Generally, the game-creation process begins with a mechanic. There tends to be an input method that developers want to explore, or maybe even a storyline that they think will be particularly powerful in an interactive setting. There’s usually a central theme grounded in a genre like “first-person shooter” or “isometric roguelike,” and the game comes together within this framework, its details and proper nouns crystalizing along the way.

In the case of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Simogo started with the name.

“There wasn't a single a-ha moment,” Simogo co-founder Simon Flesser told Engadget. “We had the title which we really liked, and from there we have been trying to figure out what laser eyes are.”

Simogo

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is the ninth major game from Simogo, the acclaimed Swedish studio that’s responsible for Device 6, Year Walk and Sayonara Wild Hearts. Simogo revealed Lorelei in June 2022 with a noir-inspired trailer promising a murder mystery, a maze of deceptions and a palace of memories. A smartly dressed woman moves languidly behind the trailer’s text, eyes glowing red as she navigates the monochromatic grounds of a large estate.

Simogo didn’t divulge a ton of detail about Lorelei at its debut, and it hasn’t provided much clarity in the year since. The game’s latest trailer includes the years 1847, 1963 and 2014, and it hints at international espionage with a paranormal twist, emphasizing the player’s ability to recognize patterns and solve puzzles. “Do you remember the maze?” the trailer asks, over and over again.

So, here are some basic details about Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, directly from Flesser:

• It’s a third-person puzzle adventure.

• It’s non-linear.

• There are nearly 150 puzzles to solve.

• It’s coming to PC and Switch.

• It’s set in the “surreal memory of a house.”

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes plays with cameras in a 3D space, drawing from the best ideas in Sayonara Wild Hearts with shifting mechanics and perspectives. It feels mysterious because, well, that’s what it is.

“The project has been transformative to make, which reflects in its themes,” Flesser said. “It's not a singular concept, it's rather more of a collection of ideas over a long time. Thematically, there are a lot of ideas about stories within stories, stories reflecting each other, memories, dreams and parallel events and worlds.”

Simogo

Players will interact with objects including cameras, computers and locks; they’ll read passages from books and magazines; they’ll play games within games, according to Flesser.

“We're trying to instill a feeling of things not being what they seem,” he said. “Not dread, but a constant feeling of ambivalence, a story in which there is no good or evil. And a sense of absurdity — finding yourself in a strange situation in which you will eventually start questioning what is happening and what is not.”

Simogo wants to mess with your mind, basically. This is kind of the studio’s jam — its previous games like Year Walk, The Sailor’s Dream and Device 6 successfully toyed with surrealism and paranormal events.

“I think there is something interesting that happens when you start blending realities,” Flesser said. “When [a piece of] media starts talking about our reality as if it is a story within its reality, it ends up becoming more real somehow. It creeps into your head in a very specific way. You become the story.”

There’s no release date for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, but it’s being published by Annapurna Interactive and it's due out in 2024 on PC and Switch. The game’s second trailer landed last week: At the end, a series of maze blocks flash across the screen, positioned as if they’re words in a sentence. It feels like a challenge, or maybe an invitation, to solve one of Lorelei’s puzzles. It feels like the game has already begun.

At least one person on Steam claims they’ve translated the maze blocks into a complete thought, and their result seems to fit appropriately (linked here, for those curious). I asked Flesser for a correct translation of the mystery blocks and he didn’t provide one. Instead, he said simply, “Everything is a puzzle.”

Storyteller is a game about writing, word puzzles and the twisted tales we tell ourselves just to get through the day, and it'll be playable on Android and iOS via Netflix on September 26th. Storyteller is published by Annapurna Interactive and it landed on Switch and PC on March 23rd — after spending more than a decade in development. 

Solo creator Daniel Benmergui announced Storyteller in 2011, and a prototype of the game actually won the Nuovo award for innovation at the Game Developers Conference in 2012. After that, life happened and Benmergui stopped working on Storyteller for a few years, but he eventually picked it back up and found a publishing partner in Annapurna.

In Storyteller, players compose narrative arcs using comic book-style building blocks, altering the lives, deaths, romances and betrayals of medieval characters in the process. It's a soothing, surprising and often amusing experience that captures the absurdity of the creative writing process. 

When Storyteller lands on iOS and Android in September, it'll come with free DLC that offers new stories for players to weave. This extra content will come to Switch and PC at the same time, also for free.

The Netflix partnership makes sense for Storyteller and plenty of other indie games at the moment. Netflix is rapidly building up its roster of mobile games, all of which are free to play for anyone with a Netflix subscription, and it plans to have nearly 100 titles in its library by the end of the year. Already, Netflix has brought Kentucky Route Zero, Oxenfree, Spiritfarer, Into the Breach, Moonlighter, Laya's Horizon, TMNT: Shredder's Revenge, Valiant Hearts: Coming Home, and other notable names to iOS and Android. The company has even purchased a few renowned indie outfits outright, including the home of Oxenfree, Night School Studio.

In to a T, players have to navigate the world as a teenager who can't lower their arms from an outstretched, T-shaped position. The character, named Teen, traverses an ordinary coastal town alongside their loyal dog, fending off bullies and discovering the strengths of their unique posture along the way. In the game's reveal trailer, it looks like flying might be the big benefit to T-shaped arms.

