Not E3 2025: The PC Gaming Show, The Latin American Games Showcase, and More

Here we are, at the end of all things, or at least Summer Game Fest. We're concluding with a two-parter. An example of what games showcases shouldn't be and then one suggestion of what they should be.

Interlude

I screw the cap back on the Mountain Dew and jam one of my crumb-encrusted fingers onto the TV handset. I'm ready for my seventh Attack of the Show this evening, but something's wrong. The Geoff Keighley on the screen isn't standing in front of a set that looks like visual ADHD. This Geoff Keighley has nerves twitching in his forehead and is shrouded in black. Suddenly, I realise he's looking at me.

"How did you-" I begin, trying to unpeel myself from the sucrose top layer of the sofa, but my body doesn't move an inch.

"Don't bother getting up. You will find escape quite impossible", Keighley says. I eye the bottle of Mountain Dew on the coffee table suspiciously. "Oh, he's catching on. You don't think I entered into all those branding partnerships for a paycheque, did you?".

"What do you want?", I ask.

"I'll cut to the chase. There have been one too many comments on the SGF livestream that I and the team consider...". He rotates his head almost imperceptibly towards the left and cocks an eyebrow. "Unfavourable. Consider this a door-to-door campaign to clean up my repuitation. Rather than asking the internet to mend its ways, I've decided to take a more direct approach". A new image lights up my living room, casting the shadow of a man in a Turtle Beach headset onto the wall behind me.

"No doubt you recognise Mr. Plott", Keighley says, a bleary-eyed gamer appearing in the PiP. It was him alright. I clench my chest muscles.

"What do you think you're doing?"

"Let's call it", Keighley tents his fingers, "Motivated persuasion. I hope you're as big a fan of prop comedy as Sean". Geoff's maniacal laugh echoes off the discarded crisp packets that make up my carpet. On the screen, Day[9] begins the first of three bits about everyday objects that also happen to be tasers.

"No, wait, I'll change the blog! I'll change the blog!", I shout, but it's too late. A trailer made in fucking 2025 is already doing the thing where it freezeframes, and a character says, "Yeah, that's me".

PC Gaming Show

I don't remember the PC Gaming Show pushing hardware this aggressively before, but then, I don't have a photographic memory of past PC Gaming Shows. I'm also surprised there isn't more interactive fiction like Den of Wolves that has us breaking into minds, Inception-style. To be fair, Inception is basically highbrow Psychonauts. The cyberpunk genre, where the digital becomes a gateway to the brain, is a firm basis for mind-infiltration stories. I also like the pollutive haze of all the drone traffic in Den of Wolves' sky, and who couldn't get behind Anders Svärd's pitch of "You can go nuts, basically"?

When Zachtronics closed in 2022, it was the near-extinction of a whole species of puzzle. While some orphaned developers continue their work under new studio aegises, statements by company head Zach Barth threw cold water on any possibility of that happening. Quote:

"It was time for a change. [...] We got very good at making 'Zachtronics games' over the last twelve years, [...] but it also kept us locked into doing something we didn't feel like doing forever".

Imagine my surprise then when I saw one of Zachtronics' assembly lines whirring away during the PC Gaming Show. As it turns out, Barth had founded Coincidence Studios in March and, despite previous statements about turning over a new leaf, had gotten right back to developing fire-and-forget sequencers with Kaizen: A Factory Story. Mechanically, the previous Barth game that Kaizen is closest to is Opus Magnum, another workload of programming robotic arms to carry parts into place. However, Kaizen's curving rectangular components follow the visual lead of SHENZHEN I/O's microcontrollers, and gunpla had gotten its day previously in Last Call BBS. Is Zach a secret mech fan?

The PC Gaming Show's preview for FBC Firebreak took on a conversational format I'd like to see other game introductions replicate. Frankie Ward didn't just segue into a trailer. She interviewed Firebreak director Mike Kayatta, which squeezed insights from him we might have been deprived of otherwise. I've still yet to strap on a crank-operated flamethrower and play Firebreak, but count my opinion upgraded from an "Errrrr" to a "Well, maybe". Wrangling faux SCPs in the multiplayer could make for some surreal encounters, and it's hard not to respect a live service game giving the boot to FOMO incentives. Yet, I'm sceptical that Control's universe is the ideal insertion point for the madcap humour of a Lethal Company or Ghostbusters Unleashed. Now and then, Control would lighten the mood, but its brutalism and psychodynamic apparitions were designed to set upon you a frigid and dreamlike atmosphere.

