Tribeca Games Fest

The Tribeca Games Fest is part of the much bigger lineup of the annual Tribeca Festival, featuring programming that has been spanning across a whole week. The Fest has been steadily growing with a smattering of not only games demos, but films and workshops since the induction of games as a distinct, recognized category in Tribeca since 2021.

Interviewed by filmmaker Mike Flanagan, Sam Lake of Remedy Entertainment talked about the influences behind the upcoming Alan Wake 2, and the two shared their thoughts on horror as a storytelling medium.

Games like Chants of Sennaar, Despelote, Goodbye Volcano High, Stray Gods, and A Highland Song were exhibited at Tribeca with playable demos.

Telltale Games’ adaptation of The Expanse, serving as a sequel to the Amazon series, was accompanied by both an industry talk with some members of the team and a game demo as well.

And one of the big talks of Tribeca is a screening of Hideo Kojima: Connecting Worlds, a documentary on Hideo Kojima.

The Wholesome Games Direct

As usual, the Wholesale Games showcase delivers a vast catalog of titles that try to tap into something cute and comfy.

There were several titles have been already previously published, but are anticipating a wider console release, such as Button City and Witch Beam’s Unpacking.

There were games about being small, such as Frogsong, Smushi Come Home, and Garden Buddies. Frogsong is a roleplaying adventure game that puts you in the role of a frog, putting you out in a fantasy world filled with combat and creatures much bigger than you.

Meanwhile, there were other games about looking at the bigger picture, such as Flutter Away, The Guardian of Nature, and Let’s Revolution! Let’s Revolution! is a tactics-style, roguelite puzzle game that works similarly to a classic round of Minesweeper.

And lest we not forget whole influx of games where gardening and farming mechanics are at the heart of their narrative, such as further developments unveiled behind Fields of Mistria, Garden Witch Life, and even a shout-out to the upcoming Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life, a remake of the Harvest Moon title of the same name. On top of some new cosmetic updates, Story of Seasons fans can anticipate this remake being the first game in the whole franchise that will allow same-sex marriage and broader gender options.

Ubisoft Forward

Ubisoft elaborated further on some titles already showcased during the Summer Games Fest, such as Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. But the Forward presentation went on to debut some new things Ubisoft had up its own sleeve, such as gameplay footage of Star Wars Outlaws.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is set to be a first-person action shooter where players will be put in the role of a Na’vi.

An extended look was also given to Assassins’ Creed Mirage, as well as Nexus and Codename Jade, Ubisoft’s first foray into VR and mobile gamign respectively.

The PC Gaming Show

The PC Gaming Show featured mostly a slew of sequels and further expanses tied to large franchises.

Frostpunk, Path of Exile, Citizen Sleeper, and Brethedge are all getting sequels.

Vampire Survivors is getting an update, and the Pathfinder name is earning itself its own Vampire Survivors riff with Gallowspire Survivors. More gameplay footage was shown of Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin. And further content was also introduced to Baldur’s Gate 3.

Some behind the scenes developments were shown with the ongoing progress of the Dune: Awakening MMORPG.

There was a significant huge round-up of new, original strategy titles, such as Fabledom, Nova Roma, Last Train Home, and Earthless.

With even many other original titles that were teased in the mix, we managed to get gameplay of Bloomtown, a dark RPG that subverts the initial facade of a wholesome life sim.

Most importantly, we got a glimpse of Ebenezer and the Invisible World, a Metroidvania set in some whacky interpretation of Charles Dickesn’ A Christmas Carol. Tiny Tim has a dive kick.

Capcom Showcase

The Capcom showcase wasn’t a heap of new info, but we did get some new looks at games that we have seen before.

The new series Kunitsu-Gami got a gameplay trailer, showing the slick combat and fantastic art style. You’re seemingly tasked with removing curses from people and places, and having those freed people join you in your quest. No release date for it just yet, but it’ll be on PS5, Xbox Series, and PC.