The game is an episodic 3D adventure with a rounded, cartoon art style that'll be familiar to anyone who's played Katamari Damacy, Wattam or other titles from creator Keita Takahashi. to a T comes from Takahashi's studio, Uvula, which recently released one of the coolest little games on Playdate, Crankin's Time Travel Adventure.

There's no release date or confirmed platforms for to a T, though Uvula began teasing it back in 2022 and it's being published by Annapurna Interactive. The project is being created in partnership with AbleGamers, a non-profit organization that advocates for people with disabilities in the video game market, leading inclusion efforts in software and hardware development. AbleGamers collaborated with Xbox as it designed the Adaptive Controller, and it provided input to Sony in the creation of the Access controller, the studio's coming accessibility-focused gamepad.

Layers of Fear was Bloober Team’s final psychological horror game. The studio didn’t advertise this fact, but behind the scenes, a switch flipped weeks ago: When the remastered and expanded Layers of Fear collection came out on June 15th, it marked the end of a phase that was known internally as Bloober Team 2.0.

“This year is like closing the era of making psychological horror games,” studio co-founder Piotr Babieno told Engadget. “Right now we are going into Bloober Team 3.0, making mass-market horror.”

Bloober is not abandoning horror as a whole, but it is shifting focus. Over the past decade, the studio cemented itself as a powerhouse in the realm of psychological horror games, releasing the Layers of Fear franchise, Observer, Blair Witch and The Medium, all of which generated terror through narrative and environmental cues (otherwise known as “vibes”). Because of these design choices, Bloober games have jokingly been called “walking simulators,” a description that Babieno didn’t deny.

“We focused on the story, we focused on the mood, we focused on the quality of graphics and music, but we didn’t put a lot of attention on the gameplay mechanics,” Babieno said. “It wasn’t our target. But we decided that there was a ceiling that we couldn’t break if we did not deliver something fresh, something new.”

Going forward, developers at Bloober will rely on action and player input to generate disquiet, and they hope that this nudge in creative direction will drastically expand the studio’s audience. This mechanics-first ethos was actually implemented internally in 2019, when Bloober began building the remake of Silent Hill 2 for Konami.

“We decided that our next titles should be much more mass-market oriented,” Babieno said. “We’d like to talk with more people. We’d like to deliver our ideas, with our DNA, not by environment or storytelling, but by action. So all of our future titles will have a lot of gameplay mechanics. They will be much bigger.”

Silent Hill 2 will be the public’s first taste of Bloober’s redirection — but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Before considering the implications of fresh design philosophies, let’s take a look at how Bloober Team 2.0 became a major name on the global horror scene in just a few years.

Babieno co-founded the studio that would become Bloober Team in 2006, after selling his marketing research company in Poland. His ultimate goal was to be a storyteller: He initially considered entering the film industry, but it was too expensive, so he pivoted to games. The studio started with around 15 employees, and they focused on building contract games and other quasi-soulless experiences.

“We crafted some smaller titles on our end, but we never were really good,” Babieno said. “We tried to catch everything on the market and we were just following the crowd. And you know, if you’re following trends, if you’re following what’s fashionable, you can’t be good.”

Everything changed for Bloober Team in 2015. Though many of us may have blocked this fact from our memories, Bloober is the studio that built Basement Crawl, the worst-reviewed launch game on PlayStation 4. Basement Crawl was essentially a busted Bomberman clone when it came out in 2014, and it was shredded in reviews, settling at a rating of 27 on Metacritic. However, since it was one of just a few games to launch alongside the PS4, it sold well enough. Bloober tried to make things right by releasing Brawl in 2015, a free game that addressed many of the complaints players had with Basement Crawl.

Bloober Team

After the release of Brawl, Bloober underwent an internal reckoning. Babieno sat down with his team and had an honest conversation about the studio’s identity and future.

“It looks like we still don't know how to make something good, and we have a game which has 27 percent on Metacritic, so maybe we should change,” Babieno remembered thinking. “Our decision was, OK, we need to focus on creating something we will be proud of. So that's why we went back to the roots and decided we would like to deliver horror games.”

Horror has a special, blood-soaked place in Babieno’s heart. He grew up devouring books, films and games with unsettling themes, including works from Stephen King, Graham Masterton and the Silent Hill team at Konami. Fear spoke to him, and as a creator, he saw how it functioned as a shortcut to deep human emotion and universal experiences.

Babieno took his team’s plan to their investors and laid it all out: “We sat with our funders and told them, guys, we need some money, but we have a pretty good idea for the next 10 years. We would like to become one of the really good psychological horror game developers.” The investors said yes. Bloober Team 2.0 was born.

Layers of Fear came out in 2016 and was a breakout hit, followed by a succession of well-received psychological horror games, including Observer and Blair Witch. But that was just the public side of things: As Bloober was rebranding and cementing itself as a pillar of psychological horror, Babieno was secretly trying to convince Konami to let Bloober make a Silent Hill game.

