Felix “Great Sage” Threepaper
Welcome folks, and happy “124th Anniversary of the only Olympic cricket game (so far)” week!
On 19 August 1900, England and France started a game of cricket in Paris as part of the Olympics. They were the only two teams in the event, and most of the French team was made up of English players who hadn’t been picked for the English team. Needless to say, England won gold, France silver, and cricket was cancelled for the next Olympics due to lack of interest. However, it will make its triumphant return at the 2028 LA Olympics! You may all celebrate by playing a game where one of your build choices takes a long time to pay off.
There’s only one game on my radar this week: Black Myth: Wukong. It’s the ancient Chinese classic Journey to the West given the God of War action game treatment. A lot of the things that first appealed to me are things the game is not: it’s not a sci-fi take on the story, it’s not a Soulsike, and it’s not a parrying game. The Monkey King prefers to dodge, usually while giggling maniacally, and so do I. The art design plays with scale and weirdness like Elden Ring did, but with its own distinctive style of gods and critters, and the graphics are so good, punier last-gen systems can’t run it.
The game is true to the source materials in rendering Monkey King’s bag of tricks: his signature cloud, staff, headband and general impudence are all there to start. There’s also a pile of other upgradeable stances, spells and transformations. In the book, Monkey King has 72 special abilities and I think they are all represented, making for some branchy skill trees. Despite this, the progression does not look very grindy. The level design is not open-world, so each stage’s secrets will not be as deviously hidden as in a FromSoft game. Monkey King will be uber-powered by the endgame.
Monkey King’s nimble fighting style is about doing perfect dodges to build up for powerful flurries, rather than slow, tanky cleaves. Parrying is minimal and non-compulsory—a feature of combat systems that I find so nice, I mention it twice. The overall effect of combat reminds me of the Sony Spiderman games on harder difficulty: you end up with a huge bag of tricks, but you still have to know how to use them properly or you’ll get overwhelmed. It wouldn’t be a big-budget action RPG without loot, either, but don’t expect Monkey King to give up his signature staff.
Many Aussie kids in the 1980s grew up watching the iconic Monkey, an English-language dub of a 1978 Japanese show about Journey to the West, after school on the national TV station. As one of those kids, I am super excited for this. I am not going to monkey about with other games, this gets my GOTW. I can’t wait to get in there and pee on Buddha’s finger fight some demons.
GWJ Word of the Week
Action RPG: A sub-genre of the RPG. There’s a sliding scale of features that tip an RPG into an Action RPG, but it’s hard to pin down because for any feature that you can say defines an Action RPG, there is an Action RPG out there that does not have it.
Originally Action RPG just meant an RPG that had real-time combat, instead of turn-based or menu-based combat, but Fallout 3 changed that with VATS. Action RPGs are said to favour twitchy combat over dialogue choices, then Mass Effect 2 and 3 blurred that line. Often the player plays a fixed character like in The Witcher, but games like Dark Souls let you customise your character into whoever. Ultimately, it comes down to a mix of these and other common game elements, like levelled loot, upgrade trees, unlockable skills, maybe even crafting. All of this makes Action RPG such an amorphous term, it's a useless search category on PS Plus.
Here's the list, in release-date AND alphabetical order!
PC
-
08-20
- Animals
- Apacies: Creatures of the Old West
- Can't revert
- Cute Candies
- Difference
- Driving School
- Dustborn
- Elemental Exiles
- Elite Taxi
- Escape From Warehouse
- Falling Boy
- KOUR 64
- Molten Iron Firework
- Multiplayer Shooters
- Seeing Things
- Street of the Cats
- Sunset Hills
- Szikra
- Tattoo Master
- Terminus: Zombie Survivors
- The Glass Road
-
08-21
- Chaperon Inc.
