It’s all relative

Relationships take work – but any fool will tell you that if you treat yours like point-scoring exercises, it won’t be long before you’re out on your ear. Yet the majority of relationships in videogames are still reduced to stat spreadsheets, carefully and methodically filled out in hopes of a tactical advantage or a flash of two-dimensional ankle. Happily, many of this month’s Hype selection have one heartening thing in common: an altogether more nuanced depiction of relationships, whether it’s with a partner, your family, yourself or even the world around you.

Haven (p30), for instance, is an interstellar love story with a twist: our intrepid couple have already met before the game starts. As such, their relationship features all the familiar ups and downs – and playfights over hogged blankets – of a real romantic partnership, and their bond is strong enough that they can finish both each others’ sentences and special moves in turn-based battles against alien creatures. Survival game The Eternal Cylinder (p40) takes a similarly intimate approach to a punishing genre, according to its developers. The idea is that you evolve your starting Trebum; it’s more about growing a family and learning every member’s biological quirks than the simple flowchart of ‘craft tools, get wood, build house‘.

As with the bizarre, ever-encroaching Cylinder of the latter game, it also pays to develop a more mercurial and abstract relationship to one’s surroundings in Superliminal (p44). In this lucid dream simulator, you can manipulate the physical nature of objects simply by getting a different perspective. Fittingly, the same is true in If Found (p48), in which you, as Kasio, slowly erase your own diary to uncover the many layers of your memory and identity. It’s already a startlingly mature representation of how our imperfect conversation with ourselves shift, and change, over time – and a suggestion that real relationships are better told in sketches than spreedsheets.