In both trailers for Baby Steps, we saw Bennett Foddy's humour branching out. Many other writers and voice actors would have tipped the scene about finding a toilet over into Adam Sandler territory. In Cuzillo, Boch, and Foddy's hands, it retains its humour by letting the casual weirdness of the conversations linger. Faces appear as they might in a tuned-down G Mod, and protagonist Nate is a cursed interpolation between Casey Tatum and Steve Brule. Where the Soulslikes say that failure is a gruelling test of your will, Foddy concurs but also thinks failure is funny.

I just rewatched that awful Anno: Pax Romana trailer. The editors on these ads have got to stop producing sequences where the narrator sounds like they're presenting something serious, then the camera cuts to something silly, the audio mutes, and there's a comedy sound effect before the trailer continues. Advert humour has done irreparable damage to our culture.

There was a back-and-forth between Sean Plott and Mica Burton that I respect, and it mocked all the software that forces us to register with third parties and link accounts to other accounts. It's courageous because PC Gamer has probably been reliant on income from publishers who do put players through this annoying data association and probably will be promoting them again in the future. It's also gutsy to see Relooted out here having players steal artefacts that, in the real world, rest in the display cases of private collectors and western museums.

"Out of context" compilations agreeably bamboozle with fast-fire non-sequiturs. You could get the same effect back in the day by flipping through the TV channels at 11 p.m. That late-night surfing is back in the form of Blippo+, perhaps the only TV show advertised at SGF. It has swirls of public access television and Tom Rubnitz's queer camp shorts. Whether it's self-unaware edutainment or Rubber News, seeing it rendered in the static of the Playdate convinces me that it's transmitted from an interdimensional cable network.

And now it's time for the bullet points again:

• More games could have you rotating to different characters to use different powers. Good on Morbid Metal for getting all Sonic Heroes with it.
• From Among Us to First Class Trouble, the social deception genre shows no signs of running out of steam. Eyes of Hellfire is a crafty entry to the pool, asking you to deduce not which of your friends has a knife above your back but how the computer is tricking you.
• There was a block of games here that was "Games like Factorio" and I don't know if cramming them all into the same segment is going to make any of them memorable for the viewer.
• No I'm Not Human looks like the good parts of The Mandela Catalogue.
• I wanna see if my neighbourhood has a "tutorial gym" like No More Room in Hell 2.

I've tried to play the hits in this section, but for every trailer that left me wanting more, there were three that washed over my brain like river water. This volume of previews would have made any stream protracted, but when you add in the cutaways to comedy so low-hanging it's on the floor, you get a show that's two and a half hours in length and feels like five. The saddest part is that where indie studios are often portrayed as the innovative alternatives to inert AAAs, the PC Gaming Show and Wholesome Direct were primarily mechanical and artistic recycling banks. I'll show some sympathy and admit the little details often set games apart. Anyone who's ever tried to learn new timings for their attacks in Dark Souls can appreciate how minute changes in play can turn your world upside down. However, trailers don't tend to do well with details, they are always big picture, and if there are a lot of big pictures painted from the same photograph, they start running together.

Microsoft/Bethesda

I'm gonna avoid recapping these two in protest of Microsoft providing technologies to Israel. Moving on.

Latin American Games Showcase

The Latin American Games Showcase was an antidote to the stagnation of the PC Gaming Show and Wholesome Direct. I don't have reems of longform analysis for it, not because it was boring, but because it was a festival you have to attend for yourself. There's only so much I can do with text to convey the individual art style of these titles, while the mechanics frequently come through clearly just by watching the trailers, whereas a written explanation would be suboptimal.

