Summer Game Fest highlights: 34 new video games to look out for, from Alien Isolation to Crazy Taxi

Hundreds of video games were shown at June’s annual bonanza. After watching more than 15 hours of showcases, our video games editor picks the highlights

The sequel to a revered 2014 horror game from British developer Creative Assembly: this time you must evade the xenomorph on the surface of a storm-ravaged colony world.

A little magpie with a broken wing and a lost flock makes its way alone, enthralled by a fallen piece of star.

The latest of Capcom’s zombie games to be raised from the dead is 2000’s Code: Veronica, presented here in first-person rather than the original’s third-person view. Every RE remake so far has been a banger, so expectations are high.

An extremely 1980s platform shooter that looks straight off the NES/Mega Drive, from the makers of the notoriously difficult 1920s-animation tribute Cuphead. (Fans of that game will also be delighted to know that development has finally begun on another new Cuphead game, and that the announcement was made by a Cuphead puppet in a business suit.)

It’s your grandma’s birthday and your family is here – to murder her. This Knives Out inspired British locked-room mystery comes from the makers of Duck Detective.

The first blockbuster action game in which we play an extremely angry mother: Kratos’ wife, Laufey, trapped in the afterlife with a whole pantheon of other gods and demigods. Co-starring a talking sword and a gelatinous cube.

A sort of extended violent vaudeville production in which a magician has to escape hell, mocked at every turn by a very dapper Satan and his minions. Notes of Bioshock and Dishonored.

The first game in a decade from Fumito Ueda, designer of landmark PlayStation games Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian. It has those games’ trademark sense of scale, as you pilot gigantic robots from within their detachable heads. I’m expecting Pacific Rim but with delicate emotional nuance.

A military sci-fi narrative action game in the Last of Us mode, from developer That’s No Moon, in which two opposing operators must form an alliance to survive.

In this paranormal action game, you are an operative from the Federal Bureau of Control, a shady US government agency tasked with keeping supernatural threats imprisoned in a brutalist building in Manhattan. Except everything from the parallel realms that they were trying to contain is now loose, and you’ve got to deal with it.

It’s high time someone tried to evolve the massively multiplayer online role-playing game in which World of Warcraft still has a near monopoly. The glimmering high-fantasy setting of Guild Wars makes