On Wednesday afternoon, the official Xbox YouTube channel premiered the Xbox Partner Preview for the rest of 2024 — just shy of thirty minutes of trailers for third-party games coming to the Xbox Series S, Series X, and Windows Store. The focus was mainly on new IP such as Capcom’s Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, Neople’s The First Berserker: Khazan, and Surgent Studios’s Tales of Kenzera: ZAU, though sequels to small to mid-sized releases with dedicated niche followings such as Frostpunk 2 and The Sinking City 2 were also featured.
Some selected trailers:
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess got the main event slot for the showcase, and deservedly so, as it was perhaps the most interesting game on display both visually and mechanically. The game appears to be a character-action game with a day-night cycle where the player’s masked swordsman character focuses on exploration, base-building, and resource-gathering during the day and at night hunkers down with the allies he’s rescued and trained behind the defenses he’s assembled to repel various invaders. There is also a shrine maiden. The art design appears to be quite colorful and vibrant, which was a theme up and down the showcase.
Tales of Kenzea: ZAU was the other most visually-interesting offering in the partner showcase, and while it looks a great deal more standard in its gameplay than Kunitsu-Gami — much of the trailer is it going through and checking the Metroidvania boxes off for the prospective customer — but offers far different visuals and mythological inspirations than the Teutonic or Sengoku stylings of a lot of the other games in this slice of the market. The game is the brainchild of Abubakar Salim, best known as the voice of Bayak from Assassin’s Creed: Origins, and it is his first project as a creative lead at the head of Surgent Studios. The game is “inspired by the Bantu legends of central and Southern Africa,” and he goes more into where Tales of Kenzea comes from in a discussion with Polygon here.
The Alters is an interesting little single-player title that looks to blend ASTRONEER, Returnal, and XCOM: Enemy Unknown into a heady package about choice, consequence, what it means to be a human, and also outrunning the sun in a giant mining wheel. It’s understandable that the trailer eschews trying to show not tell with what they’re going for and just has a narrator explain the premise, because this is a game where you are stranded on a rock planet with a big mining base stuck inside a great wheel, and that to help you operate the mining base-wheel, you’re going to pull alternate versions of yourself from your past who made different life choices that you did, and then you’re going to have to convince all the alternate yous to work together, because if the wheel stops moving long enough for the planet’s daycycle to catch up with you, you’ll all be incinerated. Simple, right? Looks like a cool combination of resource-gathering survival with Firaxis X-COM’s base and team management stuff.
ROBLOX: Griefville x Chucky is actually the precise series of words that unlocks the Lament Configuration.
