Author Archives: Jessica Conditt

‘Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess’ review: Demonic delights

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Rhythm is everything in Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess. On a micro scale, the maiden Yoshiro dances through the game with graceful, measured movements, her steps cleansing the black defilement that has consumed her mountain and its people. In combat, Yoshiro’s protector, Soh, directs their sword in nimble arcs, landing attacks and parries based on timing and flow. On a grand scale, Kunitsu-Gami employs a soothing cadence of frenzied combat and peaceful base building. Soh’s abilities grow into a powerful crescendo as they guide Yoshiro down the mountain, her body deteriorating with each encounter.

Amid these crashing waves of tension and tranquility, Kunitsu-Gami also balances beauty and hellish terror with supreme skill. The slopes of Mt. Kafuku are lush, but its plants, animals and people are slathered in caustic pools of defilement, oil-slick and sticky. Yoshiro and Soh wear layers of delicate fabrics and glinting metallic jewelry, their movements mesmerizing. The demons that have taken over the mountain are vile — eyeless and bulging with toxic pus, many of them armed with sharp claws and gaping maws. The creature designs in Kunitsu-Gami are body-horrific and each beast is uniquely, grotesquely gorgeous.

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess screenshot.
Capcom

Kunitsu-Gami finds harmony in its dichotomies. The game’s core loop involves a day-night cycle: During the day, players carve a path for Yoshiro to cleanse a settlement, meanwhile collecting crystals, repairing defenses and freeing villagers from cocoons of defilement. At night, creatures called Seethe pour out of the Torii gates, and Soh must defend Yoshiro with the help of the rescued villagers. Protecting Yoshiro and completing her ritual reverts each region to its pre-defilement form, creating a base where Soh can upgrade their units and abilities.

The game blends real-time combat with tower-defense mechanics, and all of it takes place in a zoomed-out third-person view with a fully adjustable camera anchored to Soh’s body. It’s an effective approach, inviting players to mess around with perspective and investigate every detour in the environment, purging defilement as they go.

There are 17 bases to cleanse on the mountain plus 10 boss stages. Defeating a big bad in a challenge stage unlocks a new warrior type for Soh to deploy, including healer, sorcerer, ninja, spearman, cannoneer, marksman, and an aesthetic that can slow down enemies. As night falls on a base battle, the game's music grows louder and more discordant, signaling the imminent Seethe invasion. Players assign roles to villagers using the crystals they’ve collected during the day, and then place their fighters around Yoshiro on the map. Each battle involves a different number of units — there are even fights that Soh has to complete on their own, and others where they’re incapacitated, leaving combat to the villagers entirely. The variety built into these encounters is refreshing.

Combat requires preparation and constant attention, as the Seethe attack Yoshiro from multiple sides with a variety of moves, including aerial slashes, suicide bombs and bulbous projectiles that explode in toxic pools. It’s often essential to reposition units mid-battle, and thankfully, time freezes during these tactical moments.

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess screenshot.
Capcom

Soh mainly attacks with their sword in a smooth, rhythmic form that feels fantastic to control. Attacks are simple — on the DualSense, it’s square for smaller strikes and triangle for a large hit. Pressing square before triangle lines up elaborate sequences where Soh twists and swings their body before landing a series of big blows, and their positioning is completely controllable the entire time. This makes combat feel like one elongated dance, the input perfectly predicting Soh’s on-screen movements. Soh’s abilities evolve steadily with every victory and base repair, eventually adding a ranged bow, an extra form of swordplay, stronger attacks, multiple special moves and other upgrades to their kit.

Mandatory boss levels appear after some settlements are successfully cleansed, offering massive fights against gloriously gross creatures. I had to replay most of these bosses at least once, adjusting my unit types and positions according to each demon’s unique attack style and vulnerabilities. The enemies are all giant and covered in intricate, iridescent designs, but they’re otherwise distinct: There’s a skittering centipede that rushes in for rapid hits, a literal cherry tree with stabbing tentacle roots, a vicious floating sorcerer orbited by a ring of rocky spikes, and a juicy larval beast that moves like a petulant toddler and spews lethal sludge. That last one is called Notsugo and it’s my favorite because it’s so disgustingly adorable.

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess
Capcom

After a fight in a settlement or boss stage, there’s time to take a breath and fix up some bases. The bases trail down the side of Mt. Kafuku in the stage-selection screen following a successful purge — once the defilement is cleared from a settlement, players still have to make it habitable by assigning villagers to fix broken buildings and platforms. Repairs take a few in-game days to complete and they unlock extra resources. It’s easy, tranquil work. This mechanic provides a soft place to land after a big battle, where players can strategize, upgrade their skills, pet a Shiba Inu or let a deer scream at them. I recommend repairing bases as quickly and thoroughly as possible: Not only does this net necessary resources at the proper pace, but it prevents an uncomfortable base-repair backlog from forming. By mid-game, I generally had three or four bases on the go at all times, and that was with immediate, maxed-out repairs.

