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78 Articles

There’s a good reason why video games are so obsessed with body horror

CLARISSE LOUGHREY Clarisse Loughrey is the chief film critic for The Independent and co-host of the Fade to Black podcast. Squelching flesh. Protruding bones. The realm of body horror – filled with aberrant depictions of human flesh that make us fear our own physical forms – has always been somewhat over-represented in gaming. Think of every series that, in some respect, deals with plagues and mutations. It’s an exhaustive list: Fallout, BioShock, Bloodborne, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Morrowind, Dark Souls, Borderlands, The Evil Within, Half-Life, Outlast. While playing Elden Ring, you may well come face to face with Godrick the Grafted, a pulpy tapestry of soldiers’ limbs, with a mighty dragon’s head emerging from his left side. In Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, you control Ethan Winters as he’s plunged into a full…

There’s a good reason why video games are so obsessed with body horror

There’s a good reason why video games are so obsessed with body horror

CLARISSE LOUGHREY Clarisse Loughrey is the chief film critic for The Independent and co-host of the Fade to Black podcast. Squelching flesh. Protruding bones. The realm of body horror – filled with aberrant depictions of human flesh that make us fear our own physical forms – has always been somewhat over-represented in gaming. Think of every series that, in some respect, deals with plagues and mutations. It’s an exhaustive list: Fallout, BioShock, Bloodborne, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Morrowind, Dark Souls, Borderlands, The Evil Within, Half-Life, Outlast. While playing Elden Ring, you may well come face to face with Godrick the Grafted, a pulpy tapestry of soldiers’ limbs, with a mighty dragon’s head emerging from his left side. In Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, you control Ethan Winters as he’s plunged into…

There’s a good reason why video games are so obsessed with body horror

What was the first scary game you ever played? For me, it was arguably Quake. Its predecessor, DOOM, had its fair share of jolting shocks – mostly when, say, a Cacodemon popped out from around a corner – but Quake was something entirely different. The full-blooded shooting action was matched with long stretches of quiet anticipation. You’d frequently hear the distant hiss of a Scrag before its pallid body floated into view. A zombie attack in a murky sewer would be preceded by spine-jangling groans and tortured sighs. Played through headphones, it could be a truly intense experience. Quake’s sheer, suspenseful brilliance is all the more remarkable given its tortuous development. Early on, the project was conceived as a very different sort of action game, with RPG elements and third-person melee…

What was the first scary game you ever played? For me, it was arguably Quake. Its predecessor, DOOM, had its fair share of jolting shocks – mostly when, say, a Cacodemon popped out from around a corner – but Quake was something entirely different. The full-blooded shooting action was matched with long stretches of quiet anticipation. You’d frequently hear the distant hiss of a Scrag before its pallid body floated into view. A zombie attack in a murky sewer would be preceded by spine-jangling groans and tortured sighs. Played through headphones, it could be a truly intense experience. Quake’s sheer, suspenseful brilliance is all the more remarkable given its tortuous development. Early on, the project was conceived as a very different sort of action game, with RPG elements and third-person…

THE DEVILS IN THE DETAIL

TIf you want a sign of just how popular Supermassive’s Dark Pictures Anthology has become, look no further than publisher Bandai Namco’s stand at August’s Gamescom expo in Cologne. Each day, hundreds of gamers lined up outside the firm’s gigantic stand, all waiting to get their hands on the latest instalment, The Devil In Me. Having worked our way inside the inky-black play area, Wireframe finally got to see what all the excitement was about for ourselves. For The Devil In Me, Supermassive has gone for a rather different approach from the previous three entries in the series: where the previous game, House of Ashes, was essentially a mix of monster flick and war film, this one’s more in the mould of a Saw movie, with its mysterious villain having lured…

THE DEVILS IN THE DETAIL

THE DEVILS IN THE DETAIL

TIf you want a sign of just how popular Supermassive’s Dark Pictures Anthology has become, look no further than publisher Bandai Namco’s stand at August’s Gamescom expo in Cologne. Each day, hundreds of gamers lined up outside the firm’s gigantic stand, all waiting to get their hands on the latest instalment, The Devil In Me. Having worked our way inside the inky-black play area, Wireframe finally got to see what all the excitement was about for ourselves. For The Devil In Me, Supermassive has gone for a rather different approach from the previous three entries in the series: where the previous game, House of Ashes, was essentially a mix of monster flick and war film, this one’s more in the mould of a Saw movie, with its mysterious villain having…

THE DEVILS IN THE DETAIL

Mutant and proud

Info GENRE FPS, horror FORMAT PC/PS5/XB S/X DEVELOPER Pet Project Games PUBLISHER 3D Realms RELEASE Q4 2022 SOCIAL @RipoutGame Preventing disaster in the near-future universe of Ripout is not an option. Because it’s already arrived. Instead, the main objective – as made evident in our short hand-son demo – is to simply get in and get out while trying to survive. That way, you stand a chance of ridding whatever mutant menace plagues the space freighter you’re currently docked with, all while gaining enough loot and resources to do a better job the next time around. It’s clear that for its debut release, Pet Project Games aims to craft a different style of online co-op horror FPS, intended to balance action and scares in equal measure, where playing stealthily can…

Mutant and proud

Mutant and proud

Info GENRE FPS, horror FORMAT PC/PS5/XB S/X DEVELOPER Pet Project Games PUBLISHER 3D Realms RELEASE Q4 2022 SOCIAL @RipoutGame Preventing disaster in the near-future universe of Ripout is not an option. Because it’s already arrived. Instead, the main objective – as made evident in our short hand-son demo – is to simply get in and get out while trying to survive. That way, you stand a chance of ridding whatever mutant menace plagues the space freighter you’re currently docked with, all while gaining enough loot and resources to do a better job the next time around. It’s clear that for its debut release, Pet Project Games aims to craft a different style of online co-op horror FPS, intended to balance action and scares in equal measure, where playing stealthily can offer just as much benefit as going loud. It’s this interesting blend that first…

Mutant and proud

Horrors beyond your comprehension

Info GENRE Squishy survival strategy city builder FORMAT PC DEVELOPER Covenant.dev PUBLISHER Team17 PRICE TBC 2023 SOCIAL @GordTheGame Squishy” is a word that game director and Covenant.dev boss Stan Just uses a lot when describing Gord, his fledgling studio’s upcoming survival-strategy opus. But then again, squishy is perfectly apt for a dark fantasy world positively heaving with slimy, hideous creatures: there’s Ardavan, a bloated, pustule-covered Horror that is one of nine major threats in the game. “He has mosquitoes inside those [pustules],” Just says, grinning mischievously. ”He vomits those mosquitoes at your tribe. It’s kind of disgusting.” Then there are smaller critters, such as slug-like enemies capable of burrowing underground and emerging in the most inconvenient places, or bulbous, froggy lifeforms called Foulspawn that lay poisonous eggs and ooze blood once vanquished. It’s your job to create a safe haven from all this hideousness by…

