Dining for two
At a time when many of us are in particular need of distractions, the videogame industry is delivering like never before. We’re struggling to recall a year whose opening months were quite this packed – indeed, it’s left us with little free time for anything else. This issue alone, we’ve spent 60 hours with one game, and almost 50 in another. Our current save in a third has just passed the 35-hour mark, while after being told a fourth would last us a dozen hours, we find ourselves still captivated by its world after a dozen more.
We’re feasting, as they say. But while just one of these would be enough to fill many a long evening, we don’t all play one game to the exclusion of all others. Having spent a good chunk of the past few weeks perusing the menus in Gran Turismo 7’s GT Café, we’ve naturally been thinking about flavour pairings. So which two dishes from this issue’s selection would go best together?
For starters, how about the irresistible power trips of Destiny 2: The Witch Queen and Korean MMORPG Lost Ark? A pairing of sci-fiand fantasy could be just the ticket. Or, for something a little chewier, why not intersperse dialogue-heavy tactical RPG Triangle Strategy with Total War: Warhammer III, where you can let your armies do the talking on the battlefield? Or maybe you’d prefer something more nostalgic, in which case we’d recommend the retroinspired Tunic and A Musical Story, throwing back to ’90s videogames and ’70s hedonism respectively.
But there’s one pairing that stands out above the rest. In Elden Ring, FromSoft has prepared the equivalent of a Michelin-standard dish, but this exquisite platter is not always easy to swallow. In which case, might we suggest the smooth flavour of Kirby And The Forgotten Land? It might just be the ideal palate cleanser, making the banquet Miyazaki and team have served up that bit more digestible.
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Elden Ring
We’re sure this map used to be empty. Sixty hours in, though, it’s every bit as cluttered as your average Ubisoft collectathon. In the far northwest, we’ve dropped a marker to remind us that thar be dragons – and that one of them is five times the size of the others. In the deep southeast, an aide-memoire for a boss battle we knocked our heads against for two days before taking the hint. Elsewhere there are dungeons to come back to when we’re stronger, merchants to revisit when finances are more liquid, places we can see but not yet reach, and quest giving NPCs to return to down the line. Mostly, though, our map is full of markers to remind us of the many, many things we’ve either died to or run away from. In traditional open-world games, developers plaster their maps with icons to show off just how much there is to do. In Elden Ring, you daub your own onto a blank canvas, to stand as permanent reminders of your many failures. How thoroughly FromSoftware.
So is the whole game, naturally. This is the purest expression yet of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s widely imitated, yet still inimitable philosophy, the culmination of the journey he and FromSoftware have been on since the 2009 release of Demon’s Souls. But the map is the star in many ways, and of all the ideas on show here, the one most likely to be pilfered by FromSoft’s aspirant peers. If imitators don’t quite have the courage to have the map empty at the start, they may well draw inspiration from how it is drawn, with vague outlines hinting at points of interest. Is that a church? A fort? A classic Souls-style level, here called a Legacy Dungeon? Or something else? There is only one way to find out.
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The map’s greatest trick, however, is its apparent size, which is limited quite brilliantly by your own knowledge of it. Starting out, it seems enormous. But after a few hours pootling around the opening area, you may worry that you’re reaching its limits. Once the first major boss has been defeated and you head into the northwest, however, the map suddenly enlarges, and zooms out. Later it’ll do it again, and again. You will never know exactly how big it is until you have seen it all. And heavens, what a lot of it there is.
It is tempting to view Elden Ring as a sort of greatest-hits compilation, pulling familiar elements from the FromSoft oeuvre and spreading them across the game’s major addition to the template – that vast, Breath Of The Wild-inspired open world. There are obvious evolutions of Demon’s Souls’ captivating level design, and Dark Souls’ interlocking sense of place; of DS3’s weapon arts, Sekiro’s stealth and posture systems, and Bloodborne’s aggression and eldritch horror. The Zelda connection is plain to see, and for once justified: this is the first game in the five years since Nintendo’s masterpiece to truly recapture that sense of curiosity being sparked organically, and exploration rewarded so consistently. From this perspective, the casual observer’s back-of-a-beer-mat tagline for Elden Ring – Breath Of The Souls – may seem fair enough. But it also sells it short, ignoring both the many other additions From has folded into the mix, and how well its component parts hang together as a whole.
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Combat, for example, is simply transformed. Summonable Spirit Ashes can tip a tough fight in your favour, a skeleton army, pack of dogs, spellcaster or band of archers keeping the boss busy while you retreat, heal up and circle round to its rear. Fighting on Torrent, your spectral mount means you can close in and retreat from tough foes at speed, or simply keep at a safe remove while you fling off spells or arrows. Ashes Of War offer swappable unique moves and let you tweak your arsenal’s elemental affinities. Projectiles, restoratives and elemental weapon buffs can now be crafted using resources gathered in the wild. And the new Guard Counter lets players turn patient defence into attack in a heartbeat. Never has a player of a FromSoft game been so generously empowered.
Which is not to say the game is easy, of course. As tends to be the case when Miyazaki is involved, giving more options to the player is an excuse to make the game more challenging than ever. As always, even the rank and file can punish the sloppy, but now rock-hard enemies roam the land too, many appearing from nowhere when you least expect it – though you’ll soon be trained to do so, seeing every woodland clearing, peaceful lake or open plain as a sign of imminent terror. Breath Of The Wild rewards the curious explorer with a shrine or Korok seed, and sometimes Elden Ring treats you in kind; perhaps with one of the generously placed Site Of Grace rest points, a merchant or friendly NPC, or a church that boosts the power of your healing flasks. But more often than not it’s a busy enemy camp, a pack of snarling beasts, or a monster the size of a terraced house that, if you’re lucky, can only two-shot you.
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And then there are the bosses, which on first contact can be particularly tough, even for experienced Souls players. Especially so, in fact: the final hits of an early boss’s combos come a second or two later than you expect, their weapon hanging in the air, baiting out the early roll it knows you can’t resist, then punishing it with full force. You’ll learn that particular lesson eventually, but the pattern repeats itself throughout the game, in different ways, as the scope and scale of boss fights ratchets up to previously unthinkable extremes.
You will, at times, think it unfair – and often you will be meant to. Every death against a FromSoft boss is a lesson; you are meant to learn through failure, assembling a mental model of the things that didn’t work as you build towards the strategy that will. In Elden Ring, death often contains another, vastly more important message. Go away. You are not ready. Out there in the world are countless things to see and a thousand ways in which you can grow stronger.
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It takes a while for us to work this out, admittedly. Blame that on a few thousand hours of Souls experience banked across the years, and the way a looming print deadline seems to breathe down our neck more noticeably whenever we stray too far from the critical path. In fairness, FromSoft appears to also be at it at times, the little ray of light from certain Sites Of Grace ushering you towards the next Legacy Dungeon, and the boss awaiting at its end. But that is merely there for those who have struck out to explore, got distracted and been turned round, and need a little prompt later to get them back on track.
And what distractions they are. The innocuous cave entrance that leads to a corkscrewing network of catacombs. The little drop down onto an easily missed ledge into a series of caverns full of smithing materials. The teleporter that warps you to a corner of the map you had no idea existed, or the lift you stumble upon that deposits you in a starlit underground city. There is something out here everywhere you turn, and while there are repeating elements – architecture recycled, minibosses remixed or combined – it never stops feeling fresh. The next vista you find is somehow even more beautiful than the one before, the next zone likewise more threatening than the area you’ve just run away from. The pacing is remarkable, particularly given the size of the world: one moment you’re galloping across a vast open plain, the next inching around corners in a Legacy Dungeon praying for a rest point, then bashing your head against a boss. Rare is the excursion that doesn’t end with you emerging stronger or wiser, emboldened to face the next challenge.
Even with 60 hours on the clock, we’re still not finished – and that feels OK. We have been down this road before, in similar, lesser games; we know that despite our best intentions to pick a world clean after the credits have rolled, defeating the final boss drains the idea of its oxygen. As ever with Miyazaki’s games, we are near the end of our first playthrough already thinking about our second, and since the build variety here seems outrageous, we’re also contemplating our third and fourth. There’s NG+ to come too, of course. All that can wait. This is a game to be strolled, not sprinted through – unless you’re running away from something, anyway. It will only be new once, and its delights deserve to be savoured to the fullest.
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Not for the first time, a Miyazaki game has arrived and the landscape appears transformed. As you play, there is a sense of plates shifting beneath you, of the T&Cs of game development being hastily rewritten. We haven’t felt this way since Breath Of The Wild. Here, as there, an open world means freedom and fresh air. But Elden Ring manages to make even its hugest, most sprawling spaces feel as enclosed and foreboding as any Dark Souls dungeon – yet still compels you to keep going to see what’s around the next corner, up the next hill, or behind the next hulking beast with the one-shot attack in its second phase. See those mountains over there? You can die on them. And you will do so, gladly and repeatedly, as the sensation slowly builds that you are playing a videogame for the ages.
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Post Script
Elden Ring is Miyazaki’s most successful attempt to get players out from behind their shields
Hidetaka Miyazaki has never seemed like one for sequels, which perhaps explains why his familiar gameplay template has appeared under so many different names. The Soulsborne lineage, or whatever clunky portmanteau has supplanted the label now that Elden Ring has released, has shuffled us not just between titles but styles, settings and time periods too. But despite all the costume changes and reshuffled staging, the song itself has largely remained the same.
That is particularly true when it comes to combat – despite efforts over the years to get players to change up their tactics. Swordplay in these games is a fighting game at heart: about controlling space, dancing in and out of range, baiting, evading and punishing. Success is about understanding when it is your turn; when the enemy has left themselves open enough for you to get in a hit or two. You nip in and dash off a couple of quick R1s, then retreat to safety, raise your shield, and begin the dance anew.
From’s departures from this formula suggest a certain frustration with the defensive tactics its players employ. Bloodborne’s Regain mechanic urged the player onto the front foot, and in the description for one of the game’s few defensive tools Miyazaki made his feelings plain: “Shields are nice, but not if they engender passivity”. In Sekiro, From went even further, reframing defence as the best form of attack – but where defence involved timing as precise as a hardcore fighting-game combo. Sure, it gave us stealth, but that was no use against Genichiro and company, was it?
