By Nelson Schneider - 07/26/26 at 03:57 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Happy Birthday to me... again. As I spend my special day boiling in mid-western humidity, are there any new games coming out that I can gift myself and have an excuse to stay inside in the A/C? Probably not, but we’d better take a look anyway...
Ugh. For the second month in a row, Shovel-ready slop is HALF the release schedule. In Licensed Swill, Disney is well represented with both a new ‘Star Wars’ Strategy thing and a new ‘Marvel’ Fighting thing. The ‘Captain Tsubasa’ Soccer anime is also getting a... nother game, while the cult-favorite ‘Scott Pilgrim’ is getting another game too. In Annualized Swill, there’s the predictable release of a new ‘Madden Football.’ Lastly, in Noteworthy Ports, there’s a second volume of the ‘Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection’ (though I’m of the opinion that, if your ‘Master Collection’ has multiple volumes, it wasn’t particularly masterful in the first place), and finally “Culdcept BEGINS,” which is a port of a Sega Saturn game that has been re-released multiple times over the decades, but this is the first time the original game in the series is seeing a release outside of Japan... of course, it’s a Board/Card game, and the only Western release in the series was an Xbox 360 exclusive... so...
There are half-a-dozen new multi-platform releases landing in August, and they’re scattered across quite the variety of genres. There’s “Final Kick Football Legends” for ball-apes. “Brigandine Abyss” is the third game in the ‘Brigandine’ series of Turn-Based Strategy games that I never got into during the PS1 era or via emulation. “Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy” is a spinoff/prequel in the ‘A Plague Tale’ series of narrative Stealth games, however, this one seems to be more about open combat AND instead of focusing on the medieval Dark Ages goes all the way back to Bronze Age Krete... which I should love... but I’m hung-up on how uninterested I am in the rest of ‘A Plague Tale’ in general. “Aggelos 2” (pronounced ‘Angelos Two’ because double-gammas in Greek makes a “ng” sound) is the second Indie game from Storybird Games which is attempting to carry the torch as a spiritual successor to the 8-bit ‘Wonderboy’ series as it appeared on the Sega Master System.
“Hell Let Loose: Vietnam” is a military FPS set in... wait for it... Vietnam! So... actually WORSE than all the WWI and WWII FPSes by a large margin. Lastly, Game Freak – the studio known ONLY for ‘Pokemon’ – is releasing their first original game in a coon’s age: “Beast of Reincarnation”... aaaand... it looks like a Soulslike. Game Freak’s representatives and official statements INSIST that it is NOT a Soulslike, however... but if it looks, quacks, and shits like a duck...
Finally, let’s look at those Exclusive system-sellers! Oh... well system selleR without the plural! Oh... well it’s for an old, discontinued system... the original Switch... so Legacy Support? Oh... it’s another Aksys-published Visual Novel, “OVER REQUIEMZ,” yes, in all-caps, and yes, spelled like that. So... nobody’s going to be selling any systems based on August Exclusives.
*Sigh.* Another month of mediocrity and crap. After watching the trailers for “Resonance,” I might deign to grab it on sale and just pretend that it’s fully stand-alone and not part of ‘A Plague Tale.’ But there’s really nothing coming that I’m truly excited to experience.
Backlog Embiggened: +1?
