Jank Mail: There will be blood

There was no Jank Mail last week, for which I apologise: I was in LA for the annual trailer spectacular once called E3, and now being consumed by Geoff Keighley’s glossy rival Summer Game Fest, which incorporates both his own showcase and the adjoining ones that he freely attaches the brand to. I learned many things, and one of them was that it’s not possible for me to attend everything and write any meaningful digest of the contents, so I’m going to bless you with a jumbo roundup today. 

Let’s start with what Jank did. Brendy found a game that lets you kick orcs off a cliff and it only costs £7 (total, not per orc). He also sort of reviewed Subnautica 2 by asking game developers how to create a feeling of discovery. Total Playtime planned a videogames zoo, Character Select pitted the Thumper Beetle against the Skifree Yeti and I became increasingly worried that Gabe Newell’s new yacht is the setup for a horror film. Graham was won over by The Adventures of Elliott, before heroically watching most of the showcases and picking out 12 games that give him hope for the future of the medium.

Out in the Showcase Zone, the first of twenty-two showcase events started on Monday and I’m sorry, I ain’t watching all nor glad that it happened. I’ll stick with the heavies, which started with Sony on Tuesday. They have recently confirmed that they’ll stop bringing PS5 exclusives to PC, which by this account means that we will miss out on two (2) single-player action games dedicated to extreme and relentless gore, while retaining access to a seemingly infinite collection of equivalents.

What would become a week of increasingly overwhelming, high-definition arterial spray began with Marvel’s Wolverine and ended with God of War Laufey, with the middle filled with subtly different flavours of dismemberment. The magical potential of videogames means you can dismember gritty, nightmarish naked humanoids in Ill, grimy stylised Japanese enemies in Onimusha: Way of the Sword and Phantom Blade Zero and brightly-coloured stylised Japanese enemies in Kemuri. 

On the survival horror side, we were shown how to run away from dinosaurs in The Lost Wild, nightmarish Scottish people in Silent Hill: Townfall and psychopathic island residents in Until Dawn 2. Fleeting moments of non-bloodshed came from a deeply inessential resurrection of the Stuntman franchise which recreates famous movie car chases, which I regret to inform you is very much my sort of thing, a remake of Rayman Legends because remakes is all Ubisoft can afford to do these days and a chef-based spinoff of Dave The Diver. 

We were also treated to some release dates for Control Resonant, Ace Combat 8 and the Tomb Raider remake, all of which established what would become a trend of games fleeing to a designated safe zone of three weeks either side of the launch of GTA 6, that having been decreed by marketing professionals to be the duration of the contemporary gamer attention span. Seems high, honestly, but who am I to argue with people who can fathom how to use a Meta CMS. 

The Keighley show on Friday was very PC-heavy, because all the platform holders had their own shows and kept all their crown jewels for those instead. Keighley is thus competing directly with all the PC-ish showcases, mostly notably the PC Gaming Show and the Future Games Show, and he is winning on the big releases because he has more money, a better contact book and an increasingly mafioso-like grip on the world of games marketing.

He also understands that the audience does not care for stage skits, developer interviews or anything that isn’t New Game Footage, so the SGF show was mostly trailers and mostly violence. The inevitable celebrity appearance was Snoop Dogg who showed up to hype the presence of both himself and the late Tupac Shakur in Yakuza spinoff Stranger Than Heaven, the latter confirming that it is at least stranger than previous Yakuza games which is a high bar to clear. 

This formed part of a notable tilt towards Eastern-flavoured games overall. The new game from Fumito Ueda, creative behind beloved Playstation titles Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, is being published by Epic so it is both very shiny and includes third-person shooting as well as vast, haunting behemoths. Resident Evil: Code Veronica is the latest Resi title to get the remake treatment so we got a little glimpse of Horror France. The reveal of Final Fantasy 7 Revelation confirmed it will wrap up the remake trilogy a mere 12 years after it was first announced and 30 years after the first game launched, although the story about plucky rebels facing off against an evil power company remains regrettably evergreen. NCSoft nevertheless won the longevity race by announcing Guild Wars 3 to arrive fifteen years after its predecessor.

