Every time I set out to write about the Summer Game Fest, AKA (only by me) “The Summer Feighleys” I remember about two hours in that I simply am not built for this kind of nonsense. I know how to do journalism, but I’m just not one of those people who can sit in front of an event for several hours and just tweet or liveblog about it. But I keep insisting on doing this. Why do I hate myself this badly? Why can’t I just ever do anything nice for myself? To add insult to injury, I didn’t even have to do this! I had an excuse for not watching all four hours of today’s event! I was stuck at work, earning a paycheck! I’m not being paid for this!!
But, god dammit, I did it. I did watch all two hours of the hyper-cynical Summer Game Fest Commercial-a-thon. I did watch the drearily-earnest Day of the Devs. And by fucking god, I did watch all however-many-minutes of Devolver Digital’s increasingly stupid, increasingly pointless sideshow-slash-showcase.
And out of all of that nerd-ass fuckery, I think I managed to see some games I’d like to play. Let’s talk about it.
The Summer Game Fest
We started the afternoon about six or eight minutes after I clocked out from work and shut my work computers down. I didn’t even get up from my decrepit desk chair, which I had been sitting in for about nine hours already. I just booted up YouTube, jumped over to the Game Awards’ channel, and fucking mainlined the hot consumerist garbage straight into my fucking lungs.
It’s no secret that I don’t really like Geoff Keighley. I think he’s a classic nepo baby who once did good work in the media industry yet who has solely dealt in marketing language and customs for the past, like, 15 years. The torch he lit in games media – in-depth behind the scenes interviews with devs – has long been picked up by folks like Danny O’Dwyer at NoClip, and now all Keighley can really offer us are these saccharine, plasticky awards shows and showcases that primarily offer us healthy doses of cringe on top of a thin spread of mild interest in a game or two.
This year was Summer Game Fest’s first live-audience show. The event started, according to Keighley, “in a spare bedroom” back in 2020. I don’t know why he felt the need to tell us this; I can only figure one of his writers asked him to say something that made him a bit more relatable. I still couldn’t really hear it over the sound his family connections to the movie industry makes.
This year was also the year I decided to judge Keighley harshly for his fashion choices. The t-shirt and jacket he wore tonight? Ugly. He was outclassed by everyone, even the guy from NetherRealms who wore a button-down shirt he got from Target four years ago. Compared to Nicolas Cage’s ostentatious suit and Sam Lake’s sleek black ensemble, Keighley looked like the kind of chump who would willingly host a game showcase like this.
“But what about the games?” I mean, look. We saw a metric fuckton of trailers, and if I hadn’t slavishly written them down in a three-hundred-tweet twitter thread, I wouldn’t have even been able to remember them all. But since you’re here less for my pointless vendetta against a very rich guy and more for the consumer products he shoved down our (my) throat I guess I’ll talk about some cool things I liked.
The very first game shown looked genuinely neat. It’s Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, the first actual Prince of Persia game since The Forgotten Sands. It appears to combine side-scrolling puzzle-platforming with big and brash arena boss battles. The aesthetic is super colorful and cartoonish and the action wasn’t groundbreaking but it didn’t look terrible. It’s a Ubisoft project, so I hope the folks who work on this game aren’t harassed to death by their supervisors and executives.
Another game, SandLand, from Bandai Namco, looks to adapt one of Akira Toriyama’s smallest manga to games. One weird thing was that Keighley mentioned it was a game being developed in Unreal Engine 5. I’m going to be dead honest with you: you can’t tell from a distance, and it doesn’t really seem to matter for what kind of game SandLand seems like it’s going to be: a character action RPG in the vein of every other anime/manga-based RPG ever made.
John Carpenter’s let his name be plastered all over a new video game called TOXIC COMMANDO and I’m fucking hype for it. It’s Left 4 Dead, but maybe this’ll have a chance at surviving in a way Back 4 Blood didn’t. Here’s why I’m ready to fucking go with this: “In the near future, an experimental attempt to harness the power of the Earth’s core ends in a terrifying disaster: the release of the Sludge God.” That’s the first goddamn line of the synopsis for this game on the Epic Games Store. Hell yeah. Fuck yeah. Sludge God.
