Like a lot of people, my response to the Epic Games Store launching back in 2018 was slight bemusement. Why would I want to use this minimally viable storefront when Steam is a thing? Epic’s answer seemed to be the stick of exclusivity and the carrot of freebies, and for me at least the response to that is to ignore the exclusive games until they inevitably appear on Steam, and take the weekly free games offerings and let them pile up into a large heap.
There’s been some amazing games given away for free over the six or so years they’ve been trying to bribe us, from older heavy hitters like GTA V, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Civilization VI and Control, to Indie darlings like FEZ, Tacoma, MudRunner, and Frostpunk. So maybe it’s an idea to actually play some of them for a change?
So, I’ve gone through the games available over the course of February to see if they are value for money. Well, they’re all free. So yes. Short video this one, I’ll see you next week. Still here? Well, let’s instead see if they are worth your time investment instead. Time is money and all that.
Nobody Wants To Die
The first game I chose essentially at random was Nobody Wants To Die, released in the middle of 2024 by a small Polish dev house named Critical Hit Games, although presentation-wise this looks as good as anything I’ve seen from the biggest publishers out there. I give Unreal Engine 5 a lot of stick for its performance but when it’s harnessed appropriately with strong art direction you cannot deny results like these.
It helps that I am a total pushover for the whole Tech Noir schtick that the game embraces, it’s Blade Runner mashed with Bioshock aesthetic is right up my alley. It’s set in the dystopian, far flung future of 2329, where eternal life can be yours, as long as you have the money to pay for a new body. Although perhaps you can get a good deal on the repossessed bodies of those less well off folks who couldn’t keep up with the monthly instalments.
In this extreme neo-gilded age of inequality you are James Karra, a detective with the obligatory dark past that we’ll have to explore and deal with over the piece, charged with investigating the apparent murder of the obscenely wealthy man who invented this whole consciousness transfer thing and is primarily responsible for their current society that’s threatening to tear itself apart at the seams, as have nots have had enough of the haves. So, if you want gaming as an escape from modern society maybe not the game for you.
The investigation is aided by a few gizmos, from the relatively mundane x-ray vision spyglass for scanning bodies and determining bullet trajectories, to the doohickie that can, when fed with enough bits of evidence from the crime scene, essentially recreate and rewind time to show you what’s been going on. This is great fun to play with, and indeed the first investigation is a really captivating showpiece. It’s essentially marrying a bit of the old Lucasarts point and click DNA with the investigation mini games from the Batman Arkham games, and a whole lot of modern graphical trickery to create something that’s really compelling indeed.
To slightly temper expectations, the issue is that the impact this initial investigation with the cool toys has is kinda the high point of the game, and in terms of the game mechanics, you’ve seen all that the game can throw at you here. Well, apart from the scene linking mini game of matching up some questions and evidence that’s much less interesting.
So while there’s another three, I think, even more spectacular puzzle rooms to solve, it does start feeling a bit repetitive, and in a game that only takes six hours to complete, that’s a bit of a problem. I’d love to say that it’s carried though by the atmosphere, characterisation and narrative, but only the first part of that’s true. The aesthetics are a heady mix of beauty and depravity, and the soundtrack is immaculate, but it’s trying to introduce a lot of world building, characters, and a few different concepts related to the consciousness transfer into a really compressed timeframe, and a lot of the required details get lost in the shuffle. This really needs a bit more room to breathe to hit properly, which feels cruel to say given how much work’s clearly gone into it, but it does feel like the game has bitten off more than it can chew.
Maybe it’s just me, but I find it really difficult to take Karra’s voice actor Stephen Russell seriously here when he’s using the exact same voice as his Whiterun shopkeeper Belethor in Skyrim, or maybe more fittingly Nick Valentine in Fallout 4. It could perhaps have done with being in third person a little more, I find trying to map emotions and motivations more complex than “shoot the baddies” difficult in first person perspective games. I can empathise with a third party’s struggles, but trying to do so when looking through their eyes in first person is a bit of a stretch.
