9 Rad Indie Games We Can't Wait To See More Of From The Mix Summer Showcase
The Mix Summer Showcase ran over 90 minutes and offered quick looks at dozens of upcoming games. Formerly known as Guerrilla Collective, the showcase is one of many indie events swirling around the orbit of Summer Game Fest, and unlike many of the bigger games getting shown off in the days ahead, some of these have playable demos right now while others are likely getting them in the weeks and months ahead.
We picked out nine that caught our eye. Some of them were being shown for the first time. Others were previously revealed but had gone under our radar since, or popped up with fresh trailers showing a deeper look at story, world-building, and gameplay. But there were a ton more games worth checking out and wishlisting in the full showcase. You can see all of them for yourself in the video below.
The most intriguing reveal was a tactical RPG from a small studio called Hypersect led by a former Destiny sandbox gameplay engineer, an Octopath Traveler monster artist, and the composer of Enter the Gungeon. Never's End's pitch? Final Fantasy Tactics collides with city management as you raise an army of possessed warriors to protect the last human settlement from a magical apocalypse. There's no release date yet but it's coming to PC and PlayStation.
Airframe Ultra looks like Wipeout meets Twisted Metal. It's got a slick PS1 presentation and a gritty vibe that would fit right at home on a long-lost demo disc. It's the newest project from Rain World maker Videocult so it will probably be uncompromising in every way.
Rig dice to beat evil billionaires at their own deranged games. That's the basic premise of Dead Finger Dice, a point-and-click roguelike about gambling with ghouls and trying to escape the yacht they've imprisoned you on. It's giving Inscryption meets Cryptmaster if they were made in MS-DOS. A survival horror spin on Balatro? Let's go.
The gardenvania subgrene expands with Beauty Cult's Nectarmancer, a gorgeous-looking action platformer that doubles as a farming sim. Grow crops and fight in tight 2D spaces as you try to take down The Throne, a mysterious cabal exploiting the world's resources for its own gain. Here's the line from the Steam page that sold me: 'Use a network of plants and their latent nectarmancy to build up a planet-scale biological research computer to acquire even more nectar.' Yes. Yes I will.
At first glance I thought Critterrupters was an Animal Crossing clone but it's actually more like Pokémon. Go from 3D exploration to 2D turn-based augmented reality battles with a focus on interrupting your opponent's attack to gain an advantage. There's over 100 Critter Chips to collect, train, and 'puzzle out' with the goal of defeating gym leaders and meeting the creator of the virtual Tamagotchi-based warriors.
Motorslice is an atmospheric parkour adventure in which you wall-run and slash your way through a futuristic construction site with the vibe of Shadow of the Colossus inside a mega city. Think indie, PS2-era Mirror's Edge with a sword and heavy machinery boss fights. There's a bit of a Tarkovskian undertone. Prince of Persia is also an influence according to the developers. Should I just keep name-dropping cool stuff?
A boomer shooter segment near the end of the showcase included a bunch of experimental first-person shooters, but Moros Protocol has been in production for five years and is the one that stuck out to me. The sci-fi roguelike combines Doom and Dark Souls for a low-poly fever dream that supports co-op. 'And yes, you can kick your enemies,' the devs write.
Nocturne is a story-focused JRPG that uses rhythm gameplay for its combat. Rock Paper Shotgun likened it to 'Chrono Trigger meets Guitar Hero.' It might not end up an all-time classic like those, but the pixel art and soundtrack are pretty neat. What's it about? 'Your consciousness was uploaded to a world where a sentient AI has taken control, twisted creatures roam the land, and a vast corruption spreads.' An increasingly relatable predicament!
Monsters are Coming! Rock & Road mixes and matches elements from lots of popular genres, including city builders and arcade-y bullet hell grindfests. The neat thing here is that the city you grow travels around and turns into a weapon itself, unleashing hell in Vampire Survivors-style horde mode onslaughts. There's a closed beta happening later this summer.
