By Nelson Schneider - 04/27/25 at 05:14 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! We got quite a few April Showers (and hailstorms, and tornadoes…), but will they bring May Flowers? They always do… but that doesn’t mean the Games Industry will benefit any! Let’s see what the Corporate Suits at the big publishing houses and platform holders have deigned to spurt forth as the last hurrah before the inevitable Summer Game Drought.
Well, the good news is, there’s no Licensed Swill slated for May. There’s only a little bit of Casual Swill that could have gone under “PlayStation Exclusives,” but I don’t want to be that mean: Two “Hidden Object” games with “Hidden Object” in the title. Wow. In Annualized Swill, we’ve got a new entry in the ‘F1’ series. Finally, in Notable Ports, the ‘Super Mario RPG’-inspired “Born of Bread” will be leaving PC exclusivity behind to live on PlayStation and Nintendo (LOL, Xbox).
In multi-platform releases we’ve got half-a-dozen titles to look at and… OH, MUTHER-EFFER this is not looking promising. First we’ve got “DOOM: The Dark Ages,” as if this one-trick dead-horse of a FPS series needs to keep going. Things look even WORSE than that, though, with From Software’s latest pantyhose abortion, “Elden Ring Nightreign,” which is a spinoff from their most recent Soulslike that looks to be embracing Roguelike, MMO, and Extraction Shooter tropes, as if the original mistake of ‘being a Soulslike’ wasn’t bad enough. Changing gears from ‘torture’ to ‘boring,’ there’s “Roadcraft,” which is a construction Sim in which the player is responsible for resurfacing roads. Exciting. Next, there’s “Blades of Fire,” the latest game from ‘Castlevania: Lords of Shadow’ developer, MercuryStream. It’s a maddeningly vague game from available media, but it appears that MercuryStream sold out to Epic for a bigger cut of their (destined to be low) sales of a game that has an anally-obsessive weapon forging system attached to what appears to be a bog-standard Fake RPG Action game like “The Witcher 3.” Then there’s a new prequel in the ‘Commandos’ RTS series, that will likely remain as niche as its predecessors. Finally we come to “Revenge of the Savage Planet,” a sequel to the fantastic 3D Metroidvania, “Journey to the Savage Planet,” which, if the studio didn’t lose ALL of its talent during its restructuring, should be an enjoyable romp.
In the world of Exclusives, Sony has things mostly locked-down. To be fair to them for all the times I’ve considered “Xbox + PC” releases to be Exclusives for Microsoft’s benefit, I’m extending the same courtesy here, with “Spirit of the North 2” and “Lost Souls Aside” both appearing on PlayStation + PC. The former is a sequel to the 3D Platformer/Action/Adventure featuring a magical fox, while the latter is NOT a Soulslike (in spite of the title and the idiots on Steam who continually make community tags useless), but seems to be inspired by the likes of “Final Fantasy 15” and “NiER Automata,” so… nope! The two Sony exclusives that require an actual PlayStation to play are a Visual Novel with the typical Japanese Visual Novel gibberish title, “Death end re;Quest CodeZ,” and a very weeb-ish Third-Person Bullet Hell Shooter (You don’t see that everyday! For good reason!), “Scar-Lead Salvation,” both of which have the involvement of Japanese swill-peddler, Compile Heart. That leaves only one other exclusive for Nintendo, and with the First-Party and Second-Party studios focusing on the Switch 2, and reputable third-parties jumping ship from current-gen consoles, the prospects are not exactly exciting: Another Visual Novel with a gibberish title, “7’scarlet.”
Well, that could have been a lot worse… I suppose. While there is a lot of offensively terrible stuff coming in May, “Spirit of the North 2” couldn’t be too bad (though I haven’t played the original and only own it because it was a freebie at some point). On the other hand, I’m really looking forward to “Revenge of the Savage Planet,” enough that it made my list of Games to Watch For in 2025.
Backlog Embiggened: +2
