Thoughts on E3 (Part 1): Upcoming & Released

I’ve spent the past week and a half following E3 as closely as it is possible to do from another continent. My notebook has become so full that I decided it merited its own small series of blog posts rather than a section in this month’s diary. So, without further ado… here are all the things I want to talk about from E3!

First off, two games that are thrillingly imminent, and one that was actually a surprise release during the convention.

Out now: Prey: Mooncrash DLC + New Modes

Prey was one of my favourite games of last year, but unfortunately it got somewhat buried in a strong Spring 2017 line-up that included the release of the Nintendo Switch. A worthy successor to BioShock (worthier than Infinite in this fan’s opinion), Prey is an FPS survival horror that hooked me with its incredibly detailed environmental storytelling, which included individual character models and backstories for every NPC.

Perhaps because of its muted reception, Arkane have gone all-out generous with the goodies this E3: on the day of their conference, a free update containing several new modes was released, along with a DLC campaign, and plans were announced for an asymmetrical online multiplayer mode. It’s such a busy set we barely knew where to start, but we quickly became engrossed in the Mooncrash DLC.

Mooncrash is a great example of a developer taking the building blocks from the main game and creating a very different DLC experience. While still an FPS with shades of Alien, it is very far from the world of Morgan Yu. Using data recovered from five TranStar employees, your player character Peter remotely explores a moonbase which became overrun by Typhons, using a series of procedurally generated simulations of the base’s final hours. He encounters different scenarios every time, and must keep going until all five of his avatars either escape or die; then he begins again in a new iteration.

It’s a gripping concept that forces you to think strategically and plan ahead, with the iterative run-throughs giving this DLC elements of a puzzle game in addition to the FPS features carried over from the main game. There’s a great sense of achievement to be had from working out where best to deploy your characters to use their particular skills, and keeping them alive for longer than seems possible in the brutally overrun environments. The random element adds both moments of intense frustration - for example, as one of your characters dies within an arm's length of their objective because the RNG spawned a massive enemy right on top of it - and unexpected joy when you finally have a character escape, which really does give you a victorious sense of beating impossible odds.

Though the moonbase story may be light, Peter’s attempt to escape what is effectively slavery is compellingly drip-fed to you between sections. For the £13 price tag, I highly recommend checking it out if you enjoyed the original - and with the Main Game + DLC bundle currently on sale in several places for around the same price, you couldn’t ask for a better opportunity to get into Prey if you missed it last year.

Out soon: The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit

Unbelievably, this third game in the Life is Strange franchise (and official prequel to Life is Strange 2) is going to be completely free when it releases on June 26th. It boasts a 2-3 hour run time and seems to be far deeper than a simple playable teaser: a self-contained experience that will deliver the emotional punch LiS fans love, and introduce characters and concepts that will become important in LiS2 but which will stand alone here as well. The word is that some decisions the player makes in Captain Spirit will also carry over to the main game. Expect more fantastically superpowered kids dealing with a heavy case of the blues caused by an overdose of grim reality, with great indie-folk music and stunning visuals inspired by the American north-west.

Release date announced: We Happy Few

Admittedly, I’ve had an appointment with this one at least twice before; We Happy Few has cancelled our dates so often I was starting to wonder if we were ever going to meet up. But August 10th is close enough that I feel (perhaps naively) like they’re finally ready to go.

Side note: the status of the PlayStation 4 version seems to be in some doubt again now that Microsoft have bought out the developers. On the one hand, it would seem a shame for a version of the finished product to be abandoned. On the other hand, I actually got an XBox One specifically to play this game back when it was announced as an exclusive, so I wouldn’t be too sorry to finally see that plan come together.