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Engadget
an hour ago
- Engadget
Everything new at Summer Game Fest 2025: Xbox handheld, Resident Evil Requiem and more
It's early June, which means it's time for a ton of video game events! Rising from the ashes of E3, Geoff Keighley's Summer Game Fest is now the premium gaming event of the year, just inching ahead of… Geoff Keighley's Game Awards in December. Unlike the show it replaced, Summer Game Fest is an egalitarian affair, spotlighting games from AAA developers and small indies across a diverse set of livestreams. SGF 2025 includes 15 individual events running from June 3-9 — you can find the full Summer Game Fest 2025 schedule here — and we're smack dab in the middle of that programming right now. We're covering SGF 2025 with a small team on the ground in LA and a far larger group of writers tuning in remotely to the various livestreams. Expect game previews, interviews and reactions to arrive over the coming days (the show's in-person component runs from Saturday-Monday), and a boatload of new trailers and release date announcements in between. Through it all, we're collating the biggest announcements right here, with links out to more in-depth coverage where we have it, in chronological order. Epic hitched its wagon to SGF this year, aligning its annual developer Unreal Fest conference, which last took place in the fall of 2024, with the consumer event. The conference was held in Orlando, Florida, from June 2-5, with well over a hundred developer sessions focused on Unreal Engine. The highlight was State of Unreal, which was the first event on the official Summer Game Fest schedule. Amid a bunch of very cool tech demos and announcements, we got some meaningful updates on Epic's own Fortnite and CD PROJEKT RED's upcoming The Witcher IV . To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. The Witcher IV was first unveiled at The Game Awards last year, and we've heard very little about it since. At State of Unreal, we got a tech demo for Unreal Engine 5.6, played in real time on a base PS5. The roughly 10-minute slot featured a mix of gameplay and cinematics, and showed off a detailed, bustling world. Perhaps the technical highlight was Nanite Foliage, an extension of UE5's Nanite system for geometry that renders foliage without the level of detail pop-in that is perhaps the most widespread graphical aberration still plaguing games today. On the game side, we saw a town filled with hundreds of NPCs going about their business. The town itself wasn't quite on the scale of The Witcher III 's Novigrad City, but nonetheless felt alive in a way beyond anything the last game achieved. It's fair to say that Fortnite 's moment in the spotlight was… less impressive. Hot on the heels of smooshing a profane Darth Vader AI into the game, Epic announced that creators will be able to roll their own AI NPCs into the game later this year. Another company getting a headstart on proceedings was Sony, who threw its third State of Play of the year onto the Summer Game Fest schedule a couple days ahead of the opening night event. It was a packed stream by Sony's standards, with over 20 games and even a surprise hardware announcement. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. The most time was given to Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls , a new PlayStation Studios tag fighter that fuses Marvel Superheroes with anime visuals. It's also 4 versus 4, which is wild. It's being developed by Arc System Works, the team perhaps best known for the Guilty Gear series. It's coming to PS5 and PC in 2026. Not-so-coincidentally, Sony also announced Project Defiant, a wireless fight stick that'll support PS5 and PC and arrive in… 2026. Elsewhere, we got a parade of release dates, with concrete dates for Sword of the Sea (August 19) Baby Steps (September 8) and Silent Hill f (September 25). We also got confirmation of that Final Fantasy Tactics remaster (coming September 30), an an all-new... let's call it aspirational "2026" date for Pragmata , which, if you're keeping score, was advertised alongside the launch of the PS5. Great going, Capcom! To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Rounding out the show was a bunch of smaller announcements. We heard about a new Nioh game, Nioh 3 , coming in 2026; Suda51's new weirdness Romeo is a Dead Man ; and Lumines Arise , a long-awaited return to the Lumines series from the developer behind Tetris Effect . There were absolutely no Summer Game Fest events scheduled on Thursday. We assume that's out of respect for antipodean trees, as June 5 was Arbor Day in New Zealand. (It's probably because everyone was playing Nintendo Switch 2.) It's fair to say that previous Summer Game Fest opening night streams have been… whelming at best. This year's showing was certainly an improvement, not least because there were exponentially fewer mobile game and MMO ads littering the presentation. Yes, folks tracking Gabe Newell's yacht were disappointed that Half-Life 3 didn't show up, and the Silksong crowd remains sad, alone and unloved, but there were nonetheless some huge announcements. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Perhaps the biggest of all was the "ninth" ( Zero and Code Veronica erasure is real) Resident Evil game. Resident Evil Requiem is said to be a tonal shift compared to the last game, Resident Evil Village . Here's hoping it reinvigorates the series in the same way Resident Evil VII did following the disappointing 6 . We also heard more from Sega studio Ryu Ga Gotoku about Project Century, which seems to be a 1943 take on the Yakuza series. It's now called Stranger Than Heaven , and there's a (literally) jazzy new trailer for your consideration. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Outside of those big swings, there were sequels to a bunch of mid-sized games, like Atomic Heart , Code Vein and Mortal Shell , and a spiritual sequel of sorts: Scott Pilgrim EX , a beat-em-up that takes the baton from the 2010 Ubisoft brawler Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game . There were countless other announcements at the show, including: As always, the kickoff show was followed by a Day of the Devs stream, which focused on smaller projects and indie games. You can watch the full stream here. Escape Academy has been firmly on our best couch co-op games list for some time, and now it's got a sequel on the way. Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School takes the same basic co-op escape room fun and expands on it, moving away from a level-select map screen and towards a fully 3D school campus for players to explore. So long as the puzzles themselves are as fun as the original, it seems like a winner. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Semblance studio Nyamakop is back with new jam called Relooted , a heist game with a unique twist. As in the real world, museums in the West are full of items plundered from African nations under colonialism. Unlike the real world, in Relooted the colonial powers have signed a treaty to return these items to their places of origin, but things aren't going to plan, as many artifacts are finding their way into private collections. It's your job to steal them back. The British Museum is quaking in its boots. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Here are some of the other games that caught our eye: To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. After Day of the Devs came Devolver. Its Summer Game Fest show was a little more muted than usual, focusing on a single game: Ball x Pit . It's the next game from Kenny Sun, an indie developer who previously made the sleeper hit Mr. Sun's Hatbox . Ball x Pit is being made by a team of more than half a dozen devs, in contrast to Sun's mostly solo prior works. It looks like an interesting mashup of Breakout and base-building mechanics, and there's a demo on Steam available right now. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Then came IOI, the makers of Hitman, who put together a classic E3-style cringefest, full of awkward pauses, ill-paced demos and repetitive trailers. Honestly, as someone who's been watching game company presentations for two decades or so, it was a nice moment of nostalgia. Away from the marvel of a presenter trying to cope with everything going wrong, the show did have some actual content, with an extended demo of the new James Bond-themed Hitman mission, an announcement that Hitman is coming to iOS and table tops, and a presentation on MindsEye , a game from former GTA producer Leslie Benzies that IOI is publishing. The Wholesome Direct arrived on Saturday, just in time to soothe that weird hangover we all got after the IOI showcase. The Wholesome Direct is a celebration of all things adorable, quaint, peaceful and sweet, and this year included mainstream news about Monument Valley 3 coming to consoles and PC, following a stint as a Netflix exclusive. There was also a release date announcement for the cozy but twisted shop-management sim Discounty , which is about as spooky as the Wholesome Direct ever gets. There's something sinister about the small town in Discounty , and while we're still not sure if it's demons or just the looming specter of capitalism, we know for sure the game is coming to PC, Switch, PS4, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on August 21. Meanwhile, Omelet You Cook hit Steam during the showcase as a nice little surprise. It's a game about making eggs for picky students in a cafeteria, and of course pleasing Principal Clucker (who is a chicken in a suit, yes). Simply put, it looks delicious. The final game we want to shout out from this year's Wholesome Direct is Camper Van: Make it Home , a perfect little crossover of interior design mechanics and slightly miniaturized objects, which makes for a super cute experience. It came out during the showcase , and it's live now on Steam. There were dozens of other announcements during the 2025 Wholesome Direct stream, and the entire thing is worth a watch. You can do so at your leisure, ideally cuddled up with a blanket and a nice drink, right here. Saturday was also the time for all of the hyper-specific game streams to shine. We saw the Women-led Games show, Latin American Games Showcase , Southeast Asian Games Showcase , Green Games Showcase and Frosty Games Fest . Party! The last big event of the weekend was Xbox, which had its usual breathless showcase. The major news, especially for a publication like Engadget, was the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X, two new Xbox-focused PC handhelds. Internally, they're a lot like ASUS' ROG Ally handhelds, but the grips have been smoothed out to feel more like an Xbox controller in your hands. