Welcome to SKILL ISSUE, a newsletter for the gamers, the ravers and the haters that comes out on a somewhat haphazard schedule yet to be properly nailed down! Thanks for your patience over this past month, and for sticking with us whilst we wrangle our lives into a form acceptable to us. But we’re back now. And what a time to be back.
It’s the ultimate tournament. It only comes around twice in a decade. For some, it's just overpaid wankers who think they're the centre of the world playing a pointless, stupid game and making it everyone else’s problem. For others, it’s life and death, a high-stakes ballet that we can’t take our eyes off of, stuck to our screens as the emotional pendulum swings from joy to abject horror. All held together on a healthy backbone of xenophobia, all of Europe’s taking part, that’s right, it’s election season baby!
We had hoped that one saving grace of six weeks of “ALL POLITICS, ALL THE TIME” might leave us with a lot of opportunities to discuss the machinations of our political system that were still somehow on brand. Remember when Obama ads appeared across Burnout Paradise? Would Rishi jump into Fortnite in a bid to appeal to youth voters? Would Farage be suckered in by a 5-hour livestream of border control simulator Papers Please?
Well, no. None of that is going to happen. Our political system has had enough of the pesky youth vote thank you very much. Didn’t you hear? We’re getting conscription and stopping the boats! There’s no genocide, no housing crisis! Youths on motorbikes are back to being public enemy number one, just the way we like it.
Sir Keir can’t even play Cities: Skylines 2 anymore, surely the most relevant video game available to him, after the developers had to patch out landlords in a bid to make the denizens of players' fictional metropolises something approaching happy. At best, Ed Davey will have a rally in Roblox or something. Hell, looking at the rest of his campaign, he probably already has.
So at least we have the Euros. For all the flaws of the football industrial complex, the Euros make sense. Gareth Southgate hasn’t purged the squad of England players and drafted a bunch of disgraced French ringers in a bid to get their fans onside. When we discuss footballers, we discuss their history, their past performance, and their contributions both to their own teams and the national side. We don’t have weeks of debate on whether or not growing up without cable means Cole Palmer understands the class divide.
Football is a game, and whilst there are plenty of ways to circumvent them, games have rules. Scores are scores, a red card is a red card, the referee is watching and the country remembers the most minor infractions of a player for decades to come. But politics? We don’t need that in politics.
Politics is a wild west of half-truths and forgotten memories, and one that’s only getting worse as every video clip becomes more and more likely to be a deepfake. It doesn’t need to be well structured. It doesn’t need to make sense. It’s not for us. I know we are, I'm sure we are, FPTP till we die.
It’s a bumper issue this time around. We’re catching up with what we wanted to talk about after a month off. But also because it’s June, and whilst E3 might be gone, my god, there are still a lot of gaming announcements to get through. As such, this SKILL ISSUE is probably a bit more weighted towards that stuff than we’d normally aim for. There’s still stuff here for those of you who are more about pingers than Pacman though, and normal coverage will be resumed shortly.
SKILL ISSUE is written by Hue Tailer and Christopher Watson. You can get in touch if you’d like to contribute, if you’ve got anything you think we’d be interested in, should be covered, or if you're just looking for an Overcooked squad - hit us up at skillissuecrew@gmail.com.
///STATE OF DISARRAY
Given the length of time since our last release, it only seems right to kick things off with another look at what unfortunately is the newsletter’s main running theme - the closure of some of our favourite games studios by corporate behemoths! Still, it can’t get worse than it was at the start of the year right? Well, let's take a look.
Oh. It did get worse. Industry vampires Embracer Group have continued on their mission to be the most hated organisation in video games, shuttering Alone In The Dark reboot developer Pieces Interactive, just weeks after the release of the game starring David Harbour and Jodie Comer. The same week, they announced a new policy to allow for further use of AI tools in their games. I’m sure there's nothing deeper to read into there.
Back in May, Microsoft closed four of its studios, Alpha Dog Games, Roundhouse Games, Arkane Austin, creators of the incredible (if perhaps underplayed) Prey, and most notably of all, Tango Gameworks, developers of The Evil Within and the massively well-received Hi-Fi Rush. The decision was made in order to prioritise more “high-impact” titles. Despite this, the day after the closures, Matt Booty said in an interview “We need smaller games that give us prestige and awards”. More games like Hi-Fi Rush then.