By the end, it’s turned into a bit of a walking simulator, and I didn’t have quite the investment in the narrative or the characters introduced to really feel any of the emotions it’s clearly reaching for. I’m not going to spoil that ending, but I can say that my interest over time in the narrative follows exactly the same arc as the gameplay – really strong in the beginning, tailing off towards the end.
But look, even if it doesn’t stick the landing, the opening is so strong that if you did snag this for free it’s well worth playing the first hour or so and experiencing that. However, for the twenty quid it’s going for at the moment, I’d say that’s not delivering a value for money experience.
The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark
If Nobody Wants To Die nicked a tiny bit of Lucasart’s point ‘n’ click DNA, then The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark lifted the rest of it. This style of game has been around about as long as I’ve been alive, but rather fell off in popularity around the turn of the millennium. If YouTube’s demographic report is to be trusted, like me you were probably around for their heyday, but if your kid is watching with you, in these games we hunt for tiny pixel representations of items, collect them and combine them to solve puzzles ranging from the mundane to the insane to progress further, find more things, solve more puzzles, and so it goes.
This is a follow up to, naturally, The Darkside Detective, which Epic has also given away in the past. As you can probably infer from the title, you are a detective, here in the city of Twin Lakes, where there’s a higher than usual incidence of spookiness requiring its dedicated paranormal response squad, Detective Francis McQueen and his / your hapless sidekick Officer Patrick Dooley. You’ll investigate six main episodes, and a few bonuses, ranging from recovering Dooley from the Darkside twin city to tie up a cliffhanger in the last game, to calming down a rambunctious retirement home riled up by a reverse emotional vampire, to saving the city from a massive demon by modifying a death ray into a time cannon.
So, yes, tongue is firmly in cheek on this one, and honestly the game mechanics are going to take second fiddle in terms of your enjoyment on this. If you jibe with the sense of humour that this is putting out you’ll have a good time, if not, well, give this one a pass. For me it was consistently mildly amusing, although it could do with breaking the fourth wall and falling back on pop culture references a little less often.
The puzzles are, by and large, solvable with only a little bit of lateral thinking, and the odd relapse into “use everything with everything else” when you’re stuck is helped by the smaller episodes which themselves frequently split into smaller chapters meaning there’s not an overwhelming amount of puzzles and objects on the go at any one time. This is good game design, and I approve of this. I did have to look up a couple of solutions in the guides, but I think there was only one puzzle I thought was a little bit on the moon logic side, but maybe that’s maybe just me.
The visual style is perhaps a bit divisive, I mean there’s a lot of people that think pixel art has gone a bit too far, and this could not be a chonkier style of pixel art if it tried. I think it still retains a certain charm, and for a tiny, I think three person dev team it presumably means they can actually get a game out there in a reasonable timeframe. Unlike the later Lucasarts and similar classics, there’s no voice acting, so you’re getting the authentic floppy disc experience from back in the day. The soundtrack’s pretty atmospheric too, and holds up to the repetitions over the individual episodes.
So, while it’s a much less ambitious design than Nobody Wants To Die, it’s doing a lot better in achieving its aims. I pretty consistently enjoyed the six or so hours it took to get through the main cases, and can see myself knocking out the three bonus cases and going back to the first one in the near future, so if you have any nostalgia at all for this style of game, it’s well worth firing up.
Definitely Not Fried Chicken
Now, if you only play triple A games, Definitely Not Fried Chicken probably looks a bit off-putting. However, this is exactly the sort of somewhat janky management game that I frequently disappear into for dozens of hours, so I had high hopes for this. Ultimately, they were not met, and I am ensaddened.
What we’re trying to do here, kids, is to grow and sell and increasing quantities and varieties of drugs, starting off small with mopeds delivering weed getting up into airplanes delivering cocaine. As well as setting up the equipment and personnel needed to produce and package the drugs, and give them break rooms, kitchens, manage their schedules and all that, the twist here is that you’ll also be able to set up front companies to act as distribution points.
So, you can also set up a laundry, say, or a fried chicken shop, and each of them will have their own sets of required machinery, products and staff to take care of, and, well you can see how this goes. This is a great idea for a game and there’s a possible world in which it’s one of my favourites, but the one in this world needed a bit more polish and balancing.