Babieno first approached Konami in 2015 with a proposal to make a Silent Hill spin-off game, something completely new in the series. The conversation stayed alive for four years, and finally in 2019, Konami invited Babieno to Japan for a meeting.

“Almost the whole management board came to the meeting, and they requested us to prepare a pitch for a Silent Hill 2 remake,” Babieno said. “And whoa. We were so afraid to touch it. We understood from the first day of the conversation that we will have half of the world which will love us and half of the world which will hate us. We are touching something sacred.”

Other studios were in the running to handle Konami’s secret Silent Hill 2 remake, but Bloober got the gig. Konami made the official announcement in October 2022.

Which brings us back to today. The studio just released Layers of Fear, a complete series remastering done in Unreal Engine 5. With this collection, it’s closing the door early on the 10-year plan it laid out for Bloober 2.0 in 2015. A hard pivot worked out well for Bloober once before; it makes some sense to try that again.

Silent Hill 2 will be the first title out of Bloober Team 3.0, the studio focused on action-first, mass-market horror games. This is a small but significant shift in Babieno’s direction, but he — and Bloober as a whole — is still obsessed with fear.

“We are in a very specific moment in history because we have a lot of crises,” Babieno said. He described horror games as a type of catharsis for everyday terror, a safe place where people can dissect their own reactions to intense stimuli and reckon with real-world emotions. He mentioned the pervasive threat of climate change and global economic crises; he pointed out that Bloober is based in Poland, which has a front-row seat to the carnage of the war in Ukraine.

He continued, “As human beings, we would like to be prepared for something that is unexpected. Those fears are around us … we would like to deliver games that allow us to deal with our fears.”

Meanwhile, Bloober Team has grown to roughly 230 employees, and one of Babieno’s greatest personal fears is letting them down or having to lay anyone off. As of 2023, Bloober doesn’t do layoffs; in the past three years, he said just five people have left the company. Babieno isn’t actively growing Bloober at the moment and he isn’t looking for a buyer, even as the industry’s biggest publishers are buying talented indie studios left and right. From Babieno’s perspective, Bloober works best as an independent company building AAA-quality games — horror games, to be exact.

“I would like to stay independent because only then will we be able to make something new, something fresh and creative,” he said. “I don’t want to create games by watching an Excel spreadsheet. I would like to deliver some new milestones of horror, our niche.”

Warm afternoon sunlight streams through the bay windows. A tree beyond the panes throws shadows across a plush rug, partially covered by an open cardboard box. The bedroom is compact and bright, and it’s filled with the remnants of youth: books and family photos line the walls, and the desk drawers are stuffed with drawing paper and school supplies. A skateboard pokes out from under the bed and stuffed animals are tucked into the room’s spare spaces. The record player spins soothing, lo-fi music, and you have a long, lazy afternoon to sit in this room, box up its memories, and move on.

Simpler Times provides this peaceful environment and invites players to get lost in it. There’s a story to unravel just by picking up objects, interacting with them and putting them away for good — the protagonist, Taina, is moving on from her childhood home, onto the next phase of her life, and her past and future come into focus as players explore her bedroom.

Even if Simpler Times’ idyllic setting doesn’t accurately reflect your own childhood bedroom, the developers at Transylvania studio stoneskip have designed a supremely comforting space. Everything about Taina’s room feels welcoming and safe: safe to explore, safe to get lost in, safe to fall fully into your thoughts.

Simpler Times is a first-person game with an emphasis on music and mood. The soundtrack is a series of original, lo-fi pieces that players control on the room’s record player, in a ritual familiar to vinyl owners. Each album runs for a set amount of time before it has to be reset or swapped out: Move the needle to the side, lift the record and carefully put it away, and then reverse the process with a new album. It’s a series of intentional actions designed to ground players in the moment, highlighting the beauty of anticipation and slow gestures. It’s an effective sequence and emblematic of the game’s pace overall.

iam8bit

Simpler Times’ soundtrack is composed by George Pandrea and it includes moments of lyrical poetry written and performed by Taina’s voice actor, Maeve Kroeger. There are other static points of interaction around the bedroom, including an instant camera and a scrapbook that provides backstory and suggests areas to clean next, advancing the larger narrative. There is no fail state in Simpler Times and no clock on any action. Dialogue floats in and and out as players explore, the rolling music encouraging reflection as Taina’s story passively unfolds.

On the surface, Simpler Times sounds similar to Gone Home, the original indie “walking simulator,” but this comparison isn’t quite accurate. For starters, there’s no walking in Simpler Times; the bedroom is small and players navigate by looking around and clicking on points of interaction. The game itself was conceived during the pandemic, when developers found themselves trapped in small spaces, with ample time for self-reflection. Simpler Times is a contained, meditative game that actually feels closer to a calming, repetitive experience like Threes than a narrative adventure.

iam8bit

The full game takes place over four seasons, in four time periods of Taina’s life, but the demo I played at Summer Game Fest was an introduction to her bedroom in present-day, just as she’s starting to pack up. The demo left me relaxed and intrigued, and it was a welcome, cozy break from the chaos of a large (but not, like, E3-large) video game event.

