PC Gamer hosted its annual show at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles this week. The showcase brings up hardware and software developers to put gamers in the know about the latest and best upcoming projects.
Here are some of the most important things you should know about what was on display this year.
1. Arcane horror is alive
Fans of the weird-horror writings of H.P. Lovecraft and those he inspired have a lot to look forward to. We saw a handful of titles about investigating ancient evils and trying not to go crazy while doing so. These include The Sinking City, The Forgotten City (based on an award-winning Skyrim mod), and Warframe, which delves less directly into the whole “ancient evil” thing. PC Gamer also showed off a mobile version of survival mainstay Don’t Starve, which has all kinds of weird monsters that are fully ready to eat you.
2. Exploration is key
Even when players aren’t directly investigating mysteries, several PC games at the show emphasize sprawling, open worlds and letting players explore them. Don’t Starve counts, of course, but other titles like Sable, Stormland, Genesis: Alpha One, and Satisfactory are all about dropping you into strange environs and putting you to work. Our favorite by far, however, is Maneater, a “shark-p-g” that puts players on the hunt as an aquatic eating machine.
3. We will never get tired of first-person games
One of the most popular and reliable viewpoints in all of gaming is through the eyes of a character with something they’re holding tucked down into the lower-right corner of the screen. Whether guns, robot hands, scanners, or a variety of other tools, we’re used to this perspective, and it’s not going away anytime soon. But what we saw from the show was that guns are increasingly less the standard.
4. …Or zombies
We thought after entire decades of non-stop zombie slaying, developers would have grown tired of that kind of enemy. But that’s absolutely not the case. The PC Gaming Show alone showed off two titles based on The Walking Dead comics and an add-on for Killing Floor 2. Killing Floor 2 branches out a little by including steampunk robots. But it’s still mostly a game about slaying the undead.
5. Everything is a battle royale now
In just over an hour and a half, the PC Gaming Show brought out three games that are capitalizing on the battle royale trend. That mode has a bunch of players (usually 100) squaring off in a free-for-all to see who will be the last one standing. Even Electronic Arts’ Battlefield 5 will have one of these. The new entries included Rapture Rejects, which includes a comic-strip look right out of the Cyanide and Happiness webcomic. We also saw a slightly medieval take with free-to-play Realm Royale and newcomer Mavericks: Proving Grounds. And the last one boasts an impressive feature: The developer claimed that it will be able to host as many as 1,000 players for special events.
