This Week’s New Games

This week’s new games include a new game inspired by the games of Giant Squid—and a new game made by Giant Squid. There’s also the first console release of a Game Boy Advance game that wasn’t released until 23 years after development started, and a retail sim that we gave a really good review to last week. Here’s what Endless Mode will be playing this week.

Sword of the Sea

Platforms: PlayStation 5, PC
Release Date: August 19

This week starts off with one of our favorite games of the year so far, Giant Squid’s Sword of the Sea. Made by some of the same devs behind Journey, Abzû, and The Pathless, Sword of the Sea combines the mythic, esoteric exploration of those games with the fast motion and trick-based mechanics of a skating or surfing game. It’s peaceful, graceful, elegant, and yet also forces you to score a certain number of points in a half-pipe before time runs out. As I wrote in Endless Mode’s review, which ran this morning, “skaters and surfers talk about the serenity they feel when everything comes together and they feel as one with their board, and that’s a high you’ll feel often in Sword of the Sea.”

Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution

Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Release Date: August 19

WayForward’s platforming cartoon genie returns in her sixth game, which was originally planned for the Game Boy Advance over 20 years ago. (Hence the name, natch.) Risky Revolution was canned in 2004 after two years of development, but in the decades since WayForward established itself as a reliable producer of quality retro-styled games, reviving the Shantae character in the process. And with her second wind fully in force, it was time to return to this overlooked project. If Risky Revolution plays as well as it looks, it should be another fun, old-school platformer that charmingly evokes gaming’s past. It had a bit of a rocky launch when its physical edition arrived for the Game Boy Advance earlier this year, but this week’s digital release on modern hardware shouldn’t see those issues.

Discounty

Platforms: Playstation 5,  Xbox Series X|S, switch, PC
Release Date: August 21

It’s been a solid 50 years since chain stores and shopping malls started killing off old downtowns. I can’t count the number of decades I have been alive in on a single hand and yet I’m still too young to have ever known the kind of thriving downtowns and small towns you see in old movies and TV shows. So a game about a megachain threatening a local town’s economy doesn’t sound like the most pressing or relevant thing one could play. Wallace Truesdale’s Endless Mode review of Discounty has me interested in trying this one out, though, because it seems to be more about the people in the town than the socioeconomic pressure cooker in which they are forced to exist. As Wallace wrote, “the game’s best characters realize themselves as complex human beings who don’t fall into binary categories of good or bad, but simply people doing their best to navigate a system that’s practically abandoned them,” and that makes me think Discounty might be worth my attention.

Herdling