26 (or so) very brief previews of video games you might want to know about

My favorites: Bub. Ithaca. Sonic Pico Park. Clutch. Valor Mortis. Slap Out Of It. My least favorite: Blood Message.

Lazy River. Screenshot: Mike Boxleiter and friends

Last week, I checked out more than two dozen new and upcoming video games in Los Angeles. Let me quickly tell you about a lot of them.

Read on for:

• A game that came to its developer in a dream

• A game made by someone who worked on God of War’s yak

• A game by a developer who may or may not still have my surround sound speakers

• A game about dinosaurs that kill you, a game about you killing dinosaurs, and a game where it could go either way

• A game where you can play as Sonic or Tails

• And so many more…

First up is a batch of games I checked out at the Indie Mix last Friday evening, on the roof level of the Grammy Museum in downtown L.A. This annual meetup is always great for spotting some niche titles and hearing from scrappy developers.

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Don’t Let It Starve [demo]

• Developer: Eduardo Scarpato

• PC | June 12

This is a puzzle game about carefully filling the spaces in bento boxes to feed some weird creature who reaches out from what I think is an air shaft. You score bonus points for food combos, for filling every slot in the box, etc. The pitch is that it’s like Resident Evil 4 inventory management turned into a full game, and with food.

I played it for a few rounds, found it creepy and fun, figured I’d wait for release to play it more. Then their PR rep sent me a review code but I got too busy to play it. Whoops. But it’s out today and there’s a demo.

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Neighborhoods

• Developer: E-Line Media

• PC | TBA release

A Sim City riff about fixing up a city. It’s got a squishy, claymation art style and is meant to be cheerful and cozy. Instead of building up cities, as I understand it, the player is improving neighborhoods. With a computer mouse in hand, I spruced up one dilapidated block by opening up a bakery, planting trees, picking up trash and adding some pretty banners.

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Entropy

• Developer: Lovely Hellplace

• PC | August 18

This is a turn-based RPG, and I don’t have a super strong memory of playing it. But it stuck with me because it was one of several games at the show flaunting low-polygon PS1-era art. I liked the retro look.

Dungeon Lurker (13AM Games, PC, TBA) also had good throw-back visuals…

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Ball & Gun

• Developer: NVZN Studios

• PC | June 5

This game was ridiculous in all the right ways. “You’re playing basketball during the zombie apocalypse,” developer Art Grayson told me as I walked up to play it. He and his brother made the game and had released it just that morning.

In your left hand, you’ve got a basketball. Hold a shoulder button just long enough to shoot it precisely. In your right is a gun, which is used to clear the court of zombies. As you play, you can upgrade your basketball shots (so you can also dunk, for example) and your guns (to wield a rocket launcher, among other things). Very silly. Why play NBA 2K or Call of Duty when you can play a game that combines the two?

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Deckcrawler

• Developer: Outside Joke Games

• PC | TBD

Here’s a first-person tactics game with a fun origin story. Developer Leslee Sullivant woke up in the middle of the night, having just dreamt it. At 2am, she envisionsa person in a fantasy setting holding cards instead of a sword or magic wand. She immediately tells her husband, Chris, and they decide they’ve got to make it. At the Mix event, Leslee and Chris describe Deck Crawler as Slay the Spire meets Skyrim. It’s early.

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Poly Fighter [demo]

• Developer: Heartloop Games

• PC | TBD

Game developer Osama Dorias waved me over to try Poly Fighter, a 2D fighting game roguelike that he thought would primarily appeal to fans outside of the fighting game community. Instead, he says the team’s heard a lot of enthusiasm from fighting game fans and they’re now working to make the game’s moves a bit more complex. They’re also taking the game to this month’s Evo fighting game tournament, making it one of the only single-player games ever demo’d at the show, Dorias said.

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Gunstoppable [demo]

• Developer: CAGE Studios

• PC/Xbox | August 5

This is a first-person shooter where the pitch is “speed = damage.” You’re meant to zip through its levels, eyes on a speedometer that you want to push past 100%.

I did my best, but I wasn’t able to gain much excess speed. It might be because I was distracted by chatting with the game’s solo developer, Salaar Kohari, who told me he’s ex-Sony Santa Monica and had worked on “vehicles” for God of War Ragnarok. Wait, wasn’t that game set in the world of Norse Mythology? Was I forgetting a car? Was he talking about a boat? “The bobsled and the yak,” he told me. Right. In video game design terms, those are vehicles. He couldn’t tell me what he worked on on Laufey: God of War before he left Sony Santa Monica. Guess it wasn’t the cube!

