Tribeca Film Festival 2025: The Games

Despite an industry in flux, thanks largely to the fits and seizures of late-stage capitalism, the Tribeca Film Festival’s games program is uniquely equipped to weather the storm, mostly because its focus isn’t so heavily weighted toward engagement and advertisement. “The lens through which we look at games is through storytelling and artistic excellence,” Casey Baltes, Vice President of Tribeca Games and Immersive, told me during the festival. “Since we’re in the home of creativity and storytelling [in the arts], that’s where we can shine.”

The nine titles spotlighted at this year’s festival were all ambassadors of that ethos, but it’s probably not a coincidence that they’re all tight, single-player experiences from independent studios—the exact kinds of titles that have become the breakout hits of recent years. They’re also the types of games that AAA studios, in fruitless search of the next Fortnite-esque infinite money generator, no longer take risks on. The festival’s picks were curated to cater to “the culturally curious…people who don’t play games, or play them differently, anything from 18-to-81 year olds.” That promise was kept, with the festival’s slate of titles this year providing an impressive cross-section of the things that games can be that no other medium can offer in full.

Dotemu’s dark fantasy beat-’em-up Absolum is a gorgeously animated piece of work, cut from the same cloth as the studio’s excellent Streets of Rage 4. It has all of the hard-hitting, high-combo chaos of that game, with the fantastical aesthetic of another classic Sega title, Golden Axe. Oh, and it has a run-based, Hades-like cherry on top for added flair. What raises it above its pedigree, though, is its story, centered around magical beings empowered by a weakened forest spirit to fight back against what is coded as, for all intents, an ethnic cleansing. Even in this world of goblins, orcs, and the like, the subtext screams loud and clear, and is reinforced during gameplay. It’s certainly a beat-’em-up, but it’s anything but mindless.

Elevation of tone is also the modus operandi of the Outer Zone’s Death Howl. Visually, it owes much to Souls games, but there’s a particular unearthly eeriness to it. While Death Howl isn’t operating on the same level of Boschian feculence as Lauris and Raitis Abele’s animated film Dog of God, which premiered at this year’s Tribeca, it’s certainly hanging out in the same neighborhood. It’s in service of a rather hardcore tactical RPG, where our heroine must face off against the terrors of a forest using a deck of action cards and a grid where location and angles of attack are crucial. It’s not easy by any means, but it’s excellent at the thing that all the best Souls games are good at: consistently offering a uniquely captivating sight around every corner.

Eyes Out’s Sleep Awake imagines a planet-wide, Nightmare on Elm Street-evoking scenario where anyone who falls asleep vanishes, snatched away by an unseen threat. As such, the entire population suffers from sleep deprivation psychosis, including the protagonist, one of thousands of souls experimenting with various concoctions and torturous physical experiments designed to keep them from ever needing to fall asleep, but not enough to keep from experiencing constant hallucinations. There were complaints about the short demo—much of the game is too dark for its own good, and the ruined level design gets confusing fast—but Sleep Awake’s dedication to the pervasive threat awaiting its characters should they ever stop moving is impressive.

Two platform adventure titles, Douze Dixièmes’s MIO: Memories in Orbit and Heart Machine’s Possessor(s), are ambitious in two separate ways. MIO takes place in what appears to be a techno-organic, Art Deco-ish ark spaceship containing the world’s last remaining robots. The robots struggle to come across as more than just electronic children with their feeble understanding of how a society can work, but there’s a special complexity—and difficulty—to how the titular Mio gets around and fights their way through the world. The player’s curiosity guides advancement rather than a hard and fast goal to reach or door to open.

By comparison, Possessor(s) isn’t a particularly complex or unique game to play, but much of what urges the player on through the typical Metroidvania motions is its story, which starts with an interdimensional breach by a megacorporation’s secret paranormal science division, our heroine Luca having her legs severed off, and making a deal with a demon to stay alive and save her family, and at the cost of three years and the end of the world. The writing is the major strong point here, and while the exploration and combat are serviceable, learning more about the short-tempered device on Luca’s shoulder is an excellent motivator.

If these titles revel in darkness and terror, the brightness offered by some of the other selections, namely Beethoven & Dinosaur’s Mixtape and AdHoc Studio’s Dispatch, was a salve. Taking place in the mid-’90s, Mixtape is essentially a nostalgic teen comedy in interactive form, using the framework of a meticulously curated mixtape as a guide through the teenage life and times of one Stacy Rockford. Every song, every vignette of teenage life evokes a deeply personal and endearing picture of the ’90s. That’s evident in everything from a fast-food run set to Silverchair’s “Freak” to an awkward first kiss set to Alice Coltrane’s “Turiya,” complete with a hilariously gross tongue-kissing minigame. Mixtape doesn’t have a release date yet, which is sad because it deserves to be the feel-good game of the summer.

Dispatch is the direct progeny of a group of Telltale Games expatriates. But unlike that studio’s titles, such as Tales from the Borderlands and The Wolf Among Us, dialogue isn’t the driving force of the story. The actual thrust of the game follows an ex-superhero (voiced by Aaron Paul) at his first day of work at a call center that’s basically a 911 dispatch center for superheroes. Unfortunately, he’s stuck with mostly semi-reformed villains doing community service.

Your job is to account for all these different personalities as you decide who to send where. It’s a harder job than it seems, especially since much of the laugh-out-loud banter can cause you to miss a cue to send someone to the site of a crisis. Dispatch is bolstered by a murderer’s row of voice talent (Jeffrey Wright brings his A-game as a quick-witted, aging speedster), and if any of the Tribeca selections have the potential to breach mainstream, smart money’s on this one.

The winner of the Tribeca Games Award was Cairn from the Game Bakers, and it’s no surprise. A mountain-climbing simulator where the player is in full control of all of protagonist Aava’s limbs, the game is visually and mechanically arresting. There are full-blown action games from the last few years that aren’t as pulse-pounding as this one is when Aava’s endurance get close to giving out. And there are full-fledged survival games where the stakes aren’t as immediate and grueling as Cairn is when showing how a day’s worth of holding onto rock tears up Aava’s hands. The rewards for reaching an apex are magnificent. Cairn is the best kind of interactive simulation: giving players an immediate respect for the people who can do this in the real world.

Cairn was the big winner, but perhaps the most relevant and vital game happened to be the least polished: Anima Interactive’s Take Us North, a survival game where you must shepherd a group of migrants across the Sonoran Desert to cross the border. The graphics and survival mechanics are minimalistic, and yet, the writing, drawn from the experiences of actual migrants who made the insanely dangerous journey, and the execution of every single peril along the way utterly harrowing. This is a risk no one who didn’t desperately need an escape would take without good reason. As an exercise in timely, crucial empathy, Take Us North is one of the most important interactive narrative experiences of the year.

The Tribeca Film Festival ran from June 4—15.