UPDATE: Dolmen's release date has been officially confirmed to be May 20, 2022.
Original story follows.
FromSoftware’s acclaimed collection of action RPGs have been more influential to gaming than perhaps any other lineage of titles released over the past decade. Dark Souls was heralded as the Ultimate Game of All-Time at the 2021 Golden Joystick Awards, and the recently-released Elden Ring attained instant success, standing as one of the highest-rated video games of all time on Metacritic. The Soulsborne games have spawned a genre of their own, and a new offering from up-and-coming developer Massive Work Studio may look to draw in souls fans when it releases in May.
Dolmen, a sci-fi souls-like, was first announced via a Kickstarter campaign in 2018. Unfortunately, the crowdfunding project failed to meet its minimum goal, but the developer quietly continued to work on the game, and it resurfaced again in 2021, now attached to Koch Media’s gaming label Prime Matter. The reveal trailer posits a projected release date within the year, but its listing on the Xbox Store now affirms an official launch date of May 19, 2022.
This isn’t the first time an Xbox Store listing preemptively revealed the release date of an upcoming game. In 2020, a Microsoft Store listing for the then-upcoming Ubisoft title Far Cry 6 mentioned a release date of May 25, 2021. While this prediction ultimately missed the mark by about five months, the publisher announced in March of 2021 that the game would be delayed, indicating that the listing may have, at one point, been correct.
Dolmen looks to unite the meticulous melee combat typical of the genre with a sci-fi Lovecraftian feel ala the Dead Space series. Of course, FromSoftware borrowed heavily from Lovecraft’s lore with its 2015 effort Bloodborne, though the developer hasn’t attempted anything approaching sci-fi since 2013’s Armored Core: Victory Day. Yet, Massive Work won’t be the first developer to mesh sci-fi elements with the Dark Souls formula. Cradle Games’ 2020 output Hellpoint mixed intensely difficult melee combat with out-of-this-world futurism, and, before that, Deck13 replaced swords and souls with exoskeleton rigs and tech scrap in the soulslike The Surge and its 2019 sequel.
Massive Work’s Dolmen won’t be the only soulslike title to arrive in 2022, either. Originally slated for a 2021 release, the Team 17-published Thymesia is slated to arrive in the coming months following a delay and appears to have been heavily inspired by the Victorian setting of Bloodborne. These titles, along with the epic Elden Ring, should keep souls fans sated for quite some time.
Source: Xbox Store