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“In an era of brown and grey, grim and gritty shooters and third person sandbox games, Cuphead comes as breath of fresh air, with all its colour and personality and charm.“

As the shortest gaming experience I’ve had this year, What Remains of Edith Finch managed to pack a more powerful punch in its story and themes than any AAA release so far–in a year that has already boasted some of the best games in recent memory. The second release from Giant Sparrow, Edith Finch follows The Unfinished Swan with fantastical imagery and storytelling to tackle narratives which confront challenging and emotional ideas. These are stories that couldn’t be told as effectively in any other medium.

The demo showcased two areas, including the previously teased New Donk City; and Tostarena, a desert inhabited by lovely, maraca-playing skeleton men. Motokura spoke to the deep focus on exploration at the core of Odyssey, highlighting the game’s attempts at “balancing a feeling of surprise with emotional resonance.” The devs also suggested a desire to “bounce people back and forth between the familiar and the surprising” with exploration mechanics.

The developers are hoping to “fuse old mechanics with fine-tuning to please fans.” Among these include fully analogue aiming, allowing Samus to more precisely control her shots, even firing directly behind her. A melee counter ability was also shown in both the teaser and the gameplay, giving Samus the opportunity to react to an enemies physical attack with a critical melee blow of her own, if timed correctly.

Nintendo opened their E3 conference with four new Switch announcements featuring classic IP. A new Kirby gameplay trailer showed up to three CPU allies assisting Kirby, combining their powers into combo attacks with the classic Kirby aesthetic shining through. HAL is back at it, developing this new title simply named ‘Kirby’.

By re-seating the Master Sword in DLC Pack 1, “Master Trials,” Link was shown teleporting into a new kind of shrine called “Trial of the Sword.” Trial of the Sword is a wave-based mode which has Link facing an increasingly difficult array of enemies in various environment types, including forest and mountain regions, all while enclosed in a shrine-sized area. Similar to Eventide Island in the main game, Link starts without any weapons or armor, and will have to use his skills and wits to beat the challenge.

Ubisoft Singapore previously worked on Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, and the lineage shows, as Skull & Bones was demonstrated to share many features, cannon combat and wind-management. Taking place in a “shared systemic world,” players are encouraged to form alliances and rivalries, as well as “execute ruthless betrayals,” in their quest to become the “ultimate pirate kingpin.”

Spectrevision and Ubisoft have announced a terrifying-looking VR title, Transference. Details are scant, but the trailer features Elijah Wood (Maniac) discussing the uploading of content, and the trailer blurs the line beautifully between pieces from the actual game, and interviews about the production of the game.

Details were sparse in the trailer, but Reikon says Ruiner will be a “brutal story-driven game” inspired by classic cyberpunk anime.

The Knife of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches included some of the best content produced for the original Dishonored, so I’m very excited to see what Arkane Studios can cook up with the second game’s engine.

The Fallout trailer highlighted exploration, base building, and combat. Teleport locomotion was not apparent, nor were further hand interactions. Fallout 4 VR releases in October.

Oh Telltale, sometimes it feels like you are deliberately making it hard to love you. The stories told in the Walking Dead, Wolf Among Us, and even this Batman series are genuinely fantastic, and manage to do more interesting things with the characters than any other studio manages to pull off. The Walking Dead series is the most I’ve cared about that franchise since the first season of the television show, the Wolf Among Us series stood up on its own even without knowing what the comic series was, and Batman proves itself to be the most interesting story with Mr. Wayne in it since The Dark Knight back in 2008. But Telltale just can’t seem to dig out of the technical and mechanical issues that range from being visually hilarious to rage-inducing to play.

Then the cracks started to show.

If you don’t live in a small town and have ever wondered what it’s like to live in one, simply play Night in the Woods and there you go. Night in the Woods is a shining example of articulating the emotional experience of living in a small town when you’re undergoing a mid-life crisis at 20.

In truth, Horizon really has no business being even close to as good or as fun as it is. The mechanics the game employs are not new or even especially unique. You climb enormous robotic creatures to open different parts of the map, much the same as you climb any other viewpoint in any other open-world game. You mark your human targets before charging in to fight them. You harvest resources from machines, from wildlife, and from the environment to craft upgrades. You apply skill points to skill trees as you level up your character. You explore your map, collecting missions and special items. You don’t even have the option of customizing your character’s appearance, which the majority of western RPGs would give you. Yet, Horizon Zero Dawn manages to be the best version of all of these things. It manages to take the tropes and expectations of the countless other versions of open-world games, and it shows you a fantastic example of how they can and should work.

I like to refer to Aquaria sometimes as the love child between Metroid, The Little Mermaid, and The Last Unicorn, with its own creative twists and turns thrown in for good measure. It’s that creativity meshed with tight controls and non-linear gameplay that has made Aquaria one of my absolute favourite indie games to date.

In all honesty, the word ‘videogame’ doesn’t fully describe The Novelist; at its core, The Novelist is a first-person exploration narrative, with a brutally honest examination of the pressures of life on writers as both artists and family members.