Long before Hideo Kojima made the first triple-A walking simulator, he was trying to spin sunlight into bullets. The game in question, Boktai: The Sun Is In Your Hand, is a Game Boy Advance title from 2003, in which you play a vampire-slaying gunslinger. The gun you're slinging is a "solar-powered" pistol, which you could charge up using a cartridge-mounted photometric sensor by physically standing in sunshine. This was 13 years before the launch of Pokemon Go. Sadly, Boktai's debut didn't result in city parks or rooftops being flooded by crowds of GBA-wielding undead killers. But it was a fun gimmick and the game itself is good enough to carry it - an isometric dungeon-crawler in which you have to find a vamp's coffin and drag it to the surface for purgation.
]]>Got an email about this. Looks cool. Is free. “I’ll write about that,” I thought. “I’ll write about that for Rock Paper Shotgun, a place that semi-regularly posts articles about cool and free games.” So here we are. If you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, assuming the only reason I’d open an article in a superfluous and straightforward manner is because I’m about to deliver some sort of third sentence twist, you’re completely wrong! There’s no twist at all. I’m simply going to deliver some information about the game in a neutral tone. You can find VED: Purification, a free prologue demo to RPG VED, here.
]]>You remember Lucas Pope, right? He who casually dropped two of the most influential puzzle games ever then got distracted by yellow cranks for six years, occasionally popping up to drop a demake of Papers Please? Well, Pope has ceased hogging that crank, for now at least, and just released Haloween-y adventure game Moida Mansion. It’s on Itch here, and it’s completely free to play in your browser.
]]>Shotgun King developers Punkcake Délicieux have quietly rolled out another ticklish oddity in the shape of Build The Sun, a work-in-progress 2D god sim. In Build The Sun you preside over a tribe of alarming yet cute inkblot creatures, who sometimes remind me of Pikmin and sometimes, of that awful 'roided-up panther monster from the opening stretch of Another World. Your objective is, indeed, to build the sun, because there isn't one: the game's pastoral pixelart world is engulfed in darkness.
]]>Tiny deck builder Combo Critters exhibits the winning combination common to both small games and radical breakfast cereals - it’s very crunchy, but also bright, sugary and moreish. If Thaddius Cornflakes had recommended struggling families play Combo Critters instead of eating Cookie Crisp for dinner, I imagine the backlash would have been far more reserved. Cookie Crisp tastes like like someone poured Splenda on a packing peanut fished out from a puddle. Combo Critters, though? Pretty tasty, and also free from Itch here.
]]>Rather sheepishly, I must admit that my own experience with Armenian art begins and ends with System Of A Down. Cheers then, The Bird Of A Thousand Voices, for showing up in my inbox and giving me a second reference point next to Sugar. This one’s a simple though very striking platformer, inspired by folk legends and scored by composer Tigran Hamasyan. It’s part of a multimedia project based Armenian folk tale Hazaran Blbul (Firebird). It’s completely free, and you can find it here.
]]>We're having a bit of an indie freebie morning, it seems. My humble contribution is 50/50, a downloadable or browser-based game which I suspect will fill some of you with the deepest aggravation. As the name suggests, it's about cutting things in half - specifically food items, such as fried eggs (easy enough) and candy canes (WTF). You draw a line down each object with your mouse, then click or hit space bar to perform a slice. Then, the game calculates a percentage. If it's bang-on or very close to 50/50, you'll pass. If not, you'll have to start over. I know: this is how entire days are wasted. Sorry.
]]>Haha. Hoho. Yes. Hehe. Yes. This rules. This rules so hard. Portal To The Cosmobeat is a rhythm dance battler where you copy the moves of your opponents by controlling each of your limbs, and your head, with a separate key. If you look down at your keyboard right now, you’ll notice your W, A, D, Z and X form a five pointed star - with the W key a bit off, granted. That’s you, that is. You hold down the limbs you want to wiggle, then control them with your mouse. It’s simple, silly, and very fun. Here’s a tray-tray:
]]>KIBORG: Arena feels like a throwback in several ways that I quite enjoy. It’s a free prologue to the upcoming cyberpunk puncher KIBORG. The titular arena is a large room in which you, a large man, bash a large amount of enemies. You have to punch a gong between waves to trigger the next, and this struck me as a nice pre-emptive nudge that every problem you face in Kiborg can be solved by rapidly moving your fist towards offending objects, which turned out not to be too far off the mark.
]]>Finding and sharing Free Stuff is one of the time-honoured duties of the video game journalist or SEO-monger. Back when I was OXM's online editor, "free Xbox games" was one of our golden Google pillars, the other two being "Minecraft Xbox 360 update" and "Skyrim something something". Well, uncle Valve has just rudely torpedoed that ancient investigative initiative by adding a Trending Free tab to the Steam frontpage, encompassing prologues, demos, free-to-play games and that most treasured of jewels, a full free game with no monetisation elements, such as Grimhook.
Do not cry for us pitiful electronic scribblers, crowded on our melting internet icebergs. Play free games instead! Thanks to that new tab, I've just discovered a demo for neato wide-format tower defender Frontline Crisis. Hah, that'll keep the awareness of steady livelihood erosion at bay.
