ALL FORMATS LIFTING THE LID ON VIDEO GAMES Burnout The arcade racer's continuing legacy Back to Basics The power of abstract art in video games Tale Spin A beginner’s guide to branching narratives Issue 29 £3 CYBERPUNK wfmag.cc HACKING INTO 2020’S 2077 BIGGEST RPG JOIN THE PRO SQUAD! Free GB2560HSU¹ | GB2760HSU¹ | GB2760QSU² 24.5’’ 27’’ Sync Panel TN LED / 1920x1080¹, TN LED / 2560x1440² Response time 1 ms, 144Hz, FreeSync™ Features OverDrive, Black Tuner, Blue Light Reducer, Predefined and Custom Gaming Modes Inputs DVI-D², HDMI, DisplayPort, USB Audio speakers and headphone connector Height adjustment 13 cm Design edge-to-edge, height adjustable stand with PIVOT gmaster.iiyama.com Video games are basically all about tidying up he video game industry spends just the way. Platform games! Platform games may as well the most extraordinary amount of its equip you with a broom for how thinly disguised the time and energy declaring itself to be motives are. Sweep, sweep instead of slash, slash, it T equivalent to other major media formats. would all end up being the same. Still not convinced? We’re endlessly barraged by the information that Think I’m being a little bit semantic? Look at some of games are as big as movies, how they deserve to be JOHN WALKER 2019’s most popular games: taken equally seriously, how it’s an art form as high Untitled Goose Game: a literal tick-list of chores John Walker is a as books and theatre and, I dunno, expressive dance. to complete, which suggests a game of causing lovely man who has And yet, in no other medium will you ever find as some opinions. He’s chaos, of making a mess, but ultimately has you do many of its projects so absolutely obsessed with been expressing quite the opposite – you create order, albeit clumsy, tidying up. them about malevolent order. games for the last The mighty Ian Bogost, in a recent Atlantic article Spider-Man: Not only do you tidy away all the 20-something years. (wfmag.cc/tidying), stated: “Playing a game is a villainous gangs littering up the back-alleys of chore.” His argument is that games are “broken New York, but you also tick off an enormous to-do machines,” and “the player’s job is to make them work list, including tidying up all those backpacks you again.” And he’s right. I mean, obviously he’s right. mysteriously left lying around. And, like so, so many But I’m not sure he realises quite how literally right he games, this is all communicated to the player by tidying is about the “chore” part. up the icons on a map. Clean the map, finish the game. Actually, once you venture down this line of Luigi’s Mansion 3: This game is all about vacuuming. thought, it’s hard to think of games that aren’t about And this is before we get to the peculiar popularity of completing chores. literal tidying games, like House Flipper, Viscera Cleanup A first-person shooter – the industry’s consistently Detail, and I would argue fervently, Farming Simulator. biggest-selling and highest budget games – is about Heck, if you want to see a terrifying sight, Google cleaning up an area of its enemy soldiers. The levels “games about tidying up” to discover a whole other begin cluttered, messy with foes, and through the world of grim, ad-funded shovelware on the topic. cleansing work of your arsenal of guns, you clean The rest of popular entertainment doesn’t feel the it all up. Turn around, look behind you, and you’ll #29 need to focus on this. Cinema rarely involves watching see empty streets, clutter-free fields, soldier-free the film’s lead character tidying her desk drawers. research laboratories. There may be pools of blood The most popular novels don’t often feature lengthy to mop up, but chances are they’re already fading to descriptions of how much neater things looked after save memory. the murderer was caught. In fact, they tend far more A role-playing game is almost literally a to-do list toward the creation of disorder, of things getting of household chores. “Visit the guy about the broken messier, more wrong. fridge” levels of mundane things you have to get Games are stuck in this mad place of requiring the around to. Crossing off tasks as you get them done, player to not only fix their broken machines, but clean and, of course, tidying up messy enemies along up after themselves as well. wfmag.cc \ 03 Contents Contents 6 Attract mode Interface 06. Cyberpunk 2077 18. Beyond Burnout An inside view of 2020’s biggest The developers channelling the indie game arcade racer’s legacy 10. Vulpine 24. Tobin’s