Free Loaders: Rock out with the Lonely Geologists

We’ve got some rockin’ free games for you in this week’s round-up. You might think I’m talking boulderdash, but trust me, these games are really gneiss. From stone-cold killers with the ability to swap bodies at will, to a poor sap who has been granite the power of VHS vision. Don’t worry, we’ve cobbled together a list for you. Come and marble at them all. I will stop doing these rock gags if you pumice not to slate them.

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

The League of Lonely Geologists by tak

Isolated rock cataloguing. You’re alone in a small patch of earth, scouring for interesting geological specimens. All you have is your book, your hands, and a weird portal to some unknown realm. Look around and find a stone buried underneath a mound of potato-like dirt. It’s a new type of rock! You get to name it and enter a description for all the other lonely rock collectors out there to see. Flip through the pages in your catalogue to see what other players have discovered. There’s “Glowing Slime” which “feels nice to touch”. And the “Holy” rock which has been deemed “the most Instagram worthy” stone in Christendom. Not to mention the deceitful “Roak” which is described by its discoverer as “like a rock, but not.”

At first, this all seems like a fun and small experiment, and finding new rocks among the dirt feels like a difficult task, scuppered by scarcity and a lack of direction. But there’s a surprising amount of hidden secrets and mechanics to discover here. Figuring out how it all works is half the fun, so I won’t spoil anything. Get rock hunting fellow geologists. At the time of writing there’s only 161 of us lonesome dirt-divers, having discovered 770 rocks. There’s history to be made!

Roads by JuneGames

First-person monochrome frogger. The bright lights of cars and lorries veer across the highway at superfast speeds. You need to get to the white portal across this death trap. You sprint across, lane by lane, carefully dodging the blows of a car bonnet or a truck’s grill. Hooray, the level is complete. But then the next level adds a supersonic train to the middle of the highway. That’s fine, you can manage that, another level beaten even if you did crumple against the train’s lights once or twice. What’s level three all about, then? Hey. Hey wait where’s the portal? Oh. Oh I see, now we have to walk along the road as cars whoosh by. Well that’s terrifying, thanks. But I am strong, I have the strength of my ancestors, all of whom crossed roads for a living. Here’s the portal. Level four, let’s be having you.

OH JESUS WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?

V.H.S – Video Horror Story by Isart Digital folks

First-person fuzzy horrorvision. This gives you a VHS style view where you must adjust the tracking for your own vision to see objects that aren’t otherwise there. Bumped up against an invisible obstacle? Hold down a button to twiddle with your eyesight, prompting white noise and static snow before the image becoming clear again. Only now the objects which weren’t visible before – a stack of chairs, a row of desks, a blinking green computer – can all be seen plainly. It all takes place in a creepy office building, spattered with blood and grime. Obviously, stacked chairs are not the only thing which you need to be wary of. There’s something else in here, and it can only be seen in the static, in the fuzzing lines between the focused moments, when your vision is its most obscured, when you are at your most vulnerable.

Get out.

Shell Shift by Cologne Game Lab folks

Arcade corpse-hopping shooter. As the cyberpunk burglar of a strange device you’ve developed the ability to possess the bodies of your fallen enemies. Slurp into a Pyro and flamethrow all the pesky swordsmen. When the health of this vessel gets low, slurp into one of the fallen Blades and use his dashy slice attack to get close to the enemy Snipers. Health a bit on shitty side? Slurp again into a Sniper’s cadaver and take some healthy pot shots at the next wave of Pyros. On a basic level this is simply a wave shooter but un-basically it is a loose game of rock, paper, scissors in which you can change your paper to rock halfway through the round. And it’s got a neat pixel art intro which explains away the whole premise in a succinct and flashy way. The only things I would change is to make the boxes more easily destroyed (they contain life-giving health packs) but also to make it more obvious when your player is low on health – a heartbeat, a slight tint of the screen, something that broadcasts “jump ship!” to you as a body snatcher.

Voice by Lemon Squad

Werrrrrrrrrrrrr. Wee-woooooooooohhhhh. Weruhhh? Werbble-worrrrrrrrrrrb. Weeeee-errrrrr!