T

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#346
J U LY 20 20
Fresh in the game,
but I’m no beginner
We’re sure you’ve heard this phrase a lot lately: these are unprecedented
times. But even as we write this, there are signs of tentative progress – of
select countries, and people, safely taking their first steps forward in
months, into an era entirely different from the one they’re leaving behind.
The same might also be said of the videogame industry. We have been
teetering on the edge of the next generation for a while now, with
everything that’s going on in the wider world further delaying the leap. In
Knowledge this issue we talk to developers about how they’ve adapted to
the global crisis, and are creating games in unexpected circumstances.
It is all new to almost everybody. And yet, there’s the prevailing sense
that we have been here before. We’re no strangers to a new console
generation, and although it’s set to roll out much more slowly than usual
(with Geoff Keighley having vowed to replace this year’s E3 with Summer
Game Fest, four months of drip-fed reveals), we feel that familiar prickle in
the air. The whispers we’ve been hearing for months are manifesting, as
the big companies find enough of a footing to start kicking things off.
By now, you will have had your first proper look at what Xbox Series X
has to offer. The Ascent is part of it: it’s the debut of an indie superteam
with a combined history of over 70 years in the industry working on some
of the best shooters of the last decade. Still, the team is just 11 people
strong; despite all their experience, Neon Giant’s co-founders tell us they
didn’t know how to arrange their faces when Microsoft asked them to help
launch its next-gen console. This is new territory for them, and Microsoft
too, which is putting immense faith in a tiny team that’s trying something
a little bit unusual – as well it should, from what we’ve seen. Now is the
perfect time, after all, to set new precedents. The story begins on p54.

3
 88

games
Hype Play

32 Valorant 80 Final Fantasy VII

PC Remake
PS4
36 Session
PC, Xbox One 84 Doom Eternal
PC, PS4, Xbox One
40 Hotshot Racing
PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One 88 Resident Evil 3
PC, PS4, Xbox One
44 The Pathless
iOS, PC, PS4, Xbox One 92 Gears Tactics
32 PC
46 A Monster’s
Expedition 94 XCOM: Chimera
PC Squad
PC
48 Maquette
PC 96 Nioh 2
PS4
50 Hype Roundup
98 Ori And The Will
Of The Wisps
PC, Xbox One

100 Paper Beast

PSVR

102 Call Of Duty:

Warzone
PC, PS4, Xbox One

104 Bleeding Edge

PC, Xbox One

105 Streets Of Rage 4

PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One

106 The Room VR:

A Dark Matter
Index, PSVR, Quest, Rift, Vive,
Windows Mixed Reality
Explore the iPad
edition of Edge for 107 In Other Waters
additional content PC, Switch

4

12
sections
Knowledge
8 Viral reaction
How developers are dealing with
work and life under Covid-19
12 Not forgotten
Frictional Games returns to the
decade-defining Amnesia series
14 Treasure hunters
How a Tomb Raider superfan
lead an orchestral reimagining
16 Battle plans
Hand-sketched 2.5D tank game
Paper Tanks recalls school days
20 Soundbytes
Game commentary in snack-sized
mouthfuls, featuring Geoff Keighley
106
54
#346
J ULY 2020
22 This Month On Edge
The things that caught our eye
during the production of E346
51 Subscriptions
Sign up and save money, with
50% off a year’s subscription
Dispatches
24 Dialogue
Edge readers share their opinions;
one wins an 8BitDo controller
26 Trigger Happy
Steven Poole on how an ill-
conceived app ruined Scrabble
28 Unreliable Narrator
Sam Barlow discovers an unsung
hero of videogame development
Features
54 High Life
How an indie superteam built
a dizzying cyberpunk city with
the help of Xbox Series X
74
70 The Making Of…
How ten years of pub chats
spawned comic adventure
Lair Of The Clockwork God
74 Studio Profile
Shovel Knight developer Yacht
Club Games turns its hand to
publishing, and more
108 Time Extend
Remembering Crysis as the
benchmark for sandbox shooters,
as laid out by Crytek
113 The Long Game
Progress reports on the games we
just can’t quit, featuring Capy’s
survival adventure Below
70
5
 EDITORIAL
Jen Simpkins editor
Chris Burke associate editor
Andrew Hind art editor
Miriam McDonald operations editor
Chris Schilling contributing editor

CONTRIBUTORS
Sam Barlow, Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, Phil Iwaniuk, Emmanuel Pajon,
Jeremy Peel, Steven Poole, Alex Spencer, Alex Wiltshire, Mark Wynne

SPECIAL THANKS
Tor Frick, Steve Gaynor, Jason Killingsworth, Stefano Petrullo, Thomas Puha

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

CONTACT US
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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
Aaron Asadi chief operating officer Matt Pierce brand director Dan Dawkins content director, games & film
Tony Mott editorial director, games Warren Brown group art editor, photography & games
Rodney Dive head of art & design Dan Jotcham commercial finance director

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6
KNOWLEDGE
GAMES VS COVID-19

Viral
reaction
The game industry vs. Covid-19: how developers
are dealing with life under the pandemic

L ast month we celebrated games that

could lift the heaviest of hearts, and
over the past month or so, it’s become
clear that more and more people have
turned to the medium for succour in these
unprecedented times. The Covid-19
pandemic has caused hardware and
software postponements, while distribution
and certification delays are ongoing, and
yet numbers are up across the board.
Digital and physical sales saw a huge
spike during the early weeks of lockdown,
and while the curve steadily flattened
as – in most countries, at least – the same
began to happen for coronavirus cases,
weekly figures were still well ahead of the
average. Doom Eternal recorded the best
opening sales in franchise history. The
extraordinarily well-timed Animal Crossing:
New Horizons became Nintendo’s third-
fastest seller of all time, outstripping every
Mario and Zelda game. People wanted
to read about games, too: physical copies
of E345 sold out within 24 hours; The
Observer’s monthly gaming column
became a weekly concern; the Financial
Times even wrote a delightfully straight-
faced article on the reduction in bank
interest rates in Animal Crossing.
But what of the impact of Covid-19 on
those working to bring us those games?
The ripple will surely be felt throughout the
industry for a long time, but the effects

8

upon smaller studios have been immediate
and devastating. Some have already
closed their doors, while others are likely
to face extreme financial difficulties.
Recognising how this would affect the
independent community, PlayStation
announced in mid-April that it had
reserved $10 million for a fund designed
to help developers struggling as a result of
the crisis, though details of how this would
be apportioned or distributed were
unclear. Without the marketing clout of the
industry’s biggest publishers, meanwhile,
the loss of E3’s spotlight will ensure that
future game announcements will reach
significantly fewer pairs of eyes. GDC’s
move to a digital-only event meant smaller
developers lost a valuable opportunity to
strike potentially crucial deals to gain
funding for ongoing or future projects.
One upside of the digital GDC was
how clearly it demonstrated the industry’s
Steve Gaynor: “It can be
harder to do creative work in
dire times. What we do is
important in its own way, but
the end point of the value it
has feels really abstract
compared to how concrete
the more serious things in the
world feel every moment”
capacity to adapt to events. Indeed, all
the developers we contacted to discuss
their response to Covid-19 had a head
start, tracking the overseas response to the
pandemic and introducing their own
measures well before official guidelines
came in. “Going back to February, we’d
been keeping a really close eye on it,”
Graeme Ankers, managing director of
Firesprite, tells us. “With the IT and
operations guys, we started having our
9
KNOWLEDGE
GAMES VS COVID-19
SAFE AS own kind of weekly meetings – we
HOUSES?
The most obvious nicknamed them Adder meetings, as
solution to technical opposed to COBRA meetings.”
issues isn’t always
1900 miles away in Finland, Remedy
a viable one. “Why
don’t you take the Entertainment was having very similar
computers home?” conversations at around the same time, as
Puha asks. “Well, the
number one reason is communications director Thomas Puha
security. Of course, we explains: “We’d been talking to our Asian
encrypt all the hard
drives and all that. But colleagues in mid-February, and they were
security is something like, ‘Yeah, you really need to take this
that we take very
seriously.’” Rather than wait around for
seriously.” The same
goes for Firesprite. government intervention, it began to ask
“We have an itself what a responsible company would
agreement with
development kits,” do. Towards the end of the month, it put
the studio’s creative together an internal task force, including
director Stuart Tilley
says. “In normal cases, people from IT and HR departments, to
we’re not allowed to draw up a plan of action. Volunteers were
take them off the
asked to try working remotely, before the
premises, but we have
special arrangements majority of the company followed suit.
to allow us to do “Ominously, it was Friday the 13th,” Puha
that.” Ankers credits
the studio’s platform recalls. By the following Monday, 90 per
partners for cent of its 260-strong workforce was at
facilitating that,
particularly within home. The studio is large enough to
such a short time accommodate a handful of staff; 12
frame. “They’ve been
people (“mostly IT, office management
working around the
clock to set things up and a couple of people who live nearby”)
so we could remote work there daily and are still able to
work on their
systems,” he says. practise social distancing.
“I’d like to give a
big shout-out to
those guys – they’ve Back in Liverpool, Firesprite found
been brilliant.” itself having to accelerate a process it had
originally earmarked for 12 months down
the line. It was dealing with well over
100 staff following a recruitment drive.
“Remote working wasn’t really on our
roadmap for about another year,” Ankers
says. “And so we basically had to cram in
what was ostensibly a year’s worth of
work into four weeks.” It involved finding
software and hardware solutions, and
organising calendars for each of its
internal teams. Reluctant to risk using
courier companies, the studio disinfected
individual workstations by hand before
delivering them to houses across the north-
west – all before the official UK lockdown.
“We had to spin this up in a really
concentrated timeframe, but we knew we
had to put the safety of everybody in the
Firesprite family first,” Ankers says.
Remedy, by contrast, was reasonably
well-prepared to work remotely; several of
its staff were already able to do so,
including Puha himself. But while that
meant getting everything up and running
happened relatively quickly, refining its
10
processes took a number of weeks. “You
can use VPN, you can remote access your
computer in the office, or you can just use
a laptop if you have one,” he says. “That
works fine when it’s just a few. It’s a whole
different thing when it’s hundreds of
people.” Figuring out technological
solutions quickly became one of the
studio’s biggest challenges, particularly
with regard to accessing game builds.
“When your build sizes are somewhere in
the 50 to 60 gigabyte range on an
internal company network, you can usually
just throw computers at it, and it’s all right. globe – have had to establish new lines
But the amount of data you need to
move… things that took minutes in the
office take hours, or even a day.” Finns
might well have reliable, fast internet
speeds at home, he points out, but that
doesn’t really solve the problem. “It’s
about the amount of data we can push
through our servers in the office.”
Latency has been a persistent issue,
particularly for QA purposes. With up to
200 people remote desktopping at once,
Remedy has had to carefully track lag
spikes. For a game like Control, which
has narrative triggers at very specific
points, timing is crucial; handling that
remotely has been an
ongoing trial, even with the
more efficient streaming “You’re just
solutions the studio has put
constantly amazed little bit harder to feel
in place. “It doesn’t help
that everybody around you at how people
is using data as well,”
solve problems
Puha says with a wry
smile. “Streaming Netflix so effectively
and things like that all
and unselfishly”
have an impact.”
Remedy knew it
couldn’t recreate the traditional office
experience at home, and instead decided
to ensure its staff had everything they
needed to work remotely as effectively as
possible. “We really wanted to drill that
mindset into people, that this is not just
a couple of weeks. You might as well get
comfortable, so tell us what you need.”
Chairs were shipped, and staff were given
webcams for video calls. For specialist
staff, working remotely threw up a few
unusual problems. A sound designer who
didn’t speak Finnish received a polite note
through his front door from a neighbour
enquiring about the odd noises coming
from his apartment late at night; Puha had
to write a note of explanation in return.
Over in Oregon, one of the earliest
states in the US to issue official guidance
on Covid-19, Fullbright hasn’t experienced
nearly so many logistical issues in moving
its 12-person team to remote working as it
enters “the real thick of development” on
its third game. But if the practical transition
has been relatively straightforward,
co-founder Steve Gaynor has found that
he and his colleagues – much like those
in Liverpool, in Espoo, and across the
of communication. Face-to-face time is
more crucial than ever, he says, hence the
studio organising more structured ‘team
togetherness’ time. “Whether it’s inviting
everybody to hang out on lunch break
and play Jackbox together, or just chat in
a voice channel while somebody streams
something they’re playing, we’re being
more intentional about bringing the team
together both for specific work decisions
and more general visibility.”
Gaynor, like his counterparts in the UK
and Finland, is cognisant of the mental
burden on Fullbright’s employees,
acknowledging the low-level stress
wrought by the pandemic.
“All of these worries
collectively make it that
productive, even if you are
being productive. And so,
as the people managing
the company, I think part of
our responsibility is to try to
give people any resources
that we can, from strategies
to help with mindfulness
and also just reassuring people that it’s
normal to feel like you aren’t operating at
100 per cent – and that we understand
that.” Both Firesprite and Remedy have
been keeping a close eye on their new
overseas staff, as they try to settle into their
new homes at the most trying of times. “It
might just be about spending five minutes
checking in on people from a well-being
perspective,” Ankers says. “And being
open in return, and getting that message
out to everyone that there’s no such thing
as overcommunication.”
Yet as all three studios reflect on what
has become their new normal, there’s
 BAFTA is still hoping to
organise some kind of
physical celebration for its
Games Awards nominees
and winners later this year –
assuming restrictions are
lifted, of course

a shared delight at how well people

have responded. “After two weeks,
people were like, ‘Oh, I think I’m only at AWARDS
like 70 or 80 per cent [productivity], is WORTHY
that a concern?’” Puha says. “And I’m How BAFTA delivered
a wildly successful
like, that’s zero concern! Even if you’re digital ceremony
at 20 per cent, because the family is at
home or whatever, don’t worry about
it.” In some cases, working from home
has even increased productivity, Ankers
notes. “It’s unbelievable – a real testament
to Firesprite’s ability to adapt and react,
and something we’ll be looking closely BAFTA was ahead of the
at in future.” coronavirus curve,
announcing its 2020
This is a dark time for us all, and yet Games Awards was
it’s clear there are positives to be taken shifting to a digital show
from it. All our interviewees speak of a two weeks ahead of
government guidance
sense of togetherness in moments of crisis,
about live events. In the
a spirit of resilience and resourcefulness end, a move to a pre-
that has brought out the best in everyone. produced format was
“When you’re shipping a game, the last necessary, with host Dara
Ó Briain recording his
couple of months is the best time,” Puha links in his basement. “We
says. “When the end is near, and wanted him to guide
everybody just comes together and it’s an viewers with his formidable
presence as it was
exhilarating feeling. To me, this remote
important our audience felt
working has felt the same – you’re just they were being spoken to
constantly amazed at how people solve directly,” awards director
problems so effectively and unselfishly. Emma Baehr says. “Then
of course we had to
Everybody pitches in: we talk to other engage with the nominees
developers who openly detail their tech who were fantastic at
solutions, and help each other out. It’s recording acceptance
speeches without knowing
awesome to see.” He pauses and smiles. All of our interviewees talk about trying to find the right balance when it comes to
communication – encouraging regular face-to-face contact with staff without overburdening if they had won.” With
“But I think that’s just how us humans are. them. “One good thing about working from home is that it can allow for more focus,” Steve 900,000 global views,
We can adjust to almost everything.” Q Gaynor says. “So we don’t want people to feel like they’re scheduled to death” the night was a success.

11
KNOWLEDGE
AMNESIA: REBIRTH

Not forgotten
Frictional Games returns to the series that helped define
a decade in games – and that might well influence the next

S ome horrors you’re glad to see stump

around the corner. Amnesia is back
with Amnesia: Rebirth: this time, you’re
recovering the memories of Tasi Trianon
while solving puzzles and managing
your physical and mental resources, in
“a harrowing journey through desolation
and despair, exploring the limits of human
resilience”. Pure escapism right now, then.
Most notably, Frictional Games
brought us Amnesia: The Dark Descent,
which did away with weapons in favour of
forcing players to run and hide, shredded
nerves through the infinite feedback loop
of its ‘Sanity’ system, almost singlehandedly
launched the Let’s Play phenomenon, and
landed a coveted spot on Edge’s 12
games that defined the last decade. And
while Frictional tells us it’s
not about to try to repeat
that feat, it’s also thinking “It’s not only a
about how the philosophy
strong narrative
behind the development of
Rebirth might hold the key and good
to a crucial next decade in
mechanics, but
game development.
A lot has changed at they are actually
the Swedish studio in the
fuelling each other” think we’re doing it a hell of
five years since we last
caught up with creative
director Thomas Grip and team properly.
The once resolutely small, remote-working
studio now has an office in Malmö; since
Soma, Frictional’s previous title, the
headcount has climbed from 15 to 25 (not
including outsourced workers) as the studio
has evolved into a multi-project outfit.
Rebirth is one of them; the other, which
is currently in pre-production, is something
of a departure for the studio. “It’s horror-
ish, but it’s definitely not a horror game at
all in the same sense that Rebirth is a
horror game,” Grip says. “There are going
to be horror undertones, because our
aesthetic senses are of a certain kind, but
it’s not the hard focus.” He explains that
Frictional wanted to start two projects
simultaneously after Soma; as the second
is based on “a slightly more crazy, or at
least hard-to-define idea”, the familiar
foundation of an Amnesia sequel seemed
like a solid base on which to begin.
Thus followed some soul-searching
about what an Amnesia game is, and
what the next one needed to be. “We’re
approaching it from two directions,” Grip
says. “One is that we’re trying to approach
it from the bottom up in terms of mechanics.
A lot of what makes an Amnesia game
has to do with the original Amnesia. It had
sanity, tinder boxes and lamp oil – we’re
seeing different ways of doing that in the
new one.” The other approach is in the
theming. “In the Dark
Descent, we had this theme
– I’ve always been super-
annoyed it didn’t come
across as well as I wanted
it to – ‘What makes a
person evil?’ I honestly think
there’s a similar exploration
of themes in Rebirth, I just
a lot better this time around
because we learned so
much making Soma.”
Rebirth, then, is a chance to take those
lessons and push Frictional’s games further.
Creative lead Fredrik Olsson explains: “If
you look at the evolution of Frictional, and
Amnesia, people are talking about the
mechanics, the sanity system, the lore in
the game. And then you look at Soma,
where the focus was on the narrative, and
the gameplay wasn’t that extensive. With
Rebirth, we put a lot of focus on matching
these two things, where it’s not only a
strong narrative and good mechanics, but
they are actually fuelling each other. And
I see us only continuing down that road.”
Indeed, whether it intended to or not –
and we’re told it categorically did not –
with Amnesia, Frictional hit upon one
potential solution to a design problem
that’s been around for a while: how do
you make a singleplayer game in an era
when would-be players can watch it all
streamed on Twitch? Grip believes
creating a strong emotional experience
that’s unique to every player is key. “Soma
was different, to be honest, because the
audience were experiencing [something]
pretty similar to the player. But in Amnesia,
the audience is laughing at the player
being scared. So there’s a significant
discrepancy in the audience’s emotions
versus the player’s. A horror game, you
can’t experience it as intended during a
Let’s Play the same way that you can with,
say, a point-and-click adventure game.”
The Dark Descent, he tells us, sold more in
its third year than it did in its first. It was
ahead of its time in using atmosphere and
cleverly designed systems to push different
buttons in each player’s brain in order to
create an experience closer to roleplaying:
something personal.
Now, the time has come for Frictional
to pioneer solutions to the phenomenon it
had a hand in kicking off. “It’s interesting
to design around Let’s Plays,” Grip says.
“There’s the naïve version, where you have
buttons for pop-up scares for audience
interaction. But more interesting is thinking,
how do you make a game, especially a
narrative game, that after watching it,
you’re not less interested but actually more
interested in playing it? That’s going to be
a big focus for us as a company, going
forward. And I think horror is the solution to
it, because of the discrepancy in emotions
between audience and player – but there’s
a tonne of various ways of going about
it.” One thing is certain: we can’t wait to
see what’s around the next corner. Q

12
 The Dark Descent kept you
trapped in Brennenburg Castle
– by contrast, almost every
level in Rebirth is set in a
different location, we’re told

SAFE
HANDS
How Frictional learned
that less can be more

Soma’s tight focus on

a narrative exploring
human consciousness
made it a hard sell,
Thomas Grip recalls. It
was warmly received,
however, and when
suggestions of a monster-
free Safe Mode arrived,
Frictional’s implementation
of it gave the studio
confidence in future
endeavours. “Now we
know that even though it
might not seem like
anything revolutionary or
very emotionally strong
happens in a 20-minute
game segment, if you
look at it from a two-hour
perspective, the build-up
is going to be very strong.
A lot of discussion on
being able to do that
Grip feels less pressure with Rebirth than he did with Soma, where they were heavily relies on lessons
always searching for their next ‘water lurker’: “The gameplay suffered from that” learned from Soma.”

13
KNOWLEDGE
THE DARK ANGEL SYMPHONY
Treasure hunters
How a Tomb Raider superfan found the means to produce
an orchestral reimagining of the series’ greatest hits
T he sheer bloody-mindedness of the
videogame enthusiast is not to be
denied. Tomb Raider devotee Ash
Kapriélov just might top them all (indeed,
Edge’s sister publication Retro Gamer
named him ‘Lara’s Biggest Fan’). In his
quest to fund and produce Tomb Raider:
The Dark Angel Symphony – which
remasters and reimagines music from the
Last Revelation, Chronicles and The Angel
Of Darkness games, and is available to
buy and stream now – he and his fellow
fans not only raised over £70,000 via
Kickstarter, but additionally contributed
over £100,000 out of their own pockets.
It started as an idea dreamed up at
a Tomb Raider sleepover: Kapriélov and
his friends were staying overnight in
London after attending a
concert of music from one
of the games. “It was two “I said, ‘We need worked with Madonna and
o’clock in the morning and
to have a concert
I was going to bed, and
I sent him a text,” Kapriélov with your music,
says, looking over at Peter
and you can’t say opportunity, so if I’m going
Connelly, prolific Tomb
Raider composer. They had no’ – if you want,
met once, briefly. “I said,
I will fund it’”
‘I think we need to have
a concert with your music
and you can’t say no – if you want, I will
fund it.’ I woke up at eight o’clock, and
went down the stairs to where all my
friends were sitting, having a tea. And I’m
reading the message: ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’”
With Tomb Raider’s 20th anniversary on
the horizon, the timing was perfect. “And
I didn’t have a choice!” Connelly laughs.
Kapriélov, whose events experience
includes organising the Core Event Panel
at the 2016 PLAY Expo in Manchester, set
about researching venues as well as
creating a proposal for the project for
Square Enix to approve. A Ukrainian
friend sketched concepts for the album
14
cover. Another acquaintance in Russia
worked on Photoshopping some social
media promotional imagery. Others made
jewellery and sculptures as Kickstarter
rewards. “The whole idea of the project
was always, ‘for the fans, by the fans,’”
Connelly says. “Ash knows more about
the games than I ever will, and I worked
on them, I wrote the music! So it’s not that
some diehard fans that were involved in
the project – it was driven by them. I was
in charge of what tracks I wanted to play,
and left the rest in Ash’s hands.”
Connelly soon realised the ambition of
the project had outstripped what he could
do on his own at home. While the money
they’d raised was substantial, they hadn’t
hit their stretch goals – they had hoped for
arrangements by Dr
Richard Niles, who has
Pet Shop Boys, and a live
orchestra. “I thought, ‘This
is a once-in-a-lifetime
to do it, I want to do it
right.” So where did that
extra £100,000 come
from? “I sold my car,”
Connelly reveals. “I
invested some savings, I took out a few
loans and borrowed some money.” They
found investors, and the agreement with
Square Enix allowed them to recoup some
funds. “Our videographer, Tina Ljubenkov,
came into [Connelly’s] hotel room with
£500 and said, ‘Look, you need that,’”
Kapriélov says. “I’d occasionally do that
too, when he needed cash.”
With the money – and a monster
spreadsheet – they assembled a 39-piece
orchestra plus ten soloists, including cellist
Tina Guo and vocalist Julie Elven, for a
few days of recording in London. It wasn’t
easy: not only was this during the July
DIG SITE
As well as being live
on all good streaming
2019 heatwave, but Connelly also had
Bell’s palsy. Niles, meanwhile, was ill on
the day the choir was booked, and had
services, The Dark
Angel Symphony is to direct them from Skype to recover in
available for purchase
now: you can find CDs, time for the all-important Friday session –
vinyls and digital via or risk having flown over from LA for
trdarkangel.com,
which also features
nothing. “He was messaging Ash, like,
samples of each track ‘Can you get them to sing a little bit more
so you can try before boisterous, or less arrogant?’” Connelly
you buy. But the
website goes beyond laughs. “And Ash was reading it and
the mere sale of passing the information back to the choir.”
goods: Tomb Raider
fans will find some Kapriélov was travelling between his
hidden gems here, home in Manchester and London almost
such as downloadable
scripts from The Angel
every day he wasn’t working. “I can’t
Of Darkness and remember much of the recording sessions,
original video to be honest,” he says.
featurettes with key
figures from the But the result is worth the stress. As
development of the a gay man who grew up in a country
games, as well as
blog updates from where same-sex relationships are illegal,
throughout the Tomb Raider – and its music – means
recording process of
the album. There’s so
everything to Kapriélov. “It was so difficult
to play because of the massive levels, and
much on offer here,
even if you can’t
it was such great escapism – I learned
spend a single penny
in this difficult time, English from it.” It changed his life, and
which speaks to the so hearing the final recording of the theme
depth of Kapriélov and
friends’ love for the to The Angel Of Darkness in the control
series and their room while sitting next to Ljubenkov,
willingness to share it
a friend since before his emigration to the
with other fans.
UK, was an emotional moment. “We just
sat there, going for it,” he laughs, miming
tears. “That was the actual moment –
‘Yeah, it’s done and dusted.’”
Connelly’s moment came listening to
the orchestra play his music in Abbey
Road Studios. “When I originally wrote
the music, there were always niggles, you
know. Tomb Raiders 4 and 5, they
weren’t scored by a real orchestra, and
I always thought there were things I’d love
to do today that I couldn’t do back then.
I just wanted to do it how I would do it
20 years on. And I always said, ‘I don’t
care if I don’t make any money from this.
It’s not about the money. It’s about having
this product that I can be proud of.” Q
One of the album’s
tracks, ‘Beyond The
Darkness’, was
co-written by a fan
to tie in with the
“for the fans, by the
fans” mantra
KNOWLEDGE
PAPER TANKS
BATTLE PLANS
Chill & Play’s hand-sketched 2.5D tank game recalls
bygone school days and childhood summers
Childhood is different the world over, but some
things remain constant: climbing trees, playing tag,
doodles in the backs of notebooks. Paper Tanks
brings the latter to life, inspired by Igor Durbazhev’s
memories of playing tank games on his Dendy
console (a Famicom clone produced for the Russian
market). “Drawings in a notebook are an echo from
the past, from school times, and those Dendy
games,” he tells us. Achieving Paper Tanks’ style
was initially laborious and expensive, with every
sprite hand-drawn in pen and pencil and
individually scanned. But after bringing aboard
digital artist Sergey Malkov, and creating a custom,
16
realistic-looking sketch brush in Photoshop,
development has been moving faster lately.
Desk clutter adds texture and strategy to
battlefields: rulers and biros must be manoeuvred
around, while rolling your tank under an eraser will
squash you flat. Scribbled foliage provides cover
from bosses or other players. It’s a winsome kind of
chaos that its creators are all too familiar with. “It
seemed to me that creating such a game would be
simple, but I was wrong,” Durbazhev says. “The
development dragged me onwards, and the support
of the community motivates me to continue.” Paper
Tanks will trundle onto PC first September 18. Q
Durbazhev and team are
currently adding animation
details such as foliage
rustling when you drive
under trees, and sparks
flying as you scrape walls

17
KNOWLEDGE
TALK/ARCADE

Soundbytes ARCADE
WATCH
Keeping an eye on the
Game commentary in snack-sized mouthfuls coin-op gaming scene

“I believe that augmented

reality combined with
a sense of place is the next
Game Outnumbered
transformative platform … Manufacturer LAI Games
In the golden era of arcades,

And, I believe the opportunity nailing a high score was enough

to keep players coming back. Now,
drawing in casual players is more
for Niantic is much bigger of a challenge – and will be even
harder in the wake of Covid-19.

now than we imagined then.” Outnumbered has an app for that.

