Free games of the week

From creating documentaries about coping with loneliness to beating up ninjas to save the president - dive into the world of this week’s free indie games! Become a spider, spinning webs and collecting bugs or you could follow the story of Haru who is just looking to enjoy the hot springs at her friend’s birthday party. Maybe you’d rather solve some challenging puzzles that have a very simple look or just beat up ninjas with your fists. All of this can be found in this week’s free games...

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

How To Cope With Boredom and Loneliness by Point Bleep Studios

Imagine being grounded in your room for over 30 years, never to leave. Well, you yourself aren’t grounded, but you are making a documentary of the life of Harold Fletcher, whose mother hasn’t allowed him to leave his room for 30 years. In this point and click adventure, you are trying to find the most interesting objects in Fletcher’s room, to question him about for your award winning TV series. You only have time to talk about three items and you can examine them closely before making your decision. Once you have the three you want, it is time to film.

After your selection, you will be shown your documentary. A lot of Fletcher’s replies to items might be very different from what you expect. Cute animals aren’t so cute and drawings can hold a deeper meaning for him. Hearing his story through the objects you select gives great insight into what is going on in the mind and life of this poor man. The narration in How To Cope With Boredom and Loneliness is well-written, with characters saying plenty of funny lines. The life of Fletcher himself may not be funny, but this game does put an interesting spin on it all!

8 Legs to Love by Bridgs

Spider webs are a beautiful creation, made to catch all the little bugs that fly through the air. You can create these delicate traps in 8 Legs To Love, though it takes a lot of finesse and effort. You do so by picking a starting point and holding down ‘z’. This will increase the dotted circle around you, showing you how far out you can move with your string. From there, you can attach the end of the web to another surface or another string of web.

You have a small amount of time to build your web before the bugs start appearing. Your goal is to eat as many of these bugs as you can - you can eat one's stuck in your web or in the air around you. Sometimes, bugs start digging back at the web, breaking it while others last a short amount of time before disappearing. Eating bugs will replenish the amount of web you can make as well - so you can continue to build.

As you move forward in the game, the environments you get to work in become more challenging, featuring fewer items to stick webs to or water traps to avoid. Being a spider is a very tricky job.

One Night, Hot Springs by Npckc & Maxdotine

In a very different story driven game, you can play as a transgender woman, Haru, visiting the hot springs for the first time in ages with her friends for a birthday party. She has always been a friend and knows about your transition, however going to the hot springs is something you are a bit unsure of.

There are a lot of awkward encounters, as you go through the process of signing in and being at the hot springs. Things like filling out forms, picking which gendered hot spring you want to go into, and even just talking to this new person are all more difficult for you. This game takes place in Japan, where the laws are harsh for transgender individuals - for example, not allowing them to fully change their legal gender until they have gone through surgery. To make matters worse, they can only do it if they don’t have children and are not married. This adventure into a hot springs will hopefully be better than you imagine - maybe you can even stop worrying for long enough to enjoy the holiday.

Cardinal Chains by Daniel Nora

If exploring stories isn’t your thing, and you would much rather flex your brain muscles with some puzzles, Cardinal Chains might be more up your alley. In this minimalistic puzzle game you must highlight all of the boxes on the screen. This sounds simple, but these boxes each have numbers on them. They can only be highlighted if the last box highlighted is the same, or a lower number than the current box with the same colour. At first, you can fly through these levels as they teach you the basics in box highlighting, but soon other colors get added into the mix.

You see, the starting point for each puzzle is a colored ‘X’ box. This is the box you drag your highlight out of to solve the puzzle. With more than one color, you must figure out which numbers to highlight with which color, in order to fill the entire grid with color. Though this sounds pretty simple, it becomes very complicated quickly.

Amazeball Dudes by Pigmeat

The President has been kidnapped by ninjas in this beat-‘em-up platformer that you can play with your friend if so desired. You move through different areas, fighting off the, er, Hillary for President ninjas in order to move forward. There are a variety of different ninjas to take on - some require more punches, while others throw knives at you. Sometimes they drop drinks or burgers to increase your health, or little frogs which will give you an extra life.

If you do make it to the end of the area, you will be given a bit more of the story and take on a boss. Bosses each have their own way of attacking you and do lead to another, more challenging level. You can play with a second player, doubling your chances of saving the President, if you’d like. The game does work well as a single player experience.

Disclosure: Jupiter Hadley is an apprentice games wizard at Armor Games, helping them to find released free games to sign.