]]>Sometimes I want to play a video game, and sometimes I just want to assemble a quiet little Dutch town with iron bridges, fountains and dinky trams bustling about like bumble bees. The project in question is Tramstertram. Aside from being a terrifying feat of punmanship, it's a browser-based building toy from Matt Stark, creator of the really rather lovely Viewfinder.
]]>As a quick glance at my Papa John's account will tell you, I’ve enough of an addictive personality that I’ve consciously avoided Vampire Survivors and its -likes, in the fear that the carefully balanced professionalisation of my dedicated goblin lifestyle will tip over the edge. As such, I don’t have enough experience to tell you whether the currently free Pizza Hero is an especially interesting or innovative riff on the formula. However, I am simple-minded enough to enjoy the epic bacon 1.5 humour of a sentient pizza slice with a dog for a companion upgrading itself one topping at a time. This action roguelike reeks of concentrated internet like a week old-slice nestled amidst a stack of free AOL disks. But! It’s cute and fun and free, and that’s enough for me.
]]>Time hopping in Berlin usually means queuing several hours for a club, only to magically find yourself either right back at the end of the line, or else waking up on the U-Bahn three days later with tinnitus and currywurst spilled down your Acronym jacket. Not so in cyberpunk tactics game All Walls Must Fall. Here time travel means dodging bullets, reversing flubbed hacking, and replaying that conversation you had with the bouncer that got you booted to the curb. “A bloody good time-troubling tactical shooter,” decreed Adam Smith (RPS in Peace) in his review. Well, now it’s a bloody free time-troubling tactical shooter. Take that, Monday!
]]>Sometimes I have proper critical thoughts about games and sometimes I am Marge Simpson giving her opinion on a potato. Take LXD Red Honey, a free 2D metroidvania created in just 18 days for the Metroidvania Month 24 jam by sarn and OvergrownRobot, with playtesting by Oroshibu. I just think it's neat. So neat.
]]>What I like about browser games is that clicking on a word in this mundane piece of software could take you anywhere, to anything. For example, if you click on this link to the domain corru.observer, you'll find yourself in a dark room before a strange glowing device. Apparently it's your job to do... something with it? So begins one of the most surprising and delightful games I've played all year, a sprawling, shape-shifting sci-fi story which is still unfolding through updates. I didn't even know all this was possible with HTML and CSS.
]]>This week you could get two horror games for free! Rental and Content Warning both launched for nada (albeit for a couple of days only in the case of the latter). Nate and I have both done work for free in the hope someone would retrospectively pay for it, so on this episode of the Electronic Wireless Show podcast Is it worth it? Is this how the internet is going to work from now on? Plus, what are some of our favourite free games? There are a bunch.
We also talk about the science that suggests people process visual information at wildly different speeds (I know I shouldn't have said that some people just 'see more fasterer' or whatever reductive thing I said, please don't email me), Nate teaches me about some weird cryptids, and we recommend some sweet non-video game stuff, as per usual.
]]>"It almost feels like proof-of-concept for a first-person Prince of Persia game, with an ever-so-gentle dusting of Portal," our Edwin said after playing free first-person platformer Grimhook when it launched in December. It's a cracking little game, parkouring about with the help of supernatural powers and a grappling hook, but ends right as it feels like it's getting started. I'd certainly be up for three hours of this, so how splendid to hear that the developers are planning to make a "complete" and fancier experience.
]]>Hey, do you like going shoulder-to-shoulder with a pal to battle in same-screen local multiplayer games? Follow-up question: do you enjoy deceiving your pal while trying to uncover their own deceit? Last question: do you want to throw knives at your pal's face? If so, check out Neon Knives, a fun free same-screen game for two players where you must both try to blend into a crowd of NPCs while identifying and assassinating your mate.
]]>I like horror, I like bunnies, I like cool little games. Hey, y'here that, Rental? You're alright, kid. It's a free (free!) little game originally made for 2022's 32bit jam that takes about 20 minutes to play through, wherein you play a child rabbit who has arrived at a holiday cabin with her family. You're the first to head inside and, oop, the door locks behind you. Classic twist. A further twist is that, while Rental is entirely free to download and play, you can buy a supporter zine as DLC to kick some funds to the devs. Noice.
]]>Head over to the Epic Games Store on April 4th and you'll be able to grab The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice Edition and Thief (2014) for free and to keep forever. Like a thief!
]]>[audience makes "wohhhhh" controversial noise]
I know, I know! Some might argue that Human Revolution is the best Deus Ex game, but they're wrong, it's clearly Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. The last, new Deus Ex game to be made will be free to keep from the Epic Games Store for a week starting March 14th.
]]>Modern art puzzler Please, Touch The Artwork was a bit of a surprise hit when it came out in 2022. It not only poked fun at the reverential distance enforced on us by stuffy old art galleries, but it also invited us to recreate abstract modern masterworks by clicking, tracing and generally getting up close and personal with them with our big, colourful in-game fingers. Now, solo developer Thomas Waterzooi is back with Please, Touch The Artwork 2, which takes us on a slightly different journey through the art world as a hidden object point and click game. It's out today, is completely free, and was made to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the death of the Belgian expressionist and surrealist painter James Ensor.