The bases are also home to some of the most beautiful aspects of the game. Yoshiro sets up a tent in each base where players manage upgrades, and it also contains plates to share food with her. The dessert menu fills up first, offering a variety of mochi treats and crystalline sweets in a fabulous photorealistic viewing mode. I don’t know what it is, but I could stare at hyper-detailed video game food all day. Kunitsu-Gami understands this urge and caters to it.

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess
Capcom

Additionally, the tent contains scrolls featuring traditional, woodcut-style art pieces relating to completed stages, and the bases have collectable ema plaques that showcase detailed, rotatable 3D images of the demons and villagers players encounter. These are sensational touches that not only expand the game’s lore, but shine a brilliant light on Japanese history and culture.

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is perfectly balanced, lovingly crafted, and metal as hell. It’s filled with foreboding demons and intense combat, but it’s also a peaceful experience that invites players to slow down and recognize the beauty around them — even when it’s in the form of a giant, oozing monster. Especially then.

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Game Pass. It's developed and published by Capcom.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/kunitsu-gami-path-of-the-goddess-review-demonic-delights-150004066.html?src=rss

Still Wakes the Deep is a modern horror classic

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Don’t look down. Don’t look down. Don’t look down.

Waves the size of skyscrapers explode beneath me as I creep across a busted metal beam in the middle of the North Sea, suspended at the base of an oil rig that’s in the process of collapsing. I’m crawling swiftly but carefully, knees sliding on the wet metal and eyes locked on the platform in front of me. Don’t look down.

I look down. The cold sea is boiling just inches from my beam, white spray reaching up, threatening to pull me under miles of suffocating darkness and pressure. Fuck.

Still Wakes the Deep
The Chinese Room

In Still Wakes the Deep, horror comes in multiple forms. Violent creatures stalk the walkways on thin, too-long limbs that burst from their bodies like snapping bungee cords. Human-sized pustules and bloody ribbons grow along the corridors, emitting a sickly cosmic glow. The ocean is an unrelenting threat, wailing beneath every step. And then there’s the Beira D oil rig itself, a massive and mazelike industrial platform supported by slender tension legs in the middle of a raging sea, groaning and tilting as it’s ripped apart from the inside. Each of these elements is deadly; each one manifests a unique brand of terror.

Still Wakes the Deep is a first-person horror game from The Chinese Room, the studio behind Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. The game is set in the winter of 1975 and its action is contained to the Beira D, a hulking metal maze that offers mystery, a growing familiarity and death at every turn. The rig is filled with a rich cast of characters from the British Isles, most of them Scottish. Players assume the role of Caz, an electrician on the rig whose best friend is Roy, the cook.

Still Wakes the Deep
The Chinese Room

Still Wakes the Deep feels like a hit from the PS3 and Xbox 360 era, devoid of modern AAA bloat. It’s restrained like the original Dead Space, with a core loop that serves the narrative and vice versa. The mechanics steadily evolve without becoming repetitive or cumbersome. Its monsters are murderous but not overplayed. In Still Wakes the Deep, the horror is unrelenting but its source is constantly shifting — vicious eldritch beasts, the crumbling rig, the angry North Sea — and this diversity infuses the game with a buzzing tension until the breathtaking final scene.

The game is fully voice acted and its crew members are incredibly charming. An undercurrent of good-natured ribbing belies every interaction, and the dialogue is earnest and legitimately funny, even in life-or-death situations. This skillful sense of character development only makes the carnage more disturbing once the monsters board the Beira D.

After the oil rig drills through a mysterious substance deep in the North Sea, a giant eldritch organism takes over the structure, crunching its metal corridors and infesting the bodies of some crew members. Caz is on a mission to survive the creatures and escape the rig — and help save Roy, whose body is fading fast because he can’t get to his insulin.

Still Wakes the Deep
The Chinese Room

Gameplay in Still Wakes the Deep is traditional first-person horror fare, executed with elegance and expertise. The action involves leaping across broken platforms, balancing on thin ledges, running down corridors, climbing ladders, swimming through claustrophobic holes and hiding from monsters in vents and lockers. There are no guns on the Beira D, and Caz has just a screwdriver to help him break open locks and unscrew metal panels, placing the focus on pure survival rather than combat. Interactive materials tend to be highlighted in yellow, so it’s never a question of what to do or where to go, but rather how to get there without falling prey to the monsters, the sea or the rig.

Each input feels perfectly precise and responsive. Climbing a ladder, for instance, requires holding RT and pressing the analog stick in the proper direction — but if Caz slips, players need to suddenly press and hold LT as well, so he can regain his grasp in a quicktime event. In these moments of sudden panic, squeezing both triggers feels like the natural thing to do. It’s deeply satisfying to clasp the gamepad as tightly as Caz is holding the rungs of the ladder, player and character completely in sync in the aftermath of a sudden scare. Still Wakes the Deep is a prime example of intuitive game design.

Still Wakes the Deep
The Chinese Room

It’s also just a gorgeous game. I stopped short multiple times while playing Still Wakes the Deep simply to admire the crisp lines, complex lighting and photorealism of specific scenes, but every frame is dense with thoughtful and well-rendered details. The otherworldly structures littering the rig cause Caz’s vision to bubble like a melting film reel, and multicolored circles overtake the screen every time he passes too close to a pustule — it’s disorienting and eerily pretty, much like the rest of the game.