Megaman X Dive is a gacha game that is getting shut down in the coming months, but Capcom has decided to release an offline version to let people play the game without worry of its impending collapse. Most of the playable characters will be available as well as over 900 stages. No word on how character unlocks will work here, but hopefully the gacha mechanics from the original release are removed smoothly. It’ll be released on Steam and mobile phones.

Pragmata, Capcom’s mysterious sci-fi action game, has been delayed indefinitely after its previous two delays. We really don’t know much about this, except that you’re a guy in a cool space suit fighting robots and protecting a little girl. There’s some gameplay shown in this trailer, and it does look cool! Guess we’ll be left waiting quite a while to know what’s really going on here.

Shu Takumi’s franchises, Ace Attorney and Ghost Trick, both had some pretty big updates. Ghost Trick has a demo available now, and a new Ace Attorney collection, Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy, has been announced. Ghost Trick is due out June 30th and Apollo’s Wacky Adventures will ship some time at the start of 2024.

We got some information about Exoprimal, the dinosaur killing EDF-like as well. Some story was shown off, then modes such as a five-player weekly challenge that changes its structure each week. There will be an open beta from June 16th to the 18th, and the game launches July 14th on PS4/5, PC, and Xbox Series.

Finally, we got a look at Dragon’s Dogma 2. The game’s director, Hideaki Itsuno, talked a bit about Dragon’s Dogma‘s gameplay structure, revealing that the beloved pawn system would be returning, allowing you to have a pawn of your own plus two sub-pawns from your friends. There was also talk of map size, which Itsuno claims is four times the size of the original game. No release date, but expect Dragon’s Dogma 2 on PC, Xbox Series, and PS5.

Devolver Direct

Devolver’s showcase was another “comedy” event (which personally, some of us didn’t watch as the last few have been excruciating.) They did show off four games that are daring to be something different compared to everything else we have seen so far, so we can give them some credit where it’s due here!

Baby Steps, the new game from the team behind Ape Out and Bennett Foddy of QWOP and Getting Over It fame, is a “walking simulator” where a manchild named Nate has to leave his parents’ basement and literally learn to walk on his own again.

Human Fall Flat, a goofy physics-based puzzler from 2016, is getting a sequel.

The Talos Principle 2, which was already shown at the PlayStation showcase, got a new gameplay trailer.

Finally, Wizard with a Gun, a game about. Just. That. It debuted a story trailer as well as the release of a demo on Steam.

Grasshopper Direct

The Grasshopper Direct was hyped for over two months, with a webpage promising that “something’s gonna happen” and a countdown running until June 15th at midnight. Once the clock struck midnight, however, the post was delayed around an hour and a half because they seemingly didn’t pre-upload the video to YouTube.

Once the video was posted? A small amount of Shadows of the Damned news (they’re projecting to release it on all current consoles) and a blurred out shot of their next game. And a new merch store. That’s it. There might’ve been some other teases in there, but other than an admittedly cool showcase of 25 years of their games, this felt like a waste of time.

The post The Bulletin: Everything Else But an E3 appeared first on Gamesline.

It isn’t escapism, until you come back – and then in its wake, escapism becomes adventure. Sure, we’re a bunch of kids playing games in a silly arcade, and maybe we’re feuding over a plastic toy that doesn’t really mean anything outside of our group, but us being together and goofing around is not trivial! Our fun is our community and it’s worth protecting. The designers of Button City fundamentally understand games as totemic, with its ‘Saturday morning cartoon’ stylings, short playtime, and a tightly curated selection of mini-games that work together to target a 90’s nostalgic audience. Button City is a brief hug of an afternoon adventure game. Soft, comfortable, and completely normal in both subtle and easily appreciable ways. Side-by-side, it makes Animal Crossing look almost manipulative and nihilistic in how that series pushes you to never ever stop playing.

