By Nelson Schneider - 02/02/25 at 02:26 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Big things are happening at MeltedJoystick, as we have recently inked an official partnership with the International Games Database, a.k.a., IGDB. As a result, you’ll be seeing a lot more cover-and-box art appearing on games in our database. Even better, Nick has expressed interest in finally revising the way the site handles multi-platform titles to make the database less cluttered and make new releases more discoverable.
In order to prepare for these upcoming changes, I’m going to revise the way I look at upcoming releases in a way I’ve been dreaming of for at least 8 years: I’m no longer going to mention ports, remakes, remasters, compilations, or other rehashes of old releases (unless circumstances warrant a rare exception). As a result, it will be much clearer just how little the Games Industry does each month.
Without further ado, let’s get to the shortened release docket for the shortest month of the year!
We’re still going to call-out shovelware when it rears its head, so long as it’s new shovelware. We’ve only got one coming in February, and it’s an annualized Sports release in ‘PGA Golf.’
There are six multi-platform new releases, in a fairly wide variety of genres. For people who like really clunky, un-fun Action games masquerading as RPGs, there’s both “Monster Hunter Wilds” and “Kingdom: Cum Delivery 2.” For people (like Chris) who love Horror, there’s a ‘Dollhouse’ sequel. For people who like Turn-Based RPGs but who otherwise have no taste, there’s “Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii” and “The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak 2,” neither of which I’m interested in even slightly. Lastly, for Grand Strategy fans, there’s “Civilization 7,” the latest release in the granddaddy of the subgenre.
In exclusives, there’s not much, but we do actually have the rare sighting of an Xbox exclusive in Obsidian Entertainment’s long-awaited-but-destined-to-flop “Avowed,” which is an attempt at butchering Chris Avellone’s ‘Pillars of Eternity’ setting and mechanics into a Sandbox game. The other exclusive coming in February is for PlayStation: “Stories from Sol: The Gun-Dog,” a brand-new, very-retro point-and-click Adventure game with a retro anime aesthetic. Unsurprisingly, Nintendo has nothing, since they just announced their next console, the Switch 2. The announcement of a Nintendo successor console has ALWAYS signaled the faucet of new releases being turned-off, yanked from its couplings, and thrown onto the scrap-heap if history. It’s almost as if Nintendo’s hardware isn’t all that great and game studios can’t wait to develop games for something just a little bit more capable.
And there we have it! The new, slimmed-down Backlog: The Embiggening format was a lot let aggravating for me to write, and didn’t change the fact that there’s absolutely nothing coming out in February that I want to play.
Backlog Embiggened: +0