There is nothing to be gained from comparing shuttered studios at this point. It’s all hard-working people losing their jobs for what is often failure from the corporate class. But from a personal viewpoint, the shutdown of British developer Roll7 stings worse of all, purely as they were responsible for two of our favourite games in recent years, OlliOlli World and Rollerdrome. Rumours of the closure spread in early May, forcing Take Two to deny it. However, despite this, Eurogamer reported in June that the studio was indeed “winding down”, and many employees on Twitter have posted their goodbyes to the lauded studio.
It will be a surprise to no one that great art is not the priority of big business. CEOs and artists have been at war pretty much since the first time a painting was sold. Creatives lose their jobs, consumers receive a worse product, and yes, the rich get richer. At least we have a solid media ecosystem to hold truth to power, right?
///OH NO, IGN BOUGHT EVERYONE
In our first-ever issue, we wrote about Gamer Network, the group that owned GamesIndustry.biz, Eurogamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, VG247, and Dicebreaker, with shares in Outside Xbox, Digital Foundry, and Hookshot, being put up for sale by parent company Reedpop. Well, they found a buyer, industry behemoth IGN Entertainment. Their biggest competitor.
No matter what you think of IGN as an editorial platform, consolidation like this is never a good thing. Sure enough, as soon as the acquisition was announced, it came with a string of layoffs across the companies. It’s also left the media ecosystem in tatters.
We’ve already seen the fallout of this. When Sony published an interview with Naughty Dog head honcho Neil Druckmann on its own platform rather than a dedicated news website, fans were furious at what they perceived to be his pro-AI agenda as well as his pure arrogance regarding future projects. Druckmann denied these readings, claiming that his "words, context, and intent were unfortunately lost". Sony subsequently pulled the interview from the internet, either having misrepresented their golden boy or being simply too afraid to piss him off.
Similarly, when Xbox boss Phil Spencer was finally interviewed on the aforementioned studio closures, it was at an industry event attached to the company's own showcase. His response, “Sometimes I have to make hard decisions that frankly are not decisions I love, but decisions that somebody needs to go make”, was met with cheers from the friendly audience, and that was that.
It doesn’t help that Gamergate 2.0 continues apace. The harassment of journalists across the board is rife, with Senior Editor of Kotaku Alyssa Mercante being the most popular target. Just this month, right-wing grifters were attempting to draw her into a live-streamed fight. The issue at hand? The shape of the lead character's jaw in the new Perfect Dark reboot. Maybe we don’t deserve video games at all.
///IN SEARCH OF APOLITICAL ABSOLUTION
A guest feature by Steam user xXDJ_EVIL_BRANDONXx
How you choose to spend your time is no concern of mine. However, what does concern me is the constant barrage of politics forcing themselves into my periphery as I try and finish my fourth portion of Burger King Doritos© Tangy Cheese Chicken Fries of the day. I mean I know it's all the intricate series of interconnected systems exerting force on our lives, I just don’t need to be reminded of them every time I sit down to enjoy a loaded spoon of bootleg manuka honey from Savers. As I wipe my sticky hands on the side of my recliner and pick up my DualShock, I want to know two things:
1. My choices in the game will matter
2. Those choices have no meaning whatsoever, especially outside of the game.
“Is this too much to ask?” weep the gamers. Well, let us try and find out.
Simulation games are first on the list. Build a house, habitat or abode? Political. Pretending to do a real-life job for funsies? Fuuuuuuckin political – it’s actually a main feature of them to be political, and in the age of rolling updates, the invisible hand of the devs becomes the ‘market forces’ pushing everything toward the centre of meta balance.
Let’s say players are completing all trips early on Euro Truck 23 so they can spend more time with their worried families - increase the traffic and get heavy on the weather. Maybe the markets shift, forcing you to start from level Bando in the House Flipper 2 update, warding off zombie hordes intent on killing you with fentanyl-laced door handles. A blight sets in on 13 acres of crops! There is an outbreak of BSE in your cattle! The government demands you cull and incinerate your livestock! All in the new Farming Simulator 23: Burn n Turn update. Any game where you manage or gather resources from the surroundings is political, so yes, Minecraft is inherently political, AND THEY’RE PROMOTING IT TO THE KIDS!
