairs from a Greek statue?

ADVANCE WARS 1+2: RE-BOOT CAMP

SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI V

It might not have quite the charm of Link’s glossy reawakening, which held a similar spot at Nintendo’s last E3 showing in 2019, but we’re partial to this remake’s graphical style. Hard as it is not to miss the original’s chunky pixels, the new anime interstitials are perfectly suited to Advance Wars’ larger-than-life commanding officers, and turning the battles into a game of toy soldiers is a smart touch. It’s certainly preferable to the attempts made by Dark Conflict to push the series towards, well, darker conflicts. That was 2008, making this revival, which takes the campaigns of the two original Game Boy Advance titles and adds online multiplayer, very welcome. Not quite as welcome as a fresh instalment, but there’s a sense that waters are being tested. Turn-based strategy is back in vogue, after all, and Fire Emblem has had no difficulty winning new fans on Switch.

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. Perhaps that accounts for the outpouring of delight that greeted the reappearance of this fifth mainline entry, more than four years after it was revealed during Switch’s Japanese unveiling. If such vocal support for a relatively niche series – compared to Persona, its more celebrated spin-off – was unexpected, recent re-releases of earlier entries have boosted its profile in the west. And given the wait between Persona games, it’s little wonder fans of that series have been drawn to its demon-fusing forebear. Your protagonist has experience of the splicing process, too, having fused with the mysterious Aogami to become Nahobino, a reference to two Shinto gods of purification. The Press Turn battle system (in which you regain an action if you pinpoint an enemy’s weakness) also returns, as you explore a post-apocalyptic Tokyo.

Developer WayForward Publisher Nintendo Format Switch Release December 3

Developer Atlus Publisher Nintendo Format Switch Release November 12

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ELDEN RING

Developer FromSoftware Publisher Bandai Namco Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release January 21

hen we heard, around the time of its announcement, that Elden Ring was going to be essentially “open-world Dark Souls”, we weren’t entirely confident in the summary. Because isn’t that precisely what Dark Souls fans would ask for? And when did get fans get what they want? (And, in the rare cases that it happens, when have the results stood up to close scrutiny?) And yet here we are looking forward to one of 2022’s biggest games

delivering pretty much everything Dark Souls devotees yearn for: screenfilling bosses, endlessly rewarding character builds, secrets by the sackful – plus magic, multiplayer and a whole lot more besides. Because it delivered so comprehensively on what had been hoped for, surprises were a little thin on the ground. We knew already, for example, that the scale of the game’s play area introduces horseback as a means of getting around effectively, although to be fair we weren’t

ready for our steed to be summonable out of thin air – or indeed capable of negotiating a sheer cliff face by simply leaping up it. Combat on horseback will also feature, although the focus will be on battles played out on just two legs (at least on the player’s side). There is more clarity on the contribution of George RR Martin, too. The author says that his creative involvement with the project – which he calls a “sequel” to Dark Souls, presumably in accordance with how it was touted to him initially – ended “years ago”, and mostly amounted to creating a backstory for the setting of the game, upon which the game’s writers and designers would layer their own ideas in the shape of NPCs, enemies and beyond. During the development of the game the production team has checked in with Martin, offering

updates on their progress, but the author is, by his own admission, not a keen follower of videogames, and you get the impression that such sessions have involved plenty of polite noises rather than a lot of fullthroated deliberation. Nevertheless, director Hidetaka Miyazaki says that the author’s contribution in the first instance was everything he and the team could have hoped for – even if the production agreement meant that they were free to cast aside anything that did not necessarily suit where they wanted to ultimately take the game. Their goal? To deliver the defining fantasy-themed game of 2022. Elden Ring’s continued development on PS4 and Xbox One alongside more powerful hardware may hamper the journey to their destination, but you wouldn’t bet against them completing the quest. 43

TOM CLANCY’S RAINBOW SIX EXTRACTION

Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Montreal) Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release September 16

Following a lengthy delay and a name change – the original subtitle of ‘Quarantine’ having, for some unfathomable reason, been dropped – this Siege spinoff is shaping up rather nicely. It’s a co-op shooter that pits your squad of operators against parasitic aliens rather than terrorists. The aliens are sensitive to sound and have a soft bioluminescence, useful for identifying them through walls. Missions appear to have a risk-reward element, where players can decide how far to push their luck before calling for extraction (hence the new title). Push too far, lose a teammate and you’ll need to drag their body to the safe zone, or else

TUNIC

Developer Andrew Shouldice Publisher Finji Format PC, Xbox One Release TBA

This isometric Zelda-like has been several years in the making, but it’s still startling to think it’s been put together by one man. The softly spoken Andrew Shouldice – who, if the game development thing doesn’t work out, could make a killing from ASMR videos – has crafted a quite beautiful world here. Gorgeously lit and with a certain spongy solidity to it, it bears comparison with the charming toytown aesthetic of Grezzo’s Link’s Awakening remake. It harks back to earlier Zeldas as far as its action goes: combat has a hardcore edge, and it’s easy to find yourself crowded by angular critters, bouncing blobs and tall knights with swords that dwarf your own. Elsewhere, we stumble into a skeletal warrior who we assume we’re not meant to tackle yet given how swiftly he dispatches us: just one among a clutch of mysteries we’re keen to learn more about in this captivating adventure.

lose access to that character permanently – at least, until you launch a rescue mission on the same map. Extraction’s roots lie in Outbreak, a mode for Siege introduced as part of a limited-time event, and little effort has been made to hide this fact. There are familiar faces on the roster of operators, and most of the moments that shine brightest are lifted from that game: putting a bullet through wood because you know there’s a head on the other side, or throwing up a barricade to funnel enemies into a trap. It’s unlikely to win over keen Siege players but, for anyone who prefers non-human opponents, Extraction could be a way in.

CITIZEN SLEEPER

Developer Jump Over The Age Publisher Fellow Traveller Format PC Release 2022

It’s fair to say Gareth Damian Martin isn’t hugely optimistic about humanity’s future. His TTRPGinspired follow-up to In Other Waters plonks you aboard an abandoned space station, Erlin’s Eye, in which you eke out a fairly miserable existence as an artificial intelligence within a body designed for obsolescence. Cheery stuff, then, but In Other Waters tempered its bleak worldview with wry humour and compassion for its characters, and here you’ll have the opportunity to band together with fellow scavengers and misfits to break free of the corporate yoke. Invariably, there’s risk involved in the tasks you need to complete to achieve this – but then that’s inherent in any game where dice (and ticking clocks) are involved. Despite the sci-fi trappings, it’s a perceptive commentary on the precarity of the present-day gig economy. It’s an ugly world, but hey, at least the UI is beautiful.

IMMORTALITY

Developer/publisher Half Mermaid Format PC Release 2022

Look, it would be foolish to pretend we’re not interested in the latest from Sam Barlow simply because he writes in these pages. But to avoid any accusations of cronyism, we’ll report only the facts. Not that Barlow is giving many of those away: after a cryptic build-up, Immortality’s debut trailer proves similarly elusive. It’s another FMV game, this time surrounding fictional film star Marissa Marcel, who made three movies that were never released before disappearing. What happened to her? And why was there a 22-year gap between her second and third films? Barlow isn’t saying. He has, however, assembled quite the writing team. The Queen’s Gambit creator Allan Scott is on board, while Mr Robot scribe Amelia Gray returns after co-scripting Telling Lies, alongside Barry Gifford, who co-wrote the screenplay for David Lynch’s Lost Highway. We bet they submit their words on time.

TREK TO YOMI

Developer Leonard Menchiari, Flying Wild Hog Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release 2022

Now this is Kurosawa Mode. Recognising that paying tribute to one of the greats of Japanese cinema involves more than slapping on a black-and-white filter and a bit of film grain, this samurai side-scroller appreciates the value of lighting and perspective when it comes to shooting chanbara action. The result is thrillingly cinematic, the camera zooming out to frame expansive vistas, and hanging low below a confrontation atop a bridge, silhouetting its two fighters against the moon. The story, written by Alec Meer, embraces samurai themes of duty and honour, while leaning into Shinto mythology: not all the enemies you’ll face will be human. This is a classier affair than we’re used to from Devolver, though there will be plenty of bloodshed. If it plays even half as good as it looks, this could be one of next year’s most exciting games.

RIDERS REPUBLIC

Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Annecy) Format Luna, PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One , Xbox Series Release September 2

Having smushed the Alps together in Steep, Ubisoft Annecy is pulling a similar trick with seven US national parks, creating a sprawling extreme-sports sandbox that runs through Yosemite Valley and Utah, up to Grand Teton in Wyoming. From dusty canyons to lush woodland and treacherous peaks, no beauty spot is safe from these whooping daredevils, who compete across five disciplines – mountain biking, skiing, snowboarding, wingsuit flying, rocket wingsuiting – in groups of up to 50 players (on new-gen consoles; you’re limited to 20 on older hardware). Though we enjoyed Steep most away from the organised events, the new Tricks Battle Mode offers an enticing team-based challenge: a six-a-side stunt-off where you grind rails and pull tricks to capture ‘districts’, earning your squad of thrillseekers a potentially gamechanging score multiplier.

FAR: CHANGING TIDES

Developer Okomotive Publisher Frontier Developments Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Late 2021

Another to add to the ‘Has it really been that long since the last one?’ list is this followup to the 2018 original, a sidescrolling charmer about a tiny girl and a chunky landship that seemed to come out of nowhere. This sequel is similarly unexpected, if only because the first felt so self-contained that we never considered it warranted a successor. Yet here we are. Published through Frontier’s Foundry label (the same responsible for E358 cover game Lemnis Gate), Changing Tides sees our plucky hero take to the seas instead. It’s set in the same world as the first, and presumably we’ll discover how it went from parched to waterlogged (our money’s on this being

a prequel). As in the original, you alternate between taking in the scenery and managing your vehicle – you can drop anchor and dive beneath the surface to search wrecks for salvage and fuel, and you may need to keep an eye on the weather, lest you need to batten down the hatches when storms approach. Changing Tides may lack the original’s element of surprise, though ‘more of the same but wetter’ isn’t an unappealing idea. Assuming this talented Swiss team can sustain the delicate balance that made your relationship with your vehicle in the first game feel almost symbiotic, we’re confident we’ll enjoy the reflective ride as much as we did three years ago.

MARVEL’S GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

Developer Eidos Montreal Publisher Square Enix Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release October 26

he general consensus around one of the ever aim at your closest friends. Granted, the worst-kept secrets of the summer was that a constant shouts during combat could well grow new Marvel licensed game would be a waste grating over a 15-hour adventure. Yet they’re of the studio behind Deus Ex: Human Revolution. useful, too. As Star-Lord you fight directly, Doubtless the underwhelming launch of Marvel’s combining your twin blasters with melee attacks. At Avengers contributed to that cynical stance before the same time, you also command your fellow so much as a second of footage had been seen. Guardians, choosing between four moves for each Well, we got more than a second. Much more. By and working out which ones combine to most common consent, this was a needlessly protracted devastating effect. Launch an enemy with an uppercut, and Drax’s drop-kick will overview, taking up almost half of Square Enix’s Summer Showcase – The vibrant palette soon knock the wind out of them. Invite Rocket to leap into Groot’s although once you saw the rest, you could understand why the publisher sets Guardians harness, and he’ll become a mobile of sorts. chose to spend so long on it. apart from most turretSuccessful combos accelerate a As the first major opportunity to blockbusters, special meter that means you no show off a game due out in a few short months, it surely made sense on as does its sense longer need to concern yourself with cooldowns, as Star-Lord lifts his paper. In practice, it sapped plenty of humour Walkman as if holding the Master of audience goodwill – and some of Sword aloft before pumping out an the zip out of a game that, granted, looks a lot like several other triple-A games blended ’80s hit to score the ensuing pile-on. Tunes from into a colourful, easily digestible smoothie. Marvel’s Kiss, Joan Jett, Iron Maiden, Wham!, Blondie and Mass Effect? Uncharted In Space? Heck, it even Pat Benatar are all promised: if the lack of had a ‘Rocket will remember that’ moment to likenesses means we’re saddled with an off-brand Star-Lord, at least it will sound the part. And we’re remind us this isn’t the first Guardians videogame. Yet there is plenty to admire here, too. The quietly pleased to learn that the story branches vibrant palette sets this apart from most prompted by key decisions you make will all blockbusters, as does its sense of humour: the converge – because, as narrative director Mary wisecracks here have an edge to them, with the Demarle puts it, “We’re building a strong climactic Guardians frequently bickering among themselves, ending that’s going to be exciting.” That’d make a delivering the sort of withering putdowns you’d only pleasant change for Marvel, at least.

TINY TINA’S WONDERLANDS

Developer Gearbox Software Publisher 2K Games Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release 2022

Gearbox’s showcase yielded little beyond Randy Pitchford having awkward conversations with Eli Roth, Kevin Hart and Edgar Ramirez on the set of the Borderlands movie, but there was one notable announcement: this high-fantasy take on the co-op shooter, which lets you and up to three friends battle dragons, zombies and more with big guns and powerful magic. And, this being a Gearbox game, a rainbow-firing unicorn called Butt Stallion.

MECHAJAMMER

Developer Whalenought Studios Publisher Modern Wolf Format PC Release TBA

Mechajammer is a turn-based RPG that harks back to the original Fallout and Baldur’s Gate games, and promises to give us the player freedom of an immersive sim, but what really stands out is the style. There’s a lot of cyberpunk in there but, more importantly, a heavy dose of John Carpenter and ’80s cult cinema. In other words: synths, eyepatches and people tearing around the streets of a dystopian city on motorcycles.

WALK

Developer Kazumi Game Studios Publisher TBA Format PC Release TBA

Shibuya-based collective Asobu continues its fine work spotlighting Japanese indie games, and this PS1-inspired horror looks a real find. You play a young girl pursued by a shadowy creature, her environment viewed from static camera angles resembling grainy CCTV feeds. These limited views can hide the otherworldly stalker from sight, terrifying guttural sounds and shaky on-screen text warnings tell you when it’s time to run and hide.

UNPACKING

Developer Witch Beam Publisher Humble Games Format PC, Switch Release 2021

If unboxing our worldly possessions and arranging them neatly in drawers and cupboards were this satisfying in real life, we’d be moving house every couple of months. Unpacking offers the fantasy of owning a neat and tidy home at a fraction of the cost and effort – and in the process of putting everything in its pixel-art place, you may even learn something about who you are. Seriously, socks in the middle drawer? Well, it takes all sorts.

PIONER

Developer/publisher GFA Games Format PC Release TBA

Of all the STALKER-like games on show at this E3, this might be the most promising. Partly because it escapes the shadow of Chernobyl in favour of its own island setting – albeit one with familiar anomalies and skeletal ferris wheels – but primarily because it describes itself as an MMO. Pioner is drawing equally on Escape From Tarkov, and its zone will apparently house a singleplayer campaign, co-op raids and PvP zones.

HAPPY GAME

Developer/publisher Amanita Games Format PC, Switch Release 2021

A few images from the preview build haven’t fully left our heads since we first saw them, so we return to see if Jaromír Plachý’s playfully nasty horror really is as unsettling as we remember. Again, it worms its way under our skin, not so much because of the odd gruesome tableau as the way it makes us feel like the kind of horrible child who takes great delight in pulling the wings off flies. Prepare to shudder at this one.

SALT & SACRIFICE

Developer Ska Studios Publisher Devoured Studios Format PS4, PS5 Release 2022

Ska Studios’ 2016 action-RPG Salt & Sanctuary was more than the sum of its influences, acknowledging its debt to FromSoftware’s games without slavishly following in their footsteps. Not to be confused with Smoke And Sacrifice, this successor casts you (and a friend, since there’s co-op support here) as a criminal whose punishment is to battle and devour monstrous creatures – rendered in creator James Silva’s hand-drawn style – known as Mages.

VENICE 2089

Developer/publisher Safe Place Studio Format PC Release TBA

The titular city may be submerged as soon as 2100, which means the residents don’t have long to say their goodbyes in this gentle adventure. You’re Nova, a young girl who rides her hoverboard around town, completing odd jobs for the remaining residents. A charming visual effect sees the world rotate around you as you turn a corner; finishing tasks grants you souvenirs to decorate your room, becoming permanent mementoes of your visit.

ARCADE PARADISE

Developer Nosebleed Interactive Publisher Wired Productions Format PC Release TBA 2021

Part management sim, part retro pastiche, this lets you transform a run-down launderette into your own coin-op heaven. You can place and play a selection of around three dozen arcade games, from side-scrolling brawlers to Pole Position-like racers – all of which have their own in-game leaderboards, with several supporting four players locally. If nothing else, the 1990s stylings make a change from the ubiquitous ’80s aesthetic.

FAR CRY 6

Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Toronto) Format Luna, PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release October 7

So, yes, it’s political. Ubisoft has shifted away from the triple-A party line, largely as a result of the furore caused by a slightly bad-faith interpretation of narrative director Navid Khavari’s insistence that Ubisoft Toronto wasn’t making “a political statement about what’s happening in Cuba specifically”. That gave the publisher an escape route, as Khavari went on to say that “our story is political. A story about a modern revolution must be.” It’s also a story where you can sic a pet crocodile or a paraplegic dachshund on your enemies. Plus ça change. Yet there seems a genuine desire here for Far Cry 6 to offer something different from your average open-world murderfest.

UNBEATABLE

Developer/publisher D-Cell Games Format PC Release 2023

An anime-styled rhythm-adventure in which you play along to a succession of upbeat pop-punk earworms? Unbeatable should be right up our street. And there is much to admire here, from its soft-focus cartoon looks to its delightful soundtrack and narrative interstitials which tell a story about each song. There’s a physicality to the action, too – in a future where music has been criminalised, you hit incoming beats as if pushing back against an oppressive system. And yet. Part of the problem is that it’s too keenly focused on visual rather than audio cues, the kind of rhythm game where you don’t respond intuitively to the tempo of the track so much as watching the incoming beats. The beat maps themselves are flawed, and the tutorial fails to properly explain certain mechanics. Work to do, then, but there’s time for a triumphant fightback.

As guerrilla fighter Dani Rojas, determined to end the rule of dictator Antón Castillo on the island of Not-Cuba, you’ll be given a sizeable arsenal, yet this is one firstperson revolution that lets you put the gun away on occasion; indeed, holstering your weapon is vital if you want to avoid suspicion while eavesdropping on conversations. And as A-list guest stars go, Giancarlo Esposito seems unusually invested, his enthusiastic defence of Castillo’s motives suggesting he isn’t simply here to pick up a paycheque. Whether it actually has something meaningful to say about political insurrection remains to be seen, but, as Khavari insists, “I can say we absolutely tried.”

SOUP POT

Developer/publisher Chikon Club Format PC, Xbox Series Release Q3 2021

Step aside, Cooking Mama, there’s a new food-prep game in town. Several, actually, but our pick of the crop is this “chaotic and chill” effort from Chikon Club. You can choose from more than 100 dishes using an in-game social media app, and while you have instructions to follow, you’re given room to get creative – or improvise should part of the process go wrong. There are no fail states here – instead, you’re encouraged to learn from your mistakes. Your incentive to do well, then, is simply to prepare the kind of dish you’d share on Instagram, the stylised art making the food look convincing without being photoreal. You may even find inspiration to recreate some meals in your own kitchen. Soup Pot recognises that it’s not always about following step-by-step guides, but doing things your own way. Better than Mama? Absolutely.

PASSPARTOUT 2: THE LOST ARTIST

Developer/publisher Flamebait Games Format PC Release TBA

For a game about fine art, the first Passpartout wasn’t especially easy on the eyes. This sequel looks set to change that – the reveal shows off a significant visual upgrade for the title character, underlining the idea that they’ve been cobbled together from a manikin and other art supplies. The town of Phénix looks like the perfect place to shill your MS Paint masterpieces, too, its sea views and pastel-coloured building fronts ready to provide a little extra inspiration. The townsfolk will play a bigger part this time, rather than simply buying or brutally critiquing your work, and there are hints of a grander underlying story too, with your character taking over an art shop from their missing father and trying to solve the mystery of his disappearance. How exactly this will be achieved via the medium of creating slapdash art, we can’t wait to find out.

SIGNALIS

Developer Rose-Engine Publisher Humble Games Format PC Release TBA

Everything about Signalis seems designed to discomfit you. It flits restlessly between horror tropes (flickering lights, body horror, disturbing messages, inexplicable phenomena) just as it shifts between third and firstperson perspectives, by turns resembling a visual novel, an early PlayStation survival horror and even No Code’s Observation. You play as Elster, who appears to be an android technician, trapped on an abandoned retrofuturist ship with several shrieking monstrosities. Combat is deliberately awkward in that classic Resident Evil/ Silent Hill way – you’ll run around your target before taking aim to make each bullet count – but you’ll spend more of your time exploring the place, Elster’s fragmented mind playing tricks on her all the while. The sound of a voice simply repeating “Achtung”, meanwhile, proves a shiveringly effective refrain. This could be something special.

BLACK BOOK

Developer Morteshka Publisher HypeTrain Digital Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release Q3

Slavic folklore might not hold the same place in the gaming firmament as its Greek and Norse equivalents, but, perhaps spurred by the success of The Witcher, it seems to be having something of a moment. Black Book is set in 19th-century Russia, where Orthodox Christianity rubs up against the stories that have been told in these lands for considerably longer. You play as Vasilisa, an apprentice koldun – a witch – determined to rescue her dead lover from Hell. To do so, you need to defeat devils in battles which play like a round of Slay The Spire, each card representing a page from your spell book. The strategy is less complex, at least in the demo we play, but this is just one aspect of the game, which mixes in point-and-click adventuring with segments that have you reading through folktales in search of a solution to your current fantastical problem.

THE GREAT ACE ATTORNEY CHRONICLES Developer/publisher Capcom Format PC, PS4, Switch Release July 27

Capcom has pulled out the stops for a lavish localisation of these two previously Japan-only entries. This sumptuously presented duology (there’s even 4K support on PC) comes with a host of extras, including mini-episodes in addition to the ten main cases, a selection of bonus costumes, an auditorium to listen to the soundtrack, and a Story Mode that does all the courtroom donkey work, for those who’d rather not sift through evidence and work out the right time to present it. If you’d prefer that Chronicles didn’t play itself, the games introduce two new mechanics: when detective Herlock Sholmes makes logical suppositions about a suspect, attorney

Ryunosuke Naruhodo and his assistant Susato Mikotoba pick holes in his conjecture to tease out the right conclusion. And in court, there’s a variation on the mob trials of Professor Layton Vs Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, except here you pinpoint contradictions in the findings of six jurors – convince them, and you tilt the literal scales of justice (hanging above the judge) towards a ‘not guilty’ verdict. There are two stately new Pursuit themes, part of a grandiose orchestral score, and some of the best-worst puns in series history. With a story that ties both games together, can this finally topple the original trilogy? We’ll hand down our verdict next month.

HYPE@E3

PHANTOM ABYSS

Developer Team WIBY Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC Release Out now (Early Access)

his is a quite brilliant idea – the kind that crack your whip toward the nearest ledge to latch seems so obvious in hindsight that you wonder on and pull yourself up. Your whip can be used to how it’s not been done before. Even at the trigger switches and smash vases, too. You can survive a couple of falls or hits, but the very beginning of its spell in Early Access, Phantom Abyss looks like it could be an enormous hit. It tasks stakes add extra pressure to situations you’d your bullwhip-toting explorer with looting temples normally breeze through. The knowledge that filled with hazards. You dodge spikes, spinning you’ve only got one shot at glory can make even blades, arrow traps, collapsing platforms and the most familiar videogame obstacles feel more en route to getting your hands on an dangerous, while combinations of traps in close quarters keep you on your toes. If ancient artefact hidden deep within. Not unique ideas, granted, though Should you die playing the waiting game only works up to a point, it pays to keep an eye there’s a twist: should you die in one in one of its on the phantoms you see on each of its procedurally generated labyrinths, your chance to claim that labyrinths, your run: these are players who previously perished in that temple, and their particular relic is gone forever. Only one explorer worldwide will chance to claim movements serve as both guidance warning to those who follow. complete their mission. that particular relic and Later, you won’t be able to hang The concept alone must have had Team WIBY high-fiving one is gone forever around at all, since you’ll be pursued by the temple’s guardian. another, and Devolver rubbing its To make the challenge slightly less vertiginous, hands in glee when it heard the pitch. Though, as with a successful run, it’s all in the execution. We’ve you can obtain godly blessings by donating coins seen most of these moves before – you sprint, you’ve gathered from chests at altars, affording you crouch, leap and slide in a manner that in the more air time or temporary protection from hands feels closest to controlling Faith in Mirror’s damage. However, neither of those things are quite Edge (complete with a safety roll that lets you as useful as keeping a calm head when faced with recover from a fall without taking damage – extreme peril. In that regard, we’re clearly no assuming that plunge isn’t into a pit). And when Indiana Jones – though to play Phantom Abyss is to you mistime a jump across a chasm, or misjudge arguably feel closer to inhabiting cinema’s most your run across a series of moving or disappearing famous treasure-hunting archeologist than any platforms, you’ve still got a chance to save yourself: game actually bearing his name. 50

DEATH STRANDING DIRECTOR’S CUT

Developer Kojima Productions Publisher SIE Format PS5 Release TBA 2021

No Geoff Keighley event would be complete without an appearance from Hideo Kojima – and this typically mysterious tease of a PS5-exclusive update to his most divisive game only raised further questions. The original did not seem like a game compromised by studio interference. What could possibly be left on the cutting-room floor? Could Kojima take the Blade Runner approach and trim some exposition? Best to assume otherwise, we say.