]]>Right after exploring Scottish peaks and glens in A Highland Song, indie studio Inkle are now sending us into an ever-shifting labyrinth full of art in a free new game. Made for Google's Arts & Culture initiative, The Forever Vault is an adventure game where you search the labyrinth's many attics, mines, gardens, server rooms, rooftops, treehouses, wine cellars, and such for your missing pal not only by passing through doorways and stairways but by connecting ideas and concepts contained within artwork. Having played (and failed) one attempt to crack it, I'm keen for a return.
]]>Do you like puzzles? Do you like free games? Do you like free puzzle games that are charming and idiosyncratic? Then you'll love 20 Small Mazes, a game that is just 20 small mazes. As the Steam store page says, they're good mazes, though. It's out on February the 16th from FLEB, which seems to be just one guy who really likes puzzles and making puzzles. I wholly support him.
]]>Celeste celebrated its sixth anniversary this month, and developers Extremely OK Games have marked the occasion by releasing a free Nintendo 64 homage to their excellent platforming game over on Itch. Made in just "a week(ish)", Celeste 64: Fragments Of The Mountain channels the spirits of Super Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie as it tasks players with collecting dozens of strawberrys hidden around its snowy 3D landscape. It's well worth checking out if you've got a spare minute or so, though given how rock hard it is you may want to put aside a good hour or so if you want to truly master its controls and uncover every last secret.
]]>If you enjoy the novelty and challenge of fiddly first-person shooter controls, do check out the free new "experimental survival horror game" Neural Parasite. Can you fight your way out of a Nazi bunker when everything is controlled by clicking? Even simply moving involves clicking on pictures of your left and right shoes, moving faster as you alternate shoes faster. Neural Parasite is short and it's free, so hop to it! Or, click on one of your shoes to hop to it, I suppose.
]]>Vampire Survivors was a big enough sensation that it instantly inspired a horde of similar games to spawn. 20 Minutes Till Dawn was one of the more worthy: a topdown, 2D roguelite with a similar sense of spectacle and progression, but with traditional weapon aiming.
It's currently free to keep from the Epic Games Store.
]]>I Wanna Be The Guy was a freeware platformer that pastiched classic Nintendo games and required pixel-perfect jumps and a lot of trial and error to overcome its umpteen unpredictable, unfair deaths. Naturally it became an internet sensation all the way back in 2007, bolstered further by the release of the source code in 2011 and a tidal wave of fangames that followed.
Now there's an easier way to make those fangames. I Wanna Maker is a freeware precision platformer with level editor and easy level sharing, and it just hit version 1.0.
]]>Returning with the much more SEO and annual-tradition appropriate name, The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival (formerly known as Mayor Bones Proudly Presents: Ghost Town's 1001st Annual Pumpkin Festival) is here! Every October it pops up to make your Halloween season orange and flickery with a host of digital carved pumpkins on display in a lovely gallery you can take a calming walk around. I hope this comes to be a seasonal tradition on RPS as unshakeable as Skeal at Christmas. And it's pay-what-you-can on Itch!
]]>Stretch and compress rooms to make your escape in Stretchmancer, a nice little puzzle-platformer you can play for free. Your heroic gecko is a Stretchmancer, see, able to bend the dimensions of spaces to push walls far away and draw distant objects near. This is handy when trying to defeat an evil space empire. Stretchmancer is in a similar vein to Portal: a first-person puzzle-platformer which uses one neat trick to change how you see the world, and builds on that while a baddie taunts you. It's short, it's free, it's fun, and you might enjoy it slightly breaking your eyes.
]]>Flour, egg, banana, butter, salt. Given the ingredients at hand, I thought this was a decent attempt at making banana bread. The free cooking game Little Chef disagreed, and dubbed my dish 'Eggy Mess'. Everyone's a critic. But it's fun to puzzle out potential recipes, dragging ingredients into the pot, brushing my cursor against little physics-simulated spoons and plant fronds, and discovering what fresh horror I've concocted. It's free and playable in your browser, so hie thee to Itch.io and get experimenting.
]]>Another week means more freebies are available from the Epic Games Store, and this week two very different games have slashed their price tags. Starting today, The Elder Scrolls Online and Murder By Numbers are both free to keep from the digital store. Something for multiplayer dragon slayers and solo picross lovers alike.
]]>If you ever experienced the horror of being chased and devoured by a yeti in Microsoft's SkiFree, reader dear, it's time for you to confront your nightmares. A fun little free game offers you the opportunity to become the yeti, chasing skiers down the slopes yourself and cramming their crumpled bodies into your cruel maw. It's a few minutes of fun, and I did enjoy remembering the many hours I spent trying to escape the inevitable.
]]>I like to think I'm good at picking passwords. The real secret is to not pick passwords, it's to let software generate passwords for you, but I think I can pick a memorable yet secure password when required to. Well, I thought that until I played The Password Game, a free game you can play in your web browser. You simply need to pick a password which meets its rules, but it keeps introducing more and more which become sillier and sillier. It's a good joke and grows into quite a tricky puzzle game too. Plus it's free!
