Epic Games has made the indie mystery game ‘Paradise Killer’ available for free until December 23rd; however, the announcement has received a lot of negative feedback because of the game’s disappointing performance at the winter sale.
Epic Games has recently announced its selection for the free game during the holiday season. It is ‘Paradise Killer’ an indie game developed by Kaizen Game Works which is a quite bizarre open-world murder mystery where you are on a paradise-like weird island and trying to solve a crime. Surely, it sounds phenomenal in theory. But what was the response from the gaming community on Twitter? To say it mildly, it is not an ovation for the game by any means. The scenario resembles more of a mixed bag with the boos accompanying some confusion. The offer is on till the 23rd of December, 11 AM ET, but reading through the replies, it seems that most of the people are already saying ‘no thanks’ even if it is for free.
The general mood in the comment section can be summed up as quite… tough. A gnoMadgnoMod, one of the players, hit hard with a comment saying Epic was “trying to keep the balance of the force, after giving hogwarts legacy giving us gay slop after gay slop.” Which, yes, that is a pretty direct and harsh way in regard to the perceived quality of the recent free games. Others were not so figurative and more straightforward. User chubbaLubba99 called the offer “Another shit game for free,” while below_sun directly asked Epic, “Are you planning to make the worst games free?”
The response was not all one-sided hatred, however, the positive comments were definitely a rarity. One of the users, HM Gaming Station, went to support the title by calling it, “Another great indie game ❤️ game is story-rich with mystery/detective elements.” Besides, Oscar Loría just said, “Great game, criminally underrated!” But these two voices were somewhat drowned out by the deluge of negative comments. Many of the replies simply expressed confusion. Lucas replied, “I mean… What????????” and MrbolleLFCDK asked, “What are these games bro?” It looks like ‘Paradise Killer’ was not on the list of many people’s favorite games and that was not in a good, surprise way—more in a “what is this?” way.
Some of the criticisms that people were hurling were rather imaginative. User Ronin_0703 posted a meme of a guy who is very disappointed and captioned it with “Might as well just stop at this point, cause most people wouldn’t even pick this up for free.” Another user, DarthForkYou, took a very aggressive approach: “Can you people just hurry up and go bankrupt already? This is painful to watch.” Ouch! That’s quite a strong expression of frustration there. Even the jokes had a sharp edge to them. Safir made a prediction about the Christmas Day freebie being a literal lump of coal, and Hyce felt sorry for the developer, commenting, “The dev seeing people not taking his game even for free 😭.”
A subtle undercurrent ran through the complaints about the “purple” or “rainbow” games, which apparently is a strange shorthand that some players use to reject games they think are LGBTQ+-themed or just… colorful? User Rodrig1goDigao wrote “another rainbow, no thanks,” while mahesh pleaded, “For god’s sake stop giving away purple games.” It’s a strange criticism that has been heard more than once and has contributed to the overall dissatisfaction.
And it was not just about this one game. Gamers are obviously comparing this year’s Christmas selection with that of the previous year when ‘Hogwarts Legacy,’ the giant, was there to be the major draw. The dissimilarity is striking, and many gamers feel that Epic is overdoing it. User UpandoJunto put it his way: “The event started off well but it went into dangerous territory 😅🤣.” The general opinion is that quality has declined. Some, like srbh4u, even guessed that it was a kind of revenge for the leakers spoiling the surprise game lists in advance. “That’s why people prefer leaks to surprises…” he speculated.
Along with all the drama regarding the games, some practical issues also made themselves felt. User tomincito requested Epic to fix the bug in Fortnite that was causing laptops to freeze and realjackoh187 reported problems with V-Bucks vouchers. Nevertheless, these were all minor issues compared to the main event which was the massive indifference (or worse) towards ‘Paradise Killer’.
