The 7 biggest trends from Summer Game Fest 2024
Jun. 11, 2024List | The highlights of SGF say a lot about video games trends for the next 12 months (and counting)
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Frankly, I don’t know how many trailers I saw over the frenziedSummer Game Festweekend. However, considering I watched every single event, and that each one contained anything between 30 and 80 trailers, I’m thinking there were at least 250 in total – and now they’re all coagulating into one mega-game in my head.
7. Heartbreaking journeys with heartwarming pets
I feel like there’s a Covid lockdown influence behind this year’s influx of games in which vulnerable human characters set off on melancholy adventures with cute pets. In poetic platformer Deer & Boy, a child on the run from a tragic event meets up with a stray fawn; Koira from Don’t Nod is a musical adventure where a playful pup follows on your hike into a surreal forest; and Neva is a gorgeous-looking adventure in which a young woman and her wolf travel through a dying world. Were these games first conceived during those long, lonely lockdown days, when we spent an hour a day just walking alone, and when so many people bought dogs and cats for company? I think so.
This may beanotherhangover from lockdown, or it could be inspired by our growing reliance on delivery companies such as Uber Eats and Deliveroo, but there were a LOT of games about being a courier. Petal Runner is a Gameboy Advance-style role-playing game where you breed and deliver pets in a cyberpunk town (we’ll come back to cyberpunk vibes in a bit), while Tom the Postgirl is a weird spooky tale about delivering packages and staring in the windows of your bizarre customers. The time loop adventure Hello Again starts with you delivering a package to a professor on a remote island, and the dreamy color-drenched Crescent Country has been memorably described as “GayDeath Stranding” thanks to its queer, witchy take on parcel delivery. Elsewhere, Tiny Bookstore and Fruit Bus are both about mobile retailers meeting new people on their travels. In short, this is the era of slow-paced driving and socializing games and I’m here for it.
The UK PlayStation development team used to have a neat brainstorming exercise: they’d write down dozens of games onto pieces of paper, put them in a hat and draw two out – then they had to work out a way to combine those into one new game concept. Maybe that idea-generating approach has caught on, because check these out. Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure manages to combine an RPG with block-shifting puzzlers; Screenbound is both a 2D Gameboy game and a first-person 3D adventure; and Squeakross: Home Squeak Home is Picross meets The Sims, but with mice. My fave example though was FragPunk, shown at the Xbox event – it combines a 5 vs 5 hero shooter with a collectible card game. You just know someone at fledgling developer Bad Guitar Studios said, “what are the two biggest genres right now? Okay, let’s combine ‘em” and rather than replying, “shut up, you’re crazy”’, they went ahead and did it. And all credit to them.
OK, so cyberpunk has always been a static noise in the background of game design, but it was really loud over the weekend. Standout examples included the visually incredible Psychroma from Rocket Adrift, psychological horror romp KARMA: The Dark World, detective thriller Nobody Wants To Die and moody city builder, Dystopika. I think there are two reasons for this cyber-invasion: just as William Gibson prophesied, our lives reallyarebeing governed by tech super corps nowadays (hi there, Apple, Amazon andGoogle!), while the genre’s exploration of transhumanism – including the breakdown of gender norms and the increasingly intimate invasion of technology into our lives and bodies – also feels extremely relevant. Radically invasive times call for radically invasive video games, I guess.
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Traditionally, video games have explored our fears of climate disaster through post-apocalyptic adventures – but there was a more hopeful strand of ecologically-themed titles at SGF. Generation Exile is a sort of sci-fi city construction sim, but on a giant generation starship where space and resources are in short supply. Then there were farming titles such as Croakwood, Garden of the Sea, Fantastic Haven, Crab God and Kamaeru: A Frog refuge, which all looked to be focusing on maintaining healthy ecosystems. I also loved the look of Spilled, an ocean cleaning game with a bright pixellated art style. Forget post-apocalyptic dystopias – let’s try a little pre-apocalyptic optimism.
It’s heartening to see that during a tough time for the industry, there are organizations looking to support small studios. During the Summer Game Fest live event on Friday, horror movie company Blumhouse revealed its initial slate of six spooky games, all from independent teams. At the same event, Among Us creator InnerSloth announced Outersloth, a funding initiative aimed at burgeoning teams. Then there was a whole showcase organized by the non-profit Day of the Devs, providing a platform for indie events and bundles from emerging and underrepresented talent. What’s more, Future introduced its Indie Elevator Pitch initiative, designed to give publicity to new dev teams. Grassroots game creation is vital to the industry and it needs to be protected
Plenty ofupcoming indie gamesare in the works, and we have the cream of the crop right here for you to wishlist.
Keith Stuart is an experienced journalist and editor. While Keith’s byline can often be found here at GamesRadar+, where he writes about video games and the business that surrounds them, you’ll most often find his words on how gaming intersects with technology and digital culture over at The Guardian. He’s also the author of best-selling and critically acclaimed books, such as ‘A Boy Made of Blocks’, ‘Days of Wonder’, and ‘The Frequency of Us’.
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