November Spawns A Monster Offer From Prime Gaming

When the Prime Gaming blog listing the free games for November popped up in my feeds last week I was impressed with the selection. Enough so to write a blog about it, even though I said I wasn't going to do those any more. And so, here we are. A week late but never mind. 

What I am not going to do is go through the whole lot. Partly that's because most of them aren't particularly interesting to me so I don't have anything much to say about them but mostly it's because, oh boy, there are a lot!

Two dozen in fact. Twenty-four free games in one month. I haven't been keeping score but that sounds like it might be a record. Are there any good ones, though?

Well, yes, as it happens, there are. Or at least there are some that I've not only heard of but heard good things about. Of course, I'd have to reserve judgment on just how good they might be until after I've played them, which most likely will be never, but at least there are some titles there whose reputation makes it seem like it would be a good idea to grab them while they're going.

Except that under the now not-so-new rules you can't just grab everything you want on the first of the month and bugger off until next time. Someone in the marketing department caught on to that a while ago so now you have to keep coming back each week or so as they release a new tranche. 

The games hang around for about a month, waiting to be picked, like shivering kids in some purgatorial playground, so there's no real rush. There are still games I didn't want from October cluttering up this month's selection when I scan down the page on the website.

Yes, fine, but what are the games for this month, buddy? Hold on, hold on! I'm getting there. It's just taking me a while.

Whoever writes the blog (That's the Prime blog, not this one. I know who writes this one. I do. Don't I?) always includes what looks like a full list of hyperlinks to all the games, which seems like it would be a lot of work. Work that I'd sooner avoid, too, so I was happy to copy and paste it and save myself the trouble, although I was at least going to make some effort and split the whole thing up neatly into separate lines instead of leaving them as a muddled word-cloud the way I found them. 

Unfortunately, if you actually bother to click on any of them to make sure thay work, as I just did, you'll find they all go to the same exact place, the Prime Gaming home page. So that's dumb.

I include the list anyway, just stripped of the links. I left in the stupid commas because life's too short to edit other peoples' punctuation.

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy,

Mafia: Definitive Edition,  

Dishonored — Definitive Edition,

Duck Paradox,

Close To The Sun,  

Disney•Pixar Cars,

Bang Bang Racing,

Snakebird Complete,

Ms. Holmes: The Case of the Dancing Men Collector’s Edition,

Chasm: The Rift,

House of Golf 2,

Tomb Raider: Anniversary,

Blade of Darkness,

Max: The Curse of Brotherhood,

Overcooked: Gourmet Edition,

Gloomy Tales: One-Way Ticket Collector’s Edition,

Super Meat Boy,

Moonscars,

RIOT — Civil Unrest,

Elite Dangerous,

Sir Whoopass — Immortal Death,

Jurassic World Evolution,

Mystery Case Files: The Dalimar Legacy Collector’s Edition

Shogun Showdown.

I imagine everyone can spot a few titles on there they've at least heard of, along with a franchise or two that has some traction in the culture. Always assuming we still have one. A culture, that is.

Touching on the franchised properties, I see we haven't quite run out of Tomb Raider titles yet. Never played one, not going to start now.

Pixar's Cars and Jurassic World bring a touch of Hollywood to the party but they don't do much for me. I think the last Pixar movie I watched might have been Monsters Inc. on TV at Christmas, maybe twenty years ago, and the only Jurassic Park movie I've ever seen was the first, also on TV at Christmas, back in the nineties.

I won't be bothering with either of those but I did see two of the three Guardians of the Galaxies movies on DVD not that long after they came out and I enjoyed them so I've already claimed that one. It was in the first batch to go up on the website at the start of the month. 

It's an RPG shooter adventure, apparently, which is just some disparate genres smushed together as far as I can see, not any kind of unified entity of its own. I've always liked RPGs and Adventures, though, and based on Once Human I think I like shooters now, too, so there's a fair chance I might enjoy whatever this is, assuming I actually play it some time.

Of the rest, the immediate stand-outs for me are Dishonored and Elite Dangerous. 

I've heard numerous good things about the Dishonored series, "winner of over 100 Game of Year awards". It sounds like something I might enjoy. Then again, I heard nothing but good things about the X-Com series and that sounded right up my street until I played it and found it really wasn't. I'd write a post about that if I had much more to say about it than ugly to look at, boring to play, annoying to listen to.