For its new lightgun shooter, LAI
Games has developed Weapon
“Augmented reality”? Funny way of pronouncing “Pokémon”, Megan Forge, which tracks the player’s
score and unlocks rewards – items
Quinn, but then you have been away from the company for quite a
and mods with which to craft and
while. Congratulations on your return as Niantic’s new COO customise guns. It’s an on-rails
Midway-style carnival shooter
with three themed levels: High
Noon, Quarantine Zone and Deep
“The one thing you can’t ”Indie publishing Space. So far, so nostalgic. But
see is body language, is dead. Instead of away from the cabinet, the app
and that’s kind of an comes into its own. It’s similar to
focusing on one-off a redemption game, but instead
important thing publishing deals, it’s better of spitting tickets at you, it gives
to see when you’re to build strong and you loadout options for the
hiring, to see how entertaining brands.” weapon’s sight, body and ammo.
Ammo dictates bullet trails and
someone reacts.”
Annapurna Interactive, Team destruction effects. Some ammo
effects, while providing no real
Not so, Striking Distance’s 17 and Devolver Digital technical edge, make weapons
Glen Schofield – we’re also would all like a word, feel more powerful, and it’s fun to
rarely wearing trousers in TinyBuild CEO Alex try out your Forge creations and
our Zoom calls nowadays Nichiporchik experiment with loadouts. It’s a
smart twist that could breathe life
back into the scene once arcades
reopen. The app also monitors

“I found that it didn’t have to be global leaderboards and averages,

so you can make your mark – with
more than just three letters, too.

me on a shiny black floor stage

hosting a show every day. It’s
more like being a traffic
cop to navigate all this for
everyone and line things up.”
Geoff Keighley gears up to begin rolling out his four-month-long E3
alternative, Summer Game Fest. If he doesn’t kick off proceedings
by walking onstage in a hi-vis vest, we’ll be disappointed

20
 Edge

The Annual
The essential guide to
a year in videogames

Out now

myfavouritemagazines.co.uk
KNOWLEDGE
THIS MONTH

WEBSITE WEB GAME

Turnip Exchange
turnip.exchange
Turnip fever has gripped the
videogame scene. The ‘stalk
market’ has long been a part
of Animal Crossing, but the
popularity of New Horizons
has meant canny players are
bankrupting the Nooks
(indeed, in a close-to-the-bone
case of art imitating life, a
game update recently reduced
bank interest to try to deal
with the broken economy).
Turnip Exchange helps crossers
share their town’s juicier turnip
prices with those whose shops
aren’t buying high that week
(check turnipprophet.io to
figure out your chances of
hitting it big). The delightful
noticeboard presentation is in
keeping with the game’s, and
a queue system helps avoid
crashes as players pour into
town to take advantage of a
good deal. If you want to be a
‘bellionaire’, this is worth
bookmarking – those bridges
won’t fund themselves.
VIDEO
A Dream Cast
bit.ly/dreamcastdoc
Archipel returns with another
well-crafted documentary, this
time in recognition of the 20th
anniversary of Sega’s iconic
Dreamcast. It’s a series of
conversations with the people
behind some of the console’s
best-loved games: Crazy Taxi
producer Kenji Kanno, Jet Set
Radio director Masayoshi
Kikuchi and Space Channel 5
creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi are
just some of the visionaries
recounting their very first
experiences with the console,
how they built titles for it that
would reverberate through
videogame history, and
analysing – with no little
sadness – the console’s swift
discontinuation in 2001.
RUNME.exe
bit.ly/RUNMEexe
A pet project of Roll7’s creative
director John Ribbins, this
unfinished prototype attracted
some publisher interest but,
sadly, never quite made it,
encouraging the studio to
release it for free. It’s a turn-
based miniature Roguelike
where you move across a grid,
hacking network nodes as
security drones close in. Using
the mouse wheel to choose
attacks, you can nudge or
bump them, or swap positions,
leaving them stunned for a
turn so you can make your
getaway. We’re reminded of
Michael Brough’s 868-HACK
but this feels altogether darker
and more sinister, with each
level soundtracked by an
ominous low hum punctuated
by pitchy squawks. With its
red-and-black glitch aesthetic,
meanwhile, it feels like you’re
hacking a Virtual Boy – in case
you’re wondering, that’s
absolutely a compliment.

THIS MONTH ON EDGE

When we weren’t doing everything else, we were thinking about stuff like this
BOOK
Home Computers: 100 Icons
continue quit
That Defined A Digital Generation Goosebumps Cabin fever
bit.ly/homecomputers Fortnite’s in-game Travis Covid-19 continues to cause
Technology develops so quickly that we move on to the next model
Scott gig feels like the future havoc across the world. We
without a backward glance. Home Computers: 100 Icons That
Defined A Digital Generation, then, is an opportunity to take that of digital entertainment hope you’re all keeping well
look. It’s a beautifully designed ode to the outmoded, featuring
history’s most idiosyncratic computers – the SDC Minivac 601, the Reaction time Spoiler warning
Apple Lisa II and the Commodore Pet 8032-SK among them. Written
Speedrunning event The Last Of Us Part II suffers
by former Edge editor Alex Wiltshire, and with photography by John
Short that celebrates each machine’s details and design quirks, it’s Corona Relief Done Quick a catastrophic leak, with
an oddly relaxing thing to read right now: a welcome reminder of a raises over £320k in cutscenes out in the wild.
time before the endless ping of notifications and the ubiquitous under 60 hours Don’t read the comments
cloud, in which flipping a switch really meant switching off.

Playing ketchup Bugging out

The battle of the condiments New Horizons’ tarantula
– ketchup vs mayo – is back spawn rate is nerfed.
on for one last Splatfest RIP our new kitchen

Key workers Wrong note

Games For Carers teams up Doom Eternal’s poorly-
with devs to give thousands mixed soundtrack frustrates
of free games to NHS staff composer Mick Gordon

22
DISPATCHES
JULY
Issue 345
Dialogue
Send your views, using
‘Dialogue’ as the subject
line, to edge@futurenet.com.
Our letter of the month wins
an SN30 Pro+ controller,
compatible with PC and
Switch, courtesy of 8BitDo
24
That’s Life
Ever since Half-Life: Alyx was announced as
a VR exclusive, I suppose it was inevitable
that modders would convert it for a flat
screen. Having now played through it twice
in VR, and watched a bunch of increasingly
sophisticated non-VR mods, my feelings
about the conversion are ambivalent.
On one hand, the VR install base is about
1.3% on Steam, but the ending of Alyx is
shocking and significant enough that I think
as many Half-Life fans as possible need to
see it. Likewise, one can hardly begrudge
a Half-Life fan wanting to play the first
Half-Life in 13 years.
On the other hand, while I think Alyx is
incredible in VR, I doubt it
translates very well outside it.
Alyx was designed hand-in- “I look back to
hand with the Valve Index: 2017, and the
built, play-tested and iterated
on for years to be a tailor- absolute deluge
made VR experience. That
of quality that
means there are many sections
built around environmental propelled Switch
exploration in small spaces
that revel in the tactile to success”
immediacy and interactivity of
VR. It feels like a holiday visit to City 17
(well, a mortally dangerous holiday). There
is a joy to picking up and eyeballing every
item, in opening every door and cupboard,
in leaning around, under and over furniture,
in walking through and around holograms,
that I suspect might seem like self-
indulgent over-design outside VR. There is
an intensity and panic to fighting even one
Civil Protection commando – literally
ducking, leaning and rolling for cover –
that’s probably too easy with a keyboard
and mouse. There is a slowness to the
movements of the player and the enemies,
and to the general pace of the thing, that
mostly feels exactly right in VR but
I suspect feels sluggish outside it.
So I guess, for what it’s worth, my point
is cautionary: if you play Alyx outside VR
and think it’s rubbish, try to find a way to
play it in VR before you make up your mind.
Leo Tarasov
Will Valve produce a PC port? It’s
doubtful – Alyx feels as though it was very
much created as an exemplar for making
virtual reality games solely for the headset.
High hopes
Like many Edge readers, my childhood was
spent poring over copies of The One Amiga,
CVG, and eventually, Next-Generation
before discovering its English counterpart.
I’d obsess over screenshots of expensive
games for systems I didn’t own, imagining
what it would be like to play them. (I was an
Amiga kid in Australia, which
made the SNES import scene
all the more exotic).
Flash forward to the present
day, and I’ve had to move home
due to you-know-what. Which
is tough to swallow at 35, but
I count myself lucky. And while
the Amiga is gone, I’ve brought
along my PS4 and Switch,
and have an absurd backlog of
games to keep me busy (bless
PlayStation Plus and eShop sales!)
Now I find myself back in my childhood
bedroom, reading your review of Half-Life:
Alyx, knowing that it might be years before
I get to play it. Of course, I’m gutted – but
the vicarious enjoyment of reading about it
(and your excellent feature on Valve) is more
than enough to tide me over for now. It’s
a strangely familiar, not to mention
comforting feeling, and part and parcel of
my enthusiasm for the medium.
Eventually I’ll get back on my feet – as
I hope for Edge readers everywhere.
Hopefully by the time the next-gen rolls
around. And with it, more affordable VR and
an Alyx port.
Jonty Bell
Ah, Valve. Who could have known its pricey
comeback effort would come at a time when

we’re all scrabbling to save our pennies? We
hope your new 8BitDo controller will tide
you over until a headset is within your
budget – we’ll send it as soon as we’re
allowed back in the office.
Under my skin
Your last two Making Of articles (Eliza and
Arise) interviewed designers explaining how
they consciously limited the player’s
abilities. One features a character restricted
by their depression, the other by old age.
This is often a part of indie game rhetoric,
from The Stanley Parable to Life Is Strange
(Kate’s suicide) to Neo Cab (choices are
limited by how you feel). It’s a device mainly
used to critique a problem outside of the
game, such as society, mortality – even bad
game design.
Long have I wondered why many a player
has had problems with games becoming
‘political’. Until recently, I thought it was
because some folks don’t want their
experiences in games to be coloured by real-
world propaganda. I get that – there’s
enough cacophony about our societal
problems, and it’s nice to be sheltered from
all that in pleasant, virtual worlds.
I’m chewing on another theory, and this
section being named ‘Dialogue’, I was
wondering what others think. The same
folks who shout #keeppoliticsoutofgames
also tend to be the ‘hardcore’ type that get
defensive about what a game should be.
Many will complain that story-driven indie
titles don’t feature enough ‘gameplay’. What
I’m thinking is: perhaps they get defensive
because such games don’t deliver the
fantasy of their perspiration rewarding them
fairly (ie practice will eventually lead to
success). So maybe players not only lament
the themes of artsy-fartsy ‘we live in
a society’ indie titles, but also the way these
games take away their agency.
I’m going out on a limb here: videogames
might have become a large part of our
everyday identity. I know I lost thousands of
hours of real life in World Of Warcraft. Why?
Because it was utopia for me, owning the
means of production, a true meritocracy.
I wouldn’t enjoy my character being restricted
and the game replying: ‘That’s life, deal with
it.’ I just want to do my own thing! WoW
features its fair share of politics, from Orc
civil rights symbolism to environmental
protection, but nobody seems to complain,
probably because in that world you are able
to do something about it.
From now on, the next time I see
somebody complain about politics in a game,
I’ll wonder how much it has an effect on the
mechanics. How much does the artistic
message infringe on effort/reward? Is this
what players are actually complaining about?
Robert August de Meijer
As ever, Robert, you’re a generous soul. You
only need take a look at what’s happening
online with The Last Of Us Part II leaks to
understand that the ‘anti-politics’ people
aren’t even bothered about playing the game
before beginning to stamp their feet.
Strangers in the night
May you live in interesting times, right? Our
own anxieties aside, the world is taking on
a massive shift in terms of what ‘interactivity’
means. I remember back in the days of Edge 1
when virtual reality was discussed as the next
stage of human contact – now it feels like one
of the only ones. I have been reassessing in
this time of chaos, and I expect Edge staff
have too. My job demands discussions with
people, and Zoom and other clients have
provided a tenuous link to the outside world.
All of this has got me thinking about the
‘original’ communicators – concepts like
World Of Warcraft or Everquest (of which the
latter was a particular thing of mine). I don’t
know if it’s a symptom of the time we live in,
or the current virus, but I’m absolutely
gasping for playing games live with someone,
whether online or through streaming. Whilst
my streams get 1-2 viewers, there is a
satisfaction in knowing they are seeing me
power through The Division, or in Catherine.
DISPATCHES
DIALOGUE
I don’t know where we are going to go with
online content, but I do know that we need
each other to comment, like, subscribe and
the rest. Is our future about to become
watching others complete games for us? It’s
come close before, but now… I don’t know.
Martin Hollis
You’ve hit on something here – the social
aspect of livestreaming feels more important
than ever right now. We’re not watching
Shroud for the headshots nowadays, but for
the entertaining team chat.
Get happy
Don’t tell your outgoing editor, but for many
years I have mastered the art of reading
through your magazine’s beautifully observed
news and features, then skimming through
what sometimes would feel (please don’t hate)
like pages and pages of Hype articles and
reviews of what I would kindly describe as
“another firstperson shooter with guns the
size of which Freud would have a field day
with” or “a dark action-adventure game about
saving a world where only four colours exist”.
Don’t get me wrong, I play some of these
games from time to time, but I always had
a lingering feeling that my true videogame
passion was a bit out of step with the gaming
consciousness which you so accurately reflect.
And so I would devour any inch of your
magazine devoted to games drenched in
forever-sunshine, primary colours and what
my partner would call “plinky-plonky music”.
So thank you for your ‘Feel Better’ games
issue – a whole Edge magazine dedicated to
the Peter Pans of the world! And you even
mentioned “blue skies in games”. I shed a
little tear. Once this crisis is over, you can go
back to Destiny, loot boxes and the fascinating
oeuvre of Goichi Suda. I now know I was
never alone. Thank you.
Javier SP
He does still read the magazine, you know.
We'd lock our doors, if we were you – he's
got an awful lot of free time nowadays. Q
25

S
crabble is an oasis of calm, orderly
thoughtfulness in a world of rubbishy
chaos. What could be more relaxing
than thinking about words and tidily placing
them on a grid? In my household, phone
Scrabble duels have long been a happy
pastime, after long days of trying to put
words in a grammatically meaningful order:
now we can simply play with the tools of
our trade rather than having to line them
up in order to say something. In these
strange days especially, Scrabble is a mindful
retreat. It’s a perfect game. You couldn’t ruin
it. Or so I thought.
Then I was notified by the official
Scrabble app that it was being sunsetted in
favour of a newly developed version called
Scrabble GO, which my partner and I both
obediently installed. Instantly we were
hurtled into a digital hellscape. It turns out
that it is possible to ruin Scrabble, and this
version will stand forever as a textbook
example for evil developers hoping to destroy
the innocent pleasure in any classic pastime.
The interface now looks like a toystore
after an explosion, with multiple
homescreens filled with luridly coloured
nonsense in which it is all too possible to
become irretrievably lost. Its entire UX
philosophy appears to be “Let’s trick the user
into clicking on something they didn’t mean
to”. So the player is bombarded with large
tiles featuring randomly chosen Facebook
contacts, and if you accidentally touch one
you are launched into a game of Scrabble
with that guy you met at an event years ago
and accepted a friend request from out of
politeness, but has since revealed himself to
be a Brexity antivaxxer who believes Jews
invented coronavirus.
Even worse than that are the ‘challenges’
Illustration kaeru.com.ar
from total strangers, who – if the app’s
privacy settings are to be trusted – cannot
possibly have challenged me personally
because I have chosen to be unsearchable.
Perhaps they’re bots, or the developers are
lying. Either way, it is impossible to turn
26
DISPATCHES
PERSPECTIVE
STEVEN POOLE
Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
A comprehensive
compendium of everything
that was poisonous about
pre-pandemic culture
these off, so at every moment one is at risk
from accidentally starting a game one never
wanted, with someone who might be a
‘friend’ or a computer program or a Russian
disinformation agent.
Okay, but you can’t ruin the basic
mechanics of Scrabble. Or can you? For some
reason I now ‘earn’ blue gems by placing
high-scoring words in-game, and every so
often I am obliged to click on a treasure chest
so that more blue gems fly out of it and into
my gem hoard. I have no idea what these
gems are, until one random swipe among the
billions of homescreens reveals that I have
the opportunity to buy more gems with real
money. Why would I want to do that? Oh,
just because, as it turns out, you can spend
gems not only on meaningless fripperies like
different-coloured tiles but on in-game
‘hints’ or the ability to swap tiles without
missing a turn. So you can effectively pay to
win. It is the apotheosis of philistine digital
money-gouging from children or older people
who are quite understandably confused about
how this horrific mess all works.
The previous official Scrabble app, by EA,
wasn’t perfect, but it did have a very nice
addition to the game called the Teacher: after
you made a move, the Teacher would show
you the best-possible play you could have
made (or congratulate you on doing it
yourself). In Scrabble GO, you have to pay to
see the Teacher’s retrospective wisdom. And
so the one authentically educational feature
added to the classic game has now been
bleakly monetised along with everything
else. There is so much else to hate about this
game that I don’t have room for in a single
column; suffice to say perhaps that if I were
the Hasbro executive who signed off on this
pathogenic clusterfuck as a perfect
ambassador for the globally loved intellectual
property that is Scrabble, my dreams would
have been haunted ever since.
Of course there are more important
problems in the world right now, but Scrabble
GO is, by a perverse kind of genius,
a comprehensive compendium of everything
that was poisonous about pre-pandemic
culture. Scrabble GO is not just annoying,
though it is very annoying. The deep, inky-
black cynicism of its design reveals an
implacable hatred towards anything that
cannot be instantly replaced by cash: skill,
learning and probably love as well. If modern
casino capitalism does not survive the
Covid-19 pandemic, this treacherous, greedy
ruination of a classic game will stand as
a perfect illustration of why it shouldn’t have.
Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy 2.o is now available from
Amazon. Visit him online at www.stevenpoole.net
 ON SALE NOW!

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Unreliable Narrator
Exploring stories in games and the art of telling tales
O
ne of the few highlights of my
recent self-isolation has been
the chance to catch up on mail
from readers of this column. I was most
intrigued by one letter in particular. It
included some torn pages that its sender,
one ‘Bob Videogame’, claimed were the
index to a biography of a man
instrumental in the development of
videogame narratives whose legacy had
been erased from the history books. As
best I can tell this is a work of clever
fiction. But, as requested by Bob, and
with a new editor’s indulgence, I have
printed the index verbatim below.
Axlon, RNG joins, 351
Ballard, J.G., 605
Bushnell, Nolan, meets RNG at tennis
club 129; impressed by RNG, 135
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 187
Congressional Hearings, 482
Cornerstone, 316
Cybertext, Perspectives on Ergodic
Literature, 573
Delamee High School, RNG joins 117;
starts lockpicking club, 119;
expelled for theft, 124
Doom (game), RNG plays, 491
Dragon Speech, RNG impressed by 456;
RNG quotes, 513
Edge (magazine), 588
Future Wars (game), 419
Game Developers Conference, founded
444; RNG attends, 445; RNG
boycotts 611
Granger, Gal, joins lockpicking club,
141; marries RNG, 152; Chuck E.
Cheese incident, 246; divorces
RNG, 304
Granger, Laura, love of boardgames, 9;
Illustration kaeru.com.ar
first marriage, 10; difficult birth
of RNG, 22; second marriage, 24
Granger, Robert Nathan, picky eating, 36;
ADHD, 47, appearance, 59, belief in
alternate realities, 293; criminal
record, 398; pets, dislike of, 409
28
DISPATCHES
PERSPECTIVE
SAM BARLOW
A man instrumental in the
development of videogame
narratives whose legacy had
been erased from history
Granger, Rupert Peter, career, 2;
marriage, 10; early death, 23
Hasbro, cancels Control Vision, 421
Infocom, RNG visits, 211; hires RNG, 212;
RNG pitches Ultimate Game to, 223;
RNG resigns, 339
Jarvis, Eugene, 168
Kee Games, RNG joins, 164; RNG pitches
Ultimate Game to, 167; fires RNG, 173
Ludology, 585
Mammoth Cave, RNG explores, 71;
RNG lost inside, 82;
RNG visions of future self, 94
Moby Dick, RNG adapts for Infocom, 234
Montgomery, Ruth, writes Aliens Among Us
328; RNG corresponds with, 329;
prophecies, 331
Multiverse, 435
Murray, Janet, lunch with RNG, 561;
writes Hamlet On The Holodeck, 563
Myst (game), 485
Narratology, RNG supports, 585; RNG
questions 587; RNG supersedes 644
Night Trap (game), RNG cameo in, 468;
controversy, 480
Nonlinearity, of narrative, 640; of
memory, 329; of space and time, 94
Ontological paradox, 434
Origin Systems, 503
Pig, Kentucky, RNG born in, 1;
RNG leaves, 176
Polar Shift, predicted, 386; RNG warns
Spector of, 631
Project NEMO, 363
Quake Engine, RNG licenses, 526
Roberts, Chris, 504
Romero, John, 492
Spector, Warren, meets with RNG, 503,
scared by RNG, 550; last person to
see RNG alive, 620
Subtext, as game-mechanic, 224
Sunnyvale, California, 126
Swigart, Rob, 340
Synapse Software, 281
Tamara (play), 269
Time Travel, RNG research into, 433
Ultima: Ascension (game), 643
Ultimate Game, visions of, 106; begins
development of, 515; shows to
Spector, 608; release, 655;
suppression of 658; lost, 665
Videogame, RNG changes surname to, 538
Williams, Roberta, 376
Wormholes, 607
Xyzzy, 199
Y2K, 664
Zork (game), RNG plays, 199; suggests
time travel puzzle for, 200
Sam Barlow is the founder of NYC-based Drowning A Mermaid
Productions. He can be found on Twitter at @mrsambarlow
 #346

THE GAMES IN OUR SIGHTS THIS MONTH

32 Valorant 46 A Monster’s 50 Unbeatable
PC Expedition PC
PC
36 Session 50 Peaky Blinders:
PC, Xbox One 48 Maquette Mastermind
PC PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
40 Hotshot Racing
PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One 50 Ninjala 50 Pendragon
Switch PC
44 The Pathless
iOS, PC, PS4, Xbox One 50 Nier: Reincarnation
Android, iOS

Explore the iPad

edition of Edge for
extra Hype content

30
 Game recognises game
An aphorism that’s been knocking about for decades, but Steve Jobs put it
most succinctly: good artists copy, great artists steal. It’s not an endorsement
of plagiarism, but a meditation on inspiration and iteration. There are plenty
of good artists making shameless clones out there in the darker corners of
the game industry – but this month’s Hype crop features great artists paying
homage to what came before in brilliantly original ways.
Hotshot Racing (p40) is the most obvious example. With its Sega blue
skies, Virtua Racer-esque low-poly art style and Burnout boost management,
it’s a veritable pastiche of the very best of racing games. When the results
are this delightful, the remix carried out with such evident care and joy, who
wants to be a pioneer? We’re happy to revisit well-trodden ground.
Skateboarding sim Session (p36), meanwhile, pays tribute not to a game,
but to a sport. While the Tony Hawk’s series is a clear influence, Crea-ture
Studios is eschewing its arcade-y approach for an exacting physics system
that mimics real life: here, ollies aren’t one-button affairs, but exercises in
precise foot- and weight-shifting. Then there’s the Annapurna-published
Maquette (p48), which you’d be forgiven for thinking
MOST you’d already played. In truth, developer Hanford
WANTED Lemoore was working on a recursive puzzler long before
The Last Of Us Part II PS4
While certain corners of the Internet it became something of a trend. Now, he and the
seem determined to spill its biggest
secrets, reading the CliffsNotes has never
been a substitute for experiencing a story
makers of similar games have a group chat in which they
firsthand – particularly one from some of
the medium’s finest yarn-spinners. Leaks
discuss their ideas – the challenge has been finding the
be damned: we still can’t wait to see how
it all shakes out for Ellie and Joel. twist that elevates a now well-known mechanic. In the
Deadly Premonition 2 Switch structure of a love story, he’s found it.
Hidetaka Suehiro’s time-hopping
prequel/sequel will once again wear its Riot’s artists are the perhaps the greatest of all. Valorant
influences on its sleeve if its setting, the
fictional Louisiana town of Le Carré, is (p32) mixes elements ripped straight out of Counter-Strike:
anything to go by. It’s out in July; a
summer of Swery surreality could be
just the ticket in these strange times.
Global Offensive and Overwatch to startlingly compelling
Maid Of Sker
effect, thoughtfully editing each one to create a high-skill
PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch
Firstperson survival horror games are ten-
tactical shooter that also has bags of charisma, and is
a-penny, but Wales Interactive draws on
British folklore and Gothic horror for sure to be on every esports stage available within the
eerily close-to-home scares. It’s not like
we’re sleeping much these days anyway. year. Jobs, we’re sure, would be proud.
 H Y
P E
VA L O R A N T
Riot’s take on the tactical shooter
has tricks up its sleeve
Developer/publisher
Format
Origin
Release
S
ome might say Valorant’s ace in the hole
is its concept – think Counter-Strike:
Global Offensive plus superpowered
heroes à la Overwatch, and you’re not far off.
Others may say that it’s the development
team, which includes a former League Of
Legends designer, a Counter-Strike: Global
Offensive pro player and map designer, and an
art director who previously worked on Half-
Life 2 and Team Fortress 2. Cynics will point to
Riot’s marketing experts, who broke Twitch’s
ecosystem by releasing beta keys only via rare
‘drops’ for stream viewers, encouraging
streamers to run 24/7 footage to capitalise on
the footfall, and building anticipation to fever
pitch. But if you ask us? Valorant’s ace in the
hole is, well, its ace.
Kill all five members of the opposing team
yourself, and you’ll be awarded an ace. This
type of ‘team kill’ accolade is nothing new, but
Valorant’s presentation of it raises the pulse
dramatically. It’s all in the sound design. Every
skull we pop plays a triumphant chord. With
each successive kill, the note gets higher –
our heart rate ratchets up another notch, as
does our resolve. Until, hands shaking, barely
daring to breathe, we pick an enemy Jett out
of the air and trigger the full fanfare.
“What’s funny is the original placeholder
sound was something we kind of randomly
put in there,” game director Joe Ziegler tells
32
Riot Games
PC
US
Summer
us. “And when it went off, we were so excited
to hear it that it didn’t matter that it didn’t
make sense in the world. From there, we built
on that concept of notifications: like, how do
we make sure the stingers feel really good
when we’re trying to tell you something
awesome happened?”
The feeling this rising musical cadence
inspires recalls the impulse to finish the end
of a tune that someone has stopped whistling
too early – it’s a powerful incentive to push
your skill to the limit. “But it can’t do it in
a way that detracts from your concentration,”
executive producer Anna Donlon says. “And
our sound designers found a great way to
balance out the celebratory moment and the
hype-building moment, but also keep you
laser-focused on that next kill.”
Donlon, who’s worked on two Call Of Duty
titles, is just one of the many people on the
Valorant team who has significant experience
in the FPS genre. This is Riot’s first shooter –
pushing the studio into a new space was
Ziegler’s main goal when, six years ago, he
started forming a team of people who could
help him make that happen. It started
informally, he says, with “a lot of backroom
conversations between a small set of us,
where we were talking about, ‘what additional
types of games could we make at a place like
Riot?’” Tactical shooters such as CS:GO –
Jett’s air-powered abilities
lend her speed, or boost her
up onto ledges for a height
advantage. Used too brazenly
in combat, however, their
long animations will leave
her vulnerable to attack

33
 H Y
P E
VALORANT
the 1.6 version in particular – and Rainbow
Six: Siege, in which tension, teamwork,
decision-making and skill are key, repeatedly
came up as points of inspiration.
Agent abilities are the team’s way of
building itself a “toolkit” with which it can
ensure Valorant avoids what Donlon terms
“player pain”. Ziegler explains: “We built from
this centre of, what do the people who play it
most feel frustrated by?” He sees one of the
biggest causes as games that are constructed
as “closed games”, with fewer variables to
tweak. We bring up Overwatch as a game that
has struggled to balance effectively over time.
“I think Overwatch is built in two systems: the
characters and the game mode,” Ziegler says.
“And everything is packaged into the character
and game mode, so when you’re balancing it,
you have to use one of those two levers. We
have the character, the weapon system, the
economy system and the map. Honestly,
This is a game of patience, of
lining up angles and intuiting
your opponent’s next move
having a centralised system like weapons
separated from a system like characters helps
us do a lot of balancing without making you
ever feel like there is a GOATS,” he says,
referencing an infamous Overwatch strategy
that led to the game stagnating for a long
period. “Because we can tackle things at the
character level as well as at the systemic level
to make sure that the entire package is
constantly in balance while never being dry.”
Each of Valorant’s agents has four abilities:
one comes for free on a cooldown, two can be
bought as the game progresses with ‘creds’
earned through kills and round wins, and the
last is an ultimate that charges over time
(accelerated by skilled play and collectable
orbs). There is more than a whiff of Overwatch
about them: Sova’s recon bolt is a dead ringer
for Hanzo’s sonic arrow, and Sage’s ultimate
can resurrect a fallen ally, just like Mercy.
But leaning heavily on our agent’s abilities,
as we might in Overwatch, proves fatal: cast
times are lengthy, and trying to use them in a
reactive manner instead of reaching for our
34
auto rifle usually means we get a bullet in the
brain before we have time to blink. Much like
CS:GO, this is a game of patience, of carefully
lining up angles and intuiting your opponent’s
next move so that your crosshairs sit ready in
place. Slower, coordinated plays with
teammates prove most effective – using
Raze’s homing boom bot not with the
intention of securing a kill, but to prompt
a telltale burst of gunfire from a suspicious
corner. Abilities are largely a means to an end: Flame wars
a well-aimed shot between the eyes. The communities
“A lot of the design actually comes from around high-skill
understanding what functions you’re trying to tactical shooters tend
accomplish in order to get to your gunplay,” to grow nasty, quickly.
Valorant is no
Ziegler confirms. Breaching, flushing and
exception: a UX
vision blocking are the reigning monarchs of designer at Riot
the tactical shooter – indeed, view-obscuring recently posted
abilities are everywhere in a Valorant match, footage of the
with only slight variations between agents’ harassment she’d
suffered while
versions (Phoenix’s wall of flame will also
playing, and Anna
damage anyone passing through it, for Donlon responded
instance). But it’s needed in a tactical shooter
that actively embraces the idea of – hold onto
sympathetically,
admitting she can’t
your pearls – seeing through walls. “We’ve play solo due to such
experiences. Riot has
discovered there are more things we can put
in than things we can’t,” Ziegler says.
since promised to curb
this toxicity, but it’s
not a good look –
He recalls one of their first ultimate especially given the
ideas being a map-wide pulse that revealed well-publicised
where everybody was – a huge advantage. “We problems regarding
a culture of sexism
were like, ‘What is the right trade-off to get at the studio. In
this information? Well, maybe if you get a a tactical shooter,
pick, you can turn that into vision.’” Hence communication is
Cypher’s ultimate, which lets you hack a dead everything, and
enemy’s memories to see just a brief flash of women being
harassed for playing
their allies’ locations. “We anticipate every
games is not new –
ability, or every new set of abilities, to be while the ‘report’
controversial,” Donlon says. “There should be button is nice to have,
that feeling of anxiety around any new agent moderation and
we bring into the game. I hope that over time, community
management tools
people will trust we understand the delicate
should have been at
balance of this game – but we will get it the forefront of this.
wrong sometimes, and we will work to pull
back on whatever we might have broken.”
Indeed, Riot has plenty of prior experience
in doing so with League Of Legends. Whether
more variables means more control or more
potential for things to go wrong, we’re not
sure. But as we settle in for yet another
evening of chasing the ace, we have to admit:
for now, Valorant’s playing its cards right. Q

