Consoles may not have announced any releases this week, but PC indies have some gas left in the 2025 tank. How about combining tower defense and match3 games? Or an RPG where you play the worst knight in the kingdom? A new minimalist puzzle game? A bullet hell with a name google refuses to not correct? How about a metroidvania? Already too many of those? Then how about a Christmas-themed Papers, Please clone about giving gifts to kids released five days after Christmas? Missed it by that much!
Another week filled with releases no one’s heard of. Another week where the wallet threat is mostly game sales. Although some of the elevator pitches for this week’s games make them sound pretty cool though, so keep reading and don’t assume your wallet is entirely safe.
There’s a smattering of indie games this week to threaten the wallet, from a scene thriving, imaginative, and incredibly crowded. Let’s hope the gems get the attention they deserve. But most of the biggest wallet threats this time of year come with the winter sales that tempt us into games that will forever live in our backlogs. I’m personally tempted by Divinity: Original Sin 2, which Larian Studios shadow-dropped today for current-gen consoles. It’s a free upgrade if you already own the respective last-gen versions of the game.
Several ports caught my eye this week. An Owlcat RPG coming to the Switch 2 set in a universe almost incomprehensible to me. An amazing Flight Simulator that’s hopefully fixed now that it’s coming to PS5. A game about digging a hole that’s coming to Xbox and Game Pass. The critically acclaimed Thank Goodness You’re Here, whose humor is very British apparently, finally making its way to Xbox. A tower defense / exploration / mining hybrid coming to Xbox and Game Pass this week. Some Christmas themed horror games ported to Xbox that might or might not be terrible. Current gen upgrades of the Yakuza 0, 1 and 2.
But enough about the ports. How about those shiny new games? The delayed Terminator 2D: No Fate should finally make its way to literal shelves this week, since it was delayed to coincide with the physical release. Skate Story looks really trippy and weird and could be very cool. Unbeatable, a two-button rhythm game, finally makes its way to us after being a success on Kickstarter about five years ago. And hopefully Drywall Eating Simulator can bring some good comedy to us in a bite-sized adventure (their joke, not mine).
Originally announced at E3 2017, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, after changing developers, is finally coming to the Switch and Switch 2 this week. Will it be worth the wait? Will Retro Studios’ gamble of adding a chatty sidekick pay off? I’m keeping a keen eye out this week to see how this game turned out.
And if you think that’s a long time between announcement and release, wait until you hear about Routine. Originally announced back at Gamescom in 2012, it comes out this week on PC and Xbox. This one actually holds more appeal for me. Exploring a lunar base’s decline and interacting with the environment sounds a lot like the Metroid Prime games in theory, but this one seems to have more System Shock vibes than Metroid Prime vibes.
I don’t see this week’s new releases as much of a wallet threat. If I had to pick one to play myself, it would likely be Project Motor Racing, though I continue to be perplexed that from the almost infinite possibilities of how to make a driving game, so many games seem to want to crowd into this very narrow niche of making games based on realistic race cars going around well known tracks.
On the other hand, I appreciate the break. It’s Thanksgiving week for those of us who celebrate it. I’m grateful and thankful that this community is here and we can talk about games, movies, TV shows, books, music, politics and the oxford comma.
Terrifier: The ARTcade Game is out tomorrow on Steam, and even on the Nintendo Switch. It’s a sidescrolling beat-’em-up — I think that’s what you call them — where you play Art the Clown, the sadistic Chaplin-esque killer from Damien Leone’s Grand Guignol horror movies. Leone’s trilogy starts out disgustingly effective, but gets increasingly lore-obssessed and commercially successful as it progresses. For various reasons, I don’t recommend them to anyone but the serious horror aficianado. As for this ARTcade Game, the developer, Relovo, has a history of itch.io releases that implies they might actually know what they’re doing! Could this unseat indie darling Absolum and perhaps upstage the December 1st release of Marvel: Cosmic Invasion? Will we one day get an Art the Clown kart racer? And will Art the Clown plushies be all the rage this Christmas?
Although I often think about going back to play Brian Reynold’s Alpha Centauri, lo, these many years later, I’m not sure I could. There are probably too many issues that would bother me. I probably wouldn’t be able to enjoy it the way I did way back in 1999. My rose-colored lenses might cloud over and fog up. Fortunately, I don’t need to replay Alpha Centauri because Proxy Studios has made Zephon.