Here's some lightning-round criticism of what I watched at the Latin American Games Showcase:

• If your mind was soothed by the colouring books of Chickory, you're gonna want to check out Bubumbu.
• The release of the Playdate was momentous because getting a new controller element happens once in a generation at most. We've all thumbed the face button, the D-Pad, the control stick, but now, here's the crank, the big, beautiful crank.
• I can only imagine the censorship difficulties created by calling your game Piss Off and filling it full of piss.
• If I'm picking up what A.I.L.A. is putting down, it's hinting at the entity joining you outside the headset. That's genuinely scary, perhaps bolstered by the convincing immersion of virtual reality. It's a Ringu for the modern age.

If there are two games I want to single out of the pack, they're Colorbound and Lurks Within Walls. Colorbound is from a family of puzzles where you solve rooms not just by using objects in conjunction with each other but also by modifying the properties of those objects. Think rewriting the rules in Baba is You or cutting the confetti so they can fit into place in Snipperclips. Colour also provides one of the most easily recognisable shorthands for the personality of an object. You're editing the mechanics, but you're also retouching the palette.

Lurks Within Walls is one of the more disturbing horrors on tap. Its creatures were exhumed by Trevor Henderson, an artist who's been kicking ass on Twitter for years. Henderson specialises in inserting constructed phantasms into real photographs, lending credence to the concept of cryptid sightings. Because his art prints 2D creatures onto 3D canvases, Lurks Within Walls ends up with a hallucinatory effect where distended humanoids and floating gobs of flesh appear in your vision but not of the environment. They could be all in my head. There is a blank face and constant reminder of your heartbeat in one corner of the screen. The tile-based maze also locks you in a single direction, making you vulnerable as you can't quickly check the corners.

Going into this showcase, I thought that my enjoyment might be stunted because I'm not a diehard lover of Latin American Art. I still watched because I thought there would be something to savour and a chance to expand my horizons. I was shocked by the creative range, production values, and originality of this sojourn to the south hemisphere. It even used the gaps in between games with greater elegance than the PC Gaming Show. I mean, so did Wholesome Direct. I like the idea that that programme promoted cosy streamers in addition to cosy products, but the Latin American Games Showcase also brought the sun-soaked beauty of its region into my bedroom with interstitials shot in Panama City. It's like how Eurovision has a little slice of every host country before their musical number.

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One last time, here are a few loose thoughts on what we some stuff that was at this thing that's not E3 but that takes up the slot that E3 was in but is unaffiliated with E3, but kids don't know what E3:

• Reading "Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game" is like getting punched in the gut every time, but I do like that after the empty bravado of the Hobbit films, Tales of the Shire is taking The Hobbit back to the homey, pastoral roots of the novel.
• I am ravenous for more games that let charisma checks be substantial play in itself rather than the option to avoid deep play. There are a few different games over the years that have attempted to make duels conversational with card battles. I remember the concept being posed years ago by the Extra Credits YouTube channel, but All Will Rise is the most ambitious attempt I've seen to make a Magic: The Gathering for the mouth.
• With the emergence of Identifile and Lily's World this year, I think we now have enough of these to say desktop horror is its own genre. These two games join Kinito Pet, Archimedes, and IMSCARED to steal control of your OS.
• This a great time to remember that pixel art isn't one style. Differences in shading, colour palette, dimensionality, line thickness, and more individualise games even when they're all mosaics.
• Lastly, my favourite game at SGF was the phrase "Jungle Pirate Coins -5".

And that was E3, or something like it. While I might lament the announced games' unwillingness to branch out into uncharted domains, for an industry in crisis, its vitality is remarkable. That's not to say that increasing expectations of ROI or mass layoffs aren't hurting games and the people who make them; they are. However, Summer Game Fest calls home with news of resilience from that same industry. I'll even go one further and say that we now have a telescope trained on upcoming games that we didn't have when E3 was kicking around.

A demo is not always a vertical slice, but because there is no game without the play, demos provide a more focused image of a product than a trailer alone. If you want the experience of walking around an expo and trying all the demo kiosks, Steam NextFest is closer to it than Summer Game Fest and also has overlap with it on the calendar. Yet, rather than NextFest being a replacement for SGF, the two work in tandem. SGF raises interest in games and helps the player filter them, while NextFest gives gamers an interactive preview for an interactive medium. I hope that this summer, you got to see some promising previews, but I hope you got to play them, too. Thanks for reading.