This week has been busy for those subscribing to game services, and stores giving away free copies of games. On Friday, Abdul covered what was coming to PS Plus, Monday I covered Twitch Prime, and Wednesday Taylor covered Xbox Gamepass. Also this week the BAFTA game award nominations were announced, Covid-19 might cancel E3 but currently planning is going ahead, and Stadia is still not enticing enough developers to make the system viable. Finally, a guitarist from Polyphia, one of the two featured in Babymetal’s new album, ended up playing his own band’s music on stream while playing Clone Hero; a Guitar Hero-style game.

So let’s get to the Epic Games Store games this week, the first of which is Offworld Trading Company, an RTS that I’m surprisingly good at. I should say this with a slight caveat. I played on the slightly easier difficulty, using custom game rules (for more resources), and playing against 2 AI with 1 on my side. Sure, if you looked at the books and how much sabotage I played, I would be in prison next to the Monopoly man for several counts of tax fraud, black market trading, insider trading, and a bit of embezzling, but who doesn’t do that?

However, from starting with zero knowledge of how the game works, saying “I’ll figure it out,” and winning in about 45-50 minutes, I did quite well for myself. When I say I understood nothing, I mean it. I was slightly confused as to how to upgrade my settlement, I had no clue why I wasn’t getting more available tiles, and I didn’t understand a majority of the stock market. Yet, that’s how I enjoy playing an RTS, with child-like wonder and stupidity, its more fun that way when I learn and win.

“Ok, ya fool, what’s the game like to play?” Well, it a stock market simulation with heavy RTS influences. Think of a lighter game of The Last Federation, an RTS that’s about playing the stock market of several planets, a political game of Star Trek, and a top-down semi FTL-style battling system that’s real-time-with-pausing to pick your move. Well, Offworld Trading Company focuses entirely on trading, it’s in the title. So there’s a lot less of quick action compared to The Last Federation, Age of Empires, Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, and Command & Conquer, but a lot more thinking devouring information.

What I think makes me possibly like this one over some others is the ability to sit back and think about the actions I’m about to do. Most RTS games will not have a pause button, there will be a pause menu, but no FTL-style slamming the pause button to think about your position in the moment. When I look at a wall of numbers my brain turns to mush, and I need to pause sometimes to figure out if I need to stop selling all the water and crashing the market with my trades. It might have also been good to look into some of the lower and rarer materials to play a longer game, but I ended up buying everyone out anyway.

The second game this week is GoNNER, a rogue-lite/like a procedurally-generated 2D platformer that I didn’t really care for when I first played it a while back. I didn’t dislike it because I believe the game is bad, it’s more that I just don’t understand it. With other rogue-like/lites, there is a goal you have and an end in sight; for example, The Binding of Isaac involves fighting your mother. In GoNNER, I just don’t have that same motivation to start over again and be killed again by one of those flying red bat tumors.

With most platformers, there’s a sense of speedrunning it all in the back of your head, as is the case with any good Sonic game, Hollow Knight, N++, and Celeste. With procedural generation, that’s almost lost. For the most part, and from experience, the levels are usually small colorful rooms with lots of enemies that end up killing me before I get very far. When you add how little I already don’t want to restart each time, I really don’t want to play much more. Often I’ll think of something else I’d rather be playing instead.

All this week both Offworld Trading Company and GoNNER are free on the Epic Games Store. Both will be available until the morning of the 12th of March, when we switch over to a triple bill and I cry that my day is entirely taken up by those three games. It’s not all doom and gloom, as one of the games in question is Dari’s Game of the Year nod for last year. Next week we’ll be covering A Short Hike, a game about a bird going on a small adventure; Mutazione, an indie adventure of the supernatural, akin to solo version of Oxenfree; and finally Dari’s Game of the Year, Anodyne 2 Return to Dust.

In other site-related news, David and I have been working on videos for the recently founded YouTube channel. Last week, David played one of his favorite games, Tropico 4, a dictator ’em up; while I played Overpass, a game about rolling in more brown stuff the two happy pigs. This week, David played My Friend Pedro, a stylistic 2D shooter based on the freedom of movement; as I played FTL, a game I claim is my indie game of the decade yet I can’t get the story of the game straight in my head. Check those out.

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