Power plays

By now – and especially given the events of this increasingly hellish year – we’re all well aware that with great power comes great responsibility. None more so, perhaps, than some of the games featured in this month’s Hype section. Increasingly, videogame developers are concerning themselves with the true nature of power – not wielding machine guns or throwing bolts of lightning, but using one’s influence to meaningfully affect the lives of others.

Cris Tales (p40), for instance, puts the consequences of your spacetimealtering actions on glittering display, dividing the screen into thirds showing the past, present and future. Your every action changes the world around you in realtime; whatever you do in the present visibly ripples into both the past and the future. In combat, you can weaken enemies by sending them into the future so they become aged and frail, or drag them into the past to set up traps that activate in the here and now. Its indie developer, coming from Colombia, has first-hand knowledge of how one’s history can impact upon one’s future, and is refreshingly vocal about wanting to explore it.

As is the team behind Dustborn (p36). In this not-so-alternate America, words have power: you can push aside armed guards or stop enemies in their tracks simply by commanding they ‘move’ or ‘freeze’, comic-book-style onomatopoeia flying through scenes at your command. Red Thread Games is keen not to present them as spells, however; the developer does not wish to trivialise a game which seeks to confront the morality behind the human capacity to twist language to our own ends.

In comparison, this month’s traditional power fantasies feel a touch underwhelming. Ubisoft’s foray into the battle royale shooter scene, Hyper Scape (p32) might offer an array of superpowered ‘hacks’ with which to best others, and Twitch integration designed to draw a crowd – but ultimately, we come away wondering just how much influence this latecomer is really capable of wielding.