Simpler Times is being published by iam8bit and it’s due to hit Steam in 2024.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder, a new but classic adventure featuring Mario and friends, is coming to Nintendo Switch on October 20th, 2023. The new game is a 2D sidescroller with busy, bright environments and plenty of secrets to uncover, starring Mario, Luigi, Toad, Princess Peach, Princess Daisy and Yoshi as playable characters. It also introduces Mario's newest power-up, which transforms him into Elephant Mario. Why not, you know?

Nintendo describes Super Mario Bros. Wonder as the next evolution of the series' traditional 2D sidescrolling mechanics.

"When you touch a Wonder Flower in the game, the wonders of the world unlock — pipes could come alive, hordes of enemies may appear, characters might change their looks, for example — transforming the gameplay in unpredictable ways," Nintendo says in a press release. 

Pre-orders are live now for Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

Detective Pikachu Returns is due to hit Nintendo Switch on October 6th, 2023, and it's available to wishlist today. Nintendo announced a new entry in the franchise back in 2019, hot on the heels of the Detective Pikachu movie, which was an overall, adorable success.

Detective Pikachu, the original game, came out worldwide in 2018. It gave Pikachu a new friend and a voice, transforming him into a gruff private investigator and infusing the game with Ace Attorney vibes. It's more of a narrative adventure than traditional Pokemon games — which makes sense, considering the film that followed.

The new installment reunites Pikachu with his pal Tim Goodman, and as the debut trailer shows, hijinks ensure. Regardless of the game's plot, it's always a treat to see Pikachu in a little hat, holding a cup of coffee and contemplating life's mysteries.

After dozens of stories, we’re just about wrapped with our coverage of Summer Game Fest 2023. Following the cancellation of E3 back in March, we had a smaller, stripped-back experience at SGF. It began... before it all began, with Sony holding its own PlayStation Showcase livestream on May 24th. It was a pretty packed show, featuring Bungie's Marathon, Haven's Fairgame$, a Metal Gear Solid 3 remake, more info on Final Fantasy XVI and Spider-Man 2, and a release date for Alan Wake II. There was also the Project Q handheld streaming device. 

Then came Summer Game Fest with an opening night event on Thursday, June 8th. We got a gameplay reveal for Mortal Kombat 1, a new (delayed to 2024) release date for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and a handful of smaller reveals like Sand Land and Sonic Superstars. There were a lot of sequels and free-to-play MMO trailers, but it was a generally low-key affair, with fewer big names than we've come to expect from the team behind The Game Awards.

The Day of the Devs and Devolver streams immediately following Summer Game Fest's live show were a little more successful, with interesting games from smaller studios, including Baby Steps, Beastieball, Cocoon, Hauntii, Helskate, Simpler Times and Viewfinder.

It wasn't until Sunday's Xbox event that we got an event filled with the AAA announcements you'd expect out of E3. Microsoft had a customarily dense show that featured new announcements and some release dates (or windows) for known games. Among the games featured were Avowed, Fable, South of Midnight, Persona 3 Reload, Forza Motorsport, Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, Metaphor: ReFantazio and Clockwork Revolution. We also finally got an Xbox Series S that has 1TB of built-in storage.

On Monday, we saw a pair of smaller shows. First up was Ubisoft, which featured Star Wars Outlaws and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, a trio of Assassin's Creed games, a new Crew game and a fresh Prince of Persia title. Later that day it was Capcom's turn, and they showed off Exoprimal, again, and offered an intriguing look at Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, which looks like a unique third-person action game. Finally, because it's 2023, there was also an indefinite delay to the company's almost-forgotten AAA sci-fi game, Pragmata. That's a game that was announced for PlayStation 5 way back in June 2020 — before we even knew what the PS5 looked like — and this is its second delay after initially being expected in 2022.

We’ll have more coverage in the coming weeks, and will update this post with links when they go live. For now, enjoy our analysis, previews and all the other big announcements from SGF 2023.

Analysis

Summer Game Fest 2023 and the stagnant state of the industry

I published this story about the state of AAA gaming on the eve of Summer Game Fest. After a week stuffed full of gaming announcements, I feel exactly the same way. — Jessica Conditt, Senior Reporter

Generative AI can help bring tomorrow's gaming NPCs to life

This story from senior reporter (and Engadget's AI expert) Andrew Tarantola looks at the history of NPCs from if-then programming through to finite-state-machines, decision and behavior trees, GOAPs, and modern AIs in games like The Last of Us, and then looks to the future to see how generative AI might impact the future of gaming.

Ubisoft needs a reboot

At some point in the last console generation, Ubisoft lost its soul. It was a piecemeal erosion process that started in 2015, and it finally resulted in a complete identity collapse somewhere between the studio’s unironic rollout of in-game NFTs and its sixth delay of Skull & Bones. Ubisoft has 40 years of AAA hits and weird licensing deals to its name, and it used to be a pillar of European innovation — but in 2023, it’s selling live-service blandness, mobile ports with microtransactions and unreliable release dates. What even is Ubisoft anymore? — Jessica Conditt

The Starfield direct has me excited for Bethesda's new ambitious RPG

Senior video producer Brandon Quintana shot this video immediately after Microsoft's Starfield Direct on Sunday, outlining why, after a fuller look at the game, he's more excited than ever for Bethesda's new ambitious RPG.