After that, we can disregard any game which uses a weapon. Weapons, as we know, are a democratic right, and democracy is one of the two main enemies of Hitler, the other being his crippling meth addiction. Crystal meth Hitler is ALWAYS political. Gun, bat, gravity hammer and, yes, even anthrax-riddled cow-heads all contain trace political values and thus must be disregarded. Bye bye Splatoon, your election-night-style gameplay will bother me no more.
Next, I feel we must bin off any game where there is an objective or win condition. Scores, high scores and competition all invite a level of politics that is hard for me to stomach. Even the famously nothing-to-do-with-politics arena of sports and their games are riddled with it. FKA FIFA’s “Football Ultimate Team” mode has you assemble a squad by buying packs of players with limited contracts. You are rewarded with positive team chemistry if the players you pick are the same nationality or have played in the same team before, leading to factional ethno-line ups, solidly building your pure-blood Estonian spine while frantically trying to expel the forren muck on the wing. Imagine a world where only people who played for Middlesborough could be considered for cabinet office positions, that is where sports are taking us.
I think we have to look at exploration games exclusively for something approaching the apolitical. That is, unless we count survival as something above politics, in which case there are maybe a few platformers that are potentially guff-free. I thought Mario Paint could be apolitical, but it is a creative tool sold by a company for users to reuse their iconography and essentially make the fun (work) for themselves, which is a prime example of neoliberal coercion and capture if you ask me. It gets points for allowing me to recreate non-woke classical music at least.
Is Subnautica apolitical? Is shark-fin soup still a delicacy? Can we play Journey without feeling the nagging claw of a message? Well, Journey may not be political, but it reeks of togetherness - worse in many ways, they say! “An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard.” Journey is highly suspicious.
You can use this as a guide for your spare time. After careful GPT prompting, and fourteen Steam burner accounts, I have successfully dropped nine woke games from “Overwhelmingly Positive” to “Very Positive” on Steam. I’ve posted several threads to Twitter, and I’ve got a lead on a voice actor’s hair salon. My daughter has yet to listen to the fourteen voice notes I left last night about my birthday.
///WHAT WE’VE BEEN PLAYING
Where we will shout out anything that's been resonating lately, regardless of format or release date. Because there's not enough time in the world to keep up with everything.
Animal Well
Billy Basso, Shared Memory LLC, available everywhere, 2025
There's something special about video games made by single-person developers. Whilst the rest of the industry is in freefall, with hundreds of huge studios closing down every day, the fact that some of the most compelling examples of the medium can come from one person with time and a vision never fails to instil a sense of hope.
Animal Well, the debut game from Billy Basso, and the first game published by Youtuber Dunkey’s Bigmode, is one such game. It sticks to many hallmarks of smaller games too. New twist on a familiar structure? Tick! Throwback pixel art? Tick! Cute and creepy in equal measure? You better believe that's a tick!
Despite this familiarity, Animal Well is a very special game indeed, and where it excels is just in its dense puzzle design. Unlike most Metroidvanias, Animal Well is more or less entirely combat-free. You explore the map, you solve puzzles, and you pick up items that allow you to solve more puzzles and explore more of the map. None of this is ever explained to you. It’s a process of trial and error, that whilst occasionally frustrating, is almost always rewarding.
Most pleasing of all is how the puzzles make me feel. Most games like this aim to make you feel like a genius. A mighty problem solver, bending the world to your will. Animal Well draws you in. The game feels like the genius here, and the player is the one being moulded, bent into new shapes by the internal logic that Billy Basso has created.
In an interview, Basso described the game as having four layers. The first layer is the game most people will play, you solve puzzles, you decipher your goals, and eventually you’ll roll credits. It can take anywhere between five and 14 hours.
The second level is all the other puzzles you might solve for collectables and other bonuses, and plenty of completionists will be locked in for tens more hours trying to tick all these boxes.
