Just Die Already & Paradigm, Free on Epic

Monday, another classic style RPG came to PC and console, the new WoW expansion was announced, and Greek mythology is getting another early access outing next month. Tuesday, finally there will be a school for wizards that isn’t terfy. Wednesday, don’t you guys have phones (and PCs)? The PS5 gets another optional feature, another life-sim got DLC, and an anime came to Crunchyroll. Thursday, a free-to-play life-sim with crossovers akin to Kingdom Hearts was announced. The death of the Bethesda.net launcher is here, migrate now to Steam, and Turning Red – the game has got a release window.

Moving on to this week’s free games on the Epic Games Store, it’s one last little double-bill before we return to singles for a little while. Just Die Already is something Alexx reviewed when it was released and especially enjoyed it. However, I wasn’t as pleased. It attempts to be whacky and out of the box, akin to Saints Row 3‘s Professor Genki games.

All the same, it is a collection of non-sequiturs and visually contrasting pieces of slapstick comedy as the base around this sandbox of animated Angry Grandpa skits. If you are happy with it, go you: I am not a fan of the video game equivalent of car crash TV, mindless YouTube junk, or even the natural progression of Goat Simulator.

Next is another one of those, “Oh look, it is a sloth with an obvious Toupée on. Oh, the hilarity Gladys!” or “oh, a pigeon in a tiny top-hat. My sides are splitting!” games. Paradigm is a point & click adventure game that believes surrealism comes from putting a bipedal duck with no eyes in human clothes amid a post-soviet hellscape inhabited by mutated people is the height of what it could do. Maybe I am tired of this internet-based self-referential “look at me, aren’t I so quirky!” style of ‘comedy,’ or maybe, it was already trite from the beginning. In either instance, Just Die Already and Paradigm both try my patience.

All this week, you can pick up both Just Die Already and Paradigm on the Epic Games Store for free until the 5th of May. Next week, is the digital adaptation to the board game, Terraforming Mars. After this week’s news of a sentient discarded dishrag used by Martian Sperm Whales taking over Twitter, I can’t wait to ruin another planet just like we’ve done to this one. Only this time with billions of dollars in the form of auto-piloted rockets crash landing on barges because billionaires aren’t satisfied, like you and I, after seeing a funny cat video as we eat whatever is days away from expiring.