Geoff Keighley, you son of a gun.
The actual 2025 Summer Game Fest show may not have been one for the history books, but something has clearly shifted around the event by now. Despite the largest console launch in gaming history just days earlier, and an ongoing reluctance from the big-boy publishers to allow their messaging to clash with that of their rivals, the light shining from Geoff’s would-be E3 replacement in 2025 was too irresistible to ignore for too many important names, and we ended up with an unusually dense June showcase season.
Because I only just put up a monster post for the Switch 2 launch, this annual show analysis will be much shorter, less formatted, and perhaps slightly more unhinged than usual, but I wasn’t going to miss doing one anyway.
Warm Nostalgia For Dishonest Trailers
The first of the big names to show themselves in that sweet early-June hype slot was – rather surprisingly – CD Projekt Red, who teamed up with Epic Games to release a mighty impressive State of Unreal demo for The Witcher 4 at this year’s Unreal Fest. The demo was so impressive, in fact, that the comparisons to that infamously overambitious E3 2012 Watch_Dogs trailer immediately came out in force among YouTube commenters. More like Un-Real, am I right?
All that said, despite the old-school E3 stage vibes of the presentation I am slightly more inclined to believe this crazy demo – which is purported to run at 60 frames per second on a base PS5 – is more likely to lead to something comparably playable than that fateful Ubisoft misdirect over a decade ago. Epic has already proven that Unreal Engine 5 can improve its capabilities and efficiency through the games releasing on it, and CD Projekt just proved with Cyberpunk 2077 on the Switch 2 what they are willing to do in the name of optimisation. Cautiously exciting stuff that started the season off with a bang.
Quirky Playstation Returns, Brings Fight Stick
“Live service games? What are those?” mused a pensive Playstation as they kicked off one of the best State of Play shows ever with the glorious return of Lumines. The company’s traditional tendency to ignore Summer Game Fest in nonchalant fashion and do their own thing now looks suspiciously like a multi-year plan to circle slowly around the June hype season until they can go before Xbox; I joke, of course, as not much about Playstation’s last five years screams “well-planned”, but if they bring the heat like this again we will be in for some good-old-days June appointment viewing.
The flavour of the 2025 State of Play could hardly be more different from that of last year, as even third-party online multiplayer game mentions were kept to a blatant minimum. The cheeky return of Pragmata set off my Capcom-streak alarm once again – the game is looking fabulously different from anything else in their current catalogue – and closing with an all-new Arc System Works Marvel fighter could not have shouted “hardcore traditional audience” any louder from the proverbial rooftops (announcing a new official Sony fight stick came close though). Elsewhere, the return of Suda51 via Romeo is a Deadman (a title that not-so-subtly pairs with the protagonist of Lollipop Chainsaw) will always be welcome in my house, it’s great to see the ongoing survival of the Bloodstained and Nioh series, support for Astro Bot remains stellar, and Final Fantasy Tactics LIVES! More of this please, Sony.
Sega & Capcom Carry Keighley’s Dreams
Geoff’s headline show itself was hardly his best this year, but he was always going to struggle to match up to expectations six months after the best Game Awards in history. Flow-wise Summer Game Fest 2025 was refreshingly low on both ad time and awkward stage cuts, but the reveals didn’t quite pack enough collective oomph to sustain a two-hour show. That isn’t to say there weren’t exciting games present: Muppet-esque Punch Out homage Felt That: Boxing has gone straight into my drop-everything category, sequels to Code Vein and Atomic Heart are certainly welcome surprises, and Geoff’s shadow-drop game was strong thanks to Lies of P and Hitman: World of Assassination expansions.
But the biggest headline was saved for the end, and Capcom was so bullish about the importance of the Resident Evil Requiem (9) reveal to Geoff’s show that they heavily teased the game several reveals earlier, in the middle of the same show. In terms of (justified) arrogance from a third-party publisher, I simply haven’t seen the like, and hands-on previews indicate the much-anticipated sequel is the real deal. As if RE9 and the Pragmata re-reveal weren’t enough for Capcom though, they also put up another contender for trailer of the show thanks to the cosplay skills of wrestler Kenny Omega and a pretty exciting year-three Street Fighter 6 lineup. Fellow Japanese giants Sega played a strong hand twice as well, drawing gasps via a trio of very popular Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds guest characters and the title reveal of the Yakuza team’s stunning new period piece, Stranger Than Heaven.
