By Nelson Schneider - 09/24/22 at 04:07 PM CT

As Fall wears on, we find ourselves, once again, right smack in the middle of Harvest Season, with the looming threat of ghoulish horror and Type 2 Diabetes waiting for us at the end of October. With the Summer Game Drought far behind us, we’re getting a second month in a row absolutely crammed with releases… and shockingly a second month in a row with more than one game I’d actually consider buying!

Ladies and gentlemen, get your shovels polished, sharpened, and ready to go, as there is a LOT of direct-to-dumpster gaming coming in October, representing all three major shovelware categories. First up, in the Licensed Swill category we’ve got a whole range of horrors. Least offensively, consoles are getting a physical release of the ‘TMNT’ game, “Shredder’s Revenge,” which is, by all accounts, one of the best licensed games released recently/ever. There are plenty of other rut-worn IPs getting new games, including ‘Batman’ with “Gotham Knights,” “Dragon Ball: The Breakers” (not ‘Dragonball Z,’ oddly enough), and “Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed” (just in time for Halloween). Then there are tie-ins for old-ass movies, like “Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo” and “Cobra Kai 2: Dojos Rising,” which is actually a tie-in for the “Karate Kid” spin-off streaming show. With the success of recent IP mashups like “Multiversus,” Nickelodeon has decided to rip-off Nintendo’s other mashup paradigm and is releasing a Kart Racer… with ‘3’ in the tile, so apparently there have already been two of them that nobody remembers or talks about. To balance that cartoony Racing, there’s also a ‘NASCAR’ game hitting the Switch. Then things start to get… weird, with a licensed game based on ‘L.O.L. Surprise! Dolls’ and another based on the disturbing and talentless pop star, JoJo Siwa.

Ugh. Adjust your grips, folks, we’ve still got more shoveling to do! The second category of shovelware is the 2Cazul2Live type of braindead non-game/barely-game trash that appeals to the lowest common denominator. Thankfully there are far fewer of these things than Licensed games… but sadly, they are all dumping on the Switch, like it was the Wii in 2007 or something. There’s “CoComelon: Play with DJ” and “Ultra Mega Xtra Party Challenge” both vying for ‘Worst Title.’ There’s another game that is apparently trying to glorify the horse-sports enjoyed by both affluent, little, white, private school girls and rustic, little, white farm girls, in “Horse Club Adventures 2: Hazelwood Stories.” Naturally, when I think ‘horse club,’ I think of a large, crudely-hewn bludgeoning weapon being used on horses, but that’s just my Trollish culture, I guess. Lastly, there’s a non-game that not even the weasliest lawyer would try to defend as a game… because it’s an advent calendar… called “Advent Calendar.”

Keep those shovels at the ready, as there’s one last round of trash to scoop: Annual Releases. There aren’t that many of these, either. Unsurprisingly, out of 4 annual releases coming in October, all but one is a Sports title, and that one non-Sport is… the infamous ‘Call of Duty.’ The Sports in question are mostly seasonally appropriate, with ‘Winter Games,’ Hockey, and … Golf.

Moving on, it’s time to put away the shovels and break out the snorkels, as we swim through the never-ending deluge of ports, remakes, remasters, compilations, and other methods of re-releasing something old under the guise of something new. Oh, why are there so many of these things?! It looks like Kemco decided to go nuts and port over a ton of its low-budget RPGs from the mobile stores to real gaming platforms, so we’re seeing “RPGolf Legends,” “Citizens Unite!,” “Alphadia Genesis,” “Asdivine Hearts,” and “Blacksmith of the Sand Kingdom” afflicting… the Switch, primarily. And while we’re thinking about the Switch, it is, once again, getting nearly all of the other ports dumped on it in October: “Bayonetta 3,” “Saint Kotar,” “They Always Run,” “In Sound Mind,” “Mutant Mudds Collection,” “Nier: Automata,” “Xeodrifter,” “Them’s Fightin’ Herds,” “Baldo: The Guardian Owls,” “No Man’s Sky,” and “F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch” are all headed Switch-ward, with only the latter few hitting other consoles for the first time. That leaves only 4 ports NOT hitting the Switch: a Double-Pack of ‘Commandos’ remasters, “Seed of Life,” “Train Life” (which will be hitting the Switch next year), and “Mount & Blade 2,” which has finally left Early Access to inflict its horrible mix of PvP and jank on everyone.