KILLER AUTO

Developer/publisher Virtuoso Neomedia Enterprises Format TBA Release TBA

Nestled among a set of rather drab broadcasts, the Future Of Play Direct – hosted by a computergenerated character – was arrestingly unusual. Its opening salvo, from studio Virtuoso Neomedia, was an assault of hyper-saturated Dreamcast colours, aesthetics nicked from The Designers Republic, and titles such as Raddminton and Zodiac XX Leo Edition. Killer Auto is the highlight, an anti-gravity racer citing OutRun 2 and Burnout 3 as influences.

EVIL DEAD: THE GAME

Dev Saber Interactive Publisher Boss Team Games Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release 2021

Asymmetric multiplayer horror games are having a moment right now (we half-wonder if Saber considered a crossover: Evil Dead By Daylight, anyone?) and here’s another. A variety of characters from the films and TV spin-off Ash Vs Evil Dead face off against the Kandarian Demon, which can possess enemies to take down the heroes. Though with his trusty boomstick and chainsaw arm, why would you pick anyone other than Ash himself?

INKULINATI

Developer Yaza Games Publisher Daedalic Entertainment Format PC Release 2021

It’s been a couple of years since this unusual strategy title was showcased in our Knowledge section, but a game set on medieval manuscripts, borrowing equally from Worms and Monty Python, isn’t the kind of thing you easily forget. If its exact workings are still a little less than fully illuminated, we at least won’t have to wait much longer to find out what we’ll be getting up to – the trailer promises its release is “coming this century”.

LIFE IS STRANGE: TRUE COLORS

Developer Deck Nine Publisher Square Enix Format PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Sep 10

Having succeeded in creating absorbing drama from a story to which we already knew the ending in Before The Storm, Deck Nine has earned the benefit of the doubt. Yet the latest Life Is Strange looks more aggressively touchy-feely than ever, while we’re uneasy at the ability of new protagonist Alex Chen to intuit people’s emotions – empathy – being described as a “psychic power”. It’s a bleak old world when that’s considered unique.

DEMON THROTTLE

Developer Doinksoft Publisher Devolver Digital Format Switch Release 2022

Just how far should you go when trying to evoke a 1980s vibe? For Doinksoft, mere 8bit-style pixel art really isn’t enough: vertically scrolling shooter Demon Throttle renders its visuals with the kind of fuzz once associated with RF signals piped into CRT TVs, with low-bitrate speech samples on top for extra authenticity. The ultimate kicker, though, is the fact that the game will only be available to purchase as a physical object, just like the old days.

ARAGAMI 2

Developer/publisher Lince Works Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release September 17

Hello darkness, our old friend. With stealth games few and far between these days, we’re keeping a close eye on this ninja game’s movements. Tenchu is cited as an inspiration, but many of Aragami’s ‘shadow powers’ – including teleport, decoy and mesmerise – have been not-so-sneakily lifted from the Dishonored games. The promise is that you’ll be able to approach situations as you like, and co-op opens up the possibilities further still.

TWO POINT CAMPUS

Developer Two Point Studios Publisher Sega Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release 2022

From scrubs to students: the likeable, accessible management sim shifts its focus to academia, inviting you to build a university with a difference. Rather than traditional scholastic courses, you’ll be able to set up a Knight School (enabled by the newly added ability to build outside) to teach chivalry, heraldry and jousting – while a Gastronomy class will give your undergrads a giant oven to cook colossal pizzas and pies.

WIZARD WITH A GUN

Developer Galvanic Games Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC, Switch Release 2022

This year’s Ronseal award goes to Galvanic Games, which has sensibly figured out that wizards could make things easier on themselves by combining the powerful effects of spells with a more efficient delivery system. You can enchant ammo with a variety of properties, then, but you also have a furniture-producing weapon with which to deck out your wizard’s tower – assuming you’ve gathered the appropriate crafting ingredients.

STRANGER OF PARADISE: FINAL FANTASY ORIGIN

Developer Team Ninja Publisher Square Enix Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release 2022

This was no ordinary E3 – strictly speaking, we probably shouldn’t even call it ‘E3’ – but for a few glorious minutes it felt like normality had resumed. No E3, after all, is complete without a moment of unintentional hilarity, and we got one in the form of the debut trailer for this unlikely spin-off. Stranger Of Paradise was conceived when Tetsuya Nomura decided he wanted to make a game that told “a story of an angry man”, and boy, is protagonist Jack cross. A generic grizzled hero archetype, he’s on a mission to kill Chaos and doesn’t mind who knows it, constantly reminding us of his goal in the manner of a man who can’t stop stepping on Lego bricks. That

A MUSICAL STORY

Developer Glee-Cheese Studio Publisher Digerati Format PC, Switch Release Summer

A hook, a bassline, a beat: every song starts with a single element and builds from there. So it is with this narrative-led rhythm-action game, which tells the tale of a rock trio in the ’70s. Its short stages take us from the band’s first practice session through hedonistic nights and boring day jobs working on a factory production line to fixing up a battered camper van and heading out on the road to play a make-or-break gig. Each scene follows a call-and-response structure – you hear an instrument play, then tap or hold the left or right shoulder buttons to mimic it. Succeed and the central image opens out into a short, evocative vignette; fail, and it’ll simply loop back until you get it right. There’s a woozy, hypnotic rhythm to it all, with an undercurrent of melancholy: the kind of tune, in other words, of which we’d like to hear more.

the demo, released shortly after, contained corrupted data and couldn’t be played seemed to be the icing on the cake. Once fixed, however, it showed promise – if hinting towards Team Ninja having spent a lot of time playing FromSoftware games. It has a break meter akin to Sekiro’s posture gauge – with ‘soul burst’ finishers refilling MP, which you expend on combo abilities – while Cubes are the game’s bonfire substitute. There is a touch of Final Fantasy in there, courtesy of a job system of sorts that lets you switch between roles (or at least gear sets) on the fly. An unconventional origin story, then, but some way from the disaster it first appeared.

THE BIG CON

Developer Mighty Yell Publisher Skybound Games Format PC, Xbox One Release Summer

A fantastically gaudy palette and catchy teen-com theme tune instantly tells us this Tribeca Games Festival entrant is set in the 1990s. We’d be tempted to call it a more innocent time if the game didn’t involve various disreputable activities. Still, young protagonist Ali Barlow’s motives are (relatively) pure: she’s looking to raise funds to pay off a loan shark to save her mother’s video store. And if that means a bit of low-level theft and other petty crimes, so be it. Our light-fingered heroine must sidle up to her target and hold Y to reach into their pockets, stopping an arrow within a bar to snaffle their loose change: the more money they have on them, the trickier your task will be. It’s precision-targeted towards those of us who remember having to rewind VHS cassettes before returning them to the shop – which you’ll have to do if your mum catches you in the act.

NEW WORLD

Developer Amazon Game Studios Orange County Publisher Amazon Games Format PC Release August 31

Until it launches, New World’s own qualities are always going to be in the shadow of what it represents: Amazon’s second crack at game development. It’s certainly a polished production. The lost continent of Aeternum is realised in sharper detail than any other MMORPG world we’ve seen, rich with ancient statues, stranded pirate ships and high-ceilinged dungeons. There’s perhaps a lack of identity there, but this mashup maximalism is the setting’s big idea – an island where eternal life is a given, so that all the forces who’ve struggled over it persist and overlap. And as we study it through the lens of Crucible’s failure, at least one thing has been learned: not to rush in. The game has been running previews since last summer, and the developers are keen to stress that they’ve been listening. It’s strange, and a little endearing, to see Amazon as the plucky underdog.

GRIME

Developer Clover Bite Publisher Akupara Games Format PC, Stadia Release 2021

Two things we haven’t had a shortage of in recent years: indie 2D Metroidvanias and Soulslikes. It’s getting harder to make your mark with a game that falls into either column, let alone both at once. Still, if you’re trying to grab our attention, you could do worse than casting us as a nude Adonis with a black hole where his head should be. And this is just the beginning of Grime’s oddities. Weapons that extend chattering teeth; pots that strike out with frail arms; a setting that, if we’re picking up the narrative hints correctly, appears to be within some kind of cosmic womb. Given its fascination with distorted anatomy, we’re left uneasy by the implications.

Fortunately, though, this isn’t all the game has to offer. Combat is as muscular as its protagonist, with its heavier weapons boasting the most deliberate swing animation this side of Smough’s Hammer. And fighting our way back to the point where we last died in order to recoup our losses remains a reliable source of tension. It certainly isn’t shy about its sources of inspiration, then, but Grime adds just enough of a twist to them – a parry that’s your only way of regaining health, an upgrade system that lets you gain enemies’ powers after felling enough of them – to keep hold of our attention long after that black hole first sucks it in.

ELEC HEAD

Developer NamaTakahashi, Tsuyomi Publisher NamaTakahashi Format PC Release Summer

There is real brilliance in this puzzle-platformer, which wordlessly tutorialises its systems with remarkable elegance. You are a robot that electrifies every surface it touches. Often that’s handy, sometimes it gets in the way, and occasionally it’s dangerous: above a row of lightbulbs, you want to leap on the platforms that aren’t attached to chains, lest the sparks they produce blow you up. Then you gain the ability to throw your head, and everything changes again. Your body can still move around – and is no longer electrified – but you can only survive ten seconds without your head. This prompts a succession of puzzles where you need to move while the head is still airborne, and perhaps pass on to the next screen to grab a key card before hurrying back as the timer ticks closer to zero. We find ourselves marvelling at its understated ingenuity.

BEAR AND BREAKFAST

Developer Gummy Cat Publisher Armor Games Format PC, Switch Release 2021

Surely the quintessential Wholesome Direct game. Hank the bear could be the poster boy for the movement, an adorable mascot with a flicky looseness to his walk animation that recalls beloved cartoons, and who suffers, it’s suggested in one bit of dialogue, from anxiety. Check, check and check. Meanwhile, the game Hank finds himself in – restoring a broken-down retreat in the woods to its former glory, trying to keep the human guests happy in between chats with his fellow animals and one old lady who doesn’t speak much bear – couldn’t sit more perfectly amid the recent simmer of life sims. Beyond being a stylish exercise in box-ticking, though, the crafting options seem comprehensively realised, and it has a meditative pace. Not to mention the darkly intriguing hints that the resort’s best days coincided with some since-fallen dictatorship.

SABLE

Developer Shedworks Publisher Raw Fury Format PC, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release September 23

ike the moment you ink over a pencil sketch, the protective bubble, enabling her to descend steadily thin black outlines that give Sable such a from high ground rather than simply plunge. A distinctive look – turning its desert world filled couple of simple navigation puzzles demonstrate with crumbling ruins and abandoned spacecraft how you might use it later, but for now it helps her into a kind of Moebius-drawn Tatooine – feel like a retrieve the various parts she needs for the craft firm commitment. There is no going back. Yet just she’ll use to leave the camp and head out into the as it is clearly determined to carve its own space in wider world. To reach these, you ride a smokethe open-world genre, like its protagonist billowing sandcutter: it may be a rickety old thing, Shedworks’ debut is aware it’s following in the but it makes for faster, smoother exploration than trotting around on foot. footsteps of others. The ability to In conversations with the rest of climb every surface (with a stamina We have explored the clan we get a sense of what this gauge that limits how far you can ascend) is obviously redolent of larger sandboxes all means to Sable. Dialogue choices Breath Of The Wild, as is the ability than this, but the allow us to decide whether she communicates nervousness or to gaze out from a tower and place down your own waypoint markers. place feels vast, excitement at what’s ahead, but an Yet from Sable’s awkward running largely by making inner monologue clues us in to what she’s really thinking: this departure animation to the starkly beautiful landscapes and gently melancholic Sable feel small represents farewell to her family, her home and her childhood. There is, it mood, we’re reminded just as often seems, no going back. of Team Ico’s catalogue. If these routines are familiar, they’re elevated by We have explored larger sandboxes than this, but the place feels vast, largely by making Sable subtle touches in the way they’re framed and herself feel small and vulnerable. If her early steps described. So when it’s time to assemble your bike, seem tentative (partly by dint of a slightly wayward picking up and slotting in the three parts has a camera and her jerky movements), that’s in keeping ritualistic quality, not least when a fellow clan with her state of mind. She is, after all, about to member suggests a mythic connection between partake in a rite of passage – referred to by the rider and machine: this is, clearly, more than just a fellow members of her nomadic, mask-wearing clan way to get around. Alas, our time with Sable ends as Gliding. Via a magical stone, activated within a before we’re able to discover how – which only nearby temple, she gains the ability to produce a makes us keener to flee the nest.

AVATAR: FRONTIERS OF PANDORA

Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Massive) Format Luna, PC, PS5, Stadia, Xbox Series Release 2022

Ubisoft’s ‘one more thing’ was, on paper, a sensible choice. What could be bigger than a game based on a film which – pending an unexpected re-release of Avengers: Endgame before we go to press – is the highest-grossing of all time? Yet that fact is all a lot of people recall about Avatar. It’s worth remembering that its success was largely down to its stereoscopic presentation – which subsequently caused a rush by studios to retrofit their films in 3D, their inferior presentation in turn leading many cinemagoers to tire of the technology. Still, that hasn’t dissuaded Fox from stumping up for four sequels, the first of which will launch next year. How closely

NORCO

Developer Geography Of Robots Publisher Raw Fury Format PC Release TBA

A wordy, sometimes opaque Southern Gothic point-and-click dealing with hardscrabble lives, this inaugural Tribeca Games Award winner is the gritty speculative-fiction counterpart to Kentucky Route Zero’s magical-realist journey. It’s another elegy to a broken world, its pixel-art representations of a decaying Louisiana finding moments of tragic beauty amid the swamplands. And, as in Cardboard Computer’s tale, your choices are often more about developing character than advancing the plot. But you do have a goal. Your mother has died and your brother is missing, and with the family robot, Million, in tow, you head out to look for him. Not, however, before a testy encounter with a local, which turns into a fight: a curious hybrid of turn-based attacks and real-time dodges. Norco is unapologetically bleak but rich in mood and texture; that Tribeca prize, it seems, was not unwarranted.

connected Ubisoft Massive’s firstperson open-world game is to Avatar or its successor remains to be seen, though its cinematic teaser, rendered using an updated version of the publisher’s Snowdrop engine, certainly looks the part. It features the same kind of Na’Vi-versus-military confrontations as the 2009 film; by the look of things, you’re able to fly aboard a leonopteryx for air-to-air combat. On the ground, you need to watch out for indigenous threats, from shrieking predators to bulkier beasts with subwoofer-troubling growls. As with Cameron’s vision, it shouldn’t stint on spectacle – here’s hoping Ubisoft’s writers give us more than a good-looking Ferngully rip-off.

ECHOES OF THE END

Developer Myrkur Games Publisher Prime Matter Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Release TBA

We’re not often moved to complain about being shown something behind closed doors, but Koch Media’s Summer Game Fest broadcast – a two-hour introduction to its Prime Matter publishing label that consisted entirely of staid talking-head segments – was all the more disappointing given we’d seen footage from Echoes Of The End in a pre-briefing. Myrkur boasts one of the most comprehensive motion-capture and facial photogrammetry setups in Iceland, and it shows. This adventure game primarily looks like a showcase for actors Aldís Amah Hamilton and Karl Ágúst Úlfsson, in their roles as royal assassin Ryn and her argumentative companion Abram. Whether it has the writing and design chops to back up its tech remains to be seen but, being developed in Unreal Engine 5 for PC and new-gen consoles, it’s shaping up to be a graphical powerhouse. So why wasn’t it shown off?

FRACKED

Developer/publisher nDreams Format PSVR Release TBA

All the VR titles shown during E3 week were concentrated into a single dedicated showcase, courtesy of UploadVR – and this PSVR exclusive was the highlight. It stitches a variety of elements into an action-adventure romp that feels like an attempt to adapt Uncharted’s cinematic charms into VR. With one set-piece that involves shimmying along the side of a stalled funicular, every unstable handhold threatening to drop you into the chasm below, the comparison is unavoidable. Meanwhile, the duck-and-cover shootouts, which play out in arenas conveniently loaded with waist-high crates, have more than a touch of Time Crisis about them. And then Fracked reveals its pièce de résistance: skiing segments in which you slalom down the mountain while shooting at snowmobiles. It’s the logical next step for the developer of Phantom: Covert Ops.

DESPELOTE

Developer Julián Cordero and Sebastián Valbuena Publisher TBA Format PC Release TBA

The one disappointment of an otherwise exemplary Day Of The Devs showcase was the relative lack of surprises. But one game with which we weren’t already closely acquainted was this Ecuadorian charmer from Julián Cordero and Sebastián Valbuena: a semi-autobiographical firstperson adventure in which you play a football-mad kid from Quito experiencing the excitement of their country’s qualifying campaign for the 2002 World Cup. Its art style is captivating, a blend of cartoonish characters and two-tone backdrops that resemble grainy photos, evoking the sensation of a fuzzy childhood memory. Despelote has the loose spontaneity of a kickabout in the park – which, naturally, is one of the activities in which you can

VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE – BLOODHUNT Developer/publisher Sharkmob Format PC Release 2021

“For centuries we have lived in secrecy among you,” a gravelly voiceover tells us, “maintaining the Masquerade.” Well, that’s all over now. This free-to-play battle royale has 45 vampires leaping between the rooftops of Prague, launching fireballs and firing submachine guns. As much as we sometimes fear for humanity’s intelligence, you have to imagine that wouldn’t go unnoticed. Apparently not, though – civilians on the streets below will only suspect something is up if they spot your vampiric activity up close, triggering a debuff that penalises the Masquerade-breaking players. It might be worth the risk, though, as sinking your teeth into a neck restores health and gives you a permanent ability boost. This adds a touch of MOBA to a genre short on fresh blood, but the continued prevalence of guns seems like a waste of the setting.

participate. Flick the right analogue stick and you can pass the ball between your friends, shoot toward a jury-rigged goal, try to knock a row of bottles from a nearby wall, or even boot it at other people in the park to annoy them – including the archetypal elderly gentleman who shakes his fist at you and threatens to take your ball away. When it’s popped by a dog, meanwhile, you will need to find some way (or someone) to repair it. The dialogue – subtitled in speech bubbles – is a joy, with performers actively encouraged to improvise, allowing for a naturalism rarely seen in games. In its own understated way, Cordero and Valbuena’s game perceptively captures the effect sport can have on both national identity and local community.

DORDOGNE

Developer/publisher Un Je Ne Sais Quoi, Umanimation Format PC, Switch Release 2021

From the pencils of Mundaun to the stop-motion of Vokabulantis and Harold Halibut, mixed-media games are becoming increasingly common. Dordogne’s bright French landscapes are all painted on paper in watercolour. It’s gorgeous, but wistfully so – appropriate for a game that aims to capture the feeling of returning to a place you haven’t been since childhood, and the way that just a snatch of something familiar can bring lost memories rippling to the surface. Your role, playing alternately as a 30-something woman revisiting her grandmother’s home and as her younger self, is to catalogue the sensory cues with the help of a camera and cassette recorder. Along with cuttings of flowers and the odd sketch, the results are assembled in a journal, making you a collaborator in an art project as beautiful as the surroundings that inspired it.

JURASSIC WORLD EVOLUTION 2

Developer/publisher Frontier Developments Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release 2021

On principle, we’d prefer to denounce any E3 celebrity cameos, on the basis that they distract from the point of the show. But, like Keanu before him, it’s hard to resist the charm of Jeff Goldblum. The way his voice scuttles unexpectedly between words can enliven even the plainest marketing copy, and his ribbing of Keighley’s love for “world premieres” might have teased out a genuine smile. As for what he was there to talk about… well, see what we mean about the distraction? Having honed its digital animal husbandry with Planet Zoo, Frontier is bringing those skills to bear on the thunder lizards once more. Goldblum promised “new heights” and “new depths”, meaning a wider choice of aerial and aquatic dinos to raise and house, but for the most part it looks like the title is especially apt for this sequel. It may not be doing much that’s new – just developing in the ways it needs to in order to survive.

NO LONGER HOME

Developer Humble Grove Publisher Fellow Traveller Format PC Release July

Autobiography is a genre rarely touched by videogames. Which is a shame – knowing that this point-and-click is based on the developers’ own lives lends it a painful ring of authenticity. No Longer Home started life as a way to help two friends keep in touch after university, after one of them moved home to Japan, and as a way to work through the accompanying emotional baggage. Even if you didn’t know this background, though, it’d be easy to relate to its tale of grimy shared kitchens, regrettable CD collections, and the kind of deep-and-meaningful conversations that can only happen as the last embers of a party die out around you. It’s not exactly slavish about the truth, mind, something that becomes increasingly apparent as the demo goes on and things get less realist and more magical. Come for the emotional complexities, then, but stay for the throbbing orb of unknowable geometry.

CONWAY: DISAPPEARANCE AT DAHLIA VIEW

Dev White Paper Games Publisher Sold Out Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Autumn

White Paper’s previous effort, The Occupation, was a journalist-themed immersive sim that dealt with themes of nationalism and played out in realtime. It was intriguing, ambitious and deeply flawed. So it’s encouraging to see that Conway’s scope is more constrained. You’re put in the wheelchair of Robert Conway, a retired detective now mostly confined to his flat. As his daughter, a police officer, investigates the local disappearance of a small child, Conway launches his own unofficial inquiry. There’ll be opportunities to interrogate witnesses and solve puzzles, apparently, but it seems the majority of your time is spent peering down a telephoto lens into nearby homes and gardens. A mention of Rear Window is mandatory, then, but we can see it speaking to our present circumstances – while The Occupation wrestled with Brexit, it seems this is a tribute to all those curtain-twitching neighbours in lockdown.

DEATH TRASH

Developer/publisher Crafting Legends Format PC Release Aug 8

If the original Fallout had been directed by Lloyd Kaufman, it might have looked something like this grungy post-apocalyptic action-RPG. Death Trash slops around flesh with Troma-like glee, and boasts a delightfully twisted sense of humour: five minutes in, we’re gunned down by robots, all demanding we “Please stop this violence.” These guard a giant underground bunker created to protect humanity from the horrors above. Our player-character, having contracted an infection, has had their citizenship revoked, and we’re encouraged to undergo a ‘surface integration course’ before we’re let out. Our attempts to rebel are met with a hail of bullets.

In the lawless world beyond, you’ll find the usual assortment of mutants and bandits. But there are allies, too, some unlikely – the ground near a colossal Fleshkraken might be smeared with blood, but it merely wants to be friends. Sentient globs of flesh can be tamed with the animalism skill – though so far that amounts to nothing more than a portable supply of fresh meat for a handy health top-up. There’s hardly a shortage: the organs of those you gun down can provide a quick meal, too. And if that makes you feel queasy, then vomit can be a useful lubricant. It’s no great surprise that in a place like this you’re capable of spewing on command.

HYPE@E3

DEATH’S DOOR

Developer Acid Nerve Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release July 20

hough Inkle has 2021’s best ‘game over’ off against a laser-firing, rocket-powered cathedral). moment sewn up with Overboard’s “Oh, But in between you have smaller groups of enemies bollocks”, Acid Nerve can lay a strong claim to fight, corkscrewing environments to traverse and to the silver medal. Perish here – and you will, even puzzles to solve. It’s an isometric Zelda, in essence, though this isn’t quite as unforgiving as the studio’s with a dash of Hyper Light Drifter in its combat: one-hit-kill debut Titan Souls – and ‘DEATH’ appears landing melee strikes replenishes a meter that in giant text against a stark black background, the allows you to attack from range, whether you’re site of your demise visible through the letters as a firing arrows or lobbing projectile spells. That’s an appetising combination, and it works chord of doom sounds loudly. beautifully, in no small part thanks to It’s a darkly amusing reminder of the business you’re in. You play a It’s an isometric how it all feels. Sword attacks are precise and have real impact: a crow, working for the Reaping Commission, who must harvest the Legend Of Zelda, charged swing gives you more souls of the deceased, venturing in essence, with control than Link’s spin attack, with a brisk roll letting you dodge counterthrough magical doors in this monochromatic world to more a dash of Hyper attacks easily. There’s a generous of auto-aim on arrows and colourful realms and returning when Light Drifter in degree fireballs, which are used outside the job is done. Things quickly go its combat combat to smash vases, activate awry, however, when a thief knocks braziers and stoke furnaces. You face you aside and whisks off the soul you’ve been assigned to collect. Getting it back, it a range of smaller enemies between bosses, but turns out, is not going to be that straightforward – there are shortcuts to open and checkpoint doors not least when you catch up with your assailant that allow you to return to the office and spend the and they suggest a counter-offer to the monotony of soul energy you’ve accrued on stat upgrades. Familiar ideas, in other words, though it’s rare your current existence. Which isn’t to say Death’s Door is remotely to find them executed quite so well, and the tiresome. Though its challenge is still exacting, Acid fascinating settings (a witchy mansion is Nerve has broadened the scope beyond its debut. soundtracked by screeching souls and eerie There are boss fights here, and they are still tense whispers) and judicious drip-feed of narrative make and thrilling, and your opponents are still striking in it hard to put down. Four hours in, we’re confident their design (one early challenge sees you facing Acid Nerve has plenty to crow about.

