Night in the Woods
The title implies yet another foray into video game action-horror, but the miseries you encounter here are of a different class. College dropout Mae Borowski returns home to find an impoverished American community that, through industrial decline (Possum Springs is a former mining town), has lost its hope and identity. Societal issues are expressed via individual symptoms in mental illness and depression. Illustrator Scott Benson’s animation gives the game the texture of a luxury hipster fairytale book. It cannot disguise its dark, intimate, melancholic core.
• 10 January.
Gravity Rush 2
Kat, Gravity Rush 2’s waifish, athletic protagonist, is able to flex and tighten gravity’s pull, an ability that allows her to blast herself from pavement to tree branch, from rooftop to steeple, along tumbling airborne lines. In battle, she can whip up a whirlwind of debris and use it to pleasingly slam her attackers around. But the true star of this sequel to the handheld original is the cloud city Hekesville, a chaotic jumble of architectural styles from European townhouses and Brazilian favelas to Edwardian mansions, now freshly, deliciously rendered on the PlayStation 4.
• 18 January.
Resident Evil 7
Japan’s long-running horror series returns to its original claustrophobic rhythms of dread followed by shock followed by arcane puzzling. No globe-spanning journey here, just a visit to sweltering Louisiana in search of your missing spouse. There, you’ll meet the Baker family, a hick dynasty that could have stepped straight from a Truman Capote investigation. Expect mannequin fingers stuffed in drawers, filthy crows packed in microwaves and, if you’re playing the game in virtual reality, restless nights thereafter.
• 24 January.
Yakuza 0
Sega’s grim Japanese mob-thrillers may not have the finesse of Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto series, but they offer a vivid experience of a criminal class. This, the most ambitious game in the series to date, is set in the late 1980s, within a fictionalised recreation of Tokyo’s Kabukicho and Osaka’s Dotonbori districts, seedy streets where yakuza factions vie for power. Expect bloody street fights, clumpy dialogue and an unforgettable trip to a vanished Japan.
• 24 January.
Halo Wars 2
Ensemble, the developer of the first Halo Wars, a real-time strategy game set in the pink and purple world of Microsoft’s tin-suited space marine, disbanded in 2009. For this unexpected sequel, control has been handed to 343 Studios, current custodians of the Xbox mascot. The game plays nothing like the twitchy shooter from which it takes its name, instead casting you as a divine overseer, moving units around the battlefield like a commander leering over a map. The tension and stakes are no less immediate for the change in perspective.
• 21 February.
Nintendo Switch
Nintendo has been coy about this, its much anticipated new console. While Sony and Microsoft compete for technological dominance, the ancient Japanese company has, since the staggeringly popular Wii, pursued its own path with idiosyncratic designs that facilitate new kinds of play. The Switch is no different, a hybrid machine that can be used both in the home and on the road via its tablet-like screen. It’s another high-risk commercial gamble for the company but one that could potentially nudge the paradigm.
• March. Read our feature on Nintendo’s Switch gamble
Horizon Zero Dawn
With the globe-spanning popularity of HBO’s Westworld, vast pastoral parks filled with robots are undeniably in vogue. Fortuitous timing for Horizon Zero Dawn’s Dutch developer, Guerrilla Games: its forthcoming release casts you as Aloy, a primeval hunter-gatherer touring a postapocalyptic land ruled by robotic dinosaurs. Early footage indicates a visual masterpiece. Hopefully, the seemingly inventive, freeform gameplay, which allows Aloy to rewire the monsters to work in her service, will match the technical splendour.
• 1 March.
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands
Clancy may be gone, but his khaki-coloured legacies live on in pixel. This, the first major entry in the series for years, is also the first to move to an open-world format, where missions are picked up on the ground rather than issued via separate, novelistic chapters. The setting is Bolivia, where your special operations unit is dispatched to undermine the increasingly powerful drug cartels. The development team spent months shadowing the Bolivian army, promising a nuanced and authentic depiction.
• 7 March
Nier: Automata
Developed by Platinum Games, the most successful action-game maker working in Japan, and directed by Atsushi Inaba, whose credits include Bayonetta, Vanquish and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Nier: Automata is an unlikely sequel to one of the Xbox’s most curious role-playing games. Again, the theme is humans v robots (a defining theme of contemporary fiction that surely reveals our technological anxieties), although this time the solution is bluntly expressed via swordplay.
• 10 March.
Shenmue 3
There’s no release date for Shenmue 3, the third, long awaited and highly anticipated release in Yu Suzuki’s much loved Japanese coming-of-age saga. But fans have learned to remain hopeful. Whether Sony’s reportedly meagre investment in the game (bolstered by $6m in crowdfunding donations) will be enough to deliver a game that matches the current titans of the genre is unlikely. At least Shenmue 3 will be a fascinating case study in the wisdom of resurrecting ageing, beloved stories.
• Release TBC
