Return to Ash is free on Epic

Monday, I’ve got more Advanced Wars-likes to play while pooping, as Earth Vs Mars is now on Steam Deck, and Dino Crisis is now on Steam too. Tuesday, the PS6 might be a long way off due to AI – like Elon’s child pornography making tool. Wednesday, speaking of playing games while you poo, Vampire Therapist is now on consoles, kind of. While Two Point Museum‘s latest DLC is now on Switch 2. Thursday, this next statement will get me killed by my editor, but not everything needs to be a Rogue-like, as Runix: Pinball Roguelike also has a terrible title alongside its demo.

Moving on to the Epic Games Store itself, and it is another one of those double bills that I love oh so much. That’s sarcasm. Technically a triple-bill this week, we’ll start with Stalcraft: X, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-like with the voxel nature of Minecraft and its ilk, but it is also a free-to-play “MMOFPS.” So instead of offering the free game for free you can pick up the “Starter Edition,” with 7 days of premium membership, a knife called an M9 (silly knife, you aren’t a gun), cosmetics, consumables, and whatever “artifacts” do, which are so helpfully explained in the description.

The mobile offering this week is Residual, a space action-platformer that I’ve covered before with those godforsaken Prime Gaming/Amazon Luna articles. Developed by Orangepixel and released in 2021, Residual isn’t something I speak about with much praise. I’m not the biggest fan of Orangepixel’s offerings, mostly due to the art direction. If you enjoy an everything game, according to the Steam user-defined tags, enjoy but I’m too busy pleasuring your parents.

Well, it was Ash Wednesday on Wednesday. The third offering, now that we’ve returned to the PC offerings, is Return to Ash, a visual novel type thing from Serenity Forge released last July. As you might guess, Return to Ash focuses on the best things to talk about: Death and being in hospitals. I’ll be honest, I don’t really care about Return to Ash, as short in its runtime and appealing as the art direction is, I’ve done my time in hospitals and around death, I don’t need more of that. I’ll take happy and colorful over moody and depressing, quite frankly.

All this week, you can pick up Return to Ash and Stalcraft: X Starter Edition on the Epic Games Store for PC, and Residual on the Epic Games Store for mobile, until the 26th of February. Moving on to next week with another double-bill, starting off with Boxes: Lost Fragments, a simple puzzle game that I’m sick of covering. The second offering is My Night Job, a 2D side-scrolling survival horror that is nearly a decade old at this point. Oh, how… exciting, as my monotonal sarcastic tone does a lot of lifting.