I’ve often talked about upcoming games by expressing my interest and curiosity in them, as if I was some sort of scientist or detective trying to deduce something. While I’ve played a lot of games that fell in that bucket, there are some that I just never got around to and probably never will. So here are a few games that I’ve been curious about for a while that I’ll probably never play.
PRAEY FOR THE GODS
There are few games that have ever come close to capturing the scale and drama involved in fighting a boss that Shadow of the Colossus did back in 2005, and once more in 2018 with its remake on PlayStation 4. With its core conceit being, “go kill that gigantic monster” and nothing else, it set out to do one thing and nailed it spectacularly.
Praey for the Gods is a game that was Kickstarted back in 2016 that raised upwards of $500,000 on the promise of being a spiritual successor to Shadow of the Colossus. I have no way of proving this, but I suspect the actual remake of Shadow of the Colossus killed a lot of the momentum for Praey for the Gods, but that might just be me projecting.
I don’t know why I never gave it a shot, but I suspect my personal motivations were undercut by the actual remake of Shadow of the Colossus. Also, I believe there are some survival mechanics in the game that turned me off on a product that I was already lukewarm on. It’s a shame, cause it looks like a cool game, but I’ll probably never play it.
BLACKSAD: UNDER THE SKIN
Blacksad: Under the Skin is an adventure game that whether it aims to or doesn’t, reminds me a lot of the tone and style of The Wolf Among Us, a game which I love. In a world filled with anthropomorphic animals, with you taking up the role of Blacksad, a gruff detective kitty who has a gun. Something I didn’t know but suspected to be the case, is that Blacksad is an existing character in graphic novels and comics dating back to the year 2000.
I’ll be completely honest, I still want to play this game. But it’s just a little out of my price range and never seems to dip down far enough for me to take the plunge. I’m curious about it, but not that curious.
GREEDFALL
For a game that got hyped up pretty heavily before it released, it sure did fizzle out quickly. Greedfall is an action RPG that leaned hard into the colonialism aesthetic, boasting muskets and tricorner hats along with a bunch of monsters to fight. It looked a lot like a Dragon Age game, another series that I don’t really have much familiarity with.
I wanted to play this game because I felt like I was missing a good meaty RPG in my life. One of my good friends had bought in hard to the hype and was my basically my informant on this game. His reaction was tepid at best, and I don’t think he ever played more than a few hours of the game. That was troubling because if he, a person notorious for loving these kinds of games didn’t like it, what chance did I have?
Ultimately, thanks to media coverage and word of mouth, I backed away from Greedfall, and even if it suddenly appeared in my Steam library I doubt I’d ever even boot it up.
It’s still infinitely confounding how someone could go from super interested and excited for a game, to not even knowing if they’d play it even if it were given to them. Even if you put money and time aside, something changed from then till now. In most cases, I still actively enjoy these genres and will continue to seek out these kinds of experiences in the future, but when something has been sitting on the shelf for so long, you learn to live without it.
The Bonus World 