Skip to main content

The 7 best game trailers from Sony's E3 2016 press event

The 7 best game trailers from Sony's E3 2016 press event

Share this story

While Microsoft's E3 event this morning focused largely on new hardware, at Sony it was all about games. In a lean, mean presentation accompanied by a symphony orchestra, the company highlighted a range of hotly awaited games and threw in a few nice surprises.

Here are our favorite game trailers from the nighttime event, including Resident Evil 7, The Last Guardian, and a new game from creative genius Hideo Kojima.

Resident Evil 7

A phone rings, cockroaches crawl on your hand, and it all gets worse from there. In part that's because of the medium — this game is coming for PlayStation VR. The trailer for the forthcoming Resident Evil 7 emphasizes creepiness over gore, and it's highly effective. The game arrives January 24th, but a free demo is being made available tonight.

Spider-Man

One of the evening's big surprises was that Sony has acquired the rights to, and is actively developing, a new game about Spider-Man. The game doesn't have a title yet, but we know that it comes from Insomniac Games — makers of fast-paced, good-humored titles including Ratchet & Clank and Sunset Overdrive. But this trailer focuses on the joy of movement — it's exhilarating to watch Spider-Man crash through the city, and the animations are some of the most impressive we've seen.

Days Gone

Another game that arrived as something of a question mark tonight was Days Gone, which had been rumored as some sort of post-apocalyptic motorcycle game. It does feature a drifter on a motorcycle, but the focus of the game is on zombies — unfathomable amounts of zombies, coming at you from every direction. The gameplay trailer that closed the show was frankly a little ridiculous — but the trailer above, which focuses on the game's characters, is significantly more promising.

Death Stranding

Creative genius Hideo Kojima made the event's best entrance, walking down a digital staircase that lit up in white with each one of his steps. The game he went on to present was much, much stranger — a character played by Norman Reedus, best known for his work on The Walking Dead, crouches naked in an alien environment clutching a newborn. We don't get any real sense of the story from the trailer, but you do get a view of Norman Reedus' digitized butt. When it comes to Kojima — who's making his first game here since leaving Konami in the wake of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain — it's best just to go with it.

Call of Duty: Infinite War

It's Call of Duty unlike we've ever seen it before. The trailer begins with starfighters launching out of tubes and dogfighting in space, and moves into first-person spacewalking and shooting anything that moves. It's a promising debut for a game that takes the familiar combat elements into wild new directions. You can play it November 4th.

The Last Guardian

The most important thing we learned about The Last Guardian tonight is its release date: after years of delays, it's finally set to arrive October 25th. But we also got a beautiful trailer featuring poignant scenes with Trico the giant dog-bird thing. It looks like a fitting conclusion to the trilogy that started in Ico and continued in Shadow of the Colossus, and we can't wait to play it.

God of War

One of the meatiest gameplay demos we saw came in trailer for a new God of War game — and we're not just saying that because it finds Kratos hunting for meat. Over the course of 10 minutes, we meet Kratos' son, hear vague references to his mother, and watch the father-son pair as they fight against a bewildering slew of enemies. We're not sure what all this game has in store, but the trailer has us eager to see where it all goes.