CROSSFIRE: LEGION

A LITTLE TO THE LEFT

EL PASO ELSEWHERE

While CrossfireX was notable for its absence from this year’s show, the Korean shooter sensation is finding other ways to expand its footprint in the west, including via this strategy game from Company Of Heroes and Dawn Of War veterans. Selling itself as “the modern RTS” – emphasis not our own – and with a dizzying amount of action happening on screen at once, it seems to be directly chasing the StarCraft crowd.

When Annie Macmillan and Lukas Steinman took part in a 48-hour game jam last year, the result was their first game. It’s since grown into A Little To The Left, a self-described “cosy” puzzler about figuring out how household items should be arranged, with a curious cat to add an element of chaos. Stacking letters, rotating cans of soup, nudging crooked picture frames until they’re just so: this duo might have discovered a hot new genre – the tidy-‘em-up.

The latest from the absurdly prolific Xalavier Nelson Jr is a homage to classic thirdperson shooters, in which a Texas motel has gained 46 storeys – “all below ground”. And all stuffed with werewolves, demons and other supernatural entities, which you gun down in Max Payne fashion: running, diving, sliding backwards and firing twin pistols in slow motion. It is, Nelson says, both a love story and his most personal game to date. But of course.

Developer Blackbird Interactive Publisher Prime Matter Format PC Release TBA

DOLMEN

Developer Massive Work Studio Publisher Prime Matter Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release 2022

Developer/publisher Max Inferno Format PC Release Oct 21

TERRA INVICTA

Developer Pavonis Interactive Publisher Hooded Horse Format PC Release 2021

One of the few games to actually show a trailer during Koch’s showcase, this is a Brazilian sciencefiction take on the Soulslike described by its developers as both “Lovecraftian” and “Gigeresque”, essentially meaning there are lots of tentacles on show. The action, which jumps from shooting to close combat, seems a little stiff in the footage we’ve seen, but with a systemic intricacy that could be polished into something worth a look.

Long War was a mod that hugely expanded the scope of Firaxis’ XCOM. It was such a hit that the studio partnered with its makers to provide official mods for the sequel. Now with Terra Invicta the team is making its own game from the ground up, jettisoning the tactical battles of the past in favour of some particularly grand strategy, where you’ll be leading one of seven factions as Earth counts down to – what else? – an alien invasion.

THE WANDERING VILLAGE

SLIME RANCHER 2

Developer/publisher Stray Fawn Studio Format PC Release TBA

City builders are currently enjoying something of a renaissance, if the number on show at this E3 is anything to go by. The Wandering Village should be able to get by on its good looks – the townsfolk, cartooned with thick black outlines, pop nicely against the appealing painted environments – but failing that, it also has the distinct advantage of being a city builder set on the back of a giant dinosaur. Now who isn’t intrigued by that?

Developer/publisher Monomi Park Format PC, Xbox Series Release 2022

It’s always a surprise to see an FPS where the device poking out the bottom of the screen isn’t used for violent means. Well, not overtly violent, anyway – we’d question how happy Slime Rancher 2’s critters are about being hoovered up from the wild and crammed into pens that are far from free-range. In any case, this sequel looks like a significant visual upgrade, with the aptly named Rainbow Island delivering on the pastel promise of the original.

Developer/publisher Strange Scaffold Format PC Release 2022

LOST ARK

Developer Smilegate RPG Publisher Amazon Games Format PC Release 2021

Amazon’s other great hope, as it attempts to become for MMORPGs what it already is for just about every category of shopping. This one is a Korean import, coming from the RPG wing of Crossfire publisher Smilegate, with the retail giant handling localisation – no small feat for a game that’s been running, and growing, for three years to date. Still, with millions of players in Asia already, it has the benefit of being a known quantity.

STEELRISING

Developer Spiders Publisher Nacon Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Release TBA

As alternate-history elevator pitches go, “King Louis XVI’s automata army is terrorising the citizens of Paris” is a pretty tasty one. SteelRising represents a shift in tack for Spiders, from its usual brand of ambitious, if rough-hewn, RPG to something more akin to Bloodborne by way of Binary Domain. You play as Aegis, a robot fighting for the revolutionaries in 1789. Can you commit regicide more efficiently than the guillotine did four years later?

THE ANACRUSIS

Developer/publisher Stray Bombay Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Autumn

We’ve alluded to it already in these pages, but if there was any lingering doubt that Left 4 Dead has risen from its grave to become its own subgenre, then this E3 tore it to shreds. To help it stand out from the horde, The Anacrusis is able to boast one of the writers of the original games, Chet Faliszek, leading this entire project as head of new studio Stray Bombay. The Anacrusis looks like Left 4 Dead but with ’70s sciencefiction stylings and rubber-suited aliens instead of zombies. The setting opens up various gadgetry, most of it seemingly focused on launching the aliens skywards, but it’s largely familiar stuff. There are special alien types – such as the

SUPER MONKEY BALL: BANANA MANIA

Developer/publisher Sega (RGG Studio) Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release October 5

Following whispers that EPD Tokyo was working on a new Donkey Kong platformer, these were not the apes we expected to see during Nintendo’s Direct. Yet the appearance of AiAi to the strains of Also Sprach Zarathustra (the 2001 reference shrewdly chosen given it’s the 20th anniversary of the series’ GameCube debut) was another welcome throwback in a nostalgia-heavy showcase. While most staff at RGG Studio are busy with Lost Judgment, a small team is remastering a selection of more than 300 stages taken from the original game, 2002’s sequel and 2005’s Super Monkey Ball Deluxe, itself an enhanced edition of the first two games. Though we’ll miss the octagonal gates that made the Wavebird the perfect controller for the most exacting stages (we shudder at the thought of JoyCon drift sending us tumbling into the void), this is worth celebrating for HD Monkey Target alone.

Spawner, intended to draw players away from the group, and the Brute, a dead ringer for L4D’s Tank – along with, naturally, an AI ‘driver’ steering the action from behind the scenes. Discussing the driver (a winking name that, as with so much of the game, feels just short of legally actionable), there’s a slight sense that Faliszek is trotting out the lines he had nailed down a decade ago. But some of the evolutions of the concepts being promised are intriguing: tracking a single group across multiple sessions, serving up different variants on the core story to encourage replays. That last bit is going to be essential, since The Anacrusis will be delivered episodically.

AXIOM VERGE 2

Developer/publisher Thomas Happ Games Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch Release Summer

The original Axiom Verge is still near the top of our list of favourite retro throwbacks, and not only because we remain slightly in awe of one-man development powerhouse Tom Happ, who not only designed and coded the game but created its pixel art and composed a soundtrack that hits the spot more effectively than many works from dedicated musicians. This sequel is another solo production, but set in an alternate Earth rather than an alien world, giving its environments a more familiar feel. There will be fewer weapons than before, meaning that new protagonist Indra will use more closerange moves, along with hacking and other skills, to progress. And if progress proves difficult, Happ is introducing settings allowing you to tweak the amount of damage taken and dealt, plus the option to bypass bosses entirely, theoretically opening his series to a new, broader audience.

BEHIND THE FRAME: THE FINEST SCENERY

Developer Silver Lining Studio Publisher Akupara Games Format PC Release 2021

Great art has the capacity to change how we view the world, and while it would be too soon to describe Behind The Frame thus, that’s essentially what this narrative-led puzzle game is all about. It’s the story of an aspiring young artist, her curmudgeonly neighbour across the way, and how their art connects them. When she notes a painting of his is similar to one in her room, she paints in the missing sun, which opens a drawer behind it, yielding scraps of another drawing that must be pieced together. Its puzzles seems fairly straightforward, then, but this is one of that new breed of games that locates the simple pleasures in ordinary routines: you scrub the mouse left and right to mimic a pencil sketching on a page, slot in a cassette to listen to some music, and brew yourself some coffee, each task rendered with careful attention to tactile detail.

TOEM

Developer/publisher Something We Made Format PC Release 2021

METAL SLUG TACTICS

After the pressure of Umurangi Generation’s time limits and the machinations involved in getting four-star shots in Pokémon Snap, what a treat it is to play a photography game as easygoing as this. Toem’s monochromatic world, with its chunky environments and oddball characters, has obvious visual appeal – but the sound design lends it a lovely tangibility. A combination of clunks, clicks and whirrs plus a soothing score make it a delightful place to potter around in, while your objectives are appealingly straightforward. An impromptu game of hideand-seek with a group of kids is a matter of climbing a watchtower and spotting them through your viewfinder. Elsewhere, you’ll snap monsters hiding among the trees, retrieve missing socks and capture a promo image of a hotel, earning stamps for a free bus ride to another rural idyll. A laid-back little treat.

Developer Leikir Studio Publisher Dotemu, SNK Format PC Release TBA

Metal Slug’s sidescrolling pixel art has made the jump to an isometric perspective in elegant fashion. No surprise, perhaps, given Dotemu’s experience updating retro classics, although this is the first time one of its games has abandoned the original’s genre entirely; in this case, reimagining the original games as a Roguelike tactical RPG. Marco, Fio and co are present and correct, each with their own signature super attack charged up through an adrenaline system, and you will of course be able to commandeer the tank that lends the series its name. With original music from Sonic Mania’s Tee Lopes, it’s an appealing package. (Less attractive is the baggage that comes along with Metal Slug licence holder SNK, now majority-owned by Mohammed bin Salman, which can’t help but cast a pall over this cartoonishly sunny take on warfare.)

BABYLON’S FALL

Developer PlatinumGames Publisher Square Enix Format PC, PS4, PS5 Release 2021

Announced in 2018, due for release in 2019, pushed back to 2020, and then delayed again, PlatinumGames’ high-fantasy co-op actioner was still something of an enigma until Square Enix’s summer showcase. And, well, perhaps it should have preserved the mystery a little longer. Development was “progressing well” last year, the studio insisted; in that case, we wouldn’t like to see how it would have looked had things been progressing badly. Featuring some ear-scraping vocal performances, it looked more like the developer responsible for The Legend Of Korra and TMNT: Mutants In Manhattan than the one behind Bayonetta and Astral Chain.

Yet if the footage of this live-service game could be described as ‘rough-edged’, it’s clear what we initially wrote off as a dodgy stream is actually an artistic choice: the world is painted in brushstrokes, giving it a low-resolution look – which should at least aid performance in what looks a busy hackand-slash. And let’s spare room for optimism: at the helm is Metal Gear Rising director Kenji Saito, assisted by Nier: Automata’s lead designer Isao Negishi. An imminent closed beta should reveal whether this is one either will put on their CV. Maybe it doesn’t matter either way; as that shrill man in the trailer puts it: “We’re all prisoners of our subjective reality.”

HYPE@E3

BATTLEFIELD 2042

Developer DICE Publisher Electronic Arts Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release October 21

he roulette wheel of military shooters continues Breakthrough. These are both series perennials, but to spin. Having mined the two great wars in with the player count scaled up to 128 on new-gen its most recent instalments, it’s now Battlefield’s consoles and PC. It’s half only that on Xbox One turn to head back to the future. And, after the prior and PS4, raising the question of whether maps and game whittled down the singleplayer campaign to modes will need to be considerably redesigned for three hour-long episodes (at launch, at least), that each version of the game. To help fill out those matches, bots are being element has now been jettisoned entirely, as has any attempt at a battle royale mode. Time for the reintroduced for the first time since 2006’s Battlefield 2142. (You do have to respect DICE’s messaging to switch to ‘back to basics’, then. commitment to confusing naming It’s easy to be cynical, but you conventions.) It’s possible to play a have to admit that the result of this Fighting in a match without a single human shift in focus looks like damn good fun. Fighting in a virtual war that virtual war that opponent, a decision intended to as an onramp for newer didn’t actually happen makes it feel didn’t actually serve players, or to create a co-op looser from the get-go, and the happen makes experience for those who prefer to science-fiction approach expands the with a few select friends. toybox considerably. Shown so far it feel looser playNone of which matters as much are hovercrafts, flying-squirrel wingsuits and a quadrupedal robot from the get-go as the moment in the trailer when someone drives a quad bike off the with more than a hint of Boston top of a skyscraper and into the side of a helicopter. Dynamics about it. Battlefield 2042’s debut exists in a strange It appears in both the cinematic and in-game action limbo, courtesy of EA’s decision to mostly duck E3 trailers – in the latter case with the addition of a week in favour of its own publisher event in July. second player detonating the vehicle’s C4 payload The result is a game that feels halfway announced. on impact. And it’s happening while a tornado rips Billed as a three-part multiplayer offering – at least across the map, sucking up soldiers and vehicles one of which has been built by an entirely separate alike. It’s encouraging that a scripted beat can be studio – two of those parts are being saved for EA not only recreated in-game but improved upon, and Play. The only one that has been fully announced is if 2042 can routinely deliver such moments, then All-Out Warfare, which confusingly enough is itself everything beyond them – the endless spin of the an umbrella for two modes, Conquest and roulette wheel – shouldn’t matter too much. 62

INSCRYPTION

Developer Daniel Mullins Games Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC Release 2021

Categorising every game announced at the show by genre, we bump up against this pigeonholedodger from Pony Island’s Daniel Mullins. At first presenting as yet another Roguelike deckbuilder, each new snippet of footage seems to reveal a new game hidden in its inky blackness. A firstperson escape room? An FMV game? Was that a flash of Game Boy Color graphics? We’re not sure even playing it will unravel all of Inscryption’s secrets.

THEY ALWAYS RUN

Developer/publisher Alawar Premium Format PC Release 2021

As character-action gimmicks go, an entire extra limb is hard to beat. Your bounty hunter’s third arm allows you to strike in front and behind simultaneously, and powers some Arkham-style counters that can eviscerate multiple targets. Best of all, it can be swung with the thumbstick to land haymakers. We’ll have to see what other tricks the game has up its specially tailored sleeve, but it makes for some smoothly cinematic fights.

SCHIM

Developer Ewoud van der Werf Publisher Extra Nice Format PC Release TBA

A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reappearance for one of our favourite concepts in a long while: you play as a human soul that’s somehow been separated from their body, and must leap between shadows to reach your destination. We’ve used shadows to hide before, but rarely for traversal, while waiting for the right moment for each level’s various moving parts to line up feels not unlike the Heath Robinson setups of Ghost Trick – never a bad thing.

THE LAST ORICRU

Developer Goldknights Publisher Prime Matter Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Release 2022

DESPOT’S GAME

Developer Konfa Games Publisher TinyBuild Format PC Release 2021

An action-RPG that opens with you waking up nude in a tank, covered in a strange goo and unsure how you got there? Well, it’s always nice to see everyday life reflected on the screen. As for what happens next in this “sci-fi medieval world”, the developer is making big promises, of the “your choices matter” and “no two playthroughs” variety. The whole thing can be played co-op, if you prefer not to wake up gooey and alone.

We could take or, preferably, leave this Roguelike auto-battler’s sense of humour – not every aspect of the glory days of Flash games needs to be preserved for future generations – but it’s impossible to deny its pull. Hire disposable minions, equip them with swords and guns and magic spells, then move into position for battle and watch the results play out without needing to lift so much as a finger. Simple but dangerously moreish.

SILT

POTION CRAFT: ALCHEMIST SIMULATOR

Amusingly, YouTube has automatically tagged the trailer for Silt we’re watching as an entirely different game: Playdead’s Limbo. It’s not hard to see how it got confused. This is a monochrome 2D platformer, your character – a diver or, at least, something in a diving suit – picked out in stark silhouette. We’d have gone with Inside as the comparison point, but it’s good to see YouTube has found a new way to come for our jobs.

The demo we play squeezes remarkable variety out of what is, ultimately, a crafting menu. The manuscript-like presentation helps, but it’s really down to the physicality of its processes – you grind ingredients with a pestle, lob them into a cauldron, then stoke the flames with a bellows – and the sense of experimentation. Each new ingredient pushes you around a map, as you search for a combination that can be successfully sold.

Developer Spiral Circus Publisher Sold Out Format PC Release Early 2022

UNSIGHTED

Developer Studio Pixel Punk Publisher Humble Games Format PC Release 2021

Efficient play is vital in this sharp pixel-art actioner, set in a dystopian future in which the energy that gives androids consciousness is running low. As one of them, you’ll need to hurry to rescue your fellow bots – but it won’t be easy. A Nier Automata-like range of equippable chips, a smart healing mechanic and an exquisitely satisfying parry (which enables you to crit stunned attackers) gives you a fighting chance of saving them all.

Developer Niceplay Games Publisher TinyBuild Format PC Release 2021

SEPHONIE

Developer Melos Han-Tani, Marina Kittaka Publisher Analgesic Productions Format PC Release Late 2021

From the creators of the beguiling Anodyne series (a title that couldn’t be further from the truth) comes this distinctive adventure, which combines tricky parkour with tile-matching puzzles. As a trio of biologists exploring a sprawling cave network within an island off the coast of Taiwan, you wallrun and vault your way to a range of curious creatures, which you analyse – as all biologists do – by slotting like-coloured tetrominoes into a grid.

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VIDEOGAME CULTURE, DEVELOPMENT, PEOPLE AND TECHNOLOGY

94 124 98 74

84 66 Secret Weapon 74 Collected Works: Glen Schoﬁeld 84 Built To Last 94 The Making Of… Heaven’s Vault 98 Studio Proﬁle: Playtonic Games 124 Time Extend: Assassin’s Creed

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WE T R C SE AP ON Game Naraka: Bladepoint Developer 24 Entertainment Publisher NetEase Games Montréal Format PC Origin China Release August 12

SECRET WEAPON

ut aside for a moment the fantasy setting, and the brace of swords and spears – if you want hard proof that Naraka: Bladepoint is doing things differently to most battle royale games, you need look no further than the very beginning of a match. There is an island, yes, and there are 60 players all trying to survive within its ever-shrinking circle, but it’s missing what must be the genre’s single most iconic moment: the drop. There’s no plane or bus to jump from here, just a simple gridded map with players claiming squares like this is some massively multiplayer game of Minesweeper. Once spots have been picked, and the countdown reaches zero, players are magicked over to the island in a shower of bright petals. Instead of entering from the sky, you all begin the game on the ground. Just don’t expect to stay there for long. Every piece of scenery on Naraka’s Morus Island – the trees, the cliff faces, the tall slope of its buildings’ Xie Shan roofs – is there to be climbed. Every vertical surface can be run along, clambered up, clung to, every inch providing a potential handhold, a point where you can catch your breath before the next stage of your ascent to the peak. Or you can take the easy option, and simply grapple your way there. Powered by spools found among the usual colour-coded loot, the grappling hook is perhaps the single most important tool in Naraka’s arsenal. It can grab onto any point and launch you

headlong in its direction. This can be used to set up treetop ambushes, to flee when you’re outmatched, or to stay right on the cusp of the circular boundary as it closes in. It can also attach to another player, letting you close the gap instantly and – if you can time it right – land a blow that will knock them off balance, which can be enough to swing the entire fight in your favour. Once weapons meet, Naraka veers entirely from the battle royale formula, revealing itself as an accomplished action game. Every melee weapon has a horizontal and vertical attack, each of which can be charged up to unleash a more powerful variant. However, these are vulnerable to parrying, which not only creates an opening for your opponent but has a chance of disarming you entirely. It’s a simple rock-paper-scissors foundation for a combat system whose skill ceiling we suspect will be considerably harder to reach than that of the local architecture.

Naraka might be the debut game from Hangzhou-based 24 Entertainment, but its origins stretch back to 2002, when lead producer Ray Kuan began work on a game series called Meteor, Butterfly, Sword. It soon became the most popular action game in China, installed on practically every computer in every net café in the country. Kuan calls it “one of the highlights of my career to this point”, and it established a pattern for the projects he’s worked on ever since: 3D martial-arts games with a focus on player freedom. “Little did I know,” he says, “I would be walking this path for almost 20 years.” After the launch of Meteor, Butterfly, Sword’s mobile version in 2018, Kuan decided to move on. At the time, battle royale

games were in the ascendancy, with Fortnite and PUBG drawing record-breaking numbers of players, and Kuan saw an opportunity to take the style of game he’d been honing for decades and make a push beyond China’s borders. “We thought that the two were a perfect match,” 24 Entertainment marketing executive Raylan Kwan tells us. “Battle royale was, and still is, a very popular genre in the global community.” But while other studios rushed to join the fray with similarly styled spins on the battle royale concept, 24 could see a glaring gap in the market. “We realised that there are still a lot of players who want fighting games,” Kwan says. “We think there are just too many shooters already – but we’ve been lacking multiplayer fighting games in recent years.” At a time when the battle royale’s big four seem like unshakeable fixtures, this is how it’s hoped Naraka can carve out its own space. The early signs are good – when we preview the game, it’s alongside the hundreds of thousands of other players who have rushed in to try the game’s final pre-launch beta – but 24 Entertainment isn’t resting on its laurels. Naraka is not strictly the first of its kind – The Swordsmen X, for example, is another Chinese battle-royale action game which launched in 2018, back when Naraka’s development was just beginning. “And I think there will be more,” Kwan says. “Naraka

“WE THINK THERE ARE JUST TOO MANY SHOOTERS – BUT W E ’ V E B E E N L A C K I N G M U LT I P L AY E R F I G H T I N G G A M E S ” will not be the first nor the last of this kind of design.” With that in mind, the studio is not content to apply its sharp combat system to the battle royale genre and call it a day; it’s also working to improve on what it sees as weaknesses of the current model. Which brings us back, once again, to the beginning of a match. “One thing that we feel we have to improve is that the early game experience in all the battle royale games is kind of boring,” Kwan says. “It’s just loot, loot, loot. You do that for the first 15 minutes and then, bang, you get sniped from someone you never even see, and you’re dead. It’s very frustrating, and it’s no fun at all. And that’s why we’re adding the restoration system.” If an early skirmish doesn’t go your way, and you find yourself skewered on a rival’s steel, you can simply leave behind your earthly vessel and become a spirit. In this form, you’re invisible to living players but able to move freely around the map, until you find a Soul Altar – marked on the map with a lotus flower icon – and reincarnate. You’ll spawn with basic weapons to give you a fighting chance, and can start building your inventory back up to its former glory. You can even find your corpse and, if you’re lucky, maybe reclaim your previous equipment. “We encourage players to engage in early fights,” Kwan says, “because you’ve got nothing to lose.” Even when the opportunities for resurrection disappear, following the first shrinking of the circle, you’re likely to find that

encounters have a better survival rate than your average battle royale shooter. Thanks to the historical nature of the game’s armaments, you can generally take more hits before dying, while your grappling hook offers more opportunities for a successful retreat. The parry plays a role here too: coming up against a foe with a superior weapon needn’t be the end, given that a welltimed counter will knock it from their hands and give you a chance to grab it for yourself. These are small but impactful choices that combine to give players more opportunity to get to grips with the combat system – which is, after all, Naraka’s greatest draw.

It’s worth noting that melee isn’t the only combat option available to you. That was the case in the game’s initial iteration, we’re told, but now there is an assortment of ranged weapons: bows, muskets, cannons and, very occasionally, a flamethrower. The explanation for why these were introduced can be summed up in a single word, one that comes up repeatedly during our conversation with Kuan: ‘unchained’. “Freedom is a feature I have always felt is particularly important to players,” he explains. “The freedom I’m referring to here isn’t like being able to explore a vast singleplayer game, or being able to choose a large number of sidequests. It is more about an unrestricted feeling of being unchained.” The idea is to provide as many options, and as few boundaries, as possible, 69

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RIGHT All weapons are character-agnostic, leaving players to find their own preferred combination of ability and attack styles. BELOW Viper Ning is introduced in the tutorial, acting as a kind of default character for new players, but her abilities, including a Jedi-style push and long stun effect, are anything but standard-issue

FROM TOP Raylan Kwan of 24 Entertainment and Naraka: Bladepoint lead producer Ray Kuan

JOURNEY TO THE WEST

After making the decision to go global with Naraka: Bladepoint, 24 Entertainment “had doubts about whether this kind of eastern fantasy world would attract players in western markets,” Kwan admits. The studio looked at Call Of Duty, Halo, and World Of Warcraft as archetypal success stories from the west, but ultimately decided that it would stick to its guns. Or, rather, its lack of them. “We are good at making games about eastern civilisations and cultures because, well, most of us are Chinese,” Kwan says. “If you’re going to make a game with a western fantasy world, it requires a lot of talent from the west.” (Not, of course, that the equivalent logic has ever stopped western developers.) “Also, we want to tell the world how amazing these eastern cultures are. We feel like it’s one of our duties.”

