The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the latest PlayStation Showcase: Weekly Roundup
PlayStation fans were really looking forward to this week.
This past Wednesday, May 24th, Sony’s latest PlayStation Showcase aired on Youtube. The PlayStation Showcase is Sony’s answer to the Nintendo Direct: a video compiling dozens of announcements, sizzle reels, gameplay trailers, and veritable goodies for fans to get excited about. Fans had high hopes for this most recent Showcase, expecting concrete information about Spider-Man 2, news on the Last of Us multiplayer game, and maybe news about the hinted-at PS5 Pro console.
Instead, fans got (maybe) one of those things, a slew of surprise announcements, a whole lot of live-service and VR games.
The reception has been mixed at best.
Here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly of last week’s PlayStation Showcase.
THE GOOD: THE PLUCKY SQUIRE
I’ve long been a major fan of publisher Devolver Digital’s work. Inscryption, Enter the Gungeon, and last September’s Cult of the Lamb are all incredible games that have established Devolver as a premier indie publisher in the industry, and it looks like that reputation will only grow with The Plucky Squire.
Announced early in the showcase, The Plucky Squire hosts an adorable aesthetic and adventure/platformer style gameplay that mashes up The Legend of Zelda and It Takes Two in what appears to be a truly inventive game. You hop between the pages of a storybook and the real world outside its ink in your quest to stop the villainous sorcerer Humgrump. It’s endlessly charming and looks to be a nice palette cleanser for Fall 2023-the game’s release window-with so many dark or mature games coming out in that window.
THE GOOD: ALAN WAKE 2
Speaking of dark and mature, last week’s rumor of an October release date for Remedy’s Alan Wake 2 has come true. A gameplay trailer dropped during the showcase with a confirmed release date of October 17th, and it looks fantastic.
Alan Wake 2 picks up after the events of the first game, with two cops who are investigating the disappearance of famed writer Alan Wake. Suddenly, they stumble across pages of a manuscript that mention them by name (sound familiar?) They must now find and rescue Alan from the Dark Place, where he was trapped at the end of the first Alan Wake, all while battling the horrors of the Darkness that wants to keep him there.
The graphics fall in line with Remedy’s last game, 2019’s Control and February’s Resident Evil 4 remake. For a game all about darkness, it’s shockingly well-lit and beautifully designed, and it looks like the core mechanics of “flashlight then gunfight” from the first game have been rehauled into a more modern experience. After playing the first Alan Wake in March of this year, Alan Wake 2 is easily becoming my most anticipated game of the fall.
THE GOOD: ASSASSIN’S CREED: MIRAGE
Another AAA game treated to a big announcement was Assassin’s Creed: Mirage. Officially coming out October 12th (just five days before Alan Wake 2), Mirage promises a return to form for the long-running Ubisoft franchise, with stealth and parkour once again being a major focus of the game. It looks to be a smaller game than most might expect, with game time running around 12 hours. However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Games have been getting longer and longer as of late, so a digestible, quality-over-quantity experience could be the first step for Ubisoft to get back in the main conversation of the industry after the sexual harassment scandal they’ve been hit with in the past few years.
THE GOOD(?): METAL GEAR SOLID
When Kojima announced his split from Konami, no one was sure what that meant for gaming’s favorite operative Solid Snake and his franchise Metal Gear. What Konami decided that meant was a full remake of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, titled Metal Gear Solid: Δ. They’re also bringing the first three games in the series to modern consoles, with ports coming later this year to PS5 and XBOX Series X/S.
This is all fantastic news for fans of Snake and Metal Gear. What didn’t make sense was the trailer announcing Metal Gear Solid: Δ. It starts with an ant, then a dead frog, that a bird then takes before landing on a log that’s actually a crocodile who tries to eat that bird? Before another crocodile fights it and then finally we see Snake in the marsh behind them? Is it because his name is Snake? He’s like a Snake in the grass, or water, or whatever?
