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GEAR FROM INSERT COIN ISSUE 14 JUNE 2022 gamesradar.com/playmag
NO.1 FOR PS5
PS5 GOES RETRO
>IT’S KILLER
THE QUARRY
Call the laundrette – Until Dawn’s successor is about to ruin your pants
How PS1, PS2 and PSP classics are coming back to life
TOMB RAIDER GETS A NEW-GEN MAKEOVER IN UNREAL ENGINE 5 JOJO’S BIZARRE ADVENTURE APPROACHES PS5 WITH STYLE INTERVIEW: HOW MASS EFFECT’S SCORE SHAPED SCI-FI GAMING
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THE ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE Finally tired of Skyrim? Why Tamriel’s stunning new location is the next massive RPG you need > GET CREATIVE
> HIGH STAKES
Dreams’ brightest pull back the curtain inside
Why Swansong is the only Vampire game you need
WANT TO GET INTO MAKING GAMES?
VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE
Insider
A summer camp slasher with a dash of hillbilly horror. 006
Getting you closer to PlayStation’s most exciting stories, people, and culture
INSIDER INSIDER HIGHLIGHTS 10 PS PLUS
Sony’s subscription services get a makeover
14 AFTERLOVE EP
Remembering Mohammad Fahmi
18 FLINTLOCK: THE SIEGE OF DAWN
Ashen dev presents an explosive fantasy
Dead centre with the cap is Laura, played by Siobhan Williams. Could she be your archetypal final girl or will you instead steer her directly into danger?
Are you afraid of the dark? Supermassive Games surprises with all-new horror project coming this summer his is not the final instalment of The Dark Pictures Anthology. That game, The Devil In Me, will star Jessie Buckley and be released later this year. This is The Quarry, a new completely different game. UK-based developer Supermassive Games is partnering with publisher 2K instead of Bandai Namco to deliver an original tale of terror set to get your palms sweating on 10 June. Coming to both PS4 and PS5, the just-announced project is well within Supermassive’s wheelhouse. While The Dark Pictures borrows more modern horror inflections, The Quarry feels like an ’80s throwback – VHS scan lines and all. Stop us if you’ve heard this before: teen counsellors throw an end-of-camp party – but little do they know what lurks in the dark at Hackett’s Quarry. It’s a summer camp slasher à la Friday The 13th, with a dash of hillbilly horror, and just maybe the shadow of something else. Supermassive is known for late-in-thegame twists so we can’t rule out a supernatural or creature-feature surprise.
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MOVIE NIGHT FRIGHTS
While rapid-fire QTEs make a comeback, you’ll also have to choose your words carefully during dialogue sequences. What is lurking in Hackett’s Quarry, and why has it set its sights on these camp counsellors?
There are nine unfortunate souls to shield from certain death and, as in Supermassive’s recent releases, who lives to see the dawn and who gets slashed all depends on how you make decisions under pressure. Will you play into genre tropes and check out that weird noise? Or will you do your best to flip the script whenever you can? New this time is the Death Rewind. You won’t have access to this on your first playthrough, but replaying will give you three opportunities to reverse the death of a playable character. That said, undoing an earlier mistake could spell certain doom for someone else later down the road. You can go it alone, managing the fates of these imperilled teens in solo play, but you don’t have to. Like The Dark Pictures Anthology, The Quarry features an array of
Manage the campers’ fate with up to seven other players in the local couch co-op mode. multiplayer modes. If you want to get the gang together, you can manage the campers’ fate along with up to seven other horror fans in the controller-swapping local couch co-op mode. The online mode takes more of a ‘watch party’ approach, with decisions being opened up to group votes that collectively shape the story.
ROCK AROUND THE CAMPFIRE
Now, let’s get to know the roster of potentially soon-to-be-sliced campers and the actors playing them. Dead centre in the key art is Laura, a driven character played by British actress Siobhan
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INSIDER P L AY I N V E S T I G AT E S
Three tiers for PlayStation Plus Revamped subscription service, now with separate tiers, rolling out from June layStation’s subscription services were due a makeover. Sony’s now announced that the long-rumoured ‘Spartacus’ service, combining everything we love about PS Plus with PlayStation Now’s massive cloud streaming library, will launch in June this year. The revamped service will retain the PlayStation Plus name, but will offer a variety of perks split across three differently priced tiers, each with monthly, quarterly, and annual payment options. The basic tier, PlayStation Plus Essential (£49.99 per year, or £6.99 per month), is essentially PS Plus as it is now, and offers the standard fare – two free games a month, discounts, save game cloud storage, and online multiplayer. This is the tier current subscribers will migrate to when the service begins rolling out. PlayStation Plus Extra (£83.99 per year, or £10.99 per month) bolts on a library of 400 PS5 and PS4 games to download and
downloaded natively too, with the exception of PS3 titles which remain streaming-only (thanks to that pesky original hardware). You’ll also be able to try out new games through time-limited gamer trials. Yes, paying through the nose for demos – but that’s 2022!