TOP As in CS:GO, you take it
in turns to plant bombs or
defend against them.
Knowing when to save or
spend creds on guns and
abilities – and when your
opponents might – is as
important as good aim.
RIGHT It’s far from the
prettiest game in the world,
unfortunately, with a rather
flat look. The upside is that
you can run the game on
almost any spec
TOP There’ll be an option to
switch off blood in
tournaments – a decision
that could catapult
Valorant’s esports scene to
mainstream heights above
its contemporaries.
ABOVE Not all of the audio
cues seem entirely accurate
– occasionally, we swear we
hear footsteps coming from
one direction, only to be
surprised from the other.
MAIN You’ll be lucky to land
kills with Brimstone’s orbital
strike: it’s used more to
flush enemies out of spaces
so you can dispatch them
with, say, the headshot-
happy Sheriff pistol
35
 Filmer mode – where a
second player rides along
clutching a virtual camera,
recording your tricks – is one
way Session is trying to
reflect skateboarding culture

36
 H Y
P E

SESSION
Bringing skateboarding
games back down to earth

Developer/publisher Crea-ture Studios

Format PC, Xbox One
Origin Canada
Release TBA

37
 TOP “We’re taking a lot of
pride in recreating the spots
as accurately as we can,”
Houde says. “For example,
the Brooklyn Banks, we have
the exact same number of
pillars on the bridge …
we’ve been scanning a lot of
Google Earth metrics.”
ABOVE There’s an elegance to
successful tricks, something
that’s only underlined by the
battle of pulling them off.
LEFT You can hit the pause
button at any time to rewind
and scrub back through the
last few minutes.
BOTTOM The camera is pulled
in tight – but you can adjust
this if you’d prefer a broader
view, à la Tony Hawk’s

38
 H Y
P E
SESSION
H
ave you ever tried to do an ollie in real
life? The Tony Hawk’s games conned
a generation into thinking it’d be as
simple as tapping the X button. Many
would-be skaters were inspired to head
outside and try it for themselves, where they
– and we can neither confirm nor deny
whether we’re talking from personal
experience – were quickly brought crashing
down to earth, with nothing to show for it
but the burn of rough tarmac on their skin.
Session is a skateboarding game designed with
the specific intent of redressing the balance,
demonstrating how much effort and finesse
goes into pulling off even the simplest
skateboard trick.
The control scheme assigns one trainer-
clad foot to each thumb. Pulling the right
stick downward applies weight to the back of
the board; flick up with the left and the board
will spring a few inches off the ground. Voilà,
your first ollie. Done completely stationary, in
the middle of a perfectly flat car park. If you
want to turn that into a recognisable trick,
you need to start worrying about movement.
Two face buttons are dedicated to kicking off
with each foot, while squeezing the triggers
pushes down on the virtual trucks so you can
turn – and from there timing, positioning,
judging that upcoming ledge against the
height of your jump, and so forth. The first
half-hour you spend with Session will likely
resemble one of those bail compilation videos.
Which, design-wise at least, is no accident.
“The essence of this game is really to
capture skateboarding, which is super-
difficult at first but also extremely rewarding,”
creative director Marc-André Houde says.
That was always the thinking behind the
unusual control scheme, which Houde first
started toying with in 2008. He didn’t pursue
the idea any further at the time, at least in part
because playing EA’s Skate, which promised
a similar leap in realism from the Tony Hawk’s
games, left Houde feeling inspired but with
the overwhelming sense that his own efforts
couldn’t possibly compete.
A decade on from the last Skate release,
though, there’s a gap in the market. And while
Session is indebted to those titles – “This
game would not exist without Skate,” Houde
says, “that’s pretty obvious, I think” – it’s also
an opportunity for Houde to address his
issues with them. Namely, that they’re too
simplistic. “As much as I love Skate, at some
point the game became so easy. It was not
a challenge any more,” he says. Being able
to pull off every trick on request wasn’t
desirable, as far as Houde was concerned. In
real life, even for experienced skaters, there’s
always the very real possibility of failure, of
rubbing yourself raw on the concrete; that’s On ’boarding
part of what makes the ride so thrilling. Session doesn’t just
Even two and a half years into development, have to teach new
Houde says he hasn’t reached that point of players the basics of
monotonous mastery of his own game: “I can controlling a board,
it has to show them
still fire it up for my own pleasure and find
how to think like
a challenge, which is really satisfying.” But not a skater. “When
everyone is like Houde, and the Session team I walk in the streets
wants to make the game accessible to players with my family, I don’t
who aren’t experienced skaters, or don’t enjoy skate, but I see all the
spots,” Houde says.
testing themselves for the sake of it. This is,
“My brain is kind of
shaped to this, so it’s
The first half-hour you spend really easy for me to
find fun in this game.
with Session will resemble one But others are not
trained the same
of those bail compilation videos way.” As it stands, the
game’s main structure
comes from daily and
appropriately enough, a delicate balancing act weekly challenges,
– and one that’s ongoing. “This is where early and potentially
access is really useful,” Houde says. multiplayer – you can
currently play a
The first versions of the game “went a bit rudimentary game of
too far” with difficulty, he admits, and most H-O-R-S-E, or grab
of the more hardcore features (like manual a virtual camera to
catches, which require a perfectly-timed input record your friends
to catch a flip mid-air) are now included in pulling off tricks – but
Crea-ture is still
the game as optional extras. This might sound
searching for a more
antithetical to the true-to-life sim experience complete answer,
Session is chasing but, according to Houde, it’s without betraying its
perfectly in the spirit of skateboarding play-your-way ethos.
culture. “I always like to see Session as a
culture type of game rather than a sport game,
because we’re not trying to dictate anything
here.” There’s no points system, or any firm
structure to tell you what success looks like.
“This is what’s cool about skateboarding: you
do what you want, the way you want to. And
in the same way, we open up all the options.
You can go crazy hardcore or you can be
super-automated with simplified controls.
That’s how you want to play the game. That’s
freedom. That’s skateboarding.” Q
39
40
 H Y
P E

HOTSHOT
RACING
Ten years later, the arcade
racer is finally reborn

Developer Lucky Mountain Games, Sumo Digital

Publisher Curve Digital
Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
Origin UK
Release June

While the low-poly visuals nod

to Virtua Racing, the main
sources of Hotshot’s inspiration
come from later in the Sega
oeuvre: it’s Sega Rally by way
of OutRun 2 with a dash of
Burnout’s boost management

41
 TOP The whole game puts a smile on
our face, but none of it quite so
consistently as its simply made but
gorgeous sun.
ABOVE The game borrows from Mario
Kart the concept of a boost start.
The margin for error seems much
finer here, however

TOP The checkpoint timer

seems redundant in a race
setting: if you’re running out
of time you’ve surely already
lost. Better to give race
position prominence.
ABOVE The slightest feather
of the brake trigger as you
turn a corner is enough to
get your drift going.
RIGHT In Cops N Robbers,
cars have energy bars, police
are suitably aggressive, and
the last ‘robber’ on the field
takes the prize

42
 H Y
P E
HOTSHOT
RACING
W
e are delighted to report that
Hotshot Racing plays exactly the
way it looks like it does. As we
turn into the first corner, the slightest
squeeze of the brake button sees our car’s
back end slip out, tyres squealing as we enter
the first of many, many drifts. As we wrestle
the vehicle around the turn, walking that
delicious arcade-racing tightrope between
oversteer and understeer, our boost bar
slowly fills. We exit the turn and trigger it,
surging ahead of the pack, almost feeling the
wind in our hair. Gawd, it’s been too long.
Hotshot Racing is not merely content to
be a throwback to a bygone age of gaming:
it simply revels in it, and so do we. The
soundtrack, all pumping hardcore and
clattering breakbeats, evokes a vibe and
spirit that has all but disappeared from
driving games in an era of obsessive
simulation backed by soporific licensed
tunes. The 16 racetracks in the build we play
are absurdist pastiches of real-world
locations – from the Hoover Dam to the
Grand Canyon to the Las Vegas strip all in
the space of 15 seconds, the track running
into a casino and out the other side – and
the sort of silly spectacle left behind by the
genre’s drive for realism. One track runs
through a waterpark, and as you descend
into the aquarium a dolphin somersaults
right over the road. If it sounds joyous, well,
that’s because it is.
This build is a work in progress, but it’s
certainly getting there, with 16 courses that
are split, Mario Kart-style, across four grands
prix. There are multiple characters to choose
from, their archetypes straight out of the
’90s arcade-game style guide (plummy Brit,
brash American, actual robot) and each has
their own backstory, mid-race voice lines
and grand-prix victory cinematic. They each
have their own set of four vehicles, their
stats displaying the usual tradeoffs between
acceleration, top speed and drifting ability.
Cosmetics for both motor and motorist are
unlocked through play, some bought with
cash you earn while racing, others unlocked
by completing various challenges. The latter
represent a sop to modernity that we’re not
sure the game really needs – particularly the
progress trackers on the lengthier tasks that
pop up needlessly at the end of every race.
If all this suggests a game that offers
little in the way of surprise, it’s only because
we haven’t discussed the AI yet. While we
must take into account this isn’t the final
game, in their current form your fellow
racers are absolute brutes, seemingly
thoroughly schooled in the early Gran
Turismo-era cheese tactic of using the pack Winding road
to brute-force your way around sharp turns. Hotshot Racing has
They stick to their desired racing line been in the making
without a care for the possible consequences, for almost ten years,
and the results can be chaotic. Sometimes it during which time it
has undergone a
works in your favour, the rear-ender on your
change of platform,
way into a turn that kicks off a drift for you. name and engine.
Most of the time it has the opposite effect. Originally known as
Happily they haven’t yet discovered the Racing Apex, it was
power of a nitro boost on the final straight. the brainchild of
Trevor Ley, who’d
worked on driving
It’s not merely content to be games at EA, Rockstar
and Sony before
a throwback to a bygone age striking out on his
own. It was built in
of racing: it simply revels in it Unity, designed for
mobile and had a
Chase HQ-style focus
The presence of a boost mechanic means it’s on combat and
hard to ascertain whether the AI benefits destructible vehicles.
from rubber-banding: it is hardcoded into By 2016 it was a PC
the game, in a way. But all our races, game; a Kickstarter
campaign failed to
regardless of difficulty level, are thrillingly meet its goal, and
close-fought, our victories rarely measured a Steam Greenlight
by more than a few tenths of a second. campaign was
We have some UI quibbles – putting abandoned. It was
your current position in the bottom-left of Sumo’s arrival in 2018
as co-developer that
the screen, the last place you want to be
has finally made Ley’s
looking when driving through an aquarium dream come true, its
at 150mph, is a rather odd decision. And considerable arcade-
we’re unable to run the rule over the game’s racing experience –
other modes, Cops N Robbers and Drive Or and accompanying
internal engine – at
Explode. But already Hotshot Racing is
last getting the project
brimming with promise. It’s a long-overdue over the finishing line.
revival of one of gaming’s most cruelly
forgotten genres – and a game that’s been
long in the making, with the original concept
dating back almost a decade and only
becoming a reality when Sumo Digital
came on board in 2018. As the project at
last enters the final stretch, it looks well
positioned for a spot on the podium. Q
43
 Developer Giant
Squid
Publisher Annapurna
Interactive
Format iOS, PC, PS4,
Xbox One
Origin US
Release 2020
T H E PAT H L E S S
Giant Squid resurfaces, but can it thrive on dry land?
T
here are two ways to interpret that title.
It seems to hint at an untrodden
wilderness filled with discoveries, just
waiting to be explored. It suggests freedom,
too; in the absence of paths, presumably we
can carve our own. Equally, such a place could
leave us feeling lost, or lacking in direction.
As the Byron-inspired title no doubt hopes to
imply, there is pleasure in these woods, and
you don’t have to look too hard to find it. But
(and no one is more surprised than us to say
this) it doesn’t last – even for the short
duration of a time-limited demo.
When it begins, it’s immediately clear
we’re in more conventional territory than
Abzû’s tranquil waters. A trail of floating
targets stretches into the distance; the bow on
You’re supposed to be
shooting and sprinting through
this world at all times
our veiled hunter’s back makes it obvious
what comes next. We hold the right trigger as
we trot along and a reticule shoots over to
a nearby target; we release it to loose an arrow
that zips towards its destination, landing
a split-second later to fill our energy meter.
Squeezing the left trigger now sets us into
a run, and we repeat the trick before we can
slow down. The foreground becomes a blur as
we chain hit after hit with minimal effort and
reach an exhilarating pace, skidding between
the trees, our pet eagle flying alongside us.
Then we jump and the bird grabs our
hands in its talons as we fly towards a higher
target and take aim. This time the angle isn’t
quite right – or do we take our finger off the
trigger a split-second too soon? – and the
arrow doesn’t land true. We glide along for
a moment, tapping the jump button again
hopefully, but evidently we’re not quite as
lightweight as we look. Those elegant wings
flash to let us know it’s time to land, and we
tap Square to start a petting minigame, softly
44
stroking the eagle’s feathers to help it recover.
It’s a cute touch, though stopping entirely
feels like an admission of defeat, the ever-
present targets a nagging reminder that you’re
supposed to be shooting and sprinting your
way through this world at all times.
We return several times, and come to
the same conclusion. The Pathless is at its best
when you’re grounded, despite the occasional
whiffed arrow when the reticule shoots out of Storm
view and it’s unclear that there’s an obstacle warning
between us and the target it’s selected. But Your goal is to dispel
unless we’re missing something, its air game some manner of
needs work. Any time we need to reach higher curse, though for the
ground – and that’s fairly often given that our most part there’s little
imminent threat. That
mission involves visiting a series of tall but
changes when you
otherwise nondescript-looking towers – we glimpse a swirling
end up wrestling with the camera and
bemoaning a curious sluggishness while
blood-red miasma in
the distance, which at
gliding and flapping. A powerful updraught first resembles
Fortnite’s approaching
that carries us straight to the top of one ruin
comes as blessed relief. Here, we deposit three
storm – until you
realise you need to
artefacts we’ve collected from other towers, pass through it. When
activating a stone plinth as the camera rises you do, the powerful
towards an island high above that resembles winds will carry your
an upside-down volcano. Is this our ultimate eagle away, and then
you’ll see what
destination? Or a disaster we need to stop?
appears to be causing
No doubt the finished game will answer the anomaly: an
those questions, but we’re left with plenty imposing beast with
more. We could yet feel rapture by the time glowing eyes that
we reach The Pathless’ lonely shores – if, double as a keen pair
of searchlights.
indeed, its action spreads beyond the forest’s
Whenever they swing
edges. It may be that it simply doesn’t demo your way, you have
well, that without a handler to elaborate on to keep still as you
what’s left unsaid we’re left more adrift than slowly creep back to
we otherwise would be. Its stop-start rhythm your fallen friend to
revive them. As
could well smooth out over the course of the
slightly ill-fitting
game, with possible upgrades to our winged stealth sections go,
ally. Given a longer period of adjustment, it we’ve played worse,
might start to make more sense, or when we if only because it’s
learn more about our mission beyond what mercifully easy – as
little we’re given to go off here. Perhaps, long as you’re patient,
you’ll make it through
perhaps, perhaps – but for not the only time with little bother.
this month we walk away from an Annapurna
game with our usual sense of anticipation
tinged with a dash of concern. Q
TOP Pushing this strange protrusion
into the ground dispels the red
protective barrier. Our rabbit friend
here seems distinctly unimpressed.
ABOVE The hunter is much more fun
to control when she’s sprinting and
knee-sliding about the place. On one
run we decide not to complete any
objectives and have a better time

TOP If the beast within the

storm spots you it will rear
up and slam down, forcing
you to spill the crystals
you’ve collected – though if
you’re quick, you can gather
most of them back up.
ABOVE We hope it’s just for
the sake of the demo that
the objectives are so
straightforwardly
conventional. Locating three
keys to insert into these
slots feels old-fashioned.
LEFT There’s an awful lot
of forest to explore here,
but landmarks aside, it can
look a little samey

45
 Developer Draknek
and friends
Publisher Draknek
Format PC
Origin UK
Release Autumn
A MONSTER’S
EXPEDITION
An open-world puzzler with a journey to savour
F
ive years ago, Alan Hazelden and a few
of his friends taught us that A Good
Snowman Is Hard To Build. A good
videogame? Well, that’s tougher still. “The
process begins with getting a team together to
make something with some kind of plan that
it’ll take two to 12 months,” Hazelden tells us.
“Then it’s obviously always longer than that.”
He clearly didn’t expect it to take three years
and counting, but A Monster’s Expedition
(Through Human Exhibitions), to give it its full
title, already looks like it’s been worth the
effort. An ‘hour-long’ build turns out to be
twice that, and that’s only partly down to our
sluggish brains; naturally a game’s designer
can get through their puzzles quicker than
any player, but the relaxed ambience of the
The sight of another island
peeking out of the mist is
incentive enough to investigate
game’s verdant archipelago positively invites
you to take your time.
Your goal is simply to explore a succession
of small islands; how you cross the water
between them is the game’s central mechanic.
Snowman’s inquisitive monster is back (“In
our heads,” Hazelden explains, “it’s just this
really pleasant character who is naturally very
curious and so that fit really nicely”), but this
time he’s rolling logs rather than snowballs,
and he’s rather less gentle with them, too. A
push is enough to uproot a tree into its more
manoeuvrable form; then you can tip a log up
by nudging it from either end. Move around
the side of it, however, and each shove will
send the log rolling in that direction until it
hits a solid object.
Sometimes, of course, you’ll want to push
it off the edge, since that’s how you’ll get to
the next island. A single log makes a perfect
bridge; before long, you’re rolling two into
place to form a makeshift raft, though that
needs to be in the right position from which
46
to push off to more distant shores. Then
you’ll encounter larger logs that can’t be
rolled back onto their ends. The learning
curve is elegant, and any mistakes are quickly
rectified: as well as an undo function that lets
you wind back a single move, you can reset
the entire island to its original position.
There’s no punishment for doing so, and in
some cases it’s necessary, because there’s
often more than one route off the current
island. The mere sight of another peeking Log jam
out of the mist in a different direction than Creating an open-
the obvious way forward is incentive enough world puzzler has
for us to investigate. involved more work
than Hazelden ever
imagined it would. “It
Your natural curiosity is constantly means I have to take
rewarded, then, and not just by more puzzles. all these islands
The whole game is themed as a whimsical and make them fit
museum tour of exhibits designed to teach together like puzzle
outsiders about humanity. It’s such a natural pieces,” he says. “You
need to make sure
fit – the writing is charming and witty, with that islands can’t
a gently absurdist streak – that it’s a surprise interact in unintended
to learn the idea didn’t come together until ways, and I didn’t
fairly recently. The islands, however, were in want them all to be
place from the very start. “I’ve always been square or rectangular
either.” But it’s been
interested in getting rid of menus and making vital for tailoring the
something feel like a real space,” Hazelden game to different
says. “We did that with A Good Snowman Is types of player; those
Hard To Build and I was really happy with how who prefer forward
it worked out; it made it feel more like a place progression and those
who’d rather not be
that you’re just wandering around.”
led by the hand
It makes for an unusually accessible brand should find equal
of puzzle game from a man who likes to succour here. “I’m
challenge his players – Hazelden jokes that hoping that the game
this is an apology of sorts for 2017’s delightful itself can train people
to subconsciously
but demanding colony-building conundrum
choose the routes that
Cosmic Express. “My goal is that pretty much they’ll enjoy most,”
anyone should be able to pick it up and get to he says. It’s an
the end. And if you want harder puzzles, ambitious aim, but
there’ll be a bunch of optional stuff.” His judging by this build
at least, it’s one he
guiding principle is that a good puzzle should
looks to have met.
feel like a conversation between the designer
and the player. That being the case, this is the
equivalent of an enlightening chat with an old
friend who tells the kind of stories that have
you hanging on every word. We can’t wait to
hear more. Q
TOP The exhibits are full of wry
observations of our strange little
habits. Some are more out there –
you won’t look at lighthouses in
quite the same way again.
ABOVE It’s impossible to say how
long a puzzle game is – Hazelden
estimates it could take anywhere
between five to ten hours to reach
the end. Completionists looking to
finish the many optional puzzles can
expect it to last much longer

TOP “I tend to focus on

setting first,” Hazelden says,
“then I work out the
mechanics, and the stuff to
layer on top of that.”
ABOVE The branching
structure allows Hazelden
to teach players certain
rules at different times.
LEFT If you fancy a break
from pushing toppled logs
around, moving towards
any shore sees the monster
sit down and dangle its
feet in the water

47
Developer Graceful Decay
Publisher Annapurna
Interactive
Format PC
Origin US
Release TBA

MAQUETTE
Graceful Decay’s romantic recursive puzzler won’t be tied down

W
hen you’re alone, the world seems
made for two. Maquette’s fantastical
environments are full of such
mockery: parallel paths threading through twin
archways, mirrored flowerbeds and fountains.
The absence of somebody is felt, even before
the story we’re following takes a wistful turn.
And we are, indeed, following it: much as in
previous Annapurna-published walking sim
What Remains Of Edith Finch, handwritten
words melt into being on walls and in the air,
leading the way. In wandering Maquette’s
verdant gardens and lonely carnivals, you’re
retracing the steps of a relationship. Recursive
puzzles, meanwhile, speak to a different aspect
of love affairs: how things that once seemed so guys are the enemy.’ But of course they’re not. LEFT The speed at which you
small can become gigantic, world-altering We’re all having to wrap our heads around move is fast for a walking
sim; it takes a surprising
fixtures in our lives. these game design problems that are really, amount of effort to slow
As we carry around a curious cube, we’re put really hard to understand.” down and bask in the
atmosphere. We can see the
in mind of Manifold Garden; when we set it Finding Maquette’s unique take on the reasoning behind it – in a
down in the centre of a diorama of the recursive puzzle game has taken time – nine game also featuring puzzles
that require some trial-and-
courtyard we’re currently standing in and hear years of it. “The first thing I did was I slapped a error, a sluggish walk speed
it fall with a ceramic clunk behind us as a now story on it, almost without thinking, that was could grate
much larger object, we think of Superliminal. basically a justification for the game mechanic,”
But Maquette has existed as a prototype since Lemoore says. Back then, the player was a
2011, when game designer and Graceful Decay
founder Hanford Lemoore submitted it to
GDC’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop.
“It dawned on me that
“Some of my game design heroes came up to [a love story] was actually
me and were like, ‘This looks really cool, you
should work on it,’” he tells us. “And one of the the twist the game needed”
things I was told was: hide it. They said, ‘That’s
a mechanic that, like, if a video gets out there, prisoner trapped inside a magical world:
it will get copied. Just figure out what you indeed, we still see shades of enchantment in
want to do with it, keep quiet and then, you Maquette’s architecture. “I realised at some
know – when you’re ready.’ So that’s kind of point, I hated my story,” Lemoore continues.
what we’ve been doing.” Eventually, he and the “Like, I didn’t care about it.” He put the game
designers of many of those other games – all out of his mind, and went back to writing
of whom had independently had a similar short stories to remind himself why he enjoyed
brainwave – made their own Slack group to storytelling. One of his favourites chronicled a
chat with, and help, each other. “At first there’s relationship. “I had that moment of, ‘It sucks
this idea to be super-protective: ‘No, those that I can’t use this story for my videogame

48

It’s one of the fairground
puzzles that delights us
most: when the story leads
us towards a solid wall, we
suddenly realise that the
diorama might help us
discover what’s behind it
LEFT Music helps tell this
love story. A cover of The
Animals’ San Francisco
Nights almost hints at the
game’s concept: “walls
move, minds do too”.
BELOW Some critical puzzle
elements are tricky to spot.
It’s feedback Lemoore’s
heard before: improved
signposting is underway
Bae area
Maquette’s striking
environments are the
result of Lemoore’s
love for San Francisco
and much research into
architecture. “Tim
Doolen, who’s our art
director, I brought him
out to San Francisco,
and we took a bunch
of photos of the
Victorians up here,”
Lemoore tells us.
“When I built my
prototype game,
I discovered that you
really needed unique
architecture so that
you can recognise that,
‘Oh, this tiny building
is the same as that big
building.’” They
needed a way to have
their structures be both
because, you know, it’s a puzzle game and this key to a later puzzle, for instance. But we try real and imagined:
“I wanted towers, and
is a love story.’ And then it dawned on me that countless solutions before the right one,
things that were easy
that was actually the twist the game needed.” because its connection to the part of the story
to kind of landmark
Lemoore was surprised at how readily his being told isn’t clear – some misleading and waypoint – and so
level layout for the game mapped the arc of a wording seems too much like a clever clue, that’s how the story
love story. Much of the challenge of designing sending our mind in the wrong direction, and kind of evolved into
Maquette, he tells us, has been “letting the the solution falls flat. the sketchbook that
player make their own connections between We often leave half a sentence hanging in they share, and there’s
this idea that the
the puzzles they’re solving and the story the air, too, while we cast around for a puzzle sketchbook is what’s
they’re being told.” He sees it as akin to a solution, halting the steady momentum of the evoking the retelling
connect-the-dots puzzle: provide too many typical walking sim and making it hard to recall of the story.”
dots, and the player doesn’t have to make a what’s been said. Things aren’t quite clicking
connection – practical or emotional. We can as they should just yet. But this is the earliest
see the intent during our demo, even if not all section of the game, and our understanding of
of it translates. We enjoy fantasising about the Maquette’s love language may well deepen over
narrative significance of a key that proves, erm, time – it takes two to tango, after all. Q
49
 ROUND-UP

UNBEATABLE
Developer/publisher D-Cell Games
Format PC (consoles TBA) Origin US Release TBA

NINJALA
Developer/publisher GungHo Online Entertainment Format Switch Origin Japan Release May 27

A musical adventure featuring stylish rhythm-action combat,

with hints of Persona and The World Ends With You, shot
through with a summery anime vibe? Unbeatable ticks just
about all our boxes. A release date of ‘202X’ suggests it could
be some way off; the wait, we’re sure, will be worth it.

PEAKY BLINDERS:
MASTERMIND
Developer Futurlab Publisher Curve Digital
Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Origin UK Release Summer

The benefits to membership of the Exclusive Ninja Club – the name given to Ninjala’s online stress test – are not, it’s fair to say,
immediately apparent. Yet after repeated connection failures, we soon see why the servers are being bombarded. This battle-
royale brawler is no mere Splatoon clone, as you fight with gum-enhanced weapons that you can enlarge by destroying
respawning drones. Its melee duels are chaotic, but smashing your opponent against the arena walls to a cry of ‘Ippon!’ proves
consistently satisfying; likewise, disguising yourself as a crate or a barrier to sneak up on an unwitting rival. Promising.

NIER: REINCARNATION
Developer Applibot Publisher Square Enix Format Android, iOS Origin Japan Release TBA
Might John Wick Hex have sparked a trend for unorthodox
licensed games from experienced indies? Velocity developer
Futurlab has delivered an intriguing strategy-puzzler, where
you’ll use the Shelby clan’s unique abilities – from brawling
to bribery – to coordinate a criminal masterplan.

