Last night, ID@Xbox unveiled more hip, young video games coming to Xbox One than you could shake an artisinal craft lager at. As part of the indie publishing programme's involvement with GDC, an entire room's been filled with titles you've never heard of, the kind of stuff guys wearing blazers with sneakers would look and nod sagely at, even if they had precisely no idea what they were looking at.
You can see the full list of indie games on show at GDC here- it's a mix of previously-announced and brand new fare. There's bloody loads, so we've trawled through every new trailer we can get our hands on, and brought you a list of the games you should know about before everyone else. Hold on to your Moleskin notepads, we're going to get obscure up in here.
Brought to you by a mixture of ex-Bungie and Harmonix staff, this "roguelite" is set across a flooded American landscape, seemingly prioritising basic survival over constant combat. Think if it as The Road mixed with the end of O Brother Where Art Thou.
Bonus Hip Cred: A specially-commissioned alt-country soundtrack.
Anarcute
A cartoon riot simulator, this takes the bustling, scenery-stealing pleasure of the Katamari games and welds it to the total urban destruction of some Japanese mech thing no one played.
Bonus Hip Cred: The game was made by five French people who met at a "video game school", which I didn't know was even a thing.
Submerged
In the trailer, a woman and her sick brother weave their way around the ruins of a beautifully waterlogged city, and that's more or less it. In the game itself, we're led to believe you'll be clambering up those abandoned buildings, scavenging for what you can to stay alive. We wouldn't be totally surprised if those symbolds under the title mean there'll be some kind of code to break, too.
Bonus Hip Cred: This is the second game on this list alone to feature people lost in a flooded world, which means you can probably make up a genre title for it - I suggest "cursed-person sploosher", or "real-time splash-egy".
Redout
This disgustingly attractive zero gravity racer is a descendent of F-Zero and Wipeout, from their ludicrous twitch-handling to featuring the kind of music a nightclub in 2098 would play. What's new, you ask? Well, you can play it on freaking Xbox finally.
Bonus Hip Cred: This doesn't need cred, look at the thing. It's like what Jake Gyllenhaal would look like, were he a video game.
The Sun and the Moon
It won Ludum Dare. It is a lo-fi 2D platformer with a neat, tricky central mechanic. It's probably about loneliness or something. This effortlessly becomes the hippest game on this list. It also looks like it has the potential to be desperately, screamingly difficult, which is nice.
Bonus Hip Cred: You can say "yeah, it actually reminds me of Kalimba in a weird way. Oh you don't know Kalimba?" Sorted.
Swordy
Between this and Gang Beasts, we're pretty sure the "physics brawler" is going to be 2015's winning entry for "genre that will be cloned to cultural death in 2016". You and your friends grab various weapons, then use the power of momentum to spin them into one another in a top-down fight to the death.
Bonus Hip Cred: We reckon a few clips of this would make a pretty cool music video for some otherwise middle-of-the-road dream pop band.
