So I heard that you are going to be spending a lot of time inside this April? That’s cool. I am too. Luckily, there are lots of upcoming new games to keep you busy. We have a diverse line-up of games coming out this month, from experimental indies, to three high-profile remakes, some of which might qualify for the biggest game release this year. Long story short, there’s lots of entertainment on the market just waiting for you to responsibly buy digitally and download from the safety of your own home.
In Other Waters (April 3 – PC, Switch)
In Other Waters is an interesting adventure game that puts you in the role of an A.I. attempting to guide and aid a lost xenobiologist in her exploration of an ocean planet. You never quite see this character. All you can do is hear her voice, and see data from the world around her. It’s sort of the next evolution of the text adventure, an experimental game in which you have to fill in the blanks of the action yourself. With heavy themes of transhumanism and a core mystery to uncover, this is sure to satisfy the visual novel crowd, or just anyone looking for a good story.
STAAAAAAARS! Capcom’s much awaited remake of Resident Evil 3 is coming out, with the fresh success of their Resident Evil 2 remake still in our minds. Resident Evil 3 was a bit more of a strange experimental title for Capcom. In fact, it was originally supposed to be a side-story while Code: Veronica was supposed to be the actually third entry in the series. It’s certainly not the golden boy that Resident Evil 2 was. However, it still holds an important place in many a Resident Evil fans mutated zombified heart. Will Resident Evil 3 be a hit, or will it forever live in its older sibling’s shadow?
If you’ve never heard of the Disaster Report series, this is a great time to hop in. It basically puts you center stage in a disaster movie. Natural disasters rock a city and it’s up to you to not only survive them, but to help other’s survive them as well. Your decisions matter and could mean life or death for civilians facing horrible earthquakes and much worse.
Dreamscaper: Prologue (April 8 – PC)
Dreamscaper is a little bit of everything. It’s a social game. It’s a rogue-like. It’s a dungeon crawler. It’s a puzzler. It’s an RPG. It’s a weird genre twisting and shifting game that explores the realm of dreams and deals with major issues like depression and mental illness. Every “run” you make is a dream, and the further you get in your dreams, the more positive progress you can make in your waking life. Then, by doing things in the real world, you can become more powerful in your dreams. It’s an almost Persona-like gameplay look, just to throw yet another game genre into Dreamscaper’s already impressive mix. The full version isn’t coming out this April. Just a prologue to get all our appetites wet. But it’s still worth checking out.
The Procession to Calvary (April 9 – PC)
It’s an old Sierra style point and click adventure game done in the style of Monty Python’s: Flying Circus. It’s genius. There’s really not much more to say than that. If you want a good helping of that old British humor with public domain works of art as your setting, this is for you.
This is it. The big one. The release everyone is waiting for. A massive 100GB, reinterpretation of only the Midgar section of Final Fantasy VII. It’s one of Square Enix’s biggest projects yet, and while many of us began skeptical, demo after demo showed that Square is really doing a phenomenal job capturing the spirit of the original while modernizing its gameplay and script. Final Fantasy VII is considered by many to be one of the greatest games of all time. Will the remake hold that title as well? I can’t wait to play and find out.
Someday You’ll Return (April 14 – PC)
Every month there is a new experimental walking simulator, and Someday You’ll Return is this month’s. It’s psychological horror game heavily inspired by Silent Hill. When your daughter goes missing, you track her via GPS to a location that you spent a lot of time in as a child, until you experienced some unknown trauma. As you search for her, you uncover your own painful and tormented path, while dealing with some trippy time, memory, and puzzle mechanics. I suppose that gives it enough gameplay to make it a little more than just a walking simulator, but still, you won’t be fighting zombies or abominations here, nor will you be running from a guy with a pyramid for a head. This game is all atmosphere.
