Immortals of Aveum may no longer be July’s hotly anticipated game, but there is one game swept under a rug recently that should have taken that pedestal. Immortals of Aveum’s hands-on previews received praise for how crisp and snappy gameplay feels as a high fantasy FPS, with lore and atmosphere also being favorable. This is huge for EA and shows that Call of Duty- or Doom-like shooters still have a lot of room to stretch their legs in unique genres. Fort Solis’ third-person space thriller seems much less unique, but would’ve been perfect to take Immortals of Aveum’s cozy July window.
Not much is currently known about Fort Solis and that is likely by design. The main element carrying the game’s marketing and interest right now is the fact that it stars Roger Clark and Troy Baker and looks to rely heavily on their performances. While Immortals of Aveum has shown enough to either sell fans on it or not, the opposite is true of Fort Solis. Either way, with only a handful of weeks before Immortals of Aveum was originally meant to come out, Fort Solis has missed an opportunity to have a clear launch window and instead decided to follow Immortals of Aveum into the back half of August.
Fort Solis' Release Date Lands It Amid a Busy End of Summer
Fort Solis recently announced its August 22 release date, only one day after Immortals of Aveum’s August 21 release date, adding it to an immensely packed end of the summer. Fort Solis has been clandestine and elusive thus far, which is in its favor if it does wish to keep everything under wraps before it’s fully in players’ hands, but many fans are still unsure about the game due to how little gameplay has actually been shared, even in a hands-on demo preview from months ago.
This is a double-edged blade now because on the one hand not sharing anything more could give players as much intrigue imaginable, but on the other, it may dissuade fans who are adamant about seeing what kind of gameplay it features before they decide to spend money on it. Both are fair, and it’ll be interesting to see which course of action Fort Solis takes leading up to the end of August. That said, launching sooner rather than later could have been a boon for Fort Solis in avoiding a jam-packed end of August, with Immortals of Aveum, Fort Solis, Blasphemous 2, Armored Core: Fires of Rubicon, and more releasing within days of one another.
July only has Exoprimal now as its big Capcom game, and would have made a snug home for Fort Solis otherwise. Fallen Leaf and Dear Villagers’ thriller seems to want as quiet and solitary of a pre-release ruckus as possible, but its launch may now suffer from the same obscurity due to the sheer volume of games coming out in that single week.
There aren’t many high-profile horror or thriller games coming out in the near future besides The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Alan Wake 2, though, and perhaps Fort Solis could be the perfect game for fans who may want a break from high fantasy and superheroes as the year closes out. Starfield will almost undoubtedly take the cake as the science-fiction game fans will remember from this year, especially with it coming out a mere week and a half after Fort Solis now, but Fort Solis’ thriller approach to science-fiction could help give it the edge it needs to distinguish itself from the games it is enveloped by.
Fort Solis launches on August 22, 2023, for PC and PS5.
