Summer Game Fest Unleashes 12 Blockbuster Games

The 12 best games we played at Summer Game Fest 2025 – Polygon

The annual Summer Game Fest is more than just livestreams of trailers and announcements; it’s also an in-person experience where many game developers are showing off their playable games for the first time. Gamestanza was on the ground for the 2025 SGF experience and we played a lot of demos while we were there. Typically these are 20-, 30-, or 40-minute experiences, so they’re not always indicative of what the final product will be. Nonetheless, here’s a list of 12 game demos we played that made us the most excited for the potential that lies ahead.

Possessor(s): Demon-Infested Post-Apocalyptic Fun

For those of you who, like me, wonder why there aren’t more games set in demon-infested post-apocalyptic futurescapes, good news, the folks at Heart Machine (Hyper Light Drifter) agree. Their new game, Possessor(s), is just that, and it looks fantastic. We played a 20-minute demo, and it’s clear that the team is going for a more narrative-driven experience, with a focus on exploration and combat.

Lumines Arise

The team that crafted quite possibly the finest version of Tetris ever made, Tetris Effect, is back with a follow-up to one of my other favorite puzzle games. Lumines Arise uses the same general structure as the original PSP-launching Lumines, but tosses in modern, trippy visuals like giant chameleons that beat their heads along to the music, or psychadelically enhanced astronauts. There’s also a new “Burst” mode that allows you to activate a superpowered, screen-clearing ability once you’ve generated enough energy. There aren’t too many puzzle games that have ever held a candle to Tetris for me, but Lumines has always scratched that itch for me, so seeing what amounts to a full sequel to the original, rather than just a remaster, had me fully vibing.

The Challenge of Keeping Up with New Releases

One of my more neurotic habits is maintaining a spreadsheet that tracks my media diet. Every movie, TV show, comic, sports match, Japanese study session, podcast, and of course video game gets clocked in 15-minute increments. Each day. 365 days a year. Time tracking allows me to analyze where and how I prioritize my time. This year, for example, I played a lot of video games — 106, to be precise. Scanning the spreadsheet, gaming demanded more of my time than any other media — by far. This was intentional. I wanted to keep up with video games in a year of endless new releases. So why does it feel like I missed out? For this month’s Editor’s Letter, I’ll share my takeaways from a year of drinking directly from the hose. And I’ll hopefully make sense of my lingering FOMO along the way.

• Some of what follows will read like the delirious blather of someone paid to, on some level, play video games for a living. But I hope most of my reaction is relatable. Because with services like Game Pass, an abundance of high-quality free-to-play games, and sales seemingly every other week, the challenge for most people isn’t access to games, but deciding what to play. Or, to put it another way: Everyone’s a game critic now.
• The cost of loving new games? Missing old ones I’ve written elsewhere about gaming’s current era of abundance, in which each week a dump truck unloads dozens of new releases, burying the previous week’s haul in the process. Despite the Sisyphean nature of this endeavor, I’ve tried my damndest to keep up and have spent most of the year scrounging through the ever-growing heap. Of the 106 games I played in 2024, 95 were released between January and today. The cost of that decision is obvious when you flip the numbers. In 2024 I played only 11 “old” games. Like anybody else, I have a backlog that mocks me every time I open Steam.
• I’d love to play more of those games someday, but making time to play old games means missing out on new releases, which in turn grows my backlog. One person can’t see the entire picture, but a community can. A decade ago, playing 95 new games in a year meant I’d have played every important release, every mildly interesting experiment, and still made room for a few real stinkers. Today, it’s possible I didn’t play your favorite game of the year. Here are some of the games I didn’t play in 2024 that I sincerely wanted to try but for whatever reason didn’t make the time for: Deadlock, Satisfactory, Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, Sand Land, Planet Coaster 2, Core Keeper, Smite 2, Chained Together, The Outlast Trials, and Persona 3 Reload. And what of living games like Fortnite and Final Fantasy 14? No way. These are the sorts of games that, if I played them, would consume every moment of my game time. And so, of the top 10 most-played games on Steam, in 2024, I only played one. You might be aghast. How could the person running Polygon skip some of the most important games in the world? I argue that my experience is a clear justification for Polygon’s existence. Even someone paid, in part, to have an obsessive understanding of video game culture can’t play everything. For the average person, a mix of websites, videos, streams, and podcasts will fill in the gaps. So even if I haven’t played your favorite games, I’ve probably read, watched, or heard something about them.