The mechanical riffs on the Souls template in Bloodborne and Sekiro were only made possible by the stylistic ones. Only when the game looked different was it allowed to feel different. No doubt FromSoftware understood that players would play Elden Ring like a Souls game. As soon as fans see a knight with sword and shield, a mage with robes and staff, or a wretch wearing nothing but a loincloth and a smile, they make the obvious connection and revert firmly to type. Unable to force you out of your comfort zone, in Elden Ring FromSoft instead seeks to encourage it. The result is the most generous and flexible combat system FromSoft has yet produced – one you are free to engage with as much, or as little, as you like.
Early on, the Spirit Ashes feel like the game-changer. When an NPC gives us a jellyfish to call into battle, we assume they are having us on. But despite its squishy form it’s an absolute tank, soaking up surprising amounts of aggro and causing plenty of problems with its status effect. A pack of skeletons that we could kill in seconds hangs around for an entire fight against a miniboss whose AI script hasn’t been written with self-resurrecting support characters in mind. Not that it matters: the poor beast spends most of the fight stunlocked. While they vary in shape, size, power and utility, every Ash serves a singular primary function: to draw the boss’s eye away from you, and to let you onto the front foot without fear, if only for a second.
And once you’re there, you have more options than ever. Yes, you still have your light and strong attacks, the charge-move variant of the latter dealing heavy damage to even the biggest foes and putting many smaller ones on the floor. The new jump attacks have a similar, if less dramatic effect. And in another new addition, the Guard Counter, Elden Ring makes a huge concession to the defensively minded while also showing them how much fun they can have when they throw caution to the wind. When you block an incoming blow, a quick press of heavy attack performs an instant riposte, dealing significant damage and often crumpling the foe straight to the floor – though, this being FromSoft, a certain risk is baked in: if your enemy is mid-combo, you’re probably eating their next hit instead.
After 60 hours, we’ve barely begun to explore the depths of the Ashes Of War system, which builds on Dark Souls 3’s weapon skills by not only expanding a weapon’s moveset with a unique attack, but also letting you tweak its attribute scaling and add permanent elemental or status effects to your swings. We’ve spent hours in the company of Lion’s Claw, with its slick forward somersault and unstoppable finishing slam. Bloody Slash, fast and attractive and causing bleed on every hit, is well worth the small amount of health it costs to use. There are many more to uncover, but their impact on the game is already clear. No longer do you need multiple weapons to cover different situations, or to work around certain enemy resistances with consumables. The tool you need is already in your hand, the key to victory only a few menu selections away.
Putting all of these systems together in battle is a delight – particularly when it leaves a boss prone on the floor, awaiting a critical hit – and when done correctly fundamentally upsends the traditional Souls rhythm. We round a corner and see a Black Knight, one of the toughest enemies to be found in a FromSoft title. We sneak up behind it for a backstab, then follow it with a Lion’s Claw and charged R2, and it is dead before we even make eye contact. The irony here is that this aggressive style of play is actually by far the safest course of action; there is no blocking or dodging involved at all. It has taken over a decade, but Miyazaki and the team have finally found a way of making the attack the best form of defence. We’ll still carry a shield just in case, though, if it’s all the same to you.
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Gran Turismo 7
Has it really been 25 years? Back in 1997, PlayStation’s flagship racing sim felt groundbreaking, sophisticated, even cool: that intro cinematic, with its then cutting-edge graphics, featuring high-end cars screaming around snaking bends set to The Chemical Brothers’ remix of Everything Must Go, is seared into the collective imagination of a generation. Yet Polyphony Digital’s series has not aged especially gracefully, failing to scale the heights of the PS2 years since, with Microsoft’s Forza Motorsport overtaking it in the HD era. What a pleasant surprise, then, to find that Gran Turismo has rediscovered its mojo. This isn’t just a nostalgic anniversary jamboree, but an approachable introduction to the series, and a full-throated celebration of cars and car culture.
Kazunori Yamauchi and team have achieved this partly by looking back to Gran Turismos of old, refocusing on – while recalibrating – the series’ foundations. Anyone who spent time with the earlier games can’t fail to notice the throwbacks, from the return of popular legacy courses to a singleplayer mode with extensive tuning options that should ensure tinkerers spend as much time off the track as on it.
Yet that will most likely be true for all players, not just series veterans or autophiles (and by the end, you may count yourself among the latter group). The de facto campaign mode starts at a café, to which you’ll return throughout at the behest of cheerful proprietor Luca, who sets you a series of themed tasks, presented in the form of leather-backed menus. The majority of these involve adding vehicles to your collection by competing in a succession of short race events: placing in the top three of the first, for example, gains you one of a trio of Japanese compact cars. Complete each set, either through podium finishes or by spending credits on used or new vehicles at dealerships, and Luca will reward you by unlocking cars and tracks, and by delivering a brisk history of the cars you’ve obtained.
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He’s soon joined by others, from an older enthusiast to real-world car designers. The writing has an endearingly nerdy quality, Yamauchi’s own passion reflected in their words, while the café surroundings and the laid-back soundtrack give the place a curiously similar vibe to Animal Crossing’s coffee house. From behind a cup of java, you can see your current vehicle parked near the entrance – a charming touch that gives you a sense of ownership of your growing collection.
Those accustomed to the instant gratification of many modern racers may bristle at a career structure that locks away much of the game until you’ve raised your collector level, but as a way of walking players through the various modes, it’s a stroke of genius. It guides you toward Licence Tests – which double as both replayable shortform challenges and tutorials – and gestures towards Mission mode where you’re set a variety of objectives, from slipstreaming to breaching a given speed limit to completing a treacherous circuit without any collisions. Restricting multiplayer for several hours is likely to be a divisive choice, but those who enter the online crucible may feel grateful that they were encouraged to learn the nuances of cornering – and coping with changeable track conditions – beforehand.
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Out on the circuit, Gran Turismo has never sounded or felt better. We are not automotive experts (even if we can now tell you more about Chevrolet than we ever imagined we’d know), but each vehicle has a distinct character. Much of this is communicated through sound, which reaches such a degree of fidelity that you’ll notice a difference with some quick tuning between races, whether an engine’s roar is dampened or the whistle of a turbo makes itself known. But it’s more noticeable in the way these cars feel in the hands, the DualSense haptics communicating grip and surface variations through your palms, each gear shift (even if you stick to automatic transition) producing a satisfying clunk.
It looks wonderful, too. Though ray-tracing support only really benefits replays and photo modes – stick to the performance mode otherwise – the lighting in particular is extraordinarily convincing, without feeling ostentatiously showy. Accelerated day-night cycles and dynamic weather lend drama to races, amplified by improved AI that doesn’t lower itself to obvious rubberbanding. By the time we scrape third place in a knuckle-whitening race around the Nürburgring in the wet behind the wheel of a skiddy 911 GT3 (the pack noticeably bunching up as spray reduces visibility on an already tough circuit), we notice we’re sitting two feet closer to the screen than when we started. A ten-minute tussle with a Mercedes-AMG C63 under clouds at Alsace, meanwhile, proves that FromSoftware doesn’t have the monopoly on exhilarating defeats.
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Over the past two console generations, Gran Turismo has attracted a reputation for being boring or sterile, but outside its menus – which we’d sooner describe as classy and utilitarian – such a claim cannot be made of this game. To wit, before it’s even downloaded, the breezily disposable Music Rally mode (in which you race through checkpoints as a timer counts down to the beat of the current song) lets you drive a Honda S800 around Tokyo Expressway as day becomes dusk to the sound of Idris Elba rapping.
Beyond its technical excellence, then, Gran Turismo 7 feels deeply, idiosyncratically personal in ways firstparty games rarely do. It is strange and sometimes restrictive, resolutely uncool and, in its earnest celebration of car culture, occasionally even a little overbearing. But this is a racing sim with real soul, realised with genuine passion and no little eccentricity. Twenty-five years on, Gran Turismo has never felt more vital.
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Post Script
How GT7’s unconventional MO makes it a ‘real racing simulator’ for (almost) everyone
The great paradox at the heart of Gran Turismo 7 is that it’s a racing game that wants you to slow down. ‘Let’s go back to the café’, the game politely suggests when you’ve completed a menu book (which is itself a rarity when so many modern games give instructions that often feel more like demands), and it’s telling that you’ll want to take up that offer. Rather than pinballing from one event to another, being bombarded by potential distractions, you’re given the space to pause and reflect before moving on to whatever comes next.
It’s a smart move in a number of ways, but particularly because it ensures those new to the series (or even to racing sims in general) are never made to feel overfaced. Where many games simply present a smörgåsbord of options and invite players to pick their way through them, it leads players by the hand, gradually introducing modes and features. If you’re not in the mood for a lesson on the rivalry between the Mustang and the Camaro, Luca’s informative takes are text-based rather than vocalised, and can be easily hurried along with a few taps of the Cross button. And, once a few more areas on the World Map have opened up and you’re ready to wander off the critical path, a yellow compass icon lets you know where to go next when you’re ready to return. It doesn’t flash or make a noise; there are no intrusive pop-ups to suggest you should be doing something different somewhere else. Instead, this virtual bookmark simply sits there quietly.
On the track, GT7 continues to fly in the face of modern design trends. Each race starts you at the back of the grid and asks you to work your way to the front; even in championship events, finishing first in the opening race doesn’t nudge you to the head of the pack for the next. Braking indicators and a racing line are turned on by default on the standard difficulty setting, but rather than combine the two it keeps them entirely separate: thick red lines across the tarmac gradually fade when you’ve dropped to the right speed to navigate a corner, while the yellow line is a simple, unchanging fixture. It’s a useful way to encourage you to remove the stabilisers gradually rather than all at once, and indeed you will benefit from doing so. Both steering and braking assists are pronounced enough that they don’t actually give you a competitive advantage so much as allow you to acclimatise to a new vehicle or track without spinning out or going off-road. During one of the Licence Tests you’re gently discouraged from keeping auto-brake engaged, and removing it makes an immediate difference, allowing you to brake later and giving you a much better chance of beating those gold trophy times.
While it never explicitly says so, the aim is clearly to reduce your dependence on these features. In a similar fashion, the Licence Tests steadily help refine your racing technique through bite-sized exercises: a typical set might have you negotiating a shallow turn, then a sharper one, then two in short order, and finally a longer stretch of track combining several. Likewise, the prerace Circuit Experience breaks a course up into individual sections, encouraging you to master each one before tackling a complete lap against the clock. It’s worth mentioning, too, that PS5’s SSD helps in this regard: the rapid restarts encourage you to replay tests and missions rather than moving on as soon as you get bronze.
