Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2023 i Edge

Despite the name, there are no thin white dukes in Galaxy Grove’s relaxing puzzler. Nor do its locomotive operators drive like demons, preferring to chug gently along tracks you’ve placed to form supply lines between buildings that, in the game’s most dramatic moments, thud into the landscape as if hurled down by an angry god. It’s oddly akin to the arrival of a mech in Titanfall, though ‘standby for dairy farm’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. Linking these structures is straightforward at first: place a station adjacent to a wheat farm and another next to a mill and then drag a track between the two and you’ve completed a connection. But soon the topography becomes a factor. Sending a track up a cliff requires you to shell…

Developer Thunder Lotus Games Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, Xbox Series Release 2024  Sometimes you need a good cry to get it out of your system – and so, having pulled every trick in the book to make us all weep over 2020’s mawkish Spiritfarer, Montreal’s Thunder Lotus Games is returning to its action roots with this co-op Roguelike. It’s closest in feel to the developer’s 2015’s top-down adventure Jøtun, except this time you’re accompanied on the road from hell to heaven (via a pit stop at purgatory) by up to 32 other warriors. You’ll need to work together to survive, not just splitting the toil of tackling enemy hordes, but to pull off co-operative moves, whether launching volleys of light arrows or healing other players. Since the difficulty…

Developer/publisher Xbox Game Studios (Playground Games) Format PC, Xbox Series Release TBA We recognise the inimitable tones of Richard Ayoade several seconds before his (impressive if slightly uncanny) digital likeness appears. Playground Games is presumably confident that plenty of viewers will, opening its trailer on a black screen before introducing us to Ayoade’s Dave, a ‘vegetable enthusiast’ addressing the camera as if taking part in a mockumentary. This is both an inspired piece of casting and the perfect choice for reintroducing a game after two years of silence: a beloved British comic actor whose presence is entirely in keeping with previous entries immediately suggests the series’ new custodians have understood the brief. If nothing else, it all but proves that – at least in terms of tone – Fable…

Developer Harebrained Schemes Publisher Paradox Interactive Format PC, Xbox Series Release October 3  With The Bearded Ladies dropping the ball somewhat with Miasma Chronicles, there’s an opening for Harebrained Schemes to fill the void with this pulpy combination of realtime infiltration and turn-based tactics. Set in an alternate 1930s, it sends the eponymous organisation on a globe-trotting mission to prevent a cult from taking over the world – but with all but one of the league’s finest agents dead, the last remaining founding member is forced to recruit the ‘best of the worst’. Since you’re playing a band of misfits, it’s only fitting that the developer has its cast playing against (stereo)type – lantern-jawed war hero turned robber Eddie has the physique of a boxer but is actually a saboteur,…

Developer Ninja Theory Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, Xbox Series Release 2024 After the more action-led approach of Hellblade II’s previous teaser, here is a reminder not to expect Microsoft’s equivalent to Sony’s God Of War. (You could argue that this is more like Xbox’s Horizon, given Senua has an even chattier inner monologue than Aloy.) But since we’re already aware of her psychosis, it is an odd choice to highlight it in a cinematic that otherwise gives almost nothing away – it would be unwise to read too much into the utterances of those purposely contradictory voiceovers. The trailer is a formidable flex of technological muscle, with Ninja Theory’s cutting-edge performance capture replicating every twitch of Melina Juergens’ expressive face. But Xbox Game Studios once again passes up…

Earlier this year, Ash Ketchum finally retired from his quarter-century campaign to become a Pokémon master. Greg Lobanov and friends surely couldn’t have known this was coming when they began work on their followup to 2020’s exquisite Chicory: A Colorful Tale – yet nonetheless, Beastieball opens by asking what might happen if his story had played out in realtime. Here, local hero Redd, anime hair squashed under the peak of a baseball cap and unruly stubble sprouting from his chin, is cast in the classic sports-movie role of the champ whose best days are behind him. It’s easy to imagine this guy watching videos of old battles from his sofa, a too-early-in-the-day beer warming in his hand. Luckily, though, it’s not Redd whose story you pick up here, instead assembling…

Developer/publisher nDreams Format PSVR2 Release Out now As arguably the defining tool of videogame interactions over the decades, it’s been no surprise to see the gun carry over into VR – as lightgun-powered games of old taught us, point-andshoot interactions are even more satisfying when carried out with your entire upper body. And at first Synapse seems to follow in the established tradition, offering a snappy update of Time Crisis. Where in those games you might take cover by applying foot to pedal, here you can manually grab hold of any piece of geometry to pull yourself behind it, a method that can also be used to launch your own body around the levels. Reloading is made similarly physical, requiring you to slam an ejected clip back into the gun…

