Maneater Is Free On Epic

Monday, Sony did another State of Play showcase, and budget feudal Pixar the RPG is coming to early access. Tuesday, another trite horror game is coming to Steam, and the plague of mining in games keeps going on. Wednesday, one of only two games I’ve seen this week I want to play got an announcement, Capcom is going to show off Monster Hunter and Street Fighter, and F1 Manager 2022 got its release date. Thursday, Planet Zoo is getting another expansion, perplexingly Dead By Daylight continues on, and if you enjoy creating horrors from the early 2000s, Mini Maker got its release date.

Moving on to this week’s final mystery game, though when I start humming John William’s soundtrack to Jaws I think the mystery flies out the window. A while back I reviewed the PS4 copy of Tripwire Interactive’s Maneater, as the company had to cut ties with the then-president of the company over stupid comments he had no business making. Before I start angering someone on that bloodthirsty beast everyone seemingly hates but won’t leave, I’ve got another bloodthirsty beast named Betty to talk about.

Maneater is the successor to the Jaws: Unleashed game on the PS2, with lots of gruesome and over-the-top violence captured in 4K (that’s what the kids say) for a Deadliest Catch-style reality show. Ridiculous and fun, Maneater is as the replaced CEO said it is, a ShaRk-PG. You and Betty (or whatever name you give your shark) chomp, snarl, and bash your way across the cartoonish world of Maneater. The world itself is an exaggerated snapshot of south-eastern Americana, otherwise known as the hell that is Florida.

I think Maneater is a great game and I enjoy it for several reasons, including Frankie Ward from the PC Gaming Showcase making the obvious joke with all the sincerity it needed. It is also experimental, something I wish a majority of the games industry was happier embracing with glee, as the experimental games are often the most fondly remembered. Should Maneater be the next big franchise? No, that’s the point, it is fun and a quick burst of interesting gameplay. Experimental games are little more than jumping-off points for the next idea.

All this week, you can pick up Maneater on the Epic Games Store for free until the morning of the 16th of June. Moving on to the game available next week, as the sale is about to end and thus so will the mystery games for a while. Thank Christ, though don’t get too excited as next week I’ll be talking about Supraland, a puzzle game that describes itself as a mix between Portal, Zelda, and Metroid. It is an odd first-person open-world game that could have used a more defined art direction and marketing strategy to sell itself on the street corners of Steam and Epic.