PC, PS4/5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox; Cozy Game Pals/Blumhouse Games Its expertly retro, low-poly visuals are a nod to Resident Evil and Silent Hill, but this horror game has an emotionally resonant story at its heart For those who remember the dawn of the survival horror genre, its aesthetic renaissance in the independent gaming scene has been a spooky delight. Crow County, The Closing Shift, Murder House – are all modern supernatural adventures that use low poly 3D visuals and blocky textures, not just as a visual hook but as a means of reconnecting with what made the likes of Silent Hill and Clock Tower scary and engaging in the first place. Fear the Spotlight, the debut title from Cozy Game Pals and new horror-specific publisher Blumhouse Games, is another wonderful, warmly chilling example. Two girls break into their high school library late at night, looking for one particular item: a spirit board, locked in a display case as part of an exhibition on the occult. Vivian is kind of a nerd, a star volunteer at the library, while Amy is a fascinating outsider, interested in the supernatural. When the two decide to hold a seance in the empty building, they make contact, not only with the dead, but a tragic event from the school’s recent past. And then Amy mysteriously disappears. Continue reading...

PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox; Nomada Studio/Devolver Digital Rarely do games move me to tears, but this tale of a woman rearing her cub in a world plagued by demons had a deep emotional effect A warrior and her wolf are running through perspective-shifting collages of the most sumptuous nature scenes I’ve ever seen in a video game. Cranes flit from shining pools, boar and stags roam in the background; as the camera zooms out on the plain, yellow flowers extending off on all sides, a cleaved mountain comes into view in the distance. But there is a corrupting force at work. Here birds fall from the sky, black flowers blooming from their tiny bodies. Formless masked demons emerge from the ground to feast on them. These are your enemies, vanquished with a thin blade drawn from your warrior’s side. But there are so many of them – and you’re just one human, and a wolf. Neva does not embellish this setup with words. You never find out what led to this corruption, or why you alone are fighting it. It tells its story with extraordinary visuals and elegant animation from developer Nomada Studio, in concert with chest-tighteningly effective music from Barcelona-based Berlinist. Many games that achieve this level of beauty suffer a little for prioritising style over substance, but Neva hits home on all levels. I was on the verge of tears at times, watching its formerly exquisite world succumb to corruption as the seasons passed, its beautiful creatures possessed by the awful blackness, birds frozen in motion, creating dreadful totems of the dead. By the end I was weeping as I clutched the controller. Continue reading...

Museum features consoles from 1983’s Famicom to 2017’s Switch, as well as honouring Nintendo’s pre-video-game era Traditionally, visitors to Kyoto in October come for momijigari, the turning of the autumn leaves in the city’s picturesque parks. This autumn, however, there is a new draw: a Nintendo museum. The new attraction, which opens on Wednesday, is best described as a chapel of video game nostalgia. Upstairs, Nintendo’s many video game consoles, from 1983’s Famicom through 1996’s Nintendo 64 to 2017’s Switch, are displayed reverently alongside their most famous games. On the back wall, visitors can also peer at toys, playing cards and other artefacts from the Japanese company’s pre-video-game history, stretching back to its founding as a hanafuda playing card manufacturer in 1889. Downstairs, there are interactive exhibits with comically gigantic controllers and floor-projected playing cards. Continue reading...

PC, PS4/5 (version tested), Switch and Xbox One/Series X While there are no spectacular advances on last year’s game, new refinements provide a vivid glimpse of what it’s like to be a genius on the field It’s been a year since EA, having abandoned its Fifa licence, brought us EA Sports FC, the most awkwardly named sports game franchise since Peter Shilton’s Handball Maradona. Sales were apparently 5% down after the switch to the catchy new moniker, but profits were up thanks to the cash-raking power of Ultimate Team, EA’s controversial, financially voracious take on a Panini sticker album. Now we’re on to the follow-up and with Konami’s eFootball still underperforming and no new Fifa title on the immediate horizon, it’s another open goal for team EA Sports. Fortunately for us, the developer is not taking its dominance for granted: there are genuinely intriguing new features here. Last year it was all about the advanced HyperMotion2 animation tech, this year it’s FC IQ, which looks to enhance the strategic side of the game by giving you intricate control over team and player mentalities. Here, you can tweak your build-up style and defensive approach, then go in and change the priorities of each individual player. Want Saka to play in an aggressively attacking rather than balanced role at Arsenal? You can make that change. Then, when you start a match his AI will be yelling at him to make forward runs at the expense of providing defensive support. It’s a fun option for Claudio Ranieri types, but a bit much if you’re just after a kickabout. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch; Grezzo/Nintendo It’s great to finally get to play as Zelda, but working out how to take an active without being able to fight is rather hard work Unlike Princess Peach, waiting in a castle to be rescued from Bowser, Zelda has never been a damsel. She has always commanded magical power, even in the early days of the series, when she would enlist green-clad swordsman Link to save the kingdom. For the last couple of decades, since 2003’s Wind Waker, Zelda and Link have been something of a team; they are friends, companions, a powerful regent and her loyal knight. But still we, the players, have always taken Link’s role in the story. Echoes of Wisdom is Zelda’s first star turn in the series that bears her name. Sinister rifts have appeared across the kingdom of Hyrule, sucking its citizens inside, where whole slices of the landscape are stuck in suspended animation. Zelda can traverse these rifts, and close them – after conquering the dungeon inside. The main difference between Link and Zelda is that Zelda can’t fight. Instead, with a magical staff, she can summon material “echoes” of real objects from thin air – which could be anything from a cut of meat to distract monsters, to crates and tables to construct towers and staircases. When you come across the usual Zelda selection of deceptively mild-looking monsters, you can simply conjure a spear-wielding Moblin or a few bats into existence to dispatch them for you. Or, failing that, you can manifest a pot and throw it at whatever’s menacing you. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom is out September 26; £49.99 Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox series SX; Devolver Meta spin on arts-and-crafty games has you helping an eccentric trio able to access the world outside their story to battle the evil Humgrump There is a whole sub-genre of video games that use arts and crafts as the basis for their aesthetic, landscapes and storytelling: LittleBigPlanet, Chicory, the Paper Mario series, Yoshi’s Woolly World and Kirby’s Epic Yarn, to name but a handful. The Plucky Squire takes things one step further, and then things get very meta. About two-thirds of this game takes place in a gorgeous children’s picture book with a hand-illustrated feel, wherein the player helps the titular Squire and his two friends – an apprentice witch with an affinity for painting, and a mountainside rock’n’roll troll with a knack for rhythm – face up against the chaos raining down from the evil Humgrump. But despite these twee beginnings, it gets pretty postmodern pretty quickly. The remaining third of the gameplay takes place on the child’s desk around the book. The Squire has the power to jump out of the 2D world of his story into reality. Here he can turn pages, tilt the book itself and smuggle objects from the chaotic, messy desk into the story to help him. Continue reading...