]]>Six months ago, MMORPG Temtem introduced a mode that let you jump straight into the game’s 2v2 turn-based battles, ignoring the busywork of quests, creature-catching, and all the other Pokémon-isms. Showdown was the mode's name; something for the animal fight pit lovers in the room, rather than the plain old animal lovers. That mode has now been spun into a free standalone release aptly called Temtem Showdown, out now.
]]>It's been ten years since Intelligible Games graced us with Socrates Jones: Pro Philosopher, an Ace Attorny style argue 'em up where you confront a cavalcade of philosophers in an attempt to uncover the ultimate nature of morality. Also you're dead, and there are lots of silly jokes.
I loved it, so I'm very pleased that the devs have just announced that Pro Philosopher 2: Governments and Grievances will be out at some point in 2024. It's nearly time to get down and dirty with political philosophy, baby.
]]>Tetris is grand, but it could do with more chainsaws. Thus (presumably) went the thought process of the developers behind Dr. Fetus' Mean Meat Machine, a Super Meat Boy spinoff about lining up colourful meaty blobs while dodging buzzsaws and other grizzly hazards. Think Tetris meets match 4 meets Meat Boy slapstick.
A demo came out in April, but publishers Thunderful Games have just announced you'll get to play the full thing on June 22nd.
]]>Midnight Ghost Hunt pits ghost against hunters in multiplayer scraps in which the ghosts are able to possess inanimate objects and both groups can unlock abilities with which to catch out their opponents. It's still in early access, but it's also free to keep from the Epic Games Store right now.
]]>Continuing their annual tradition, developer Don’t Nod have announced that all three episodes of Tell Me Why will be free to keep for the rest of June. Rather than spending money on the game, the team asks that you might consider donating that money to “trans creators, trans-inclusive charities local to you, and trans people in need,” in honour of Pride Month. Regardless, the supernatural mystery is one of the best recent adventure games and is well worth the time.
]]>Tetris gobbled up so much of my time during the early years of university, partly because it functioned as a quick break between writing essays. Those quick breaks soon became trances though, as my eyes stayed unblinking and my fingers snapped across the keyboard with a mind of their own. The best game of all time, some might argue. Professional procrastinators can now rejoice as there’s a new way to play the blocky puzzler: Setris, or Tetris with sand.
]]>Every week, the Epic Games Store gives away one free game for everyone. This week that freebie is Fallout: New Vegas - Ultimate Edition, available to keep forever from now until June 1st. So, if you somehow missed Obsidian’s post-apocalyptic postal service sim, now’s the time to get stuck in the wasteland. Just hop over to the Epic Games Store to add the game to your account. The giveaway ends at 4pm BST on June 1st, at which point New Vegas will be replaced with another mysterious free game.
]]>Amazon Prime subscribers can claim 13 free games during the month of June. Well, at no extra cost to their Prime subscription, anyway. That’s on top of the recently announced extras that are available for the next few weeks, including Turnip Boy and Calico. But next month’s lineup of freebies - which includes the ever-lovely SteamWorld Dig 2, Neverwinter Nights and Autonauts - starts on June 1st, with more free games being made available every single week after that, so be sure to check back every Thursday.
]]>This month, Amazon were already giving away 15 games to all Amazon Prime subscribers, but they’ve now sweetened the pot with 8 more, including some real good indies up for keeps. The new additions are available to claim starting today, up until June 26th - giving you a little over a month to grab the lineup below.
]]>I’ve lost countless seconds, minutes, maybe even hours to those TikTok videos showing off ludicrous marble runs. Strangers decorate their houses with mini slopes and sliding paths, they record their marbles rolling down these elaborate courses, and then they’re posted online for strangers like me to mindlessly enjoy. I’ve now spent the last few nights building my own marble runs - not in real life, because I’m too lazy for the cleanup after - in Zen Marbles, a free playable prototype, out now.
]]>Free is free and spooky shooter Metro: Last Light is currently free to keep from Steam. It has been made available by developers 4A Games in order to celebrate its 10th anniversary. The catch, sort of, is that this is the Complete Edition, a version that does not normally even show up in Steam search results. The slightly-improved Metro: Last Light Redux will still cost you a few quid or bucks.
]]>A sequel to Hawken was certainly not on my 2023 bingo card. Five years after the multiplayer mech FPS shut down on PC, now requiring a fan-made fix even just to play offline against bots, I didn't expect to ever again dash around its cool sci-fi cityscapes as a charmingly scrappy little stomper. So I was excited when publishers 505 Games announced singleplayer follow-up Hawken Reborn on Monday then launched it into early access two days later. Having now played it, oh dear. You know, it's okay for the dead to stay dead.
]]>Fans of Monument Valley’s Escher-like staircases and Carto’s level rearrangement, allow me to introduce you to an indie that unites both of those pleasures under one small roof. Solo developer Atlas Imaginal released Little Postman last week as a “personal exercise” to test their game-making knowledge and communicate with players in non-verbal ways. The results are a series of nine down-tempo headscratchers that are out now, for free.
