Saturday Morning Gaming: Dandara

The Epic Store knew that it had a tough row to hoe when it was going to go up against Steam.

Sure, it had Fortnite (and that’s not nothin’!), but being a one-trick pony will eventually stall out. Remember Farmville on Facebook? Candy Crush? *SHUDDER*

Well, the Epic Store did two things to set itself apart. The first was really, really, really controversial: Epic Exclusives. They would get games for a while before they’d be available on other platforms. Months? A year? Well, for that duration, they were the Only Game In Town.

On top of this, the first few months of the Epic Store were clunky. You had to re-log in every single time the store updated (WHICH WAS CONSTANTLY) and it was all around a pain in the butt. It was an unpleasant interface that was unrewarding to log into, let alone *USE*.

So they started doing the second thing: They gave games away. One game a week. Here’s the surprising thing. They weren’t giving away dogs. They were giving away games that weren’t bad. Sure, some of them came out, like, 4 years ago, but they were *GOOD* games. And they were Free! So, okay. Maybe you weren’t inclined to pay For the King or Offworld Trading Company, if someone offered it to you for free, would you take it? Like, maybe you’ll play it over the weekend or something.

And so the Epic Store became something that you wanted to log into once a week anyway. Because… hey. Maybe they were giving away something good.

And they fixed the “updating the store every other day” thing and they fixed the frequency that you had to re-log in and it became less of a pain in the butt. And, slowly but surely, it went from being unrewarding to being rewarding.

Which brings me to this week’s free game.

It’s an interesting platformer called Dandara.

It’s a platformer, but it plays a little bit differently. You aren’t tethered by gravity. You pick the direction you want to jump in (but you are limited to available platforms… you can’t jump wildly to a place that doesn’t have something for you to land on) and you pick the direction with the thumbstick before pressing A to start jumping. In all 360 degrees. Observe:

Like that.

And you also fire your gun similarly. Pick a direction to jump in with the thumbstick and press A to jump, press X to fire. See:

Now here’s what’s interesting: you may think “oh, I just jump to where I want to go, then run around and shoot things!” and that’s not correct. You jump to your next jumping point. No running around. So it’s much more of a puzzler platformer than a shooty one. I’m only about 20 minutes into the game and so I can’t really say “I recommend this!” or not, but… hey. It’s free.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is Dandara start screen. Screenshots taken by the author.)