Still, I won't have to pay even the pittance I wasted on the two X-Com games to find out I don't much like Dishonored either, so I may as well chance it. It's supposed to be up today, although at time of writing it hasn't reached the web page yet. It comes with all the DLC, too, so it's a real bargain at nothing down and nothing to pay.

Elite is a game I remember with absolutely no fondness from the 1980s. I thought it was too expensive back then but I did very much like the idea of a trading and exploration game set in deep space so I bought another, cheaper title that ripped it off. I tried playing that one a number of times but never really got the hang of how to fly the ship. Also trading as core gameplay as opposed to a way to make money so you can do something interesting with it is hella boring in any setting. I have no clue why anyone enjoys it.

About the only thing I know about Elite Dangerous is from a couple of posts Wilhelm wrote about it ages ago. The main thing I remember him saying was how he couldn't get the ship into space or control it when he did. That seems to square quite well with my memories of whatever Elite clone I played all those decades ago so I have no real expectation of ever being able to "play" Elite Dangerous. I did enjoy my free flies in Star Citizen, though, and I managed to get the ship to fly there, so I'm going to claim it anyway, always assuming I remember. It's not due until the 27th so I may forget.

There are some other fairly big names on the list that don't really interest me but which I'm sure someone reading will want to grab, assuming they haven't got them already. Mafia, Overcooked and Super Meat Boy are all well-known titles I'm sure I've read multiple blog posts about over the years. None of them appeals to me though.

Of the remaining games, none of which ring any bells, I plan on claiming... none of them. There were several I thought might be interesting - Sir Whoopass, Ms. Holmes, Blade of Darkness - but when I took a closer look they all had something about them that made me sure I'd never play them so what would be the point?

There is one game on the list I haven't mentioned that I definitely would play, and yet I am not going to claim that one, either. Why's that? I'm glad you asked. It's a very interesting answer.

The game is Close To The Sun. It's a puzzle adventure, set on a quarantined steamship in an alternate 1897. As the Steam description has it "Deep in international waters, Tesla’s Helios stands still. An unbound utopia for scientific research, Rose Archer steps aboard in search of her sister, quickly to discover not all is as it seems. A single word covers the entrance… QUARANTINE!"

I read that and thought it sounded awfully familiar. I looked at the screenshots and said to myself  "I think I've played this...".  I wondered if perhaps I'd played a demo in a Next Fest event. I searched the blog to see if I'd ever written about it and guess what?

I reviewed the game on May 30, 2021, when I described it as a "visually delightful.. walking sim with puzzles". I was less impressed with the writing, which I called "not terrible but... jarringly ill-judged at times" but I loved the gameplay, describing it as "almost perfectly pitched to hold my interest".

And how did I come to have access to this game in the first place? It's not free to play. It retails at £15.99 on Steam. I know I would never have paid that much for it. Did I get it in a sale or something? 

Nope. As I said in that review three years ago it was "Another from Amazon Prime". They gave it away already. I can see it right there in the list of Claimed games on my account althogh it appears I uninstalled it after I finished, which is a lot tidier than I would usually be. 

So, are they recycling old games now? Or is it just a mistake? I mean, it was three years ago. I suppose it makes sense. There must be plenty of new Prime members who weren't around to grab Close To The Sun the last time it came round. 

Maybe there are more games on the list that aren't new. Maybe they're constantly rec-upping old offers and I just haven't noticed. Maybe I have noticed and I've commented on it before and now I can't remember doing it. That wouldn't surprise me.

It's pretty likely I'd never remember any giveaway I hadn't played, even if I claimed it. It's not that unlikely I wouldn't remember it even if I had played it and even written about it. Everything is so ephemeral.

It certainly would explain why there are so many games in the offer now. I thought two dozen games in a month sounded exceptionally generous. Perhaps there's a reason for that

I guess I'd better check more carefully in future. I wonder if it tells you when you try to claim something you already own? I ought to check. Close To The Sun is in today's batch. When it comes up I'll try it and see. Expect an edit later.

Or, if you're reading this after the seventh, here it is now.