The Black Voices in Gaming Summer Showcase aired as part of Summer Game Fest week, spotlighting games from black developers around the world. The full showcase is right here. Five games made our shortlist, ranging from a vampire heir crawling out of a coffin to a teenager on rollerblades uncovering her town’s worst-kept secret.
Bathory: Heritage of Blood
TL;DR
Keylocker’s Moonana sends a poisoned vampire princess crawling out of her coffin to murder her way to the throne.
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- Release date: 2027
- Developer: Moonana
- Publisher: Moonana
- Platforms: Steam | Nintendo Switch
- Genres: Metroidvania, action, souls-like
Moonana, the Bristol studio behind Keylocker, is making a vampire Soulsvania where you play a poisoned princess who wakes up after decades in a coffin to take revenge on her own mother, and I am unreasonably excited about it.
Ursula Bathory, heir to the vampire throne, was poisoned and coffined by her own mother for decades and has now woken up with a very specific grievance to settle. The combat pulls life from your own health bar to attack, which is a pressure system I find far more interesting than a stamina wheel. It comes out in 2027 for PC and Switch.
Alchemic Beasts
TL;DR
A monster-taming JRPG where alchemy determines what your creatures become, set in a tropical paradise that needs rebuilding one captured beast at a time.
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- Release date: TBA 2026
- Developer: White Guardian Studios LLC
- Publisher: White Guardian Studios LLC
- Platforms: Steam
- Genres: JRPG, creature collector, crafting
White Guardian Studios has been building out its Celestial Tear universe for years, and Alchemic Beasts is their most ambitious swing yet. The twist on the creature-collector formula is the alchemy system: elemental ores determine how your beasts evolve, so the path to your team isn’t random luck but something you actively engineer.
I appreciate that the world restoration mechanic ties progression to community rather than just combat. Looks like there are over 200 creatures to catch, and every one of them has a stagger system in battle that rewards timing over button-mashing.
Saturday AM: Battle Manga
TL;DR
Son Studios puts Saturday AM’s manga heroes in a 2v2 tag fighter built on a brand-new engine, and the first thing they did was give everyone a cinematic super.
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- Release date: TBA
- Developer: Son Studios
- Publisher: Son Studios
- Platforms: Steam
- Genres: 2.5D fighting, tag fighter
Saturday AM is an independent manga anthology founded in 2013 to showcase stories by creators from around the world, with a specific focus on diversity and representation. Its roster spans Apple Black, Clock Striker, Soul Beat, Hammer, and more. Son Studios, an Austin outfit also developing the arena fighter Netcode Warriors, has spent five years building toward this crossover, and it shows in how deliberately the mechanics serve the source material.
The Night Sky Engine powering this was built from scratch by lead programmer Ryn (WistfulHopes), which is the kind of detail that tells you this team is not cutting corners. The roster currently sits at 14 fighters.
Carrier Cuties: Pets in Mechs!
TL;DR
AI wiped out humanity, the pets inherited the earth, and now they’re piloting human-shaped mechs to settle their differences in destructible arenas.
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- Release date: TBA
- Developer: Cornerstone Interactive Studios
- Publisher: Cornerstone Interactive Studios
- Platforms: Steam
- Genres: 3D arena fighter, co-op
The founding team at Cornerstone Interactive Studios has credits spanning Double Fine, Ubisoft, Unity, 2K, Xbox Publishing, and Meta, which is either reassuring or the kind of resume that makes you nervous about scope creep. The concept is doing a lot of work in its favour regardless: AI eliminated humanity, the surviving pets built mechs modeled after their former owners, and now they fight.
It is a co-op 2v2 arena brawler with destructible environments and a lore premise that I am embarrassed to admit I find compelling. The Hu-Mech designs are genuinely funny.
RollerGirl
TL;DR
A 16-year-old’s car breaks down on the first day of summer and she rollerblades into a small-town cover-up, a teenage romance, and her neighbours’ increasingly strange problems.
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- Release date: TBA
- Developer: Pushing Vertices
- Publisher: Pushing Vertices
- Platforms: Steam
- Genres: Adventure, slice-of-life, narrative
Indigo Doyle, director of Ontario-based Pushing Vertices, drew RollerGirl directly from her own small-town childhood, and the specificity shows: Naomi, 16, gets her first car and it immediately dies, so she laces up her rollerblades, grabs her MP3 player, and goes out into the world. I still do this, usually on Sundays when time and the weather allow.
The music system is what gets me. Your playlist choices change how the world reacts to you, and you collect new tracks around town. That is a mechanic that earns its theme rather than just illustrating it.
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