The third level is made up of puzzles that are only able to be solved through community engagement. A number of these have been appearing online, with individual players only able to get one element per playthrough. Online discussion is rampant, and the game's fans are hard at work, covering cork boards in strings trying to get to the bottom of it all.
The fourth layer Basso doesn’t expect anyone will realise is even there. The game, he says, contains some kind of overarching meta-puzzle. So far, he’s confirmed that whilst the community is doing vastly better than he expected, they aren’t close to figuring it all out.
For such a dense experience, the truly wild element of the game is its file size. It is the smallest app on my PS5, and the menu image is bigger than the game itself. At a time when the new COD game is weighing at 300GB, to see a solo dev taking optimisation so seriously is a relief.
There’s plenty more to say about Animal Well. I love its world, its sparse sound design, its subtle animations and its mysterious plot. I have never gelled with a Metroidvania before and it’s forcing me to reassess the genre as a whole. But I’ve already said too much. It’s a game of mystery, and whilst I’ve tried to avoid anything that could be considered a spoiler, I’d urge you to go in as blind as possible.
Scavengers Reign
Joseph Bennett; Charles Huettner, Netflix, available now
It’s good practice, as a rule, to not kick off your extremely positive reviews on a negative note. If you want a reader to feel good about something, then you want to try and start off on a positive. It makes sense, but unfortunately, I feel like I have no choice here but to open with the bad news: before it was even released worldwide, HBO cancelled the animated sci-fi Scavengers Reign after just one series.
The good news: after cancelling it, they sold the rights to Netflix, who have at least given it a fighting chance to find its audience, even if they haven’t done any work to market it at all. There is little doubt in my mind that audience is out there. After all, it might just be the defining animation of the decade.
The setup is simple enough. Far-future humans crash a giant spaceship and are separated across a harsh and beautiful alien planet. The plot moves nicely, drip-feeding you backstory at a pleasing pace whilst the dangers and beauty of the moment-to-moment never slow down. Characters are well-rounded, and the voice acting is great. But none of this is what makes the show stand head and shoulders above similar recent offerings.
What makes it stand out is the spine-tingling alienness of it all. Scavengers Reign is beautiful, and has so many bizarre ideas making up the planet’s delicate ecosystem that a large portion of your viewing time feels more like watching a nature documentary than a cartoon. Studio Ghibli and the illustrations of Moebius loom large over the series, but to suggest it is derivative of either is doing the show a massive disservice.
Smaller aliens will make you coo with delight, and maybe let out a little giggle. Larger ones often have a cosmic poignancy, living and dying in a fully fleshed natural world you can’t hope to understand. The threats the world poses are truly terrifying in a way most science fiction doesn’t even come close to. They operate on a level of consciousness impossible to describe in most other mediums.
Any one of these designs would be enough to base an entire film on. Scavengers Reign offers an absolute feast. Lifeforms are so densely layered on top of one another that it should be easy to get overwhelmed. Luckily, each is realised in such a compelling manner, with a twisted surreal internal logic, that it all seems to make sense somehow.
If it sounds like you might be a fan, then you probably will be. And since it’s been given one more chance at life, it’s genuinely important to get involved as soon as possible. Watch it. Tell your friends. Saving Earth might be out of our grasp, but the world of Scavengers Reign? That feels more achievable.
Ultimate Hickups
Johnathan Hickman, you can’t avoid the guy in the comic world right now. The king of the reboots has done it again, holding the Marvel Comics power button for ten seconds ‘til the Ultimate Universe (Earth 6160) sprung up once more. Last time around, it was Big ‘ol Bendis at the helm of the original Ultimate Universe (Earth-1610) which became a very successful way for Marvel to test out ideas without fucking with the sacred timeline. Crucially, it hit big for Marvel at a time when the industry really needed a hit.
This time around we’re getting 24-esque 1:1 time pacing with the monthly issue releases as the Ultimate Universe is kicked off by The Maker (evil Reed Richards, obviously), his plan to create a world without his adversaries by stopping the catalyst to their powers. If he seems to have a dose of Hickman’s Moira McTaggart about his timeline schemes, you’d be right - he slaps the radioactive spider away, stops the Fantastic Four’s space flight, and so on.
