Free games of the week

This week, we have a few games with female protagonists! With games about crashing through everything in the mall because you haven’t had equal pay as compared to your male co-workers, being a princess who wants to get all of her stuff back, or being a small child just trying to find a way to turn her cat back into an animal instead of a hat. If you are looking for some games you can play with your friends you are in luck! I have a cute game about competitively growing flowers and another that has you chaotically typing out mini-games before your food overcooks. With such a huge variety of awesome games to play this weekend, you should read on...

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

Lost Wage Rampage by Jane Friedhoff, Marlowe Dobbe, & Andy Wallace

Mad about the amount of money your co-workers make being far greater than the amount of money you, as a woman, are making? Well, the best way to deal with that anger is clearly to take it out on the shops at the mall you work at. There is a car on the show floor - so you might as well use that to drive around the store, crashing into displays, and stealing anything you can grab. The destruction will be worth it after all of the hours you have worked for a fraction of what the male employees make - as long as you don’t get caught by the cops. You can drive the car around, smashing into things with green outlines to gain money. The more money you have (and the longer you are driving around without being caught) the more police cars show up to remove you from the mall. If three cop cars collide with you, you will have finally been caught - but you will still get to keep as much cash as you grabbed on your way out. Lost Wage Rampage is a super fun little game with a very cute intro scene that touches upon a very real problem when it comes to equal pay.

Super Weekend Mode by Pixelteriyaki

In Super Weekend Mode, someone has also stolen your possessions, but as a badass princess, you are capable of shooting your way through enemies to get it back. This game combines falling blocks with a shoot’em up to create a wonderful yet challenging arcade game. You are able to control two paddles at the bottom of the screen which you can move to the center or to their respective side, as well as shoot. Hearts, rabbits and skulls fall down the screen - you must collect the hearts, bash your paddle into the side of the rabbits, and avoid the skulls to stay alive. Skulls cause instant death, while letting rabbits or hearts fall to the bottom forces the screen to become smaller. You will need to hit the enemy a specific number of times to move onto the next level. However, it is quite difficult to gain more lives (though power-ups do fall from time to time), so you will need to think quickly and try to stay alive. This game even continues to increase the challenge if you are doing well, so be careful to not be too good... It is worth noting that the controls are a bit odd - it’s tap ‘z’ to move the left paddle, tap ‘m’ to move the right paddle, and tap (or hold down!!) space to shoot.

Twin Sprouts by Ozan Öztürk, Jasmin Habezai-Fekri, Svenja Rösner, & Janine Janer

Instead of destruction, why not grow a few flowers over the weekend? Twin Sprouts is a competitive, local two-player game where you must collect water and sun orbs to nurture life into your plants! You start off with a seed in your base, which you must plant somewhere in the land beyond where you live (in a special pod area). Once your plant is in the ground, you need to collect water orbs and sun orbs to nourish your plant. You can collect a bunch of these orbs before making your way to your flowers and topping them up with whatever they require. Once you have some well grown and happy flowers, they will begin to drop happy orbs - which can be collected for points. Whichever player has the most orbs at the end of the time wins. You can even go and grab some of the orbs off of your friends flower, if you are fast enough, and gliding around with your own sprout wings can get you far. Who doesn’t like competitively growing perfect flowers?

Too Many Chefs by Ivan Wang, James Wu, Anshu Bansal, Topher Mohr & Alex Elena

If you’re not into growing flowers and beautiful environments, or if you crave something a bit more ‘old school’, then Too Many Chefs might be what you are looking for! This is a text-based singleplayer (or multiplayer) cooking game where you must quickly type out recipes and solve little minigames to cook your food before time runs out. I was playing it single player and that's what I talk about below, but with multiplayer you can have each person assigned a recipe (sharing a keyboard between you all). So just imagine what is going on below, but with more chaos and more people typing at once.

In this game, you need to prepare different recipes simultaneously. Each step in the recipe needs to be done within a set amount of time (normally a few seconds) and the entire recipe needs to be done as quickly as possible to gain a place on the online scoreboard. These recipes vary in their requirements for creation, from having to hit the arrow keys in the correct order, typing out words like ‘whisk’, hitting keys to make sure ingredients are in different categories, or giving a name to your creation. Cooking multiple dishes at a time (as a single player) will mean that you will need to prioritise the different dishes depending on how long it will take to complete the task. If you fail to do a step, you will need to retry it until you are successful. If you fail 3 times, the other dishes will have a word on them that needs to be typed before that dish will be saved and able to resume. Failing too many dishes completely will force you to lose the game. Too Many Chefs is super simple in graphic style, but it's a really fun, hectic game.

Boneko by Patchouga & Picoid

For something completely different, Boneko is a retro platformer where you are chasing after your cat in an abandoned mansion. You are Bony, a young girl who has gone into the mansion to look for your cat. As it turns out, your cat has been turned into a magical cat hat - which can now talk! Determined to return your cat to it’s original, animal state, you have gone on a mission into the mansion to see what else is lurking around. As you explore, you will find potions that your cat-hat-friend can drink up. These elixirs will give you the ability to fling furballs, smash through the ground (or enemies heads), and even change the level around you. There are also crates that can be destroyed with your new attacks to reveal hearts or children’s toys. You can kill enemies to gain yarn balls which you are collecting... for some reason. The further you get into the mansion, the more you will discover about the person lurking inside. You will really need to be fast and careful to get your cat back to their original state.