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. The software experience is also different. The Xbox Ally handhelds run Windows 11, but in Microsoft's version of Steam Big Picture mode there'll be fewer background processes and… just a generally lower overhead compared to regular Windows handhelds. Thankfully, Microsoft isn't locking things down, as it'll be able to access other "popular storefronts," which we're taking to mean Steam and Epic. The Xbox Ally will be available closer to the holidays, but price is a huge question mark: The ROG Ally costs significantly more than the Steam Deck and Switch 2. Is Microsoft going to subsidize these things, or are they going to cost $600-$800 like ASUS' own-brand versions? Side note: A quick screw you to Microsoft for using Hollow Knight: Silksong to show off the new handheld. We're all starving out here, and this was not helpful. I guess the news that it'll be playable on day one on the handheld at least narrows down the release date to "between now and whenever this thing comes out." Less of a surprise was Outer Worlds 2 , which Microsoft said would be at the show well ahead of time. We got a release date — October 29 — and a deep dive into the game's new systems. It looks like an expanded title compared to the original, with an improved combat system and a more fleshed out set of companions. We hope to have more on what's new real soon. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. The One More Thing of the show was a new Call of Duty game, Black Ops 7 . Truly, when a game comes out every year is it really worth blowing your one more thing on? If only Microsoft had an Xbox-branded handheld to show off, that would've been a really cool note to end the show! Here are the other bits and pieces worth reading about from the Xbox show: Paralives has been in the works for what feels like forever, but you'll be able to play it this year: It enters early access on December 8 . The indie take on The Sims looks charming as all hell in its latest trailer, and I can't wait. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Blippo+ has been a great distraction since it launched with Playdate season 2 , and we found out Sunday that it'll be coming to more platforms soon — in full color, no less ! It'll arrive on PC and Nintendo Switch in fall 2025. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so. Now you're all caught up. There's just one event on Monday, and it's the Black Voices in Gaming showcase. It starts at noon ET, and we've embedded the steam below for your viewing pleasure. To view this content, you'll need to update your privacy settings. Please click here and view the "Content and social-media partners" setting to do so.
Engadget
2 hours ago
- Engadget
Sword of the Sea is what happens when Matt Nava strides back into Journey's shadow
Sword of the Sea is a game about letting go. Its main mechanic involves surfing across vast desert dunes on a thin blade, slicing through glittering sands and scaling ancient towers on a quest to unearth the secrets of civilizations past. It plays best when you forget about the controls entirely, and just surrender to the slick physics and let your little character flow. With enough exploration, you'll naturally discover glowing orbs and shining gold gems, and the sands will transform into deep, crystal clear seas with fish swimming through the air, carving wet paths through the dirt. Your character, dressed in flowing robes and a gold mask, rides the orange hills and the blue waves with the same easy athleticism, reacting instantly to every input on the controller. Charge up a jump and then complete sick tricks with a few quick inputs, or unleash a bubble of sonic energy to smash nearby vases, uncovering bits of currency in the shattered pieces. The protagonist moves in whatever direction you push, stopping immediately when you let go of the analog stick. There are giant chains to grind, a hover ability in some areas, and half pipes generously positioned around the environments. Control prompts pop up when you're first introduced to an ability, but the text fades quickly and you're left alone in the desert. There are no waypoints in Sword of the Sea , but the environment tells a clear story, inviting you to solve puzzles in the mysterious temples dotting the landscape. Find glowing orbs on the rooftops and hidden down secret passageways to unlock the buildings' secrets, opening up new areas. Your Yahoo privacy setting is blocking social media and third-party content You can Allow your personal information to be shared and sold. Something went wrong. Try again. You can update your choice anytime by going to your privacy controls, which are linked to throughout our sites and apps. This page will now refresh. I played about 20 minutes of Sword of the Sea at Summer Game Fest, but I wanted to surf its dunes for a lot longer. It's the kind of game that makes the real world fade away, no matter how chaotic or intrusive your immediate surroundings are. It's built on rhythm and vibes, and it encourages a meditative flow state from its first frames. Learn the controls and then forget them; play with pure intuition and it'll most likely be the right move. 