Microsoft unveiled a new Xbox at The Game Awards tonight, the Xbox Series X, and to go with it, a brand new game from Ninja Theory: Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2.

The trailer doesn't reveal much about the game, but it appears as though it won't stray too far from its roots. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice told the tale of a Celtic warrior battling Viking-esque undead in a dark and gloomy world, but it also took on the challenge of portraying mental health struggles in a sensitive and effective manner. Overall, it did a pretty good job in that regard.

It's a little surprising that a game built around that single, well-contained concept would get a sequel, but given how well it was handled the first time around I'd give Ninja Theory pretty good odds of pulling it off. Using it as the premiere game for a new Xbox sends a very strong signal that Microsoft believes in it, too. There's no sign of a release date yet, but we'll keep you posted.

Ninja Theory's harrowing hack-and-slasher Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and dungeon-crawling shop sim Moonlighter are the early unlocks for July's Humble Monthly, which means you can play them both right now for $12.

For the $12 fee, which activates a rolling subscription that can be cancelled or paused at any time, you get both immediately, plus several other mystery games when the bundle goes live next month. Both are worth playing, and at $12 you're getting them for their combined lowest-ever prices. 

Leif called Hellblade, which explores themes of mental illness, a "powerful portrait of the strength of will over personal demons" in our review, while Lauren thought Moonlighter was a "cute and casual" mash-up of the shop sim and dungeon crawling genres. Fans of Recettear, step right up.

Sign up to the Humble Monthly Bundle here.

In case you missed it, the first footage for Ninja Theory's next game, a 4v4 online melee game called Bleeding Edge, emerged yesterday.

In surprise E3 news, Xbox's Phil Spencer just announced that Microsoft has acquired Ninja Theory. The Cambridge-based studio is best known for Hellblade, DmC, Enslaved: Journey to the West and Heavenly Sword on PS3. Hellblade is perhaps its most notable success to date, winning multiple BAFTAs and selling over half a million copies.

Ninja Theory joins Compulsion Games, Playground Games and Undead Labs in the growing roster of Microsoft studios, which also includes a new Santa Monica Studio called The Initiative. Can't wait to hear about what Ninja Theory will be working on next, although the studio's chief creative director Tameem Antoniades did hint at what's in the works when I spoke to him earlier this year.  

Ninja Theory's Hellblade was arguably a surprise success last year, selling over half a million copies on both PC and PS4 and getting positive notices from the likes of us. This Viking age-set hack-and-slash adventure found an interesting middle ground between big $60 game and indie game, helped by the fact that it looked and sounded amazing, and had a price point that made sense for the scope of experience on offer. 

Earlier this month, Ninja Theory won a staggering five BAFTAs for the game, and to chief creative director Tameem Antoniades, that level of acclaim obviously means a lot. "It's sort of a validation of the model we chose, which was to do something outside of the publisher model, taking all the risk ourselves, putting our own money into it. And then relying on our team. All of us had no real reason to believe that this would be successful, but everyone put everything into it."

When I visited Ninja Theory in Cambridge in late 2014 to see Hellblade in a really early state, most of the staff were working on the now-defunct Disney Infinity. Antoniades was realistic in our conversations about the difficulty of working with big publishers as a mid-sized independent studio, and how that led to Hellblade, a game funded, published and owned by Ninja Theory itself. "Back when we started, the big publishers started to move away from consoles," says Antoniades when I speak to him at Rezzed. "They were abandoning consoles for mobile and free-to-play, and the publishers were investing in their own internal teams and not coming to studios like us. So we couldn't get signed, despite our history and track record. 

"We couldn't get signed, and when we did get signed, various projects quickly collapsed. So it felt like there was no place for us, and people would say to us, you can either do big triple-A or you can be small indie—there's nothing in between. We did have our backs against the wall, and things were looking dark, which is why we had to do something about it. Take a different path. I'm glad we did. I'm glad we were in the situation where we had to take a big chance."

Cashflow is no longer an immediate concern for the studio, which is encouraging to hear. "For the first time in 18 years, we feel like we're now in the driving seat. That doesn't mean that we won't do work for hire and work with other publishers, because I think having a healthy mix of work-for-hire, publisher work and original work is better than going back to how we were, which was being a one-team studio. Things got very precarious after you'd finish a project."

