EDIT: I initially wanted to put this in with the original post but I forgot because my brain is fucked right now, but since the Summer Game Fest is such a creativity suck, you should go buy the Queer Games Bundle. It’s $60 for nearly 600 games and such, and it’s got a lot of quality shit in it. Click here for more information.
I have never really committed to “covering” an industry event like the Summer Game Fest, aka not-E3, aka “Do Not Call This Keigh-3 Under Any Circumstances,” but for some reason I’ve decided to be Big Stupid. And now that I’ve watched the first two shows out of… several this weekend alone, I do have some thoughts.
Let’s start from the most obvious position we can: this whole concept is one big infomercial for an industry that realistically, by-and-large, does not need it. Triple-A video games sit at the top of the cultural ubiquity scale, and it just does not really seem necessary for there to be this big special to-do about “celebrating” or even informing the public about these games when chances are pretty good they’re already going to get a lot of press. A game like The Callisto Protocol is already prominent on the minds and tongues of games media, for example, because it’s a game designed by Glen Schofield, the designer of Dead Space – an important video game™. What Summer Game Fest offers us is: what if The Callisto Protocol, but every other fucking game on the docket. I’m only exaggerating a little bit.
There were a handful of other big features at Summer Game Fest, and they all felt weird and soulless. Like the 10 minutes we spent fixated on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2022), a game published by Activision Blizzard, in a year where that company’s reputation has literally never been worse. We also spent just… too much goddamn time with Neil Druckmann talking about The Last of Us Part I: We Remade This To Crunch Again Just For Fun. There was at least one surprise in the reveal of Routine, a game that basically disappeared for a while. Unfortunately it chose to reappear amidst a glut of other, similar space horror games, like Aliens: Dark Descent, the aforementioned Callisto Protocol, and some goof-ass Troy Baker vehicle called Fort Solis.
The one (one!) game I saw during Geoff Keighley’s Gamer Prison that I thought looked interesting was Highwater, which is a strategy game set in a climate apocalypse. Its art direction looked cool, and the trailer starts with an incredible line (said by a pirate radio DJ), “the one thing we can’t deny is that the world ended on a sunny day.”
Other than this, the Summer Game Fest presentation proper was mainly just two hours of corporate shit-shoveling. And while it was fun to dunk on the absurdity of it all, I have to admit I was exhausted after the show. The void definitely started to stare back.
By comparison, the Tim Schaefer-hosted Day of the Devs was a cool drink of water: 45 minutes of nothing but interesting internationally-developed indie games that… weren’t… fucking… space horror games!!! I can’t stress enough: there was such a relative paucity of interesting ideas in the Summer Game Fest that everything – even the stuff I normally find cloying and off-putting – in this indie showcase felt new and exciting. The show started with a look at Time Flies, a game where you play as a fly as a means of exploring life expectancy and the certainty of death, and followed that up with a look at Choo Choo Charles, a fucking horrifying title where you pilot a tiny train being stalked by a bigger train with spider legs. Then the show took a hard pivot into twee territory with new info on Bear and Breakfast, before showing my two favorite games out of the whole presser: Naiad and Schim.
Naiad is a game where you portray a newly-born water nymph, and you explore your environment, interact with colorful flora and fauna, and contend with man’s incessant pollution. The thing about Naiad that really struck me was – again – the art style. It is painterly in a way that I haven’t seen expressed in exactly the same way before. I will absolutely be checking this out.
SCHiM seems to combine Splatoon-like gameplay with puzzle-solving elements in this gorgeous isometric view. I know almost nothing about this game, but the moment I saw it I knew I’d end up playing it. It’s just… I mean look at it.
While these two games in particular stood out to me, I have to say that my overall enjoyment for Day of the Devs was such that I felt positive about everything I was seeing. This has a lot to do with the sheer cringe and pain from the Summer Game Fest show, but also, I did get a kick out of seeing some genuinely inventive stuff.
The final show of the night was the Devolver Digital showcase, and it was characteristically weird as fuck, with Suda-51 showing up as a Max Headroom-esque virtual head inside a mecha while the world collapsed into the video game singularity. Among this chaos were some interesting announcements, principally: The Plucky Squire, which is an adventure game that combines 2D and 3D elements in a really neat narrative way, and Skate Story, which – fuck –
The Devolver “press conference” also had some fun social commentary in there for all the fans of “oh god Mark Fisher was right.”
There are more showcases tomorrow, and I guess I’ll be getting up sort of early for one of them, but honestly here’s what I’d have to say about today: I don’t really find this kind of thing all that edifying. I mean sure, it’s fun to dunk on Geoff with Twitter friends, but what do we really gain from putting all our energy into staring at this kind of cultural event? Is what we’re putting out into the world stemming from this really worth all our anguish and ennui? Can we ever escape Geoff Keighley’s Gamer Prison?
All I know is: video games forever. no escape dot com.