HopFrog’s offbeat survival crafting adventure Forager initially launched on PC in the spring of last year, but it wasn’t until it arrived on the Nintendo Switch a few months later that it finally caught my attention. It looked like a colorful and cartoony take on Stardew Valley, a game I was obsessed with at the time, mixed in with a dash of something like Minecraft or Terraria. All of that was blended with a heavy pinch of plain old weirdness. As much as I loved the look of Forager, I never ended up pulling the trigger on the Switch version, and in the back of my mind I couldn’t help but think that it would be the perfect type of game for mobile.
Well I wasn’t the only one thinking that apparently, as back on the game’s one-year anniversary in April, HopFrog announced that a mobile version was in the cards, and although no release date was mentioned, another update in June specified that the mobile version would feature all of the content updates released for other versions thus far, so we would be getting the full-fledged Forager experience on our mobile devices… whenever that may be.
After impatiently waiting for a few more months, just a few weeks back it was revealed that Forager would finally be arriving on mobile on September 24th. A quick check of the old calendar tells me that September 24th is tomorrow. Well, what would have been a glorious day has been soured by last-minute news that the mobile version of Forager is now delayed until 2021. That seems… odd, right? Literally the day before you’re set to launch a game, probably more like a matter of hours, and all of a sudden the game must be delayed until next year? What the heck problem showed up that caused this to happen out of nowhere without anyone being aware of it until now?
Yes, part of me is just irritated that a game I was looking forward to has been pushed back, but also there’s just something weird about this type of eleventh hour decision. I mean, if it needs a few extra days or a couple of weeks, that sort of thing seems reasonable. But 2021 is more than 3 months out, and there’s no specification on WHEN in 2021 the game is planned for now. We could end up waiting a very, very long time for Forager on mobile. HOPEFULLY that’s not the case and we’ll see the game’s release in the very early part of 2021, but it’s still a major bummer and still an incredibly weird turn of events that I wasn’t expecting at all. I guess I’ll just play it on Xbox Game Pass?
