I sifted through 29 showcases during the past week and a half for this summer showcase season. My rough guesstimate is that they, all together, contained about one zillion games. To keep this list down to a tenable 50, we have some strict preliminary qualification rules: games have to be new to me and unreleased. After that, it’s just what I’m into — keeping in mind that these types of shows are less good at introducing an audience to new games and more about who cuts the best trailer. There are a number of games that caught my eye but didn’t quite sell me, but either have demos or are coming out soon. I’ll get to them another time, along with those which are already available.
Apathema
Limb- and part-targeting, craftable spells, sparing or slaying enemies, a sanity system, and probably more, on top of all the other turn-based RPG mainstays. Ambitious and grungy as all hell.
Appa
Appa shows off a lot in a short span of time. Gorgeous pixel art in an animated comic format; grief and trauma; a few human characters and their personal demons; and a conceptual-looking card battler, with lofty concepts like aenima and contemplation.
Backpack Boy
A puzzle platformer with a magic flashlight that shifts everything in its path to another world — one with different platforms, paths, and hazards.
The Birdsong Tree
Build a birch tree taller and taller, up and up with birdhouses, to attract all the local birds!
Bobls
An itsy-bitsy precision platformer that’ll have its own singleplayer and co-op campaigns out the gate, alongside a level editor and inbuilt level browser.
Bot slash bot
A fast-paced hack n’ slash designed entirely around the mouse! It’s great to see an action game knuckle down on spacing and pacing like this, without extraneous ARPG tech to muck up the works.
Bub
I suspect this will be many folks’ best in show. It aired as part of Day of the Devs, for one, and had all the elements of a strong showcase: unforgettably unique handmade visuals, a strong, evocative trailer, and a developer talking head that sold you emotionally.
The Button Effect
A first-person puzzle game where every puzzle is buttons, because you’re in an art museum of buttons.
Cardaire: Eternal Aces
A singleplayer trading card game… not a roguelike deckbuilder… not an RPG where all the abilities are cards for no reason… but an honest-to-goodness TCG…
Cloudlings
A colony sim on a floating chunk of earth in a big, open sky of other floating chunks. Skyblock with little guys!
Come to my party!
One of my favorites of the whole shebang. Cute, squishy, beautifully fluid pixel art and animation belie a dark narrative core of neglected middle children and deadly school bullying.
Cow Chess
It has even less to do with cows and chess than Ultimate Chicken Horse has to do with chickens and horses. This is one of a couple multiplayer party games on here; contrary to the other, it’s like Worms with some over-the-top Smash Bros. physics thrown in for good measure.
Darkbound
A low-poly survival horror game set in a dark, quasi-abandoned hospital, inhabited by plenty of other patients and staff who could use your help. In this world of kitty cats, I appreciate the dedication to giving so many of them punny names (Miguel becomes Miauguel, Adrian:Adrinyan, etc). That said… I think this is one of the worse-named games I saw. “Darkbound” is just too generic; the name slides off my brain even as many times as I’ve stared at it in this draft the past week. It looks great! But I think the name is a bad choice.
Edwin Earstwhile: Medical Examiner
This is a detective game that takes more from Sherlock Holmes than Return of the Obra Dinn, involving coroners’ examinations as well as living interrogations — and, like Sherlock Holmes, the ability to get it wrong…?
ESSOMENIC
This one still escapes me a bit, but considering it’s also a horror game, that’s only to its benefit. There are interface-driven sections as you mind dive into your “patients’” memories to extract vital information; hopefully without killing them.
Fallosophy
Pinball precision platforming! The philosophy of it all isn’t of the looksmaxxing et al variety, but puts this more in the vein of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy than a basal “rage game.”
Fossil Quest
I feel like excavation minigames are usually a good time (hello fellow Pokémon Diamond/Pearl/Platinum fans) and the addition of designing your own museum exhibits — down to the type and placement of fauna and other decorations — is a fun idea.
Heaven Crawler
There’s something that feels wrong about building combat into such an Ueda ass world, but, well, it is really cool, and Ueda’s putting guns in his next game, so…
House of Saturn
This is already deeply my shit (first-person horror adventure, Catholicism, exorcism, fucked up giant mansion, lantern in the right hand??) but WOW does this trailer and voiceover kick absolute ass.
GHOSTLESS
A Cold War A.I. has trashed the world and sent nigh-undetectable androids out to disrupt what guerrilla forces remain. While it is an element, this isn’t a singleplayer social deduction game like GNOSIA or No, I’m not a Human. It seems to have quite a lot going on actually, with some basebuilding and social deduction on one end and exploration and action platforming on the other.
In the Drift
A game by one of the creators of Sable!! With Laryssa Okada on the soundtrack!!! Fuck me up!!!!!
Incredibug
An action platformer where a humble roly-poly and his co-op capable firefly friend get to live out my dream of destroying a smart home system.
Job Fit for a Devil
Shapeshifting, gambling, lying, cheating, stealing, farting… all devilish activities to partake in in a Russian folk adventure.
