Sony's announcement last week of the upcoming release of its next-generation video game console, the PlayStation 4, went exactly as expected: The company's executives took the floor of Manhattan's Hammerstein Ballroom, talked about the new machine's extended RAM and redesigned controller, and left very few fans and reporters moved. Instead, whatever excitement surrounded Sony originated from a rumor that the company would finally deliver a long-awaited game called The Last Guardian. When that rumor proved untrue, Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida—who probably expected to be riding high after the PS4 announcement—found himself apologizing for the game's delay.

Console makers typically time the release of their latest machine with a number of anticipated games, a way of drumming up attention and convincing gamers to spend hundreds of dollars upgrading to a slightly improved version of the machine they already own. But The Last Guardian is not your common blockbuster: It is the sequel to 2005's Shadow of the Colossus, a radically minimalist game—created by the celebrated Japanese designer Fumito Ueda and published by Sony itself—that featured long stretches of meditation and had much more in common with Ingmar Bergman than it did with Grand Theft Auto. Like its predecessor, The Last Guardian is expected to be a visually arresting, spiritually stirring exercise in dreamlike play. Also like its predecessor, which easily made it onto Sony's list of its all-time greatest hits, Guardian is slated to bring the gaming company a much-needed windfall.

That a game focusing on the relationship between an unarmed boy and a giant baby Gryphon, and dedicated to exploring ideas and emotions rather than actions, could rise to such prominence is a testament to how comfortable video games have grown with experimentation. Increasingly, game designers are taking risks exploring the limitations of their craft—and increasingly, they are being rewarded for their daring.

Among the more lavishly rewarded is Limbo. Released in 2010 on the Xbox Live Arcade download service, it is the sort of nightmare that German Expressionism so expertly produced, a black-and-white set piece with stark lighting and strange shapes that make every moment creepy and foreboding. The game focuses on an unnamed young boy's effort to find his lost sister in a vast and punishing forest—located, the game informs us, on the "edge of hell"—and, to the extent that it matters, the gameplay revolves around solving puzzles. The real pleasure, however, comes from being forced to contemplate death, never too subtly: Make the wrong move, and your scrappy protagonist meets a gruesome end. A slew of peculiar gory dismemberments later, the game comes to a maddeningly open end, making its deliberately disorienting plot even harder to fathom. It's as demanding and moody a work of fiction as anything cinema has produced in a long while, but its box-office intake was more Cineplex than art house: The year it was released, the game was the highest grossing title on Xbox Live, earning its small studio, Playdead, $7.5 million and 527,000 registered players. The following year, with the game introduced on additional platforms such as Apple's App Store, the number of Limbo players crossed the one million mark, making its developers enough money to enable them to buy back their company from their corporate investors.

But while Limbo and The Last Guardian innovate in ways that Hollywood might find familiar—bending the form rather than breaking it—other titles go much further. When you start playing the desktop game Activate the Three Artefacts and Then Leave, for example, all you see is a black dot on a white screen. Move closer, and the dot is revealed to be a complex geometrical structure, an Escherian maze that soon proves impossible to master. Frustrated, you start noticing that the maze emits a high-pitch note, and that the note's frequency changes with each movement you make. To find the objects hidden in the maze, and to find your way out, all you have to do is listen very closely and, literally, play it by ear.