In Button City you play as the new kid in town named Fennel, who finds an arcade named Button City within his neighborhood. On arrival to Button City, Fennel finds a bevy of other kids currently embroiled in a rivalry over a MOBA-styled arcade game called ‘Gobabots’. Here our shy, sheepish fox protagonist shines as he is suddenly enlisted to help his new team win the Golden Gobabot. Things get tough for Fennel and his new friends when Button City closes and you find out a greedy fat cat named Peppermint Pepperbottom is buying Button City to replace it with a big-box department store. This is the classic 90s teen-movie premise, and over the 5 hours of playtime there’s little in the way to challenge the protagonist more than sassy teens and moustache-twirling capitalist greed, but that’s totally okay! Button City has the intensity of fleece blanket, and at almost no point do they try to dramatize things beyond that point – in that way I’d liken it to if Donut County was made for kids. It’s cute!

I think it’s easy to write off Button City as a twee little Animal Crossing styled game just based on screenshots or the soundtrack, but that reduces a lot of the incredible presentation of this game. Easily the strongest part of Button City is its bold 3D dioramas and character animations which are simple but impactful. There are no wasted shapes or colors within the cell-shaded pastel palette, as this game shows exactly enough as needed, without a single vector feeling out of place. There are also a few interstitial cutscenes styled like 90s cartoons that bring fresh flair to the game each time they happen. On top of that, the UI for moving around the world by ‘teleporting’ between zones is so seamless and fun to use, that it even becomes a rather funny plot point later on in the game. I know game designers who avoid diegesis, and they’re all cowards! These moments really make the game stand out on its own when you play through it. My only problem with the presentation is that I wish there was a run button (or a ‘skip-merrily’ button) to give a little variety to how Fennel moves around his world. It can get dry moving at one speed on every screen, and anything to break that up would be nice.

There’s something special in the way that no part of Button City overstays its welcome. Despite everything in the game being so soft, there isn’t one part of the game that outshines any other. Outside of doing tasks for people along the main storyline, there are sidequests that let you get to know the characters more, playing Gobabots which has multiple heroes you can try out and build teams with, a racing game inspired by Initial D, and a rhythm game inspired by Dance Dance Revolution. All three of these mini-games understand their genres well enough to emulate them in fun ways while adding some nuance that made them all increasingly fun. By the last time I’d come back to the racing minigame I’d learned how to practically always be in a drifting position, and my best time dropped incredibly low! Normally, I’d expect folks to like or dislike certain mini-games or sidequests more than others, and maybe a game with less technical craft would have that, but there’s clearly a deft hand behind the scenes making sure each subsystem within the game has a little TLC without overdoing it in any one part. Nothing steals the show and gets overemphasized, and neither does anything ruin the game and make me want to stop playing, all playstyles are validated here. Button City really does just want you to play this for a bit and then afterwards go do something else, and I think that’s admirable.

Not that there isn’t some difficulty to pressure you, but this game is largely unchallenging. Both emotionally and mechanically, there is almost no friction to the game in any way whatsoever. The few characters that have some development encounter barely any strife, including the protagonist, whose life seems pretty idyllic outside of one plot point with Fennel’s mom that goes unexplored. The stakes to anything happening are extremely low and as soon as you are given a problem you are almost always immediately given a solution as well. I wouldn’t say that the frictionless play of Button City is a bad thing, however I feel like it could be a missing ingredient to take the game to the next level! Currently, the only friction that exists in the game is when you click on interactive objects it takes Fennel about 1.5 seconds to get to the specific spot in front of the object that lets the interaction happen. This means almost nothing in the grand scheme of things, but when it’s the only tiny bit of friction in a game that is otherwise unchallenging to the player, it becomes super noticeable and frustrating all the time. I love Button City insisting on simple moment-to-moment plot structure to emulate a 20-minute TV show structure, but I think if there was just a little more teeth to the overall plot of the game, it would add that seasonal-arc feeling that is missing.

