Original link: https://markonreview.com/2023/06/25/2023-jun-upcoming-games/
Killer Frequency
2023.06.01 / PS4, PS5, Xbox (smart distribution) NS, Quest, PC
A first-person thriller adventure game that puts the player in the role of a late night radio DJ in the 1980s. Tonight is different. Someone calls to say that they have witnessed a horrible event. Players need to react in real time and Explore the radio station and its surroundings while answering the phone, discover clues to a series of horrific events, and try to help the caller and himself escape the killer’s grasp.
The development team has worked very hard to promote the retro atmosphere of “Fatal Frequency”. Players will be able to hear the golden songs of the 80s, and at the same time, they can explore the scene of the radio station carefully decorated in the era, fully immersed in the retro thriller that the development team worked hard to create film atmosphere.
Labyrinth of the World Tree I·II·Ⅲ HD REMASTER / Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection
2023.06.01 / NS, PC
“The Labyrinth of the World Tree” is an RPG series launched by Atlus since 2007. The previous works have landed on Nintendo DS and 3DS handhelds. Now the high-definition remakes of the first three works in the series will come to the NS platform for the first time.
The main gameplay of the “Maze of the World Tree” series is that players create custom characters, explore the mysterious mazes that appear underground, and participate in turn-based battles. The situation is hand-drawn (the game also provides an auto-draw option). In the original game, players usually watch the scene on the upper screen and draw the map on the lower screen. This time, the remake of NS has adjusted the layout of the screen, with the scene on the left and the map drawing controls on the upper and lower screens on the right. New vertical paintings have been added, and pre-orders (or separate purchases) can also get linkage vertical paintings of Atlus’s works such as “Persona”.
Street Fighter 6 / Street Fighter 6
2023.06.01 / PS4, PS5, XS X|S, Arcade, PC
The sequel to the “Street Fighter” series after seven years, the engine has changed from the Unreal Engine of the previous generation to the RE Engine, which is self-developed by Capcom and fully applied in its works. It presents us with more features that try to cater to the current market. before.
In addition to regular operations such as updating character appearance design, adding new characters, and upgrading audio-visual levels, the author noticed that “Street Fighter 6” has put a lot of effort into expanding the audience of the game:
On the one hand, this work has made major adjustments in the operation input, forming three operation modes, the first is the “classic” mode of the traditional six-key input, the second is the four-key “modern” mode that simplifies the input of some combination keys, and finally It is a “dynamic” mode in which you only need to press one button other than the arrow keys, and the game will automatically judge the moves according to the battlefield situation (only used in some occasions of non-online battles), corresponding to players with different levels of fighting game experience, newly added The latter two modes especially allow relatively amateur players to have a sense of participation;
On the other hand, “Street Fighter 6” also added the “Global Travel” mode and the “Fighting Center” system. The former allows players to create custom characters, travel around the world to follow legendary fighters, learn moves, challenge powerful enemies, and experience a period of Slightly rough, but the role-playing sense of the single-player plot is not bad. The latter is similar to an online metaverse arcade hall. Players can control their own characters to come here, sit in front of the arcade, and conduct battles with customizable rules. You can also play Capcom’s old arcade games in the “Street Games Center” area, which are updated daily, weekly, and monthly.
Diablo IV / Diablo IV
2023.06.06 / PS4, PS5, Xbox (Smart Distribution), PC
The new multiplayer online ARPG series produced by Blizzard has been 11 years away from “Diablo III”. It was first released at the Blizzard Carnival at the end of 2019. In the middle, it also experienced the resignation of core production staff caused by Blizzard’s sexual harassment and malicious work environment lawsuits , is finally on sale earlier this month.
The gameplay of “Diablo IV” is basically similar to the previous game. Currently, the game has five professions: Barbarian, Mage, Ranger, Druid, and Necromancer. Players can choose a profession to create their own characters and continue to explore the entire game world. , Defeating enemies, brushing equipment, gaining skill upgrades, and so on, and in this process, you can appreciate the mythical stories of the Three Realms written by the “Diablo” series for many years.
Sebastian Stepien, the creative director of this work, once said that the story of this work will be more solid and down-to-earth, starting from the encounters of small people, instead of involving high-level politics and relying heavily on fantasy elements like Diablo III. In addition, former game designer Jesse McCree once said that the overall tone of this work is greatly influenced by heavy metals, and the art style is between the second and third generations of the series. It has both the dark feeling of the second generation and the hand-painted feeling of the third generation. , Medieval aesthetics.
