12 minutes

Amid the onslaught of announcements during Sunday’s Xbox briefing, it would have been easy to miss this fascinating experimental game from coder and artist Luis Antonio, who previously worked on Jonathan Blow’s acclaimed adventure The Witness. You play as a nameless man stuck in a 12-minute time loop involving his wife, their apartment and some unexpected visitors. Seeing things from a neat top-down perspective, the player has to untangle the series of events, discovering more about the mystery with each short lifespan. Channeling Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow, this is a truly intriguing project.

Spiritfarer

Considering how large a role death plays in video games, it’s rare to find one that explores the concept in a meaningful way. Here is one rather beautiful example. In Spiritfarer you play Stella, whose job it is to row the recently departed across the river into the afterlife. But Stella’s passengers (represented by their animal spirits) have tasks for her to complete so they can rest in peace, and all the while she has to maintain her boat, adding furniture and tending to crops. It’s like a postmortem Stardew Valley, which sounds sad, but you do get to hug all your passengers.

Way to the Woods

Young Melbourne-based developer Anthony Tan was in his teens when he started work on this gorgeously minimalistic adventure about a deer guiding a companion through mysterious woodland. En route you encounter communities of raccoons and intelligent cats that bring to mind the novels of Richard Adams. With a warm, pastel-coloured art inspired by Studio Ghibli and subtle apocalyptic undertones drawn from Tan’s love of The Last of Us, we’re expecting a meaningful, elegiac tale when the game arrives on PC and consoles later this year.

Cyberpunk 2077

The latest peek at CD Projekt Red’s follow-up to the Witcher 3 has sparked mixed reactions. For some, the game’s explorations of race and gender in the year 2077 are handled with a lack of finesse. But this isn’t Grand Theft Auto, and the game’s world-building goes beyond puerile in-jokes between developer and player: our own brief venture into Night City suggested a richly textured setting, displaying an understanding of the themes of the genre that doesn’t simply end at neon and prosthetics.

The Outer Worlds

Obsidian’s pitch for the Outer Worlds couldn’t be clearer: the folks who made the best game in the Fallout series, New Vegas, are here to rescue you from Fallout 76 with an all new fun and funny first person retro-futurist RPG. Yes, the satirical targets are different now – the key touchpoint is the Old West, replete with company towns, private security forces and frontier justice – but fans of Bethesda’s flagging series should find plenty here to scratch that itch. Most interesting from the glimpse we were given is a new personality trait, Leadership, which stands alongside conventional focuses like stealth or dialogue and allows you to make much better use of your companions’ abilities.

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

Vying with Majora’s Mask for the title of weirdest Zelda game is Link’s Awakening, a surreal Game Boy iteration of the famous series from 1992 that saw hero Link washed up on an island that may or may not be a figment of his imagination. This upcoming Switch remake embraces a toylike aesthetic that only adds to the dreamlike feel. It’s a game that plenty of modern players will never have experienced in the original monochrome, two-inch-square version, but even for those who have, it’s more than a nostalgia trip. An absorbing, endearing, strange adventure to look forward to at the end of the year.

Boyfriend Dungeon

Dating simulator and dungeon crawler: two great flavours, together for the first time. The premise of Boyfriend Dungeon is simple, not that you’d know it from the look of bafflement on people’s faces when they hear about it for the first time: you are a hot single adventurer, looking for love, and also for weaponry to explore dungeons for loot. Luckily for you, your address book is full of people who can fulfil both requirements, because as well as being beautiful singles looking to meet similar, they are also weapons. This is no Persona-style metaphor. Your hot boyfriend will literally turn into a scimitar when you need to fight with him. It could be a one-trick pony, but the latest E3 demo suggests that the game has the substance to deliver on the premise, particularly when it comes to the dungeon-crawling action.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2

This vampire role-playing game is set in modern-day Seattle, where tech-industry bloodsuckers are stalking the streets alongside the more traditional fang-toothed ones. It’s heavily narrative-driven, centred on the players’ choices and their effects, foreseen and unforeseen, on other characters, vampire politics and the city itself. A dense web of warring vampire bloodlines, informants, betrayals and relationships provides the backdrop for this thinking person’s supernatural horror.

Gods and Monsters

The Assassin’s Creed teams at Ubisoft have mostly leaned on actual history to inspire their extraordinary recreations of ancient, Victorian, renaissance and early-modern cities and periods, rather than mythology. But as the last two games have centred on ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, it’s perhaps no surprise that they have felt called towards mythology instead. Presented as a story told by Homer, Gods and Monsters is Zelda meets Greek myths, with a softer art style and more whimsical approach than Assassin’s Creed. Like Nintendo’s Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it relies on the player’s curiosity and ingenuity to propel them forwards through the world, discovering new skills and secrets.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

Finally a Star Wars game that looks and feels like a hero-driven space adventure. Developer Respawn was responsible for the best single-player shooter campaign in recent history with Titanfall 2, and after EA’s previous two single-player Star Wars games were unceremoniously cancelled, it’s a relief to see Fallen Order looking so promising. It’s got the Star Wars hallmarks of snappy dialogue, lightsaber combat driven by counters and parries, and Jedi powers – and it offers the freedom to travel between planets and explore the Star Wars fiction outside of its scripted cinematic moments.

