Summer Game Fest, We Don't Need This Many Space Games
It used to be a well known fact that space was the one place that hadn't been corrupted by capitalism. Flash forward a few years from Tim Curry's masterful line delivery, and we have Elon Musk pitching indentured servitude on Mars and Jeff Bezos ejaculating into the atmosphere with a giant dong. We also have video games set in space. Lots and lots of goddamn video games set in space.
Space was a recurring theme of the opening showcase of Summer Game Fest, and I don't just mean the awkwardly open floor space that the Geoffmeister himself drifted around as he pelted our faces with game after game after game. So many of the Summer Game Fest games were set in outer space, and it feels like the setting will quickly become generic. In theory, there's lots you can do in space. Earth is just one planet, while space is made up of at least dozens, and contains all of the juicy cosmic stuff in between, but so many of the SGF offerings had a similar dark and dusty aesthetic, and it feels like things might be about to get worse before they get better.
Related: Game Developers Need To Get Over Aliens
Setting a game in space is not inherently awful, of course. My favourite game of all time, Mass Effect 2, was set in space. Alien: Isolation, Knights of the Old Republic, Dead Space, and Outer Wilds are all fantastic video games set in space, but SGF made them all feel a bit reductive. Fort Solis got a reveal and seemed to be promoted entirely on the back of the fact Troy Baker and Roger Clark are in it. That's a great pitch, but with little else to go on, it seemed to drown in a sea of space titles.
We also saw a new Aliens game (which looked great right up until we saw gameplay footage), more on The Callisto Protocol, and Routine came
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