Game Freak’s entire identity is intrinsically linked to the behemoth that is Pokemon that it’s easy to forget that they develop other games as well. The first episode of Game Freak’s live drawing and interview video series on YouTube features legendary artist Ken Sugimori drawing a character from the studio’s 1994 game Pulseman, and next year the studio will also be releasing ‘Town’ on Nintendo Switch, an RPG that’s entirely set within… well, a town. A recent game of theirs that only released on PC, a platformer known as Giga Wrecker, mostly went under the radar after its release, but they’ll be hoping the game will receive a new lease of life when Giga Wrecker ALT comes to consoles.
In collaboration with indie and Japanese game publisher Rising Star Games, Giga Wrecker ALT will be an expanded port of the original game. The game itself is a 2D platformer where you control a girl named Reika who has a power known s ARCHE that allows her to construct objects like weapons or platforms using rubble and scrap metal, with the need to destroy the environment and use rubble a requirement in order to beat enemies and clear each stage. The music for the game is being handled by Shinji Hosoe, known for his work on Tekken, among other projects.
In addition to the content of the PC release, this new release adds 20 new puzzle stages to the campaign, a non-playable second character who can help if a player is stuck, a harder Ironman mode that means you’ll take 5x more damage alongside a brand-new English translation localisation. The final release will include 11 languages, these being Japanese, English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Korean and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
The game is currently not yet dated, but will be coming to Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4 and Xbox One. While Rising Star Games will be publishing the game digitally, Limited Run games will be creating a limited physical print run that will be available on Nintendo Switch and Playstation 4. I’m quite a fan of the visual style and the gameplay concept sounds rather unique, making this a title I personally will be making sure to keep an eye on as it edges closer to release.