Summer Game Fest’s best games were small and personal

Summer Game Fest 2025 was definitely a weird one, but even with everything going on outside, the games on display were still immaculate. My favorites, the ones that I live for, are small, unique, and made for pure love of expression. Being able to see that love so clearly on display, expressed through such painstaking and often thankless work, and also being able to show them to our audience who might not otherwise encounter them, is the defining privilege of my job. That’s what I love about Summer Game Fest, weirdness and all, and hopefully when these games come out, you’ll check ‘em out too.

I loved the first Escape Academy and vibrated through my chair seeing that Coin Crew Games had returned to Summer Game Fest with a bigger, more expansive sequel. Instead of selecting levels, now you can explore an open world, solving puzzles as you discover them in a college campus setup. I love this new direction: the open-world exploration better melds the quirky / cute storytelling of Escape Academy with the actual act of solving puzzles.

In the short demo I was introduced to a cat who lived in my dorm room and wanted a snack. As I explored the campus, I found the cafeteria was closed but the special of the day was fish and milk. I solved the puzzle to open the cafeteria and was rewarded with my feline dorm-mate following me around campus for the rest of the demo and hopefully the full game. There’s no release date yet, but whenever it’s out, I’m enrolling.

Speaking of pet companions, Petal Runner is a somber exploration of the tension between the joy of owning a pet and the inevitable devastation that comes with that, only disguised as a lighthearted pixelated Pokémon-like minigame-a-palooza. You, as a newly minted motorcycle courier, are tasked with helping people with their living Tamagotchis known as HanaPets. Install them, feed them, and bring them items while along the way you explore your relationship with your own first-generation HanaPet, who might not be around for much longer. I did not expect to sit down and play this game, which had all the hallmarks of a quote-unquote “wholesome game,” and be emotionally devastated. It ruined me… 10/10, can’t wait to play.

When I tell you I sat the hell up seeing Relooted’s trailer. Here’s a game, stuffed full of African folks, talking about stealing back their cultural artifacts??? Hell, and I cannot stress this enough, yes. Relooted really captures the feeling of pulling off your own Ocean’s Eleven-style heist. You have a team of experts with their own specialties, and before your heist, you have to position them strategically so that the right person is in the right place to hack locked doors and help you reach unreachable places for a smooth escape.

While some of the Black members of the game’s African developer team couldn’t secure the visas they needed to attend SGF, Ben Myres, the creative director who I was able to speak to, said that each item you’re stealing is a real-life artifact currently being withheld from its country of origin. Each gets its own encyclopedia-like entry giving you its history, where it is now, and where it actually belongs. Nathan Drake, Lara Croft, Indiana Jones are all weaksauce compared to these heroes.

I enjoyed Supermassive Games’ spooky narrative choice adventures in The Quarry and its Dark Pictures Anthology. So I was really glad I had the chance to see what the team is doing next with Directive 8020. This time, instead of haunted schools or cabins in the woods, we’re going to space with Lashana Lynch — a favorite actress of mine for whom I will show up no matter what.

The neat thing about Directive 8020 is its replay system. At critical decision-making moments, you have the option to replay events without having to replay the game. Shoot a guy you shouldn’t have shot? You can immediately go back and see what happens when you don’t. You’ll also have the option to disable that, so the choices you make stick. I had the option to unshoot someone, but I chose to live with my mistake, and all these days later, I still think about that.

Heart Machine, maker of Hyper Light Drifter and its sequel, Hyper Light Breaker, are back with another game guaranteed to mess with your emotions. Possessor(s) is a Metroidvan— excuse me, search action game. I had a spirited and convivial conversation with one of the developers on the merits of using “Metroidvania” versus “search action” as a descriptor and I gotta say, I’ve been convinced. Not enough to remove “Metroidvania” from my vocabulary, but definitely enough to think more about how I use these terms when I write about games.

In Possessor(s) you play as a young woman escaping a city under attack. She is grievously wounded and enters a pact with a demon to heal her wounds and grant her powers so she can escape from the city. Speaking to the developer, he told me the game was about toxic relationships and what they can do to a person. The demon you make your pact with is not nice; he is not the hero. And yet, the developers at Heart Machine decided to make him smokin’ hot, which they know will obscure the very necessary message they’re trying to relay… which, I’m thinking, is probably the point.

Out of Words is my game of the show. Developed by Kong Orange and published by Epic Games, Out of Words is a stop-motion co-op adventure game akin to Split Fiction with a much, much better story. This is the kind of game that reminds me that video games are more than just vehicles for making money or simple entertainment; they are works of art, expressions of a developer’s heart and mind.

It’s about two teenagers who, after a moment of miscommunication, have their mouths removed, forcing them to communicate and navigate a fantastical world without words.

Everything in the game is made by hand and with love so evident it was incredibly moving. When I asked the game’s director, Johan Oettinger, why he and the team spent so much time — he told me they’d been working on this game for a decade — and money to make something that could potentially get drowned out by bigger, flashier releases, he looked me in the face, serious as a cemetery, and said, “Because it has been my dream to make something like this since I was a child.”

As a games journalist I live for the moments when I can see a developer’s fingerprints in a game, their personal quirks and the idiosyncrasies of their lives reflected in their art, and that was all over Out of Words. The developer told me how each blade of grass was made from paper, and how the blue clay they used to make the quirky clay men that populate the world comes from a specific place in Denmark where they harvested it by hand. It was so beautiful I spent most of the 20-minute demo in tears.