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40 Articles

Behold! A cumulation of novel participatory delights

As much as we’d like it to be, making an Edge cover isn’t a predictable process, and we reach the goal in different ways, according to all sorts of factors. At its most basic (and often most challenging) level it’s a matter of repurposing existing artwork, possibly with an additional flourish here and there. More often, though, we’re able to work with imagery created specifically for the purpose of making page one look as appealing as possible, dropping it into place alongside our established visual furniture. And then there is this issue’s cover. In first discussing the opportunity it became clear that the team at Cuphead developer Studio MDHR wanted to try something that hadn’t been done before. “Sure,” we said. “Of course.” And then they showed us what they…

Behold! A cumulation of novel participatory delights

Making spectacles

Ten years have passed since Google co-founder Sergey Brin took to the stage during the keynote of the company’s I/O event to give the world its first real demo of Google Glass. It was a defining moment in the public understanding of smart glasses, albeit perhaps not in the way Brin might have hoped, as the tech became something of a byword for misconceived tech projects. But in this year’s keynote – just in time for the decaversary – Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduced a similar demo of the company’s next smart glass project. “Subtitles for the world”, was the description that stuck, providing live captioning of speech for the benefit of the deaf or hard of hearing, or for people speaking different languages. The focus, then, was on something…

Making spectacles

Four years ago, insurance adventure Return Of The Obra Dinn earned multiple awards and near-universal acclaim for its creator Lucas Pope – and made enough money that he could afford to take it relatively easy for a while. Still, it came at a cost: Pope was close to making that hiatus permanent, admitting to considering retirement after the game’s four-year development left him burned out. Happily, he’s since changed his mind; forthcoming Playdate release Mars After Midnight has rejuvenated his love of game-making, while he has another mystery project in the pipeline, too. After his appearance at this year’s LudoNarraCon for an online panel about detective games, he joined us for a candid and wide-ranging chat about solo creation, design philosophies, and the magic of 1bit art. You’ve talked about…

Social distance

Less than a minute after typing in the URL ‘jam.gg’, Metal Slug is running in our browser. We have to admit it’s a very convenient way to revisit SNK’s run-andgunner, and the only thing that feels a bit off at this point is the presence of our webcam feed in the top-right corner, pushing the game display leftwards. If our instinct is to minimise it, though, that would be missing the point, as soon becomes clear when another player joins our game. Their cam feed (showing a masked avatar) slots under ours, and we can now communicate with them via video, chat or text in one browser tab. It’s an arrangement that, with a group of friends, turns a simple cloud gaming service into a kind of virtual couch. Jam.gg…

Social distance

Alexander Goodwin fled Russia with his girlfriend in February. “We were against the political situation for a long time before that,” he says, but the pair eventually realised they could no longer make games under the regime and bought one-way tickets to Turkey. Goodwin left behind a position teaching game design at a university, but has found himself among a tight-knit community of expat developers – all the while continuing his work on Selfloss, due out on PC later this year. It’s a narrative-driven adventure game with Metroidvania elements – in terms of inspirations, Goodwin reckons, it’s around 70 per cent Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and 30 per cent Inside. The story centres on an old man who helps grieving people by performing the titular ritual. “He’s like…

“We owe it to each other and to PlayStation’s millions of users to respect differences of opinion among ever yone in our internal and external communities.” “We are, and will continue to be, Bungie.There will never be a ‘muzzle’ big enough to stop us from standing up for what’s right.” ”We all have our own perspectives and sometimes we won’t speak, and that will be upsetting, and I understand that.” “A friend said to me, ‘I can’t wait to buy the new game you’re making Unless it’s free to play.I can’t afford another one of those’ and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.” ARCADE WATCH Keeping an eye on the coin-op gaming scene We haven’t yet chosen the categories for this year’s Alternative Edge Awards, but if we end up…

DISPATCHES AUGUST

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com.Our letter of the month wins a year’s subscription to Edge. All hands I am now the lucky and proud owner of a Steam Deck. It’s a really impressive machine, but perhaps not as impressive as a showcase in the way media oversaturation can skew expectations. I must have read and watched several dozen articles and analyses of the Steam Deck over the past few months. As a result, when it arrived it felt smaller, lighter, and quieter than I expected.Don’t get me wrong: it’s not small, light, or especially quiet. In a child’s hands it looks like the Bayeux Tapestry. But I guess reading repeated complaints about the Deck’s size, weight and noise eventually built up a subconscious…

