Summer Game Fest announcements include Resident Evil, Aliens, and Saw
It’s that time of year where an onslaught of video game news streams are hosted, bringing with them a flood of trailers and reveals. One of the heavy hitters is the annual Summer Game Fest, which just premiered on June 5. Included amongst its big reveals were a couple of horror titles that players have been wanting for years, as well as an unexpected new asymmetrical multiplayer adaptation.
Kicking off the event was the reveal of Resident Evil Veronica, a remake of Resident Evil Code: Veronica (2000) from Capcom. The trailer starts with what’s presumably the remake’s version of the game’s opening. Three months after she survived the Raccoon City Incident, Claire Redfield has finally located her brother Chris in France. But instead of being met with a sibling reunion upon her arrival, she finds an empty apartment before getting captured by the Umbrella operative HUNK. It’s an interesting change of pace from the original game’s opening, which saw Claire storming Umbrella’s European branch and getting into a high-octane gun fight that leads to her capture. However, this new opening is much more fitting for the more serious tone that the Resident Evil series has acquired as of late.
Claire is taken to Rockfort Island following her capture, a remote prison run by the Umbrella Corporation. As if things couldn’t get any worse, an unknown biological disaster has caused the place to become overrun with zombies and other Bioweapons. Now she’ll have to do whatever it takes to escape the island, or die trying.
The rest of the trailer contains flashes of things that fans of the original game will recognize. The Golden Lugers, the prison yard, and a glimpse of Alfred Ashford, one of the game’s main villains. The trailer comes to an end with a cutscene of Claire getting ambushed by a horde of zombies, once again displaying the remake’s drastically altered tone that puts more emphasis on horror. A tweet posted by the official Resident Evil account confirmed that the zombies of Veronica move in hordes, unlike the isolated zombies seen in Resident Evil 2 (1998, 2019).
The final shot discloses a release window, revealing that Resident Evil Veronica is set to release in 2027 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and Steam.
Shortly after this was the first trailer for Alien: Isolation 2, the long-awaited sequel to 2014’s Alien: Isolation developed by Creative Assembly and published by SEGA. The trailer primarily consists of pre-alpha footage of the game’s environments, with shots showing the terrain of an alien planet and empty rooms inside of a cassette-futuristic outpost.
But this changes as the trailer continues. Lights and monitors flash as alarms blare in the background, blood spatter is seen on walls and doors, something has burst out of a vent, a synthetic missing its lower body writhes on a table, a set of terrified eyes looks at the camera, and a familiar Alien stalks the corridors.
There’s a handful of shots that show some gameplay as well, albeit nothing extraordinary. The footage takes a first-person perspective as clips play of someone walking towards a building holding a flare, wiping mud off of a sign, pulling a lever, opening a hatch, and what’s presumably a game over sequence as the Alien shoots its inner-jaw at the camera.
During all of this, part of an unseen conversation is heard. A woman speaking in Japanese tells someone that they made an expensive mistake, something that “the company rarely forgives.” She goes on by telling this person that this is their last chance. She switches to English to confirm that they understand. The other person, another woman, confirms that she understands.
A SEGA news post gives more details on the game. Aside from confirming the brand new setting seen in the trailer—a remote, storm-ravaged colony-world—it also confirms that Alien: Isolation 2 features a new story and protagonist. This suggests that Alien: Isolation 2’s story is disconnected from that of the first game, which was centered around Amanda Ripley between the events of Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986).
The news post then says that, “Players will endure the elements as they navigate the planet’s surface and explore the claustrophobic confines of the Weyland-Yutani outpost of Kurosaki Station. It’s a new hunting-ground for the Alien, forcing players to improvise and develop new tools, techniques, and tactics to survive the deadly game of cat-and-mouse.”
Alien: Isolation 2 is coming soon to PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and Steam.
Aside from a cryptic live-action teaser trailer for Dead by Daylight’s 10 year anniversary livestream that’ll be on June 14, Summer Game Fest had one more horror reveal up its sleeve: a brand new, asymmetrical multiplayer SAW game. Developed by Bloober Team, SAW: Genesis is a 3v1 multiplayer game set in the aftermath of World War 1, a century before the reign of Jigsaw. One player takes on the role of the Judge, the man that inspired John Kramer, while three other players must fight to survive his deadly labyrinth of painful trials and traps as the Accused.
A website launched for the game describes these roles in more detail. The Judge was a soldier who was physically disfigured during his service in The Great War. This experience led him to become, “dedicated to rehabilitating humanity through pain and sacrifice.”
Unlike most other asymmetrical horror games, the Judge is not a lumbering foe chasing after the other players. In fact, “the Judge is physically vulnerable and cannot overpower the Accused through sheer force alone.” This means that those who play as the Judge will need to orchestrate the game from behind the scenes using perks and traps.
Meanwhile, the Accused will need to work together in order to scavenge for items, collect keys, and ultimately complete the Judge’s challenges before their time runs out. Progress becomes harder as the Accused’s willpower gets whittled down and they grow more susceptible to being ensnared in one of the Judge’s rehabilitation traps the longer that the game lasts. Players that get caught in a trap are forced to make a difficult decision between either losing a body part to escape, or waiting for their teammates to rescue them in time.
This leads to a unique bodily dismemberment system that feels right at home in SAW: Genesis. “These choices have permanent consequences for the match. Damage your arm and it will be harder to complete puzzles and fight back. Injure a leg and you’ll move slower, becoming easier to corner. Survival is possible, but you may not survive intact.”
Looking at the trailer, the gameplay seems reminiscent of The Outlast Trials (2023). Outlast Trials is a similar multiplayer horror game where players work together to survive experimental trials by completing objectives and avoiding monstrous killers. But Genesis puts enough of a SAW twist (spiral?) on things to stand on its own.
You can sign up for the SAW: Genesis Alpha Playtest via their website today, and the game itself is set to release on Steam at a later date.