All of which makes the game’s alwaysonline requirement especially disappointing. In a sim that’s approachable to its very core, it feels like a glaring misstep, a rare example of conformity in a game that otherwise seems keen to buck convention. And most egregiously of all, it ensures Luca’s café is temporarily closed for business should the servers (or your Internet connection) fail – and that simply will not do at all.
Tunic
Anxiety of influence is not something that seems to bother Tunic developer Andrew Shouldice. This game declares its inspirations up front with the image that, if we still lived in the days of such things, would surely be its box art: your vulpine protagonist, decked out in green, sword raised high, with a blue and red shield in the other hand. It’s a good thing they are a fox, in fact, or else you rather suspect Nintendo’s lawyers would have come knocking by now.
This is just a taste of the allusions to be found within. Tunic begins with your amnesic hero waking up on the beach of a mysterious island. Presented from an isometric perspective that makes heavy use of tilt-shift, and rendered with a certain clumpy physicality, it recalls the Switch remake of Link’s Awakening – though, given Shouldice’s work on Tunic predates the latter game’s announcement, this is surely coincidence. The same can’t be said of the quest it puts you on, to unite three parts of a magical relic. Nor of the way combat feels, as you lock on to enemies with a trigger, then alternate between sword slashes and a roll that, in the early going, feels more than a little sluggish. (Well, Link has never been the nimblest of heroes.)
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As homage, it’s done well enough. Each area and dungeon comes with its own minor gimmick, with out-of-reach chests positioned so that they stick in your memory for hours, until you’ve got the necessary equipment to return for them. There’s a good selection of items on offer, from bomb to hookshot, which drive navigation puzzles while also dramatically improving combat. None of them, though, can claim to be the most important pickup here. That title must go to the glowing pages found around the island, which reveal Tunic to be more than just a competent tribute act.
Out in the world, these pages are arcane objects, bright with knowledge, something to be hidden in an out-of-reach spot or stored behind glass. Once collected, though, some reverse alchemy occurs, as they’re transmuted into something more earthly: a sheet taken from the game’s own manual. This is a thing of beauty, reproduced down to the staples and coffee rings, with lavish maps and illustrations that invite you to zoom right in close until you can make out the individual halftone dots. Enough to make you yearn for a bygone age of boxed videogames, certainly, but this manual is more than an aesthetic appeal to nostalgia. Out of the way it presents its instructions, Tunic manages to squeeze in puzzles, a progression system, even plot twists. This is a remarkable magic trick, and one that sustains the game past its first ending and into – well, that would be telling.
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At the risk of breaking the magician’s code, it’s worth examining how this trick is pulled off. The first thing to know here is that the manual isn’t in English. The odd word or phrase aside, it’s written in the same pictographic language used by the island’s inhabitants. You’re left to decipher many of its tutorials and hints based on context; meanwhile, your eye is caught by familiar snippets of language for which you have none. Effigy? Siege engine? Inverted Ash? It’s tantalising.
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While the language barrier is used to withhold information, something else is working in your favour. Because, as those coffee stains suggest, you’re not the first pair of hands this manual has passed through. Most pages are marked with scratchy biro – an arrow pointing to a shortcut, a doodle that offers an extra clue to what those glyphs might mean, one spot of map circled with a crudeness that suggests excitement. Sometimes these annotations are as obscure as the foreign text, but once you learn to follow someone else’s logic, it can be just the nudge you needed.
This push and pull of knowledge is the heart of Tunic. It’s a game thick with secrets, many of them technically available the moment you first wake up on that beach but hidden away in some part of the manual you haven’t read yet. Remember that you’re getting this thing in instalments: one page, front and back. With most sections coming as a spread, that might mean a controller diagram that doesn’t include the face buttons or an overworld map missing its western hemisphere. Sometimes, the other half will be withheld for hours, providing powerful motivation to keep exploring.
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And yes, the whole thing is also pandering shamelessly to nostalgia. Memories of rented cartridges still burdened with the save files of strangers. Games borrowed from friends who have filled the manual’s memo page with their own scribbles. Imported games navigated with the scantest amount of Japanese comprehension. But all this serves a purpose other than sending us, Ratatouille style, back to a childhood spent cross-legged and wide-eyed in the light of cathode rays. It’s trying to capture what made those experiences exciting in the first place.
When Tunic gestures towards Zelda games of old, something it does with all the subtlety of an air traffic controller, it’s indicating an attempt to chip away the intervening decades and get back to the feeling of playing those games for the first time, when they still held what seemed like bottomless mystery. As in Inscryption’s game-within-a-game, that requires a return to a time when games could still be found objects, before online guides were within easy grasp. Playing before release, our own experience was not too dissimilar, and we’d advise trying to replicate this as best you can – Tunic’s secrets can be a little obtuse, but the game is more modest than, say, a FromSoftware outing, and it should be possible to plumb their depths without too much external assistance. Just RTFM, as they used to say. You’re sure to be rewarded. 8
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FOXY BOXING
Tunic is very much an exploration game with combat in it. In other words, you’re unlikely to be impressed the first time you get into a fight. Swipes with your stubby sword often fall short of the target, while the dodge roll is unresponsive enough to have us double-checking performance settings. Things start to improve when you acquire the shield, and get better from there, as your options open up. Special mention must go to the game’s customisation system, which turns out to function much like Hollow Knight’s Charms. There are some borderline gamebreaking combinations to be found here – which is of course all part of the fun. It stands to reason that the best part of combat would involve exploration of another kind.
Triangle Strategy
Dot. Dot. Dot. If you play a lot of Japanese games, you’ll be acquainted with their use of ellipses – JRPG favourite Xenogears is said to have almost 7,000 in its main story alone. However, rarely has that pregnant pause been quite so effectively (or frequently) deployed as in Square Enix’s tactical roleplayer. Every other line during the many dialogue exchanges can be accelerated, but those three dots, tapped out in a similar tempo to the speaking clock’s pips, refuse to be hurried. It’s annoying at first, but it’s a device whose value soon becomes clear. It helps you settle into the game’s unusually measured cadence, while encouraging you to take a moment to collect your thoughts: the decisions you make here, on and off the battlefield, shouldn’t be rushed. That thinking time might make a big difference.
If you downloaded the eShop demos, you will already know that the balance between strategy and story is weighted towards the latter – this isn’t quite 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim in that regard, but it’s fair to say if you’re here for the grid-based skirmishes you’ll need to be patient. Good job, then, that the fluctuating tensions between the three territories that compose the continent of Norzelia make an absorbing backdrop. There’s more than a hint of Game Of Thrones in the political machinations that splinter the alliance between the kingdom of Glenbrook (where your adventure, as protagonist Lord Serenoa of House Wolffort, begins), the duchy of Aesfrost and the holy state of Hyzante – and in its pitiless treatment of the wider cast. Characters you assume will play key roles are suddenly, brutally dispatched, and while there’s no permadeath (units cut down on the battlefield will return for the next encounter), it isn’t giving too much away to say not all allies will still be by your side 40 hours later.
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BOOT CAMP
Between the battle, exploration and dialogue phases, you spend most of your time in your party’s encampment. Here you can talk to allies and upgrade them, using items to buff individual stats and unlock new abilities. For some items you’ll need more than money: each battle awards kudos points for certain feats, such as attacking from safe zones, backstabbing enemies, or performing followup attacks (achieved by flanking an enemy on both sides). But the bulk of your time here will be spent on mock mental battles to beef up your squad. These are hardly optional – without completing them you’ll leave yourself woefully underprepared and underlevelled for the fights to come – but they’re an enjoyable way to experiment with new tactics away from the story.
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That title, then, refers not to a Fire Emblem-style weapon triangle, but three guiding principles, or convictions – Liberty, Morality and Utility – that are at the heart of the choices you make. These parameters, at least for your first playthrough, are invisible: a pop-up will confirm that Serenoa’s convictions have been strengthened, but you won’t know the precise effect. It’s a surprising move, perhaps, but a smart one: rather than show its working and, consciously or otherwise, lead you towards a particular path, it forces you to go with your gut. Whether it’s an optional dialogue exchange or one of the bigger decisions, the choices don’t always fall neatly under those categories (Utility feels the most cleanly defined of the three). But as you mull over the potential repercussions of your words and actions, you can almost hear that trio of taps accompanying your thoughts.
Every so often, you’ll encounter a decision that directly involves the input of Serenoa’s most trusted allies, determining the path you take. Here, thoroughness is a virtue: the more carefully you’ve explored and the more optional conversations you’ve engaged in, the greater the chance you have of winning over any doubters to your chosen cause. These are not straightforward, binary choices, either. Take, for example, an early choice to ally with the scheming leader of one of Glenbrook’s high houses: most of your allies doubt his motives, but even if he plans to sell you out to Aesfrost’s callous archduke Gustadolph, it may be worth a temporary alliance to bolster your numbers (or to keep your enemies closer). You’ll be told how likely each member of your inner circle is to be swayed, but due diligence may unlock additional dialogue options that make your arguments more convincing. Even when you’re confident of the outcome, there’s a sense of tension when they all place their counters on the Scales Of Conviction, the weighted side dramatically tilting down and bursting into flame.
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Whichever route you choose invariably leads to battle. Ostensibly, the conflicting ideologies of the territories put them at odds, but this war really comes down to who controls Norzelia’s most valuable resource: salt. Either way, the forces of Hyzante and Aesfrost (and any mercenaries in their employ) represent a stern challenge on these multi-tiered battlefields, which in most cases are familiar locations repurposed into combat arenas – from bathhouses to villages, rocky hillsides to castle grounds. It’s a smart trick that, along with all that narrative groundwork, makes each clash feel more meaningful. Many have gimmicks or specific completion requirements, too. Routing the enemy is usually enough, but you may need to escort NPCs or protect a specific party member. A nautical battle forces you to consider when to use the zipline to ferry your units between ships. And you need to use carts to negotiate Norzelia’s mines, letting you cover more ground as you race to defuse Aesfrosti explosives.
