11 jeux et annonces qui nous ont enthousiasmés dans le dernier Galaxies Showcase

Résumé de l'actualité

You can smell it in the air can't you? The chill in your nostrils and the earthy whiff as leaves fall and the sun departs for another year. Yes, autumn is here, meaning we're teetering on the cavernous hole of near-nothingness as the entire games industry gives GTA 6 the widest berth imaginable. But that doesn't mean there isn't stuff to be excited about, of course. And the latest edition of the Galaxies Showcase has chucked a few more things onto the 'ooooh intriguing!' pile. Actually, quite a lot of things given its nearly two-hour runtime; but while you can watch the full thing in its entirety if you've got the time, we've also picked out a few of the announcements that especially caught our eyes and highlighted them below. Was all this really just an excuse for Connor to enthuse about penguins? Perhaps!

I've been very excited about Bristol developer Friday Sundae's There are no Ghosts at the Grand ever since I saw it at a preview last year. It's one of those things that reads like a checklist of my very specific gaming interests, being part musical, part home renovation sim, and part ghostbusting mystery adventure, all unfolding in a dilapidated hotel in a British seaside town.

The idea is you've got 30 days to renovate it (exactly why is part of the mystery given its protagonist has motives so secret, he'll even try hiding them from the player), but there's plenty more to do besides: you can explore the cobblestone streets, go sailing out at sea, or take a scooter into the countryside as you attempt to uncover the truth about the hotel's strange past. By night, there are ghosts to deal with - and throughout all this, the cast is prone to bursting into song. And if that tickles your fancy in the same way it's tickling mine, you can play a Steam demo right now ahead of its December arrival.

AfterZero: The Last Drive is possibly the first Pacific Drive-like, in that it's a game about driving a car across a post-apocalyptic wasteland - where you'll scavenge, fix up, and upgrade your car, and build out your hideout. It's the work of 3DClouds, the studio mostly known for Formula Legends, but The Last Drive is an altogether different beast. There's a focus on environmental and traversal challenges, similar to the Snow/MudRunner games, or Over the Hill more recently. Its setting caught my eye, too, unfolding in a post-industrial world where it's always winter. Everything is covered in snow, and the reveal trailer hints there's a mystery at the heart of it all. Like Formula Legends, The Last Drive has a sort of blocky, inky artstyle that elevates its plastic toy-looking cars and objects, and it's releasing sometime in 2027 for PC (Steam), PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.

Contact Protocol is an eerie, grim-looking (in a good way) starship job sim that places you in the shoes of a security officer working for a greedy corporation. Your decisions, while surely horrid, are keeping a crew of miners alive as you set course for Jupiter's biggest moon. Aside from a killer premise, Contact Protocol has a wonderful aesthetic, offering a dirty, grisly look - full of delicious retro hardware - at a ruthless life among the stars. There's a demo available on Steam now, and the full game's out next year.

It's hard to explain why, but Late Shift immediately reminded me of Susanna Clarke's wonderful story Piranesi. I think it's to do with the game being about escaping from a world you find yourself trapped in. Maybe it's also just because there's a section with a white hallway.

On closer inspection, Late Shift, from developer AstroCat Studios, is probably more like Remedy's work, presenting players with a bizarre, incoherent world that they have to find their way out of. Specifically, it's a "short found-footage anomaly horror game", according to the Late Shift Steam page, told through the eyes of a missing cinema employee. Did you know former Eurogamer people Tom Phillips and Martin Robinson both used to work at cinemas? Perhaps it's their story Late Shift brings to life. The trailer announced the release of a Late Shift demo, and the full game is "coming soon".

Deperson is an eye-catching horror game set in a "nation consumed by surveillance and fear"

Call me superficial, but I was onboard with Deperson the second I saw its artstyle. Developer Error Thing describes its game as a "self-reflective psychological horror adventure", and that begins when protagonist Aaron mysteriously finds himself in Indrija, a "nation consumed by surveillance and fear". I'm not entirely sure what genre we're dabbling with here on the gameplay front, but it's got an air of point-and-click puzzler to it and it sounds like there might be a bit of action too. "Sometimes you'll need to run. Sometimes you'll need to think carefully," says Error Thing. "Deperson is not a forgiving game." Whatever it is, though, it's certainly a looker, with a wonderfully unnerving hand-drawn animation style that's as surreal as it is striking. Deperson is set to launch sometime next year, but there's a demo out now on Steam, so I guess I know what I'm doing this weekend.

When Sirens Fall Silent is a psychological horror styled like a true crime documentary

I had no idea about When Sirens Fall Silent until last night, but it stood out like a fart in a church during the Galaxies Showcase. This heavy psychological serial killer horror is the new game from Martha is Dead and Town of Light studio LKA, and I'm in love with the mood and styling of it. That's an odd thing to say given the subject matter, but its story appears to be told through a mixture of news reports, recorded interviews, and various pieces of media, all painstakingly styled with a mid-90s aesthetic. The result is something not unlike a true crime documentary, and I'm very fond of those.

The part I'm worried about, after seeing a pretty young woman in a plunging neckline top manacled to a chair in the opening, is that there's a questionably seedy undertone to the trailer. But reading more about When Sirens Fall Silent reveals it to be a story directly dealing with misogyny, trafficking, trauma, and - much more hopefully - redemption. It's got me fascinated, and it's due next year.