PENDRAGON
Developer/publisher Inkle
Format PC Origin UK Release Summer

Nier was always better than its critical reception suggested, but we can’t pretend we ever
thought its publisher would celebrate its tenth anniversary with an upgraded version –
somewhere between remaster and remake – and a new mobile game. Details are scant, but
footage of a girl (alongside what appears to be an Automata-style pod covered in a ghostly
sheet) trotting through a desolate world to Keiichi Okabe’s lush score is an encouraging start. Branching storytelling isn’t new for Inkle, but we’re excited to
see it try a new genre in this Arthurian turn-based strategy.
The studio has invited fans to submit short ‘campfire tales’
which will be scattered throughout its dynamic narrative. It’s
paying for them, too – take note, Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

50
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52
54 High Life

70 The Making Of…

Lair Of The
Clockwork God

74 Studio Profile:
Yacht Club Games

108 Time Extend:

Crysis

Game The Ascent
Developer Neon Giant
Publisher Curve Digital
Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
Release Winter
How an indie
superteam built a
dizzying cyberpunk
city with the help of
Xbox Series X, and
positioned itself at the
pinnacle of the next
generation BY JEN SIMPKINS

55
HIGH LIFE
on’t look down. It’s the mantra of all those who fix their
sights on a point high above their heads and vow to
make it to the top. But in The Ascent, it’s impossible not
to: the edges of the tower we are climbing are
constantly, mercilessly kept in our peripheral vision. Out
there, away from the gunfire and the tentacles, drones
dart through tangles of cables thatched across a near-
bottomless chasm. Disused balconies – more than we
can count – line the sides of it, floors falling away below
as far as the eye can see. And so the kick of a shotgun is
always tempered with a lurch of the stomach.
So it is, too, over at Neon Giant, the Swedish indie
studio responsible for this behemothic creation. Much of
the world may be on pause right now, but as we sit
down to speak with slightly frazzled co-founders Tor Frick
and Arcade Berg, it’s clear the studio is currently working
overtime. All 11 people at Neon Giant are pouring
everything into finalising the details of the biggest
announcement of their careers: their debut game will be
an Xbox Series X launch title, leading the charge for the
next generation of videogames. The length of their to-do
list is, for now, helping them to not think too hard about
just how far they’ve come. Here we are to force them to
look: to ask, in no uncertain terms, how they got here. because we want to work on similar things,” Frick says. Most people in this
“We had the luxury of actually being able to make some world sport some
form of cybernetic
choices, and using what’s been given to us. And we augmentation that
T H E V E T E R A N S AT N E O N said, ‘We’ve worked on five different Wolfenstein titles, affords an edge in
combat – enemies
and enough is enough – we’ve got to act on this thing with glowing eyes are
G I A N T H AV E A C O M B I N E D we, you know, had coffee about back in 2010, in rarely good news
Poland.’” In 2018, the timing was as perfect as it was
RECORD OF OVER 70 YEARS ever going to be: in even inexperienced hands, an
Unreal Engine 4 souped up on the phenomenal success
IN GAME DEVELOPMENT of Fortnite was helping tiny teams create unbelievable
things, let alone in the hands of the people who’d been
“Yeah,” Frick says, shaking his head in disbelief as he directly involved in its development. And the digital
repeats our question to himself: “How did that happen?” download market was still on the rise, with ambitious
Well, firstly, this is not your typical merry band of sci-fi publishers – Curve Digital among them – having figured
enthusiasts out to try their hands at making a videogame out that their role in giving this new wave of indies
for the first time. The veterans at Neon Giant have a platform in a saturated market could make them millions.
a combined record of 70 years in game development,
and have worked on a prolific slate of triple-A titles, Having worked in large companies for such a long
including System Shock 2, Far Cry 3, Gears Of War: time, Frick and Berg knew how they could build their new
Judgment, 2016’s Doom, The Division, Bulletstorm, studio for success. “It’s very easy to have good ideas,”
Fallout 4 and no fewer than five of the most recent Frick says. “What becomes hard is realising them. The
Wolfenstein games. Frick and Berg are well known in the fewer people you are, the easier it is to channel that
industry for their talents and expertise, having worked for pure creativity, because you don’t have to take it through
many years at both Epic Games Poland (now People ten different meetings. We just want to dream up things
Can Fly) and MachineGames. Frick is the artist and have them be real as soon as possible.” He laughs.
responsible for designing many of the most iconic virtual “I would say that we are furiously creative.”
guns you’ve ever shot; Berg, the technical mind behind Berg nods: “We take great pride in the games we
the combat arenas you’ve fired them in. worked on, but we also saw how many people it takes,
They had always dreamed of starting a studio how much time it takes.” When you’re a studio with a Tor Frick, creative director
together. “That’s why we often end up in similar places, headcount of hundreds, he says, the unavoidable and Neon Giant co-founder

57

middle-management becomes inefficient. “The studios are
built on that. And that’s perfectly fine, because the game
sells and then you can make another one. It’s just not
how we see ourselves working, because you cannot
squeeze 100 per cent out of everyone in a 500-man
house. You can maybe get 90, and that’s cool – but we
want that extra ten. We are happier if we get to really
flex our game dev muscles.”
On this evidence, we think, as we gaze up at the full
height of the Ascent Group arcology, Neon Giant must
be absolutely ecstatic. The tower at the centre of The
Ascent is a monument to the personal and financial
investment the studio’s received – first from “calling in
every favour we had amassed through life,” Berg says,
T H E N E X T- G E N E R AT I O N X B O X
GIVES NEON GIANT LICENCE
TO PUSH THE ARCOLOGY TO
ITS TECHNICAL LIMIT
namedropping various industry vet friends and Amplifier
Game Invest, and then an Unreal dev grant following
their first prototype, made by just the two of them. Next
came publisher Curve Digital’s backing, and finally
Microsoft’s involvement, the addition of the next-
generation Xbox as a platform giving Neon Giant licence
to push the arcology to its technical limit. But it’s also the
direct end result of Frick and Berg’s determination to build
a studio that’s a bespoke fit for the needs and
capabilities of all of its members. As Frick explains, this
was not about developing a dream game. “This was
more like, if we’re gonna make a game, what’s cool?
What do we like to do? And what can we do?”
What Frick and Berg can do, and love to do, is build
worlds – often ones in which your primary means of
interaction involves bullets. “Something we said very
early on,” Berg says, “was that whatever the story or
58
Lighting is frequently
stunning, lending
unexpected colour to
the arcology’s dingy,
bustling interior. This
will doubtless be one
of Xbox Series X’s
most visually
advanced games
game world ends up being, it needs to be something that
can support whatever we want to do in gameplay, but
with a narrative hook – like, we need to be able
to anchor it somehow.” They could do sci-fi scenes.
They could do guns. And with an expert knowledge
of Unreal Engine, they could even do scale – as long
as they did it in a sustainable way. The Ascent began
to take shape with the idea that if they were going
to allow players to create their own character in
a shooter-slash-RPG, the world would be the main
character, and its rules needed to be clearly defined.
What clearer definition than a hierarchy?
A planet-hopping epic wasn’t going to be possible
with such a tiny team, but a thriller set in a single,
memorable locale just might. Thus, the arcology: run by
a company called The Ascent Group, it’s a terrible marvel
of trickle-down economics, with the megacorporation
overlords at the top, all the way down to the crime
syndicates and the underclass – workers, people, you –
at the bottom. Many have continued to flock to it,
eagerly attaching themselves to this now-sprawling base,
leeching whatever dregs of the economy have been left
to them. And then, something goes wrong. Everything is
bathed in red light, as the arcology suddenly shuts down.
Automated defences switch off, and private security
forces aren’t getting paid. Panic, riots and gang wars
ensue as everybody tries to move in on each other’s turf.
And this is your chance to climb the tower, in the name of
finding out what happened.
The concept immediately calls to mind a few of
our favourite films. “The Raid is very much a reference for
us,” Frick confirms, “and Dredd. That’s a great example:
it’s its own little universe, and it doesn’t matter what
happens outside of the building. And that’s how the idea
of the shutdown came about, because we want to have
this vast world we can talk about and imagine, but we
wanted to have a very local story that affects you and
that you can see the impact of.” It’s meant that Frick and
the other artists at Neon Giant – who work more or less
straight into Unreal Engine 4, hyper-literate as they are,
HIGH LIFE

59
60

for efficiency’s sake – have been able to illustrate this
part of this world we find ourselves ingrained in in an
almost hypnotic level of detail. Everywhere we look, at
least on these bustling lower levels, there’s something
going on: a bruiser idly swinging a baseball bat,
contemplating a training hologram with its fists up;
pipes full of unidentifiable liquid and strings of tattered
paper lanterns criss-crossing overhead; an unfriendly-
looking discussion in a grimy back alley; ads for RushRX,
Endo Energy and Best Ramen flicker across searingly
bright digital billboards.
All this, because the concept of an ascent through
a tower was not only well-suited to an RPG progression
system, but also a cyberpunk world in which you
transcend the limits of your original body through
technology. The world dictated the game; even, to an
extent, the camera angle. Neon Giant hadn’t set out to
“THE PEOPLE WHO JOIN YOU
W I L L D R A S T I C A L LY C H A N G E
W H AT YO U C A N D O ”
make a top-down, twin-stick shooter (although Frick and
Berg admit that, despite their years of expertise in
making firstperson shooters, they weren’t keen to go up
against a market they knew first-hand to be extremely
competitive). But they were up for making something that
didn’t fit entirely within their wheelhouse. And, most
importantly, they weren’t about to let the player forget
who – or what – the main character of The Ascent was.
The rule was simple: on every level, you should always
be able to see down through the arcology. A top-down
camera angle would help achieve that. Through holes
yawning in the midst of metal floors surrounded by
rickety handrails, or cascades of scaffolding drawing the
eye over the edge and down to the city below, the past
is always at least implied, if not directly visible, as you
fight each floor’s occupants. “The important thing is that
you’re never allowed to forget about it,” Berg says,
“because that’s when you end up with the football field
made out of metal.”
Instead, The Ascent’s impromptu combat arenas –
whether the grimy, graffitied, low-level stacks full of pink-
mohawked pipe-swingers, or the gleaming futuretech
habitats of the advanced megacorp fighters near the
HIGH LIFE
top – feel like real spaces. Destructible environments are
You’ll start out as
another way of achieving that sense of having an effect
a bottom-feeder,
on a tangible world, and so the team decided early on but level up your
that guns would have to rip chunks out of walls. “That character – both their
stats and their social
required a lot of R&D on the tech side with Unreal standing – and you’ll
Engine,” Berg tells us. Neon Giant is using SideFX’s unlock access to
higher-up areas in
Houdini to help the small team generate the amount of
the arcology
assets needed for The Ascent’s film-quality particle effects.
“We need tools that can do that with manual oversight,
because we say that we don’t do procedural runtime
generation of anything, but we generate a lot of things
offline, then review it and bring it into the game. So that’s
one of the ways we’ve increased our output, because
pure random is not necessarily a good thing, but using
the power of it can definitely help us.”
It’s a belief that carries over into The Ascent’s weapon
pool, which spans flamethrowers and launchers,
miniguns and sniper rifles: it was decided very early on
that they wouldn’t use RNG for weapon stats, in order
that they could maintain control over what each specific
gun feels like to shoot. “What we do use RNG on is
what loot is dropped, and when it’s dropped,” Berg
says. When you start encountering robotic foes, then,
you won’t have to hunt too far to find the kind of energy
weapon they’re vulnerable to. It’s all about maintaining
that upward momentum through the arcology. “So it’s all
handcrafted content – quite a bit of it, I’d say. And we
have methods for being able to do very broad strokes
when we’re working with that, so I don’t have to spend
half a day tweaking one weapon out of many.”
As development on the game has progressed, Frick
and Berg have been able to add to Neon Giant’s
headcount, all while keeping in mind their goal of being
a studio whose efficiency comes from being a bespoke
fit to its creators. “We pitch the studio more than the
game when it comes to finding colleagues,” Berg says.
“Like, ‘This is how we want to work, and make games.’”
But the end result, they believe, should bend around
your experts. “The people who join you will drastically
change what you can do,” Frick says. “And you should
embrace that. Instead of trying to make them do the
thing that you thought, maybe it’s better to make them do
the thing that they’re really great at.” And while it’s
difficult to redirect the path of, say, a hundred-person
dev team, keeping a headcount barely in the double
digits meant Neon Giant could swiftly adapt plans to Arcade Berg, game director
a new mechanic, or piece of tech, or team member. and Neon Giant co-founder
61
Berg is no stranger to Or tentacles. “We’re like, ‘Okay, we can make tentacles.
making shooting feel Let’s put in tentacles.’”
good. “It’s what you
shoot – not only The Ascent’s cyberpunk themes, then, have paid
enemies flinching dividends in terms of allowing Neon Giant to be as
when they’re shot in
the chest, but walls
flexible as possible. So it is in battle, where your heavily
crumbling and pillars modded fighter can use their cybernetics to cause tactical
falling. It’s the world chaos. Grafted to various parts of the body, abilities
responding: ‘Oh, I’m
being shot at!’” seem mainly centred around crowd control: the AP
Missile Barrage attached to our arms locks onto multiple
charging thugs; a skeleton-rattling Stasis Stomp in our
legs juggles those that get too close, leaving them
hanging in the air to be torn apart by the shotgun we’ve
just switched to. The tentacles have replaced our internal
organs and, well, the less detail we go into about what
they do, the better for your stomach.
It is all, in other words, sort of a known quantity.
When we suggest this, Frick agrees: “One of the things
that was important for us in the beginning was, we didn’t
want to do something that is focused around one
gimmicky thing – ‘what if time played backwards’, or
something. We are old-fashioned, in that way. We
make gameplay-driven games, and interactive systems:
it needs to have a solid core, it can’t rest on one thing.
What we really wanted to bring to this game was our
love for very rewarding-feeling gameplay, and put
that extra love into how it feels and reacts and behaves.”
For Berg, The Ascent’s standout element, he hopes, is
a kind of confidence: “It does full VO, dialogue,
cutscene, trading, co-op, world-building, destruction,
AI civilians, hacking, loot, the visual fidelity – I’ve never
seen a game like this being packaged this neatly with all
the bells and whistles.”
Frick and Berg obviously take extreme pride in how
much the company’s approach to indie development
has achieved. But even they did not expect so many
people to come calling. First, it was Curve, following
the news of the Unreal dev grant. “They came by and
they were incredibly excited about the game, our
vision for the studio and how we want to be creative,”
Frick says. “They pitched right back at us. No one
62
else matched their enthusiasm, and it felt like they
really got what we’re trying to do with Neon Giant.”
And not too long after that, the publisher passed on
a message: Microsoft was interested in visiting. “We
were like, ‘Okay, cool – let’s just, uh, cancel our
other plans’,” Berg laughs. Microsoft’s European team,
ID@Xbox director Chris Charla and partnerships
manager Agostino Simonetta among them, piled into
a tiny glass room – “basically an aquarium” – in their
office for a demo of the game. “They were just
like, ‘Guys, what you have here is really special.
We need to talk more.’ They were told in no uncertain
terms: don’t show this to anyone. “Like, ‘Don’t waste your
announce – this is gonna be big.’”
“I’VE NEVER SEEN A GAME
L I K E T H I S B E I N G PA C K A G E D
T H I S N E AT LY W I T H A L L T H E
BELLS AND WHISTLES”
Big enough to help launch Xbox Series X, in fact.
“Like, all this was happening before we had income
papers,” Berg laughs. “We were like, ‘Surely this can’t
be happening.’” Blown away in particular by The
Ascent’s visual fidelity, it wasn’t too long before Microsoft
would send over Xbox Series X dev kits to see what
Neon Giant could do with next-gen tech. The
progression to next-gen would be fairly smooth: they
were already leaning heavily on its firstparty software,
Epic’s Unreal Engine, and so the real trick would simply
be ensuring they were prepared to use the new
technology to the fullest. “We’re doing, of course, 4K
60fps, which is blazingly fast,” Frick says. What it meant
specifically for the world of The Ascent, and where they
should put the resources, took longer to discern – indeed,
they’re still finding out what the new console can do.

AHEAD OF THE CURVE
When CEO Dominic Wheatley joined the firm in
2016, his plan was to grow Curve Digital into
one of the UK’s biggest videogame publishers.
“Over the years, the industry has been dominated
by those people who managed to clamber up the
slippery slope,” he tells us. “And the reason was
that the capital required was so enormous. It
required 200 million pounds of capital just to be
able to deal with warehouse inventory coming in
and out from Sony, Xbox and so on. And so we
saw a dearth of British games publishers.”
Initially, Curve ported popular PC games
to consoles. With the rise of Steam and the
digital market, and the declining visibility
of indies, came an opportunity to provide
a platform, with the warehouse costs gone. Hits
such as Human Fall Flat convinced Wheatley that
this was the way to go. Investing in The Ascent
was “the next step” for Curve, and the scale of
the operation is “now in the millions.”
Next-gen will do that for you. In regular
conversations with platform holders, The Ascent
caught Microsoft’s eye. “This was before we knew
about the new machine. Initially we were talking
about a general exclusive. And then they said,
‘Actually, there’s a whole new thing, and we’re
going to give you some dev kits to give to Neon
Giant, because we’ve got some extra things we
want to feature.’” He can’t help but compare
the experience to his time at Eidos publishing
Tomb Raider: “Software sells hardware, and
there’s no doubt Sony sold more PlayStations that
Christmas. Now, I’m not suggesting we’re going
to be Tomb Raider with The Ascent, but I think
it’s one of a number of titles that will separate
[Xbox] from other formats.”
For Curve, hitching its wagon to a next-gen
launch title is huge. “It’s a bit like Leicester City
HIGH LIFE
winning the cup,” Wheatley laughs. “It propels With Stadia and others
you to a new level. It commands attention with on the rise, Wheatley
says, distribution will
the platform owners. And, at the end of the day, become “direct to the
one’s rather hoping that one’s going to make consumer in the way
that mobile is through
quite a lot of money out of it. And the reason for Android and iOS. It’s
that is, if you do, then you can start to put some of a very exciting time
that money back into backing more games with for British publishers”
more independent developers.” Digital releases
are absolving publishers of inventory costs, and
time spent pursuing deals with physical
wholesalers, that can be instead invested straight
into the games. “And hopefully, you can sort of
get there a bit quicker. In the old days, you had to
really sort of clamber up there. I think now, there’s
nothing to stop you.”
The digital distribution pipeline is only going
to improve, he says, with the advent of
next-gen: Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, Stadia,
and so on. He’s confident that Curve is in the
right position to take advantage of it without
the baggage of a legacy – much as King and
Zynga saw the mobile gaming opportunity at
the start of the last decade. “In the end, the
big companies, all they could do is watch as
the billions of dollars went straight past them.
And I think we’ll see something similar. I hope
in this push, you get the new winners who
can’t be pushed to one side, and I’m
hoping companies such as Team 17 and
Curve will be those people.”
63

“Faster load speeds – it just comes out, magically. You
just click, and there you go, it loads way faster.”
The distinct increase in visual fidelity, meanwhile,
has meant Frick and his artists have been able to do the
most. “The draw distances are going to be as long as
we can possibly make them anyway,” Frick grins, as
another look down the tower inspires a fresh wave of
vertigo, “so it’s mostly about the clarity of detail, because
we have more detail than you can actually see at lower
resolutions.” On Series X, when the camera changes
position following a vicious gunfight, you should be able
to count the bullet-holes in the walls. “With high
resolution, you can actually see that,” Berg says. “Again,
it loops back to the methods and workflows here.
Everything is ludicrously detailed. So when we bring
down the camera, it just works.”
Crucially, the addition of a next-gen platform hasn’t
disrupted Neon Giant’s process. “It’s been – I’m not
gonna say stress-free, but it’s not the old days of getting
an obscure box with a manual in a different language,
and then you call a hotline on your landline phone,” Frick
says. Berg continues: “Microsoft is very open and
approachable. I mean, Tor has worked on I don’t know
how many machines by now. So we’ve seen the different
generations of consoles, and things just get better and
better. Microsoft knows what it takes to be able to make
a game for their machines, so they’re prepared – the
tools are there.” And for someone who’s worked with so
many next-gen consoles, Frick is emphatic about the
leap Series X represents for videogame development,
even if today’s leaps are “different” from those of
yesteryear. “It’s huge. The hard drive read speed, and
stuff like that – there are so many things. But also, the
great thing is that it’s becoming easier and easier to
develop. So it’s easier and easier to actually use all that
power, and to spend more time on the creative bits,
because ideally, you just want everything to work, to
realise your creations. An 11-person indie studio could
not have done what we are doing 20 years ago.”
The benefit of next-gen for players, then, goes
beyond the visual and performance upgrades. “You’ll
64
Not all the cybernetic
abilities are explicitly
combat-focused;
there’s a hint of
Metroidvania promise
about Leapfrog, for
instance, which
powers up your legs so
that you can clear tall
obstacles with ease
“A N 1 1 - P E R S O N I N D I E
S T U D I O C O U L D N OT H AV E
D O N E W H AT W E A R E D O I N G
20 YEARS AGO”
play a game and say, ‘Wow, this is amazing – thank
god someone could make it,’” Berg says. “Yeah,” Frick
agrees, “it just cuts down the barrier between us saying,
‘we have a great idea,’ and then you’re like, ‘Okay,
cool, where are your 300 engineers?’ Now you’ll start
seeing more and more creative titles, and more can be
explored, because you don’t need to spend two years
doing the technological bit.” As making games becomes
more accessible, it seems assured that we’ll start to see
new spaces opening up in the industry, with smaller
teams on bigger stages, with riskier ideas rendered in
higher fidelity, for a fraction of last decade’s costs. “And
if someone’s thinking about doing it,” Berg says, “or
looking at us as an example – just wait, and see how we
do?” Frick throws his head back, and laughs.
Their honesty is endearing: no matter their collective
experience, this is untrodden ground for Neon Giant. The
atmosphere is rarefied. It’s a long way to fall. But they
wouldn’t have it any other way. And despite everything
there’s the sense, they tell us, that in some ways life is
similar to how it’s always been. “I wake up, I go to an
office, I make games, and I go home, right?” Berg says.
“But more than anything it changes the mindset, because
I go in and I’m building my future, literally. I will see the
direct result of this – crash and burn, or rich and famous,
we’ll see. But this is definitely my future I am working
towards. And this goes for everyone here. It’s not just
coming in, working, collecting a paycheque: ‘This is my
life, I’ll see what I’m doing in two years.’ In two years, I’ll
still be doing Neon Giant. I’ve never been this invested
in what I’ve been doing before. This just takes it to a new
level with the commitment, and, you know, visualising the
goal. This is it. Time to make a mark.” Q
HIGH LIFE

65
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67
 T H E
M A K I N G
O F. . .

L A I R O F T H E
C L O C K W O R K G O D
How ten years of pub chats spawned an emotional comic adventure
BY CHRIS SCHILLING

Format PC
Developer/publisher Size Five Games
Origin UK
Release 2020

70
W
hen Dan Marshall started
talking about the third Dan And
Ben game, the second was only
three months old. Time
Gentlemen, Please had launched in June 2009;
by September he’d announced the first in a series
of new episodic adventures starring the digital
alter-egos of Marshall and writing partner and
co-designer Ben Ward. “Right then,” he tweeted
the following January, “The ‘The Revenge Of The
Balloon-Headed Mexican’ Hype-Machine starts
here!” Needless to say, that machine ground to
a halt; likewise when Marshall revealed that Son
Of Ben And Dan would be the next entry in the
series. Eventually, after 2017’s intensely silly
football parody Behold The Kickmen, he decided
it was finally time to make the game he and
Ward had been discussing for the better part of
a decade. “We’d done so much prep work and
put so much effort into designing something we
thought would be really cool that we felt it would
be stupid not to make it,” he says. And so, at
last, Lair Of The Clockwork God was born.
The likes of Thimbleweed Park, Night In The
Woods and Owlboy convinced Marshall that it
was the right time to revisit his idea of a narrative-
led game that combined point-and-click
adventuring with puzzle-platforming. “Zeitgeists
come and go,” he says, “but all these games
were out and I thought, ‘Well, this is only going
to take me a year and a half to make.’” He
laughs at the memory, though his optimism wasn’t
entirely misplaced; the groundwork, after all, had
already long been laid. A look at the 2009
press release for his first abortive attempt could
be copy-pasted into one for the finished game:
‘Dan and Ben can now be split up, allowing the
player to flip between the two as and when they
choose,’ it reads. “Yeah, it’s not like it had ever
gone away,” Marshall says. “It was this
omnipresent force in my life that was just sitting
there like a big lump waiting to be dealt with.”
That the lump remained was partly thanks
to Marshall’s desire to avoid making a straight
sequel. He and Ward had already written two
point-and-click pastiches – a third, he reckoned,
would be overkill. The pair continued to meet
in pubs to thrash out ideas; Marshall can’t
remember exactly when the move into
platforming came about, though he recalls the
idea that sparked it. “You know when that first
Goomba-type enemy rocks up? You’ve got this
relatively safe baddie where you can just jump
“Ben was always the adventure fanboy,” Marshall says.
“I was always happier playing platformers than adventure
games. So the seed was there for the two characters.”
on its head and move away – it’s something
everyone innately understands. Well, I had this
scene in my head of Dan jumping on some
creature, and it just explodes into blood and
guts. Then he slips on all the entrails and tries
to stand up and ends up falling over again.”
This delightfully grisly image ultimately didn’t
survive – though there’s a similarly gruesome
“WE WERE VERY
FASTIDIOUS ABOUT
MAKING SURE WHAT
WE WERE SAYING
WAS RECEIVED THE
RIGHT WAY”
replacement – but it stuck with Marshall,
convincing him there were plenty of ways the
two writers could joke about platformers. For
a while, the game featured an amusing riff on
Jonathan Blow’s Braid, where Marshall’s in-game
self would be convinced he had the ability to
manipulate time, “but all it really did was just
make him walk backwards and make stupid
rewind-y noises with his mouth.” The code was
in place, but in a game that already had two
characters with very different abilities and
gravitational changes, there were too many ways
such a mechanic could break the puzzles.
That alone might not have been enough to
make them abandon the idea, but Marshall was
also keen not to make the humour too specific.
Lair Of The Clockwork God might mock certain
genre clichés, but both Marshall and Ward were
conscious that the jokes should never feel nasty,
or target individual games. “Our mantra has
always been to be Scream and not Scary
Movie,” he explains. “Scream is a pitch-perfect
pisstake of all those slasher films, but it’s also its
own thing. And then Scary Movie did what
Scream did but worse, because it was basically
just making dumb jokes at the expense of
a load of properties.” The game does feature
a sequence railing against maudlin walking
simulators, but the pair took great care to ensure
its jabs didn’t come across as vindictive. “That’s
the closest we get, but it’s never actually going,
‘Oh, look at Dear Esther’ or ‘Look at Gone
Home’. We’re taking the motifs from those
genres and amalgamating them into something
we can make fun of without being unpleasant.”
This sequence is called Hope, one of
a range of constructs designed by an AI to
harvest data from Dan and Ben so it can learn
about human emotions. This particular concept,
Marshall says, goes back some 15 years, and to
a pub conversation with ex-game journalists Jon
Blyth and Steve Hogarty (both of whom are
acknowledged in the end credits). “You play
a little USB drive trying to teach a computer
about human emotions. But they weren’t big
emotions. They were smaller things like what it’s
like to trip over in the street and pretend that you
haven’t, just these weird things that would have
been impossible to make a level for.” But the
idea stuck, and felt thematically fitting: Ben There,
Dan That had involved visiting different dimensions
to solve puzzles, while Time Gentlemen, Please
had Dan and Ben travelling between time zones.
Putting the pair through a range of emotional
experiments seemed to make perfect sense.
So how did he and Ward choose which
emotions to feature? “Ben and I basically spent
a lot of time in pubs looking at a Wikipedia list
of emotions – obviously we hardly know any,
because we’re dead inside,” Marshall laughs.
“Everything that we could think of an actionable
idea for went in the game.” In the end, there
were very few that didn’t make the cut.
Obsession, Marshall says, was an N++-inspired
platforming sequence where Dan had 100
trinkets to collect that were either difficult or
impossible to get; Ben, meanwhile, would have
to struggle past a series of guards to find out
the secret inside a large box in the middle of
a room. What was once Anger became
Frustration in the finished game – a deliberately
difficult platformer, but it was originally
71
THE MAKING OF...
followed by Relief, which would be the same level
albeit spikes would retract on approach while
bridges would pop into existence over every gap.
Other chapters stayed, but with significant
changes. Marshall conceived a puzzle at the end
of Grief that would punch home the idea of life
being more difficult when a friend or loved one
isn’t around. “We had this really convoluted
sequence where you needed three batteries, but
you could only get two,” he explains. “So you’d
have to keep on taking them out of things and
putting them in other things and moving this robot
around to get the door open. It was an amazing
metaphor for life being harder after someone else
has died, but it was just a really boring, laborious
puzzle.” He and Ward instead asked themselves
what the polar opposite of that would be, coming
up with the hilariously inappropriate alternative
that features in the finished game. “We were
sitting there in floods of tears laughing, and I said,
‘Well, we’ve got to do this now because it’s made
us laugh just talking about it.’”
It’s a shockingly funny moment in a sequence
that treads a very fine line; Grief tackles tough
subject matter with a degree of levity that feels
unusually daring. Even Marshall had his doubts
about it at times, asking himself whether was he
pushing things a little too far. Then again, he
says, all of this was surely in keeping with one
great tradition of adventure game characters:
“Whether it’s Guybrush Threepwood, George
Stobbart or Sam and Max, they all just walk
around stealing objects if they need them and
doing things that are completely amoral. Ben’s
character just sees that through.”
“I can’t tell you how much we worried about
everything,” he continues. “Anything that was
slightly contentious, we were very fastidious about
making sure what we were saying was received
the right way.” That’s understandable in an
adventure with a running gag about a flower that
can cure cancer; those who’ve played the game
will be well aware it’s joking about games that
treat serious subject matter flippantly by doing
precisely that. But when he told a friend at
Brighton’s Develop conference, the horrorstruck
response let him know he needed to tread
carefully. “It was absolutely not done lightly – all
of that stuff was worked really, really carefully.
And then we finish it all off with a farting corpse.”
He laughs. “I think that’s one of the things we
do quite well in this country. The British sense
of humour has always been quite dark. We
72
Q&A
Dan Marshall
Writer/designer/
programmer, Lair Of The
Clockwork God
The whole
respawning section
feels like something
you’ve wanted to explore for a while.
One of the things about Ben is that he’s an
amazing writer but he will not tolerate something
being explained in a woolly fashion. He insists
on there being a solid line of logic throughout
the entire game. Like I said about jumping on
the Goomba’s head, it was a godsend to make
fun of these mechanics that we all intrinsically
understand because we’ve had 30 years of this
stuff, but no one’s actually thought to question it.
The Fear section suggests you could make a
horror game. Is it something you’d like to try?
Certainly not in 2D! Horror in 2D is a fucking
ballache. I looked at Aliens Vs Predator. AVP
and AVP2 did this amazing thing where every
lift sounded like an alien screeching. It was so
fucking daft, but it was amazing. Pipes falling
from the ceiling that look like alien heads –
everything was a jump scare. But with no depth
or darkness or fog it’s difficult to make things that
are scary. The spider monsters work, I think, by
being unsettling. They shriek when they come for
you and that’s quite horrible.
You’ve had a positive response from people
who have played it. What do you think were
the biggest hurdles to wider interest?
It’s probably a lot of things. No matter how
much we made it clear that it’s a standalone
thing and you don’t need to have played the first
two, there are obviously people who go, ‘Oh,
I haven’t played the first two so I’ll not bother.’ It
is obviously going to influence what I make next,
which is very much something that does play
well on Twitch or YouTube. A little bit of it’s that –
a game about reading is not necessarily the
best fit for Twitch and all that sort of stuff.
get through stuff with comedy, and I think that’s
a healthy attitude to have.”
Marshall and Ward’s affinity for comedy meant
the script was the easiest part of the equation:
almost all the dialogue was written during a four-
day period, with both holed up in a log cabin “in
the middle of nowhere”. Realising some of the
bolder ideas, however, was more time-consuming:
Insecurity was the first emotional construct to be
completed simply because the challenge presented
by its perspective shift meant Marshall was keen to
get it out of the way as early as possible. Similarly,
accompanying visual novel Devil’s Kiss was all but
finished 18 months ago. It was, Marshall says,
a stressful game to develop, though he
acknowledges the biggest problems were of his
own making. “In practical terms, it’s really stupid
making games in pubs,” he says. “You come up
with these amazing ideas when you’re half-drunk,
and then the next day you have to sit in front of
a computer and you’re like ‘Oh my god, what did
I agree to?’” And yet those inebriated ideas that
give the finished game a sense of anything-goes
spontaneity wouldn’t work without an awful lot of
careful planning and refinement, for which
Marshall entirely credits his co-designer. “Ben is
like a driving force for quality,” he says. “He’s
always the one nagging me to make stuff better.
I can’t undervalue that.”
That quality control almost certainly influenced
Clockwork God’s glowing critical reception,
though the review process introduced its own
problems. One deliberate piece of misdirection
has since come back to bite Marshall, though to
reveal how would give away one of the game’s
most satisfying epiphanies. Elsewhere, an F2P-style
in-game store isn’t all it seems; when one critic took
it at face value, Marshall decided to keep up the
charade. “He emailed two days later saying, ‘Oh,
thank fuck!’” he grins. “It’s really nice when those
jokes land, because we worked so hard on them.
Some of it is a massive gamble, so the fact that all
this stuff seems to be landing is a huge relief.”
He sighs, but not with relief. Financially, the
game has done better than he feared – some of its
big gambles can be partly attributed to Marshall’s
concern before release that this could be the last
game he makes – but worse than he’d hoped,
though he reveals he’s already starting work on his
next project. The critical landscape, he suggests,
is very different from five years ago when he
released The Swindle. Then, the reaction was less
positive, though the game got plenty of coverage;
this time “it’s been like pulling teeth”, he says.
“I mean, of the Punnett square of all possibilities,
‘made a good game and it didn’t sell’ is not the
worst one. I could have made a shit game and it
didn’t sell.” He pauses for thought. “Maybe that’s
people doing what I would do – hand on heart,
if I saw Clockwork God and I hadn’t made it,
I would be looking at it, going, ‘Man, that looks
really good. I’ll buy that when it comes out on the
Switch.’” It’s fair to assume, then, that the game
won’t be PC-exclusive for much longer – and that
ten years on, Ben and Dan’s emotional odyssey
isn’t over just yet. We’ll raise a glass to that. Q
 1