]]>May is on the horizon and that can mean only one thing: Star Wars Day of course. To celebrate May the 4th (be with you), Amazon Prime are giving away 15 games to subscribers over the next month, with the flight combat sim Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 3D leading the pack of freebies. Every single Thursday a new batch of free games will be available to claim, so take a look at the lineup below.
]]>When I think of quintessentially British games, a few highlights come to mind. Fable's fairytale world of stocky goblins and poverty-stricken orphans with Victorian-era voices is definitely very British, as is Banjo-Kazooie’s dry wit and sarcasm. A decent bucket of contenders, but the crown has to go to the Greggs Simulator, a free shop sim that tasks you with managing a Greggs pasty shop that's a staple of every UK high street.
]]>Mordhau is about alternately bashing at other players with swords, axes and polearms, and teaming up with other players for playful buffoonery with lutes, emotes, and spontaneous roleplay. It was one of our favourite games of 2019 and it's currently free to keep from the Epic Games Store.
]]>I entered a sterile biodome with nothing but myself present and nothing to do but cry, spit, and piss. This is what science looks like. From these scant three verbs, you can create a whole world in The Barnacle Goose Experiment, combining substances to spontaneously generate whole other forms of matter, life, landscapes, and oddities. Made by Everest Pipkin, it's part idle game, part clicker, and wholly fascinating. Best of all, you can play for free in your browser.
]]>Roguelike puzzler Desktop Dungeons was first released a decade ago, and the remastered Desktop Dungeons: Rewind launches next week on April 18th. Developer QCF Design evidently have a lot to celebrate and they’re doing so in style. Owners of the original game will be able to grab the remaster for free when it comes out. At no extra cost.
]]>We have the dingy corridors of Dead Space (2008), we also have the pretty corridors of Dead Space remake (2023), and now, we can enter the Ishimura a third time with Dead Space Demake (2023, but it looks like 1996.) The fan-made Dead Space Demake takes the horror classic’s oppressive environment and brutal aliens, and recreates them in a PS1-style polygonal aesthetic. It’s out now on itch.io and it’s totally free.
]]>The long-running sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica received a turn-based strategy spin-off a couple years ago. Focusing on the epic space battles alone, Battlestar Galactica Deadlock was generally well-reviewed at its launch in 2017, and it’s become increasingly popular in the years since, thanks to hefty post-launch support and a lack of other BSG-related things going on. Luckily, Battlestar Galactica Deadlock is now free to keep on Steam until 6pm BST/ 10am PT/ 1pm ET on April 9th.
]]>Dying Light 2 came out last year, but the polished zombie-parkour sequel didn't make its predecessor obsolete. If what you're after is a more freeform, organic open world in which to survive, then the first Dying Light is arguably the better choice. Good news: its currently free-to-keep from the Epic Games Store alongside its excellent expansion.
]]>Falling-block puzzle games get a gory makeover in Dr. Fetus' Mean Meat Machine, a spin-off from Super Meat Boy. Rather than dodging buzzsaws and baddies while platforming, here you'll be doing that while dropping coloured blobs into grids to match chains of colours and make 'em vanish. You can see that for yourself, as Mean Meat Machine now has a free demo offering a taste ahead of the game's launch later this year.
]]>Players likely recognise Celeste as the pixel-perfect platformer from 2018, but it began its life as Celeste Classic, a free game written for the PICO-8. Celeste Classic presented a condensed climb up the titular mountain, letting you dash across platforms, hang onto walls, and collect strawberries - in miniature form. As a fun homage, you can find the PICO-8 version inside Celeste proper. And now, as an even funner homage, you can play it on the Playdate. A loveable game on a loveable handheld.
]]>Solitaire has been a constant fixture for professional procrastinators since time immemorial. Many households, including mine, used the casual card game to kill time - dragging cards, dropping them, and planning sets ahead of time, all in an effort to catch the final fireworks. I was never much good at Solitaire, but as an adult I do understand Word Solitaire, a remixed version of the classic from indie dev Petri Purho.
]]>Developer Landfall - the studio behind wobbly strategy game Totally Accurate Battle Simulator - have released its next game, although game (singular) might be inaccurate. Landfall Archives is a digital museum of sorts, compiling 23 playable prototypes and demos from unreleased projects that never crossed the finish line. It’s out now, and best of all, it’s free.
]]>Each month, subscribers to Amazon's Prime service get a new batch of games to keep. April's collection includes a bumper crop of fifteen games, released in waves every Thursday, including Terraformers, Metal Slug 4, and BJ Blazkowicz sad eyes in Wolfenstein: The New Order.
]]>Indie studio Majorariatto have released small, experimental games every March since 2017 - barring the cursed year of 2020 - and now they’re back with another thought-provoking adventure called Pineapple On Pizza, this time asking the profound question: can video games convey such a complex flavour? It’s out now, it’s free, and it’s only about ten minutes long.
]]>Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters ended up turning me into a bit of a Warhammer game convert last year, and over the last nine months or so I've been steadily hovering up as many Warhammer-themed strategy games as I can muster. Today, I can add another one to my roster for literally zero pounds, as Proxy Studio's 4X Warhammer-thon Gladius - Relics Of War is now over on the Epic Games Store for the next week.