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The characters, however, are what make it sing. Rather than being limited to familiar archetypes, each has unique abilities that makes them valuable in certain situations – and leads to some thrilling synergies besides. The stoic Erador draws attention away from frail allies, his shield slam capable of knocking enemy units off their perch for fall damage. Blacksmith Jens can build ladders – handy for getting retreating units to relative safety, or offering an elevated position for veteran bowman Archibald to target distant foes. Wheedling Merchant Lionel can tempt enemy units into defecting, gaining interest on coins left behind by the fallen, while shamaness Ezana harnesses the elements, conjuring rainstorms to form large puddles, which can in turn be electrified to stun clusters of enemies. But it’s more than utility that makes them valuable. True, the relentless earnestness of the script may have you agreeing with Serenoa’s comment during a sparring session with his best friend: “Ah, enough sentimentality. Raise your spear so I can knock it down!” But it’s hard to deny that Square’s most effective stratagem is the time it takes to invest you in the fate of this war-stricken continent, and all who live there… 8
Destiny 2: The Witch Queen
Bungie’s shooter has long had identity issues. Is it a competitive FPS? An MMORPG? A seasonal grind or a serialised science-fantasy saga? Fortunately, The Witch Queen, Destiny 2’s fourth major expansion, knows exactly what it wants to be. This is a focused, narrative-driven romp designed to get the story back on track, delivered through a satisfying campaign featuring some of Destiny’s best environments and combat.
The Witch Queen gathers up the plot threads laid down over the past two years. The Cabal and the Fallen, once expendable foes, have major factions fighting alongside humanity, preparing for war against a fleet of mysterious pyramid-shaped ships. Meanwhile, the Hive trickster goddess Savathûn has been sneaking around in human disguise, stirring up drama. Now she’s hatched her plan to steal the Light, the proper-nouned cosmic magic that allows Guardians to respawn endlessly – so long as their plot armour holds out, at any rate.
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It’s a clear villain, a clear problem, and a fine excuse to take players on a solid ten to 12 hours of story questing through a new environment featuring a trio of new Hive enemy archetypes. These alien versions of the Titan, Hunter and Warlock classes have similar abilities to players – which includes respawning, unless they’re permanently put down with a posthumous finisher.
While the new enemies aren’t as menacing as the story makes them out to be, their relative tankiness makes them fun targets for an arsenal of new weapons, each lovingly modelled and with unique audio. One standout is the Grand Overture: available to all at the start of the current season, it’s billed as an Exotic heavy machine gun, firing armour-piercing slugs at a rate of around one a second, each hit charging up a spectacular missile-barrage alternate fire. It’s pure overkill, but then Destiny has always been good at selling a power fantasy.
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THE SPEAKERS
Destiny 2 has always walked a fine line between engrossing science fiction and high camp in its scripts. This chapter leans hard on the melodrama, and many of its plot beats would fall flat without some sterling vocal performances. While she gets surprisingly few scenes, voiceover veteran Debra Wilson delivers Savathûn’s soliloquies with gleeful relish. Ian James Corlett, the first English voice of Dragon Ball Z’s Goku, gets a major role as Fynch, a rogue Ghost with anxiety issues providing comic relief and exposition in similar measures throughout. Surprisingly, there’s no voice credit for whoever was cast as the excellent Immaru, Savathûn’s own Ghost, who growls orders to the Lucent Hive with a tone that’s equal parts drill sergeant and doting father.
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The campaign missions combine sequences of cutting through hordes of fodder with duels against more capable enemies in and around exquisite architecture. Previously the domain of endgame content, there’s a smattering of puzzles during missions, and you need to solve several while under fire – a welcome change from the usual approach of fighting enemy waves in an arena while whittling down a boss’s health bar. Expect more platforming than in previous expansions, too, since there are plenty of high towers and caves to navigate.
While the swampy hinterlands of the new zone are nondescript, Savathûn’s gothic mega-castle is a gorgeous study in misinterpreted human aesthetics. The Gigeresque Hive get a regal makeover, swapping black chitin for ivory. Dark tunnels are now hedgerows rich with blood-red roses, cobwebs and thorned roots spilling out over the borders. Better yet are what look like stainedglass windows that are revealed to be gigantic eyes. This is what happens when aliens get into gothic poetry.
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The expansion also delves deeper into the pyramid ships, only glimpsed in the previous expansions. We get to poke around one here and it’s delightfully strange, containing little more than abstract geometry in pearlescent hues. Aside from ominous statues, nothing seems designed for humanoid hands, raising questions to be answered later. In the meantime, it plays host to fierce battles, thanks to the return of difficulty settings.
Each major story quest can be tackled in Legendary mode, which doubles the rewards while capping player Power, adding extra enemies and tricky combat modifiers to the mix. Some changes feel arbitrary (disabling the radar hampers accessibility for some) but there’s clear intent behind the new enemy placements. As a result, Legendary offers some spicy encounters, made deadlier by the exploding white moths that emerge from some of the new Light-empowered Hive. While tuned for co-op, Legendary can – in theory – be beaten solo, assuming you have a sufficiently robust character build. But it’s a leap so pronounced, it feels like Bungie skipped a more moderate setting on the way.
Sadly, the gratifying friction of Legendary mode only applies to the instanced campaign missions, making the open-world exploration around Savathûn’s Throne World feel toothless. Unless, that is, you stumble into an unmarked cave that just happens to contain highlevel enemies – some of which necessitate grinding your Power stat if you’re to even put a dent in them.
Still, there’s plenty to grind on, not least with the new season taking players into psionic dream realms. There’s also a new crafting system that allows assembly of weapons with custom stat and perk sets, assuming you can farm the resources using specially marked weapon drops. This is how you’ll acquire the new Glaive weapons. These bladed melee spears with energy cannon and shield modes are reminiscent of Stargate SG-1’s Goa’uld staves – and though they feel idiosyncratic at first, after a little practice they’re satisfying to wield.
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Despite those few awkward seams where MMORPG meets FPS, then, this is a worthwhile continuation of Bungie’s space opera, telling a story featuring enough twists and teases to keep things rolling until the next expansion, Lightfall. For players who have been here since the beginning, this is prime red meat. Yet there’s an elephant in the room to address: the removal of Destiny 2’s first major expansion, Forsaken. Previously, Bungie had also ‘vaulted’ the game’s original Red War campaign and two minor DLC chapters. That’s around 50 hours of story content replaced with a tutorial segment rehashed from the original game. It’s frustrating, since The Witch Queen finds Destiny 2 firing on all cylinders. What should be an easy recommendation is instead laden with provisos: this is a good expansion, a solid foundation for the next year of updates, and a lousy place for newcomers to start. 7
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Kirby And The Forgotten Land
HAL Laboratory’s mascot hits the big 3-0 this year, and to celebrate his maker has finally given him permission to enter the third dimension. Has any other established videogame protagonist had to wait quite so long? HAL gave Kirby his first glimpse of a 3D world in 2000’s Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, but he was locked to a single plane. And there he has remained ever since – tasting stereoscopic depth with two 3DS entries, but denied the freedom to roam. Discounting downloadable spinoff Kirby’s Blowout Blast (an expanded version of a minigame from Planet Robobot), this is, to all intents and purposes, the 3D platformer debut of the medium’s most gluttonous hero. Little wonder, then, that his appetite is voracious. Within minutes of his arrival at the forgotten land of the title he attempts to eat a car – and that is merely an appetiser.
Instantly, we see it’s too big. Kirby’s exterior warps as he attempts to swallow it (in much the same way as you can trace the outline of a large meal in a snake’s belly) and he ends up stretched taut across its roof and and bonnet. HAL instinctively understands that there is plenty of is plenty of comic mileage in this, not least in the incongruous combination of cartoon hero and pseudo-realistic objects. Kirby variously becomes a walking lightbulb and a sentient water balloon, rolls down ramps as a length of pipe, and spits cans as an ambulatory vending machine. Each tends to have a specific use – all you can do with a set of storage lockers is pull them free from their moorings – but even if it’s obvious where you have to place a set of steps, it’s amusing to see Kirby waddling around awkwardly, his mouth stretched long and thin, giving him an expression that suggests he’s reconsidering the choices that brought him here.
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In practice, it’s not wildly different from Super Mario Odyssey’s Cappy (which was itself indebted to Kirby’s malleability), albeit without the same transformative effect on its hero’s basic moveset. Some forms reveal the way forward (and often allow access to secret areas), while others are designed for set-pieces. The main difference is that there’s an element of slapstick violence in the way they’re used here. A racetrack is littered with enemies for you to plough through en route to the chequered flag, that familiar hit-pause selling the impact. Another enemy is positioned below a high ledge, allowing you to leap off in Kirby’s cone form, with the sharp end pointed downwards. As a circular fan, you can approach a seal, obliviously juggling a bomb on its nose, before obliterating it with a blast of air.
That applies equally to Kirby’s more traditional forms. A cute penguin in a woolly hat is just asking to be frozen in a block of ice and booted down a steep ramp to take out a trio of fluffy fox cubs at the bottom, while his Needle ability transforms him into a Kirby Katamari, enemies pinned to his spines before being flung off as he rolls to a halt. Indeed, Kirby’s destructive impulses have such a devastating effect on his environment (one level involves him inserting various forms into similarly shaped holes to pull down walls) that you wonder if this colourful postapocalypse is in the state it is thanks to a prior, unremembered visit. (That would, after all, explain why it’s called The Forgotten Land.)
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ADMIT DEE FEAT
The game’s story involves Kirby rescuing Waddle Dees, who have been kidnapped en masse by a group of antagonists known as The Beast Pack. You’ll retrieve a handful by following the critical path to the end of a stage, but getting them all requires side missions to be completed, while unlocking an area’s boss requires picking up more than the bare minimum. The Waddle Dees you’ve saved populate a cheerful village hub, opening up new facilities that allow you to take temporary buffs or health items into a stage, or to spend the coins you’ve earned to amass a collection of capsule toys. There’s the usual colosseum besides, and a handful of simplistic minigames of the playonce-and-never-again variety.
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Though HAL briefly drops the camera to a worm’s-eye view to emphasise scale when Kirby lands in a level, this place is no open-world sprawl. It’s larger in scope than his previous adventures, but still split into snack-sized segments – a combination of big and small that fits Switch to a T. It’s a structure that allows HAL to introduce ideas and then move briskly on: there are flying sections, on-rails sequences, time trials, puzzles and races against the clock. The world design similarly adopts an anything-goes approach, with conventional biomes made to feel fresh once more. Your archetypal winter world begins with Dickensian streets, before moving into an abandoned metro station, and then a stage that miraculously gets away with combining wind and slippery ice. A desert features a sun-kissed villa surrounded by toxic pools, but also a behind-the-scenes staff area of a sandswept mall. Put it this way: we didn’t imagine we’d be reminded of Spec Ops: The Line while playing a Kirby game – nor, in one late-game moment, Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia.
Throughout it all,...
