Snapshot: Tokyo Jungle (PS3)

Tokyo Jungle appears to be a cute, low-budget oddity – a cute action game about Pomeranians and baby chicks, wandering around a human-free Tokyo. The notion of its cuteness dissipates very quickly: despite the use of simplified, thankfully detail-free animation for the act, Tokyo Jungle is a necessarily gruesome game about animals surviving just as they do in nature, eating other animals and doing their best to avoid getting eaten. The Pomeranians stopped being cute the first time I saw two of them team up to drag a giant dead cat home.

As long as you keep that content warning in mind, I can't recommend Tokyo Jungle enough. The violence shouldn't have been surprising, but the clever structure of the game is a well-earned surprise.