Filament Is Free On Epic

Monday, I ranted and raved about the tepid state of this month‘s Prime Gaming offerings, with the highlight being Fallout: New Vegas, a game I’ve stated many times that I don’t love. Tuesday, Evil West got a new gameplay trailer ahead of its upcoming release later this month. Wednesday, the latest releases on Microsoft’s Game Pass service were unveiled, with New Vegas director Josh Sawyer’s Pentiment coming later this month. Thursday, I wanted to find the offices of WordPress, defecate in an envelope and mail them a turd, as a bug meant we couldn’t publish anything.

Let’s move on to this week’s games on the Epic Games Store and this week’s redux of what we’ve seen before. Rising Storm 2: Vietnam is a glossy paint-over of the actual history of ‘Nam to become an arena for some multiplayer fun. It’s apt that this was the week I decided to relisten to Stephen King’s 11/22/63, a time-travel alt-history book asking the “what if?” of Kennedy’s assassination being thwarted and the ramifications of that to the war in Vietnam. None of that matters as (like all online-focused shooters) the so-called “realism” goes out the window when someone starts playing “Fortunate Son” and the entire affair becomes much like the sentiment at the start of They Shall Not Grow Old (which I mention a lot), it is just a jolly old time.

Swiftly shifting from my anger over the phrasing of realism, let’s talk about the early 2020 sci-fi puzzle game, Filament. As we’ll see next week and many other times over, the colorful and overall simple art direction is aesthetically pleasing as you play a nameless crew member of a seemingly empty ship. However, the truth is the only people on the ship are you and the captain who is locked in the bridge. Your job as you explore is to unlock “anchors” to free the captain, with 300-ish wire-based puzzles to do. Don’t expect it all to make sense, as once you get to the latter stages the puzzles become more complex and are known to have little true explanation.

All this week you can pick up both Filament and Rising Storm 2: Vietnam on the Epic Games Store until the 10th of November. Moving on to next week we have a strange one, Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is a cute and cozy adventure game about a child exploring the Mediterranean island her grandparents live on and taking pictures. It is colorful and simple that’s my type of thing right now. To juxtapose that we’ve got the isometric real-time stealth tactics game Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun; a colorful Edo period take on what you’d find in the old Desperados and Commandos games of the late 90s and early 00s.