At a time when many of us are in particular need of distractions, the videogame industry is delivering like never before. We’re struggling to recall a year whose opening months were quite this packed – indeed, it’s left us with little free time for anything else. This issue alone, we’ve spent 60 hours with one game, and almost 50 in another. Our current save in a third has just passed the 35-hour mark, while after being told a fourth would last us a dozen hours, we find ourselves still captivated by its world after a dozen more.
We’re feasting, as they say. But while just one of these would be enough to fill many a long evening, we don’t all play one game to the exclusion of all others. Having spent a good chunk of the past few weeks perusing the menus in Gran Turismo 7’s GT Café, we’ve naturally been thinking about flavour pairings. So which two dishes from this issue’s selection would go best together?
For starters, how about the irresistible power trips of Destiny 2: The Witch Queen and Korean MMORPG Lost Ark? A pairing of sci-fiand fantasy could be just the ticket. Or, for something a little chewier, why not intersperse dialogue-heavy tactical RPG Triangle Strategy with Total War: Warhammer III, where you can let your armies do the talking on the battlefield? Or maybe you’d prefer something more nostalgic, in which case we’d recommend the retroinspired Tunic and A Musical Story, throwing back to ’90s videogames and ’70s hedonism respectively.
But there’s one pairing that stands out above the rest. In Elden Ring, FromSoft has prepared the equivalent of a Michelin-standard dish, but this exquisite platter is not always easy to swallow. In which case, might we suggest the smooth flavour of Kirby And The Forgotten Land? It might just be the ideal palate cleanser, making the banquet Miyazaki and team have served up that bit more digestible.
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Elden Ring
We’re sure this map used to be empty. Sixty hours in, though, it’s every bit as cluttered as your average Ubisoft collectathon. In the far northwest, we’ve dropped a marker to remind us that thar be dragons – and that one of them is five times the size of the others. In the deep southeast, an aide-memoire for a boss battle we knocked our heads against for two days before taking the hint. Elsewhere there are dungeons to come back to when we’re stronger, merchants to revisit when finances are more liquid, places we can see but not yet reach, and quest giving NPCs to return to down the line. Mostly, though, our map is full of markers to remind us of the many, many things we’ve either died to or run away from. In traditional open-world games, developers plaster their maps with icons to show off just how much there is to do. In Elden Ring, you daub your own onto a blank canvas, to stand as permanent reminders of your many failures. How thoroughly FromSoftware.
So is the whole game, naturally. This is the purest expression yet of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s widely imitated, yet still inimitable philosophy, the culmination of the journey he and FromSoftware have been on since the 2009 release of Demon’s Souls. But the map is the star in many ways, and of all the ideas on show here, the one most likely to be pilfered by FromSoft’s aspirant peers. If imitators don’t quite have the courage to have the map empty at the start, they may well draw inspiration from how it is drawn, with vague outlines hinting at points of interest. Is that a church? A fort? A classic Souls-style level, here called a Legacy Dungeon? Or something else? There is only one way to find out.
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The map’s greatest trick, however, is its apparent size, which is limited quite brilliantly by your own knowledge of it. Starting out, it seems enormous. But after a few hours pootling around the opening area, you may worry that you’re reaching its limits. Once the first major boss has been defeated and you head into the northwest, however, the map suddenly enlarges, and zooms out. Later it’ll do it again, and again. You will never know exactly how big it is until you have seen it all. And heavens, what a lot of it there is.
It is tempting to view Elden Ring as a sort of greatest-hits compilation, pulling familiar elements from the FromSoft oeuvre and spreading them across the game’s major addition to the template – that vast, Breath Of The Wild-inspired open world. There are obvious evolutions of Demon’s Souls’ captivating level design, and Dark Souls’ interlocking sense of place; of DS3’s weapon arts, Sekiro’s stealth and posture systems, and Bloodborne’s aggression and eldritch horror. The Zelda connection is plain to see, and for once justified: this is the first game in the five years since Nintendo’s masterpiece to truly recapture that sense of curiosity being sparked organically, and exploration rewarded so consistently. From this perspective, the casual observer’s back-of-a-beer-mat tagline for Elden Ring – Breath Of The Souls – may seem fair enough. But it also sells it short, ignoring both the many other additions From has folded into the mix, and how well its component parts hang together as a whole.
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Combat, for example, is simply transformed. Summonable Spirit Ashes can tip a tough fight in your favour, a skeleton army, pack of dogs, spellcaster or band of archers keeping the boss busy while you retreat, heal up and circle round to its rear. Fighting on Torrent, your spectral mount means you can close in and retreat from tough foes at speed, or simply keep at a safe remove while you fling off spells or arrows. Ashes Of War offer swappable unique moves and let you tweak your arsenal’s elemental affinities. Projectiles, restoratives and elemental weapon buffs can now be crafted using resources gathered in the wild. And the new Guard Counter lets players turn patient defence into attack in a heartbeat. Never has a player of a FromSoft game been so generously empowered.
Which is not to say the game is easy, of course. As tends to be the case when Miyazaki is involved, giving more options to the player is an excuse to make the game more challenging than ever. As always, even the rank and file can punish the sloppy, but now rock-hard enemies roam the land too, many appearing from nowhere when you least expect it – though you’ll soon be trained to do so, seeing every woodland clearing, peaceful lake or open plain as a sign of imminent terror. Breath Of The Wild rewards the curious explorer with a shrine or Korok seed, and sometimes Elden Ring treats you in kind; perhaps with one of the generously placed Site Of Grace rest points, a merchant or friendly NPC, or a church that boosts the power of your healing flasks. But more often than not it’s a busy enemy camp, a pack of snarling beasts, or a monster the size of a terraced house that, if you’re lucky, can only two-shot you.
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And then there are the bosses, which on first contact can be particularly tough, even for experienced Souls players. Especially so, in fact: the final hits of an early boss’s combos come a second or two later than you expect, their weapon hanging in the air, baiting out the early roll it knows you can’t resist, then punishing it with full force. You’ll learn that particular lesson eventually, but the pattern repeats itself throughout the game, in different ways, as the scope and scale of boss fights ratchets up to previously unthinkable extremes.
You will, at times, think it unfair – and often you will be meant to. Every death against a FromSoft boss is a lesson; you are meant to learn through failure, assembling a mental model of the things that didn’t work as you build towards the strategy that will. In Elden Ring, death often contains another, vastly more important message. Go away. You are not ready. Out there in the world are countless things to see and a thousand ways in which you can grow stronger.
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It takes a while for us to work this out, admittedly. Blame that on a few thousand hours of Souls experience banked across the years, and the way a looming print deadline seems to breathe down our neck more noticeably whenever we stray too far from the critical path. In fairness, FromSoft appears to also be at it at times, the little ray of light from certain Sites Of Grace ushering you towards the next Legacy Dungeon, and the boss awaiting at its end. But that is merely there for those who have struck out to explore, got distracted and been turned round, and need a little prompt later to get them back on track.
And what distractions they are. The innocuous cave entrance that leads to a corkscrewing network of catacombs. The little drop down onto an easily missed ledge into a series of caverns full of smithing materials. The teleporter that warps you to a corner of the map you had no idea existed, or the lift you stumble upon that deposits you in a starlit underground city. There is something out here everywhere you turn, and while there are repeating elements – architecture recycled, minibosses remixed or combined – it never stops feeling fresh. The next vista you find is somehow even more beautiful than the one before, the next zone likewise more threatening than the area you’ve just run away from. The pacing is remarkable, particularly given the size of the world: one moment you’re galloping across a vast open plain, the next inching around corners in a Legacy Dungeon praying for a rest point, then bashing your head against a boss. Rare is the excursion that doesn’t end with you emerging stronger or wiser, emboldened to face the next challenge.
Even with 60 hours on the clock, we’re still not finished – and that feels OK. We have been down this road before, in similar, lesser games; we know that despite our best intentions to pick a world clean after the credits have rolled, defeating the final boss drains the idea of its oxygen. As ever with Miyazaki’s games, we are near the end of our first playthrough already thinking about our second, and since the build variety here seems outrageous, we’re also contemplating our third and fourth. There’s NG+ to come too, of course. All that can wait. This is a game to be strolled, not sprinted through – unless you’re running away from something, anyway. It will only be new once, and its delights deserve to be savoured to the fullest.
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Not for the first time, a Miyazaki game has arrived and the landscape appears transformed. As you play, there is a sense of plates shifting beneath you, of the T&Cs of game development being hastily rewritten. We haven’t felt this way since Breath Of The Wild. Here, as there, an open world means freedom and fresh air. But Elden Ring manages to make even its hugest, most sprawling spaces feel as enclosed and foreboding as any Dark Souls dungeon – yet still compels you to keep going to see what’s around the next corner, up the next hill, or behind the next hulking beast with the one-shot attack in its second phase. See those mountains over there? You can die on them. And you will do so, gladly and repeatedly, as the sensation slowly builds that you are playing a videogame for the ages.
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Post Script
Elden Ring is Miyazaki’s most successful attempt to get players out from behind their shields
Hidetaka Miyazaki has never seemed like one for sequels, which perhaps explains why his familiar gameplay template has appeared under so many different names. The Soulsborne lineage, or whatever clunky portmanteau has supplanted the label now that Elden Ring has released, has shuffled us not just between titles but styles, settings and time periods too. But despite all the costume changes and reshuffled staging, the song itself has largely remained the same.
That is particularly true when it comes to combat – despite efforts over the years to get players to change up their tactics. Swordplay in these games is a fighting game at heart: about controlling space, dancing in and out of range, baiting, evading and punishing. Success is about understanding when it is your turn; when the enemy has left themselves open enough for you to get in a hit or two. You nip in and dash off a couple of quick R1s, then retreat to safety, raise your shield, and begin the dance anew.
From’s departures from this formula suggest a certain frustration with the defensive tactics its players employ. Bloodborne’s Regain mechanic urged the player onto the front foot, and in the description for one of the game’s few defensive tools Miyazaki made his feelings plain: “Shields are nice, but not if they engender passivity”. In Sekiro, From went even further, reframing defence as the best form of attack – but where defence involved timing as precise as a hardcore fighting-game combo. Sure, it gave us stealth, but that was no use against Genichiro and company, was it?
