Here are all the best bits from PlayStation’s State of Play January show

Every few months, Sony likes to take to the stage and flex its muscles by showing off a bunch of upcoming PlayStation games. State of Play 2024 was just such an occasion, and it was a star-studded affair that made anyone with a PS5 feel rather excited about their lovely white box of dreams.

There’s a lot of big games heading to the PlayStation ecosystem in the coming months, And we’ve cherry-picked the most exciting of all so that you don’t have to sit through the whole 40-minute livestream yourself.

All of it absolute nonsense, of course. Babies puking miniature space ships. A woman with too many hands, performing surgical procedures. Norman Reedus battling a giant spider that seems to be visiting from Elden Ring. Don’t try to make sense of it. To stare into the plot arc of a Kojima game is to go mad. Just let the wonderful images wash over you and prepare for gaming’s premier ‘carrying things about in Scandi landscapes’ sim to return bigger and better in 2025.

Yes, there’s a bathtub full of viscera and some legs-monsters and faceless nurses clawing at your face. All things you’d ordinarily file away under ‘upsetting horror imagery not to think about before bed’. But it’s the quiet moments that really impress in Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 remake, due for release later this year. It’s the unbearable tension of walking down a creaky corridor, or working away at a puzzle in eerie stillness, knowing that the monsters are out there, somewhere.

There’s also a montage involving a moth that is painted onto our eyelids now and we will definitely be seeing it as soon as we turn out the lights tonight.

Look, we’ve watched this one a few times now and we still can’t make sense of the story. A girl in mid-Noughties emo makeup’s telling you that all your memories are fake, and suddenly you’re in a frenetic shooter that’s giving BioShock vibes. Sometimes games don’t need to make sense. We’re in.

There’s a good reason it looks a bit like BioShock: developer Ghost Story Games is Ken Levine’s studio. Yep, the Ken Levine who worked on System Shock 2, and the BioShock series (and a bit of the legendary late ‘90s stealth game Thief: The Dark Project, too). He’s one of the best storytellers the medium has, so we trust him to turn this trailer and its highfalutin ideas about fake memories and turn it into cold-pressed gold.

The original game was where western RPGs and JRPGs met in the middle. It was where great new ideas percolated, and where a vision of the genre that stood apart from Skyrim and Soulslike was born. Number 2 looks like that, but all pretty and polished.

This new trailer shows off what it’s like to play as the Wayfarer vocation, a new class that’s exclusive to the player character. Essentially it lets you do everything in one build - wield powerful magic, cast deception spells on enemies, and take all kinds of physical weapons into combat. The indecisive player’s go-to, then. This one’s out on 22 March, so there’s not long to wait now.

Who remembers 2015’s Until Dawn? Left or right? Stop and help your friend or continue evading the saw-wielding maniac? Ah never mind, you skipped a dialogue choice half an hour ago so now you’re watching a close buddy being cut in half. Good times.

Visually, Supermassive’s interactive teen horror slasher flick always felt a bit ahead of its time. The frame rates on PS4 were playable, rather than zippy, but the fidelity was intense. Well now in remastered form, it can really stretch its legs and make use of PS5’s grunt. And maybe on this playthrough we can actually keep everyone alive. (We definitely won’t.)

Hands up who saw that coming. Put them down, you absolute fibbers. Dave The Diver was one of 2023’s surprise hits, a collection of genres, art styles and disparate activities all tangentially related to the titular diver’s life that just shouldn’t have been so compelling. But it was. So in a sense it’s no surprise that it’s heading to PS5, or that there’s more content on the way for it.

That it’s a DLC pack that seems to be about Godzilla, though - that’s a bit of a left turn. We’ll go with it. Dave The Diver arrives on PS5 in April, and it’s inexplicably bringing that Godzilla DLC with it for free.