And finally, a game anyone who has known me for longer than an hour knows I’d clamor for: Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name. It looks to be Yakuza 6-era combat mixed with a healthy dose of pulp spy melodrama surrounding Kiryu Kazuma’s descent into the Daidoji group. It’s out on November 9.
Honorable mentions: Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior looks like Hades but with a time travel cloning mechanic. Worth checking out. Under the Waves combines underwater exploration and submarining with horror, because we all needed more reasons to have thalassophobia. Remnant II is out soon, looks cool. I never played the first game because it didn’t seem to be for me.[1]The trailers for Lysfanga and Under the Waves come from Quantic Dream, a shitty company with a shitty history of workplace abuse, toxic workplace culture and bigoted harassment. However, the games … Continue reading
Day of the Devs
I always tend to enjoy myself more watching DoubleFine and Iam8bit’s joint production, Day of the Devs, than I do watching the Summer Game Fest. But for whatever reason, there seemed to be this weird cloud hanging over the second major event of the day. I don’t know how else to explain it, except that I thought just about everyone who came through to promote their games – many of which were bright, vibrant, intricate, passionately-made things – did so with this kind of dead cadence. It was weirdly earnest, almost po-faced, and not even the sparest spread of Tim Schafer’s usual shenanigans seemed to brighten the mood. I don’t know what the deal is with that, but I do know that I saw another handful of games I’m very interested in playing.
Hauntii, by Moonloop Games, is the first game of the night that genuinely made me sit up and utter, “oh shit” under my breath. I am in awe of how pretty this game looks, and it seems like there’s quite a bit of substance to it as well. The gameplay premise is simple enough: haunt stuff to get around and do things. Don’t mind if I do.
The next game I saw, I almost feel like I have to talk about: Cart Life.
Cart Life is not a new game. It first came out almost ten full years ago, and it immediately took the indie games world by storm, winning the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, the Nuovo Award, and the Excellence in Narrative Award at GDC 2013. The game, developed by Richard Hofmeier, is about labor, setting down roots in unfamiliar situations and settings, and relationships formed in the process of starting a business. AdHoc Studios is overseeing the remaster of the original in collaboration with Hofmeier, and it looks fantastic.
Finally, Die Gute Fabrik, creators of Mutazione, has a new game coming called Saltsea Chronicles that feels very much like the spiritual sequel to the aforementioned Mutazione. It looks like we’ll split our time between various small communities, learning their social dynamics and building up a myriad of stories along the way. My shit entirely.
Honorable Mentions: Mars First Logistics looks like building a Mars Rover to solve weird puzzles with a LEGO set. Cocoon, a game developed by the gameplay dev from Inside et. al, is bewildering but I still want to play it. And BeastieBall, a game by Greg Lebonov etc., looks like a somewhat creative spin on “collecting monsters to battle with.”
Devolver Digital’s… thing
Emphatically, I wish Devolver Digital would fucking stop. That’s all I even want to say about this.
Anyway, there were only four games shown. Two of them looked cool. One of them was Wizard With A Gun, a survival/crafting/co-op shooter that looked like a cross between Cult of the Lamb and a Hellboy comic. The other was Baby Steps, a game by the developers of Ape Out and the Worst Person To Make A Video Game[2]not really, though Getting Over It was exquisitely frustrating, Bennett Foddy of Getting Over It infamy. Extreme QWOP vibes here.
Come back tomorrow as I report on the Tribeca Games Showcase, I guess.
Fuck, I’m so tired.
References
| ↑1 | The trailers for Lysfanga and Under the Waves come from Quantic Dream, a shitty company with a shitty history of workplace abuse, toxic workplace culture and bigoted harassment. However, the games themselves look like they’re published by different studios that have simply signed on to be published by Quantic Dream. Some might find that to be a distinction without a difference, but I think it’s a meaningful enough layer of separation to not immediately turn these games down. |
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| ↑2 | not really, though Getting Over It was exquisitely frustrating |