Summer Game Fest's 10 Best Games

10 Games We Loved Playing at the Summer Game Fest’s Play Days

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Summer Game Fest was held once again in Los Angeles earlier this month, and two things can be true: Los Angeles was not the chaotic war zone the media might have made you think it was, and despite that it was still incredibly hard to focus on the job of playing games knowing that raids and protests were happening within a mile or so of SGF Play Days’ Fashion District headquarters. Games are fun, games are cool, games don’t mean much in the face of encroaching fascism and the racist campaign against anybody who isn’t a white person born in the United States. Still, Paste was there to do a job, so games we played. Our games editor Garrett Martin and former assistant games editor Moises Taveras were on hand to play the most exciting upcoming games, and here are the 10 games they most enjoyed. And no, we’re not going to say when they’re coming out or for what systems, because not all of them have announced that stuff yet. Maybe they don’t even know yet. The future’s a mystery, right? And the biggest mystery: will there even be a future at all?

Ambrosia Sky

SGF Ambrosia Sky

Ambrosia Sky is a remarkably exciting new take on the cleaning-and-immersive-sim. Set in a dense and already rich sci-fi world, you play as Dalia, a member of a clandestine organization of scientists who conduct death rites known as Scarabs as she is sent back to her home for an unfortunate reckoning with her past. Along the way they clean up alien fungi, collect the DNA of the recently deceased (with consent) and use it to further their own aims: the Ambrosia Project and its ambition of achieving immortality. The moment-to-moment action consists of cleaning up the sites of these deaths, investigating their causes, solving puzzles with an increasing arsenal of tools, rooting around for resources, and getting to know the people of Dalia’s past. The developers invoked Deus Ex during our demo, and showed how finding alternative routes can massively alter the flow of even the simplest of levels, like enabling zero-gravity in an out-of-the-way control room to glide through a particularly thorny chamber. Suffice to say, I was left impressed by Ambrosia Sky‘s ambiance, visual direction, and narrative-heavy take on a genre I’ve grown to love. This is one to keep an eye on.—Moises Taveras

Dosa Divas

Outerloop Games just gets me. After literally falling in love with Jala, the protagonist of the studio’s last game Thirsty Suitors, the team has once again targeted me with Dosa Divas, a substantially fleshed-out RPG about sisterhood, food, community, fancy ass mechs, and fighting the good fight. Everything about Thirsty Suitors feels tighter here, from the expanded party and combat systems (which riff on the charges found in the Bravely series and Octopath Traveler) to the cultivation of dishes and complementary cooking minigames. For all of its fun new additions, though, Dosa Divas still crackles with Outerloop’s top-notch animation chops and in-your-face writing, which has made them such a grounded and rewarding team to follow. I sincerely chuckled as my demo opened on an awkward conversation between the central pair of sisters where I could keep putting off responding to the other. And my jaw dropped as one sister fluidly somersaulted out of their mech only to land in its hand with a fishing rod. Dosa Divas already appears to have every ingredient necessary for a heartwarming and dazzling adventure.—Moises Taveras

End of Abyss

I’m chiefly a sucker for two things in my games: something inconceivably moody–maybe even dripping with dread–and a dodge roll. Luckily for me, End of Abyss is brimming with them both, wedding the atmosphere of a Playdead game to the heft and satisfying feel of something like Enter the Gungeon. This top-down horror-tinged action game dropped me into the cold and gray walls of an abandoned facility where I was immediately beset by mysteries and monsters alike. Fortunately for me, I gelled right away with its fluid-as-hell combat, which plays like a twin-stick shooter with a dodge roll, and before I even knew it, I was in a flow state and dispatching creatures left and right…save for the little critters that repeatedly mounted my character and chipped away at my health. I wasn’t scared much, but I was continually impressed by End of Abyss‘ presentation. Nothing ever leapt out at me to elicit a jumpscare, but I could feel something hanging in the air, especially as I descended deeper into the maw in search of answers. I was also enamored with a scanner, which could be brought out at just about any point and be used to commit obstacles and elements of the environment to memory i.e placed on a map. Much like Hollow Knight‘s map, this scanner feels like a tactile mechanic that grounds the player in the world of these kinds of games (sorry, I can’t say the M word on this site) and I always appreciate a system that goes the extra mile to make me feel a part of its world. And boy do I want to keep plumbing the world of End of Abyss.—Moises Taveras

Lumines Arise

Lumines, the premier music puzzle game that tasks you with matching and clearing blocks in rhythm to its dance music soundtrack, returns with more than a little bit of a resemblance to publisher Enhance’s earlier concoction, Tetris Connect. Like that mindbender, Lumines Arise leans into a psychedelic aesthetic, but not quite as emphatically as Tetris Connect does—at least based on the demo at SGF. (Arise also has a VR mode, which we didn’t get to play.) What we did play was utterly engrossing, a dreamlike blur of light, music and color-matching that introduces at least one major new mechanic to the classic Lumines formula: Burst effectively pauses time, letting you stack blocks on top of one that’s been cleared, wiping them all away when the meter runs out. I couldn’t entirely wrap my head around Burst during my short demo, but hey: it’s just a demo, even if it was one of the best at Summer Game Fest. I expect to play a ton of this when it comes out later this fall.—Garrett Martin

