Live Free, Play Hard: The Week’s Finest Free Indie Games

grotesque mega babies

Feature by Porpentine Contributor

Published on Feb. 24, 2013

THIS WEEK: Now logging into GiantTranshumanBabyNet. Two enemies, one spacebar. Cyborg bounty hunter. RAW ANIME TERROR.

Looking for more free games? Check out our round up of the best free PC games that you can download and play right now.

Shotguns in the Dark by Droqen

A brilliant piece of two player one keyboard action from Droqen, a maze shooter where each player can:

1) press the fire button so you shoot in all directions, instantly killing your opponent if you hit them BUT you take a second to recharge, during which you’re helpless, so missing is the perfect opportunity for the other player to step in and calmly destroy you.

2) hold down Spacebar to make both players invisible (two enemies sharing the same key!) BUT the plus signs scattered around the level still get blacked out when you pass over them, like a silhouette passing against the light, adding a thrilling aspect of prediction.

Shotguns in the Dark has risk

mind games

sudden reversals

in other words it’s fun to play with HUMAN BEINGS and it thinks about WHY games are fun to play with human beings.

Sluggish Morss by Jake Clover and Jack King-Spooner

Sluggish Morss is a set of collaborations between two of the coolest new weirdgame talents (loved Jake’s post-apocalyptic ghost story Nuign Specter and Jack’s Dantean claymation odyssey Will You Ever Return).

Recurring figures pass through both games, unsettling elephantine spirits and grotesque mega babies, but beyond their shared universe, beyond their collagescape approach, each has a distinct mood.

Jake’s game feels like a journey through space and death, a cyclic voyage in a reggae time-ship full of shining star-creatures and drugged-out crewmembers. You wander the corridors guided by coins--this is the psychedelic hell of our coin zeitgeist--you want coins, you shall have them, until you are driven insane. Coins and gems have always been the purest signifier of what we want, distilled, glittering need, and despite their dissonance in this setting, they still exert the same pull.

Sluggish Morss: A Delicate Time in History by Jack King-Spooner and Jake Clover

Jack’s, on the other hand, is full of portent, transcendence, the sense of being on the cusp of an inarticulable change. You're traveling through space-time on the Sluggish Morss as a member of far-future sublimated humanity.

Remnants of the past remain--a passed-down version of Beyonce’s Halo performed by a robot mannequin, medical facilities constructed purely as a facetious gesture. Everyone is blurred, identity in flux, ascended to a stage where appearing as human seems purely optional. A Delicate History in Time evokes atemporal emotions, the loosened time sense of dreams.

One character’s utterance of the Don DeLillo line “We want to be stones in a field.” sparked thoughts about how humans crave protection and structure to the point of becoming inhuman, trading squishy underbellies for mindless invincibility, a fitting phrase for a posthuman setting.

The Id tunnels stayed with me as well, ghostly children ambling animal in the warm light.

So basically Sluggish Morss dragged all these esoteric feelings out of my subconscious that I'd forgotten about or didn't even know I had. These are beautiful games.

From an interview with Jack:

I kind of started making games so as to have a nice place for my songs and pictures then it went a bit off the tracks.

Actual Sunlight by Will O’Neill

The only thing remotely approaching a puzzle in Actual Sunslight is trying to find a place to sit on the bus that isn’t too close to another human being.

That’s Actual Sunlight.

The protagonist is locked inside a directionless, apolitical, frustrated rage that can only see the symptoms of problems, not their causes. His relationships with women are dysfunctional to non-existent, but he can't understand why. He repeats cycles of eating and gaming that leave him with crippling self-loathing.

He’s always fantasizing about the perfect time to turn it all around--an agonizing form of psychic torture.

Actual Sunlight is about the possibility that things can’t change, about reaching fatal inertia. This is an important feeling to acknowledge.

As for the sunlight of the title, it's a moving description of a society where working hours are so long that many don’t even see their homes by the light of the day.

And the brutal irony is, as the game discusses, that much of the work is meaningless, made-up, with no connection to how people live, to what people actually need. For the egos and paychecks of bosses, for customers who can’t tell the difference between nutrition and shit. Artificial busywork on a mass scale, a collaborative nightmare where everyone is too greedy or scared to stop.

See also John Walker's previous writing about Actual Sunlight on RPS.

Mad Father by Miscreants Room

A girl lives alone with her father in a creepy mansion. He does experiments in the basement, the kind where you hear screams. But he’s all she's got and they love each other. Then he disappears.

YOU WON'T BE SEEING HIM AGAIN UNLESS YOU GET SOME GEMS AND SOLVE SOME PUZZLES

Mad Father is the kind of Japanese horror RPG where you guide an adorable little girl through a mansion full of terrifying creatures. It strikes a good balance between scary and fun, sort of an accessible Clock Tower feel?

Tip: You can stand next to things and go into your inventory to do things to them. There’s hints and a walkthrough on the author’s page if you get stuck.

The King of the Wood by allen

The King of the Wood is a Bladerunneresque short that serves as a superb example of efficient storytelling, recommended for FPS fans who prefer 30 Flights of Loving to turgid manshoots.

Your job is to break into a mansion and kill a cyborg. After all, they're just playing at being human. Why let yourself be affected by their simulated emotions?

Rush too fast and you'll miss details like, what's on the laptop screens, or that the books scattered throughout are invented scraps from various genres, all written by the same author, Lee Williams.