Kaile Hultner Look, I’ll just say it so nobody else has to: no one goes into the Summer Game Fest presentation truly believing that it’s a heartfelt celebration of the art, craft and hobby of video games. We all understand to varying degrees that it is a corporate party, a chance for executives and big marketing teams with hundreds of thousands of dollars to burn to let their hair down and have a little fun – and that the fun usually corresponds with some big announcements and tentpole trailer drops for the plebs to pop at like 1990s pro wrestling fans. This has always been the case, and it has allowed even the most cynical among us to convene during this time of trailer dumps and kind of just like lightheartedly snicker at the artifice of it all. Everyone gets to have a good time even when we’re hatewatching the thing.
Today was not that. Today was not a celebration, a party, not even a fucking wake. Today we got a two-hour-long grim demonstration of what happens when the video game industry is done playing with toys like SGF. If things like the Unearthed Treasure Room and Access-Ability Summer Showcase are legitimately positive riffs on the trailer dump formula that SGF and, like, the Nintendo Direct has pioneered, then this SGF presentation was at the absolute nadir of what this shit’s capable of being. It was utterly abysmal, and I think Keighley owes cohost Lucy James an apology (and all of us some kind of spiritual refund) for making this event the first-ever SGF with a non-Keighley cohost.
Did some big announcements happen? Sure, a few. Was it totally, completely devoid of interesting games? No. But I don’t want to whitewash this shit any further than that. I walked away from the presentation feeling drained of my desire to enjoy video games at a base level. That might sound hyperbolic, but after subjecting yourself to two hours of dogshit punctuated mostly by CAPCOM announcements you’d find it hard to muster any enthusiasm for this medium too.
Let’s take it from the top. Geoff Keighley opened this shit with a little sales numbers presentation reminding us that little games from small developers are the ones raking in big bucks lately, pointing to social horror-comedy game R.E.P.O. as an exemplar of the kind of game doing gangbusters right now (with no analysis of why such a game might be popular, of course). From here he immediately veered into an annoying discourse point by referring to Mortal Shell developer Cold Symmetry (and by extension publisher Playstack) as a “thriving independent studio of just 30 creators.” They’re going to do this multiple times with other developers. The problem with this buzz line isn’t that the main studio is or isn’t actually small, it’s that it obfuscates how big of a team is actually required to make the game work beyond the core devs – QA, IT, the marketing team, the publishing team. Over 100 people are listed in the credits for Mortal Shell; its sequel will likely have more.
After barely seven minutes of showtime, Keighley then brings out Hideo Kojima and his translator to show off a clip of Luca Marinelli as a dude named Neil in a context-free clip of Death Stranding 2. As a reminder, according to the big schedule of Not-E3 events Kojima has an entire event on Sunday dedicated to doing a live demo of Death Stranding 2 in which he could introduce this character with some more context, but instead we just get a scene with no external meaning to tide us over. It’s honestly just kinda wild to me that Kojima even showed up this early in the presentation. I really don’t know why he even had to show up at all. Anyway, Kojima’s presence is almost anodyne compared to the procession of horse apples that followed him.
Next, remember Atomic Heart? The 2023 Russian FPS adventure game that looked like a weird janky cross between Bioshock, STALKER and Half-Life 2? Remember how its studio, Mundfish, came under fire for odd coincidences around Atomic Heart‘s release date, like its proximity to the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and “Defender of the Fatherland” day? And for not condemning the Russian state for its invasion of Ukraine? And for allegedly providing personal information about Russian players to the FSB (which the studio vehemently denies)? Well, we got us a whole big giant block of their games specifically, starting with Atomic Heart II and continuing into “MMORPG Shooter” The CUBE, and just… what are we doing.
Why is it shot like that. Why can we almost see her labia. Why did this shot linger for so long on her like this. Come on man. Why do you need to goon to every video game you play.
It’s not even that this shit is particularly sexy. It’s just… lecherous. Even if it could be considered sexy, it is very evidently not the kind of sexy every consenting adult can get down with; it’s meant for a specific audience. And like… fine, y’all do y’all. But this is weird. It’s weird that this type of shit was so much of both of the full-length trailers for this studio’s video games. And it’s weird that it got prominent billing at the beginning of Summer Game Fest. But we can’t linger for long.