SECRET WEAPON

This is Tianhai’s ultimate, while a main ability (on a faster cooldown) throws up a Qi barrier in the shape of a glowing bell, resisting attacks and sending projectiles back at their shooter. Other characters’ abilities are less obviously transformative, if no less effective. Kurumi is a magical healer, able to link herself to a teammate, removing her ability to attack for the duration while restoring health and even allowing her to teleport to their side. Matari is a speedy stealth specialist, with a short-range teleport ability and an ultimate that makes her all but invisible. The idea is that players will be able to find their preferred combination of character and weapon, then customise it further with the Talent system. A single Glyph slot offers a straightforward boost to, for example, grappling-hook distance or stamina; meanwhile, each ability has two unlockable variants, offering some tradeoff of benefit and drawback – a more potent effect but a shorter duration, for example. This is presented as an extension of the ‘unchained’ design philosophy, extending the player freedom well beyond the heat of battle. However, isn’t there a risk here of encouraging players to chase the optimal build? The aim, Kwan tells us, is that there

“THERE IS NO BEST SOLUTION OR METHOD. THERE’S ONLY T H E M O S T A P P R O P R I AT E M E T H O D F O R Y O U R P L AY S T Y L E ” to allow players to approach each situation however they like. It’s a design philosophy that led to the creation of the grappling hook and parkour systems, we’re told, and the generosity with which you can use them. “Many players, even members of the development team, have asked me some questions like why climbing trees does not consume energy,” Kuan says. “Why is there no fall damage in the game, or why is it that players can use powerful moves for each weapon without limits? The answer always revolves around this concept of ‘unchained’.” And so, in the first pre-alpha playtest of Naraka, in an incarnation that only offered melee weapons, Kwan says: “We realised that the players were still chained. We needed to give them more options.” In the latest version of the game, there are two weapon slots, which can be used for any combination you prefer. You can be a generalist, chipping away at a rival’s armour with arrows before closing in to deliver the finishing blow. But perhaps you decide it’s better never to engage in close combat at all, with a musket and pistol ensuring you can be effective at multiple ranges. A combination of spear and katana can achieve the same at a tighter scale; then again, it might be sensible to keep a greatsword in your back pocket, just in case. These weapons work in tandem with each character’s abilities, undeniably the most eye-catching of which belongs to warrior monk Tianhai. A flash of light removes his figure from the battlefield and replaces it with a Vajra warrior three times his size and with three times as many arms. The Vajra can grab two opponents at once, smashing their skulls together until they wriggle free, or stamping to send out a disabling shockwave.

simply won’t be one to chase. “What we’re trying to achieve is that there is no best solution or method. There’s only the most appropriate method for you and your own play style.” To that end, 24 Entertainment will be constantly monitoring player stats and tweaking the balance between characters, weapons, ability variants and Glyphs. “It will be a huge task for the dev team,” Kwan admits, but one that’s absolutely necessary for a game that is selling itself on the notion of ‘unchained’ player freedom. After all, if a single best choice exists, then there’s not really any choice to be made at all.

There’s a sense that 24 Entertainment is already preparing

for Naraka to thrive, well beyond its launch. This beta is the game’s third in the west, and the studio has held pre-launch tournaments in China in order to lay the groundwork for what it hopes could be a bright future in the competitive scene. But Kuan remains humble: “The latest beta, in particular, exposed some problems with aspects of our game. It demonstrates that, no

MODE SELECTOR

Battle royale is Naraka’s centrepiece, but it’s not the only mode on offer. There’s also The Bloodbath, which unlocks after a few rounds of battle royale. It’s a simple deathmatch that drops players into a tighter arena with unlimited respawns and a 12-minute timer. It’s a great way of practising a particular character or weapon, as every player starts with a fully loaded armoury – the perfect complement to the comprehensive selection of tutorials. Meanwhile, 24 Entertainment is working on “several” other multiplayer modes, we’re told, alongside a second map and other post-launch updates. “We have some surprises planned for our community,” Kwan says. “But I think we’re better to just keep them secret for now.”

matter how much preparation and effort we have made, it’s never enough. We have so much more work to do.” Not that this has held Naraka back so far. The June beta quickly nosed its way into Steam’s top five, reaching a peak of over 185,000 concurrent players on the service. That’s roughly the same as PUBG’s average concurrent player count in recent months, and Naraka has seen its playerbase grow reliably with each new beta. A successful launch, now just over the horizon, seems inevitable. When we put this to Kwan, though, his guard remains up. “This is a free-to-play beta right now – but Naraka at release will be a premium game,” he says. “So we are happy to see these numbers, but we have to be cautious and continue to work hard to provide more content, a better and more streamlined experience overall for our players in the time for the August launch, otherwise…” He trails off for a moment. “We just don’t want to fail our community.” The decision to sell Naraka for an upfront price is a significant one, breaking the trend both for battle royale titles and games made by Chinese studios. It wasn’t an easy decision – “pricing, competitors, and also players’ feelings are all things we have considered and discussed many, many times,” Kuan says – but it ultimately came down to two factors. The first is what Kwan calls “the cheater problem”, something that has notoriously plagued CS:GO since it dropped the entrance fee. “Because if you ban one account, I can just open another and I’ve lost nothing.” As for the studio itself, 24 Entertainment believes that the premium model is a safer bet. The studio is a subsidiary of Chinese Internet

Weapons degrade over time, requiring the player to collect and use repair kits if they want to stick with their current armaments because they’re working well for them. The same system is used in lieu of ammunition for ranged weapons

giant NetEase but “we are kind of financially independent,” Kwan says. “So we have to make sure that we can recover what we spent on Naraka.” Three years in the making, with 120 developers now on staff: it’s already a big gamble for a studio’s debut game. Premium is considered a more “conservative” option than the unpredictability of free-to-play. “After all, the last successful free-to-play battle royale games would be Warzone or Apex Legends, and they’re created by huge studios, backed by EA and Activision, who would still be doing fine if the revenue didn’t cover the costs,” Kwan says. “But this is the first game from 24 Entertainment. And if we failed to do that, Naraka could possibly be the last game of 24 Entertainment.” On the strength of everything we’ve seen, though, this seems rather unlikely. With most of Kuan’s previous games never reaching these shores, the promise of a wuxia action game where swordfights can play out among the treetops should be enough to draw a crowd of players. But it’s also a smart twist on the battle royale, arriving just as the genre is starting to feel overfamiliar and in serious need of a shakeup. We’re reminded of the game’s all-important parry, and the moment we use it to trip up a player with more experience and a significantly better weapon, disarming them to take the win. As it braces to launch into a space that has a tendency to whittle down competition to just a few survivors, Naraka: Bladepoint feels like 24 Entertainment preparing a well-timed counter of its own. n 73

W COLLECTED WORKS GLEN SCHOFIELD

BARBIE: GAME GIRL GEX 3D: ENTER THE GECKO THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING JAMES BOND 007: FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE DEAD SPACE CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 3 CALL OF DUTY: WWII THE CALLISTO PROTOCOL Developer Imagineering Publisher Hi Tech Expressions Format Game Boy Release 1992

Developer/publisher Crystal Dynamics, Midway Games Format Game Boy Color, N64, PC, PS1 Release 1998

Developer/publisher EA (Redwood Shores) Format GameCube, PC, PS2, Xbox Release 2003

Developer/publisher EA (Redwood Shores) Format GameCube, PS2, Xbox Release 2005 Developer/publisher EA (Redwood Shores) Format PC, PS3, Xbox 360 Release 2008

Developer Sledgehammer Games Publisher Activision Format PC, PS3, Xbox 360 Release 2011

Developer Sledgehammer Games Publisher Activision Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release 2017

Developer Striking Distance Studios Publisher Krafton Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Release 2022

The artist-turned-producer reflects on 30 years with very little dead space By Chris sChilling

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len Schofield was confident when he applied for his first job in the game industry some 30 years ago. “I can do this,” he remembers telling himself. “Little did I know how hard it was!” Either way, he could hardly have imagined that, three decades later, he’d have worked with some of the world’s biggest brands: from Barbie to Bond, Disney to Call Of Duty. Having gained a degree in commercial art from Brooklyn’s prestigious Pratt Institute, he started his career as an illustrator in New York before moving to a multimedia company where he learned about computer graphics, using tools such as DPaint. When he was given a commission to illustrate covers for Game Boy games, his career path was set. Making games was, of course, very different back then: at the time, he says, he could be involved in as many as eight releases per year. In his role as art director at Absolute Entertainment, most games were made by just two people: an artist and a programmer. “In most cases, the artist was the designer; the engineer mostly spent time implementing the game, and they would also do the music at that time. They had their hands pretty busy. So I ended up designing all the time.” A move to California to become art director at Capcom America in 1994 proved transformative, even though he only worked on one game there, contributing art to Street Fighter: The Movie. “I was the third guy hired there. They hired the president, the vice president, and then me, the art director. And guess who had to do all the work! I was painting the walls, buying equipment and all sorts of things. But it taught me a lot about setting up a studio, which I used in my later years.” After joining Crystal Dynamics, Schofield led his first project, directing Gex 3D: Enter The Gecko, where he worked with Evan Wells and Bruce Straley, latterly of Naughty Dog fame. Schofield directed six games there, running the studio for a while before another move to EA, where he assumed production roles on several

“THOSE WERE THE WILD WEST D AY S O F M A K I N G GAMES – YOU COULD DO ALMOST ANYTHING”

big-name licences, from James Bond to Lord Of The Rings. But it was with a new idea that Schofield made arguably the defining game of his career: 2008 chiller Dead Space. “My elevator pitch was: I want to make Resident Evil in space,” he grins. With its brilliant diegetic interface and grisly ‘strategic dismemberment’, it earned Schofield some of the best reviews he’d ever had. Following a stint at Sledgehammer developing three Call Of Duty games, it’s no surprise that he’s returning to sciencefiction horror with The Callisto Protocol. And despite the demands of his role as a studio head, he’s still unable to resist getting involved in art and design – hopefully without becoming too much of a backseat art director. “I don’t want to be too prescriptive, because I’ve got some great people on the team. I won’t tell them exactly what to do if I don’t like something. But I’ll tell them if it’s a little off.” As an artist, Schofield has always recognised the importance of fine details; as he reflects on his career to date, it’s clear that’s what got him where he is today.

BARBIE: GAME GIRL Developer Imagineering Publisher Hi Tech Expressions Format Game Boy Release 1992

By the time he left Absolute Entertainment, Schofield had contributed art to more than ten games over three years, from Barbie: Game Girl to 1994’s Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit!

There was a small company in New Jersey, I think I was like the 12th or 13th person hired at a place called Absolute Entertainment. We did a lot of the work for Acclaim – they were a powerhouse in the ’90s. So I did a lot of cartoon games, things like Swamp Thing, Bart Simpson, Ren & Stimpy, and Rocky And Bullwinkle and a lot of the other big cartoons that were around at the time. I worked on a Goofy game where I learned a lot because the quality standard for working on a Disney product is just really high. I had to train a little bit with a couple of Disney artists and get the style down. We were kind of creating a newer style for them – it wasn’t pure 2D; they wanted some shadowing and things like that in it. Man, did I learn a lot on that product! I moved up to art director, as a bunch of my games were pretty successful.

Believe it or not, my first game was called Barbie: Game Girl. They thought it would be funny if the new guy did the Barbie game, but little did they know that Barbie would outsell everything that we did that year [laughs]. I don’t take any credit for that – I give that to Barbie, the licence. But I did my studying on it. I mean, I didn’t know anything about Barbie, so I had to go out and buy some Barbie dolls, and I had to look at the clothing. I went into women’s clothing stores so that I could understand it a little bit more. So I did my research, which was a little embarrassing at times… and the guys would put a Barbie doll on my chair in the morning, and a purse, or things like that. They wanted to have a little fun with me, but I got the last laugh in the end because I became the art director.

GEX 3D: ENTER THE GECKO

Developer/publisher Crystal Dynamics, Midway Games Format GBC, N64, PC, PS1 Release 1998

I got a call one day from Crystal Dynamics to come up for an interview and I remember going up with all my drawings. Because as an art director back then, you did all the drawings and backgrounds and characters – and I had a ton of them. I went in with big pieces of paper and canvases and all sorts of things, and they hired me on the spot, as the producer. They wanted me to produce Gex, and within a couple of weeks of being there they put me in charge of the game. The guy who was in charge – who was a lawyer, believe it or not – he said, “I don’t know anything about this – you take over from here”, and he went on to run the studio and I went on to run the game. So Gex was my first 3D game. I went there and I saw that they had this beautiful engine and no art. And I’m like, ‘My god, this is perfect for me’. Because I knew how to create art and how to hire artists and get the game going. And they did have a game designer there, but I worked with the game designer to help design the game. Those were the Wild West days of making videogames, man – you could do

Enter The Gecko was the first of two Gex games Schofield directed while at Crystal Dynamics, with follow-up Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko arriving in 1999

almost anything, and Gex was about as irreverent as you could get at the time. Gex was crazy because he could walk on walls and ceilings, so that made it tougher but easier [to design] in some ways, because he could do all sorts of things, but you didn’t want him just going everywhere. You couldn’t do that at that time, either, because you were messing with the camera all the time. I ended up directing six games while I was at Crystal Dynamics, and I ended up running the studio for… I don’t know, a year and a half, maybe two years? I was part of the team that picked Eidos to buy us. There were about six or eight of us in the room and we voted on which company we wanted to buy us and we picked – unanimously – Eidos. Because at the time, Tomb Raider was a powerhouse, man. It was the thing, you know. And we just wanted to learn from those guys if we could. 77

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THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING Developer/publisher EA (Redwood Shores) Format GameCube, PC, PS2, Xbox Release 2003

I directed a Knockout Kings game [for EA]; then they asked me to come over and help on Return Of The King. For the first year, the executive producer of the game was finishing Two Towers, so I was the EP running Return Of The King, just getting people on board, getting the engine up and running, starting to do the design and work on what the screenplay would be – because you had to adapt this giant book and movie into a videogame. And then when Neil Young finished working on Two Towers, he came over and ran the game, and I was producer – I was producing the levels. So I had a huge job of designing and producing and getting the levels done – I was like the number two guy behind Neil – and getting that game out the door. And I’ve never worked so hard. I mean, we were working seven days a week, because it had to come out before the movie, and we had less than a year to make it. This was the first time we had a team of about 175 people – a giant, giant team. So I guess I was [in charge of] at least 100 people because most of the emphasis was on the levels. Oh my gosh, it took a lot of work.

It may no longer be state of the art, but back in 2003 The Return Of The King was widely praised for its visuals

“MAKING DEAD S PA C E , W E D I D N ’ T THINK OF SALES, WE DIDN’T THINK O F AWA R D S ”

DEAD SPACE Developer/publisher EA (Redwood Shores) Format PC, PS3, Xbox 360 Release 2008

JAMES BOND 007: FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE Developer/publisher EA (Redwood Shores) Format GameCube, PS2, Xbox Release 2005

What was great [about Return Of The King] was that it was where I made a good rapport with many of the artists and designers and guys who worked on the levels. After that, they put me in charge of Bond, which was a big feather in my cap. I was very proud to get the James Bond licence. But all these people, I started to get to know these guys really well, and we went on eventually to make Dead Space.

But, yeah, there were a lot of licensed games. I look at the early 2000s as the heyday for licensed games. I mean, everything was in the studio: Harry Potter, Tiger Woods, just one right after the other. The Godfather! I even worked on The Godfather for a while there. After those three games, I got an offer to go to Activision. Because what happened was, they asked me to make another James Bond game in less than a year, and I was like, “This thing is going to fail.” Because there’s no way you can make a game in less than a year. But they had a contractual agreement with the Broccolis and whoever [owns] James Bond to get it done in another year. And so I was looking at about a ten-month production. I had just made one in 12 months, and got like a 78 [Metacritic] or something like that on it, and I knew that this one was bound to fail.

One of the most notable aspects of From Russia With Love is that it features Sean Connery’s last performance as Bond: the actor agreed to voice the character one more time after more than two decades away from the role

I kept saying about this Bond game, “I can’t make it. I can’t do this.” And they were like, “Yes, you can.” So I went out and I got an offer from Activision. I gave my two weeks notice at EA and they tried desperately to get me back. Which I appreciated a lot – I didn’t realise that I had been appreciated that much. And finally, the president [of EA Worldwide Studios] Paul Lee asked me what it would take to get me to stay. I said, “I want to make my own game. But in order to make my own game, I need a team of 15 to 20 people at the beginning, and you’ve got to leave us alone for six months.” Because EA was notorious for… if one game needed help, they would just go to another game and grab a bunch of people and bring them over. And that’s what led to some games coming out late and some games coming out and getting lower scores, things like that. So I just wanted to be left alone, and they kind of put me in a corner for a while. We had this small team, and we made a little demo of this scary corridor. We

were like, “We’re just going to cut off limbs – we’re just going to be about dismemberment”. And everybody was like, “That’s going to be too gross. It’s going to be too much for the public”, and things like that. But we made this greatlooking demo. The other thing I did, I worked on with my art director at the time. Because when you were at EA, and especially back then, you were competing against like, 40 games worldwide for money. You know, they had Tiburon, they had Montreal, they had Vancouver and Redwood Shores, which was making probably six or seven games of its own. So you were competing against all these games, and they would only make so many a year. So we made posters, and we hung them up all over EA. I would hang them up in the bathrooms. I remember we even made a calendar for Dead Space with this very early art. We were trying to sell it within EA, and it worked. But what really worked the best was the demo: EA saw that they had something special and they put more and more people behind it. And they gave me what I needed. It took a while for them to understand it because this was something that they hadn’t done before. ‘OK, we’ve got a brand-new IP, it’s science fiction, it’s horror – how do we sell it?’ That sort of thing. But eventually they greenlit the

Dead Space’s diegetic HUD is one of its most outstanding features, with engineer Isaac Clarke’s health, O2 and stasis meters displayed on the back of his suit. Translucent projections, meanwhile, are used for video messages and Clarke’s inventory

project, and they got 100 per cent behind it. After that, [John] Riccitiello finally came in as as the new CEO, and he loved it. He was a big advocate for the game. I think they still wondered how they were going to sell it because they were used to licensed games, but they gave us us some money and we were able to finally get the game off the ground. I remember showing it to [Shinji] Mikami. EA was always having people come in from different game studios. At the end of it, he bowed. We showed him one level, and he bowed to me and he said, through an interpreter, “You’ve got something special.” And I was so proud. I was like, “Wow, maybe we’ve got something great here – I don’t know.” You never know. You never know when you make any game what you’ve really got before it comes out. I’ll be honest with you, I still didn’t know what we had once we shipped the game. I was in Europe when the game came out. I was on a PR tour. I remember being in a hotel lobby and I started getting calls first thing in the morning, which was late the night before from the US. I was getting these emails and calls: “Are you seeing the scores?” I’m like, “No, no.” And I started looking at the scores, and I was like, “Oh my gosh.” I was stunned. When we were making Dead Space, we didn’t think of sales, we didn’t think of scores, we didn’t think of awards – we were just focused on quality and making something we were passionate about. I know that sounds weird – like, yeah, you should do that. But back then you were focused on getting the game out on time, what your sales were going to be, things like that. In this case, it was the opposite – I’d just worked on a bunch of licensed games and I wanted to focus on quality, so that’s what we did. All of a sudden it started getting these great scores and we were stunned, and then we started winning awards. The initial sales were OK – if you look back, I think it took a while for the sales to get off the ground, and of course a sequel always helps. But it turned out to be something I’m really proud of. When people come up to me, of all the games I’ve made, that’s the one they like to talk about the most. 79

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people out of college – and we were able to get some of the best of the best to come work on it. But, yeah, I think we went in a little naïve, and when it was all done I could turn around and go, “My god, I became a better game-maker because of this game.”

CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 3 Developer Sledgehammer Games Publisher Activision Format PC, PS3, Xbox 360 Release 2011

It was so hard to leave Dead Space. But I thought it was time to make my own studio. So I talked to Michael [Condry], who had been my development director on a number of games, including Dead Space, and I said, “Maybe we can go out on our own. I know a couple of people over at Activision – we could talk to them.” It took a long time for it to develop. But Activision finally signed off on it and let us build a studio – a Call Of Duty studio. We first started making a thirdperson Call Of Duty game, an actionadventure game, completely different. And then things went a little south with Infinity Ward and I remember one day a bunch of execs flew up and said, “How would you like to work on Modern Warfare 3?” [Laughs] It didn’t take long to just say, “Thank you, yes, we’ll work on that.” We went on to make the singleplayer game and Infinity Ward made the multiplayer aspect of it. I have to say, I learned a lot from the guys that were still there at Infinity Ward. They had made some awesome games – Modern Warfare 1 and 2 started the franchise and so even after a lot of people had left there still were some really great people there, and I learned a lot from them on how to make a Call Of Duty game. But what was nice is that game also won Action Game Of The Year, just as Dead Space did, so it was like two in a row, which I was really proud of. I actually think we went into it a little naïve. We’d just made Dead Space – we’d just made a good game and so we [thought], ‘Ah, we can make this game.’ Again, I thank Activision and Infinity Ward for helping teach us. There was a lot of pressure because we also had to get it out on time, which was at that point I think about two years out. And we also knew we were following up one of the best games of all time – you know, not just the best shooter, but one of the greatest games ever. But Call Of Duty also allows you to hire some really good people. People want to come on board. So we built a really good team at Sledgehammer – really good vets, and then 80

CALL OF DUTY: WWII Developer Sledgehammer Games Publisher Activision Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release 2017

“CALL OF DUTY ALLOWS YOU TO HIRE SOME REALLY GOOD PEOPLE. PEOPLE WANT TO COME ON BOARD”

Modern Warfare 3 sold 6.5m copies on launch day and went on to generate around $400m in revenues, making it the biggest entertainment launch of its time

People nowadays [think] a Call Of Duty is… you know, just put it through the grinder and another one will come out. They don’t realise how much work goes into making a Call Of Duty game. There’s just a ton of research. You’re working with experts – I studied World War Two for three years. I worked with historians. I spent eight days in a van in Europe going to all the places that were going to be in the game. I shot different old weapons. All these things that you have to do when you’re working on a Call Of Duty game. And, you know, to become an expert – Advanced Warfare, we worked with Navy SEALS and Delta Force people to learn and tactics and techniques and get them into the game, right? You had to learn about the Special Forces from different countries like England and France and Spain and Italy and all that, because they were all in the game. So, a lot of learning, constantly reading, constantly watching videos and constantly working with experts. Was there internal competition? No doubt, no doubt. It’s weird, because you really rooted for each studio because you needed and wanted every Call Of Duty to do well. But you always wanted to get a higher score. You wanted to achieve more sales if you could. So yeah, we pushed each other, we really did. But then again, we would also help each other out – like, in between, we would go help out Black Ops a little bit. We might take on a level or take on a few objects and things like that – vehicles and things. We were this sort of Call Of Duty brotherhood. There was a quiet competition definitely going on, but you helped advance the next game as much as you possibly could. WWII was very difficult subject matter. We actually lost people from the studio who just didn’t want to go there because it was a

difficult time. But we approached it knowing that it was difficult time in history. We had to find a storyline that had a long throughline, where you could follow one group, so that was the main thing that I was concerned with. I studied the Italian campaigns and the African campaigns and the European campaigns, and the one that had the longest throughline was following the Big Red One – the advance of landing on Normandy and then just going all the way through France and Belgium, all the way up into Germany. So we knew that we could do a story there. You’ve got a lot of nationalities that you have to pay homage to, and at the same time you’ve got to be careful about the Germans as well. We spent a lot of time in Germany, making that game, talking with locals and people about how they felt about it. And so we went about it with that [in mind]… you know, there’s a section in there where you rescue a German group, things like that. So we wanted to have that sensitivity. And then we also knew [there would be] controversy, like when the Jewish soldier is taken and beaten and put into a special prison. A lot of people didn’t know it at the time, but the [Berga] concentration camp was one that was just for Americans. It didn’t have a lot of people in it, but it had a few hundred Americans there. And, like anybody else in a concentration camp, they went through hell.