Xbox Promises Me A Good PC App For the 7th Time
It’s finally real, after years of teasing: as unveiled early in the 2025 Xbox Games Showcase, there is an actual Xbox-branded handheld PC coming out later this year. Which would be tremendously exciting to me, except the “ROG Xbox Ally” has a processor that is theoretically weaker than the existing ROG Ally (and therefore my AyaNeo Air 1S), and the premium-tier “ROG Xbox Ally X” is likely to be priced well north of $1500 AUD unless Microsoft is kicking in with some serious subsidy muscle.
The better news about this handheld push is that the Xbox team at last seems to be trying to declutter Windows enough that it can run on this new portable platform – and eventually other portable platforms – with properly game-optimised full-screen efficiency. Which would be tremendously exciting to me, except I feel like I’ve heard that same promise every couple of years since the early Xbox One days. This could be a properly exciting time, but the Windows team needs to get out of their own way first.
Beyond that, Xbox had another great show. It didn’t quite have the clear-front-runner energy of the last few years, but the showcase kept up its reputation as the most productive show for planning a videogame release calendar, as the majority of the games that interested me showed up with actual release dates. Keeper, Ninja Gaiden 4, and The Outer Worlds 2 lead the charge there – but unfortunately they are all due out in October, so apparently the Game Pass team wants another April on their hands. Grounded 2, THPS 3+4, Gears of War Reloaded, and the new Indiana Jones expansion continue to fill out a strong 2025 for the green corner, and FOR REAL THIS TIME Hollow Knight: Silksong is expected to join it.
Bonus mentions go to Clockwork Revolution, which looks absolutely phenomenal after its lengthy deep-dive, and Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, which is thrilling just in principle (name sucks though). Beast of Reincarnation is the next in a long line of non-Nintendo games from Game Freak – and it sure looks pretty – but hopefully it finds more success than Tembo the Badass Elephant, Giga Wrecker, or Little Town Hero did. Mudang: Two Hearts has my attention after the recent Korean strides into single-player gaming, I need At Fates End like yesterday, and Invincible VS completed a clean sweep for quality fighting game content across the major June shows. But the last word has to go to Persona 4 Revival, a weird subtitle for a remake with a weird sterile Unreal Engine 5-ish look that I am not yet sold on. Persona 4 Golden is one of my top 5 games of all time so I am definitely nervous – but I probably shouldn’t be.
Nintendo Sighs, Tosses New Splatoon Game to the Crowd
Yes, I know I usually wait until later in the month to post this annual round-up just in case Nintendo does a big Direct show in late June – and they usually do – but we pretty much already know about every first-party Nintendo game the Switch 2 has lined up for the rest of this year, and honestly after this last week I’m kind of sick of talking about the console – even if it’s extremely clear that a bunch more third-party reveals are imminent.
What I am not sick of is the Splatoon franchise, especially whenever the developers try something different with the mechanics: arguably my two favourite entries in the franchise are Octo Expansion and Side Order. So the idea of Splatoon Raiders, a single-player Splatoon game literally labelled as a spin-off by Nintendo that runs natively on the new hardware, is so tantalising it has shot all the way up the list to become my most-anticipated Switch 2-exclusive title for the moment. Nintendo rarely announces games long before launch unless they hail from absolute top-tier franchises, so the real question is when we’ll get to play this one, but the limited footage so far looks rad.
A Lazy Wishlist Summary
I didn’t quite have the free time to watch all the smaller showcases this year – or even half of them – but Day of the Devs is always really easy to watch given its post-SGF time slot, and I always make time for Devolver Digital’s marketing whiz-bangery. At the time of this post’s publication Steam Next Fest is also on, so in that spirit here are the indie games I added to my wishlist over the Summer Game Fest-ivities:
- TOEM 2, an instant add after I enjoyed the quirky box-ticking photography charm of the original so much;
- Relooted, a sort of reverse art-heist platformer with fun-looking movement mechanics coming out of South Africa;
- Consume Me looks like exactly my kind of charmingly anxious minigame-shuffling jam, and I kind of dig that the development team doesn’t even have a name;
- Big Walk was already on my wishlist thanks to a previous year’s showcase, but Aussie Untitled Goose Game creators House House are clearly going wayyyy more ambitious;
- Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault was also on there since its announcement, but the reinforced gameplay loop now looks extra dangerous in 3D;
- Ball X Pit, a triple-genre-mashup spearheaded by solo dev Kenny Sun, but which Devolver Digital saw fit to make the sole focus of their awkwardly hilarious 2025 presentation – this time only 10 minutes long. So you should definitely watch it:
Vagrant Rant 