9 – We Happy Few
We won’t be forgetting We Happy Few’s E3 2016 trailer anytime soon. It was creepy, disturbing, but at the same time pretty darn captivating. This survival-heavy rogue like from Compulsion Games is set in an alternate 1960’s, where the citizens of Wellington Wells have subjected themselves to taking a new drug called Joy, which represses all the horrors of the world. You play as Arthur, an outlier, who chooses to stop taking Joy, which doesn’t bode well with the other residents. We like the premise of We Happy Few, but based on the Game Preview on Xbox One, it’s hard to invest into it at this time in the game’s incomplete state. Either way, it’s one to look forward to in 2017.
8 – Tacoma
It’s always a tough act to follow when your first game was such a breakout indie success, but Fullbright’s followup to Gone Home has all the makings of a sophomore hit. Taking part in an abandoned space station, players will have to piece together what happened aboard the station as well as its missing inhabitants. Similar to Gone Home, much of the gameplay involves exploring the space station and discovering augmented reality avatars to solve its many mysteries. Tacoma is expected to be out this Spring.
7 – State of Decay 2
The first State of Decay was the only true zombie game for grown ups. Unlike other would-be zombie games, State of Decay had you keeping track of your relationships, supplies, ammo, bases — basically everything in order to keep surviving. Players could decide on who lives and dies, who to trust and who to ignore, and so on. It made for a wildly diverse zombie game that didn’t adhere to the same old genre tropes. The only downside was its relatively low budget presentation. With State of Decay 2, however, Undead Labs appears to be fixing that while also expanding and refining on what the first game was already good at.Â
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