Edge

If you offered a game developer of a certain age the choice of any classic movie property as the basis for their new game – with zero restrictions on budget or schedule – how many might land on Indiana Jones? On the face of it, Lucasfilm’s series has everything we need for a sure-fire videogame smash. There’s travel to exotic locations, where ancient secrets await discovery. An endless supply of bad guys, of course, that can be punched or cut down with volleys of lead, with some outliers that could easily be repurposed as bosses. There are vehicle chases by the hangar-load, and traversal by road, sea and air. Puzzle-like diversions provide respite from the exhilarating action elsewhere and provide a little extra depth, while a bundle of likeable companions…

When Humble Games laid off 36 employees this July, amid the general sense of unease and distaste was something more specific: déjà vu. Humble’s downsizing came just days after the launch of its latest game, Bo: Path Of The Teal Lotus, a situation painfully reminiscent of Embracer’s closure of Versus Evil late last year, which left Broken Roads developer Drop Bear Bytes without a publisher weeks before its planned release. Meanwhile, Humble owner Ziff Davis labelling the move as “restructuring” brought to mind the fate of the Take Two-owned Private Division, which remains in flux after most of its employees were laid off in April. It hasn’t been an especially good few months for indie game publishing, then. But is the situation completely – as Mike Rose, founder of publisher…

Definitions are essential to LOK, so let’s begin with one. LOK is a puzzle book – a lovely little 104-page spiral-bound A6 thing first released by Slovenian multihyphenate artist Blaž Urban Gracar in 2022. But ‘LOK’ is also a magic word – the first you encounter within that book’s gridded puzzles of letters and blank spaces. Connect its letters all in a row, in order, and something happens. But discovering things for yourself is also essential to LOK. Rather than attempt to explain how it works any further, we’ll instead direct you to the facing page, where you’ll find five bespoke puzzles Gracar has created for Edge. While four are entirely brand-new, the final puzzle has technically been ported from screen to paper. Because this word now has yet another…

Although Berlin remains the home of A Maze, the arthouse game festival previously covered in E333 and E349, it’s done its fair share of travelling since the first event back in 2008. That has taken many forms: as part of other festivals; as game jams in Palestine, Brazil and Kenya; and exhibitions in Romania, Kosovo and Ukraine. The circumstances around A Maze Sheffield, however, are different – not just because it’s closer to the usual format, but also because it represents the repaying of an old debt. In 2019, the organisation was in financial difficulty, prompting A Maze founder and artistic director Thorsten S Wiedemann to create a Kickstarter campaign. The single biggest supporter was James Brown, director at Boneloaf, the Sheffield-based developer of Gang Beasts. He was the sole…

Anyone who has played Triband’s What The games will immediately recognise the visual signature of Simon Post. But we haven’t seen him turn his hand to something quite like this fantastical firstperson shooter. Post describes his work on Sulfur as “an antithesis to the cute, nonviolent, if perhaps sometimes suggestive, themes I worked on at Triband” – hard to argue, as bullets strip the flesh of our goblin attackers away in chunks. “A lot of the game spawned from things we joked wouldn’t be allowed normally,” he says. This isn’t just gore by the bucketful, but also things “so stupidly niche that maybe only three to five people on Earth will pick up on it,” according to Perfect Random CEO Anton Albiin. His incomplete list includes “lo-fi hip-hop, a Swedish…

“I used all the tools available in the market in order to organise the cables. Also… it’s not only to play – it’s like a museum.”With 444 hooked up, Ibrahim Al-Nasser earns a Guinness record for the most consoles connected to a single TV. (No wonder he can only afford one telly – imagine how much all that hardware cost.) “My movies were rated R and made more money than this.”The Borderlands movie’s paltry $8.8m opening doesn’t impress genre warhorse Uwe Boll ”So excited that videogame adaptations are not good again. Nature is healing.”Sam Barlow can rest easy now that order is restored “Man, I would love to build a studio… where creatives can work and thrive at a reasonable pace instead of needing to fuel an insatiable lust for…