By Nelson Schneider - 10/31/26 at 03:41 PM CT
Welcome back to another look into the near future! Autumn is nearly over, and we’ve only got one more “lame” holiday left before the orgiastic end-of-year sales season that Industrial Gaming still has the unhealthy tendency to pin all of its hopes on. November is also when this year’s most stupidly-anticipated title is releasing, so the rest of the stuff coming this month is going to be from studios who are so brazenly overconfident that they think they can compete. Let’s see what’s what.
Sadly. the Shovelware publishers aren’t afraid of the elephant in the room, so we’re getting... plenty. Most of the Licensed Swill is old stuff being repackaged, so it overlaps with Noteworthy Ports (even if they aren’t actually noteworthy): “Barbie Rewind” and “Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Remastered.” The one new Licensed Swill title coming in November is “Unicorn Academy: Island of Magic,” based on an Intersectional Feminist series of children’s books which were later adapted into a Canadian CGI cartoon, which was later picked up by Netflix as original programming.
The Casual Swill takes the form of two Rhythm games: “K-Pop Rising: Dream to Shine” and “Let’s Sing 2027,” the latter of which is also the only Annualized Swill coming in November.
Then in Noteworthy Ports, we get the lion’s share of swill, with compilations of ‘Air Conflicts,’ ‘Super Monkey Balls,’ and ‘Hasbro Junior (Board) Games.’ Consoles are also being afflicted with “Gothic 3: Classic” (the retroactive renaming of the original TERRIBLE Eurojank Action-“RPG,” as well as the ancient Card Battle game from the Sega Saturn, “Culdcept: The First Saturn Tribute” (which was supposed to hit consoles a few months ago when it hit PC, but didn’t). The Nintendo Switch 2 is getting a further dose of portage with releases of Sony’s “Stellar Blade,” Square-Enix’s “Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy,” and Nintendo’s own “The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time” (which didn’t even get a word tacked onto the title to denote that it is, in fact, an old game being re-released on a new platform).
In legitimate, new Multi-Platform releases we’ve got... only a few things that are willing to go toe-to-toe with RockStar Games' big release. We’ve got a few Halloween games that didn’t quite make it in time: “Dark Mass” (which I’m not sure if it’s about a tumor or a Catholic ritual – though I suppose both are cancerous, so it doesn’t really matter), “ASYLUM” (in all caps), and Nippon-Ichi-published Third-Person Survival Shooter “Anomalith.” There are a couple of Indie sequels that give zero EFFs about RockStar: “Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault,” a Rogue-ish shopkeeping Sim, along with “Edge of Memories,” the Action/Sandbox sequel to the Turn-Based “Edge of Eternity.” Unfortunately, for “Edge of Memories,” the developer, Midgar Studio, was liquidated by its holding company, so it’s entirely likely the game won’t actually see release... which is a damned shame, considering it’s the ONLY thing coming in November that I personally care about! Lastly, the afore-mentioned elephant in the room is RockStar’s “Grand Theft Auto 6,” which has Chris frothing at the mouth and hoarding food so he doesn’t have to stop playing it for a solid week. However, I’ve been seeing a LOT of apathy about “GTA6” online, and I, myself, wouldn’t play it for all the tea in China.
What about Exclusives? We don’t need no stinkin’ exclusives! Yup, sadly, PlayStation has been busy pushing “GTA6” as if it’s actually an exclusive. XBOX has been busy restructuring and getting rid of all those studios it bought that didn’t make any games between then and now. And Nintendo is busy porting old games to the Switch 2 while simultaneously losing their minds over AI making emulation and recompiling their games to run natively on PC so much easier.
Well, November is an expectedly-dreary month. Chris and I could come to blows about whether or not “Grand Theft Auto 6” is the best thing ever or just another sh!tty RockStar thug game, while the one Sandbox game I’d actually be interested in, “Edge of Memories,” could either be the last gasp of a dead studio or vaporware that never actually sees a final release.
Backlog Embiggened: +0?
