Table of contents for July 2024 in PLAY

“THERE MAY BE A LIGHTER ANIME AESTHETIC… BUT THESE MONSTERS CAN STILL SLAP YOU INTO NEXT WEEK.” i FORMAT PS4 / ETA 14 JUN / PUB CAPCOM DEV CAPCOM, MARVELOUS / PLAYERS 1-4 To quote a famous line from our sister magazine Edge, in its 1994 review of the then-new Doom: “If only you could talk to these creatures, then perhaps you could try and make friends with them.” People scoffed at the idea then, but here we are with Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings Of Ruin, in which you do indeed befriend monsters you would be hunting for their skin and bones in the mainline series. Taking the form of a story-focussed creature-collecting RPG, this spinoff will be belatedly arriving on PlayStation next month. Its predecessor is coming to…

i FORMAT PS5 / ETA 2024 / PUB FURNITURE & MATTRESS DEV FURNITURE & MATTRESS / PLAYERS 1 “YOU DON’T MOVE HEROINE JEMMA AROUND SO MUCH AS REARRANGE THE WORLD.” Have you ever wished for a videogame based on a lattice pie crust? Us too! Well now, our dreams are coming true; sort of. This is a game world made up of interconnected horizontal and vertical lines, which you push and pull like tabs in a pop-up book. Only rather than popping up, things slide up, down, or across. As much as we enjoy talking about delicious pies, and thinking about delicious pies, and eating delicious pies, perhaps a crossword puzzle would be a more suitable thing to compare this to. Arranger is a puzzle adventure, after all, and it’s…

There’s much to like about this game, but one of the best things has to be that your teen of choice, upon awakening with amnesia in a box in the garden to find that they’ve been shrunk to the size of a particularly small ant, acts as surprised as if they’d opened a packet of crisps and found some crisps inside. Grounded was originally released in Early Access back in 2020, and since then has been expanded to a full release with plenty of updates on top. The good news is that as PlayStation latecomers to the party, we get to enjoy the full, polished product from day one, with the bugs the developers didn’t intend to include helpfully eradicated. The bad news is that the game suffers from an…

Type ‘2D puzzle platformer with cute lead moppet who goes on a moving journey’ into an AI and you’ll probably get a photo of a cat with seven arms. But put that into an AI at some unknown point in the future when AI actually works and you’ll get the opening 20 minutes of Planet Of Lana, a game that’s almost impressive in how unashamedly clichéd it is. Tranquil village setting that’s about to be destroyed? Check! Best friend/relative whose kidnapping drives the plot? Check! ‘Puzzles’ wherein you move a box across the screen so you can use it as a platform? Oh, be still our beating hearts… You leap between chasms, swing from vines, hide in bushes until enemies look the other way, and slap yourself awake – we’ve…

Sometimes a game has one critical flaw that stops it being an easy recommendation, such as dodgy platforming physics or the publisher accidentally filling the box with angry wasps. At other times you get a game that suffers from a thousand cuts, lots of minor irritations doing a really good job of obscuring the undeniable quality of what you’re playing. Tales Of Kenzera is one of the latter. We’re happy to recommend it, but if you ask us for an opinion after one of its bloody chase sequences, we’ll laugh bitterly in your face while writing a ‘1’ in that box in the bottom-right corner. It starts well, with the kind of appealing graphics you get when EA is signing the cheques. The game is from Abubakar Salim, the voice…

Aha! Oh. What? Hmmm. Yes! If awards were handed out for how often games caused involuntary noises of puzzlement, confusion, shock, and unmitigated delight, Animal Well would absolutely clean up. Inspired as much by Resident Evil as Fez, solo developer Billy Basso’s game is the spellbinding result of spending ages building a world and then stuffing every pixelated inch of it with wild ideas, bonkers mysteries, and brain-boggling secrets. Forget the metroidvania, we’re witnessing the birth of a whole new subgenre: the Well-like. (And if that doesn’t catch on, it’ll certainly be Well-liked.) Playing a small, unassuming blob-like creature – distinguished only by its searching eyes, each just two pixels high – you hatch out of a flower and into a compact, complex labyrinth. It’s not huge but it feels…