Why the 'Oxenfree II' team became Netflix's first game studio

In early 2021, Night School was in the market for a partnership. It ended up being acquired by Netflix, becoming the company's first game studio. Now, Night School is gearing up to launch its first game for the streaming giant. But that's not the end of Netflix's ambitions.

Game previews

'Alan Wake II' stands out in a sea of sequels

I’m nervous about Saga’s fate in Alan Wake II — and that only makes me more excited for the full game. This is first-and-foremost a linear, narrative-driven experience, and it looks spooky as hell. – Jessica Conditt

‘Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon’ has fast battles with customizable mechs

Armored Core, one of the longest-running mech battle series ever, hasn’t been seen in over a decade. Now, developer FromSoftware, flying high from Elden Ring and Dark Souls glory, is returning to mechs, with what it says is a remastered, reimagined take on robot combat. It’s time for a mech gaming boom. – Mat Smith, UK Bureau Chief

‘Cocoon’ is worth getting excited about

Cocoon is a game that makes perfect sense while you're playing it. That would be an unremarkable achievement if it wasn't also a game that forces you to use its levels to solve themselves. It’s the debut title from Geometric Interactive, a studio from folks that previously worked on the award-winning puzzle platformers Limbo and Inside. At Summer Game Fest 2023 I had around half an hour to play through the game’s opening, and it has stuck with me more than anything else I saw at the show. In my mind it’s the game of the show. – Aaron Souppouris, Executive Editor

'Forza Motorsport' wants you to drive forever

The long-overdue next title in the Motorsport series (it’s been over five years since the last!) has a bunch of new features, improved physics, better AI and looks absolutely fantastic at 4K/60. The most interesting thing about it to me is that it could well be the last distinct Motorsport game, as Microsoft is moving the series to a game-as-a-service model. In the age of Game Pass, that makes perfect sense to me, and I can’t wait to start driving this October. – Aaron Souppouris

'Immortals of Aveum' first look: A little more magic and this might be wonderful

When I saw the announcement trailer for Immortals of Aveum in the winter of 2022, I was surprised by my own interest in the game. Today, I remain interested in Immortals of Aveum and I think I’ve figured out why. There aren’t a ton of first-person action games that rely on mechanics other than guns — Dishonored, Ghostwire: Tokyo and Hexen come to mind, but it’s a small field overall. That might be one reason Immortals stands out as something fresh, but it’s also nice to see a new, AAA-level game that’s single-player and narrative-driven with a contained campaign, rather than an open world of live-service features. – Jessica Conditt

‘Lysfanga’ is what happens when hack-and-slash meets tactical time travel

Lysfanga’s isometric views may conjure up memories of Hades, but this is a different kind of game. While you’ll still be slicing and dicing monsters and enemies, protagonist Imë combines her spells and weapon combos with the ability to revert time and do it all over again, differently. The second time around, her shadow from the previous timeline will continue to rush into the enemies. While some action-game prowess helps, you’ll only beat most levels by thinking them through before you act. The controls and play style aren’t remotely similar, but Lysfanga reminded me of old Fire Emblem games, where careful planning decided a fight before it even begins. Even in this early demo, the game offers some incredibly satisfying moments when all your attacking clones come together to wipe out all the enemies in mere seconds. – Mat Smith

‘Mortal Kombat 1’ made a great first impression

Ed Boon's on-stage gameplay reveal of Mortal Kombat 1, the latest entry in the storied fighting game franchise, was one of the stand-out moments of an otherwise subdued opening event. At a private event after the show, Brandon Quintana and Mat Smith sat down to play some MK1 and came away impressed.

'Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown' is a Metroidvania-style platformer coming in 2024

After a small reveal at Summer Game Fest’s opening night event, Ubisoft did a deeper dive into the game during Monday’s “Forward” stream. After that, senior video producer Brandon Quintana got his hands on an early build of the game and had a blast.

'33 Immortals' first look: Defying a god is more fun with friends

Can you imagine assembling 33 players for a 25-minute raid? 33 Immortals plans to do exactly that. Channeling the animation style of retro cartoons (and a little Banner Saga), 33 Immortals is a multiplayer roguelike top-down action game from the creators of Spiritfarer. In this early build of the game I played with five others and had a lot of fun, even if some technical issues spoiled the party a little. I’m excited to play a roguelike as part of a mob, and I'm curious to see what the other character types will be. – Mat Smith

‘Under the Waves’ is a sad but relaxing oceanic adventure

Parallel Studio’s Under the Waves is a calming game. Between the cheers and jeers from Crash Team Rumble players (possibly employees) nearby, I was diving. Diving deeper and deeper into the inky blue, chasing a jettisoned shipping container as it bounced off rocks, spilling soft toys and revealing a mysteriously abandoned submarine hidden deeper still. While I might have been relaxed, I also felt a little unsettled. In a lot of ways, whether it’s the story yet to be revealed or the uneasy tension that is touched on regularly, it reminds me of Firewatch, even if it’s all set undersea. – Mat Smith

All the other big announcements at Summer Game Fest 2023

You can find all of our coverage from Summer Game Fest right here, but here’s a chronological list of the announcements we think really moved the needle.

