Not-E3 events summarised: Summer Game Fest 2025
Top dollar, mid range
Vibe: The smoothest presentation, the shiniest trailers, and by the way indies are great
Format: Live stage, pro hosts, occasional guests, sparing inclusion of on-stage banter
Discernable trends: Dark Souls, horror, medieval fantasy, anime
Geoff Keighley has killed and eaten E3, and that means he inherits its problems: there isn’t the volume of triple-A games that used to sustain the show in its prime, and those that remain are so huge they don’t really need his event or anybody else’s. The solution is to pivot to the thousands of increasingly spectacular double-A games capable of delivering the trailer quality he needs, which our host made particularly explicit by putting up a GameDiscoverCo sales chart at the opener to big up R.E.P.O, Schedule 1 and Clair Obscur..
Opening with the sales figures is a classic E3 conference move so in one sense this is merely honouring the ancient rituals, but it also feels like a machine that was built for one type of warfare being hastily repurposed for a new one. A persistent talking point was listing how small each development team was (something which is not really accurate) and Geoff opened by explicitly hyping his showcases as a way for games to be discovered. This juxtaposition is a bit thick given that his ratecard is $250k per minute for the privilege, and discovery has rarely been that difficult for people with that sort of marketing budget.
To his credit, there are some free slots for small teams, but most of the games at the show had a publisher on the end-card and presumably the invoice as well - although rarely any in-person talent to talk about. The result was a show with less celebrity fluff and more game trailers, which started to feel like a monkey’s-paw wish as you hit the middle of the second hour, and regular pleas to wishlist things because wishlists are the opiate of the marketing classes and the metric by which these showcases are judged.
The first in what would prove to be a long, long list of games that resemble Dark Souls was Mortal Shell 2, a sequel to a game celebrated for its resemblance to Dark Souls and thus understandably sticking close to the model. We then had the briefest glimpse of a new Star Wars event in Fortnite before Geoff’s best mate Kojima showed up with a Dead Stranding 2 trailer in what was apparently but implausibly his first time on the SGF stage.
The trailer itself was a classic Kojima banger, being the exclusive reveal of a man called Neil meeting a woman called Lucy in an office, and telling us barely anything about either save the names of the actors playing them. Nobody else gets to spend money like this any more and we should cherish Kojima while the spell lasts.
Next was Chronicles Medieval, which sounds like a European TV show you’d find at the very bottom of Amazon Prime and is also the only two features confirmed by the trailer. A Tom Hardy voiceover confirmed the existence of stories in a medieval setting but not how they’d be told or in what circumstances, save of course that it involves killing people because this is videogames. Then came Sonic Cross Racing, which is Mario Kart but with Sonic and an extended list of Sega family friends, as if the creators of Yakuza needed a different franchise to put their characters into a go-kart race.
The success of the Sonic movies means that there’s an increasing likelihood that the extended cast of Sonic characters will be known by people who aren’t creating fetish fanart, although the game also expands the horizons of the latter by adding Hatsune Miku and Minecraft Steve to doubtless horrifying effect. The director called out Mario Kart directly when announcing cross-platform play, which was kind of adorable given that the latest Mario Kart had probably already beaten the lifetime sales of his game since its launch 72 hours previously, but it’s a worthy feature and the Sonic Racing games are always fun.
Next was another game that looks a lot like Dark Souls and turned out to be a sequel to an existing game that had previously looked a lot like Dark Souls. This was Code Vein 2, which is Dark Souls but more anime, so at least there were some clean clothes and a big motorcycle to liven things up. End of Abyss took us back to fighting nightmarish body-horror creations but in third person, and Mouse: PI For Hire took us back to first-person shooting and Troy Baker voicing things, neither sufficiently disguised by a retro-animation aesthetic.
Game of Thrones: War For Westeros was another entirely cinematic trailer which made a point of saying “this is not the game you know” and ending on “A REAL-TIME STRATEGY GAME” which felt like solving a problem that the trailer had itself created by focusing on a multi-camera 1v1 faceoff instead of anything that resembled a strategy game. There was footage of a dragon toasting the battlefield before being shot down so I guess that’ll be one of the larger battle units.
Next came a multi-hyphenate genre combination that turned out to be Mundfish’s Atomic Heart 2, which felt like one of those Xbox post-conference recap sizzle reels rather than a coherent look at a single product. There were strong notes of Titanfall, Mad Max and Just Cause in there, along with all the Soviet futurism that gave people the ick about the first game, but that was mostly trying to be Bioshock and this suggested that the sequel will continue that effort but adding more features rather than a coherent story.
Mundfish also had an equally unfathomable and CGI-rich trailer for The Cube, which is a multiplayer shooter that uses the characters and world of Atomic Heart. Based on the fetish-gear costumes and lingering crotch shots it’ll be a version of Destiny in which fourteen-year-old boys are the character designers as well as the player base, but it was another trailer that was all vibes and no detail so we’ll have to wait and see.
Geoff then attempted to hype new characters for a Marvel Cosmic Invasion, which looks like a fun game but character reveals are never exciting to anybody except the True Fans and putting them in large-scale showcases is never going to change that. Then it was back to Fromsoft comparisons with a very Sekiro-like clip of Onimusha Way of the Sword, before what felt like the show’s first sincerely novel debut in the form of muppet combat simulator Felt That Boxing. That’s it, that’s the pitch, I’ll take it.