For a while things kind of level out. CAPCOM announces Onimusha: Way of the Sword. Felt That: Boxing promises us muppets that swear and beat the shit out of each other, Punch-Out-style. Arc Raiders announces its release date for a month after Marathon is slated to release, just to rub it in Bungie’s face. A game that is absolutely not related to Chrono Trigger or Chrono Cross is revealed to be called Chrono Odyssey in a move seemingly guaranteed to tilt certain people. A game called MIO: Memories In Orbit features character designs guaranteed to tilt Silksong fans. Out Of Words actually gives me hope that cinematic platformers can be good; LEGO Voyagers reminds me so much of Builder’s Journey that I even crack a warm smile. Everything’s coming up Milhouse.
And then… we hit a solid like six minute block of gacha slop games that all look like Genshin Impact but whose whale fans would fucking crucify you if you called any of them Genshin Impact. CLEARLY that was Wuthering Waves! Couldn’t you tell based on the character designs and world and the types of spells all my little waifus were doing? CLEARLY that game doing a promo for a One Punch Man crossover in 2025 was WAY DIFFERENT from Blade and Soul! Why are you so stupid! Why are you not aware of the difference between Honkai Star Rail and Mongil Star Dive!
But no seriously what was the game doing the One Punch Man crossover in 2025? I genuinely have no idea. Anyway, whether we like it or not we’re getting a VR Deadpool game where the merc with a mouth is voiced by a narcoleptic Neil Patrick Harris lazily regurgitating jokes from the movies and comics while you play a rhythmless version of Pistol Whip. I’m really sorry if you popped for that, but it looks like shit.
Keighley returns to the stage to announce a new game by “a solo dev” from Indonesia and nine of his friends???? called Acts of Blood, and like, the absurdity of Keighley calling Eksil Team a “solo dev” aside, the game looks like an alright sendup of Oldboy and The Raid. Then we get a trailer for MindsEye, a game that has been described to me as a former metaverse-slop GTA clone and game tool proof-of-concept that now has legitimate funding from IO Interactive. Lex Luddy over at Rewinder attempted to explain it further to me and failed. What I know is that it used a needle drop of a cover of Tears For Fears/Gary Jules’ “Mad World” that made me more disappointed in video games than the Queen needle drop during the Atomic Heart II trailer did.
Speaking of Mundfish, they’re back as the publisher for a game called ILL, a “realistic first person action horror game” with the wettest corpses I’ve ever seen in a game. Absolutely soaking. It looks like one of those games that shows up in TikTok ads that don’t really exist and when you click through to the store page it’s invariably a match-3 puzzle game with endless ads for gambling games, but apparently it’s gonna challenge even seasoned veterans of the “shoot zombies with gun” genre, so that’s neat, I suppose.
Oh, also, we’re getting a Wu-Tang Clan game that looks legitimately rad. Wu-Tang: Rise of the Deceiver should’ve been the surprise thing everyone was talking about at the end of this cavalcade of nonsense aside from the Very Big Announcements, but instead one more little sliver of bullshit had to make its way through.
You probably don’t know Ian Proulx from a hole in the ground, and that’s honestly probably fine; you’re not supposed to know the CEOs of video game companies, usually. But his company, 1047 Games, wanted to announce a new battle royale mode in their portal-based shooter, Splitgate 2, and Proulx decided to do it himself. So he took to the SGF stage wearing a fucking MAGA hat (It said “Make FPS Great Again”) and made a really odd speech:
When we started Splitgate in our dorm room, we just wanted to make a game we could play with our friends. And 20 million of you played with us. Now, with help from our amazing community, we’ve built Splitgate 2. Why? Because I grew up playing Halo. And I’m tired of playing the same Call of Duty every year. And I wish we could have Titanfall 3. With Splitgate 2 we asked ourselves, “How would we take portals to the next level?” What if you could portal to entirely different worlds? So we combined the action movement and gunplay of arena shooters with the scale and intensity of something much bigger. Splitgate: Battle Royale launches for free right now, and it’s fucking awesome.
He then walked wordlessly away into the darkness to muted applause as the trailer for his game played.
So why did he do this? After everyone clowned on him for his shitty hat and dumb speech he took to Twitter to chastise anyone who took the hat seriously as a weird-ass right-wing dogwhistle, saying “This is not a political statement, it is quite literally what it says, so take it at face value.”