That said, after the credits roll, there is one special moment in the postgame that really gets to where I wish more of the game would go. Button City absolutely has a ‘superboss’ that gets introduced within the Gobabots minigame, and earning that final Gobabot to play with was a highlight of my time playing through. It’s not like I showed some kind of mastery of a complex system, but beating this game’s version of a superboss still felt important and impactful proportional to the short amount of time I played through the game. I’d love to see Button City expanded along these lines, because there is so much room there for it to grow!

Over the last year the label of Wholesome Games has brought many games including Button City into the spotlight. However, Wholesome Games’ aesthetic-based curation also runs the risk of flattening certain styles of games, and Button City is firmly in the crosshairs for that kind of flattening. Through it’s adept presentation and careful design considerations, I’d say it manages to escape the gravitational pull from being ‘just another Animal Crossing looking Wholesome Game for Switch owners’. There’s more than just uwu cute heart furry feelings inside of Button City and it all comes from underneath the hood of the game.

The post Button City – Full Review, A Furry Nickelodeon-Inspired Children’s Adventure Game appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s been a big news week with Super Mario Brothers selling for over 2 million, Capcom showing off the final Street Fighter V DLC character, and Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds adding BattleGrounds to their name to become PUBG: BattleGrounds. We also dig into the deeper stuff with Steve Gaynor’s abusive behavior at Fullbright, J. Allen Brack stepping down from Blizzard, and Unity making it a whole lot more expensive if developers want to put their game on console.

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The Gecko Gods – by Solon
Louis Waloschek

You know how in Zelda games Link always walks into a dungeon and everything’s like perfectly sized for him? Well, same spirit of dungeoneering, but now you’re a gecko! In The Gecko Gods, everything’s much larger than you and definitely still made for people, but you’re doing your best by walking on walls, jumping over gaps, and solving puzzles. Little Linky lizard slinking ‘round some ruins solving mysteries and stuff! The dynamic where everything in these rooms is perfectly still until you interact with it was really captivating!

Bear and Breakfast – by Elvie
Armor Games Studio

Look at that damn cute bear! In this management sim, Bear and Breakfast has you play a bear trying to run a bed and breakfast alongside his fellow forest-bound friends—all while possibly learning that there is more to the wood itself.

Button City – by Solon
(Subli)minal Gaming

A lot of indie games this year are working towards being feature-rich and full of different modes and mechanics to play with, and Button City is one of these that puts in all the systems I love to see. I’m not one for farming and house-sim mechanics, but show me a car INITIAL-D DRIFTING and I’ll freak out. Button City has you taking down capitalists with all your friends with a pastel-y and anthropomorphic style very reminiscent to Ben Esposito’s Donut County and that’s always a headspace I want to be in.

Lake – by Elvie
Gamious via Whitethorn Games

Man, if you haven’t been really keeping up with things this past year, or just somehow never gotten mail ever, you would know our country’s public postal system deserves better! I am actually not sure what Lake is trying to do here, but I’m intrigued. In lieu of many cheesy Christmas movie rom-com premises, you were a #girlboss who was just sick of urban life and decided to lay down low moving back to a smaller community in the suburbs; except instead of falling in love with a prince from a fictional country, she decided to become a mail carrier! Through your job, you get to know the residents of the town more, and perhaps are bound to fall in love at some point anyway,

Paralives – by Solon
Alex Massé

I’m looking up more about Paralives right now, and the trailers that played during Wholesome Games didn’t even give us half the picture. I’m enraptured by how Paralives let’s you cleanly control building a house like it’s The Sims, but with way more architectural customization, by letting you extend walls and adjust elevations, you can express a character’s stylings so much more thoroughly and subtly than simply filling a flat square with knick-knacks. This is the aspect of interior-decorating that gets me excited, and on top of that, looking through the dev documents, it seems there are full characters and narratives that are currently being built out. Plenty to come from Paralives!

