5 of the best-looking new games at E3

E3 is over, and it’s been a great year for announcements. We witnessed a post-apocalyptic Boston in Fallout 4, saw Star Wars: Battlefront in action, and watched Nathan Drake destroy loads of stuff with a jeep in Uncharted 4.

New iterations of long-running series are the backbone of big conferences like E3, but among the sequels it’s easy for new games to get lost. With that in mind, we’ve found five of the most tantalising new titles to treat your peepers.

Firewatch (PS4, PC)

Not only is Firewatch a primary-coloured delight to look at, if the trailer is anything to go by it could end up having some of the funniest writing and voice acting to ever grace a game.

You play volunteer fire lookout Henry, and spend a lot of time chatting over walkie-talkie with Delilah, your supervisor. Something isn’t right in the forest, and your duties soon take a turn for the sinister as people go missing and communications start failing. Some of the developers behind Firewatch worked on the massively successful Walking Dead titles by Telltale Games, so expect a gripping narrative and a strong sense of player choice in how you interact with Delilah.

Dreams (PS4)

Media Molecule, the UK team behind LittleBigPlanet and Tearaway, could be bringing one of the most intriguing games to this generation of consoles with Dreams. The trailer doesn’t give much away in terms of gameplay, but during the Sony conference Media Molecule demonstrated how players will be able to use a DualShock 4 controller to sculpt, paint and animate their own game worlds.

“We’re building a place where you can go to explore the dreams of others, and then you can create your own,” the company said. It will be interesting to see how these dreams come to life, and the company has promised to show more of the game over the next few months.

Cuphead (Xbox One)

What do you need to know about Cuphead? Well, it’s a run-and-run co-op platformer about crockery-headed characters having to repay a debt to the devil. More importantly, it looks like a 1930s cartoon – an age when cartoons had more in common with surrealist paintings than Disneyland.

If you’ve never seen Swing You Sinners!, please spend eight minutes of your life watching it now, if only for the weird dancing frog around the 7:30 mark. It’s the stuff of nightmares, and it’s this aesthetic that Studio MDHR is drawing on for their awesome-looking game. 

Tacoma (Xbox One, PC)

How games tell stories is a long-running topic of contention between developers, critics and players. Developer Fullbright has been one of the leading companies in this dialogue – the studio’s previous game, Gone Home, was famous for rejecting combat in favour of exploration and emotional detail.

While Gone Home was set in a family home in 1995, Tacoma will be based on a lunar transfer station 200,000 miles from Earth. From the looks of the omnipresent AI “Odin” in the trailer, expect things to go wrong on moon station Tacoma à la System Shock 2.

Beyond Eyes (Xbox One, PC)

In Beyond Eyes, players will guide a blind girl called Rae on a journey to find a stray cat she’s befriended. What sets the game apart is the emphasis on sound as a gameplay mechanic along with the beautiful watercolour aesthetic of the environment.

Mimicking Rae’s perspective the world starts out completely white, with things only becoming visible when your character touches them. If it works, Beyond Eyes could not only be a memorable game but a fantastic way to build a sense of empathy for Rae’s condition.