]]>Irish drama The Banshees Of Inisherin walked home empty-handed on Sunday after being nominated for nine Academy Awards at the Oscars show. But the film shouldn’t be too sad since it’s received the biggest prize of all: a Pac-Man-like video game adaptation as a free game in your web browser. “It was an interesting challenge,” says Cogs & Marvel’s creative director, Jon Hozier-Byrne. “How can you tell a complex story in the simplest narrative form?” The answer is Banshees: The Game, a short, hilarious, 8-bit game that you can play right here.
]]>"A better Alien game than any official Alien game" is how our Brendy described 2016's Duskers, the latest game that's going free for keepsies on the Epic Games Store. Duskers is a roguelikelike sci-fi horror survival game about salvaging supplies from derelict spaceships using drones, seeing through their sensor readouts and issuing commands by typing into a console. Oh, by the way, there's a reason why all these spaceships are now empty. Well, mostly empty.
]]>A new month is on the horizon which can mean only one thing: more gaming freebies. Amazon Prime members can snag seven free games throughout March, with 90s RPG Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition leading the pack, followed by the cute puzzler (and undercover horror game) I Am Fish. New games are available every Thursday, so scribble that day into your calendars.
]]>Overwatch 2’s third season is well underway, adding more of the usual maps, modes, and cosmetics. The big surprise this season is the Valentine’s themed Loverwatch, a non-canon text adventure that allows you to court either Mercy or Genji. Naturally, I chose to date Genji (described as Overwatch’s “bad boy”), and the results were surprising. It’s cringe-y and occasionally grating, but it’s also surprisingly charming and stuffed with referential humour that OW fans will surely love.
]]>I've never met a deck I didn't want to build, but I don't think I've met deck-building in a shoot 'em up before. That's the offer of Dire Decks, a cute little arcade shmup which you can play for free right now in your browser on Itch.io. As you face down endless enemies, you draw and play cards representing individual attacks and power-ups, drafting new and more powerful cards as you level up. I dig it! In another time, this might have been a wee hit Flash game on Newgrounds.
]]>If you spent a portion of the 90s going cross-eyed to look at Magic Eye 3D pictures of dolphins, elephants, and sailboats emerging from fields of noise, you might enjoy the new platformer from indie developer Daniel Linssen. It's called Stereogram, because it's made of moving stereograms. Let your eyes go slack and gaze into the distance of an optical illusion as you jump around pretty little Magic Eye levels in this platformer which reminds me of VVVVVV.
]]>February might be the shortest month, but this year it’s jam-packed with free games for anyone with an Amazon Prime membership. There’s nine games up for keepsies over the course of the month, with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind GOTY Edition standing out at the front of the pack from February 2nd. Members will also get to claim the bathhouse management game Onsen Master, futuristic 3D runner Aerial_Knight's Never Yield, and chibi god-brawler Divine Knockout in the first half of the month.
]]>Last year, word puzzle Wordle swept through family WhatsApp groups across the planet and was quickly snapped up by the New York Times. In the wake of its success, several other games inspired by Wordle gained popularity, including Quordle, in which you attempt to uncover four words simultaneously.
Well, now it's Quordle's turn to be bought, as it's been picked up by Merriam-Webster.
]]>While Lunar New Year celebrations continue (I'm enjoying all the fireworks over my neighbourhood at night), you might fancy joining in by playing Tet. This lovely little free indie game has you zooming through minigames to prepare a dinner for a Vietnamese Lunar New Year party before all your guests arrive. Chop this, fry those, and don't forget to wash your hands! Designed and hand-drawn by Swiss-Vietnamese illustrator Charlotte Broccard, it's a lovely five minutes of fun.
]]>Are there any sweeter words than "A Short Hike-like"? Both because the sweet, mountain adventure is one of my favourite games, and because "Hike-like" is a fun rhyme. Well, anyway, Haven Park is like A Short Hike crossed with Animal Crossing, and it's currently free to keep from GOG.
]]>You may be able to hack your way across the Lands Between, but do you really know them? Can you tell your Nokrons from your Nokstellas? How about your Sanctums from your Catacombs? Can you distinguish between the Ainsel River and the Ainsel River Main? Look me in the eye and tell me you can pinpoint the Cathedral of Manus Celes, I dare you.
Alternatively, you can try out this fan-made Elden Ring Geoguessr-inspired game that plonks you into a random bit of the map and scores you based on how close you can drop a pin to your true location. If Rings aren't your thing LostGamer.io has maps from other games, too, including Skyrim and Fortnite. It's a lovely idea.
]]>The latest free offerings from the Epic Games Store are futuristic RPG Gamedec - Definitive Edition, space-based party game First Class Trouble, and godly 3D brawler Divine Knockout. All of them are free for the next week, so you can pick them up for precisely zero outlay right now wherever you are in the world. The three games are a canny mix of genres, so there could well be something of interest there even if you’re not bothered about jacking into things or whacking chibi deities with a comically large mallet.
]]>Before Hello Games began work on No Man's Sky, they made several games in the cute, colourful stunt racing Joe Danger series. Joe Danger and its sequel Joe Danger: The Movie remain available via Steam, but a mobile spin-off released in 2014, Joe Danger Infinity, never left iOS.
