Live Free, Play Hard: The Week's Finest Free Indie Games
Powerful game teens. @’s widow. EVERY DAY I WAKE UP AND OPEN PALM SLAM A KILLER RETORT TO MISOGYNY INTO THE SLOT.
Looking for more free games? Check out our round up of the best free PC games that you can download and play right now.
Live Forever by Hubol
I love Live Forever! so much. Shuddering, messy, ecstatic--life as an arcade experience. You don’t win or lose, things just change. Food and porn and drugs are hurtling at you, and, and...ice? Hit the porn that matches your sexuality and you’ll spray cum destroying everything in your path! You’re high, you’re aging, you’re cumming, you’re puking, you’re dead, that’s life!
Hubol’s joyous handling of colors and patterns and music and design is all the more impressive when you learn that Hubol is sixteen years old. In ten years I expect his games to be cosmic balls of energy that swallow and regurgitate matter.
Every Day by Courtney Stanton
Courtney Stanton is doing a game Every Day for a month. Personal musings on pets, work, the game industry (I cannot stress how on point these bits are), pregnancy, pizza, booze, anything, everything.
Mundane, everyday frustrations and activities somehow seem much more interesting when they're happening to someone else. Emotional voyeurism. Our own nudity is boring.
I’m interested in what people are thinking and not saying, the silent battles they fight each day, so games like these draw me in.
7Soul’s Tower by 7Soul
7Soul’s Tower is an addictive two-button platformer where lava is rising in a randomly generated tower. You can’t control where your character goes but you can control when they jump, a satisfying constraint.
The bottom of the screen measures how super you are. Spikes destroy your ability to be super. Crystal orbs help you be super. If you are super, you can do a superjump, which passes through platforms and saves you from lava when all else fails.
Housefly by David Capello
Poor little Housefly trapped inside a room. Someone closed the window and you want to feel the fresh air on your wings. Interactive parts are conveyed with natural color and motion--a spot of white against drab green, the twitching of ears.
No flashing red, no targeting reticules. We don’t need to leave our fingerprints anymore than a movie set needs to show the boom mic and crew. This is just, ah, what pure design. Argh. So good.
WasteDroids by TNERB
Well WasteDroids involves being a robot racing around a track and each time you lap you get sprayed with massive blasts of booze (this implies the robot was built with alcohol receptors), and you can run over people in the crowd, and it supports two players. Not sure what else you want.
Less Raum by Jake Clover
Mysterious delivery mission. I like how Less Raum simultaneously suggests travel and claustrophobia. Endless metal tunnels and dark voids graced only by retinal-damage dots and your lonely ship.
Reminds me of something I read today: watching a movie when you’re 8 years old, when you kind of don’t care about a lot of the stuff like dramatic subplots and musical numbers but you accept them anyway as possibly appealing to a kind of phantasm audience that you don’t belong to but which presumably exists, and which has needs and tastes far more defined than yours. the fact that this structure seems so consistent across the board just heightens this feeling. playing videogames and feeling that anything awkward or silly about them was just you failing to get some kind of reference that would undoubtably be picked up by the people that the game was REALLY made for.
Jake Clover makes games for aliens and I’m okay with that.
Collect the stuff. If you don’t collect the stuff, you get the bad ending. You gotta get the STUFF.
Predicament by orangepascal
An attractive one-room, err, one-cave escape game. Full of surprises but never frustrating, Predicament is the cozy knowledge that everything you need is in this tiny space and you just have to look harder for it to pop out.
Audio only seems to work in Chrome.
Subbania by Ektomarch
Subbania, an atmospheric submarine exploration set in monochrome. Every detail sets the ominous mood, from the minimal, sinister music to line of sight that leaves everything outside your vision pitch black. Shoot your way out of Hell’s sinister ocean armed only with an upgradeable sub and the advice of your Nazi crew or die trying. Or respawn at the checkpoint, trying.
Red Rogue by Aaron Steed
@’s widow is back for revenge. Her husband’s skeleton is tagging along to help out. Red Rogue is a 2D roguelike that plays out live or can be set to go turn-based when Something Dangerous Is Happening.
Cool things I've noticed so far:
-Runes can be applied to armor, weapons, or eaten by you or your minion, adding an interesting layer of decision making and unexpected interactions.
-Shrines to the RNG spawn here and there. I got health the one time I used it but I'm hoping there's a chance that you instantly explode.
-MULTIPLAYER (someone controls the minion)
-You can record GIFs ingame using the Option menu oh my god
-You can wear a tiara! You can wear flies! Fuck the typical fantasy rpg adherence to boring medieval armor, I love my tiara.
Roguelikes have always been hopeless, brutal slaughterfests, but unlike most, Red Rogue leaves little to the imagination. Kill monsters and throw their heads to kill other monsters. Health potion? You mean that kobold heart?
It’s a roguelike, of course you’re here to kill everyone, and of course there’s no attack button--just your attack existence. We kill others by moving into them. We are toxic. We are death.
Grim, gray dungeon. The only color it permits is red, the color of oh I dunno BLOOD. Blood sprays out of enemies. Blood sprays out of you. Take a lot of damage and blood fills the screen. The only thing that isn't red is the overworld, for which I will let the author’s source code speak for itself:
/* Create the overworld
*
* The overworld is present to create a contrast with the dungeon. It is in colour and so
* are you. There is a health stone for restoring health and a grindstone -
* an allegory of improving yourself in the real world as opposed to a fantasy where
* you kill people to better yourself
*/