By Nelson Schneider - 12/26/20 at 03:31 PM CT
Welcome back to another year of glimpses into the immediate future, where we spy upon planned Games Industry releases, and appropriately temper our expectations with cynicism. As per usual, January is never a particularly full month, usually relegated to deadline-missers that were supposed to launch during the previous September-through-December, or low-budget junk whose publishers didn’t want to compete with the big releases of the prior season.
It’s nice to start off the new year with a little bit of good news: There’s no shovelware… well, there’s no officially licensed shovelware, too-Casual-to-live non-games, or annualized treadmill releases… but there is a compilation of ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ titles, which comes dangerously close to all three categories without falling into any of them. At least now console peasants can join their PC gaming counterparts in experiencing this punishment.
Of course, the fact that the ‘FNAF’ compilation is, indeed, a collection of old crap being shopped around to new audiences brings us to the grim and indisputable fact that 2021 isn’t going to change a single thing with regard to old games cluttering up the release schedule and making it seem like there’s more stuff for each of the new consoles than there actually is. The Switch is getting a compilation of old ‘Turrican’ Arcade games and Visual Novel, “Root Double,” while the PlayStation 5 is getting a remaster-in-all-but-name port of “Ride 4,” and all three consoles are getting the previously-PC-exclusive “Bladed Fury,” a visually striking 2D Action/Adventure title that looks like something Vanillaware used to make.
New releases… aren’t looking too stellar. There are, once again, no exclusives for the brand new 9th Gen consoles (so, really, what’s the point of them?). Instead, we’ve got several word-salad titles (and one of them isn’t even Japanese!), in Visual Novel “re:ZERO – Starting Life in Another World: The Prophecy of the Throne” (please, hire an editor), item-crafting RPG “Atelier Ryza 2: Lost Legends & The Secret Fairy” (a great title if your game is about the late Little Richard), and Racing title “Offroad Racing: Buggy X ATV X Moto” (just to make it clear that ALL THE VEHICLES are in it). Then there are two more titles that are a bit less verbose: “Hitman 3” is… another ‘Hitman’ game by Eidos (under the auspices of Square-Enix) and “Iris Fall,” whose title does nothing to inform potential buyers about this Adventure game’s Gothic, monochrome Indie artsiness.
Aaaaaaand, 2021 gets off to a limp, quivering start, as expected. The only thing coming out at the beginning of the year that I’d even bother with is “Bladed Fury,” but I already own it on Steam. Maybe I’ll actually get around to playing it this year?
Backlog Embiggened: +0
