DISPATCHES MAY

The boy who cried wolf

I ended last year the same way we all do: looking over what we enjoyed and didn’t from the previous 12 months while looking forward to what’s coming in the next year. That’s when it dawned on me: there are a lot of long gaps between the games I really want to play this year, so I made a decision and dubbed 2023 the year of the backlog.

On top of this list was Okami, a game I had (mostly) played already when it first graced us in 2006, but one I never finished and had never returned to. It’s a product of its time – the mid-2000s, when developers had budgets to back unique ideas as game creators tried to figure out what the future in this landscape would be. This might seem like nostalgia talking, but being a young teenager at this time made us all feel like Charlie being invited to tour Wonka’s chocolate factory. The downside to being a young teenager is that you’re not all that good at games, and without the vast knowledge to back it up, not very good at understanding their less-thanobvious mechanics.

It’s here that Okami let me down – or rather, how I let it down. It wasn’t until my playthrough this year that I discovered different weapon types had different levels of power, not merely distinct range and looks. Despite knowing this now, I still fell back on my old favourite, the prayer beads that work like a fast whip. They’re the weakest of the weapons but grant the best range and, for my money, the best look. It was only the latter I cared for at 13 years old but now I can appreciate that sacrificing power gave me greater speed and distance. Not that the combat is all that difficult – the game throws helping items at you like you’re battling demons with a wooden spoon. I never even bothered to look at them on my first playthrough, since I was getting along just fine.

But the more I played, the more I realised something. Had I actually played this before? As well as the weapons and combat, I now had a newfound respect for the world I was in. I thought: ‘There are side quests?’ See, the game never explicitly marks these down for you. A woodcutter I used to walk past all the time is now offering me handcrafted vases as thanks for my help. Leave these at statues around the land and I’m gifted a boon of praise, the game’s upgrade currency. Okami is full of these, and I never had any idea. As a 13-year-old, I only cared for finding my new powers and getting on with the story. After near two decades of playing games, I’m now much more methodical in my approach: never leaving a location until I’m sure I’ve done everything I possibly can, making a mental note to return when I get a new ability.

This realisation was at its fullest when I hit the point I could never get past as a kid: a puzzle near the end of the second act where you have to hit certain points on a recurring character called Blockhead. I must have tried this a dozen times before, never getting it right. Eventually I decided that my game was broken and put it down with a sour taste in my mouth, never to return. Seventeen years later, I did it on my first try, without even having to think about it. You see, at 13 I never realised I had to hit these points in a certain order. How could I have missed that?! And what else had I missed in other games?

From then on, everything in the game was brand-new to me. The boss that follows this ‘puzzle’ is now my favourite in the entire game. A whole new region and powers were unlocked to me that I never even knew about. Admittedly, I think the game loses some of its charm towards the end – instead of sweeping colourful vistas to travel through, you’re trapped on a dreary snowy mountain. I won’t spoil the ending but it

“Okami is a product of its time – when developers had budgets to back unique ideas”

left me thinking I would have enjoyed that far more if I had seen it when I was 13.

If this is to be the year of the backlog, perhaps I should expand it to include some of the games I never finished from my youth. I keep wondering: how many other Blockheads did I never get past?

Joe Cuciniello

This is, believe it or not, the abridged version. But such dedication to these pages surely merits an Edge T-shirt, right?

Ringing the changes

A year on from Elden Ring and I’m sat wondering what its legacy will be. It was a transformative experience for me, as I was hitherto not a fan of FromSoft or Soulslike games, but now rank Elden Ring up in my top two or three games of all time.

Moreover, I just can’t go near any openworld games any more. I find them tiresome and tedious, and their extensive cutscenery intrusive and irritating. It was a dying format but Elden Ring has breathed some life into it. It feels certain we’ll see a flurry of open-world Soulslike games in the not-toodistant future, but I’m more interested in what impact it has on the wider open-world genre. Perhaps much less handholding, railroading and icon farming.

