Wireframe Magazine #61

Have you played Vampire Survivors yet? You should do; it’s utterly brilliant. If you haven’t, all you need to know is it’s an indie smash-hit Steam sensation that’s in Early Access, went completely viral, and – I’m estimating – has made approximately a million billion dollars, or thereabouts. Here’s the rub, though: the game looks, for want of a better phrase, like absolute garbage. It honestly looks like someone’s first go at making a game as they follow along with an online tutorial. There are Mega Drive games that looked significantly better. I’m not being rude… I mean, I am, clearly, but I’m not trying to be obnoxious about it, is my point. I believe wholeheartedly that graphics don’t matter, but Vampire Survivors was obviously made with ‘programmer art’ and…

As most of the planet digs into the harsh world of Elden Ring (our review’s on page 97), I’ve been thinking how well games can function as toys. Sure, challenge and goals can be important, but so too is the freedom to just enjoy playing with the mechanics that a game presents to you. It’s the same aimless pleasure you get from, say, seeing how long you can evade the police in a GTA title, or forgetting about quests and seeing what’s on the other side of a hill in Elden Ring. Some games function so well as toys that they don’t need much challenge at all. Take 2018’s Donut County, for example. You control a hole in the ground which you can move beneath objects to make them drop…

Cold. Confused. Trapped. Even felt individually, just one of these emotions would be enough to make the average person’s spine tingle. How unfortunate, then, that not only does the diver at the heart of Silt begin the game experiencing a combination of all three, but they do so while they’re submerged deep within the bowels of an inky ocean. If exploring this oppressive environment sounds like an ordeal, that’s likely because it’s meant to be. First-time development duo Spiral Circus wants to throw you into the bleak unknown. They’ve been kind enough to give you one important tool, however, which is crucial to successfully navigating the murk. Silt’s luckless diver has the ability to send out his consciousness like a curling whip, which can then be used to connect and…

Having already proved their love for all things arcade with the likes of Xeno Crisis and Battle Axe, Bitmap Bureau’s Mike Tucker and Matt Cope are once again looking to the coin-op era with another modernised homage to a classic genre: the beat-’em-up. Take one look at Final Vendetta and it’s easy to see the DNA of Capcom’s seminal Final Fight in every frame. From the chunkiness of the character sprites to the thumping dance-inspired soundtrack, nods to Final Fight abound and are wholly intentional. According to the duo of 2D game development veterans, working on such a project has been a passion since childhood. “I was a big fan of Final Fight and Streets of Rage,” reveals Tucker. “And yeah, I’ve just always wanted to make a beat-’em-up and…

Whenever the concept of mythology springs to mind, odds are most of us remain guilty of skipping straight to Norse or Greek. After all, the stories of Odin, Zeus, and the inter-familial disputes of both are something that video games (and wider pop culture) have been obsessed with for decades. Fortunately, though, Red Stage Entertainment is a small, six-person Finnish studio trying to change that, developing a 3D action-adventure based on a culture that many of us will likely have never heard of; that of the Sámi people. Skábma – Snowfall launches on PC later this year, hoping to shed light on this otherwise under-represented group of indigenous people who first originated in Northern Europe, using a mixture of platforming, environmental puzzles, and folk-like storytelling. “To me it was something…

German developer Tiny Roar clearly isn’t interested in making life easy for itself. When it first began work on its upcoming Zelda-like, XEL (pronounced ‘k-sell’) a couple of years ago, the studio spent five months working on a prototype – only to throw the whole thing away and start again from scratch. “We all love action games and we all love Zelda, but we’d never worked on a Zelda-like,” explains studio co-founder and game director Maurice Hagelstein. “So we needed to make all the mistakes we could when making a game like this, and then we applied those learnings and condensed it down to, ‘What’s the core of XEL? How can we make it fun?’… It felt like, ‘OK, we need to start from scratch.’” As Hagelstein readily admits, throwing…