Thursday June 8th

• You can play a demo of the goth Pinocchio game 'Lies of P' right now

• 'Sand Land' is a new adventure game based on a manga by the creator of Dragon Ball

• 'Sonic Superstars' gives classic gameplay another modern makeover

• ‘Like A Dragon Gaiden’ revives Kiryu on November 9th 2023

• 'Final Fantasy VII Remake: Rebirth' is delayed to early 2024

• 'Baby Steps' is the 3D 'QWOP' we've all been waiting for

Sunday June 11th

• Take a peek at Xbox's Fable reboot in action

• 'South of Midnight' is a Southern Gothic monster adventure from Compulsion Games

• Obsidian's fantasy RPG 'Avowed' is coming to PC and Xbox in 2024

• 'Senua's Saga: Hellblade II' will arrive in 2024

• 'Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth' will make you see Ichiban's bare butt in early 2024

• Xbox Series S will be available with 1TB storage in black for $349 on September 1st

• 'Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty' will take you back to Night City on September 26th

• 'Cities Skylines II' will arrive on PC and consoles October 24th

• 'Metaphor: ReFantazio' is a fantasy RPG from the team behind 'Persona 5'

• 'Clockwork Revolution' is a time-traveling RPG of steampunk anarchy

• Overwatch 2's story missions and new PvP mode will land on August 10th

• 'Persona 3 Reload' updates a PS2 classic for modern platforms in early 2024

Monday June 12th

• Ubisoft’s ‘Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora’ arrives on December 7th 2023

• 'Skull and Bones' is still alive, will apparently have a closed beta in August

• First 'Star Wars Outlaws' gameplay trailer offers 10 minutes of scoundrel wish fulfillment

• Capcom's Pragmata has been delayed for a second time

• Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is an action game with traditional Japanese aesthetics

In early 2021, Night School was in the market for a partnership. The studio’s debut game, Oxenfree, was a breakout success in 2016, and it was followed by Afterparty in 2019 and then 2020’s Next Stop Nowhere, an Apple Arcade exclusive. By 2021, co-founders Sean Krankel and Adam Hines had made deals with the major players in the industry – Xbox, PlayStation, Valve, Nintendo, Apple – and Night School was an acclaimed indie team.

“We were actually talking to Netflix about just bringing some of our existing games over,” Night School co-founder Sean Krankel said at Summer Game Fest, sitting with co-founder Adam Hines and lead developer Bryant Cannon around a small table behind the demo hall.

Krankel said Night School wasn’t in danger of collapsing or laying off any staff in 2021. He and Hines had about 20 employees, they were still dealing with the effects of the pandemic, and they were interested in establishing real stability at the studio. Maybe they’d even find a buyer. They were casually talking with Netflix employee Bill Holmes – whom Krankel described as “the reason why there's a Netflix button on our TV remotes” – about potential publishing deals, nothing more.

“It's like another normal conversation with any first party,” Krankel said. “And then, one day, he literally says, ‘Would you ever be interested in joining?’ And I'm like, hummina hummina – yes. Totally.”

Night School Studio (Twitter)

Night School was the first video game team that Netflix purchased outright, and the deal was announced on September 28th, 2021. This was just two months after Netflix revealed it had hired former EA executive Mike Verdu to lead the company’s formal push into video game publishing and development, with plans to offer titles to subscribers on its streaming platform. Netflix had been messing around with games since 2017, offering mobile experiences and interactive streams based on popular shows like Stranger Things and The Dark Crystal.

Netflix’s first experiment in video games was Stranger Things, a mobile title that landed in October 2017, developed by Texas studio BonusXP. It was well-received and Netflix and BonusXP went on to release a follow-up, Stranger Things 3: The Game, alongside the premiere of the show’s third season in 2019.

If it feels like there was a weird gap between these releases, that’s because there was – but not in the way you might think. Throughout 2018, Telltale Games was building an episodic narrative adventure (as it generally did) based on Stranger Things, signalling the start of a broader partnership with Netflix. At the same time, Telltale tapped Night School to create a companion mobile game set in the world above The Upside Down. Telltale and Night School had collaborated before on the 2016 Mr. Robot mobile title, Mr. Robot:1.51exfiltrati0n.

As reported by The Verge, Night School began work in January 2018 on a first-person narrative adventure that would feed directly into the wider-platform game, and Krankel and Hines hired four new people for the project. Telltale missed a number of milestone payments to Night School and was generally difficult to communicate with, according to studio members who spoke with The Verge. And then, in September 2018, Telltale effectively shut down. Night School was left floating for a while, until it was clear their game was dead, too. There’s been a Netflix-shaped ghost in Night School’s résumé ever since.

By 2021, Krankel and Hines had seen the best and worst of what publishers had to offer, and Netflix was finally ready to admit its video game ambitions. The Night School team had considered acquisition offers from other companies over the previous few years, but “there was always something off,” Krankel said.

“After the first chat that I had with the executive team [at Netflix] about this next thing, it was so exciting, because they didn't ask me, you know, ‘Are you in the red on this?’ Or, ‘What's going on with that?’ It was more like, ‘What can we do to unblock your team from making your dreams?’”

