Opinions are like Kotaku — they’re a bunch of assholes! I think that’s how that saying goes. Anyway, this week, we liked Pragmata and hated Crimson Desert, felt skeptical of Xbox’s forthcoming handheld and thankful for the Switch 2, and, perhaps most urgently, had a great many things to say about promotional popcorn buckets. And if you read until the end, there’s a treat for you in the form of 11 games we think you should be excited for based on what we played at Summer Game Fest.
Every app, website, and device I use seems to be getting worse and worse. You’ve likely noticed this, too. Shitty AI is being shoved into more products. Features people don’t want are being added to apps that have become monstrosities, chasing trends in order to squeeze out more profits. Searching for stuff online is awful. Buying something sucks. Your fucking toothbrush has an app now. Enshittification is happening and making everything worse. This makes Nintendo’s Switch 2 a very compelling product in 2025. - Zack Zwiezen
I’m trying to put all my thoughts about the time I spent with the medieval fantasy RPG Crimson Desert at Summer Game Fest into words. Kotaku Managing Editor Carolyn Petit likes to tell us that we should feel bold enough in our criticism of video games to say something is “bad” without couching it in wishy-washy “this just isn’t for me” disclaimers. These days, making sweeping declarations about something’s quality can feel like a daunting task, as the internet has lost any ability to put opinions into context. If I say something is bad, that must be me making a declarative statement that readers are required by law to agree with. Thus, we get the typical internet defensiveness that follows, and the most annoying person you know starts to nitpick everything you say as being too definitive and not acknowledging that plenty of other people might feel differently. - Kenneth Shepard
With every new report about Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s troubled development, it feels like a miracle that the game came out at all. A new story from Bloomberg outlines how the Dragon Age team was jerked around by publisher Electronic Arts and forced to make pivots with limited resources and time, making it impossible for the RPG to complete the sort of holistic retooling it would have received under more reasonable circumstances. Reading this and seeing how, after all that strife, the team was still demolished and subsequently thrown under the bus, it feels like BioWare was set up to fail, and it bore the consequences of its publisher’s poor decisions. - Kenneth Shepard
I had forgotten all about Pragmata by the time Capcom was setting up appointments to play the puzzle shooter at Summer Game Fest. We’re five years removed from its original announcement, and Capcom is no stranger to quietly hiding a game away and never releasing it (remember Deep Down?). So, I let the game disappear from my memory until its name showed up in my inbox. Perhaps it’s fitting then that Pragmata feels a bit like a game out of time, as its gruff old man protagonist, slow-moving enemies, and brutalist sci-fi aesthetic are all evocative of the over-the-shoulder shooters from the PS360 era. Given those seemingly bygone qualities, it’d be easy for Pragmata to feel rote and dated, but what I played was just inventive enough to feel novel. I was super impressed with it. - Kenneth Shepard
As it turns out, the Dune: Part Two sandworm-shaped monstrosity that AMC passed off as a popcorn bucket wasn’t the only one of its kind. In fact, since 2019, AMC has apparently made a killing selling all kinds of collectible tie-in buckets for the year’s biggest blockbusters, from Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker to Taylor Swift: Eras Tour. This year, they’ve been making a killing by selling buckets themed after a bunch of blockbusters and family-centric movies, which tend to bring in huge audiences that live and die for this kind of stuff. It’s all a racket, I tells ya, but a racket that has spawned a bigger market than I was led to believe. Cinemark and other movie theater chains have also jumped on the train, and by now there are folks with a sizeable-enough bunch of these buckets at home to call it an honest-to-goodness collection, and their interest in them an obsession. - Moises Taveras
Microsoft’s new ROG Xbox Ally has a lot to prove in the market of handheld consoles. The Switch 2 was only days old when the company officially unveiled its competitor during the Xbox showcase. With PlayStation’s Portal mostly being a streaming device that offers a very specific, incredibly niche player benefit (despite it feeling very good in your hands), the Switch 2 and the Steam Deck still largely have the handheld market cornered. The Ally, meanwhile, is the endgame to the “Play Anywhere” tagline Xbox has been touting for years. - Kenneth Shepard
The PlayStation 4 was released nearly 13 years ago. In the world of video games, it is a dinosaur. And yet, in 2025, during Summer Game Fest’s many shows and directs, new PS4 games were being announced alongside PS5 and Switch 2 games. Turns out this old machine still has some life left in it, though that might be a horrible sign for the video game industry. - Zack Zwiezen
The Switch 2 is here, and I’m loving the upgraded hardware so far. It feels nice, looks wonderful, and runs like a dream. But while Mario Kart World is excellent, and I’ve enjoyed revisiting a bunch of other great games through their spiffy Switch 2 ports, I can’t help but feel like something is missing. - Ethan Gach
This year’s Summer Game Fest was a weird one. On a show-wide scale, Geoff Keighley’s Not-E3 was lacking the the big, juggernaut announcements we usually expect from a June video game showcase. That understated showing extended to the actual “Play Days” show floor in Los Angeles, where developers gave press and content creators a chance to try out new games. What made the show so odd on a smaller scale was that I was the only person on-site covering the show for Kotaku. - Kenneth Shepard
