The sleeper hits of Summer Game Fest 2023

To fill the hole left by the lack of E3 in this year’s gaming calendar, there have been more than a few trailer-filled video presentations showing off hundreds of upcoming games. But for a select few creators and critics who could make it to Los Angeles, there were also some hands-on preview opportunities to play upcoming games at "Play Days" as part of this year’s Summer Game Fest "not E3" festivities.

Rather than focus on the big-name sequels and established franchises (which, let’s face it, usually just provide a small twist on their predecessors), we tried to focus on games from lesser-known studios. Here’s a selection of the 10 upcoming titles we played in the last week that you definitely shouldn’t sleep on, especially if you’re looking for something out of the ordinary.

33 Immortals

Platforms: Xbox Series X/S, Windows
Planned release: 2024
Links: Official site

While 33 Immortals’ Summer Game Fest trailer focused on the game’s 33-player co-operative gameplay, we only had six players gathering for our 30-minute Play Days demo. But that was still enough people to get a feel for how the game layers classic MMO raids on top of a simple but effective 2D presentation.

The usual co-op brawling tactics all apply here, letting you mix ranged attacks from your archers with melee beatdowns from your sword-equipped warriors, for instance. The co-op angle gets a strong boost from a series of partner spells, requiring players to stand in a triangle to activate healing areas or a powerful volley of light arrows.

The most memorable part of the demo, though, came after we destroyed the powerful demonic mini-bosses found inside portals dotting the map. The developer warned that we had “angered god,” and our party was inundated with screen-filling pyrotechnic hazards. These left us all screaming and clamoring for the precious little safe space remaining on a map that was quickly becoming a hellscape of flame and falling projectiles, all while simultaneously dealing with encroaching enemies.

I’m not sure how well this will all work if you’re not in the same room with your fellow players or if you’re playing with 32 strangers. Still, we have high hopes for any game that gives us an excuse to run from hellfire with our buddies.

-Kyle Orland

Cocoon

Platforms: PS4/5, Xbox One/Series, Nintendo Switch
Planned release: 2023
Links: Steam | Official site

Tired of games that bog you down with hours of wordy tutorials to explain their complex mechanics? Cocoon is just what you need. Without a single word or pictogram, the game’s early minutes gently lead you through everything you need to learn about the clockwork machinery powering this imposing, intricate world. Then, just as you’re getting the hang of things, you place a puzzle-powering orb on a pedestal, only to find that the orb contains an entire new world with its own intricate puzzles to solve.

The mechanic of jumping between these fully portable orb-worlds was used to great effect for some brain-bending puzzles and even some interesting, non-traditional boss combat in my demo. But what makes Cocoon really stand out is the environmental design. The way the seemingly sterile world stirs and comes to life evokes games like Tunic or Samorost, where just seeing how the mechanized pieces fit together is at least half the fun. The slick animations and clever, subtle lighting cues convey plenty of grandeur and emotion without ever saying a word.

-Kyle Orland

Fae Farm

Platforms: Switch, Windows
Planned release: Sept. 8, 2023
Links: Steam | Nintendo eShop | Official site

Ever since Stardew Valley raised the bar for farming sims in 2016, other games in the genre have struggled to rise to the challenge. At first glance, Fae Farm is just a farming sim with a small mystical twist, but some hands-on time on the Play Days show floor revealed much more depth. Beyond veggie-growing and tending to adorable barnyard animals, Fae Farm has crafting, combat-filled dungeons, inventory management, cooking, potion-making, and enough story and seasonal events to fill hundreds of hours of gameplay, according to a representative from developer Phoenix Labs.

My time with Fae Farm gave me the impression that it was just as much action-RPG as it was life sim, making it more comparable to Rune Factory than Harvest Moon. It’s bright, colorful, and cartoony, a refreshing aesthetic in a medium full of too-dark or aggressively gray and brown color palettes.

One of my favorite things about Fae Farm is that, like Stardew and Rune Factory, players can go at their own pace and focus on the activities they like best. Want to become the world’s best pumpkin farmer? Go for it. Would you rather use magical shortcuts to cut down on time in the fields so you can conquer every dungeon? You do you.

The planned September 8 release date puts Fae Farm’s launch amid some of the biggest game launches of the year, but when you’re ready to take a break from exploring space and delivering fatalities, this cozy charmer will be there for you.

