Amazon Luna Games with Prime

So after two very emotionally heavy weeks, let’s ruin my week further with Prime/Luna in October. As usual, we focus on the games to download and such, but the Luna side of… “Luna” with this Cloud Gaming nonsense is quite interesting this month. God no, not that Sonic X Shadow Generations is on offer, nor that you can play Space Metal Mania. Released this week and currently available via Luna too, you can play Star Wars: Galactic Racer. Now that’s… a waste of time for former Burnout and Need for Speed developers. You can shove your pod racing.

Probably about the same place you can shove this month’s first offering, because I’ve been lectured at (emphasis on at) about the series by a child. Available now for the Epic Games Store, you can pick up Five Nights at Freddy’s: Into the Pit. Released in 2024 and previously available for free on Epic last October, the latest in the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise is probably the most polished and most praised game in the series. However, it is difficult to mess up a 2D horror game.

Far more interesting (and less problematic) is the other offering from last week, at the start of the month. DOOM (2016), a Doom for the modern age of shooters that doesn’t sacrifice the idea of “big gun goes boom” and that the Doom Marine cares not for your plot but rather to rip the horns off of a monster from hell and spread their guts along the ceiling. Like a serial killer version of Michelangelo. Big, loud, fast, and fun: what we all need right now. Available now via a GOG code.

Available now via a GOG code too, and only a year on from the release of id Software’s more well-known level of horror, we step back into 2017’s Conarium. Developed by Stormling Studios, I think we’ve seen Conarium before, and I mean a long time ago, maybe even pre-pandemic or maybe the very early days of that. In the wake of Outlast and all those walking sim horrors, Conarium does that with a Lovecraftian twist, taking inspiration from At the Mountains of Madness, though set after. Thankfully, that one features a less racistly named monster: Shoggoth.

Released before Moses bought a tablet to watch pornography, the next offering is the game that’s older than dust itself, which is fun to say when you are older than even that. Available now via a GOG code and developed by Red Orb Entertainment, WarBreeds is a 1998 RTS that was middle of the road when RTS and RPGs were one of four genres on PC. A twinge of sci-fi, you play in a far-off galaxy as part of a former slave clan that has seized the means of genetic modification and production.

Back to Epic for next week, and it is certainly more exciting than FNAF. Released in 2023 and developed by The Council‘s developer Big Bad Wolf, Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong is a lighter RPG-style of “choices matter” gameplay in the franchise’s world. Not exactly praised to the high heavens, it takes the world of Vampire: The Masquerade and shoves it into the gameplay model of Telltale’s The Walking Dead with a less engaging plot, characters, and gameplay.

It would have been funny if this next one was offered from the 10th of September rather than the 15th of October, but sure. One of only two Amazon Games App offerings this month, we saw Caravan SandWitch on the Epic Games Store recently, where I pointed out that it is a “colorful and light sci-fi exploration adventure game about finding a missing sister with an environmental subtext,” albeit with all that “WOKE” stuff the internet likes to complain about without defining what Huddie Ledbetter meant by the phrase. If you can get over yourself and enjoy a colorful little adventure game, then you’ll enjoy it.

Available through the Epic Games Store from the 22nd of October, and very much my feeling for these articles, it is Hekate’s 2023 World War 1 (yes, but what do you mean, one?) horror game, Ad Infinitum. Sadly, this was around the same time that Frictional Games had already released Amnesia: The Bunker, putting Ad Infinitum out to pasture for doing horror ad nauseam and with poorer execution. Reviews typically note that while it is technically made well enough, its horror isn’t as frightening as it probably should be.

What is horrific, however, is this idea that point-and-click hidden-object games that look like a mess are in fact worth any money. Indeed, we’ve found the Legacy Games code offering, and it is Time Travel: Escape Room Game. For an “Escape Room Game,” it does have a lot of screenshots outdoors. Might I suggest that English is not Saltium Games’ first language? Though one might assume that a German company would do better than this.

Back to the Epic Games Store for the penultimate offering for the month on the 29th, and it is actually a good one. I probably should have ended on this one instead. Released in 2025, Spilt Milk Studios’ Trash Goblin sees you play as a little goblin running a cozy little imporium where you clean and fix people’s junk and sell it on. Pretty, nice, wholesome, and praised heavily by Alexx, both in his preview and when talking about accessibility.

The final game for October actually isn’t a horror game, but rather a Rogue-lite beat ’em up on my wishlist. Available from the 29th of October for the Amazon Games App, you can pick up Kiborg. Developed by Sobaka Studio, Kiborg is a somewhat ambitious if unpolished combat-heavy adventure through a somewhat sci-fi prison where cybernetic implants are commonplace. Interesting enough to check out.