Horrors beyond your comprehension

Horrors beyond your comprehension

Info GENRE Squishy survival strategy city builder FORMAT PC DEVELOPER Covenant.dev PUBLISHER Team17 PRICE TBC 2023 SOCIAL @GordTheGame Squishy” is a word that game director and Covenant.dev boss Stan Just uses a lot when describing Gord, his fledgling studio’s upcoming survival-strategy opus. But then again, squishy is perfectly apt for a dark fantasy world positively heaving with slimy, hideous creatures: there’s Ardavan, a bloated, pustule-covered Horror that is one of nine major threats in the game. “He has mosquitoes inside those [pustules],” Just says, grinning mischievously. ”He vomits those mosquitoes at your tribe. It’s kind of disgusting.” Then there are smaller critters, such as slug-like enemies capable of burrowing underground and emerging in the most inconvenient places, or bulbous, froggy lifeforms called Foulspawn that lay poisonous eggs and ooze blood…

Horrors beyond your comprehension

That was the month that was

01. Tears of joy Mid-September’s surprise Nintendo Direct was chock full of interesting announcements: Fire Emblem Engage being shown officially, the return of Radiant Silvergun, and yet another Kirby game reveal. Almost all of those titles were overshadowed, however, by the sequel to Breath of the Wild finally getting a title: Tears of the Kingdom. The accompanying trailer offered plenty of teases for what it could mean for Link’s next adventure, too. It was also impossible to ignore the Skyward Sword vibes as Link leaped off a floating city and down to the kingdom below. No signs of any Loftwings so far, though. 02. Free to Sim In between countless expansion packs that have whisked players off everywhere from high school, the jungle, and even Star Wars’ planet Batuu, The Sims 4 is…

That was the month that was

That was the month that was

01. Tears of joy Mid-September’s surprise Nintendo Direct was chock full of interesting announcements: Fire Emblem Engage being shown officially, the return of Radiant Silvergun, and yet another Kirby game reveal. Almost all of those titles were overshadowed, however, by the sequel to Breath of the Wild finally getting a title: Tears of the Kingdom. The accompanying trailer offered plenty of teases for what it could mean for Link’s next adventure, too. It was also impossible to ignore the Skyward Sword vibes as Link leaped off a floating city and down to the kingdom below. No signs of any Loftwings so far, though. 02. Free to Sim In between countless expansion packs that have whisked players off everywhere from high school, the jungle, and even Star Wars’ planet Batuu, The…

That was the month that was

Jump scares and creeping tension

MR BIFFO Mr Biffo, better known as Paul Rose, was the creator of the legendary Digitiser. Check him out on wfmag.cc/digitiser “I was so nauseous playing Resident Evil VII in VR that I focused on trying not to barf” Have I ever been scared by a game? It’s hard to say. Alien: Isolation stressed me out, but I can’t say I was ever scared by it. I mostly just got wound up that I appeared to have wasted money on a hide-under-the-desks simulator. I was worried about the fate of Joel in The Last of Us, to the point I gasped out loud when (spoilers) he fell off that balcony in the hospital. However, I can’t even think of a moment when I might’ve jumped, even with all those lurking fungus people. Heck,…

Jump scares and creeping tension

Jump scares and creeping tension

MR BIFFO Mr Biffo, better known as Paul Rose, was the creator of the legendary Digitiser. Check him out on wfmag.cc/digitiser “I was so nauseous playing Resident Evil VII in VR that I focused on trying not to barf” Have I ever been scared by a game? It’s hard to say. Alien: Isolation stressed me out, but I can’t say I was ever scared by it. I mostly just got wound up that I appeared to have wasted money on a hide-under-the-desks simulator. I was worried about the fate of Joel in The Last of Us, to the point I gasped out loud when (spoilers) he fell off that balcony in the hospital. However, I can’t even think of a moment when I might’ve jumped, even with all those lurking fungus people.…

Jump scares and creeping tension

ODDADA This compact little offering may look like a puzzle game, but it’s actually more of a musical sandbox: placing various objects on an isometric landscape will cause different notes and melodies to play. Think of it as a kind of whimsical synthesiser where you make new songs by placing tiny houses on blocky hillsides. It’s not challenging, necessarily, but it sure sounds relaxing to us. The Time I Have Left Set in a futuristic, underground city, The Time I Have Left casts you as the luckless heroine Aline, on the run from a deadly phenomenon called The Miasma. The game’s described as a “timedriven escape adventure”, and it looks as though bouts of exploration and 3D platforming will be joined by turn-based combat and other RPG elements. Then there’s the whole look…

ODDADA This compact little offering may look like a puzzle game, but it’s actually more of a musical sandbox: placing various objects on an isometric landscape will cause different notes and melodies to play. Think of it as a kind of whimsical synthesiser where you make new songs by placing tiny houses on blocky hillsides. It’s not challenging, necessarily, but it sure sounds relaxing to us. The Time I Have Left Set in a futuristic, underground city, The Time I Have Left casts you as the luckless heroine Aline, on the run from a deadly phenomenon called The Miasma. The game’s described as a “timedriven escape adventure”, and it looks as though bouts of exploration and 3D platforming will be joined by turn-based combat and other RPG elements. Then there’s…

A WORLD OF HORROR THE HISTORY OF DEAD SPACE

From the first moment that a pair of disembodied eyes explored the spooky rooms of Atari’s Haunted House, game designers have sought to frighten, intimidate, and downright terrify gamers. That most primal of emotions, fear, has been a frequently tapped well throughout gaming history, and its origins, as with all horror, are the campfire ghost tales that people tell each other to while away the cool nights. The basis of all these tales is usually an oft-used core idea or concept: a dilapidated haunted house, a mutilated hitchhiker, a 1000-year-old bloodsucking vampire. The Dead Space series, forged within the walls of EA Redwood Shores in the mid-Noughties, starts the same way. “Unquestionably, Glen [Schofield] was the whole raison d’etre for Dead Space,” begins producer Chuck Beaver. “If it wasn’t for Glen,…

A WORLD OF HORROR THE HISTORY OF DEAD SPACE

A WORLD OF HORROR THE HISTORY OF DEAD SPACE

From the first moment that a pair of disembodied eyes explored the spooky rooms of Atari’s Haunted House, game designers have sought to frighten, intimidate, and downright terrify gamers. That most primal of emotions, fear, has been a frequently tapped well throughout gaming history, and its origins, as with all horror, are the campfire ghost tales that people tell each other to while away the cool nights. The basis of all these tales is usually an oft-used core idea or concept: a dilapidated haunted house, a mutilated hitchhiker, a 1000-year-old bloodsucking vampire. The Dead Space series, forged within the walls of EA Redwood Shores in the mid-Noughties, starts the same way. “Unquestionably, Glen [Schofield] was the whole raison d’etre for Dead Space,” begins producer Chuck Beaver. “If it wasn’t for…

A WORLD OF HORROR THE HISTORY OF DEAD SPACE

A Little to the Left

With a pastel colour palette and serene sound effects, it’s hard not to be charmed by A Little to the Left’s purposeful attempt to make puzzles relaxing. The two-person Max Inferno team recognise that, while the sight of messy objects is nightmarish, straightening them up is equal parts gratifying. “Tidying up is satisfying because it’s the other half of making a good mess,” says Annie Macmillan, the studio co-founder handling art and animation. “We started by gathering a list of objects that we would like to work with, and then thought about their unique qualities and started to imagine an organising principal using those inherent characteristics.” A Little to the Left features well over 75 logic puzzles to stack, organise, and sort through, which should make it an ideal way for Marie…

