My Top Five Free Prime Gaming Picks For June

How d'you like the clickbait title? I guess if I really wanted views I should have said "All The Games Amazon's Giving Away For Free In June Stink - Except For These Five!" or something like that. I do still have some self-respect left though...

And in any case, this is more than a little late, seeing as how I got the email telling me about the June slate of free games on Amazon Prime Gaming over a week ago but what is it they say? Better late than after the horse has bolted the door or something like that. Or maybe it was never look a gift post in the eye. One of those.

Anyway, I did want to mention it because it seemed like a considerably more interesting offer than last month's. I don't think I claimed a single game in May. I have to say it doesn't say a lot for your selection process, when people won't even take what you're giving away for free. Of course, that might just be me. I do have very sophisticated tastes, I'll have you know, as must be obvious to everyone by now.

Enough waffling to up the word count. So, what games did I take? It goes without saying, I hope, that I have no idea. I mean, it was a few days ago now. Who can be expected to remember anything that far back? Luckily, Amazon sends a confirmatory email every time you claim anything so I don't have to go grubbing through Good Old Games and the Epic Store to find what I took.

Oh, and this is handy! They even give you a nice little picture of the game with a little icon to say which platform you claimed it on. That's very thoughtful, especially since I can steal those and use them here. Saves me scrubbing around for some screenshots from the website. (Anyone getting the idea this is some sort of cut-price, low-effort filler can just go try and come up with five posts a week themselves and see how they like it. Not the people already doing that, I don't mean you... or the ones who post every single day, either... all of you can have a good laugh if you want but I bet you've all been here...)

Back to the games. I'll take them in the order I claimed them. It would be easy to read something into that but it was most likely just the order they appeared in the original email.

Just for fun, let's see how much I can remember about any of these before I go look them up. I did read the descriptions at the time or I wouldn't have known which I wanted, so I ought to have at least a vague idea. There were far more games available than the five I picked, though, and I read some of those as well, so there could be bleed-through.

Hmm. I think this one's a turn-based rpg set in the Warhammer universe. (Edit: It is!) More than that I couldn't say but I'm quite impressed I could remember that much. It does look a bit Warhammery but then so do a lot of things. 

I bought the Warhammer RPG Rulebook when it was first published and GM'd some of the campaign that came with it or that came out at the same time. It went down quite well but I don't think we finished it. Then I played the Warhammer MMORPG for a few months but only a year or two after it appeared. Mrs Bhagpuss and I did an awful lot of battlegrounds and I think we got into the thirties or maybe the forties before we quit. I know we never got as far as the cap.

Other than that, I have no experience with or affection for the IP. I do like a good turn-based RPG, though. 

I seem to remember this is a Point&Click adventure. And that's just about all I do remember. I was going to go through all of them without looking up any details and then grade myself at the end to see how well I did but clearly that's not going to work. 

Ok, so I checked and I was right. This is going surprisingly well. It's a "throw-back, retro-inspired, point and click adventure with chunky and beautiful pixel art" according to Steam, where it has a "Very Positive" rating, albeit from fewer than a hundred reviews. 

It also says "Inspired by games like Myst and Riven with a dash of the LucasArt adventures of the 90s, The Abandoned Planet is sure to scratch that old-school adventure game itch.", which very nearly put me off taking it even for free. I did not like Myst or Riven at all and I find almost all LucasArt adventures intensely annoying. I'm hoping those are just generic touchstones for "popular puzzle-based adventure games" and not actual templates the dev team followed. Looks pretty, anyway.

Pretty sure I know this one. It's another Point & Click adventure, set in the 1920s, in which a flapper finds herself partnering with Oscar Wilde's ghost to solve a mystery. Now, that's a solid elevator pitch.

More than that, though, I can't say without looking it up. So let's look it up. 

Ooh! It's more interesting even than that! 

"In 1921, young French artist Jennifer Chevalier becomes embroiled in death, espionage and revolution, assisted by the ghost of Oscar Wilde. A hand-drawn Point & Click adventure with a unique comic book inventory design. " 

Yep, there's "comic book inventory design".  Worth claiming just to find out what the heck that means. Comic books aren't famous for inventory management and I find it hard to see where the connection comes in so that'll be interesting. I note it doesn't say she's a flapper but just look at the cloche hat...

Now, this one is set in the French Revolution. Go on! Ask me how I knew! That makes it the second game in the set with a French setting. Other than that I got nothing. Let's ask Steam.

Well, stap me! I would have been a long time guessing this one. It's "a deck-builder roguelite inspired by the French Revolution and body horror." Was I drunk? I don't much like deck-builders, I have never knowingly played a "roguelite" and I have a total aversion to body horror. Why the heck did I pick it?

I can remember, as it happens, or rather it's coming back to me now. I thought it might be time I gave roguelikes a try, seeing as how I'm always reading about them but never have played one. 

Astute readers will have spotted that I said "roguelikes" not "roguelites". That's not a typo. I realise now that I misread it the first time. Not that it would have made much difference. I haven't played any roguelites either so the principle still applies. 

As for the body horror part, though, I missed that completely. Had I spotted it, I very likely would have passed and now I've seen it the chances of my ever playing Liberte have gone down by an order of magnitude.

And finally...

Nope. No idea. Don't have clue one. It could be just about anything from that generic name and picture. Going to have to look it up.

Ah! It's a dungeon crawler! Now I remember! Also it's famous, if ancient. "During the golden days of action RPGs, FATE was a powerhouse, winning runner-up for PC Magazine’s Role-Playing Game of the year. Popular enough to spawn 3 sequels, this was one of the premier dungeon crawlers of its time."

You'd think I'd have heard of it then. Maybe if they hadn't given it such a bland, unmemorable title...

Still, probably going to be quite good, of its kind. Not that I was a fan of action RPGs back in their heyday. I bought Dungeon Seige when it came out, thought it was pointless and boring and never bothered with the genre again. I think when I claimed this one, I was thinking of modern ARPGs, which I like a lot more.

"Overwhelmingly Positive" on Steam though, from almost four thousand reviews, so somebody likes it.

That's my pick of what's available so far for June and not bad at all, I'd say. If you want to see the full line-up, it's on the Prime Gaming blog. 

Other than the above, it includes one of the Thief games (Again, bought the original when it came out, didn't like it, never played a stealth game since.) and one called "Dark Envoy" that's not available for another week or so that I might claim then. That's some kind of party-based RPG.

And finally, it seems I was mistaken when I slagged off the May collection. On closer inspection, some of the ones I picked in June were actually from last month. Maybe I just didn't even look at May's choices.

Someone ought to do a monthly blog post about this stuff so we'll all know what there is!