CATEGORIES

TWELVE MINUTES

And you’re back in the room

Nurturing nature

How Afrofuturist strategy game We Are The Caretakers is helping to tackle real-world rhino poaching

SOLAR FLAIR

Heart Machine’s elegant action-platformer redefines open-world traversal

Celeste

How facing inner turmoil helped us climb a mountain

ROAD 96

Taking a trip that delights in the path not taken

PLAYING POLITICS

From triple-A to two-person teams, the developers refusing to shy away from politics in their games

GORD

Exploring the darkness on the edge of town

Broadcast media

Behind the scenes of Ghosts, an FMV-based game that can only be played once per day

THE MAKING OF... STREETS OF RAGE 4

How a team of French Japanophiles cashed in their credits to revive a classic Sega series

TEAM NINJA

The Ninja Gaiden and Nioh developer enters an exciting new era

LAST STOP

All change for the Virginia dev’s surprising science-fiction anthology

SEVERED STEEL

This indie FPS is a cut above

Slay The Spire

What we talk about when we talk about running

THE MAGNIFICENT TRUFFLE PIGS

Detectorists meets Firewatch? We dig it

CROWD COVER

How social stealth found its people in the world of indie multiplayer

HELL LET LOOSE

Learn by dying like a dog for no good reason

CLOSING THE LOOP

Lemnis Gate looks to the past, present and future of the first-person shooter

Collected Works ED Logg

He was the golden boy of the golden age of arcades – and even has the T-shirt to prove it

The Harder They Fall

Cyberpunk 2077’s disastrous launch asks questions of the blockbuster business model

There Will Be Blood

Turtle Rock Studios breathes new life into the horror of Left 4 Dead

Resident Evil Village

Capcom mixes the old and new in a tall tale of Eastern European vampirism

OPEN ROADS

Fullbright’s star-studded road trip looks to new horizons

STATE OF PLAY

How the BAFTA-winning indie gravitated from paper towns to the Antarctic coast

BALAN WONDERWORLD

Is Yuji Naka’s return missing a trick?

Hitman 3

Developer/publisher IO Interactive Format PC, PS4 (tested), PS5, Stadia, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series (tested) Release Out now

ACOLYTE

This AI-powered detective game is a real conversation piece

A Plague Tale: Innocence

How killer rodents helped us see the light

Goodbye Volcano High

Ko-op scales up for a bittersweet ode to youthful impulse

NODDING HEADS GAMES

How an Indian studio defied the odds to develop a culturally rich adventure

SHADOWS OF DOUBT

A detective procedural