Featuring new trailers for Street Fighter 6, Baldur’s Gate 3, Tchia, and more.
Sony’s first State of Play of 2023 gave fans a little bit of everything. Some neat VR games were shown off. Resident Evil 4 made a brief appearance, along with a new puzzle game from the makers of Tetris Effect, a heaping helping of the Suicide Squad, and more. Here are some of the highlights from the presentation.
It always looks like the Guardians of Destiny 2 are having so much fun with their cool spaceships and guns with impossible names and backstories. With a new trailer for the next expansion Lightfall, the Traveller is under attack (again) by a malevolent force (of course), and it’s poor Zavala’s job to rally the troops with the help of new human-adjacent allies. You can protect the big, white, fancy ball on February 28th.
In Goodbye Volcano High, graduating high school is like the end of the world, literally. This narrative adventure game follows the exploits of Fang and their saurian pals as they navigate an uncertain future in the closing days of high school. Talk with friends, make choices, design logos for your band, and practice your latest single, all while struggling to decide what kind of future you want in a world that may not exist for very much longer. (After all, they’re dinosaurs — there aren’t too many around anymore unless you count chickens and alligators.) Check it out on June 15th.
Your ears do not deceive you: that is indeed J.K. Simmons narrating this newest trailer for Baldur’s Gate 3. It seems like, in addition to all the be-tentacled mind flayers, you’ll also have to contend with Simmons’ villain Ketheric Thromthe. No matter, as I plan on doing to him what I will to every enemy I encounter in Faerûn: shove ‘em off something high. Baldur’s Gate 3 releases on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox on August 31st.
Not too much is known about Tchia, an adventure game that seems inspired by the coolest, calmest parts of Breath of the Wild. This newest trailer features an intrepid little girl climbing trees, piloting a catamaran across beautiful pristine waters, and, with the help of a bit of magic, inhabiting the body of a dolphin to explore a coral reef. We’ll find out more when Tchia launches on March 21st.
As an elder millennial, it’s really hard to swallow that Naruto’s been around for 20 years. I was in college when Shippuden came out. (Kids these days don’t know how good they have it. Remember when we waited through months of filler episodes for Shippuden’s release?) Anyway, Naruto’s grown now with kids of his own, and that means they get their own Ninja Storm game now, too. Naruto x Boruto Ultimate Ninja Storm Connections launches sometime in 2023 and features characters from Naruto’s 20-year history, allowing players to relive the show’s entire story from “ROCKS” to… whatever Boruto’s theme is now (which will never be as good as Asian Kung-Fu Generation’s “Haruka Kanata”).
Capcom’s slowly drip-feeding us all the characters we can expect in Street Fighter 6. So far, we’ve seen old favorites like Ken and Chun-Li while we’ve been introduced to new characters like the stylish Kimberly and the fun-loving Jamie. In this newest crop of fighters, Cammy and Zangief make their return, and appearing for the first time is the indigenous wind-controlling fighter Lily. I gotta say, I really do appreciate the brown girls Capcom’s putting in Street Fighter 6, and I definitely appreciate the wall of man that is Zangief. Here’s hoping we get more brown girls and muscle men when Street Fighter 6 launches on June 2nd.