Ahh… Now that all the crap and old crap is out of the way, we can finally start looking at new releases! There are a whopping SIXTEEN of them… and not all of them look terrible. There are two new Survival Horror things coming for Chris to drool over: “Charon’s Staircase” and “Yomawari: Lost in Dark.” There are THREE new Racing things for Nick to… ignore like everything else that isn’t “Destiny 2”: “Art of Rally,” “Dakar Desert Rally,” and “WRC Generations.” There are even two RPG-or-RPG-adjacent things for me to get excited about… except the RPG is “Star Ocean: The Divine Force,” from a series where my feelings have been pretty tepid… but at least it’s on PC again! The RPG-adjacent thing is, “Warhammer 40K: Shootas, Blood, and Teef,” which I immediately knew would have something to do with my boyz, da Space Orks… but instead of an RPG or ‘GorkaMorka’ adaptation… it’s a mobile-trash-tier sidescrolling SHMUP that looks incredibly poor. Then there are several low-key titles that have generated zero hype. I only recognize the title of “Arcade Paradise” because it’s been postponed so damned many times (not a good sign). “Train Sim World 3” most likely exists solely to re-sell thousands-of-dollars’ worth of DLC to Sad Train Men. “Miraculous: Rise of the Sphinx” is some sort of French superhero… thing that only avoided the shovelware category by virtue of my never having heard of a related parent IP. “Life in Willowdale” is part of the recent plague of Rural Life Sims that Penny Arcade summed up nicely. “Kamiwaza: Way of the Thief” looks like… a PlayStation 2 game by From Software. Then there are a couple titles with name recognition: “A Plague Tale: Requiem” is a sequel that I thought had been released already, but apparently not. Likewise, “No More Heroes 3” is coming, whether we wanted it or not (Chris might). Then there’s the out-of-nowhere release of “New Tales from the Borderlands,” a Telltale Games-style episodic Adventure, only without the participation of Telltale Games and with all the episodes available from day 1. Lastly, there’s a super-low-key Indie Metroidvania, “Astronite,” which gives me incredibly-positive ‘Cave Story’ vibes.

At last, we come to exclusives: Those elusive treasures that can only be played on one specific platform, and thus can be used to justify said platform’s existence. In October, only the Switch is receiving any exclusive TLC, with two titles all to itself. Of course, half of them are crap: An Idea Factory Visual Novel, “Paradigm Paradox.” The other half, though, is extremely interesting: A sequel to the Switch launch title by Ubisoft that still stands as one of the only reasons to own a Switch, “Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope,” which I ‘hope’ continues the excellence demonstrated by its predecessor.

Wow! Very Game! Much Interest! It’s amazing that for a second month in a row, I’m excited about more than just one or two upcoming titles! Unfortunately, my excitement about “Steelrising” last month didn’t pan-out, as the game is, indeed, a Soulslike, not an open-world Action/Adventure like “Greedfall.” Sure, it has ‘assists’ that allow the player to granularly turn-off the litany of Soulslike annoyances… but if you’re going to do that, why even bother playing a Soulslike at all, especially when not playing is literally the only way to turn-off ‘unbearably clunky melee combat’? Anyway, I hope “Star Ocean: The Divine Force” turns out to be one of the better entries in a hit-and-miss series. Likewise, I hope “New Tales from the Borderlands” can provide as compelling a narrative as its predecessor, even without Telltale’s writing staff. “Astronite’s” gameplay footage shows a low-fi Metroidvania with plenty of visual charm, in spite of being black-and-white, and generally looks enjoyable. Of course, I’m REALLY looking forward to more of the TRPG goodness of the ‘Mario + Rabbids’ mashup in “Sparks of Hope.” I might actually have to excavate my Switch from beneath its layer of dust.

Backlog Embiggened: +4 (again?!)