Platinum is making a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, which sounds like a great pairing that the trailer showed absolutely nothing of. Gundam Rogue Orbit was yer standard E3 show of extreme violence, but with robots. Even Crossfire, a third-person action shooter made by a crew hailing from Naughty Dog, CD Projekt and Bungie that looks exactly like what you’d expect from that description - the sort of glossy cinematic nonsense that EA would have rolled out at E3 2012 - is actually a venerable Korean brand brought to the West using the only language that Western gamers understand: extravagantly-titled cover systems and motion-captured soldiers stabbing people.

The wearying levels of gore continued throughout, to the point where no less than three games promised it in the name. The Blood of Dawnwalker is about stabbing people up in medieval Europe, Blood Message is about stabbing people up in ancient China, and Stellar Blade: Blood Rain mixed things up a bit by enabling you to beat up and stab up body-horror monstrosities in a neo-futuristic sci-fi metropolis. It also adds an even more jailbait-y heroine than the original Stellar Blade for which the developer promises “even more appealing outfits”, which I’m sure everybody is going to be extremely normal about. 

To represent the West we had Alien Isolation 2, which is more Alien but on a planet now, followed by Patrice Desilet’s Ubisoft cast-off 1666: Amsterdam which didn’t give any clues as to what it’s like save that it definitely includes Amsterdam in 1666. There were a lot of demonic flash-forwards so we’ll assume there’s a lot of blood there too. There is a playable demo which doesn’t really help matters. A new trailer for Wolf Among Us 2 didn’t tell us much either, really, but it’s Telltale so you know what you’re getting. 

Venerable franchise updates included XCOM But Star Wars and Burnout But Star Wars, both of which look pretty good, and Sonic Racing Crossworlds adding Godzilla and Evangelion, crushingly as environmental hazards rather than competitive racers. There is also an “indie” Sonic game, Pico Park, which looks quite cute but not in a way that benefits from having the Sonic licence attached. Post-Forza Horizon racing game Clutch got a very flashy story trailer that paired serious emotions with hypercars equipped with harpoon guns, which is extremely videogames. There will be a new Cuphead for people who like hand-drawn cartoons and dying a lot, and a spin-off for people who like 16-bit consoles and dying a lot. There’s some stiff competition for the latter but let’s see how they get on. 

Keighley’s show was followed by Day of the Devs showcase, which was not entirely gore-free but did at least deliver more colour and less meticulously-animated violence all of which you can find summarised over on Eurogamer. There followed hours of other showcases which I simply cannot bring myself to watch, although I’ll highlight the extended showcase of own-brand Mass Effect Exodus because boy howdy that really looks like Mass Effect. 

Microsoft rolled up on Sunday and got the gore flowing from the off, with an extended look at Gears of War E-Day demonstrating the franchise’s usual delicacy and sophistication and revealing that Young Marcus Fenix was less hench but the durag is eternal. Otherwise it’s just Gears again, with the big news being that it won’t be coming to PS5 due to a newfound belief in platform exclusives. This is big news in console circles, but Microsoft’s stuff is all still coming to PC so we can just skip past into the rest of the lineup and wouldn’t you know it, it was just packed with stabbings. 

Yes, the erstwhile Xbox player can look forward to stabbing mythical enemies in ancient Japan (Wo Long 2: Wings of Ember) mutants in the post-apocalypse (Metro 2039) Roman warriors in 13th-century France (Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy) Soulslike bosses in Napoleonic France (Valor Mortis) and unfortunate goons in some flavour of magic-infused pre-history (Senua). The latter is Ninja Theory’s latest and was described as “bold new action-adventure gameplay” but looks like yet more third-person stabbing that would have blended into the Sony showcase. 

The definition of “new” was further tested by the reveal of Spyro: A Realm Beyond, heralding the return of a character who I’m assured is much-beloved but I will forever associate with ropey PS2 platforming. The developers are delighted to be free from the Call of Duty mines, which is hard to argue with, and the glimpse of the game did suggest open-world flight so I will withhold my judgement. 