Tale A survival game red in tooth A solo dev’s adventure with a and claw. With hammers unique verbal twist 12. Total War Saga: Troy 44. Art of Abstraction Creative Assembly’s latest RTS Games that strive for something heads to Greece other than realism 16. Incoming 50. Taito Bullets, buccaneers, and the Celebrating a golden age of 44 bravest of berries coin-op video games 04 / wfmag.cc Contents WELCOME It’s nearly Christmas, and to get ourselves in the spirit, we’ve been revisiting a few of our favourite festive moments from the history of video games – you can find a stocking-load of these over on page 48. One game we didn’t find room to squeeze on the list, though, was a Yuletide gem named Moley Christmas for the ZX Spectrum. Given away on the cover of the January 1988 edition of Your Sinclair, it was essentially a 18 cut-down spin-off from Gremlin’s then-popular series of Monty Mole platformers. Aside from the usual jumping around and collecting stuff, Moley Christmas had a likeably meta backstory: as Monty, you had to shepherd the game’s code from Gremlin’s headquarters, to the duplication plant where the games could be mass-produced as audio cassettes, and finally onto the cover of the magazine, ready to be delivered to newsagents in time for Christmas. Little more than a glorified demo, Moley Christmas was a curious snapshot of the early British games industry, and also intended as Monty Mole’s last-ever game, which would’ve 24 60 made it a decidedly muted swansong: its last scene sees the hapless mammal running back and forth between a parked van and a shop, trying to Toolbox Rated avoid being hit by speeding cars. If you want an idea of how far 28. 56. games have come in 30 years, Design Principles Pokémon Sword/Shield just imagine a Tomb Raider The best and worst of brainstorming The United Kingdom through finale where Lara Croft ends game ideas the eyes of Game Freak her career unloading copies of Wireframe from the back of a 32. A starter guide to ink 58. Concrete Genie Leyland DAF. Get started with inkle’s narrative Platforming, puzzles, and painting Have a magnificent scripting language the town red Christmas, readers. 38. Networking 60. Luigi’s Mansion 3 Ryan Lambie Why it isn’t just for the grasping Nintendo’s spooky sequel definitely Editor corporate climber doesn’t suck 40. Source Code 62. Star Wars Jedi Code your own own addictive The Sith really hits the fan in Flappy Bird homage Respawn’s Fallen Order wfmag.cc \ 05 Attract Mode Interview world of Night City as they see fit. Want to The distant dystopia of Cyberpunk 2077 go in and cyber-batter everyone? Go for it. is much closer than you might think Prefer a subtle approach of silent hacking? Go (quietly) wild. Look good while you’re t stretches the definition a cybernetic enhancements, and lashings of doing whatever you’re doing, however it is bit, admittedly, but Cyberpunk grit; the underlying ethos for players of the you’re doing it? Naturally. 2077 is arguably the biggest game went as such: style over substance, We caught up with Richard Borzymowski, I independently made game of attitude is everything, and live on the edge. producer on Cyberpunk 2077, to pick his 2020, if not ever. Developer For some reason, it’s taken until 2020 brain about the much-hyped game – there CD Projekt Red is publicly listed, so – in the real world, not the game – for are few better to ask when you want to is in no way a true indie, but this is a a proper, big-budget adaptation of the know just how a project so vast came studio that makes and publishes its own influential original tabletop game to come to be. games without outside help from other to fruition. When word came out that CD publishers. As such, it’s something we felt Projekt Red, the studio behind The Witcher It’s been a long time coming, but you’re utterly compelled to cover – helpfully, it’s series, was at the helm for Cyberpunk almost there. How are things feeling in also looking great. 2077, pulses began racing: this would be the studio as launch day approaches? The original Cyberpunk, set in the a proper RPG, and it would most definitely Richard Borzymowski: We’re excited. futuristic and distant year of 2013 (its not be a case of style over substance. We’re really excited. We’ve been working sequel jumping forward seven years in So far, the signs are good. The on this game for a long time. We wanted Cyberpunk 2020), made its way to us substance is joined by a considerable to not only make a well-playing game, as a pen-and-paper RPG.