With Tears Of The Kingdom on the near horizon, too, I just can’t see that there’s any more excuse for the formulaic open-world format. It will be interesting to see how it goes, because what Elden Ring pulled off is clearly a lot more difficult than it looks. Perhaps the doors will have opened to making the format much more exciting, creative and immersive. That was what we were sold with the first open-world games well over 20 years ago now, but we’ve got horribly lost somewhere on the way since.

And what price Rockstar is reviewing how we’ll approach GTAVI? If it doesn’t, it runs the risk of having waited too long and ends up releasing a prehistoric videogame. Andy Roberts

High and dry

Following the latest Death Stranding 2 teaser, I took a brief tour down a Hideo Kojima rabbit hole, reading how terrifyingly accurate his predictions were in his games, be it the fake news, deep fakes and militarism in MGS2 or the more immediate lockdown and invisible threat of COVID feeling eerily similar in the original Death Stranding.

There’s one prediction that thankfully has yet to come to pass. Quoted in 2010, Kojima suggested games will become platform agnostic, available to play anywhere, any way, at any time. I found this quite odd considering his history of fawning over hardware; anyone who follows his Twitter can attest to his obsession with the practically defunct Sony Walkman. To me, Kojima is someone who’s built his reputation using the hardware available to innovate in his games, an infamous example being the use of PS1 controller slot two and memory card to gain the advantage in the Psycho Mantis boss fight in MGS, a less successful model using the DualShock 4 controller microphone to shout “Jareth” into a telephone in PT to progress.

Kojima is at his best when he works under certain constraints. Take the original Death Stranding. The idea of him being free to express himself without a platform to play as a pseudo-editor is less than exciting. Game consoles are technological landmarks in the history of videogames, a map of how far we’ve come. I grow fond of the startup screens and all their quirks. Hardware and their games go hand in hand. Without new hardware to use as a clear step into the unknown, we would merely be wandering from strand to strand with no connection, haunted by the prospect of the invisible enemy, ‘cloud gaming’. Nathan Brady-Eastham

True, Kojima has become something of a modern-day Nostradamus. Which means we’re approaching Death Stranding 2 with a degree of trepidation, if it means getting an early glimpse at what horrors might be in store for us over the next few years – and definitely not just because our toes still haven’t fully uncurled from all that “Mario and Princess Beach” nonsense.

Prêt à jouer

Recently I came close to buying a CRT monitor on Facebook Marketplace. And though I was tantalised by the thought of playing my dusty SNES library on the fuzzy warm glow of a period-accurate screen, common sense (and my bank balance) changed my mind. Like many Edge readers, I am sitting on too many games and too little time.

But then a funny thing happened. I pulled out my Switch OLED – also dusty – and have since rediscovered the joys of handheld gaming, catching up on indies and remastered classics perfect for pre-bed sessions. Another purchase, an 8BitDo Arcade Stick, has also afforded the Switch more (55” OLED) screen time, but favouring arcade classics and a newfound interest in fighting games.

Replicating the arcade experience at home is a teenage dream come true. All of which got me thinking about the importance of context. Certain types of games just work better on certain systems; I now think of my PS5 as my ‘blockbuster’ machine, mostly reserved for Sony’s cinematic gaming universe and other immersive experiences. On mobile, I dabble in high-concept games in short bursts. And every so often I’ll boot up Steam to play a slow-paced adventure on a MacBook.

I’ve found this ‘platform play style’ to be a remedy to choice paralysis, while also making better use of the time I have available to play games. As for Edge, after reading on the iPad for a good year or two, I’ve returned to print – much like a CRT, far easier on the eyes. Jonty Bell

Talking of easy on the eyes, thank you for submitting this letter in a font size normally associated with the top of a Snellen chart. We might follow suit if that didn’t mean we’d have to rename this spread ‘Dispatch’, or that we could only review two games per issue. Actually, thinking about it...