THE CALLISTO PROTOCOL

Developer Striking Distance Studios Publisher Krafton Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Release 2022

I stayed at Activision for about a year after WWII. I was working on some special projects and helping out on a few things there, trying to figure out what I wanted to do next because I didn’t want to make another Call Of Duty game. I eventually [decided] I wanted to form another studio, and that I’d like it to be closer to home. And I’d like to make another one of my own IPs – stuff I couldn’t actually do at Activision any more. So I took some time off and wrote out a bunch of ideas. And I was writing out… I guess you would call it a screenplay, maybe 20 to 30 pages of stories here and

Schofield is doing the equivalent of getting the band back together for The Callisto Protocol: Dead Space producer Steve Papoutsis is on board, and the game’s art director, writer and concept artist all worked on Redwood Shores’ survival horror

Call Of Duty: WWII heightens the sense of peril by forcing you to use health packs when you’re injured, rather than letting you crouch behind cover to heal

there. I wrote a few of those. At one point, I went out to the desert down in Tucson, and spent some time at a resort for a couple of weeks, and would just go out and come up with ideas. That was a great way for me to think – I would go out there with my drawing pad and just come up with ideas and then write them down. Eventually, I just came back to [thinking] I want to do another sci-fi horror game and go back to my roots. Like, what I really love the most about Advanced Warfare is that it’s got science fiction in it. If you look at WWII Zombies, which I directed as well, that’s a real horror game. It wasn’t the typical Treyarch one, it was more Visceral, if you will. So I wanted to go back to those things that I liked a lot, and wrote out this story. And then I just went about looking for, you know, somebody who would want to make the game, which is a big undertaking. I looked at just about everybody, but I kept coming back to the PUBG folks. They just had this attitude about them that was creativity first, and everything else follows. And they were like, “We don’t want to get involved in your game. We want you to make the game that you want to make.” It was really refreshing to hear it. There are times when you’re like, ‘Do I actually believe them?’ But now that I’ve been here almost two years… I had a meeting with them last night and they loved what we were doing. They gave us a little bit of feedback, but more like testers, if you will. We just get guidance. They’ve been really great to work with. I decided to go with them, and it’s been the right decision. n 81

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B U I LT T O L A S T 84

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Has Roblox finally become impossible for the wider industry to ignore? By Jeremy Peel

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That disconnect has been a long-term frustration for Josh Ling, who has built a career in spaces dismissed by the game industry at large. In his previous role at Hypixel, he led a team of 30 in operating Minecraft’s largest multiplayer server, supplying minigames to an audience of more than 13 million. Now he’s director of business operations for Uplift Games, a newly formed studio spun out of the success of a single Roblox-powered game. Adopt Me is the single most popular game on the platform, and the numbers are nothing short of extraordinary: 22 billion visits, 1.92 million of which happened concurrently on one day in April, following the launch of its Ocean Egg update. For context, that’s almost double the strongest concurrent performance of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Steam’s most popular game. Yet when Ling

Families, whereupon the Parents push the Babies around in prams, attend to their basic needs, take them to school and rush them to hospital when sick. The shape all this interaction takes will be recognisable to MMORPG players, from the right-click camera controls to the ever-present chat box. But rather than embodying a teenage preoccupation with things such as orcs and arrows, Adopt Me offers the gentler make-believe of the primary school playground. It’s a lower-to-the-ground perspective that’s reflected in the game’s design, which avoids mandatory tutorials and scripted sequences. “A lot of games for older audiences tend to try and railroad the player into specific mechanics,” Ling tells us. “Designer friends of mine will get annoyed when players do something that’s not necessarily

talks to peers in the traditional game industry, he finds most are ignorant of the scale at which Roblox operates. They are unaware of the Giant Man that looms over them. “They might not even understand what Roblox is,” he says. “Those who do tend to have children in their lives. And even then, it might just be a thing that their kid plays on a tablet. So it’s definitely been an uphill battle, trying to contextualise Adopt Me within the wider industry. But I think that perception is shifting.” Adopt Me is built around a premise of pet ownership – the Tamagotchi-like fantasy of raising an animal from an egg. Regardless of its real-life reproductive process, every species starts as a pale orb bobbing obediently at your back, until it is fed enough chocolate milk and blueberry pies to trigger a hatching. Atop this central loop are layered Sims-like mechanics for home decoration and character customisation – much of it paid-for – as well as some fascinating familial roleplay. Players pick whether to become Parents or Babies, and join together in

intended, and design around it. With games like Adopt Me, we provide tools and verbs and action systems, and the players generate their own fun. When you give a child a dollhouse, there’s no ruleset that comes with it. They create their own rules and their own forms of play.”

Josh Ling, director of business operations, Uplift Games

THE NUMBERS FOR ADOPT ME ARE NOTHING SHORT OF EXTRAORDINARY: 22 BILLION VISITS, 1.92 MILLION OF WHICH HAPPENED CONCURRENTLY ON ONE DAY IN APRIL

Typically, a number of roadblocks have

prevented younger audiences from accessing games: hardware, downloads, credit card payments. But Roblox is notable for a barrier to entry that sits barely above sea level. On PC, there is no generic Roblox client, merely a website with a Discovery tab that puts you two clicks away from whatever experience you desire. Each game boots up from your browser, and the requisite RobloxPlayerLauncher.exe is 1.58MB – small in comparison to the Flash plugin that opened up the strange worlds of Kongregate and Newgrounds to kids in the early ’00s. Cavanagh, who made scores of games in Flash before the platform became a magnet for malware 87

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Indie developer and Roblox dabbler Terry Cavanagh

and was ultimately discontinued altogether, can certainly see the resemblance. “The game loads up, you can play it for ten minutes, and then you can just play another totally random thing,” he says. “There are literally millions of games – some of them are good, some of them are bad, some of them are exploitative, and some of them are making fun of that. It’s a really interesting ecosystem.” Though Cavanagh’s Climb The Giant Man Obby stands out as a project from a respected indie developer, it also slots neatly into a preexisting Roblox tradition. An ‘obby’ (from ‘obstacle course’) is a form of 3D platformer that uses Roblox’s default physics – which, as Cavanagh puts it, “aren’t really designed for very expressive platforming.” “You can override anything in Roblox,” he explains. “You can do your own custom camera or controller code, but almost no games do that because it’s a huge hassle, and has only been possible relatively recently. So there’s this whole decade-long history of people making 3D platformers in an engine not really built for it. I think it’s really funny that the Roblox community has independently created this

use the word ‘softography’. “I care about making games that people want to play,” he says. “I want to make pop games.” The Roblox experience has been an antidote to running terrysfreegameoftheweek.com, the site where Cavanagh regularly highlights freeware projects. “It’s really like pulling teeth sometimes, to make anyone care about freeware,” he says. “It’s kind of depressing. And then at the same time there’s this parallel community where virtually every game is free, there’s a ton of interesting stuff happening all the time, and thousands of people play every new thing that comes out. It’s really refreshing.” That influx of players is tangible since, like every project in Roblox, Cavanagh’s Giant Man is multiplayer as standard. During the ascent, it’s a joy to look down at the players hopping through gauntlets you’ve already cleared – and to race through the next challenge in impromptu competition with the stranger running beside you. “I had no idea how that was going to feel until the game went live,” Cavanagh says. “Playing a lot of Roblox games has made it clear just how many games could be multiplayer that

genre, that obviously has a cousin on other platforms, but they don’t talk to each other.” Climb The Giant Man pays homage to the tropes of obbies that came before, such as the ‘choose paths’ – colour-coded bridges in which some shades fail to support your weight and send you back to the last checkpoint. Even the giant himself comes from a long line of colossi, which Cavanagh acknowledges on the information boards of the Experience Centre (“Ancient Mystery of the Giant Men: Where did they come from? Why are there so many?”). The game was intended as an introduction to the world of Roblox, he says. “Something that was very much influenced by stuff I saw in Roblox, rather than trying to do something more traditionally indie-games-y.” Yet even as Cavanagh leads his existing indie game audience by the hand into the heady world of Roblox, there are plenty of familiar elements for them to cling onto. The unforgiving default controls of the obby genre lend themselves to the binary, succeed-ordie difficulty and quick resets Cavanagh popularised with VVVVVV. And the simple art assets – coloured spheres, bright lines, oversized rubber ducks – recall the aesthetic abstraction of Super Hexagon. For Cavanagh, though, part of the draw is bringing his style to a new, young audience – one that doesn’t care about his softography, and would certainly never

aren’t. It’s like a new paradigm. Multiplayer game programming is really hard, and when I’ve tried it’s not been that successful. To have an engine that can just handle that for you, automatically taking care of players, avatars, and synchronising things from server to client, it’s really exciting.” Ling was likewise surprised by the power of the tools on offer when he first downloaded the Roblox engine. “It’s much closer to something like Unity than it is to Twine or Minecraft mods,” he says. Uplift Games has a team of engineers working on complex systems that underpin Adopt Me. “It might seem quite a simple game on the surface,” Ling says, “but there’s a lot of underlying technology that affords that simplicity.” Despite that power, there are some limitations that tend to cause frustration and friction for newcomers. The toy-store art style that unifies so many Roblox projects, for instance, means studios struggle to visually differentiate their projects from the crowd. “There’s not as much freedom as something like Unreal,” Ling says. “Roblox recently added a lot of visual features that have been standard in other game engines for ten years, but there are these limits you have to work within.” It’s true that, like those of Flash and Minecraft before it, the limitations of Roblox’s toolset inspire innovation. When mesh deformation finally became

“THE ROBLOX COMMUNITY HAS INDEPENDENTLY CREATED THIS GENRE, THAT OBVIOUSLY HAS A COUSIN ON OTHER PLATFORMS, BUT THEY DON’T TALK TO EACH OTHER”

possible in the engine, one veteran animator at Uplift was both elated and saddened, having previously perfected the art of creating fluid movement within a strange, rigid style.

There’s one quirk of the platform, though, that developers might find less charming: the commission Roblox Corp takes on top of the usual App Store fees. There’s been plenty of debate recently about whether storefronts earn their 30 per cent cut, but Roblox inverts that share – creators are left with just 27 per cent of the money players spend in-game. Ling describes the cut as “excessively steep” compared to other platforms. “That makes it more difficult for smaller studios to thrive, I think,” he says. It’s a point that Cavanagh echoes: “I don’t even know if most developers can make money in Roblox. Obviously there are success stories, but it seems tough. I’m pretty unlikely to make a big commercial Roblox game.” For its part, Roblox Corp points to some of the advantages it provides: a massive social network, streamlined distribution, cloud services at no upfront cost, and automatic translation and localisation. “This approach levels the playing field for developers and opens up creation and monetisation opportunities to people who might not otherwise have an easy entry point into development,” according to Roblox Corp VP of developer relations Matthew Curtis. “We believe this is the reason we are seeing so much diversity in our community. Once you take into consideration the benefits, most developers will find that Roblox is the best opportunity available by a large margin.” Uplift has a “really good” relationship with Roblox’s developer relations team, Ling says, and he praises the company for making decisions that empower creators rather than hold them back. “They’re not very restrictive,” he says. “Unlike certain other user-generated content platforms, on Roblox you own all of your IP. They understand that the success of their platform is dependent on the games being fun and engaging to players.”

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Adopt Me players are very clearly having fun – that much is evident as we watch giddy avatars bounce by on the street outside our suburban starter home, a modest detached bungalow sheltered by a giant blue toadstool. But we can’t help but note the way Adopt Me’s reward loop feeds inexorably back into its basic resource, Bucks. You’re awarded dosh for going to the playground when your character is bored, or showering your pet, or simply for remaining logged in. The concept of currency is ever-present, which seems a strange pairing for a premise that allows kids to play pretend families – we don’t remember too many playground games folding in the financial reality of their scenarios. 89

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Matt Curtis, VP of developer relations, Roblox Corp

From a designer’s perspective, however, it’s a smart way of enabling player freedom. “I think it works well in Adopt Me, because it’s very much a ‘play in the background with your friends’ kind of game,” Ling says. “You play for an amount of time, you get a resource, and you can choose where to spend that resource. We’ve taken steps to reduce grinding, to make the economy more liberal.” Nonetheless, during a session you’re encouraged to supplement that fake money with the real thing, presented with regular prompts to buy bundles or options to skip progression with a purchase. It’s an experience reminiscent of MMORPGs during the early free-to-play boom, when microtransactions were implemented with apparent gusto. Ling counters that Uplift has focused on “soft investments” – such as furniture that can be resold to recoup most of its initial cost in Bucks – as well as a trading system that enables players to be a part of Adopt Me’s world without paying out. And the studio can hardly be faulted for monetising its wildly successful free game, the current form of which has

For Cavanagh, self-censorship meant not situating Giant Man’s VIP area in the titan’s enormous backside, but rather on a distant island players can fly to. “It was going to be that you fly into the bum and there was a dance floor and a disco ball,” he says. “And then I thought, you know what, I probably shouldn’t do that.” His enthusiasm for Roblox projects remains undiminished, however. Shortly after our conversation, Cavanagh released his second game on the platform, Anyone Could Be Struck By Lightning At Any Time, a multiplayer simulation of a secluded, rainy island on which, sure enough, drenched players are occasionally zapped and killed. The only way to survive strikes and thus top the leaderboard is to gather in large numbers and hope for the best. “Don’t feel bad,” reads the loading screen during respawn, “it wasn’t your fault.” It’s as far from a commercial project as you can imagine, and testament to the breadth of the Roblox ecosystem. “I’m not going to suddenly go full Roblox, but I’m totally going to do more freeware stuff,” Cavanagh says. “It seems like a really interesting space to be in.”

been almost four years in the making. But it’s tough to disagree with Cavanagh’s initial perception of Roblox as “microtransaction-y”, a platform where potential purchases are put front and centre. At the top end, where developers are making the real money, that’s often been the model for success. “If users are asked to spend money frequently in certain games and they aren’t having a good experience because of that, they switch to other games on the platform,” Curtis says. “So we actually find that our users and developers self-regulate when it comes to this type of thing. Having said that, we strive to prevent kids from making unauthorised purchases and have rigorous safety measures in place to make it harder.” Roblox’s young playerbase raises another hard question: how free can developers be in their creative expression on a platform embraced by children? “Developers are encouraged to create unique, positive experiences as long as they are within our rules and guidelines,” Curtis says. “The safety of our community is our top priority and we are striving to create a place that balances safety with the creativity of our diverse community.” There is surely no other game company with a more sobering duty of care than Roblox Corp – which has a staff of 1,600 dedicated purely to eliminating inappropriate content from its platform.

Uplift, meanwhile, has no plans to desert Roblox either. “It’s where our experience lies,” Ling says. “It’s where our community is. We’re focused on Adopt Me and future Roblox projects at the moment.” In one sense, at least, the studio has embraced its position on the periphery of the traditional game business – by committing to avoiding the overwork and burnout ingrained in the larger industry. “This is the place where, hopefully, we can just sidestep those issues entirely,” Ling says. “Because we don’t have decades of baggage and entrenched beliefs from leadership.” Yet while Roblox developers are determined to stick with the platform, the membrane between its universe and the rest of the game industry has already begun to thin. Over time, it seems inevitable that the innovations discovered on the platform will spill out into the wider world, taking developers who have largely chosen to ignore it by surprise. “It’s difficult to replicate the combination of benefits Roblox provides,” Curtis says. “However, I do think certain aspects of these unique designs are already finding their way into the broader industry.” Obbies and adoption simulators are in all of our futures, then. Soon enough, we’ll be confronted by the questions Cavanagh has been asking this past year: where did all the giant men come from? And why are there so many of them?

“IT WAS GOING TO BE THAT YOU FLY INTO THE BUM AND THERE WAS A DANCE FLOOR AND A DISCO BALL. AND THEN I THOUGHT, YOU KNOW, I PROBABLY SHOULDN’T DO THAT”

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T H E M A K I N G O F. . .

H E AV E N ’ S VAULT How Inkle translated millennia of human history into a unique archaeological adventure By Malindy Hetfeld Format PC, PS4, Switch Developer/publisher Inkle Origin UK Release 2019

t the beginning, there was Stargate SG-1. In late 2014, less than half a year from the release of the critically acclaimed 80 Days, Inkle founders Jon Ingold and Joseph Humfrey landed on space archaeology as the theme for their next game, inspired by Stargate and driven by the realisation that this was still unexplored territory for videogames. After initially experimenting with a comic-book presentation that let you move the camera around static panels, the pair knew they wanted players to move through a 3D environment – something new to Inkle games – and talk to characters, but weren’t sure what they’d do in between. And, as it turned out, they weren’t entirely sure what archaeologists did. “Very early on, Joe asked, ‘Well, what are players actually going to do?’” Ingold recalls. “And I said, ‘I don’t know – push levers and buttons, avoid spike traps, that kind of thing. That’s what archaeologists do’. And Joe said: ‘Is it, though?’” As the team swept aside their pop-cultural preconceptions, they gradually began to excavate a potential structure for the game. “We prototyped a puzzle mechanic around the exploration of old sites,” Ingold says. “We had an idea for a holographic projector that was going to ‘rebuild’ old ruins, because we already had the robot design with the projected head, but we always ran into the problem of ‘so what?’ Once the player has uncovered a space, what do they do with that information? We didn’t feel like there was an endpoint to any of those explorations.” In the end, it wasn’t Stargate that provided the answer but another piece of archaeologically adjacent pop culture: Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. Specifically, the scene where Indy solves a word puzzle to reach the Holy Grail. This got the team thinking about the connection between archaeology and language. It was the practice of translation, and the thought processes behind it, that fascinated them most. Ingold likens it to teaching people how to read: before you could read a sentence, you had to learn the meaning of individual words. In Heaven’s Vault, you begin with a small set of glyphs, from which you can guess at the meaning of other glyphs. As your vocabulary grows, so does your ability to translate new material from context. A further twist emerged from Ingold’s research into hieroglyphs. He discovered that scribes cared very little about legibility, and didn’t like to leave large empty spaces between words. It

[available for its translation] have very simple meanings; it’s a long word so it must be a more complicated concept’. We hadn’t thought of that strategy before, but even without our intent it was a valid strategy that produced results.”

With a solid foundation in place, it was just Just like any real archaeologist who comes across abandoned places, Aliya has to hunt for clues pertaining to a site’s former inhabitants and use – and mind her head

meant that learning to read hieroglyphs wasn’t limited to knowing single words, but being able to tell whether you were looking at a single word or a compound. You had to be able to tell where one word ended and a new one began. In the finished game, the option of picking between a longer compound and breaking up a compound string into several shorter words is always there,

INKLE HAD TO BUILD NOT ONLY AN ENTIRE LANGUAGE BUT ALSO AN ENTIRE NEBULA TO GO ALONG WITH IT and your choice between both options is contextual, based on what other words in a given sentence you’ve already encountered. Many prototypes later, Humfrey realised it was all coming together when he started to encounter a feeling familiar from his time learning German: the satisfaction gained from correctly guessing the meaning of an unknown word by breaking it into separate elements. Inkle realised that language worked in logical ways, much like a puzzle, and that by applying different methodologies you could arrive at an end result that seemed right to you. Whether it was actually right or not wasn’t that important. And, as more people started to play the game, Inkle discovered there were more methodologies than it had anticipated. “We showed a demo of Heaven’s Vault at GDC and asked one journalist how they guessed the meaning of a word,” Ingold says. “And they said ‘Well, this is a long word, but two of the options

a case of building out the game’s language of glyphs, which encompassed thousands of words by the time of release. “Our 3,000-word vocabulary wasn’t designed in order to meet some abstract goal of making the language practical for real-life use,” Humfrey says. “Rather, it evolved gradually over the project to support the things that we needed it to say.” Of course, an archaeologist isn’t much without a good civilisation to uncover – and so Inkle had to build not only an entire lost language but also, in the game’s setting, an entire nebula to go along with it. To populate the nebula’s moons, Inkle started to look to real-life ancient ruins for inspiration. A visit to an exhibition on underwater archaeology taught the team more about sculptural styles, as well as the pleasure of finding remnants of a civilisation in unlikely places – an inspiration for the different items you can find strewn across the game’s many planets. “In a way, we took human history and used it to build our own world,” Humfrey says. The team started with the most obvious inspiration of Egypt, he says, “because you often associate Egypt and the pyramids with archaeology”. But as the project went on, the net was cast considerably wider. “These days, if something is obviously inspired by ancient Greece, players immediately go, ‘That’s ancient Greece’,” Ingold says – and Inkle wanted to avoid the associations that came with such well-worn territory. “Instead, we wanted something visually appealing that were still places people actually lived in and used.” Heaven’s Vault ended up drawing from the Mali Empire as well as Persian and Moroccan architecture, with senior artist Laura Dilloway drawing up an architectural timeline, allowing eagle-eyed players to place a site in the nebula’s history just by looking at the shape of its doors. Ingold admits that at first he thought Dilloway’s dedication to an architectural calendar was “a bit mad”, but it worked with the game’s theme of tracing history, whether through language, archaeological finds or even your surroundings. In the game, players can freely traverse several 3D environments as protagonist Aliya 95

THE MAKING OF...

who, like all characters, is rendered in 2D. (A nod to that initial comic-book concept, as well as Inkle’s love of 2D design.) Humfrey describes the style as a happy accident: “We created 3D environments primarily for flexibility – to be able to compose camera with the character art superimposed over the top. Then we started to experiment with subtle camera pans in the 3D environment, combined with character frames cross-fading from point to point. By this point, our illustrator Anastasia had systematically created hundreds of frames already, so that we could present the character from every conceivable camera angle. Within Unity we were able to spin the camera around these characters, and we fell in love with the way the frames responded like a flipbook. The final step was to implement a 3D character controller, allowing you to move the character and camera with left and right thumbsticks.”

In Heaven’s Vault, you often start with little to no idea where a find is going to lead you, an experience familiar to archaeologists. Unearthing useful finds is a minor miracle in and of itself, and to determine where a find originated or even what it was used for, archeologists have to consult a number of experts and examine prior discoveries. Similarly, Aliya travels all over the nebula to discover the meaning of her finds. Even so, Inkle was keen to avoid a common frustration with adventure games – overlooking a critical item and subsequently having to dig back through every location to find it. Instead, Heaven’s Vault is designed to encourage you to follow an interesting thread in the story regardless of whether or not you’ve found absolutely everything a location has to offer. “We just wanted to make sure people found interesting things in the world and that they didn’t backtrack too much,” Ingold says. Once you’ve found enough clues to continue to your next destination, robotic companion Six will pipe up and ask you if you want to leave. When we ask whether Six’s insistence to move on doesn’t end up making players defiantly want to stay in a location and keep looking, Ingold laughs. “Maybe the solution isn’t the most elegant, but the point is that it’s possible to leave, that you’re not stuck in one place forever.” Heaven’s Vault is full of options – where to go, how long to spend there, whether to engage in conversation or not – but Inkle resists calling it player freedom, chiefly because what players decide isn’t what drives the game. “This isn’t a 96

Q&A

Joseph Humfrey Co-founder, art & development director, Inkle

You’ve previously likened Heaven’s Vault’s script to a film script. Why is that? Our narrative scripting engine, called Ink, has powered all of our games for the past ten years, and in the previous games this has been a textual script that presents text on screen in the game, with a combination of prose and dialogue that feels like reading an interactive book. For Heaven’s Vault there is still an underlying text-based script, but the major difference is that, as the player makes choices, it then internally produces something almost like a linear film script with both dialogue lines and cinematic directions – telling the camera to move to frame a particular subject, or to tell a character to pull a facial expression. The game then follows these instructions, and presents the film-like script in a visual way. Given that it was Inkle’s first 3D game, what did you learn in the process of making it? Lesson learned: do not make 3D games. Of course, I’m being glib, but we’re genuinely returning to creating more 2D games for now. We have a background in making 3D games at triple-A game companies [Sony and Rare] so this ought to be absolutely no surprise, but that extra dimension throws up problems at every turn. 3D cameras, in particular, are notoriously difficult to get right. What inspired you to let Aliya move around? For a long time we’d been talking about how combining various activities such as dialogue and traversal could be a great way to make a narrative experience feel more fluid. Oxenfree came out while we were in the middle of development on Heaven’s Vault, and it simultaneously validated our thoughts on the subject while also blowing our minds with the seamlessness of their implementation.

branching narrative, there’s no tree in place,” Humfrey says. “You don’t make decisions that inevitably alter the course of the game.” Instead of locking yourself out of a narrative branch through some previous decision, the game opens up conversational routes based on what you’ve discussed and discovered so far. “It’s all about creating an interesting narrative space to explore,” Humfrey says. There might not be multiple endings, but there’s plenty of reason to go back – it’s impossible to see everything the game has to offer in a single playthrough, and there might be some lines you’ll never hear at all.