A Little to the Left

CREEPING DOWN THE CORRIDOR

Not before or since has there been a video game demo more analysed, dissected, and pored over than Hideo Kojima’s P.T. Short for “Playable Teaser”, the seemingly infinite corridor players must repeatedly navigate more than delivered on this eponymous promise, using an endless loop structure (alongside a plethora of other effective shock tactics) to give players a taste of something more expansive, intended to come later. Of course, Kojima’s unceremonious break away from Konami meant it never did. Seven years on, and Silent Hills is still nowhere to be found, merely leaving us to wonder what potentially could have been. And yet it’s precisely because of P.T.’s standalone nature that it’s garnered such a legendary status among horror fans. The demo’s pared-back, defenceless, and downright unsettling approach to scares and abstract…

CREEPING DOWN THE CORRIDOR

A Little to the Left

With a pastel colour palette and serene sound effects, it’s hard not to be charmed by A Little to the Left’s purposeful attempt to make puzzles relaxing. The two-person Max Inferno team recognise that, while the sight of messy objects is nightmarish, straightening them up is equal parts gratifying. “Tidying up is satisfying because it’s the other half of making a good mess,” says Annie Macmillan, the studio co-founder handling art and animation. “We started by gathering a list of objects that we would like to work with, and then thought about their unique qualities and started to imagine an organising principal using those inherent characteristics.” A Little to the Left features well over 75 logic puzzles to stack, organise, and sort through, which should make it an ideal way…

A Little to the Left

How to monetise your bad games

KIM JUSTICE Kim Justice is a YouTuber, streamer, and writer who specialises in the world of retrogaming. If she isn’t making lengthy documentary videos about old games and companies, she’s probably chatting and mouthing off about them live to a dedicated handful of people. It’s always nice to buy into the illusion that no one would actually set out to make and sell a bad game – that every project starts with the best intentions. Of course, these days, we could easily point to the sewer of effluent that seeps out onto Steam and flies in the face of that – the achievement farmers, the crypto-miners, the titles that aren’t just bad but potentially even malicious. Faced with all of this, my mind tends to drift back to something from nearly 40…

How to monetise your bad games

The principles of game design

Howard is a video game pioneer who authored several of Atari’s most famous and infamous titles. His book, Once Upon Atari: How I Made History by Killing an Industry, is out now. onceuponatari.com The field of streaming video is starting to coalesce and narrow after an intense and crazy scramble, with virtually everyone joining the fray. This is a familiar sequence with any hot technology innovation. It starts as a trickle, soon becomes a flood, and eventually evolves into a new irrigation system. This is the cavalcade of consequences. The flood part of this transition is very exciting. That’s the feeding frenzy! I remember sitting in a hot desert in the middle of a sandstorm years ago. I was witnessing an immense effort to launch a new major diner at the feeding…

The principles of game design

CREEPING DOWN THE CORRIDOR

Not before or since has there been a video game demo more analysed, dissected, and pored over than Hideo Kojima’s P.T. Short for “Playable Teaser”, the seemingly infinite corridor players must repeatedly navigate more than delivered on this eponymous promise, using an endless loop structure (alongside a plethora of other effective shock tactics) to give players a taste of something more expansive, intended to come later. Of course, Kojima’s unceremonious break away from Konami meant it never did. Seven years on, and Silent Hills is still nowhere to be found, merely leaving us to wonder what potentially could have been. And yet it’s precisely because of P.T.’s standalone nature that it’s garnered such a legendary status among horror fans. The demo’s pared-back, defenceless, and downright unsettling approach to scares and…

CREEPING DOWN THE CORRIDOR

Tropes vs fiction in video games

Antony is Wireframe’s writing and narrative design columnist. He’s also a videogame storyteller currently at FISHLABS, and you can find his work on default.games or @antony_de_fault on Twitter. When we talk about a trope, what we mean is a common element which may recur from story to story. These elements can be of any conceptual ‘size’, ranging from the expansive ‘chosen one’ archetype, which may dominate an entire story, all the way down to some tiny sub-scene moment, like how a villain might face their chair away from a hero at first, then at the right moment swivel dramatically to emphasise their menace. The point is that these tropes are recognisably a pattern in storytelling, occurring more than once. BUILDING BLOCKS In many ways, tropes are the language of storytelling. Once an element…

Tropes vs fiction in video games

How to monetise your bad games

KIM JUSTICE Kim Justice is a YouTuber, streamer, and writer who specialises in the world of retrogaming. If she isn’t making lengthy documentary videos about old games and companies, she’s probably chatting and mouthing off about them live to a dedicated handful of people. It’s always nice to buy into the illusion that no one would actually set out to make and sell a bad game – that every project starts with the best intentions. Of course, these days, we could easily point to the sewer of effluent that seeps out onto Steam and flies in the face of that – the achievement farmers, the crypto-miners, the titles that aren’t just bad but potentially even malicious. Faced with all of this, my mind tends to drift back to something from…

How to monetise your bad games

Recreate P.T.’s horror features in Unreal Engine 5

An avid developer at The Multiplayer Group with a strong passion for education, Ryan Shah moonlights as KITATUS – an education content creator for all things game development. It’s Halloween season and there’s something behind you… or is there? Here, we’re going to look at bringing some spooks into our Unreal projects by creating a ghostly shadow that follows you, an ethereal spirit that’s there one minute and gone the next, and a spooky telephone that reacts when the player interacts with it multiple times. There’s a lot of ground to cover, so let’s dive right in. To begin, let’s create a ghostly shadow that follows you. You’ll see a shadow cast from a mysterious figure behind you, but if you turn around and look… there’ll be nothing there. We’ll be using…

Recreate P.T.’s horror features in Unreal Engine 5

The principles of game design

Howard is a video game pioneer who authored several of Atari’s most famous and infamous titles. His book, Once Upon Atari: How I Made History by Killing an Industry, is out now. onceuponatari.com The field of streaming video is starting to coalesce and narrow after an intense and crazy scramble, with virtually everyone joining the fray. This is a familiar sequence with any hot technology innovation. It starts as a trickle, soon becomes a flood, and eventually evolves into a new irrigation system. This is the cavalcade of consequences. The flood part of this transition is very exciting. That’s the feeding frenzy! I remember sitting in a hot desert in the middle of a sandstorm years ago. I was witnessing an immense effort to launch a new major diner at…

The principles of game design

Recreate Elite’s iconic opening title screen

For many gamers, Elite (and more recently Elite Dangerous) needs little introduction. For those who are unaware, though, Elite was a pioneering space trading sim released in 1984 by Acornsoft for BBC B and Electron computers. Elite featured 3D wireframe graphics and enabled players to command a variety of spaceships and travel across thousands of star systems. If you want to play an emulated version of the BBC game, you can find an online version at bbcmicro.co.uk. For this sample, we’re going to remake the title screen from the BBC B version, which features a spinning wireframe Cobra Mk III ship. We’re using Pygame Zero and some pretty nuts and bolts calculations to create the wireframe ship without a 3D library. Some of the maths may seem complicated, but it’s all…

