By Nelson Schneider - 10/05/25 at 04:11 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! It looks like we’re getting a late start on the games coming in Spoopy Month, since I was so flabbergasted by last week’s news of EA’s impending doom at the hands of private equity that it interrupted the flow. But now that every retail location is crammed with tacky, plastic skeletons and other Halloween-related junk; while grocery stores are stocked with Pumpkin Spice and Apple Cider... everything, there’s a definite hint of Autumn in the air, even if the weather itself is still insisting that it’s Summer (and it’s not even an Indian Summer, where it gets hot again after a hard freeze, like we’ve always had in the Midwest... It’s just still summer, even though the crops are all done, dried, and (mostly) harvested.
Do the remaining maggots gnawing on the dried-out sinew of the corpse of Industrial Gaming still think it’s Summer – and thus a drought – or have they moved on? Let’s take a look at the variety of used needles, razor blades, and rocks they’ve tossed in our collective trick-or-treat bucket.
Let’s get our shovels ready and start scooping some slop – and don’t forget, shovelware was “slop” before the rise of AI chatbots made “slop” cool... err... well, you know what I mean. In October it looks like the pile is... ABSOLUTELY OVERWHELMING! We’ve got all four flavors of crap in fairly vast quantities – even disregarding non-noteworthy ports!
In the Licensed Swill bin, we can toss a ‘PAW Patrol’ Kart racing game, a ‘Hot Wheels’ racing game, a ‘Fast & Furious’ racing game (which may or may not be based on the Vin Diesel/Rock movie franchise, but I don’t care enough to do any research), a ‘Barbie’ horse racing game (Are we stuck in a rut, here?), a new ‘Dora the Explora’ game (I guess not!), a new ‘Chicken Run’ game (Based on a movie that hasn’t been in theaters in 25 years... But apparently did get a sequel in 2023 that I never heard about... But still, releasing your shovelware tie-in game 2 years later? Really?!), a third ‘Jurassic World Evolution’ game, a tie in for the ‘Peanuts’ comic called “Snoopy and the Great Mystery Club” (It’s a good thing Charles Schulz has been dead for a while, or seeing his IP butchered like this would kill him. Maybe the current rightsholder can put us all out of our misery by bludgeoning us with the titular club... Oh? It’s not that kind of club? Shame.), a new ‘Digimon’ RPG (Honestly, it’s hard to say whether ‘Digimon’ in an anime first, then a game – and thus shovelware – or a game first, then an anime – and thus a legit title, but it definitely feels like non-game media are oversaturated in this IP, so it’s shovelware.), and, finally, the single scariest horror game releasing right in the midst of the month of our Spoopiest nightmares: “The Elf on the Shelf: Christmas Nightmares Heroes.” Seriously, those EFF-ing elves have been around for decades, and they just keep getting more horrific and disturbing.
Moving on to the 2Cazul2Liv category, we’ve got a handful of barely-games and non-games to keep the simple distracted, much like jangling one’s keyring in front of a toddler. There’s yet another low-effort entry in the ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ series, a descriptively titled “Winter Games Collection + Advent Calendar,” a 35-in-one “Sports Camp,” and Ubisoft’s latest annual release of ‘Just Dance.’
Alongside ‘Just Dance,’ there’s only one other Annualized Swill release, and that’s “Battlefield 6.” Honestly, it feels like there have been WAY more than 6 of these things released over the years... But it could be due to the fact that the blur together with all of the other grey goo of military shooters.
In the final shovelware category, we’ve got quite a few Noteworthy Ports that survived my editorial process to get a mention in the present day. “Dragon Quest 1 and 2” are getting a HD-2D Remake, and might actually be worth giving a look, since these aren’t supposed to be simply graphical updates, but are supposed to include completely de-suckified script revisions and rebalancing to put them more in line with modern ‘Dragon Quest’ titles. Next, one of those idiosyncratic series that Chris absolutely loves, for reasons that only make sense to him, ‘Corpse Party,’ is getting a tetralogy compilation pack... But it’s only coming to the Nintendo Switch for now, so he might just have to borrow mine. Moving on, the last half of the original glob of ‘Tomb Raider’ games, 4-6, which were released before the modern reboots are being re-released (which was supposed to happen LAST month, IIRC), “Painkiller” is getting a reboot, “Oblivion” is getting a remaster, and Atari’s (delenda est) Golf series ‘Golden Tee’ is getting an Arcade Classics compilation.
With the crap out of the way, it’s time to look at... New crap! We’ve got multi-platform releases by the dozen! Well, at least ONE dozen, which is pretty huge compared to Summer Game Drought months! There’s a ‘Truck Driver’ sequel, a ‘Flying Aces’ sequel, a ‘Harvest Moon’ sequel, an ‘Outer Worlds’ sequel, a ‘Katamari’ sequel, a ‘Vampire: The Masquerade’ sequel, a ‘Little Nightmares’ sequel, a ‘Ninja Gaiden’ sequel, a ‘Double Dragon’ sequel, and a ‘Simon the Sorcerer’ prequel. A lot of those series have been dormant for a while... But that’s a LOT of sequels, and even Indies are getting into a rut. There are only two new multi-platform games coming in October that aren’t sequels: “Wreckreation” is some sort of mayhem-centric Racing game, while “Bye Sweet Carol” is a thematically appropriate Horror game for Halloween-time.
Surprisingly, there are a few exclusives, though not nearly as much from Nintendo as you’d expect from a corpo with a new console to flog. Starting off, Steam is getting quite a few exclusives, with “Ealu” being some sort of skeuomorphic maze game, “Chronoquartz” being one of those irritating timeloop games, a Rhythm game called “KALPA: Cosmic Symphony,” and a low-effort Canadian Horror game cryptically titled “Tom Dahl.” Moving on to PlayStation, Sony is getting a handful of Horror games including “Tormented Souls 2” (which is allegedly NOT a Soulslike), “Dead Reset,” and the mouthful that is “Project Nightmares Case 36: Henrietta Kedward.” Oh, and we can’t forget that PlayStation is also getting the Wokified samurai sequel, “Ghost of Yotei.” Xbox is getting... LOL Xbox. And finally, Nintendo and Game Freak are bringing us “Pokemon Legends: Z-A,” but it will be available on both the Switch 2 and the original Switch... And everything I’ve read about it makes it sound like Nintendo and Game Freak decided that the previous ‘Pokemon Legends’ title was too feature-complete, so this one has a butt-load of DLC and Live Service crap tacked on.
Wow, that was a LOT of releases, so the Summer Games Drought is officially over, in spite of it still being in the 80s and 90s F everyday. Unfortunately, October’s releases are looking like a load of trash, with too much stale candy from previous years, weird flavors, and acquired tastes finding their way into our collective treat bucket. Out of all the stuff coming this month, the “Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD-2D Remake” is the only one I’d bother with, and only because it’s supposed to be more than a simple one-to-one rehash. Still, it’s not a priority, nor am I even particularly excited about the prospect, so it can wait to hit a deep discount before I’ll bite.
Backlog Embiggened: +1 (Or is it +2, since it’s a compilation?)