I ask Antoniades why he thinks Hellblade stood out at a time when it's hard for independent developers to get eyes on their games. "I think there are a few keys to that. One is your game has to be creatively different to what's out there. If you're doing a smaller version of a bigger game, no one will be interested. So you have to take a different path, which in our case was exploring mental health and psychosis. So you have to have something that's worth talking about.

"But the second thing we did was we built up a following through our 30 development diaries, and just before release, we asked our supporters, the people who were following, to pre-order the game to help us. We were quite open about it—'we need your help, please pre-order the game'. And we used money from the pre-orders to launch a marketing campaign, so at least we had a chance. That's a good lesson to take forward. And those followers were our PR army. They were out there, spreading the word, and this is a game, if it's successful, it's because of the word-of-mouth power."

The future of Ninja Theory

"This year, I think we'll start showing some new stuff," Antoniades tells me. "We have 100 people...working on a mix of projects on different sizes and different themes. Some in VR, some in traditional. It's quite a good mix actually." I ask if the success of Hellblade means Antoniades feels any pressure to explore serious subjects in Ninja Theory's next game. "I think that's more down to my own personal interest. We've got other projects on the go, led by different team members who have their own personal slant on what they want to do, and they're not serious subjects, they are much more fun, traditional games if you like. 

"You can see it back from Heavenly Sword: I've been interested in the idea of the medium being used in a way that games like Ico and Another World on the Amiga and Prince of Persia. I like that kind of experience, the personal hero journey. And I'd like to explore more interesting subjects like that."

For Antoniades' team and their next game, he plans to restrict the scale of the operation once again. "I think it was the severe lack of money and people that made this game innovate, that made the team innovate." I ask if the solutions they found in compensating for Hellblade's limits in team size and budget puts them in a good position for their next project. "Yes. So we can build on that, but we can find new challenges. The magic of games for me as I was growing up, or in this industry, is that certain developers—John Carmack, Peter Molyneux—certain teams and certain developers just seemed to create magic out of nowhere. 

"They were creating such amazing things. I'd like to be part of that culture."

The meaning of permadeath

At launch, Hellblade generated a lot of discussion around permadeath. The markings on Senua's arm creep up the more she dies in the story, and the game suggests that 'all progress will be lost' once the markings reach her head. The game never deletes your save, though, but just the idea of it provoked a lot of conversation—some interesting, some frustrating as you might expect. Either way, I'm pretty certain it was good for the game's profile.

"Looking back, it probably was," Antoniades says. "It did blow up a little on Twitter. We watched with some amusement at the conversations that went around it. The outrage, the debate. But what I'd like to say about that, is it wasn't a gimmick. It was in service of the story, which is why we did it. Some people say we lied—if you look at that statement we put out about the game, about the permadeath, it's not a lie. It's actually true. But our interpretation of it is what counts, is what causes anxiety. And that was a very deliberate move, because the whole game is about our interpretation of reality and how we undermine our own belief systems and how we suffer by believing things that we are absolutely certain works in one way, and it turns out it's another thing."

Antoniades tells me that he was inspired by the movie Fargo for this idea, which famously opens with the message 'This is a true story' despite being an entirely fictional tale.

After launching Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice in August last year, developer Ninja Theory reported "better than expected" sales by October. Six months after that, the dark fantasy action adventure triumphed in five categories at the British Academy Games Awards. 

In conversation with Samuel at Rezzed, chief creative director Tameem Antoniades said that while he and his team expected Hellblade's sales to excel on console—the overall split was closer than anticipated.    

"We did see this as primarily a PlayStation 4 title, and we thought that platform would be the bulk of our sales, and in fact it was pretty evenly split," explains Antoniades. "So going forward, we will make sure that we get our interface and everything right for the PC audience as well."

Following his warm review, Leif Johnson explained why games like Hellblade are eroding the border between indie and triple-A. Hellblade has since earned a place on our coveted best stories in PC gaming list—all of which underscores its place on this platform.  

Antoniades adds: "We were so surprised that so many people played the game with mouse and keyboard, and we dropped the ball a little bit at the start. We patched it afterwards, but we dropped the ball with our mouse and keyboard support." 

Additional reporting by Samuel Roberts. 

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice was the big winner at tonight's British Academy Games Awards, the UK's annual BAFTA ceremony celebrating outstanding achievement in videogames. Hellblade claimed victory in five categories, including Artistic Achievement, Best Performer, and Best British Game—but the Best Game nod went to What Remains of Edith Finch. 