Until now. As of right yesterday, Joe Danger Infinity and a mobile port of the original, Joe Danger Touch, are playable in your browser and completely free.
]]>You can grab free games from every corner of the internet these days. Well, that's if you consider 'at no extra cost' free. One such place is Amazon Prime, where members can claim and keep six free games from now until the end of the month, with 2017 horror The Evil Within 2 leading the pack. The other freebies are Elsewhere, Breathedge, Beat Cop, Faraway 2, Lawn Mowing Simulator, and Chicken Police - Paint it RED!
]]>Last week, developer David Moralejo Sánchez released Outpath: First Journey, a free "prologue chapter" for a first-person mix of clicker and crafting due in 2023. As of right now, it has an "overwhelmingly positive" rating on Steam and over 700 reviews.
]]>The Epic Games Store's festive season of freebies has drawn to a close. The Epic Games Store's weekly freebies have therefore resumed. Right now and until January 5th you can grab Dishonored: Definitive Edition for free, which includes Arkane's first-person stealth playground and all its expansions.
]]>Yesterday, I used my amazing arithmetical reasoning abilities to surmise that there were only eight free games left to come from the Epic Games Store’s Winter Sale giveaway. I was wrong. Don’t look shocked, it happens. Today sees three of the earliest Fallout games being offered up for nothing. They’re Fallout: A Post-Nuclear Role-Playing Game, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood Of Steel. I already own all three elsewhere, as you might well too, but if you don’t then it’s a good way of picking up three classics of 90s PC gaming.
]]>Tradition is a transformative power. Often unintentionally, something happens during an event and, if people want, it becomes more than an occurrence, it becomes part of the event. They repeat it, and they share it with other people in their lives and hearts, and the tradition grows. Often the original food/game/gesture/saying/joke/whatever had nothing to do with the event's core, and that doesn't matter. Sometimes it simply brings joy and feels right. For example, the use of 1956 pop song Green Door in free festive indie game Dracula Cha Cha feels so right that to me, it is a Christmas song. Green Door has run through my head for weeks, and it is once again time for the annual go on Dracula Cha Cha.
]]>While our RPS Advent Calendar has been counting down to the reveal of our favourite game of the year, another advent calendar has brought far spookier treats. The low-fi indie developers of the Haunted PS1 community have another Madvent Calendar this year, offering another 24 small horror games and oddities released daily. So far, these have ranged from an extreme snowboarding murder game to a pleasant little online social network where you leave messages for other people by decorating plants and plaques in a sunny courtyard. A lovely thing, and free!
]]>As fun as it is to declare something "a tradition" and blithely repeat it year after year to entertain myself, it has been quite magic to see other people anticipate and adopt the things I've declared RPS Christmas traditions. That's all you need to form tradition: people who want to experience something together. No matter how slight or daft the thing is, what really matters is that we do it together. So please, reader dear, join me for an annual play of Skeal, a wonderful (and free) festive single-joke game.
]]>While I procrastinate as hard as the next desk jockey, in truth I've never had the patience for Minesweeper. It doesn't have the fast pace and stunning climax of Solitaire, y'know? So what if we jazz it up by smashing in another puzzle game. Like in Minesweeper Tetris, released for free on Steam this morning, which kinda adds Tetris by making the screen slowly fill in with fresh lines of mines, challenging you to clear mines quickly. It twists my melon, man.
]]>Grab your lute and set off for adventure in Stomp Plonk, a lovely new indie game about exploring a musical fantasy land. Delightfully, its soundtrack is built from loops tied to the animations of people doing things around the world: xylophone plings from little guys tossing coins into a fountain; drum beats from jesters dancing or goblins smashing dead gnomes; barbershop mutterings from pipe-smoking fishermen; long horns from passing ships; organ notes from giant seabirds stretching their necks; and so many more. A bit like Proteus meets Bernband and Alien Caseno with the added ability to make annoying noises by slamming on your lute.
]]>Star Wars: Squadrons, an actually decent Star Wars game from recent years, is being given away on the Epic Games Store next week. You can pick up EA Motive’s dogfighting game for precisely zilch for seven standard Earth days starting from November 24th, although it seems to be the only game going for free that week. Until then, you can play with your boomstick in co-op multiplayer schlockfest Evil Dead: The Game, and there's tactical role-player Dark Deity too.
]]>A jaded private investigator teams up with her 12-year-old kid detective self to solve a mystery in The Grown-Up Detective Agency, a lovely bit of free interactive fiction. Bell Park doesn't know how or why her perfectly precocious child self is here, now, but who better to help crack a case involving her former childhood best friend? And who better to offer fresh perspective on her adult life? It's a funny little buddy cop story, and it made my morning.
]]>What are you doing for the next ten minutes? Nothing much? Alright, here's what you're doing: playing Greaser, a wee free visual novel about riding a Cronenbergian biomechanical motorbike along an endless unreal desert highway. It's playable in your browser so kick-start on over to Itch.io right now. I don't know what else you're doing this morning that'll get your engine running more than adventure, self-discovery, and erotic motorbike maintenance.
