Summer Games Fest is back with more bombshells than a Hideo Kojima story. From surprise reveals to long-awaited updates, lets explore the biggest news from 2025’s edition of SGF.
Speaking of Kojima…
Death Stranding 2 got its long awaited premiere, showing off the next installment in the new series headed up by industry legend, Hideo Kojima. After controversially rewriting the script following reviews that were “too positive”, we finally got to see the open expanses of Mexico and Australia that we will be traversing on the 26th of June.
Following the initial trailer reveal back in March, the SGF premiere featured a live gameplay demo and a panel following the trailer we got to see at the main SGF event. The trailer shows us two new characters, Neil and Lucy in an interview style meeting, at first it appears these characters don’t know each other, but it seems as if there’s a history here between them that Kojima says will “play out throughout the story”, with Neil seemingly forgetting Lucy until they both reveal matching Cancer zodiac brands on their hands before sharing an emotional embrace.
It goes without saying but I am huge Kojima fanboy, so I seriously can’t wait to see what he’s cooked up with his newest title. Death Stranding 1 was phenomenal and critically acclaimed, and in my mind, there’s no way that the sequel will fall short of that mark – June 26th can’t come soon enough!
DS2 Isn’t the Only Post Apocalyptic Big Hitter at the Event
Bandai Namco have been working on a sequel of their own, a follow up to 2019’s soulslike action RPG, Code Vein. Promising a return to the blood-siphoning, fast paced action of the first game, Code Vein II has shown us everything we need to be excited for the next installment, crazy weapons? Check! Edgy anime aesthetic? Of course! Hopefully this time though, the game doesn’t fly under the radar as much as the original.
The original Code Vein, in my eyes is a solid game, a great entry point into the soulslike genre for newcomers, but it isn’t without its flaws, the story is fairly one dimensional, some of the level design feels heavy handed and the anime graphics surely won’t be for everyone, but finding this game on Xbox Game Pass in 2021, I was immediately hooked in by the massively in depth character creation, the flashy visuals and faster paced combat than I’m used to seeing in games like this really won me over.
A heavy focus on time as a story point, Code Vein II has already showed us steps in a great direction, gathering golden blood, time travelling and hunting revenants as part of a sequel I was never quite sure if we’d ever see, but I’m so glad that 2026 is the year that this series hopefully reaches an even bigger audience!
Embark on a Journey into Countdown Timers and Reddit Drama
Embark Studios have skyrocketed up my list of favourite devs after the release of The Finals back in December of 2023. Between this game and XDefiant, it felt like the FPS genre was really in safe hands, steering us away from the tedium of same-y yearly releases and lazy rehashings of the same formula. Unfortunately, it was never meant to be for XDefiant, which I think is one of the biggest injustices in recent gaming history – but that’s a story for another day. The Finals launched to a huge playerbase, peaking at just shy of 250,000 concurrent steam users at release. It was finally time for a fresh FPS game to take the stage, and it’s become one of my most played games since release, I’ve clocked in hundreds of hours, been there for every season and loved every second.
ARC Raiders is the newest title from Embark, a third-person PvPvE extraction shooter, a kind of “Tarkov meets Helldivers 2” blend of robot slaying and trying to survive. The playtest was some of the most fun I’ve had on a game in a while, the weapons felt great, the world felt expansive and atmospheric and the enemies felt like genuine threats, so what’s the drama?
Following the playtest, players were told the game would return in the “not too distant future”, was an open beta coming? I mean, the playtest felt fairly polished? Or maybe they’d do a surprise launch at SGF, much like how we saw The Finals get shadow dropped during The Game Awards. The launcher updated, now showing a countdown timer counting down until… Summer Games Fest. In the leadup to the show, we even saw the Steam and Epic Games Store repositories get updated, with pricing structures attached to the game, surely we’d be seeing the release, right?
Watching with bated breath, the trailer lit up the screens of Raiders across the world, only to be met by words at the end of the trailer that nobody expected. Coming October 30th.