Recreate Elite’s iconic opening title screen

Tropes vs fiction in video games

Antony is Wireframe’s writing and narrative design columnist. He’s also a videogame storyteller currently at FISHLABS, and you can find his work on default.games or @antony_de_fault on Twitter. When we talk about a trope, what we mean is a common element which may recur from story to story. These elements can be of any conceptual ‘size’, ranging from the expansive ‘chosen one’ archetype, which may dominate an entire story, all the way down to some tiny sub-scene moment, like how a villain might face their chair away from a hero at first, then at the right moment swivel dramatically to emphasise their menace. The point is that these tropes are recognisably a pattern in storytelling, occurring more than once. BUILDING BLOCKS In many ways, tropes are the language of storytelling.…

Tropes vs fiction in video games

Fear & loathing at gamescom 2022

Everyone warned us about the crowds. Nobody bothered to tell us about the heat. It was an unseasonably spicy 34°C as Wireframe arrived in Cologne for Gamescom 2022 back in August, and even a friendly policeman commented on just how freakishly sweaty the place was. “I’ve never known anything like it, and I’ve lived in Germany all my life,” he said, as we crossed a road in search of shade, any shade at all. “It’s not the weather for working; we should be sitting on a beach somewhere.” Fortunately, the convention centre that hosts Gamescom – that’s the Koelnmesse to you – had air-con, so the situation was decidedly less sweaty once we made our way indoors. Which is just as well, because Gamescom really is gigantic: spread across eleven halls,…

Fear & loathing at gamescom 2022

Recreate P.T.’s horror features in Unreal Engine 5

An avid developer at The Multiplayer Group with a strong passion for education, Ryan Shah moonlights as KITATUS – an education content creator for all things game development. It’s Halloween season and there’s something behind you… or is there? Here, we’re going to look at bringing some spooks into our Unreal projects by creating a ghostly shadow that follows you, an ethereal spirit that’s there one minute and gone the next, and a spooky telephone that reacts when the player interacts with it multiple times. There’s a lot of ground to cover, so let’s dive right in. To begin, let’s create a ghostly shadow that follows you. You’ll see a shadow cast from a mysterious figure behind you, but if you turn around and look… there’ll be nothing there. We’ll…

Recreate P.T.’s horror features in Unreal Engine 5

Recreate Elite’s iconic opening title screen

For many gamers, Elite (and more recently Elite Dangerous) needs little introduction. For those who are unaware, though, Elite was a pioneering space trading sim released in 1984 by Acornsoft for BBC B and Electron computers. Elite featured 3D wireframe graphics and enabled players to command a variety of spaceships and travel across thousands of star systems. If you want to play an emulated version of the BBC game, you can find an online version at bbcmicro.co.uk. For this sample, we’re going to remake the title screen from the BBC B version, which features a spinning wireframe Cobra Mk III ship. We’re using Pygame Zero and some pretty nuts and bolts calculations to create the wireframe ship without a 3D library. Some of the maths may seem complicated, but it’s…

Recreate Elite’s iconic opening title screen

With their wide eyes, long limbs, and outsized swords, the character designs in Soulstice take their cue from Japanese manga and anime, but that eastern influence is also married to a distinctly western take on dark, twisted fantasy. The whole experience pivots on the idea of two protagonists which the player can switch between during combat, explains Soulstice’s creative director Fabio Pagetti. Once that was established, much of the game’s art and design could be built around the concept. “After we decided that the protagonists of Soulstice would be two sisters, we started thinking about the details of their character design,” Pagetti says. “Briar is a strong-willed and determined Ashen Knight, and as a result, has been granted superhuman capabilities and regenerative powers. Her physique and the proportions of her…

Fear & loathing at gamescom 2022

Everyone warned us about the crowds. Nobody bothered to tell us about the heat. It was an unseasonably spicy 34°C as Wireframe arrived in Cologne for Gamescom 2022 back in August, and even a friendly policeman commented on just how freakishly sweaty the place was. “I’ve never known anything like it, and I’ve lived in Germany all my life,” he said, as we crossed a road in search of shade, any shade at all. “It’s not the weather for working; we should be sitting on a beach somewhere.” Fortunately, the convention centre that hosts Gamescom – that’s the Koelnmesse to you – had air-con, so the situation was decidedly less sweaty once we made our way indoors. Which is just as well, because Gamescom really is gigantic: spread across eleven…

Fear & loathing at gamescom 2022

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Interactive/Ghost Song

Are you a solo developer working on a game you want to share with Wireframe? If you’d like to have your project featured in these pages, get in touch with us at wfmag.cc/hello On the murky moon of Lorian, presumably millions of miles away from our own, the story of Ghost Song is just beginning as a long-dormant Deadsuit awakens to seek answers. For solo developer Matt White, meanwhile, this journey has been over a decade in the making. With experience in illustration and creating comic book art, it was in 2011 that White felt the pull to develop a game that was “a mix of Terraria and Metroid” – despite having no programming experience. That didn’t stop him, though, as evidenced by Ghost Song’s various early iterations. “It began as a…

Interactive/Ghost Song

With their wide eyes, long limbs, and outsized swords, the character designs in Soulstice take their cue from Japanese manga and anime, but that eastern influence is also married to a distinctly western take on dark, twisted fantasy. The whole experience pivots on the idea of two protagonists which the player can switch between during combat, explains Soulstice’s creative director Fabio Pagetti. Once that was established, much of the game’s art and design could be built around the concept. “After we decided that the protagonists of Soulstice would be two sisters, we started thinking about the details of their character design,” Pagetti says. “Briar is a strong-willed and determined Ashen Knight, and as a result, has been granted superhuman capabilities and regenerative powers. Her physique and the proportions of her…

Interactive/Ex-Zodiac

Are you a solo developer working on a game you want to share with Wireframe? If you’d like to have your project featured in these pages, get in touch with us at wfmag.cc/hello The Nintendo 64 didn’t have the largest of libraries, but there were some big, big hitters among its line-up. One of the console’s key titles: Lylat Wars, known outside the UK as Star Fox 64. A colourful, blindingly quick rail shooter, it successfully built on the groundwork laid by its SNES predecessor, Starwing (known outside the UK as Star Fox. Seriously, what did Nintendo have against foxes in the nineties?). Lylat Wars certainly left a lasting impression on British solo developer Ben Hickling, since he’s spent the past three years or so making Ex-Zodiac – a 3D spaceship shooter…

Interactive/Ex-Zodiac

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Interactive/Ghost Song

Are you a solo developer working on a game you want to share with Wireframe? If you’d like to have your project featured in these pages, get in touch with us at wfmag.cc/hello On the murky moon of Lorian, presumably millions of miles away from our own, the story of Ghost Song is just beginning as a long-dormant Deadsuit awakens to seek answers. For solo developer Matt White, meanwhile, this journey has been over a decade in the making. With experience in illustration and creating comic book art, it was in 2011 that White felt the pull to develop a game that was “a mix of Terraria and Metroid” – despite having no programming experience. That didn’t stop him, though, as evidenced by Ghost Song’s various early iterations. “It began…

Interactive/Ghost Song

GETTING INTO GAMES How I became a… Narrative Designer

“You’re not just a writer; you need to understand design and technical principles, too” Can you remember the game that first made you want to get into games? I remember being around eleven years old and for Christmas I asked my parents for Kingdom Hearts II. I’d never played the first game, or even any Final Fantasy games at the time, but there was something about it that made me gravitate towards it. Fast-forward to me completing it, and I’d never experienced anything like it. I loved the story, the characters, the music. I decided then that I wanted to create something like it. How did you break into this industry? After I realised making games can be a real job, I found a few courses after school that specialised in video game design…

