Just Some Dope Unreleased Video Games To Get You Excited For E3 2018

Downward Spiral: Horus Station is a nice big step forward in the frustratingly uneven evolution of virtual reality so far. The reason for this can be summed up in one word: cooperation. Horus Station unspools a well-thought-out VR co-op experience that does more than throw two players in a virtual space to dick around. To survive Horus Station, we actually needed to work together in meaningful ways.

Moving yourself through a 3D space in zero gravity is a bit tricky. There's a good amount of fumbling with hatch handles and running into walls, but once we got the hang of it (and a cool-ass grappling hook), it was exhilarating to zoom through narrow, dimly lit corridors and cavernous control rooms. We encountered some rogue maintenance droids, and I blew them up with a high-powered nail gun.

During our demo, the art director of the winsome, mysterious Smoke and Sacrifice compared it to Nintendo's 2017 juggernaut The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which is one hell of a reference point. But the longer we played the game, the less it seemed like a boast and more like a legit comparison.

Alt.Ctrl.GDC, dedicated to experimental games that don't use traditional controllers, is always one of the highlights of the show. Tucked into the Moscone Center's North Hall is a veritable island of misfit toys (sometimes literally) as game devs enlist spray bottles, colorful masks, door stoppers, and anything else you can think of to serve as controller mechanisms for their games.

The engineer can't see the ship. It's on a screen behind them trying to dodge incoming asteroids and trading laser fire with a multicolored fleet of alien enemies. To earn points, the engineer is totally dependent on a committee of "captains" who try to communicate what's happening on the screen by barking commands like "Fire red!", "Move up! UP!", or "Yellow shields! QUICK!"

The "gorgeous indie puzzle game" has been a gaming mainstay since at least the launch of UsTwo's breakout hit Monument Valley in 2014 (though some date it back to Braid in 2008). Last year, the breathtakingly lovely watercolor tiles of Gorogoa carried the mantle. This year, Iris.Fall seems destined to be the subgenre's 2018 poster child.

We didn't actually get our hands on the game, but what we know piqued our interest. Iris.Fall is the story of a girl who follows her cat into a mysterious clock tower where she embarks on a quest to uncover a secret by solving puzzles using "shadow and light." Kind of sparse on detail, admittedly, but often the joy of the "gorgeous indie puzzle game" comprises the themes they hint at, the worlds they inhabit, and cliffhangers or narrative twists. This is definitely one to watch.

The playful RPG For the King was inspired by an actual tabletop RPG created by one of its developers. In it, co-op players take turns exploring hexagonal sections of a dynamic game board that reorders itself with each new game so that no two play-throughs are the same. The pleasures of games like For the King are the same strategic satisfactions of plotting your way through a super-engrossing round of D&D.

The game's art helps to capture this feeling by being "tabletop-ish," too. It looks a bit like colorful molded clay. We joke with Gordon Moran, the art director, that the style is "mid-poly," neither the photo-real textures of AAA worlds nor the blocky, stylized "Lego" look of Minecraft or Superhot. "I wanted [the characters] to feel crafted," he tells me, "sort of tactile. Like you could pick them up and move them around the board with your hands."

We spent our 30-minute demo accomplishing simple tasks. "Things get more dangerous at night," Colby Young, the game's designer says as the sun sets and shadows fall over the game board's topography. We fought from hex to hex using the game's highly customizable turn-based combat system and slowly expanded the areas of the map visible to us.

We're not the biggest fans of tactical turn-based games. We admit it. We're sorry. But that's why we were stoked to be invited to the first-ever demo of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, a new tactical game that promised to tweak the rules of genre classics like XCOM with real-time elements that appeal to filthy casuals like us!

The demo we saw of Mutant Year Zero delivers on that promise, blending tactical battle planning and character customization with stealth approaches and disruptive real-time battle moments that keep the action dynamic and unpredictable. The levels also boast a verticality that adds an extra dimension (literally) to each brawl.

Billed as "the world's least realistic pool simulator," Pool Panic is what you get when you unleash the weirdos at Adult Swim on a pool hall/amusement park simulator. The result is an ever-swirling world of anthropomorphic billiard balls rolling around, breaking, screaming, laughing, and just generally acting the fool.

The bright, hand-drawn animation style and spread-out macro map of playable levels calls to mind the similarly charming kingdom of Cuphead and Mugman. Levels stick pretty close to the basic physics of pool: There are balls, there's a pool cue, and you hit the balls with the end of the cue. That's pretty much where the similarities to actual billiards end.

In fact, the levels of Pool Panic are so varied that we spent most of our time trying to figure out our objective rather than actually progressing through the demo. But the art and physics of the world kept us engaged as we experimented, and eventually figuring out what the hell was going on became part of the fun.