Doctor Strange's portals were 'particularly challenging' to add into Marvel Rivals, as they created 'unprecedented performance demand' for Unreal Engine 5 - Related to mist, strange's, demand', 5, challenging'

Doctor Strange's portals were 'particularly challenging' to add into Marvel Rivals, as they created 'unprecedented performance demand' for Unreal Engine 5

I never cease to be amazed by portals in video games. Even though the tech is nearly two decades old (and older still, if you include the use of portal rendering for hidden environment transitions in Thief and other early 3D games), Portal's seamless, real-time transitions through holes in space still feel like magic to me, and I love seeing it appear in other games too. One of the enhanced uses of portals lately can be found in Marvel Rivals, where if you're playing as Doctor Strange, you can conjure portals in thin air and drop your entire team of superheroes on the heads of your foes.

It's a fantastic effect which, as explained by Rivals' technical lead designer Ruan Weikang, was extremely difficult to pull off. Weikang lately spoke to Epic Games about how NetEase used Unreal Engine 5 to recreate an Avengers movie's worth of superheroes, and he referenced the good doctor's space-folding abilities as one of the trickiest powers to replicate.

In the interview, Weikang starts by providing a broad overview of why Doctor Strange's portals "proved particularly challenging" to implement. "Creating portals that enable real-time spatial connections and bi-directional combat interactions not only presented complex gameplay implementation challenges, but also introduced unprecedented performance demands when combined with advanced graphics functions".

The details of the technologies involved in Strange's portal conjuring come later in the chat. Weikang states that the portals were initially built using Unreal Engine 5's scene capture system, which essentially lets designers place a virtual camera in the world that captures live footage of a scene, deployable as a texture in in-game materials. However, Weikang says this approach "encountered significant performance limitations in complex combat scenarios", due to "substantial CPU wait states", Moreover, the fact that each portal essentially re-rendered the entire scene "creat[ed] a GPU overhead."

Instead, Weikang and the Rivals' team opted for a "modified ViewPort split-screen implementation", which folded portal rendering "directly into the main view pipeline". The reasons this helps are complicated, but they essentially ensure portal rendering happens much earlier in the scene-rendering process. This makes the portals less taxing on performance for several reasons, such as "minimising pixel overdraw" and "enhancing GPU efficiency".

There's one other interesting trick at play in Doctor Strange's magical wormholes. For representing the transition of heroes and ability effects through portals, Rivals "generates appropriate model and effect duplicates" while "managing proper occlusion for portal intersections". This is a fancy way of saying that anything passing through the portal gets a double spawned on the far side, while the original is removed in such a way as the transition appears seamless.

The end result, Weikang says, "successfully captures the essence of Doctor Strange's iconic abilities while adding meaningful tactical depth to gameplay, ultimately justifying the technical investment". It's a pretty wild amount of work to recreate one ability of one character, which gives you some idea why hero shooters, including the unfortunate Concord, are so astonishingly expensive to make.

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While we were highly sceptical of Marvel Rivals when we first played it in closed beta, it turned out to be a pretty entertaining slice of superpowered multiplayer shenanigans, (although its progression system still sucks). Elie ultimately afforded it a score of 73 in her review, praising its colourful combat and highly destructible maps, but pointing out that its massive roster of heroes is as much a curse as it is a blessing. "Balancing a roster of heroes is arguably one of the hardest things a live service hero shooter has to do, and Marvel Rivals has made things unnecessarily difficult for itself by starting off with so many instead of drip-feeding players."

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Monastery escape tactics sim The Stone Of Madness is out now and has me thinking about time

Today is release day for The Game Kitchen's The Stone Of Madness, an isometric tactical stealth game set in an 18th century monastery - "isometric tactical stealth game" being a pretty clinical way to describe the plight of sundry lost souls exploring a maze of hellish Catholic art populated by guards and ghouls.

As in Commandos, you control a group of characters with different skills, strengths and weaknesses. Unlike in Commandos, your characters have sanity bars and a range of narratively-grounded foibles and phobias - either present from the get-go, or sprouted in response to the hardships you put them through. Lewis Gordon done a review for Eurogamer and he makes it sound extremely appealing, half-cooked plot and tricksy controls notwithstanding.

I'm interested in The Stone Of Madness partly because it's from the Spanish studio behind Blasphemous, a terrific study in religious horror, and partly because I've been thinking lately about the role of monastic orders in developing "modern" European understandings of time. For the philosopher Michel Foucault, the hourly and daily rites of forgotten generations of monks paved the way for the 9-to-5. Writing in Discipline And Punish, he describes the monasteries as "the specialists of time, the great technicians of rhythm and regular activities", and explores how they influenced the secular world by way of attached schools and poorhouses and eventually, industrial workplaces that "long retained a religious air".

