Get the band back together

Developers love solving two problems with a single idea, and so do we. This is a curious month for Hype: on one hand we have teams of veteran developers going back to ideas they explored in the formative years of their careers. On the other, young, small teams are exploring the future shape of music games. Two very different groups with wildly varying philosophies on the future of interactive entertainment – and both summed up by a single headline. Magic.

Underworld Ascendant (p36) sees members of the team behind genredefining 1992 RPG Underworld: The Stygian Abyss reunite to see what modern processing power, and 25 years of progress in game design, can do for an idea that proved the genesis for the immersive sim. Likewise, Two Point Hospital (p46) sees a team led by some of the creators of 1997’s

Theme Hospital reunite to explore what 2018 can offer the sorely underexplored hospital-management game. Neither, as you’ll discover in the pages that follow, is a mere reunion tour, topping up ageing coffers with the promise of nostalgia.

As for our musical youth? Wandersong (p44) plays with the concept of music as mechanic in a wistful 2D adventure. And in Rhythm Doctor (p48), a team working remotely in Malaysia and Peru offers up a rhythm game that doesn’t break the fourth wall so much as shatter it, feed the noise into a sampler and spit it back out in brilliant, staccato bursts of dizzying experimentation.

Some might call this headline-led style of writing ‘lazy journalism’ (seriously, you can stop sending those emails now, we get it). If it’s proper shoe-leather stuff you’re after,

The Occupation (p40) has you covered, with its tale of an investigative reporter nosing around the northwest of England for four realtime hours, wondering whether to blow the whistle on a bombshell of a story. Now that’s what we call headline news.