Ubisoft's conference on Monday night was all the richer for not rushing through their upcoming catalogue and letting us linger on the footage and news of their games. It sat in stark contrast to the Microsoft presentation in which Phil Spencer boasted about squeezing fifty video games in a single ninety-minute slot like someone trying to stuff their whole wardrobe into a tiny suitcase. You might argue that a company like Microsoft has to spend less time on each game compared to a company like Ubisoft because of their different roles in the industry. Of course Microsoft had to burn through all those introductions to and elaborations on various titles, they're a console manufacturer who sees hundreds of games land on their platform every year, while Ubisoft is simply one of many publishers who'll release on that platform and doesn't have to keep as many balls in the air at once. But Sony exposes that the naivety in that argument; against all the odds, they are a console manufacturer who constructed their show around just four titles, working within a format that let us get an in-depth breakdown of a few games rather than morsels of information on a wide range of them.

At least, that's how it looked on paper. It wasn't that we didn't get a sizeable gameplay reel for at least three of those four releases, but where other companies were desperate to conserve every last drop of time in their press conference, sometimes it felt like Sony wanted to fill time. Obviously, they had to spend some of their available time on trailers for new titles which was fine, but then there were two long instrumental performances which were a more questionable use of that resource, and there was the almost quarter hour where Sony cut away from their theatre for a Playstation talk show with a couple of trailers thrown in. There was a point at which it seemed like the host had to reassure us that they would return to their regular feature in the coming minutes for fear of losing their interest, and thirty minutes in, the company had only shown us one of their four main games.

We're used to seeing the pacing of press conferences wilt when a particular kind of game pops up on screen: This happens with sports titles, and it used to be the speciality of motion control games, but in Sony's conference it felt like they hit that same wall for no reason other than they had to march their audience from one room to another. Was it cool that they got their crowd inside one of the locations from The Last of Us II? Yes. Was it worth the press conference taking a nap while people filed into the primary venue? No, it was not. At least when the rhythm of press conferences would hitch in the past, they were still imparting information about games. That wasn't the case for Sony this year. Although, the reason I call those calm instrumental performances questionable rather than condemnable is that they did help establish a slower speed for the briefing and seemed to be more accurate to the attitude of the games than even Bethesda's guitar-thrashing Andrew WK song was to theirs.

The quick-fire nature of the trailers somewhat disrupted the more patient flow of the rest of the show, but they also brought with them one of my favourite unveilings of the conference. The combat in Remedy's Control looked a little bit Alan Wake, and Alan Wake's gun-slinging wore thin by the end of that game, but the environmental art in Control looked phenomenal. Remedy sidestepped the generic haunted houses and infested spaceships that are ubiquitous in horror games to focus on a more surreal setting inspired by offices, recording studios, and abstract geometry. Horror aims to unseat us with the alien but all too often fails because its tropes feel so familiar so it's hugely gratifying when someone subverts those tropes. DONTNOD's Twin Mirror also appears to have a contagious enthusiasm for surreal environments. But there were a couple of the trailers I wasn't so hot on.

The Trover Saves the Universe advert was unusual in that when you have actual gameplay footage to show then you usually don't spend time on a lot of pre-rendered content that isn't part of your product. Maybe that was a more natural way to convey the humour of the game than showing cutscenes to us, but we need to see the comedy in the product itself to know it's there. The skit was also awkward and unfunny. Justin Roiland knows how to pen jokes but it felt like the brevity of that trailer threw the comedic timing off and that the lack of a narrative backbone meant there wasn't much to hang a joke off of. This was also the third press conference this year that featured a Kingdom Hearts III trailer, and it feels like the game is just a little too cult to merit that degree of exposure. The Pirates of the Caribbean art style clashed with the Disney art style, and that kind of incompatibility is inevitably going to emerge when you smash a bunch of disparate cinematic universes together. In retrospect, it seems like Kingdom Hearts was a precursor to the audio-visual metaverses of the Marvel and DC films, although, from the outside, the meaning behind those three title cards at the end of the trailer was impenetrable. Now onto the big four.

The Last of Us II was a beacon of queer representation in an expo otherwise devoid of it. We must, however, pay attention to the audience reaction to it online and acknowledge that while many fans were overjoyed to see romance between two women in a game, a worrying large homophobic portion of the audience that made themselves known as that demo went out. The silver lining is that Naughty Dog was angering the right people. While other companies have mimed taking sociopolitical stances which could at least partially divide their userbase, Naughty Dog actually did it. Although, I am seeing more trailers than ever which start with idyllic human moments and then descend into video game grittiness with that grittiness intended to be the real subject matter of the game, but the human moment remaining the more interesting part. It's more a problem I had with the cinematic trailer for The Division 2 or the preview of Stormland, but I felt it a little with The Last of Us II.

