Echo Generation and Luto are free on Epic

Monday, nothing happened because we’re in three dead zones left of the year. Tuesday, Bobo and the Chest of Nightmares gets a Switch release. Wednesday, Vampire Hunter: Nightrise is out now, Blargis revealed Blackout Jack, and there is a new devblog on 1666 Amsterdam. Thursday, Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy has a weird collector’s edition. I can’t wait for GTA VI to come out so we can all move on to actually announcing and releasing games again.

Moving on to the Epic Games Store this week, and quite frankly, there is only one thing of interest. However, we’ll start with the secondary offering this week, Luto, a psychological horror walking sim that released last year and sells itself on screenshots of empty hallways and that one with the red nun. At least she won’t leave you legless like the blue one. I’ll give Epic this: Luto is positively reviewed on Steam, but to take away from Broken Bird Games, that’s about the only thing that’s marketable right now at a glance.

If that doesn’t sound appealing, the second offering of a game in about a month isn’t going to help, especially on mobile. As I said back when it was on offer in June, The Ouroboros King is a Chess game that thought, “You know what isn’t in every single game ever right now? Rogue elements. Let’s make a Chess Rogue-like.” Yeah, I’ll give Epic and Oriol Cosp Games this: Offering something like this on mobile is a good option, but also, I need to take away from it because we literally covered The Ouroboros King right here, five weeks ago.

The second offering on PC (and the only interesting option), however, this week is Cococucumber’s 2024 HD voxel turn-based JRPG-inspired nostalgia machine, Echo Generation: Midnight Edition. It might seem reductionist, but it is exactly what it is in response to; it is Stranger Things, but in the 90s instead of the 80s. I could try and sell it more, but the visual style and general ideas seem to do that well enough, with supernatural action-adventure nonsense and nostalgia being front and center. It is also worth highlighting that Echo Generation 2 was released in May this year.

All this week, you can pick up Echo Generation: Midnight Edition, Luto, and The Ouroboros King, with the latter on mobile only this time, on the Epic Games Store until the 23rd of July. Moving on to next week, is this another repeat? Maybe not as quickly, but the only offering of card-based story-driven adventure, Foretales, looks familiar enough that I am sure we’ve seen it before. I want to say it was two, maybe three years ago, with Prime.