12 upcoming games that give me hope for the future

Not-E3 and its exhausting cavalcade of marketing showcases has drawn to a close, leaving behind the hangover of disdain and regret I feel every year. Do I even like videogames anymore? Did I ever? How could anyone possibly appreciate this dour medium? Let me summarise the blockbuster games thus: Coca-Cola announced new Coke flavours for the Coke drinkers, Pepsi announced new Pepsi flavours for the Pepsi drinkers, and those of us in desperate need of a sip of water rasped for it all to end.

Do not, as I almost did, give up hope. The rains will come. In the meantime, I have harvested the morning dew and dug under the dry riverbeds. I have found water in the desert. Here are the only games from Not-E3 that were actually worth your time.

Carcass Clad

I love clunking machinery and a diegetic interface, and I love steering tanks through desolate landscapes. Carcass Clad is about both, as you and your co-op partners operate the cranks and levers of the Yksiö, your Soviet (or Soviet-inspired) tank which has the husks of (mutated?) livestock messily nailed to its armour. That this is also from Wrong Organ, the developers of Mouthwashing, one of our games of the decade, guarantees that the Jank crew are going to die together in this metal tomb whenever the game is released.

Vivarium

There are a handful of games in development inspired by anime (another of which you'll find on this list), but none that looks as enchanting as this hand-painted life sim inspired by works from the '70s and '80s. You control Jenny, an 11-year-old that lives in a tiny terrarium in which you can spend summer days gardening, crafting and befriending the locals, each of which have their own "branching and dynamic storylines". Those systems appear more akin to the light touch of Boku no Natsuyasumi than the timesink of Stardew Valley, and make Vivarium seem like my ideal hangout game.

Duskers 2.0

Duskers was a tense and evocative strategy-adventure in which you scavenged the remains of derelict spacecraft with drones you controlled via a command-line interface. That might sound intimidating, but Duskers' challenges all lay in its world and roguelike structure, not its interface. It was, as Brendy wrote in 2016, a better Alien game than any official Alien game. Ten years later, it's getting a sequel.

Bad Magpie

There are a handful of games trying to follow in Untitled Goose Game's webbed footsteps, but Bad Magpie is the first I've seen that seems to have its own distinct take on the formula. You play as a magpie with one wing who has "an unhealthy obsession with a fallen star", and there is pathos and surrealism and seemingly no remaining humans in the trailer above. I support this magpie, who I think is in fact a very good magpie.

Blood Dungeon

Many people are making Survivorslikes (or bullet heavens, if yer nasty), but Blood Dungeon combines the genre staples with platforming in which you can parkour up walls, hang from ceilings, and acrobatically kite the enemy hordes while your autoshooting does its business. That would be compelling enough for me, but Blood Dungeon is also the work of the unfailingly stylish Messhof, makers of the classic Nidhogg, as well as several lesser-known freeware platformers such as Punishment 2: The Punishing. Plus, bonus, there's a Blood Dungeon demo available now.

Signet City

This is the next project from the developer of Citizen Sleeper, but its pitch would entice me regardless of who was making it. It's a "first-person fungalpunk RPG" in which you control a parasite as it moves between hosts, experiences the city through their different perspectives, and gradually twists their behaviour through your choices. The city is on the verge of ecological collapse, while being inspired by the industrial northern towns of the UK during the 1980s. This could be the rare game to claim the somethingpunk genre modifier and really earn it.

Into The Wind

If Vivarium evokes Miyazaki's pre-Ghibli career at Toei animation, Into The Wind is clearly inspired by Ghibli's Porco Rosso, my favourite Miyazaki movie. You're a delivery girl running a business in the islands of the Mediterranean-inspired Santa Rosa, with a sentient motorcycle-plane named Ermes you maintain, upgrade, and pilot in fights against sea pirates. This is also reminiscent of my beloved Kino's Journey, in which the title character has a sentient motorcycle named Hermes. Was this game made for me, specifically? There even seems to be a little Death Stranding/Easy Delivery Co. physicality to the packages, should you crash your bike. I am praying it nails the execution given how much I love the concept, and it'll launch in Early Access first to try to get it right.

Catechesis

A horror-RPG about a demon-possessed altar boy. Your grandfather is sick in hospital and he is healed a little each time you do a good deed. Unfortunately those good deeds also open gateways to hell. You split your time between exploring the city, making friends, studying, fishing and playing baseball, and fighting (or sneaking by) monsters in twin-stick combat. I love the mixture of pixel art styles here, with small and simple sprites during combat and expressive, beautifully animated sequences during cutscenes and certain minigames. This is not normally the kind of game I'd play (horror or RPG), but I'll be checking out the demo.

The Mermaid Mask

I've never played Tangle Tower or Crow Country, but I've always wanted to. Now I also want to play The Mermaid Mask, a new mystery adventure starring Tangle Tower's Detective Grimoire. The background art, animation and voice acting in the trailer above are all so lush that I simply want to spend time in this world, and good news, there's a demo available already where I can check if I find the puzzles or mystery suitably engaging.

Penguin Colony

"Cosmic horror through the eyes of a penguin" is a pretty good pitch. That it's more specifically inspired by At The Mountains Of Madness and from the developers of Umurangi Generation makes it a must play. I can't get a sense of what you actually do in it - of how this penguin influences events, if at all - from anything I've seen, but I trust the developers to make a story and a world worth exploring if nothing else.

Virtue And A Sledgehammer

Yet another game about feelings that looks like it's set in the Pacific Northwest, eh? Except your hometown here is haunted by android ghosts and you have a big sledgehammer with which to smash them through walls, which makes this more Suda51 than Pseuds Corner. It's also from the developers of Many Nights A Whisper and The Red Strings Club, who have excellent dramatic chops. And again, there's a demo available right now.

N Plus Infinity Times Two

I used to play the original N in stolen moments at my old day job, working my way through hundreds of levels of its physicsy, momentum-based platforming whenever other people couldn't see my screen. Its superior successors N+ and N++ never captured my life in the same way - my monitor was by then in a place where people could always see it - but I am always down for another go. N+∞x2 is the most substantial change to the formula so far, taking the same single-screen platforming and introducing co-operative and competitive multiplayer. At last, it doesn't matter if other people can see my screen; they can just play with me.

My thirst is quenched. In putting together this list, I successfully rediscovered my love of this stupid, diverse, and surprising medium. There were, in truth, more games I was interested in than I am including here, because I wanted to focus mainly on games we didn't already know about, and then highlight only my favourites. You may have your own. Tell us what new games you're looking forward to in the comments.