This was immediately followed by the first bit of laugh-out-loud dissonance, with Killer Inn’s voiceover’d pitch of murder mystery deduction paired with footage of third-person mass murder. It sounds a bit like The Ship updated for a world in which everybody watches The Traitors, and looks like a sort of multiplayer Hitman, and none of those things are easy to accurately express in a trailer so I have to give them bonus points for including a lot of game footage rather than leaning on CGI.
It didn’t last. ARC Raider and Dune Awakening are both hugely anticipated online games that are all but guaranteed to be massively successful, but chose to manifest as CGI mood boards that give little idea of what the game will actually entail save that it involves shooting people. Dune could at least claim to be in line with the books and the films by prioritising aesthetic over almost everything else, but the trailer felt like an invitation to a branded experience rather than to a game I’d actually want to play.
Proceedings then deteriorated into a relentless, anime-infused mass which felt like the weebs getting revenge for those years when E3 was nothing but military shooters. Chrono Odyssey appeared to be another Dark Souls with dress-up and something about different timelines, but didn’t have a 2 appended to the title and I can’t decide if that made it better or worse. It’s somebody at NCSoft’s job to make people care about “the Blade and Soul universe” and I wish them luck, but a combat trailer isn’t going to do it. Jeff Goldblum’s VO for the Jurassic Park Evolution 3 trailer was so hilariously perfunctory it eclipsed the illogicality of his character being in any way positive about Jurassic Park.
There were some standouts. The performance-captured cloth puppetry of Out of Words and the verisimilitude of Lego Voyagers both had a distinct aesthetic, co-op play and a child-friendly focus and felt like a ray of light into an increasingly dark future in which there are only huge axes or huge eyes or both. The abundance of Unreal-engine output - emphasised further by a trailer for Unreal Fest, which was effectively a trailer for some more trailers - meant the NES aesthetic of Hollow Knight followup Mina the Hollower felt fresher as a result.
An overdone “crash” managed the one-two disappointment punch of namedropping Hollow Knight: Silksong, then revealing a new Ryan Reynolds-voiced Deadpool game… but for Quest VR. The game looks quite well done, but it’s not going to reach a big audience and having Deadpool crack wise about late capitalism doesn’t really work in an ad for Mark Zuckerberg’s previous attempt to own reality.
Dying Light: The Beast feels like a very old-school E3 game but it appeared here purely to confirm a release date, which is the sort of PR beat that only really blossomed in the age of digital showcases. I can’t describe the Mixtape any better than Nic Ruben’s “somebody else’s idea of being a teenager”, although I have to commend its resurrection of Trailer Voiceover Guy to ram home its 90s credentials. Towa and Guardians of the Sacred Tree is one for the furries and looks a bit more hardcore than the name might suggest.
Acts of Blood looks like Sleeping Dogs but leaning a bit more into the Batman combat, which I’m into. I don’t believe that anybody has been waiting over a decade for a new Scott Pilgrim game, but I’m glad it exists if only for “Playable Toronto” as a feature. The very shiny, look-how-high-fidelty-we-are trailer for MindsEye is the sort of thing that would have “won” E3 not long ago, but it’s launching in two days, the platform holders haven’t mentioned it and nobody seems all that fussed. Not a good sign.
Le Chiffre as an Elusive Target is a solid crossing of IO’s streams but not remotely worth wheeling Mad Mikkelsen out for, so I must assume that was just appeasing Geoff’s thirst for celebrity guests. Wildgate and Last Flag both appear to be going for “competent but shameless Team Fortress 2 clone” which you might have thought would cause awkwardness but Last Flag is so shameless they’re probably incapable of feeling it. Infinitesimals looks like a heavily militarized version of Antz which manage to feel like a distinctive aesthetic choice this year. Other highlights: Rise of the Deceiver was yet another third-person action game but it’s about the Wu-Tang Clan, and Into the Unwell is the same but it’s doing the Cuphead animation aesthetic which still just about counts as novel.
There was an uneven run to the finale. Splitgate 2 both highlighted and justified the night’s relatively rare developer appearances by introducing an unreconstructed bro wearing a “Make PC Gaming Great Again” hat who’d come to celebrate Halo 3, mourn Titanfall and shit-talk Call of Duty, before throwing to a Battle Royale trailer soundtracked by Imagine Dragons. This was a great way to spend a huge amount of money on ensuring that people talked about him rather than the game, and doesn’t even seem to have got the anti-woke folks on board.
A much better use of money was Stranger Than Heaven, which added a name, a new time period and a bunch of LA Noire-type mechanics to the vintage Yakuza game previously called Project Century. It’s set in 1943 and looks extremely promising. Then the big reveal: all the previous pussyfooting around Resident Evil was all a clever ruse and there was actually a reveal trailer, containing what remains of Raccoon City and a release date.
This was undoubtedly a big drop, of the sort that you feel Summer Game Fest was built to feature, and Geoff seemed to be more energised to be talking about a major big-budget exclusive after all those Soulslikes and Korean imports. Then again, maybe he was just glad the show was over. It was hard not to feel the same, and this was only Friday: the showcases would continue until morale improves.
Rating: C+