Summer Game Fest Play Days Impressions Round-Up

At Summer Game Fest Play Days, I got to experience many demos across a wide variety of games, and this article is about the ones I didn’t get to spend much time with but were interesting nonetheless. RPGamer was able to get an early look at and experience four wildly different games: murder mystery farming sim Grave Seasons by developer Perfect Garbage and published by Blumhouse Games; cooperative survival third-person shooter Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2, developed by Cold Iron Studios and published by Daybreak Game Company; third-person action combat game Nekome: Nazi Hunter by developer-publisher ProbablyMonsters; and Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game by developer Gameplay Group International and published by PM Studios.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2

One Alien is already scary enough, but multiple Xenomorphs? Jeepers!

I don’t play a whole lot of shooters, but there’s something seriously satisfying about unloading a machine gun into a group of lurching baddies and going full Rambo mode, so it’s an itch I like to scratch every now and then. Further, I quite liked the original Alien after seeing it a few years ago, and I also liked what I saw of the roughly half of the more action-oriented sequel, Aliens (the VHS tape broke, for curious readers!), so this game sparked my interest because of that, but also because of its cooperative elements and third-person view, which I prefer over first-person. The itch in my trigger finger was thoroughly scratched, and Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 pleasantly surprised me with how well it balances tactical and action elements, synthesizing them into a heart-pounding survival experience as hordes of Xenomorphs mob the team from all directions. There were also a surprising number of mechanics that felt surprisingly friendly to players of RPGs.

In the Fireteam Elite 2 demo, players could choose from five classes: Duelist, a single-target DPS class with two weapons; Hunter, which focuses on continuous fire with SMGs and shotguns; Machinist, who controls the field with drones, turrets, and plasma weapons; Marauder, an AoE class with flamethrowers and rocket launchers; and Medic, a support class with healing and damage buffs. I elected to play as a Medic, and I was pleasantly amazed by how much the team’s strategic coordination and spacing mattered. The different enemy types all have different elemental weaknesses to exploit, and electing to buff or heal at the right moments between waves of Xenomorphs mattered a lot. Humblebrag: I only died once, our team survived the area, and by the time the appointment ended, I truly felt like part of an elite fireteam with the other three players.

Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game

Katara unleashes verbal venom against the wicked, fiery Azula.

I’ve never been a real fighting game aficionado, but I grew up absolutely adoring Avatar: The Last Airbender, and the animations I’d seen online for this game seemed quite impressive, so I wanted to see firsthand if they were as thoroughly impressive as they looked online: they were. All the attacks, dodges, and special abilities feature seriously impressive hand-drawn animations, and the game looks as gorgeous as the original show. All the characters are depicted very authentically, featuring their lore, abilities, and techniques from the original show, and it’s very entertaining to see them interact with one another.

Gameplay-wise, the most interesting features were the Chi resource and the Flow mechanic. Essentially, along with the life-bar, every character has a Chi meter they can expend to use specific abilities, but more importantly, enter a Flow state where attacks are automatically dodged or blocked, allowing players to fluidly reposition or chain into special abilities. I wasn’t able to garner much more from my brief twenty minutes; this was the very last appointment I had at the end of the second day, and most other people had already cleared off the campus. But based on the gameplay of the two guys I saw playing it next to me, who seemed to be quite skilled at fighting games, it makes for some pretty riveting, high-octane fights, and anybody who loves the original show or fighting games should consider checking this out.

Grave Seasons

Hari the hunk might want to be careful about passing judgment too quickly, given our prior history as a, *ahem*, problem solver.

Grave Seasons is a farming sim with an interesting twist: it’s also a murder mystery, and the killer can be any number of characters. And yes, the killer can be romanced. Salacious! The demo opens with the player, an escaped convict, arriving in the mountainside town of Ashenridge to start a new life as a farmer. However, shortly after putting down new roots, a killer starts murdering all of the neighbors, casting a shadow over the entire town. Players are given one calendar year to solve the murders and identify the culprit, with a new murder occurring each month. Grave Seasons immediately stands out for several reasons: its compelling narrative, gorgeous, detailed spritework, and excellent, varied character portraits, which burst with identity and personality.

Gameplay-wise, Grave Seasons appears to be a mixture of farming sim and life sim. Given the generally slow pace of these genres, I wasn’t able to get too far into how the farming elements would intermingle with the murder mystery or life-sim elements, but the basics appeared fundamentally sound from a brief glimpse. What was more apparent from the demo was that Grave Seasons has a stunning and dizzying amount of dialogue, with an impressive variety of dozens of characters to interact with. Given that I experienced just a few days out of a whole year, the game promises a long, intricate story with a truly impressive range of narrative possibilities. How it executes on that remains to be seen, but I was quite intrigued by the game’s premise and very impressed by its dialogue and presentation.

Nekome: Nazi Hunter

Protagonist Vano Nastasu executes a guard with a finisher.

Nekome: Nazi Hunter is a third-person action combat game where players step into the shoes of Romani survivor Vano Nastasu, who seeks revenge against the Nazi regime for murdering his family. The demo began with Vano entering a room of Nazi commanders, all gathered around a dining table, under the guise of a waiter. As he is due to present a dish under a cloche to the Nazi commander, he lifts it up to show a beheaded Nazi, and then begins brutally executing them, one by one. Nekome‘s presentation is quite good, with many historically accurate depictions of the period, as well as a strong sense of style in the executions, evoking a vivid visual catharsis and a sense of revenge. It felt a lot like a video game version of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.

After the bloody opening sequence, the demo flashed back to New York City, where Vano had seemingly escaped the Nazi regime. His apparent mentor and employer, a butcher, was murdered by a hooligan, whom Vano chases down into a compound, which is occupied by the German American Bund, a real-life Nazi movement in the United States that was outlawed in 1941 at the start of America’s involvement in World War II. Unfortunately, at least from the demo content, Nekome seemed to have a lot more style than substance. The action combat, while stylish, felt somewhat rudimentary, not particularly fluid, and far too easy, and the stealth mechanics felt unrefined and clunky to execute while sneaking through the Bund’s headquarters. The presentation remained intriguing from a historical standpoint, but by the time our time expired, I felt disappointed that actually executing Nazis didn’t feel as cathartic as it looked.