Top Releases:

• Synduality: Echo of Ada (PC/PS5/Series X|S) – Releases Jan. 24^th
• Dokapon! Sword of Fury (PC) – Releases Jan. 21^st
• King Arthur: Legends Rise (PC) – Releases Jan. 21^st
• Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist (PC/PS4/PS5/Switch/Series X|S) – Releases Jan. 22^nd
• Sword of the Necromancer: Resurrection (PC/PS4/PS5/Switch/Xbox One/Series X|S) – Releases Jan. 23^rd

The first two weeks of 2025 have been pretty exciting, full of big releases that are atypical for this time of year. Week three, however, is far calmer and much more in line with traditional trends. Still, that doesn’t mean we don’t have any good games coming out. In fact, week three has got a ton of indie titles to check out and may, perhaps, be the week where your favorite hidden gem of 2025 appears. Let’s check ’em out!

Synduality: Echo of Ada (PC/PS5/Series X|S) – Releases Jan. 24^th

Developed by: Game Studio Inc. (seriously, that’s their name)
Published by: Bandai Namco

Our top game of the week is also our first online multiplayer, live service game of 2025, Synduality: Echo of Ada. Set in a post apocalyptic future (of course), players find themselves living on an Earth that has been ravaged by a toxic rain that will kill you on contact. As if that wasn’t enough, hideous monsters have also overrun the planet, as they are a byproduct of all this toxic rain. In order to survive, humans went underground but they, of course, still need to eat and stuff, so they built a whole bunch of giant robots (as one does) called Cradlecoffin, and have assigned a task force of “Drifters” to scour the planet’s surface for supplies.

I have to admit, I am not all interested in Synduality, sorry Ada. This takes all the tropes of other live service titles and lumps them into their own game. However, I also thought Helldivers 2 looked like shit and it ended up being one of the best selling, most critically beloved games of 2024, so I could be wrong. Will Synduality be 2025’s Helldivers 2 or its Suicide Squad: Kills the Justice League. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Dokapon! Sword of Fury (PC) – Releases Jan. 21^st

Developed by: Sting (not the singer)
Published by: Sting (also, not the professional wrestler)

Looking for even more online fun? Then check out Dokapon! Sword of Fury. The long running board game/RPG hybrid has a brand new entry that is, for now, exclusive to Steam. The gameplay seems to be very similar to past Dokapon! games, with players moving around a board and partaking in traditional video game RPG battles. For this entry, though, you can take the fun online and compete against players from all over the world. What could go wrong?

Another PC exclusive this week is the squad RPG (whatever the hell that means), King Arthur: Legends Rise. Developer Kabam Games is mostly known for their licensed browser/mobile titles like The Hobbit: Armies of the Third Age, Marvel Champions, Star Wars: Uprising, and Disney Mirrorverse. With King Arthur, it seems Kablam are ready to move onto bigger and better platforms. Will the game be good or will it fall into the endless loop mobile game trap? I don’t know.

King Arthur: Legends Rise (PC) – Releases Jan. 21^st

Developed by: Kabam Games Inc.
Published by: Netmarble

Our last two top titles this week are both kinda/sorta already out. First, we have the metroidvania Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist, which has been available on PC in early access since March of 2024. I guess it’s finally ready for full launch and I’m sure there are no bugs to speak of, whatsoever. Second is Sword of the Necromancer: Resurrection, which is a 3D remake of a 2D game that came out in 2021. Look at that, we’re already remaking games from the 2020’s; amazing.

Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist (PC/PS4/PS5/Switch/Series X|S) – Releases Jan. 22^nd

Developed by: Adglobe/Live Wire
Published by: Binary Haze Interactive

Sword of the Necromancer: Resurrection (PC/PS4/PS5/Switch/Xbox One/Series X|S) – Releases Jan. 23^rd

Developed by: Grimorio of Games
Published by: Grimorio of Games

Ports and Re-releases:

Honestly, the best games coming out this week are the ports. The biggest of the bunch is Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, which is coming to PC, but we can’t sleep on Guilty Gear -Strive- coming to Switch, either. Finally, the oldest port is Jedi Power Battles, a PSX beat ’em up that is, arguably, terrible, though critics seemed to enjoy the Dreamcast port. The rose colored glasses come for everyone and everything at some point, maybe you’ll dig it.

