The Town Of Light

A psychiatric hospital is hardly an unfamiliar setting for a videogame, though the history upon which The Town Of Light draws is the kind that has itself inspired several contemporary horrors. This is a fictional story, but one based on real-life accounts of the conditions within a now-abandoned asylum in Volterra, Tuscany. A lifeless English voiceover isn’t the only reason to switch to Italian with subtitles: the native language lends further veracity to an already authentic rendering of the institution. The cracked plaster, exposed brickwork, smashed basins and rusted bed frames at times seem a little too artfully arranged for maximum aesthetic impact. Not so, as even the most cursory research proves, it’s all disturbingly real.

Unbox

Special delivery: a soggy, banged-up, bouncing cardboard box

Move over, Amazon drones. Unbox’s Global Postal Service would like to present the real next-gen of shipping solutions: the self-delivering box. You’re the latest prototype of this revolutionary endeavour, a cardboard cube capable of self-propelled motion. You bobble along awkwardly, but at a surprising lick, and are blessed with surprising agility for an object that’s all straight edges and sharp corners. You can jump with a tap of the right trigger, and with a squeeze of the left one you’ll perform the titular ‘unbox’, shedding an outer skin for a burst of mid-air momentum in what is surely the most oddly conceived double-jump in videogame history. Or hextuple jump, if you’re so minded.

The Solus Project

A sci-fi survival game that wants you to live

We have to admit, we’d never previously considered whether windmills were cool. Then again, we hardly expected we’d stumble across one while exploring an alien planet in Teotl’s sci-fi survival game. And yet there it is, proudly protruding from a large outcrop. “It makes no sense from a practical point of view,” creative director Sjoerd De Jong concedes. “But it’s really cool!”

Knights & Bikes

An affectionate salute to the joys of childhood

Developers often talk about their cultural influences, and when you’ve been doing this job as long as we have, you notice the same handful of names cropping up. The Goonies, it’s fair to say, is rarely one of them – which makes a pitch that name-checks it all the more intriguing. Not that you’d immediately recognise the inspiration from a first glance at Knights & Bikes. Its heroes are two young girls, a seaweed-obsessed goose, and the sentient decapitated head of a legendary knight, and they’re exploring an island just off the coast of Cornwall, throwing Frisbees and angrily pecking at the bewitched creatures that cross their paths. Our memories aren’t what they used to be, but that’s not quite how we remember it.

Paragon

Epic Games expands the MOBA template into a new dimension

Epic is keen to stress that Paragon is a MOBA. This is a contested, storied term, one that describes some of the world’s biggest games and a few of its bigger failures, too. MOBAs were the new MMOGs, and the demise of projects such as EA’s Dawngate and Warner’s Infinite Crisis reflect the difficulty that a succession of large studios have faced in trying to climb onto the bandwagon.