Sker Ritual and Home are free on Epic

Monday, Gothic/fantasy themed cleaning up game Cluttermancer got a release date, meanwhile, apparently everyone still thinks this Backrooms thing is fun, and Kingmakers is still delayed. Tuesday, Coral Island gets a Switch 2 release window, and There are No Ghosts at the Grand hits early access soon. Wednesday, Kitaria Fables 2 is to get a physical release, and Nintendo is doing Nintendo things for PR. Thursday, the Launch Preview for Football Manager 27 will be free next week, so you can try-before-you-buy. Also, if you haven’t had enough of my ranting by the end of the day, I had a moan about Scottish football and the TV deal.

Moving on to the Epic Games Store, we’ll start with the PC and mobile offering of Home – A Unique Horror Adventure. Unique in that it is short, practically demands that you replay it a couple of times, and will probably just annoy you. To say Home is a horror game is to say I am a swimsuit model; it does the bump-in-the-night thing and it covers dark topics, but as developer Benjamin Rivers noted in a 2013 interview with PocketGamer.biz, he created the game to generate discussion. In that interview, Rivers’ notes that negative criticism doesn’t matter because it is discussion.

From one developer firmly planting their own head up their anus, let’s talk about the second offering this week, Sker Ritual. Released in 2024, Sker Ritual is what if The Killing Floor and Left 4 Dead mixed and was somehow more horrible, less interesting, and less fun. Indeed, that’s a rousing review for Wales Interactive, though it is rather difficult to sell this idea of yet another co-op-focused shooter without there being something appealing. The only positive I can pull out of it is that Maid of Sker fans have this as a co-op shooter, but even then it is a niche of a niche within the niche that is horror gaming.

All this week, you can pick up Home – A Unique Horror Adventure and Sker Ritual on the Epic Games Store until the 29th, when I’ll be busy managing an Italian third-tier football team, probably. Onto next week, Epic is lying because it is saying there is only one offering next week: Sorry We’re Closed. The last time we didn’t have a double bill on Epic, there were dinosaurs roaming the Earth, or maybe I’m just thinking of the lizard people that run all world governments.