I think I've been hearing people say that we've reached the end of the line for the last six E3s; that the expo can't continue because of a clash between the current state of media marketing and the communication channels E3 uses. But I think the idea of this rigid, immutable E3 that will blow away like a sandcastle in the wind ignores the historical polymorphism of the event. E3 used to be an industry-facing meet-up slathered in earnings calls and pie charts but increasingly aimed to wow these companies' customers. Eventually, the managers decided they wanted to cut back on promotional models and gatecrashers. As streaming technology improved and the web became ubiquitous, more publishers turned away from filtering their E3 announcements through critics. They began directly interfacing with prospective buyers until the physical convention became a mixed consumer and press event. Maybe one day in the foreseeable future, E3 curls up and dies, but for now, it evolves, and no year has provided a better example of its ability to fit new containers than 2021.
No show floor meant no booths or in-person interviews, so mid-tier publishers and indie developers had to find alternate means to get the news of their games out. The result was a torrent of side streams which were sometimes threadbare, but other times, a mine of hidden gems. In previous years, I've said that it's becoming impossible to talk about everything at E3. This year, you had your work cut out for you if you even wanted to see every game that appeared on a stream. So, accept the games I'm about to talk about as only a tiny sliver of the entertainment that stood out at 2021's expo.
We're spoilt for charming indie treasures, but character designs or environments in such titles can sometimes lack detail. Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan is rich in its city, wilds, and characters. While it has a proud reverence for Fleischer's early cartoon art, it is interesting that the game's goal is to banish the black and white, rejecting the retro look and welcoming in something more colourful. Bird Problems is a comedy that, intentionally or not, finds an unsettling air in the humble tragedies and disembodied laughter of the US sitcom. On paper, nothing should make it all that creepy, and yet, I am getting strong Too Many Cooks vibes from this one.
There's a common urge to believe indie projects have stunning art design, but AAA products have a realistic look. Pint-sized puzzler Woodo and space industry manager Ixion challenge that view with natural lighting and pristine surfaces. I've seen a lot of people use Tetris as a lens through which to understand real-world spatial organisation tasks like arranging shelves or stocking storerooms. Unpacking brings the metaphor full-circle, turning the process of placing our belongings in a new home back into a puzzle. Of course, anywhere you have peoples' possessions, you also have an environment that tells a story about those people.
For as many video games have let us play with time, I've never seen one do it quite like The Lemnis Gate. This FPS starts with players each taking twenty-five-second turns to act within the world. Those twenty-five seconds are then replayed, with players trying to sabotage their opponents' actions from the original turn. Those twenty-five seconds are then played over, and what you end up with is a complex layering of time-travel agents trying to kill other time-travel agents. There's a beautiful potential here to make players think about combat as they never have before and force them into strategic uses of tiny chunks of time.
As a Civilization fan, I'm keeping one eye on Civ-like Humankind. However, I found that its trailer at the PC Gaming Show neglected the essential work of showing where it breaks from its spiritual predecessor. Next Space Rebels is another game heavily inspired by a previous: this time, Kerbal Space Program. These engineering simulators often make you feel like a hobbyist glueing together an irresponsibly dangerous contraption in your garage. Here's a game literalising that idea. Gigabash is one of those creations that gets a lot out of taking a familiar idea and changing the framing. In the brawler, huge monsters duke it out in a concrete cityscape, flattening buildings with their mighty punches. Having that destructive influence on your surroundings looks like a lot of fun.
Citizen Sleeper is an RPG with a difference. Instead of the actions you can take simply being a test of your characters' skills, you roll a set of dice each turn and then decide where to spend each resulting figure you end up with. I'm always fascinated by video games that import tabletop mechanics, and there's a satisfaction in matching the right resources to the right tasks. Also, the music in the Citizen Sleeper trailer: a banger. The OneEx Player is effectively a handheld gaming PC with the Switch's form factor and button layout. That means it's probably out of my price range, but the idea of a gaming rig that can play whatever I want is very appealing. Speaking of the PC, I was pleasantly shocked to see proof that Gabe Newell is still alive. I was certain that this was an Emperor of Mankind situation.
