Earlier this week, the culture desk asked me to recommend four games for our annual autumn arts preview. Reader: I struggled. The period between September and November is usually stacked with AAA releases as publishers jostle for space in the historically lucrative run-up to Christmas. Even in this era of “live service” games such as Fortnite, Destiny and Genshin Impact (which ignore external sales patterns in favour of their own ever-updating season passes) you’re usually guaranteed an autumnal belch of major gaming releases.
But this year … not so much. September is mostly about The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (below). October is the Silent Hill 2 reboot, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and at a stretch Sonic X Shadow Generations. We have to wait until November for a truly busy blockbuster lineup with Slitterhead, Football Manager 2025, Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl all lining up for our wintery delectation. The long anticipated role-playing game Avowed has been delayed until 2025, while Indiana Jones and the Great Circle still hasn’t been given a release date beyond “2024”, which doesn’t seem promising.
Why is this? There are a few possible explanations. 2023 was a very busy year, overloaded with major releases such as Baldur’s Gate 3, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Alan Wake 2, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Starfield and Diablo IV. Meanwhile, 2025 is already looking mightily busy with GTA 6, Death Stranding 2, Monster Hunter Wilds and Civilization 7 all standing about flexing their muscles. And the burst of development activity that took place during Covid is now subsiding – as we’re seeing in the disgraceful number of redundancies and studio closures throughout the industry. Perhaps a fallow year was to be expected.
The good news is that thinning out the attention-hogging mega titles means that smaller games will have the chance to grab an audience. September has some really interesting original and independent titles, such as the weird adventures Phoenix Springs (pictured top) and Demonschool, fascinating retro collection UFO 50 and Atari-era throwback Yars Rising. My son Zac is desperate to play October’s Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero, while as an ancient fan of the comic books, cartoons and 1990s Konami arcade games, I’ll be enjoying TMNT: Mutants Unleashed. Life is Strange: Double Exposure should also benefit from the extra space it’ll get for its time-shifting murder mystery.
There may be something comforting about having dozens of gigantic multi-year video game franchises lobbed at you over the space of 12 weeks. Like summer blockbuster movies, they mark out the structure of our years; they tell us where we were and what we were doing at key moments in our lives. In a world where old certainties are crumbling, the rituals of entertainment provide stability and shared expectation. We may never again have people queueing round the block to see the latest Star Wars film, or forming a line outside Game or Electronics Boutique at midnight to buy Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, but those spectacles of consumer enthusiasm truly meant something.
And yet, quieter years give us different options. You get the time and space to strike out from habitual purchases. 2014 is often named as a “bad” year for games due to its lack of huge tentpole releases. But it was also the year of Alien: Isolation, Titanfall and Shovel Knight. It was the year I put hundreds of hours into Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor despite not being a Lord of the Rings fan at all. It was the year of OlliOlli and The Evil Within and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. These are games I might not have had a chance to play properly had they not been given space. I’m so glad I did.
Anyway, I did manage to pick out four games for the autumn arts preview, and as I started to think about it more broadly, many others emerged with them. So use this coming autumn to try something new, something original, something you can go on to share and recommend. Those games will get you through autumn and winter just as well, and you’ll have your own stories to tell at the end of it.
What to play
With the lack of a dedicated Olympics game this year, it’s worth revisiting Nintendo Switch Sports, especially as a new update has added basketball to the roster. You can play alone or against friends (both online and local), shaking the Joycon to dribble and flicking your wrist to shoot. There are mini-games, too, to test your dunking abilities. Five other Olympic events are included in the collection, so you can easily arrange your own slightly chaotic sports tournament.
Available on: Nintendo Switch
Approximate play time: As much as you like
What to read
Indie studio Innersloth scored an unexpectedly huge hit with its traitorous Among Us game during lockdown. Now the company is using that money to fund small developers with innovative ideas – a heartening story.
There are fresh rumours of a new Half-Life game! References to a Valve development codenamed ‘Project White Sands’ were found on the online portfolio of video game actor Natasha Chandel. The mention has since been scrubbed from the site, but that’s not going to stop the rumour mill.
I do love highly specific video game deep dives, and Polygon is a great source. The site’s latest is a list of all the banned and unaired episodes of the Pokémon cartoon, complete with explanations. It’s a wild ride.
What to click
Tactical Breach Wizards puts the magic into military tactics games
‘If you do nothing, you can speedrun this game’: While Waiting, a game about biding your time
Grab your Ouija board: behind Fear the Spotlight’s 90s-inspired horror
Over 300 video game actors protest over unregulated AI use in Hollywood
Crushing it: why millions of people still can’t stop playing Candy Crush
Question Block
This week’s query came in from X user Dan Chambers, who asked:
“Can the Switch 2 or whatever it’s called in the end ever hope to live up to the Switch, or is it doomed to comparable failure? And what are some of the key fundamentals for it to succeed?”
Little is known about Nintendo’s next console, apart from the fact that it’s due before the end of March 2025, and that rumoured specs include an eight core Cortex-A78AE processor, 8GB of RAM, and 64GB of internal storage. That’s fine, but it isn’t very exciting, and nobody comes to Nintendo consoles for technical oomph.
With the exception of the SNES, the company has always done best when radically updating the form factor of its machines – the SNES to the N64, the GameCube to the Wii – while it has struggled (comparatively speaking) when making more technologically guided updates – namely the GameCube (beloved by some, but a sales disappointment) and the Wii U. The Switch 2, at the moment, looks to belong in the latter category; we’re not hearing about wild new ideas in terms of interface or interaction.
What it needs is a highly visual, easily understood gamechanging concept – something that can easily be shown in a few seconds of footage from a new Super Mario game. Perhaps there will be some new feature of the built-in screen, or some local multiplayer concept we’ve not seen before. The design philosophy of Nintendo’s late great tech wizard Gunpei Yokoi still stands: lateral thinking with withered technologies. A big OLED screen just won’t cut it.
If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.
