Two years ago, Vita was in an undeniably better state. Sure, it had never sold particularly well worldwide, but it wasn’t on the verge of discontinuation with western cart production stopping and stiff competition from the new kid on the block. At the very least, it’s prospects were more promising and there was still plenty on the horizon to look forward to.

Fast forward to today and Vita is in a very different position and thanks to the above factors, cancellations of previously announced games are now commonplace – it’s easier to work on the assumption that a title isn’t coming until you see it on the PlayStation Store. That’s left the status of some ports – many of which were previously offering very positive signs that they are still targeting the platform – in limbo.

It’s these games that I’m going to look at in this article – 10 titles that I’m still very keen to see on Vita that we’ve not heard about for a long time, that I’m beginning to doubt will ever hit the handheld and that I’d love to hear an update about.

Deathbase 900,000,000

In 2017 we got the brilliant and sadly overlooked Son of Scoregasm from Charlie’s Games, a twin-stick shooter that offered some fast-paced and incredibly enjoyable gameplay. On the developer’s blog in the same year he mentioned that Deathbase 900,000,000, a “noisy, neon homage to Solar Fox” would be hitting Vita “shortly after” Scoregasm, but here we are approaching 2019 and it’s nowhere to be seen. To be fair, Charlie is a solo dev who is also working on a PS4 port of his previous title, but it would be nice to have some kind of word to know if it’s still coming!

Drifter

Back at the end of 2017, I included the sandbox space trading sim Drifter in my list of 10 games I was excited to play in the coming year – based on the assumption that from its first announcement for Vita in 2014 to the date of the article it would surely be hitting the handheld soon. That turned out to be too optimistic – the devs do occasionally tweet reminders and videos that Drifter has been up and running on Sony’s handheld, but I’d appreciate getting a proper update on the status of this port.

Drift Stage

Another game that made my list of upcoming 2018 games that didn’t get close to making the cutoff, Drift Stage is a gorgeous cell-shaded neon-drenched arcade racer that takes heavy inspiration from 90’s games like Outrun and Ridge Racer. Recent rumblings from Twitter suggests the title is in somewhat of a development hell and the code has been passed off to another company to work on – who knows what’s happening with this one, but I’d be all over it if it did manage to make it out on Vita.

Is it Wrong to Try to Pick up Girls in a Dungeon? Infinite Combate

Diligent readers of my website will note that I have a full section dedicated to import reviews and love importing titles from Japan (especially where they contain a lot of easy-to-understand gameplay). So when a tie-in to the popular DanMachi series was announced that promised action-based dungeon crawling my interest was piqued, but the game missed its original 2017 release date and then its delayed 2018 release. It’s currently aiming at spring 2019 which should match the launch of the second season of the anime – hopefully it sticks this time, because it wouldn’t be the first time a 5pb game for Vita got delayed repeatedly then cancelled.

Monster Slayers

Digerati Distribution have had a fairly positive relationship with Vita, bringing a variety of hidden gem indie games to Sony’s handheld. That support has continued into 2018 with things like Slayaway Camp, but one game that was announced but never materialised is the turn-based deck-building RPG Monster Slayers, developed by Nerdook of Vertical Drop Heroes fame. Monster Slayers was pegged for a spring 2018 release on all platforms but while PS4 and XB1 versions came and went, the Vita port never happened – so just where is the game?

Narcissu

When visual novel localisation experts Sekai Project revealed they would support Vita, I was ecstatic – then the years rolled by and nothing happened. Just as my faith was being tested, they announced a partnership with Limited Run Games to bring numerous titles including Narcissu (which I’m told is an emotional rollercoaster) to the console – but that was years ago and there’s still nothing to show for it. The last word I’ve heard was that LRG were pushing to make a couple of these releases happen before the physical window closes (by asking for current builds), but I’m willing to bet that’s Fault Milestone and World End Economica and that Narcissu gets left in the dust (I really hope that I’m wrong!)

NightCry

I’m not a massive fan of horror games, but I’m always willing to give them a try – and there doesn’t appear to be anything quite like NjghtCry on Vita, a spiritual successor to the trailblazing point ‘n’ click Clock Tower franchise. Originally funded through Kickstarter for Android, iOS, PC and Vita, the PC release came and went and it seemed the handheld port was quietly killed… until Playism announced the Vita version was coming in 2018. With only a couple of weeks left in the year that seems unlikely, so that begs the question of whether it’ll happen at all at this point – but I don’t see why Playism would announce it at this late stage if it wasn’t happening!

Ray’s the Dead

Another promising Kickstarter project that seems to have run into some development problems along the way, Ray’s the Dead from Ragtag Studios has you controlling a human named Ray who becomes able to lead the undead around as an army in order to fight and solve puzzles (it sounds a bit like Overlord crossed with Pikmin crossed with Zombie Tycoon 2). The developers haven’t been coy about the fact that Vita hasn’t been their priority but they’ve also continued to hint it’s coming – but time is definitely running out and it would be nice to see a final commitment (or not!).

Starlight Tactics

Starlight Inception was one of the earliest Vita Kickstarter ‘success’ stories out there – while it did arrive on the platform in a timely manner the game itself was a bit of a technical mess, although the developers did take the time to improve things with patches. They then went on to announce two more titles in the same universe for Vita – Starlight Tactics and Starlight Titanium, both space-based tactical games which looked promising enough. Yet despite the odd teases of footage neither is out yet and it’s looking increasingly unlikely they’ll happen – so it’d be really nice for Escape Hatch to give us an update.

Strength of the Sword Ultimate

On PS3, Strength of the Sword 3 was a neat little boss rush fighting game with a punishing difficulty that seemed to fly completely under the radar. So when the developers decided to fund an expanded remake for new platforms (including Vita) on Kickstarter they received a solid amount of support – but years down the line we seem no closer to the game releasing on any platform. Ivent Games (for a while) did provide regular updates and have recently conducted an interview with VitaIslandViews, yet that seemed to shed little light on when we’d actually be playing it beyond hopefully 2019.

Conclusion

Announcing a game for a platform doesn’t automatically mean it’ll happen – even successful machines like PS4 and Nintendo Switch see things like Deep Down and Steep facing cancellation years after being revealed. This is often exacerbated on less successful consoles like Vita and Wii-U though, where early enthusiasm turns to cold market reality over the years and projects inevitably get shelved for commercial or technical reasons.

Despite this, Vita has always been the little machine that could – whether it be things like Papers, Please appearing out of the blue more than three years after it was initially announced (a similar thing happened to Roundabout after four years), or 2064: Read Only Memories being un-cancelled after the developer found the energy to finish it off.

The realist in me accepts that the majority of the titles in this article will never happen as Vita finally reaches worldwide discontinuation and cart production finishes, yet there’s a part of me that is hopeful that some more miracles will happen and I’ll be playing these games on my handheld at some point in 2019. Whether that happens is still up in the air, but it’d be nice for these developers to keep to their word and to get some kind of new acknowledgment to keep the positivity going!