Still Wakes the Deep is an instant horror classic. It’s filled with heart-pounding terror and laugh-out-loud dialogue, and it all takes place in a setting that’s rarely explored in interactive media. Amid the sneaking, swimming, running and climbing on the Beira D, Still Wakes the Deep manages to tell a heartfelt and powerful story about relationships and sacrifice. Caz and Roy have a special friendship, but they also have family back on shore and returning to these people — alive, ideally — is a constant driving force.

Still Wakes the Deep
The Chinese Room

Still Wakes the Deep is available now on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and it’s included in Game Pass. It’s developed by The Chinese Room and published by Secret Mode.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/still-wakes-the-deep-is-a-modern-horror-classic-175304800.html?src=rss

Still Wakes the Deep is a modern horror classic

Posted on by

Don’t look down. Don’t look down. Don’t look down.

Waves the size of skyscrapers explode beneath me as I creep across a busted metal beam in the middle of the North Sea, suspended at the base of an oil rig that’s in the process of collapsing. I’m crawling swiftly but carefully, knees sliding on the wet metal and eyes locked on the platform in front of me. Don’t look down.

I look down. The cold sea is boiling just inches from my beam, white spray reaching up, threatening to pull me under miles of suffocating darkness and pressure. Fuck.

Still Wakes the Deep
The Chinese Room

In Still Wakes the Deep, horror comes in multiple forms. Violent creatures stalk the walkways on thin, too-long limbs that burst from their bodies like snapping bungee cords. Human-sized pustules and bloody ribbons grow along the corridors, emitting a sickly cosmic glow. The ocean is an unrelenting threat, wailing beneath every step. And then there’s the Beira D oil rig itself, a massive and mazelike industrial platform supported by slender tension legs in the middle of a raging sea, groaning and tilting as it’s ripped apart from the inside. Each of these elements is deadly; each one manifests a unique brand of terror.

Still Wakes the Deep is a first-person horror game from The Chinese Room, the studio behind Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. The game is set in the winter of 1975 and its action is contained to the Beira D, a hulking metal maze that offers mystery, a growing familiarity and death at every turn. The rig is filled with a rich cast of characters from the British Isles, most of them Scottish. Players assume the role of Caz, an electrician on the rig whose best friend is Roy, the cook.

Still Wakes the Deep
The Chinese Room

Still Wakes the Deep feels like a hit from the PS3 and Xbox 360 era, devoid of modern AAA bloat. It’s restrained like the original Dead Space, with a core loop that serves the narrative and vice versa. The mechanics steadily evolve without becoming repetitive or cumbersome. Its monsters are murderous but not overplayed. In Still Wakes the Deep, the horror is unrelenting but its source is constantly shifting — vicious eldritch beasts, the crumbling rig, the angry North Sea — and this diversity infuses the game with a buzzing tension until the breathtaking final scene.

The game is fully voice acted and its crew members are incredibly charming. An undercurrent of good-natured ribbing belies every interaction, and the dialogue is earnest and legitimately funny, even in life-or-death situations. This skillful sense of character development only makes the carnage more disturbing once the monsters board the Beira D.

After the oil rig drills through a mysterious substance deep in the North Sea, a giant eldritch organism takes over the structure, crunching its metal corridors and infesting the bodies of some crew members. Caz is on a mission to survive the creatures and escape the rig — and help save Roy, whose body is fading fast because he can’t get to his insulin.

Still Wakes the Deep
The Chinese Room

Gameplay in Still Wakes the Deep is traditional first-person horror fare, executed with elegance and expertise. The action involves leaping across broken platforms, balancing on thin ledges, running down corridors, climbing ladders, swimming through claustrophobic holes and hiding from monsters in vents and lockers. There are no guns on the Beira D, and Caz has just a screwdriver to help him break open locks and unscrew metal panels, placing the focus on pure survival rather than combat. Interactive materials tend to be highlighted in yellow, so it’s never a question of what to do or where to go, but rather how to get there without falling prey to the monsters, the sea or the rig.

Each input feels perfectly precise and responsive. Climbing a ladder, for instance, requires holding RT and pressing the analog stick in the proper direction — but if Caz slips, players need to suddenly press and hold LT as well, so he can regain his grasp in a quicktime event. In these moments of sudden panic, squeezing both triggers feels like the natural thing to do. It’s deeply satisfying to clasp the gamepad as tightly as Caz is holding the rungs of the ladder, player and character completely in sync in the aftermath of a sudden scare. Still Wakes the Deep is a prime example of intuitive game design.

Still Wakes the Deep
The Chinese Room

It’s also just a gorgeous game. I stopped short multiple times while playing Still Wakes the Deep simply to admire the crisp lines, complex lighting and photorealism of specific scenes, but every frame is dense with thoughtful and well-rendered details. The otherworldly structures littering the rig cause Caz’s vision to bubble like a melting film reel, and multicolored circles overtake the screen every time he passes too close to a pustule — it’s disorienting and eerily pretty, much like the rest of the game.