Charitably, there exists a class of upper-middle-class cishet white dude that not only doesn’t have to think about the social consequences of merely existing unfavorably under the Trump Administration, but pointedly refuses to do so. “C’mon man I was just talking about how shitty FPSes are,” the rich studio owner says. “I wasn’t trying to make a political statement!” But what does “Make ____ Great Again” represent? Often it’s the forcible reversal to an imagined “nostalgic” past—one that never fucking existed in the first place, and where incalculable damage must be done to the world as it is to try to bring that phantom past into reality. What’s fucking hilarious about this one-man clown car’s stunt, hat included, is that they made their game into a fucking Battle Royale, the literal exemplar of New FPS Slop. He wants to radically change the FPS genre… by capitulating to what the market has dictated is the Ideal Modern FPS Form. Fucking Geniouse!
Anyway, this shit sucked the wind out of me entirely. RGG Studio announced their “Project Century” was a time-period-spanning crime drama called Stranger than Heaven and it looks cool in that way all games without concrete stuff to mess with look cool (I do trust RGG tho. I bet it will be rad as shit). And then CAPCOM announced Resident Evil Requiem, the official ninth mainline game in the franchise, and it honestly also looks cool in that same way. I just didn’t have the energy to feel excitement for these things anymore.
And that was two by-and-large goddamn wasted, definitively toxic hours of trailers and game announcements. It was immediately followed up by the much less spiritually-destructive Day of the Devs showcase, but the damage on my soul was done. This was by far the worst SGF event I’ve ever tuned into, and I genuinely think the VOD of it is eventually going to be used by US military torture experts as a much more advanced and worse “enhanced interrogation” technique than METALLICA songs.
Okay, let’s be fair. Before I peaced out to dissociate in a Taco Bell parking lot with a chili cheese burrito halfway stuffed down my gullet, I did watch Day of the Devs, and aside from like… one game, I had a much better time with it.
Right off the bat we get Snap & Grab, a game where you play as Nifty Nevada, the world’s greatest fashion photographer and the eminent gentlewoman thief. You take pictures of your heist target and then craft a plan of attack for your crew to execute, taking great pains to stay more than one step ahead of INTERPOL investigator Rio Rivers, in what I can only describe as a vaguely-sapphic Lupin III dynamic. This was followed closely by Big Walk, a very fun and cute-looking co-op exploration game by House House that looks primed for shenanigans. After this we got a deeper dive into Sword of the Sea, the Journey-like game announced at the MIX Indie Showcase, and after hearing the devs talk about it (it’s meant to evoke Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and SSX Tricky), I’m now fully on-board.
I then blacked out momentarily, waking up to a closer look at Blighted from DrinkBox Studios, that led into a first look at Dosa Divas, what I’d describe as a spiritual successor to Thirsty Suitors involving two sisters doing turn-based battle in dosa-themed mechs against a destructive multinational fast food corporation; I immediately wishlisted this. We saw a new Heart Machine game that I’d honestly forgotten about, Possessors; Moonlighter 2 from Digital Sun; a really rad life sim horror RPG called Neverway; and Relooted, a game from South African dev team Nyamakop that has players planning heists of real African artifacts that have been stolen and hoarded by western museums – it’s one part strategy game, one part escape runner a la Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield, and it looks absolutely fucking cool.
After this, I kinda coasted into the end of the presentation with one eye on the video and one eye on my discord and Bluesky. I was (and am!) exhausted; there are cool games in this latter third of the presentation to be sure (like Tire Boy and Toem 2) so go check out the Day of the Devs video when you have a chance. Something I didn’t mention might strike your fancy. The presentation ended with a nice little live-on-tape recording of a new song from Unbeatable, my future absolute favorite rhythm-adventure game. Check that performance out below.
Okay. Fuck. We’ve got at most two days left of this shit. So, to business: there are six showcases today, starting with the Wholesome Direct at 11:00 AM CT/9:00 AM PT. Normally I would turn my nose up at this but I’ve gotta trust that it won’t be anywhere near as dogshit as the main event by several factors of 10. Then there’s the Women-Led Games showcase at noon/10 AM PT, the Latin American Games Showcase at 1 PM/11 AM, the Southeast Asian Games Showcase at 2/12 PM, the Green Games Showcase at 3/1 PM, and the Frosty Games Fest at 6:00 PM CT/4:00 PM PT. Also somewhere is the Future Games Show Summer Showcase but I’m pretty sure it conflicts with one of the other ones I just mentioned. I don’t know how much of all this I’ll be covering, or even if I do, but if I decide to throw down you know where I’ll be: Bluesky and Discord (for Patreon subscribers).
Don’t watch the Summer Game Fest presentation if you can avoid it.
I guess Devolver Digital did a pretty short thing announcing a new game if you care.
There was an IO Interactive thing after all of this; I was already lost to the burrito by the time it aired. Also the vid is private, so w/e.
Bye
