Upcoming Games I'm Very Excited About (Part 2)
Today's entries are more 'yes and' of existing stuff but that's ok!
When I started writing yesterday's blog post I had planned on doing about 6 but as I got through the first three and looked at the clock I realized breaking it up into two posts was for the best, so here we go.
Oh and I should note: nothing in today or yesterday's post has (to my knowledge) any AI use; no steam disclosures, no comments from the devs but who knows. Hard to trust anything these days.
Let's dive in:
Threads of Time
Developer: Riyo Games
Release Date: TBD
Link: Steam
Man, despite various amounts of mixed disappointment in this particular space (SNES-era JRPG nostalgia pulls) I am still not fully immune to "Listen, Chrono Trigger was good, right?" and like - shit, Threads of Time looks like it's going even harder on that than Sea of Stars did, which is saying something that this because I fell for that game's bait and was severely let down lmao1!
Threads of Time looks like it's taking visual lessons from Octopath with the sort of 2.5D visuals but also it's like, even more ridiculously HEY REMEMBER CHRONO TRIGGER than anything else in this space. They didn't need to copy the time periods lmfao, there's no reason it needs to be 1000 AD, 12,000 BC etc...but man. It looks fucken great. I can't wait to dig in and hopefully have good things to say about it. This can be my lucy football, I'm ok with that.
Feather's Edge
Developer: Clockwork Acorn
Release Date: TBD
Link: Steam
I don't want to be reductive on this one but it's hard not to look at the visual style down to even the font choices and not think "Oh so it's a Silksong" - but watching the trailer, it feels more like "What if Silksong where the Ori and the Blind Forest 'bash' ability was the primary method of attack" and you know what I'm here for it.
Silksong was one of my 2025 games of the year so I guess I'm not really surprised that this trailer peaked my interest but as with all things that are (maybe this isn't even strong enough a word) heavily showing their influences, I'm hoping that's just what gets you in the door and there's far more under the surface. It does look legitimately fun to traverse in the way presented in the trailer.
Ironwing Valiant: Record of Astera
Developer: Tiger Team
Release Date: TBD
Link: Steam
I get that this installment of the games I'm excited about is basically a list of "games clearly evoking other games" but I'm ok with it because sometimes "that thing you like is getting a 'yes and'" is neat! And maybe there's more under the surface!
For what it's worth, I'd heard about Ironwing Valiant from a friend and got interested from the gameplay/mechanical standpoint before I even knew what it looked like; watching the trailer made me realize "oh so they're doing Valkyria Chronicles art style2" and I feel somewhat better about it going in that order. Frankly I think making a VC about mechs proper instead of tanks and ground troops is cool as hell, and like, yea there are...shall we say litigiously similar versions of mechs from famous franchises in this trailer alone and it's almost evoking the combat from Robotech: Battlecry...but doesn't it look sick as hell?
There's a playtest available but I'm probably going to hold off for release since the whole aforementioned "need to focus on moving first". Still. I'm tempted lmfao.
Anyway, thanks for reading. Here's your end-of-post cat; his name is Mastodon and he's really unsure about the whole moving boxes thing.
I'm on the record in my Chained Echoes post from last Blaugust talking about how much I did not enjoy Sea of Stars; it tried WAY too hard to ride on the "Hey remember Chrono Trigger" coattails and fell miserably short. I don't envy a dev trying to do that but also, the story was god awful. "The Fleshmancer". Cannot take that shit seriously. Stop trying to make Garl happen.↩
I saw a brief gameplay thing from the demo and the 'mission select' screen is just a 1:1 copy of the Valkyria Chronicles newspaper screen. Like, shameless.↩