Humankind is free on Epic

Monday, beautiful city-builder Town to City was announced, Wayne June has made it out of the darkest of dungeons, and another one of those faux-PS1 horror games nears full release. Tuesday, Cast n Chill has me rubbing the inside of my podcast listening pockets, and Best Served Cold is another Coffee Talk-esque talking simulator. Wednesday, Wreckfest 2 made a mess of my March plans (and pants) with an early access launch, E-reader-come-console Ink Console is a visual novel lover’s dream, and PGA Tour 2K25 has a demo. Thursday, NEOWIZ and Wolfeye Studios semi-announced a game.

Moving on to the Epic Games Store, I think we’ll start with the game I have so little to talk about, I couldn’t fill a paragraph on a Sea World pamphlet. While Beyond Blue is a very important idea, edutainment isn’t going to light up anyone’s prostate with a pleasurable throbbing. Beyond Blue is fine but it isn’t going to kick-start you or your kid in a career in marine biology for the sheer hell of it. The hyperactive among us (myself included) will be bored 20 minutes into a 4-hour game.

This isn’t to say the second game will keep the coke (you know which one) or caffeine-addicted among you from wandering off when playing Civ-like, Humankind. That’s it, whoever at Epic or SEGA thought this was a great idea is just being petty. People were obviously going to downvote Civ7 for being different as they will with FM25 when it eventually comes out, give away the alternative for free. Shrewd marketing, too bad for 2K I’m a fan of shrewd marketing when it is done right. A Civilization game in all but name, it’s one of several alternatives, maybe the top big-budget alternative though.

All this week you can pick up both Beyond Blue and Humankind on the Epic Games Store until the morning of Thursday, the 13th of February. Moving on to next week it seems to be the quarterly/biennial Apex Legends skin thing that children and adult-children care about, while only the most sophisticated among us will be swearing like Gordon Ramsy at the fact that fast car doesn’t in fact go vroom. Though, maybe that’s because Lance Stroll is too busy licking the jam off of his chin. It’s F1 Manager 24.