As the year is drawing to a close, it's time to point out the stuff you're looking forward to in the next one- especially since there are some new platforms on the way. Here's my own favored list for 2014-
Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number.- Apparently enough people liked the original Hotline Miami for Jonatan and Dennis to work on a sequel. The new game looks to keep the high but reasonable difficulty, as well as the mixture of flexible reality, Miami Vice-style aesthetic, and the disturbing pixelated ultra-violence that distinguished the original. this one will have two separate storylines, as well.
La-Mulana 2: The 0th Body, The 9th Spirit.- Naramura says that work began on this concurrently with the creation of the La-Mulana remake. They are continuing the goal of making the puzzles less obtuse than in the original game, or even the remake, but they are still committed to making a challenging metroidvania. At Nigoro's TGS booth, they kept a tally of how many people who tried the game ended up getting the heroine killed during their play session.
The tally they showed in the photo was 16, and I have no doubt it went higher as the day went on.
Enemy Starfighter- Mike Tipul's solo space-combat game project promises to be a little different from other games in the space combat genre. The complexity isn't so much on the gameplay end, but rather that each new campaign is procedurally generated, and the fact that the player is allowed to plan how to attack each mission Rainbow Six-style, and choose what available assets to commit to the latest fight. An intriguing variant that may be worth keeping an eye on.
http://www.enemystarfighter.com/Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky- All right, I know this is out on other platforms, but this is about the PC release, as well as the fact that more games than the first are going to end up being localized. Besides, it's always good to see more Falcom games trickle into the open market. This may certainly be worth looking into because it plays out more like a tactical RPG than Falcom's other action-RPG offerings like the Ys series, and it's being localized by the folks who brought us Recettear, so the quality is pretty much assured already.
And for the two or three others of you who care about pen and paper tabletop gaming:
Ryuutama: Natural Fantasy RPG- Yeah, Japanese tabletop RPGs are getting localized too. This one was first described to me as "Hayao Miyazaki's Oregon Trail", as far as tone and purpose go, and it's still pretty much the best description I could find. It is a fantasy RPG about travel- the PCs are going places in a very literal sense, where you get far more EXP for, say, crossing the mountains the hard way than killing any monster. A game that is very much about seeing the world rather than looting or saving it, essentially, played through the lens of more normal sorts of people than make up most adventuring parties. It doesn't use any odd mechanics, either.
I decided to give special mention to this because it occupies a conceptual space generally not explored in Western tabletop fantasy games, as the game is billed as a honobono (heartwarming/feelgood/something along those lines because Japanese has some words that can't be translated precisely into English) game. This denotes focus on friendship and exploration and community as opposed to violence or other extreme action, and so it seems to be built on the concept of a more people-firendly fantasy world rather than the sort where one wonders how a farmer gets his good to town due to the high likelihood of being jumped by 1d3+1 ogres on the way at all times of day, even (and perhaps especially) on weekends. this isn't to say it isn't without perils, as crossing high mountains or jungles is always dangerous even for high-level PCs, or that it's without great deeds to aspire to- rather that it's a more relaxed, sort of fantasy with more personal rather than sweeping stakes.
http://kotohi.com/ryuutama/