Kaile Hultner Oh boy. Okay. Folks, there were seven showcases yesterday, five of which I thought were pretty good, one of which… whew, we’ll get to it, and one of them, the Future Games Show: Summer Showcase, was simply too long for my addled brain to handle. In total, I spent nine full hours yesterday watching video game trailers. I honestly wish to never see another video game trailer again as long as I live (until next year, ofc) but naturally we still have one or two more days to get to depending on what’s on your personal SGF calendar.
So what happened yesterday? How the fuck did an entire perfectly good Saturday get sacrificed to video games, especially after Friday night’s horrendous display of chump shit? Well, totally not conspicuously at all, the Saturday block of game showcases were primarily what we might unfortunately call the “DEI” block, as this was the day SGF decided to shove all the “diversity” showcases together into – weirdly, except for the Black Voices In Gaming showcase, which is apparently scheduled for Monday at 11 AM CT/9 AM PT. So starting at approximately 11 AM on Saturday we got the Wholesome Direct, the Women-Led Games showcase, the Latin American Games Showcase. the Southeast Asian Games Showcase, the aforementioned Future Games Show and the Green Games Showcase all crammed into one back-to-back-to-back block. Then, if you were like me and crashed in the middle of the Southeast Asian Games Showcase and slept through both the FGS and Green Games Showcase by accident, we had a 6:00 PM CT nightcap with the Oceania-focused Frosty Games Fest, so named because it’s fucken winter in the southern hemisphere right now.
This is a lot of shit to talk about without some kind of scaffolding. So let’s do it like this: I’ll talk about what I really enjoyed, I’ll talk about what I didn’t like so much, and then I’ll talk about the frankly astonishingly shitty spectacle I observed last. We’ll call it [Sergio Leone’s estate’s lawyers have advised me not to continue the joke].
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So going into the proceedings yesterday I admit I was a little trepidatious because I am not normally a fan of the Wholesome Direct. However, maybe it was because it was strictly better at bare minimum than SGF or because my brain was simply still too fried from the night before, but this year I had a reasonably good time watching it. I popped at a few games – Squeakross: Home Squeak Home chief among them, I know who I am – and felt reasonably excited about a few others. Is This Seat Taken?, for example, seems to be a nice little anti-work logic puzzle game. Ambroise Niflette & the Gleaned Bell looks like a cool little (aggressively French) detective game. All Will Rise looks extremely cool and extremely political; I’m especially a big fan of the tagline “The river is a god, and they killed it.” Everdeep AURORA continues to intrigue, as does Gecko Gods. Now the usual problem I’ve had with Wholesome Directs in years past is that they’ve been chockfull of what I’d call “cozy capitalism simulators;” those were certainly still present, but they seem to have been replaced with more “traditional” farming and fishing games. I do wonder if that’s an actual shift away from the prior “wholesome” formula, and if it is, I wonder why that shift has happened. But that’s maybe beyond the scope of this roundup; we’ve still got so much shit to talk about.
Women-Led Games was next and as a juxtaposition with the all-pastels and soft edges of the Wholesome Direct it was fascinating. Right off the bat we got two kinda satisfyingly dark and grimy games, WILL: Follow the Light and Perfect Tides: Station to Station. The former billed itself as “a walking simulator but more engaging,” which like, it looked and sounded like a cool game but at the point where we’re adding “hardcore” mechanics and puzzle shit to a walking sim we’re kinda just reinventing adventure games? I dunno. The latter was an absolutely striking pixelated point-and-click game that really emphasized the difficulties of young adulthood – living on your own, maintaining relationships, figuring out what you’re going to do with your life – in a really neat way. There was a cool game about witches on motorbrooms making deliveries called Crescent County that I’m interested in, a fascinating idle game that’s supposed to live on your PC desktop called Nano Neighbors, and a really vertically-dense horror-tinged farming sim called Grave Seasons.
However, the pièce de résistance of the whole fucking WEEK for me was a game called Drywall Eating Simulator. Folks, we do not dream of labor but we absofuckinglutely dream of eating our way through the fucking walls if it means we can get away from annoying coworkers and bullshit jobs. Standing goddamn ovation for Peripheral Playbox, we salute the flag, we put our hands over our hearts for the fucking national anthem. A better video game there has not been.
The wild part is, despite the emergence of the all-time GOAT of this and every showcase, Women-Led Games wasn’t done showing off some great shit. In quick succession we saw Cairn again, we saw the incredibly stark and stylish A Heavy Morning (it kind of reminded me of Persepolis a little bit), we saw an absolute banger PS1-style soulslike in PRISON OF HUSKS, there was the macabre management sim Roots Devour, the unnerving space nun horror adventure Void Martyrs, hand-drawn creepy puzzle adventure Provoron, and an action RPG reminiscent of Death of a Wish called Downhill.