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Insomniac’s solo Miles Morales outing is a headline addition to PS Plus Premium.
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CROSSES AND MINUSES Kratos thinks the deal is godly, though the extent of his backcatalogue coming to the service remains to be seen.
play, like a streamlined version of PS Now without the streaming. PlayStation Plus Premium (£99.99 per year, £13.49 per month) is where things get snazzier, especially for long-time PlayStation fans. On top of everything in the other two tiers it gives access to 340 games developed for PS1, PS2, PS3, and PSP. These classics can be streamed to PS4, PS5, or even PC. All of them can be
So what kind of games can we expect? At time of writing, the retro classics aren’t confirmed (so try not to get overexcited). Extra and Premium promise some big hitters, with Death Stranding, God Of War, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Mortal Kombat 11, and Returnal all confirmed. Judging by recent comments made by SIE’s president and CEO Jim Ryan, offering day-one access to brand-new releases isn’t currently on the cards. In conversation with gamesindustry.biz, Ryan said, “The way our publishing model works right now, [offering day-one access to new releases via PS Plus] doesn’t make any sense. But things can change very quickly in this industry, as we all know.” In a similar vein, we have to ask what will happen to all the original PlayStation, PS2, PSP, and PS3 games many people already own digitally from their PS3, PSP, and PS Vita libraries? Will the higher tiers of this overhauled subscription service really be the only way to play classic games on modern consoles legitimately? Will we ever be able to spend a fiver to play a PS1 game forever? There’s a lot of questions we want answered, and most revolve around establishing some kind of library consistency.
PRICE IS RIGHT
And how about those prices? There’s no reason you can’t be just as happy on the basic tier as you are now if PS Plus is all
INSIDER
you desire. Premium, meanwhile, basically adds up to the equivalent of current PS Plus and PS Now subscriptions combined. However, given the step up from Extra to Premium mostly enables you to access
current generation, both to develop and to buy. The biggest releases can set you back £70 before you even get into the likes of premium editions. Premium costs £99.99 – that’s the same price as the
Premium basically adds up to the equivalent of current PS Plus and PS Now subscriptions combined. demos and retro content, the price seems a bit steep at a glance. On the other hand, games have only become more expensive during the
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Ultimate edition (which doesn’t even include the recent Dawn Of Ragnarök DLC) and can net you access to a huge library of recent releases
and past classics, so it could be more economical for many. That said, given the recent furore around the mismanagement of timebased game trials (the time included the time it took to download the trial, meaning some players ran out of time before they could even boot the game up), it feels strange as a Premium option. We love demos, and they’re a great way to get people to buy games, so they should be free for all (okay, as past purveyors of cover-mounted discs, we might be more invested in that than some). What do you think about the new Plus? Let us know: play@futurenet.com
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PREVIEW FORMAT PS5, PS4 / ETA 19 MAY / PUB NACON / DEV BIG BAD WOLF STUDIO / PLAYERS 1
Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong A detective story with teeth
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hey say the only thing worse than finding a maggot in your apple is finding half of one. In a similar fashion, the only thing worse than finding a corpse is then having to ask “But where is their head?” This is the scene we, as vampire Galeb, walk into, masquerading as a crime scene investigator for one night only. The victim is Jason Moore, an accountant catering to clientele both living and long dead. His murder is just one part of a much FA C T R I C K larger mystery that winds its way through 1. HISTORY LESSON Vampire: The Masquerade Boston and the unlives of three playable was first published as a vampire protagonists. In our hands-on we tabletop RPG by White Wolf see Galeb’s investigation through to one of in 1991. its many possible conclusions and even get 2 . M A N Y FA C E S a little bit of dirt on another protagonist… The series has been but back to the matter at hand. adapted into a CCG, many videogames, and even a Before his demise, Moore was analysing short-lived 1996 TV series. the accounts of high-ranking vampires on 3. LONG IN THE TOOTH behalf of Boston’s Prince, Hazel Iversen. The The fifth edition of the core top-ranking fang herself has now tasked rulebook debuted in 2018, Galeb with retrieving the iced accountant, or with a number of additional sourcebooks since. bringing back his reports at least. Whichever you prioritise, you’re given free rein to poke around Moore’s high-rise apartment, question witnesses, and hope you don’t find more bodies.
