DISPATCHES OCTOBER

The chain

Since when is threatening the lives of developers because some players did not like the storyline of a videogame a civil way to behave? I personally loved The Last Of Us II, and even though I found some of the gameplay a little repetitive I enjoyed the story. I felt a range of emotions like guilt, empathy, anger, love and was able to understand the point of view of each character and even relate to them.

In this game, there are no heroes or villains. The real villain is the endless chain of violence which does not resolve anything. I found it difficult, as I moved through the story, to stomach the violence yet I understood the story the game wanted to tell. I appreciate some people are disappointed by the game but there is no need to lead a hate campaign forcing their views onto others or demanding things to be different. The writers of game stories have the same right as those of movies, TV series and books, to tell the story as they intend to tell it. It is their story to tell and not ours.

The game is for mature people and if some players feel it is acceptable to send death threats to the developers or the actors then I suggest it is time they find games appropriate for their mental age or that a disclaimer is added for them: ‘You may believe yourself to be an adult but parental guidance is recommended.’

Vincenzo Morra

Dreams

Ever since I first heard rumours of it, I knew Dreams was going to be something special. Little did I know that once I checked it out, there would be no going back. The game has unearthed a creative force in me I didn’t know existed. I knew the game creation tools would be easy to learn and use. I didn’t know that the experience of making my own game with them would be more enjoyable and rewarding than playing any other game. It has taken over almost all my spare time.

Playing a game in Dreams feels different to playing a regular game too. Normally

I feel some guilt when playing a large game knowing that significant parts of it were probably made under crunch. In Dreams

I play a series of passion projects, whose creators’ work by contrast is voluntary. In addition, if I see an interesting asset in Dreams, I can usually find it in the list of items the game was made with, make a copy, tinker with it, then include it in my own games. The ability to do this in a game outside of Dreams is, of course, usually impossible.

I love that the game is revolutionary in small ways too. Consider for instance the mouse cursor. Media Molecule demonstrated that it doesn’t have to be boring. I love using a creature as a cursor! Seeing it pirouette whenever I undo or redo an action, or shake its head when I cannot puts a smile on my face. A year ago the idea of someone looking at a mouse cursor and smiling would have been absurd, and yet in Dreams I do this constantly.

I know people are excited about the next generation of consoles, but I’ve already discovered something that will keep me entertained for the entirety of this decade. A remastered Demon Souls is tempting, but compared to the prospect of making, playing, and sharing a platformer in PSVR with the spherical geometries and gravity mechanics of Super Mario Galaxy, set to a soundtrack which builds like a Mizuguchi game? I know which excites me more.

Benjamin Thompson

We’re also consistently amazed by how effectively Dreams shows us how much unseen work goes into game dev by removing the smoke and mirrors from the

“In Dreams I play a series of passion projects, whose creators’ work is voluntary”

process – if only a certain proportion of the videogaming audience would give it go, we wonder how their attitudes might change. Fingers crossed it comes to PC: in case it does, we’ll send you an 8BitDo controller.

Second hand news

Your review and game of the year award for Outer Wilds convinced me to buy it. However, I eventually got fed up with searching for and figuring out eccentric physics as described by oblique ancient graffiti. As much as I respected the game, I didn’t feel like I had a reason to delve deeper. That is, until I ignored the spoiler warnings of Errant Signal’s video essay. Oh, the game is actually about metaphysical LSD fever-dream concepts like the moral imperative of perceiving reality, and the beauty of playing music with friends in harmony! I’m back in action!

Meanwhile I had been reading a few The Last of Us Part II reviews. I wanted to love the original because folks kept harping on its strong emotional impact. Alas, it didn’t work for me. According to the reviews, Part II is also stirring, but none of them had said how or why. And so, I figured it would be more of the same. Luckily, I stumbled across a Girlfriend Reviews video earnestly describing the sensation of playing as the story’s antagonist. Oh, this game apparently uses interactivity in an innovative and bold way! It forces us to empathise with the bad guy like no other medium can. Sold!

I find myself wishing videogame reviews wouldn’t be so careful about spoiling an important part of what makes it work. If somebody says, ‘Trust me, it’s great, but you have to play it for ten hours to find out why,’ you’re competing with all the other people saying the same thing. There are many excellent games. But if the thing that makes them stick out is considered a spoiler, how am I supposed to know? As for Edge, considering how printed media usually gets into my hands a few days after all the online reviews, and then is stashed like library books, it’d be appreciated if the magazine produced unambiguously thorough reviews. Robert August de Meijer

A good point well made, as ever, and we’ll take it on board. With so much of the joy of Outer Wilds tied to discovering its secrets for yourself, we were deliberately careful (Post Scripts are where we usually delve into spoiler territory). The Last Of Us Part II, however, was a whole different kettle of embargo.

Over and over

Are we the baddies? I just read through the Play section in Edge issue 342 – specifically the Darwin Project review. What a refreshing idea it was, having someone be the ‘director’ of the round. I immediately started thinking about dropping my love-hate relationship with Warzone and telling my squad about this new cool game.

It’s been three months since this issue released (I’m a little behind). I go and search online about the game. First result: “Google: 93% of users liked this game”. I then go to the Wikipedia, and find out the studio announced in May that they would stop all development of the project. They said, “We’ve tried every idea we have – nothing’s been enough. This is unsustainable for us.” We as players can complain that there are no new ideas, that everything’s a copy of successful games. But then, a game with new and interesting ideas comes up. It tries its luck with giants such as Fortnite, and makes the game actually fun to stream. Still not enough?

A journey that started two years ago died in less than a year after its full release. This makes me sad. The gaming community complains about everything being too ‘samey’, but when cool ideas come up, they don’t gain enough community support. Maybe the new battle royale games will need a radical idea to gain a chance to play with the big boys. I glance at the issue’s back cover for a few seconds, and put it away. I go to bed feeling deeply for Scavengers Studio.

Adrián Toscano

We must admit, our hearts broke for the devs too when we first saw Hyper Scape. Still, that’s not doing so hot on Twitch right now either. We wonder what might have been, had The Darwin Project’s distinctly more exciting take on streamer interaction had the weight of a Ubisoft-sized company behind it.

Go your own way

You’re all familiar with the Sandwich Alignment Chart, I’m sure. Is a hotdog a sandwich? Is a Jaffa Cake really just an orange ravioli? Important questions, but they raise a more vital point – all of those food items exist on a spectrum, and the boundaries between them are more flexible than they seem. Purists might say a pizza isn’t a sandwich, but put two of them together, and what do you have if not a big, round sandwich?

In fact, I would go so far as to argue that a sandwich is actually beer. It’s wheat and yeast with added ingredients for flavour, and it has roughly the same amount of calories, one just happens to be a bit wetter. Once you realise this, it starts to make a lot of other things make sense. People have tried to define what a game is for centuries – is it just playing but with rules, is it art or education, does it need to be interactive or have a story? Even deciding what the point of a game is has seemed impossible to pin down, as everyone plays them for different, personal reasons.

Cut through the illusory barriers on the Game Alignment Chart though, and it becomes clear that a game is really just a thing humans like to do, and they can do any of the things humans want them to. They can be an escape, or a fight. They can help us reach out to each other, or even teach us how to become another person entirely.

Games aren’t a walled garden, they’re just another place in the real world, and there aren’t any rules in the real world. I do have a few tips and tricks though: try to have fun, help whenever you can, and always be kind. David Mear

Hello, police? Right over here, please.