FREE 3: Play These Games While You Wait

E3 has kicked off in Los Angeles, bringing with it trailers, announcements and "leaks". But sometimes it can all get a bit much. So, this year we'll be doing a series of posts against that spirit. Our 'anti-E3'. Think of it as a sordid pagan feast to the industy's uptight Christmas dinner. To start, we'll be recommending three free games for E3 2016, every day, to substitute each blockbuster. Three free for E3! It's also a tongue twister. So let's forget about the hype and see what great games you could be playing instead, right now for nothing.

Instead of Deus Ex: Human Revolution try...

NORTH by Outlands

You could drool over shots of a futuristic dystopia where corruption is commonplace and segregation is a way of life, or you could inhabit one in the minutes it takes to download NORTH. This is a game where you play a refugee from an unknown land, arriving in a monolithic city you just can't comprehend. But instead of getting more powerful like Adam Jensen and cutting off people's body parts, you simply become more dispossessed and confused. A dystopia many times more provocative and bewildering than anything Squeenix will give you.

Instead of Mass Effect: Andromeda try...

Universally Loved by Meant Games

We all know the reason you play Mass Effect games. It's not to bumble through dilemmas, or save the planet or shoot the bad guys. It's because you get to choose an alien fuck-buddy. Well, the developer of this game has kindly stripped away all the nonsense of interplanetary warfare and planet mining, leaving only the solid foundations of a great and strange love story. A blossoming romance between you and these three inter-dimensional blobs and all the conversational wooing necessary to become one with them. Don't look at me like that. You slept with Garrus, didn't you.

Instead of Battlefield 1 try...

Morse by Alex Johansson

If you really must slaughter hundreds of soldiers in one of the most famously pointless conflicts the human race has ever endured, at least don't get muddy doing it. Rather than planting you down in each battle, theater-by-theater, Morse sees you giving co-ordinates for artillery strikes by using real Morse code, tapping away at your keyboard, frantically trying to remember the pattern for 'N'. It's a little trickier to get to grips with, but you'll probably still do better than when fighting against scarily-gifted children in Conquest multiplayer.

More free for E3 tomorrow! In the meantime you can still find new games to wait for by following our E3 2016 news.