Don’t look back, just keep on walking

Thanks to our cover game, we’ve got loops on the brain this month. Designers talk a lot about a game’s core loop: that circular flow of action and reward that repeats for its duration. Loop Hero takes that concept literally, putting your diminutive hero on an unending circuit, the ride only stopping when you get off or a monster brings it screeching to a premature halt. It’s caused a few fierce arguments here: is this absorbing game design or just a cleverly disguised Skinner box, designed to tap into our worst compulsions? Or simply a bit of both?

Yet, combined with its permanent progression system, even Four Quarters’ Roguelike feels less a loop, more a tight spiral. There are plenty of those elsewhere in Play this month, with no more emphatic example than Monster Hunter Rise. Each time we return from a successful hunt, we’re able to put our spoils to good use; carved fur, flesh, horns and bones are all repurposed as superior weapons and armour, putting us in a stronger position to face the more fearsome beasts that await. And with the addition of an insectoid grapple, the series gathers major upward momentum, too.

The recursive environments of Maquette, meanwhile, are more like a series of concentric loops – one of its most exhilarating moments sees you resize a staircase to scale a high wall, only to realise there’s another, even larger world outside. And then there’s Feral Cat Den’s giddying debut Genesis Noir, with its planetary orbits and Fibonacci curves showing us our universe is made up of loops and spirals. Sometimes we end up back where we started, and sometimes we’re capable of breaking that loop: still going round, yes, but moving up, out, beyond.