November 2019

Edge

The must-have companion for game industry professionals, aspiring game-makers and super-committed hobbyists

Edge2 min read
If You Don’t Eat Yer Meat, You Can’t Have Any Pudding
As we send this issue to press, it’s the final days of the school summer holidays. One member of the Edge brood is seeing deadline day out in fine style: sitting on his backside playing videogames. Were we not quite so profoundly jealous we might sug
Edge4 min read
Final Stage
Just two months ago, our E3 report sought to discover what Sony’s absence from the biggest videogame show on the planet told us about the balance of power in the industry as we looked towards the next generation of consoles. Two months later, we real
Edge3 min read
Switcher Perspective
There’s arguably no genre better-suited to Nintendo’s home console/handheld hybrid than the open-world RPG. Breath Of The Wild was the ideal launch game for Switch, demonstrating how a vast adventure could scale according to a player’s needs: all-con
Edge4 min read
Player Power
Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss. Chances are we will never know how much it cost to persuade the most famous streamer on the planet, Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins, to move from Amazon’s Twitch to Microsoft’s Mixer. And it is probably better that way. On
Edge1 min read
Arcade Watch
Bandai Namco is among the biggest players in the nascent VR arcade scene. In E313 we brought you word of VR Zone Shinjuku, a Tokyo game centre concept that has since spread around the world, its 19 locations spanning New York, Dubai, Singapore and, e
Edge3 min read
This Month On Edge
bit.ly/birdswolves The new book from longtime Edge contributor Simon Parkin takes you back to 1941, when the Allies are facing defeat in a battle raging in the Atlantic. A retired navy captain, together with a group of eight women – some as young as
Edge3 min read
Trigger Happy
On September 25, 1982, in Pennsylvania, George Emil Banks murdered 13 people, including his own children and a stranger walking past his house, using an AR-15 assault rifle. The most violent videogame in existence at the time was the classic Robotron
Edge6 min read
Dialogue
We live in strange times. If you had told me 20 years ago that the people of today could get paid to play videogames I would have probably requested a restraining order. Yet here we are. The Fortnite World Cup has come and gone. Teenagers have won un
Edge2 min read
Do The Wrong Thing
With Hollywood’s superhero obsession showing no signs of abating any time soon, we often find ourselves pining for some perspective from the other side of the good vs evil divide. Games, too, tend to prefer to cast us as saints than as demons. Happil
Edge3 min read
Hold To Reset
As a consummate professional, I am writing this on my phone from a steamy business lounge deep in the bowels of Gamescom. I’ve come perilously close to missing my deadline as we prepped Savage Planet for what is likely our last major convention befor
Edge3 min read
Synced:off Planet
Developer Next Studios, Studio Gobo Publisher Tencent Format PC Origin China, UK Release TBA Made up of veterans of Epic and Ubisoft together with newcomers from the broader tech industry, Tencent’s youthful Next Studios has worked on a wide variety
Edge3 min read
Röki
Developer/publisher Polygon Treehouse Format PC, Switch Origin UK Release TBA Dig deep into the etymology of the word ‘monster’ and you’ll find that it refers to something part-beast, part-human – horrifying yet recognisable, even sympathetic. This a
Edge15 min read
Outside The Box
Where on Earth does the biggest game on the planet go next? Minecraft has earned that lofty title time and time again: becoming an overnight sensation upon its release in 2011, scooped up by Microsoft for a cool $2.5 billion in 2014, and most recentl
Edge10 min read
Helen Chiang
Helen Chiang joined the interactive entertainment business arm of Microsoft in 2008, working as group business manager of subscriptions. Just under two years later, she moved up to director of Xbox Live business strategy, creating the service’s model
Edge9 min read
Dead Cells
Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Developer/publisher Motion Twin Origin France Release 2018 Motion Twin made a difficult decision in early 2014. It was going to stop work on the project which would eventually become Dead Cells – potentially forever.
Edge18 min read
Rise Of The Robot
Speedrunning is a very human hobby. The community around it is filled with people who are driven to complete videogames at blisteringly fast speeds with a blend of well-practised manual skill and bombastic game exploits, who share their discoveries w
Edge5 min readAstronomy & Space Sciences
Kerbal Space Program 2
Developer Star Theory Publisher Take-Two Interactive Format PC Origin US Release 2020 Dozens of attempts were made by many Kerbal players before one reached the moon. Heaven knows how many tries it will take to reach another solar system. In developm
Edge7 min read
Robot Entertainment
Robot Entertainment began as a rescue operation. While some studios start small, taking cautious steps toward their ambitions, this one crammed as many people as it could onto the lifeboats. The sinking ship was Ensemble Studios, the venerable develo
