Rogue Legacy & The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Free On Epic

Monday, Steam is hosting a Bruce Lee showcase later this month. Tuesday, one of the best action-RPGs of this year was revealed to be coming to PlayStation and Switch, and Kickstarter funded another anime-influenced Metroidvania. Wednesday, Monkey Island is set to return, and the first wave of games on Game Pass has been unveiled. This includes Cricket, which no one in their right mind cares about. Thursday, Epic did a showcase about Unreal 5, and gave no news about making that Matrix: Awakens tech demo a full thing, sadly.

I believe it was during my article on this month’s Prime Gaming offerings that I may have mentioned offering a game that is very surface-level of any genre isn’t all that exciting. By no fault of the game or its creators, time is a cruel mistress and sometimes specific games date about as well as Black‘s aiming controls. Of course, then I was talking about something that hadn’t refined the genre for a while before being knocked off. Guild of Ascension was never meant to be that; Rogue Legacy, through hook or crook did.

Influenced by several different games and entangled in a difference of genres throughout, Rogue Legacy is a mix of platformer, Metroidvania, Rogue-lite, and action. Technically influenced by From-Soft’s Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls, it was more obviously entranced by similarly Rogue-influenced games like Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac. The thing is, I’m more likely to play Spelunky or The Binding of Isaac than I am Rogue Legacy any day, even Enter the Gungeon, FTL: Faster than Light, or Hades.

Moving on to the rather dull “horror” game that is little more than a walking simulator shouting plot at you, we have The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Call me a misanthrope, but I want horror that is willing to unease me like a half-naked man sticking his big slobbering tongue down my ear. I also want the gameplay to feed into that in some way, and a walking simulator is (if anything) the best way to tell an interactive story without other aspects. So of course there are a few puzzles, but to call them clever, difficult, or feeding into the horror element would be like saying I enjoy forcing rice pudding into one of my orifices.

All this week, you can pick up Rogue Legacy and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter for free on the Epic Games Store until the 14th of April. Moving on to next week, I won’t enjoy playing serious QWOP, but I will relish playing a bit more XCOM 2. Alongside XCOM 2 is Insurmountable, a Rogue-lite survival about the risky decisions made while climbing a mountain. It is interesting but not my jam. The strawberry jam I use is a bit green and hard to find when you aren’t being invaded by Vogons.