Developer/publisher Visai Games Format PC (tested), PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release July 31 V enba pulls out her mother’s tattered cookbook and frowns: a vital step in a handwritten recipe she’d been hoping to recreate for her husband’s breakfast has been smudged. Achieving the desired result in Visai Games’ narrative-led cooking game, then, requires you to follow the instructions you have been given and also figure out the parts you haven’t. It’s a neat way to capture the trial-and-error process of cooking an unfamiliar dish, but it doubles as a metaphor for its protagonist’s circumstances. Having uprooted their lives to move to Canada, Tamil couple Venba and Paavalan likewise feel they’re missing something. Can they – and you – adapt, without knowing what they’re supposed to be…

Developer Second Dinner Studios Publisher Nuverse Format Android, iOS, PC Release 2022 A progress report on the games we just can’t quit A tthe time of our review in E379, we couldn’t be sure whether Marvel Snap was a work of genius or simply a compulsion. Months later, having kicked the habit a couple of times and come crawling back, we can see it’s a little of both. But after hundreds of matches, that this tiny game – three lanes, a deck of 12, and still a smaller card pool than Hearthstone at launch – is able to produce moments of surprise at combinations and strategies we’ve never seen before? There’s got to be a bit of genius in there. Yes, every attempt to improve the game’s free-toplay economy and…

Deferred pleasure was always the driving force of E3, as the industry decamped to California for a tantalisingly brief taste of coming attractions. But you’re not, surely, supposed to leave thinking primarily about the future of the show itself. This began with last June’s incarnation, the first with Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest stepping into the hole left by E3’s cancellation not just online but in person, in the old ancestral home of LA. Play Days was an embryonic event, but for understandable reasons, and Keighley’s lot made a convincing argument that SGF could carve out its own niche alongside E3, which US industry body ESA had confirmed that same month would be returning for 2023. That optimism is rather harder to sustain now. E3 2023 didn’t actually happen, of…

Developer Bethesda Game Studios Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, Xbox Series Release September 6 As much as Todd Howard wants to convince us that Bethesda has “never tried to make a game like this”, we’re not buying it. For all of its spacefaring ambitions, the 45-minute presentation bookending Xbox’s showcase makes one thing very clear: Starfield represents a greatest-hits record for the veteran open-world studio. Not that Bethesda is limiting itself to borrowing from its own back catalogue. Using a scanner allows you to preview the resources and inhabitants of a planet in the manner of Mass Effect 2, while the influence of No Man’s Sky is felt in the procedurally generated environments you explore upon landing. Bethesda’s Creation Engine 2 continues to impress, offering detailed landscapes populated with…

Developer/publisher Xbox Game Studios (InXile Entertainment) Format PC, Xbox Series Release TBA Showtunes playing from speakers. A steampunk city with an art nouveau aesthetic. Heavily armed automata controlled by a dictator set on bending the world to their will. The team at InExile aren’t so much borrowing from BioShock Infinite as stripping it for parts, resulting in a firstperson action game which resembles Columbia with the serial numbers filed off. This extends to combat, which takes cues from immersive sims: one power allows our protagonist to electrify a set of spinning blades, for example, while another grants them the ability to manipulate time. And although its narrative shifts its focus from American frontierism to British colonialism, it’s not enough to quieten our sense of déjà vu. We remain cautiously optimistic,…

Developer Microbird Games Publisher Curve Games Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release 2024 The cel-shaded pop-art aesthetic of Microbird Games’ debut was always likely to turn heads, but its self-referential approach to dungeon-crawling and social-simulation elements might ultimately be a bigger draw. It’s set in a former skiing resort in the Alps, which attracts tourists and adventurers from across the world when a series of magical dungeons appears out of nowhere. You fill the shoes of one such adventurer, Luisa, spending much of your time flitting between a ski lodge and these labyrinths, each brimming with twisted monsters. Luisa navigates her surroundings on foot, swinging on ziplines, grinding railings, and solving environmental puzzles to reach new areas and scavenge treasures. Combat fits the fastfiring realtime ARPG template, with…

Developer Asobo Studio Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, Xbox Series Release 2024 Even with an opening caption announcing “the next generation of Microsoft Flight Simulator”, it takes a little while for the penny to drop: this isn’t an expansion, but a standalone sequel. We bristle – until we realise it’s somehow been four years since Asobo’s successful reboot and that it’s not too soon for a followup. Not least given what’s on offer here: encouraging you to “pursue your dream of a career in aviation”, it presents a huge variety of options, from helicopter mountain rescue and cargo-transport operations to crop-dusting missions. There are scientific research quests that ask you to fly close to climatological phenomena, VIP charter flights, and hot-air balloon tours besides. It’s a clever way to…