Mixtape

Mixtape wants you to experience the many facets of its characters’ lives, even if that means the game won’t have any constant, consistent style of play. The demo is a series of interactive vignettes, using play in a variety of unexpected ways. During the SGF demo I skated pure and simple to a Devo song, learned about lead character Rockford’s past and friendships by exploring their room, and had a second downhill jaunt that was far more urgent and stressful as Rockford and Slater tried to escape cops busting a party by wheeling their passed out friend Cassandra through the streets in a runaway shopping cart. Earlier, as Rockford looked to play a mixtape some boy had made them, I spun the right joystick in a circle, as if I was manually rewinding a cassette with a pencil jammed inside the tape reel. When I was done, Rockford hit play, telling the story of how they made out with that boy as an Alice Coltrane song plays (Rockford calls it an “interlude” from their perfect “last day at home” mixtape, which seems to be the game’s main narrative throughline); as Coltrane played, the camera zoomed into the two teenagers’ mouths, and I used the controller’s joysticks to slop and slide their tongues all over each other. Mixtape is the very first videogame where you French kiss to Alice Coltrane in graphic detail, and that alone should earn it some kind of award. (Read our full preview.)—Garrett Martin

Possessor(s)

There’s a reason every year brings another bevy of new Metroid-style backtrackers: people dig ‘em. With the right combo of story, concept, art style, and level design, it can also be an almost bulletproof genre, one whose teasing structure perpetually drives the player forward. And Possessor(s), the new one from Hyper Light Drifter developer Heart Machine, certainly has the art style and concept down, with soft, cool colors and set after an apocalypse engineered by demons (some of whom are surprisingly chill and low-key about the whole thing). In the demo combat is often confined to what are essentially pop-up arenas, with impenetrable walls penning you in until you kill a few waves of demons. Expect fast, floaty fighting that encourages air juggling and dash-based defense, with the kind of ability-aided backtracking the genre is known for. The same demo I played has been up on Steam since Summer Game Fest, so feel free to try it out yourself.—Garrett Martin

Pragmata

It might sound hard to shoot your way through a space station full of jumpy security robots when you have a tiny android girl riding on your back, but at least she’s pulling her own weight in Capcom’s upcoming action game Pragmata. You know how Dead Space was all about targeting limbs instead of just shooting all willy-nilly at heads and torsos? In Pragmata your outer space army man can’t do much damage to the Terminator bots until the girl-bot he’s carrying around hacks their security system. At the start of every encounter you have to trigger a little minigame where you use the controller’s face buttons to navigate a grid; if you pull it off quickly and without a mistake, you’ll be able to blast away at the robots without compunction. It’s an interestingly complex system that could become a total drag if the puzzle grids become too elaborate or there are too many enemies to contend with at one time, but it didn’t enter that territory during the demo.—Garrett Martin

Relooted

Relooted has a bulletproof concept: you’re a team of African adventurers and academics dedicated to reclaiming cultural artifacts held hostage by Western institutions and collectors. So yes, you’re basically stealing back what colonizers stole from Africa decades, sometimes centuries earlier. Each stage is an elaborate puzzle box spread across multiple rooms and floors, and you start by exploring its layout and crafting the best plan. That means finding the quickest route from one artifact to the next to the exit, and prepping your snatch-and-escape plan. The one level playable at SGF was a tricky challenge, which bodes well for the final game; what good is a puzzle you can crack immediately?—Garrett Martin

Snap & Grab

Ever wanted to play a Hitman level based on the set of a 1980s music video? Play Snap & Grab, a colorful, stylish heist game about a hotshot photographer who funds her extravagant lifestyle by stealing from her clients. Nifty Nevada turns every job into a heist, casing the joint while snapping pics and forming a plan for her hunky partner to pull off. The demo consisted primarily of a mission at a party for the flashy artist Erik Pop, an oblivious Andy Warhol / Jeff Koons type who’s always the star of his own work. Nifty prowls Pop’s très Miami Vice pad snapping party pics while plotting to steal a jewel-encrusted crown; she’ll have to distract a few guards, turn off some lights, turn on some other lights, retrieve a key clutched by an ice sculpture of Pop, evade a “vicious” tiger, and more, all while Pop’s insipid guests spout parodic nonsense and Falco’s “Der Kommissar” plays on a never-ending loop. (That last part is awesome for about 12 minutes, then becomes annoying, then circles back to being even more awesome, much like The Simpsons‘ infamous rake gag.) The demo was super rough technically, but its super-neon Reagan-era sandbox is a vividly realized setting for a Hitman-style game.—Garrett Martin

Sword of the Sea

What if you could surf in Journey? That’s the basic proposition behind Sword of the Sea, a new game from Giant Squid that I’m pretty sure I could hang out in for days on end. Surf Journey, Tony Hawk’s Art Skater, T&C Surf Desert: there are jokes and goofs a-plenty if you just need to call it by a snarky short-hand. Let’s call it by its name, though; Sword of the Sea deserves that respect, because it’s maybe the best thing I played at SGF this year. The Journey comparison is immediate and unavoidable. It’s got a faceless, silent main character who wears a cool robe and explores sand-clogged, quasi-mystical ruins in an enormous desert. Instead of walking, though, they shred—or hang ten, if you prefer surf talk. That’s the beauty of Sword of the Sea: it’s both skating and surfing at once, letting you rip tricks and occasionally dropping you into half-pipes as you glide across the sand like a surfer catching a wave. Sword of the Sea is a literal title. You’re not on a board; you’re on a sword. A surf sword. One that hovers above the sand, where you’ll careen off conveniently ramp-like ruins and into dilapidated temples and abandoned castles, magically resonating with urns and braziers and other checkmarks while slowly restoring the seas to this sunscorched domain. It’s sweet. (Read our full preview.)—Garrett Martin

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.

Moises Taveras is a struggling games journalist whose greatest aspiration in life at this point is to play as the cow in Mario Kart World. You can periodically find him spouting nonsense and bad jokes on Bluesky.

10 Games We Loved Playing at the Summer Game Fest’s Play Days