Some assembly required

NYU Game Center director Frank Lantz once suggested that “games are basically operas made out of bridges”, the process of making them combining the hard parts of both. Working in this medium demands aptitude in both artistic and technological disciplines. However simple your idea, it’s always a complex business putting all those moving parts together.

That’s something multimedia company Neostream, Korean creator of Little Devil Inside (p28) has been learning over the past five years. The theme of its debut game – the surprise star of PS5’s reveal event back in June – might be minimalism, but its compact, semi-open world has taken quite the effort to build. The art, too, has brought its own problems, with the studio having to redesign an enemy type that struck all the wrong notes. Still, both opera and bridge parts are coming along rather nicely now.

As, too, is mellow delivery sim Lake (p40), which leans towards the soapier side of opera, and started from similarly modest beginnings: its pitch was a single image of a vehicle by a body of water. It’s taken three years and counting to make, but that’s the messy complexity of human relationships for you. For co-op survival game Scavengers (p46), meanwhile, it’s been all about tightening up the rivets over the course of eight separate playtests: after an underwhelming E3 demo last year, its foundations now look much more robust.

The same can’t be said for the bright, busy postapocalypse of Forza Polpo (p32). Here, the world is already in bits, and it’s your job to remotely navigate a drone through the colourful detritus that remains. When you hit an obstacle in rhythm-action adventure Starstruck: Hands Of Time (p36), meanwhile, you guide a giant hand to smash up your surroundings. Yet beneath the straightforward pleasures of both we’re reminded that, in games, even destruction requires careful construction.