DISPATCHES AUGUST

Frankly, I don’t know what these housebuilders are smoking. New dwellings pop up in totally arbitrary locations, in the middle of fields or mud flats, and then I’m supposed to build new roads to serve them before the car-owning inhabitants go postal because they can’t drive to the other side of our pretty little town. Well, it was a pretty little town before I was forced to bury it under a Gordian knot of concrete flyovers and motorways to serve the insane requirements of all the idiots who kept moving here. A cutesy vision of absolute dystopia in urban planning, then, is one way to describe the utterly charming and also profoundly disturbing Mini Motorways, lately released on Switch. The game says it is about “the roads that drive our…

Alternate Reality

Almost all of the games I’ve made over a 15-year career are unavailable today. Of the dozens of mobile and Web-based titles I’ve been involved in designing, some of which had millions of players, only three can still be installed. Games are an astonishingly ephemeral art form. Outside of a few devoted preservationists, most seem resigned to the permanent disappearance of all but the most successful games. When game designer Emilia Lazer-Walker recently highlighted Apple’s policy of removing ‘outdated’ software that hadn’t been updated in the past three years and wasn’t being downloaded, many applauded Apple for keeping the App Store clean and free of abandonware. In other words, if your game was removed, it deserved it. Apple’s impulse to highlight the most modern games is understandable, but there’s a…

Alternate Reality

Wistful thinking

As if a cover inspired by vintage comics wasn’t enough, there’s a powerfully nostalgic feel to this issue’s Hype selection, too. Dave Gilbert’s new point-and-click adventure Old Skies actually originated as a warning against spending too much time wallowing in the past – until the pandemic hit and all he wanted was to seek comfort in the familiar. Wadjet Eye’s latest, then, has been repurposed as a dark comedy which centres on the concept of time-travel tourism. Protagonist Fia, an agent of the corporation organising these trips, accompanies customers on their temporal holidays to make sure nothing goes horribly wrong. (Evidently, she’d make a pretty good videogame producer.) Joel McDonald’s Hindsight, meanwhile, underlines the truism that the past is a foreign country: though it’s not so much that they do…

Developer Soleil Publisher 110 Industries Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Switzerland Release 2022 Sergei Kolobashkin is in the process of explaining why Wanted: Dead features a live-action cooking show when he says something that seems to sum up the game’s entire existence: “Why? Because, why not”. Those four words could serve as an origin story for both 110 Industries, founded by Kolobashkin after he left a career in the energy industry to turn his hand to videogames, and for its debut – ablend of thirdperson cover shooter and katana slasher that occasionally morphs into a 16bit shoot-’em-up, a rhythm game and, yes, a cookery show. It feels out of sync with the rest of modern videogames – that’s deliberate, it turns out. “At some point I noticed – and…

Developer Joel McDonald Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, Switch Origin US Release Late 2022 Joel McDonald has only just started giving us the lowdown on his followup to topiary puzzler Prune, and already we’re wondering whether to end the call. “You’re 47 years old,” he begins. We’re just about to say, ‘Look, it’s been a rough year’ in response when we realise he’s actually talking about Hindsight’s central character. “The next minute you’re suddenly seven again,” he continues. Chance would be a fine thing, eh? We uncross our arms. McDonald goes on to outline the story of what he’s calling a “narrative exploration game”: you play as Mary, who’s called back to her childhood home to clear it out after her mother passes away. The initial mood, as you’d expect,…

Developer OverBorder Studio Publisher Team17 Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Taiwan Release August 9 For the meeting and repelling of blades, where a games like these – the kind that live in single missed parry or dodge means death – timing is everything. And in one sense at least, Thymesia’s is impeccable. Arriving just as we’ve all had time to digest Elden Ring and grow hungry for the next delivery from Miyazaki’s kitchen, what better time could there be for a game that looks (let’s be honest here) like an unlicensed Bloodborne spinoff? Your character, Corvus, is dressed in black robes and a beaked plague-doctor mask we’re pretty sure we nabbed from Eileen The Crow in that game, and stalks the wrought-ironlined streets of a town stricken by a…

Developer/ publisher Enigma Studio Format PC Origin Ireland Release October Just as legions of videogame designers have striven to recreate the aesthetics of the pioneering 8- and 16bit eras, it stands to reason that a new generation would seek to capture the visual essence of the games from their childhoods. Many current developers’ formative experiences with the medium came in the early 32bit days, and there’s a subset of those studios working in a fuzzy, polygonal PS1 style that have smartly recognised its utility for horror games, where that lack of detail is a boon: after all, it’s what you can’t see that scares you most. Echostasis isn’t overtly horrifying so much as brilliantly confounding – though there is a skin-prickling sense of menace throughout its early moments. In part…

