In case you don’t have the time to sit through the entire multi-hour livestream, we’ve done the hard work and put together a list of every noteworthy trailer and announcement that was shown at this year’s The Game Awards. You can get started reading; I’m just gonna… shut my eyes for a bit.
Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons Remake
The sequel to The Case of the Golden Idol trades pixel art for a more painterly style, but judging by the trailer’s tangled string map connecting a series of mysterious clues,The Rise of the Golden Idolwill very much keep the focus on puzzle-solving and brain-straining.
Next up was a trailer for Arknights: Endfield, featuring some absolutely banging music and a lot of extremely good-looking fight scenes. The trailer announced a PC technical test which will be coming soon, so anyone who’s looking forward to diving into the new sci-fi action RPG can give it a solid go ahead of its currently unknown release date.
Well, I thought it looked slightly naff until I realised it was a VR game. Now it seems pretty cool. Assassin’s Creed Nexus was released last month on the Meta Quest line, and aside from, y’know, being a VR game, it sets itself apart with the ability to take control of three separate assassins: Ezio, Kassandra, and Connor.
A beautiful trailer for Harmonium: The Musical came next, allowing us a first glimpse at a vibrand and confident-looking adventure game made with the deaf community in mind. It reminds me quite a lot ofTchiafrom earlier this year. It looks lovingly crafted, and it’s already won me over with a single shot of the protagonist shrinking, falling into a music book, and hopping between musical notes in a black and white platformer segment.
From MotionTwin, the studio that brought us the excellentDead Cells, comes a brand new, equally exquisite-looking action brawler game:Windblown. Only this time, it’s fully 3D. My main takeaway from the trailer was that the combat looks very crisp and readable, which is really important for a brightly coloured, fast-paced, optionally co-op action game like this. Windblown will come out in early access sometime next year.
I’ll admit I bounced off Dave The Diver when I first tried it, but I’ve been meaning to return to it, because it really does seem like my kind of game. And what better way to bring me back than a team-up with one of my favourite games of this year, creepy-cosy eldritch fishing sim, Dredge. What a perfect match.
A high fantasy RPG from the creators of Personas 3, 4, and 5. As expected, it looks and sounds great, and it seemingly maintains some of the systems of the Persona series such as turn-based combat, a party system, and some sort of character bonding mechanic. Also looks very different, too, of course, given the wildly different setting.
Now the Game Awards itself begins! And suddenly Matthew McConaughey is on stage, announcing the first game he’s ever worked with,Exodus. A punchy cinematic trailer filled with lots of explosions, gorgeous lighting, and concerned-looking faces. This Mass Effect-esque third-person shooter looks like it’ll tell an emotional story around a struggle against an alien race known as the Celestials, and the effects of time dilation while moving at lightspeed. Nice use of Muse’s Supermassive Black Hole there too.
I never played the 2D Prince Of Persia games back in the day, but they always looked more appealing to me than the one Prince Of Persia Ididplay as a kid, which was Warrior Within. Now Ubisoft have returned with another 2D entry, calledPrince Of Persia: The Lost Crown- and it looks so damn pretty I may have to give it a go.
I played a bit of Lego Fortnite earlier today. There really is something good here, combining both brands to create a very solid foundation for a survival crafting game to rival the likes of Valheim, Grounded, and - dare I say it? - Minecraft. The building is satisfying, the artstyle is charming, the world is rich and invites exploration. And it’s free, too. If you’re a fan of survival games, check it out and see what you think! There are some teething issues with controls and the like, but otherwise I’m really impressed.
Whenever a new trailer forHellblade 2appears, it’s almost guaranteed to be the most visually stunning trailer at the event. The expressions on Senua’s face! The mud and rain and grime! Thatlighting! This trailer shows Senua delving into various dark places, fighting with lots of nasty-looking fellows, and slicing up her demons in a blood-red nightmare realm.
Kemuriis the debut game from Unseen Inc., the studio founded by former Ghostwire: Tokyo creative director Ikumi Nakamura. It almost looks like a wilder, more stylish cousin to Ghostwire, with its apparent urban fantasy premise of mythological youkai invading modern-day Japan, but it looks like you’ll be fighting them with a much flashier range of parkour and swordfighting moves. Maybe as a team, too.
Naysayers may scoff, but I absolutely love the Avatar films. Adore them. And Frontiers Of Pandora was one of my most anticipated games of this year. A short but sweet launch trailer showcasing Na’vi life and some high-octane RDA battles is now fighting against my colleagues' news that the game isn’t quite living up to their expectations. But I love the world so much, of course I’m going to play it and see for myself.
Sega teased a “new era"to come before show started, but in reality what they announced were new games in several old series. New Crazy Taxi, Shinobi, Jet Set Radio, Streets Of Rage and Golden Axe, and glimpses of all of the above in this single trailer. Details are otherwise thin on the ground but: cool. I approve.
I haven’t engaged with Dragon Ball since watching the little bald guy explode back in my school days, so let me make sure I’ve got this right: Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero is the latest entry in the Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi series of 3D fighting games, and is the first one since…2007? Man, yeah, let those Dragon Ball fans eat.
Surprise! Supermassive Games, of The Quarry and Until Dawn, are making a singleplayer horror game set in the world of Dead by Daylight. It’s an all-new story with all-new characters, so probably don’t expect DBD’s cast of weird killers (or Nick Cage) to show face, and will feature Supermassive’s signature choice-based story branching.The Casting Of Frank Stoneis out next year.