-Sarah Leboeuf

Foamstars

Platforms: PS4/5
Planned release: TBA
Links: Official site

In the eight years since the release of Splatoon, it’s a shame that “Splatoon-like” has not become a full-fledged genre. Foamstars seems determined to help remedy that situation, though, providing a frenetic and colorful third-person shooter experience about more than just killing anything that moves.

In place of Splatoon’s paint guns, Foamstars has you shooting a bubbly foam that lets you quickly surf across the part of the map controlled by your team (or slow you down if you try to walk through opposition-controlled territory). But that foam also has a thickness to it, letting you build walls that can protect you from incoming shots or ramps that can give you the high ground at a moment’s notice.

You can also use your foam gun to attack enemies, of course, but foam alone can’t get you a kill. Instead, foamed enemies get trapped in a roly-poly ball of suds, and they can roll around waiting to be saved or be finished off, depending on which team manages to surf into them first.

Although the early demo version we played was a little too visually busy at points to really process what was going on, I was instantly drawn in by the colorful and interesting variety of characters, with plenty of unique weapons and special moves to try out. Like Splatoon before it, Foamstars seems poised to bring lighthearted fun to an online shooter space that can often feel way too serious.

-Kyle Orland

Galacticare

Platforms: Xbox One/Series, PS4/5, Windows
Planned release: 2023
Links: Steam | Official site

The pitch: A hospital sim… in space! This was all I needed to hear before checking out Galacticare, which had a demo that delivered exactly what was advertised.

At first, Galacticare felt like a standard-issue hospital management simulation that hearkens back to the days of ‘90s sims like Theme Hospital—not that anyone’s complaining—but before long, the sci-fi aspects reveal themselves. Each level takes place on a different planet or station in the galaxy, which means dealing with challenges that an Earth-based medical facility wouldn’t encounter. You’ll also see these science-fiction details in your patients and medical staff because, naturally, some of them will be aliens.

What impressed me about Galacticare was the smooth learning curve that lets the player experiment and learn from their mistakes. Some modern sims are very tutorial and menu-heavy, but in Galacticare, it took just a couple of minutes to figure out how to set up a reception desk and a few examination rooms.

Once those doors were open, managing patient and doctor expectations added far more layers of strategy. Did some aliens die waiting for help because I didn’t have enough specialists on hand? Sure, but failure is a data point, and I’ll learn from those mistakes when I’m building the best intergalactic health care company the universe has ever seen.

-Sarah Leboeuf

Immortals of Aveum

Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Windows
Planned release: July 20, 2023
Links: Steam | Official site

A first-person shooter where the guns are replaced with magic spells hasn’t been a compelling or original pitch since the ‘90s heyday of Hexen. So I was pleasantly surprised when I came away from my hour-long demo with Immortals of Aveum wanting to spend more time slinging magical energy beams at open expanses full of enemy wizards.

Most of that feeling comes down to the game’s snappy controls, which cover both the speedy dash- and double-jump-infused movement and the game’s three basic magical weapons (which resemble nothing so much as a railgun, a shotgun, and a plasma gun, only without any limits on ammunition). Zipping through crowds of (relatively stupid seeming) enemies reminded me of doing the same in the recent Doom games or the Serious Sam series in the best way, especially once I started unlocking alternate fire moves for each weapon.

While the early plot feels like some generic Gears of War-plus-magic pablum, the few scenes I saw were pushed forward by some strong dialogue writing and performances led by Firefly’s Gina Torres. It all has me hopeful that the full game can be just as engrossing as my demo by the time it hits on July 20.

-Kyle Orland

Little Kitty, Big City

Platforms: Switch, Windows
Planned release: 2024
Links: Steam | Nintendo eShop | Official site

With possibly one of the most literal titles of all time, Little Kitty, Big City is a third-person adventure game about a small cat lost in a bustling metropolis. Outside of its cozy apartment home for the first time after a catnap gone wrong, the titular and nameless (at least for the demo) Little Kitty finds itself in a world full of dangers. Puddles of water, too-tall walls, and clumsy humans all threatened Kitty’s blissful existence throughout my 20-minute demo session.