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The Alley [demo]

• Developer: AIXLAB

• PC | 2026

I had to settle for watching other people play this first person horror game in which you wield… a phone! The in-game phone is used as a camera to decipher what’s real and what isn’t. So much for there being ghosts in this game. Any game that has you glancing at your phone while you’re supposed to be walking somewhere is hauntingly realistic.

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That was it for the MIX. On Saturday, I started a three-day tour of Summer Game Fest’s Play Days. Picture a city block of mostly one-story buildings. An open walking lane cuts through the middle, so you can access all the buildings from within the middle of the block. From the inside, you’ve got a periphery of buildings and cabanas occupied by various publishers. For example, Annapurna’s got a building next to a Wizard of the Coast tent, which is adjacent to a Saber Interactive building that’s conjoined to a Sega structure. And so on.

Blood Message

• Developer: 24 Entertainment (NetEase)

• PC/console | TBD

Technologically impressive, Blood Message is the latest proof that Chinese studios can now make games that resemble the biggest-budget productions from the west. Emphasis on “resemble,” because, though it it is set during the late Tang Dynasty in 848 AD, Blood Message looks a whole lot like one of Sony’s Uncharted or God of War games, with a stout lead character squeezing through tight cracks, battling enemies in cinematic close-up, even doing that thing where your computer-controlled ally gets to high ground, reaches down for your hero’s arm and hoists him up.

You play as a messenger, and there’s something going on around your character’s son, but the melee, the swordplay, the glimpses of horseback riding all look like a game in search of an identity beyond Game You’ve Played, But In China. To be fair, while Blood Message felt merely fine to me, other attendees I chatted with named it one of their favorites of the show.

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Sea of Remnants

• Developer: Joker Studios (NetEase)

• PC/PS5 | TBD

One of the most baffling game preview experiences I’ve had in a while, with total miscommunication between me and the NetEase official demoing it. What I understood: it’s a real-time pirate sailing adventure when you’re on the high seas; it’s a turn-based role-playing game when you’re exploring on land. What I didn’t understand: Just about everything else, mostly due to me being left to my own devices and tossed into the middle of the game with a heavily upgraded party and a very busy game map.

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Sonic Pico Park

• Developer: Tecopark

• PC, console | TBD

This 2-8 player game was a delight. Sonic Pico Park is a spin-off of a decade old series of cooperative side-scrolling puzzle games. I played this new one as Tails, along with three Sega reps in control of Sonic, Knuckles and Amy Rose.

In each brief level, we needed to work together to reach a goal. In one, three of us had to stack up so the fourth could climb and hit a switch to get us all through. In another, we had to roll into balls to speed toward a goal. As the levels got more complex, we had one where the four of us were tethered together, two of us had to climb on top of a floating platform, and the other two dangled below it to grab a key.

Refreshingly strong level design.

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Valor Mortis [demo]

• Developer: One More Level

• PC, console | October 13

One of my favorites of the show. Soulslike combat and level design + first-person parkour, set in some twisted version of the Napoleonic wars. Our hero is back from the dead, sword in hand, battling some grisly, mutated enemies while hearing Napoleon’s voice in their head. There’s lore, too. You collect notes and look at ghostly after-images to figure out what happened. I liked it a lot, but am a little worried it’ll be tuned to be tougher than I’d like. We’ll see.

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Star Wars Galactic Racer

• Developer: Fuse Games

• PC, PS5, Xbox Series | October 6

I played this game. As a condition for doing so, I can’t write about it until later in June. (Embargoes are common at events like these, though usually not for that long). I also can’t tell you yet if I enjoyed it or not. But feel free to guess.

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Bub

• Developer: Paperfrog

• PC | Q4 2027

One of the best games I played at Play Days, but be warned that I am highly biased due to the very special connection I have with one of its developers.

I wouldn’t say we’re close, per se. But he lives with a friend of mine, and, years ago, I gave that friend a surround sound system that my wife and I didn’t want anymore. So, for a time, this developer had my old surround sound speakers. I’m sorry if you feel scandalized right now.

My intimate connections aside, Bub’s development was led by two friends, Case and Todd who’ve made a stop-motion adventure about an artist in New York City. It’s quirky, intermittently sad and hopeful, influenced by Case being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis during development. Tough to describe, but quite lovely. Bub’s announcement video is worth a watch.

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Ithaca

• Developer: The Pixel Hunt

• PC | TBD

The most intriguing demo I saw all weekend. It’s first-person. You’re driving a car. You’re an environmental rights lawyer. There’s a body in your trunk. It’s a road trip game.