• Star Wars Episode I: Jedi Power Battles (PC/PS4/PS5/Switch/Xbox One/Series X|S) – Releases Jan. 23^rd
• Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth (PC) – Releases Jan. 23^rd
• Guilty Gear -Strive- (Switch) – Releases Jan. 23^rd

Everything else:

I tried really hard to find a trailer for Gugu Pizza: Delivering Pizza to the Space Station? Boss, this is just not Right! on YouTube but it was impossible. Click the link to the Steam page below and check this game out; it looks wild!

• Somber Echoes (PC) – Releases Jan. 21^st
• Disorder (PC/PS5) – Releases Jan. 22^nd
• GuGu Pizza: Delivering Pizza to the Space Station? Boss, this is just not right! (PC) – Releases Jan. 22^nd
• Mercenaries Lament: Requiem of the Silver Wolf (PC) – Releases Jan. 22^nd
• Legends of Savvarah: Children of the Sun (PC) – Releases Jan. 23^rd

Notable Releases from 10, 20, and 30 years ago:

Not a lot to really get excited about in our new releases, what about our notable titles? Eh, not really much there either, haha. Well, we do have a Kojima game, so that’s something, right? Let’s check ’em out!

Games:

Starting with our notable title from 2015, we’ve got the zombie survival game Dying Light. Developed by Techland, who found previous success with another zombie game, Dead Island, this new game, Dying Light, take place in the Middle East where players must infiltrate a quarantined city in order to find a rogue politician who may, or may not, carry a vaccine for the zombie plague. After arriving, players must make a choice between completing their mission or helping the survivors.

The major gameplay feature of Dying Light is its parkour system, where players must run, jump, and climb various structures and other obstacles, in order to avoid the hordes of zombies. Apparently, the addition of the parkour system had a major effect on the game’s initial storyline, causing Techland to re-write large portions of their original story. This had a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” effect, as critics called out the parkour as the game’s best feature, while saying that its story was repetitive and generic.

Aside from the satisfying parkour movements, critics were also keen on the game’s day/night cycle, which would completely change the style of play. While zombies are fairly docile and easy to avoid during the day, at night they become enraged and will restlessly hunt the player, making it much more difficult to explore and fight during these twilight hours. Despite these positives, as well as good controls and well designed combat, Dying Light just didn’t have that “it factor”. The drab, muted environments were not fun to play in, the aforementioned story was painfully boring and riddled with clichés, and the player protagonist was yet another in a long line of standard, been there done that, action hero dudes that we’d all seen a million times before.

Despite the mixed reception from critics, players were very excited about the game, with Dying Light selling over 1 million copies in its first week, which was enough copies sold to beat out both GTA V and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. By August of 2015 the game had sold over 5 million copies, and that wasn’t the end of it, as the game continued to grow in popularity through word of mouth, selling an astounding 20 million copies by the end of 2022. The success of Dying Light forced Techland to put all of their other games on hold and led to a 2022 sequel, Dying Light 2: Stay Human. As of now, the studio is basically all Dying Light, all the time which, I guess, is a good thing but comes as a double edged sword; guaranteed revenue that keeps people employed, but doesn’t allow you to branch out and try something new that might be more creatively fulfilling.

Going back to 2005, we’ve got the action/adventure game Virtua Quest or, as it was known in Japan, Virtua Fighter Cyber Generation: Ambition of the Judgement Six which, you know, just rolls off the tongue in English. A spin-off of the Virtua Fighter series, Virtua Quest is set in the near future where humans have escaped to virtual reality in order to ignore the reality of their actual world (seems implausible, who would ever do that). In the game, players take on the role of a young boy named Sei, who is recruited into the world of the “Hunters”, a group of VR users that sell data chips found in the Nexus (the virtual world the game takes place in).

After being recruited, Sei discovers that a nefarious group of users, called the Judgement Six, have plans to collect data from the various fighters, in an attempt to take over the world; it’s certainly not Shakespeare (the writing, not the fighting. I don’t think Shakespeare was a good fighter, I wasn’t alive in the late 1500’s’early 1600’s and, thus, cannot verify). Like 2015’s Dying Light, this plot was flimsy and full of clichés, however, unlike Dying Light, critics were not able to find anything positive to say about Virtua Quest.