A long series of very comic-booky events, basically. All that preamble gets us to where the Ultimate stories take place. More importantly in the real world, Ultimate Spider-Man is a hit. Along with the beautiful and unique (well, for Marvel) Ultimate X-Men by Peach Momoko, and Ultimate Black Panther by Bryan Edward Hill and penciller Stefano Caselli, this new Ultimate package is demanding reprint after reprint, something the industry is again in dire need of.
Not only that, but Hickman dropped a surprise DOOM one-shot alongside artist Sanford Greene, complete with an MF tribute splash page. I hear the story is great, but good luck if you can find a copy for under £30 right now! The guy is on a hot streak, and thankfully Marvel is giving him whatever he wants to keep him sweet.
As Marvel bids (in a truly gut-wrenchingly bad way, more to follow on that) goodbye to one of the best X-Men Eras of all time in Hickman’s Krakoa saga, it’s comforting at least to know the cosmic stat-geek has reached a kind of dominion of his own over the Marvel universe. It’s clear from the fact that Johnathan Hickman is currently writing an Avengers VS Aliens run, coming later in the year. (There better be an Ant-Man chest burst gag, or I’m out.) He’s also helming a Wolverine book with Greg ‘Court of Owls’ Capulo. Marvel is doing the Partridge second series dance, and this is the output keeping the cheese flowing.
The Alien / Avengers crossover could be a groundbreaking exploration of the moment ideology meets a truly nihilistic force. But the fact it's Xenomorphs and not just like, the Brood, means it whiffs of boardrooms, cigar smoke and shit ideas. If rumours of Disney farming off the comic’s division to publishers are to be believed, the print side of comicdom could be due a grim contraction soon, with Disney seeing no need to nurture the very source of their output inhouse. But hey, that could be a very fucking good thing, and as long as Hickman is attached, it’ll probably be worth picking up.
///WHAT CRUMBS LURK AHEAD?
A look at upcoming gems to keep us motivated! And given its trailer season, there’s a lot to discuss!
@Disturbance
Ugly Duck, 49 Tanner St, London, SE1 3PL / Online, 22 - 23 June 2024
Performance and multimedia exhibition @Disturbance is leading up the previews of this issue and with good reason - it starts today and continues until Sunday. If you’re in London and reading this in time, we strongly recommend checking out the first summer edition of the LGBTQIA+ focused arts showcase, featuring Alex Billingham, Samiir Saunders, Ace Rahman, Kobi Essah Ayensuo and Ella Frost. Previous editions have always been excellent with adventurous sound design, thought-provoking performances and brilliant installations and films. If you can’t make it down in person, live-stream tickets are available.
///IT’S NOT E3 ANYMORE, IT'S DIFFERENT NOW,
Summer Games Fest
Surely Geoff saw this coming? With E3 being officially un-alive now, this left a big 10-day E3 hole in every game company’s promo Trello and why move it? And certainly, why give any announcements to Keighley? Summer Games Fest was kind of pointless this year, feeling more than ever like an unskippable ad break for DLCs you’ll probably never buy. But hey, at least we got the Civ VII announcement!
There’s a good chance this generation's AAA 10/10 contenders are done and gone, GTA 6 excluded. We’re always happy to be surprised, but the industry feels like it’s firmly stuck in mid-mode. Nearly everything from the event seemed high 8, with a lot of room to still be great, but all the ideas seem tapped out, regurgitated and very safe. We got Last of Us-alike’s, at least five Zelda glider open-world clones, and zero stoned Zack Efron’s. Someone needs to tell CEOs that we’re honestly good for open worlds.
We saw a glimpse of Batman Arkham Shadow, the Meta quest exclusive ‘Man ‘Ham spinoff – destined to be cherished by at least twenty-four frat boys. There was a smattering of VR in general, but nothing that seems anywhere close to Half-Life: Alyx yet. One of the genuinely cool-looking games shown was Slitterhead – a ghostly possession-based action-adventure game from Gravity Rush developer Keiichiro Toyoma and Bokeh Games.