Firaxis Games needed to move on from Civilization 6 because, its developers explain, ‘it was getting too big for its britches’ It’s been eight years since Civilization 6 – the most recent in a very long-running strategy game series that sees you take a nation from the prehistoric settlement of their first town through centuries of development until they reach the space age. Since 2016 it has amassed an abundance of expansions, scenario packs, new nations, modes and systems for players to master – but series producer Dennis Shirk at Firaxis Games feels that enough it enough. “It was getting too big for its britches,” he says. “It was time to make something new.” “It’s tough to even get through the whole game,” designer Ed Beach says, singling out the key problem that Firaxis aims to solve with the forthcoming Civilization 7. While the early turns of a campaign in Civilization 6 can be swift, when you’re only deciding the actions for the population of a single town, “the number of systems, units, and entities you must manage explodes after a while,” Beach says. From turn one to victory, a single campaign can take more than 20 hours, and if you start falling behind other nations, it can be tempting to restart long before you see the endgame. Civilization 7 will be released on PC, Mac, Xbox, PlayStation 4/5 and Nintendo Switch on 11 February 2025. Continue reading...

In this week’s newsletter: This autumn may not deliver its usual raft of franchise mega-titles, so use this time to embrace the weird, wonderful and original instead • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Earlier this week, the culture desk asked me to recommend four games for our annual autumn arts preview. Reader: I struggled. The period between September and November is usually stacked with AAA releases as publishers jostle for space in the historically lucrative run-up to Christmas. Even in this era of “live service” games such as Fortnite, Destiny and Genshin Impact (which ignore external sales patterns in favour of their own ever-updating season passes) you’re usually guaranteed an autumnal belch of major gaming releases. But this year … not so much. September is mostly about The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (below). October is the Silent Hill 2 reboot, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and at a stretch Sonic X Shadow Generations. We have to wait until November for a truly busy blockbuster lineup with Slitterhead, Football Manager 2025, Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl all lining up for our wintery delectation. The long anticipated role-playing game Avowed has been delayed until 2025, while Indiana Jones and the Great Circle still hasn’t been given a release date beyond “2024”, which doesn’t seem promising. Continue reading...

Our video games writers get their children to play the games they loved as kids – and get to grips with the ones they adore now. Will they be bored, baffled – or hooked? Keza MacDonald plays Pokémon Shield Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch; Nintendo As ever, Mario’s brother is a scream, but this remaster is haunted by the spectre of its much better sequel – and the price might spook you My favourite thing about the Luigi’s Mansion games is the detail. The way Mario’s cowardly brother nervously hums along to the music as he bumbles through spooky stately homes. The slapstick animations when he falls through a fireplace or gets catapulted into a secret room by a fold-down bed. The cackles and goofy expressions of the ghosts as they get up to their hijinks. As you use Luigi’s trusty ghost-capturing vacuum cleaner to pull back rugs and expose secret trapdoors (or secret spiders), and suck up the banknotes and golden coins that are hidden everywhere, you can’t help but notice how each little sound, scene and secret has been carefully arranged to give you a small dose of delight. This ghost-busting puzzle game was such a delightful surprise sequel in 2013, when it was released for the Nintendo 3DS. Its diorama-like mini-mansions and peepholes gave Nintendo’s artists ample opportunity to show off that console’s stereoscopic 3D effects, activated with a little slider at the side of the screen. But now it’s out on the Switch, 11 years later, and two things have changed. Firstly, the 3D effect that it was designed around is no longer a thing. And secondly, Luigi’s Mansion 3 now exists, and it’s significantly better. Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD is available now for £49.99 Continue reading...