Free Loaders: What a plane in the neck
It’s the Saturday after thanksgiving. The turkey bits in the fridge have started to disappear, the empty bottles of hooch languish by the sink, and the corpse of uncle Kenneth still lies where it was first discovered, on the floor behind the sofa. But that’s just in the United States. Meanwhile, the rest of us have been feverishly playing these free games and giving thanks only to our neo-god, the internet. And the feast we hold in its name is not called thanksgiving but Free Loaders, now held on Saturdays again. Hooray!
Looking for more free games? Check out our round up of the best free PC games that you can download and play right now.
Winds of Revenge by Team Crybabies
“Revenge is a dish best served flying through the air and also it is made of paper” - Anonymous. As the most disgruntled employee of the office building, it is up to you to attack the manager of each floor with a paper aeroplane from afar. Use the fans and heaters of the office to alter the course of the plane. Steer it as best you can (you're able to adjust the direction post-throw, but not the pitch) and make sure it hits its mark: the face, head, heart or hat of The Man. This is full of fun bits. There’s a radio that you can tune to different music. The elevator transports you between levels. Fans can be turned on and off, even if they aren’t integral to the final route of the plane. One of the levels features a roomba that you can hop on and ride as it slowly does its thankless job. In many ways, we are all the roomba. Think about it.
If on a winter's night a library cardholder by Robin Camille Davis
Okay, this is not really a game. But it is a) procedurally generated and b) very cool. As part of National Novel Generation Month, a techologies librarian put together a program that extracts random passages from books in the Gitenberg vaults and places them within a frame story. You can see a sample here. The story is about you. You vaguely remember a book and you want to read it again. You end up going to all the libraries in New York in search of it. Every page of ‘library cardholder’ takes place in another library, where you find a book on a shelf or are handed one by a clerk. You flip open to a random page and read an extract, before discovering, no, this isn’t the one you were looking for.
If any of this sounds familiar to you, maybe you once (in real life) read a book called ‘If on a winter’s night a traveler’ by Italo Calvino, upon which this whole idea is based. What’s even better is that the creator got a hardback copy made for herself, and it looks good. “I believe that there are 4.5 x 101366 possible novels that can be generated by this script,” she says. “For comparison, there are an estimated 1082 atoms in the universe.”
Jean-Paul Dance by Ultrabanaman
You are Jean-Paul, reddest man on the beach, hottest thing on the sand, best dancer in the country. Strike different dance poses using the top row of letter keys and tap left to switch up the sides. Keep time with the disco music (or don’t, it doesn’t matter) and be the best that you can be. Strong, lithe, nimble, graceful, powerful. That’s you, Jean-Paul Dance. That’s you.
Kith by Screwy Lightbulb
Monochrome adventure in a void-surrounded world. Saunter about as one of the town’s unlikely guardsmen, a dude in a t-shirt. Talk to the citizens and see what’s up. The witch has a problem with her bridge, but the town administrator, a barrel man called Buz, won’t fix it without the requisite forms and procedures, which may take three weeks. This is not ideal. It’s a mostly standard point and click but the world is pretty intriguing, and it’s planned to come out in episodes. This is just the first one.
The Fall by Grzegorz Śnieciński, Piotr Chodun and Patryk Woźnicki
Fall down the stairs, carefully. After tumbling down the side of quite a lot of mountains in the Steep beta, I have a new found respect for rag dolls who can survive huge distances. This wee man, however, cannot. A fall larger than a few metres will kill him. You have to navigate the stairs cautiously while also keeping enough speed to “jump” gaps in the criss-crossing Escher-like staircase. It's actually quite hard.
Silent Crossing by Lycaon
Just a rando creepy village shrouded in mist.
Commute by seansleblanc
This has happened to me too many times to be funny.