It’s a new month, and that means a slate of new game releases. 2022 has already been off to a mind-numbingly busy start, and April looks to be a little bit of a breather. At least for those of us whose job it is to follow Everything. Yeesh. Anyway, quantity is fairly low for game releases in April, but there are still some neat and interesting highlights. Check ’em out!
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (April 5)
Star Wars came back in a huge way with The Force Awakens, but after one game the famous Lego Star Wars series didn’t follow through. Series fatigue was definitely a factor, alongside the weird cultural mess the next two movies made. So instead of being roped into the Star Wars discourse, a game comprising the Whole Entire Thing was made. This may be the last we see of this series for a long time, and it looks like Traveller’s Tales Games is going out with a bang. Or maybe there’s a dozen more Lego Marvels in the tubes. Who can say?
House of the Dead Remake (April 7)
Part of a small highlight reel in a Nintendo Direct, the bizarrely disrespected House of the Dead Remake is on my shortlist of Games I Need to Play Yesterday. Sega’s classic light gun arcade series hasn’t exactly maintained its glory days, but a remake is worth checking out for sure. Especially since it’s being handled by Forever Entertainment, which facilitated the pretty solid Panzer Dragoon remakes.
Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition (April 7)
There isn’t much else to be said about this one I haven’t already squawked about elsewhere. But still, Chrono Cross is a rare sort of game, a product of Squaresoft’s early 2000s hubris and drive for experimentation. And even that said, the real star of the show is Radial Dreamers, a visual novel follow-up to Chrono Trigger that was eventually molded into Chrono Cross, and never localized for obvious reasons. Now it’s like, a real, official thing and that’s just unhinged on a new level for 2022.
Pocky & Rocky Reshrined (April 21)
Natsume hasn’t quite been the same since it lost Harvest Moon and Kunio-kun, but it does have a rich history of other games. And most of those games run for multiple hundreds of dollars on the secondary market. Luckily games like Wild Guns Reloaded have alleviated the wallet-pain of game preservation, and Pocky & Rocky Reshrined is the latest on the list. Developed by folks who were involved with the SNES original, this is a remake of an adorable and deceptively intense scrolling shooter and anyone interested in retro gaming should play it! You can also check out the original if you have a Nintendo Switch Online subscription.
Nintendo Switch Sports (April 29)
Wii Sports was a juggernaut, the kind of software that explodes beyond the typical gaming audience. That ended up working against the Wii at the end of the day, but there’s no denying the power of cute little sports games. So here’s a new attempt at capturing that lightning in a Nintendo Switch. Will it work? I dunno! But that’s probably the biggest release this month.
Honorable mentions for April 22 include the latest MLB The Show, new Switch ports of 13 Sentinels, Tormented Souls and Nobody Saves the World, and Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. It’s a bit of a slow month compared to the madness of February and March, but there’s still solid genre variety on the table. What game are you checking out this month? Are you catching up on something instead? Let us know on Twitter or something!