2 3

5
1 Concepts for Dan and Ben’s
expressions by artist Michael Firman. 6
2 An early test environment.
3 “Fear was a weird level, because
you need to make it dark, but you
can’t make it dark,” Marshall says.
“It needs to be fake dark, and that
was quite hard work. Then Tobey
[Evans] sent the music through and
that suddenly sealed the deal, and it
became genuinely unsettling.”
4 Firman concepts for the Joy
sequence, which in Dan’s case is
essentially a booze-themed riff on
Green Hill Zone.
5 A range of possible looks for
Ben and Dan. Marshall ultimately
decided the size difference should
be more pronounced.
6 The hilarious youth-speak of the
Feeling Old chapter took a lot of
refinement. “I didn’t want it to come
across as [saying] ‘Young people
are stupid, look at them with their
stupid fashions.’ The strength of
Feeling Old is that we’re making fun
of Dan and Ben for struggling to
recapture something that is no
longer there,” Marshall explains

73
 STUDIO PROFILE

YACHT CLUB
GA MES
With Shovel Knight finally
finished, its maker turns its
hand to publishing, and more
BY ALEX WILTSHIRE
S
hovel Knight wasn’t meant to take seven
years to complete. But then again, Yacht
Club Games has never worked to much
of a plan. This Los Angeles-based indie
developer has instead bobbed along in the
rushing flow of its first game’s success, taking
opportunities where it’s found them, seeing its
characters featured as Amiibos and in Smash
Bros, and becoming a publisher and a franchise-
holder. “I feel we’re like the people trading
a paper clip right up to a car and then the house,”
says co-founder Sean Valasco.
After all, Yacht Club built all this on a game
that evokes the simplicity of the golden age of
NES platformers. Shovel Knight was meant to be
finished in September 2013, six months after the
end of its Kickstarter campaign. But even before it
was actually playable, and before most of the
game had even been conceived and designed,
Shovel Knight had taken on a life of its own.
Yacht Club Games emerged from
WayForward, the Los Angeles-based developer
famous for the Shantae series and other snappy
2D action games. There, Valasco, programmer
and designer David D’Angelo and three other
developers had become friends as they worked
on licensed titles like BloodRayne: Betrayal and
Double Dragon Neon. But as a work-for-hire and
publisher-beholden company, WayForward had a
tendency to break up its development teams,
shifting members between projects as they waxed
and waned, and as it signed new deals with
partners. “We wanted to stay together,” says
D’Angelo. “We realised that we clicked and if we
could make something else, it’d be way better.”
“And also we could control the marketing, and
be able to present the game in a way we thought
would show it best,” says Valasco. “Most of the
time at WayForward that was out of our hands,
and it was frustrating.”
The idea of jumping ship together came before
a game, but they knew they wanted to make
something that revitalised ideas which had been
discounted by new conventions. Surely they’d find
a hole in the market. They liked working within
limitations, too, the creative challenges in
designing around restriction. And so Shovel Knight
was conceived, a platformer rooted deeply in
NES’ 13-colour spectrum and the design
affordances of its 6502 processor. Valasco quit
WayForward and founded Yacht Club Games in
2011, and as the others joined him they began
working out of his apartment.
“It wasn’t really acrimonious, but you know,
when people leave your company to form another,
From left: Sean Valasco directed the A Boy And His Blob
remake; David D’Angelo worked on BloodRayne: Betrayal
you’re not necessarily going, ‘Go for it!’ Although,
to their credit, WayForward came around,” says
Valasco. In fact, WayForward shared some of its
tools and sales data. But the nascent Yacht Club
Games still needed money, and the team knew
that to sign with a publisher would mean handing
over control of its marketing again.
In 2012, Kickstarter was in the ascendant.
Double Fine Adventure had closed its $3.3 million
campaign in March, and so, to Yacht Club,
crowdfunding looked like the ideal way to score
“EVERYONE THOUGHT
MAN GAME, SO WE
REALLY BLOW OUT
capital as well as to build a fanbase. But Valasco
says the team wasn’t thinking particularly
strategically. “It seems crazy now, but we didn’t
have that much of a plan,” he says. Indeed,
D’Angelo puts what happened next to being in the
right place at the right time, but it was much more
down to Yacht Club’s responsiveness to feedback,
and the promise in its 8bit tribute.
Shovel Knight’s Kickstarter campaign
consumed the studio for three months. The team
went to PAX, figuring out on the fly how to promote
a game at an expo. They hurriedly worked out new
mechanics and produced images and character
designs, because at the time, Shovel Knight was
just a video. “There was nothing else, so we
crammed the work, just any content we could put
up there and show,” remembers Valasco.
It worked. Shovel Knight was funded to the
tune of $311,502 (£250,000) in April 2013. It
wasn’t Double Fine-successful, but it was more
than the $75,000 the studio asked for. The money
meant it could move out of Valasco’s apartment
Founded 2011
Employees 15
Key staff Sean Valasco (founder), David
D’Angelo (programmer), Jake Kaufman
(composer)
URL www.yachtclubgames.com
Selected softography Shovel Knight: Treasure
Trove
Current projects Shovel Knight Dig, Cyber
Shadow
and into a window-less office. More significantly for
Shovel Knight, the campaign transformed it.
“I mean, we thought it’d be a short game,”
says D’Angelo, laughing. “But because it was
funded so well we realised we could make a big,
meaty game.” But more than that, the team
involved backers in Shovel Knight’s development.
Five backers who’d pledged for the $1,000 tier
were ‘Director For A Day’, which meant they
helped to design characters – four of them worked
on Shovel Knight’s optional Wandering Traveller
sub-bosses. Yacht Club held Design Hangouts.
“We had 50 to 100 backers and we’d say: ‘OK,
we’re doing Lost City, here’s the stage. What
ideas would be cool here?’” says D’Angelo.
IT WA S A MEGA
WERE GOING TO
THEIR EXPECTATIONS”
More subtly, backers brought to Shovel Knight
their expectations of what a NES-inspired game
should be, giving Yacht Club a baseline upon
which it could build. “Everyone thought it was
a Mega Man game, so we were going to totally
fool them and really blow out their expectations,”
continues D’Angelo. That’s why you get a Super
Mario Bros 3-style overworld map that opens
out as you beat levels, challenges you with
Wandering Travellers to battle, and adds a suite
of ability-granting relics to buy, as well as a raft of
secrets and sub-quests.
Shovel Knight was released in June 2014 to
immediate acclaim, and Yacht Club began to
work on the stretch goals it promised during the
Kickstarter campaign, including making three of
the boss characters playable. Starting with Plague
Knight, the devs had no idea they’d still be working
on it in 2019. “Every year we were like, ‘This will
definitely be the last year,’” says Valasco. As with
the original release, they found the Plague Of
Shadows update becoming bigger than they were
anticipating. They tweaked every level and
75
STUDIO PROFILE
boss encounter to fit Plague Knight’s movement
capabilities and attacks, and gave it a fresh story.
Next, the team felt they had to make Specter
Knight’s update a little bigger than Plague Of
Shadows. So Specter Of Torment, which was
released in 2017, features another remix of Shovel
Knight’s levels and a do-over of its overworld map.
“We were trading on our popularity for each
one,” says Valasco. “When Specter Of Torment
came out it was when the Switch launched, so we
got a bunch of sales, and then we could make
King Knight even bigger and better than we had
initially imagined. At any time the sales could
totally have fallen off and the next one would have
been very short, but that didn’t happen.” So for
King Of Cards, released in November 2019,
they did it all over again, this time adding a card
battle minigame called Joustus and a multiplayer
game called Shovel Knight Showdown.
Yacht Club released each campaign as
a free update for existing owners and raised the
price of the base game to fit its greater value,
and also released standalone versions, mostly to
have a new release that could hit the front page
of the stores. “We tried to follow the Minecraft
model, which is a game that was really small and
they charged one price for it, and they kept on
adding and adding to it, even today, so it’s almost
a service,” says Valasco.
It’s been so successful that it’s easy to forget it
all started as the need to fulfil Kickstarter campaign
promises. “We wanted Yacht Club to be a
company for which there’s only goodwill,” says
D’Angelo. “Especially for our first product. In the
same way we surprised and excited everyone with
what Shovel Knight could be between the
Kickstarter campaign and the release, we want to
do the same thing with each game.”
“If we made five separate games, maybe we
would have made a zillion more dollars, but who
76
Late last year, Yacht Club moved into a new office to give the growing company much-
needed room to expand into, though after the current round of recruitment is complete
it intends to keep its head count to 20 or so, so it remains tightly focused
knows, right?” adds Valasco. “At least, it kept
Shovel Knight in the popular consciousness for six
years and counting. That’s been really important.”
Remarkably, the team isn’t sick of Shovel
Knight. It helped that they weren’t just remaking the
platformer: “Joustus was a whole different thing,
making a card game within a game and figuring
out how they’d work together, and then doing
a four-player multiplayer game with Showdown,”
says Valasco. Then there was the Shovel Knight
Amiibo (“I remember when we got the approval
to be on Nintendo to begin with,” says D’Angelo.
“It was just bananas!”), another demonstration of
Yacht Club’s knack for blending right-place-right-
time luck with smart preparation.
“WE TRY TO PUT OURSELVES
TO BE LUCKY… WHEN
TO DO A T O Y, WE KNEW
“When the Amiibo opportunity came up, we
had that stuff in place: Shovel Knight on cereal
boxes and bedsheets, T-shirts, a cartoon show
and a comic book,” says Valasco. “It was always
part of the idea.”
“We try to put ourselves in a place to be
lucky,” says D’Angelo. “We got these marketing
deals because when someone asked us to do a
toy, we knew how to do it. Nintendo could come
to us and we didn’t have to shrug and look like
fools.” While Shovel Knight hasn’t yet made it to
breakfast tables, a studio called Panda Cult
Games Kickstarted a licensed board game,
Shovel Knight: Dungeon Duels, last September.
Yacht Club has also published games, starting
with the Western physical release of Inti Creates’
Azure Striker Gunvolt: Striker Pack in 2017. Yacht
Club went into that project wanting to help out
friends, and now it’s expanded its list, backing
Mechanical Head Studios’ 2D action platformer
Cyber Shadow (featured on the first page of this
profile), Nitrome’s Roguelike Shovel Knight spinoff,
Dig, and, most recently, Roguelike puzzler Shovel
Knight Pocket Dungeon by Cavern Kings
developer Vine. D’Angelo says the studio sees
publishing as a chance to help out promising
projects, but it’s also an opportunity to build on
Shovel Knight. “We simultaneously want to be a
small studio and have as many spinoffs as Mario.
We can’t do both, so publishing might make sense
as the way to do that,” says Valasco.
Now, with Shovel Knight’s final update done,
Yacht Club is in the process of hiring five or so
IN A PLACE
SOMEONE ASKED US
HOW TO DO IT”
staff members and figuring out how it can work on
two games simultaneously without losing the sense
of a single team that’s powered it through to today.
And as for what form these games might take, the
team’s still thinking about revitalising old ideas, and
about genres which have been forgotten but still
hold promise. “What could we do with shmups?”
wonders Valasco. “Summon another ship, like a
soapstone, and you fight the boss together? 100
ships go into the battle, only one remains?”
“We shouldn’t make a shmup,” says D’Angelo.
“No one buys them and hasn’t for the last five
years.” Even if Yacht Club never set out with a
plan, over the past seven years it’s found a
balance between creativity and popularity, design
and marketing, a mindset that’s driven seven years
of development and the ambition to put a pixelated
spade-wielding knight on a cereal box. Q
 1

1 Shadow, the player

character in Cyber Shadow.
2 King Knight, a boss in
Shovel Knight before he
starred in Treasure Trove.
3 Art from Vine’s Pocket
Dungeon, a puzzle take on
Shovel Knight’s digging action.
4 Nitrome’s Shovel Knight
Dig adds a Roguelike
dimension to the original

77
 REVIEWS. PERSPECTIVES. INTERVIEWS. AND SOME NUMBERS

STILL REVIEWED
PLAYING THIS ISSUE
Animal Crossing: New Horizons Switch
One of the weirder aspects of the Animal 80 Final Fantasy VII Remake
Crossing community has always been the PS4
trade of popular villagers. Sure enough,
players are still cursing Tom Nook’s good
name, and in the same breath selling anime
84 Doom Eternal
cat Raymond into slavery for 100 Nook
PC, PS4, Xbox One
Miles Tickets. We’re more baffled than ever,
especially as New Horizons lends such 88 Resident Evil 3
personality to animals: Iggly the penguin PC, PS4, Xbox One
might be ‘ugly’, but we fall in love the
moment we see him stare down a massive
tarantula until it walks away, whereupon he
92 Gears Tactics
takes a victory swig of fizzy pop. Legend. PC, Xbox One

Horizon Zero Dawn PS4 94 XCOM: Chimera Squad

Not so much still playing as finally playing. PC
With the newest member of the team a
refugee from the sadly shuttered Official
Xbox Magazine, there’s a rare frisson of
96 Nioh 2
taboo to his finally being allowed to get PS4
hands-on with a PS4, safe in the knowledge
that Phil Spencer won’t burn down his 98 Ori And The
house. Guerrilla’s sci-fi adventure is a fine Will Of The Wisps
place to start, deft and clinical dispatches of PC, Xbox One
mecha-dinos providing tutelage in the ways
of Square, Triangle, Circle and Cross.
100 Paper Beast
Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories PC PSVR
We’ve long had a soft spot for this series,
finally adopting its US title in Europe – 102 Call Of Duty: Warzone
though Granzella’s latest entry makes the
PC, PS4, Xbox One
endearingly wonky Raw Danger! look like
a Naughty Dog game. Beneath the creaky
design, terrible camera and myriad 104 Bleeding Edge
technical wobbles, however, it retains the PC, Xbox One
series’ haphazard charm. How would we
react in an earthquake? By donning a tengu 105 Streets Of Rage 4
mask and convincing a group of credulous
PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch
survivors that rainwater has miraculous
healing properties, of course.
106 The Room VR
Index, PSVR, Quest,
Rift, Vive, Windows Mixed Reality
Explore the iPad
edition of Edge for 107 In Other Waters
extra Play content PC, Switch

78
Open season
Like us, you’ll likely have spent too long cooped up inside lately – beyond the
odd hour of government-mandated exercise – to really notice that we’re well
in the throes of spring. In keeping with the season, as the cycle of life begins
anew, so do we – returning to something approaching normality.
Given that we spent E345 shifting our attentions away from violence, it’s perhaps
fitting that this month’s bumper selection also represents a return to form of sorts.
As many of you noted, sometimes that’s just the kind of catharsis you need. You
could start with Dotemu’s stirring throwback to the classic side-scrolling brawler,
Streets Of Rage 4 (p105), which offers a succession of enemies on which to
take out your frustrations. Or, assuming you haven’t already had the pleasure,
Doom Eternal (p84), which builds upon the brisk combat loops of 2016’s reboot
to even more exhilarating – and grisly – effect.
You’ll make another fine mess in Gears Tactics (p92),
where chainsaw executions add a strategic wrinkle to brutal
battles. And while we suspect it may have been dashed
out early to steal its turn-based rival’s thunder, the breach
mechanic in XCOM: Chimera Squad (p94) similarly finds
a new angle of attack in the same genre.
For those who’d rather make peace, this month brings
a couple of games that might’ve been contenders for our Feel
Better issue had they arrived sooner. The soothing aquatic
ambience of In Other Waters (p107) makes for a fine piece
of counterprogramming, while we celebrate another return
in Paper Beast (p100), as Eric Chahi channels Another
World and From Dust into a captivating VR adventure.
In these times, it’s good to know we can rely on such
a variety of escapes; whatever your poison, we hope you
find something here to put a spring back in your step.

79

Final Fantasy VII Remake
P
lay Final Fantasy VII Remake without having played
the original and you’ll probably enjoy it more. The
setting, Midgar, is one of gaming’s greatest, if least
subtle, social metaphors: a vertical city split between
gentrified boulevards and slums quarried from trash
heaps hundreds of feet beneath. This is a dystopia fuelled
by toxic Mako energy supplied by Shinra, a comically evil
megacorp. Beginning in the middle of a raid on a Mako
reactor, you take charge of Avalanche, a band of eco-
warriors fighting to save an ailing planet. There’s Barret,
the group’s over-muscled leader; Tifa, a big-sisterly
martial artist; Aerith, a flower peddler touched by
destiny; and Cloud, a dour super-soldier who is afflicted
by mysterious flashbacks. These hallucinations often
feature a swordsman named Sephiroth, a fallen war hero
turned creature of the apocalypse.
Decked with flourishes but faithful to the designs of
their 1997 forebears, the remake’s cast are possibly the
most photogenic characters you’ll see this generation.
More importantly, they are engaging personalities, with
simple but gripping motivations and plenty of team
chemistry. Cloud is a mixed-up youth struggling to play
hero, Tifa the childhood friend trying to thaw his reserve
while wrestling her doubts about Avalanche’s methods.
Aerith is a haunted sweetheart whose tale reaches far
back into the planet’s past. Even Barret, a blaxploitation
caricature Square Enix would have done well to overhaul,
is likeable for the ferocity of his principles. Captivating
in conversation, the characters set the screen on fire in
battle, each bringing a distinct style to a fussy but
engrossing wedding of real-time and turn-based combat.
Even as a newcomer you may detect the mistakes
Square Enix has made in revamping its best-loved RPG:
lots of filler, a distracting emphasis on superficial puzzles
and a vivid but obnoxious ending. The first thing you
notice as a returning player, meanwhile, is the loss of the
original’s fixed perspectives, which cultivated a variety of
moods from wonder to claustrophobia. The remake
compensates with a greater sense of continuity and
bustle – areas flow into one another organically, and the
streets are a blur of gossiping NPCs and picturesque
scrapyard architecture. Mileages will vary over which
approach is better; in any case, the real issue is runtime.
This remake is the first in a series: the 35-hour story
spans the opening of the original game, ending with the
cast’s departure from Midgar. Splitting one story into
several was a business decision, not an artistic one, and
while the writers and designers have worked hard to
justify Remake’s bulk, the stretch marks are conspicuous.
In the original FFVII, Avalanche mounted two Mako
reactor raids in swift succession. In the remake, those
core missions are separated by hours of character
development and sidequesting. Cloud’s first brush with
Aerith was once a handful of dialogue lines; it’s now a
lengthy sequence featuring the gloating apparition of
80
PLAY
Developer/publisher Square Enix Sephiroth. Everywhere you go, the geography and
Format PS4
chronology have exploded. Areas that once spanned a few
Release Out now
backdrops have become murky labyrinths of lever puzzles.
Two-step quests have been padded out into chapters.
Much of this is welcome. Avalanche’s visit to Wall
Market, Midgar’s red light district, is now a cracking night
out reminiscent of Sega’s Yakuza games. The idea is once
again to infiltrate a crime lord’s mansion by dressing up
Cloud as his bride-to-be, but the remake adds some
charismatic new characters, arena fights with diabolical
robot houses and a stupendous dance sequence, while
clearing away much of the original’s lazy discrimination.
Aside from fleshing out locations, the remake adds layers
of personality to the core cast, and strengthens side
While the characters, like Avalanche underlings Jessie and Wedge,
who were little more than talking signposts in the first
writers and game. Wedge is a walking fat joke, unfortunately, but
designers have there’s a lot to like about Jessie, a bomb-maker after
Cloud’s heart (or whatever else she can get). The addition
worked hard to of another romance interest beside Tifa and Aerith creates
justify Remake’s a slightly cloying harem anime feel, but the flirting is
amusing – Cloud is about as emotionally articulate as
bulk, the stretch a cabbage, and reacts to being hit on with palpable terror.
Above all, Remake’s story marks the triumphant
marks are rebirth of Aerith, one of gaming’s most celebrated damsels
conspicuous in distress. Given her role in the story, it would have been
easy to portray her as a tragic princess, so it’s delightful
to find that she can be sarcastic, coarse and a prankster.
One of the loveliest sequences is an unassuming walk-
and-talk through a ruined town, Aerith pretending to fall
off things while Cloud struggles to make sense of her.
For every such moment, however, there’s a generous
dose of filler. If some expanded locations are worthwhile,
others, like the sewers, are extravagantly boring. The next
plot point flies endlessly backward like the exit door in
a nightmare, as you search for keycards and switches.
Dungeons are clogged with puzzles, most simplistic to the
point the accompanying tutorials feel insulting. You’ll
move giant robot hands around so that Aerith can hop
onto ledges, aim Tifa as she swings from light fittings,
and use Barret’s machine gun to blast open passages in
a new laboratory area. These questionable pace-changers
aside, each Midgar district offers a dreary shopping list
of secondary quests such as finding lost cats, justified by
Cloud’s skin-deep ‘merc’ persona. There are also X-of-Y
monster research missions to complete for new types of
materia, the orbs that confer spells and abilities.
The combat, at least, is absorbing all the way to the
finish. Square Enix has spent decades trying to adapt
FFVII’s Active Time Battle system for modern audiences;
this is one of the stronger attempts, though not the best.
You control one character at a time, switching with the
D-pad (the enemy AI tends to target whoever you’re
controlling) or giving orders to offhand characters in
 ABOVE For a world consisting
mostly of tunnels, factories and
detritus, the remake’s Midgar is
extraordinarily vivid, but you’ll be
glad of the chance to wander in
Aerith’s garden.
LEFT The original’s flimsy motorbike
subgame is back, but now feeds
into an extra chapter about Jessie’s
family, featuring a flamboyant
new antagonist whose hairdo
is even louder than Cloud’s

BELOW Once a seedy brothel (and

that’s without taking certain pieces
of cut content into account), in
Remake the Honeybee Inn is more
of a cabaret club, staffed by
dancers of different genders

ABOVE Summons, some unlocked by fighting simulated battles to gather

data for a wandering boffin, move and fight autonomously, but you can
trigger their big attacks by spending character ATB gauges

81

menus. Regular attacks and evasive rolls are performed in
realtime, care of a fiddly lock-on system. Hitting X
triggers slow motion so you can pick abilities and spells
that consume chunks of each character’s ATB gauge.
You can perform a small selection of these in realtime
using hotkeys – handy against small fry, but it’s better to
slow things down when fighting bosses with intricate,
element-based defences. In particular, you’ll want to get
the most out of the stagger mechanic, whereby picking the
right attacks eventually stuns enemies while increasing
the damage they receive – an idea lifted from the divisive
but influential Final Fantasy XIII. It’s as entertaining as it
is awkward, a halfway house between beat-’em-up and
party-based combat. Team management isn’t difficult,
but it always feels like a chore. Offhand party members
move around and attack under their own steam, though
they’ll keep spells and abilities in reserve. It’s easy, amid
the blizzard of special effects, to lose track of where
everybody is and who they’re fighting.
To a degree, this confusion reflects one of Remake’s
strengths: each character is a very different fighter, and
their signature moves from 1997 have been beautifully
adapted. Cloud has two duelling stances, one offering
speed and reach, the other brute force and a tide-turning
parry. Tifa’s trademark ability is Unbridled Strength,
which extends her combos and overclocks her heavy
attacks. Barret is the default ranged fighter, but his real
asset isn’t his gun-arm but his massive health pool,
especially given an ability that absorbs damage in place
of allies. Aerith, meanwhile, is no wallflower: her staff
projectiles hit hard, and she can surround herself with an
Arcane Ward that doubles offensive spells cast inside it.
Backing all this up is the returning materia system,
with spell and ability orbs plugged into equipment
82
BUSTER MOVE
Final Fantasy VII Remake is most
graceful as a work of audio.
Besides collecting fuzzy
orchestral arrangements of the
original’s songs from vending
machines in-game, you’ll be
treated to artful variations on
legendary leitmotifs. Aerith’s
theme, a piano phrase that rises
and falls wistfully, could easily
have been depressing if it were
played straight too often;
instead, it recurs in creative
guises, some pensive, some
playful. Sometimes the music
layers up and down dynamically,
the battle theme pulsing in the
background in dungeons,
bursting to full volume when
enemies appear. There’s also
a slightly-too-frequent gag where
Barret bellows the original
game’s match-ending melody –
a sudden reminder that this was
once a world of random battles.
The English localisation is one of Square Enix’s best to date. Cody
Christian’s Cloud is steely but vulnerable, and makes a good foil for
more playful, empathetic party members like Britt Baron’s Tifa
sockets, gaining levels as they are used, which motivates
you to master each one. The lack of class restrictions on
materia use allows for different builds without
compromising each character’s particular flavour. Cloud
can spec to sabotage enemies with magic or focus solely
on damage; Aerith can be a glass cannon or a tanked-up
healer. The sore spots are equipment upgrades, which
reveal Square Enix’s continued obsession with bombastic
visualisations of rather basic unlockables. These can be
automated, though it’s wise to dive in at least once to
assess each weapon’s capabilities.
Sadly, there’s no side-stepping the clumsiness of the
ending. Having mostly followed the original plot right up
to a climatic assault on Shinra HQ, Remake torpedoes the
mood with a Kingdom Hearts-like crescendo that turns the
concept of a remake into metaphysical soap opera. The
idea is intriguing, and the associated battles are a blast,
but it’s a terrible disappointment given the delicacy of
the rewriting elsewhere. All the goodwill generated by the
handling of Aerith, Wall Market and the ATB system
evaporates in a blast of sub-Kojima franchise navel-gazing.
Even the fetch quests seem appealing by comparison.
The ending marks a split from the events of the 1997
game, pointing towards greater departures in episodes to
come. There’s still a planet to save, but we are otherwise
in uncharted territory, new and returning players alike.
A breathtaking way to polish off the definitive videogame
nostalgia project, certainly – padding aside, the first 30
hours of Remake suggest that this is change for the better.
By the conclusion, though, you may feel like things
are going off the rails in more ways than one.
7