CLEAN UP CREW In the kitchen a bloody trail streaks the garbage chute, suggesting an undignified tumble for some vital evidence. Asking around, we learn that if we want to follow, we’d best ask the witness who was first on the scene for access. The man in question, concierge Ethan Adams, is inconsolable. The cop keeping an eye on him hasn’t been able to calm him, but they are only human. As Galeb, we get a choice: to bring the concierge back to an even keel with words alone, or to use our supernatural powers to influence his emotional state. The success of your approach depends on how you’ve allocated your skill points. Hover your reticule over a skill in conversation and you’re shown the likelihood of your success as a percentage, but there’s always the risk of something worse than mere failure. Mundane conversation skills use blue points of energy, whereas supernatural skills use up purple points that you can only replenish by having a bite to drink. If you go hard on supernatural
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skills and use up all of this latter resource pool, you risk awakening the beast and wreaking bloody mayhem. If you’re flagging, you need to find a quiet corner, a blood donor, and navigate a QTE to avoid draining them dry.
HEAD IN THE GAME We take the supernatural option, and after a psychic nudge from Galeb Ethan answers our questions and even lends us his pass to the parking garage in the basement. Looks like it’s finally time to get, ahem, a-head of things. Annoyingly the bins downstairs are locked and the parking attendant with the keys is a thin-blooded vampire with secrets of his own. Worse still, after dealing with him and doing some dumpster diving, we pull out a head that is not Jason Moore’s. The cops say they’ve had the place on lockdown since arriving on scene, so where could the accountant be? After reviewing the evidence in the apartment you may simply choose to collect the files and exit via the elevator. But if you find the accountant there are plenty of twists left in this tale, including Jason Moore’s death – for real this time. That could be at Galeb’s own fangs if you overuse your vampiric abilities, or at the hands of a foe hiding in plain sight. (If you tap o it reveals that which is unseen. If only we’d thought to give someone a second look.) For us, Jason Moore lies dead on the floor due to our oversight. We’re not leaving emptyhanded though, as we drag his killer back to face the Prince. We’ll see where that rabbithole leads later this year.
“THERE’S ALWAYS THE RISK OF SOMETHING WORSE THAN FAILURE.”
TRACK RECORD
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IMPRESSIONS Just how deep does this rabbithole go? With multiple protagonists, impactful choices, and a raggedy cardigan’s worth of mysterious threads for us to pull on, we can’t wait to find out.
Big Bad Wolf Studio’s last game was episodic thriller The Council. Almost all confrontation happens in conversation, with mechanics that borrow heavily from tabletop roleplaying games. These dialogue fights return in Swansong.
4 The lady in red is the Prince of Boston herself, Hazel Iversen. Almost everyone else here, including the three playable protagonists, answers to her. 5 Galeb’s supernatural skills can grease the wheels with this witness, but using these abilities too much will unleash the beast. 6 Depending on what you find while investigating, and your choices, you could leave this high-rise apartment bloodier than you found it.
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1 Jason Moore has a young daughter, but she’s nowhere to be found in the wake of her father’s supposed murder. 2 Galeb Bazory is a centuries-old vampire who once lived a life on deck. Tonight, he’s playing investigator. 3 Tapping o allows Galeb to sense what is unseen and snag clues the human coppers have missed.
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THE ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE: HIGH ISLE
Set sail for new shores
FORMAT PS5, PS4 ETA 21 JUN PUB BETHESDA SOFTWORKS DEV ZENIMAX ONLINE STUDIOS PLAYERS MULTI (MMORPG)
Creative director Rich Lambert talks with Oscar Taylor-Kent about crafting an unexplored corner of Tamriel for The Elder Scrolls Online: High Isle
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THE ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE: HIGH ISLE
This is the first time High Isle has been explorable in an Elder Scrolls game. The location alone makes this expansion unmissable for fans.