Throughout this entire week, different showcases and trailer dumps have shown off some good games, for sure. But the Women-Led Games showcase had such a fucking wildly good hitrate that I’ve actually got a wishlist I’m really excited about for the first time in a while.
And the good shit didn’t end there. The Latin American Games Showcase continued the trend with games like Neverway making a reappearance, LAN Party Adventures, a survival-horror dungeon crawler with turn-based combat and monster designs from Trevor Henderson called Lurks Within Walls, a fucking tokusatsu game called Changer Seven; the feast simply did not stop.
I don’t quite know where else we’d have gotten Oscuro Blossom’s Glow or Gunny Ascend or Desktop Explorer or fuckin GRIZZLY MAN, but the sheer bounty of sauce oozing out of these showcases and the LATAM showcase in particular absolutely blew the “real” “main event” showcases of the festival out of the water. Like any of these games injected into Geoff Keighley’s stage time would have fucking decimated the grey slop we got. We were introduced to a goddamn furry noir Max Payne-alike at this shit – The Shadow Syndicate. We had to watch three Mundfish game trailers and the beginning of that fuckin Splitgate guy’s crashout on Friday night instead. Eagle Knight Paradox? Bogdan’s Cross? Piss Off? It’s over man, SGF is cooked, get out of the way so these folks can take center stage for once.
Like just to give you an idea of how good these “diversity” showcases were, after four fucking hours I was still having a great goddamn time with the Southeast Asian Games Showcase. Now, did I essentially pass out halfway through? Yes I did, BUT I went back and watched the latter like 25 minutes when I woke up. We got Coffee Talk: Tokyo, an immense metroidvania called Fallen Tear: The Ascension, we got a really vibrant “creature collector” called Montabi that looks fascinating, and we even got another beloved antiwork game, Table Flip Simulator. One game that I saw which I absolutely want to know more about immediately is Compensation Not Guaranteed, a game that looks like it’s going to do to eminent domain what Papers Please did w/r/t immigration.
Skipping forward a bit: after my impromptu nap I watched the Frosty Games Fest showcase. These are all games from Australia, Aotearoa or Tasmania, and there were some really neat choices among them, starting with My Arms Are Longer Now, a game I can only describe as the continuation of one specific bit from Thank Goodness You’re Here, with heisting thrown in for good measure. There was also Māori albatross flight sim Toroa: Skycall; BraveCart, a game whose central supermarket beef is extremely specific and extremely fascinating; A turn-based sports RPG where the dog can play rugby called Tryhard; and Parasensor, a really cool game where you have to survive in a mutating city while fixing people’s phone lines and reconnecting them to the telecom grid.
These showcases and the games I’ve mentioned are such an incredible and varied cross section of this industry and hobby that, contra how I was feeling on Friday night, after watching all of these showcases I feel way more up on the future of video games. Even if not every game shown was for me (or even strictly speaking “good”), the fact that anyone could go into that five-hour block of trailers and come out with at least a handful of things they find interesting should be a wake-up call for those stuck in the AAA blockbusters-only system.
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Listen. I do not relish what I’m about to do. I wish I didn’t have to do it. But someone needs to say something. If the Summer Game Fest main event was the worst event to occur this weekend, its runner-up was the Green Games Showcase. Put together by an organization called PlanetPlay, this showcase was, on paper, all about games and studios committed to solid climate action — think Die Gute Fabrik, Saltsea Chronicles and its climate impact report independently drafted up by Dr. Ben Abraham (conflict-of-interest disclosure: I work with Ben at Critical Distance). Nothing could be further from the truth. Hosted by veteran freelancer and Raptor PR Senior Content Specialist Will Freeman, the Green Games Showcase was a truly disappointing mutation on the concept of being environmentally-aware. Like fuck video games for a second, this shit was just pure unadulterated cynicism, a show that actively believed its audience was a bunch of stupid little piggies with no brains and pockets full of cash to spend on the most egregious slop I’ve ever seen promoted at one of these godforsaken corporate events.
But let’s back up. The showcase was organized into three broad categories: “Green By Design,” “Green Activations,” and “Green Donations.” Now, assuming in good faith that the stated intent of this showcase was to show off games and companies that wanted to make a meaningful difference regarding climate change was accurate, these categories, aside from maybe “Green By Design,” don’t really make sense.
This is because they have nothing to do with the environment.
The “green” in these categories stands for “greenwashing.” The more accurate category names for this showcase could be: “AI slop,” “Web3/crypto slop,” and “mobile slop.” Of the mere seven “Green By Design” games shown, two of the games were ostensibly normal with some kind of PlanetPlay monetization thrown in, two of the games either prominently featured generative AI art (and a fucking AI song) or included GenAI assets in their marketing, one of them was a Roblox game and two of them were mobile games, one of which billed itself as “The Duolingo of Giving A Shit” and an “adventure activism” game. Now, I’m a firm believer that posting is not activism is a much more nuanced take than face-value but I have to draw the line at “activism” in any way being something you can just log into on your phone for 30 seconds once a day to do. That’s not how any of this shit works. It just convinces rubes they’re making a difference by barely even tapping their screens when they’re simply not doing jack shit.
As far as “Green Activations” was concerned, it almost entirely consisted of slop mobile games with excessive and predatory monetization schemes, dark design patterns, and expensive and useless “PlanetPlay themed battle passes.” And then the final category, “Green Donations,” included an Amazon Games title, studios with Saudi money attached, more mobile slop, and fucking The Walking Dead. Yes, THAT The Walking Dead.
How did we get here? How did this happen? How and why did the games journalist with supposedly 19 good and respected years in this industry really sit there and say every fucking derivative TikTok adslop Homescapes clone looked like a game he really wanted to explore and immerse himself in?
PlanetPlay is a not-for-profit organization helmed by Rhea Loucas, a Swiss entrepreneur who also heads up a company called Sphaira Innovation, which bills itself as PlanetPlay’s parent company. Sphaira describes itself as a company that believes it can motivate large numbers of people to take certain actions – whether in service to the climate or otherwise – by leveraging certain technologies. In PlanetPlay’s case, this action is spurred on by leveraging game storefronts and monetization schemes. Essentially, if you sign up to be a partner of PlanetPlay’s, a portion of your profits will go to organizations like WithOneSeed – a carbon forestry company operating in Timor Leste. Basically: studios and publishers sign up for PlanetPlay and just keep pumping their customers dry through predatory monetization practices, and as a knock-on effect some trees get planted in East Timor to offset carbon increases elsewhere.
Both Sphaira and PlanetPlay’s advisory and supervisory boards are chock full of government officials, financiers and tech executives, like Pierre Mallevays, Partner and Co-Head of the Merchant Banking team for Stanhope Capital; Gabriela Maria Payer, Vice-Chairwoman of Sygnum Bank, “the world’s first digital asset bank;” John Hanke, Niantic CEO; and Baroness Bryony Worthington, life peer of the British House of Lords.
None of what I’m writing here should be construed as something nefarious. What it should be construed as, is absolutely fucking cynical. The body copy on the PlanetPlay partner website reads in part, “PlanetPlay is a disruptive NPO, harnessing the power of 3+ billion players within a $190+ billion industry to effect change through the best games and biggest superstars in the world.” They’re literally, parasitically, jumping on top of slop farms to take a cut and plant a tree that will symbolically fix the climate crisis, rather than, I dunno, work with companies to make games, platforms and hardware that no longer requires the destruction of the planet to produce.
As far as Freeman’s performance is concerned, like, get your bag or whatever dude but it looked pathetic. At one point while describing a game, he was just listing off random games that kinda-sorta resembled the one in question, no real sense of whether or not he’d even played any of them. It really just sucked to watch, across the board, from the premise to the presentation.
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The alternative to watching the Green Games Showcase was watching the Future Games Show Summer Showcase and Live LA Showcase. In total, this event was almost three hours long, and herein lies the problem: It was almost three hours long. Earlier this week I skipped an entire trailer dump precisely because it was nearly four hours long, and I’ll use the same logic I used to justify that skip to talk about why I basically absorbed none of FGS: it’s the same runtime as three regular events put together. It’s dozens of game trailers thrown together in an almost-context-free lump. The coolest shit imaginable could’ve been in this showcase and dead to rights I could not point you in its direction.
Unlike previous showcases, I didn’t live-post my reactions to Bluesky for this one. Instead, I wrote some notes on my computer’s notes app. Here are some games from that list of notes:
- The Expanse: Osiris Reborn
- Whispers in the Fog
- Sleep Awake
- WTF: Waifu Tactical Force (lol, lmao)
- Formula Legends
- Hell Is Us
- Ground Zero
- Hark the Ghoul
- Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (set in the sleazy 70s)
- Crisol: Theater of Idols
- Deepest Fear
- Berserk B.I.T.S
- Hope in the City
- Holstin
Are these games good? I sure hope so! I don’t think I would’ve mentioned them if they weren’t. But I’ll be honest, it was like 2 AM when I finally finished watching the FGS thing and my brain has basically no room left in it for anything.
The point is, these ultra-long showcases absolutely need to be shorter and more curated. I don’t know if that’s something folks can manage but I know for certain that I had better luck – and better retention – with hour-long joints than with shit that could be classified as an epic feature film.
Anyway, that’s it from me. It’s already well into Sunday, so I’ll just say this: don’t expect anything from me regarding the Xbox Showcase. We’re still boycotting Microsoft. See you tomorrow with maybe the last recap until next year. And hey – this one really did beat the shit out of me. It would be rad if you could help us out with the No Escape essay collection if you appreciated the recaps this week.