This ancient discipline of timekeeping, as Foucault describes it, can also be traced to the variably time-locked worlds of video games. Being a game set in a monastery, The Stone Of Madness naturally makes the connection explicit. Its challenges and opportunities follow an elaborate day-night cycle, requiring you to match the right character to the right hour if you're to succeed. It takes inspiration on this count from another, much older Spanish production, The Abbey Of Crime, itself a loose adaptation of Umberto Eco's gargantuan monastic mystery novel The Name Of The Rose.

All this makes me wonder whether "monastic time" is a concept worth pursuing to other, non-monastic games, as both alternative and precursor to the superior-known idea of the "game as a job", encapsulated by live service looting simulators. I'll hopefully have something lengthier to say about all that in the next few weeks. For the moment, The Stone Of Madness seems worth a stab. There's still a Steam demo live at the time of writing.

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Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist review

A soulful and gorgeous Metroidvania with exquisite hack and slash action.

After just under a year in early access, this sequel to the beloved 2021 Metroidvania Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights is finally ready for prime time. Set a few decades after Ender Lilies (but which you don't need to have played to appreciate this standalone adventure), Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist begins in a very similar fashion. You awaken in a dark and fantastical landscape with only the tiniest scrap of memory to help you get your bearings, but you quickly discover you possess a strange ability to control synthetic, robotic beings called Homonculi to help you fend off wayward attackers. As before, this is a journey of discovery, healing and trying to fix a world where everything - and everyone - has seemingly turned against you, all through the lens of befriending monsters and drawing on their respective abilities to help you push further into this strange and dying land to find the source of its malignance once and for all.

Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist review Developer: Adglobe, Live Wire.

Adglobe, Live Wire Publisher: Binary Haze Interactive.

Binary Haze Interactive Platform: Played on PC (Steam Deck).

Played on PC (Steam Deck) Availability: Out now on PC (Steam), PS4/PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.

In fact, Ender Magnolia sticks so closely to the foundations co-developers Adglobe and Live Wire laid down in Ender Lilies that it almost feels like an exact replica of that game at first glance. Lilac's Homonculi pals come with similar flavours of ranged and melee attacks, with your basic hack and slash sword combos gradually bolstered by big tanky punchers, ranged rapid-fire shooters, devastating counterattacks, and an automatic aerial drone of sorts over the course of its 20-odd hour runtime. All of them can be mixed and matched to suit your play style, and you can also map them to whatever face buttons feel the most natural to you. It's a wonderfully flexible system that feels crunchy and satisfying with every button press, and the more you power up your menagerie of companions by enhancing their weapons with special, hard-won components, the more deadly and fulfilling they are to use against the droves of powerful enemies you'll face.

And what a world they inhabit, too - a dense and dreary cityscape separated into three so-called 'stratum'. The lower strata - effectively the slums of this place - are comprised of forlorn streets that peel off into dank, grimy mine shafts and shady laboratories those in the upper echelons of society (or what remains of them, anyway) want to keep firmly out of sight and out of mind. The central regions, meanwhile, start to take on more formal structures, such as a magical academy full of portals and twisting dormitories. There's also a Japanese-style pagoda whose floors once saw Homonculi testing their strength against one another, and which now forms the stage for one of the game's most memorable, multi-stage boss gauntlets. Estates and factories fill out the edges with interlocking shortcuts to other parts of the map, while the final, upper strata you're ultimately trying to reach is all sleek, futuristic curves and imposing architecture protected by laser turrets (though still with a certain grunginess about it given its state of neglect).

The magical barriers that once protected this city have begun to fail, you see, letting in a deadly blight and 'rain of death' that's killed almost all its human inhabitants, and caused its remaining Homonculi population to go mad. It's perhaps a slightly hackneyed setup where good intentioned characters have become predictably corrupted by forces beyond their control, and any attempt to stop them must first be met with terrible violence before Lilac can 'tune' them and restore them to their advanced selves. But it certainly makes for some thrilling boss encounters, and makes even rudimentary exploration through its warren of interconnected corridors feel fraught with tension and unrelenting danger. Indeed, you'll breathe a sigh of relief whenever you stumble across one of its sparse smatterings of rest points, as these are the only spots you can replenish your healing vials and tweak your equipment and accompanying set of Homunculi. Once you leave, everything is locked in place until you find the next one.