The mechanical riffs on the Souls template in Bloodborne and Sekiro were only made possible by the stylistic ones. Only when the game looked different was it allowed to feel different. No doubt FromSoftware understood that players would play Elden Ring like a Souls game. As soon as fans see a knight with sword and shield, a mage with robes and staff, or a wretch wearing nothing but a loincloth and a smile, they make the obvious connection and revert firmly to type. Unable to force you out of your comfort zone, in Elden Ring FromSoft instead seeks to encourage it. The result is the most generous and flexible combat system FromSoft has yet produced – one you are free to engage with as much, or as little, as you like.
Early on, the Spirit Ashes feel like the game-changer. When an NPC gives us a jellyfish to call into battle, we assume they are having us on. But despite its squishy form it’s an absolute tank, soaking up surprising amounts of aggro and causing plenty of problems with its status effect. A pack of skeletons that we could kill in seconds hangs around for an entire fight against a miniboss whose AI script hasn’t been written with self-resurrecting support characters in mind. Not that it matters: the poor beast spends most of the fight stunlocked. While they vary in shape, size, power and utility, every Ash serves a singular primary function: to draw the boss’s eye away from you, and to let you onto the front foot without fear, if only for a second.
And once you’re there, you have more options than ever. Yes, you still have your light and strong attacks, the charge-move variant of the latter dealing heavy damage to even the biggest foes and putting many smaller ones on the floor. The new jump attacks have a similar, if less dramatic effect. And in another new addition, the Guard Counter, Elden Ring makes a huge concession to the defensively minded while also showing them how much fun they can have when they throw caution to the wind. When you block an incoming blow, a quick press of heavy attack performs an instant riposte, dealing significant damage and often crumpling the foe straight to the floor – though, this being FromSoft, a certain risk is baked in: if your enemy is mid-combo, you’re probably eating their next hit instead.
After 60 hours, we’ve barely begun to explore the depths of the Ashes Of War system, which builds on Dark Souls 3’s weapon skills by not only expanding a weapon’s moveset with a unique attack, but also letting you tweak its attribute scaling and add permanent elemental or status effects to your swings. We’ve spent hours in the company of Lion’s Claw, with its slick forward somersault and unstoppable finishing slam. Bloody Slash, fast and attractive and causing bleed on every hit, is well worth the small amount of health it costs to use. There are many more to uncover, but their impact on the game is already clear. No longer do you need multiple weapons to cover different situations, or to work around certain enemy resistances with consumables. The tool you need is already in your hand, the key to victory only a few menu selections away.
Putting all of these systems together in battle is a delight – particularly when it leaves a boss prone on the floor, awaiting a critical hit – and when done correctly fundamentally upsends the traditional Souls rhythm. We round a corner and see a Black Knight, one of the toughest enemies to be found in a FromSoft title. We sneak up behind it for a backstab, then follow it with a Lion’s Claw and charged R2, and it is dead before we even make eye contact. The irony here is that this aggressive style of play is actually by far the safest course of action; there is no blocking or dodging involved at all. It has taken over a decade, but Miyazaki and the team have finally found a way of making the attack the best form of defence. We’ll still carry a shield just in case, though, if it’s all the same to you.
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Gran Turismo 7
Has it really been 25 years? Back in 1997, PlayStation’s flagship racing sim felt groundbreaking, sophisticated, even cool: that intro cinematic, with its then cutting-edge graphics, featuring high-end cars screaming around snaking bends set to The Chemical Brothers’ remix of Everything Must Go, is seared into the collective imagination of a generation. Yet Polyphony Digital’s series has not aged especially gracefully, failing to scale the heights of the PS2 years since, with Microsoft’s Forza Motorsport overtaking it in the HD era. What a pleasant surprise, then, to find that Gran Turismo has rediscovered its mojo. This isn’t just a nostalgic anniversary jamboree, but an approachable introduction to the series, and a full-throated celebration of cars and car culture.
Kazunori Yamauchi and team have achieved this partly by looking back to Gran Turismos of old, refocusing on – while recalibrating – the series’ foundations. Anyone who spent time with the earlier games can’t fail to notice the throwbacks, from the return of popular legacy courses to a singleplayer mode with extensive tuning options that should ensure tinkerers spend as much time off the track as on it.
Yet that will most likely be true for all players, not just series veterans or autophiles (and by the end, you may count yourself among the latter group). The de facto campaign mode starts at a café, to which you’ll return throughout at the behest of cheerful proprietor Luca, who sets you a series of themed tasks, presented in the form of leather-backed menus. The majority of these involve adding vehicles to your collection by competing in a succession of short race events: placing in the top three of the first, for example, gains you one of a trio of Japanese compact cars. Complete each set, either through podium finishes or by spending credits on used or new vehicles at dealerships, and Luca will reward you by unlocking cars and tracks, and by delivering a brisk history of the cars you’ve obtained.
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He’s soon joined by others, from an older enthusiast to real-world car designers. The writing has an endearingly nerdy quality, Yamauchi’s own passion reflected in their words, while the café surroundings and the laid-back soundtrack give the place a curiously similar vibe to Animal Crossing’s coffee house. From behind a cup of java, you can see your current vehicle parked near the entrance – a charming touch that gives you a sense of ownership of your growing collection.
Those accustomed to the instant gratification of many modern racers may bristle at a career structure that locks away much of the game until you’ve raised your collector level, but as a way of walking players through the various modes, it’s a stroke of genius. It guides you toward Licence Tests – which double as both replayable shortform challenges and tutorials – and gestures towards Mission mode where you’re set a variety of objectives, from slipstreaming to breaching a given speed limit to completing a treacherous circuit without any collisions. Restricting multiplayer for several hours is likely to be a divisive choice, but those who enter the online crucible may feel grateful that they were encouraged to learn the nuances of cornering – and coping with changeable track conditions – beforehand.
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Out on the circuit, Gran Turismo has never sounded or felt better. We are not automotive experts (even if we can now tell you more about Chevrolet than we ever imagined we’d know), but each vehicle has a distinct character. Much of this is communicated through sound, which reaches such a degree of fidelity that you’ll notice a difference with some quick tuning between races, whether an engine’s roar is dampened or the whistle of a turbo makes itself known. But it’s more noticeable in the way these cars feel in the hands, the DualSense haptics communicating grip and surface variations through your palms, each gear shift (even if you stick to automatic transition) producing a satisfying clunk.
It looks wonderful, too. Though ray-tracing support only really benefits replays and photo modes – stick to the performance mode otherwise – the lighting in particular is extraordinarily convincing, without feeling ostentatiously showy. Accelerated day-night cycles and dynamic weather lend drama to races, amplified by improved AI that doesn’t lower itself to obvious rubberbanding. By the time we scrape third place in a knuckle-whitening race around the Nürburgring in the wet behind the wheel of a skiddy 911 GT3 (the pack noticeably bunching up as spray reduces visibility on an already tough circuit), we notice we’re sitting two feet closer to the screen than when we started. A ten-minute tussle with a Mercedes-AMG C63 under clouds at Alsace, meanwhile, proves that FromSoftware doesn’t have the monopoly on exhilarating defeats.
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Over the past two console generations, Gran Turismo has attracted a reputation for being boring or sterile, but outside its menus – which we’d sooner describe as classy and utilitarian – such a claim cannot be made of this game. To wit, before it’s even downloaded, the breezily disposable Music Rally mode (in which you race through checkpoints as a timer counts down to the beat of the current song) lets you drive a Honda S800 around Tokyo Expressway as day becomes dusk to the sound of Idris Elba rapping.
Beyond its technical excellence, then, Gran Turismo 7 feels deeply, idiosyncratically personal in ways firstparty games rarely do. It is strange and sometimes restrictive, resolutely uncool and, in its earnest celebration of car culture, occasionally even a little overbearing. But this is a racing sim with real soul, realised with genuine passion and no little eccentricity. Twenty-five years on, Gran Turismo has never felt more vital.
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Post Script
How GT7’s unconventional MO makes it a ‘real racing simulator’ for (almost) everyone
The great paradox at the heart of Gran Turismo 7 is that it’s a racing game that wants you to slow down. ‘Let’s go back to the café’, the game politely suggests when you’ve completed a menu book (which is itself a rarity when so many modern games give instructions that often feel more like demands), and it’s telling that you’ll want to take up that offer. Rather than pinballing from one event to another, being bombarded by potential distractions, you’re given the space to pause and reflect before moving on to whatever comes next.
It’s a smart move in a number of ways, but particularly because it ensures those new to the series (or even to racing sims in general) are never made to feel overfaced. Where many games simply present a smörgåsbord of options and invite players to pick their way through them, it leads players by the hand, gradually introducing modes and features. If you’re not in the mood for a lesson on the rivalry between the Mustang and the Camaro, Luca’s informative takes are text-based rather than vocalised, and can be easily hurried along with a few taps of the Cross button. And, once a few more areas on the World Map have opened up and you’re ready to wander off the critical path, a yellow compass icon lets you know where to go next when you’re ready to return. It doesn’t flash or make a noise; there are no intrusive pop-ups to suggest you should be doing something different somewhere else. Instead, this virtual bookmark simply sits there quietly.
On the track, GT7 continues to fly in the face of modern design trends. Each race starts you at the back of the grid and asks you to work your way to the front; even in championship events, finishing first in the opening race doesn’t nudge you to the head of the pack for the next. Braking indicators and a racing line are turned on by default on the standard difficulty setting, but rather than combine the two it keeps them entirely separate: thick red lines across the tarmac gradually fade when you’ve dropped to the right speed to navigate a corner, while the yellow line is a simple, unchanging fixture. It’s a useful way to encourage you to remove the stabilisers gradually rather than all at once, and indeed you will benefit from doing so. Both steering and braking assists are pronounced enough that they don’t actually give you a competitive advantage so much as allow you to acclimatise to a new vehicle or track without spinning out or going off-road. During one of the Licence Tests you’re gently discouraged from keeping auto-brake engaged, and removing it makes an immediate difference, allowing you to brake later and giving you a much better chance of beating those gold trophy times.
While it never explicitly says so, the aim is clearly to reduce your dependence on these features. In a similar fashion, the Licence Tests steadily help refine your racing technique through bite-sized exercises: a typical set might have you negotiating a shallow turn, then a sharper one, then two in short order, and finally a longer stretch of track combining several. Likewise, the prerace Circuit Experience breaks a course up into individual sections, encouraging you to master each one before tackling a complete lap against the clock. It’s worth mentioning, too, that PS5’s SSD helps in this regard: the rapid restarts encourage you to replay tests and missions rather than moving on as soon as you get bronze.
