Welcome to another edition of This Week at Games Australia! As we slowly move into August and the onset of the holiday flood, the list of new releases begins to heat up. This week is all about indies, gifts, expansions and remasterings. MultiVersus, Warner’s free tilt to the Smash Bros formula arrives this week, as does the new Xbox independent narrative As Dusk Falls.
July 19th
As Dusk Falls (XSX, PC, XBO)
Xbox calls As Dusk Falls an “interactive narrative drama” about a city, two families, and thirty years of dark secrets between them. Everything is very stylized, using still images of characters painted during the game while the world in which they live is fully realized and animated. Sounds like an interesting little experiment and I’m sure I’ll be eager to check it out. Go out on the first day at Game Pass.
Endling: Extinction is Forever (NS, PS4, XBO)
Endling is a game where you play as the last mother fox on Earth. It’s an environmentally friendly platformer game about trying to keep your puppies alive in a world destroyed by human greed and arrogance. It will surely make you cry. I can see Ruby playing this and being completely overwhelmed.
Forza Horizon 5: Hot Wheels Expansion (XSX, PC, XBO)
It’s a universally recognized fact that a new Forza Horizon game should need a Hot Wheels expansion. These expacs are more than just a brand exercise: they allow the part of your brain that still wants to build crazy Hot Wheels games full of loops, ramps and jumps. Playground takes care of all this for you and then gives you a hypercar to launch you down the track. Lots of fun and a good excuse to come back.
MultiVersus (PS5, XSX, PC, NS, PS4, XBO)
I wasn’t fully sold to MultiVersus until I played the beta some time ago. Much in the line of a multiplayer fighter like Smash Bros., so if you’ve filled yourself with Smash Ultimate but would like a whole new list of characters, maybe MultiVersus will fill that hole in your life. However, it’s free to play, so be prepared for aggressive monetization. July 19 is the start date for early access to the game’s next open beta period, but it will result in a wider release. You can get early access to the beta via Twitch drops. You can find out how to get in right here.
Stray (PS5, PC, PS4)
Game of the week. A little game about being a little cat in a forgotten cyberpunk city, Stray will be one of the hits of 2022. The decision to make the protagonist a cat is interesting. It opens up a whole world of designer doors that wouldn’t be available to a human character. Very excited to play this one (as is Ruby, who has been talking about it for two weeks in a row). It will arrive on PlayStation Plus on the first day.
July 21st
Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 2 (PC)
If you had regular multiplayer nights with your friends on Xbox in the early 2000s, you definitely played the Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance games. This week, a remaster of Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance II hits PC and I, for example, look forward to reliving my youth. Fun and easy PS2 / OG Xbox scavenger trackers era. Try it if you haven’t done it before.
Soda Story: Brewing Tycoon (PC)
Soda Story is an Upper Class Walrus management simulator from Adelaide. The game is to start your own brewery and expand it into a big money-making operation. This just seems like the kind of game I can put music on and vibrate. Looking forward to it. You can check out their Steam page right here.
July 22nd
Live A Live (NS)
A SNES-era JRPG classic remade and remastered for the modern era. This comes to Switch exclusively (at least for now). An essential game for anyone with a lot of love for the golden age of JRPGs.