Hines added, “Our big concern was the autonomy aspect. We’ve all worked at bigger studios before, and have just seen and felt how long it would take to get decisions made, how the creative would kind of get choked out of things because there's too many cooks in the kitchen. But just talking to Netflix a lot before we joined up, we felt really at ease, just like we were talking the same language about how to make games.”

Night School’s latest project is Oxenfree II, a hotly anticipated sequel coming to PlayStation 4, PS5, Steam, Switch and mobile devices via Netflix on July 12th. (There’s no drama behind the Xbox exclusion, Krankel said: “Nothing happened honestly; it is just where we are in our development.”)

Night School has expanded its team size and moved into the Netflix offices, and they’re able to fly remote employees in as often as they need. One obvious benefit of the Netflix partnership in Oxenfree II is its inclusion of 32 languages at launch.

“That’s crazy,” Hines said at Summer Game Fest.

Lead developer Bryant Cannon agreed: “Especially for a game with hundreds of thousands of words in it. All that's really exciting. I think the game is going to be better because we have this battery in our back.”

Night School was the first purchase in September 2021, but Netflix today owns six video game studios, including Alphabear developer Spry Fox and two internal teams in California and Finland. Netflix has plans to expand into AAA development and past mobile platforms; it offers more than 50 games in its library right now, and the company plans to add 40 more by the end of 2023.

Netflix is publishing more games than it’s buying outright, including Spiritifarer, Into the Breach, Poinpy and Kentucky Route Zero. One of the biggest names in its pile is Laya’s Horizon, the latest title from Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey studio, Snowman. Laya’s Horizon is a serene wingsuit game set in a sprawling mountainside sandbox, and it’s exclusive to Netflix Games on Android and iOS.

Snowman

Snowman got its start publishing the iOS versions of the Team Alto games in 2015 and 2018, followed by the Apple Arcade timed exclusives Skate City and Where Cards Fall. Snowman developed and released Lucky Luna for Netflix in 2022, followed by Laya’s Horizon this May. Snowman’s games tend to end up on multiple platforms, eventually, but Android has generally been an afterthought. Its last two projects landed on Android and iOS simultaneously because of Netflix.

In April, Snowman founder Ryan Cash told Engadget that the Netflix partnership hadn’t been a barrier for players. Yes, you need a Netflix account to play the games. But:

“Everyone I've had this conversation with has Netflix,” Cash said. “So they just get to playing right away. Whereas before, it was either, I have to sell them a $5 game or I have to tell them, OK, it's free to play, there are ads but you can remove them if you want. Or it's like, you gotta sign up for Apple Arcade, or you need an Xbox or whatever it is. So it's been the most barrier-free way to tell people what I do.”

Laya’s Horizon doesn’t have a currency system, microtransactions, pop-ups or billboards advertising real-life products lining the slopes of its virtual mountain – because Snowman doesn’t need these features for the game to be adequately profitable. The Netflix partnership took care of that aspect, and creative director Jason Medeiros didn’t have to implement monetization in the actual game.

“I didn't want any of that stuff,” Medeiros said. “Because I mean, I liked games before all that stuff happened. So having a platform like Netflix, it's just like, none of that matters. Like, you don't have to do that stuff. It's a breath of fresh air; we jump on opportunities to make games that way.”

When I initially asked the Night School crew why they chose to be bought by Netflix, Krankel immediately got to the heart of the matter and volleyed, “Why not remain independent?” And then he answered his question:

“A small subset of teams are good to go for the next 10 years, but others have these peaks and valleys, and we were somewhere in between. We weren't in danger of anything going sideways. But we were at a spot where we're like, it would be cool to tether to somebody who has a similar vision, and somebody that we could work with that would like, de-risk us.”

Signing up to be acquired by a massive media company comes with its own risks, but they’re different concerns than those of a fully independent operation, which has to manage funding and paying salaries without a safety net. The challenge for indie studios is to sign up with a parent company that can strike a healthy balance between support and autonomy, and Netflix has a proven track record in this space when it comes to film and television. Games are just the next frontier when it comes to streaming entertainment.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest right here!

At some point in the last console generation, Ubisoft lost its soul. It was a piecemeal erosion process that started in 2015, and it finally resulted in a complete identity collapse somewhere between the studio’s unironic rollout of in-game NFTs and its sixth delay of Skull & Bones. Ubisoft has 40 years of AAA hits and weird licensing deals to its name, and it used to be a pillar of European innovation – but in 2023, it’s selling live-service blandness, mobile ports with microtransactions and unreliable release dates. What even is Ubisoft anymore?

Ubisoft

Ubisoft has been a company longer than most of its players have been alive. It’s responsible for developing and publishing hundreds of games, including iconic franchises like Prince of Persia, Far Cry, Trackmania, the Toms Clancy, Rabbids, Rayman, Just Dance and, of course, Assassin’s Creed.