Still Wakes the Deep is an instant horror classic. It’s filled with heart-pounding terror and laugh-out-loud dialogue, and it all takes place in a setting that’s rarely explored in interactive media. Amid the sneaking, swimming, running and climbing on the Beira D, Still Wakes the Deep manages to tell a heartfelt and powerful story about relationships and sacrifice. Caz and Roy have a special friendship, but they also have family back on shore and returning to these people — alive, ideally — is a constant driving force.

Still Wakes the Deep
The Chinese Room

Still Wakes the Deep is available now on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and it’s included in Game Pass. It’s developed by The Chinese Room and published by Secret Mode.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/still-wakes-the-deep-is-a-modern-horror-classic-175304800.html?src=rss

Neva hands-on: A grand achievement in emotional game design

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Neva is going to make me cry. It very nearly did at Summer Game Fest, as the game’s introductory cinematics faded to black, literally just one minute into my time with the demo. I won’t divulge what happens in those initial frames, but it shattered my soul. It also perfectly primed me for the heart-pounding danger and devastating beauty that I would get lost in for the next 45 minutes, alongside my new best friend, Neva the wolf.

Neva
Nomada Studio

Every aspect of Neva is breathtaking. It plays like a living watercolor illustration: Alba, the protagonist, has long, slender limbs, a cloud of silver hair and a flowing red cloak that drapes behind her elegantly with each leap and fall. Neva is a young white wolf, fluffy and energetic, and the two share an intense bond that’s repeatedly reinforced and tested in the demo.

The world of Neva feels slightly more grounded than that of Gris, the game that put Nomada Studio on the map in 2018, but it’s still filled with layers of magic. The landscapes beyond the 2D plane that Alba and Neva traverse have incredible depth — dense forests hiding secrets and mountain ranges towering above wide valleys, sharp peaks piercing the sky in the far distance. The demo has lush glades draped in vines and weeping branches, sunlight streaming through the gaps in the leaves, as well as cave systems with dark, tight corridors. At times Neva takes the Frank Lloyd Wright approach to design, squeezing players through claustrophobic thickets that suddenly burst onto fields of thick green grass, the camera pulling back to show how small Alba and Neva really are in this space.

Neva
Nomada Studio

Trees, leaves, rocks and roots compose the game’s sidescrolling playground, with sloping platforms and floating islands built mainly out of stone. Touches of fantastical alien technology appear with increasing frequency as the demo progresses, as do hordes of inky-black enemies with round white faces, mouths open in silent screams.

Platforming in Neva is intuitive. There’s minimal on-screen text in the game, and instead direction comes from the environment, soft highlights and sunkissed glows marking the proper paths in a way that feels completely natural. I flowed through most areas of the demo, leaping onto ledges with almost-subconscious impulses, knowing that I could trust the game’s subtle instructions. There are areas of spiky blackness that Alba has to clear for Neva to be able to progress, and at times it’s necessary to leave the little wolf behind for a moment, generating instant separation anxiety. Neva yelps and squeaks as she learns how to traverse the world, and they’re heart-wrenching sounds. I was keenly aware of Neva with each jump, making sure she could follow my path, lingering to watch her complete big leaps, petting her after each success, and consistently calling out her name.

Alba’s voice is fairy-like and the way she says, “Neva? Neva. Nevaaa!” has become an earworm I can’t shake. In the days since coming home from Summer Game Fest and reuniting with my two small dogs, I’ve been walking around the house saying, “Neva?” as if it were their names. It’s been a very confusing time for them, but they’ve gotten a few extra treats, so all’s well.

Combat in Neva feels as intuitive as platforming, with simple inputs that land satisfying hits of Alba’s sword. The enemies, long-limbed creatures that appear out of dark pools in the ground, slash at Alba with their spiky fingers and throw lethal blobs at her, but one-on-one, they’re fairly easy to dispatch. Alba is able to get incredibly close to each creature before she takes damage, and this generous proximity makes the fight scenes feel like dance, with constant action and minimal interruptions. I didn’t die until I reached the boss fight at the end of the demo, where Neva and I had to fight off a giant creature, double jumping around it to slash at its legs and back, avoiding its attacks. I defeated the boss after three deaths, and the scene felt like an appropriate escalation of everything I’d learned so far.

Neva
Nomada Studio

I’m convinced that every preview of Neva (including this one) will mention how quickly and easily the game will make players cry, and I want to take a moment to recognize the magnitude of this achievement. The bond that Nomada Studio have built between Neva and Alba is incredibly powerful, and this type of emotional connection doesn’t just happen when you put an animal and a human in the same scene. Neva is a constant source of anxiety and joy: The cub must be protected, at all costs, and she feels like a physical part of Alba’s being, necessary to the protagonist’s survival. Neva establishes their shared trauma and every following mechanic reinforces their partnership — protect, pet, repeat. Neva and Alba need each other, and their shared love resonates from each frame of the game.

Guaranteed, Neva is going to make me cry.

Neva is due out on PC and PlayStation 5 this year, developed by Nomada Studio and published by Devolver Digital.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/neva-hands-on-a-grand-achievement-in-emotional-game-design-180516649.html?src=rss

Phoenix Springs offers breathtaking beauty in a desolate neo-noir world

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Take me to Phoenix Springs. 

