Chuchel is free on Epic

Monday, PowerWash Sim 2 got a new trailer and the first game got more DLC, Ready or Not is coming to consoles with much-needed improvements, and Windblown got a new update. Tuesday, Persona-like Demonschool got a new release window, and Star Wars Zero Company got announced to the delight of the internet with a new game to be divided about for a while. Wednesday, Oblivion Remastered was released to the surprise of no one, and Spine got a new trailer with a Switch 2 announcement. Thursday, Bloodbreaker: Labyrinth of the Witch is another Rogue-lite, and if you’re not sick of SCP yet, there is a new game coming soon.

Moving on to the Epic Games Store, two things are available this week, I have a little story. So, between scrolling social media and an amount of pasta that would make an Italian burst, one of the social media apps decided to give me an ad for Albion Online. This happens to be one of the things available this week. This was between ads for hair plugs and men’s beard dye, and to highlight how ridiculous that is, I’ve got long brown hair down my back and a big brown beard. Yet the Albion ad was still one of the worst, most offensive piles of twaddle I’ve seen this week.

Launched on PC back in 2017 and then on mobile in 2021, Albion Online is one of those free-to-play medieval fantasy MMORPG things that survives off of 12 people paying lots of money. That, alongside the usual free-to-play things that if I really went in on it, I’m sure I’d be sued by Stillfront Group by morning. It’s your typical MMORPG thing that is trying to attract new players by giving them starter packs to kickstart a new drug addiction, see last week’s rant for that one. The Welcome Gift for this week includes the “Knight Adventurer vanity bundle, the Mistbison mount skin, 3 days Premium, 250 Learning Points, and much more.”

Yes, I believe there is less wasted copywriting splooge in a teenager’s bedroom, so I think we’ll move on. Next we have Chuchel, a game that courted two bouts of controversy, one after another, for reasons that will make you wish humanity was a burnt husk: a blip in the timeline of the universe. Devised by designer Jaromír Plachý following the release of Botanicula, the character of Chuchel was basically a clump of fluff with eyes, a mouth, and an orange hat. The colors were inverted after it was sort of noted that having a character that is the color black with thick, round, lighter-toned lips could be an illusion of Minstrel-style Blackface.

I’m not saying that Plachý did that intentionally, I’m just pointing out that it was certainly the first storm to be kicked up about an otherwise fine point-and-click adventure. Of course, when you correct something like that by making the character orange instead, you invoke the spirit of the “anti-woke” mob that threw their arms up over a character design, again. It wouldn’t be their last time being angry, as earlier this year, Amanita Design decided to donate 100% of the proceeds to humanitarian relief for Ukraine. Oh no, feeding and sheltering people whose homes were bombed, how horrible.

On the mobile app for the Epic Games Store, it is kind of more of the same. There is Chuchel, which as we’ve established, is a fine point-and-click adventure that has found controversy from people who struggle to debate their cat. However, there is another offering that isn’t just a bit meh or a free-to-play pile of twaddle that wants to steal your wallet, instead, it’s one of my game-of-the-year contenders in prior years. I’ll bang the drum of Loop Hero for years to come because it is a dark-ish fantasy setting with a heavy retro-inspired graphical style, but also has a dyslexic font.

Loop Hero is simple, you play as a hero locked in this time loop, which means you are walking the same path every time you venture out. The gameplay isn’t so much about the combat that you play, but rather the combat that you assist with your cards. You see, the world is a dark and scary place (I mean in-game) that is procedurally generated and is built up by you using your cards both to make the world more rewarding and sometimes more difficult. It’s a fantastic little Rogue-like/lite loop (not a pun) of gameplay that is exciting, fun, and rewarding.

All this week, you can pick up the Welcome Gift for Albion Online on the Epic Games Store for PC, with Chuchel appearing on both the mobile and PC versions of the Epic Games Store. You can also pick up the fantastic Loop Hero via the mobile version, but that’s only until Thursday, the 1st of May. As for next week, I’ll probably go out the same way I came in, naked and screaming for someone to kill me. However, if you want to know what’s next on the Epic Games Store, it seems to be GrahamOfLegend’s lo-fi arcade shooter, Super Space Club.