GETTING INTO GAMES How I became a… Narrative Designer

Interactive/Ex-Zodiac

Are you a solo developer working on a game you want to share with Wireframe? If you’d like to have your project featured in these pages, get in touch with us at wfmag.cc/hello The Nintendo 64 didn’t have the largest of libraries, but there were some big, big hitters among its line-up. One of the console’s key titles: Lylat Wars, known outside the UK as Star Fox 64. A colourful, blindingly quick rail shooter, it successfully built on the groundwork laid by its SNES predecessor, Starwing (known outside the UK as Star Fox. Seriously, what did Nintendo have against foxes in the nineties?). Lylat Wars certainly left a lasting impression on British solo developer Ben Hickling, since he’s spent the past three years or so making Ex-Zodiac – a 3D…

Interactive/Ex-Zodiac

FROM ISOLATION TO OBSERVATION THE NO CODE STORY

This article was originally going to be about suspense. About how writerdirector Jon McKellan, first at The Creative Assembly and later at the studio he co-founded, No Code, has worked on some of the most tense, downright scary games of the past decade. First, there was Alien: Isolation, a survival horror title that seemed to come out of nowhere in 2014; establishing a battle of wits between the player and a computer-controlled creature that could pop up and kill them at almost any moment, Isolation was intelligently and elegantly crafted as few licensed games are. Then came No Code’s 2017 debut, Stories Untold – an anthology of quietly terrifying short tales that felt like a quartet of contemporary adventures written by Edgar Allan Poe. Next came 2019’s Observation, an absorbing…

FROM ISOLATION TO OBSERVATION THE NO CODE STORY

Gaming: it’s not not for everyone

Steves just want to have fun. Like many of you reading this, it’s still depressingly common to be met with confusion by normal people* when I tell them that I, an adult, like video games. “My son likes that one with all the cubes”, they say. “My niece wants V-Bucks for Christmas for an Ariana Grande glider”, and so on. Aside from the fact that not all of those statements are true, it genuinely does make me sad to hear people exclude joy from their lives. I know that some people cling to the perception that games are for kids, or that the time could be better spent on more fruitful pursuits – heaven forbid the serfs should prioritise pleasure over labour – but in my experience, there’s a game out there…

Gaming: it’s not not for everyone

GETTING INTO GAMES How I became a… Narrative Designer

“You’re not just a writer; you need to understand design and technical principles, too” Can you remember the game that first made you want to get into games? I remember being around eleven years old and for Christmas I asked my parents for Kingdom Hearts II. I’d never played the first game, or even any Final Fantasy games at the time, but there was something about it that made me gravitate towards it. Fast-forward to me completing it, and I’d never experienced anything like it. I loved the story, the characters, the music. I decided then that I wanted to create something like it. How did you break into this industry? After I realised making games can be a real job, I found a few courses after school that specialised…

GETTING INTO GAMES How I became a… Narrative Designer

FROM ISOLATION TO OBSERVATION THE NO CODE STORY

This article was originally going to be about suspense. About how writerdirector Jon McKellan, first at The Creative Assembly and later at the studio he co-founded, No Code, has worked on some of the most tense, downright scary games of the past decade. First, there was Alien: Isolation, a survival horror title that seemed to come out of nowhere in 2014; establishing a battle of wits between the player and a computer-controlled creature that could pop up and kill them at almost any moment, Isolation was intelligently and elegantly crafted as few licensed games are. Then came No Code’s 2017 debut, Stories Untold – an anthology of quietly terrifying short tales that felt like a quartet of contemporary adventures written by Edgar Allan Poe. Next came 2019’s Observation, an absorbing…

FROM ISOLATION TO OBSERVATION THE NO CODE STORY

1–9 Trash. Unplayable. A broken mess. 10–19 A truly bad game, though not necessarily utterly broken. 20–29 Still awful, but at a push could be fun for two minutes. 30–39 Might have a redeeming feature, but otherwise very poor. 40–49 Adds in more redeeming features, but still not worth your time. 50–59 Average. Decent at best. ‘Just about OK’. 60–69 Held back by glitches, bugs, or a lack of originality, but can be good fun. 70–79 A very good game, but one lacking spit and polish or uniqueness. 80–89 Brilliant. Fabulous fun. Everyone should at least try it. 90–99 Cutting edge, original, unique, and/or pushes the medium forward. 100 Never say never, eh?…

Gaming: it’s not not for everyone

Steves just want to have fun. Like many of you reading this, it’s still depressingly common to be met with confusion by normal people* when I tell them that I, an adult, like video games. “My son likes that one with all the cubes”, they say. “My niece wants V-Bucks for Christmas for an Ariana Grande glider”, and so on. Aside from the fact that not all of those statements are true, it genuinely does make me sad to hear people exclude joy from their lives. I know that some people cling to the perception that games are for kids, or that the time could be better spent on more fruitful pursuits – heaven forbid the serfs should prioritise pleasure over labour – but in my experience, there’s a game…

Gaming: it’s not not for everyone

Info GENRE Open-world action adventure FORMAT PC/PS5 (tested)/PS4/XB S/X/XBO DEVELOPER Deep Silver Volition, Fishlabs PUBLISHER Plaion, Deep Silver PRICE £59.99 RELEASE Out now SOCIAL @SaintsRow Less than an hour into Saints Row, the new boss is looking suitably ridiculous. After visiting a few clothes stalls in downtown Santo Ileso, she sports offset pink pigtails, shades, and cowboy boots with elongated toes that curl up like giant bananas. A little later, she’ll be machine-gunning gangsters while dressed as a smiling ice cream cone, before switching to a violet business suit and a hot dog hat. None of which feels unusual in this franchise, of course; it’s more like a rite of re-initiation. Yet perhaps these outfits have more symbolic significance this time around – like them, Saints Row can be entertainingly silly, but also rashly assembled and barely coherent. One thing’s for sure, more is definitely more…

Destroy All Humans! 2: Reprobed

Info GENRE Third-person shooter, open-world FORMAT PS5 (tested)/XB S/X/PC DEVELOPER Black Forest Games PUBLISHER THQ Nordic PRICE £34.99 RELEASE Out now If the art of a great remake is in reconstructing the gameplay and visuals in such a way that you feel nothing has changed, then Crypto’s groove-filled jaunt through the 1960s doesn’t disappoint. However, just as Black Forest Games meticulously recreated the original Destroy All Humans! in painstaking detail, franchise newcomers may find this souped-up sequel’s mission design and humour equally dated. Still, the concept of a squat little alien running riot in an open world similar to our own still (somehow) remains a novel one 16 years on, and Reprobed gets by on the sheer peculiarity of its premise alone. Though very much a direct follow-up to 2020’s Destroy All Humans! remake, you’re quickly caught up to speed with previous events thanks…