Quite a busy week in the realm of AAA releases and ports. There’s a new Lumines release. A Sacred 2 Remaster. A Fallout 4 anniversary release. A new Anno game! (I’m still yet to actually play one of those myself, but I do still get excited about each one myself for some reason). Sega is porting Yakuza 1 and 2’s remasters to Switch 2. Square Enix is porting Monster Hunter Stories 1 and 2 to Xbox. A new Call of Duty is coming out! And one of those big action-adventure Chinese games we’ve been seeing trailers for is finally coming out: Where Winds Meet.
I’ve personally never checked out the Europa Universalis series because I’ve always been afraid to, thinking it would be too tough and hard-to-learn. Maybe with the fifth game in the series that has changed? A lot of people at Quarter to Three are pretty excited over that one. Since traditional point-and-click adventure games died a long time ago, I suspect that Syberia — Remastered will be threatening few wallets this week. I personally loved the original. Tom has already quit, but he’s confessed that he’s not much of an adventure gamer.
A few years ago, I started wondering about this burgeoning “factory” genre. On the forum, I asked which game would be ideal to start getting into these games. Factorio? Satisfactory? Dyson Sphere? Shapez 2? The answer from most seemed to be to wait for 1.0 release of Satisfactory. And then when it was released, I started waiting for the console release. And this week I’ll have no more excuse to wait any longer, since the console release of Satisfactory is finally here.
So what is it that what I’m most excited about among this week’s releases? Maybe it has to do with how much I’ve been enjoying Farthest Frontier, a recent village building game, but the games that seem the most exciting to me are of the calmer zen variety, focusing on charm over challenge. There’s a charming adventure game called A Pizza Delivery out this week. A coop sequel in Biped 2 about two robot having an adventure where each player controls both of the charming biped robots’ limbs individually. A charming puzzle game called Puzzle Depot about pushing boxes. A charming platformer where you play as an egg in Egging On. And a lovely looking charming simulation about creating tiny, Japanese inspired garden dioramas in Dream Garden. What is threatening your wallets this week?
Doesn’t it feel as if the big releases have been relentless lately? The trend continues this week with big releases like Arc Raiders, the big extraction shooter de jour. The Outer Worlds 2 is a sequel to what I lovingly referred to as my gaming comfort food, and this one is reportedly the same but slightly better in every way. Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection is Digital Eclipse doing their thing of being gaming historians, and preserving old games by putting together presentations of how they were made while having you play the games themselves. On the JRPG front, we have a couple of remakes and remasters: Tales of Xillia was originally a PS3 exclusive, so most people probably missed it, and Dragon Quest 1 & 2 get the HD-2D remake treatment from Square Enix. My own personal time, attention and money is under the greatest potential threat this week from a game created by ex-Criterion employees that looks like a combination of Trackmania and Burnout, and is a game called Wreckreation.
[Editor’s note: Please welcome longtime forum member Rock8man back to the front page! Every week, he’ll be detailing the threats posed to our metaphorical wallets by the upcoming week’s new releases. Note that wallet threats don’t just pose a financial danger! Perhaps more importantly, they pose a danger to those far more precious currencies such as time, attention span, spouse tolerance, fear of missing out, and all the various elements that determine what we play and when we play it.]
How many revivals, remakes and sequels are out this week? Well, we have a new Ninja Gaiden, a new Painkiller, a new Jurassic World Evolution, a new Double Dragon, a port of Persona 3 Reload to the Switch 2, a remake of the original Plants vs Zombies, a sequel to Powerwash Simulator, a new Katamari, and a remake of House of the Dead 2. There’s also a sequel to Vampire Bloodlines coming that’s reportedly less of an RPG than the original. Crate is finally releasing their follow up to Grim Dawn, Farthest Frontier, which is not another ARPG but a city builder that’s been in early access for a few years. The now standard indie game practice of cross-pollinating genres of games continues this week with Bounty Star, which combines Mech fighting with farming and base building.
Personally speaking, I’ve got my fingers crossed that the new Painkiller recaptures the magic of the original game this week and I’ll gladly let it drain my wallet.
As you may have noticed, the forums are currently borked. If you were on your way to post something, hold that thought! And thanks for your patience while we figure out what broke and how to fix it.
I’ll update this space as more information is available.
UPDATE: And we’re back up! Turns out the server ran out of disk space, most likely as a result of all my posts about the Switch 2.
Old World is out today on Steam! Bruce Geryk and I have an ongoing game underway and we’ll be posting an update every ten turns. Here is our starting situation.