THE PALE BEYOND

Recently in these pages – E367, if you’re keeping count – we featured Inua: A Story Of Ice And Time, which used Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition to find the Northwest Passage as a jumping-off point to explore the cosmology of the Inuit people who were there long before him. The Pale Beyond uses the same tale as loose inspiration, but stays with the crew. The premise is summed up in a line of an opening poem: “What will ye do, when steel hearts break and courage does abscond?” The appeal of adapting Franklin’s story is twofold. First, it’s a tale that, by dint of the many unknowns surrounding the expedition, provides fertile ground to imagine the potential outcomes. Second, it’s a tale of hubris: the idea that such a…

THE PALE BEYOND

Developer/ publisher Wadjet Eye Games Format PC Origin US Release 2023 Back in January 2020, Dave Gilbert set out to make a game about a time traveller who accidentally ruins the future, and then sets off to fix her mistake. “It involved going back and forth to all these different eras and trying to figure out what happened, and having to change things to save someone’s life,” Gilbert says. “It was breaking my brain because it was just too much to try to design all at once.” Most of Gilbert’s previous point-and-click adventures, such as 2018’s Unavowed and the ghostly Blackwell series, have been episodic and heavily character focused, with a wider plot loosely tethering the tales. His approach for Old Skies focused on the big picture instead. But after…

MOONLIGHT IN GARLAND

Developer/ publisher Winters Group Estate Format PC Origin Australia Release TBA For all the cosiness of farming life sims, they tend to share something of a conservative worldview – where small rural towns are represented as an idyllic fantasy in sharp contrast to the dehumanising capitalism of the big city. That’s very much at odds for those accustomed to urban living, with all its diversity, conveniences and opportunities – certainly if you used to live in the middle of nowhere, as Violet LeBeaux did. “I grew up in a very small place [in Queensland], and as a teenager I desperately wanted to leave it and chase my big-city dreams,” the Melbourne-based developer tells us. “I’ve been living in cities since I finished high school.” As a fan of pastoral life…

MOONLIGHT IN GARLAND

METAL: HELLSINGER Developer The Outsiders Publisher Funcom Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Sweden Release TBA 2022 Are rhythm shooters the new Roguelikes? Between BPM, Soundfall and Gun Jam, this new subgenre is positively flourishing.The new game from David Goldfarb’s Swedish studio The Outsiders hews closest to the first of those three, albeit with an even heavier soundtrack. As you shoot, dodge and perform finishers to the beat, tearing through waves of demons, a combo builds up to 16x – at which point, one of a number of metal vocalists is added to the exhilaratingly noisy mix. System Of A Down’s Serj Tankian is the latest to lend his talents: his track provides a more melodic alternative to the guttural screaming. FIRE EMBLEM WARRIORS: THREE HOPES Developer…

CHALICE IN WONDERLAND

Ready? WALLOP! The first two words of a Cuphead battle say everything about the immediate and powerful impact of Studio MDHR’s remarkable debut: a haymaker delivered through the combined force of its astonishing audiovisuals and equally eye-opening challenge. Here is a game that is old-fashioned in a very literal sense, its rubber-hose animation realised largely via traditional techniques, just as its run-and-gun mechanics lean on (and refine) ideas first introduced in the 8- and 16bit eras. The result is a captivatingly unlikely fusion of influences. Those vintage cartoons and videogames may be writ large across it, but there was nothing else quite like Cuphead when it belatedly launched in 2017, and that’s still the case as expansion The Delicious Last Course finally takes its bow five years on. “A love…

CHALICE IN WONDERLAND

COLLECTED WORKS JOHN ROMERO

As you enter one of the final rooms of E1M2, fireballs bombard you from multiple directions. The demons casting them are on raised platforms, obscured by flickering lights, while a swarm of enemies lies waiting in a pit below. After you survive the onslaught and approach a darkened section of the wall, a switch reveals itself, opening up two paths to the exit. This level, Doom’s second, was the turning point for John Romero in the development of what would become an eradefining shooter. But the seed of his action gaming heritage was planted over a decade beforehand at an arcade in Tuscon, Arizona. “I HIRED JOHN CARMACK AND THEN ADRIAN CARMACK FOR, LIKE, FIVE BUCKS AN HOUR” It was here, at Spanky’s, that the young Romero was first exposed…