“You could think of it like designing a garden,” Humfrey says. “It needs to be large enough to create variety; it needs constraints and paths to guide you to various corners. And like a garden, it also needs corners that are designed to feel secret and special that only a small number of people will discover. But, by making as many of these little corners as possible, the majority of players will feel like they’ve had a unique experience. Of course, all this needs to be done on an indie budget, so – at the risk of overextending the metaphor – the plot of land for this garden isn’t huge.” The same could be said of the player’s relationship with protagonist Aliya. You aren’t able to remould her character through the responses you pick; the idea is that every conversation option you can choose from is equally valid for her personality. “With Heaven’s Vault, you’re not in control of the character, you’re with them,” Ingold says. “There should be a tension between what the player wants the protagonist to do and what they actually end up doing. That’s what makes it dramatically compelling. If a player doesn’t get to have a say, there’s no point in playing, but if a player gets to have their way all the time, from a writing point of view you might as well not bother writing any dialogue, because it gets overtaken by the story players have written in their own heads.” To Ingold, giving the player full control of the journey and its characters removes the possibility for surprises. “Choices aren’t the only way to make a player feel involved in a narrative. Anything you find can open up the next thing. The fact that the overall story doesn’t branch or that there’s a fixed end point is neither here nor there, because it doesn’t matter where you end up, it’s about how you get there. You can get to the end point with a very good understanding of the history of the nebula, or a very poor one or even a wrong one, and that possibility to misinterpret things is something we’re actually quite proud of, because that’s something that can happen to archaeologists all the time, too.” More than the original inspiration of Stargate, it’s that link to real-life archaeology which ultimately came to define Heaven’s Vault. There’s a maxim that Ingold and Humfrey reiterate throughout our conversation, and it’s not hard to imagine it driving Aliyah’s real-world counterparts to keep searching for the secrets of human existence, just as much as it guided the game’s development: the journey is the goal. n

1 A selection of concepts for Huang, Amadu and Mina. 2 A detailed concept image of the nebula. Players traverse its rivers to get to different sites. 3 A view of the moon of Renaki, influenced heavily by Arabian culture. Among its market stalls, many unfamiliar delicacies await Aliya. 4 Six the robot underwent colour changes to ensure he’s visible against any backdrop. 5 Concepts for the colour and pattern of Aliya’s headscarf, which led to the final, plain blue scarf that can be seen in-game. Inkle worked on Aliya’s design first with concept artist Jeremy De La Garza, inspired by Egyptian archaeologist Dr Monica Hanna to make her resemble a real academic, rather than a “Lara Croft type”

STUDIO PROFILE

PLAYTONIC GAMES

The Yooka-Laylee creator on becoming a friendlier kind of developer-publisher By Chris sChilling

avin Price wants to make it clear that Playtonic the developer isn’t going anywhere. The studio has, in fact, some very grand plans, about which we’re sworn to secrecy – suffice it to say, it’s currently working on three games, though we won’t be seeing them for a while. In the meantime, Playtonic the publisher will be keeping itself busy: its new Playtonic Friends label has announced its first raft of games, and Price tells us there will be more to come. In some ways, it’s a strange time to establish a new part of your business. How has COVID-19 affected Playtonic’s plans? “It’s hard to tell,” Price says. “You can’t reload your quicksave from before it happened and try playing it another way. But in some ways, I think it’s actually helped us. We always said, if we’re going to have [several projects] on the go, we want to have time to slow-cook them. So it’s actually been fine moving to working from home. It’d be horrible, I think, if we had to transition and we were under pressure to ship something pretty immediately. This is the nice phase of development.” And on the publishing side of the business? “There’s been pros and cons. It must be hard to start a new role for the people who’ve joined us during the pandemic.” As things slowly start to move back to normality, Playtonic is recruiting for two more full-time in-house positions to help it expand, though Price says that side of the studio isn’t ever going to get too large: “We don’t want to become a publisher with a development studio. We’re a developer with a publishing arm. We’re not going to go and sign five more titles each year, then go from five [staff] to ten to 15 to 20. We will be able to stay small and nimble.” Price says the move to publishing other developers’ games came about as the solution to a different aspiration – from day one, Playtonic wanted to eventually be in a position to self-publish its games, and in fact had already set the ball rolling on that ambition. “But we thought, if we’ve got this self-publishing team as well, for many months of the year they’re just going to be waiting for us. So we thought: actually, why don’t we find some developers?” That, Price says, was not too difficult: “I was speaking to someone at another publisher the other day, and it’s become apparent that there’s way too many brilliant devs and games out there – more than enough to go around all the publishers, we agreed.” And so Playtonic Friends was born.

Founded 2014 Employees 30 Key staff Gavin Price (studio head), Steve Mayles (character art director), Jens Restemeier (technical director/software engineer), Chris Sutherland (project director/software engineer), URL www.playtonicgames.com Selected softography Yooka-Laylee, Yooka-Laylee And The Impossible Lair Current projects Demon Turf, BPM: Bullets Per Minute, A Little Golf Journey Demon Turf, from Slime-san creator Fabraz, is leading the first wave of Playtonic Friends games. There are more to come, Price teases, including a sequel to a highly rated indie game

That name conveys the approach Playtonic is hoping to adopt (it’s perhaps telling that Price tends to use the word ‘partner’ more than ‘publisher’ during our chat), and there’s a recognition that it will only be comfortable taking on projects of a certain size. Not every developer will be a good fit, Price says. “If someone comes to us and says, ‘Hey, we’re a 30-person team, and we’re going to need $10 million for this project’, we’re never going to be the right kind of partner for them to do their game at that scale.” Instead, it’s aiming to be

teams to work with, he says, genre is the last consideration. “It’s about the game and the quality of the team doing it,” he says. “That’s way more interesting for us, because every time they know they’re going to get a bespoke service. It’s not like we can say, ‘This is how we marketed the last game we did – let’s just copy and paste and do the same job for these people.’” Rather than trying to make things easier by restricting itself to certain types of game, he says, diversifying its approach should only encourage its development partners. “They get that assurance that we’re dedicated to doing something fit for purpose for each game we sign.”

“ T H E R E ’ S WAY T O O M A N Y B R I L L I A N T DEVS AND GAMES OUT THERE – MORE THAN ENOUGH TO GO AROUND” more boutique, and offer a bespoke service for each game published. “We’re literally saying to people: what do you want us to do? It’s pretty much: give us your shitlist and we’ll go and get it done,” Price laughs.

The first three games announced under the ‘Playtonic Friends Presents…’ banner could hardly be more different from each other. Demon Turf, a 3D platformer with illustrated 2D characters, would seem to be closest to the studio’s wheelhouse. A Little Golf Journey is an adaptation of a relaxing mobile golf game for PC and Switch. And then there’s BPM: Bullets Per Minute, from Awe Interactive – which, having self-published the game on PC, has teamed up with Playtonic for its forthcoming launches on PS4 and Xbox One. It’s an eclectic mix of experiences, and deliberately so, Price suggests – it should help Playtonic avoid being pigeonholed as a company that’s only interested in making and releasing platformers. When choosing which

Given the studio’s evident desire to make Yooka-Laylee into more than just a game (Price admits to hoping to see the pair on a Happy Meal box one day), is it looking for developers who might want to take their games down a similar path: not just one-offs, but the start of a series? Price hesitates. “I don’t know if we’re actively looking for it. But it probably occurs naturally anyway. We kind of gravitate toward the developers who want to set themselves up for this long-term sustainability.” Another consideration is something more straightforward, but not often mentioned by the developer-publishers we’ve spoken to. “A lot of the people we talk to are young, and a lot of them have played our games, and we’ve played theirs and that’s great,” Price says. “We really value how we get on with the people we talk to during that phase. A lot of attention is paid to that – almost more than the game itself, in a way!” With so many Rare alumni at the studio, it would be more surprising to find a developer 99

STUDIO PROFILE According to Price, the team may soon outgrow its offices in Burton-on-Trent

who hadn’t played its games – and that experience is no doubt part of the appeal of Playtonic. In particular, Price says, that makes it feel like a safe pair of hands for younger studios that are in the early stages of existence. “In some cases, they just need a partner to help them get the message out, but we do provide some dev assistance ourselves, such as optimisation and porting. One of the benefits of being old is that we’ve been around the block on a lot of games,” he smiles. That, he says, automatically gives Playtonic a certain credibility – it can tell developers what has and hasn’t worked for it in the past, and what it would have done differently. And, as all game developers are aware, there are always new things to learn in such a fastmoving industry. Price acknowledges that the studio has come a long way in recent years, particularly with regard to Unity – Playtonic invested a lot of time, he says, in making sure 2019’s Yooka-Laylee And The Impossible Lair ran at 60fps docked and undocked on Switch.

If harnessing its technical expertise is part of the service Playtonic Friends provides, it’s also aiming to become a more approachable kind of publisher. When people come to Playtonic, Price says, it tries to offer the kind of deal it would want as a developer: “We’re so developer-biased, even to the detriment of our own publishing terms”. The publishing arm, he says, is about much more than just the studio’s growth and bottom line. “It’s about the fact that we can help people along the way. And yeah, we get to make some profit, which covers our own self-publishing aspirations as well, in due course. But it’s so easy to create really nice win-wins for everybody, to keep everyone’s stress levels down and say, you know what, 100

it’s not about that extra few quid that either side could be making. It’s about how we’re going to make what is a nice amount anyway, that hopefully can set other developers up for longterm sustainability.” Indeed, quite a few of the developers he’s working with, Price says, are hoping that this is the deal that allows them to operate full-time in the game industry; for some, this is still only a side hustle. “They’re putting in so much time and effort, juggling two jobs and hoping that they can have the dream of being full-time game developers. It’s really nice that we’re helping people like that.” If its approach as a

quite in yet, is it?’ And wagging our finger. There’s none of that. If anyone tried to do that with us, we would not get on with them as a publisher, so we wouldn’t do that to others.” Price cites Thunderful and Mediatonic as the developer-publisher ideal, acknowledging that Playtonic will probably continue to work with publishers for its own games, at least for the next few years. “They seem to have this common-sense approach of: well, actually, we could self-publish this, but if we partnered with this publisher, they’re right for this game more than us,” he says. “We wouldn’t just assume blindly we’re the right publisher for our own

“IT’S SO EASY TO CREATE REALLY NICE W I N - W I N S F O R E V E RY B O D Y, T O K E E P EVERYONE’S STRESS LEVELS DOWN” publisher is tailored to the developer’s needs, its terms are consistent. “It’s based on the same criteria, and again, it puts them first. If we 100 per cent fund, for example, we’ll split revenues with the developer before we’ve recouped. We’ll start sharing immediately. If they have 100 per cent funded, we don’t take anything until they’ve got their recoup back. And then we start sharing.” As for its level of creative involvement, Price says it’s hands-off until it’s asked not to be, and then it will lend its expertise and provide feedback. It will look at builds when its development partners want to present them, rather than setting milestones. “We keep putting money in their bank account when we said we would,” he says. “We’re not going” – and here he takes a sharp intake of breath and shakes his head – “‘Ooh, it’s not

games. And there’s also co-publishing that we would like to look into, particularly when physical retail releases are involved. We’re never going to be a physical publisher.” It’s refreshing to hear a studio so keenly aware of its strengths and equally comfortable acknowledging the areas in which it can’t quite compete with others. Yet with Price suggesting Playtonic may open another studio to broaden its talent pool, it’s clear it has big plans for the coming years. And if that Happy Meal deal might be a way off yet, the developer’s other ambition certainly doesn’t seem beyond the realms of possibility: “Playtonic is pretty much us saying to ourselves, ‘What were the best things about Rare with Nintendo and Microsoft?’ And trying to put all the positives of both those eras together.” n

1 Demon Turf protagonist Beebz, whose goal is to become Demon Queen. Her adventures begin in Demon Turf: Trials, a short, challengefocused version of the momentum-based platformer, currently available on Steam. 2 A Little Golf Journey is actually developer Okidokico’s fifth game. It’s due for release in the summer. 3 BPM: Bullets Per Minute is getting a much-deserved new lease of life on console. 4 It’s fair to say Playtonic isn’t done yet with the cute cast of Yooka-Laylee

3 4

101

REVIEWS. PERSPECTIVES. INTERVIEWS. AND SOME NUMBERS STILL PLAYING Mirror’s Edge Catalyst Xbox Series The firstperson parkour of Phantom Abyss reminds us it’s been a while since we visited DICE’s largely unloved sequel. And though it takes a moment to acclimatise to the absence of that wonderful whip, we’re soon back in the groove. With most missions already completed, we’re content simply to run around these pristine rooftops, admiring the physicality of Faith’s movements and trying to sustain flow as long as we can. Away from its feeble story, there is still much to enjoy here – not least the way Series X’s FPS boost makes the action even smoother.

104 Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings Of Ruin

Terra Nil PC Technically falling outside E3, Devolver’s reverse city-builder invites you to transform a wasteland into a thriving – and then selfsustaining – ecosystem, steadily removing the turbines, toxin scrubbers and irrigators that made it that way. It’s soothing and satisfying, though in asking us to “leave no trace of humans behind”, does it not simply serve to further the idea that there can be no reciprocity between humans and nature?

PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series

Neo: The World Ends With You PS4 More ‘just started’ than ‘still playing’, really, but the sequel to one of our favourite Nintendo DS games is worth bending the rules for. A successor deserving of the name? So far, the signs are promising: it’s every bit as stylish, while its combat sustains the original’s sense of rhythm and energy, streamlining its light-puck mechanic with prompts inviting you to switch up your attacks, building up your party’s groove meter so you can eventually unleash your special. Review next issue.

Explore the iPad edition of Edge for extra Play content

102

REVIEWED THIS ISSUE PC, Switch

108 Edge Of Eternity

PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series

112 Griftlands

PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One

114 Scarlet Nexus 116 Backbone

PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One

118 Mario Golf: Super Rush Switch

119 Umurangi Generation PC, Switch

120 Minute Of Islands PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One

121 Strangeland PC

123 Ynglet PC

Future imperfect

If modern videogames are anything to go by, humanity may not have much to look forward to. Today’s game-makers clearly take a cold view of our prospects in the years and decades to come, although many of these visions aren’t necessarily looking forward so much as looking around, refracting contemporary concerns through the prism of dystopian science ﬁction. Take photography game Umurangi Generation, a cult hit upon its original release last year on PC, but which feels comfortable in its new home on Switch – particularly in handheld mode, where you can tilt the console to adjust the orientation of the pictures you take. Yet these aren’t exactly holiday snaps, and ‘comfortable’ probably isn’t the right word for what is a caustic piece of social commentary, created as an angry response to crisis mismanagement by the Australian government. Then there’s the grimy cyberpunk setting of post-noir adventure Backbone, which provides a striking pixel-art backdrop for a story dealing with intensely relevant themes of political corruption and systemic racism. Yet if we are the architects of our own downfall, there are reminders that the solutions to the problems we’ve caused lie within us. Your work in Umurangi Generation is a vital documentation of societal ills. And in Bandai Namco’s actionRPG Scarlet Nexus, which can be read as a metaphorical warning about our reliance on the Internet (the downsides of its pervasive technology are made glaringly apparent), its characters become stronger in battle by forming bonds with one another, even across ideological divides. When one character steps in to revive another, harnesses a friend’s power to bolster their own, or leaps in front of a vulnerable ally to block an incoming attack, a glimmer of hope pierces the gloom. Perhaps we’ll be OK after all? 103

PLAY

Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings Of Ruin

ould there be anything more guiltily satisfying than carving an animal apart with a weapon made from its own brethren? Pacifying a monster that was just going about its business in its natural habitat and stripping it down for parts before kitbashing your spoils into something more powerful and doing it all again has been at the core of the Monster Hunter series since its inception. Though it’s masked with cartoon skin and more accessible systems, Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings Of Ruin brings the foolproof formula back for another outing. Capcom would be foolish to discard it. The incremental approach to powering yourself up, and the laser-focused specificity of the maths that determines drop rates for materials, is catnip. But where Monster Hunter traditionally pairs this loop with action and bombast, the Stories games take it slow and steady. This sequel is happy to hit the same notes as the original: turn-based battles, interlocking rock-paper-scissors mechanics, and a greater focus on exploration. The star of the show is, unsurprisingly, the bestiary: ticking off the titular monsters one by one until you’ve collapsed an entire Palaeolithic ecosystem is the real force pushing you forward here, not the nebulous and unconvincing story stapled onto that familiar template. Realised with an anime-inspired aesthetic reminiscent of Akira Toriyama’s expressive Dragon Quest art, Monster Hunter Stories 2 is a tonal whirlpool. The story – which casts you as a juvenile Rider; rival of the Hunters – is saturated in high-fantasy shonen anime tropes: you’re a silent hero, your grandfather was a man of legend, you’ve inherited his moxie, and fate has chosen you to save the world. Mix in a couple of rivalries, some troubled mentors and force-fed lessons about personal growth and responsibility, and you’ve got the picture. An obnoxious talking Felyne acts as your introduction to this world; your youthful naïvety combined with the cat’s unending reservoirs of unsolicited advice enlighten you about Mahala, its hyperactive ecosystem, and its apparent doom.

Contrasting with this lightweight setup is the overarching story and those titular Wings. A rare Rathalos has been prophesised to bring about an extinction-level event if something isn’t done immediately. (At least that bleaker part of the game aligns better with the indiscriminate monster murder.) And so, with that onerous task resting on your shoulders, you’re kitted up and booted out into the world. Within minutes, you’re in your first battle – and soon, you’re introduced to the most compelling thing about Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings Of Ruin: its two interlocking rock-paper-scissors systems. There are three damage types: piercing, blunt and slashing. You need to arm yourself with a weapon that 104

will deal damage to a monster’s weakness and then choose whether you want to attack technically, powerfully or speedily. Your attack type and damage type can be overridden by a monster’s defences and its own attack; quickly hitting a rock-backed dragon with a sword if it’s coming at you with a technical attack will negate your turn. As the game goes on, a few more threads are woven into this tapestry, but that’s the crux of it. And it will sink its claws into you, because it flirts with that perennial Monster Hunter formula. Finishing off a monster in fewer turns, preventing it from attacking with your own predictions and techniques, and being on the same wavelength as your Monstie (the twee title given to the tame creatures with which you’ve bonded) all help rack up points. Gain an S Rank, and the potential for rarer spoils increases. Get your hands on rarer spoils, and you can make better gear. Get better gear, and you can demolish monsters with ease. And so we settle into that Monster Hunter rhythm, returning to the hub, upgrading our kit and then heading back out on an expedition. Pity, then, that the story gets in the way. Having some NPC trot out a few lines of dialogue about finding some lost kids is trite, and the quest is busywork at best, but needs must. As you progress, you get the option to hatch more Monsties. Each has a type (power, technical, speed) and, like Pokémon’s HMs, a power it can use in the field (swimming, climbing ivy, smashing boulders), so it’s best to arm yourself with a diverse party before heading out. Rounding out your Monstie collection by sneaking into monster dens and pilfering their eggs is a welcome distraction at first, but once you realise the dens are all FAKE PLASTIC TREES largely the same and there’s no real challenge involved, The art style is gorgeous – seeing special attacks in action the appeal dissipates. Luckily you’ll be given an egg or two by NPCs from time to time to keep your Monsties is exhilarating, watching monsters rush at one another in and their powers relevant to impending barriers. head-to-head rage is similarly The creature-collecting aspect isn’t particularly invigorating, and catching rewarding in and of itself, either – several monsters characters side-eyeing each have the same skeletons and animations, and once other as your Felyne colleague mouths off is funny. But some you’re a few hours in you can largely stick to your in-world assets – scavengable materials, rock faces, water and personal favourites. A late-coming mechanic that allows you to sacrifice monsters to bulk up others’ stats gives those trees – are surprisingly the egg stealing a renaissance, but by this stage any new ugly. Perhaps it’s because the cartoon character models and Monsties are best used to empower your veteran crew. monsters are so well realised Performance issues, some ugly world assets and the that these other assets look so story’s pacing issues undermine the entertaining combat. offensive. Being introduced to And without urgency and direction, Wings Of Ruin’s magnificent, sprawling landscapes worthy of bigturn-based battling and creature-collecting mechanics budget helicopter shots across the Sahara is all well and good run out of steam well before the endgame. Even the when it works, but when rocks engaging, iterative heart that beats within Monster Hunter’s chest cannot offset the brainless quests that pop in on a whim and dopey cow-things clip into each other pad out your hero’s journey. The series’ rich world is with no collision, it makes you ideally suited to the RPG structure of Stories; we can feel like you’re playing a midonly hope Capcom takes some choice parts from 6 tier RPG, not living the dream this effort and crafts them into something better. as a roaming, heroic hunter.

Developer/publisher Capcom Format PC, Switch (tested) Release Out now

Ticking off the titular monsters one by one is the real force pushing you forward here

ABOVE Targeting parts and using specific damage types and elements to break through creatures’ defences is essential if you want to get better gear as early as possible – just as in the mainline Monster Hunter games MAIN Your erstwhile companion – and prophesied bringer of oblivion – really doesn’t look particularly intimidating at first. ABOVE With even custom characters looking this good, it’s a real shame that the rest of the game can be so decidedly rough. RIGHT The UI can be tough to parse at first, but every gauge and menu has its place in the system

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Holding off on a special move is worth it if you can predict when an AI teammate is going to uncork their special abilities

Post Script

Why Wings Of Ruin’s wilful AI is a strength, not a shortcoming

I companions get a rough time of it. Belittled, insulted and widely mocked, our little computer-controlled friends are frequently the cause of frustration – and understandably so. They end runs early, deploy useless attacks in battle and more often than not are more trouble than they’re worth. But what if that unpredictability, that lack of focused logic, was used as a mechanic? AI teammates in RPGs have never been popular – the multiple post-release versions of Persona 3 gave you direct control of your allies for a reason – but Monster Hunter Stories 2 addresses that in a way appropriate to the feral, semi-tame monsters you build gentle alliances with as you progress. Charging headfirst into battle with a Royal Ludroth, say, means you want something that hits hard, smacks other monsters about a bit and then soaks them with a powerful wave of water. In this game’s skill triangle, power beats technical. But as the raging Tetsucabra prepares its attack, your Royal Ludroth – acting of its own free will – decides it’ll go for a speedy attack this turn. Which loses out to technical. Oh. But therein lies the charm. Similar to Pokémon, you have a party of other creatures you can call into battle – perhaps the feckless Royal Ludroth needs a break (well, its head is a 106

little muddy after that Anjanath fight) and we can coax a Bulldrome in instead. Maybe that’ll be more consistent in its attacks. Having to dedicate points to order your creatures around makes them feel more like, well, creatures. Predicting when they might deviate from how they’re supposed to behave and having contingencies set up to best soften their impact is a truly mesmerising part of a game that often feels like it needs to click in your face to get your attention. It works the other way, too. If a monster you’re facing is known to pile on the technical attacks for the most part, if you break its horn off or shatter its femur, it might start mixing it up – probably just to spite you. Watching your neatly organised flowchart of attacks, healing items and support buffs fall apart as an angry Nargacuga skewers your erstwhile lizard friend really hits you in the heart. Monsters are supposed to be wild and unpredictable – that’s the whole point of the Monster Hunter series – and seeing that instinct-driven, non-human logic work on both ends of the battlefield is a delight. Having an AI companion yell “You need to learn their patterns!” in a patronising way if you happen to read an encounter wrong should be irritating, but that’s exactly what you’d call out to a fellow Hunter getting

bodied by a Rathalos in any other mainline Monster Hunter game. In that sense, it feels entirely authentic. We’re reminded, inevitably, of Trico and how The Last Guardian’s baked-in awkwardness matched its belligerent personality. Whether it’s our imagination or not remains to be seen, but some monsters – the more mischievous types, perhaps – seem to intentionally swap out predicted moves for unnecessary buffs or weird esoteric attacks just when we’re about to land a fatal blow on a boss. Given that the game’s main narrative conceit is about kinship and forming bonds with these creatures (Pokémon, eat your heart out), seeing some of the more primeval beasts march defiantly to the beat of their own drum is reassuring. Monster-collecting games should embrace weird, wonderful (and even outright stupid) AI more in the future; there’s nothing more endearing to an RPG player on their last morsel of health – staring into the jaws of defeat at the hands of a particularly stubborn mega-boss – than a considerate special move from an ally that has been famously uncooperative up until that exact point. These are the moments that stick with you, the emergent stories you never get tired of telling. And they’re almost worth all the frustration it takes to get there. n

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Edge Of Eternity

ithin minutes of being introduced to Edge Of Eternity’s spiky haired protagonist Daryon, a friend mocks his oversized sword, before calling out another companion for her “clingy girlfriend routine”. Not long after, this self-aware camaraderie is cut brutally short when most of your starting party is wiped out by an invading alien force – and that’s before you discover your other comrades are being sacrificed by the religious Sanctorium, which is supposed to be protecting humanity. Right from the outset, then, it feels as if Edge Of Eternity is consciously subverting the genre it purports to be inspired by. While we’re uneasy about a game by a non-Japanese developer being touted as a JRPG, it’s evident that the biggest influence on Midgar Studio – if the name didn’t give it away – is Final Fantasy, arguably the most western-leaning of JRPGs. So despite that initial selfknowing air, Eternity is happy to plunder from (or be a love letter to, if you’re feeling generous) its inspirations, with its own versions of Active Time Battles and Limit Breaks, not mention Nekaroos, summonable cat-like mounts which serve as the game’s Chocobo equivalent. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t try to bring something new to the table. The turn-based battles take on a tactical twist, with party members able to position themselves on honeycomb-style grids. A ranged fighter or spellcaster can stay at a distance, or you can move away from a glowing grid that’s telegraphing an enemy’s devastating attack. Although battles whisk you away to separate arenas, they nonetheless take account of your immediate surroundings. Initiating a fight with a stray monster, for instance, usually means that’s the only enemy you fight rather than spawning an arbitrary group, while initiating a battle near a crystal means you can position yourself in proximity to it to yield buffs. Yet while the freedom to move around might open up tactics, this is still a JRPG that makes you fight countless battles to level up, so you’ll prioritise your most damaging attacks to make the grind as efficient as possible. The ability to turn up the battle speed, with everyone’s HP and MP automatically restored at the end of each battle, does help. Yet that leaves the tactical movement mostly redundant save for boss fights, until the game tries to compensate by shoehorning in some awkward navigational puzzles. The best thing we can say about the latter is that they’re largely optional, and at least preferable to games where the distraction of random encounters while solving environmental puzzles can make you lose your bearings.

