Gaming console wars seemed to be a thing of past, but this year the competition is gonna heat up again. An hour into its online event, mostly dedicated to showing trailer of new games developed for its next-gen console, yesterday Sony revealed how the Playstation 5 will look like. The palette choices and the shape of the new device are interesting and bold, and contrast quite strongly with the design of its main competitor, the Xbox Series X. With the new Xbox Microsoft went for a blocky, black, monolithic design, Sony’s designers picked white, with accents of purple, and sandwiched the black core of the console between two wavy planes twisted along the same axis.

In most of the marketing visuals available so fare, the new Playstation 5 is shown standing upright. In this position it reminds of a skyscraper commissioned by a sci-fi loving Dubai entrepreneur. When it’s laid horizontally, to fit comfortably under a TV set on a sideboard, it turns into a generic contemporary art center where the architects forgot to design the entrance. Apart from the easy irony that will inevitably greet the new design (Twitter’s your go-to place if you’re into that kind of thing: apparently everyone’s a celebrated designer, on there), Sony made some commendable visual choices here. Whether you’ll like it or not, the new Playstation 5 design comes across as bold and distinctive and will certainly help to set the device apart from anything else we’ve seen so far.