Welcome to Video Video games Weekly on Engadget. Count on a brand new story each Monday, damaged into two components. The primary is an area for brief essays and ramblings about online game tendencies and associated matters from me, Jess Conditt, a reporter who’s coated the trade for greater than 13 years. The second incorporates the online game tales from the previous week that you could learn about, together with some headlines from outdoors of Engadget.
Please get pleasure from — and I will see you subsequent week.
Summer season Recreation Fest 2025 shall be remembered as the one which occurred whereas the Waymos burned.
The SGF Play Days occasion area, the place video games media and influencers meet up with builders over a protracted weekend, is within the style district in Los Angeles, and this 12 months it was a couple of miles from the center of sprawling protests towards ICE. After months of of LA residents by masked federal brokers — emboldened by President Donald Trump’s far-right extremism and outfitted with weapons constructed for warfare — the bubble of resistance popped. Protestors hit the streets after ICE officers swept up dozens of individuals throughout LA in one other spherical of coordinated raids on Friday, June 6. The protests grew over the weekend and Trump referred to as within the Nationwide Guard, adopted by the Marines. Militarized LAPD officers attacked individuals , and so they fired rubber bullets into crowds and . On Sunday night, protestors lit a line of unoccupied Waymos on hearth.
The thick, black smoke was seen from the Play Days lot. I noticed it as I used to be leaving the media lounge, heading towards the meals vans, and it stopped me in my tracks simply in entrance of the Capcom sales space. The low buzz of helicopters and the cries of police sirens had been a continuing companion that weekend, however the smoke was new. I ended and took a photograph as upbeat reggae music pumped out of the speaker beside me. Across the nook, an actor dressed as a Fortnite banana in a go well with was attractive passersby to play Ddakji as a part of a cross-promotional effort with Squid Recreation. The dissonance made my head spin.
The sickly pallor of encroaching authoritarianism has hung over each online game conference previously six months — as a result of it’s shadowed actually the whole lot in the USA this 12 months. I’ve spent a major quantity of this time actively shutting down ideas about Mission 2025, government-sponsored human trafficking, neo-Nazis and all method of hateful, bigoted insurance policies focusing on the USA’ most weak individuals, as a result of if I didn’t, the stress of those realities would eat me. I believe most of us are doing one thing comparable these days. We’ve to deprioritize particular ideas at sure occasions, with the intention to get work performed, keep relationships and make it via the day. Having to disregard these monumental issues in favor of, at the very least in my case, video games is a mindfuck.
The smoke from the burning Waymos, seen from the principle alleyway at SGF, felt like a bodily manifestation of this fixed inner rigidity. Video video games are a car for connection and expression, and so they’re deeply useful to society — however, as with the rest, their significance is a matter of perspective.
The information
Our SGF 2025 roundup submit is a complete rundown of all of the information from the present, from Day of the Devs to the massive Xbox showcase. We’ll be including our hands-ons and interviews as they’re revealed over the approaching week proper on the high of this text, so be happy to maintain checking again. Or, will maintain you coated.
Arguably the most important bit of stories out of SGF 2025, Resident Evil Requiem is due out on February 27, 2026. It’s a mainline Resident Evil title starring FBI agent Grace Ashcroft, and it options acquainted places from the sequence, together with Raccoon Metropolis’s demolished police division.
Obsidian’s sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds 2 is heading to PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Sequence X/S on October 29 — simply in time for everybody to grasp your fancy-man moon-head Halloween costume.
After about Microsoft and ASUS teaming as much as make an Xbox-branded handheld gaming gadget, we lastly have reduction. The ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X are due out this vacation season, able to enjoying Xbox video games natively by way of the cloud or a distant console connection, and with help for different in style PC storefronts like Steam, GOG and . There’s no phrase on worth or an actual launch date but, however the Xbox handhelds are undoubtedly, lastly coming.
When you solely have time to examine one sport from SGF 2025, acquaint your self with Relooted from South African indie studio Nyamakop. It’s a heist sport about rescuing African artifacts from the Western colonizers who stole them, and it’s full of puzzles, motion and Afrofuturism. That is one to regulate.
Enter the world of Mat Smith writeups
Engadget’s UK Bureau Chief Mat Smith was on the bottom at SGF 2025 and he’s already revealed a trio of tales straight from the present, every yet another pleasant than the final. There’s , full with enter from director Takashi Ishihara; a preview of Patapon ; and Mat’s ideas on . There’s extra coming from Mat, too, so maintain that Engadget Gaming tab open.
I had a beautiful little chat at SGF with Matt Nava, the artist answerable for Journey, Abzû, The Pathless, and the upcoming sand-surfing sport, Sword of the Sea. Nava has spent the previous decade or so operating from his personal shadow, however with Sword of the Sea, he’s lastly following his instinct once more. This story consists of impressions of the sport — spoiler: it’s fabulous — and improvement perception from Nava.