animations that spoil the more extravagant special attacks, we’re moved to wonder why Midgar doggedly pursued a realistic look in Unity rather than adopting a stylised approach like other JRPG developers working within relatively limited budgets. Eternity’s environments, on the other hand, are much easier on the eye. Indeed, our first steps into the vast green pastures of Solna Plains feel as wondrous as Gaur Plain in Xenoblade Chronicles – and the comparison doesn’t stop there, since that game’s composer Yasunori Mitsuda also contributes to the soundtrack. We only wish exploring the continent of Heryon was as freeform as in Monolith Soft’s game, or at least allowed you to jump over knee-high fences instead of forcing you to take the long way round. Navigation is also hampered by UI oversights: it can be difficult to tell from the world map which fast-travel point you’re warping to unless you’ve memorised the name, and while arriving at a new town floods your HUD with icons of quest markers or other areas of interest, there is no option to view a more detailed map. And once you get past the surface, the environments are lacking in engaging activities, largely consisting of requests to hunt a certain amount of monsters with gradually diminishing returns. It’s a shame, because earlier sidequests inject some personality. (In one absurd scenario, our curiosity gets the better of us as we agree an exorbitant fee to open a treasure chest behind a guard, despite him saying that it contains nothing more than a basic healing potion.) The illusion of an open world soon cracks, too, as we’re gradually funnelled through areas surrounded by cliff faces, Eternity becoming as linear as the first half of Final Fantasy XIII. One element that does stand out is the characterisation of central siblings Daryon and Selene, CRYSTAL CHRONICLES Pitched between FFVII’s materia who bicker and tease one another relentlessly, but are and FFX’s skills sphere, crystals ultimately bound by familial love. It’s a more accurate are used to enhance weapons depiction of sibling relationships than we often see in with increased stats or new JRPGs, which have been known to veer into creepy abilities. Weapons can also be levelled up to unlock more territory. Indeed, it’s refreshing to find a JRPG cast who crystal slots, which can diverge aren’t constantly falling for one another. Yet perhaps into multiple paths – and that contributes to one of Eternity’s fundamental issues: although you can only choose one path, you can always start it’s hard to care too deeply about anyone. Apart from over. Since crystals are regularly Daryon, forever enveloped in an aura of gloom, the given as rewards in battle, you’ll default tone is snark. Though we might normally find have a surplus soon enough, although in our playthrough we ourselves gravitating towards the one sarcastic know-itall in an otherwise wide-eyed and noble group, a whole found a lot of the same skills kept coming up or overlapping, room of them quickly becomes insufferable. which seems a waste when After a lengthy development, Eternity has the good socketing two blue crystals fortune to launch in a year without a new mainline Final that both give you Icestrike. Fantasy to be compared against, but anyone hoping this Of course, an indie studio striving to compete with Although crafting benches one known for making some of the most lavish RPGs of also enable you to recycle your will fill the gap is settling for a tribute act that lacks its crystals in the hope of yielding own identity. Besides, there are better examples of this all time was always going to face an uphill battle. As something better, finding genre – believe it or not, from Japan itself – and 5 we’re treated to close-ups of characters that send us rarer crystals is largely about you don’t have to wait an eternity for them. back to the uncanny valley circa 2004 or clumsy grinding through the RNG. 108

Developer Midgar Studio Publisher Dear Villagers Format PC (tested), PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Out now (PC), Q4 (consoles)

The illusion of an open world soon cracks, Eternity becoming as linear as the ﬁrst half of Final Fantasy XIII

ABOVE At their best, Eternity’s environments help tell the story of Heryon’s long-standing war against the Archelites and the Corrosion unleashed that’s corrupting the lands and its inhabitants. LEFT While we’re not against riding a Nekaroo, their speed often doesn’t feel much faster than on foot. They also fight, so you have to dismount if you want to preemptively attack an enemy in the field

BELOW The story occasionally switches over to what plans the antagonists are cooking up. For JRPG veterans, it isn’t a spoiler to say things culminate in a tower

ABOVE The default battle camera isn’t always helpful for the tactical side of the game, but when you really do need to move your party members, it helps that you can shift to a distant top-down perspective

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In the original Kickstarter, Selene was a nomad princess, while in the final version of the game she and Daryon are related

Post Script

Building expectations through crowdfunding and Early Access

aced with epic sagas that can last anywhere between 40 and 100+ hours, RPG players are a patient lot. The time between Edge Of Eternity’s announcement and launch may not be a record-breaker compared to the decade-long development of Final Fantasy XV, but from its Kickstarter campaign in February 2015 and Early Access release at the end of 2018, it’s been a long haul for Midgar Studio, which has surely been working towards this ever since the studio’s foundation in 2008. Despite the game’s shortcomings, for a team consisting originally of just four people, and having only grown by a mere handful since, to have shipped a game of Eternity’s scale and ambition should be considered a victory in itself. It’s certainly more than you can say about the ongoing development of the Kickstarter-funded Star Citizen, or some MMORPG scams that shall not be named. It’s perhaps because of this underdog scenario, especially in a genre still often derided for being niche and antiquated, that the reactions from Eternity’s 4,000+ backers and the majority of the 2,000 Early Access reviews were positive. Of course, any review ahead of full release speaks more of the hope of its potential. It’s why, despite the regular PR communications over the years, we had

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been reluctant to make a start until the development team pushed out version 1.0. Our verdict is hardly an outlier. Since launch, Steam reviews have taken a downturn under the cold scrutiny of consumers expecting a polished final product that could fill their play time in lieu of a mainline Final Fantasy this year rather than an indie studio’s rough-edged homage. So why the disparity between early adopters and the wider public? We can probably look to the tens of thousands of fans who backed Shenmue III and were simply happy that Yu Suzuki’s unfinished saga had another lease of life regardless of the outcome, even if the end result felt a little out of time when judged by modern standards. Old-school JRPG fans who backed Eternity presumably understood they had invested in a modest team with huge ambitions, while receiving regular updates showing a game that was making steady improvements generated goodwill. (If you think those final character models look ropey, you should have seen how they looked prior to the Early Access phase.) Being part of this warts-and-all process of development can indeed help set expectations of what a developer is able to do within its limited means. Compare that with building early hype via ‘target’ visuals and promising the world before ultimately cutting features,

delivering an inevitable compromise, and then bracing for the impact from consumers. That doesn’t completely excuse the rough state of Eternity’s launch. Its undercooked systems and bugs suggest the game is still in beta, all the more so when Midgar’s roadmap, stretching into 2022, doesn’t just outline bonus post-game content but features that were promised with the original Kickstarter, such as Nekaroo breeding and summons. While we doubt these elements would fundamentally improve the core of the game, rushing out a v1.0 expecting to build more on top feels more in step with an MMORPG than a singleplayer RPG. Yet for its early supporters, who have been happily playing a new chapter episodically over the course of the past few years, it probably does feel like an MMOG, each new improvement and update another excuse to stick around in Heryon, even if the only people benefitting from these fixes have to play through the adventure again. For those wanting a polished and feature-complete RPG on the first playthrough, you may want to wait until Midgar has delivered on its roadmap. The old Miyamoto quote about rushed games may not hold as much water today, when any game can be patched and updated, but we can only assess what’s in front of us at launch. n

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eveloper Klei’s knack for identifying a popular genre and making its own distinctive mark on it has long been one of its greatest strengths. From Don’t Starve’s quirky, Tim Burton-esque take on survival sims to Mark Of The Ninja’s elegant sidescrolling stealth, the studio’s games elevate established genres with craft, imagination and style. Science-fiction adventure Griftlands continues this trend, taking the Roguelike and the deck-builder and giving them a Klei spin. While narrative is often pushed to the side in these games, Griftlands places it front and centre, using randomisation, character relationships and player choice to construct some brilliantly dynamic, interactive stories. And underpinning everything is a slick card battler, where you use your ever-growing deck to tackle both combat and tense negotiations. It’s set on an unnamed planet – a scuzzy galactic backwater populated by aliens, grizzled mercs, jellyfishworshipping cultists, and malfunctioning robots. It’s a confidently realised setting, with masses of fascinating backstory that’s never forced on you, but emerges naturally through the dialogue. If you want to learn more about something – say, the sea-god worshipped by those cultists – its name will be highlighted whenever it crops up in conversation. Hover over the text to see a lean snippet of vivid world-building. You’re never deluged with exposition, but the game still manages to draw you deep into its setting. There are three playable characters, each offering a unique perspective on the world. Sal is a bounty hunter on the trail of the criminal who sold her into slavery. Her search leads her to Murder Bay, a bandit-infested stretch of coastline to which the authoritarian Admiralty is trying to bring law and order. Rook, meanwhile, is a former soldier working undercover in Grout Bog. This inhospitable marsh is being fought over by two factions – a rivalry in which Rook has a mysterious stake. And Smith, an amphibious alien, is a drunken layabout from an influential family. He travels to the coastal town of Pearl-on-Foam to claim an inheritance, but is denied it by his more successful siblings. Griftlands’ greatest strength is, by far, its storytelling. All three characters are riddled with interesting flaws and endearing quirks, and a delight to guide through their respective plotlines. The writing is wonderfully crisp, economical, and snappy. Few games simulate the organic flow of a conversation quite this well, and the script’s digestible bursts of sharp, witty dialogue make for an enjoyably fast-paced interactive narrative. As you make a name for yourself as a grifter, a mercenary for hire, you form relationships with the people you meet. These can be positive or negative, and the impact they have on the story is direct and far-reaching. If you rescue someone from danger, let a bounty go or sweet-talk a debtor into forgiving money they owe,

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Griftlands Developer/publisher Klei Entertainment Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release Out now

The concept of taking a conversation and applying the structure and cadence of a card battler to it is a clever one

KILLER INSTINCT

For players seeking an extra challenge, a Griftlands run can be altered with a large selection of mutators, unlocked after completing one of the three characters’ storylines. These can be selected manually or, if you’re feeling brave, applied randomly, which can have a dramatic impact on a playthrough. The Barbarous mutator is an interesting one, letting you get away with murder. Normally, killing someone in public will negatively impact your reputation and add nuisance cards to your deck that you have to waste turns to discard. This reputation can also work in your favour in certain situations, but mostly it’s best to avoid being too trigger-happy. Battles give you the opportunity to accept an enemy’s surrender before dealing the final blow, but with this mutator activated you can merrily murder anyone you please and suffer no repercussions whatsoever.

they’ll love you. This can result in a number of positive outcomes, including buffs, cards, the character joining your party as a combat ally, or appearing unexpectedly during a tricky situation to help pull you out of it. It pays to have friends. But if someone hates you – because you kill their friend, work with their enemy, or disrespect them – this will have a negative effect. You might be forced to fight, be refused help when you need it, or get slapped with a debuff. Building and maintaining this sticky web of fragile interpersonal relationships, and how it feeds into both the story and the battle layer, is one of Griftlands’ neatest narrative tricks.

Card battles come in two flavours: combat and negotiation. Each has its own suite of cards and interface, but the fundamentals are the same. You have to reduce your opponent’s health – either their physical health or their will to resist your arguments – to zero, through a combination of attacks, buffs, and debuffs. Combat is where Griftlands plays it safest, with a turnbased battle system that is challenging and fluid, but familiar to anyone who’s ever played a deck-building game. Klei has resisted the urge to innovate, which is a little disappointing. However, the negotiations – which arise whenever you have to convince someone to see things your way, do something they don’t want to do, or help you in a fight – are much more stimulating. Your opponent will mount their defence in the form of arguments, which you attack by playing cards. As you chip away at these defences, points from their core argument will drop away until you eventually break it. As a system, it isn’t wildly different from the regular battles, but the concept of taking a conversation and applying the structure and cadence of a card battler to it is a clever one. In story mode you can stroll through the card battles and focus on the narrative, but on higher difficulties thinking ahead, and thinking strategically, is absolutely essential when it comes to winning both types of card battle: this can be a punishing game, with sudden difficulty spikes occasionally souring the fun. Griftlands is a decent deck-builder, with an intuitive interface and engagingly tactical battles. Many of the cards lack visual spark, and some fights drag on too long, but the underlying systems are all solid. The story, world and characters ultimately make it great. Klei’s scrappy, lived-in universe is so well established, it feels like it could be adapted from some forgotten series of science-fiction novels. The art is superb, with bold, Don Bluth-like characters set against atmospheric painted backgrounds. Finally, the Roguelike structure makes it replayable: the main thrust of each protagonist’s story is largely unchanged, but randomised missions, characters, and encounters mean there are countless paths through them. And with a world this absorbing, we don’t 8 need a second invitation to start over.

ABOVE You’ll often have to convince people to fight by your side in a negotiation card battle. But if they like you they may just volunteer their services instead. RIGHT You can find, name, and keep pets, such as this mechanical AutoDog. They’ll join you in battle, and some can even intimidate opponents during negotiations

BELOW The game’s seedy spacebars are pure Star Wars. You’ll find jobs here as well as drinking buddies – buy them a beer and you’ll earn a card or a buff

ABOVE Late-game battles can be very difficult, especially if you haven’t made enough friends and don’t have any allies backing you up. You’re also at the mercy of the randomised cards you’re dealt. Victories are well-earned

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Scarlet Nexus

sychokinesis may well be the quintessential videogame power. Certainly, games are uniquely placed to communicate the physical exertion involved in controlling objects with your mind, and that particular sensation is at the heart of Scarlet Nexus’ wildly entertaining combat. As the aloof Kasane (one of two playable protagonists you choose between at the start; she gets the nod ahead of the blandly heroic Yuito on our first playthrough), we lift and throw barrels, boxes and even cars. By holding the right trigger, we automatically launch these at our target. With a longer squeeze of the left, we pull up a stone statue before thumbing the left stick downward to pound repeatedly on an enemy as if hammering home a stubborn nail. We swing a lamppost across the screen like a colossal baseball bat, swatting opponents aside. Soon after, we wrench a chandelier from its moorings and whirl it like a spinning top, grinding away a beast’s hard carapace. This is merely one of a startling range of options available to you in battle, as you lead a group of psionics against an invading force known as Others – nearindescribable hybrids of plant, fungus, human, animal and machine that look like gene-splicing experiments gone horribly wrong. Developers Bandai Namco Studios and Tose deploy just about every character-action game trick in the book: launchers, air combos, backdashes, perfect dodges (which confer temporary immunity), break meters, an overdrive mode, and a range of cinematic finishers. And if that isn’t quite enough power, you can borrow those of your allies, too. That’s possible thanks to the Struggle Arms System (SAS), a mental link that connects the group, allowing them to communicate with one another via a kind of cerebral Slack channel. In combat it lets you borrow up to three team members’ psychic abilities. Pyrokinesis and electrokinesis are two of the earliest and most straightforward, adding fire and sparks to regular attacks, but they can be devastating if you use objects to oil up and soak opponents respectively first. Sclerokinesis – which temporarily negates damage – is helpful when a boss winds up a powerful attack and you don’t have time to get out of harm’s way. The more exciting abilities are introduced as a way to deal with specific enemy types but prove useful in most scenarios. Teleportation replaces your dash-step, letting you blink out of an Other’s reach when attacking at close quarters, while zipping you straight to the next target when you attack after finishing off an enemy. Hypervelocity slows everything but Kasane down until she next takes a hit. Invisibility lets you reveal unseen threats or else sneak up on the most sharp-eyed monsters. And squad leader Kyoka’s duplication ability lets you hurl two objects for the price of one. Two later becomes three once you’ve grown sufficiently close. Fighting together, sharing gifts and attending ‘bond episodes’ with your squadmates

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Developer Bandai Namco Studios, Tose Publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment Format PC, PS4, PS5 (tested), Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Out now

We wrench a chandelier from its moorings and whirl it like a spinning top, grinding away a beast’s hard carapace

boosts those SAS links, giving you access to yet more active and passive abilities. Such a glut of options leaves you spoiled for choice at times during these chaotic encounters. The stylised art keeps the action relatively readable, as its busy visual flourishes threaten to overwhelm your senses. And that feeling that everything’s getting a bit too much is reflected in Kasane’s ability to stretch herself beyond her already supernatural limits: once her brain drive is filled, she can take the battle into a vibrant, abstract space where her psychokinetic powers are unlimited, and floating objects can be swept or thrown by tapping a button rather than demanding enough time to hold it. You are, then, gloriously overpowered for a time, albeit with a fatal caveat: you need to disconnect before it overloads your brain and kills you. The action warping and blurring as you push it to the last possible second lends tension and visual drama to that rarest of things: a rage mode with real risk attached. And you’re not the only one who has this power: when it’s used against you, your priority shifts towards pure survival.

As exhilarating as the combat can be, it’s a pity

the story makes the mistake of attempting to match it for sheer excess. It throws up one or two early surprises, but over 20-plus hours there are so many revelations, betrayals and changes of allegiance that the characters feel like pawns of the plot, rather than drivers of it. So keen is Scarlet Nexus to surprise that it fails to dig into the intriguing ideas set up by its opening act. It never properly interrogates the downsides of this internal Internet’s pervasive presence, for example, beyond showing its characters regularly needing to rest. Having 24/7 access to the thoughts of others is exhausting? BOND. BRAIN BOND Tell us something we don’t know. And when a schism Between missions, you convene opens up, effectively splitting the psionics into two at a (reasonably luxurious) opposing factions, the interpersonal conflicts make a hideout with the rest of your mockery of the bond episodes. Watching one character team, where you can give presents to team members to trying to kill another before agreeing to meet up for a boost your connection with drink and a chat five minutes later feels deeply silly. them. You can trade enemy Those bonds are far better communicated through drops and environmental data its systems. Battling alongside one another builds for these gifts, which hint towards hidden depths to each camaraderie: these are friendships forged in fire and character’s personality, or blood. Teammates will sometimes heal and even revive encourage them to open up. you. Their SAS gauge will refill quicker, allowing you to Quick-tempered Shiden will call upon them more often, while certain attacks of soften when you present him with a feather duster or a pair yours are more explicitly connected to their powers. of glasses, while Kagero When one ally calls out, you can respond, inviting a responds to teddy bears and vision of them to fight by your side. And occasionally acoustic guitars, suggesting a they pull off that triumphant Fire Emblem trick whereby more sensitive side. It’s worth taking the time to talk to them they step in front of you to intercept a potentially fatal all, even if you skip the bond blow. Scarlet Nexus’ overstuffed story might be fixated episode cutscenes: over time on the human brain – and when you skittle a line of your team bond will improve, which makes revives and Vision Others with a train, you’ll be glad of that – but in 7 moves more likely during battle. these moments it recalls where its heart is, too.

RIGHT From its distinctive enemy designs to its dazzling effects (particularly in the Brain Field), this is one of the most visually striking ARPGs we’ve played in some time. MAIN You’ll occasionally be forced to battle Septentrions – elite agents with devastating powers. You’re merely supposed to survive these fights until a cutscene kicks in, but it’s thrilling to find yourself taking chunks off their health bars, even if you don’t get the pleasure of finishing the job. BOTTOM This is hardly a megabucks production, but its budget has been spent wisely – there are finishers for each enemy type, for example

ABOVE Outside the bicycles-as-bludgeons Yakuza series, you will struggle to find a game that lets you put your environment to such effective use in combat. Here you can lob things such as vending machines and lamp posts

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f all the detective offices in all the world, she had to walk into yours. A missing husband. Late nights, suspicions of infidelity, booze on his breath and something herbal underneath it. A black-and-white photo, and a promise made by one deadbeat to the wife of another: you’ll track the missing man down, one way or another. Backbone’s is a distinct shade of noir, one that pays its dues to Raymond Chandler in its opening act but isn’t content to sit within traditional confines for the duration of its story, instead opting to freewheel through genres and themes with reckless abandon in its latter stages. The same goes for developer EggNut’s approach to interactivity: this is an adventure puzzler with precious few puzzles, giving way to a more minimalistic approach to mechanics as time goes on. It’s also a linear tale that wants you to consider the other paths – blowing an interrogation, perhaps, and selling out friends – even if they don’t transpire to have been a real option in retrospect. Like any good private investigator, it’s a bit of a maverick.

Two elements distinguish Backbone from the

likes of Thimbleweed Park, Gunpoint, Unavowed and the rest of the well-stocked retro-noir subgenre. The first is a startling approach to 2.5D visuals that recalls former Raw Fury stablemate The Last Night. Each scene is full of cinematic depth and gritty atmosphere. Every 2D sprite occupies 3D space as if it’s stepping onto a film set, whether that set is the grimy interior of detective Howard Lotor’s apartment or the rainy streets of Granville, where his quarry was last seen drinking away his banker’s salary. Its pixel art and animations are so eyecatching that audio is left in the visuals’ wake. A few smoky jazz numbers elevate the mood, but too often silence prevails, the kind that makes you wonder if your speakers entered standby mode without you noticing. The second notable thing, of course, is that the PI protagonist is a raccoon. He’s in good company: his cab driver friend Anatoly is a beaver. The patrons of the bar The Bite, an early stop in his investigation, are all canine and feline types, while the ruling classes pulling all the strings in the city are known as ‘the Apes’. Naturally, there’s a clear and brutal hierarchy, central to both world-building and specific story beats. Allegorical racism has been there in the background of fantasy RPGs for years now, keeping elves in ghettos and putting jibes in NPCs’ mouths as you pass them, depending on the choices you made in the character creator. Its impact here is admittedly lessened by familiarity, but still provokes thought beyond Howard’s immediate situation, alongside that of investigative journalist Renee, who picks him out of the gutter after a sleuthing session gone awry, and a grisly conspiracy in which all manner of powerful figures are embroiled.

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Backbone Developer EggNut Publisher Raw Fury Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release Out now

Its story moves from old Hollywood pastiche to something more disturbing with perfectly measured timing

THE NEW NOIR

Postmodernism, trilbies and trenchcoats: a triad straight from game design 101. Games can’t help but use film noir with a self-aware tone as a device for recontextualising the past or poking fun at genre conventions, because unlike cinema itself the medium has no sincere in-situ examples of it. Perhaps that’s why it so often appeals to developers who want to say something about the way we play. Thimbleweed Park uses it to comment on nostalgia and fan service, Gunpoint wants to crack wise with observations, and Backbone examines the idea of protagonists as proxies for the player, and our expectations around that. At least until it becomes rote, the Bogart-flick aesthetic seems to be videogame shorthand for fourth-wall breakers.

Despite that grander theme, it’s the pace and trajectory of the smaller-scale narrative that proves Backbone’s strongest asset. Establishing the pertinent figures and rules without silting up the opening act with exposition, its story moves from old-Hollywood pastiche to something more disturbing with perfectly measured timing, and its knack for the unexpected prevails until the credits. Just as Howard and Renee have to come to terms with the fact they’re in way over their heads, the player is forced to shift expectations at speed, too. There is time to drink in the districts of its Vancouver analogue, known only as The City, and even to fiddle with the odd side-objective – two elderly residents of affluent Gastown are that bit less lonely thanks to our meddling – but only just. A screeching left turn lies only a few clicks away at any point. Less well measured, however, are its tonal shifts within conversations and descriptive passages. In the same exchange, Howard might veer from the wry observations of a veteran investigator to a much younger and more contemporary tone of voice, a recognisably millennial nihilism of the Tide-pod-consuming ilk. His conversational partners seem similarly fleeting in tone of voice, sometimes committed to their role of pulling you deeper into the world, and sometimes succumbing to the urge to break the fourth wall and add another layer of postmodern irony. In the end, you can’t be sure whether you’re experiencing Backbone as Howard or as a modern observer peering into a game world. EggNut is far more consistent when it comes to interaction. Not a lifetime ago, it would be unthinkable to make this game without a cavalcade of convoluted, progress-halting puzzles, but there is a light touch to your involvement that prioritises pace over mechanical depth. Ostensibly you’re simply walking back and forth pressing the interact button for the majority of Backbone, but in practice your conversation choices and moments of clue-hoovering are enough to keep you occupying a PI’s brain. And when puzzles do appear, they’re intuitive and satisfying, which makes you wonder why there aren’t more of them. The breakneck plot development could easily withstand another handful of computers to hack and keycodes to find, even if Looking Glass acolytes will invariably solve them on sight. But this is a fine debut. Backbone uses its seductive looks to enrich a conceptually thoughtful and carefully plotted-out world, and delivers real surprises within a genre that is all about adhering to time-honoured conventions. Aside from its minor tonal slips, it is only guilty of building a universe that seems like it could withstand a longer, deeper journey than this. EggNut’s next game should be brilliant – particularly if its creators commit further to saying what they want to say through their worlds and their characters, 7 rather than addressing the player directly.

