Our full recap of this year’s Game Awards includes almost 50 trailers. At a minute or longer, it’d take over an hour to watch all of them, so we’ve distilled the night (which did also include awards) into just our favorite seven reveals.
These are the 2023 Game Awards reveals we’re most excited about:
Light No Fire
Tyler Wilde, Executive Editor: You know what? I don’t care if Hello Games might be repeating No Man’s Sky history and suckering me in with huge, somewhat abstract promises. Worst case, this bigger-than-Earth game is a glorious disaster, and that’s more exciting to me than a sensible game done competently. Plus, Hello Games has certainly learned a lot during No Man’s Sky’s long path to redemption, so now we’ve got real evidence that they can pull off a great game, even one this ridiculously ambitious. Uh oh, there I go again.
Chris Livingston, Senior Editor: My first thought was this looks just like No Man’s Sky. Part of it is the trailer format is identical to all those NMS update trailers we’ve seen over the years, and at first view it just felt like an ad for No Man’s Sky: Only One Planet edition. How could that be better than having lots of planets?
Rewatching it, though, I really started taking in the details: the rabbit men, the bird mounts, the skeleton family, the giant octopus, even the finer details of the characters’ backpacks and the animation of the troll boss reacting as the party walks into the throne room. I really love the look of Light No Fire, and I’m excited to see more of Hello Games’ take on fantasy instead of sci-fi. Throw in the intriguing idea of a shared planet the size of a planet… okay, I’m in.
No Rest For The Wicked
Lauren Morton, Associate Editor: So the developers of Ori and the Blind Forest are making *checks notes* an ARPG? And not only that, but they want to “revolutionize the genre”? Those are some bold words. I mean Ori and its sequel are the platonic ideal of puzzle platforming but I don’t think they actually revolutionized that genre. But this trailer nearly has me believing in Moon Studios.
Isometric ARPGs often have pretty dour worlds, and when they’re not dark they’re indistinct fantasy soup instead. Moon Studios is great at developing a gorgeous visual identity, which you can already see in this reveal trailer that showcases the verticality the studio is promising, too. Moon Studios is also great at telling stories (and making me cry) without any dialogue at all. I think they really could shake up the genre on both those axes. In the end though, an ARPG is going to live or die by combat, which we just barely see in this trailer. Moon Studios is angling for something “where skill and timing is required over simple ‘button-mashing,'” which, different genre though it may be, was a core part of what Ori did so well already.
Blade
Ted Litchfield, Associate Editor: Look, I’m not a Marvel Guy, I’m actually pretty soft anti-Marvel, but I can still get behind everybody’s favorite daywalker. The little teaser we got definitely had that Arkane flair I love, and I’m curious to see what a third-person action game from those wiz kids in Lyon would look like. In our initial coverage, we joked about the dev tempting fate by double dipping on vampires, but Redfall was the Austin studio’s cross to bear—Lyon’s still fresh off the success of 2021’s Deathloop. I’m ready for some slashing, shooting, and maybe even some of the developer’s signature crouch-walking in Gay Paree.
Monster Hunter Wilds
Morgan Park, Staff Writer: As much as an Arkane Blade game intrigues me, the only trailer at The Game Awards that got my heart racing was Monster Hunter Wilds. As much as 90 seconds can really tell you about a game, Wilds looks like it’s taking all the right cues from Monster Hunter World and Rise. I saw the scale and density (that was a pretty big monster horde the player rode through) that made World so special and the return of the best idea to come out of Rise: mounts! I can’t wait to stretch my legs in wide-open hunting grounds again and glide across gaps with a not-chocobo. And what’s up with the desert that deaged back into beautiful grass? Capcom knew what to show to get fans hyped in such a short teaser.
Big Walk
Tyler Colp, Associate Editor: Make a game as absurdly funny as Untitled Goose Game and I’ll be there for whatever you do next. House House dropped a trailer for its next game, Big Walk, and it has the same kind of quietly goofy vibe that Goose Game did. The trailer has a group of little guys in it that looks like ants with Pinocchio noses. These are the characters you play as in what seems to be a first-person, co-op puzzle game set in the Australian bushland. Bright buildings, bridges, and other objects scatter the countryside and all of them look ripe for co-op mischief. The Steam page promises hijinks like the ability to join your friends and then “kick them into the ocean.” I will be doing that in Big Walk, as well as knocking them into the big yellow hole, when it releases in 2025.
Chris Livingston, Senior Editor: This already looks better than anything the so-called metaverse was promising us, and is really all we need: just a cool place to hang out with friends and do stuff. That stuff might be structured, like solving puzzles and working together to complete objectives, or it could be just riding around on each other’s shoulders, exploring, goofing around, or sitting by a fire.
Kemuri
Lauren Morton, Associate Editor: Okay look, I can barely tell what kind of game Kemuri is but that trailer is so slick as hell it gave me goosebumps last night. The description on Unseen’s official account says you’ll be a yokai hunter playing solo or co-op in an urban jungle. We’ve been waiting to find out what Ikumi Nakamura would do after leaving Tango Gameworks and founding her own studio and I am not disappointed. Even if it turns out to be a style of game I don’t normally play, this looks so rad I may have to anyway.
Den of Wolves
Tyler Wilde, Executive Editor: I actually don’t love this trailer. It’s dudes growling at each other in a cyberpunk dungeon. But, I got to talk to developer 10 Chambers last week, and what they’re making sounds pretty cool: A co-op heist game inspired by stuff like Inception, Ghost in the Shell, and The Matrix, which I’m assuming is going to involve infiltrating a mind palace or two.
A couple other details that have me curious: There’ll be a planning phase before missions where co-op players can work out how they want to tackle the mission, and there’ll be some sci-fi way that you can go from stealth to free fire and back to stealth again. I like the idea that, rather than just restarting a blown stealth run, my squad and I might be able to regain control of the situation. You can read my full preview of Den of Wolves here.
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