American Arcadia shows more of its world at Summer Game Fest

Out Of The Blue’s retro-styled dystopian puzzle game American Arcadia shared a little more footage of its creepily camera-laden city at tonight’s Summer Game Fest showcase. The Seventies aesthetic and Milton Keynes-esque, city-of-the-future feel shown in previous looks at the game are still very much in evidence – those massive swan statues are boss, and nobody hates monorails, right? Take a Logan’s Run at it yourself by watching the new trailer.

The Call Of The Sea dev’s next game was announced back in April. American Arcadia is moving on from its predecessor’s first-person puzzling by adding in some 2.5D sections. I can’t quite tell from the emphasis on satirizing always-on digital surveillance whether they’re playing that straight as a homage to dystopian cinema from the last century, or just engaging in meta-commentary on the broken dream that is social media. Any road, there’s a lot of orange scenery and flares.

It looks like protagonist Trevor will have to escape from Arcadia by any means necessary. The rooftop balancing and car chases are a change of pace from the fairly sedate puzzling of Call Of The Sea, so if you found that one a bit dull then American Arcadia might be more up your CCTV-observed alley. Most interestingly, we got a look at the much more modern environment of whoever’s guiding Trevor out of Arcadia at the end of the trailer, and the big orange dome that presumably contains the dodgy city in the distance. So orange.

American Arcadia doesn’t have a firm release date yet, but it’s probably whenever it can escape the authoritarian police-state it hails from. It’ll be coming to Steam and consoles when it finally hops the fence.

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Not E3 2022 is in full swing – see everything in our E3 2022 hub. Many more big game showcases and streams are still to come this summer, so make sure you stay up to date with our summer games stream schedule.