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2015 was a pretty sweet year for video games, and 2016 has the potential to be something truly special. Both Xbox One and PS4 have hit their stride, and this year we should begin to see some of the big-hitters stepping outside their comfort zones with bold titles like Crackdown 3 and Horizon: Zero Dawn, while smaller developers delight with the likes of Firewatch and Tacoma. There's also the almost incomprehensible possibility that we'll have played both The Last Guardian and Final Fantasy 15 by year's end. But, as ever, there's a good chance that many of this year's most exciting titles aren't to be found in the list we've compiled below, for the simple reason that we don't know about them yet. There'll be unexpected pleasures to be found in quiet corners of Steam; there's whatever Nintendo has in store for the end of the year, potentially on a new console; and there are the uncharted territories that the realisation of virtual reality in the home will bring. For now, though, in (very) rough order of release date, these are the 50 titles coming in 2016 that we're most excited for.Jonathan Blow's poured plenty of money and time into this follow-up to Braid, a game that feels like it almost single-handedly kickstarted an entire industry. Even without that lineage, though, The Witness still exerts quite a pull: it's a nested puzzlebox of a game in which you ponder a series of interlocking mazes that promise to fit together in surprising ways. At its most basic level, this is disarmingly simple stuff as you wander an island, tackling one puzzle after the next. The devil, though, lies in the details as one challenge builds on or subverts the last, and every piece contributes to the whole.
If Frontier's Elite Dangerous drew comparisons to Euro Truck Simulator, then perhaps SCS Software's follow-up American Truck Simulator is its Star Citizen: bolder, brasher and with an emphasis on the transatlantic twang. For all the glamour that a 4am run from Portsmouth to Ghent once held, soundtracked by the middle-aged melancholy of Magic FM, there's something a little more alluring about the American open road and its promise of freedom. That, and the Americans know a thing or two about how to make a damn fine truck, too.
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