Doomed Backlog Season New post Garrett, Link and Lara are all coming back at once

My Steam library currently reads like an alibi: ≈93.8 hours in Tomb Raider I-III Remastered, parked somewhere in the middle of Tomb Raider 3, and ≈64.7 hours of Factorio in the last two weeks alone. I didn’t burn out on Lara; I ran out of variety after three games with the same moveset, and the belt-and-inserter part of my brain took over the shift.

And then June and September went ahead and announced Thief, Ocarina of Time and Tomb Raider – all three in parallel, all being rebuilt by people who clearly know what they’re holding – and I’m genuinely, embarrassingly hyped about every one of them. The only real problem left is scheduling.

Thief goes through the KEX machine

Announced June 7, 2026 during the PC Gaming Show: Thief: The Dark Project Remastered, built by Nightdive Studios with Eidos-Montréal, published by Atari, coming this winter to PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, Switch 2, Steam, Epic and GOG. It’s the whole 1998 package plus Thief Gold – the original’s 12 missions and the three that Gold bolted on in 1999 – running in Nightdive’s KEX engine at up to 4K and 120 FPS, with reworked models, textures and animations, a weapon and item wheel, rumble and gyro, small fixes to the original level design, and a mission selector so you can replay Assassins whenever the mood strikes (the mission selector alone would have saved teenage me an ocean of reinstalling).

Which still undersells what’s being preserved here, because Thief was never a graphics game. It’s a game about a cold stone corridor, one guard’s boots going away from you, the wet sound your own footsteps make on tile versus carpet, and the exact black where a torch doesn’t reach. Light and sound as mechanics, in 1998, while every other first-person game on the shelf was handing you a rocket launcher.

Two details from Nightdive’s own Deep Dive podcast matter more to me than the resolution numbers. The first: Daniel Thron, one of the Looking Glass artists who drew, animated and directed the original’s hand-drawn cutscenes, is back to redo them rather than letting an upscaler have a go at his own artwork. The second: fan missions are a stated priority, and The Black Parade runs on day one.

That second one hit me personally, because I reviewed The Black Parade here in early September and called it the Thief game Looking Glass never made – and now the studio doing the official remaster names that exact campaign as the one that has to work out of the box. Whoever made that call, thank you.

The through-line is a little embarrassing once you lay it out. I wrote about Thief on this blog in 2010, then again in 2013 about the community patch and the HD texture packs that kept a fifteen-year-old game looking presentable; sixteen years of poking at the same game with mods, and now a studio is doing officially, with the original artist on payroll, what a handful of people did for free out of pure stubbornness.

The announcement trailer

Ocarina of Time, on hardware I don’t own

Nintendo revealed the remake on June 9, 2026 with a teaser that showed a tapestry, a boy asleep in bed, and precisely zero gameplay – then sat on it for three months while the internet argued about the new art style. The 40th Anniversary Direct on September 8 paid it off: Eiji Aonuma walked through Kokiri Forest live on stream, and the date is November 5, 2026, Switch 2 exclusive, two weeks ahead of GTA 6 on November 19.

What’s new runs longer than the word “remake” usually buys you: fully voiced cutscenes with Matthew Mercer reprising Ganondorf from Tears of the Kingdom, a free-moving camera, a roll-dash, a quest log called Threads of Time, Zelda Notes support through the phone app – and an actual jump button, in Ocarina of Time, in 2026! The ocarina listens to the Switch 2 microphone now as well: hum the song, or play it on a real ocarina, which Nintendo will naturally also sell you. Some loading screens were kept on purpose, and I can’t tell whether that’s preservation or a shrug, which is exactly why I love it.

I’m the wrong audience for this and the right one at the same time. I’ve never been a console guy – one exception, a Wii on day one, which I rode to 100% completion on Twilight Princess and then never repeated. Everything else came through emulators: A Link to the Past, Link’s Awakening, Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask, all on Windows, all on keyboard, objectively the worst way to experience Hyrule and the only one I ever had. Majora’s Mask is still my favorite and I will take that argument any day of the week.

The complication is hardware, because Ocarina of Time 2026 is welded to the Switch 2, emulation isn’t a serious option for something two months old, and Nintendo has therefore built the first thing in fifteen years that gets me pricing consoles at midnight. They know it, too: the Zelda-themed Switch 2 and Pro Controller land October 29, one week before the game, and the Young Link and Young Zelda amiibo arriving in 2027 unlock masks styled after the original N64 character models. Sell me my own nostalgia back as a cosmetic – fine, sold, whatever, I’m not made of stone.

Well. In 2009 I posted about leaked Zelda artwork for the Wii and the usual Nintendo silence around it. Seventeen years later I’m doing the exact same thing with better sources and worse impulse control.

The gameplay and release date trailer

Lara gets remade a second time

Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis turned up at The Game Awards in December 2025, teased through Fortnite three days early, because that is how reveals work now. Crystal Dynamics and Flying Wild Hog are building it in Unreal Engine 5 for Amazon Game Studios: a full remake of the 1996 original, the second one after Anniversary in 2007. Alix Wilton Regan takes over as Lara from Camilla Luddington, who held the role across the three Survivor games.

The ambition is the interesting part. Legacy of Atlantis folds the classic timeline, the Survivor trilogy and the Netflix series into a single continuity, and hands Lara a wrist-mounted grappling hook, an archaeological scanner for reading artifacts and clues, and a Focus meter that slows combat down for precision shots – none of which existed in 1996, when the entire traversal toolkit was a running jump and a prayer.

Then Sony’s State of Play in June pushed it back to February 12, 2027, with a Switch 2 version quietly added on the way out the door. Game director Will Kersake also said the thing I keep chewing on, that properly reinventing a game means adapting it to the tastes of modern players.

I’ll take the grappling hook; I’ll take the scanner. The difficulty is where I get twitchy, because I just spent ≈93.8 hours in the remastered originals with classic controls switched on, finished the first game ugly on purpose and then argued that the second one is the better tomb. The instant deaths, the pixel-perfect ledges, the total absence of hand-holding: those aren’t defects 1996 shipped with and modern design has kindly outgrown. They’re the reason a Tomb Raider level feels like somewhere you’re trespassing instead of a ride you’re strapped into. Modernize the tank controls, absolutely, please, god. Keep the bit where the room is allowed to kill you for being careless.

It also gives me until February 12 to finish Tomb Raider 3, and I fully intend to use most of it. Maybe Tomb Raider 4-6 Remastered after that, if the variety fatigue stays gone.

The release date trailer

So the calendar reads: November 5 for Hyrule, some time this winter for The City, February 12 for Peru – three rebuilds of games I’ve been playing, modding and writing about since this blog was still in German, all landing inside four months of each other.

Meanwhile a Tomb Raider 3 save file sits there waiting, and a factory in the other window keeps demanding to grow.

I’ll manage – my free time won’t 🎮