Edith Finch beat out Assassin's Creed: Origins, Hellblade, Horizon Zero Dawn, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Super Mario Odyssey to take the big crown. This is actually the second win for developer Giant Sparrow; its previous game, The Unfinished Swan, won the Best Debut Game award in 2013. 

Double Fine Entertainment boss Tim Schaer was this year's BAFTA Fellowship winner, awarded "in recognition of an outstanding and exceptional contribution to film, games or television." Previous Fellowship winners include John Carmack, Gabe Newell, Peter Molyneux, Shigeru Miyamoto, David Braben, and Will Wright. 

"Tim Schafer is a true pioneer of game design, who has pushed the boundaries of the medium through his extraordinary talents," BAFTA CEO Amanda Berry said. "With a career spanning three decades, his diverse body of work includes some of the most iconic and best-loved adventure games, all characterised by his powerful storytelling and distinctive comedic writing style. We are honored to be presenting him with the BAFTA Fellowship." 

The full list of categories and winners is below. 

• Artistic Achievement – Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice - Ninja Theory Ltd/ Ninja Theory Ltd
• Audio Achievement – Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice - David Garcia Diaz - Ninja Theory Ltd/ Ninja Theory Ltd
• Best Game – What Remains of Edith Finch - Giant Sparrow/Annapurna Interactive
• British Game -  Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice - Ninja Theory Ltd/ Ninja Theory Ltd
• Debut Game – Gorogoa - Jason Roberts, Buried Signal/Annapurna Interactive
• Evolving Game – Overwatch - Blizzard Entertainment/ Blizzard Entertainment
• Family – Super Mario Odyssey - Nintendo EPD/Nintendo
• Game Beyond Entertainment - Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice - Ninja Theory Ltd/ Ninja Theory Ltd
• Game Design -  Super Mario Odyssey - Nintendo EPD/Nintendo
• Game Innovation – The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Nintendo EPD/Nintendo
• Mobile Game – Golf Clash - Paul Gouge, Alex Rigby, Gareth Jones – Playdemic/Playdemic
• Multiplayer – Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Larian Studios/ Larian Studios Games
• Music – Cuphead - StudioMDHR Entertainment Inc./StudioMDHR Entertainment Inc.
• Narrative – Night in the Woods - Scott Benson, Alec Holowka, Bethany Hockenberry – InfiniteFall/ Finji
• Original Property – Horizon Zero Dawn – Guerrilla/Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe
• Performer – Melina Juergens as Senua – Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

The full list of nominees and winners is available at bafta.org.

A look at some our recent Game of the Year winners—Spelunky, Metal Gear Solid V, Dishonored 2—suggests that baked-in narratives are less important to us than personal stories plotted by physics and AI. That's broadly true, but not to the total exclusion of videogame storytelling, of characters and dialogue and, to give an overarching definition of what we mean by 'story' in this case, 'sequences of events which may be influenced by the player but are not authored by them.' The setting, the conflict, the reasons characters act (through us) and the consequences for those characters. You know, stories. 

Some say games are bad vehicles for this kind of storytelling, full stop. Others argue that while the stories in games are often bad, it's the fault of the storytellers, not the medium. And yet another camp argues that games are the greatest storytelling medium of all time. In listing our favorite stories, we will resolve exactly zero of these contradictory views. Unconcerned with theory for the moment, we just want to celebrate the stories that stuck with us, and recommend a few games for those who love to be told a good tale. Here are our favorites, as picked by regular PC Gamer writers Samuel Horti and Richard Cobbett, as well as the whole team:

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice 

Hellblade is an important game, not just because of the subject matter it tackles—a young woman’s struggle with psychosis—but also because it proves that modern-day audiences are willing to listen to developers that want to tackle difficult themes.

Pict warrior Senua is on a journey to retrieve her lover’s soul from the depths of the Norse underworld of Helheim, and she’s prepared to go up against the gods to do it. Her battles with towering, undead Vikings mirror her struggles against her inner demons, and through sparse writing and long, lingering close-ups of Senua’s face you really feel her pain. She bares her soul to the player, and it’s utterly moving.

The inner struggle is the one the game wants you to focus on, but there’s still subtlety on the surface, too: you can look back at the end of it and think about how Senua’s outward journey reflected her inner torment, making connections that weren’t obvious at the time. 