Thankfully, Ender Magnolia has made a few welcome concessions here compared to its predecessor. While you were always able to fast travel back to any previously discovered rest point in the first game, there's now a specific option to return to the one you visited most lately to help make that process a bit faster if your exploration starts going south. Brilliantly, you can even do this in the middle of a boss battle, allowing for much hastier retreats and finetuning, rather than slogging it out to the bitter end. Like Hollow Knight before it, resting does inevitably reset an area's enemy spawns, but altogether it makes uncovering the map feel just a little more welcoming than it did before.

Combat in general is also more pared down than it was in Ender Lilies, for advanced and worse. Whereas the first game gave you reams of enemy creatures to bend to your will - albeit with a lot of repetition involved - Ender Magnolia has a much more focused set of abilities on offer, giving you just ten core Homonculi to play with, versus Lilies' 26 monster spirits. Ender Magnolia also ties crucial traversal techniques such as dashing and barrier-breaking slams to specific button presses, rather than particular monsters that had to be equipped manually.

With fewer monster abilities to uncover, it also detracts somewhat from the overall thrill of Ender Magnolia's exploration. The world is still chock full of secrets and hidden trinkets to discover, but finding a chest or glowing doodad on the floor at the end of a tricky platforming section isn't quite the same as stumbling upon a surprise mini-boss, for example. Apart from being a bit anticlimactic, it also affords you fewer opportunities to really kick loose with its excellent combat system - which is a shame considering how delicious it is to mash and pulp its run of the mill enemies on your travels elsewhere.

I'm also not quite convinced that its stacked map structure works quite as well as the more traditional left to right journey its predecessor took. Thematically, it provides a solid spine to direct your journey upwards, but when areas spill out on either side of its central column (the central strata has a very literal transit system that takes you east and west, for example), the thrust of your exploration can feel a little unfocused and diluted at times. It is, to its credit, a lot more freeform-feeling than most Metroidvanias I've played. While progress between each stratum is often gated by major story beats, you're free to push in either direction when travelling within one. There's no strict order to how you tackle its various areas, and those with a more completionist mindset will no doubt thrive in this fuzzy, feeling round the edges mode of uncovering the map - as I did during my playthrough. But I suspect that its lack of objective markers may well grate for some, and those who prefer a more directed kind of journey may feel themselves floundering here.

Admittedly, the map does a good job of highlighting when rooms are 'complete' and have been stripped of their secrets. I also appreciated how it distinguished between obstacles and blocked doors I was equipped to smash or unlock, and those I wasn't able to tackle yet. It certainly prevented a lot of needless backtracking as can sometimes happen in Metroidvanias. But it does also have a bad habit of hiding critical items in quite obscure rooms that aren't directly related to where you are at any given moment.

To access the upper stratum, for example, you'll need to find two halves of a key - a fact that is neither relayed to you via any kind of dialogue or cutscene with its bosses, or marked on your map as an objective you need to seek out. Instead, I found the first half by simple, happy accident when I was trying to figure out where to go next, ticking off previously impassable rooms to see if I'd missed anything. It's a similar problem to one I had with Axiom Verge 2, where the route into certain areas almost always seemed to be in the opposite direction of the objective marker in question. Only here, there aren't really any objectives to speak of, and you've just got to nose around its nooks and crannies of your own volition.

As I mentioned, some folks will adore this approach - and knowing how the first game worked definitely helped prepare me for what to expect from this sequel. But even if this approach doesn't quite mesh with your own preferred style of Metroidvania perusal, I do think Ender Magnolia works hard to make itself feel enjoyable nonetheless. The constant flow of increasingly challenging enemy types keeps your eyes, ears and fingers completely focused on its tight combat, and when you're always gathering experience points from these encounters, it rarely feels like much of a chore to pick the game clean of all its secrets. It helps, too, that dying doesn't erase any progress you've made. All items and experience points are kept on death, making it feel firm but fair in the amount of pain it dishes out (which is a lot, even on Normal difficulty). It's a much smoother ride than games like Hollow Knight in that regard, and when it's all backed up by such a dreamy and atmospheric soundtrack from returning composer Mili, I found I rarely wanted to put the game down.

Is it a enhanced game than Ender Lilies? In some respects, I still think the original just about edges this one out in terms of variety and visual spectacle, though more of an already great game is hardly something to complain about (and if you haven't played the first, consider this a hearty endorsement to go and do so). This is still a superb Metroidvania in its own right, and it's been fascinating to see what the developers have chosen to iterate on and what to keep here - even if it's not always wholly successful in the process. Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist remains a confident step forward in an increasingly crowded genre, and it's a brilliant addition to this increasingly essential series.

A copy of Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist was provided for review by publisher Binary Haze Interactive.

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