This edition of RPGs Coming This Week has a heavy adventure game slant, with a hint of… bullet hell tactics? Never say creativity in gaming is dead because you just don’t know where to look! Which, incidentally, is the point of this column! So let’s dive in, shall we?
Maid Café on Electric Street – November 18th (Windows)
Cozy barista/dating sim with kawaii waifus? Cozy barista/dating sim with kawaii waifus.
Maid Café on Electric Street is a new adventure title from Playism, and it puts you in the shoes of a young burnout who ends up managing a run-down maid café in Osaka’s Nipponbashi district. You become the boss of four ladies, and you naturally end up dating one of them. You can choose from the shy and nerdy type, the outgoing gyaru, the goth chuunibyou, or the low-key shrine maiden with a secret hobby.
Perhaps my favorite thing about Maid Café on Electric Street is that it depicts a lot of real-life stores and restaurants around Den Den Town. Even if the dating or barista sim elements aren’t your speed, you might enjoy visiting small, pixel-art versions of Super Potato, Game Tanteidan, Surugaya, and more.
Touhou Spell Carnival – November 19th (PS5, PS4, Switch)
If you like your tactics with a side of bullet hell, Touhou Spell Carnival might be the game for you. This Touhou Project fangame (from developer Compile Heart) attempts to unite the signature grid-based layout of strategy RPGs with the deluge of projectiles common among shmups, and by god it actually seems to work.
Touhou Spell Carnival achieves the impossible by tossing out the turn-based gameplay and placing the onus on players to weave through the bullets. The tactics aspect is alive and well in the pre-battle stage, though; expect to tool around with your characters’ skill loadouts, placements, and more, since you need to mind enemy types. Compile Heart may be cooking here, and even if the result doesn’t quite land, props to the team for trying something new.
Loco Motive – November 21st (Switch, Windows)
It’s kinda been a good year for point-and-click games, hasn’t it? Feels like we’ve had a string of excellent titles lately, like The Rise of the Golden Idol and Clock Tower: Rewind, and I couldn’t be happier that this little niche is as healthy as it is. Coming this week is Loco Motive, a slapstick mystery caper with a pixel-art aesthetic calling back to the old-school LucasArts adventure games.
It’s got a classic premise: a murder takes place on a luxury train in the 1930s, and it’s up to a motley trio — a crime novelist, lawyer, and undercover spy — to uncover the truth. If you’re looking for an unserious whodunit to get immersed in for a weekend, I suspect Loco Motive should be under consideration.
Also Coming This Week
Genshin Impact – November 20th (XSX)
The ultra-popular Genshin Impact finally makes its way to Xbox Series X|S this week, alongside an extensive new patch. Diehard Xbox fans can now sink a thousand hours (and hopefully not a thousand bucks) into one of the biggest RPGs in the world.
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