Edge7 min read
Control
Developer Remedy Entertainment Publisher 505 Games Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release August 27 The opening line of Control could serve as a sort of motto for the entire game. “Fair warning,” says a disembodied voice you soon learn belongs to
Edge4 min read
Post Script
Words have power. That’s true both in the story itself, and how the game wields language to tell it. Control offers a novella’s worth of documents tucked away in its corners, and they’re the site of the game’s best storytelling and world-building. Wh
Edge2 min read
Play
Slay The Spire, Switch What a magical journey this is turning out to be. Realising our early successes were almost entirely owing to RNG, our ascent through the ranks is about two things: hoping for another blessing from the OP gods, and working out
Edge5 min read
Predator:hunting Grounds
Developer Illfonic Publisher SIE Format PS4 Origin US Release 2020 The jungle is as silent as the grave. The question is, whose? Hunkered down behind a boulder, we risk a peek at the treeline across a narrow river. There’s nothing visible save an NPC
Edge5 min read
Chicory
Developer/publisher Greg Lobanov Format PC Origin Canada Release 2021 They say boredom breeds creativity, and two weeks before Wandersong came out, Greg Lobanov was very bored. The fun stuff had been over for a while; he’d spent the last few months w
Edge5 min read
Telling Lies
Developer Sam Barlow, Furious Bee Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format iOS, PC (tested) Release Out now Pity the player of Telling Lies who, having revelled in piecing together one of the most elegantly constructed – certainly the most elegantly de
Edge5 min read
Astral Chain
Developer PlatinumGames Publisher Nintendo Format Switch Release Out now Excuse us. Don’t you know who we are? We have just completed the prologue of Astral Chain and have been advised that we’re playing on the Casual difficulty setting. Frankly: how
Edge5 min read
Dicey Dungeons
Developer/publisher Terry Cavanagh, Marlowe Dobbe, Chipzel Format PC Release Out now Dice are the oldest gaming technology we have. Predating recorded history, they were the first way humankind found to condense luck into a solid object, and have sur
Edge3 min read
Evil Genius 2:world Domination
Developer/publisher Rebellion Developments Format PC Origin UK Release 2020 There’s a tempting connection to be made to the recent resurgence of strategy-management games. Many, after all, are born in the UK, where the notion of assembling order from
Edge4 min read
Post Script
As the spiritual sequel to Sam Barlow’s 2015 game Her Story, Telling Lies was designed to build on the database-searching magic rather than simply repeating the trick. Here, Barlow explains some of Telling Lies’ unorthodox design choices, which exist
Edge5 min read
Rad
Developer Double Fine Publisher Bandai Namco Games Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release Out now Weird soon becomes the new normal in Double Fine’s gaudy top-down Roguelike. Rad is yet another Lee Petty game about transformation, followin
Edge4 min read
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey
Developer Panache Digital Publisher Private Division Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now An incidental loading-screen tip in Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey suggests: “Play as if you’re teaching Hominids how to be Homo Sapiens”. It mig
Edge2 min read
The Blackout Club
Developer/publisher Question Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now With an eerily stretched shadow here and a sleepwalking suburbanite there, The Blackout Club turns the welcoming white picket fences of middle America into a waking nightm
Edge2 min read
Eliza
Developer/publisher Zachtronics Format PC Release Out now Artificial intelligence isn’t as artificial as we’d like to believe. Amazon, Google and other tech companies employ thousands of contractors to guide their flagship digital assistants, parsing
Edge5 min read
Knights And Bikes
Developer Foam Sword Publisher Double Fine Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now Foam Sword’s exuberant debut is at its best when it abandons any pretence of challenging its players, and instead celebrates the simple joy of two kids on an
Edge6 min read
The Order: 1886
Developer Ready At Dawn Publisher SCE Format PS4 Release 2015 The Order: 1886 begins with an effective piece of foreshadowing. Our head is submerged in water, the words of our torturers muffled amid the swirling bubbles. We see their hardy, Victorian
Edge2 min read
Oxygen Not Included
Developer/publisher Klei Entertainment Format PC Release 2019 When Klei first launched its space colony management game Oxygen Not Included in 2017, it was incomplete and undocumented. Players scrabbled around in the dark to discover ways of combinin
Edge2 min read
A Short Hike
Developer/publisher Adam Robinson-Yu Format PC Release Out now Adam Robinson-Yu gets videogames. Take the premise of A Short Hike, a narrative pull echoing Celeste’s: playing as bird-girl Claire, you’re out to reach the highest point of the island on

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