ANTICHAMBER (Release date to be determined: PC, Mac) One of many forever-in-the-making indie games that has a good shot at coming out in 2013, Antichamber is a first-person puzzle game that might be what M. C. Escher would have created if he had made first-person-perspective video games. The actual creator, Alexander Bruce, has devised a geography of nested puzzles designed to appeal to people who don’t expect a hallway or a stairwell to be the same shape when they walk through it backward as it was when they walked through it forward.

WATCH DOGS (Release date to be determined: PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3) The expensive-looking Watch Dogs is a wholly original game from the multinational publisher Ubisoft that appears to let you play through an action-adventure as a man who can hack into networks in the city where he lives. While walking down the street, he can change a traffic light from green to red. In a police chase he can immediately cause a drawbridge to lift. Most fascinating, as he walks past bystanders, he can see who qualified for home loans, who is H.I.V. positive and so on. This game assumes information and computer networking are the next deadly weapons.

0X10C (Release date to be determined: PC, Mac) In 2009 Markus Persson released Minecraft, a game that seemed to be about surviving in the wilderness but was really about using the Lego-like blocks that composed its world to make anything the players fancied. It became the canvas of choice for millions of imaginative players-turned-creators.

0x10c is what Mr. Persson is making next, though he can’t promise when it will be out or if it will even be fun enough to release. It seems to be a sci-fi action game set in the year A.D. 281 474 976 712 644, but its grand potential is in the virtual 16-bit computers that players will be able to have in their in-game spaceships. These will be fully programmable, empowering players to create a new universe’s worth of programs, viruses and who knows what else. Mr. Persson, it seems, doesn’t know how to think small. STEPHEN TOTILO