Cuffbust looks like a valiant pitch to be the next viral party game, with its cutesy prison break gameplay just the right side of janky for it to hit on Twitch. Who knows, if developers Two Star Games are lucky, we may get another global stay-at-home situation by 2025
Spooky film specialists Blumhouse are moving into spooky games and doubling down on the PS1 being the spookiest aesthetic in gaming. They showed a sizzle-reel of upcoming titles, most interestingly Sam Barlow (Her Story, Silent Hill: Origins) and Brandon Cronenberg teaming up to haunt our dreams via Project C, so there’s that to look forward to. In all honesty, The Keighleys this year mainly served to tee up the big publishers to give us some reason to keep interested in what is turning out to be a pretty tepid generation.
Xbox showcase
The Xbox non-denominational Gamepass preview event was a roaring success. I scored a case of promotional Modern Warfare II Mountain Dew from an IRC scrub in a 1v1 knives-only Soldat, so I was already pumped. And boy Phil delivered, with new games up the wazoo. He reminded us that there are still many studios yet to be culled, and each with very different offerings on show. But who knows which will survive until Q2 2025. Given Microsoft’s recent activity, half of these games may never ship!
Gears Of War: E-Day - THE RETURN OF MAD WORLD! GEARS OF WAR GO FULL FENIX FORCE AND DISREGARDS RECENT STORYLINES. PANDERING TO THE UNDERSERVED BRO AUDIENCE?? Will I play this? Probably not. Will it rile up online discussion whether it’s good or bad? Most definitely. MY MAD WORLD COVER IS TOO CHEERY - INTERPOLATE THAT SHITE MORE – 20% MOOOOORE MOROSE PLEEEEEEAAASE SUNO!
Perfect Dark - I had gone to violently wretch after my fourth Mountain Dew so I missed the start of this reveal and assumed it was a new iteration of Deus Ex, but no! The Perfect Dark reboot actually looks great?! After wiping my brow, the Deus Ex gadgetry and slick movement might all look a bit too good to be true, but the fact they’re reaching for this ballpark is a good omen at least. Perfect Dark always felt like one of those ‘best of a console’ type games that would never get enough clamour to be resurrected, but what the fuck – Gamepass me up, Phil!
Doom: The Dark Ages – Angry man finds himself cast into an unfamiliar realm, to fight back the undead hordes with a parry shield and recallable weapon, no this is not the Sony showcase, the console wars are over! Following on from Spawn comics and our NHS waiting rooms, Doomguy finds himself in medieval times, to do Doomguy stuff, with new swing mechanics and, I assume, reveal that he was actually Nathan Explosion from Metalocalypse the whole time. A reliably good time is incoming.
Indiana Jones - The Great Circle – Playing through the eyes of one of the most famous and recognizable faces (Harrison Ford) seems a baffling creative decision until you realise the Uncharted series was just so good it seems like LucasArts deem third-person action a no-go. Indy is not the professor he used to be, after all, and we’ll see how well this voice holds up, but an Indiana Jones game coming out is something we only get once every three generations. So we’ll keep a hopeful eye on The Great Circle. (Great Circle? Really? Who names Indiana Jones projects?)
Mixtape - This looks like a very typical Anapurna joint – a nostalgic mixtape-based adventure mystery game, with an aloof Perks of Being A Wallflower vibe. If I’m honest, I’ll reserve judgment on this because the vibe they’re going for could go either way. Will it be Stand by Me or Garden State? Ferris Bueller or Saltburn? I’m sure nothing at all traumatic will happen, or any dark secrets will be unlocked when you put in the wrong tape. I’m sure you won’t spend two weeks trying to make the perfect mixtape for someone at school and then wait outside their house for an hour to give them the tape, only for them to never mention it again. And I’m sure we won’t be able to move for coverage of the game with the Smashing Pumpkins on the soundtrack, so excuse me if I hit snooze on this for now
The main takeaway from the presentation was that it felt like both players and developers are moving towards a PC-first approach. We will always still have proprietary boxes, but will the subscriptions stay as such? What does this mean for developers? Where a ‘second-party’ scenario would once sustain a manageable team and remain semi-autonomous, this structure seems to have almost entirely disappeared.