The implications of remaking a story about the political power of stories
J
udged as an anti-capitalist fable, the original Final
Fantasy VII is too obvious to convince. Released in
the same year as the Kyoto Protocols, it reflects
both the ecological and social anxieties of its era in a
spellbinding but superficial way. The heads of Shinra
Corporation are a clownishly evil bunch, cackling at
their own dastardliness and filled with contempt for the
little people below. While the painted urban backdrops
suggest a more nuanced analysis – wandering amongst
them, you may feel as though you’re trapped in a
machine that has taken on a life of its own – your
attention is drawn to these gloating arch-villains rather
than the hierarchies of exploitation that enable them.
Instead of a structural critique, the story of Midgar thus
becomes an exercise in beheading the hydra.
There are times, however, when the game invites
a little more thought. One of your companions on the
train during the opening reactor assaults is a nameless
Shinra manager, who complains about sharing the car
with “riff raff” and gets into an argument with Barret
over giving up his seat. If a character like President
Shinra is the kind of cartoon villain you find on
propaganda posters, the manager represents the low-
grade I’ve-got-mine acquiescence to an unjust world
that, when multiplied by a few million, offers a more
tangible obstacle to change.
Remake expands the manager’s scene, and makes
this arrogant pencil-pusher a more sympathetic and
difficult figure. In the retelling, we find him gossiping
with two other Shinra employees about Avalanche’s
tactics. He subsequently stands up to the enormous
Barret – a man who, let’s not forget, has a Gatling gun
for a hand – arguing that Shinra is a benevolent
organisation. “We will not submit to intimidation or
violence, but work together for peace and prosperity,”
the man stutters. “That is how civilised people change
the world!” With Barret looming intimidatingly over
him, he adds: “It’s what we believe. We all have to follow
our conscience, don’t we?”
The remake is most successful at justifying its own
existence when it develops such interactions and
themes, rather than just treating this best-known of
stories to a costly audiovisual upgrade. Able to portray
dozens of chatty NPCs (whose conversations now
unfold without your intervention) rather than the
scattered, inert bystanders we met in the 1997 game,
it presents a more elaborate, if still familiar, vision of
capitalist society – and especially of how people cling
to a malign reality when they’re taught that there’s no
alternative. It also explores how those with the ability
to resist authority might be forced to hurt their fellow
oppressed, both directly and indirectly, in the name
of a kinder tomorrow.
PLAY
Post Script
After Avalanche bombs the first Mako reactor,
you’re turned out into streets filled with hurt, desperate
citizens, trying to reach loved ones through burning
wreckage. You’ll overhear people asking one another
who would do such awful things. It’s easier to brush
this off when it comes from the affluent, but
Avalanche’s efforts to make Shinra abandon Mako usage
also affect those on the breadline. The second reactor
attack involves a maze puzzle where you must
deactivate massive lamps on Midgar’s underside to
power up an elevator – turning off the daylight for the
poor in their shacks beneath. It’s common to find
crowds of workers in the slums gathered around
Presents a more community broadcast screens, lamenting the cost of
Avalanche’s adventures to their livelihoods.
elaborate, if still The core cast aren’t oblivious to these repercussions.
familiar, vision For all her bouncy manner, Jessie is consumed by
remorse about the collateral damage from her bombs.
of capitalist Tifa, who runs a bar when she’s not high-kicking
society – and robots, is dubious throughout about the ethics of direct
action, only accompanying you on the second reactor
of how people raid when circumstances leave her with no other option.
Barret’s binary morality, however, simply cannot process
cling to a the fact that civilians might take issue with Avalanche’s
malign reality methods. He is outraged, later in the game, by the
suggestion that Midgar’s citizens are knowingly
complicit in the planetary endgame that is unchecked
Mako extraction. The character least moved by the
mounting fallout is Cloud, the corporate thug turned
mercenary, whose ruthlessness scares his eco-warrior
allies at times. But even Cloud gets drawn into the
discussion, arguing with Barret about the benefits of
Shinra’s rule during a tour of a company museum
towards the end of the game.
These are complexities the overblown finale kicks to
the curb. And yet there is a resonance between the
concept of a dystopia propped up by the anxious
consent of the many and an ending that, without giving
too much away, casts the most demanding fans as
antagonists – guardians of the canon who see the
events of the original game as sacred, and are fearful
of alteration even when it might be for the better. Final
Fantasy VII Remake isn’t just a story about efforts to
revolutionise a miserable world. In dramatising the
challenges and frustrations of remaking such
a cherished game, it also links that need for revolution
to the retelling – and perhaps, reworking – of such
stories. Only belatedly does it occur to Barret that
blowing up Shinra’s reactors means little while the
company controls the overarching narrative, and is able
to portray Avalanche as terrorists. Social change isn’t
just about disruption, after all; it’s about weaving a
more hopeful tale than the one you’re given. Q
80

Doom Eternal
R
ound and round it goes: the most literal combat
loop ever conceived. You enter an arena – it might
be dressed as an open-plan office, or the public
square of a gutted American city, or the shore of an
underground lava lake at the centre of Mars. But you
come to recognise these coliseums wherever you find
them by their furniture: multi-layered, adorned with
monkey bars and littered with canisters of chainsaw
fuel. As the first monsters wink into view, it becomes
second nature to start spinning, a constant circle-strafe
your only means of survival.
It’s tempting to imagine Id Software as the teenager
who, having been left in charge of the teacups at a
fairground, falls asleep at the controls; as the ride’s
guardian unconsciously nudges the lever forward, the
cups get faster and faster, a giddy whirligig at the very
edge of control. But that image doesn’t do justice to the
intelligence of Doom Eternal’s design. Edge once asked,
infamously, whether Doom might be more engrossing
if it allowed you to negotiate with the creatures that
stalked its halls. Today, of course, many shooter-RPGs
fulfil that brief, and Id is happy to leave them to it. The
studio has learned, after a painful reboot in the mid
’00s, that Doom doesn’t need dialogue to be smart. It
needs an invisible layer of resource management.
You never finish an arena battle in Doom Eternal
without running short on the essentials: health, armour
and ammo. Thankfully, your enemies bleed all three;
finish them off with a glory kill and healing orbs pour
from their eye sockets; split them down the middle with
a chainsaw and bullets gush from the wound; set them
alight with your shoulder-mounted flamer and armour
spills from their pores. It’s an ingenious system, only
slightly updated since 2016’s triumphant entry, that
inspires something like bloodlust – resource retrieval
pulling you forward into the fight.
All this free exchange makes an economist of the
Doom Slayer. One alt-fire of your shotgun launches
bombs which, if landed in the gob of a cacodemon,
readies them for an instant glory kill. A perfect kill? Not
quite: since dead enemies drop armour quicker than
living ones, it’s best to treat the demon to a quick blast
of flame before pulling its single eye from its floating
head. That way, you’re instantly given a life-saving bath
of both blue and green orbs – enough to get you
through the next 30 seconds, if you move fast enough.
Since this sequel is far less generous with ammo
than its predecessor, the chainsaw has become a key
tactical consideration. When fully fueled up with three
canisters it can tear through even the largest demons,
ridding the battlefield of a particularly nasty opponent
and topping up your guns in the process. And yet
wouldn’t it be thriftier to save those three canisters for
three smaller enemies, ensuring a more even
distribution of ammo through the fight?
84
PLAY
Developer Id Software
Publisher Bethesda
Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One
Release Out now
There aren’t
playstyles in
modern Doom
so much as
players who
use absolutely
everything, and
players who die
SECRET SOURCE
Doom has always had secrets,
but it’s never been so desperate
to tell you about them as in
Eternal. A suite of upgrades to
your suit allows you to know
exactly what kind of items
you’re still looking for, while
Automaps along the main path
show you the corridors you’ve
missed. Oddly, though, the hunt
is more satisfying for the extra
information: even when you
know the location of a plush
demon, you still have to figure
out the route there, whether
you’re dealing with a false wall,
hidden vent or long jump from
an adjacent part of the level.
Best of all, Id has removed all
pesky perambulation from the
completionist’s journey – toward
the end of every level, a fast
travel option unlocks to teleport
you back to areas of interest.
No corner of your weapon wheel is allowed to gather
dust. Some demons now have weak points, lending new
importance to the sniper scope of your automatic rifle.
Others are susceptible to a Blood Punch, built up with
consecutive glory kills. There aren’t playstyles in
modern Doom so much as players who use absolutely
everything available to them, and players who die. Mick
Gordon’s exemplary soundtrack lets you know when it’s
finally over; the djent guitars subside, but the industrial
soundscape is always throbbing, a pilot light of fury.
Doom Eternal, then, is a thinking person’s shooter.
It’s because of this that the arenas form just part of its
hefty 20-hour-plus playtime. So taxing are the battles
on the mind and the fingers that the breaks built into
the campaign are welcome. Where Doom 2016 merely
encouraged downtime through the search for secret
rooms, the sequel mandates platforming sequences to
progress. These lead to the odd double-take: are those
spinning flame chains imported from the Mushroom
Kingdom? Is Doomguy dashing across Celeste-style
chasms, after decades glued to the ground? Purists
ought to remember, however, that Doom has always
played with vertical space, and platforming suits the
series just fine. When those sequences become multi-
part puzzles to piece together – jump here, shoot this
target, cling to that wall – they tickle the same part of
the brain as a good LucasArts conundrum.
Traversal mechanics may befit an FPS in the 2020s,
but not every contemporisation in Doom Eternal strikes
the right distorted note. Like the protagonists of
Borderlands 3 and The Outer Worlds, the Doom Slayer
now has a hub spaceship from which he launches
operations. Perhaps it provides necessary scaffolding,
given the sheer length of the campaign, each level of
which incentivises return visits to master challenge
rooms and uncover missed items. And there are charms
to the Slayer’s floating castle, like the literal ramparts,
or the demon-punishing prison he’s christened the
‘ripatorium’. But there’s little hidden in its alcoves that
couldn’t be relegated to an upgrade screen, and the idea
of the Slayer planning beyond the next punch seems
perverse. More successful is the singular Battlemode
that constitutes Doom Eternal’s multiplayer. Playing as a
demon, you develop a kind of cunning: summoning
lesser meat puppets to occupy the Doom Slayer, then
trapping him in pools of lava and toxic sludge.
It’s the strangest thing, to see the Slayer from the
outside. To realise how much time he spends airborne
nowadays; to see how relentless his onslaught becomes
once he locks on. The Slayer is the one thing the demons
fear, and as one of them, you feel that fear too. But more
than anything, you want to be back behind his visor –
to orbit another battlefield, and think through the
problem of mass monster murder again.
9
ABOVE Id doesn’t mess about with
its allegory for carbon-based
climate disaster.
RIGHT The plasma rifle’s upgrades
see it become incrementally angrier
with sustained fire

BELOW There are Paradise Lost

overtones to a campaign that
plumbs the depths of hell before
rising to the heavens

ABOVE The Doom Slayer’s wrist blade is the star of his resource-releasing
glory kills, capable of carving through things conventional weapons can’t
touch; if you’re squeamish about speared eyeballs, you’d better look away

85
Doom Eternal’s obsession with resources
extends from the battlefield to its plot,
which concerns a search for energy
Does Id’s new fascination with lore belong in its artificial worlds?
T
he first act of desecration in Doom
happened before the first game was even
finished, when John Romero and John
Carmack threw out the Doom Bible. Id
co-founder Tom Hall had slaved over the
document, which detailed characters and
backstory. He had planned an opening in
which a demon burst in on off-duty marines
playing cards; only Doomguy would survive.
Before long, though, Hall was isolated from
his peers and kicked out of the company.
Figuratively speaking, his bible was burned.
What the two Johns realised was that
Doom didn’t need a story – only a premise.
The naturalistic scenes Hall had been pitching
for levels paled next to the heightened,
abstract realms Romero was building; strange,
shapeshifting warrens that defied explanation
through lore but compelled players forward.
Long after Romero followed Hall to the
exit, Id stuck to those early principles –
which is why it’s such a surprise to find Doom
Eternal stuffed with lore. It’s a break from
the form of 2016’s reboot, which presented
a likeable satire of corporate care-speak. It
encouraged you to question who was being
sacrificed on the altar of your Next Day
Delivery, but otherwise fired the Slayer
straight ahead through an adventure that was
more premise than plot.
86
Post Script
The codex pages scattered throughout
Doom Eternal’s levels might not constitute an
entire bible when bound together, but could
easily fill a gospel or two. They carry an Old
Testament tone, too, in declarative passages
that concern seraphim and the sorry fates of
ancient civilisations. It’s solid stuff, with your
own mileage very much depending on your
taste for Warhammer.
Most of the words are pushed to the
background – while the Doom Slayer manages
half a sentence in flashback, he mostly storms
silently about his third-person cutscenes, as if
his lines have yet to be added in post. But the
campaign takes you on a tour of the worlds
namechecked in the codex, and constitutes
the closest thing the Slayer will ever get to an
origin story. It revisits the formative places
where the marine of the early games became
the godlike figure of later iterations. We’ve
been to hell enough times: doesn’t it logically
follow that heaven is just another dimension
in Doom’s universe?
Given all that backstory, it’s ironic that
Doom Eternal’s environments are more
abstract than ever before. Even in the most
grounded locale of Earth, invaded in the
fashion Id had planned for its original Doom 4,
the office blocks are chunky and modular,
evoking Duke Nukem 3D and Lego City
Undercover. The studio has embraced the non-
diegetic, painting the skies with hovering
dash tokens and the toxic seas with glowing
pick-ups to refill your hazard suit. Breakable
walls are marked by luminous green cracks,
while bright blue health potions have returned
to the streets for the first time since the ’90s.
Id has decided that a world doesn’t have to
appear real for you to believe in it. That new
artificiality lets the studio’s designers play
with the limits of their maps, while the
writers happily fill out the codex.
Few will object to Doom Eternal’s prose,
since so much of it is optional. And there’s an
argument to be made that it fits a larger arc;
where 2016’s Doom concerned the splicing of
science with spirituality, this sequel finds faith
overtaking the facts. But there’s a sense that
its most satisfying storytelling still lies in the
firstperson animations that began in 2016.
A running joke sees the Slayer impatiently
thumbing the malfunctioning fire buttons of
increasingly large cannons. And in one scene
notable for its physical comedy, our objective-
driven hero drags a desk jockey to a keycard
terminal by the lanyard around his neck. The
sight of the petrified pencil pusher rolling
along on the castors of his chair is likely to
stick in the memory long after any lore about
Sentinels and Wraiths has faded. Q
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Resident Evil 3
T
here’s perhaps no better summary of Resident Evil 3
than a line from the ill-fated Brad Vickers. “It’s like
Arklay on steroids!” he yells, referring to the first
game’s mansion incident, and he couldn’t be more right.
A game that opens on a panicked populace facing a
deadly pandemic may not seem conducive to escapist
entertainment at present – certainly, zombies have
little concept of social distancing – but you’ll hardly
have time to think about that. It splits the difference
between last year’s Resident Evil 2 remake and Resident
Evil 4: as it teases more narrative links to the latter, the
constant forward momentum of its action provides
more connective tissue across an intense six-hour
campaign that tears along at a terrific clip.
It’s not a huge step back, then, just a different
flavour of survival horror – one where the evil never
lets you take up residence. Though you’ll pay a brief
visit to Raccoon City’s police station, and return to
earlier areas armed with bolt cutters and a lockpick
(thorough players will ensure Jill Valentine really earns
the nickname Barry Burton once gave her) this isn’t a
place that gives you the room to get properly acquainted
with it. Puzzles are at a premium, and there are fewer
opportunities to pause for breath. But that all makes
sense: quite apart from spending half your time being
chased by a mutant that somehow makes a taped-up
body bag look like something you’d see on the catwalk
during Paris fashion week, you’re in a city that’s about to
be flattened by a nuke. Sticking around isn’t an option.
Resident Evil 3 is also a better-written game than
its immediate predecessor. It knows exactly how
seriously to take itself – which, for the most part, is
not very seriously at all. It regularly draws attention to
its own ridiculousness: forced to find a way to open a
voice-activated door in a hospital, Carlos moans “what
kind of sci-fi bullshit is this?” But it’s also smart
enough to embrace its innate pulpiness while updating
its characters for modern audiences. It’s refreshing that
Jill has no interest whatsoever in pursuing any kind of
entanglement with her newly mop-haired ally,
correcting Carlos with a dismissive “Not your partner.”
Thanks largely to Nemesis, there would be no time
even if she did. Though after grabbing Jill’s – and our –
attention in a heavily scripted cinematic intro, the
headline act disappears for long enough to give other
enemies time to shine. The repulsive bugs we
encountered during our playthrough at Capcom HQ are
no less unpleasant second time around. Zombies,
meanwhile, seem harder to subdue – and they’re
certainly more numerous than before. Inventory
management is more critical than ever: you’ll find
yourself weighing up the pros and cons of red herbs
versus gunpowder for your last slot while you hear the
guttural moan of a lunging zombie.
88
PLAY
Developer/publisher Capcom
Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One
Release Out now
It knows exactly
how seriously
to take itself –
which, for the
most part,
is not very
seriously at all
HARMON’S WAY
Going off alone in Resistance is
asking for trouble: if you’re
separating to cover more
ground (or to force the
Mastermind to split their
attentions between several
areas) you’re better off staying
in pairs. But the best tip we can
offer to Survivors is to ensure
that Valerie Harmon is on your
team. Her abilities make a far
bigger difference than the
others: she can mark key items
and local threats for the other
three, and also has a special
first-aid spray that heals others
in her vicinity, as well as
temporarily buffing their stats.
She comes with two extra
inventory spaces, too – so while
combat might not be her
speciality, she has room for gear
that can help even those odds.
With a press of the right bumper as they attack you
can evade their grasp, though the timing for a perfect
dodge – which prompts a brief window of opportunity
to line up a headshot – takes some mastering. (Carlos,
meanwhile, launches a haymaker which is a handy, if
risky, option for crowd control.) It’s easier, oddly, when
facing Nemesis, yet his presence consistently forces you
to stay on the move, often making you regret that you
didn’t finish off a certain zombie that’s now blocking
your path as those footsteps stamp closer and closer. As
the game wears on, and Nemesis mutates into ever more
grotesque forms, it becomes a less frequent threat,
instead showing up in sporadic scripted boss encounters.
Still, these are entertainingly fraught: regardless of how
much ammo you’ve stockpiled, the fights usually finish
with Jill clutching her side, having exhausted the
contents of her pockets and hip pouches. Besides, his
absence coincides with one of the game’s standout set-
pieces: a hospital lobby siege that doesn’t quite live up
to the barn sequence in Shinji Mikami’s series peak, but
leaves us equally breathless when the horde finally falls.
There are fewer highlights in the 4v1 multiplayer
mode Resistance, at least once its initial novelty has
worn off. It’s a totally separate download from the main
game, which only makes it feel more disconnected: take
out the Umbrella branding and a clutch of familiar faces
(and mutated bodies) and it could easily be an entirely
different game. Here, four young millennials must
survive a deadly experiment set by one of four returning
villains, solving puzzles while fending off zombies and
dodging traps laid by their host. Though effective
communication can help teams reach the later stages,
playing as the bad guy is much easier: we find creating
one or two bottlenecks in the first area is usually
enough to bring down a couple of survivors, or else
waste enough time that the second and third objectives
are all but impossible. We begin to wonder if easily
defeated Survivors might be put off. Tellingly, it often
takes as long to find a game playing Mastermind as to
finish it; we win our first eight matches within the first
stage, the longest lasting a whisker over four minutes.
While it would be unfair to describe Resistance as
vestigial – it’s hardly essential, but a decent attempt to
try something new – it’s so disparate from the
singleplayer game that it’s unlikely to satisfy those who
might feel short-changed by the latter. Those who
require more incentive to replay a game than to beat
their best time, or simply for the pleasure of it, could
feel let down by a campaign that’s shorter than Resident
Evil 2 and features no alternative scenarios. But it’s not
our job to determine an individual’s perception of value,
and we’re confident plenty will be happy to start over as
soon as the finale has played out. All we can say is that
six hours of Resident Evil 3 is just enough – and
we’re aware that’s both compliment and curse.
6
RIGHT Mastermind players can
assume direct control of stronger
enemies and special characters, at
the cost of a more tactical
overview. Turning Mr X loose on
a group of Survivors almost feels
like cheating.
BELOW The inevitable late-game
laboratory section feels a little
rushed in places, though it does
introduce one worryingly resilient
new enemy type.
MAIN Boasting a handful of minor
visual improvements from the
already-handsome Resident Evil 2,
this is easily among the most
technically accomplished current-
gen games we’ve played

ABOVE A brisk FMV intro immediately sets the tone for the rest of the
game: it’s a confident start that shows Capcom’s writers have their
tongues wedged firmly in their cheeks for this remake

89
There are shades of The Last Of Us in the
spectacular, linear opening; it certainly
captures the chaos of Raccoon City
Does Resident Evil 3 really represent poor value for money?
A
n unpalatable truth about modern
videogames is that most people don’t
finish them, though the completion
percentage for Resident Evil 3 should be a good
deal above the average. The lowest difficulty
setting, Assisted, gives you an assault rifle
from the off, and aim assist to make your shots
more likely to hit the weaker enemies from
whose attacks you can recover more easily –
ensuring that just about everyone should be
able to reach the end. On our first playthrough
on the Standard setting, even playing
cautiously and thoroughly, saving often and
collecting all documents while pillaging just
about every locker and attaché case, our run
concludes at just over the six-hour mark.
Before subsequent replays, our total playtime
(which would appear to include continues after
deaths and cutscenes) is a little over eight.
By current blockbuster-franchise
standards, that’s a little on the short side,
albeit comparable to the game it’s remaking.
Though it doesn’t have the original’s multiple
endings – which were determined by key
choices that are also absent here – there are
still incentives to play again. You can try for a
faster clear time to improve your ranking: an
S rank requires you to finish within two-and-
a-half hours having only used five saves. The
points you’ve earned from actions throughout
90
Post Script
the story can be spent on equippable items
that increase the damage you deal or reduce
the amount you take. You can start with the
lockpick and bolt cutters to save time, or
spend credits on a knife that sets zombies on
fire. The campaign’s relative brevity, in fact,
makes it particularly suited to speedruns.
It’s more faithful to the original in spirit
than in – forgive us for using the c-word –
content, reworking sections substantially and
introducing new ones, while prudently cutting
others. Yet the very fact that it’s missing
features from the original will be enough for
some to trot out the ‘lazy devs’ accusations,
even given the vast disparity in presentation
standards. This is, in part, one of the inherent
problems with remakes: a certain degree of
faithfulness is expected, and any diversion
from that is always likely to cause ructions
among long-term fans (in that regard, Resident
Evil 3 is hardly this month’s main offender).
Yet content, as Bill Gates once said, is king –
and in that regard it’s easier to see why the
question of value has been raised so often and
so vocally. Indeed, Capcom made something
of a rod for its own back with last year’s
Resident Evil 2 remake. That, too, was missing
elements of the original: its two campaigns
ultimately weren’t as distinct, nor would
actions in one have a tangible impact on the
other as they once did. Even so, that was
enough encouragement to replay the campaign
at least once, while the 4th Survivor mode
(and even its jokey tofu-led variant)
incentivised further attempts. The publisher
can point to Resistance to justify Resident
Evil 3’s price tag, though – who could have
guessed? – it appears most Resident Evil fans
would have preferred a more substantial
singleplayer component.
The value question is one we’re always
thinking about, and we recognise that our
own perception is skewed slightly by
circumstance. We rarely review games under
optimal conditions; deadlines, late code and
embargoes demand we have a more
concentrated experience than the average
player who might complete a game in
relatively bite-sized sessions over a longer
period of time. So we’re perhaps less likely
than most to complain that a game is too
short – although, of course, we’ll always
speak out if its length negatively affects it in
any way. Outside extreme cases, we believe
our role should not be to determine whether
a game is worth your money – not least
because a game’s price is rarely constant – but
your time. At six to eight hours, give or take,
we recommend playing Resident Evil 3; only you
can decide how much that’s worth to you. Q
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Gears Tactics
T
wo men, as broad as they are tall, stomp into a
room. “What are we looking for?” grunts one. “The
most classified-looking file they got,” growls the
other. It’s a reassuring moment: a line this knowingly
silly, delivered with a straight face, immediately lets us
know we’re in safe hands. And familiarity counts for
a lot in Gears Tactics; it’s a big part of what makes this
spin-off feel so instantly accessible. Your units advance
towards cover in that recognisable crouched waddle,
magically adhering to those convenient waist-high walls
as if their armour were lined with magnets. There are
frag grenades, Lancers and Gnashers; Corpsers, Kantus
and Wretches, too. And when the Theron Guards and
Boomers show up, we feel strangely comforted to know
exactly what kind of trouble we’re in.
For all its reputation as a gung-ho shooter, Gears
always seemed well-suited to turn-based tactics. The
phrase Cliff Bleszinski liked to use was “stop and pop”;
here, you’re simply given longer to stop so you can, well,
pop more effectively. Each unit has three actions per
turn, split between movement, shooting and special
abilities, the latter accrued as they (slowly) level up. The
maps aren’t grid-based, giving you more granular
control over movement, and of your overwatch, where
you can control the angle and range of your vision cone.
This way, you can ensure the maximum possible
coverage when you’re holding a position, or else focus
your fire on a bottleneck to keep out the multiple Locust
you can see preparing to funnel through it.
It’s more than just a gory XCOM, in other words,
though you’ll experience that same stomach-churning
sensation when a shot with an 80 percent hit rate
misses the mark, particularly when it’s your last action
of the turn. Or, worse still, when a round whistles wide
of an explosive Ticker, which, in a deliciously horrible
twist, scuttles closer after each volley – although you can
also use this to your advantage, drawing its attention
from a vulnerable ally. As you fight your way across
dust-blown desert settlements and through abandoned
medical facilities, the terrific level design forces you to
reckon with environmental challenges alongside a steady
drip-feed of new threats. With a range of elevations and
sightlines to consider, when it seems you’re hunkered
down and have every angle covered you’ll invariably find
one opponent managing to circumvent your defences –
even if you’re more frequently outnumbered than out-
thought. Even on the rare occasions that you survive
quite comfortably, the intensity of these battles will
convince you that you’ve just scraped through.
There are a few contrivances to make it work. Why
a vanguard class unit’s full-throated yell is enough to
scare Locust within a ten-metre radius out of cover is
beyond us, but when their sniper has your heavy pinned
down, or your lone healer risks taking two bursts of fire
92
PLAY
Developer The Coalition,
Splash Damage
Publisher Xbox Game Studios
Format PC
Release Out now
When the
Boomers
show up, we
feel strangely
comforted to
know exactly
what kind of
trouble we’re in
WAR STORIES
The absence of an upper
strategic layer à la XCOM is
perfectly understandable, not
least since the Gears are often
as much at loggerheads with
command as the Locust. Indeed,
that particular theme is central
to a prequel story that produces
a few minor surprises, even if a
significant plot development is
one with which long-term fans
will already be well acquainted.
While Gabe Diaz, father of
Gears 5’s Kait, is a slightly bland
lead, his two cohorts – reluctant
recruit Mikayla and weary
veteran Sid – are much more
charismatic. The latter gets most
of the best lines in Gears Tactics,
including a broad range of
amusingly profane battle cries.
Toss a frag grenade into a
waiting cluster of Wretches, for
example, and he’ll bellow, “Hot
potato, shitheads!”
just by moving, you won’t care. We can just about buy
that a lancer might need to reload after five shots, since
it’s actually more like five bursts of fire, though a sniper
with three rounds in the chamber smacks of inefficient
gunsmithing. Still, it means you’ll agonise over whether
to risk that last round on a 50/50 shot, or to set up an
overwatch and hope that you’ll take your intended target
down when they move on their next turn. (Invariably,
they’ll move around the other side of the cover you’re
aiming toward.) These limitations also make upgrades
more valuable, such that you’ll risk breaking formation
to gather a temptingly-positioned case that might just
let you fire two more rounds before reloading.
Over time you’ll find ways to even the numerical
mismatch, from mods that make your guns more
powerful or accurate to clever skill combinations that
increase the number of actions available per turn. You
might tee up your sniper by leaving an opponent
downed but not out, guaranteeing a kill shot that earns
you a free reload. You could leave them alive in the hope
of baiting out their allies, though the maxim ‘leave no
Locust behind’ seems alien to your opponent – and
besides, a bloody execution inspires everyone to a
further action. Some classes don’t come into their own
for a while – no spam-rolling your way out of trouble
here, shotgun lovers – but with mods and abilities
shortening skill cooldowns, scouts become more useful
than they first appear. Throw in a sprint that covers two
movement turns in one, plus proximity mines that can
close emergence holes as soon as they open, and while
the Gnasher may no longer be the dominant weapon,
the unit wielding it becomes one of your greatest assets.
For a while, it works wonderfully. Every time you
think you’ve hit upon a reliable strategy, Gears Tactics’
objective design and mission structure invites you to
rethink your approach. Sometimes you’ll have to dig in
without your two strongest units, while at others you’re
forced into a forward march as a Nemacyst bombardment
shortens the battlefield after every turn. One-man
rescue missions ask you to extricate survivors from
torture pods, then to keep everyone alive as you race to an
evac point upon which the enemy has turned its sights.
Yet these smart twists gradually become formulaic
over the course of a needlessly protracted second act
and into its third. You’ll find the same challenges and
maps cropping up time and again: though you’re often
presented with a choice of side missions, you’ll have to
complete the majority before you can move on. Those
familiar ingredients, at first an asset, become a liability,
the element of surprise waning as we find ourselves
fighting enemies we’ve seen many times before. There
simply isn’t enough game nor story to justify such a
drawn-out campaign, as attritional wear and tear causes
those well-oiled cogs to grind. The more we pop,
in other words, the keener we are to stop.
7
 ABOVE New Locust units are introduced in brief cutaways that let you
know what to expect from them. Forewarned is forearmed, as the saying
goes, but that’s only fair when it’s four of you against dozens of them