We didn’t exactly get off on the right foot. I misclicked during the tutorial and somehow soft-locked it, having to pretty much play it through again, which was irritating, and then having completed the tutorial the way it tells you you’re left in a position where you’re not well set up to make money. Maybe I missed something.
Starting again and figuring it out for myself was a bit more rewarding, and by day four or so of the in-game clock I’d started to turn a decent profit per day, but money doesn’t unlock everything. You essentially trade your product for development points at a few locations around the town, but the point requirements are absolutely massive, and your ability to produce without the unlocks of better equipment and drug types is extremely limited. I’d clocked this by about hour three of my time with it, but persevered for another hour just to confirm and I think I’d have been just watching it essentially play itself for another dozen hours before any meaningful change would be available. This is very much a grindset I am not here for. Maybe the design aim was for this to be some sort of second screen experience or almost-idle game, but it isn’t working for me.
It’s a shame, because if it just moved a bit faster there’s so much scope for setting stuff up and endlessly revisiting and twiddling with it, and that’s the sort of gameplay loop that had me sink 80-plus hours into the likes of Rimworld and Mad Games Tycoon 2. As it stands, if you are going to go all Breaking Bad, you’d be better advised to go for something like Schedule 1. Even at the low cost of free, it’s not worth your time.
Return To Ash
Here’s the thing, I just don’t get the appeal of visual novels, and Return to Ash is a visual novel. As such there’s not much point giving much in the way of a review of this, at least in terms of it being any use for a visual novel enjoyer to determine if this is something they’d enjoy. So this will be as much of a critique of the genre rather than this game in particular, although it does pretty well illustrate a lot of the reasons I don’t like visual novels.
Here we’re playing, if that’s the term, the role of Ash, a chronically ill young woman who wakes up to find the hospital she’s in mostly devoid of life. Forced to explore, she finds a headstrong woman, Scarlet knocking around who explains they are, sadly, dead, and escorts her to a suspiciously teenage emo seeming Death, who explains they’ll be stuck in this limbo until they can pass a trial.
Trials like the one middle aged Celadon is currently failing, a Sisyphean task of moving huge stacks of coins and ensuring they are all face up, only for the terms to change to flipping each of these thousands of coins with success being determined by all of them coming up heads. Or tails, I forget. Clearly being set up to fail, Ash has to figure out what’s going on, how to get out of it, and what the deal is with Scarlet, Celadon, and even Death.
There’s a couple of moments that act as decision points that lets you choose your own adventure, and while that doesn’t translate to any real amount of agency it does give six, I think, different endings to check out. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any of the characters, narrative, or illustrations interesting enough to do more than two, and even that was only because I’m doing this video on it.
There’s way too much repeated text between the run throughs, and there’s a very limited number of character and location illustrations so there’s really not enough variety to hold my interest even over the half hour it took me to reach an ending. I read faster than I talk, if you can believe it. It’s just not a very visual visual novel.
I don’t doubt that the themes of loneliness and self worth that Return to Ash explores will feel meaningful to many people, and maybe it would help them to get some perspective on what they are going through. Ultimately though, I’m not convinced this is really saying much more than “having friends is better than not having friends”, which isn’t really the breakthrough insight it seems to think it is.
There are some narrative aspects that a game can do better than a book. What it can’t do better than a book is be a book. Even judging this as a visual novel, for me, the visuals aren’t good enough to provide any elevation to the written material. Your mileage, of course, may vary, and if this is the sort of thing you like, it’s hard to argue with the low, low price of free. For a fiver? Maybe not.
Botany Manor
Botany Manor is yet another of the plague of first person horticultural simulators that we have been deluged with recently. Well, okay, it’s a first person puzzle game, so like the Talos Principle, but with seedlings. You’ll wander around a old English stately home, realised in a really quite fetching impressionist (I think) style, looking for clues on how to grow a selections of plants, matching these to the correct one and then executing that plan.