At the company’s Summer Game Fest show we got reveals of Massive Entertainment’s big licensed games, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws, as well as a proper look at the new 2D Prince of Persia game, which actually seems pretty good. But for the most part we saw sequels, live-service games and mobile titles. XDefiant is a free-to-play team-based shooter, and following an off-key sea shanty performance, we saw Skull & Bones – a live-service game we actually played in 2017 and 2018, but has since been delayed to oblivion. Then there were several mobile-first games like The Division Resurgence and Assassin’s Creed Codename Jade, and a new Crew game, The Crew Motorfest. We also got another Ubisoft TV show and a look at the Assassin’s Creed VR game. It was far from the worst stream of the Summer Game Fest, but it didn’t do much to make people excited about Ubisoft.

So, let’s talk about how we got here.

Everything changed for Ubisoft in 2015. Assassin’s Creed: Unity shipped the previous November and proved to be the series’ most busted installment to date. It was the first Assassin’s Creed built specifically for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and Ubisoft overshot it on all fronts: Unity was full of visual and mechanical bugs, and it was so unplayable at launch that Ubisoft publicly apologized for the game and eventually released free DLC, all while furiously rolling out fixes. That same year, Ubisoft debuted Watch Dogs, too – and that game was also disappointing from a visual standpoint, especially compared with its announcement trailers in 2012.

Until this point, Ubisoft had an annual cadence for Assassin’s Creed, releasing one mainline entry per year from 2009 onward. Syndicate came out in 2015, and by 2016, Ubisoft was openly talking about series fatigue and announced plans to re-evaluate its approach to its tentpole franchise. Notably, longtime producer Jade Raymond left Assassin’s Creed and Ubisoft altogether in October 2014, just before the Unity disaster.

Ubisoft

This was the stage when a French media investor group, Vivendi, attempted to take over Ubisoft. Vivendi began buying up shares in the studio in 2015, and Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot went on a publicity tour against the raid, arguing about the importance of staying independent on-stage at E3 and beyond. Meanwhile, the Guillemot family, which founded Ubisoft in 1986, went on a buying spree of its own, increasing its control of the studio alongside Vivendi. The fight ended in 2018, when Vivendi agreed to sell all of its Ubisoft shares for nearly $2.5 billion, a hefty return on its investment. This deal was able to happen because Vivendi sold a significant chunk of its ownership to Tencent, an existing Ubisoft investor and one of the largest video game companies in the world. At the exact same time, Ubisoft and Tencent, a Chinese company, announced they’d entered a strategic agreement that would bring Ubisoft’s games to PC and mobile devices in China. Since then, Tencent’s stake in Ubisoft has grown significantly, and today, in addition to its studio shares, it owns 49.9 percent of Guillemot Brothers Limited.

I feel like you can see this period of financial turmoil in Ubisoft’s creative output between 2015 and 2019. Ubisoft was consistently releasing entries in its established franchises, but it wasn’t developing original, genre-shifting hits like it used to. The studio was kind of coasting. In 2019, Ubisoft delayed a number of big games in its lineup – including Skull & Bones, again – and executives said they wanted to slow down even more between releases. In 2020, Ubisoft faced serious allegations of systemic sexual misconduct and sexism, and a handful of longtime leaders were fired or quit.

Ubisoft

On an investor call in 2021, Ubisoft’s CFO said the company was focused on building its library of free-to-play and mobile games. Since then, Ubisoft has done exactly that, developing Rainbow Six, The Division and Assassin’s Creed mobile games, and focusing on live-service iterations of its franchises, old and new. Ubisoft also earnestly tried to make in-game NFTs a thing, which… no.

The most recent Assassin’s Creed games, Valhalla and Odyssey, have been just fine, but they’ve suffered from the same open-world bloat as Far Cry, offering too-big worlds with too little variety or innovation. The studio’s newest announcements include licensed games, live services, mobile entries and microtransaction specials – with Assassin’s Creed represented in most of these categories. The most intriguing Assassin’s Creed title in Ubisoft’s roster is Mirage, the next mainline entry due out in October. It’s a condensed Assassin’s Creed experience that was initially conceived as a bit of DLC for Valhalla, and it’s an homage to the series roots, with a contained map and a return to stealth-first combat. It sounds like the original Assassin’s Creed – which maxed out at 15 hours or so, rather than 60-plus for the recent games – and it feels like the type of thing Ubisoft players have been looking for over the past eight years. Unfortunately, Ubisoft doesn’t see it that way, and it’s charging just $50 for the game. That’s not a bad thing for players, but when Ubisoft is charging $70 for The Crew Motorfest, it says something about how the studio sees value in terms of game size and paid DLC, rather than substance.

Ubisoft

To me, Mirage is a welcome step back in terms of scope, but it almost feels like an accident in Ubisoft’s broader plans to build freemium experiences and mobile games for a global market. The studio might be on the cusp of a renaissance, with the space to find its voice and alter the direction of entire genres again, but I don’t think microtransactions and open-world blandness will push it over that edge. Ubisoft used to be weird and profitable in the world of prestige games, but both of those descriptions are fading fast as the studio chases hot monetization trends and relies on the innovations of other creators. Mirage represents one path for Ubisoft, where it chases quality design rather than accounting goals. A game like XDefiant represents another potential altogether – it might be lucrative, but it doesn’t really feel like Ubisoft.