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THE ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE: HIGH ISLE 1
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or adventurers in The Elder Scrolls Online, journeys across Tamriel have been lengthy, leaving hardly a stone on the map unturned. Set many years before the main RPG series, TESO’s given us looks at those games’ key locations in an earlier age – some still undeveloped, others at their peak. Last year’s Blackwood expansion revisited TES IV: Oblivion and before that Greymoor took us back to zones from TES V: Skyrim. High Isle, however, takes Elder Scrolls fans to a brand-new location, where they’ll discover lore and cultures that have never been explored in the series before. We ask creative director Rich Lambert if making substantial additions to the huge RPG series increases the pressure. “Oh, absolutely,” he laughs. “Yes, yep. ‘Don’t let us down.’ Yes, there’s all kinds of pressure there, for sure.” But
“IT WAS A SPECK ON A MAP IN REDGUARD. THERE’S NO LORE WRITTEN ABOUT IT.” it’s also something the team could get really excited about, owing to having a lot of freedom in how to tackle the new chapter, which kicks off the Legacy Of The Bretons storyline. “But the flip to that is it’s also almost more difficult because there is no kind of box,” says Lambert. “You have to go in and you have to figure everything out from scratch. So it’s definitely been a fun challenge and a different challenge than what we had in previous years.” High Isle is certainly different. Home to half-elf, half-human Bretons, with a ‘mediaeval
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Mediterranean’ vibe, the island and surrounding Systres Archipelago have only been referenced a few times in previous Elder Scrolls games. Here it’s completely built out, and you can explore it for yourself. It’s a deliberate shake-up. “One of the things that we always do whenever we are thinking about where to go next is to kind of look back at where we’ve been,” explains Lambert. “We look at not only the stories, but the visuals, the biomes, the types of places the players are
1 Inspired by the Mediterranean, the Systres Archipelago has plenty of lush land to explore between its more populous feudal towns. 2 You’ll come to know Lady Arabelle Davaux well, a Breton noblewoman key to Society Of The Steadfast, who wants an end to the war.
exploring, and we knew we wanted to do something that looked and felt very different than anything we’ve done in the past.”
A LORELESS PLACE Beyond deciding on a previouslyunvisited location, this emphasis on doing something different also applied to the story, which is all about secret politicking to end the legendary Three Banners War (and the cult-like Ascendant Order, which wants to put a stop to the peace talks). The out-of-the-way island seemed like a perfect location for such tricky dealings. “It was a speck on a map in Redguard [a 1998 PC spin-off]. There’s no lore written about it. There’s no lore books. So this is all whole cloth for us,” says Lambert.
THE ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE: HIGH ISLE HISTORICAL RECORD
The TESO chapters so far: play them in any order you want THE ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE 2015
With stakes like a vacant throne and realm melding, the base story, which pitted you against Daedric Prince Molag Bal on a quest to recover your soul, ticked some key Elder Scrolls boxes. Story updates included the orc-focused Orsinium, and The Dark Brotherhood, which added the famous guild.
MORROWIND 2017
Returning to the setting of The Elder Scrolls III, players set out for the volcanic island of Vvardenfell, inhospitable home of the dark elves. In this first full new chapter of the game, they had to stop moonlet Baar Dau from crashing into the city. Updates expanded on Skyrim too, with new dungeons and a storyline centred on the Forsworn.
SUMMERSET 2018
Put your jugs of cider and Wurzels CD down, these are Summerset Isles, not Somerset. The Altmer high elves are quite a bit different to our editor, though perhaps just as tricksy in their own ways. In an adventure spread across both Summerset and Artaeum, you had to investigate a shadowy plot that lay beneath the otherwise bright and sunny land.
ELSWEYR 2019
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The titular zone, with its deserts and jungles, appeared here for the first time since the very first Elder Scrolls, and added (a lot of) dragons as they made their return to the continent. As it’s home to the khajiit, the cat-like race got some welcome fleshing out, plus a necromancer class added a compelling new way to play with the dark arts.
GREYMOOR 2020
What’s worse than vampires, werewolves, and witches individually? When they all team up, of course. Greymoor had you butting heads with the Vampire Lord as they laid supernatural siege to the region. Set across both the snowy land of Greymoor itself (part of Skyrim) and the Blackreach caverns below, there was plenty to get stuck into.