01 Red Dead Redemption 2 You won’t find another open world quite like this, the streets of Los Santos paling in comparison to this gorgeous, realistic western sprawl. Arthur Morgan’s wild west adventure is epic, emotional, and has enough teasing mysteries on every horizon for no two cowboys’ journeys to feel the same. With train robberies, tootin’ headshots, and racists to kill, there’s never a dull moment in Rockstar’s greatest. 02 Grand Theft Auto V Laughing in the face of other cross-gen ports, GTA V on PS4 is more than a mere HD remaster. Upped to a glorious 1080p, it weaves together everything that made the PS3 original great, with new music, more dynamic weather, and a game-changing FPS mode. 03 God Of War A departure in some ways but a resounding return…

You can’t overstate just how formidably open-world games dominated PS3. In addition to iconic Rockstar sandboxes GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption, we got to enjoy a breathtaking mix of competitors and copycats. There were the Batman romps of Arkham Asylum, the island escapades of Just Cause 2, and the compendium of carnage called Saints Row: The Third. Often lost in discussions of that heavyweight mix is the most underrated of them all: Sleeping Dogs. That this Hong-Kong-based brawler even became a contender is surprising given the development hell it endured. Initially conceived in 2008 as a sequel to cop sim True Crime: New York City, it would take four years, a name change, and a switch of publishing rights – from Activision Blizzard to Square Enix – before Sleeping…

Far Cry Primal (2016) is set in 10,000 BC. Resistance: Fall Of Man envisions a 1940s/1950s alien invasion. Driver: Parallel Lines (2006) is split between 1978 and 2006. MediEvil (1998) isn’t realistic, but is specifically set in 1286. FACTS MATTER Edutainment that works Although the fine details are fictional, Black Friday is steeped in fact. Designed to educate players, the narrative combines meaningful, difficult choices with an original but historically accurate story, real photos from the time, and even recordings of speeches by Ayatollah Khomeini. There are also two possible endings, depending on your actions leading up to that point. 1979 REVOLUTION: BLACK FRIDAY IS A 2016 PS4 GAME ABOUT THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION, IN WHICH YOU PLAY AS AN ASPIRING PHOTOJOURNALIST. STAY ALERT Soviet coming from miles away Command &…

“It’s pure fighting games overload as you can catch a cracking match whichever way you turn your head.” For more than two decades, the Evolution Championship Series, better known as Evo, has been the most prestigious event for the fighting game community. While the tournament’s roots are in the US, the organisers decided to honour the genre’s birthplace when they introduced Evo Japan in 2018. With new titles Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 featuring in this year’s event, we spent three days in Tokyo’s Ariake Gym-Ex soaking up the fast and skilful competition. The fighting was fierce for the duration; day one saw 350 players vie for Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes’ championship title, while Top Six finals were held for King Of Fighters XV, Street Fighter III: 3rd…

The Game Music Festival, organised by a passionate group of game music fans from Poland, made its London debut in 2022 and was held at the Southbank Centre this year. While the previous festival was a little subdued, possibly as a result of being post-pandemic, and featured a lot of music from indie games (though highly acclaimed ones, such as Cuphead), this year’s sold-out event centred on music from two huge PlayStation hits: ‘The Sounds Of The Fireflies’ was dedicated to The Last Of Us, and ‘The Symphony Of The Realms’ to Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s no surprise that tickets sold out. Concerts dedicated to game music are more common in the calendar these days, but this day-long celebration is the only festival dedicated to the art form. What’s more, there’s…

i FORMAT PS5, PS4 / ETA 2024 / PUB ARMOR GAMES STUDIOS / DEV SEED BY SEED / PLAYERS 1-4 Ever found the rules and long playing time of tabletop RPGs intimidating? Then Baladins might be for you. It’s a lightweight fantasy RPG whose developers have taken the more daunting parts of the Dungeons & Dragons rulebook and simplified them into the game’s core components. The result is a more approachable tabletop-style RPG that doesn’t take itself too seriously, making it perfect for newbies and those who want a short but fun fantasy adventure. Baladins begins in classic RPG fashion. You and up to three other players each pick an adventurer from a handful of classes, a roster that feels more whimsical than your usual goth rogues and bearded wizards.…

