Celebrating the World of Gaming: Highlights from Devolver Digital’s Latest Fiesta

Outside of The Game Awards, few gaming spectacles have the weird wit and explosive creativity of the Devolver Digital showcase. This text-set publisher’s annual E3 gala, hosted this year under the title Volvy’s Birthday, has never lacked in spoof humour, slide-whistles, pip-squeaks or indie game discovery. If you’re not in the mood to spend 30 minutes clicking through game reveals and bawdy skits, you’re in luck. Here’s a roll-call of the top announcements that should be added to your watch list for new games on PC and CONSOLES.

A Glimpse into Future Adventures

Tenjutsu: A Rogue-Jutsu Revelation

The first is Tenjutsu: a rogue-jutsu brawler being developed by the Dead Cells team (developer Motion Twin and lead designer Sébastien Benard in particular). Players will step into the dark underworld of a decaying city. A rogue yakuza, you are hellbent on destroying the syndicates who were once your family. Tenjutsu features a complex brawler fighting system, as well as a novel city-building system to aid you on your way. Due out later this year for PC and CONSOLES, the official release date is currently anyone’s guess.

Possessor(s): Sci-Fi Horror Meets Side-Scroller Action

Then there’s Possessor(s), from the studio Heart Machine, the creators of Hyper Light Drifter and Solar Ash. This one places Luca and Rehm in a city torn apart by interdimensional chaos. There’s a heavy emphasis on combat and boss battles, but that’s not all it’s got going for it – it looks set to be a sidescrolling sci-fi horror game that will ravish the eyes and ravage the brain when it hits PC and CONSOLES in 2025.

Introducing The Crush House and Anger Foot

The Crush House: A Reality Worth Directing

Think of yourselves as the puppetmaster of a reality TV drama – except you’ve got to cast all the characters, speculate their motivations, and craft the plot to keep the audience hooked. Oh, and the deeper you go into the story, the more confounding it gets. You can play The Crush House on PC within the next few weeks – it’s due for official launch on August 9 – and you can get a free demonstration of it on Steam right now.

Anger Foot: Kick Your Way to Victory

Developed by Free Lives, Anger Foot tasks players with venting their frustrations via blistering kicks. It’s like Hotline Miami if instead of shooting everything, you just kicked everything. A first-person…kicker, it aims for release on PC in July - step into these shiny takkies, and kick the shit out of Shit City.

DLC Delights: The Talos Principle 2 and Cult of the Lamb

The Talos Principle 2 - Road to Elysium: Expanding Minds and Realities

The Talos Principle 2, the outstanding puzzler about puzzles that also challenged players with philosophy, has announced an entire batch of downloadable content to add to the game. Road to Elysium adds three new chapters, each with a new perspective and narrative to The Talos Principle’s lore. It will be released on 14 June.

Cult of the Lamb - Unholy Alliance: Summoning the Goat

Cult of the Lamb announced the date of a free update that will bring the Goat as a new playable character and local co-op to the PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch. The Unholy Alliance update is being previewed for 12 August.

Understanding the World of CONSOLES

As an entertainment industry that finds itself at once old and new in an increasingly blurry landscape, CONSOLES are crucial to helping developers bridge the gap between their brains and our living rooms, all with a single box of magic. Tenjutsu, Possessor(s), The Crush House, Anger Foot – all those games are built with audiences in mind, and reaching those audiences is much easier now that these games are out in the world, being played and enjoyed.

But you can’t do that on phones and tablets Constructors like the one above are made possible by the fact that the boxes – CONSOLES – have been made available to developers like Devolver Digital. These are publishers who are offering software that the major platforms consider too niche to support on their own, even though they often offer the most innovative concepts and gameplay mechanics. Tenjutsu, Possessor(s), The Crush House and Anger Foot, along with the coming DLCs for The Talos Principle 2 and Cult of the Lamb, will all be making their home on CONSOLES when they are released. The day of CONSOLES waning in importance seems a long way off now. Then again, it’s probably how the powers that be saw it when a Norwegian computer geek dropped a pair of gunmetal six-sided dice into one of their welcoming and consoling boxes all those years ago.

And if you love rogue-jutsu battles, interdimensional sci-fi, reality TV travesties and meditative puzzles, the future of gaming looks bright too, all thanks to Devolver and the console’s enduring reign.