“Some people will say they are on the more mundane or boring side,” says Lambert, as we talk about how the Bretons are reminiscent of a certain type of feudal mediaeval fantasy. “But they have this really cool, interesting culture […] They are very into the pomp of family politics, and the various houses. High Isle, in
particular, is kind of the epitome of High Breton culture. This is a very, very affluent place. This is where a lot of the nobles go when they take their vacations.” But it’s not all about the high life. “There’s tournament grounds everywhere. There are knights in shining armour, you know, all of that kind of stuff is there,”
BLACKWOOD 2021
An expansion couldn’t revisit the setting of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion without having you tackle Mehrunes Dagon, everyone’s favourite Daedric Prince who wants to claim Tamriel as his own. This is where PS5 support was added, which Rich Lambert says has been great for development. “It’s amazing, right? Like, just the platform in and of itself, and just how beastly that machine is.”
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THE ELDER SCROLLS STUDY GUIDE
The Elder Scrolls study guide
FORMAT PS5, PS4 ETA OUT NOW PUB BETHESDA SOFTWORKS DEV ZENIMAX ONLINE STUDIOS PLAYERS MULTI (MMORPG)
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The Elder Scrolls Online not for you? Perhaps it’s not quite what you think. Here are ten things that prove it’s worth a chance
THE ELDER SCROLLS STUDY GUIDE
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here’s no such thing as a game, or even a genre, that everybody likes. For many players, the idea of an MMORPG can be intimidating – they can be a huge time commitment. So why make an exception for The Elder Scrolls Online?
Well, in the words of creative director Rich Lambert, it’s designed to be a “true Elder Scrolls experience”. If you like the offline RPGs, this should be for you too. As a result, it differs from many others in the genre in some important ways. Take our virtual hand as we guide you around some corners of Tamriel you might not have been aware of.
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REVIEW PS5
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga
Well Wookiee here – something Wicket this way comes
Y INFO
es, there have been multiple Lego Star Wars games already, but just as Luke Skywalker felt no shame at chugging that blue milk, so we felt no shame or hesitation in welcoming this game with open arms. And after playing through the whole saga, we can tell you that we don’t have a bad feeling about this – and that’s not Hoth air.
FORMAT PS5 (reviewed), PS4 PRICE £49.99 ETA Out now PUB Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment DEV Traveller’s Tales PLAYERS 1-2 (offline only) LENGTH 15 hrs approx (story), plus side activities ACCESSIBILITY Health regeneration on/ off; navigation assist on/off; motion blur on/ off; camera shake on/off; vibration on/off; aim assist on/off; adjustable camera bob; adjustable subtitles on/off; simplify or autocomplete QTEs on/off
Perhaps one day we’ll get a single Lego game that mops up all the Star Wars spin-offs such as Solo, Rogue One, and (dare we dream?) the holiday special. Until then we have this, which includes a handful of levels for each of the mainline movies. You can start playing at the beginning of any trilogy, but the second and third movie level sets within that trilogy must be unlocked in order. There’s a tangible sense that the developers are trying to make this the definitive Lego Star Wars experience. One simple change that’s been made is to bring the camera in slightly closer, with the result that you’re immersed in this blocky sciencefiction world more deeply than ever before. Aim while holding a gun, and it’s essentially a third-person shooter, your character becoming transparent so that the camera can zoom in even further. Things are occasionally a little too close for comfort – melee combat in tight spaces can result in your character becoming partially or fully obscured – but this is rare enough to forgive.
BLOCK BUSTERS As this is nine movies in one game, there’s little to none of the padding that previous entries have suffered from, some events that previously might have resulted in lengthy platforming sections
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Play as your favourite characters – all of them. And some you might have forgotten about too.
There’s a PS5 tangible REVIEW sense of trying to make this the definitive Lego Star Wars experience.
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REVIEW PS5
Let’s not get into a hammer-waving contest; this boss fight isn’t all about size.
