Wireframe Magazine #55

I’m sitting on a horse, galloping at full speed towards my destination, deftly weaving around the occasional tree and across lush green meadows. See how the grass bends around my steed’s feet? Majestical. Oh no! A small stone wall. This is no problem for my mighty steed, as we clunkily hop over it with a slightly ill-fitting animation but never mind that! Onwards! Just another eight miles or so to the mission marker. Look, we all love a good horse. Pop a carrot in their happy, enchanted faces. Watch as their swishy tail chases flies away which immediately re-land on them. Over and over, an endless cycle. It’s a good time! We all love a horse, which is lucky, because these days every single game has a rideable horse in…

Just as this edition was in its final, pre-press stages, news broke that Sir Clive Sinclair had sadly passed away at the age of 81. We’ll save a more detailed article for a future edition, but for now, I thought I’d take a moment to mention how pleasing it is that so many of the tributes that have sprung up over the past few days have – rightly – focused on Sinclair’s incredible contribution to the British games industry. For years, the UK media had a tendency to point to Sir Clive’s failures – most commonly the C5, his ill-fated electric vehicle from 1985. But with the passing of time, the impact of Sinclair’s most successful computer, the ZX Spectrum, has really begun to be more widely understood. The plucky…

Freedom is an intoxicating brew, offering video game players the chance to do far more than they might – or could – in their everyday existence. Fantastical, impossible feats are one part of the lure, of course, but there’s something to be said for freedom alongside grit. Hard work. Even suffering. Wartales is an open-world, turn-based tactical RPG from Shiro Games, the studio behind Viking strategy title Northgard, and it’s a game that revels in both the freedom it offers players, and the realism it portrays in its fictional medieval setting. Wartales sees players exploring, fighting, and growing their wealth – all while they keep their band of hired mercenaries happy. ‘Happy’, of course, meaning paid and fed. That or risk walkouts, mutinies, or harsh deaths in an uncaring universe.…

Shiro Games’ previous titles Evoland (and its sequel) and Northgard were successful titles, but with success, is there an additional pressure to perform with the follow-up? “I mean, there’s always pressure,” Cannasse says. “When you make a new game, you kind of always want to go bigger and better than anything you’ve made before, so this is very much our mindset at least.” With the team growing in the past couple of years, Cannasse says Shiro has been looking to take advantage of the growth rather than seeing it as a factor in any perceived pressure: “[We wanted to] put all of those resources into realising that ‘bigger and better’ project,” he explains, “while also making something new and fresh that stands out from the rest of our catalogue. We’re…

An air of mystery hangs as thick as fog in the village of Gravoi. Its maze-like streets change configuration each time you play, and there are shadowy figures that vanish when you attempt to follow them. Then there’s the abandoned mine, from which an imposing, rattling creature will soon emerge to stalk and kill you. Should you get caught by the fiend, the game will switch perspectives to another character, the town will shape-shift into a new layout of narrow streets, and you’ll continue on your quest to discover Gravoi’s secrets: what does the monster have to do with the mine that lies beneath the town? What connections does the game’s cast of outsider characters have to the town and its ancient customs? As play shifts abruptly from, say, Anita,…

Saturnalia’s late-eighties time period wasn’t chosen for Stranger Things-style nostalgia; rather, it’s both practical – the lack of internet and mobile phones adds to the sense of mystery and isolation – and also political. Although Saturnalia isn’t as overtly about, say, second-wave feminism as Wheels of Aurelia was, there’s still a context waiting to be found if you want to find it, Righi Riva says. “I think, from a political point of view, [the 1980s] is a time that’s recent enough, especially in Italian history, that its problems are also relatable to today’s problems. So we can still talk about characters and their struggles, and their problems with discrimination, with workers’ rights, and it’s still very true today. People can still make the connection when they play the game, and…