]]>It’s that time of week again, as the Epic Games Store rotates its free games and grants us two fresh things to play for nowt. If we don’t own them already, that is. There’s a strong chance that you might have already picked up either or both of this week’s freebies. One is Bethesda’s first instalment of their take on the retro-futuristic post-apocalypse in Fallout 3. There’s also Shiro Games’ ode to classic console RPGs, the Evoland series.
]]>As has been tradition for many a year now (three), Mayor Bones Proudly Presents: Ghost Town's 1001st Annual Pumpkin Festival is back! I first reported on this free pumpkin carving game from Adamgryu (of A Short Hike fame) way back in 2020, when it was only the 999th festival, and Alice0 took a stroll around it last year, too.
This year the pumpkins are back, and better than ever. Download the Pumpkin Fest for pay-what-you-can on Itch, carve your very own pump with the tools provided, and place it among the efforts of others in a peaceful spooky scene. You can take a walk around and vote for your favourite pumps. But this isn't the only pumpkin game to enjoy! I've found a couple of others, too. It's the reason for the spooky season.
]]>Reading the words "haunted house cleaning simulator," I knew exactly what diddy indie game Late Night Mop would be. And it is what I had thought. And it is what you will have guessed upon reading that too. And yet, I enjoyed my ten minutes binning rubbish and mopping up stains (just stains, don't worry about it). Then I played it again to see another ending, even knowing I am a big scaredy baby. Ugh. I will regret having played this next time I clean my flat at night.
]]>I first made the RPS treehouse aware of Kevin Costner's Waterworld The Game over a week ago, when I dumped this tweet in our work chat. At the time it was swiftly shot down as an obvious joke, and I was shamed, but now the freeware game based on a ten-second joke in a 1997 episode of The Simpsons is out. So who's laughing now, eh? Play it for yourself via creator Macaw45's itch.
]]>Two-person Indian studio Oleomingus make some of the very prettiest video games, I've long thought, and now they've expanded into a new genre with their latest free game. Folds Of A Separation is a puzzle game navigating rooftop mazes in a flooded city bristling with giant clocks, taps, and such in the usual gorgeous Oleomingus way. It's a lot to get your head around, though a treat to look at while boggling.
]]>Hop on your horse and head out for revenge in Card Cowboy, a delightful new indie game you can get for free. Your adventure unfolds by making decisions using cards which represent allies, resources, and events, which often have weird and surprising consequences. Weirdly, the game it most reminds me of is Townscaper: throw pieces together, uncertain what will happen, then be surprised and delighted what the system produces. Like accidentally making your cowboy confess his love for his horse, leading to a fresh new baby horse card in your hand. Oh no.
]]>EA and developers Maxis have revealed today that The Sims 4 will be going free to play from October 18th. You’ll be able to grab it on Steam, Origin or the EA app. There had been rumours circulating online earlier today that an announcement was incoming from EA on this, and those were evidently legit. More information on the future of The Sims will be coming on October 18th too, EA said, at an event dubbed the Behind The Sims Summit.
]]>Over the past decade, indie developer Pippin Barr has regularly shared free game experiments that you can play in your browser, such as Epic Sax, Chesses and its sequel, and the fantastically named Jostle Bastards. Now, Barr has taken another pass at his 2016 game v r 2, which was an exhibition of stuff you could find in the Unity engine’s GameObject menu. Except everything was inside cubes. In v r ^2, or v r squared, everything is out in the open on display. Take a gander at the trailer below.
]]>Hotline Miami inspired a lot of topdown, ultraviolent copycats, most of which failed to replicate its propulsive action. Midnight Mercenaries does it better than most - while also being a free fangame that mixes that Hotline Miami structure with characters and weaponry from Team Fortress 2.
]]>While the Tour De France is currently zooming about the Alps, the next stage of my own cycling journey through video games leads somewhere far flatter—and weirder. Bird Snapper is a nice little free game that's just you, an endless grey desert, a bicycle, a howling night, and innumerable antennae and electricity pylons. A walking simulator on two wheels, with a bell.
]]>Video game parodies are often ropey, being neither funny nor fun to play. I am delighted that The Looker is both, and free too. It's a loving send-up of The Witness, inviting us to a strange island to solve more line-drawing puzzles and listen to more audio tapes. Some of the puzzles are quite clever, and many of the jokes made me laugh—plus it's only an hour or two to complete.
]]>Today I visited a virtual launderette to do my virtual laundry in Roblox, lining up alongside online strangers who were also washing their virtuasmalls. After loading the machine, filling my powder, and carefully selecting then starting my cycle, I watched through the door for 12 minutes as my washing sloshed and spun. And then I watched another players's washing in disgust. Visiting this laundry simulation has made me realise I have strong opinions on how other people run their imaginary washes. You wouldn't believe the laundry crimes I've seen.
]]>Take chess, reduce one side to only the king, fill him with a terrible wrath, hand him a shotgun, then watch him go. That's Shotgun King, a roguelikelike turn-based shooter where units (mostly) move like chess pieces, only our lone king has a shotgun. It might sound like a throwaway joke game but Shotgun King is an interesting and fun challenge, especially when your upgrades also bestow different buffs upon the opposing army. And it has a free early version so you can have a go yourself.
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