I didn’t make it all the way to the remote desert oasis and its mysterious community of misfits while playing the Phoenix Springs demo at Summer Game Fest, but after spending a brief time in Iris Dormer’s neo-noir world, I’m desperate to get there. I want to find out what happened to Iris’ brother, a man I’ve only heard about in strange, sad tales. I want to hear Iris’ voice articulating in my ear, providing brusque context for every scene. I’m ready to get lost again in the game’s sickly green shadows. I’m wildly curious to find out what awaits me in the desert. Take me back.

Phoenix Springs
Calligram Studio

Phoenix Springs is a point-and-click detective game starring Iris Dormer, a reporter who’s looking for her estranged brother, Leo. Her search eventually leads beyond the city’s crumbling skyscrapers and across the desert, to an oasis community called Phoenix Springs. Iris investigates the area and its people using an inventory of mental notes, collecting ideas instead of physical objects as clues.

The Summer Game Fest demo covered the game’s initial stages, featuring Iris on a train and in the city, only teasing the oddities that might be hiding in the desert community of Phoenix Springs. Each scene in the game is a work of art and Iris is its historian, revealing threads of relationships and storylines as she reads documents and picks up information from strangers. In any situation, she has three options for interaction: talk to, look at, use.

Phoenix Springs
Calligram Studio

Iris’ mental inventory fills with names, dates, places and obscurities as she unpacks boxes, searches the net and tries to speak with her brother’s former neighbors. Leo’s last address is a building that’s been boarded up, abandoned by its landlords mid-remodel, and here she encounters the people that have been left behind. There’s a young boy making a plant dance with some kind of electronic box, and a middle-aged man sprawled, unconscious, on top of a shipping container. They’re called the orphans and neither of them are up for conversation. On the other side of the building, an intercom houses a separate voice that shares the history of the area, filling Iris’ inventory with words. Selecting an idea allows Iris to investigate her surroundings with that information, narrowing her focus and often unlocking solutions. It’s a clean and familiar investigation mechanic presented in a starkly beautiful format.

Phoenix Springs is gorgeous. Undeniably. Its canvas is menacing — dark green backgrounds are striped with even-deeper shadows, while pops of yellow, red and blue define the edges of important set pieces. The inventory bursts onto the screen as a bright white screen with black text, individual ideas separated by delicate thought bubbles. There's a papery sheen to the entire experience, as if it's an interactive interpretation of a mid-century sci-fi novel cover.

Phoenix Springs
Calligram Studio

Where the game lacks color, Iris provides it via narration, and her verbal palette is just as stark as the game’s appearance. She speaks dispassionately and with a posh nihilism that would feel at home in an Orson Welles detective noir. Her voice is comforting and foreboding, and it’s a welcome, near-constant companion in the demo.

In the middle of a busy trade show packed with compelling games, I wanted to keep playing Phoenix Springs, and that’s pretty much the highest praise I can give. Phoenix Springs feels utterly unique. It’s coming to Steam on September 16, developed and published by London-based art collective Calligram Studio.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/phoenix-springs-offers-breathtaking-beauty-in-a-desolate-neo-noir-world-130046288.html?src=rss

Skate Story hands-on: Kick, push, shatter

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Push. Push. Push, push, push, jump —

All four wheels reconnect with the glowing pavement in a slap of crisp plastic and crunching wood.

Push, push, push, push, jump kickflip —

Another slam, a quick screech.

Push, push, push, ju —

A shattering crash. The world flips on its head in an explosion of glittering blacks and iridescent pinks. I let out a small laugh, adjust the controller in my hands, and lean forward. Reset.

Push.

In a hyper-chilled demo space at Summer Game Fest, Skate Story creator Sam Eng drew a picture of a flaming skateboard on a business card while I played his game, occasionally lifting his head to giggle at my crashes and answer my questions. He described Skate Story as an attempt to capture the feeling he often has while skateboarding, invincible in one moment and utterly vulnerable the next. Fragile, like glass.

Skate Story absolutely crystallizes this feeling. You play as the glass skater, a demon made of translucent pain, and your goal is to skate to the moon, eat it, and escape this hell. The game takes place in a series of surreal playgrounds in the Underworld, offering long catwalks for gaining speed, winding pathways lined with lethal red shards, and open areas dotted in concrete ramps, gaps and waxed ledges. The Devil and his minions are your enemies, and their only weaknesses are your sweet tricks.

Skate Story
Sam Eng

Skate Story is coming to PC and I played the demo with a standard Xbox controller: Press Y to hop on the board, A to gain speed, X to powerslide and B to ollie. Holding A pushes the glass skater forward in a steady rhythm, holding B does a higher ollie, and combining the trigger and bumper buttons with a jump executes a trick. I leaned heavily on ollies, kickflips (left trigger + B) and grinds (near a ledge + B), but I also landed a few moves that included these inputs plus a nudge of the right analog stick, swapping stances.

