Welcome back to Pushing Buttons – this is Keza, back with you after a period of convalescence. As I was lying in bed with Covid, watching what felt like 4,000 trailers from the live-streamed summer video-game showcases, I struggled to tell the difference between a lot of them. Every shooter seemed to be set in space. Every wholesome indie seemed to feature frogs or bears. Admittedly I was quite ill, but also, as our games correspondent Keith Stuart explored in last week’s newsletter, we’ve reached a point where a lot of mainstream culture, including games, is starting to feel as if it’s folding in on itself.
Remakes, homages and expansions of old ideas and franchises are continually repackaging our nostalgia and selling it back to us. As big-budget games become more expensive and risky to make, they have also gotten more similar. And if a game is successful, then its ideas proliferate until they’re everywhere. (Think of scalable watchtowers in open-world games – their absence now feels quite novel.)
There is a way to do this right: Nintendo might still be making Mario and Zelda after 25-plus years, for instance, but only rarely do they uncritically reproduce the exact same ideas, characters or settings. Those series boast games that have pushed the medium forward, and it helps that there tends to be a few years between each new one. Elden Ring is built on conventions introduced more than 10 years ago by Demon’s/Dark Souls, and yet it’s one of the best games of all time. Nonetheless, wouldn’t it be nice to see some games that were genuinely new?
In that spirit, here are five upcoming games that made me think: “Huh, I haven’t seen that before.”
You are an Indian mother who has emigrated to Canada with your family, and the food that you cook tells a story. Venba is a mix of cooking game and narrative game about the immigrant experience in 1980s Canada, featuring real southern Indian cuisine. Everything about this makes me want to play it.
This creepy platformer has the vibe of an adventure game that you used to play on the school computers, but could never quite remember, so it took on a mythical place in your imagination. You are a blob in a pixellated underground world full of strange animals that are not very friendly, and you must find a way around them with frisbees and water guns and other stuff that you find. I’m especially intrigued by what the developer calls its multilayer approach: there’s playing and completing the game, and there’s finding hidden secrets that are neither obvious nor technically necessary. Then there are grand-scale puzzles and mysteries that might require years of community collaboration to uncover. It reminds me of Fez. I really want to play it.
In recent years, more games have started to explore grief, sometimes abstractly (Ori and the Will of the Wisps), sometimes head-on (Spiritfarer). This is a snazzy-looking puzzle game about helping ghosts to escape obstacles that are standing in the way of moving on. Each level is an arrangement of tiles that you poke and prod to make your way through – scenery and ghosts and doorways move pleasingly around the screen.
I’ve seen farming games. I have seen mech games. I have not seen a mech farming game before, and I have a bit of a fondness for robots thanks to a teenage obsession with Japanese animation. Here, you land on pristine untouched alien planets and build beautiful farms, using a mech suit like a stompy tractor to pull down trees and water crops. The colourfully calming art style gives me hope that this will not unexpectedly turn into a mech battle simulator two hours in.
Have we not all been waiting for a game in the style of late-medieval manuscripts? This is a narrative game from Obsidian Entertainment, a developer I have immense respect for, about an artist in 16th-century Bavaria. It is a murder mystery that begins in an abbey, historically informed but not entirely bound by historical realism, and inspired by the struggles that people always experience with social change. Interestingly, the story takes place over 25 years, so you’ll see the characters and surroundings change and age over its course.
What to play
Here’s a real weekend-evening game that you can play with partners, housemates and teenagers: The Quarry, a choose-your-own-adventure-style horror featuring endearingly tropey characters, played by actors such as Ted Raimi and David Arquette, who are stuck at a remote summer camp as terrifying events start to unfold. Your plot and dialogue choices can result in 186 different endings. This is a real shout-at-the-TV kind of horror game – and because there’s not much actual gameplay getting between you and the plot, it’s very accessible, too.
Available on: PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One/Series X/S, Steam
Estimated play time: about 10 hours
What to read
A bumper crop of news and links this week, as I spent most of last week listlessly scrolling on my phone:
I just complained about the resurrection of old games but cult favourite Dragon’s Dogma is finally getting a sequel, and I am thrilled. This was the weirdest fantasy game, a mish-mash between Monster Hunter and the later Final Fantasies and Skyrim that had a strong Japanese feel despite a western high-fantasy aesthetic. It has the quality of a fever dream, and my memories of it revolve around baffling plot nonsequiturs and unlikely victories in night-time chance encounters with griffins and ogres. Oh, and I customised all my wizard/warrior/archer servants to look like different Bowie personas.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has been on a gaming investment spree, acquiring stakes in Nintendo, Capcom and Embracer Group, the company that recently bought the rights to Tomb Raider. In a long statement, Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors addressed players’ objections to games companies accepting money from a non-democratic regime that, among much else, criminalises homosexuality and is implicated in the murder of journalists. It boiled down to acknowledging concerns but saying it was good for shareholders and, well, there are a lot of gamers – and therefore room for growth –in the Middle East and Africa. As predictable as it is disappointing.
The makers of Stalker 2 in Ukraine have shared their experiences of the war in a moving developer diary, showing the destruction near their office in Kyiv, their children playing in destroyed playgrounds, the constant air sirens, and their improvised workspaces in bathrooms and corridors. “It’s not easy to write violent quests when there’s a war outside your window,” says narrative designer Dariia Tsepkova. Some joined the army; others left the country; some speak with weapons in their hands. Meanwhile, in a video shown during the Future Games show, independent Ukrainian developers shared their experiences and their games; and People Make Games shared Ukrainian developers’ and refugees’ stories.
Activision Blizzard continues to try to rid itself of troublesome harassment allegations as its merger with Microsoft nears completion. Last week, the Call of Duty studio announced that internal investigations cleared itself of wrongdoing, saying that the “media barrage” has been unjustified, stoked by California’s investigations into women’s experiences at the company. How convenient.
Question block
Today’s question comes from reader Ashley: My friends and I want to play games together but due to jobs and kids, the brief periods of free time we have never seem to align. Do you know of any multiplayer games that would allow us to dip in and out at different times? We played Neptune’s Pride a few years ago, but I don’t think we are ready for a rematch yet!
I can’t think of anything as intense and competitive as Neptune’s Pride – a space-strategy game that has actually ended friendships – but have you tried something more collaborative? In No Man’s Sky, for instance, you can work together at different times to build up a planetary base or collect minerals and resources, alongside having your own solo adventures when everyone else isn’t around. You could take turns in Wargroove, a cheery-looking war strategy game based on Advance Wars. Or you could all play a shared-world sports or driving game, such as one of the Forza Horizons or Riders Republic, and set challenges and scores for each other independently. I have always been more of a solo player, though, so I’ll throw this out to the readership: what might Ashley enjoy playing with their friends that doesn’t require them all to be online at the same time?