Most of the games above came from the IGN Expo, the PC Gaming Show, or Wholesome Direct, which were all exciting additions to the lineup this year. That last briefing, especially, showed some scintillating originality. Sadly, some conferences felt entirely needless. Gearbox's was largely Randy Pitchford bothering various actors backstage at the Borderlands film shoot. Koch Media put developers in the uncomfortable position of answering questions about games they couldn't show in any detail. I love to listen to creators talk about their work, but their answers only have relevance when we can see the media to which those answers apply. The whole thing was also given an oddly corporate overtone by each developer being asked how Koch helped them.
Bandai Namco might have done better this year if they'd made it explicit that they were only showing off one title. I'm pretty up on the E3 schedules, and even I wondered if I was missing something. That one title was House of Ashes, the modern military horror from Supermassive. While the medium has danced around the war in Iraq or even inaccurately stated that recent operations in the middle-east were a roaring success, House of Ashes is openly talking about the war and seems to be suggesting that, yes, it was hell. Using monsters to embody that hell is an original and evocative approach. Still, when you've got a developer in an interview talking lasciviously about how many death animations the game includes and how gory the soldiers' ends will be, the whole thing feels like a really tasteless exercise. I could stomach House of Ashes being yet another Iraq War retrospective that sees the conflict only from the western side, but if this is going to be a haunted house ride about a real war that killed hundreds of thousands, I don't want any part in it.
Capcom's presentation had this odd directorial quirk that doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, but that I can't stop thinking about. You'll notice that most of these briefings are delivered directly to camera, simulating a one-on-one conversation between the speaker and viewer. Capcom kept taking these long diagonal-on shots of presenter Rachel Quirico. It's a technique you might have seen in some documentaries recently. It breaks the illusion of a direct link between the viewer and speaker to remind the audience that they are watching someone being filmed, who exists with their own focus and in a larger world. Great if you're making a show about events in the larger world. I have no idea what it's doing in a promotional pitch.
That new Ace Attorney game looks fun, though. The voicing is awful, and the animation is overacted. I preferred the older Phoenix Wright approach of leaving the expressions symbolic, so your imagination could fill in exact details about how these characters are moving. But you can see the designers shaking up the format by having us contradict many jurors instead of one lawyer. The new structure allows us to analyse many arguments and take them in bitesize form instead of rooting around in one long speech to see where the pieces don't fit. Having our triumphs rebalance the scales of justice provides an impactful visualisation of our success.
Devolver once again knocked it out of the park as the only company that can still do reliably narrative-driven press conferences. I've heard and even voiced the criticism before that sometimes Devolver is guilty of the very industry practices they're satirising. Still, I think they've gotten better at avoiding that pitfall just through making many of the services their conferences are built around fictional. There is no Devolver Max Pass+, yet the ideas behind this fake subscription service exist at the heart of our industry. This was a postmodern mockery of our industry where it's not entirely clear whether we can buy this service or what we'll get when we do. It's appropriate in a financial ecosystem of lootboxes containing mystery items and subscription services with uncertain futures.
I enjoyed the Square Enix conference this year more than I expected. Who'd have thought the Guardians of the Galaxy levels might look right like landscapes out of Death Stranding? And with a highly original look for the monsters. And why not use licensed music in campaign modes? Movies do it, so why do computer games relegate their licensed tracks to the radio? Of course, you would hope that they wouldn't repeat them too often, and all that squad chatter could get overwhelming. There was a lot of dialogue in the demo, but the jokes were hit and miss for me. If you're meant to be paying attention to the Guardians' cross-talk at the same time as focusing on shooting straight, that could get a bit much. I also have to echo the criticism that I'm not sure I want to spend an entire game as Starlord; the Guardians films, have after all, shown us all the cool tricks that Gamora, Rocket, Groot, and Drax can also pull off in a fight.
It's so weird that Square Enix wouldn't port their upcoming Final Fantasy remakes to the Switch. These games worked on the Gameboy Advance and DS because the low resolution and uphill grinds render them perfect to play while focusing on something else, like a TV programme or a commute. The Switch could do the same thing all over again. Lastly, we come to Life is Strange: True Colors. A protagonist that can read minds could be a great way to keep us in the shoes of one person while letting us explore the overflowing contents of every other characters' heads. Think of it as a serious Psychonauts.
And with that, we come to the end of another E3. While I don't want to trivialise the ongoing hardships that the coronavirus is creating for developers, it was wonderful to see that the industry has endured. That it's continued making games on such a scale and with such high quality is proof of the resilience and dedication of creators from across the world. Thanks for reading.
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