As protests exploded in Los Angeleslast weekend, elsewhere in the city, a coterie of games journalists and developers were gathered together to play new games at the industry’s annual summer showcase. This week’sissue is a dispatch from our correspondent Alyssa Mercante.
Summer Game Fest (SGF), the annual Los Angeles-based gaming festival/marketing marathon, was set up to compete with the once-massive E3. It’s taken a few years, but now it has replaced it. 2025’s event felt like a cogent reminder that the games industry has dramatically changed since the pandemic. Whereas E3 used to commandeer the city’s convention centre smack in the middle of downtown LA, SGF is off the beaten path, nestled among the reams of fabric in the Fashion District, adjacent to Skid Row. There are fewer game companies present, it’s not open to the public and there’s no cosplay, unless it’s for marketing purposes.
Its centrepiece is a live show held at the YouTube theatre near the airport, hosted by ever-present games industry hype-man Geoff Keighley and streamed to millions – and you can buy tickets for that. Some video game enthusiasts and smaller content creators told me that the in-person showcase wasn’t worth their money: just a very lengthy show that they could have watched online, culminating in a massive traffic jam to get out of Inglewood.
This year’s event had some hiccups, including an attempted gatecrasher, but felt the most put-together yet. Attending SGF is a privilege, but it is also an ungodly hybrid of a marathon and a sprint: back-to-back-to-back appointments with publishers and developers with no downtime in-between, speed walking between cabanas and moving swiftly in and out of over air-conditioned rooms to ensure you don’t upset a PR person or accidentally spurn an indie developer. During brief breaks, if you even get one, you’ll shovel a canape into your gullet, wash it down with a Red Bull, have a quick bite of some (surprisingly good) PC Gamer-branded ice-cream, and attempt to get a few of your thoughts down on paper.
I saw a lot of games this weekend, some of which I can’t talk about, but once again it was the indie games that were the most memorable. Not just because they’re unexpected or unique or silly, but because there are usually far fewer restrictions while you play, devs are more open to questions and there aren’t eight PR people standing over your shoulder to ensure you don’t open up an unfinished menu or wander some place you shouldn’t.
On night one, I stuck my head in at the Media Indie Exchange (MIX) party downtown, and was immediately enraptured withUrban Jungle, a plant based game that speaks to my newfound love of horticulture. Placing plants around a cutesy little room afforded me a brief moment of zen in a crowded space full of people trying out dozens of indie games.
Then there’sPetal Runner, a pixel art RPG that looks and feels like a Game Boy-era Pokémon title. Published by iam8bit and developed by two people who met in the Instagram comments under some cyberpunk artwork, it’s a beautiful, adorable, “no violence” RPG. Rather than engage in the questionable practice of capturing cute creatures and forcing them to fight each other, you simply help deliver them to their new owners and “calibrate” or calm them down through a series of old-school minigames. Then you hop on your motorcycle (Petal Runner’s programmer was inspired to get a bike after watching Tron: Legacy) to deliver another pet. After just 15 minutes, its modern chip-tune soundtrack, cool-toned palette, and cute creatures had me sold.
ThickAs Thieves, meanwhile, is a multiplayer stealth game. A representative for the developer told me that the team wanted to make a multiplayer game that avoided the three “black holes”, or oversaturated genres: shooters, PvP combat, and pure action gameplay. The result is something that feels like Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood mixed with Dishonored: you’ll sneak through maps set in a dark early 1900s world cut through with slices of rich colour, while you try to pull off difficult heists to impress a thieves’ guild. But other players are trying to do the exact same thing, and guards and civilians will get in your way.
I also got a chance to try out the new season ofMonster Hunter Nowfrom Niantic, the studio behind Pokémon Go. This augmented reality game drops you into a version of the real world filled with monsters from Capcom’s iconic action game, condensing the series’ epic fights into bite-size battles that are barely a minute long (they can be close to an hour in the mainline games). And I played the new, four-person party gameLego Partywith two other journalists, screaming as our Lego characters fell over each other during minigames or stole gold bricks in an attempt to get to first place. It was fun and freeing; people gathered around us as we yelled and guffawed and talked smack with gusto, as if we needed this game to help cleanse our tired palates.
Every game I spent even a few minutes with this weekend was imbued with passion and creativity, no matter the size of the team or the scope of the project. It was a testament to the drive that fuels so many in this space, and the technological advancements that let smaller teams (sometimes just one or two people) make beautifully complex games. Seeing tons of fellow journalists and developers bright-eyed and excited, even with so many of us struggling to find work, recently laid off, or otherwise worried about the future, was a shot of adrenaline.
But it was also impossible to ignore that something larger was taking place in LA, acting as a sombre backdrop to this comparatively low-stakes weekend of video games. On Saturday, protests broke out in Los Angeles, with citizens pushing back against the militant and cruel anti-immigration raids taking place across the city. The constant whir of helicopters was a bizarre soundtrack to the weekend; many people who had come from out of state or even out of the country were noticeably concerned about the escalating events. We furtively shared updates with each other at hands-on appointments, whispering about the national guard, warning each other to travel together and safely. On Sunday night, dozens of journalists and devs were told they couldn’t leave a downtown LA bar where they had gathered; the LAPD had shut down the area, determined to quell the protests.
On the last day of SGF, we chatted about how weird it was to preview video games during such an acute political moment. One person told me they were playing a demo that kicked off with tanks and military men and, as he played, he heard the sounds of a helicopter circling overhead, and wondered where the game ended and the real world began.Alyssa Mercante
From the makers of Frostpunk and This War of Mine,The Altersis a strangesci-fi strategyexperiment that sees stranded space-worker Jan cloning himself several times over in order to assemble a team big enough to make it off an exoplanet before the sun rises and burns everything to cinders. The thing is that the clones don’t exactly get on. Each one represents a different alternate-universe version of Jan: imagine being stuck on a remote base with nothing but your squabbling selves.
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I thought The Alters was going to be a comedy game, but though it is sometimes fleetingly funny, it’s also a surprisingly involving base-building survival affair, more tense and urgent-feeling than I was expecting and full of consequential choices that encourage a second or third run-through. I will certainly be playing more of it.
Available on:PC,PlayStation5, XboxApproximate playtime:20-30 hours
While Alyssa was on the ground at Summer Game Fest, Keith and I were watching an endless stream ofshowcases and trailersfrom the UK– we’ve picked out themost interesting gamesfrom the show.
The biggest announcement was probably anew Xbox handheld– though, confusingly, it’s not quite what it seems. The ROG Xbox Ally X (why can nobody at Microsoft name something properly?) is an Xbox branded version of an existing line of portable PCs. Still, Alyssawas impressedwith how well it worked in her brief demo.
We’ve also been extremely busy playing an inordinate amount ofNintendo’s Switch 2. Keith’sreview of the consoleis here, andhere’s my reviewof its flagship game, Mario Kart World.
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No question for this week’s guest issue but, as ever, if you’ve got something you’d like to ask, or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us onpushingbuttons@theguardian.com.