i FORMAT TBC / ETA TBC / PUB RAW FURY / DEV GROUND SHATTER / PLAYERS 1 Look, if you want to make lurid jokes about medieval romantic encounters, that’s up to you; we’re here to talk about a videogame. Specifically, the spiritual successor to deckbuilding brawler Fights In Tight Spaces (there’s a clue in the name that you may have picked up on). If you know it, much will be familiar here – with a few significant twists. The basics remain the same. It’s still turn-based combat, the spaces are indeed still very tight, and you still build a deck of virtual cards that are used for attack, defence, and even movement. It’s not, therefore, taking a traditional approach to card games. This is much less poker and more…

We’ve done it! The summoning circle we laid out worked, and Shin Megami Tensei will return to PlayStation at long last on 14 June. However, as is so often the case when things are plucked from the other side, the fifth instalment has come back different. Previously only available on Nintendo Switch, this expanded rerelease is making its PS5 and PS4 debut with a fresh thirst for revenge as Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance. Shinjiro Takata, the producer of that original Switch release as well as Vengeance, tells us, “After the great response it received [on Nintendo Switch], we were excited to expand the reach to more users with additional platforms. Therefore, we started to develop the best SMT V possible by carefully improving the game system and adding in…

i FORMAT PS5, PS4 ETA SUMMER 2024 PUB SQUARE ENIXDEV SQUARE ENIX CREATIVE BUSINESS UNIT IIIPLAYERS MULTI The Dawntrail expansion is getting close now, with only a few more weeks before launch in July. We’re excited for it to pull into port, but while we wait the dev team has given us a quick peek at the upcoming jobs and how all of our favourites will change with the new level cap after the recent benchmark test. It was only the tiniest of teases, though, so we asked the producer and director of Final Fantasy XIV, Naoki Yoshida, about everything that goes into making and continually polishing the MMORPG’s job roster. Currently there are 19 different battle jobs to choose from, one special job, three gatherers and eight crafters, with Dawntrail…

Fun in the sun is what you’re in for with this second, meatier batch of DLC – even if it takes place while Clive and company are in dire straits. It’s set right after Echoes Of The Fallen, as the fate of Valisthea hangs in the balance, just before the main game’s final confrontation. All the crystals and Eikons have been mastered… or have they? With news that the conspicuously absent Leviathan has resurfaced, Clive ends up leading the party across the bay to Mysidia, the blighted land from which the sea serpent hails. However, it turns out to not be as blighted as once thought, instead kept healthy and hidden thanks to a witch’s ancient glamour. WATER RIDE The tropical clime and lush jungles mean this DLC’s awash with…

One of the saddest things about the recent passing of manga legend Akira Toriyama is that he didn’t quite get to see Sand Land’s modern resurgence reach its peak. Far less well known than Toriyama’s legendary Dragon Ball series, Sand Land is the perfect candidate for an open world videogame thanks to its sprawling setting, interesting characters, and instantly recognisable tanks. You play as Beelzebub, son of Lucifer, and you’re accompanied by a demon named Thief, plus a human sheriff called Rao. You’re soon joined by the mysterious Ann, making for a pleasantly varied core team who grow to feel like friends (and fiends), as you set off to find the ‘Legendary Spring,’ a water source of which the people of Sand Land are in dire need. Activity-wise this translates…

Some games just flow. You go from task to task with a sense of accomplishment, and each accomplishment unlocks something fresh for you to explore. This is the best way to describe Dave The Diver, because any comparison to the likes of Stardew Valley probably wouldn’t do it justice – not least because this game’s idea of farm-to-table involves shotguns. Professional diver Dave receives a call from his friend Cobra about an exciting business opportunity: dive into the Blue Hole, a mysterious part of the sea that can somehow house marine creatures from oceans all over the world at once, to stock the up-and-coming sushi restaurant Mr Bancho. The taciturn Bancho can turn any fish into sushi, but he doesn’t have any interest in management, which is why you don’t…