ABOVE A certain contingent will always try some combination of 0451 on every keypad, hoping their Looking Glass fandom will be rewarded. Backbone’s characters have their own reasons for their codes, though

TOP Arrangements of objects to investigate appear often in the early hour, but they’re conspiciously absent later on, a shift that is made in the name of pacing. MAIN However invested in the lows and lows of Howard Lotor the player might become, Backbone’s gritty streetscapes are consistently wonderful to take in. LEFT The canine on the right with the dreamy dance moves and the burgundy turtle neck is named Audrey. Mr Lynch would be proud

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Mario Golf: Super Rush

lenty would argue that the Mario sports games’ N64 debuts were their peak and they haven’t reached the same level since, yet Camelot remains Nintendo’s go-to when it’s time for the plumber and his Mushroom Kingdom friends to hit the court or the links. With a few exceptions (such as Wii U’s painfully slender Mario Tennis: Ultra Smash), it has been a safe pair of hands, but it has let its normally reliable grip slacken and well and truly shanked this one. It’s rare to play a Nintendo game that feels so fundamentally misguided. Outside a round of Standard Golf, the game’s big feature is that you play at the same time as your opponents. Once you’ve taken your swing, you grab your bag of clubs and run down the course while the ball is in mid-flight, avoiding other players and hazards along the way. The goal is obvious – to hurry the game along – yet there’s a stamina meter to manage, meaning you spend half your time at a gentle trot until the titular dash is available. This allows you to knock your opponents aside, or even displace their ball if you pass through it en route to your own. True, this cuts down the waiting time between turns, particularly if you know someone who’s exasperatingly cautious over each stroke. In practice, Of a miserly six courses, the penultimate Wildweather Woods is the most challenging, largely thanks to localised storms which zap you should you attempt a full-power shot. Special shots, however, negate the effect

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between rivals knocking you over and pace-sapping obstacles such as quicksand, this so-called ‘speed golf’ doesn’t feel much quicker than other golf games that warp you straight to your ball once it’s landed (not least since you still need to watch your opponents finish if you hole out first). It’s farcical that you can effectively ‘win’ a hole having taken more strokes than your opponent simply because you didn’t spend any time examining your lie or considering the wind. Shifting the focus onto boisterous, disruptive play – with special strokes designed solely to make things more difficult for the other players – feels profoundly unsportsmanlike for such a genteel, considered sport. Worse, you don’t even get a picture-in-picture view of PUTTER ALONG your shot. When we chip in for an eagle and an Adventure mode plays like a slightly truncated version of albatross on the same round, we don’t get to see either, the RPG modes in previous and there’s not even a replay option. handheld entries. You’ll play a It’s one of several baffling oversights, along with the variety of events to level up your aiming trajectory failing to properly adjust to the loft of Mii and boost their stats, including one that provides a your chosen club, or the range finder to track course narrative excuse to shake a leg: elevation being entirely unavailable in Speed Golf mode. a desert course where the heat A parade of Biddybuds being one of the main gradually dehydrates you. Mushroom Kingdom gimmicks on the fifth course, Though spoiled by the flawed aiming arc, the timed crossmeanwhile, sums up the oddly drab presentation. We’ve country mode is one of the few resisted revising that Mark Twain quote so beloved of ideas that works, presenting a golf game reviewers, but can avoid it no longer: series of holes to complete in 4 this, unfortunately, is a good sport spoiled. whichever order you choose. Developer Camelot Software Planning Publisher Nintendo Format Switch Release Out now

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Umurangi Generation

all it a long exposure. Umurangi Generation first arrived on PC last year, attracting a cult following and a nomination for the IGF’s Seumas McNally Grand Prize. Now it has arrived on Switch, complete with its Macro DLC pack. It’s a move that has helped many indie darlings break through, and in some ways Nintendo’s console feels like a natural home for this photography-focused game. In handheld mode, with motion controls activated, the screen in your palms makes perfect sense as a viewfinder, as you’re dropped into each of the game’s levels – a hangout spot, a protest, the frontlines of a war – with a beaten-up SLR, a time limit and a shot list of objectives. You might be asked to take a close-up of a graffiti tag, or to use your telephoto lens to snap a portrait of someone in a face mask. The challenge stems first from finding these objects, and then figuring out how to frame them to meet the requirements: how are you going to squeeze seven birds into a single shot? The answer often requires rethinking your surroundings like a parkour traceur, clambering up to an out-of-reach spot or squeezing into a tight corner. Unfortunately, doing so means wrestling with controls that, when you’re not peering down the lens The best levels in Umurangi Generation are very much like the ideal locations for real-world photography: colourful, well-lit and packed with all sorts of interesting subjects waiting to be captured on camera

Developer/publisher Origame Digital Format PC, Switch (tested) Release Out now

GEARING UP

One thing Umurangi Generation can boast is perhaps the most relatable upgrade system of any game we’ve played. You start out with a fairly useless camera, spending your earnings from each new foray on new lenses and editing tools. More can be unlocked by completing each stage’s bonus objectives, and it’s worth investing the time. A full suite makes it considerably easier to take attractive photos, and to grab the required shots – the ultra-wide-angle lens in particular is borderline OP.

of your camera, prove considerably less intuitive. The floaty jump has a tendency to wedge us into the scenery, while we never quite find a thumbstick sensitivity that feels right for both aiming the camera and moving around the world. After a few too many frustrations, pride in our work starts to ebb away, and instead of those early careful compositions, we’re soon firing off unfocused shots we suspect will tick the necessary boxes. All too often, they do. Artistry, however, isn’t really the objective of Umurangi Generation’s photography. Instead, its makers are more interested in the camera lens as a way of making you look more closely at the world around you, piecing together the story of its setting as you examine each detail-rich environment. It’s a run-down cyberpunk future informed by Maori culture and Jet Set Radio, by way of Neon Genesis Evangelion and the increasingly dystopian nature of our present day. The closing credits dedicate the game to “the last generation who has to watch the world die”, and that anger bleeds into every aspect of the game. The messages screamed via graffiti on every available wall; the brilliantly abrasive soundtrack; the visibly large polygons that make up its characters and world – Umurangi Generation is a game of jagged edges, in many more ways than one. We just wish that didn’t apply 6 to how it so often feels in the hands.

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Minute Of Islands

world on the brink of collapse, where an airborne threat is having a devastating effect, while people protect themselves with face coverings – apart from one who believes that they alone can fix the problem. No, we didn’t expect Minute Of Islands to be such a stark reflection of the past 18 months, either, but this narrative-led puzzle-platformer manages to burrow beneath its charming comic-book stylings to unearth unsettling imagery and quietly upsetting scenes. Young mechanic Mo is tasked with maintaining ancient machines that keep a toxic fungal spore at bay from her archipelago home. When they all break down at once, she embarks on a desperate journey to fix them. But coming to the surface also means running into family members – encounters that trigger old resentments. These aren’t apparent from Mo’s stoic expression, but her thoughts are conveyed by Megan Gay’s excellent narration, which flits between a fairytale cadence and a more biting tone. It complements Minute Of Islands’ Belgian-comics aesthetic that at first appears family-friendly until the sight of a whale carcass, intestines spilled all over the shore, tells you otherwise. Mo’s boat functions as little more than a meditative loading screen as you sail from one island to the next – a shame because its fascinating biomechanical nature would have been worth exploring further

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Yet while Studio Fizbin’s game serves up some striking visuals that will linger in the memory – often the grotesque kind we’d rather didn’t stick – it’s also often too introspective for its own good. That leaves much of its world a stubborn enigma, such as how there even came to be four giants keeping the cogs of the island’s machines turning while imprisoned underground in the first place. Mechanically speaking, it offers the bare minimum, too. Mo’s special Omni Switch is supposed to be an all-purpose tool for solving puzzles, so it’s disappointing to discover that it essentially amounts to a compass, and that puzzles where you insert it like a lever into a machine A LONG TIME ARCHIPELAGO before directing an energy current to kickstart another The islands you visit are almost are broadly the same. Occasionally, Mo’s reckless all places Mo is familiar with. journey through the toxic spores leads to some more Objects therefore yield not just hallucinatory sequences, but the platforming elements observations but instances here are also rudimentary and repetitive. where you’re prompted to Nonetheless, Mo’s quest is an intriguing ‘remember’ each island and its inhabitants. They’re examination of what it means to be a young chosen essentially narrative collectibles, hero given the burden of saving the world in utterly designed to encourage more hopeless circumstances. However, it’s also a reminder thorough exploration for that there are no quick fixes, nor should one person completionists. However, the game’s linear nature means that bear this responsibility alone. While Minute Of Islands once you move on from one lays this message on rather thickly towards the end, island, there’s no opportunity and suffers from rote mechanics, it’s an all-too to return – except by starting 6 timely (big) mood piece. another playthrough. Publisher Mixtvision Developer Studio Fizbin Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release Out now

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Strangeland

he title ‘Strangeland’ openly promises something weird, and the setting of Wormwood Studios’ (Primordia) twisted point-and-click adventure, made in collaboration with genre vet Wadjet Eye Games, delivers on that pledge. In this murky otherworld, a thin path over a yawning abyss leads to a circus entered via a sinister clown’s gaping maw, its tongue your welcome mat. Later you meet a giant cicada which acts as a fasttravel system, a talking furnace, and an acid-spitting cosmic horror abomination in a glass case – and that’s not even the most disturbing creature you’ll encounter. It’s cut from a similar cloth to Cyberdreams’ adaptation of I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream, while its eerie, dreamlike quality and moments of body horror (presented in grainy close-up) are redolent of Dark Seed. Though its dialogue can sometimes be similarly opaque, it’s better at subtly seeding mysteries and hinting towards solutions with audiovisual cues – a flash of light here, a raven’s call there. While you will be mocked for using it, there’s a phone that offers more direct clues, but with repetition built into its story (there are many ways to die, though the world is compact and you’ll respawn with your held items and progress intact), you soon tune into Strangeland’s wonky logic.

Puzzle design is fine, if occasionally slightly uninspired – using a grapple to pull an out-of-reach lever is hardly fresh thinking in videogames, even if the process you go through to obtain the tool is a little different

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Developer Wormwood Studios Publisher Wadjet Eye Games Format PC Release Out now

SICK JOKE

Games that trade in weighty material have a tendency to take themselves too seriously. Strangeland, however, recognises that comedy can be a coping mechanism, and its gallows humour is one of its greatest assets. Not all of its jokes land, but sometimes that’s the point: each time you die, the clown will tell you a deliberately bad variant on a classic gag. Some of the deaths you suffer are designed as dark punchlines, and you earn an achievement for finding them all.

Within this unsettling pixel-art world are elements that are troubling in different ways. The amnesiac protagonist – unkempt, with greasy hair and wild eyes – wears a straitjacket, while the first thing you see when you enter the circus is a woman throwing herself down a well, motivating him to try to save her. It might be an unconventional rescue attempt, but it’s no surprise that these familiar tropes ultimately amount to a man confronting his inner demons. Grief, loss, self-harm and suicide are thrown into the macabre mix, alongside nods to Nietzsche, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and Norse mythology. Strangeland’s script attempts to reckon with the way it presents its themes, suggesting we all use familiar symbols – such as a snarling black dog – to make sense of what we don’t understand. Yet its moments of self-admonishment (“In this story, there’s only room for one woman,” mock three Moirailike sisters, wearing masks to present as men) simply feel like it’s trying to have its cake and eat it. Among this “grab-bag of myths and masks” are moments of genuine intrigue, but its vague storytelling lacks the specificities that would make it universal; its metaphors, by contrast, are overexplained. An ‘In Memoriam’ note suggests the creation of Strangeland may well have been cathartic for the development team, but by the time its climax delivers a glimmer of 6 hope, you wish it had been a little weirder.

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ifflas’ latest is a bundle of fascinating contradictions and juxtapositions. In Ynglet, the line between safety and peril is only ever a few pixels thick. You control a creature that feels by turns graceful and clumsy, weightless and heavy. You can be plummeting one moment and soaring the next. Its world is a top-down map presented as a side-scroller, in which microscopic organisms navigate spaces the size of city districts. Wonderfully abstract yet somehow oddly personal, it’s calming then exhilarating, both a mellow exploration game and a challenging twitch platformer (that isn’t really a platformer at all). And it’s entirely up to you how you experience it. Confused? You won’t be. This is a strange game on the surface, but a remarkably intuitive one to play, constructed as it is with a rare degree of consideration for every type of player. If we’re being reductive, it’s somewhere in the ballpark of an arthouse Ecco The Dolphin. You control a jellyfish-like creature with a trail of thin tendrils, launching yourself between what are best described as bubbles – even though they’re rarely round, and piercing their surface doesn’t pop them. In the spaces between them you’re a dead weight, so you need to consider your exit point as you leap from one to

There are mini-challenges throughout: some collectables require you to pass through five glowing circles without touching a bubble, while a few stages have hidden rails and routes revealed by microbial allies

Ynglet the next. Sometimes those gaps are too large, but a mid-air dash allows you to redirect yourself – briefly slowing time so you can fine-tune your trajectory back toward the amniotic embrace of the next bubble. Assuming, that is, they don’t suddenly disappear when you boost, or eject you after a few seconds. Between these floating membranes, you’ll find thin red and blue lines into which you can launch yourself: your aiming line needs to connect with the reds to rebound off them, while the blues bounce you off automatically. Both reset your single-use boost, which lets you string together a range of daredevil moves. Drop off the bottom of the screen, and your fall wraps CITY LIMITS around to the top, landing you in the last bubble you Being able to set your own activated by staying still inside it for a few seconds. respawn points allows for a granularity of challenge we Beyond its meticulously refined controls and the rarely see, though there are delightful tactility of it all (every action is accompanied already three preset difficulty by an algorithmic electronic score, and sudden, thrilling settings (Chill, Tricky and Challenging) alongside tweaks flourishes of colour), these diegetic checkpoints are to game speed, movement Ynglet’s real stroke of design genius. Cautious players assist, gravity and air control. can take a breather ahead of the next set of leaps and Either way, only the most dedicated players will unlock its dashes, while experts and risk-takers can up the stakes final achievement. To earn 101 by refusing to pause. With heart-stopping shortcuts per cent completion, you’ll need and collectables encouraging deliberate exploration, this to play the game in various modestly ingenious game bears the hallmarks of a areas around Copenhagen, an creator keen to follow his own path, and to give abstracted version of which 8 provides the setting for Ynglet. his players the freedom to choose theirs. Publisher Triple Topping Developer Nifflas Format PC Release Out now

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Ubisoft’s overture was one part method acting, one part madness

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Publisher Ubisoft Developer Ubisoft Montreal Format PC, PS3, 360 Release 2007

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This stubborn newness runs deeper still. Today, Ubisoft is known for the cross-pollination of its franchises, the autocover mechanic from one series turning up in two or three others. But Désilets’ team took almost nothing from their colleagues, to the point of self-sabotage. Critically acclaimed stealth games had been developed under the same roof in Montreal, and Assassin’s Creed could certainly have benefited from the brains of the guards in the Splinter Cell series, with their multiple levels of player awareness. Yet that learning was tossed aside. In theory, this was because Assassin’s Creed was building a new paradigm based on social stealth: a ruleset in which you relied on good behaviour, rather than deep shadows, to blend into the background. Yet in practice, your ability to meld with the foot traffic in Acre is very limited, dependent on whether there happens to be a group of white-hooded scholars passing nearby. While there are creative options for escape, such as the counterintuitive thrill of sitting calmly on a bench as your pursuers hurry by, you’re often forced to rely on stripped-back versions of traditional stealth mechanics to remain undetected in the first place. And while it’s possible to deal with an

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The four colourful face buttons of a controller, meanwhile, are reimagined as a holistic representation of the human body’s extremities. Triangle handles the head, allowing you to scout for enemies or spot opportunities from a vantage point; Square and Circle are the arms, dedicated to grabbing handholds, swinging swords, and pushing guards over ledges. Cross, finally, is reserved for matters of the feet, carrying you out of trouble at top speed. It’s a control scheme that reads like a discredited medieval theory of medicine, and is truly baffling for a new player. Subsequent entries managed to ditch much of this language without fundamental changes to the button mapping, which suggests Désilets’ protagonist puppetry may not have been so revolutionary after all. But Assassin’s Creed deserves credit for introducing a generation to contextual controls – in turn enabling more complex action games that used every button on the pad and then some, knowing that players could keep up.

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istory records, with a questionable level of accuracy, that Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad hated the water. Poke even one of his toes into the Barada River, and the synchronisation bar that measures your commitment to recreating the events of his life drops straight to zero. The man would stick a blade into a English crusader in public, but a bracing swim in the waterways of Damascus? Far outside the bounds of possibility, academics agree. It’s fair to assume, then, that Altaïr wouldn’t be fond of a naval metaphor. But 13 games into a cycle of constant iteration, the Assassin’s Creed series is the quintessential Ship of Theseus. Going back now to the 2007 game that started it all, there’s almost no part that hasn’t been replaced in the years since. There’s the occasional mannerism that’s familiar: the rhythmic way the assassin shifts his weight during a climb, and his bird-like bearing on a spire. But even those with an intimate knowledge of Assassin’s Creed’s past decade would find themselves off-balance in Patrice Désilets’ strange first experiment. This is a supposed stealth game in which there are no tools for distraction; in which silent takedowns are finicky and escalating street fights the norm; in which you thunder into town on horseback then methodically work the alleys for information. It’s contradictory, frustrating, and fails to live up to its central fantasy – but is beguilingly different to the games it birthed. By his own admission, Désilets has a tendency to reinvent the wheel. In Assassin’s Creed, his first step was to redescribe it. The row of small white rectangles in the top-left corner on the screen may resemble a health bar, but they actually symbolise your tether to Altaïr’s memories. Take too many hits, or dole them out to civilians, and you’ll lose your connection. Not as a punishment, per se, but because that’s not how the man lived. Save some innocents or clamber up a church and suddenly you’re starting to resemble Altaïr as his friends knew him. Success in Assassin’s Creed is an act of roleplay – even if, for the most part, it involves simply staying alive. Or avoiding water.

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individual spotter before a situation escalates, your witness indicator gives little indication of which eyes are watching. A single shout from a guard typically devolves into a Jerusalem-set Benny Hill routine. It’s comforting, then, that Assassin’s Creed doesn’t suffer from the usual dissonance between player and character. Your cack-handed antics are matched by unconcealed contempt from your peers in the Brotherhood, who Altaïr has riled with his hotheadedness. It’s a trick more action games should employ: reflecting back the self-hate of new and clumsy players, rather than surrounding them with sycophants. It feels right, novel even, to be disrespected. And when your grudging allies begin to thaw, it feels that you’ve earned their warmth. It’s with the goal of teaching some humility that Assassin leader Al Mualim

mind as well as their whereabouts. The steward of Acre can be relied upon to retreat to the back of his citadel whenever challenged by King Richard’s authority – his headspace reflected in level design. Additional investigation yields further detail, including maps of guard positions and potential entry points. Studying them is key to your preparation, and yet you’ll only find them by digging in the pause menu among

SQUEEZING INFORMANTS FOR INTEL IS AN IDEA THAT HASN’T SURVIVED INTO ASSASSIN’S CREED’S SEQUELS

The first Assassin’s Creed is a rarity in the series as a whole: a game where the Templars bother to explain their motives

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stipulates that you hunt down your targets yourself – personally handling the drudgework of piecing together the location, mindset and weaknesses of your prey. And so you step out on the town, pursuing leads and squeezing informants for intel. It’s an idea that hasn’t survived into Assassin’s Creed’s sequels, but is also one of its best. Whenever an Assassin’s Bureau chief begins imparting local knowledge, it’s worth paying proper attention. If the man on the ground says you ought to sniff around the rich district’s southernmost church, then you can save yourself much scaling of buildings elsewhere. The same approach applies once you’ve made contact with an informant – the closer you listen, the less likely it is you’ll make a meal of the coming assassination. At their best, these briefings give you a sense of your target’s state of

the stats and sound options – something the game never teaches you adequately. It’s fair to assume many players never happened upon the materials they’d worked so diligently to acquire. Why would Ubisoft choose to bury such pertinent information? It’s a question answered, indirectly, by Al Mualim – who wants Altaïr to become not just a soldier, but a surveyor. “Like any task, knowledge precedes action,” he says. “Information learned is more valuable than information given.” It’s a good line, but even so: a tooltip wouldn’t have hurt.

Once you’ve learned to commit those maps to memory, the assassinations themselves take on new weight, becoming exams you’ve practised for. Successfully creeping up on your target without alerting

Swimming mechanics were added in later sequels. Here, though, the sea is essentially lava, making Acre’s docks frustrating to traverse

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A direction-sensitive grab button can be satisfyingly applied on rooftops to hurl enemies down to street level – but the commotion will attract extra combatants

their bodyguards is a source of pride and relief. Especially since the game regularly seeks to undermine you with scripted chases and cinematics. This is no murder sandbox, sadly, and the existence of the recent Hitman trilogy certainly doesn’t flatter it. Even outside the investigation phase, however, Assassin’s Creed is admirably dedicated to procedure. The ritual night’s rest before the kill; the gifting of a feather from the chief of the local Assassin’s Bureau, which Altaïr paints with blood once the deed is done; the return to Al Mualim in Masyaf; and finally, the horseback ride out to your next destination. As gameplay loops go, it’s rather a large one, justifying the accusations of repetition. Rarely has a triple-A game gone to such lengths to place you inside the costume of an action hero, during downtime as well as in the set-piece moments of their life. The result, to borrow Abstergo

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The wider world between cities is soundtracked by constant battle music as you kite enemies across the kingdom – but is mercifully skippable later

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Assassin’s Creed set Ubisoft, and the industry, on the path toward the free-roam collectible hunt as a dominant art form. Yet the game nearly didn’t have collectibles at all. Those 420 flags and 60 killable Templars were distributed across the Kingdom during just five days in late development – so late, there was no time for testing. The build in which they were implemented was burned directly to disc and released at retail, selling eight million copies. “It’s a miracle that the game didn’t just melt your console or whatever,” Charles Randall, the game’s fight system AI lead, recently tweeted. The result, though, was remarkably bug-free – excepting a Templar who had a chance of falling through the world, denying the player a kill and 100per-cent completion.

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terminology, is better synchronisation between player and protagonist. It’s just a shame that so many parts of that loop fail to support the game’s supposed main themes. Only a fraction of your investigation time is spent spying or pickpocketing, activities that employ social stealth. Instead, many informants require you to break cover, scrapping in the street or, in the most demeaning cases, collecting flags from nearby rooftops before they’ll talk. “Have you forgotten the meaning of subtlety?” Jerusalem bureau head Malik asks during a typically heated exchange. It would be a prompt to reconsider your approach – if only you had the tools to do so. Those tools did come, eventually. Assassin’s Creed was a smash hit, giving its developers time to fill the gaps in its mechanics – to make its structure less strange, for better and for worse. Lessons from the Splinter Cell and Far Cry series were folded in over time, and by 2014’s Unity you could just about blend with the crowd and pass completely unknown in the city, the way the fiction of the assassins had always suggested they could. The series has played host to a variety of genres since: wilderness survival, pirate fantasy, Witcher-style RPG. Yet it still has a distinct ruleset of its own, and that’s down to the bloody-minded determination of Désilets and his team to lay down new flooring, granting Assassin’s Creed an essential oddness that, even as all the original parts have been replaced, can never quite be finessed away. n 127

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T H E

L O N G

G A M E

A progress report on the games we just can’t quit

Spiritfarer

Developer/publisher Thunder Lotus Games Format PC, PS4, Stadia, Switch, Xbox One Release 2020

ith half a million copies sold to date, Spiritfarer has undoubtedly struck a chord. This is a game of great emotional ambition, with real teeth behind that serene Disney-Pixar smile. But there were more than a few notes of criticism mixed in with the warm initial reception. It can be frustrating, both by accident and design. And while it’s never cruel, it can be brutally affecting. Chief among those problems is its ending, a quiet, lonely anticlimax that seems to go against the central theme of companionship at the end of life. ‘We heard it loud and clear,’ Thunder Lotus noted on its website, referring to fan feedback. ‘We really gave it our all to make Stella’s story and its conclusion more satisfying.’ Listening to fans can be an awkward prospect for many reasons, and from the mouth of a bigger developer those words might precede some serious pandering. But this is no corporate megateam: it’s an indie studio based in snowy Montreal trying to tackle an incredibly delicate subject. What could be harder to finish than a story about death? It’s that awkward conclusion that the free ‘Lily Update’ seeks to fix – Lily being the first of several new characters the studio plans to introduce over the coming months. She’s the protagonist’s sister, a rare

figure from the ‘real’ world breaking into Spiritfarer’s cosy limbo, here to fill in the blanks of Stella’s life and clarify a few points that the original story left ambiguous. As well as a narrative fix, Lily’s useful to have around: with her on board, the ship can finally sail at night. It’s one of several small but well-considered quality-of-life improvements that make returning to the spirit world a much smoother experience. ‘Less is more’ might be the golden rule when it comes to writing, but in Lily’s case a little more goes a long way. Her interludes give us a much-needed view into Stella’s world and point – ever so slightly – towards the kind of troubled thoughts that might swirl behind her exuberant smile. And while the ending still isn’t perfect, it does give us at least a hint of the love she’s leaving behind. It simply feels right; Stella of all people deserves a little company at the end. Two more expansions are planned for release before the year’s out. Adding more passengers to the floating palliative care ward that is Stella’s ship feels rather ghoulish – parcelling out units of grief and catharsis in the way other games sell funny outfits. But balancing dissonant tones is what Spiritfarer is all about. And if the Lily update is anything to go by, Thunder Lotus has the tact and skill to pull it off. n 129