It’s a great weekend for trying big games for free, with temporary free weekends currently going on for the excellent superhero strategy game/friendship simulator Midnight Suns, as well as Age of Empires 4 and Far Cry 6.
If you’d rather have some free games to keep, GOG’s hosting giveaways as part of its current We Love Games sale (opens in new tab). Unfortunately the first giveaway, for Alien Breed Trilogy, has already ended. As a consolation prize for the next two days you can claim a copy of, er, let me check my notes here, a game called Biing! Sex, Intrigue and Scalpels (opens in new tab).
Biing is, as Richard Cobbett explained in his Crapshoot column once upon a time, an erotic hospital management sim. It’s a niche subgenre without a lot of competition, I guess because nobody except German studio Reline Software thought to ask, “What if Theme Hospital was really horny?”
In Biing you’re a hospital’s micro-manager. It’s your job to hire staff, buy an ambulance, build new rooms, expand your selection of wards, buy medical implements, decide which patients to take on and where to send them, play golf, and balance the budget. It’s just that all this takes place in the same universe as the cartoons from an old issue of Playboy magazine where every nurse has the kind of figure I haven’t seen since the last time I visited my accountant, and every joke is on the same level as that one about the accountant.
GOG’s giveaway also includes the sequel, Biing! 2: Sonne, Strand Und Heiße Nächt. As the name suggests it’s only available in German, as are the other downloadable extras: the pdf of the original’s manual, as well as an uncensored version of the game. I suspect we’re not missing much. Neither is likely to make the list of the best sex games any time soon.
As for the name, it’s a reference to The Miracle of Birth, the hospital scene from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (opens in new tab). Which is probably still funnier than anything in these games.