You can customize your character by looking at the rearview mirror, can check your quest log by looking up, where your to-do list is organized as constellations. You can call people via your car’s computer.

There might be integration with real-life podcasts, but the developers aren’t sure–they didn’t tell me this, because they weren’t there, but they coded little multiple choice dialogue options inside their demo to explain their design intentions.

Also, your name is Penelope and you can text Hermes? There are demos where my bewilderment is bad (Sea of Remnants) and there are demos where I cannot wait to find out more about the madness with which I’ve just interacted (this one).

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Lazy River

• Developer: Mike Boxleiter, Kevan DuPont, Jake Yetter, Joel Corelitz and Karlee Esmailli

• PC | summer 2027

Here’s an absurd multiplayer game about crafting and enhancing a floating base of pool floats as it drifts down a lazy river in a sci-fi water park… while trying to fend off attacks from zombies who are defeated when they’re soaked. It’s the only game I’ve played this year in which you use a pool noodle as a weapon.

Sadly, I barely had time to play Lazy River, but I was amused by a premise that would have been the weekend’s most ridiculous, if not for Ball & Gun.

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Erosion

• Developer: Plot Twist

• PC | TBD

I was excited to see this one. It’s a twin-stick shooter, a Western with blocky voxel graphics and a design hook wherein every time you fail a violent run through its enemy-filled levels, time advances 10 years.

During my 10 minutes playing the game, the moment-to-moment action was easy to sample. It was frantic, as twin-stick shooters go.

What was harder to assess was that time system, which is tracked by an in-game timeline that shows how you can make decisions in one decade (save a town vs. help cultists take it over, for example) that will impact the look and layout of the game once it jumps 10 years forward. You’re trying to rescue your daughter, who starts the game at age 8. The developer showing me the game wouldn’t say how many decade jumps are possible. I’m curious for more.

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The Lost Wild

• Developer: Great Ape Games

• PS5, PC | 2027

I got a theater demo presentation for this one. Dark room, head of the dev studio narrating the action, as a small group of us watched a character named Saskia find herself on an island populated with dinosaurs. Pitched as “evasion-baed survival horror,” this is a first-person game about avoiding dinosaurs by hiding in the bushes, throwing objects to distract a stalking Allosaurus, and generally trying to not get eaten.

There were certainly Jurassic Park vibes to this one, but also a dash of Lost, thanks to Saskia’s discovery of a seemingly abandoned facility run by a mystery corporation. Warning: They told us that the dinos can kill your character even when you’re trying to save your progress at an in-game kiosk.

(The game’s title might ring a bell. It was first teased in October 2021.)

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Bad Magpie

• Developer: Milktooth

• PC, Xbox | 2027

This was cute. You’re a magpie with one wing, so you skitter around looking for shiny things, solving environmental puzzles along the way. Grab a small log with your break, light it on fire, burn down a fence, grab a shiny thing. Enter a house, walk into an old TV set, retrieve a shiny thing. Peck at a sand castle. Shiny thing. Make a nuisance, get rewards. It’s of a feather with Untitled Goose Game.

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Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis

• Developer: Crystal Dynamics, Flying WIld Hog

• PC, console | February 12, 2027

What to say? I never played the original, because my college console of choice was N64, not PSX. Was Lara Croft always a ruthless dinosaur killer, slow-mo shooting bullets into their skulls? Were these puzzles about floating cog wheels in the original? My favorite Tomb Raider was 2015’s Rise of the Tomb Raider, a game that was more bow, arrow and pickaxe. This remake seemed fine, I say, though I clearly don’t have a good point of reference. Much of the buzz the game generated over the last week was over how the developers couldn’t spell Tomb Raider without using the letters AI.

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Slap Out Of It

• Developer: Turbo Button

• PC, console | 2027

The personal detail I most enjoy sharing with people is that I don’t like comedy, after which I explain that I don’t have time to laugh and then they wonder if I’m joking. I can report that I was laughing on the inside while playing Slap Out Of It, one of the most enjoyable demos of the weekend.

This is a first-person “slap-and-solve” game which starts with a tutorial in which you must solve a bunch of cartoony people’s problems and/or slap these people.

A man’s hair was on fire. I took his burning dollar bill, sprayed him with a fire extinguisher. Then I slapped him. Somebody needed a jigsaw puzzle, but those cost two bucks.. I photocopied the first guy’s dollar, bought the second person a puzzle, then slapped them. A cop had a bad donut. I improved it. Slapped him.