'The game is about surfing, and it's really about the process of learning to surf and getting comfortable with surfing, and then trying things that are a little bit beyond your abilities, failing, and then figuring it out and actually accomplishing them,' Sword of the Sea creator Matt Nava told Engadget on the SGF show floor. 'And in the process, you kind of realize that surfing is all about harnessing the power of something greater than yourself. You're not paddling — the waves carry you. The zoomed out camera, the little character; in a lot of games, they're right on the character, because the character is the focus. But in this game, it's about how the character is a part of the environment, that is the focus. And I think that's a constant in a lot of the games that we've made.' Nava is the creative director and co-founder of Giant Squid, the studio behind Abzû and The Pathless . Even with these two successful games under his belt, Nava is still best known as the art director of Journey , thatgamecompany's pivotal multiplayer experience that hit PlayStation 3 in 2012. Nava has spent the past decade attempting to build explicitly non- Journey -like games with Giant Squid, and while Abzû and The Pathless both have his distinctive visual stamp, they're the opposite of Journey in many ways. Where Journey was set in a dry, desert landscape, Nava's follow-up, Abzû , took place in an underwater world. After that, The Pathless was mostly green, rather than dusty orange. With Sword of the Sea , Nava let go. He dropped all preconceptions of what he should be making and mentally said fuck it . He finally allowed himself to manifest the game that came naturally to him. 'In this game, it's very much taking on, accepting and proclaiming that this is me,' Nava said. 'I did Journey . I'm doing orange again. And I'm going back to the desert because I have way more ideas that we couldn't do in that game … It's like I've been living in my own shadow for a long time in a weird way. It's like, why am I doing that? I should just be who I am and continue to explore the art that is my art.' Sword of the Sea is a specific and special game, and even though it's set in an orange desert, it doesn't feel like Journey . The game also includes music by Austin Wintory, the Grammy-nominated composer behind Journey , Abzû and The Pathless . Together, Nava and Wintory form a formidable foundation. 'A lot of video game scores, they just make a music track for the area,' Nava said. 'If you're in the town, you hear town music, and then it just repeats. But that's not how it works here. The music advances as your story advances, it reflects where you are on your surfing adventure, what you're learning how, how far your character has gone on this character arc. And so that's where the music of a video game like ours should be.' As Nava and I chatted, someone sat down to play Sword of the Sea on a nearby screen, and when I glanced up, I saw that they were gliding through an area I didn't find in my runthrough. A giant animal skeleton was half-buried in the sand, bright white vertebrae dotted with gold gems for the player to collect. There are a lot of secrets to find in Sword of the Sea , Nava assured me. The best way to find them is to just let go and play. Sword of the Sea is due to hit PlayStation 5 , Steam and the Epic Games Store on August 19.
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
Persona 4 Remake Announces Itself With Laughably Short Trailer
During today's Xbox Summer Game Fest event, the long-rumored remake of Persona 4 was finally announced... but that's about all we got from the ridiculously short teaser revealing the upcoming remake. Here's the trailer for Persona 4 Revival, which doesn't have a release date: In the extremely (incredibly) brief teaser released by Atlus during the event, we saw a few seconds of gameplay, got a name for the remake, and a list of platforms that the remake of the beloved JRPG will be available on in the future. Persona 4 Revival has been rumored for years now, with leakers and insiders hinting at the game's existence. And then on May 28, Persona 4 voice actor Yuri Lowenthal posted on BlueSky—in response to fans asking him about the then-rumored remake and his return—saying that he wasn't coming back despite possibly begging Atlus to return. 'And for those who keep asking, no, I will not be returning as Yosuke for the Persona 4 remake,' posted Lowenthal, who also voices Spider-Man in the Insomniac games on PS4/PS5. 'I asked. Maybe I even begged, but they don't want me to come back.' This was a big hint that the remake was happening. And now, courtesy of Summer Game Fest, we finally got a teaser. There's not really much to it, but I suspect fans of the original Persona 4 and the franchise as a whole will be digging into every frame to see what they can uncover. Persona 4 Revival arrives on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC in the future. No Switch 2 port was announced. Which is odd, but hey, maybe things will change between now and whenever the remake finally arrives. . For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
