Tuesday, 19 June 2018

Thoughts on E3 (Part 2): Release Dates & New Trailers


In today's E3 thoughts, I want to focus on some new trailers for games that I've been following for a while. One of them even got a release date! (Something that was generally in short supply at E3, as we'll see...)


New trailer & release date: The Sinking City
I have made no secret of my love for developer Frogwares, who make those wonderfully cheesy Adventures of Sherlock Holmes games that I can’t get enough of. After their work on my personal favourite, the Lovecraftian mashup Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, I was sorry when they handed over development of Call of Cthulhu to studio Cyanide. Their upcoming game The Sinking City, however, seems poised to make up for my disappointment: another take on the detective genre within the Lovecraft milieu, which shares its darker and gloomier aesthetic with the latest game in the Holmes series. March 21st, 2019 is soon enough to be excited about, but far enough in the future to feel like an achievable release date. Definitely topping my 2019 wish list.


New trailer: Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game
It didn’t get the release date I was hoping for, but since I’d put my money in advance on Call of Cthulhu as E3’s “Most Likely To Be Delayed To 2019”, it’s possible that no news is good news, and that we could still be on track to have this one by the end of the year. The game still looks stunning, even if the new trailer doesn’t really give any more information than the one from a year ago. Since it seems that Call of Cthulhu and The Sinking City started life as the same game, it’s currently hard to see any major differences between them, but as a fan of both detective games and Lovecraftian pastiche, I don’t entirely mind getting two very similar games on the theme a few months apart.


New trailer: Death Stranding
Speaking of starting life as the same game, I’ve been having fun trying to work out exactly how much material from the cancelled Silent Hills has made its way into Death Stranding. On the surface there seems to be little common ground, but I sense some crossover between the theme of rebirth in Death Stranding and the hints of cyclical repetition and alternate selves that were teased in P.T. My current favourite fan theory - that Death Stranding’s infamous “babies in jars” are clones, designed to protect against the accelerated ageing caused by the game’s monsters by quickly replacing their “parents” - has added a lot of fuel to this fire. Parents and babies, cycles of birth and rebirth, a version of yourself who is both “you” and “not you”... am I describing Death Stranding or the monologue from the end of P.T.? Either way, I’m very interested to see more of this one.

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