So for example we’ll find clues that a certain plant flowers only in warm, rusty water, so we’ll need to fix up a boiler to heat some bathwater, and find a source of rust to prepare the water. And so it goes, for roughly three and a half to four hours, so it’s certainly not outstaying its welcome.
Again the price tag is all important here. I had a very charming, cosy evening’s worth of enjoyment with Botany Manor, and left it feeling happy and relaxed. If I’d paid twenty quid for it, I expect I’d be experiencing a very different set of emotions. Which is probably unfair, after all a trip to the movies is the best part of that these days and is likely to be a similar or worse minutes of enjoyment per pound ratio. Some things just don’t submit properly to science and logic.
Still, I didn’t pay twenty quid for it, so I’m very happy to have enjoyed the experience. The puzzles are all sensible and don’t require any crazy moon logic to solve, it looks and sounds really nice, and I liked the little touches of characterisation about the struggles of getting British academia to take women even slightly seriously in the 1890’s. I won’t say much more, as this review’s already a decent percentage of the game’s run time, just that if you added this to your account, give it a chance for an evening, I think it will be rewarding.
Stalcraft X: Starter Edition
Now, I wasn’t going to cover the MMO shooter Stalcraft X: Starter Edition, as it’s a free to play game all the time. You can make your own mind up about it with a 50 gigabyte download. Epic have given us a small bundle of in-game currency and weapons and whatnot to give you a bit of a leg up, allegedly a £20 value, but obviously the play is to get you into the same, in my opinion, abusive relationship all free to play games have with their player base.
The developers say that “STALCRAFT: X adheres to a fair F2P model: all key items can be obtained through gameplay. If desired, the convenient monetization system allows you to accelerate certain areas of character progression or obtain cosmetics”. In other words, pay to skip the grind. Preferably, you could also simply not put the grind in there in the first place. It was boring when JRPGs did it in the 90’s but at least I had time to spare during my school days. These days it’s just not an option.
Given my philosophical distaste for this model of monetisation, this is going to be another game I’m not really giving a fair shake to. This is the sort of game people will be happy to dump fifty hours into, or five hundred, and I’ve played for five. I’m not saying that’s enough to give a full review of all the systems and experiences the game has to offer, but I can say it’s enough to recognise that this isn’t enticing me to play it any further.
I can see that it’s not a bad game, if that’s any mollification to any aggrieved fans watching. It’s essentially taking the gameplay conceit of the Stalker series, exploring the oddities and anomalies of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, shooting enemy mobs and gathering loot with a visual style heavily influenced by Minecraft. The anomalies are largely represented by little swirling vortexes of wind or lightning that damage you if you blunder into them.
I’m no MMO expert, but this seems to conform to the usual gameplay loop. A lot of people seem to like it, but I think I’m too spoiled by the power trips of single player games to get much out of shooting up endless small mobs of wild boars. There are quests, to be clear, that try and give a bit of worldbuilding and characterisation to the blocks that make up the world and the people in it, but it’s primarily shooting the same mobs you find wandering around on the way to find person to talk to or McGuffin to pick up and return to base. Maybe late game quests have more meat to them, but this is a bit too pedestrian to grab my attention enough to reach them.
I wouldn’t mind the quests being a bit uninspired if the action felt good, but the various types of guns thrown at you all feel much the same to shoot, and seem to have very little impact on the enemies you encounter who only react by running straight at you. As such, I’m not offended by the game, I just find it a bit dull. I expect player vs. player would be a different matter, but my brief experiences with that aspect involved sudden and immediate death from unknown and unseen enemies, which was dispiriting.
Of course, this is from my perspective as an old geezer with no mates and less free time playing it, if you have a gang of you teaming up with more time to sink into it then this can become more of a social event. It’s no real surprise that taking the MM part out of a MMORPG hurts the general concept. This is not the sort of game I enjoy, so shockeroonie, I didn’t enjoy it. Who could have predicted this outcome. However, if this is the sort of game you enjoy, there’s no barrier to entry so feel free to give it a bash.