Moss: Book II Proving PSVR is still small but mighty
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uring the four years since mousy heroine Quill graced our PSVR headsets, developers have been making the most of both the hardware and medium to evolve the VR experience in new, more challenging directions. Moss: Book II doesn’t feel like much of a technical leap forward from its predecessor, but that’s because there wasn’t really a need for Polyarc to change what was already working. This second volume of Quill’s adventures continues from where the first abruptly ended – with the defeat of fire-breathing snake Sarffog. A confident adventurer with a firmly established bond with you, her Reader, Quill is now ready to take the fight to the mechanical armies of the Arcane to save Moss once and for all. Cue a journey to new worlds, which appear like portals into pages of a storybook (like the original, this game uses the device of fading in and out between scenes with the sound of a page turning). There’s also a fresh cast of characters, from other rodent allies to the leader of the forest sprites, all the better for returning narrator Morla Gorrondona (Destiny, Horizon Forbidden West), who’s clearly having a ball acting out the diverse range of voices like any great children’s storyteller. This is still a relatively bite-sized adventure, with a runtime only slightly longer than the first game’s. Yet it feels more expansive than the first,
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INFO FORMAT PSVR PRICE £32.99 ETA Out now PUB Polyarc DEV Polyarc PLAYERS 1 LENGTH 5 hrs ACCESSIBILITY Multiple languages for audio and subtitles
covering locations beyond enchanting forests and ruins – there are snow-covered mountains, and even a tower with gravity-defying portals. As before, you play by controlling both Quill (like in a traditional 3D platformer) and the Reader looking down at this dioramalike world, who can reach in to interact with select objects (if you’re a PS5 user, note that you’ll need to play with a DualShock 4 as its light bar controls the orb’s movement).
DANGER MOUSE It’s the way Quill and the Reader’s abilities combine that makes the moment-to-moment puzzle-solving clever and engaging. It also elevates the fairly simplistic sword-slashing
combat, as you can step in to freeze an enemy or even take control of one to use as a turret or bowling ball. The new power upgrades also factor into this interplay well, beginning with an ability that enables you to form handy bridges out of plants for little Quill. Our gutsy mouse holds her own with weapons like a ranged chakram and a mighty hammer that looks almost too heavy for her to pick up. Like in any good adventure game, these tools are important for solving puzzles as well as in combat – in fact, the best boss fights feel very much like puzzles themselves. The additional special abilities also work wonders, such as a warp-dash sword attack that covers a great distance for
Quill and the Reader’s abilities combined makes the puzzlesolving clever and engaging.
PS5 REVIEW 1
T H E P L AY B O O K W H AT Y O U D O I N : M O S S : B O O K I I 29% As the Reader, reaching out to interact with Quill and her world.
38%
6% Watching Quill celebrate with a cute animation and giving her a high five.
As Quill, platforming and fighting through pages of enchanting environments.
5% Turning the pages of Moss’ enchanting volumes inside a constantly evolving library.
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12% Delighting in Morla Gorrondona’s storybook narration. 10% Looking all over the diorama-style levels, figuring out a path to those collectible scrolls.
HOW TO… HEAL QUILL If Quill gets hurt by an enemy, you can heal her by reaching out with your blue orb and squeezing the trigger to hold her in a floating embrace. When she’s fully recovered, you get a popping animation. Be warned that this takes a couple of seconds so she’ll still be vulnerable to nearby enemies. 3
Chapters conclude with illustrations out of a fairytale book in a library. 2 Your Reader has competition from other floating balls of light jostling for Quill’s attention. 3 If Quill puts out her little paw, don’t leave her hanging. 1
COMPEL-O-GR APH Recapping Moss: Book I
Tragedy strikes, but… Hammer time!
Getting the Reader’s first new power
Gravitydefying finale
…surprise change of perspective
CLOSING THE BOOK
Without drastically altering its comfortable VR setup, Moss: Book II is a more expansive sequel in an enchanting world that’s a pleasure to spend time in again. Alan Wen
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TIME
5 hours
L O V I N G / H AT I N G
MAKE THE DREAM WORK
Solving some of the best puzzles involves using Quill’s new special powers, which are charged up with your Reader’s input.
PROTECT AT ALL COSTS
Seeing harm come to Quill, including your own platforming mishaps that lead to her drowning or falling into a bottomless pit.
