Because Life is Strange, the brand new, episodic adventure game from Remember Me developer Dontnod, isn't taking the grandiose, superheroic approach to temporal tomfoolery. Rather, it integrates its clock-bothering malarkey into an otherwise entirely naturalistic tale of estranged childhood friendships, troubled parent/offspring relationships, and the strains of becoming an adult amid the numerous traumas of school, small towns, and non-ideal peer groups.

There is a central mystery at the core of the story, namely one relating to the recent disappearance of a local girl, but however that plays out, the game's refreshingly matter-of-fact, personal, and introspective treatment of its content already gives me high hopes for an unusually engaging tale. Playing like a quiet, sedate version of Telltale's The Walking Dead, it concentrates its time-warping not on epic, world-saving situations, but on the fixing of minor but important mistakes.

The careless screwing over of a friend with a panicked, badly thought-out dialogue choice can be undone. The whole preceding scenario can be struck from the record by going back a little further. Environmental puzzle solutions can be reverse-engineered by coming to understand their causality backwards. And all of this is wrapped up in a quietly thoughtful--but thankfully non-angsty--vibe of underplayed humanity. However much the game's core mechanic might flagrantly break the fundamental laws of physics, it's all to the end of making little, but hopefully far reaching, improvements in its very real characters' very real lives.

Battlefield Hardline's campaign is being made not by usual developer DICE, but by Dead Space studio Visceral games. That fact is very, very significant. Because while multiplayer-minded DICE has often seemed to struggle in translating Battlefield's open, emergent online play into a satisfying offline campaign, Visceral has a hell of a track record with the all-important pacing, structure and set-pieces.

That shines through in Battlefield Hardline's Gamescom demo. Now focused around a single, rather human cop, rather than legions of faceless Marines, its tale of undercover investigation and moral ambiguity feels a far cry from the vast but unengaging conflicts of single-player Battlefields past. Previous games have impressed with their breadth, but been found lacking in terms of agency and involvement. Hardline takes the opposite approach, scaling things in, but ironically providing much more scope for experimentation and improvisational play. In fact, it's built out of the stuff.

You see that 'far cry' line above wasn't a mere figure of speech. The action I've seen this week seems to take inspiration from Far Cry 3's fantastic, dynamic camp raids in all the right ways. Watching an assault on a junkyard play out twice, in stealthy and loud variations, the parallels are obvious and very, very heartening. A small sandbox. A non-linear objective with optional bonus tasks. Multiple means of entry and escape. More nuanced AI than usual, with multiple levels of alertness and aggression, leading to more layered interactions. It's great stuff, right down to the climactic, Metal Gear-style, hide-and-seek evasion, leading to a custom zipline escape from a guard tower.

And there's more going on than that, and it’s all very cool. Click on through the following slides and I'll fill you in.