The logic puzzles of Minesweeper have been given a glow-up in Lets! Revolution!, a turn-based strategy adventure that takes the rules of the PC legend and punches them up. It’s a colourful roguelike puzzler in which you need to use the art of deductive reasoning to flip tiles and find the dastardly king. There’s plenty of strategic depth here, together with gorgeous animation. Each level tasks you with hunting down the king, who is hiding somewhere in the map. Maps are made up of tiles that are placed face-down, and your task is to flip them until you find the crowned coward. When he’s been exposed, he’ll flee into the next level in a cycle that will keep repeating until you end his reign once and for all. The tiles…

Warning: mild spoiler for Marvel’s Spider Man 2 ahead. Ready? Sure? Right… Isn’t the bit where you get to play as Venom brilliant? Peter Parker and Miles Morales are both wonderful good boys, but sometimes you just want to cut loose and become a terrifying, tendril-covered monster. It’s a nasty fantasy that Radical Entertainment nailed perfectly with Prototype. Playing as Alex ‘Grrr’ Mercer, you’re a science experiment with superpowers such as the ability to consume NPCs to regain health, arms that can turn into claws and blades, and the wonderfully named ‘Tendril Barrage’, which allows you to shoot (yes!) a barrage of tendrils. “I want a new one NOW,” demands reader Peters Nathan, a man so passionate about this he seems to have flipped his surname with his first name…

i FORMAT PS3 / PUB KONAMI / DEV VATRA GAMES / RELEASED 2012 You’re Murphy Pendleton, a convict being led down to the prison showers. The guard gives you some advice: if you turn on the showers, the steam fogs up the security cameras. He’s also left you ‘a present’ on one of the benches, and it’s not a nice fluffy towel. You enter, try the trick with the showers and suddenly the first signs you’re in a Silent Hill game emerge, with the clouds of steam imitating the series’ famous fog. A brilliant touch. You go to the bench and find a knife. Then another prisoner arrives. At first he seems merely confused. “You don’t recognise me, do you?” asks Murphy, eerily calm. “We used to be neighbours.” The…

Warhorse Studios’ 2018 debut introduced us to the trials and tribulations of Henry, a mediaeval peasant living in the kingdom of Bohemia during the 15th century. When a mercenary army razes his village, Henry’s everyday existence ends and his quest for revenge begins. But a man can’t subsist on white-hot fury alone; Henry needs to eat and sleep just like anyone else. In fact, the first game takes such a manual approach to RPG mechanics that at launch you could only save your progress by finding a bed and tucking Henry in for the night. As he sleeps (or looks for trouble in first-person duels, or gets sloshed at the nearest public house), the world keeps on turning, with questlines progressing whether you’re there to see them unfurl or not.…

i FORMAT PS5, PS4 / ETA SUMMER 2024 PUB PONCLE / DEV PONCLE / PLAYERS 1-4 Hell’s the hottest spot for all that goes bump in the night – but it’s kicking out time at the bar and the devils have nowhere to go save your back garden in rural Italy. The horde’s drink of choice? Oh, that’s all you. Thankfully, you’re far from defenceless in this roguelike shoot-’em-up. You attack automatically, leaving you to focus on cutting a path through the throng of oh-so-bitey foes. You start the fight with one character-specific attack, which can be anything from straightforward whips and blades to less predictable weapons such as splashes of holy water and rippling waves of lightning. Cutting through weaker beasties, the way forward is paved in shiny gems.…

i FORMAT PS5 / ETA 18 JUN / PUB SECRET MODE / DEV THE CHINESE ROOM / PLAYERS 1 Creepy mansions are great settings for horror, but when you think about it, oil rigs are even better suited to it. It’s surprising that they’re not used more often: a rig is a huge but claustrophobic industrial complex in the middle of the sea, many miles from land, with little means of escape. In short, it’s not where you want to be if something goes wrong. And something goes very wrong here. We’re still not sure precisely what that something is, but thanks to an extended look at an early section of gameplay, we now have a clearer picture than ever before of what’s going on. Still Wakes The Deep takes…