Doom Eternal

Near the start of the new Doom’s E3 demo, you need to get from an orbital base to Mars. Other games might have you commandeer a shuttle, or teleport, but as far as Doom is concerned, other games are cowards: Doom Eternal asks you to fight your way over a cannon that’s bombarding the surface, kick out the ammunition, climb in the chamber and shoot yourself onwards. Doom Infinite is hyperviolent, sublime silliness: 2016’s Doom reboot already turned everything up to 11, and yet this somehow outdoes it.

Final Fantasy VII: Remake

We didn’t want to allow ourselves to hope, but hallelujah, this long-awaited game is GOOD. This is no rerelease or remaster: Final Fantasy VII has been fully remade, and the result is an entirely new game that just happens to share a story and characters with the 1997 original. Purists may wail over the changes, but only for as long as it takes them to remember that the original was, well, showing its age. In its place is something as visually stunning in 2019 as the original was 22 years ago, with exciting battles akin to Square’s Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy XV – but where those games rapidly descended into unsatisfying button-mashing, FFVII: Remake’s is a commanding mix of style and strategy.

Watch Dogs Legion

“Play as any character in the city” is the sort of claim that looks good on the back of a box, but falls apart when you actually try to implement it. And yet Ubisoft looks to have pulled off the impossible. Recruiting disuillusioned Londoners to join the ranks of hacking collective DedSec forms the core of Watch Dogs Legion, a ferociously complex game set in a smartly realised, dystopian, post-Brexit future London in thrall to private military contractors. Fall in combat, and you’re given an option: surrender, or carry on fighting. Pick the former, and the mission fails, but that character will be released from jail a few real-world hours later and you’ll be able to play as them again. Pick the latter, and you get one last chance to win – but fail, and they’re dead for good. The one persistent character is the city of London itself. Watch Dogs’ recreation may understandably fudge the backstreets, but head to the landmarks and it’s the best video game version of the British capital we’ve ever seen.

John Wick Hex

The adaptation no-one saw coming captures the John Wick films, responsible for the umpteenth revival of Keanu Reeves’ stardom. The films are known for their trademark “gun-fu” action: a methodical fight choreography where every bullet counts, where guns are as likely to be used as projectiles as they are to fire them. John Wick is a superhero, and his superpower is guns. In another world, the films would have been turned into a prosaic cover shooter, but thankfully indie developer Bithell Games convinced Lionsgate to go a different route and emphasise the tactical elements of Wick’s fighting. An early version of the game was a straightforward turn-based tactical game – a sort of one person Xcom, Bithell says – until Wick director Chad Stahelski saw the edit and asked, reasonably, why Wick was standing there letting others shoot at him. And so, in the finished game, the action is much more fluid.

Hollow Knight Silksong

A sequel to the sleeper hit of 2017/18, casting adversary-turned-ally Hornet as the lead in a whole new adventure that combines Metroidvania-style exploration with Dark Souls-esque brutal combat. A few small tweaks alter the feel of the game: for one thing, Hornet speaks (in text), conversing with the denizens of the new underworld she is exploring. Experienced players will need to retrain their reflexes to suit the tweaked combat. For anyone craving a return to the world of Hollow Knight – which is, surely, anyone who played it - Silksong is an easy sell.

Control

Impressive to watch and extremely difficult to explain, Control is a reality-bending action game in which nothing is as it seems. Characters sometimes make no sense when they talk. Dialogue is weird and stilted. You can fling things around with your mind, and sometimes you fall through the floor into a void of suspended abstract architecture. It’s vastly more intriguing than any other shooter at the show. We were deeply weirded out by it, and haven’t quite been able to shake it from our minds.

Honourable mentions

There were a lot of promising-looking games teased this year that weren’t actually playable, but which were nonetheless exciting. Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Halo Infinite and a sequel to Zelda: Breath of the Wild all made huge splashes with trailers alone, as did Ghostwire: Tokyo and Deathloop. Telling Lies, from the creator of Her Story, has you digging through hours of NSA surveillance footage of four characters’ lives. Fall Guys looks like a madly fun multiplayer brawler, a la Gang Beasts. Skate Bird, a pun made playable, turns you into a skateboarding pigeon (or wren, or robin). And though Pokémon Sword and Shield doesn’t exactly revolutionise Pokémon, we had a good time wandering its whimsical British-inspired world.