UPDATE:Dolmen’s release date has been officially confirmed to be June 30, 2025.
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 Soulswas heralded as theUltimate Game of All-Time at the 2021 Golden Joystick Awards, and the recently-releasedElden Ringattained 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 toKoch 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 July 23, 2025.
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This isn’t the first time an Xbox Store listing preemptively revealed the release date of an upcoming game. In 2020, aMicrosoft Store listing for the then-upcoming Ubisoft titleFar Cry 6mentioned a release dateof Jul 30, 2025. 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.
Dolmenlooks to unite the meticulous melee combat typical of the genre with a sci-fi Lovecraftian feel ala theDead Spaceseries. Of course, FromSoftware borrowed heavily from Lovecraft’s lore with its 2015 effortBloodborne, though the developer hasn’t attempted anything approaching sci-fi since 2013’sArmored Core: Victory Day. Yet, Massive Work won’t be the first developer to mesh sci-fi elements with theDark Soulsformula. Cradle Games’ 2020 outputHellpointmixed intensely difficult melee combat with out-of-this-world futurism, and, before that, Deck13 replacedswords and souls with exoskeleton rigs and tech scrap in the soulslikeThe Surgeand its 2019 sequel.
Massive Work’sDolmenwon’t be the only soulslike title to arrive in 2022, either. Originally slated for a 2021 release, the Team 17-publishedThymesiais slated to arrive in the coming months following a delayand appears to have been heavily inspired by the Victorian setting ofBloodborne. These titles, along with the epicElden Ring, should keep souls fans sated for quite some time.
