EGX – Our Blockbuster Picks – Part 1

EGX 2016 gets underway this Thursday in Birmingham! To celebrate the four-day gaming conference, we have put together a list of some of the biggest blockbuster games that will be available to play at the NEC Arena.

In part one, I will choose five games from the selection on display on the EGX show floor. Look our for part two later in the day, which will feature five games selected by Josh!

Horizon: Zero Dawn (due for release Feb 2017)

Cyberpunk and steampunk have always been relatively prevalent in gaming. Though distinct from one another, both take a historical or present-day aesthetic and drag it like a burlap sack of vegetables into technological advancement. That’s how you end up with a film noir detective in a dystopia or a steam-powered George Washington in a sky city.

The opposite, as in taking futuristic technology and shoving it into a past aesthetic, is a lot less common. The only example I can think of (though I’m sure there are others) is Star Wars, particularly the KOTOR series, with its stone temples, warrior monks and inconvenient robes.

Horizon Zero Dawn, present at EGX having appeared at the previous two E3 conventions, does the same - taking highly evolved (literally) machinery and sticking it in a world with a 10,000 year-old aesthetic. The game is set in the distant future, after SkyMatrixSquidNet9000 and the machines took over and destroyed human civilisation. Humanity has reverted back to its infancy, leaving us with an action RPG with, simply put, cavemen versus robot animals.

It’s difficult to know what to call it.

‘Neanderpunk’.

Rise of the Tomb Raider (released 2015)

The sequel to the 2013 reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise, Rise of the Tomb Raider moves away from Japanese soul transfusion and towards Russian immortality, as the Bible says we all should.

It continues the more character-rich approach to Lara Croft adopted by its predecessor, pitting her against an ancient-order-turned-military-organisation called Trinity. If the first game was, in a sense, her origin story, Rise of the Tomb Raider is a new hero finding her feet.

Little Nightmares (due for release 2017)

The instantly striking thing about Little Nightmares, an upcoming 3D platformer, is its incredible atmosphere. The art style is reminiscent of American McGee’s Alice games, mixed with Tim Burton and a little Coraline. The whole thing looks gorgeous but in a creepy way, if that’s a thing.

There are sometimes scenes in film or TV shows in which we briefly see something simple twisted through the eyes of a child. Maybe an elderly neighbour says ‘hi’ or a doctor asks them to ‘open wide’, but we are shown, from the child’s perspective, some horrible monster staring down at them, speaking unintelligible words in terrifying voices. It’s a handy way of visualising a child’s fear of an adult world.

Little Nightmares turns that fear into an entire aesthetic. You play as a very small girl in a yellow rain coat, and must traverse a dark, distorted world several sizes too big.