The Last of Us will obviously still make time for moments of human conflict and empathy, but where violence seemed to be used to punctuate the quiet of the first game, the trailer for The Last of Us II suggested a more constant stream of brutality. That may be unrepresentative of the final experience, but it's that attitude that made it appear a little more like a gallery of gore than it did a game which was using violence to reinforce the story's emotional bullet points. It's definitely a read worth considering when you notice how nonchalant that trailer was in slipping from a passionate kiss to the image of Ellie slitting a man's throat. Such violence isn't something you can just turn the knob up on to get more horrified reactions. The gameplay looked a little more Tomb Raider than the last game's did, but compare this to the actual new Tomb Raider game coming out, and there's no competition. The Last of Us II had more unique encounters in its levels and a thematic framing for its action that Shadow of the Tomb Raider could only dream of. It does also feel like we've made some progress as a community since the purposefully disturbing murder of the original Last of Us being met with hungry cheers from the audience.

In its riding, climbing, swordfights, and stealth, Ghost of Tsushima looks somewhat derivative of Assassin's Creed, and while its lack of HUD helped us make an unfettered connection with its world, it did make it a little harder to tell what controls and mechanical consequences the player was working with at any one time. I also wonder if such a game will be able to have players navigate smoothly to its objectives without a waypoint system. But it was a strong example of how the graphical formidability of current consoles can natural beauty to life. GPUs are in themselves more like paint and canvas than the artistic achievements they've often treated as, and it takes a game like Ghost of Tsushima to use them towards astounding ends. By the point we hit this presentation, we could also see how the slower pace of the Sony conference supported the tempo of more gentle, measured games where other briefings used rapid back-to-back trailers and demos to present titles that always stayed on the move.

If I'm reading the room right, Death Stranding has been one of the most divisive games of E3, and I'm on the side of that divide which doesn't believe in this Hideo Kojima passion project. At least, not until we see more. This is one of those moments where there is no shortage of people expressing that they love how the game looks and I can only respond with "What game?". I enjoyed the visual design in its preview: gloomy but organic environments pierced by shafts of alien, utilitarian technology, but if you've fallen for Death Stranding, I have to ask, what is the premise of Death Stranding? What does playing Death Stranding involve? I don't think those questions have answers.

This is the third year in a row where Kojima has shown us not a game but a bunch of themes and actors floating in a tank, and not only is his unwillingness to talk in detail about the game not held to the same scrutiny as that of other developers, but that vagueness often seems to be confused for artistry. Kojima is borrowing from high art cinema which tends to use a lot of symbolism where video games are traditionally very literal, but just because nuanced works use a lot of indirect representation, that doesn't mean that any use of symbolism is nuanced. Visual metaphor becomes meaningful when it relates to well-developed characters and plot; when done right, it creates depth not because the fiction is missing detail but because it adds detail to it. I'm worried that what we have at the moment is a drought of information on Death Stranding which has encouraged people to fill in the gaps with their own ideal version of the game rather than them considering that there might not be enough material here to make a glowing judgement on it.

But even a game that didn't put on a stunning performance before can still be redeemed. I didn't see what other people saw in Spider-Man last year and was worried the game came down too close to the frequently-imitated Arkham Asylum, and I can't say I'm convinced now that it's not importing heavily from Rocksteady's classic. Its demo didn't just have Spider-Man using a grapple and striking out against multiple enemies at once; it also had prisoners with stun batons and shields which are both long-running enemy types in the Batman Arkham games. However, where Spider-Man was copying established patterns of game design, it never felt like it did so in a way that eclipsed who this character is. Spider-Man's fighting style consisted of more aerial moves than you'll find in a Batman game, and in a pinch, he was able to grapple nearby objects to hurl at enemies, a pull-and-push move which looks empowering to perform and allows you to get more in touch with the environment. You could see a similar technique being used in the Control trailer. While we could view Spider-Man's web-slinging as another commonplace grapple mechanic, you can see that he moves in a low arc as opposed to the straight line that grapples in other games usually rely on. The underhand movement of Spider-Man's tumbling about the city emphasised momentum and rewarded the player for jumping into another grapple with the correct timing. Narratively and aesthetically, what surprised me most was that while the rest of the game looks sunny and reasonably light-hearted, this section of the adventure had a murky look and told a story of Peter Parker's downfall. Either the game sets itself up by having all the criminals released from the prison into the map in a similar way to Arkham City, or we saw part of the game's second act. Either way, Sony had an above-average closer for this year.

While this conference was kept from reaching the heights it could have due to padding and logistical issues, I appreciated that the games Sony put the most resources into displaying weren't by-the-numbers AAA crowd-pleasers. We got to see a more narratively-focused title with some queer representation in the form of The Last of Us II, Ghost of Tsushima was a game that longingly depicted Japanese countryside and architecture, Spider-Man was a bet on the superhero genre when few other companies are leaning that way, and while I have a lot of criticisms of Death Stranding's presentation, nothing they showed of it was ordinary. We're told that E3 has to be an unrestrained spectacle and that companies coming to the podium with bravado and more to say than to show is just how the expo is. But Sony showed a surprisingly classy alternative considering they're one of the world's largest tech corporations. The dignity of their presentation didn't mean we were deprived of our superheroes and swordfights, those were still in there, but a greater reverence for their audience meant a more substantial look at these empowerment fantasies, and I'd love to see other companies follow suit. Thanks for reading.