All of which makes the game’s alwaysonline requirement especially disappointing. In a sim that’s approachable to its very core, it feels like a glaring misstep, a rare example of conformity in a game that otherwise seems keen to buck convention. And most egregiously of all, it ensures Luca’s café is temporarily closed for business should the servers (or your Internet connection) fail – and that simply will not do at all.
Tunic
Anxiety of influence is not something that seems to bother Tunic developer Andrew Shouldice. This game declares its inspirations up front with the image that, if we still lived in the days of such things, would surely be its box art: your vulpine protagonist, decked out in green, sword raised high, with a blue and red shield in the other hand. It’s a good thing they are a fox, in fact, or else you rather suspect Nintendo’s lawyers would have come knocking by now.
This is just a taste of the allusions to be found within. Tunic begins with your amnesic hero waking up on the beach of a mysterious island. Presented from an isometric perspective that makes heavy use of tilt-shift, and rendered with a certain clumpy physicality, it recalls the Switch remake of Link’s Awakening – though, given Shouldice’s work on Tunic predates the latter game’s announcement, this is surely coincidence. The same can’t be said of the quest it puts you on, to unite three parts of a magical relic. Nor of the way combat feels, as you lock on to enemies with a trigger, then alternate between sword slashes and a roll that, in the early going, feels more than a little sluggish. (Well, Link has never been the nimblest of heroes.)
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As homage, it’s done well enough. Each area and dungeon comes with its own minor gimmick, with out-of-reach chests positioned so that they stick in your memory for hours, until you’ve got the necessary equipment to return for them. There’s a good selection of items on offer, from bomb to hookshot, which drive navigation puzzles while also dramatically improving combat. None of them, though, can claim to be the most important pickup here. That title must go to the glowing pages found around the island, which reveal Tunic to be more than just a competent tribute act.
Out in the world, these pages are arcane objects, bright with knowledge, something to be hidden in an out-of-reach spot or stored behind glass. Once collected, though, some reverse alchemy occurs, as they’re transmuted into something more earthly: a sheet taken from the game’s own manual. This is a thing of beauty, reproduced down to the staples and coffee rings, with lavish maps and illustrations that invite you to zoom right in close until you can make out the individual halftone dots. Enough to make you yearn for a bygone age of boxed videogames, certainly, but this manual is more than an aesthetic appeal to nostalgia. Out of the way it presents its instructions, Tunic manages to squeeze in puzzles, a progression system, even plot twists. This is a remarkable magic trick, and one that sustains the game past its first ending and into – well, that would be telling.
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At the risk of breaking the magician’s code, it’s worth examining how this trick is pulled off. The first thing to know here is that the manual isn’t in English. The odd word or phrase aside, it’s written in the same pictographic language used by the island’s inhabitants. You’re left to decipher many of its tutorials and hints based on context; meanwhile, your eye is caught by familiar snippets of language for which you have none. Effigy? Siege engine? Inverted Ash? It’s tantalising.
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While the language barrier is used to withhold information, something else is working in your favour. Because, as those coffee stains suggest, you’re not the first pair of hands this manual has passed through. Most pages are marked with scratchy biro – an arrow pointing to a shortcut, a doodle that offers an extra clue to what those glyphs might mean, one spot of map circled with a crudeness that suggests excitement. Sometimes these annotations are as obscure as the foreign text, but once you learn to follow someone else’s logic, it can be just the nudge you needed.
This push and pull of knowledge is the heart of Tunic. It’s a game thick with secrets, many of them technically available the moment you first wake up on that beach but hidden away in some part of the manual you haven’t read yet. Remember that you’re getting this thing in instalments: one page, front and back. With most sections coming as a spread, that might mean a controller diagram that doesn’t include the face buttons or an overworld map missing its western hemisphere. Sometimes, the other half will be withheld for hours, providing powerful motivation to keep exploring.
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And yes, the whole thing is also pandering shamelessly to nostalgia. Memories of rented cartridges still burdened with the save files of strangers. Games borrowed from friends who have filled the manual’s memo page with their own scribbles. Imported games navigated with the scantest amount of Japanese comprehension. But all this serves a purpose other than sending us, Ratatouille style, back to a childhood spent cross-legged and wide-eyed in the light of cathode rays. It’s trying to capture what made those experiences exciting in the first place.
When Tunic gestures towards Zelda games of old, something it does with all the subtlety of an air traffic controller, it’s indicating an attempt to chip away the intervening decades and get back to the feeling of playing those games for the first time, when they still held what seemed like bottomless mystery. As in Inscryption’s game-within-a-game, that requires a return to a time when games could still be found objects, before online guides were within easy grasp. Playing before release, our own experience was not too dissimilar, and we’d advise trying to replicate this as best you can – Tunic’s secrets can be a little obtuse, but the game is more modest than, say, a FromSoftware outing, and it should be possible to plumb their depths without too much external assistance. Just RTFM, as they used to say. You’re sure to be rewarded. 8
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FOXY BOXING
Tunic is very much an exploration game with combat in it. In other words, you’re unlikely to be impressed the first time you get into a fight. Swipes with your stubby sword often fall short of the target, while the dodge roll is unresponsive enough to have us double-checking performance settings. Things start to improve when you acquire the shield, and get better from there, as your options open up. Special mention must go to the game’s customisation system, which turns out to function much like Hollow Knight’s Charms. There are some borderline gamebreaking combinations to be found here – which is of course all part of the fun. It stands to reason that the best part of combat would involve exploration of another kind.
Triangle Strategy
Dot. Dot. Dot. If you play a lot of Japanese games, you’ll be acquainted with their use of ellipses – JRPG favourite Xenogears is said to have almost 7,000 in its main story alone. However, rarely has that pregnant pause been quite so effectively (or frequently) deployed as in Square Enix’s tactical roleplayer. Every other line during the many dialogue exchanges can be accelerated, but those three dots, tapped out in a similar tempo to the speaking clock’s pips, refuse to be hurried. It’s annoying at first, but it’s a device whose value soon becomes clear. It helps you settle into the game’s unusually measured cadence, while encouraging you to take a moment to collect your thoughts: the decisions you make here, on and off the battlefield, shouldn’t be rushed. That thinking time might make a big difference.
If you downloaded the eShop demos, you will already know that the balance between strategy and story is weighted towards the latter – this isn’t quite 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim in that regard, but it’s fair to say if you’re here for the grid-based skirmishes you’ll need to be patient. Good job, then, that the fluctuating tensions between the three territories that compose the continent of Norzelia make an absorbing backdrop. There’s more than a hint of Game Of Thrones in the political machinations that splinter the alliance between the kingdom of Glenbrook (where your adventure, as protagonist Lord Serenoa of House Wolffort, begins), the duchy of Aesfrost and the holy state of Hyzante – and in its pitiless treatment of the wider cast. Characters you assume will play key roles are suddenly, brutally dispatched, and while there’s no permadeath (units cut down on the battlefield will return for the next encounter), it isn’t giving too much away to say not all allies will still be by your side 40 hours later.
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BOOT CAMP
Between the battle, exploration and dialogue phases, you spend most of your time in your party’s encampment. Here you can talk to allies and upgrade them, using items to buff individual stats and unlock new abilities. For some items you’ll need more than money: each battle awards kudos points for certain feats, such as attacking from safe zones, backstabbing enemies, or performing followup attacks (achieved by flanking an enemy on both sides). But the bulk of your time here will be spent on mock mental battles to beef up your squad. These are hardly optional – without completing them you’ll leave yourself woefully underprepared and underlevelled for the fights to come – but they’re an enjoyable way to experiment with new tactics away from the story.
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That title, then, refers not to a Fire Emblem-style weapon triangle, but three guiding principles, or convictions – Liberty, Morality and Utility – that are at the heart of the choices you make. These parameters, at least for your first playthrough, are invisible: a pop-up will confirm that Serenoa’s convictions have been strengthened, but you won’t know the precise effect. It’s a surprising move, perhaps, but a smart one: rather than show its working and, consciously or otherwise, lead you towards a particular path, it forces you to go with your gut. Whether it’s an optional dialogue exchange or one of the bigger decisions, the choices don’t always fall neatly under those categories (Utility feels the most cleanly defined of the three). But as you mull over the potential repercussions of your words and actions, you can almost hear that trio of taps accompanying your thoughts.
Every so often, you’ll encounter a decision that directly involves the input of Serenoa’s most trusted allies, determining the path you take. Here, thoroughness is a virtue: the more carefully you’ve explored and the more optional conversations you’ve engaged in, the greater the chance you have of winning over any doubters to your chosen cause. These are not straightforward, binary choices, either. Take, for example, an early choice to ally with the scheming leader of one of Glenbrook’s high houses: most of your allies doubt his motives, but even if he plans to sell you out to Aesfrost’s callous archduke Gustadolph, it may be worth a temporary alliance to bolster your numbers (or to keep your enemies closer). You’ll be told how likely each member of your inner circle is to be swayed, but due diligence may unlock additional dialogue options that make your arguments more convincing. Even when you’re confident of the outcome, there’s a sense of tension when they all place their counters on the Scales Of Conviction, the weighted side dramatically tilting down and bursting into flame.
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Whichever route you choose invariably leads to battle. Ostensibly, the conflicting ideologies of the territories put them at odds, but this war really comes down to who controls Norzelia’s most valuable resource: salt. Either way, the forces of Hyzante and Aesfrost (and any mercenaries in their employ) represent a stern challenge on these multi-tiered battlefields, which in most cases are familiar locations repurposed into combat arenas – from bathhouses to villages, rocky hillsides to castle grounds. It’s a smart trick that, along with all that narrative groundwork, makes each clash feel more meaningful. Many have gimmicks or specific completion requirements, too. Routing the enemy is usually enough, but you may need to escort NPCs or protect a specific party member. A nautical battle forces you to consider when to use the zipline to ferry your units between ships. And you need to use carts to negotiate Norzelia’s mines, letting you cover more ground as you race to defuse Aesfrosti explosives.
