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“We’re trying to create a neutron star, not a black hole”
The impact of the COVID pandemic on videogames has been impossible to ignore, between the spate of release-date delays to the themes explored in games made during it – from tiny indies to expensive blockbusters. No game tapped into lockdown loneliness quite so successfully as Madison Karrh’s brilliant Birth, while even Nintendo’s new Zelda features a ‘great upheaval’ and a gloom descending over Hyrule.
Edge 385’s cover game, Fort Solis – an independently developed game with production values shooting for triple-A standards – was birthed during those early months of enforced isolation. Like many, game director James Tinsdale exhausted various TV-series boxsets in that time – but as the rest of us moved on to baking banana bread, the co-founder of Liverpool studio Fallen Leaf started writing a script.
In Time Extend, we revisit Ice Pick Lodge’s esoteric sandbox RPG Pathologic 2, and examine how this dark, twisted vision became horrifyingly prescient. There’s more light-hearted (and light-fingered) trickery in The Making Of Card Shark, in which we find out how Nerial delivered sleights-of-hand with Kubrickian elegance. Columnist Steven Poole considers how games can be a vaccine against misinformation, while Adrian Hon visits the modern-day arcade, where cocktails and cabinets compete for attention.
Our Hype section highlights a diverse selection of forthcoming attractions including Post Trauma, Anger Foot and Astronaut: The Best, while in Play we run the rule over Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Redfall, Planet Of Lana, Humanity and Darkest Dungeon II. Not forgetting, of course, Tears Of The Kingdom: has Nintendo managed to produce a second great upheaval for the open-world genre? The answer is in Edge 385, on sale now.