TOP Cosmetic choices are reflected

in cutscenes, so we equip our crew
with the gaudiest chrome armour.
If you like to see your units’ faces,
you can turn helmets invisible
while retaining their stat boosts.
MAIN It pays not to group too
many units together, lest you get
caught in your enemies’ sights
without anyone to flank them.
A disruptive pistol shot will end
a unit’s overwatch if you can’t
guarantee a kill.
RIGHT You have an impressively
granular degree of control over
where frags land – handy when
a group of Wretches is approaching.
The same applies to overwatch:
shorten your cone of vision and
you’ll all but guarantee a direct hit
when an enemy passes through it

93

XCOM: Chimera Squad
B
eing named after a mythical, mixed-up beast feels
apt for XCOM: Chimera Squad; Firaxis has rearranged
XCOM’s turn-based tactical blueprint with a twist
in the tail, said tail being the series’ traditional timeline.
In classic XCOM, fights can be lost in the space of one
turn while you watch in dismay, unable to influence the
battle once you’ve committed to your actions. Chimera
Squad’s subversion of this is interleaved turns –
individual units and enemies each swap turn order. The
timeline is displayed in your HUD, as well as above
enemies’ heads, so you can adapt tactics on the fly, for
example priority-targeting the next stacked enemy
before they can get a shot off. You can also use abilities
to change the order of the timeline, and while this
prescience makes encounters easier than traditional
XCOM, it also makes them much more dynamic.
This is not so much a total reinvention as a crowd-
pleasing remix, then – a dextrous spin on a classic game
that tweaks its proposition in inventive, yet brilliantly
obvious, ways. Rather than customisable grunts, squads
are picked from a roster of 11 fully-drawn characters,
each with a backstory, unique abilities and skill trees.
The squad has a scripted role in the relatively grounded
story, set several years after the events of XCOM 2, with
aliens, humans and hybrids all attempting to co-exist in
the wake of the war. The game’s setting of City 31 is an
uneasy utopia for diverse cohabitation, and paramilitary
police force Chimera Squad is tasked with keeping order
in the city’s districts and dealing with the three criminal
factions seeking to undermine the fragile peace.
This gives us the first XCOM in which teams can be
built with aliens as well as humans, adding psionic
powers and species-specific abilities to the ballistic
arsenal. The alien Verge’s psionics can incapacitate and
expose enemies; Torque is a Viper, a cobra-faced alien
who can pull enemies toward her with her tongue;
human-alien hybrid Cherub’s Phalanx ability draws
enemy fire to his shield. These exotic combatants fight
alongside typical human damage-dealers such as squad
leader Godmother, and Terminal, a tech-savvy medic
whose drone gives her the ability to heal team members
in the field. These distinct roles and disparate ability
sets make team balancing feel significant to mission
success, and how you use each unit in combat requires
tactical, though not overly finicky, consideration.
Missions – which roll out day by in-game day –
are snappier than in previous XCOMs, and involve
storming buildings and compounds, going room-by-
room in close-quarters battles, with additional
objectives such as rescuing hostages, arresting criminals
(you can now non-lethally subdue) or defusing bombs.
Chimera Squad introduces a breaching sequence at the
start of each encounter, in which you assign units at a
location’s entry points. Using charges to blast through a
94
PLAY
Developer Firaxis
Publisher 2K
Format PC
Release Out now
This is not so
much a total
reinvention as a
crowd-pleasing
remix – a
dextrous spin on
a classic game
PARANOID ANDROIDS
The squad’s equipment is
upgraded in the Assembly
research lab at XCOM HQ.
Assigning a unit to this (a cushy
desk-job for an injured squad
member) reduces researching
times, the fruit of which is
better armour, weapon mods
and battle droid reinforcements.
This costs credits and elerium,
the energy resource that powers
alien tech, so while kitting out
squad members and ensuring
they have the best loadouts is
critical, it’s also prudent to
prioritise your research projects.
Androids are pricey, but are more
useful than the relatively tiny
buffs a better weave of armour
provides. If a squad member
bleeds out, you can call in a
droid reinforcement for the next
encounter. Permadeath is very
real for your metal pals, though,
and it’s an expensive loss.
wall or rappelling in through a window adds surprise
bonuses to your breach actions. Upon breaching, there’s
a free group turn in which you can either fire on targets,
use an ability such as cover rush to gain defensive buffs
or employ flashbangs and other breach items. The order
in which squad members are stacked for the breach
dictates turn order and where in the room they take
cover, which is meant to give you a starting advantage.
However, since Chimera Squad has all the tech except,
strangely, heat-source recognition or any other means of
divining enemies’ positions, you’re going in blind. This
means it can be pot luck where your units end up. Once
breach action points are spent, you have no control over
where everyone takes cover. It’s a big flaw in a game
where positioning of units is critical, though there are
thrills to be had in wrenching back order from chaos.
The unit-by-unit turn order radically changes the
way XCOM rounds play out, in a way that makes all
choices feel life or death. Labels above enemies’ heads
reveal whether they are surprised, alert or aggressive,
dictating how quickly they react. Once you learn to read
the turn order effectively, battles become tense and
reactive, as you weigh up whether to break cover to try
to take out the next enemy in the turn order, or focus
fire on Sorcerers capable of incapacitating your weapons
with their psionic blasts, costing you valuable turns. Do
you return fire, or hunker down for defensive bonuses in
the next round? How long have you got to stabilise that
downed squad member before they bleed out? Sustaining
too much damage during an encounter results in units
receiving scars, causing lost accuracy, slower movement,
or panic in the ranks. Managing your squad and assigning
these units to training or desk jobs back at HQ for a day
or two will, fortunately, magically heal their PTSD.
City 31’s districts need constant attention – lose
control and the city falls to anarchy, and it’s all too easy
to neglect this as you bounce from mission to mission.
To manage these districts, you assign field teams which
can lower or freeze levels of unrest while generating
cash, intel and resources. Next to Chimera Squad’s
missions, the strategic management of City 31 often
feels like systems-based drudgery, though we learn its
importance the hard way. Around ten hours in, we find
ourselves on the brink of catastrophe thanks to our early
neglect of unrest levels, and almost fail the campaign as
a result of the city’s descent into chaos. These deeper
strategic layers underpin the story and give more
meaning to the endless cycle of breaches and battles.
Still, we suspect Chimera Squad might not be to the
taste of genre purists, having sacrificed perhaps a little
too much of the player’s control over strategic outcomes
in favour of reactive encounters. In some ways, it’s
XCOM for those who prefer action games – a hybrid
that isn’t afraid to ruffle some feathers, even if
the resulting beast loses a little of its identity.
6
 LEFT Encounters begin with
breaching, with units deployable
at multiple entry points. Don’t
bother to knock.
BELOW The timeline is stacked
to the right, and gives you the
chance to target the next enemy
in the turn order.
MAIN Moving within the blue lines
costs one of two action points,
and the shield-value of cover is
displayed by hovering over it.
Units can dash just beyond this
area, for a second AP

ABOVE Some enemies have psionic abilities that can disable your weapons,
putting you in a very precarious position. (Remember the Archon from
XCOM 2?) Naturally, you’ll want to take those ones out first

95

T
wo samurai circle one another. Neither set of feet
stops moving, but hands don’t move from weapons
either. Each weighs up their opponent, waiting for
their moment. Around them, cherry blossoms flutter to
the ground. A blade swings. It falls short. It’s an
opening, one you drive your blade directly into, pressing
the advantage in a sudden blur of action. The
ex-samurai unfolds into two red-edged halves, spraying
orbs of light as they join the petals on the ground.
For all the enemies it pulls from Japanese folklore,
for all the supernatural abilities it hands you, this is the
true fantasy of Nioh 2: a face-off between two evenly-
matched, mostly human foes. Yes, the Yokai monsters
let Team Ninja cut loose with its flair for creature
design, from the Gaki – squat vampires that are more
Gollum than Dracula – all the way through to lesser-
spotted boss creatures such as the Tatarimokke, in its
mythological origins an owl possessed by the spirit of a
dead baby, here a monstrous bird the size of a bungalow
with three enormous eyes that shoot laser beams. And
yes, the sequel-expanded selection of powers – attacks
infused with the power of monsters you’ve bested, the
ability to transform yourself into a Yokai for a short
time – slot neatly into combat, adding the occasional
burst of colour to fights. But honestly, we’re never
happier than when fighting yet another soldier in drab
robes, relying on our wits and the basics (a misnomer if
ever we heard one) of combat to make it through.
This might sound like too much to invest in every
single encounter, especially given most enemies will
regenerate when you pause at one of the game’s shrines,
but it’s worth taking each fight this seriously, because
the tide can turn incredibly quickly. As with the first
Nioh, this is the developer of Ninja Gaiden doing its own
Dark Souls. Given those are both titles renowned (if not
fetishised) for their difficulty, you can guess where the
level of challenge sits. A brief lapse in concentration
and even a lesser foe can cut your health bar in half.
Facing two – or, god help us, three – enemies at once is
enough to push your heart rate to uncomfortable levels.
You’ll die, over and over, until you start to improve.
And then you’ll die again, at the worst possible
moment, to an enemy you thought you’d mastered.
You’ll watch a carefully-hoarded pile of Amrita – the
upgrade currency that serves as this game’s equivalent
of Souls or Blood Echoes – ebb away into infinity. It’s
a game to test the limits of your swearing vocabulary.
So far, so Soulslike. But more than its difficulty, it’s
the complexity of Nioh 2 that’s most off-putting at first.
Every part of the game is a tangle to hack your way
through. There are little things, like the fact that
collecting Amrita also charges up a gauge that lets you
Yokai Shift – not to be confused with Anima, which
fills a bar that lets you trigger the aforementioned
96
PLAY
Nioh 2
Developer Team Ninja
Publisher Koei Tecmo, SIE
Format PS4
Release Out now
Battling with a
better version
of yourself,
Nioh 2’s combat
sings like
polished steel
being pulled
from its sheath
FACE VALUE
Where the first Nioh had you
playing as a set character
(William Adams, a real-life
historical figure and inspiration
for the unproduced Akira
Kurosawa script which
eventually led to Nioh’s
development), this sequel lets
you build your own hero, with
a robust character creator that
enables you to tweak everything
from posture to cheekbone
depth. The game isn’t afraid to
show your creation during
cutscenes, and they hold up
impressively well, even in tight
close-ups. At least, ours did –
we’re sure there are monsters to
be created with these tools,
though you’ve got chance to
rework the design at any point.
This means you needn’t be
beholden to a default white
protagonist, as in the first game,
and you can steer clear of the
more salacious character design
choices Team Ninja is known for.
demon-powered special attacks, but doesn’t contribute
to the full transformation. (After hours of play, we still
have to triple-check which way round those two go.) It’s
a small niggle, but one that’s indicative of a larger
messiness in the game’s systems and their presentation.
Most games strip back their HUDs as far as they’ll
go; Nioh 2’s UI is a horror show. It inherits those ugly
Dark Souls D-pad inventory menus directly, with none
of the streamlining Sekiro introduced, then stuffs them
with surplus loot until it’s impossible to pick out the
best items from the trash. Outside of menus, you still
can’t escape information overload. There are three
separate bars and three gauges clustered at the top-left
of the screen, the constant presence of a minimap,
indicators for the weapons you have equipped, a wheel
of potential Stances, and on it goes. This is all crucial
information, but the game’s refusal to prioritise it
means it effectively becomes invisible.
Combat is similarly convoluted. Every melee weapon
can be held in three stances: high gives the most
offensive power, low enables speedy hits and dodges,
and mid sits steadily between the two. Each comes with
its own hefty moveset and passive perks, unlocked
individually, so it feels like you’re learning three similar
yet distinct weapons at once. Take into account the fact
any button press can be modified by holding a trigger,
and it’s a lot to hold in your head.
But here, and here alone, the extra complexity is
absolutely worth it. There are tangible gains, even if
the cost is the occasional whiffed attack because you
thought you were in high stance already, or could’ve
sworn it was R2 you were holding. Combat is expressive
enough that two fights with human enemies, identical
but for their weapon of choice, can feel entirely distinct.
As you become more fluent, a spearman who favours
high stance is enough to give a duel its own flavour.
This is why it’s much more fun picking on someone
your own size – it gives you chance to appreciate the
small differences. One of the game’s best tricks is
a mimic enemy who bites your style for a perfectly
symmetrical showdown, demonstrating how incomplete
your understanding of your current moveset is. In
these moments, battling with a better version of
yourself, Nioh 2’s combat sings like polished steel
being pulled from its sheath.
But as the game strays further from this core fantasy,
its charms are dulled. Nioh 2 is a rather conservative
sequel, clinging to the shape of its predecessor, with the
main expansions of its boundaries concentrated on
further exploring the Yokai realm. But we find ourselves
wishing it had retracted instead to focus on that
gleaming centre. It’s a Gordian knot of a game, bloated
systems and messy presentation wrapped tight around
one another, and we all know what those require:
the well-timed application of a sharp blade.
7
ABOVE You’ll occasionally find yourself wandering into the Dark Realm,
which saps your Ki stamina recovery until you kill all its demon inhabitants.
On the plus side, though, it does give you an enviable pair of horns

MAIN There are some absolutely

huge bosses who’ll happily monster
you with room-spanning sweeps of
their weapons, but you’ll come up
against plenty of human-sized
bosses too. You can probably
guess which we prefer.
ABOVE This is Tokichiro, your main
companion. In one of Nioh 2’s many
nods to real-world history, it
suggests that Japanese Daimyo
Hideyoshi Toyotomi was actually
a composite figure, conflating
Tokichiro with your character, Hide.
LEFT Staggered enemies are left
open to a brutal finishing move –
just be aware that, while it strips
away a huge chunk of their health
bar and sprays blood everywhere,
it won’t necessarily see them off

97

Ori And The Will Of The Wisps
T
he real world seems even more grey when we tear
our eyes away from the screen. We’d begun to
wonder if Moon Studios’ sequel was going to be
a permanent E3 fixture for Microsoft – since its 2017
announcement, each year has given us an increasingly
spectacular-looking trailer, a reason for Xbox owners
without Game Pass (if such people exist) to keep their
consoles mothballed. If anything, it’s more dazzling than
the promos; even the darkest areas of this sprawling
world are bathed in a bioluminescent glow. Its palette
covers the entire spectrum, and frequently reaches for
the most vibrant hues. You sprint through a forest on
the cusp of winter, the warmth of a late-evening sun
taking the edge off an autumnal chill you can almost
feel in your bones. You swim through holiday-brochure
seas in one biome that finds the sweet spot between
tropical and otherworldly. The notion of a living,
breathing world is a marketing cliché, but here you can
detect nature’s pulse. Everything seems to move, down
to the wooden bridges buckling gently beneath your feet
and the twitching wings of dying insects enmeshed in
a spidery hollow. And at its heart is Ori, their brilliant
white glow just about enough to drag your attention away
from the countless visual distractions around them.
It’s a good job that ancestral light focuses the eyes,
because this is a more immediately hostile place than
before, illustrated by a brief early encounter with
a huge, toothy wolf. The original’s tame combat was an
undoubted weak point, such that we were uneasy about
talk of an increased focus on fighting, even with an
expanded arsenal. Yet combat is far from an unwanted
interruption. You start with a sword that Ori wields
with grace and speed; later, there’s a powerful spear
with a glorious wind-up animation. But by then we’ve
fallen in love with Ori’s hammer. If there’s something
incongruous about a tiny sprite wielding a whacking
great mallet, it’s forgotten the second a mid-air swing
hits a buzzing fly or a stomping brute with an almighty
wallop; it’s as satisfying as connecting with the jaw of
a wyvern in Monster Hunter, and it happens much more
frequently here. And if explosive slugs discourage close-
quarters attacks, an upgrade that turns ground attacks
into shockwaves that spread beyond the point of impact
ensures we keep it permanently bound to the B button.
For the face buttons not reserved for Ori’s jump
(which is eventually tripled) there is a palette of abilities
to choose between. A mid-air dash later lets you tunnel
through sand, and burst up and out from it, accounting
for the right bumper. The left, meanwhile, is reserved
for the Bash ability that lets you seize and redirect
projectiles mid-flight, and a grapple with surprising
reach (if relatively limited use). Between those and the
arrows, the explosive spheres that melt ice and the late-
game ability to turn yourself into a projectile – let’s not
call it self-Bashing, hm? – Ori becomes an astonishingly
98
PLAY
Developer Moon Studios
Publisher Xbox Game Studios
Format PC (tested), Xbox One
Release Out now
There are plenty
of moments
when you’ll be
convinced it
plays as good
as it looks,
and that’s
going some
PICKUP TRUCKLOAD
Alongside the usual capsules
that extend your health and
energy meters, you can expand
Ori’s abilities by completing
combat shrines to earn extra
shard slots – up to eight in all.
The shards themselves act as
difficulty modifiers, after
a fashion. One boosts offensive
power at the cost of reduced
defences. Another lets you stick
to walls: a godsend in places,
but a rather unwanted talent
when you’re in a hurry.
Elsewhere, you’ll bring back ore
to a craftsman who will build
houses in a central clearing that
acts as a safe hub, while
a gardener plants seeds you’ve
retrieved to add extra features.
Yet, thanks to creative use of
Ori’s abilities, by the time
they’ve been installed we’ve
already visited the places they’re
designed to help us reach.
versatile protagonist. For large parts of the game, we’re
convinced we’ve not enjoyed controlling a character so
much since Super Mario Odyssey, though Ori’s moveset
is less about expressiveness or showboating trickery.
There is a sense of desperation to exploration – you’ll
dash over to a wall, barely avoiding the thorny tangle
below, or scrabble up to the edge of a platform, having
just about cleared a huge gap with a triple-jump and
a dash. And that’s when the pressure isn’t on. Escape
sequences are back, though whether it’s a burrowing
worm or an avalanche from which you’re sprinting,
they’re more forgiving this time. Recalling the frustration
of the Ginso Tree, we gasp with delight after clearing
the game’s first chase on our second attempt. One or
two later pursuits fall into the trap of all but demanding
precognition to beat first time, but each allows more
margin for error, giving slow fingers the chance to
recover from any mistakes. There are plenty of moments
during Will Of The Wisps when you’re convinced it
plays as good as it looks, and that’s going some.
The enchantment, alas, wears off. Such an expansive
moveset leads to indecision and confusion, and points
when the game’s huge world – substantially larger than
the first game’s, albeit quicker to traverse, even without
fast-travel shrines – leaves you lost. Getting stuck is
part of most Metroidvanias, of course, but too often it’s
unclear which tools you need to get by. Sometimes it’s
an ability you gained a long time before but benched in
favour of the stronger combat options. More than once,
it will demand you pull off a succession of moves with
fussy timing, such that you can never be sure whether
you’re doing it wrong or missing a vital skill upgrade.
And then there are occasions where it’s apparent that
playtesters got stuck, and a text overlay will simply tell
you which ability you need to progress.
The game’s size isn’t a problem, but there’s a Baz
Luhrmann-esque maximalism to it all that makes us
wish Moon Studios had dialled everything back a bit.
Even the visual sumptuousness grows overbearing: with
every inch of the world seemingly designed to inspire
an awestruck reverie, gorgeousness becomes the norm,
such that we greet later areas with little more than
a shrug. Gareth Coker’s lush score swells and soars,
prodding you to feel more deeply about a story that’s
laser-focused on showing you sad things happening to
excessively cute, vulnerable creatures. And the build-up
to the big finish is a crushing disappointment, setting
you a tedious task in an abstractly gamey environment
that simply covers every available surface in spikes,
culminating in a dreadfully boring boss fight. Its
moments of genuine brilliance are worth experiencing,
but they shouldn’t blind anyone to the shortcomings of
a sequel that, underneath that beautiful surface,
is as frustratingly flawed as the first.
7
 ABOVE This instakill stealth sequence, albeit brief, is ill-advised. At one
stage we’re spotted despite appearing to be hidden; only through trial and
error will you determine which parts of the environment will conceal you

MAIN There are a few platforming

sequences like this, usually before
an optional pickup, where your
brow furrows as you try to plot out
the next series of inputs in your
mind before trying it out.
ABOVE Moon Studio can certainly
craft a scripted set-piece, and
though this time they’re less
demanding you’ll still breathe
a relieved sigh once the music
dies down again.
RIGHT The map fills in as you
explore it, but if you want a fuller
picture (including the location of
nearby pickups) you’ll need to pay
some orbs to cartographer Lupo

99

Paper Beast
N
ow we know how Lester Chaykin felt. Granted,
we’ve not experienced anything as dramatic as
Another World’s protagonist ripping a hole in
the space-time continuum and teleporting himself to an
alien planet. But we too find ourselves suddenly
transported to a strange and barren land, feeling
similarly awestruck and not a little frightened. It’s not
long before we realise that this place isn’t nearly so
hostile – at least not to us. We may have arrived in the
shadow of a towering creature, but it’s benign: the
gentlest of giants. Gnarled and spindly, it’s something
like a skeletal version of the Pokémon Dialga: the title
might suggest it’s made from paper, but it seems to be
made from bone, studded with tiny jewels of rock. As it
lumbers on, we’re struck by how powerful and yet how
fragile it seems – and fascinated enough to follow its
lead. Like us, you’ll be surprised at where it takes you.
Éric Chahi’s latest game, in other words, has at least
as much in common with his most famous creation as
with his last. The dynamic environmental manipulation
of From Dust returns, and in Paper Beast’s sandbox
mode, you again get to play god, forming mountains and
rivers and summoning storms to see how this simulated
universe and its inhabitants respond to natural disasters
of your own making. But for the most part, it’s about
working out the rules of a world unlike our own to
figure out a way forward, albeit with much lower
stakes – a failed experiment or bodged action here
won’t result in your avatar’s death. It turns out you’re
exploring an abstract ecosystem spawned from lost
data (look up to the skies and you’ll see the pink clouds
forming numbers), though any story elements are
consciously left open to interpretation. The focus,
rather, is on the experience of existing in a world that
combines organic and man-made elements, and the
ways in which you directly and indirectly influence it.
The most transformative effects come from the
beasts themselves, albeit often as a result of your
prompting. Many resemble origami models, assembled
with geometric precision yet chaotic and unruly now
they’ve been given life. Your controller (or two if you’re
using Move, though for once there’s little difference)
effectively becomes an invisible fishing line: you’ll
uproot the odd plant, but you mostly use it to grab
these creatures, bringing them closer to get a better
look, or shunting them away. By studying their
behaviour and combining them with one another or the
various flora scattered around these desolate lands, you
learn exactly what they’re capable of.
At first, you simply want to study them because
they’re so beguiling to watch. One is a tangle of paper
ribbons, halfway between a cheerleader’s pom-pom and
the clumpy mass you pull out when emptying a
shredder; another has seemingly unspooled from a reel-
100
PLAY
Developer/publisher Pixel Reef
Format PSVR
Release Out now
For the most
part, it’s about
working out the
rules of a world
unlike our own
to figure out
a way forward
PAPER PLAINS
Sandbox mode is a delightfully
pure plaything that benefits
from completing the story mode
first. By then, you’ll have
unlocked more creatures and
features to scatter across the
land – retrieving certain
colourful collectables hidden
within some chapters will
expand your palette. Though
you can descend to ground
level, you’ll mostly want to
watch from above, putting
down creature combinations
you won’t see elsewhere to see
how they respond to one
another – or simply feeding
everything to the vicious Voraxo,
the game’s deadliest predator
despite being rooted to the
spot. With experimentation,
you might even pick up a few
tips for alternative solutions to
problems you’ve encountered
in the main game.
to-reel tape deck. You discover stark contrasts between
the colourful predators (which are impossible to wrangle
without assistance) and their papery prey, which can be
easily dragged and flung around, making them feel more
delicate and vulnerable still – and leaving you all the
keener to protect them.
So yes, you can indulge in acts of casual callousness,
but in the main you’ll want to use your powers to
benevolent ends, since that’s how you progress. In many
cases, paper trees will sprout up where animals gather
to mewl and low. Usually, it’s your job to shepherd them
there, creating bridges and paths, perhaps, or protecting
them from inclement weather or prowling predators. In
the latter case you need to find an effective distraction,
luring them towards plants that have a narcoleptic
effect, or else tethering them to heavy objects to limit
their reach as you guide the weaker creatures to safety.
Elsewhere, the environment itself is the problem,
and in some cases there’s more than one way to solve it.
In one area, crab-like creatures use plant stems to drag
balls of sand, which you can push up a slippery slope to
help clumsy quadrupeds reach the top – rolling the ball
in the sand yourself to make it larger and cover more
ground when you splat it back down. Or you could
harness the dirt-scattering power of a spinning plant
that resembles a large sycamore seed to aid their grip.
The mop-like ends of a large worm represent another
option, as it sucks up a sand pile from one end and
excretes it out of the other. It might seem a high-
minded game, but it’s hardly shy of playful touches, not
least during an impromptu parade soundtracked by
bouncy J-pop. Or when a tree bursts into life, sprouting
tiny pods that you quickly discover function like Metal
Gear Solid’s Fulton recovery balloons.
Its languid pace gives you time to make mistakes and
recover from them, though while the pressure increases
when the predators show up, the most stressful moments
are down to the fussy nature of some objectives. One
puzzle, involving finding a way for lightweight
quadrupeds to negotiate a storm-blown clifftop, is
fiddly to the point of exasperation. And while the lack
of direction is often an asset, there are one or two
occasions where we’re left feeling lost, and not in a
good way, where our immediate objective would seem to
be apparent yet our destination isn’t at all clear.
Still, we’re prepared to forgive Chahi and his team
these rare slips. Captivating and uncanny, Paper Beast is
a rare one: a distinctively weird game that’ll stick with
you long after your brain has filtered out the little
hiccups and frustrations. It’s a minor miracle that, amid
the real world’s information overload, a game about big
data can leave us feeling overwhelmed for entirely the
right reasons. We may not return for a while, but we’re
left with memories that will linger – of one more
unforgettable trip to another world.
8
 ABOVE The smaller critters are every bit as fascinating in their way as
the larger ones – and you have more control over them. The delicate limbs
of this creature actually inspire us to be more gentle with our interactions

MAIN One of the trickier objectives

has you ferrying objects through a
field of sticky tendrils. Just when
you think you’ve freed your cargo,
another will latch on.
ABOVE The creatures are strange,
yet their behaviour is utterly
convincing, to the point where
you’ll start feeling guilty for using
them for your own ends.
RIGHT A screenshot can’t capture
the imposing size of this fellow. The
environments might look sparse,
but you’ll usually be too busy
gawping at the beasts to notice

