There aren’t many truly metal games—except for those that are accidentally very metal, like Dark Souls—but Brütal Legend is one of them. As Tyler pointed out yesterday, the late Ozzy Osbourne makes a cameo in the 2009 Double Fine action-adventure. Now the latter has made the game free on Itch.io to honour the prince of darkness, but you’ll need to act fast, because the offer will only last for 666 minutes.
666 is, of course, the number of the beast, a fact I first learned from Iron Maiden. It’s hardly the only lesson I’ve learned from metal. Type O Negative taught me Pi to its 13th digit and Cradle of Filth taught me how to describe unusual sexual acts in romantic style English.
Brütal Legend was met with a lukewarm reception back in 2009, which feels like an injustice in retrospect. It released slapbang in the middle of the 360-era brown shooter, and dared do something different. People seem to like it a lot more nowadays, and not just because Ozzy Osbourne is in it. When it finally hit PC in 2013, our reviewer described it as “rough as the back of an old rocker’s throat, but gleeful whether you dream heavy metal nightmares or not”.
This offer is only available on Itch.io, presumably because Steam doesn’t let you run promotions for 666 minutes. Which by the way, is a little over eleven hours. At the time of writing, you still have just under ten hours to grab the game.
In case you slept through yesterday, Ozzy Osbourne has died at the age of 76. He was a founding member of Black Sabbath, a prolific solo artist, and quite obviously a design inspiration for very many RPG baddies.
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