Because there isn’t a huge library of video games with cat protagonists, it’s easy to compare Little Kitty, Big City to the 2022 Annapurna hit Stray, but they’re very different in tone. Where Stray was dystopian and drearily atmospheric, Little Kitty, Big City is vibrant, cartoony, and genuinely funny; think Untitled Goose Game, but with an unnamed little kitty instead. During my demo, I pounced on some birds (they’re fine), tripped clueless humans while their faces were buried in their phones, received pets from kind strangers, collected the shiny treasures the city had to offer, and befriended a street-smart raccoon. Not a bad day in the life of a cat.

-Sarah Leboeuf

Lysfanga: The Time Shift Warrior

Platforms: Windows
Planned release: 2023
Links: Steam

Single-player titles where you play alongside pre-recorded copies of your past self are nothing new these days—we reviewed Super Time Force Ultra over nine years ago, after all. But Lysfanga stands out for how it uses the mechanic to turn some by-the-numbers hack-and-slash combat into a series of intricate, tightly timed puzzles.

That’s because Lysfanga is full of enemies that force you to team up with yourself. There are pairs of enemies that will constantly heal each other if they’re not attacked at the same time and shielded enemies you need to distract with pointless frontal attacks so another time-clone can sneak up behind and hit their unprotected backside.

None of this is too complicated in a vacuum, but organizing your sequential 15-second or so runs efficiently—so that each copy is exactly where it needs to be at exactly the right time—becomes a complex subgame in and of itself. And the basics of hack-and-slash combat are quickly complicated by doors and obstacles that can close the player off from parts of the map for long periods, trapping you in unproductive sections of the map unless you plan your routes carefully

Over the course of a 30-minute demo, I could already feel Lysfanga rewiring the way my brain processed “single-player” combat in this context. I can’t wait to figure out the most efficient speedrun strategies alongside other fans.

-Kyle Orland

Thirsty Suitors

Platforms: PS4/5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, Windows
Planned release: TBD
Links: Steam | PlayStation Store

You couldn’t not notice Thirsty Suitors on the Play Days floor. It’s an aggressively bright and unapologetically stylish celebration of South Asian culture in which a woman named Jala returns to her hometown to face her past. Along with diverting skateboarding and cooking mini-game sections, Thirsty Suitors is full of insult-based battles as Jala confronts her exes; think turn-based RPG combat, except all of the basic attacks are actually taunts designed to weaken the opponent. Jala’s first encounter occurs at a diner immediately upon her return home, where she runs into her third-grade boyfriend and discovers he’s still carrying a torch for her. How embarrassing.

What’s even more interesting is how the battle ended: Jala and her ex made peace, each of them realizing how their own actions led to such a tense situation. This is presumably the first step in Jala’s quest to stop running away from her problems, which—according to an inner voice that takes the appearance of her golden-child sister—is a common theme in her life.

I only played Thirsty Suitors for about 10 minutes, but I kept thinking about it well after that; it’s a hilarious and witty story of self-discovery that highlights cultural elements we don’t often see in video games. Annapurna Games has built a reputation as a publisher of special, thoughtful, and sometimes super-weird indie games, and Thirsty Suitors fits right in with the rest of the publisher’s portfolio.

-Sarah Leboeuf

Viewfinder

Platforms: PS5, Windows
Planned release: July 18, 2023
Links: Steam | PlayStation Store | Official site

It’s hard to remember a time before “first-person puzzle game” was part of the gaming industry lexicon. In the 16 years since Portal expertly blended the first-person shooter and puzzle genres to create a wholly original masterpiece, many other developers have built upon that inspiration with their own contributions to the genre.

Next up: Viewfinder, a perception-challenging, photograph-based puzzler from Sad Owl Studios and Thunderful Publishing. Originally announced at the 2022 Game Awards, Viewfinder now finds itself about a month away from release, with the potential to be another memorable puzzle-venture.

Viewfinder feels a lot like Superliminal, where in-game objects change physical scale based on your perspective. The twist here is how you use in-game photographs to change the world around you. You can create bridges and paths, open up new spaces, and even turn the photos upside-down to dump out the items in them and use them elsewhere. It’s the kind of thing that’s hard to describe but makes perfect sense once you see it in action.

Don’t let the calming, serene environments fool you; these puzzles are tricky in the best way. They’ll have you feeling silly one moment and fist-pumping in victory the next, and I’m ready to get lost in this photogenic world when the game launches on July 18.

-Sarah Leboeuf