Sometimes it’s just fine to make it up as you go along
It doesn’t feel so long ago that the open-world videogame was such a rare beast that sighting a new one felt kind of magical. The DNA of these exotic specimens seemed to be familiar only to a select group who’d unlocked parts of our gaming hardware that lay agonisingly beyond the reach of mere mortal engineers. Eventually, though, others caught up. Which isn’t to say that such an approach was ever a magic bullet, and indeed we’ve seen plenty of examples over the years whose ideas would’ve struggled to fill a waste-paper bin, let alone the acres they were given to play with. As a concept, though, it does at least feel somewhat mature nowadays – to the extent that even modest indie teams, not only 600-employee-strong triple-A studios, can join in and shake things up.
On the cover of this issue we talk about Hyper Light Breaker ‘rewriting the rules of Roguelikes’ in adopting an open-world ethos, but this phrase is really just shorthand to describe developer Heart Machine’s willingness to come at the genre from a new direction. In reality, one of the truly great things about videogames as a whole is that their rules are not at all static – because games are still young, and their physiology is being defined, modified and rebuilt as they go along, just as the technology behind them drives so much change by moving so much more quickly than innovation in other fields. Consider it: what other form of artistic expression can hold a candle to the creativity and experimentation we’ve seen in indie game development over the past ten years or so? As the Marvelisation of the big-budget videogame production feels more difficult to resist with each month that passes, so the efforts of studios such as Heart Machine may resonate even more. Our cover story begins on p54.
Finally, for another excursion outside of rote mainstream fare, consider Humanity, whose spirit harkens back to the heady days of cult Japanese PlayStation favourites such as Q: Intelligent Qube and Katamari Damacy. Director Yugo Nakamura and his cohorts at Enhance tell all on p80.