Even with remakes as firm fixtures on the release calendar, it seems overly self-conscious for a developer to have its game’s title state as much. So when Square Enix did exactly that with Final Fantasy VII Remake, the first chapter in a three-part retelling of this classic RPG, it should have been a clue that this wasn’t going to be a scene-for-scene refurbishment. With second instalment Rebirth being framed as an “unknown journey”, the gloves seem well and truly off. Still, it would be unwise to alienate an audience that is still mostly showing up to experience one of videogames’ most beloved stories with a current-gen glow-up. So despite an initial curveball with news coverage of a natural disaster befalling a previously unseen sector in Midgar, Rebirth’s focus is on…

Developer/publisher CD Projekt (CD Projekt Red) Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Release September 26 Since Cyberpunk’s launch, the polished press demos of E3s past have become infamous for their smoke and mirrors. But a lot has changed since then. We sit down for 90 minutes with the game’s expansion, and with quest director Paweł Sasko, a man who has the air of having read every review. If there are any remaining doubts that CD Projekt has learned its lesson, they dissipate when, halfway through that time, Sasko says the magic words. “I have a proposition: let’s just fuck around with some systems.” No sticking to the scripted path here, then. We’re encouraged to create our own chaos, summoning a vehicle (using the new, streamlined system) and using its chassis-mounted machine…

Format PC, Switch Developer Color Gray Games Publisher Playstack Origin Latvia Release 2022 Anyone who’s played Color Gray Games’ offbeat detective story will know that it revolves around a sinister secret brotherhood, a Freemason-like cult obsessed with sticking to the upper rungs of society. It was a very different kind of brotherhood that brought the game into being, however, as a pair of Latvian siblings – one an artist, the other a programmer and former co-founder of a socialnetworking game firm – combined their talents to produce this indie gem. Not that they necessarily expected to get that far, having set out with extremely modest ambitions. As we discuss the origin story of The Case Of The Golden Idol with Ernests and Andrejs Klavinš, words such as “dabble” and “tinker”…

Developer Accidently Awesome Publisher PID Games, East2West Games Format PC Release July 18 P icture a stray red sock, inadvertently thrown in with a white wash in a hand-cranked spin dryer. Now imagine it darting around the drum, as if consciously trying to avoid turning everything else in there a fetching shade of pink. Surviving this chaotic twin-stick shooter – as a peculiarly nimble slug trapped within a series of geometrically shaped levels that move with you, each crowded with enemies – feels a little like that. Space, in other words, is at a premium, and touching anything (bar the odd bubble that contains a weapon or a restorative) tends to be a bad idea. You have an ace in reserve, however. When dodging left and right isn’t enough to…

Just as expected, Apple’s entry into the world of extended reality (or XR, encapsulating both VR and AR) diverges from the path trodden by the likes of Meta and Valve. However, rather than presenting something that gets closer to the construction ideal of a pair of spectacles, the company’s Vision Pro hardware, unveiled at its WWDC event in June, turns out to be almost as obtrusive as any other headset we’ve been invited to strap to our faces in recent years.  And it has to be: in order to deliver the kind of performance required to facilitate its unique feature set, the Vision Pro headset is loaded with more technology than has ever been crammed into such a device, with Apple’s M2 silicon working in concert with its new R1…

Developer/publisher Xbox Game Studios (Turn10 Studios) Format PC, Xbox Series Release October 10 With the Horizon series putting a more approachable, welcoming face on the sim racer, Gran Turismo 7 becoming a wonderfully earnest and idiosyncratic celebration of car culture, and the likes of iRacing and Project CARS burrowing deeper into their hardcore niche, where does that leave Forza Motorsport? This is a series that has effectively been usurped by its brighter, brasher offshoot – in the six years since FM7, we’ve seen two very different Horizons, after all. The answer lies in doubling down on everything it has always done well: this is effectively the videogame equivalent of a V8 engine and diamond piston set, with advances in machine learning powering the new dawn of an 18-year-old racing…