As I ollied my way through the Underworld, I encountered a variety of floating stone heads — some friendly, some vicious — and I collected items to unlock new progression areas, slamming my board into the ground to solve little puzzles. There was a shop with custom decks and parts for sale, and wide-open spaces for practicing tricks. The demo’s concluding boss fight, versus a giant stone philosopher’s head no less, provided a concrete arena for me to perform tricks and deal damage with my rad skateboarding prowess.

Skate Story
Sam Eng

I’m craving a few uninterrupted hours with the game, ideally at home and after a few edibles, so I can perfect its mechanics, unlock upgrades and learn new moves. I crashed a dozen times in my 45-minute demo, often in the same spot repeatedly and always with a magnificent, shattering explosion — but resets were swift and not too punishing. The crash always hit harder after I’d found a flow state, holding down A to push and jumping smoothly over neon spikes embedded in the shimmering black asphalt, taking a risk and landing a kickflip, reaching peak velocity, feeling completely free. And then I’d clip a sliver of concrete and the ride would be over, sudden and harsh. In Skate Story, sidewalk-high edges are just as dangerous as glowing-red obstacles, and the game requires a constant buzz of situational awareness. A lot like skateboarding in real life, I’d wager.

Skate Story induces a limbo-like haze through its mechanical rhythm, VHS-filtered visuals and the constant, low whoosh of the glass skater's wheels rolling across the Underworld's concrete. Strategy becomes impossible and the only option is to feel your way through the brutalist, pearlescent landscapes. The game's soundtrack is provided by New York artist Blood Cultures and it's a soothing, lo-fi vibe fest, like OlliOlli’s flow music but with a distorted edge. It feels like a perfect fit.

Skate Story encourages you to enter a peak state early on, only so you can chase that feeling the rest of the game. It’s an incredibly compelling loop, with room for payoff or failure in every push.

Skate Story
Sam Eng

The Underworld is so much larger than the slice I explored in Skate Story’s Summer Game Fest demo. The full game has more than 70 tricks to learn, fresh gear to acquire and a leveling system to unlock. Skate Story feels like a game that will easily swallow hours upon hours of my time. As easily as eating the moon, at least.

Skate Story is due out this year (not 2023, as suggested by the top trailer) on Steam, developed by Sam Eng and published by Devolver Digital.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/skate-story-hands-on-kick-push-shatter-120051976.html?src=rss

Astro Bot is a supremely silly and incredibly smooth platformer

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Astro Bot is as precise as it is ridiculous, and this is exactly what makes it so damn delightful. During my 30-minute demo at Summer Game Fest, I crashed into spiky obstacles, flew off the side of sky-high platforms, bounced into deadly projectiles and popped my little robot protagonist like an overinflated balloon — and I could not keep the smile off my face the entire time. The art style, sound effects and animations in Astro Bot are infused with childlike joy, taking the sting out of each failure. Simultaneously, each death felt avoidable with a little more practice, each leap landable with just one more try. Resets were quick and generous, encouraging trial-and-error while maintaining a superb platforming flow.

Despite its kid-friendly appearance, Astro Bot feels like a mature — and super tricky! — platformer.

This competency makes sense, considering Sony has had more than 10 years to perfect the Astro Bot recipe. The first official Astro Bot title was Rescue Mission, a 2018 PlayStation VR game and a semi-sequel to 2013’s The Playroom demo on PS4. Next, Astro’s Playroom came pre-installed on the PS5 at launch in 2020, offering a short but memorable tour through the features of the DualSense controller. All of these experiences were cute and well-executed, but as it turns out, they were long-tail teasers for the full Astro Bot game coming out on September 6.

Astro Bot
PlayStation

The SGF 2024 Astro Bot demo was on PlayStation 5 and showcased a few different worlds, each with a distinct gadget and map style. I tried out a dog jetpack that let me dash forward and a pair of frog-face gloves with spring-loaded punching abilities. The frog gloves were my favorite weapon of the day: the left glove was activated by the LT button and the right was attached to RT, and I spent most of this level rhythmically punching the air, just because it felt cool to do so. Throughout this stage there were also red sticky points to punch into, allowing me to hold the gloves in place and stretch out the springs, turning Astro into a robot-sized slingshot. You have to hold the triggers in place and pull Astro back before flinging its little body in the proper direction, which is sometimes directly into the face of a giant red octopus. Obviously.

Astro makes the most adorable wah wah wah wah sound when it dies, diffusing any disappointment. I heard this sound most often while attempting to clear a section of spinning, spiked balls and pink-glass platforms that shattered as soon as Astro skated over them. The fragile nature of the glass forced me to react with twitchy adjustments, ramping up the tension and encouraging replays. There were so many clever mechanics, tools and obstacles on display in the Astro Bot demo, including a throwable time-freezing item, a powerful magnet that picked up anything metal nearby, a line of flaming spheres that snaked rapidly across a platform, and even just the standard jump, which propelled Astro into the air and shot lasers out of its feet, injuring the blobs and other enemies below.

Astro Bot
PlayStation

The full game will feature more than 50 unique planets of platforming proficiency, more than 300 bots to rescue (more than half of which are classic PlayStation characters), and dozens of weird and satisfying tools to use. It’ll take about 15 hours to complete, and according to Team ASOBI head Nicolas Doucet, that length was chosen purposefully.

