Wireframe Magazine #56

There was a video that did the rounds recently, where someone had gotten the modded Wii U version of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild up and running on a PC, and they’d turned all the settings in the graphics menu right up to 11. Ray tracing! 4K resolution! Enough buzzwords to make a subreddit swoon. Breath of the Wild looks better than ever with this amazing mod!’ read the headlines. Words like ‘stunning’ were thrown around pretty liberally, with almost everyone agreeing how much better it looked. Better. Who wouldn’t want to click on that and have a look? Breath of the Wild looked amazing on release, and if it somehow looks ‘better’ now… then wow! Here’s the thing. It doesn’t look better. It looks more realistic,…

Well, blimey, this snuck up on us. Just as we were putting the finishing touches to the current edition, we took another look at the calendar, and something dawned on us: this issue falls on our third anniversary. Yes, way back in the mists of time, on 8 November 2018, the first-ever edition of Wireframe hit newsstands. A lot has changed in that time, of course: for one thing, we’ve gone from a fortnightly to monthly schedule, thanks in no small part to another event – the global pandemic we’ve all had to work through in one way or another over the past 18 months or so. One thing that hasn’t changed over the past three years, though, is our enthusiasm for making the magazine. From the beginning, our aim…

What’s our plan for the impending climate catastrophe? Ignore it until it all blows over and the billionaires are safe in their bunkers over in New Zealand? Well, not in The Wandering Village, the eco-themed city-builder that brings in elements of the survival genre. No, in this game, the denizens of a world that has become overrun with toxic spores have jumped aboard – literally – a unique solution. You spend your time in The Wandering Village – as you might expect – wandering; you’re tasked with the upkeep of a township sitting atop the back of a giant, lumbering creature. This beast makes its way through a changing landscape, keeping your people safe from the ravages of a world gone awry, but at the same time demanding you look…

Will the world end with a bang, or a whimper? Certainly, the gently melancholic tone of Scavengers Studio’s upcoming Season suggests the latter. There are no crowds of screaming people fleeing in panic, or vast alien battleships flying overhead, or raging lava flows; there’s just your lone protagonist, riding their bicycle, diligently taking down photos and sketches. As follow-up games go, Season couldn’t be more different from the team’s previous title, the chilly battle royale survive-‘emup, Darwin Project, though writer Kevin Sullivan says that embarking on a new creative direction wasn’t a conscious decision when work on Season began. “It was inspired by our experiences travelling,” Sullivan tells us, “ and a general sense of foreboding regarding the future.” That sense of foreboding is all over Season, even if it’s a…

Wizordum looks in a slightly different direction to the recent crop of retro-inspired first-person shooters. Rather than the nod coming from DOOM, Quake, or Duke Nukem 3D, this Slovenian-made indie title takes its cues from the likes of Catacomb Abyss, Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, Heretic, and Hexen. Those familiar with (three of) those games will immediately know what to expect: a kind of magic. With fantasy, goblins, fireballs, castles, and plenty of gold to grab along the way, Wizordum is already shaping up to be another fine mix of games from the past and more modern design sensibilities. Even though you’re unable to look up or down in the game. Speaking to Primož Vovk of Emberheart Games, it soon becomes clear where the enthusiasm for the project comes from:…

“I’ve always been fascinated by everything that flies,” explains Felipe Falanghe, creator of Balsa Model Flight Simulator and founder of Floating Origin Interactive. A fairly generic statement to make when talking about the game you’re making and how it involves a realistic model of (model) flight. But factor in Falanghe’s history in gaming and it feels like a vast understatement, with his past work on the now-legendary Kerbal Space Program not just having an impact on video games, but stretching into the wider world of actual space flight. The man’s not lying when he says he has a fascination with flight. And it’s from there the idea for Balsa Model Flight Simulator came – bringing together the handcrafted, customised nature of Kerbal and introducing it to the suborbital flying devices…