Santa Monica closed the show with its next God of War, and for the first time Kratos isn’t the lead. You play Faye, his deceased wife from the 2018 reboot, awakening in the afterlife of the gods, joined by a talking cube (???) and an enchanted ribbon-sword. Cory Barlog has confirmed it’s not a prequel but a continuation picking up right after Faye’s funeral pyre. No date yet.
Mintrocket announced a standalone Dave the Diver prequel built around fan-favourite sushi chef Bancho. Set in 2004, nineteen years before the original, it follows a young Bancho travelling across Asia to learn from master chefs, blending cooking sim, RPG and adventure, and trading the pixel art for 3D. No date yet - PS5 and PC. Unexpected.
The wuxia action RPG turned up mostly to tee up a dedicated State of Play later this summer, but the bigger news was a delay. S-GAME has pushed it from September 9 to October 29, with creator Soulframe Liang citing extra polish time. Probably a smart move to dodge the September pile-up.
Remedy confirmed September 24 for its CONTROL sequel, out on PS5, Xbox Series and PC. Dylan Faden, brother of original protagonist Jesse, is the playable character this time, fighting through a Manhattan warped by paranatural forces with his shapeshifting weapon. The story trailer leaned hard into the Fadens’ shared history. Super keen.
Ikumi Nakamura resurfaced with the first real gameplay for Kemuri, the yokai-hunting action game from her studio Unseen, now slated for 2027. You play a hunter who uses the ‘Fox Window’ to reveal hidden yokai, then wear their powers that reshape how you fight and move, all across a vertical Tokyo-ish cityscape solo or in three-player co-op. The style is doing a lot of heavy lifting - looks cool.
Insomniac kicked off the show with an extended look at its Logan game, ahead of a September 15 PS5 launch. The combat looks noticeably more violent than the Spider-Man games, built around adamantium claws, the healing factor and heightened senses, with Jean Grey turning up to fight alongside him and seemingly some stealth in the mix. Pre-orders are live.
IO Interactive’s young-Bond origin trades Hitman’s sandboxes for something more linear and cinematic, and while I get it, I did miss the open-ended scheming. The opening sequence is a super satisfying and Patrick Gibson’s cocky not-yet-007 is great, but the pacing is very stop-start, forever pausing to hand control back to a cutscene. The set pieces are gloriously bombastic, but half the time the game seems to be playing itself. The most confident Bond game in decades, and great for what it is, I just wish it trusted me to drive it more.
ZA/UM’s follow-up to Disco Elysium is an espionage RPG built from the same mechanical bones: isometric, dialogue-heavy, sharp and surreally written. There are things to like here: the exert and ailment systems, and some dramatic encounters. The new setting of Portofiro is more populous than Revachol, but I suspect fewer of its faces will stay with me. Despite the name, it doesn’t fully commit to being a spy game; it’s Disco in a trenchcoat, and the shadow of everything that happened at ZA/UM never really lifts. The art and writing are legitimately good - from any other studio, unambiguously so - certainly Anton Vill’s artwork is extraordinary. Strip away the context and it’s an uncontroversially good game - I just can’t tell how much of the distance I feel is the game falling short, and how much is conflicted grief for what could have been.
June 9’s update will be the last content Destiny 2 ever receives, with Bloomberg reporting significant layoffs to follow as Bungie winds down the development team - and reportedly, most of the studio found out at the same time as the rest of us. No Destiny 3 is in the works, no successor project has been greenlit, and two already-announced expansions have been cancelled. Resources are being redirected to Marathon, which hasn’t found its footing since launch. Destiny 2 has had a rough few years, so none of this lands as a shock - but it stings all the same… end of an era.