![]() ![]() ![]() Set against a backdrop of jobless, small-town America, the plot gently bends according to your decisions. Life Is Strange: Before the StormĪnother piece of keenly observed young-adult interactive fiction, this follow-up to the 2015 French game Life Is Strange is a careful depiction of a teenage girl caught in a maelstrom of bereavement, while simultaneously struggling to find her identity in the confusion of adolescence. Don’t be fooled by the bobble-headed characters and the fizzing onscreen effects: this a deep and meaningful representation of golf, now with online game modes and the kind of free-roam courses that could surely entice a president to serve the remainder of his term on the fairway. While EA struggles to find a new identity for its marquee golf series post-Tiger Woods, Sony’s saccharine, endlessly riveting approach gains further ground as the quintessential video game take on the sport. This collaboration between the French publisher Ubisoft and Japan’s Nintendo is a curious mashup, not only of each company’s mascots, but also of these brightly coloured characters with chess-like strategy-game rules. One of the most moving moments at the E3 video game conference held in Los Angeles this month was the sight of David Soliani, creative director of Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, weeping with pride as Shigeru Miyamoto extolled the game’s virtues on stage. Any opportunity to experience more of Uncharted’s peerless direction and execution while it remains a profitable undertaking is welcome. Last year’s Uncharted 4 perfected an increasingly rarefied style of cinematic adventure game, with all the extravagance and expense of a Spielberg blockbuster. The first standalone chapter in Naughty Dog’s tear-jerkingly lavish, Saturday matinee-style adventure series follows two women as they race a notorious war-profiteer to recover a fabled Indian artefact. Peerless cinematic adventure game … Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. Released 15 August on PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One. The game reimagines classic Sonic levels, expanding them with new hidden paths and areas, while the character moves with a slick alacrity we haven’t seen in ages. Sonic Mania is another attempt by Sega to revitalise the character by recapturing his glory days in the mid-90s. Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog, once arch-rival to Nintendo’s mascot Mario, has become an internet punchline a rogue’s gallery of DeviantArt images depict the character as a washed-up drunk, a shadow of his former, athletic self. While this is a violent, hack-and-slash affair, the game has been made carefully, with consultancy from Paul Fletcher, a leading psychiatrist and a professor at the University of Cambridge. Senua’s mental illness manifests as hallucinations and delusions, which form the substance of the game’s levels. ![]() Hellblade examines the psychological effects of warfare on historical figures, in this case Senua, who must battle through the hellish visions she suffers following a Viking invasion. Post-traumatic stress disorder is well documented in modern service personnel. ![]() Hallucinations and delusions … Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. As such, their final movements, interactions and conversations can be viewed from multiple perspectives. By contrast, this follow-up is far flung: set on a forsaken space station 200,000 miles from Earth, the game unfurls like a play as you follow the final recordings made by the crew, represented by brightly coloured silhouettes. The Fullbright Company made its name with Gone Home, a nostalgic, affecting story wrung from 1990s-era Oregon domesticity. Aven Colony is a city-building strategy game in which you work to set up such a colony, dealing with all the usual municipal headaches of power, drainage and food supply, as well as some uniquely alien challenges: plague-inducing dust storms, winters without solar power, gaseous eruptions and the odd attack from a local sandworm. As our planet wheezes and slumps under our feet, our horizons turn to the exoplanets that might be able to support human life in the event of interplanetary emigration. ![]()
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