TROPHY CABINET STORATION RE
BRONZE
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BUBBLE W
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Ultimately, what keeps you invested in the world of Moss is Quill herself, forever an adorable little bundle of joy to be around. Gorrondona does a great job, voicing her in a high pitch that conveys both bravery and vulnerability but it’s those attentive animations that really steal your heart, whether she’s celebrating after the end of a gruelling wave of combat (in one case, delivering a kick to a
gigantic boss after it’s been felled) or shaking water from her fur after a platforming mishap. All this makes one mid-game twist especially heartbreaking – but we’ll say no more than that (apart from no, she doesn’t die. That’d be an immediate 0/10). Although Book II is often a darker tale, it rouses to a thrilling climax that gives our pint-sized heroine the conclusion she deserves, although you can carry on to re-explore previously visited areas to mop up any remaining collectibles, including a few outfit changes. It’s a perfectly fine excuse to turn on your PSVR headset once again, though let’s hope Polyarc takes an even more daring approach for PSVR2 if there’s a Book III.
IT’ S
crossing previously unpassable gaps. It may feel awkward that you have to reach in with the Reader’s orb to activate these abilities each time, but it’s also in keeping with the idea that these are powers that you’re passing onto Quill as you help her in her quest.
SILVER
Restore one stained Use your power as a glass window by Reader to break many collecting the required objects. Do you feel fragment scrolls. mighty now?
U YO
SAVED MOS S
GOLD
Finish ‘reading’ the second book of Moss (in other words, beat the entire game).
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RETROSTATION MEMORY CARD
DON’T DELETE Save icons for these historical May moments spin in the PLAY hive mind. Do you remember this?
Dragon’s Dogma The wind has pushed this fantasy towards its tenth birthday
5 YEARS Arkane drew upon its immersive sim roots for 2017’s Prey. Unable to defend itself against the mimicry of the alien Typhon, space station Talos I has fallen… or has it? Memorable narrative twists are wrapped up in a pleasing shooter.
The Ur-Dragon’s massive health bar requires online co-operation with other Arisen to whittle it down.
his action RPG opens with your heart being torn out by a dragon. Your fate as the prophesied Arisen does not improve much from there but, as you vengefully hack and slash across the open world of Gransys, at least you’re not alone. Accompanying your custom protagonist is a Pawn, an AI-controlled player-created party member who can be summoned to journey alongside other Arisen online too. While fondly remembered, they are not always the brightest bunch. Reader Andrew Petch recalls, “Amazing game - the Pawns were hilarious though! [They’d walk out of a cave and then go] ‘Oh look, a cave!’ …Or [you could] just pick one up and throw them off a cliff! Nah, they’re still your best friend.”
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10 Y E A R S The former NYPD detective returned in Max Payne 3, older and more jaded. After Rockstar’s success with open world titles like Red Dead Redemption, this linear third-person shooter was a change of pace that highlighted the developer’s strengths.
THROWN FOR A LOOP
20 YEARS Does any game scream ‘2002’ as loudly as Britney’s Dance Beat? Featuring five hits from ‘…Baby One More Time’ to ‘I’m a Slave 4 U,’ plus simplistic gameplay, rhythm fans of a certain age fondly remember this genre footnote.
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INFO PUB Capcom DEV Capcom RELEASED ON PlayStation 3 RELEASE 2012 IF YOU LIKE THIS, TRY THIS… For fantasy just as over-the-top as Director Hideaki Itsuno’s other best known work, Devil May Cry, try Dragon’s Crown. For something darker and weirder, you can’t go wrong with Elden Ring.
Questionable behaviour aside, Pawns have your back in a fight. In addition to charging in head-first, they also yell out hints in the heat of battle. And when you aren’t using it to harass Pawns, the grab mechanic lets you hang onto big beasties to bring the pain Shadow-Of-The-Colossus-style. “The game was great,” Chris Join in the Howe says, “Plenty of content and conversation as we the endgame was done right. That celebrate PlayStation’s big group progression fight past, present, and future with our community: you against the Ur-Dragon was cool can email us at and when the [expanded play@futurenet.com. re-release] came out it got even better. I think I ended up buying it on four different platforms.” He wasn’t the only one; Carey Paypompee chimes in that he “Bought it
three times,” before bemoaning the fact its MMORPG followup never launched outside Japan. Stephen Leonard Harvey gets right to the point: “Great game. Needs a sequel.” Whether you’re newly Arisen or considering heading back to Gransys a decade after your first time there, it’s still a tale worth telling. BYTE SIZE BITS
Essential numbers that add together to tell you everything you need to know about the game.
2015 Saw MMORPG Dragon’s Dogma Online launch – but only in Japan. The servers were shut down in 2019.
42,000 Lines of character dialogue tell the game’s dark fantasy story. That adds up to 20 hours of voiceover from 82 actors!