Some of Virtua Quest’s lowlights include: terrible controls, half-baked platforming sections, sub-par graphics, forgettable sound design, poor enemy AI and, worst of all, an antiquated camera that you couldn’t even move. Overall, Virtua Quest was cited as being mediocre and unimaginative, with highly derivative gameplay. This was the first and only Virtua Quest game, with Sega opting not to revisit the series after only selling, according to VG Chartz, about 30k copies worldwide. If you’ve got a copy still, wow, good for you. As for the rest of you, do not pay the exorbitant price you might see on eBay or retro game shops; Virtua Quest is not worth it.

From 1995, we’ve got a cult classic from video game auteur Hideo Kojima, the Sega CD version of Snatcher. Originally released in 1988 in Japan for the NEC PC-8801 and MSX2, Snatcher is a graphic adventure game (basically a point & click or visual novel game) in which players get wrapped up in a cyberpunk mystery involving androids who are killing humans and replacing them with look-alikes. The story’s protagonist, Gillian Seed, is part of a task force that refer to themselves as “Junkers”, who hunt down these androids, which are called Snatchers. The human replacement mystery is not the only enigma to unravel, as Gillian must also find clues to his past, having his memories recently erased.

In developing Snatcher, Kojima wanted to make something that was closer to an animated film, with more of a focus on storytelling and cutscenes rather than through traditional gameplay. Heavily inspired by the film Blade Runner and the manga Akira, Kojima wanted Snatcher to engage in philosophical ideas on the human condition with mature, though provoking dialogue and characters. These themes would be explored even further in the Metal Gear Solid franchise which ended up being far more popular and well known than Snatcher.

When it released in North America, for the Sega CD, Snatcher was highly praised by critics. While the medium of video games had been around for over twenty years by 1995, mature themes, particularly in home consoles, were exceptionally rare. The serious, violent, and sexual tones of Snatcher helped set it apart from your typical 16-bit platformer of the era. While some critics felt the game’s pacing was too slow, and that it would sometimes meander into more juvenile territory, the overall story was a satisfying award for those players who stuck through it.

Despite Hideo Kojima’s status of one of modern gaming’s greatest developers, Snatcher has been all but ignored by publisher Konami over the last 30 years. The game would get PlayStation and Saturn ports in 1996, but that was it as far as video games. In 2011, developer Suda 51 collaborated with Kojima to create a radio drama (again, only released in Japan) that was released weekly in the month of November. Video game pundits and scholars have been perplexed by the abandonment of Snatcher, wondering why such a critically acclaimed game has gone this long without any kind of retro re-release (shit, we got re-releases of Aero the Acrobat in 2024, why can’t we get Snatcher). Around the time of the radio dram’s release, Kojima stated that a Snatcher sequel would need to sell 500k copies to break even and, it seems, nobody at Konami felt this was attainable. Let it be, I guess.

Movies:

In notable films, 2015 gave us one of the worst reviewed films of that year, the Johnny Depp comedy Mortdecai. A massive financial flop, Mortdecai continued a trend that saw Depp’s star power continue to plummet, after two other high profile failures, The Lone Ranger and Transcendence. Depp and his co-star, Gwyneth Paltrow, both received Razzie nominations for their performances. Director David Koepp would later take some blame, stating that he directed something another person wrote and wasn’t able to make it to the best of his abilities. I mean, throwing the writer under the bus is always a good look, right?

While Mortdecai was terrible and only holds a 12% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it looks like Citizen Kane compared to our 2005 film, Alone in the Dark, which has an abysmal 1% fresh rating. The film, directed by Uwe Boll, claims to be based on the video game series of the same name, but it is far from anything that could be considered an adaptation. Poorly acted, poorly directed, and poorly written (though the writer claims Boll changed much of his original script), Alone in the Dark is not just bad, it’s painfully bad. It is the epitome of what a bad movie is, particularly one that has some kind of budget behind it (reportedly over $20 million). The film would fail to make that back, gross just over $12 million, though it found some life on home video. The film was nominated for two Razzies, Worst Director for Boll and Worst Actress for Tara Reid, both losing to John Asher & Jenny McCarthy for their film Dirty Love.

Moving on to 1995, we’ve got a movie that could run laps around our 2015 & 2005 films, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. Co-written by Linklater and Kim Krizan, the film follows two twenty-something’s as they walk around the city of Vienna until the sun comes up. The film was inspired by a real-life moment in Linklater’s life, in which he and a woman named Amy Lehrhaupt walked around Philadelphia all night (Linklater would reveal in 2013 that Lehrhaupt died in a motorcycle accident a few months before the film released).