The Thief trilogy 

The first Thief game tells a neat noir story complete with dry narration from a cynical protagonist and a femme fatale who hires him for a dangerous job. The end result of its tangled plot has him stealing from a god of chaos and changing the world. Thief grows from a simple mash-up of hard-boiled fiction and steampunk into something much more complex. Over the course of the next two games it explores the religious consequences of a god's death and the Mechanists who rise in his absence, and by the third game follows those explorations of chaos and order by focusing on corruption within the Keepers, the group dedicated to balance Garrett left behind at the start of that first game.

There's a neatly cyclical quality to the three Thief games, which end where they began—not just with the Keepers, but with a scene of a child being caught pickpocketing. Only where once Garrett was the kid, now he's the adult deciding the fate of that child. So many videogame heroes get dragged back again and again, long after their story is done, so Garrett having such a complete arc is a pleasant rarity. The reboot's Garrett could never live up to it.

What Remains of Edith Finch

The overarching tale of the Finch family is full of intrigue, but it’s the individual stories of each family member that stand out. Returning to the family home as the titular Edith, you poke around the abandoned house, slipping in and out of the memories of the various characters as you gradually piece together a moving tragedy.

Each is told as an inventive mini-game. You transform into a shark, chop fish on a production line and listen to poetry while flying a kite. The simple mechanics provide the perfect window to learn about the personalities of each family member. These vignettes are moving, and deceptively layered and rich, changing your perception of what you’ve heard before while also advancing the overarching plot. The game offers a masterclass in environmental storytelling, too, with each object in the house giving you a new insight into the family.

Quite simply, it’s the pinnacle of the first-person narrative game genre, and toppling it will take some doing.

Mafia and Mafia 2 

The first two Mafia games each contain their own compelling stories, built from familiar cinematic influences—but the first is my favourite, telling a more sympathetic tale of cab driver Tommy Angelo being drawn into the criminal underworld, before finally trying to escape it. The cutscenes look like they're being acted out by Gerry Anderson puppets by today's standards, but it felt like careful attention was paid to the writing, cinematography and use of music in Mafia's story—plus the smoke effects are still nice. The shock ending, which we won't ruin here, ties into Mafia 2 in an utterly dazzling way. 

Mafia 2, meanwhile, focuses on Vito Scaletta and his best friend Joe some years later. Vito gets into the mob to clear his family's debts, following a memorably boring sequence where you work at the docks, doing legitimate and repetitive work until you choose to walk away. The story ends somewhat abruptly, though some might argue that elevates its closing moments, but the friendship between the two main characters is what I remember loving about Mafia 2, as well as believing this story was actually taking place across two decades.

Her Story

You’d think that if you take a murder mystery, chop it into bits and deliver all those parts in the wrong order then the resultant story would be a mess. And in most cases you’d be right. But not in Her Story. You flick through a database of police interviews with a young woman, pulling up clips by searching for keywords and watching them on a battered CRT monitor. Each video reveals a piece of the jigsaw, and it’s your job to slot them all together in your mind.

The minimalist presentation wouldn’t work without astonishing acting and tight, punchy writing. Through a single screen the game depicts more drama than most blockbuster movies. Each clip you watch changes your mind about the case, and then the next clip makes you realise just how wrong you were again.

It’s a showcase of ambiguous storytelling done right. Even if you watch every single clip, and therefore know what every jigsaw piece looks like, the overall picture will still be blurred by your own interpretations and preconceptions. It means different things to different players, and you learn something new every time you play.

Bioshock 2 

While it’s the first game that gets all the attention for its fantastic concept, it’s Bioshock 2 that’s secretly the high point of the series. Under Jordan Thomas and his crew, a story once primarily about a city became a story of its people. The victims of Rapture. The next generation, emerging as butterflies from a cocoon of poverty and deprivation. It told real stories of people who followed a dream, only to realise that they were in service to someone else’s. And then of course there was Eleanor—Lamb of Rapture, and far superior as a character than Bioshock Infinite’s Lamb of Columbia. Through actions rather than words, you guided her nascent morality in a world where morality was routed in human concern rather than big plot twists, as the ‘dadification’ of gaming arguably reached its zenith. This wasn’t your story. It was your merely your privilege to begin hers.

