When Charlie Brooker's Netflix series about tech-driven dystopias, Black Mirror, returns, it will do so with a surprising new twist: a mobile video game tie-in called Thronglets. Think Tamagotchi, but psychologically threatening. Netflix showed off both a sneak peek of the new season of Black Mirror and the accompanying life sim game from Night School Studios during a private event in March during the Game Developers Conference. Sean Krankel, cofounder of Night School Studios and Netflix's newly appointed general manager of narrative, says the team worked closely with Brooker to create "an artifact" from the show people could experience as an extension of its story. "The way I came back to the team and I was like, oh my God, imagine if you brought a Mogwai home and it effed up your life after you watched Gremlins," Krankel says.

There is no way to speak definitively about what is likely to astonish in the days to come, and so one must fall back on intuition or educated guesses. In the search for shortcuts, pedigree is an easy metric on which to rely; it's the principle that informs the following selections of the most anticipated video-game titles of the coming year. Each of the development teams behind a game on this list is responsible for a previous widely acclaimed tile. No one here is an underdog. In 2013, the cultural marketplace was saturated with post-apocalyptic zombie narratives.