The latest issue of Edge magazine has begun arriving at subscriber’s doors and contains the usual excellent assortment of articles, previews and reviews. Highlights of this issue are in in-depth look at Alan Wake 2 and a fantastic feature by Jeremy Peel that delves into the role of the mute protagonist in games.

The review section of this months issue covers 11 games, heading by Exoprimal. Contained within the pages is also the first review for Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, the excellent supernatural pirate strategy game I previewed a little while back.

Edge handed Exoprimal a score of 7, saying that, “persevere past those one-note opening hours and you’ll find a game that should have significantly greater longevity than its prehistoric stars.”

Edge’s words may already be proving untrue, though, as a glance at SteamDB shows Exoprimal’s playerbase has been dropping quite steadily and over the last few days has been peaking at about 600 concurrent players. Of course, that’s just on Steam and I have no doubt that the numbers are probably higher via Game Pass where it launched on day one.

Pikmin 4 also got a score of 7. The review closed out saying, “It is, as ever, possessed if considerable charm, dusted with mischief and strangeness. But the real surprise is that Pikmin 4 is mostly content to coast on its strengths. As sequels go, it could have used more dandori.”

On Opencritic, Pikmin 4 currently holds an aggregated score of 88, so Edge are certainly on the lower end of the scale. However, the magazine is known for scoring lower over all, which I quite appreciate.

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is a game I’m really excited for, so I’m happy to see it get an 8 from Edge. The review praises the interesting characters and the strategic gameplay, though it does note on occasion failure feels like the game’s fault and not the player’s. In the special Post Script for the review, Edge tackles the way the developers tie game design into its world’s fiction, ending the piece with this tantalising tease: “Eventually, though, all these ideas are tied together, the concept of saves-as-memory being woven directly into the plot, powering one of the best twists to crash together mechanics and narrative since BioShock.”

As for the rest of the reviews, here they are:

Atlas Fallen – 6
The Banished Vault – 5
Jagged Alliance 3 – 7
Remnant II – 6
Videoverse – 8
Viewfinder – 8
Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical – 6
Sludge Life 2 – 7