COLLECTED WORKS JOHN ROMERO

Swaying softly in the late-morning breeze, a SNES controller, suspended from a thick telephone wire, hangs in the air above the street. It’s a visual metaphor that could mean a number of different things in a documentary about indie games. Resembling a shot from a public information film about the danger of overhead power lines, it could represent the perils facing a small team of creators. It might refer, perhaps, to the many projects discarded partway through development, abandoned by their makers when the going got too tough. You could even say this old-school controller is indicative of the dominant genre featured in the film: Braid, Super Meat Boy and Fez are all, after a fashion, sidescrolling platformers. And the phone wire? Well, that obviously speaks to the online distribution…

THE MAKING O F. . . LAST STOP

Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Developer Variable State Publisher Annapurna Interactive Origin UK Release 2021 When Variable State pitched its second game to Annapurna Interactive back in 2017, the developers took with them a pitch video. One that – as we discover when they dig it up from some dusty corner of an old hard drive for us – bears little resemblance to the game that would be released four years later. There are no familiar faces to be seen: instead of John, Donna and Meena, here the spotlight falls on a postman doing his rounds, and some kind of amateur teenage detective. Nor, even more strikingly, is there any sign of the London setting that tied together Last Stop’s anthology of stories. You’d be forgiven…

THE MAKING O F. . . LAST STOP

CREATIVE ASSEMBLY

Even 26 years ago, Alien: Isolation creative director Alistair Hope was desperate to make videogames, he tells us. “I actually have Edge to thank in part for that. I got right to the end of my fine art degree. Was I really going to have a go at being a traditional artist? And I picked up a copy of Edge, the one with Mario 64 on the cover. It was this era as 16bit was moving into the 3D world, and it all looked super-exciting. Then, at the back, there were adverts for jobs in game development. That blew my mind. I’d always assumed it would be such a cool job that it wouldn’t be advertised anywhere. From that moment, I decided that’s what I’m going to do – and…

CREATIVE ASSEMBLY

Explore the iPad edition of Edge for extra Play content STILL PLAYING Super Corporate Tax Evader Playdate A jubilee-enforced short deadline means we’ve been seeking out quick fixes for our limited leisure time – and no device fits into a busy life quite so neatly as Playdate. This surprisingly tense shortform score-chaser offers an amusing twist on Game & Wario’s Gamer mode: rather than hiding under the covers from your mother’s evil eye, you must destroy documents in a backroom while your boss tries to stall the taxman from catching you in the act. Winding the crank quickly is only half the job; to avoid being spotted you’ll need to dock it to hide the shredder before the door is forcefully flung open. Mega Man 2 3DS What better way…

Digital floundering

Conventional videogame design wisdom holds that if you’re conscious of what you’re doing with your hands while you’re playing, something’s probably gone wrong. It’s generally accepted that best practice involves make the player feel one with the controller – that their digits should be able to dance around the buttons, sticks and triggers instinctively, allowing them to concentrate on what’s happening on the screen. It’s particularly vital when you’re playing something like Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course (we vividly recall having to remap the original’s controls in order to get anywhere with it), but within moments of tucking in to this delectable DLC we’re fully focused on the gorgeously animated action unfolding before us – and the many, many projectiles headed our way – as we dash, duck, dip, dive…

Digital floundering

Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course

There’s a case to be made that the best possible review of Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course would simply involve recommending – with, perhaps, a marginally more insistent tone than you might ordinarily adopt – that you play it. (And, of course, a score at the end: some traditions are worth upholding.) The problem with an expansion such as this is that it’s undoubtedly a pudding best served cold: as we tuck in, we recognise the privilege of being the first outside Studio MHDR to have this particular pleasure, and that we are getting to experience it at its freshest. Finally overcoming a tough fight in Cuphead is satisfying, but the game is never better than it is during the many attempts it takes to eventually scale that peak. The…

Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course

The Delicious Last Course represents the culmination of the Cuphead story, with the Moldenhauers closing the book on their 1930s-inspired hero for the time being. Here, they discuss the character’s origins, and the challenges involved in bringing this long-awaited expansion to fruition. You went through a huge range of character designs before settling on Cuphead. What made him the right choice for protagonist? Chad Moldenhauer As granular as it sounds, Cuphead’s look really began with the glove and the boots. It’s no secret that Cuphead and Mugman’s relationship as brothers and best friends pulled from my time growing up with Jared. When we settled on 1930s cartoons as our inspiration, we began looking closely at characters like Mickey Mouse, Bimbo, Oswald, and Felix the Cat, really steeping ourselves in their…

