So far as I can tell, choosing when to release your videogame is a kind of haruspicy. Just a collection of folk rituals, nuggets of received wisdom, and a smattering of hard data that you somehow have to translate into a decision that—done wrong—could utterly sink your game. What’s the right choice? What’s the wrong one? It’s almost impossible to tell until after release.
Usually, anyway, but sometimes fate is kind enough to make the choice glaringly obvious. That’s what’s just happened with Enotria: The Last Song (via PCGamesN), an upcoming soulslike from Italian studio Jyamma Games. Promising a world “inspired by Italian folklore where the brightest sun casts the darkest shadow,” the game was originally set for a June 21 release date, which probably sounded like a great time to release a game right until Shadow of the Erdtree’s trailer dropped last week and announced a release date of, ah, June 21.
The unfortunate coincidence led Jyamma CEO Giacomo Greco to take to Enotria’s Discord, announcing that, yes, the studio is “perfectly aware” that a “release on the same day as Elden Ring for us, as for any other game, would be suicidal,” and that the studio would be consulting the auguries to choose a new release date in the very near future. “We were ready immediately to be able to take different paths and possibly postpone the game,” wrote Greco, promising more info at the upcoming Future Games Show (which, full disclosure, is helmed by PCG’s publisher Future Plc).
I’ve gotta be honest, while I agree that most games would want to clear out of FromSoft’s way, I think it’s a particularly unlucky (and “suicidal”) coincidence for Enotria in particular. After all, Jyamma’s game is outwardly and avowedly a soulslike, and just so happened to settle on a release date that put it on a collision course with a souls, no “-like” required. It’d be like Deep Silver coming out and announcing Saints Row 5 for the same day GTA 6 releases. I don’t mean to imply that Enotria is uncreative—it looks incredibly striking from a glance at its Steam page—but rather that, let’s be frank, everyone is going to be looking for their souls fix elsewhere come June.
But hey, chin up, because I’d honestly not heard of Enotria before I happened across this story, and now I’ve gotten a look at its Carnevale-core fashion and Italo-souls screenshots, it’s suddenly become a game I’m very interested in. I look forward to seeing what Jyamma does with the game whenever it releases. Just not, you know, in June.