An unsettling commitment to Britishness was suggested first by the latest trailer for Clockwork Revolution. This highlighted some faintly Bioshock-y combat, a steampunk setting, an irritatingly twee British gang who resemble the most annoying cosplayers at a provincial Comic-Con and some sort of time-hopping butterfly-effect mechanic. Later came Magicians: The Devil’s Deal, which also looked somewhat Bioshock-like except with overpowered stage magic instead of plasmids and a warped Victorian theatre-derived setting. Finally there was a new trailer for Fable, which was also wearyingly heavy on melee combat but did at least temper it with credibly-performed profanity, squeaky Hobbes noises and decent performance capture, which was headlined by Hayley Atwell but also includes Super Hans. They put half an hour of gameplay up on YouTube if you want to see more of it.

The inevitable Call of Duty inclusion highlighted the equally inevitable addition of an extraction shooter mode, and this year’s similarly-mandatory Master Chief Thing is a remake of the original with some additional prequel missions. State of Decay 3 and Join Us offered two different flavours of open-world four-player co-op building an survival outpost in the zombie apocalypse and a successful cult compound, respectively, and the latter looked ropier but more fun. 

The flashes of colour came from a new Crazy Taxi, which adds new cities but no acknowledgement of the rise of ride-sharing, Personas 4 (remake, now with release date) and 6 (entirely new) and Bad Magpie, which may be thought of as Titled Goose Game with a supernatural narrative and pyromaniac tendencies. The highlight was Vivarium which Graham has already highlighted. There were also some more GTA-dodging release dates for things like Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse and Minecraft Dungeons 2.

The Microsoft showcase was followed by the PC Gaming Show, and as a PC Gaming Site that’s really what I should be spending time on, but it’s very long and the sponsor breaks are interminable and I simply can’t face picking through 60 games after the week I’ve had. At a glance the Disco Elysium-style Vampire The Masquerade CRPG and the haunted desktop of Hack ‘95 look good but they’ve listed everything in the show out here, fill your boots. 

Nintendo added to my exhaustion by rolling out yet another showcase after I’d dared to hope it was all over, but at least most of them were Nintendo-exclusive and very few of them involved filleting enemies with a sword. The items of interest for us were an August release date for House House’s Big Walk, a very confusing and thus very on-brand announcement of an expansion for Dragon’s Dogma 2, a multiplayer Vampire Survivors that is made by the same dev but for some reason based on a manga, and a Final Fantasy game that’s based on a mobile game but apparently nothing like it. 

The rest of the week has been largely driven by embargoed coverage from the weekend’s showcases, of which the spiciest was probably Game Informer capturing an explicit PR line live on camera as somebody from Crystal Dynamics explained why their use of generative AI is fine actually. This was greeted as warmly as all recent AI discussions, which is a problem because Crystal Dynamics are absolutely not alone in this approach. 

Beyond that, Ubisoft continued its pivot from a company that makes videogames to a company that lays people off. Xbox is reportedly considering pivoting from not releasing Elder Scrolls to releasing Elder Scrolls, although you have to suspect that’s a management directive of the “have you considered just being more profitable” variety and thus unlikely to survive first contact with Todd Howard. Apparently Elder Scrolls 6 looks amazing, though, and expect lots of people to get laid off regardless, because Xbox spent $20 billion in five years and doesn’t have enough to show for it.

Valve has given up on gift cards because of all the crime. Will Wright revealed that he really appreciated the opportunity to spend nine years and millions of dollars making Spore and really, who wouldn’t. Arkane’s Blade game is still alive. Nightdive is remaking the original Thief, and the boss of Embracer says that Embracer will buy again. Be careful out there, folks.

We conclude with our finest commenters. Mae was one of several aligned with Holly Gramazio's view that watching games counts as much as playing them, as highlighted on The Lie-In.

KingFunk has the HR insight on Gabe Newell's yacht.

0tzn has a still-valid game recommendation for those drawn to Brendy's orc kicking.

That’s it for this week, and last week, and the not-E3 period. Geoff Keighley will return in Gamescom Opening Night Live; I will return next week. Go and play some PC games in the meantime.