Hardspace: Shipbreaker

At once a cautionary tale about working-class labour in a privatised solar system, a beautiful zero-G engineering puzzle, and a smart, sinister deconstruction of the playbour elements of today’s service games, Hardspace: Shipbreaker is essentially about learning not to love a job that doesn’t love you back. It casts you as a new hire at Lynx, a starship-salvaging megacorp. The most insidious thing about working for Lynx is that the work is often enjoyable. True, the probationary period is traumatic: a billion-credit onboarding debt and the offscreen liquefaction of your body to enrol you in Lynx’s EverWork programme, which respawns you for a fee. But from there, it’s possible to have fun in the usual videogame sense – for a time. Shifts last a bite-sized 15 minutes, and see you…

Hardspace: Shipbreaker

Blackbird Interactive’s vision of an Earth ringed by inexpertly butchered derelicts is hardly years away. As of May 10, 2022, the European Space Agency is tracking 31,140 pieces of orbital debris, weighing about 9,900 tonnes in total and ranging from ‘natural’ litter such as meteoroids to human-created space junk such as discarded rocket launch stages. Based on statistical modelling, the ESA estimates that there are around 130 million pieces of debris in Earth’s orbit that are larger than a millimetre. That may not sound like much, but when you accelerate a paint fleck to 15,700 miles per hour it can do plenty of damage, and many pieces of debris are much larger – the estimate includes almost 3,000 defunct satellites, which countries such as China sometimes use for target practice.…

The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story

For a game about sniffing out motives behind a century-long killing spree, The Centennial Case’s own loyalties are easier to detect. A glance at the menu screen timeline, which records the fictional events of the era-hopping story, reveals a century not simply defined by its wars and political upheavals, but the evolution of the murder mystery itself. You see how Poe’s Murders In The Rue Morgue set in motion the domino rally of Conan Doyle, Christie and Van Dine, who in turn inspired Japan’s Edogawa Ranpo, Seishi Yokomizo and the ‘new orthodox’ school of Soji Shimada – the last of whom has the biggest influence on the flavour of ‘impossible’ death tricks you chew over throughout this FMV mystery. The chronology is both a nod to a debt owed and…

The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story

Koichiro Ito is no stranger to knotty plotting, having previously navigated five intertwining narratives as the writer on the seminal visual novel 428: Shibuya Scramble. Now the director of The Centennial Case, he explains how HAND Inc brought the FMV mystery to life – and sent characters to their deaths. Why did you decide to make the game as an FMVdriven mystery, rather than, say, a visual novel or more traditional adventure game with 2D or 3D art? Mr Yasuhito Tachibana, our cinematographer and scenario director, is incredibly knowledgeable about how to create narratives with characters who really feel alive. He brought together a lot of staff who excel at crafting dramas, and I think that having real people play the characters in the story adds a sense of depth…

Evil Dead: The Game

The question of how to adapt horror movies into videogames has, it seems, been settled. Asymmetrical multiplayer, in which a band of survivors try to complete tasks before a lone killer catches up with them, has been the dominant format since Dead By Daylight’s launch in 2016. And it’s proved remarkably flexible. Even putting aside the attempts at standalone adaptations in a similar mould, all manner of horror film series have been assimilated into that original game, with DLC pack releases adding Pinhead, Ghost Face, Leatherface, Pyramid Head and Ash Williams. That last name stands out rather, doesn’t it? Unlike most other horror series, Evil Dead has been defined not by its villain, but by its hero. And, close as it may hew to the established formula in other ways,…

Evil Dead: The Game

Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong

Roleplaying videogames have long been connected to their tabletop ancestors, though Vampire: The Masquerade has only recently made a comeback to the medium. After several interactive fiction games and visual novels in the VTM universe, Swansong constitutes the first real stab at a 3D narrative adventure since 2004’s Bloodlines. Alas, this is far from a triumphant return. You take control of three different vampires, all of whom work for Prince Hazel Iversen of Boston. In the world of Vampire: The Masquerade, a prince oversees a city’s vampire community, and Iversen is eager to make a name for herself by uniting the vampires of Boston and Hartford. However, things go awry during a party meant to celebrate this new union, leaving many vampires killed and the Masquerade – the name given…

Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong

For a sniper nicknamed ‘The Shadow’, Karl Fairburne certainly isn’t afraid to cause a ruckus. After being discovered approaching a Nazi checkpoint on the fortified island of Beaumont-Saint-Denis, we flee into a church. After climbing a spiralling tower, we scuffle with a previously undetected sniper, the sounds alerting every nearby enemy. Following a firefight with a platoon charging up the staircase, we spy a piece of intel nearby, revealing a critical flaw in the roof of a room hosting a meeting of Nazi officials. Armed with this information, we zipline down from the church tower, land in a patch of grass, and resume sneaking through the town. Moments such as this showcase Sniper Elite 5 at its most flexible – astreamlined take on the immersive sim rewarding those willing to…

Most of the deaths we suffer in Silt involve getting eaten. In the murk of this deep-sea Limbo – built, as with Playdead’s classic, on an edifice of vulnerability, foreboding monochrome, and compact puzzles – deadly jaws are everywhere. The more assertive fish will take a chunk off you as soon as look at you. A gigantic eel shows off its maw of dagger teeth before snapping them shut. Tubular creatures lurk in coral walls, instinctively snatching nonplussed passers-by in vice-like mandibles. Indeed, there’s something doubly chilling about the latter – being swallowed down by a thing devoid of conscious intent, completely indifferent to who or what you are. Then again, what are you? For all the ravenous sea life in Silt, the most disconcerting entity might be its diver…

Amid 28 separate acts of card manipulation and related deception, a story involving much chicanery, false identities, secrets and at least one unreliable narrator, perhaps the most startling sleight-of-hand in Card Shark is one that the game pulls on you, the player. But in keeping with the theme of bluff and subterfuge – and their accompanying showmanship – we won’t divulge what that is just yet. You will have to stick around for the final reveal. Together with Nerial, no stranger in the art of telling stories with cards, artist and designer Nicolai Troshinsky has crafted a captivating, beautifully presented rags-toriches adventure that bucks contemporary trends: it’s not so much a deck-builder as a deck-exploiter. You play as the mute protégé of 18th-century French philosopher the Comte de Saint Germain,…

A ssimultaneously a sliding-block puzzle, the procedurally generated dungeon broken up into a concept, it’s hard to resist: a Roguelike that’s tetromino-like parts that can be steered by the player. The appeal is obvious from the moment you set eyes on it: a mashup that alternates between Souls-ish combat, where between attacks and dodges you can rearrange your environment like furniture, and a kind of underfoot Sokoban, where interlocking blocks must be shuffled around in the correct order to reach the exit. In practice, though, Loot River’s parts often fail to tesselate the way we might have hoped. The bird’s-eye presentation immediately causes legibility problems during combat, as enemies mob together into an indistinguishable tangle of attack animations. When swarmed like this, the easiest option is to spam the parry…

The Last Clockwinder

The goal of this captivatingly clever, occasionally finicky VR puzzler is to secure your own obsolescence. A clock tower built within a giant tree is slowly flooding; your job is to repair it, using a pair of special gloves that can record your actions for a few seconds, creating automata that repeat those movements on a loop. You might, for example, feed an energy-producing fruit into a machine with one robot, while another pulls a lever to process it. Before long you’re creating a production line to fulfil more complex tasks, generating enough energy to let you visit other rooms within the tree. Holographic cylinders offer hints on how to get started, but otherwise you’re left to come up with your own solutions. A screen in each room displays a…

The Last Clockwinder

Developer BioWare Publisher Electronic Arts Format PC, PS3, 360 Release 2007 Nearly 15 years on from its release, Mass Effect feels like a forgotten relic. The game’s achievements as a character-driven space opera have been appropriated by its immediate successor, Mass Effect 2, leaving behind a reputation for clunky combat and awkward driving segments (see ‘Mako or break’). Last year’s Legendary Edition remaster attempted to conceal its many blemishes while collecting the trilogy in one package – and in doing so, highlighted the gulf in quality between games one and two. But the dented legacy of the 2007 original, first released as an Xbox 360 exclusive, doesn’t do it justice. Mass Effect remains a special game, with flaws that aren’t as obvious as you remember and a setting to match…

Halo Infinite Developer 343 Industries Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release 2021 T he last-minute turnaround is something at which Halo has always excelled. Those dying moments of a multiplayer match when failure seems certain, until a fortuitous plasma grenade triggers a Killtacular, and suddenly there’s everything to play for again. So, after six months of complaints – amiserly battle pass, a slim selection of maps, mandatory crossplay that allows PC cheating to spread to console – that has led to a dramatic drop in player numbers, might 343 be ready to pull off a similar turnaround of its own? Not yet, it seems. The game’s second season, Lone Wolves, launched without the previously advertised co-op support and with its own set of problems, from…

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