I’m not going to beat around the bush here, the internet, in one word, imploded. Reddit was full of angry posts, fans were going crazy, even enough that some said they’d given up entirely on the game and didn’t care anymore – but that’s not the attitude to have. ARC Raiders is honestly one of the most refreshingly brilliant experiences I’ve had in gaming recently, is it disappointing we have to wait? Sure, but with another 4 months worth of polish on an already brilliant game, I know those militant downvoters will be back come October.
Making FPS Great Again
Anyone remember Splitgate? I’m sure at hearing the name, a number of eyes have lit up and remembered a time, likely in the summer of 2021 where you sat at your PC playing a “Portal meets Halo” FPS game, an amazing concept, but it turned out to just be the flavour of the month, literally. With 36,000 players that August, dropping to 12,000 in September, to 4,000 by October, and now sat on around 150 players, it’s a shame that such a fun concept just fell by the wayside.
Enter Ian Proulx, game director on Splitgate 2, promising to “Make FPS Great Again” all while taking jabs at industry leaders, Call of Duty, Halo and others, while showing off his sequel to the original game. He touted the game as a Triple A title, fully featured with the multiplayer action we remember from the original, as well as a Battle Royale mode – I don’t know, man, that sounds a little like Call of Duty to me.
The game launched on the night of Summer Games Fest, to a player base of 25,000 on PC. Now I know this sounds like I’m dunking on this game, but honestly, I’m not. Splitgate is an excellent concept for a game, just horribly mishandled. Trying to distance yourself from games like Call of Duty all while adding a Battle Royale mode, the mode that “killed” the series for many people, launch with microtransactions priced at over £100 and standing there on stage dressed in an accessory sporting a slogan that’s a bit too on the nose for me, honestly, this isn’t a project I can get behind – excellent idea, just very poorly executed. At the time of writing, the playerbase has already severely dropped off to nearly half of its original number, and that number just seems to keep falling. Sadly this isn’t the FPS revolution the world needs, but at least we still have The Finals and XDefiant… oh wait 🙁
Last But Not Ninth Least
In the middle of the Summer Games Fest, Capcom announced that next year they would be celebrating 2026 as the 30th anniversary of the Resident Evil franchise with more news to come down the line and that was it, all we had to hear from Capcom. Disappointing I guess but at least they must have something in store for the huge milestone.
SGF was coming to a close with one final trailer left for us to see. Enter Grace Ashcroft, an FBI Analyst writing a report about an unknown disease that has claimed a 4th victim, before being called to the FBI Director’s office to be told of a fifth, and that she’d be the technical analyst assigned to the case at the Wrenwood Hotel, the place that Grace’s Mother was murdered. Waking up tied to a bed at the hotel, the camera pans across missing person posters on the walls, before a mysterious voice calls Grace “The special one, the chosen one”. The camera pans again to a devastated city with a huge crater on the outskirts, then showing… wait is that the ruins of Racoon City Police Department?
Title card appears – Resident Evil Requiem. What a way to cap off the show. Very unexpected after having expectations subverted by Capcom earlier in the night, the only way of figuring this one out would be if you’re familiar with the lesser know Resident Evil Outbreak games on the PS2 and knew of the death of Alyssa Ashcroft from there.
Resident Evil has always been the bar set for all horror games to meet, innovating with every installment and once again, it look like we’re in for another true “Resi” experience, stuck in a huge building alone up against a plethora of things that all want you dead. Resident Evil is one of my favourite series of all time, with RE4 potentially being my favourite game ever released and having loved every game in the series, this is absolutely the reveal I was most excited for and 2026 can’t come soon enough so I can find myself lost in the halls of the Wrenwood.
So there you have it, all the biggest news from this year’s Summer Games Fest, another successful event showing off what the industry has in store for us in the next 12 months, its safe to say that we’ve got some excellent releases coming this year and hopefully we have enough free time from playing them to be able to tune in again next summer!
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