Destroy All Humans! 2: Reprobed

1–9 Trash. Unplayable. A broken mess. 10–19 A truly bad game, though not necessarily utterly broken. 20–29 Still awful, but at a push could be fun for two minutes. 30–39 Might have a redeeming feature, but otherwise very poor. 40–49 Adds in more redeeming features, but still not worth your time. 50–59 Average. Decent at best. ‘Just about OK’. 60–69 Held back by glitches, bugs, or a lack of originality, but can be good fun. 70–79 A very good game, but one lacking spit and polish or uniqueness. 80–89 Brilliant. Fabulous fun. Everyone should at least try it. 90–99 Cutting edge, original, unique, and/or pushes the medium forward. 100 Never say never, eh?…

Info GENRE Open-world action adventure FORMAT PC/PS5 (tested)/PS4/XB S/X/XBO DEVELOPER Deep Silver Volition, Fishlabs PUBLISHER Plaion, Deep Silver PRICE £59.99 RELEASE Out now SOCIAL @SaintsRow Less than an hour into Saints Row, the new boss is looking suitably ridiculous. After visiting a few clothes stalls in downtown Santo Ileso, she sports offset pink pigtails, shades, and cowboy boots with elongated toes that curl up like giant bananas. A little later, she’ll be machine-gunning gangsters while dressed as a smiling ice cream cone, before switching to a violet business suit and a hot dog hat. None of which feels unusual in this franchise, of course; it’s more like a rite of re-initiation. Yet perhaps these outfits have more symbolic significance this time around – like them, Saints Row can be entertainingly…

Info GENRE Emotional, interactive narrative FORMAT Switch (tested)/PC/iOS DEVELOPER Team Hindsight PUBLISHER Annapurna Interactive PRICE £11.99 RELEASE Out now SOCIAL @hindsightgame Of the objects you can interact with in Hindsight, a red corded telephone isn’t one of them, but its presence alone is enough to telegraph tragedy. Its first ring is what calls protagonist Mary away from her busy life – on the eve of opening her restaurant – back to her childhood home following her mother’s passing. Cut to cleaning out the house while going through old belongings. Through this process, Mary revisits memories of her life, from birth to present day, played out in the space of two hours. Suffice to say that keeping tissues to hand is strongly advised. Memories are presented as frozen 3D snapshots that you rotate around with the camera, taking in the scene: playing with a hose on a…

Destroy All Humans! 2: Reprobed

Info GENRE Third-person shooter, open-world FORMAT PS5 (tested)/XB S/X/PC DEVELOPER Black Forest Games PUBLISHER THQ Nordic PRICE £34.99 RELEASE Out now If the art of a great remake is in reconstructing the gameplay and visuals in such a way that you feel nothing has changed, then Crypto’s groove-filled jaunt through the 1960s doesn’t disappoint. However, just as Black Forest Games meticulously recreated the original Destroy All Humans! in painstaking detail, franchise newcomers may find this souped-up sequel’s mission design and humour equally dated. Still, the concept of a squat little alien running riot in an open world similar to our own still (somehow) remains a novel one 16 years on, and Reprobed gets by on the sheer peculiarity of its premise alone. Though very much a direct follow-up to 2020’s…

Destroy All Humans! 2: Reprobed

Info GENRE Edit-’em-up FORMAT PC/XB S/X (tested) DEVELOPER Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid PUBLISHER Half Mermaid PRICE £15.49 RELEASE Out now SOCIAL @HalfMermaid Immortality does much to restore the eeriness that people must have felt back when cinema was still a new medium: the sense of peering back into the past at people and events that have long gone. A similar ghostly quality hangs thickly over developer Sam Barlow’s latest interactive adventure, which, like Her Story and Telling Lies before it, continues to find fascinating new modes of storytelling in the once-derided FMV genre. The focal point is an actress, Marissa Marcel, who vanished some time in the late nineties after appearing in three unreleased movies. Given the task of finding out what happened to Marissa, you’re asked to pore through fragments of those movies – plus other bits of contemporary footage – in the hope of…

Arcade Paradise

Info GENRE Business simulation FORMAT PS5 (tested)/PC/XB S/X/PS4/XBO/Switch DEVELOPER Nosebleed Interactive PUBLISHER Wired Productions PRICE £15.99 RELEASE Out now SOCIAL @nosebleedgames As you enter the King Wash for the first time, you hear the voice of your father via an answering machine message. Played by Geralt himself, Doug Cockle, he both admonishes his teen offspring for their lack of responsibility and gives them the job of managing his longneglected laundrette. As Ashley, you’re tasked with washing and drying customers’ clothes, cleaning up rubbish, unclogging the toilet, and trying to turn a profit. Hidden in the back room, however, is a small selection of arcade cabinets, and with this discovery, the game’s real focus comes to light. Your dad doesn’t want you running an arcade – to him, it isn’t a profitable endeavour. Your sister sees the value in coin-ops, though, and via a beige desktop PC…

Arcade Paradise

Info GENRE Emotional, interactive narrative FORMAT Switch (tested)/PC/iOS DEVELOPER Team Hindsight PUBLISHER Annapurna Interactive PRICE £11.99 RELEASE Out now SOCIAL @hindsightgame Of the objects you can interact with in Hindsight, a red corded telephone isn’t one of them, but its presence alone is enough to telegraph tragedy. Its first ring is what calls protagonist Mary away from her busy life – on the eve of opening her restaurant – back to her childhood home following her mother’s passing. Cut to cleaning out the house while going through old belongings. Through this process, Mary revisits memories of her life, from birth to present day, played out in the space of two hours. Suffice to say that keeping tissues to hand is strongly advised. Memories are presented as frozen 3D snapshots that…

Info GENRE Adventure, visual novel FORMAT Switch (tested)/PS5/PS4/Mac/Linux DEVELOPER Team OFK PUBLISHER Team OFK PRICE £17.99 RELEASE Out now SOCIAL @OFKband A narrative-driven, point-and-click musical adventure based on the real-life indie band OFK. Going in, I feared there was a real danger of We Are OFK being almost too self-aware. For example, as well as this already meta twist on the musical biopic genre, OFK itself is composed of virtual members – akin to Gorillaz – as opposed to real people. Fortunately, this only contributes to the game’s music video/interactive story fusion. And as such, making choices to help the band navigate issues such as dating, career crossroads, friendships, and relationships, as you follow their adventures trying to find success in LA, certainly hits some good beats, even if the impact you have on where the band ultimately ends up is limited. The game’s split into…

Info GENRE Edit-’em-up FORMAT PC/XB S/X (tested) DEVELOPER Sam Barlow, Half Mermaid PUBLISHER Half Mermaid PRICE £15.49 RELEASE Out now SOCIAL @HalfMermaid Immortality does much to restore the eeriness that people must have felt back when cinema was still a new medium: the sense of peering back into the past at people and events that have long gone. A similar ghostly quality hangs thickly over developer Sam Barlow’s latest interactive adventure, which, like Her Story and Telling Lies before it, continues to find fascinating new modes of storytelling in the once-derided FMV genre. The focal point is an actress, Marissa Marcel, who vanished some time in the late nineties after appearing in three unreleased movies. Given the task of finding out what happened to Marissa, you’re asked to pore through…

