Kaile Hultner We had two events on Wednesday: The Shacknews E4 Indie Showcase and Sony’s summer State of Play. I think both went more or less how everyone expected they would, but I still came away from each presentation feeling kinda odd.
The E4 Indie Showcase hosted by Shacknews lasted less than an hour and showed off just 23 games, which feels positively subdued compared to some of the other trailer dumps that usually happen this week. Not every game appealed to me personally (a normal and good thing), but there were some interesting standouts. 1000 Deaths reminded me heavily of those old marble platformers on macOS. Blood of Mehran looked a little janky but simultaneously like the studio, Permanent Way, was taking some really big swings. Causal Loop and Memory’s Reach both seemed like they were kind of playing in the same puzzley space. Never’s End got another shoutout and Twilight Wars looked like someone applied a cyberpunk filter to Darkest Dungeon – not a bad thing in the slightest.
All in all, not a bad little showcase. I did find it odd that Shacknews EIC/CEO Asif Khan took a minute after credits rolled to compare his games media website to independent developers because they’ve “gamified” it, or added a “web-based, browser-based game called Bubbletron, which is kind of like a sarcastic stock market almanac slot machine game that resets daily, kind of in the style of Wordle” to things. Like sure in the strictest sense of the word you’ve engaged in “development” but it feels exceptionally weird to compare yourself to folks making whole-ass games like that. I dunno. Left a weird taste in my mouth.
Later in the afternoon Sony hosted its State of Play, a 55-minute showcase of all the stuff coming to PS5 within the next 18 months, assuming the games industry doesn’t collapse entirely. Right off the bat we got a new Lumines game, called Lumines Arise, followed by my favorite announcement of the night from Grasshopper Manufacture, a new game called Romeo is a Dead Man. I’ve admittedly slept on GhM’s recent output but I’ve always loved the excessively stylish way they do violence, and Romeo is a Dead Man promises not just regular old violence for us to revel in, but ultra-violence. Hell yeah. I think Suda51 at one point called it a “Strong-style” action game, which, considering what that means in the context of pro wrestling, I’m interested to see how he’s going to apply it to his work.
We got a new trailer for Silent Hill f, the Ryukishi07-written sidequel to the classic survival horror series, and it was requisitely scary. I saw some immediate criticism of it on Bluesky that boiled down to, “man I hope this game isn’t just 20 hours of abusing young girls,” and like… yeah, that’s always what you kinda hope won’t happen. As someone with less than average interest in -vanias, be they Metroid- or Castle-, I also was kind of nonplussed by the Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement trailer, aside from making the note that it feels like only yesterday that Bloodstained was primarily a 2D pixel sidescrolling platformer, and now it looks… not realistic but more fleshed out, so to speak.
It would be remiss of me not to mention the Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles announcement, as that was technically the most major announcement of the day. Hinted at by various games media folks who were already in the know, and suspected by eagle-eyed folks watching Yasumi Matsuno’s twitter account like a fucken hawk, rumors were abundant that FFT would be receiving some kind of revamp. What I was surprised by was that said revamping was being done by the folks over at Creative Studio 3 (FFXIV, FFXVI), and it includes a fully-voiced main cast (including Ben “Jimbo” Starr as Dycedarg Beoulve). This update includes a version of the game with revamped graphics and UI as well as the original 1997 look (both featuring the War of the Lions translation), and is directed by Kazutoyo Maehiro (FFXVI). Yasumi Matsuno returns as scenario writer.
And like… as undoubtedly cool as this is, I have a copy of Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions sitting on my iPad right now. I’ve booted the game up, watched the low-res opening cutscene more times than I can count. This has been the state of affairs for like six years running. So what, if I haven’t played it despite having it readily available to me, is going to push me over the edge to buy it again for two or three times the price I paid for it on mobile? I’m feeling a specific sense of deja vu, where I got unnaturally excited for Tactics Ogre Reborn because of its pedigree and then just… never bought it. Ditto Triangle Strategy and even, to a much lesser degree, Unicorn Overlord. It’s like I am trying to convince myself that I am a tactics sicko when in fact the opposite is much more likely to be true.
Of course, there were other highlights at this State of Play as well – Nioh 3, Thief VR and the Mortal Kombat Legacy Collection from Digital Eclipse stood out particularly nicely. Bennet Foddy threatened us with Baby Steps yet again, we got to see the soft asynchronous multiplayer from Death Stranding applied to a game reminiscent of Deathloop in Tides of Tomorrow, there’s a game evidently combining Monkey Island with Clair Obscur in Sea Remnants and Journey is getting a spiritual sequel in Sword of the Sea. And finally, when my Discord learned that Arc System Works was making a Marvel tag team fighter sans Capcom in Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, everyone got real mad lmao. As someone who is pointedly not a fighting game player, I caught some minor flack for simply thinking the game was pretty. We love to see it.
But just as important as what appeared during this presentation was what was conspicuously absent. Despite the fact that we’re merely three months away from its stated release date, there was no marketing or beta announcement video for Marathon, Bungie’s erstwhile extraction shooter. There are likely a few reasons for why it didn’t show up, but it seems like earlier reports from folks like Paul Tassi at Forbes were correct, and Sony has seemingly essentially cut the marketing budget for Marathon for the foreseeable future. For the blissfully unaware, Marathon has come under intense scrutiny these past few weeks for being absolutely shot through with plagiarized art and design assets from an artist under the moniker of Antireal. Bungie has apparently been hard at work scrubbing the game of the plagiarized art ever since the discovery was made, and it seems possible other legal processes are underway behind the scenes. Not great!
Anyway, tonight we’ve got a bit of a lull in the proceedings before things really pick up through the weekend. Tonight at 6:00 PM CT/4:00 PM PT I’ll be tuning in to Melos Han-Tani and Liz Ryerson’s THE UNEARTHED TREASURE ROOM – an alternative showcase of overlooked games, which should have no shortage of interesting works to look at. As always I’ll be live-posting my reactions over on Bluesky and paying Patreon members can come chat about this and every presentation during SGF Week in No Escape‘s Discord!
Sony PlayStation State of Play
See you later!