Later, I explored a proper level that involved elevators, fog machines and literally turning a bathroom upside down. I actually saw this game secretly about a year ago and most of the elevator level was the same. But the developers added a really good gag involving a magazine centerfold. A glorious use of development time.

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Stuntman: Hollywood

• Developer: Saber Interactive

• PC, PS5, Xbox Series | TBD

You’re a Stuntman in this third-person driving game. I played a Back to the Future level in which I performed jumps, skids and swerves, as directed, while dodging “actors’ shooting machine guns at me. I played a level based on the 1974 disaster movie Earthquake, as I dealt with crashing jumbo jets while trying to nail my jumps.

This was fun, and the movie licenses helped. Now, how come my demo didn’t include any Jurassic Park levels?

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Clutch

• Developer: Maverick Games

• PC, PS5, Xbox Series | Spring 2027

Then most lavishly-produced (technically) independent game of the weekend, from a team helmed by the former top developers of the Forza Horizon games. Much of Clutch’s development was bankrolled by Amazon before the commerce giant started backing off most of its game development projects.

The idea is that this is open-world racing with an interesting story, which is a low bar to clear when the main competition’s plot is “There is a big party in country X.” Maverick is upping that with the tale of sibling race car drivers, Theo and Cass Martial, who witnessed a friend/rival die on the track, have decamped to the open-world 780-road playspace that is the French Riviera and now drive in a mix of official races (be fast, stay on the track) and street races (drive wildly, accrue faux-livestream accolades).

Any doubts I may have had about whether a Forza Horizon-like game needs a story evaporated when the developers showed me a heist mission that involved stealing a souped up car that shoots a harpoon. You use this harpoon to shoot at a telephone poles in order to then whip your car in orbit around a curve (see clip above). Amazon, how did you not love that?

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Alien Isolation 2

• Developer: Creative Assembly (Sega)

• PC, console | TBD

I played this one in the dark. Sega had a camera pointed at me to film my reactions, but I don’t think I gave them good material. I’m very serious when I’m working, as established above.

The AI2 demo starts on another planet during a ferocious storm. It’s first-person, and a good chunk of the time is spent trudging through a forest, walking down wind-battered cliffs, then reaching a crashed spaceship. Ignoring common sense, we open the hatch, go inside, crawl through vents and soon enough, you see…it.

The original Alien Isolation was all about having a game that pits you against one smart, lethal enemy. The sequel’s doing that, too. I tried hiding under a desk. I tried slowly crouch-crawling to a door. I tried ducking into a vent. The Alien got me a bunch of times. In my defense, Ripley never had to noisily rush past the Alien because she’d double-booked her Sega game demo with a Nintendo third-party showcase.

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Turok: Origins

• Developer: Saber Interactive.

• PC, console | Fall 2026

At the Nintendo third-party showcase I first tried Turok. You can play this dinosaur-hunting game in third-person, but, come on, it’s Turok. The classics were in first-person, so I quickly toggled to that view. This was another of the weekend’s it-was-fine demos. I shot some bad guys and some bad (I guess?) dinosaurs, gathered some plants to heal, and wound up in a boss battle against a heavily armored T-Rex.

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Among Us Story: On Guard

• Developer: Innersloth

• PC, Switch 2 | TBD

Innersloth co-founder Forest Willard sat near a couple of Switch 2’s running this new, single-player story-driven spin-off of his team’s perpetually updated multiplayer sensation. He called this small game a “relaxer from the grind.” You play as a crew member called the Guard, who has been wrongly accused of murder and been ejected from the airlock. You survive, and you must investigate. It’s a dialogue-filled mystery, with a demo hitting Steam on the 15th.

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Demi and the Fractured Dream [demo]

Developer: Yarn Owl

PC, console | February 2027

As I started to play the same demo of Demi and the Fractured Dream that you can try on Steam via the link above, it was explained to me that the two developers making this game loved The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. That was certainly clear to me, given the hooded sword-wielding protagonist, the puzzle rooms, and the curly-cued cartoon smoke.

Thankfully, I dig Wind Waker, too, and had the instincts to know when to seek a treasure chest to find a needed key and when to wave a special feather item to move the platform I was standing on. No complaints from me about playing a Linklike.

And that’s it! That sure was a lot of previews, but those weren’t all the games I saw. There are a handful of other upcoming games I’ll be telling you about in the coming weeks, mostly tied to some pretty interesting interviews.

I hope this run-down put some new games on your radar!