101

Call Of Duty: Warzone
T
here’s no question of whether it’s a riot. Deeply
silly military gadgets spewing forth from humming
containers; Cockney accents accompanying your
death-baiting dashes from Eastern bloc petrol stations
to dilapidated arenas; thrumming ballistic effects and
crosshairs changing smugly to indicate you’ve hit the
meat of the cranium; knee slides, item pings, punch-ups
in gulags and quad bike jumps in gas masks – Warzone
is the highlight reel version of battle royale.
No, instead the question Infinity Ward’s free-to-play
juggernaut raises is this: how much has been lost in the
process of creating this more accessible, thrill-a-minute
version of the genre, and how much do you miss it? It’s
certainly a substantial simplification of PlayerUnknown’s
Battlegrounds, and it’s unquestionably PUBG Infinity
Ward has taken its notes from. There’s none of Fortnite’s
befuddling base-building or cutesy Moisty Mire stylings,
and while Apex Legends might well feel aggrieved to see
its brilliant ping system lifted wholesale here, Brendan
Greene’s legal team must be grinding what’s left of their
teeth into paste. Not that there’s anything wrong with
setting a battle royale in a fictional abandoned Soviet
town in which a military base, a prison, and a secret
bunker are within walking distance of tenement blocks,
but we aren’t thrilled by the prospect of it any more.
The Verdansk map feels geographically just a few
towns over from Erangel, but they’re galaxies apart in
terms of how they are to play. Nearly every building you
enter contains a loot chest with enough kit to give you
a fighting chance. Here, it isn’t whether or not you’ve
managed to find an assault rifle yet, but whether that
assault rifle has an amygdala-massaging word like ‘epic’
and an impressive rarity colour attached. Equipment and
ammo are plentiful, and with that sense of inhabiting
and controlling a large kitchen appliance that’s intrinsic
to Arma-based games gone, it’s much easier to shoot
people, too. Until the final minutes of a round, even
death isn’t the end of the road – you’re just woken up
in a prison and made to fight mano-a-mano in a bizarre
arena made of urinals. Win that fight, and you’ll be
airdropping back into the game as if nothing happened.
One might call it ‘battle royale lite’, were one feeling
particularly uncharitable. But the truth is that although
death doesn’t carry quite the same consequence here, all
the other fascinating wrinkles of the genre – baiting
other players, choosing your fights, being in the right
place at the right time – carry over perfectly. This being
Call Of Duty’s second stab at the genre after the tepid
Blackout mode in 2018’s Black Ops IIII, lessons have
obviously been learned and applied.
It’s also a game with the dizzying array of unlockables
you’d expect from a free-to-play Call Of Duty, delivered
in a manner you wouldn’t. In the opening hours of
traditional COD multiplayer, you’re not the consumer but
the product. Your job is to be killed until the teethmarks
102
PLAY
Developer Infinity Ward,
Raven Software
Publisher Activision
Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One
Release Out now
How much has
been lost in
the process of
creating this
more accessible,
thrill-a-minute
version of the
battle royale?
CASH IN THE BALTIC
In addition to Warzone’s
traditional solo and three-man
squad battle royale modes lies
Plunder. Gordon Gecko’s vision
for battle royale, it takes the
emphasis off survival and puts
it squarely onto accumulating
wealth. With no diminishing
zone and limitless respawns, the
aim is to gather a million dollars
and deposit it before any rival
teams. Free to go about it
however they like, from robbing
banks to targeting high-earning
players (who are displayed on
the map periodically), Plunder’s
participants here find a more
freeform and forgiving mode,
and one that works as a useful
tuition tool for map knowledge
and combat experience. There’s
unmistakably something in it,
but Plunder’s not as sharply
hewn as the main attraction yet,
and needs further support.
in your controller are more than implied, while players
who’ve already earned better weapons and attachments
steamroll through in bliss. The best you can hope for
is to endure this ritual humiliation for long enough to
become the predator, but in Warzone the paradigm is, if
not quite inverted, certainly radically recalibrated.
This is because, technically, you don’t need any of
the things you unlock. Loadouts don’t arrive with you,
but are airdropped to a nearby location several minutes
and zone-shrinks in. This means a few fortuitous chest
openings near your drop zone or an aggressive early
game phase replete with body-scavenging will equip you
with equivalent gear to a high-level, many-hour profile.
It also forces players who haven’t yet satiated their
weapon-lust out from their foxholes, scuttling towards
bright red flares which, of course, everyone else in the
region can also see. While killstreak rewards do remain
bound to your personal progress, and just as seismic as
they are in a round of Kill Confirmed, elsewhere Infinity
Ward has wisely placed the emphasis on scavenging for
gear rather than grinding for it.
The topography of Verdansk, like the positioning
of its major areas, works in harmony with the loadout
drop system and a steady influx of resurrected players
dropping back in to keep players moving and spotting
each other. Sitting scoped-in and tensing every muscle
for five solid minutes is a valid strategy, as it should be
in a genre that has essentially weaponised hide and seek,
but the temptation is simply greater in Warzone to get
out and determine the action than in its contemporaries.
The bluntest instruments to this end are contracts which
highlight a nearby squad or player on the map – the
hunted knows their position’s being broadcast to an
unseen foe, and that unseen foe knows their target is
waiting for them. Fairly often nothing happens at all:
a HUD indicator turns red to signal imminent danger,
and your assailant passes by harmlessly, either stumped
as to your location or unwilling to risk a fight. What’s
important is that it’s another beat in each round’s story.
It’s a tale not just of survival, but of grabbing cold,
hard cash in the process. This final spin on the formula
lets you view Verdansk in a different light, not just as
a gallery of doors to hide behind but a sprawl of lottery
tickets. Money buys killstreaks, armour plates, revive
kits and loadout drops, giving an advantage to flush
players. The best way to accumulate it? Killing people.
Behind the familiar weapons and machismo, there’s
a rewarding new slant on battle royale in Warzone, one
that has already captured the imaginations of some 50
million players. Derivative and at times off-puttingly
insistent upon drawing your attention to season pass
rewards and flimsy unlocks, it’s nonetheless some of
Infinity Ward’s most considered design in years,
and a sign it’s ready to get back in the fight.
8
ABOVE With a more generous distribution of weaponry across the map,
picking a drop location isn’t a round-defining decision in Warzone. If all
else fails you can hunt down your loadout drop shortly after landing

TOP Friendlier than its battle

royale peers, Warzone includes
a brief but satisfactory tutorial
where the basics are laid out in
a peaceful environment, followed
by a PvE practice run.
MAIN If this were a traditional Call
Of Duty multiplayer match, you’d
both be laying dead by now and
expunging shimmering dog tags.
Thank the stars it’s not, and there’s
time to take a breath and plan.
LEFT Enemies who’ve procured
helicopters are every bit as
dangerously overpowered as they
sound. With great OP comes great
complacence, though, as this
individual learns the hard way just
a few moments later

103

Bleeding Edge
T
his team-based melee fighter desperately wants to
be noticed – with its ostentatious style and bold
character design, at times it can feel as though
Ninja Theory has forced us into the Clockwork Orange
eye clamps. It’s an approach that backfires: go in with
eyes wide open, and the similarities between Bleeding
Edge and its contemporaries become uncomfortable.
So much of Bleeding Edge feels lifted from Overwatch
that it’s awkward, as if the two had rolled up to a party
in the same outfit. Gizmo actually has: her pink mech
suit is oddly reminiscent of D.Va’s. Half-motorcycle
cyborg Buttercup has a chain-hook like Roadhog, and
support hacker Zero Cool throws up a protective wall
and heals teammates with a beam just as Mei and Mercy
do. Bleeding Edge’s version of ‘Play Of The Game’ is
dubbed ‘Final Play’, and instead of highlighting a display
of skill or ingenuity usually centres on whichever
beleaguered healer has managed to cap the point while
their DPS friends were off chasing kills.
Still, the oft-visited concept of a cyberpunk future in
which you can pop round the corner to have a chainsaw
transplanted into your left elbow has, happily, led to a
few original character designs. Kulev has transferred his
consciousness to a robot snake that now controls his
There are only two game modes at launch. In this one, Power Collection,
teams battle to be the first to deliver power cells to drop zones, while
navigating environmental hazards such as missile attacks
104
PLAY
Developer Ninja Theory
Publisher Xbox Game Studios
Format PC, Xbox One (tested)
Release Out now
DOJO RISING
A training dojo and the addition
of a crafting workshop are
a great way to work on your
character builds and combat
skills away from the online
arena. Mods in the form of
microchips can be swapped out
and set to interchangeable
builds, and provide ability,
damage and health buffs.
Progression for you and your
chosen characters is also
monitored, with unlockable
skins and emotes providing
cosmetic changes, but all of this
assumes you’re invested enough
in the core game and its limited,
repetitive game modes to be in
it for the long haul.
corpse, and Maeve is an elderly witch who leaves other
damage-dealers in the dust, once you get your head
around how to use her ranged pokes properly.
Ninja Theory can be forgiven for borrowing from its
own games, especially since creative director Rahni
Tucker was responsible for DmC’s satisfying combo
system, and combat revolves around a pared-back
version of that. But for a game built around close-
quarters skirmishes, they frequently bore. You’ll vie for
dominion over territory in Objective Control, or take
power cells to a drop zone in Power Collection, but both
largely involve mashing one button to throw out limp
projectiles as you wait for your far more exciting special
abilities to cool down. Time-to-kill is slow, making for
some dismally long exchanges of fire, while thoughtful
squad composition doesn’t seem to factor into fights –
synchronising abilities for creative plays can be tricky,
with visual noise often making the action unreadable.
And with new players mostly arriving via Game
Pass, Bleeding Edge will need more than a few likeable
characters, two game modes and four nondescript
arenas to retain the attention it craves. Of course, that
didn’t hold Overwatch back, but if you’re following
rather than leading, you really need – apologies – an
edge, bleeding or otherwise. There’s an abundance of
character here, sure, but what Bleeding Edge needs
most is a personality – preferably its own. 5

Streets Of Rage 4
T
hings are rarely just as we remember them, but
Streets Of Rage 4 manages the impressive trick of
being exactly the way we recall the classic ’90s
side-scrolling beat-’em-up series, in all its vibrant
rose-tinted hues.
Almost everything feels familiar. Moves, characters
and enemies – from brightly mohawked street punks on
seedy, neon-lit streets to strobing dancefloors packed
with cyberpunk psychos – are portrayed in a beautiful,
hand-drawn art style that affords them a bold, comic-
book feel, the very image of what our brains believe they
really did look like decades ago. You can even turn on a
filter to pixellate and add scan lines.
That’s the first clue, perhaps, that there is little to no
reinvention here – tonally and mechanically, this is
obsessively reproduced. But where the old games might
feel rough around the edges, things have been boosted
and bettered. Attack animations are more fluid, but each
blow connects with hefty cracks and whuds; movement
feels modernised, with imperfections such as the way
enemies had a tendency to disappear off-screen well
and truly ironed out. Only once does the traditional
one-way side-scrolling betray a fundamental flaw,
when our progress is halted because an unseen enemy is
Melee weapons, from knives and pipes to swords and pole-arms, can help
even the odds. You can throw weapons, and even catch them on the
rebound – the downside is, enemies will also use them against you
PLAY
Developer DotEmu, Lizardcube,
Guard Crush Games
Publisher DotEmu
Format PC, PS4 (tested), Switch,
Xbox One
Release Out now
ROCK OF RAGES
Music is a big part of Streets Of
Rage 4. Not only does Cherry
wield a guitar and the story
involve a showdown with a DJ
who looks like one of Daft Punk,
Olivier Derivière’s synth-funk,
rock and dubstep soundtrack is
a contender for best of the year.
It also includes key contributions
from original series composers
Yuzo Koshiro and Motohiro
Kawashima. Want their full,
original soundtrack from Streets
1 and 2? You can swap out the
new soundtrack for the old, and
listen to those synths soar.
stuck behind some chairs and we have to backtrack
to disentangle him.
Alongside Axel, Blaze and Adam are new characters
Cherry (a nimble fighter) and robot-armed Floyd. Each
has their own moves, such as Axel’s upper-cut and body
slam; basic attacks flow into weightier combos, and a
double-tapped quick-dash knocks down enemies.
Alongside a powerful finisher there are two special
moves, one defensive, the other an unblockable attack,
traded for a little health which can be regained by
landing hits. A reverse kick or punch is effective when
enemies have you boxed in, and you can grab and throw
enemies, bowling over other goons. A wide range of
returning bad guys ensures a mix of behaviours to deal
with at any one time: enemies that block, those that
barrel at you, or use ranged weapons or aerial attacks.
The AI, though not overly bright (it’s a beat-’em-up,
after all), is smart enough to occasionally surprise.
The joy of a good beat-’em-up is in its simple, yet
compelling, loop – keep punching and moving – while
learned knowledge of enemy attack patterns and
weaknesses, and best use of your own attacks, drives
you to beat those high scores. Any gimmicks would have
muddied the waters – what you need to bring a golden-
age beat-’em-up bang up to date, it turns out, is a team
of fans with the hands of a heart surgeon and an
eye for why we fell in love with it in the first place. 8
105

The Room VR: A Dark Matter
F
or years, Fireproof Games has invited us to puzzle
our way inside its intricate contraptions. Now we
find ourselves inside from the start, surrounded by
the kind of world into which we’re used to peering. As
we descend further into a supernatural-tinged Edwardian
mystery, this feels like a VR wonderland in more ways
than one. With otherworldly portals shrinking us to
investigate objects from within – having manipulated
them from the outside to form pathways inside – we’re
frequently left asking ourselves just how deep the
rabbithole goes. Curiouser and curiouser, indeed.
This series has always rewarded the player’s natural
inquisitiveness like few others, and Fireproof makes the
most of the opportunities the tech presents. The
vocabulary has changed slightly: there’s still poking and
prodding, but plenty more grabbing, lifting and tipping.
And while, as ever with VR, you’re something of a
semi-corporeal presence, your leather-gloved hands
sometimes passing through scenery as you reach forward,
everything you can interact with has a satisfying
solidity. Whether you’re investigating dusty sarcophagi
in the bowels of the British Museum, or indulging in
a bit of eye-of-newt potion brewing in a witch’s cottage,
there are levers and pulleys to tug, keys to turn, dials to
If you’re playing in PSVR, we’d recommend using Move controllers if you
have them; the puzzles have clearly been designed for two hands, and
the DualShock occasionally makes for a slightly clumsy alternative
106
PLAY
Developer/publisher Fireproof Games
Format Index, PSVR (tested), Quest, Rift,
Vive, Windows Mixed Reality
Release Out now
INTO THE UNKNOWN
A Dark Matter begins with a
missing persons case, with an
enigmatic missive from someone
who’s dubbed themselves ‘The
Craftsman’ promising to reveal
more. But don’t expect to come
away with all the answers, even
when the ending makes plain
what you’re dealing with. If part
of The Room’s success is what it
leaves unsaid, compelling you to
dig deeper, the overarching
story doesn’t always feel
connected to the objects you’re
investigating: these challenges
may be enjoyable, but they can
feel slightly arbitrary.
twist and so much more. Everything here has a tangible
presence, even the ghosts. The Room has never been
short of atmosphere, but in VR it’s more enveloping
than ever: you always feel on the verge of a great
discovery, with hints that you’re dabbling in forces
beyond your comprehension adding just a hint of
danger to leave the hairs on your neck bristling.
Occasionally it lacks the elegance of its predecessors.
You’ll encounter some objects that are designed only to
be looked at, while others won’t yield until you’ve solved
another part of the puzzle, the distinction between ‘not
at all’ and ‘not yet’ not always apparent. We rely on a few
more hints than usual, not because we need to know the
solution but because it’s not obvious where we should
be looking. And there’s a little too much back and forth,
particularly in a church-set middle chapter, which
returns to a stained-glass puzzle at least once too often.
But even here the quality of the craftsmanship is
hard to deny, and what follows is as thrilling a VR
experience we’ve had outside City 17. Here, you’ll find
crystal balls and cracked mirrors revealing hidden
symbols, dimensional doors activated by tarot cards and
a liquid-to-solid transition so mesmerising we welcome
its repetition. A finale that blends Lovecraft and
Spielberg seals the deal. Before, we couldn’t imagine
The Room anywhere else but a touchscreen;
A Dark Matter suggests VR could be its ideal home. 8

In Other Waters
L
ike the more elusive creatures you’ll find in the seas
of exoplanet Gliese 677Cc, writer-designer Gareth
Damian Martin’s debut game can be tricky to pin
down. We could liken it to an aquatic Metroid Prime in
which Samus Aran needs nothing more than her scan
visor. Or perhaps it could best be described as a visual
novel masquerading as a Metroidlike; certainly, text is
especially crucial here. As an artificial intelligence
guiding bioscientist-slash-biologist Ellery Vas, who’s
here to document alien flora and fauna while searching
for her missing colleague, your view of the world is
limited: in the centre of a stylish interface, all you see is
a wireframe topographic map pocked with simple
shapes. What these look like through human eyes is
relayed back to you by Vas, her messages combining
scientific detail with awestruck fascination. Your
imagination fills in the rest.
For a while, we’re forced to recalibrate our
expectations. You’re not completely free to explore;
instead, you ping the area to highlight environmental
features and objects, choosing one for Vas to swim
towards. And though you gain new abilities to bypass
hazards and obstacles, whether it’s extra propulsion to
withstand strong currents or lobbing gas-filled sacs to
The interface seems alien at first – fittingly so – but it soon becomes
second nature. The colour palette changes as you move between areas,
which helps with navigation while adding welcome visual variety
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PLAY
Developer Jump Over The Age
Publisher Fellow Traveller
Format PC (tested), Switch
Release Out now
ENCYCLOPAEDIA AQUATICA
You’ll collect samples regularly,
rotating a radial tool to
centralise each object, then
clicking both sides of a clamp
to excise the tissue so it can be
taken back to base for analysis –
assuming it’s not required
beforehand. For some creatures
a single sample is enough, while
others you’re forced to study
further to find out more about
their behaviour. Once they’re
properly classified, you’ll find
detailed entries for each
discovery, with a bonus sketch
to reward your thoroughness.
make a forest of tall stalks retract, the object you need
is always nearby. With abundant samples of organic
matter topping up your oxygen and power meters, your
survival is never in doubt – although a couple of maze-
like areas hurry you along in a way that discourages you
from lingering on those delightful details.
It’s relatively easygoing, then: contemplative and
calming, yet with a low-lying feeling of peril that goes
with the territory. When it’s time to dive deeper, the
sight of a silt bank or layered outcrop looming out of
the black provokes a flutter of excitement and
anticipation. The sound design does much of the heavy
lifting, from the echoing whirrs and bleeps of your
suit’s tech to a soft whoosh as something suddenly
swims by at speed. Then you hear the acid crackle of
toxic spores or pools of concentrated brine eating away
at your O2 and you know it’s time to move on.
As you catalogue the plants and creatures, an event
that occurred prior to your arrival is teased, though the
reveal isn’t as satisfying as the build-up. What emerges
is a familiar tale of corporate hubris, even if the setting
gives it a distinctive edge. Regardless, this is
a debut that brims with potential, with Martin proving
himself an accomplished world-builder. By the time
the story reaches its understated, affecting denouement,
it’s clear Vas’s mission is far from over. Her
creator’s, we hope, is only just beginning. 7
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Crysis
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Remembering the benchmark for sandbox

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BY PHIL IWANIUK
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Developer Crytek Publisher Electronic Arts Format 360, PC, PS3 Release 2007

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R
ight now, your PC can
probably – probably –
run Crysis. But even
as recently as 2015,
anyone incanting PC
gaming’s most famous
meme in response to
a new hardware release
wasn’t asking an entirely redundant
question. What Crytek created in 2007 was
a technological spectacle so advanced, and
so astonishingly different to the look of its
contemporaries, that it took mainstream
PCs almost a full decade to accommodate
its demands. On launch day back in
November 2007, anyone who hoped to enjoy
the sandbox shooter (whose scarcely
believable screenshots had been ubiquitous
in the gaming press for months) at anything
like a smooth framerate was about to get
their paradigm shifted.
This was mid-noughties PC gaming in a
nutshell. A new release would come along
and dictate a higher bar for hardware than
your current machine could manage, and its
allure was strong enough that you’d invest
the requisite hundreds into those specs to
play it. Then a couple of years later the next
Half-Life 2, Oblivion or Arkham Asylum
would arrive and you’d either invest in more
cutting-edge PC parts or declare insolvency.
But nowhere was it more true than with
Crysis. In many ways, the primary activity in
the game was simply getting it to run. It was
a sort of preliminary puzzle which involved
finding the correct combination of drop-
down menu options to unlock a path
forward, beyond the flip-book drawings
of a jungle that arrived on your monitor
every half-second or so, and into a full-
motion interactive experience. This was
a puzzle which might have taken months to
reach a satisfying solution.
With such an expensive barrier for
entry, Crysis was never going to reach
a mainstream audience. Instead it found a
cult of ultra-engaged enthusiasts who could
scarcely believe their luck at having such a
lavish release aimed squarely at them. This
was most players’ first look at post-
processing techniques such as motion blur,
depth of field and RGB split HUD effects.
The physical behaviour of every object you
picked up and threw, from barrels and crates
to turtles on the opening level’s beach and,
later, terrified KPA soldiers, felt instinctively
right. The texture work on its character
models’ faces still feels contemporary now,
and being surrounded by three-dimensional
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seemed transformative. At least, for the few
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Those enthusiasts weren’t just given
a skin-deep tech demo, though. Crysis’ story
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and situation were gripping in their own
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right, providing an amped-up analog of
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Predator with extra technobabble. A team
of super-soldiers, clad in secret military
tech which gives them the appearance
of skinned robot bodybuilders, descends
on the Lingshan Islands to stop North
Korean forces capturing an archeological
dig site at the island’s centre. Dr
Rosenthal’s team there have discovered
something which, you’re told, “might
change the course of the world”.
It’s not breaking new ground by any
means with this setup, nor does it have to in
order to keep the player’s attention. Instead
the focus of Crysis’ storytelling wisely
narrows on the Nanosuit itself. Not just
a mechanical convenience to afford the
player invisibility, super strength, speed and
armour, it’s a symbol of prestige and
exclusivity. Just as the game itself pandered
to a prototypical PC ‘master race’ whose
belief in their platform’s superiority was
suddenly validated, the Nanosuit made you
feel extremely special to be occupying it.
The opening cutscene feels more
like a promotional trailer, explaining the
suit’s abilities and playing out tightly
orchestrated scenarios in which each of
them shine. And as the squad prepare to
parachute-drop into Lingshan, special care
is given in the script to emphasise what
a position of privilege you’re in to be
wearing the Nanosuit. It saves your life
almost immediately when your parachute
becomes tangled, an efficient way to create
a bond, while a fallen comrade has to be
retrieved and taken back to HQ to stop
the North Korean KPA forces laying hands
on the suit’s technology.
And it works. Plenty of games before and
since have given you invisibility, extended
jump height and unnatural pace. But while
they’re usually explained through the prism
of the supernatural, or just as a necessary
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quirk of the control system (Quake players
running at what feels like a non-stop
50mph, say), in Crysis you owe them all
to your suit, which also defines how
you look. The microtransaction revenue
from PUBG and other games in which
you can’t see your own avatar while playing
tells us what a powerful element appearance
– even perceived appearance – can be.
It’s helped along by a brilliant bit of
sound design which marries a macho,
phase-effect voiceover announcing your
selected power with an unironic “maximum
armour” with otherworldly effects such as
something contracting very tightly over
your skin, or flushing your body with
a stimulant. Bullets, too, ping and zip with
uncharacteristic detail for 2007. In this way,
it sounds just as good as it looks, and
Crytek demonstrates a real mastery of
I T ’ S A L I N E A R J O U R N E Y F R O M WAY P O I N T
T O WAY P O I N T, D E N Y I N G Y O U T H E K I N D
O F F R E E D O M I T F E E L S L I K E Y O U H AV E
triple-A production values in a game whose
audience was in truth much narrower than
that of a triple-A release.
By placing such emphasis on this
aspect of the game, Crytek consigned Crysis
to be remembered first for the way it
looked, and far less for the way it played.
But as an evolution of its bravely sandbox
debut shooter Far Cry, and a prototype for
open-world combat games that would
dominate the landscape for many years
afterwards, Crysis is worth remembering.
The trick is that it’s a sandbox and
a linear corridor shooter at the same time.
In any given situation on Lingshan, you have
a large grid of real estate to prowl around in
The image that shipped and choose the angle of approach on your
a thousand graphics cards. The
reality proves to be far messier,
enemies. Your Nanosuit’s powers, too, give
but no less enjoyable for it you the choice of exactly how you’ll take
110
them out. Barrelling in with an assault rifle Some people just want to
watch the world burn,
and maximum armour engaged is an while others would settle
approach no less viable than any other, for watching the world at
particularly on lower difficulties. But when an acceptable frame rate.
Therein lies Crysis’
you might have sneaked in cloaked and grenade dilemma
moved from guard to guard taking each one
down silently, or jumped to a vantage point
and sniped an explosive barrel to take out
a whole cluster of enemies in one, it feels
like the least imaginative one.
With breadth of approach in most
encounters and a generous area in which to
enact it, the first half of Crysis identifies the
things open-world games are best at. But
it’s a deceptively linear journey from
waypoint to waypoint, denying you the kind
of freedom it feels like you have. Forget
about making your way to the dig site on
the mountain at Lingshan’s centre at the
start of the game – you’re unable to break
away from a very carefully curated sequence
of beaches and encampments.
You’ll first notice this when you get into
a vehicle and quickly run out of road, or
water. The pleasure of commandeering
enemy equipment and using it to travel
safely and quickly gives way to the
realisation that you didn’t really need a jeep
after all, because the waypoint’s just down
the road by that blockade. But these

IDENTITY
CRYSIS
If there’s a more
forgettable sequel out
there than Crysis 2,
then we really have all
forgotten it. The
about-turn on all the
first game’s principles
was whiplash-inducing
when it arrived in
March 2011 with half
the Nanosuit powers,
a strong focus on
console versions and
much smaller levels.
Although in retrospect
Crytek was likely
reacting to the first
game’s poor sales and
reportedly high piracy
rate, to Crysis fans the
simplified journey
through New York
must have felt like an
outright betrayal.
Crysis 2 sold better
than its predecessor,
but at the expense of
jettisoning the series’
identity. By the time
a third Crysis released
in 2013, it did so to
a market that no
longer had a grasp of
what the IP stood for.
Poor sales followed,
and the series ended.
Nanosuit powers made for
a few irresistible set-pieces,
such as this maximum-
strength jump through a
suspiciously flimsy KPA hut
momentary glimpses of how the sausage is
made don’t ruin that feeling of liberation
and experimentation. This might be Crysis’
crowning achievement, moreso even than its
startlingly high-resolution turtles.
Which makes it all the more frustrating
when Crysis changes pace at the halfway
mark. Following Far Cry’s deeply flawed
blueprint, the gratifying fights against smart
but under-equipped human enemies give
way to something much sillier and less
suited to sprawling jungle canopies. As if
bound by an obligation to introduce terrible
enemies after a certain number of hours,
Crytek ushers in squid-like alien machines
to the fight at the very point you’re
relishing KPA encounters most. The effect
this has on combat is disastrous: Crysis’
alien machines can’t be sneaked up on or
grabbed by the throat. They’re faster than
you and also airborne, which nullifies your
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Vehicles give an
immediate sense of player
freedom on Lingshan
Island, but you’re
funnelled towards the
next checkpoint whichever
direction you set out in
Nanosuit’s speed ability. There’s one way to
take on your new enemy, and it’s shooting
them when they appear, and stopping
shooting when they die.
There’s merit in the idea of turning the
tables on the overpowered player, erstwhile
very much the hunter in their exotic
military attire, and making them into prey
for something meaner and with a greater
appetite for bullets than a North Korean
soldier. But it’s the specific choice Crytek
made to simplify combat to the point of
tedium, undermining its closing hours.
Two sequels over the following six years
would fail to deliver on the promise of those
Lingshan beaches in the first game’s
opening act, even as technology caught up
to allow true open worlds. The industry
proceeded to grow in the direction it had
felt like Crysis wanted to go, most notably
with later Far Cry sequels developed by
Ubisoft after it acquired the name in 2006.
But Crytek seemed resolute in its refusal to
acknowledge the tenets that brought the
first game its cult following, stripping away
every characteristic which had previously
seemed integral with each new release.
Still, whatever mistakes were made later
down the line, Crysis remains a significant
part of the history of sandbox shooters.
Indeed, it has endured a lifespan far beyond
any expectation, not just for its ever-
evolving visuals but for the Nanosuit, an
invention that made it feel as though you –
and your poor, long-suffering PC – could
do anything. Q
111
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112
 T H E L O N
A progress report on the games we just can’t quit
Below
Developer/publisher Capybara Games Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release 2018
W
ith teeth gritted, we climb the steps once
more. Wasn’t the journey supposed to be
easier this time? Below’s new Explore mode,
patched into the Xbox One and PC versions to coincide
with its arrival on PS4, promised as much, with Capy
making a few concessions in the hope of encouraging
more players to delve deeper. Hunger and thirst meters
are no more. Spike traps won’t instantly kill you.
Campfire checkpoints are permanent. In theory, we
should be making swifter progress. And yet.
Granted, we now have more room to properly
appreciate Below’s strengths, our avatar’s enviably
efficient metabolism no longer forcing us to hurry
along quite so intensely. We can take time to shine our
lantern into more of those deep shadows. No longer do
we fear we’ve missed something crucial in our haste.
We locate more secrets than ever before: fresh armour,
helmets, decorations for our dreamworld hub, a whole
new area. We marvel at the Dutch angles of the ice
biome that give it a hallucinatory feel, and the sound
design that suggests the world is cracking up around us
– or, worse, that something is trying to break through
it. Shivers of a different kind are provided by Jim
Guthrie’s magnificently bruising score, conjuring
a sense of deep foreboding and primal menace. We’re
G G A M E
struck anew by the way Capy somehow fuses elements
of sci-fi, cosmic horror and dark fantasy into a fully
cohesive aesthetic. What lies below? A great many
mysteries, and they’re still exciting to uncover.
Alas, many will still give up before seeing them.
Those survival systems aren’t gone – in colder areas
you can still freeze to death if you don’t carry a torch
or huddle by a brazier. Making all damage bleed
damage isn’t the game-changer you’d think, since it
only allows you to recover when there’s a brazier
nearby – and that’s assuming you can afford the
agonisingly long animation as your warrior cauterises
their wound. When you’re running from enemies that
can move between rooms, the difference is negligible.
Your belongings aren’t returned to the beach by the
time you reach the long, shortcut-free sections of the
middle floors, which means backtracking through rooms
of enemies that can still hit you through solid walls or
the split-second your feet touch the floor after
descending a cliff face. We’d hoped Explore would turn
Below from a game we admire for its astonishing
ambience and singular challenge to one we could truly
love. Then again, perhaps it’s only right that its
deepest secrets should remain elusive to all but the
most committed adventurers. Q
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June 18

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