“Usually games use like one or two mechanics really well, and they build up on top of that, but this is really more about us rebooting everything for every planet, and just keeping Astro and the crew as the center point,” Doucet told Engadget at SGF. “But it's something we decided from the beginning, that maybe as a result, it won't be like a 50 hour game — but that’s okay. It's better to have 15 hours of constant renewal than 30 hours where you feel like, sometimes, it drags a bit.”

Team ASOBI’s goal with Astro Bot is to offer a fresh experience at every turn.

“We want people to think, ‘What surprise are they going to throw next?’” Doucet said. “And if we can maintain that all the way to the end — even like, final boss, game ending, we are trying to keep that alive to the very, very, very last second of the game. If we succeed with that, I think people will have a good time.”

As in Astro’s Playroom, the DualSense controller has a starring role in Astro Bot. The game’s bots regularly fly around on a jet-sized DualSense and Astro is on a mission to collect friends and store them inside the controller itself. When new bots are picked up they appear inside an on-screen DualSense, and when players shake the controller in real life, it’s mirrored in the game. The little characters sway and knock into each other, and they can even pop out of the gamepad if it’s rattled in the proper way, and it’s all just pretty adorable.

Astro Bot
PlayStation

It’s refreshing to see Sony leaning into silliness.

“The design of Astro has a little bit of a tummy, and actually, the bots originally were supposed to look a little bit like toddlers,” Doucet said. “They look a little bit clumsy on their legs and, you know, their butts sticking out as if they were wearing nappies and stuff. The design came from that, so that the silhouette would be endearing and also a little bit silly. But that was separated from the tightness [of the mechanics]. It's almost like there's two mindsets, because the silliness can be there and we kind of laugh about it, but when it comes to clearing a challenge, it's good to be tight. It’s only pixel perfect.”

The balance between acuity and absurdity is what makes Astro Bot so compelling, even just in its demo form. It feels like a solid platformer first, providing a mechanically sound foundation where all of the nonsense can thrive.

“The silliness usually comes from animation and the visual side, whereas the tightness of the gameplay comes from the engineering and really the game design and programming,” Doucet said. “If I go back to the origins of Astro, before being a funny-to-look-at platformer, it was actually a platformer that feels good, where the jump lands exactly where you want and starts when you want. Your input lag and all of that was really the focus point.”

The PlayStation demo space at Summer Game Fest was a cool cave of happiness, featuring Lego Horizon Adventures and Astro Bot, two games that turn classic Sony characters into irreverent cartoon versions of themselves. Considering some of PlayStation’s most popular protagonists are serious, grizzled warriors like Kratos, Joel, Ellie, Wander, the Bloodborne guy and Aloy, there’s room for these interpretations to go horribly wrong. Astro Bot gets it right (and it sounds like Lego Horizon Adventures does, too).

“The writing of the games isn't as important to us as what the character background is,” Doucet said. “In the case of The Last of Us, for example, the main characters are good characters. They have complex decisions to make, but fundamentally, they're good people. There would be nothing wrong about questioning, ‘Who is Ellie?’ and, ‘Who is Joel?’ And then, you know, parents and kids can exchange [ideas]. You can imagine a good conversation coming out of that.”

Astro Bot
PlayStation

The character I was most stoked to see in Astro Bot was the red-cloaked protagonist from Journey. While the meeting immediately triggered memories of loss, discovery and introspection, I was mostly just happy to see an old friend in an unexpected place. The fact that the character was guaranteed to be carefree and comedic here added an extra layer of mental security to the experience. A colleague who was watching me play didn’t immediately recognize the Journey character in Astro Bot and I was happy to explain it, automatically recounting some of my own experiences with the game from back in the day. It’s easy to see how Astro Bot will introduce new audiences to classic PlayStation franchises, while also reigniting those feel-good hormones in veteran players.

But I’ll be honest: I don’t really need the PlayStation characters in Astro Bot. They’re adorable and capable of generating a warm tinge of familiarity, but for me, Astro Bot’s allure doesn’t lie in its nostalgia play. Instead, I view the character appearances more like easter eggs, cute but not crucial to the actual gameplay. Which, I have to say again, is incredibly competent, replayable and fun. Stellar platforming is Astro Bot’s true joy.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/astro-bot-is-a-supremely-silly-and-incredibly-smooth-platformer-200012651.html?src=rss

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess feels as luscious as it looks

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Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is lush. Set on the side of a mountain that’s been covered in a terrible black defilement, Kunitsu-Gami’s world is an ancient, psychedelic dreamscape packed with magic and otherworldly horrors. It’s also mechanically dense, with moments of slow strategizing and rapid-fire hack-and-slash combat. After playing for nearly an hour at Summer Game Fest, it’s clear that Kunitsu-Gami is much more than a beautiful screenshot.

The game is divided into day and night mechanics, but all of the action takes place in various camps along the mountainside, set under green canopies and among dense foliage. The defilement creates plants with glowing pink orbs and slathers some areas in an iridescent black goo, trapping villagers in putrid sacs and infecting the local deer population.