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The characters, however, are what make it sing. Rather than being limited to familiar archetypes, each has unique abilities that makes them valuable in certain situations – and leads to some thrilling synergies besides. The stoic Erador draws attention away from frail allies, his shield slam capable of knocking enemy units off their perch for fall damage. Blacksmith Jens can build ladders – handy for getting retreating units to relative safety, or offering an elevated position for veteran bowman Archibald to target distant foes. Wheedling Merchant Lionel can tempt enemy units into defecting, gaining interest on coins left behind by the fallen, while shamaness Ezana harnesses the elements, conjuring rainstorms to form large puddles, which can in turn be electrified to stun clusters of enemies. But it’s more than utility that makes them valuable. True, the relentless earnestness of the script may have you agreeing with Serenoa’s comment during a sparring session with his best friend: “Ah, enough sentimentality. Raise your spear so I can knock it down!” But it’s hard to deny that Square’s most effective stratagem is the time it takes to invest you in the fate of this war-stricken continent, and all who live there… 8
Destiny 2: The Witch Queen
Bungie’s shooter has long had identity issues. Is it a competitive FPS? An MMORPG? A seasonal grind or a serialised science-fantasy saga? Fortunately, The Witch Queen, Destiny 2’s fourth major expansion, knows exactly what it wants to be. This is a focused, narrative-driven romp designed to get the story back on track, delivered through a satisfying campaign featuring some of Destiny’s best environments and combat.
The Witch Queen gathers up the plot threads laid down over the past two years. The Cabal and the Fallen, once expendable foes, have major factions fighting alongside humanity, preparing for war against a fleet of mysterious pyramid-shaped ships. Meanwhile, the Hive trickster goddess Savathûn has been sneaking around in human disguise, stirring up drama. Now she’s hatched her plan to steal the Light, the proper-nouned cosmic magic that allows Guardians to respawn endlessly – so long as their plot armour holds out, at any rate.
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It’s a clear villain, a clear problem, and a fine excuse to take players on a solid ten to 12 hours of story questing through a new environment featuring a trio of new Hive enemy archetypes. These alien versions of the Titan, Hunter and Warlock classes have similar abilities to players – which includes respawning, unless they’re permanently put down with a posthumous finisher.
While the new enemies aren’t as menacing as the story makes them out to be, their relative tankiness makes them fun targets for an arsenal of new weapons, each lovingly modelled and with unique audio. One standout is the Grand Overture: available to all at the start of the current season, it’s billed as an Exotic heavy machine gun, firing armour-piercing slugs at a rate of around one a second, each hit charging up a spectacular missile-barrage alternate fire. It’s pure overkill, but then Destiny has always been good at selling a power fantasy.
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THE SPEAKERS
Destiny 2 has always walked a fine line between engrossing science fiction and high camp in its scripts. This chapter leans hard on the melodrama, and many of its plot beats would fall flat without some sterling vocal performances. While she gets surprisingly few scenes, voiceover veteran Debra Wilson delivers Savathûn’s soliloquies with gleeful relish. Ian James Corlett, the first English voice of Dragon Ball Z’s Goku, gets a major role as Fynch, a rogue Ghost with anxiety issues providing comic relief and exposition in similar measures throughout. Surprisingly, there’s no voice credit for whoever was cast as the excellent Immaru, Savathûn’s own Ghost, who growls orders to the Lucent Hive with a tone that’s equal parts drill sergeant and doting father.
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The campaign missions combine sequences of cutting through hordes of fodder with duels against more capable enemies in and around exquisite architecture. Previously the domain of endgame content, there’s a smattering of puzzles during missions, and you need to solve several while under fire – a welcome change from the usual approach of fighting enemy waves in an arena while whittling down a boss’s health bar. Expect more platforming than in previous expansions, too, since there are plenty of high towers and caves to navigate.
While the swampy hinterlands of the new zone are nondescript, Savathûn’s gothic mega-castle is a gorgeous study in misinterpreted human aesthetics. The Gigeresque Hive get a regal makeover, swapping black chitin for ivory. Dark tunnels are now hedgerows rich with blood-red roses, cobwebs and thorned roots spilling out over the borders. Better yet are what look like stainedglass windows that are revealed to be gigantic eyes. This is what happens when aliens get into gothic poetry.
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The expansion also delves deeper into the pyramid ships, only glimpsed in the previous expansions. We get to poke around one here and it’s delightfully strange, containing little more than abstract geometry in pearlescent hues. Aside from ominous statues, nothing seems designed for humanoid hands, raising questions to be answered later. In the meantime, it plays host to fierce battles, thanks to the return of difficulty settings.
Each major story quest can be tackled in Legendary mode, which doubles the rewards while capping player Power, adding extra enemies and tricky combat modifiers to the mix. Some changes feel arbitrary (disabling the radar hampers accessibility for some) but there’s clear intent behind the new enemy placements. As a result, Legendary offers some spicy encounters, made deadlier by the exploding white moths that emerge from some of the new Light-empowered Hive. While tuned for co-op, Legendary can – in theory – be beaten solo, assuming you have a sufficiently robust character build. But it’s a leap so pronounced, it feels like Bungie skipped a more moderate setting on the way.
Sadly, the gratifying friction of Legendary mode only applies to the instanced campaign missions, making the open-world exploration around Savathûn’s Throne World feel toothless. Unless, that is, you stumble into an unmarked cave that just happens to contain highlevel enemies – some of which necessitate grinding your Power stat if you’re to even put a dent in them.
Still, there’s plenty to grind on, not least with the new season taking players into psionic dream realms. There’s also a new crafting system that allows assembly of weapons with custom stat and perk sets, assuming you can farm the resources using specially marked weapon drops. This is how you’ll acquire the new Glaive weapons. These bladed melee spears with energy cannon and shield modes are reminiscent of Stargate SG-1’s Goa’uld staves – and though they feel idiosyncratic at first, after a little practice they’re satisfying to wield.
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Despite those few awkward seams where MMORPG meets FPS, then, this is a worthwhile continuation of Bungie’s space opera, telling a story featuring enough twists and teases to keep things rolling until the next expansion, Lightfall. For players who have been here since the beginning, this is prime red meat. Yet there’s an elephant in the room to address: the removal of Destiny 2’s first major expansion, Forsaken. Previously, Bungie had also ‘vaulted’ the game’s original Red War campaign and two minor DLC chapters. That’s around 50 hours of story content replaced with a tutorial segment rehashed from the original game. It’s frustrating, since The Witch Queen finds Destiny 2 firing on all cylinders. What should be an easy recommendation is instead laden with provisos: this is a good expansion, a solid foundation for the next year of updates, and a lousy place for newcomers to start. 7
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Kirby And The Forgotten Land
HAL Laboratory’s mascot hits the big 3-0 this year, and to celebrate his maker has finally given him permission to enter the third dimension. Has any other established videogame protagonist had to wait quite so long? HAL gave Kirby his first glimpse of a 3D world in 2000’s Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, but he was locked to a single plane. And there he has remained ever since – tasting stereoscopic depth with two 3DS entries, but denied the freedom to roam. Discounting downloadable spinoff Kirby’s Blowout Blast (an expanded version of a minigame from Planet Robobot), this is, to all intents and purposes, the 3D platformer debut of the medium’s most gluttonous hero. Little wonder, then, that his appetite is voracious. Within minutes of his arrival at the forgotten land of the title he attempts to eat a car – and that is merely an appetiser.
Instantly, we see it’s too big. Kirby’s exterior warps as he attempts to swallow it (in much the same way as you can trace the outline of a large meal in a snake’s belly) and he ends up stretched taut across its roof and and bonnet. HAL instinctively understands that there is plenty of is plenty of comic mileage in this, not least in the incongruous combination of cartoon hero and pseudo-realistic objects. Kirby variously becomes a walking lightbulb and a sentient water balloon, rolls down ramps as a length of pipe, and spits cans as an ambulatory vending machine. Each tends to have a specific use – all you can do with a set of storage lockers is pull them free from their moorings – but even if it’s obvious where you have to place a set of steps, it’s amusing to see Kirby waddling around awkwardly, his mouth stretched long and thin, giving him an expression that suggests he’s reconsidering the choices that brought him here.
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In practice, it’s not wildly different from Super Mario Odyssey’s Cappy (which was itself indebted to Kirby’s malleability), albeit without the same transformative effect on its hero’s basic moveset. Some forms reveal the way forward (and often allow access to secret areas), while others are designed for set-pieces. The main difference is that there’s an element of slapstick violence in the way they’re used here. A racetrack is littered with enemies for you to plough through en route to the chequered flag, that familiar hit-pause selling the impact. Another enemy is positioned below a high ledge, allowing you to leap off in Kirby’s cone form, with the sharp end pointed downwards. As a circular fan, you can approach a seal, obliviously juggling a bomb on its nose, before obliterating it with a blast of air.
That applies equally to Kirby’s more traditional forms. A cute penguin in a woolly hat is just asking to be frozen in a block of ice and booted down a steep ramp to take out a trio of fluffy fox cubs at the bottom, while his Needle ability transforms him into a Kirby Katamari, enemies pinned to his spines before being flung off as he rolls to a halt. Indeed, Kirby’s destructive impulses have such a devastating effect on his environment (one level involves him inserting various forms into similarly shaped holes to pull down walls) that you wonder if this colourful postapocalypse is in the state it is thanks to a prior, unremembered visit. (That would, after all, explain why it’s called The Forgotten Land.)
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ADMIT DEE FEAT
The game’s story involves Kirby rescuing Waddle Dees, who have been kidnapped en masse by a group of antagonists known as The Beast Pack. You’ll retrieve a handful by following the critical path to the end of a stage, but getting them all requires side missions to be completed, while unlocking an area’s boss requires picking up more than the bare minimum. The Waddle Dees you’ve saved populate a cheerful village hub, opening up new facilities that allow you to take temporary buffs or health items into a stage, or to spend the coins you’ve earned to amass a collection of capsule toys. There’s the usual colosseum besides, and a handful of simplistic minigames of the playonce-and-never-again variety.
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Though HAL briefly drops the camera to a worm’s-eye view to emphasise scale when Kirby lands in a level, this place is no open-world sprawl. It’s larger in scope than his previous adventures, but still split into snack-sized segments – a combination of big and small that fits Switch to a T. It’s a structure that allows HAL to introduce ideas and then move briskly on: there are flying sections, on-rails sequences, time trials, puzzles and races against the clock. The world design similarly adopts an anything-goes approach, with conventional biomes made to feel fresh once more. Your archetypal winter world begins with Dickensian streets, before moving into an abandoned metro station, and then a stage that miraculously gets away with combining wind and slippery ice. A desert features a sun-kissed villa surrounded by toxic pools, but also a behind-the-scenes staff area of a sandswept mall. Put it this way: we didn’t imagine we’d be reminded of Spec Ops: The Line while playing a Kirby game – nor, in one late-game moment, Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia.
Throughout it all,...
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Edge Uk (Digital) - 1 Issue, May 2022