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Years passed between the PS3 release and the game’s PS4 debut in 2017 as the Dark Arisen remaster.
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Nero The good-hearted Nero might be DMC’s real future, argues Oscar Taylor-Kent eplacing a beloved protagonist with a younger, less experienced version can be dicey. Raiden’s prominence in Metal Gear Solid 2, with Solid Snake consigned to the background, was reviled by many players, and Devil May Cry 4, with the similarly floppy-haired and comparatively younger Nero spending the first half of the game trying to find and defeat Dante, got a similar reaction. In the same way that Raiden’s relationship with Rose is core to MGS2, Nero has Kyrie, who he’s trying to protect as he quells the demon uprising supposedly caused by Dante. While he might not have Dante’s instant, easy cool, Nero’s arsenal makes up for it, each item more appealing than the last: Blue Rose, a double-barrelled revolver; Red Queen, a huge sword he can rev up like a motorcycle; and the Devil Bringer, a sealed demon right arm he can use to spectrally grapple enemies. When you switch to controlling Dante for the back-tracking portion of the game you realise what a boon the grapple was for fighting some of the zippier enemies, enabling you to dash around a fight with ease and completely own an encounter. With Nero it’s a classic case of not realising what you had until he was gone. Thankfully, we didn’t lose him forever. Devil May Cry V might have taken 11 years to materialise, but even with three playable characters (V joined the crew) vying for players’ attention, Nero proved himself the heart of the squad. His arm was replaced with detachable robotic versions that meant playing as him involved constant and exciting variation, and his shorter, fresh haircut and new outfit made him easily the most stylish. But it’s in the ending, as he shoves himself into harm’s way, angrily demanding the end of the cycle of violence between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ that we really fall in love with this good-hearted bad boy, who’s willing to put it all on the line to protect those he cares about.
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YOU LISTEN, DEAD WEIGHT. I WON’T LET YOU KILL EACH OTHER. THERE ARE OTHER WAYS OF SETTLING YOUR DIFFERENCES. I’M PUTTING A STOP TO THIS SIBLING RIVALRY.” Nero won’t let his family’s mistakes influence his own life any more, and is willing to fight for a better future.
INFO GAME Devil May Cry 4, Devil May Cry V STATS Japanese light novel Deadly Fortune digs into his childhood, though only hints at his true parentage (he’s the son of Vergil, Dante’s demonic brother). Nero’s voiced by Johnny Yong Bosch, who also played Power Rangers’ Adam Park, a Black and Green Ranger. Devil Bringer was originally conceived as a new power for Dante, before the team decided to split abilities between two characters. SPIN-OFFS Street Fighter V (as a skin) HOW TO PLAY? PS Store, from £19.99
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T H E F E AT U R E
THE SOUND OF THE FUTURE Mass Effect composer Jack Wall discusses his long career and creating the sound of space with Aaron Potter ew science-fiction universes stay with you as much as the one Bioware created in 2007. Game director Casey Hudson and his team had proved their RPG development chops working on games like Neverwinter Nights, Baldur’s Gate II, and Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic, and the first Mass Effect was a culmination of everything they’d learned up until that point. This time, however, they wouldn’t be fleshing out a preestablished universe, they were creating an entirely new ‘space opera’. The first Mass Effect launched as a console exclusive on Xbox 360, but since going multiplatform with the critically acclaimed sequel in 2011 the series has been acclaimed as one of the best in gaming. Part of what helped it achieve that reputation is its music. Since completing work on the first two games,
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original composer Jack Wall has become known for his work on the Black Ops subseries of Call Of Duty games. His journey scoring Mass Effect, though, began with another Bioware game. “After Jade [Empire] they asked me for a demo for their new game” says Wall. “They did a blind listen to everyone’s demos, as I recall, and I got the gig.”
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Wall quickly got to work trying to find the identity of Mass Effect, and what that might sound like within the realm of an orchestral score. The inclusion of strings was seen as essential to capture the essence of the story but, Wall reveals, there was another musical element the game’s director saw as a must-have. “Casey Hudson had a very specific style he wanted,” the composer explains. “It was synth from the ’80s, similar to Tangerine Dream’s ‘Love On A Real Train’
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RETROSTATION Mass Effect Legendary Edition is a remastered compilation of all three games featuring enhanced visuals and improved mechanics.
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