Woodo – by Elvie
Yullia Prohorova

You know that baby puzzle-solving toy where you have to put a shape in the right hole? That is what Woodo is! But more complex! Woodo is based on the charm of wooden toys all in video game form. You scan through rooms to fit objects all in the right place where they belong, and these challenges seem to increasingly get harder as the scope of the room expands. It’s a rather simple concept that can still get your brain juices flowing while innately tapping into your inner baby—and I think it’s brilliant!

We Are OFK – by Solon
OFK

So this confuses me and charms me. OFK is like supposed to be an actual band IRL but virtual, kiiinda loosely like the Gorillaz, but as far as I understand they mostly exist for this game, whose trailer is super well done! I’m not sure what direction the game itself is going and so this is something I want to keep a close eye on because there’s so much messaging that seems like It’s desperate to be seen bya millennial audience, but also deeply corporatized for marketing purposes. I think I’m capable of being hype for a trailer and also skeptical of the direction it’s going in? Either way, We Are OFK is going to be fascinating to see this develop.

KreatureKind – by Elvie
Valiant

KreatureKind had an awfully short teaser within the grand scheme of the Wholesome Games’ showcase, but it captured my eyes with its stunning, highly illustrative, character-driven art style. A card battler, KreatureKind takes heavy inspiration from fantasy and subverts our usual expectations of combat by instead having you kill things with kindness. Despite the very little we have seen with the game thus far, its concept certainly puts “wholesome” in Wholesome Games.

Princess Farmer – by Solon
Samobee Games

There were so many Witchy Puzzle Farming games throughout the E3 lineups today, and for me, Princess Farmer as well as Spirit Swap: Lo-fi Beats To Match-3 To both scratched a really nice itch for me aesthetically and mechanically. If I could just smoosh them together into like one of those 2-pack DVDs you used to see at the grocery store it would be perfect. I think the Switch actually has that functionality? Either way, be strong and gay and beautiful and match-3 to farm up some witch’s brew while some hella good tunes play!

Please Be Happy – by Solon
Studio Élan

“I love being a fox!” and immediately the trailer showed a foxgirl making out with a different anthropomorphic girl. That’s the opening for Please Be Happy’s showcase in the Wholesome Games E3 block, and you know what? Yuri visual novels in the Wholesome Games! That owns! Let’s go! No more information needed, thank you Wholesome Games for repping art. It’s Studio Élan, so if you know… you know.

Passapartout 2: The Lost Artist – by Elvie
Flamebait Games

Art is pain and the sequel to Passapartout: The Starving Artist is here to come back with a vengeance to remind you of that! Our Muppet-like Frenchman returns to the canvas for Passapartout 2: The Lost Artist, and they seem to be in better spirits! Not much else is known about this so far besides returning to the usual system found in the first game, but the announcement trailer leads us to believe we are in a different location (Italy? Pray tell.) where we must impress to find success. What sort of new grievances will burden our creative soul this time?

LEGO® Builder’s Journey – by Solon
Light Brick Studio

LEGO® isn’t messing around! You want extremely well-lit peg blocks going on an adventure? I didn’t know how much this was something I needed nor how much effort LEGO® was going to be putting into what looks to be a text-less adventure game where everything is expressed through simple LEGO® puzzles. It’s kinda like the Captain Toad games but with a wider opportunity space and a super special lighting system.

Ooblets: Port Forward – by Elvie
Glumberland

Speaking of an all-new location, the Ooblets: Port Forward update is now here! According to the official developer’s update logs, Port Forward is going to be a “pretty big departure” compared to the gameplay of the other game’s regions thus far. Following a major quality of life update as well, which included finally the ability to stack items on other furniture pieces (Take note, all life sims!), the Pokémon-like title is still technically in Early Access, and every new update is taking a huge step towards what a huge (cute) behemoth of this game will potentially become in its final release.

If you’d like to see even more games, the entire list was full of charm and love! We recommend checking out the Wholesome Games website where you can wishlist and follow and Patreon-ize and all the other indie things we need to do to support these games within their overwhelming storefront infrastructures! We all lift up together out here!

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