Sunless Sea Free On Epic Games Store

Monday, Alexx wrote about a remake of something very Japanese from 1994, David time-traveled back to 2007, and I (in an editorial) covered the darkest days of 2004. It was a horrid nostalgia trip. Tuesday, I wrote about Watch Dogs Legion‘s online mode looking a little meek. Wednesday, I wrote a news piece about THPS 1 + 2 coming to the Switch later this year. Then on Thursday, I rapidly shot out a news piece about Destroy All Humans! 2 getting an equally quick tease following its previous game. Later on Thursday, Aaron covered the news that Sony are once again set to give away games with the “Play at Home initiative.”

On to my many woes with the Epic Games Store and possibly the game that is free, this week. For a couple of weeks now, I’ve sat and persisted with the Epic Games Store’s one or two little hiccups. I don’t mind restarting the launcher or restarting a download once in a while. However, for the last couple of weeks, I’ve just had some of the worst luck getting all of this together. For example, last week the launcher itself didn’t want to start up, so I was locked out for a while and only got a short time with Absolute Drift. This week I’m ready to bash my head off my desk with the force of a piano dropped on a cartoon character.

This week’s free game in Sunless Sea, something quite purposefully slow and carefully managing the suspense of what is in the waters below. It would be really nice to have as much time with that as possible, but I am forever on a deadline. Here I am about three hours before we need to publish this article and I’m still swearing at Epic. Issues abound between the launcher crashing when attempting to update (great update) and the download function stopping to flash up an error about (paraphrasing) “[you] don’t have permission to control this hard drive.” It is the same hard drive I’ve been downloading and uploading images too and from for these articles for almost two years.

Can you see where my anger is starting to build up? Sunless Sea is, as everything is these days, very Lovecraftian with the cosmic horrors in the darkest depths of hell; or as some call it, the water. Released in 2015 following a successful Kickstarter in 2013, raising £100,000, it would first go into early access following a short 15-day run on Steam Greenlight. The only thing that would make it more mid-2010s would be if it was Steampunk and Roguelike. Set in a fallen Victorian gothic London, you have to try and survive the horrors of the rising waters. If you die, it is a Roguelike, so you can continue on. I think it might have been better that I don’t play it then.

All this week, until Thursday 4th of March, you’ll be able to pick up Sunless Sea for free on the Epic Games Store. What will replace it? Well, back at the end of October, I spoke about Wargame: Red Dragon coming up the following week, then that didn’t happen. instead, I spoke about the fantastic Dungeons 3. Now it seems whatever issue stopped it from appearing the first time on the storefront has been resolved. So next week, I’ll be playing an RTS about an interesting war, but it will be all the boring fighting bits I’ll have to cover.