Little Cheese Works
I’m a simple woman — a simple woman who loves Overcooked. Little Cheese Works is a multiplayer co-op game with meeses and cheeses, and also some in-game chat shenanigans, like a big, hungry cat you can wake up. The meeses are also very cute. That much is a winning formula, but I do wonder how the game will format itself, and whether or not level design factors in so hugely as it does with Overcooked, or if it’s more of a straight playthrough.
Lost & Found
A detective-ish adventure game about reuniting lost items with their proper owners, rendered in a wild and personal blend of art styles à la The Amazing World of Gumball.
The Memphis Chronicles
Now there’s a word you don’t see every day in games: “tragicomedy.” A walking sim with a theatrical bent.
Mimic Meadows
The only way to explore more of the world is to gain the animals’ powers! The only way to do that is to transform into them by identifying and mimicking their movements.
Mingle
A top-down-but-not-clicky hidden object game where the goal is to find your twin and merge with them into a new guy; and then find that new twin; and repeat.
Neighborhoods
A block-by-block miniature citybuilder with an emphasis on urbanism and livability, presented in a laid-back, faux claymation style.
NOL
Despite being made in a Doom engine port, something tells me this isn’t gonna be a fun time. NOL is set in a dream; a dream about an ordinary house whose real-world inhabitants have been massacred.
The Outer Frame
A detective game with a twist: you’re the fixer. Solve the mystery on your conspiracy board and dispatch field agents to take care of anyone who’d spill the beans.
A Pocket Full of Slagford
I love the cement mixer look of early 3D. I love point-and-click adventures. I love (checks notes) taking the piss out of the British.
PUTRID/SHARP
I knew right away PUTRID/SHARP was nice and nasty, but I thought it was more on the visual novel/adventure side of things at first glance — not so! Its graphics are still sugary rotten, but it’s apparently an RPG with… nonogram-inspired combat?
Raahi
A life sim about being a tuk tuk driver and falling in love!
Recollage
A creepy-cute adventure where you scrapbook yourself together again and again, adapting to new environments and old problems.
Rinthine
From the developers of Moncage and While Waiting comes, of all things, a survival crafting game set in an endless Cretan labyrinth.
Rubber Bird
Bird born with horrible, stretchy arms grabs the world…!
Short Short Fictions
From what I can gather, Short Short Fictions is a game where you play a game called LOST AND FOUND, a game where you play two games called DON’T SAY YES and TO:NORTH, so you can find another game to play called IMMEMORIAL. Statistically, at least one of them must be haunted.
Shutter Story
A grieving boy searches his family photos for evidence of their hauntings… This is one game where the uncanny hyperreality of the latest game engines (Unity here, I think) helps the project instead of hindering it. If this is as much your thing as it is mine, be sure to check out CORPOREAL as well.
Sisters of Solitude
A nonlinear detective game of the ghost hunting variety, set in an abandoned convent and starring a teenage girl obsessed with the paranormal.
Some Puzzles
That FLEB (Strange Jigsaws) is at it again… Now taking the collage theme to the next level, with each puzzle living in its own little window on your desktop!
Stardream
Conspiracy on a retrofuturist generation ship! It’s a neat idea to combine the “taxi driver talks to passengers” thing with the snooping and decisionmaking of a more traditional adventure game.
The Telwynium
It’s a little weird to see such an otherwise faithful-looking MS-DOS game move at modern speeds, but that’s the beauty of living in the future. This one is from the developers of The Drifter and Crawl, and apparently started life as a series of shorter, free games made simply for the fun of nostalgia.
Toada Brava
I think Toada Brava featured in the most showcases of any game here, and it’s easy to see why it was selected so often. The animation is great, the characters are cute, and a little bit of active time battle JRPG never hurt nobody.
TOYA
Roll the cube, get more cubes, become a bigger cube, size up into a new world. It’s hard not to think of Patrick’s Parabox, but that’s no insult!
The Troll & the Witch’s House
Another meticously hand-drawn and animated 2D game, but this time a point-and-click adventure!
T.W.I.R.L.
This may well be my game of the shows. A child confessing a sin so apparently great that the priest immediately moves to keep it contained, though his voice still drips with disdain. I like my PlayStations X’d and my horror psychological.
Unseal
The Little Nightmares series is quietly one of the most popular of recent times, and there’s been no shortage of similar side-scrolling horror adventures since LIMBO popularized them. I like Unseal for living the aesthetic while having the audacity to move to a fully 3D space despite being an amateur team. Good luck to them!
Waterful
I like little nature builders and anything with a conservationist kinda lean. One thing that does annoy me about the latter is a persistent tendency to equate deserts with death and decay, like they’re these impossible environments nothing and no one has ever called home. Waterful does, as the name implies, seem to focus on regreening, but I can only hope that the mentions of other biomes and animals’ needs means that the dunes get some love, too.
Wild Chorus
A vibrant, top-down adventure game about singing songs to little guys (and also people, buildings, and the universe) to save the world!