Who knows. What I do know is multiple people skipped this trailer because they thought it didn’t matter in the opening seconds. Bad marketing, Konami. Bad marketing.
THE good/BAD: SPIDER-MAN 2 (and its lack of release date)
Spider-Man 2 looks incredible. Insomniac gives us a solid look at main villain Kraven the Hunter, now traveling to New York City to hunt its steady stable of metahumans, along with Spidey’s new Venom-inspired threads. In a ten-minute-long gameplay trailer, they show the upgraded UI, new abilities like web walking, jumping between Miles and Spidey, and a chase sequence involving Curt Connors/The Lizard. It could very well be Insomniac Game’s magnum opus.
But when can we play it?
They capped the gameplay trailer off (the last trailer of the Showcase) with two words: Fall 2023. That doesn’t tell us anything. We’ve known for months that Spider-Man 2 was coming out this fall, and a vague window gives us no more clarity. Just give us a date! With Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse coming out this week, now would’ve been the perfect time to let the fans in on when we could expect the new game. But, alas. It was a fantastic game’s brilliant trailer that left a slightly bitter aftertaste.
THE BAD: VR GAMES GALORE
As a friend of mine put it while watching the Showcase, sitting through FNAF, Resident Evil, and Beat Saber VR announcements: VR should’ve died a long time ago.
Of course, PlayStation wants to sell the PSVR2, their newest Virtual Reality rig. But when your showcase is an hour long already, with only twenty-five minutes of really solid, consequential announcements, sitting through VR trailer after VR trailer (five games!!) is alienating for a major section of the audience. Virtual reality is getting more and more niche as time goes on, and VR was the last thing fans cared about.
THE UGLY: SILENCE FROM NAUGHTY DOG (AND EVERYTHING ELSE)
The rest of the Showcase apart from the major announcements was more-or-less forgettable. While the people behind Gris and Journey are both making new games, and the dev team from Night in the Woods announced something new, the momentum was hindered when it became apparent that Naughty Dog was staying quiet.
The highly anticipated The Last of Us multiplayer game has been teased for what feels like ages now. With the remake of TLOU1 and the HBO Max show, it’s the perfect time for something new from Naughty Dog. Instead, fans got radio silence. And Naughty Dog knew it. They tweeted a pseudo-apology following the Showcase, promising fans that they were working on both the multiplayer Last of Us and a new first-player experience, but that they both needed more time. They apologized and promised to keep fans consistently updated.
This level of transparency and authenticity regarding the state of a game is welcome from any studio. And the fans and critics have jointly agreed that Naughty Dog has put up such exceptional work in the past that they’ve earned time to polish a product. It still hurts that they weren’t present at the Showcase, as Twitter and Reddit have been quite vocal about, but the response to Naughty Dog was largely “keep working; we trust you.” Let’s hope that trust leads to a reveal soon from Neil Druckmann and the team.
THE VERDICT: B
After the Showcase, Geoff Keighley of the Game Awards put a poll up asking what grade fans gave the Showcase. It was somewhat split, but the majority of answers leaned downward into C’s and D’s. Overall, gauging the online response, people are disappointed. “Just Spider-Man” isn’t enough to sell an hour of content, as the Internet claims. An abundance of mediocre reveals and strange choices made the Showcase simply tough to watch. In fact, online publications and leakers are already claiming that PlayStation purposefully held back from this Showcase, making it worse by design.
While I agree that a Showcase can’t bank on “just Spider-Man”, it’s important to remember that the Showcase wasn’t just Spider-Man.
Alan Wake 2. Assassin’s Creed: Mirage. Metal Gear Solid: Δ. The Plucky Squire. Foamstars – no, I’m just kidding on that last one. Foamstars looks awful. Sorry, Square Enix.
But these other games are innovative, beautiful, and exciting. They helped carry the rest of the Showcase through to a solid B grade from Render Distance. It’d be nice to see more, and hopefully Summer Games Fest brings good tidings for Christmas in July, but until then this was a promise of big things to come this Fall from PlayStation.