With mega-game budgets exploding at a similar rate to the influx of solo/small-team indie games, are we reaching a critical devaluing of video games in general? We’re not sure if Microsoft saw Gamepass doing for gaming what Napster did for music, but if I can play Halo 2 on a Switch at some point, the downfall of this highly exploitative and underregulated industry might be a small price to pay. We just hope that the people behind the things we love can continue making them.
Nintendo Direct
Only a fool would have been excited for this year's Nintendo Direct. With the Switch successor launching next year, recent updates in most major first-party properties, and the fact that the technological equivalent of a seven-year-old tablet is increasingly laughably underpowered, it seemed safe to say that the world's most popular console was going to be winding things up. At best, we’d be looking at a couple of Gamecube remasters, and a new skin for Splatoon.
That was not the case. A brand new Mario & Luigi RPG, with amazing cel-shaded graphics and an almost Persona-esque UI design? The confirmation of Metroid Prime 4, a game that everyone had given up on even existing? A new top-down Zelda, adapting mechanics from Tears Of The Kingdom, where you play as Zelda for the first time since the Phillips CDI abomination Wand of Gamelon? When every other major publisher is tripping up at every corner, how is Nintendo doing things so right?
The beauty of Nintendo lies in its rejection of the rest of the gaming industry’s established principles. They refuse to get caught up in the graphical arms race, perfectly happy to let timeless design and great concepts stand on their own. They retain talent, often for decades, and aren’t afraid to hire outside of the industry either - Eiji Aonuma, producer of the Zelda series, first joined the company as a marionette maker who had never played a video game.
It’s heartwarming to see a company take this approach to games. There’s plenty to complain about with Nintendo - their pricing structure, their litigious nature, the button that they insist is A. But whilst other industry leaders strive to push the boundaries of technology and storytelling, everything Nintendo does is entrenched with a wondrous sense of what it means to play. It’s no wonder they’ve lasted for over a century.
Oh, and we’ll take the Marvel vs Capcom mega package as well, thank you very much!
Steam Next Fest
Let’s be honest with everyone for a second and come clean. It’s not major life events, or moving house and set-up, or other work or anything else that has bogged us down of late, it’s Elden Ring. It’s always Elden Ring and from the looks of the DLC (at time of writing) review scores, it’s always going to be Elden Ring.
With limited time between killing those poor Albanaurics for sweet sweet runes and deciding which cape will look better in the Land of Shadow, it was nice that Steam scheduled a demo dump to June’s industry-wide E3 not E3
Oddada
Sven Ahlgrimm, Mathilde Hoffmann, Steam, release TBC
HANGOVER TIP!
A music-making roguelike? You have our attention. Actually, isn’t Ableton a music-making roguelike? Are all DAWs roguelikes? Well, if true, Oddada could be the cutest audio workstation we’ve seen.
You control a trundling little train, driving through primary-coloured wooden block dioramas, each stop having different noise mechanisms, which you are free to prod and poke to create a loop of sounds. Dropping from the sky are tiny houses and roof pieces, which can slot on top of spots on the machines to augment the sounds they’re making.
This, coupled with switches on the train that control the time of day (you get a kind of ambient mix for nighttime, for instance), means you really have quite a lot to play with on your journey, which culminates in you creating your own cassette to save your minute-long musical meanderings. With unlockable sounds, more levels I didn’t see and even some FX to boot, it’ll be interesting to see how the Oddada sound evolves over time.
I had no idea what I was getting into when I booted up this demo, but Oddada was exactly what this fragile mind needed, half awake and hungry for something wholesome. Bells, xylophones, and soft synth basses all give it a warm fuzzy sound that when coupled with the visuals makes playing Oddada feel like you’re in a sensory room chilling with The Clangers listening to some Midori Takada. The demo doesn’t tell you anything, leaving you to poke around with the gizmos until the premise clicks – which was almost right away for me (Ableton UI 0 – Oddada UI 1). I didn’t find the house tile that sends audio to your WAVES plugins, but I’m sure they’ll patch that in…
There’s still no date for this little gem from Berlin-based development duo Sven Ahlgrimm, Mathilde Hoffmann, but it’s definitely out this year at some point and you can try the demo out for yourself now.