- Ducks in a Row
- Floops Big House Adventure
- Invention 6
- My Love Empress
- My Lovely Empress
- Naive Boy Super Lash
- Never Forgotten
- NightFall Hollow
- Space Ranger Appleseed
- The Killer
- The Law of Creation
- Tyrant's Realm: Prelude
- Wedding Day
-
08-22
- Aeons Echo
- Alien Paradise
- Balocks
- Doll Grabber
- Elrentaros Wanderings
- Finding Mosey
- H.A.R.D.
- Iron Diamond
- LightRay
- Liminal Void
- Lost Gorga
- Merge Marbles
- Milking Mira!
- My Dear Delirium
- No Signal Escape Room
- Periphery Synthetic
- Pitty Meaty
- Rise Eterna War
- Selatria
- Shells Shooter
- Space Memory: Animals
- SwayBods - physics puzzle game
- Tactical Breach Wizards
- The Upper Hand
- Tiebreak: The Official Game of the ATP and WTA
- Tunnel Escape
- Veiled Skies
- WAKKA Follow the treasure ring
- WGV: Dreamcatcher
- Wild West Dynasty
-
08-23
- Ark's Wonder Dungeon
- Click Click Dig: Prologue
- Concord
- Devious Path
- Dodge Barrage
- Dragon Clicker
- Fit My Cat
- Galaxy Burger
- Lexicon (illum Softworks)
- Multiplication Mayhem
- Paper Plane Arena - A Medieval Fantasy
- PBN - Da Game
- Pure Golf
- Recycling Center Simulator: Prologue
- Slash/Jump
- Split Spirit
- The Eightfold Path
- The Veiled Ones
- Transformative Summer: Life with a TS Companion
- Unakis
- Why Me
-
08-24
- EGG Arena
- Perfect Hand of Nostalpix REMASTER
- Scary Bingo
- SnowDown
- Takeover
-
08-25
- Aestik
- Cat Bait
- Second Rate Superheroes
Xbox Series X
-
08-20
- Black Myth: Wukong
- Dustborn
- Pneumata
-
08-21
- Mangavania 2
- My Love Empress
- My Lovely Empress
- Parking Masters
-
08-22
- Rise Eterna War
Xbox One
-
08-20
- Dustborn
-
08-21
- Mangavania 2
- Parking Masters
-
08-22
- Rise Eterna War
- Tiebreak: The Official Game of the ATP and WTA
-
08-23
- Aery - Ancient Empires
PlayStation 5
-
08-20
- Black Myth: Wukong
- Dustborn
- Pneumata
-
08-22
- Rise Eterna War
- Tales from Toyotoki: Arrival of the Witch
- Tiebreak: The Official Game of the ATP and WTA
-
08-23
- Concord
PlayStation 4
-
08-20
- Dustborn
-
08-22
- Rise Eterna War
- The Ninja Kids
- Tiebreak: The Official Game of the ATP and WTA
Nintendo Switch
-
08-20
- Inti Creates Gold Archive Collection
- Stumble Guys
-
08-21
- Energy Lab
- Mangavania 2
- Mika and The Witch's Mountain
- My Lovely Empress
- White Eternal
-
08-22
- Argol - Kronoss' Castle
- As Per My Last Email
- Ataraxie
- Coloring Book Simulator
- Colorizing
- GP CLUB LIFE Motorsports Team
- Korean Drone Flying Tour Jeju Island-1
- Natsuno-Kanata: Beyond Summer
- QuietMansion1
- Ring Sculptors
- Rise Eterna War
- Sky Airplane Racer: Flight & Fight Simulator
- Tales from Toyotoki: Arrival of the Witch
- The Ninja Kids
- Verne: The Shape of Fantasy
- XI Columbus
-
08-23
- Ecchi Memories
- Hatch Tales
- Lost in Heart of Chernobyl - Survival
- Magnus Trilogy
- Pixel Retro Drift - Arcade Car Racing
- Thermonuclear
-
08-24
- Underground Station
-
08-25
- Shadowblade Knight Symphony
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