To the Moon

An emotionally draining game that has caused many a tear to drop on our keyboards. To the Moon's premise seems overly complex at first: in the future, a company can travel into your mind and implant new memories in a way so that present time-you believes them to be true. But really, it’s a story about one man’s dying wish to visit the moon, hence the title.

The game take’s place inside the memories of that man, called John. You travel backwards through his mind step-by-step. So at the beginning of the story you pick up mysteries, and as you go back in time those mysteries unpack themselves piece by piece (wait until you know what that rabbit means—you’ll weep). It never hits you over the head with anything, which means you feel clever for picking up on its nuances.

But its intelligence is not what sticks with you. The memorable bit is the game’s exploration of love, loss and regret, all three wrapped together in something that’s a comedy one minute (it’s seriously funny in places) and a tragedy the next.

Realms of the Haunting

This obscure British gem has enjoyed something of a resurgence of late, and justifiably so. While the script is more than a little on-the-nose and the basic concept is a fairly stock haunted house setting giving way to a fairly stock battle between good and evil, it’s not really the plot itself that makes ROTH so special. It’s the details, some of which may actually contain the devil.

Few fantasy or horror games have presented such a wonderfully fleshed out world—the sense of stepping into something bigger than you could ever comprehend, with every scrap of it meticulously detailed and woven into a grand tapestry. Ignore the relatively primitive 3D engine. The joy of ROTH is in the descent to understanding, dealing with powers, and the moments of compassion that emerge from it, like being faced with a trial from a seemingly implacable god willing to bend the unbreakable rules of his domain because your situation is so dire as to have drawn his impossible pity. It was a world that dripped with fantastical history long before the likes of Dark Souls were a glint in their creators’ sadistic eyes, and remains a beautiful obscurity that badly deserved its sequel.

Grand Theft Auto IV

GTA IV dialled back the wacky, fun stuff of San Andreas—military jets, jetpacks, getting fat from eating burgers—in favour of a sober story set in a stunningly realistic interpretation of New York, Liberty City. This meant that, as an open world game, GTA had less moments of large-scale, thrilling chaos than we'd eventually see in GTA V, but the flipside of that was a more interesting story. GTA IV is a pretty sincere tale—and it has a few thematic links with Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption, which also has a protagonist who can't really escape his past life. 

Niko Bellic, an Eastern European veteran who comes to Liberty City to start again, soon finds himself dragged back into a life of killing. The tragedy of Niko is that you sense he knows it's the one thing he's best at. It's melodramatic but effective—a daring effort to bring GTA into the modern age with a more dramatic story.

The Yawhg

The Yawhg is coming, and it isn't going to be good, and that's all you know. This fantastic little game sends up to four players around town to prepare for that coming disaster, and each simple decision—teach the king your seductive techniques or let him flounder?—can lead to terrible things at the end of the brief adventure (or rarely, something good). The writing is concise, unembellished, and biting; simple fantasy tales that may end with stolid brutality or newfound wisdom, whether you spend a week drinking in the tavern or meditating in the garden.

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc 

Danganronpa stands out from other visual novels because, rather than a game about making decisions, it's a game about making deductions. You play as one of 15 students trapped in an elite school where the only way to graduate (read: escape) is to kill a classmate and get away with it by lying and framing your way through a murder trial. If anyone pulls it off, the remaining students will also be killed, so everyone has a stake in every trial—doubly so if you've grown attached to the victim or the prime suspect. 

The process of collecting, considering and presenting evidence makes for a far more interactive experience than merely navigating dialogue, and the trials work because Danganronpa has colorful and interesting characters you won't want to see die. They look like one-note caricatures at first glance, but you start to see different sides of everyone as antagonist Monokuma ratchets up the stakes with unique twists. It becomes clearer and clearer that everyone has something to hide, and the dread of suddenly losing a favorite character, or accusing one of murder, should not be underestimated.

A Mind Forever Voyaging

When did games get so political, people demand. Well, try 1985, with one of the most beloved text adventures not to involve hitchhiking around the galaxy or exploring an underground kingdom. A Mind Forever Voyaging is interactive fiction doing something that no other medium could do—to put you into a world, and let exploration tell its story. Yes, in many ways, this was the first walking simulator—its setting, a Matrix style recreation of a small American town, and you a sentient computer program charged with stepping into progressive simulations of the future under a popular senator’s Plan For Renewed National Purpose. Needless to say, it doesn’t go well. Over the course of the game you experience America’s collapse around you, complete with now familiar sites collapsing into decay and your own family becoming victims of an oppressive theocratic regime. Can you stop it, despite your only presence in the real world being as a scrap of data on a computer?  