The Alters
11-bit studios, Steam, TBC 2024
We’re simple here at SKILL ISSUE. Give us a game where the main elements are isolation and bickering between different facets of the protagonist’s psyche and we’re happier than a pig with a coin-sized chip in it’s brain. So obviously when we heard about a demo for 11 Bit’s new sci-fi survival game with a paranoid butterfly effect-like cloning mechanic, we immediately cancelled any fun-sounding plans with concerned friends and drew the curtains.
When the main character starts arguing with themselves
Forget Inside Out, this is Outside bloody In! You play as, basically, Matt Damon, embittered at being left behind by his absolute chud crewmates (who seem totally fine without him), trying to survive on a barren planet. “Matt Damon” is left to build up his base of operations by grappling with the rough alien terrain before him, gathering a spooky space crystal with which “Matt” can clone himself. “This seems all fine” you might think! Well, just you wait.
Unfortunately for Mr. Damon, these clones have all led very different clone lives you see. One lil’ Damon never left his high school sweetheart, on lil’ Damon chose to do further maths at college, this lil’ Damon was disbarred in drunken circumstance, and your little Damon has to use all these clones to help and build up the XCom like shelter, whilst remaining wary of how your decisions will affect all these clearly inferior versions of Main “Matt Damon”.
Whether or not you like resource management and arduous gathering missions will be key for this one, as you guide “Matt Damon” like a baby-free version of Norman Reedus over craggy terrain. As someone who loved the base building and roster management on Metal Gear Solid V, I feel like the demo was just the first hit of something I’ll be coming back to more than I should. I mean, it’s basically just building Mother Base in space, and everyone is Big Boss!
Only Way is Down
Jilted Generation Productions, Steam, TBC 2024
Cats have gone the way of bacon and officially left the online collective consciousness. They used to be on home screens and bumper stickers, asking for burgers and watching us from ceilings, now they seem to be back to skulking across the road at night suspiciously right before you stub your toe. They’re barely even on UKG artwork anymore. We all needed two years off after James Corden as a cat, but still, people persist.
Regardless of feline standing, you’re a cat in this, and for my money, the world’s frailest example of one. Somehow this gingernut has found itself on the top of a half-completed building and needs to get down so it doesn’t waste our tax money on fire rescues. It’s a physics puzzler, with an added ‘cat detective’ mode.
The cat handles very badly, but not in a fun catnip kind of way, more like a stuttery brain worm. The cat has a laughably short fall distance - we’re talking Dark Souls 1- I guess to make the physics platform conceit work. There was more than one occasion I casually jumped off a beam onto some wood below, only to crumple when I landed, limp and useless. There is a designated safe path, but a little bit like Stray from a couple of years ago, that’s just not how cats work. They’re agile and nimble, yet feckless and clumsy. This game does the latter two okay, perhaps to its detriment. But to us, no game has nailed all four aspects of being a cat yet, unless you count VRchat role-players.
Chinese Online Game
648工作室, Steam, TBC 2024
Unfortunately my download expired before I could try the pre-release of Chinese Online Game, Life Sim RPG, due out later in the year from developer ‘Wise Games’ but the blurb reads:
"Chinese-style online game" is a simulation game that stitches all the gameplay and routines of domestic online games, where players will play an older unmarried young man, Lao Wang, because of a lack of money for marriage, he was accidentally attracted by a pop-up advertisement of an online game endorsed by a certain star when he was trying to find a way, and at that moment the gears of fate began to turn.”
Stop Asking:
‘Poor performance’ ‘no object’ ‘average job’
Obviously, I can’t go too deep into the gameplay, but goddamn I’m intrigued. For some reason, I feel like this is going to be in a lot of EOY discussions. Anyone with a passing interest in semi-seditious memes should wishlist this after their next tang ping. And if this piques an interest, may I suggest Exhausted Man, sir?
That’s it for SKILL ISSUE #8! Do get in touch at skillissuecrew@gmail.com with any thoughts and please, if you’re into it, tell your similarly-minded mates and help get the word out.
Thanks, friends. Always check behind waterfalls, start with a half and remember: