There's this thing that keeps happening at the glitzy gaming extravaganzas where a presenter will get up on stage and give a speech about how games are all about stories, artistry, and bringing people together, and then proceed to show you twenty trailers for games that are about action, spectacle, and commercialism. These are usually the same shows that betray a lack of confidence in games as medium by seeking outside validation from film actors and music artists, as if video games aren't enough on their own. Between The Game Awards and Summer Game Fest, Geoff Keighley's got this down to a science.
There's nothing wrong with an explosive, high-budget action game; I play quite a lot of them. However, if Keighley wants games that are about moving storytelling, unconventional use of the form, and social cohesion, most of them blossom from small, independent studios. In 2024, Geoff opened Summer Game Fest with a splash screen of the best-selling games of the year and remarked on the indie minnows holding their own among the corporate whales. The message was very 2008: Digital distribution means you don't need a publisher, so AAA beware: Indies are coming for your lunch.
The latest Summer Geoff Fest began with basically the same spiel except with an updated list of games, including R.E.P.O in pole position and Schedule I taking the bronze. Schedule I was a three-person effort, and according to Keighley, R.E.P.O. was developed by a ten-person team, meaning he has a point. Independent does not mean small fry, and AAA is not alone in these woods. Yet, you'll also notice that despite Keighley implying that micro-games and bedroom inventions have a place at the Summer Game Fest, few to none appear in the lineup. Ostensibly, our ringleader can claim otherwise using one nifty gadget: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
A painstakingly detailed, book-length JRPG, Clair Obscur was #6 in the charts and, by Keighley's reckoning, made by a team of under 30. It's an astonishing and comforting story. Up until now, gamers have appeared chained to the rock of big tech if they want big games. However, they have long been frustrated at the rising prices and extortionate business practices associated with the industry's upper echelons. Not to mention, confidence in the stability of these Atlasian studios is at an all-time low. If, however, we can get the same games made by studios a fraction of the size, high-production-value gaming is sustainable and our wallets might finally be able to breathe easy. Besides being the subtext of Summer Game Fest, this is also how what Clair Obscur was discussed on the first evening of Giant Bomb @ Nite.
Obviously, I'm now going to tell you that the figure of < 30 developers on Clair Obscur is incorrect, but Keighley's not just undercounting. He's undercounting by a factor of more than 10. While you can argue Clair Obscur was handled by a core team of around 30 people, Sandfall Interactive was reliant on extensive external support. In total, their game took more than 400 employees across at least seventeen companies to develop and publish. It's still an amazing feat for the people at the epicentre of its development slog, and I can see a future where a fracturing, costly AAA industry leaves a power vacuum for more mid-tier studios. However, this is less the story of how you might be able to make the next Dark Souls on a single office floor and more the story of how today's big-budget developers are often reliant on a sprawling supporting cast that goes ignored when it comes time to credit artists. Even the mid-tier status of Sandfall Interactive is relative, an anomaly of ballooning studio sizes. The original God of War from 2005 also took between 400 and 500 people to make, and rather than being considered a AA hit, it was one of the highest-budget releases of that year. 2008's Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 was made by about 200 staff.
I'm not asserting that Keighley was deliberately misleading us and I'm sure he has the health of the industry at heart. However, this is an egregious miss and is liable to impart misunderstandings about the financial input required to create the titles SGF advertises. It would be easy to see all the games that look roughly as development-intensive as Clair Obscur at the Summer Game Fest and conclude that the ceremony is promoting the little guy in the industry. After all, Expedition 33 was developed by a number of people you could fit onto a bus. The reality is that games like Clair Obscur, Blade & Soul, or Chronicles Medieval simply do not exist in the same league as R.E.P.O. or Schedule I, even if they're also not on the scale of a Rockstar or Ubisoft project. That also means it'll take more than an indie team and UE5 to develop even a AA game; cash rules every blockbuster around you.
The platonic ideal of the mid-tier game is the Soulslike. If, like me, you've found that genre needlessly frustrating and disrespectful of your time, this is a rough Not E3. Your eyes will have glazed over at Chrono Odyssey, Codevein II, Lies of P: Overture, Nioh 3, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, and Mortal Shell II. A dark gothic fantasy is my idea of a vacation, I just don't want to spend all my time banging my head against the wall in one. While there's been something quiet and dignified about Dark Souls, Mortal Shell is going tip and tear with its animation, really rubbing it in every time a boss in big black robes grinds you into the dust.
You know when you see a game and you think, "This feels like it was made for me, personally?". The Fortnite Star Wars event is my opposite. I had an experience with Fortnite that I can only describe as someone lesioning part of my brain out. Its almost rogue-like climb-until-you-fall structure went down smooth for so long. Then one day, I dropped back under its purple gradient skies, and I felt nothing. Total anhedonia. I'm also scared of Chewbacca due to a childhood incident.
Now, Death Stranding: On the Beach sounds nice. No more gloomy skies, Norman Reedus can get a Mai Tai, play some volleyball. It's an intriguing premise because, despite this sticky opinion that everything Hideo Kojima touches should be hung in the Louvre, Death Stranding 1 is a mess. It's the narrative equivalent of dropping a whole bowl of gumbo on the kitchen floor. I might write about that at some point, but it's such a lengthy, convoluted game, it's like trying to get ahold of a boa constrictor. You could also question how much a Kojima trailer can ever tell us about a game when they're so fixated on twist reveals and coda after coda. On the upside, Kojima's creative casting for Death Stranding 2 shows an eye for acting talent that stretches far beyond the bounds of Hollywood. The scene in this screening had some great moments where the small choices characters made told you about their demeanours.
I've admonished some trailers for emphasising character in titles where gameplay is the heart. Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds may be an example of the opposite. It's rare that a single series captures a genre, but no cart racer has been able to measure up to Nintendo's, including Sega's. I don't know how much crossover there is between the fans of Sonic and fans of Yakuza but when it comes to the blue blur and his furry friends, the people who are into them are really into them. Like, really into them. Hearing Keighley say End of Abyss is specifically targeting the Epic Games Store was a trip because it's seldom seemed like Epic cares deeply about the store. It has sales, it has free giveaways, but its owner isn't exactly smearing on warpaint when it comes to competing financially with Steam, adding features, or streamlining the interface.
Now to Atomic Heart II, the home of the whale-tickling machine. Atomic Heart I's glossy, rounded Soviet retro-future is up there among the most beautiful virtual settings I've seen. We, unfortunately, explore it through a detestable manchild. P-3 is petty, mean-spirited, and SNL unfunny with no redeeming traits. The worldbuilding often happens without cause and effect, and Mundfish assumes very low media comprehension on the part of the player. If Atomic Heart II wants to taste greatness, it's gotta get over these humps, but it's not clear whether it will from this preview. Not a word dropped from P-3's foul mouth because this peep show was less dialogue-led and more a carnival of debauchery. It's deeply impressive how Mundfish is already reinventing its visual style after one game. Atomic Heart II is perhaps even more utopian and futuristic in its countenance than its father. However, it's noteworthy that there are hard divides right now in how regions of the industry depict women.
The west has had a big rethink when it comes to how much of its female characters' skin it wants to expose. Not all Japanese games think about this issue the same way, but anime-inspired games still tend to dress their female characters salaciously. As a Russian company, Mundfish is in a whole third camp. That's not to say they are representative of their country either, but Atomic Heart II is making some of these anime cheesecake characters look positively tame by comparison. There are costume designs in AHII that are borderline pornographic.
It's nice to see Peter Molyneux still getting work with The Cube: Atomic Universe. Cutting back and forth between the portrait and landscape aspect ratio made this commercial pretty frustrating, but I do like the idea that this floating platform was always there, and the characters just couldn't see it. As with FBC: Firebreak, though, I'm not convinced that Atomic Heart has the legs to go full gun combat for a release.
Controlling a video game character is puppetry, but usually, that puppet feels like a cartoon character or CGI simulacrum of a person. I did not expect one of gaming's first forays into photorealism to be convincing me I was controlling a mange-riddled Grover. Felt That Boxing is tucked into the same media niche as other adult puppet entertainment like Avenue Q or The Happytime Murders, and it's got spunk. Fuzzy's scrangly arms are perfect for flailing about either while punching or getting punched.
It's inexplicable that with Grand Theft Auto being more popular than Jesus, there aren't more pretenders to its throne. Open-world crime games are expensive to build and have plenty of points of failure, but when have those complications ever stopped the industry? Mafia: The Old Country is an exception to the rule and is carving out a rustic alternative to the contemporary Americana of GTA V. Mafia: The Old Country capably shows us what Italy is all about: a woman with a head covering and a long skirt holding a basket of tomatoes at her side.
Despite LEGO being a construction toy, the LEGO games are mostly about miniaturising movies rather than clicking together models. Minecraft feels more like playing with LEGO than the LEGO games. LEGO Voyagers perches on a middle ground between the toy and the existing popular computer entertainment, letting bricks be characters. The world looks serene rather than silly and those moments where the protagonists have to rotate themselves through the environment while considering their unique shape are obviously inspired by Kine. The toyification in the cutscenes is also striking.
After this point, the show dipped into a predictable lull, bottoming out in the comedy torture chamber of Deadpool VR. Deadpool's breezy and pleasant voice acting didn't feel right for the character, and the snipes at fascism and capitalism land as cheap pandering for a game that shows no vested interest in critiquing either and is profiting the world's second-largest media conglomerate. Oh, and Re: Scum, you know when Also Sprach Zarathustra starts playing in an advert, you're about to hear the least funny shit of your life.
Generally, however, Not E3 is getting softer on the ear. That Splitgate 2 sizzle reel was backed by an Imagine Dragons song because of course the announcement with the dudebro CEO would use an Imagine Dragons song. However, I can only name one game this year that tried to do an epic chilling pop cover (Mindseye), a trend that has become all too played out, The First Descent: Breakthrough is fucking with some Where Is My Mind? shit, Scott Pilgrim EX gives us a follow-up to a criminally underrated game soundtrack, ARC Raiders sounds like a Perturbator, and the J-jazz in the Stranger than Heaven spot was like liquid caramel.
We've heard a lot of bad video game names this year: Digimon Story: The Time Stranger, Chronicles Medieval, Gray Zone Warfare, etc. but "Ill" works for me. There's something to be said for confronting your audience with a concept, as the titles of films like "Mother" or "Doubt" do. It's the work telling you it is that abstraction it names. Ill's undead adapt their ambulation and attacks as their limbs are dismembered, taking admirable inspiration from Dead Space. I'm interested in the game's use of changing size as much as changing shape to create new enemies.
After a seemingly interminable run of pre-rendered teasers over many E3s, gameplay trailers have, at last, become the norm, helping establish a much-needed trust between players and studios. That leaves me somewhat bamboozled that many viewers came away from Not E3 saying they're more excited for Resident Evil Requiem than any other game. When writing this, I only vaguely remembered the RE9 montage as containing some moments in an office and some gurning zombie faces. I returned to the VOD to see what the bulk of the trailer was and then realised that was the bulk of the trailer. There's relatively little RE9 in the RE9 preview. While Resident Evil 7 and Village each had a coven of personified villains to terrify, Capcom is hinting that the focus is returning to mindless hordes of zombies. Racoon City looks like a bomb hit it.
Time to go bullet point mode on your ass:
- Just the ideal delivery on the line, "It's in the sky, a giant cube".
- As someone who was into the Assassin's Creed multiplayer to the point where it might be considered medically interesting, I am the target audience for Killer Inn.
- Hey look, that new Hollow Knight game is finally coming: Mio: Memories in Orbit.
- It is honestly ballsy how phoned-in Nicktoons & The Dice of Destiny looks.
- The phrase "Disease and puppet frenzy".
- I like the idea of the new Hitman mission contrasting how Agent 47 would approach a problem versus how James Bond would.
- I'm not sure what it says about me that I was more excited for the office paperwork bit of the Requiem trailer than the zombie cop bit.
Look, as big a game as Keighley talks about this medium's micro-projects, there's a simple reason that they barely appear at Summer Game Fest, when Fortnite and Resident Evil 9 do: hard numbers. There are other presentations this time of year that promote the work of modestly-sized teams: Day of the Devs, Devolver Digital, Wholesome Direct, Black Voices in Gaming, and the Latin American Games Showcase. Credit where it's due, Keighley's channels stream out some of these other shows and Summer Game Fest is a sponsor of Day of the Devs, but notice that Keighley sponsors Schafer and not the other way around. Because, as we know from the disclosures last year, slots at the Summer Game Fest cost $250,000-$550,000, and the Semiworks Studios of the world don't tend to have $250,000 lying around.
You can say that Keighley needs that money for the theatre rental, the entrancing graphics, and the solid gold sneakers, but those are all optional. I'm not knocking a little spectacle, but you either pick spectacle for your show or accessibility for the little guys, and Keighley prefers the former. He probably couldn't find the next R.E.P.O. or Lethal Company anyway because no one could. The very fact that these games were guerilla successes means that their virality was not predictable. Briefings like the Summer Game Fest are meticulously planned, but the stardom of Clair Obscur or Schedule I make them all too organic. Thanks for reading.
