Free games of the week - August 18th 2018

This week we've got a mix of low impact games that'll help you chill out as the recent heatwave continues to collapse in on itself. Become a slightly melancholy chair that explores a strangely-staged house full of objects. Explore further: an electric planet, or perhaps an old bus stop close to your home might be a better option for you. To top it off, we have an idle clicker mixed with a top-down shooter where you fight against jelly-enemies! These games are filled with a lot of different themes for you to try out, but none of them will tense you up or stress you out.

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

Sat So Long I Became a Chair by aido wall

Ever wonder what would happen if you sat for a long, long time? You would, of course, become a chair yourself. As you might have guessed from the title, this is what's happened in this little Bitsy game. As a chair you explore a very strange building, full of various objects - other chairs, sketches, candles, various pieces of furniture, and even some books open to specific poems. Some of the rooms are called things like "Class Warfare Lab". You're just a chair now, so you can’t grab or hold - but you can explore and take in your entire environment, and wonder aloud about what you find. What you find, incidentally, becomes increasingly odd.

There are a lot of hidden areas and items in Sat So Long I Became a Chair - discovering those items and interacting with them is a part of the game - but some locations are a lot more challenging to get to than others. Like most Bitsy games, this one doesn’t have audio, but there is an audio file embedded into the browser that you can hit play on, providing an unsettling soundtrack while you find your way around. Being a chair has more adventure in it than being a human, as long as you make your way around the world at your own pace.

The Sands of Voltark by Colorfiction

If you’d rather explore a place that seems a little more real and a little less metaphorical, The Sands of Voltark is a captivating exploration game where your job is to find and activate electrical towers on what looks like a desert planet.

As a new employee of Proton Fuel Cell Networt, your job is to maintain industry efficiency and liveware optimisation (obviously). You do this by activating various electrical towers (just as obviously). Each of these towers are in hidden around the desert, and the wind is whipping the sand up into the air, making it hard to see. Once you manage to find a tower and bring it to life, it sparks electricity towards the next one in the sequence.

Exploring more of the desert will show more of the strange environment around these huge pillars. This world is pretty fun to explore, especially with the large amounts of electricity you are pushing through it, and the more you explore the more you'll enjoy the game.

The Last Bus Home by MonsterJail

Then again, you might want to return somewhere almost too familiar. Picture the scene: it’s dark, raining, and you're making your way home for the first time in a long time. Normally, someone picks you up and you get a ride the rest of the way home, but this time you've decided to make the journey yourself. You've arrived just in time for the final bus, at midnight, and a stranger suggests that you follow the path to the bus stop.

But you don't have to do that. I mean, you're a grown up. It's up to you. You could indeed follow the single path straight round to the bus stop, but you could instead explore around and find that your old local area has creatures lurking in the dark. Some are even looking for an item that only you can find and bring them. But you do ultimately need to catch your bus, so you need to keep checking the giant clocks that are dotted around to make sure you're not going to miss it.

Idle Shot by Dot Slash Games

Idle Shot combines a shooter with an idle clicker in an adorable game about escaping an alien planet! You crash landed on your way to Mars, and now need to find the pieces of your ship and repair it. These parts seem to he hidden behind locked walls, which for some reason require jelly and shells as payment before they'll open. Odd design choice.

Anyway, shells are easy enough to get - they're what makes this game idle - because you gain shells as you shoot your weapon, so you can click away to your heart's content and get more currency. Shells can be used to purchase more life, upgrades, keys, and much more. Jelly, on the other hand, you get by shooting alien jellyfish that appear at the start of each wave. Jelly tokens are used to purchase turrets and fix your ship (once you have a part to put onto it) so killing off monsters is not only beneficial for your health.

You can try to last round after round, collecting enough parts and resources to build your base and repair your ship - but you'll have to shoot a lot of aliens to do it.