The Flower Collectors (April 21 – PC)
The Flower Collectors is an interesting mystery game that puts you in the shoes of a wheelchair bound shut-in ex-cop. Your goal, uncover the truth of a murder from your home, with nothing but your binoculars, a camera, and the help of a young journalist to help you. The Flower Collector’s is an odd one-room game that tasks you with uncovering a city full of secrets without ever getting close enough to touch them.
Help Will Come Tomorrow (April 21 – PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch)
Set in the wake of the 1917 Trans-Siberian railway crash, Help Will Come Tomorrow puts you in control of a group of refugees, stuck in the frosty wilderness, just trying to survive. Like most survival sims, there is a heavy focus on resource and time management, however Help Will Come Tomorrow also has an interesting focus on class struggle and relations.
ITTA (April 22 – PC, Switch)
ITTA is a bullet hell boss-rush game that tasks you with discovering who killed your family, while being guided by the spirit of your dead cat. It’s a little grim. The big draw to ITTA is it’s magnificent sprite art, which renders both a somber spiritual world and a dangerous projectile riddled battlefield in incredible detail.
Filament (April 23 – PC)
Filament is a two sided puzzle game. One side has you walking around a deserted spaceship, uncovering the secrets of its missing crew. The other has you controlling a small power conduit robot that has to solve special puzzles by wrapping a filament of light around structures. This is going to be one of those heavily emotional puzzlers, similar to The Witness, which packs a lot of emotional punch in some rather simple mechanics.
Predator: Hunting Grounds (April 24 – PC, PS4)
Predator: Hunting Grounds has had a bit of a mixed reception once the public got its hands on it over the game’s first trial weekend. However, its concept is still so great it’s really worth checking out. This is a one versus many Evolve-style shooter, which puts a single predator against many humans. The humans have a series of goals to carry out while the predator has only one goal: hunt.
Yes, believe it or not Square Enix actually has two major RPG remake projects coming out this month. In fact it’s a shame that Trials of Mana is sharing a release month with Final Fantasy VII Remake because it will most certainly be overlooked because of it. Well, I’m here to tell you not to sleep on this full remake of Seiken Densetsu 3, the direct sequel to Secret of Mana. It is one of the great 16-bit RPGs that never made it to America, and it deserves to be played, especially with how much effort Square is clearly putting into this full remake.
Biomass (April 28 – PC)
Biomass is, in a word, hard. It’s a sprite-art Metroidvania with Dark Souls style combat mechanics that is not afraid to absolutely slaughter you. But that’s a feature, not a bug. This is a game about triumph, a game in which you scrape away every tiny bit of progress you make. That just makes every victory feel that much sweeter.
Gears Tactics (April 28 – PC, Xbox One)
Gears Tactics really does what it says on the tin. It’s a turn-based tactical RPG, similar to XCOM, but set in the Gears universe with Gears characters. It’s a prequel, set 12 years before the first Gears of War, in the very early days of the Locust War. It’s a very character driven story, so you probably won’t be sending randomly generated troops to perma-death in this one.
Sakura Wars (April 28 – PS4)
Sakura Wars is a soft reboot of the Sakura Wars franchise. What is Sakura Wars? Well it’s an alternate history visual novel action role-playing giant mecha battle game/dating sim. Yep. It’s pretty much the most anime game coming out this month. I could go on about its alternate history Taisho period, or its gameplay loop which rewards you with better battle units should you make good choices in the dating sim portions of the game. However, I think I’ll just say that the central mechanic, the Live & Interactive Picture System, is code-named LIPS, and that should tell you all about whether or not you are the type of person who would enjoy this game.
Moving Out (April 28 – PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch)
Moving Out gives new meaning to the term “couch co-op”, not because we will be sitting on the same couch with each other, but because we will both be working together to throw a couch through a window and onto a moving truck. If you are a fan of co-op task based party games, like Overcooked, you will absolutely love Moving Out, as it has the same frantic co-op gameplay with an even more absurd premise of high speed moving. Moving might be one of the most stressful life experiences, but it becomes a lot less stressful when you can just chuck everything out a window.
What April release are you most looking forward to? Let us know in the comments.