Amnesia: The Bunker
2023.06.06 / PS4, Xbox (Smart Distribution), PC
Frictional Games, the fourth work of the “Amnesia” series from the thriving survival horror puzzle game, still uses the iconic first-person gameplay of the series, but the story does not follow the previous one, but opens a new chapter. It tells the story of a French soldier trapped in a bunker under the background of World War I. With only one bullet and a flashlight in his hand, he needs to solve various obstacles in the bunker, find a way to escape, and avoid the mysterious monster at the same time. invasion.
Different from the previous series, this game has a “semi-open world” structure, and most of the puzzles have strong physical attributes, so that players can relatively freely collect resources everywhere and think about comprehensive utilization, instead of having to complete a game linearly A series of tasks makes the puzzle-solving process more in line with the player’s intuition; the system will also refer to the player’s actions to adjust the monster’s action rules, and continue to output a sense of oppression. According to the official statement, “every game process is unique”, “every decision will change the outcome of the game.”
Harmony: The Fall of Reverie
2023.06.08 / NS, PC
Don’t Nod, who developed “Remember Me” and the first two “Life is Strange” (Life is Strange), is a new visual novel developed using Unreal Engine 5, 2D rendering, and a unique art style. Well-known composer and game developer Lena Raine was invited to compose the original soundtrack.
The protagonist played by the player has dual identities in the real world and the parallel world, and has the ability to predict the future. The player needs to make various choices while constantly exploring personal abilities. Branches close up.
Rose Mask / Mask of the Rose
2023.06.09 / PS4, PS5, X1, XS X|S, NS, PC
The new work produced by Failbetter Games, the developer of “Sunless Sea”, the development team fictionalized a magical story stage that caused London to fall underground and a mysterious ruler ascend to the throne. Players will investigate murders in New London, Find love and reveal hidden secrets. At present, the community widely praises the highlights of “Rose Mask” in terms of drama and reasoning design, while there are relatively many criticisms about the length and completion of the game. In addition, it should be noted that this work is currently only available in PC and NS versions, and other host platform versions have not yet been released.
Pastoral / Dordogne
2023.06.14 / PS4, PS5, Xbox (smart distribution), NS, PC
Launched by two all-round multimedia content teams, UN JE NE SAIS QUOI and UMANIMATION, and released by Focus Indie Series, an independent game distribution brand under Focus Entertainment, the work uses beautiful and imaginative watercolor-style graphics to lead players into the title. Refers to the French Dordogne province (Dordogne), where the player plays the role of Mimi, who is under pressure in real life, and follows the guidance of the letter from her grandmother Nora after her death, returning to the old house where she played as a child, immersing herself in the In the innocent childhood memories, I traveled the countryside like a child on summer vacation, collected photos, sounds, and smells to make adventure notes, and discovered family secrets.
The author briefly tried this work, and I can clearly feel the unique visual ingenuity of “Pastoral”, the picture has both the delicateness of watercolor and the three-dimensional effect brought by the 3D scene, which well sets off its fantasy atmosphere; a little What is unpleasant is the operation of this work. Players need to control the cursor to click on specific interactive areas on the screen, and multiple operation steps are required to simulate specific behaviors. For example, there is a “take the key from the mailbox” shortly after the game opens. It is decomposed into multiple links such as pulling out multiple letters, shaking the mailbox, turning the mailbox, removing the back cover screws, removing the back cover, picking up the keys, etc. It involves a lot of operations of pressing and dragging, pressing and turning, which is slightly annoying.
Layers of Fear / Layers of Fear
2023.06.16 / PS5, XS X|S, PC
“Layers of Fear”, released in 2016, was born under the influence of Hideo Kojima’s “PT”. Now with the power of Unreal Engine 5, the developer Bloober Team has combined the first and second generations of the series and DLC content, as well as the newly created first-generation plot with different perspectives. They are integrated together to form this new work with contemporary cutting-edge technology. According to publicity, this work supports new features such as ray tracing, HDR, and 4K resolution, which will bring players a more realistic and suffocating sensory experience. Bloober Team is also currently in charge of the remake of “Silent Hill 2” (Silent Hill 2), and I believe that the completely remade “Layers of Fear” can set us a quality expectation.
