Obduction & Offworld Trading Company Free On Epic

This week I didn’t do a lot of news. Monday, Taylor spoke about FIFA 22‘s release date, and I spoke of Gran Turismo 7‘s possible beta. Tuesday, someone rang the bell and we’re about to have Apple Vs Epic 2: The Thunder Down Under, and Alexx spoke of an upcoming retro-futurism racer. Wednesday, I might have mentioned that Kojima is technically right, which could mean anything, since it is Kojima. Thursday, I quoted Jack Churchill and made many references, including one to Hogan’s Heroes, as Company of Heroes 3 was announced. Also, Alexx spoke of several new JRPGs in a beloved series, and further went on about a party game’s remaster.

That covers everything, now I can get to my usual ranting about something non-sequitur. Anyway, feel lucky this is the Epic Games Store article and not one for Prime Gaming, as I’d be going through a specific “logistics specialist” so rapidly they’d have wished for death by a thousand paper cuts. I am, to nicely put it, slightly miffed after spending a majority of my day yesterday not playing games and enjoying it. Instead, I was impatiently waiting for a Prime delivery to arrive which was marked to arrive by ten last night. See, After Eights are great, a small wafery minty chocolate that makes you sick if you eat the entire box in 10-minutes, excellent. Waiting for 14-hours on a package until after ten is infuriating. This is the same logistics company that’s done this before, you love to see it!

Back to the task at hand. This may be part of my less than pleasant mood today in the article, I never got the chance to go back and play anything for this week. As a result, we’re relying on my general knowledge and deduction of games without really playing them. First up is something I’ve played a little bit of, but it was a long time ago in a short amount of time. I don’t think I fully grasped the entire game all that well either. First we have Offworld Trading Company. Look, I get it, some are a little upset right now at the idea of space colonization, and I understand that. I also understand that it is annoying to watch billionaires spend far too much for space tourism when a drop in the ocean of that money spent could solve housing crises or feed the hungry right now.

Online right now, the entire discourse around space and any kind of discussion surrounding the topic’s near vicinity is being fought by two sides of a coin. While I agree to some degree on most of these sides of these ideas, it is becoming a little hard to enjoy space fiction for what it is, when someone is trying to call you a colonialist for enjoying the adventure and possibility. What makes that worse is when you are doing that very thing in a game. Offworld Trading Company is a Weyland-Yutani-esque simulator of the company’s birth. Colonizing and profiteering are your main goals. It is actually a very interesting game in the way dad sims like a Football Manager-like are. You are pretty much fighting a spreadsheet with pretty graphics.

It is to some extent the usual Stardock game. You have a UI that makes you believe the 90s are alive with the sound of music. Ashes of the Singularity, Galactic Civilization, Sins of a Solar Empire, and a few other (and lesser) grand strategy/business simulators do this same thing. You have resources you need to harvest, you need to increase your numbers to survive long enough to make a profit and see yourself become the villain, or your rivals at Mariam bat Joachim beat Congo to burn Mars to a cinder while a company called Edison bombs it with AI rockets. What bit of that joke was too on the nose? Virgin Mary, Edison, or Congo? Either way, it is nice game if you are that way inclined.

Anyway, onto the second game which I know very very very little about at all: Obduction. Unless dyslexia is failing me, my bum-probing joke will go down very well here. Obduction is that game that likes to remind you at an alarming degree that it is from the creators of Myst, which they hold up as if that’s an achievement now. It is like every game now, “from the people of Spec Ops: The Line” and it turns out they were only the janitor. If you are still putting “from the creator of” and list a game from almost 30-years ago (23 when Obduction was released), maybe it is time to move on. However, I don’t believe that will be the case, as Cyan Worlds is set to release a new version of Myst on PC this year.

If you enjoy a game you made, I’m not going to begrudge you of that. Attempt to let something stand on its own merits, at least for the few that don’t know. If you are one of the few people to still not understand what Obduction is: You play as a walking camera around a fairly empty world solving mild puzzles and looking at all the environmental mystery clues for the plot, some of which you’ll still not entirely understand. It is very pretty and interesting, but name a game that isn’t pretty or interesting most of the time over the last few years. I’ll wait.

All this week, you can pick up Obduction and Offworld Trading Company on the Epic Games Store for free, until the morning of the 22nd of July. Moving on to next week: I’m going to talk about two genres I don’t particularly like, tower defense and multiplayer world war shooters. Defense Grid: The Awakening is something you may already have, and Verdun is a small town in France that played host to a horrible battle in WWI. So, expect me to talk about young men being sent into an unwinnable war to be gassed to death by the thousands, but this time for fun!