Crying Suns Is Free On The Epic Games Store

Monday, I returned to the hell known as Prime Gaming to round up the month, and later David would round up the Steam Awards of 2020. Tuesday, I spoke of the latest study to look into games and violence, I later also noted some PS4s are being discontinued in Japan. Wednesday, I covered that Minecraft Earth will be leaving us later this year, and later in the day, I spoke of The Sinking City returning amid the ongoing legal battle between its publisher and developer. Thursday, Alexx wrote about Bloober Team’s latest horror game, The Medium, getting a new gameplay trailer ahead of its release later this month.

It is good to be back and writing, I somewhat missed it during our little break from doing weekly articles such as this Epic Games Store free-game thing. I wonder what is coming next week? Ahh, right. I would like now to take a week-long sabbatical to… wash my hair or something. No, on a serious note, it is good to be back after doing nothing for 10-days. It felt weird being away. I guess that’s how the producers of Cyberpunk 2077 felt for four-years.

This week’s free game on the storefront with oddly angry people shouting outside of it is Alt Shift’s Crying Suns. Now stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It is a tactical Rogue-lite where you command a fleet of ships in the space of your once-mighty empire. Yes, it is Super Mario Galaxy. No, of course not! It is FTL again, though from the other side. It is a dark Kaylon-led nightmare that you are fighting to stave off. I love FTL, it is one of the few games I install on every system available. However, I’m a bit done with Rogue-lite/likes. This is why, as everyone showers Hades with all their praise, I quietly went back to play the Metal Gear Solid series (from the 80s to the mid-2010s).

You play as the clone of an admiral that has died and will continue to wake up as a clone every time. This fills out the Rogue-lite portion well enough, but what about the FTL part? Well, that’s the thing, it isn’t that tense hammering of the spacebar trying to solve the problem of a torpedo about to enter your rear starboard porthole as the dead bodies of your crewmates huddle in the Med-bay. It is slow chess, very slow expositing 3D chess trying to tell you everything about its inventor, Chris Chibnall.

Ok, what I have just said is offensive to the concept of 3D Chess, FTL, and Crying Suns; no one or thing should be compared to the worst human being alive. However, it does make sense: Crying Suns is much slower and dull by comparison, to what it is trying to mimic. Yet at the same time it is desperately throwing story and lore at you like Judge Judy getting a bit angry with a book in-hand. What FTL does so well is let the gameplay inform the story, and thus you aren’t reading too much.

Crying Suns spends a good couple of minutes setting up the clone, “why don’t I have my memories?” and establishing what is going on. That is when you should let the gameplay take over the storytelling. Instead, we’re expositing questions and answers back and forth. The real-time pausing sections of FTL-like gameplay mostly (in my experience) stick to the slow torpedo and cloak gameplay of later map sectors of the better game. This isn’t to say Crying Suns is bad. It just isn’t improving on what I love about FTL or the reasons why I think it is one of the greatest games of all-time.

All this week, you can pick up Crying Suns on the Epic Games Store for free until the morning of the 14th of January. So then, what is replacing it from there on? STAR WARS Battlefront II: Celebration Edition; no, not the good one. The smaller 2017 release, the one I’ve openly demonized for the loot boxes that a top NHS nurse argued is gambling marketed to children. I would like to formally hand in my letter of resignation simply so I do not have to criticize it; You will now find me along with Elaine Chao, Betsy DeVos, and Theresa May on the island of resigning cowards.