Oh boy, it’s a new Hideo Kojima game. Prepare yourselves for a wacky, unsettling trailer for the upcoming horror “experience” known asOD. The trailer doesn’t give away much: just three extraordinarily uncanny-valley faces performing the same short monologue, with some very different emotions behind it. Thanks to a short on-stage interview with Kojima after the trailer, we know that the game is “a new form of media”. Well, that clears things right up. Oh, and Jordan Peele is here, lavishing praise on Hideo and giving us very few details about the game-that-isn’t-a-game-but-also-is, but assuring us that OD is going to be pretty terrifying.
Okay you bastards. It’s a real dirty trick to show such iconic scenes and to deliver such iconic Richard Attenborough lines to get me excited for a new Jurassic Park game. This world premiere ofJurassic Park: Survivalgives us a cinematic and thrilling look at InGen scientist Dr Maya Joshi and her harrowing attempts to survive and escape a dinosaur-dominated Isla Nublar after failing to evacuate with the rest of her team. I’ve been saying for years that we need a good strong Jurassic Park horror survival game.
Rocket League is one of my absolute favourite and most-played games ever. It’s earned and kept my goodwill by not messing with the central formula over its many-year history. Fortnite has had pretty much the opposite journey. But adding a racing game with Rocket League cars is, I’ll admit, a canny move. It’s actual racing though, so not exactly Rocket League. More like Mario Kart, except you can do all the same boosting and aerial shenanigans that Rocket League cars can do. And if you’re reading this, it’s almost certainly out right now!
A new chapter of Warframe begins with the upcoming release of Whispers In The Walls. Some pretty fancy-looking sci-fantasy moves are on display in this trailer showcasing the next chapter of the Warframe story, which players will get to enjoy next week on 13th December.
Hardcore tac-shooter Ready or Not has endured a tumultuous early access phase, eventemporarily vanishing from Steamand facing some (not entirely unreasonable) accusations of turning a blind eye to real-life police brutality. In any case, it’s about to update into version 1.0, on December 13th, and there’s a new CGI trailer to mark the launch.
From the Life Is Strange peeps comes a new cinematic story whose tone is very adequately summarised by this world premiere trailer. It starts off familiar, as a group of teens explore a pastoral landscape and encounter supernatural goings-on, but it seems as if the game will also feature those same teens years later, as grown-ups, meeting up to deal with the consequences of whatever happened when they were younger. Intriguing.
Okay, that’s another thing I wasn’t expecting. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is coming to my very favourite battle royale, Apex Legends, on 9th January. In what way? I’m not rightly sure. But that was some very sweet-looking artwork of Crypto, Wraith, and Horizon at the end there.
The next destination for surprisingly excellent sci-fi HoYo game Honkai: Star Rail was revealed in a new trailer at this year’s The Game Awards. Many characters, old and new, feature in this new teaser for Penacony, the so-called Planet of Festivities.
A new Arkane game, eh? That’s gonna turn a lot of heads. What’s more, it’s a Marvel game. In Blade, you’ll take control of the titular sunglasses-wearing half-vampire and get to play him “your way”, whatever that means. I’ll say one thing though. Another vampire game from Arkane after Redfall? That takes balls.
Next up, Steve C. Martin of Lightspeed LA got up on-stage to announce their new open-world sci-fi game, Last Sentinel. I do love a good rainy cinematic where robots menacingly knock down doors. Protagonist Hiromi Shoda mows down a battalion of said menacing robots in an alternate sci-fi Tokyo, and saves a group of children along with their robotic caretaker. It’s a fairly by-the-numbers cinematic trailer, but it does look good.
I never used to be interested in mech games, but after Armored Core 6 this year… I might be coming around on the genre. Here’s a rather more vibrant take on giant mech battles, in MechaBreak, whose trailer tonight announced an upcoming closed alpha test.
A new sci-fi heist FPS is in development from 10 Chambers, the developers behind co-op horror shooter GTFO. A gritty yet over-the-top cinematic interrogation scene ends with the title reveal:Den Of Wolves. It looks like a combination between their previous game, the sci-fi GTFO, and the game some of the developers previously worked on at a different studio: Payday.
Exoborneis a tactical open-world extraction shooter from some of the creators of The Division, with vertical movement using grappling hooks and the like. The trailer was a cinematic, but it looked nice. It’s also being developed by Sharkmob, whose previous game, the Vampire: the Masquerade battle royale Bloodhunt, remains playable but ceased development not long after launch. Hopefully their second swing goes better.
VR games look more and more impressive every year. Asgard’s Wrath 2 is a pretty big deal, being the free game that Meta will be giving out with every purchase of the Meta Quest 3. And to be fair, the combat in this trailer looks pretty swell. The action game is coming out on December 15th - so just a few days from now!
No Man’s Sky is famous nowadays not only for its catastrophic launch but for its incredible turnaround over the years into pretty much exactly the game that Sean Murray promised from the beginning. And what a way to celebrate it, with a trailer that goes through the years showing off the many, many content updates that transformed No Man’s Sky over those years. Oh, but that wasn’t the real trailer. Therealtrailer, also from Hello Games, was for…
A new game from the makers of No Man’s Sky set in a similarly ambitious procedural environment. The twist is that this time they’re not generating a universe.Light No Fireis a multiplayer game that takes place on a single Earth-like planet, generated at a scale whereby mountains can be taller than Everest. Sean Murray was as cagey as ever in terms of what youdoin the game - that man hates verbs - but it seems to have co-op building and pilotable dragons, so there’s that.
The Finalsis here, at last. Its playtests over the course of the year were each an enormous success, sucking in thousands upon thousands of players to engage in chaotic fast-paced PvP heists in the midst of some of the nicest destructible environments this side of Teardown. Lots of slo-mo shots of explosions and people bursting into coins heralded the announcement that The Finals is out and free to play right now! Hopefully they fixed that gnarly bug I got hit with in the last playtest, where I periodically wouldn’t be able to fire.