Lauded by critics as one of the best movies of the year, Before Sunrise hold a rare 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes (take that, Mortdecai & Alone in the Dark). The film received high praise for its ability to convey complex emotions in such a “small” movie, helped along by its brilliant leads Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Their conversations felt genuine and raw, partly because the two actors claimed to have re-written the script, something that Kim Krizan disagrees with. In a 2016 interview, Delpy claimed that the original script was devoid of romance and that herself & Hawke added all of that in. Krizan disputed Delpy’s claim, though it is telling that Krizan was not asked back to write the next two films.

Before Sunrise is the first of a three film trilogy, followed by Before Sunset and Before Midnight, all released nine years apart. While the film wouldn’t receive any Oscar nominations, it was nominated for something even more prestigious, an MTV Movie Award, in the category of Best Kiss for Hawke & Delpy (they would lose to Jim Carrey & Lauren Holly’s kiss in Dumb & Dumber). Linklater would win the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 1995 Berlin International Film Festival, while the movie itself would show up on several “Best of…” lists over the last 30 years.

Albums:

Moving on to notable albums, 2015 saw the release of Non-Fiction from the R&B singer Ne-Yo. I don’t know a lot about Ne-Yo and I don’t know a lot about this album but, according to Wikipedia, this was Ne-Yo’s sixth consecutive album to reach the Billboard Top 10, making him only the second R&B artist to achieve this feat (the first was Chris Brown). Good for you, Ne-Yo.

From 2005 we have my favorite notable album of the week, LCD Soundsystem’s debut album, LCD Soundsystem. Following their 2002 formation by the bands leader, James Murphy, LCD Soundsystem put out a string of successful singles, making their full debut highly anticipated. Mixing elements of dance music, electronica, and indie rock, LCD Soundsystem felt like a band that could only exist because of what came before them.

That isn’t to say the group is derivative, hardly, but it was like someone took the previous 30 years of pop music, mixed it into a blender, and out came LCD Soundsystem. While the band gained notoriety with their single “Losing My Edge”, it was the song “Daft Punk is Playing at My House” that took the group to the next level and ended up being blasted at every cool kid party for the rest of the decade.

The album was a critical smash, though not quite a commercial success. LCD Soundsystem was able to crack the Billboard Top Dance/Electronic Albums chart, peaking at #6. At the 2006 Grammy Awards, the album was nominated in the Best Dance/Electronic Album category but would lose to The Chemical Brothers album, Push the Button. In subsequent years, LCD Soundsystem has gained a reputation as one of the best albums of the 2000’s, coming in at the #113 spot on Pitchfork’s list of the greatest albums of the decade.

Closing things out, from 1995, we’ve got the album Balance by the legendary rock group Van Halen. A turning point for the band, this would be their last with singer Sammy Hagar, and the last album to feature bassist Michael Anthony on every track. The album was a massive commercial success in the US, debuting at #1 on the Billboard Top 200 and selling over 3 million copies, though it was met with mixed reviews from critics.

Tonally different from anything Van Halen had put out before, Balance flirts with greatness, but ends up falling victim to in-fighting and self indulgence. Listening to it for the first time this past week, I can appreciate the artistry of it all, but Balance is just far too boring to be enjoyable. If this had been put out by any band other than Van Halen, well, we probably wouldn’t be talking about it.

Dying Light (PC/PS4/Xbox One) – Released Jan. 27^th, 2015

Virtua Quest (PS2/GameCube) – Released Jan. 18^th, 2005

Snatcher (Sega CD) – Released Jan. 1995

Finally, I wanted to take a moment to remember the amazing artist, David Lynch, one of my all-time favorite filmmakers. Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks, are three of the greatest works of art I’ve ever come across in my 43 years of life. Everything Lynch did, from his surreal debut, Eraserhead, to the box office bomb, Dune, to his last major feature, the experimental Inland Empire, contains its own cult following and are, likely, someone’s favorite film.

If I’ve learned anything over the last few days, it’s that everyone out there seemed to feel some kind of connection to Lynch. His works sparked our imaginations, made us recoil in fear/disgust, and had us questioning life & reality itself. Plus, he had a really funny voice; remember his voice!!?

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