Mass Effect 2

A solid space romp from start to finish. A lot of RPGs struggle to sustain forward momentum for more than a few hours at a time, but Mass Effect 2 does it for 30, constantly nudging you from one point in the galaxy to the next by presenting you with a series of interesting missions, each containing its own short story. It gets the balance just right between exposition and action, with enough big set pieces to keep you on your toes.

The characters are the glue holding it together. The series has some of the best personalities you’ll find in games (and Garrus might just be the best NPC of all time). Walking around the Normandy after a mission to hear the quips of each crew member in turn is a joy, and you can dig even deeper into their personalities in the companion missions, which provide some of the best moments in the entire series. Learning more about them, and forming these personal ties, lends more weight to the overall plot. Even though you might not care about the Geth or the Reapers or the fate of humanity, you care about your crew, and whether they make it out of the game’s bombastic ending alive.

It also has the benefit of being able to incorporate the decisions you made in the first game, which makes for a richer, more personal tale. It’s an excellent space opera that Bioware struggled to better in both Mass Effect 3 and Andromeda, and a game against which all their future titles will rightly be measured.

The Witcher 3 

What can we say about The Witcher 3 that hasn’t already been shouted from the rooftops? The Bloody Baron quest alone warrants its place on our list. To focus just on that would be a mistake though, as barely a moment goes by without a reminder that CD Projekt are playing in a different league to almost every other RPG studio out there. It’s in the plots, which effortlessly merge myth and fairy tale and fantasy. It’s in the humour that underlines everything. It’s in the cheeky imagination of a studio as happy to have you chase after a missing stone phallus as your long-lost adopted daughter. But mostly, it’s about seeing this wonderful world through the practiced neutrality of Geralt himself—a man who can’t stop his compassion and sympathy bleeding out through his stoic front, no matter how much it might make his life easier. What many games demand long cutscenes to tell, this one often handles with nothing more than a subtle eye animation, or an obvious opinion held back. The Witcher 3 tells great stories, but it’s how they all weave together and filter through their star and his unique perspective that really makes them special. 

Analogue: A Hate Story 

Investigating an abandoned spacecraft inhabited by untrustworthy AI is a videogame staple, and it's been done well (most recently in Prey). Analogue: A Hate Story is different. For starters it's a visual novel rather than an immersive sim, and also it's an exploration of the societal pressures on women in Joseon-period Korea.

The spaceship Mugunghwa (named after South Korea's national flower) is a multi-generational slower-than-light colony ship whose inhabitants, over the centuries, regressed to a feudal society that somehow collapsed 600 years before your investigation begins. In other games like this you might read emails about changing the passwords on the armory—in Analogue the logs tell the story of competing dynasties in a society where women are forbidden from learning to read and write (but do so anyway). It's historical fiction wrapped in sci-fi trappings that bounces the two off each other, you and your new AI companions examining and reacting to the text as you go. It's about how the past isn't as far behind us as we like to think, and has a thematic richness that honestly puts a lot of other games to shame.

Oxenfree 

Here are the ingredients: a spooky deserted island; a group of quirky teens who are better at banter than any of us; a mystery involving radio frequencies. Saying any more than that about Oxenfree's story is tricky, because it's a twisty one. Fortunately it's not just a great story because it will surprise you, but because of how it's told, which is in naturalistic dialogue any Kevin Williamson movie would be proud of. Characters talk over each other freely and you can interrupt them as well—when you make a dialogue choice you're never sure if Alex, the protagonist, will save it for the next gap in conversation or blurt it out immediately. 

So many games have a scene where somebody interrupts someone else, but what actually happens is that character A stops abruptly, there's a significant pause, and then character B jumps in with a line obviously recorded in a different session, possibly in a different country. Oxenfree doesn't do that. Its dialogue has a flow that you can get caught up in, so you're already engaged even before its plot uncurls and rears up in your face.