Info GENRE Roguelike golf-sim FORMAT PC (tested) /XBO/PS4/XB S/X/PS5/Switch DEVELOPER Chuhai Labs PUBLISHER Thunderful Publishing PRICE £16.99 RELEASE Out now Whether Cursed to Golf, whose library of 70-plus labyrinthine holes is entirely handcrafted, can be accurately termed a roguelike is debatable. Still, Chuhai Labs’ unconventional sports sim, one that features boss fights and gravity-defying power-ups, shares many similarities with procedurally generated classic, Spelunky. In both games, you make your way to the bottom of hazard-filled caverns (or spend hard-earned resources to divert your trajectory upwards), relying on good reflexes and strategic planning to escape to the next level. Pixel-perfect precision is required: a barely perceptible nudge of the stick in the wrong direction, a button pressed with a tenth-of-a-second delay can make the difference between surviving for another moment and starting over. The reason why Spelunky is a masterpiece and Cursed to Golf ends…

Arcade Paradise

Info GENRE Business simulation FORMAT PS5 (tested)/PC/XB S/X/PS4/XBO/Switch DEVELOPER Nosebleed Interactive PUBLISHER Wired Productions PRICE £15.99 RELEASE Out now SOCIAL @nosebleedgames As you enter the King Wash for the first time, you hear the voice of your father via an answering machine message. Played by Geralt himself, Doug Cockle, he both admonishes his teen offspring for their lack of responsibility and gives them the job of managing his longneglected laundrette. As Ashley, you’re tasked with washing and drying customers’ clothes, cleaning up rubbish, unclogging the toilet, and trying to turn a profit. Hidden in the back room, however, is a small selection of arcade cabinets, and with this discovery, the game’s real focus comes to light. Your dad doesn’t want you running an arcade – to him, it isn’t a…

Arcade Paradise

Info GENRE Adventure, visual novel FORMAT Switch (tested)/PS5/PS4/Mac/Linux DEVELOPER Team OFK PUBLISHER Team OFK PRICE £17.99 RELEASE Out now SOCIAL @OFKband A narrative-driven, point-and-click musical adventure based on the real-life indie band OFK. Going in, I feared there was a real danger of We Are OFK being almost too self-aware. For example, as well as this already meta twist on the musical biopic genre, OFK itself is composed of virtual members – akin to Gorillaz – as opposed to real people. Fortunately, this only contributes to the game’s music video/interactive story fusion. And as such, making choices to help the band navigate issues such as dating, career crossroads, friendships, and relationships, as you follow their adventures trying to find success in LA, certainly hits some good beats, even if the impact…

Kid Canary & The Midnight Tower fake gamer comics/Name your own/ wfmag.cc/kid-canary The inhabitants of the Midnight Tower – whether they be slime-cursed cats or sentient fungi – are definitely trying to kill you, but with charming sketchbook art and a dreamy synth soundtrack, it’s still a strangely inviting place to spend some time. A contiguous HP count and stat sheet follows you from one encounter to the next, and the tried and tested roguelike reward choices await you between fights. It’s not the most tactical – your options are limited to attacking, and progress is mainly about health conservation. But short blurbs of biography for each enemy, along with colourful attack and item descriptions, make this a worthwhile crawl through an endearing and creative dungeon. Voracious Riches SomeoneInflative/Name your own/wfmag.cc/voracious This ultra-difficult roguelike card…

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

What would you say is your favourite game of all time, and why? Of course, several games come to mind when I think about favourites, but one that will always be close to my heart is The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. It was the first game I ever completed by myself as a kid – it really made me fall in love with the Zelda series and gaming in general. I really liked collecting the masks and how weird it was – thinking about the moon still gives me anxiety. I keep the original gold Collector’s Edition cartridge on my desk. What is it about horror games in particular that makes for such great streaming entertainment? I think people find watching horror games entertaining for several reasons. Some are too afraid to…

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Info GENRE Roguelike golf-sim FORMAT PC (tested) /XBO/PS4/XB S/X/PS5/Switch DEVELOPER Chuhai Labs PUBLISHER Thunderful Publishing PRICE £16.99 RELEASE Out now Whether Cursed to Golf, whose library of 70-plus labyrinthine holes is entirely handcrafted, can be accurately termed a roguelike is debatable. Still, Chuhai Labs’ unconventional sports sim, one that features boss fights and gravity-defying power-ups, shares many similarities with procedurally generated classic, Spelunky. In both games, you make your way to the bottom of hazard-filled caverns (or spend hard-earned resources to divert your trajectory upwards), relying on good reflexes and strategic planning to escape to the next level. Pixel-perfect precision is required: a barely perceptible nudge of the stick in the wrong direction, a button pressed with a tenth-of-a-second delay can make the difference between surviving for another moment and…

The Wireframe HOTLIST

The games for… BIG ADVENTURES Elden Ring/Bandai Namco/95% (Issue 61) Assassin’s Creed Odyssey/Ubisoft/93% (Issue 1) Yakuza: Like a Dragon/Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio/90% (Issue 45) Amnesia: Rebirth/Frictional Games/87% (Issue 46) Death’s Door/Acid Nerve/87% (Issue 55) The Last Campfire/Hello Games/86% (Issue 47) Resident Evil 2/Capcom/86% (Issue 7) Stray/BlueTwelve Studio/86% (Issue 65) Lost in Play/Happy Juice Games/86%/(Issue 66) Journey to the Savage Planet/Typhoon Studios/84% (Issue 33) The games for… REPEATED PLAY Hades/Supergiant Games/94% (Issue 44) They Are Billions/Numantian Games/88% (Issue 20) Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice/FromSoftware/87% (Issue 11) Streets of Rage 4/Dotemu/Lizardcube/Guard Crush/86% (Issue 40) Trials of Fire/Whatboy Games/84% (Issue 50) Katamari Damacy REROLL/Monkeycraft/84% (Issue 4) Spelunky 2/Mossmouth/83% (Issue 44) Hitman 2/IO Interactive/82% (Issue 3) Alba: A Wildlife Adventure/ustwo Games/82% (Issue 46) Slay the Spire/Mega Crit Games/81% (Issue 45) The games for… SOLID STORY TIMES Disco Elysium/ZA/UM/94% (Issue 28) Life is Strange: True Colors/Deck Nine/89% (Issue 57) Mutazione/Die Gute Fabrik/86% (Issue 26) Whispers of a Machine/Clifftop Games/Faravid Interactive/85% (Issue 14) The…

The Wireframe HOTLIST

Kid Canary & The Midnight Tower fake gamer comics/Name your own/ wfmag.cc/kid-canary The inhabitants of the Midnight Tower – whether they be slime-cursed cats or sentient fungi – are definitely trying to kill you, but with charming sketchbook art and a dreamy synth soundtrack, it’s still a strangely inviting place to spend some time. A contiguous HP count and stat sheet follows you from one encounter to the next, and the tried and tested roguelike reward choices await you between fights. It’s not the most tactical – your options are limited to attacking, and progress is mainly about health conservation. But short blurbs of biography for each enemy, along with colourful attack and item descriptions, make this a worthwhile crawl through an endearing and creative dungeon. Voracious Riches SomeoneInflative/Name your…

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

What would you say is your favourite game of all time, and why? Of course, several games come to mind when I think about favourites, but one that will always be close to my heart is The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. It was the first game I ever completed by myself as a kid – it really made me fall in love with the Zelda series and gaming in general. I really liked collecting the masks and how weird it was – thinking about the moon still gives me anxiety. I keep the original gold Collector’s Edition cartridge on my desk. What is it about horror games in particular that makes for such great streaming entertainment? I think people find watching horror games entertaining for several reasons. Some are…