Boxes: Lost Fragments
Can’t argue with this title, Boxes: Lost Fragments is a game about puzzle boxes that you puzzle out how to open to find some lost fragments of a, let’s say an android for ease of description if not complete accuracy. This was also given away before at some point in the past, I should add, Epic do give the odd repeat but not only is it churlish to look a gift horse in the mouth, in this instance it’s also released alongside another fresh freebie.
If you’ve been around the gaming scene since the advent of modern smartphone you’re probably familiar with this puzzle room style of game from, for example, the popular The Room series of titles. In a way it’s another continuation of the point and click lineage, scouring the box’s design for hidden compartments that uncover further puzzles or the tools to solve them.
I do like playing this type of thing once in a while, and as it’s been a while since I last played one, it comes at an opportune time. It’s a pretty good example of its type, with an interesting framing device and many quite beautiful puzzle boxes that are enjoyable to solve without being too taxing. What I particularly liked in this game is the hint system, a mystical mask that points you where you should be looking without completely destroying the challenge, but removes the frustration of banging your head against a puzzle you don’t have the information to solve or not noticing a hidden compartment that contains some vital tool or whatnot.
This was also given away free on Epic’s mobile game store, as was Botany Manor now I come to think of it, and I think these sort of games are a more natural fit for those devices. Not just because their length is more suited for dip in, dip out occasional entertainment rather than a proper gaming session, but also the tactile nature of swiping to move dials and open stuff feels better with touch controls rather than the humble mouse.
It’s another relatively short experience, like most of this genre of games, so at the four and a half hours it took me to finish you might be left questioning the value for money proposition if you’d paid full price. But I didn’t. So I don’t. I don’t think it’s doing anything amazingly innovative or genre redefining, but it’s a fundamentally solid example of type and gives an entertaining evening or two of enjoyment. I don’t think it will be doing anything to convert anyone who doesn’t already get along with this style of game, but regardless I think it’s well worth giving it a chance if it’s sat in your library.
My Night Job
Last up for February’s offerings is My Night Job, which is perhaps the game I’ve got the least to talk about. In fact you can probably get as much as you need to know about it from looking at the gameplay footage.
You cut about a haunted house finding randomly spawning, lets call them hostages, and have to escort them back to an extraction point. Save one hundred and you are then tasked with setting four C4 charges and escaping the house.
There’s not just the usual damage taken when fighting the zombies, critters and mechanised nightmares to deal with, if any room gets too full of enemy spawns they’ll start to stomp on the floor and if left unchecked, will destroy the room. If that happens to four rooms, it’s game over. Quite why that’s the case, given that the ultimate goal is to destroy the entire house, is left unexplored.
Improvised melee weapons are scattered throughout the house to use, as well as some guns given as random rewards for rescuing the hostages. Unfortunately, despite some nice animations, none of them feel particularly fun to use, and none have the meaty, over the top impact that a retro inspired game like this needs to have to stand out. Splatterhouse, this is not.
It’s all just a bit pedestrian to play, and you very much feel like you’ve experienced everything this game has to offer within the first ten minutes. The longer the game goes on, the more enemies spawn, at the expense of making the playfield feel really cluttered, especially if you’ve got a full complement of hostages in tow. It just turns into a difficult to parse mess.
I’m sure there’s more to be uncovered than I found in my hour or so with it, presumably there will be even more references to classic horror franchises tucked away, that sort of thing, but I just can’t bring myself to play much more of it.
It’s not bad, exactly, it’s arguably worse, it’s boring. Maybe if you have more love for horror films you might have a bit more tolerance for it, but I’ve had my fill of it, and I’m glad I didn’t spend actual cash on this.
Since starting this channel I’ve spent more time benchmarking games than playing them, so I hope you’ll forgive this slightly self-indulgent excuse to just play some games. If you’ve enjoyed it, let me know, and maybe this can be a recurring feature, otherwise normal service will be resumed next week. It’s certainly given me some very pleasant gaming experiences, even if the hit rate wasn’t 100%. Can’t say fairer than that for no money down.
Until then, If you have any questions or want further details please leave a comment down below, and if you enjoyed this videotronic missive then consider subscribing. Until next time, take care of yourself, and each other.