Summer Game Fest host Geoff Keighley warned fans to temper their expectations for today’s livestreamed event, which kicks off several days of demos and events. And indeed, the show didn’t have a lot of huge reveals — especially because one of its biggest announcements, a PlayStation 5 remake of The Last of Us, leaked just before the show.
But Summer Game Fest did manage to introduce a couple of surprises and new gameplay for the coming year’s big titles. Also, for some reason, a lot of it involved outer space.
If you didn’t catch the show, you can see the biggest announcements below.
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A new Aliens game is coming next year
Alien and Aliens games, to put it mildly, vary in quality. And we don’t know much about Aliens: Dark Descent, a newly announced installment in the franchise. (It’s presumably unrelated to Frictional’s Amnesia: The Dark Descent.) Developer Tindalos Interactive describes it as a squad-based action game where you command a group of Colonial Marines against xenomorphs and a new, unknown enemy. The game is scheduled for release on current- and next-generation PlayStation and Xbox consoles, plus PC, in 2023.
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We’ve already seen a trailer for The Callisto Protocol, a survival horror game made by Striking Distance Studios, whose members worked on the original Dead Space. But today’s event gave us a closer look at the gameplay. The project seems to heavily channel Dead Space’s survival horror style, with goopy monsters, a plasma cutter-like weapon, and gruesome death animations for your character. As previously announced, the game comes out December 2nd.
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A new level from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II is months away from its October 28th release, and Summer Game Fest cast a little more light on what we’ll find there, showing a full playthrough of a level. The video shows players boarding a ship to neutralize a missile and survive a storm, highlighting the game’s water and wind physics.
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Classic platformer Flashback will get a sequel
Flashback helped establish the cinematic platformer genre in 1992, and 30 years after its release, it’s getting a sequel. The sequel is being developed by French studio Microids, and it’s apparently coming to current- and next-gen PlayStation and Xbox consoles, Steam, and Nintendo Switch in winter of 2022. That’s all we know! You can check out a teaser above for a sense of the vibe.
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Ubiquitous game voice actor Troy Baker and Red Dead Redemption 2’s Roger Clark are lending their voices to Fort Solis, a newly announced game from independent studio Fallen Leaf. Baker describes Fort Solis as a “tight thriller” and “Dead Space meets Duncan Jones’ Moon,” and it’s apparently a fast-paced narrative game set on a remote Martian mining outpost. Its trailer says it’s going to be released on Steam.
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Robot horror game Routine was delayed by a decade, but it’s back
Routine first appeared all the way in 2012, promising a creepy horror atmosphere on a spaceship populated by dangerous robots. Then it was pushed back year after year as a relatively inexperienced team tried to complete it. Now it’s got a new trailer, which lists it as coming to PC, Xbox Series X and S, Xbox One, and Xbox Game Pass at an unknown date.
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Frost Giant Studios was founded by former Blizzard developers, including veterans from the StarCraft and Warcraft real-time strategy series, and just revealed its first title: a sci-fi-plus-demons RTS called Stormgate. Stormgate is supposed to “stay true” to the classic RTS formula. But it’s intended to be more accessible and use a free-to-play model without including pay-to-win mechanics or crypto tokens. You can see a short trailer above.
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Golf Club: Wasteland developer Demagog’s new title Highwater is an “adventure strategy game set in a world ravaged by extreme climate change,” according to Keighley. At Game Fest we got a colorful yet melancholy trailer about characters navigating a flooded city dubbed Alphaville, showing off pieces of the game’s exploration and turn-based combat.
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Marvel’s Midnight Suns is coming October 7th
Firaxis Games’ Marvel’s Midnight Suns was announced last year at Gamescom, and now we have an official release date: October 7th. In case you’ve forgotten, it’s a tactical role-playing game set in the “darker side of the Marvel Universe,” and you can see some new footage above.
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Naughty Dog’s big news actually leaked before Summer Game Fest: it’s releasing a remake of The Last of Us Part I for PlayStation 5 on September 2nd, and a version for PC is in development. But it also teased a new project: a multiplayer-focused game that’s supposed to be as big as its single-player titles and feature a story that’s “very unique” to the game. As Naughty Dog co-president Neil Druckmann describes above, the project began as a The Last of Us Part II multiplayer mode. Then it was then expanded into its own — as of yet unnamed — game. A piece of concept art suggests will be set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, and it features “a brand-new cast of characters.” For now, that’s about all we know, with more news promised to come next year.