Month: June 2022

While 2022 was yet another year without an E3, game publishers big and small haven’t stopped releasing tons of hype-filled trailers during the usual summer promotional season. After sifting through Summer Game Fest and the Microsoft/Bethesda showcase, we’ve spent much of the week watching literally hundreds of trailers, as featured in the Future Games Show, IGN Expo, Wholesome Direct, Day of the Devs, the PC Gaming Show, and many others.

We’ve picked out 25 titles whose presentations stood out for one reason or another. Scroll through for a collection of titles we’ll be watching over the next year or so. And keep an eye out for hands-on impressions from our own Sam Machkovech, who sampled a handful of these games at a Summer Games Fest event earlier this week.

A Little to the Left

Platforms: Switch, PC, Mac, Android, iOS
Planned release: 2022
Links: Steam | Itch.io (w/ demo) | Official website

Enlarge (credit: NIH)

For billions of years after the origin of life, the only living things on Earth were tiny, primitive cells resembling today’s bacteria. But then, more than 1.5 billion years ago, something remarkable happened: One of those primitive cells, belonging to a group known as the archaea, swallowed a different one—a bacterium.

Instead of being digested, the bacterium took up permanent residence within the other organism as what biologists call an endosymbiont. Eventually, it integrated fully into its archaeal host cell, becoming what we know today as the mitochondrion, the crucial energy-producing component of the cell.

Its acquisition has long been viewed as the key step in what is arguably the most important evolutionary leap since the origin of life itself: the transition from early primitive cells, or prokaryotes, to the more sophisticated cells of higher organisms, or eukaryotes, including ourselves.