Bookwalker / The Bookwalker: Thief ot Tales
2023.06.22 / PS4, PS5, Xbox (smart distribution), PC
The new work of Finnish developer Do My Best, the team’s previous best-known work is the 2016 side-scrolling action game “The Final Station”. In “Book Walker”, the player will play a writer who can enter the world of the book. He was sentenced to be unable to write because he committed a certain crime, but the gang boss threw an olive branch at this time, as long as he entered the book and stole some legendary items , can help restore the ability to write, and the protagonist also embarks on an adventure, annihilating powerful enemies, solving puzzles, and sometimes needing to travel inside and outside the book. This work contains many world-renowned literary elements, such as “Thor’s Hammer” and “Sword in the Stone” mentioned in the promotional draft. Presumably players will visit the scene in person and appreciate the visual presentation of relevant passages by the development team.
Final Fantasy XVI / Final Fantasy XVI
2023.06.22 / PS5
The new work of Square Enix’s most important IP “Final Fantasy” (FF for short), is mainly developed by the team of MMORPG work “Final Fantasy XIV” (FF14). For more than a month, core production staff such as producer Naoki Yoshida and game director Hiroshi Takai have accepted a large number of media interviews, and talked about some production concepts behind the scenes of “FF16” through various channels, such as: the team hopes that this work will It can be closer to real life and touch many profound topics of reality; at the same time, it also makes the overall style of this work more Western fantasy (the text of this work is also the first draft in Japanese, the finalized English, and then translated back to Japanese, and the mouth shapes of the characters are all English, Yoshida himself also plays English), because Yoshida and other main creators are very fond of dramas like “Game of Thrones” (Game of Thrones), and also require the development team to learn from them; in general, the team hopes to make “FF16 ” into a more modern and immersive work—similar to the rebooted “God of War” (God of War).
However, in my opinion, at least as far as the information conveyed by the “FF16” demo demo is concerned, I don’t feel that this work is fulfilling the high expectations of Yoshida and other creators. The feeling of playing the game is indeed more like a western fantasy film and television drama, which is also consistent with Yoshida’s understanding of the “FF” series-pursuing a cinematic experience, but the development team has buried too many elements in the game that destroy the immersive experience. Including complex and frequent interface interactions that interrupt the game process, slightly stiff dialogue performances, etc., especially the “Encyclopedia” function “Active Time Lore” that can be called out at any time, the development team’s reliance on it, its super in the game The high priority seems to highlight the development team’s immature cognition of “the immersion that the game can provide”, because even “FF16” did not choose such an approach in “God of War”, which was benchmarked against.
Some Western media that have passed the game believe that the improvement in the gameplay design of “FF16” is very good, but the core of the story is relatively old-fashioned, and there are certain defects in diversity.
Everybody 1-2-Switch!
2023.06.30 / NS
The sequel to NS’s first escort work “1-2-Switch!”, the first generation is a party game to demonstrate the performance of Joy-Con. Playroom). According to Nintendo’s recent publicity, the improvements of this new game include enriching the content of the mini-game, and can be joined using a mobile phone, supporting up to 100 people to play together, and adding a game host role-a character wearing a horse hood; In addition, some levels added this time require players to interact more with reality, such as taking specific photos (you can use your mobile phone to scan the code on the NS screen).
In July last year, a website called Fanbyte released a batch of gossip, in which the description of the unannounced sequel game content of “1-2-Switch!” was highly consistent with the actual content of this game. The article mentioned: the game It was basically completed at that time, and families with children were mainly invited to participate in the test, but the feedback from the test was not very good. The testers generally thought that the content was boring, and some testers could not even insist on playing all the games; the revelation also pointed out that Nintendo A pricing and sales model for Everybody 1-2-Switch! could not be finalized internally at the time, as it was uncertain whether releasing a game of this quality for a fee (rather than with membership) would affect the company’s reputation.
A year has passed, and I don’t know whether Nintendo has made improvements to the testing problems, but from the current media and the author’s observations, the situation is rather weird and may not be optimistic: First, many media pointed out that Nintendo’s first The news that this game will be released to the media is one month before the release window, and the first official notice is only 10 days away from the official release, which is very surprising; second, “Everybody 1-2-Switch !》The hasty launch at this point in time is also confusing. Maybe this game had a chance to launch last year, but it was delayed due to various factors such as the epidemic situation and test feedback. With the arrival of new models approaching, leave it to this game. Thirdly, this work expands the usage scene to 100-person group building, which is too far from the impression of the previous work focusing on family, private and other party scenes, and may not open up sales for the game.
(The pictures in the text come from the Internet)
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