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Backwards compatible

Segavania The original Castlevania on a Sega console? Regrettably, it never happened, mostly thanks to the aggressive licensing deals that Nintendo tended to make with publishers in the 1980s. It was only later, when Konami (and other companies besides) renegotiated those deals in the 1990s that we began to see things like Castlevania IV and Contra: Hard Corps appear on the Sega Mega Drive. Sega’s 8-bit consoles, the Master System and its handheld brethren, the Game Gear, did get at least a taste of Castlevania, though: 1992’s Master Of Darkness. Like the first Castlevania, it’s a side-scrolling platformer that unfolds at a deliberate pace, is drenched in a gloomy, midnight atmosphere, and sees the player fend off a variety of ghouls with close-quarter melee weapons and longer-range secondary attacks. The resemblance to Castlevania…

Backwards compatible

Backwards compatible

Rip and tear The general meme is that 1993’s DOOM runs on anything, right? A calculator, a thermostat… Hell, John Romero and John Carmack’s iconic first-person shooter can even be played on a treadmill – presumably to unleash maximum gains or something. One format we’ve yet to see it run on, though, is that of our own reality. Well, that day has arrived thanks to YouTuber Bill Thorpe. He recently took it upon himself to recreate the original DOOM far more accurately than any cinematic, high-budget adaptation featuring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson ever could. And why? Because his love letter of a short film uses an ungodly amount of cardboard, which works wonders in achieving that classic geometrical aesthetic we all associate with the Doom Slayer’s first brutal trip from Mars…

Backwards compatible

The Wireframe HOTLIST

The games for… BIG ADVENTURES Elden Ring/Bandai Namco/95% (Issue 61) Assassin’s Creed Odyssey/Ubisoft/93% (Issue 1) Yakuza: Like a Dragon/Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio/90% (Issue 45) Amnesia: Rebirth/Frictional Games/87% (Issue 46) Death’s Door/Acid Nerve/87% (Issue 55) The Last Campfire/Hello Games/86% (Issue 47) Resident Evil 2/Capcom/86% (Issue 7) Stray/BlueTwelve Studio/86% (Issue 65) Lost in Play/Happy Juice Games/86%/(Issue 66) Journey to the Savage Planet/Typhoon Studios/84% (Issue 33) The games for… REPEATED PLAY Hades/Supergiant Games/94% (Issue 44) They Are Billions/Numantian Games/88% (Issue 20) Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice/FromSoftware/87% (Issue 11) Streets of Rage 4/Dotemu/Lizardcube/Guard Crush/86% (Issue 40) Trials of Fire/Whatboy Games/84% (Issue 50) Katamari Damacy REROLL/Monkeycraft/84% (Issue 4) Spelunky 2/Mossmouth/83% (Issue 44) Hitman 2/IO Interactive/82% (Issue 3) Alba: A Wildlife Adventure/ustwo Games/82% (Issue 46) Slay the Spire/Mega Crit Games/81% (Issue 45) The games for… SOLID STORY…

The Wireframe HOTLIST

Backwards compatible

Segavania The original Castlevania on a Sega console? Regrettably, it never happened, mostly thanks to the aggressive licensing deals that Nintendo tended to make with publishers in the 1980s. It was only later, when Konami (and other companies besides) renegotiated those deals in the 1990s that we began to see things like Castlevania IV and Contra: Hard Corps appear on the Sega Mega Drive. Sega’s 8-bit consoles, the Master System and its handheld brethren, the Game Gear, did get at least a taste of Castlevania, though: 1992’s Master Of Darkness. Like the first Castlevania, it’s a side-scrolling platformer that unfolds at a deliberate pace, is drenched in a gloomy, midnight atmosphere, and sees the player fend off a variety of ghouls with close-quarter melee weapons and longer-range secondary attacks. The…

Backwards compatible

Journey to the centre of the Earth

Apple Arcade should be a good way to introduce mobile players to an abundance of great games they wouldn’t otherwise check out. However, it does often leave those of us without iPhones scratching against yet another walled garden, begging for the exclusivity period of certain titles to end whenever something interesting pops up. This was exactly my case with Little Orpheus, a likeably comedic action-platformer from the same folk behind (among other things) the evocative first-person adventure, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, back in 2015. I was curious about how developer The Chinese Room’s typical arthouse sensibilities would translate to something a bit breezier in tone. That’s why, with its arrival on Nintendo Switch, I soon discovered a loving throwback to classic B-movies and pulpy sci-fi serials that’s equal parts…

Journey to the centre of the Earth

CAPCOM/1996/PLAYSTATION Save rooms keep you safe. That’s the general rule anyway, and it’s one that the Resident Evil series (alongside countless other survival horror games it inspired) has followed for over three decades. Capcom understood the importance of giving players a reprieve following moments of high anxiety, you see, letting them catch their breath after escaping, say, a surprise zombie attack or boss fight against some kind of giant mutant abomination. The beauty of save rooms is that while Resident Evil itself may have often changed its identity, the simple sight of a typewriter in a room remains comforting all these years later. The first time anyone experienced the relief this treasured place brings was, of course, in Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion. Shortly after finding refuge in its grand hall and being grinned…

Backwards compatible

Rip and tear The general meme is that 1993’s DOOM runs on anything, right? A calculator, a thermostat… Hell, John Romero and John Carmack’s iconic first-person shooter can even be played on a treadmill – presumably to unleash maximum gains or something. One format we’ve yet to see it run on, though, is that of our own reality. Well, that day has arrived thanks to YouTuber Bill Thorpe. He recently took it upon himself to recreate the original DOOM far more accurately than any cinematic, high-budget adaptation featuring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson ever could. And why? Because his love letter of a short film uses an ungodly amount of cardboard, which works wonders in achieving that classic geometrical aesthetic we all associate with the Doom Slayer’s first brutal trip from…

Backwards compatible

Journey to the centre of the Earth

Apple Arcade should be a good way to introduce mobile players to an abundance of great games they wouldn’t otherwise check out. However, it does often leave those of us without iPhones scratching against yet another walled garden, begging for the exclusivity period of certain titles to end whenever something interesting pops up. This was exactly my case with Little Orpheus, a likeably comedic action-platformer from the same folk behind (among other things) the evocative first-person adventure, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, back in 2015. I was curious about how developer The Chinese Room’s typical arthouse sensibilities would translate to something a bit breezier in tone. That’s why, with its arrival on Nintendo Switch, I soon discovered a loving throwback to classic B-movies and pulpy sci-fi serials that’s equal parts…

Journey to the centre of the Earth

CAPCOM/1996/PLAYSTATION Save rooms keep you safe. That’s the general rule anyway, and it’s one that the Resident Evil series (alongside countless other survival horror games it inspired) has followed for over three decades. Capcom understood the importance of giving players a reprieve following moments of high anxiety, you see, letting them catch their breath after escaping, say, a surprise zombie attack or boss fight against some kind of giant mutant abomination. The beauty of save rooms is that while Resident Evil itself may have often changed its identity, the simple sight of a typewriter in a room remains comforting all these years later. The first time anyone experienced the relief this treasured place brings was, of course, in Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion. Shortly after finding refuge in its grand hall…

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