Players are tasked with protecting the Maiden Yoshiro from the Seethe, the monsters that spawn out of the defilement at night. Yoshiro is the key to cleansing the mountainside, but her ritual takes time and she’s incredibly vulnerable. It really takes a village to protect her.

During the day, players purge the defilement and rescue locals from their containment sacs, while also clearing a path for Yoshiro’s dance. Press B on the gamepad to assign an attack role to a villager, and then press RB to place them in the environment. At night, the Seethe pour out of the Torii Gates — the basic hordes are composed of globular, juicy monsters with long, thin arms and gaping mouths, their pink tongues dragging on the ground.

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess
Capcom

Combat plays out in a rhythmic “sword dance” style, with simple inputs that can be combined into fancy combos. Using just two attack buttons and a 360-degree camera, players slash through the Seethe, make sure the creatures don’t get too close to Yoshiro, and manage their additional attack units. Combat flows smoothly, with satisfying swordplay and a challenging rush of monsters to defeat at each Torii Gate. After cleansing an area, players can hang out in the camp, upgrading their skills, unlocking new abilities, and learning about the food and culture of the region that’s been defiled.

There are also challenge areas with bigger, deadlier monsters to kill. Here, players are provided a small team of villagers plus upgrade materials to assign these units specific roles, like archer or woodcutter. The challenge enemy I encountered, Gakinyudo, was a giant, eyeless beast that ripped its own jaw in half before the battle began, revealing an even more disgusting form. The monsters in Kunitsu-Gami have distinct backstories dripping in vile details, and I adore the amount of attention their designs have been given.

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess
Capcom

Here’s how Capcom describes the beast I battled: “The ravenous Gakinyudo are born from the corpses of lecherous monks who fell to defilement from their debauchery while alive. They prefer to dig up their meals from graveyards.” Metal.

I defeated the Gakinyudo, but it took some time, unit rearrangement and a new group-attack move to finish the job. I enjoyed every slice of my sword in this fight.

The game’s environments and character designs are dense with fascinating details. The Maiden Yoshiro wears layers of flowing fabrics, a delicate face covering and intricately adorned jewelry, and she dances with a slow, focused purpose. She feels both fragile and incredibly powerful. The distanced, third-person perspective and fully adjustable camera encourage players to investigate every corner of each new area, slashing plants to receive resource orbs and purging shrines that have been covered in ooze.

Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess
Capcom

As each night approaches, the game’s background music becomes more unsettling and discordant, until it’s overrun by hellish screams and the Seethe begin spawning. Details like this make Kunitsu-Gami memorable, even just in demo form. It's clear that there's much more to uncover in this game and I'm eager to explore its ancient, magical mountainside in full.

Kuntisu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is due to come out on July 19 for PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC. It’ll be available on Game Pass at launch.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/kunitsu-gami-path-of-the-goddess-feels-as-luscious-as-it-looks-150059627.html?src=rss

Mixtape brings a killer ’80s soundtrack to Xbox, PS5 and PC in 2025

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Mixtape is a coming-of-age story about the reality-bending adventures of three teenage friends on their final night of high school, featuring a soundtrack of classic punk and alternative hits. It's due to hit Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and PC in 2025, and it'll be available day-one on Xbox Game Pass.

Mixtape follows three friends on their way to their final high school party, as they relive their glory days to the tunes of a perfectly curated playlist. Their memories appear in dreamlike sequences, featuring songs by Iggy Pop, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, DEVO, The Smashing Pumpkins and other old-school hit makers.

The main trio in Mixtape provide plenty of teenage sass in the game's reveal trailer, and its art style feels like something between stop-motion and cel-shaded cinematics. It's a welcoming, stylish world. The Mixtape microsite includes the mantra, "Skate. Party. Avoid the law. Make out. Sneak out. Hang out." Sounds like high school to me.

Mixtape comes from Beethoven & Dinosaur, the studio behind the musical adventure The Artful Escape and fronted by Australian rockstar Johnny Galvatron. It's published by Annapurna Interactive.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mixtape-brings-a-killer-80s-soundtrack-to-xbox-and-pc-in-2025-181740393.html?src=rss

Compulsion Games’ South of Midnight will arrive in 2025

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South of Midnight, first revealed at last year’s Summer Game Fest, will launch on Xbox and PC sometime next year. During today's Xbox showcase, we got a first look at how the third-person action-adventure will play. 

Right off the bat, it reminds me of Square Enix’s fun-but-flawed Forspoken. In South of Midnight, protagonist Hazel is apparently pulled into a “Southern Gothic world” where reality and fantasy are blurred. Hazel is able to move around the environment fluidly, with the new trailer showing off gliding skills, double jumps, and some sort of magical grapple hook to speed up level navigation. 

We also got even more cutscenes to help flesh out this world, and they still have that Into The Spider-verse jumpy frame-rate trick to separate cutscenes from in-game actionYou’ll be able to fight monsters with close-up magical blade attacks and other midrange weaponry. Oh and you seem to befriend – and ride – a giant catfish around the magical bayou.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/compulsion-games-south-of-midnight-will-arrive-in-2025-174928203.html?src=rss