Soma

What does it mean to be alive? Sci-fi stories have grappled with the thought for decades, largely telling the same sad story over and over again. Who would’ve thought that the developers of the classic Amnesia: The Dark Descent would follow up with one of the most gripping, mind-bending, horrifying takes of all in Soma? Maybe it just took inhabiting the body of a character inhabiting a dead body to give the premise the punch it’s been needing. Its optimistic ending is the biggest surprise, given that you’re repeatedly confronted with puzzles that risk the lives of junkpile robots also harboring a human consciousness inside them. They might look like rusting mounds of metal plates and bolts, but they’ll also tell you they’re happy and don’t want to die. What if a human with their guts hanging out told you the same thing? Renegade and Paragon alignments won’t help you. 

Deranged monsters roam the halls (and you can turn them off now), but they too are confused, semi-conscious beings in unfamiliar bodies. They’re mostly a sideshow to the main attraction, the underwater research station built to harbor the remnants of humanity after a comet devastated the surface. In order to discover who you really are and save whatever you can of humanity on a glorified USB stick, you’ll need to descend to places without light or life in some of the most oppressive, uncomfortable underwater environments this side of Bioshock. But for every plot twist Rapture holds, Soma has two, and they’re all going to make you feel like shit. 

Every year we round up our favorite screenshots, with preference to those taken at ultra-high resolutions with custom camera controls for beautiful HUD-free compositions. Previously, we've mainly included shots of our own, but this year I asked the community to submit their own. Special thanks to Larah Johnson (aka HodgeDogs) and Andy Cull who've lent us their collections for the year, as well as Cinematic Captures and The Gamers Zone for their great Battlefront 2 shots.

For the sake of space, we haven't included every screenshot submitted, but do check out these comments for more, and leave your best in the comments here.

Star Wars Battlefront 2

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

Assassin's Creed Origins

More on the next page!

Ghost Recon Wildlands

Middle-earth: Shadow of War

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus

Mass Effect: Andromeda

Destiny 2

Nier: Automata

More on the next page!

theHunter: Call of the Wild

Prey

The Evil Within 2

What Remains of Edith Finch

Night in the Woods

In Ninja Theory's latest—and final—developer diary, the studio announced that Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice had successfully proven that there is indeed "a space between indie and AAA games that could work commercially." 

Amid the usual flurry of nerves launching any new product, the team admitted that it had been concerned that the game's portrayal of mental illness would "blow up in a storm of controversy"... and it had been lucky that the game's early progression-halting bugs—which it worked fast to patch—hadn't snowball into a more serious problem.

"In the first week, we sold an amazing 250,000 units across PlayStation 4 and PC at $30," said "product development ninja" Dominic Matthews, before confirming the game had now almost doubled that in the three months since launch. This meant the studio has smashed its plans to break even and make a profit several months ahead of schedule. 

For more—including the touching feedback the team received in light of its careful portrayal of mental ill-health—check out the video above.

We gave Hellblade a 78, stating: "Other games have focused on such themes, sure, but few have delivered the truth of that message with such conviction."

Developer Ninja Theory is set to break even from harrowing hack-and-slash Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice months ahead of schedule, partly thanks to its decision to publish the title independently, the studio's chief creative director has said.

Hellblade, which depicts a Celtic warrior's battle with mental illness, was due to break even between six and nine months after its early August release, but it will have made its money back "and then some" three months after it came out, Tameem Antoniades told VentureBeat.

The decision to publish the game independently—the first time Ninja Theory has done that—was a big help because it means it gets the bulk of the money from sales, rather than a big-name publisher taking a slice. "It sold better than our expectations. [Self-publishing has] opened up a bunch of doors and possibilities that we just didn’t have until this point," he said.

"The triple-A publishing model goes in cycles, sort of, but it doesn’t really serve developers like us very well, mid-size developers...you’re not fully in control of your destiny. As we’ve seen over the last several years, dozens of good developers have disappeared. The only way you can counter that is find another way. This seems to have worked for us.

"There’s a real danger in losing great studios at an alarming rate when we shouldn’t have to, simply because we don’t know what works and what doesn’t in the digital era."

Antoniades said that Ninja Theory will release more data on the sales in a development diary "to help encourage [other developers] to do more games like this".

I think the news can only be positive. Perhaps if other developers see an experimental game like Hellblade finding commercial success then they'll be more likely to take risks on their own titles—and that, ultimately, will lead to more interesting games. 

Read Leif's review of Hellblade here. The game costs $29.99/£24.99 on Steam, GOG and the Humble Store.