Like other titans of the RPG genre, Megami Tensei has been around since the 1980s and the 8-bit console era. The first game in the series was released in 1987, the same year as Final Fantasy and only a year after Dragon Quest. Yet while those contemporaries took a while to reach English-speaking audiences, Megami Tensei had an even slower start, not really flourishing until PS2 despite having its beginnings on PS1. To add to the confusion, while its contemporaries have often led to spinoffs and sub-series, what constitutes the mainline of Megami Tensei, or indeed, Shin Megami Tensei (they’re different) can be much less clear. Rather than each numbered entry being discrete, Megami Tensei was divided into distinct sub-series from early on. For example, Shin Megami Tensei II and…

Cataclysms often form the backdrop for soulslikes, but they usually have a fantastical bent. The genius to Another Crab’s Treasure’s premise is that the doom that comes from above is all too real: trash tumbling down into the deep as ever more rubbish is dumped into the ocean. Disastrous? Absolutely. But it’s a slow boil for the denizens of the deep who make their homes in discarded waste, use wrappers to create fashion, and trade in microplastics. That is, until the poison accumulates too much and they lose themselves to it – settlements like an entire milk carton village turning on anyone who wanders in. Sheltered in the tide pools, Kril has to come out of his shell when it’s stolen in the name of taxes by a strange, talking,…

Given it’s the latest in a series of popular RPGs created by a strong development team, you’d expect this to have some pizzazz or at least be comfortably familiar. However, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes lapses instead into the disappointingly familiar, feeling much more like getting stopped at three traffic lights in a row. You know the drill: an evil empire wants to use a magic item as a weapon of war, leading to archetypal characters with nothing better to do joining your merry band in a random-encounter-addled, dismal-dungeon slogfest. It’s not Eiyuden’s fault everything has been done before, but that’s no excuse for not having learned from any of the games that came before it. It’s bloated with unnecessary dialogue every few steps through its generic dungeons. The attempts at…

You would, perhaps, expect a game that hands you a camera and asks you to do nothing but take photos to be about photography. And to an extent, this one certainly is. Yet as we progress through what turns out to be a story, it quickly becomes obvious that this is about so much more than the art of taking pictures. Umurangi Generation’s premise is so perfectly suited to virtual reality, and its implementation so superb, it’s genuinely surprising that a VR version of the game has only been made available this year (the non-VR game was first released on PC in 2020). The camera is your ever-present friend. When you want to take a photo – which you can do at any time and any place – you just…

Maid Of Sker was a first-person horror game that didn’t even have guns when it was first released. So naturally this new game in the Sker series is… a round-based zombie FPS? It’s a bit like finding out The Last Of Us Part III is going to be a cosy farming simulator. Still, it’s a spinoff, not a straight sequel, and we’re never ones to discourage a developer from trying something new. Hmmm, but how new is it, really? This plays a lot like Call Of Duty’s Zombies mode, only made on a much smaller budget and with enemies wearing funnier hats. You spawn in some horrible location and have to complete missions while wave after wave of nasty monsters attack. Gunplay is fine, you move at a decent speed,…

01 Synapse Telekinesis and guns make a wonderful combo in VR. With one mapped to your left hand and the other to your right, you feel like a conductor of chaos as you blast your way through a rogue colonel’s mind to uncover secrets. Eye-tracking is wonderfully used to target your telekinesis, meaning you can slam enemies all over the place as you reload your arsenal. It’s got a roguelite structure, so you’ll keep coming back. 02 Horizon: Call Of The Mountain Manages to make level after level of climbing compelling with different environments to pull yourself up through, the Sense controllers allowing for neat player expression. Just make sure you take a break, or all that spider monkeying will make your arms throb. 03 Star Wars: Tales From The Galaxy’s Edge Who…

Despite doing the whole ‘survival horror with fixed camera angles’ thing years before Resident Evil, Alone In The Dark has always been its less popular little brother. But The New Nightmare does one thing well that Resi was, arguably, struggling with at the time: even today it has effective jump scares and unsettlingly creepy moments. Not as powerful as they were back in 2001, but still impressive. Mind you, it really highlights the need for Sony to make more of an effort with its emulators. Being able to save at any time is a blessing,1 as is the rewind function. However, the ability to remap the controls would give this experience a real boost. We adapt fairly quickly as we play, but they never feel great.2 ALONE SHARK The game…