Developer/publisher Xbox Game Studios (Compulsion Games) Format PC, Xbox Series Release TBA Between the vaudeville trappings of puzzler Contrast and the ’60s psychedelia of survival Roguelike We Happy Few, Compulsion Games can certainly deliver a distinctive aesthetic. So it’s no great surprise that some of the most memorable imagery of the Xbox showcase should come from the Montreal studio. Via an angular, stop-motion visual style redolent of animation house Laika, it introduces us to demonic blues guitarist Shakin’ Bones, perched on a pier in a Mississippi bayou. His crooning is interrupted by the game’s protagonist Hazel, who asks for help locating a creature that is, as trailer convention dictates, about to rise up from the swamp behind her. Handsome stuff, though with no introduction beyond the basso-profundo “world premiere”,…

Developer/publisher Xbox Game Studios (Obsidian Entertainment) Format PC, Xbox Series Release 2024 Might Ghostwire: Tokyo turn out to be one of the most unexpectedly influential games of its generation? It appears to have inspired the recent wave of elaborate spellcasting animations in titles such as Immortals Of Aveum and this, a firstperson sword-and-sorcery roleplayer. It’s perhaps the most noteworthy element in a game that resembles nothing so much as a new-gen take on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, with the gamma and saturation levels bumped up in post-production. Sent to an island called The Living Lands to investigate a plague – one that causes fungi to sprout on zombies and bears alike – your envoy will amass an arsenal of weapons (from flintlock pistols to frost axes) and curses (binding…

Developer Don’t Nod Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, Xbox Series Release Autumn VR and climbing have proved natural bedfellows, but it’s taken a while for flat games to catch up. Encouraged, perhaps, by Breath Of The Wild’s vertical exploration, and maybe even Death Stranding’s idea of landscape as adversary, Don’t Nod’s latest suggests a more involving alternative to the traditional blockbuster approach. No more pushing up on the analogue stick and tapping a button to move between clearly marked handholds; here, your stick inputs must be accompanied by squeezes of the left and right triggers to cling on. As you ascend a mountain littered with shipwrecks (the title is a French term referring to low tide), the visual clues to guide you are subtler, the stylised art ensuring…

Nintendo’s fondness for remakes or remasters of older games, or sustaining more current ones via DLC – an approach that has rarely been so evident as during this summer’s Direct – means it doesn’t feel like it’s been six years since the last mainline Mario game. Or, for that matter, 11 since its sidescrolling predecessor. With Ubisoft’s Yves Guillemot lamenting the sales performance of Mario+Rabbids: Sparks Of Hope, citing Nintendo’s advice not to release two similar games on the same hardware, you can understand why it waited. Though Guillemot’s suggestion of being told to hang on for new hardware raises a question: given Switch’s successor appears to be just around the corner, is it not unusual for a new Mario game to be released so close to the end of…

Game Star Wars: Outlaws Developer Massive Entertainment Publisher Ubisoft, Lucasfilm Games Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Release TBA NEW HOPES In order to develop both this game and Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora side by side, Massive has divided itself into “two very separate teams”, Gerighty explains. Both games are, of course, a step away from Massive’s previous work – “after eight years of The Division, Outlaws seems, that the latter is actually the “slightly larger team within Massive”. Though of course, given the way Ubisoft operates, that doesn’t tell the full story. There are nine other studios credited on Outlaws, from Bucharest to Shanghai, and Gerighty admits even he doesn’t know the total number of people working on it across the world. the core team felt like it was time…

Developer Umanimation, Un Je Ne Sais Quoi Publisher Un Je Ne Sais Quoi, Focus Entertainment Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch (tested), Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Out now A fter her grandmother Nora’s death, Mimi goes to visit her house in the Dordogne region of France to find a mysterious box of memories. A journalist in her 30s, Mimi hasn’t been back to see Nora since her last Dordogne holiday as a 12-year-old, which she no longer remembers. Her relationship with her family, largely expressed via tetchy text conversations, is fraught – as was her grandmother’s. Seeking closure, she arrives at the old house only to discover that the items there trigger memories of a happier time. Your interactions with these items have a satisfyingly tactile quality. You pick up…

Developer GSC Game World Publisher THQ Format PC Release 2007 Come to STALKER: Shadow Of Chernobyl fresh from a younger open-world series and it may appear deliberately unfinished – an earlyaccess build that never made it to version 1.0. Set in a radioactive psychic hinterland based on the 1989 Chornobyl nuclear disaster, it’s a work of unvarnished post-Soviet miserabilism, a resolutely fun-averse shooter consisting of dreary geography full of loveless mercenaries, ethereal deathtraps and malfunctioning guns. While badged as a horror game, it’s more depressing than horrifying. And how much more miserable it seems in the context of games such as Horizon: Forbidden West, with their bright, exotic landscapes of smoothswallow quests and conveniences, their magnetic mission loops, crunchy ability combos and syrupy insistence that the postapocalypse is a place…