Live Free, Play Hard: The Week’s Finest Free Indie Games

THIS WEEK: 700 year old Tibetan edutainment. Sauce noir. Interactive friction. Femme Super Hexagon.

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

 

Super Puzzle Platform Plus by Andrew Morrish

Super Puzzle Platform Plus is a game about tensions. You want to shoot touching blocks of the same color to get big points but at the same time there are spikes below and blocks raining from above. The ground keeping you from falling to your death is full of precious gems...what a dilemma...

Things get tricky with cannon blocks that shoot projectiles, dynamite blocks waiting for you to slip and fall on them, and so on. To destroy these, you have to shoot an adjacent block, which gets harder to pull off as the terrain gets increasingly chaotic.

So much action in such a tight space, requiring reflex and planning alike to survive.

 

Surgeon Simulator 2013 by Tom Jackson, James Broadley, Jack Good, Luke Williams

Look. I think taking five minutes to manipulate the hammer in a massaging motion back and forth across his chest before suddenly slipping and smashing open his rib cage, sending his right lung flying across the room, is a damn good start.

If you find yourself doing badly, watch this excellent video to see how a real professional does it in front of a live audience.

 

Proke by pouchmouse

Race to build a tower by filling in the blanks on word fragments. The longer you stick with one route, the more combo you rack up, so evaluating which one has the most potential is key, and so is knowing when to switch.

Letter bubbles float by, rewarding you with points if you use them in a word before they disappear.

 

 

Heart the Beat by Nico Tuason

I get why Terry posted this. Heart the Beat is like femme Super Hexagon or something. Orient yourself in a brutal pink geometry zone throbbing in time to the beat, big crunchy glitter music jaws grinding out your arena.

Getting coins and avoiding walls is a lot harder than the first few seconds will lead you to believe because the level starts rotating and the controls change to reflect that.

No death, you just lose your combo multiplier, which is the worst possible fate that a True Gamer can suffer.

 

 

Davy Dreams of Flying by David Pittman

A dream about flying. I don’t have those very often, so this game can be my dream. I fly past a car and this is incorporated into the narrative. There are distant stars. I fly higher.

If you aren't feeling the half-tone, there's an option to turn it off and enjoy seamless fluffy clouds. Five minutes of weightless escapism.

 

 

Never Have I Ever by Molly Carroll and Ashton Raze

Conversational hypertext powered by the core mechanic of the party game never have I ever. Someone says, never have I ever done [activity]. If you did, take a drink. Teasey fun game that punishes failure with inebriation.

I like the way they use this format to talk to the player directly, drawing on their actual history. There have been some good games that chat with the player, but this one gets real, real personal. Ever been drunk with someone who started off friendly but ended up getting kind of scary? Yeah.

 

Hero Room by Rocketlex

I had a smile the whole time playing this. Self-aware fantasy RPG mumbling all over the place as it creates itself.

Gets way more in depth than I suspected based on the opening feeling of improvisation. Multiple endings, an epic duel with a witch, and the most unreliable narrator ever.

 

 

The Great Work by Nifflas

From the creator of Knytt Stories and the recently released Knytt Underground comes The Great Work, another installment of Nifflas' peaceful exploratory platforming. A soothing wander through wet tunnels of subterranean grass and drifting motes, searching for alchemical reagents.

 

Fuck That Guy by Benji Bright

Fuck That Guy is a special night where every possibility leads you to a hot gay fantasy. This is good erotica, and I say that because each scene stands apart with fine details, little quirks of personality and environment that get you immersed without getting in the way of getting off. The fantasies have good variety too, ranging from dark and kinda scary to cute and playful.

Still, are we ever getting a game where you can play as a straight protagonist? Sounds unbelievable, yeah, but a hundred years ago, it was illegal to ride giant babies into battle, and now look at how much things have changed. 2013, believe.

 

 

 

Dog of Dracula by Team Batsu

Dog of Dracula is a white-knuckle thrill ride into the darkest part of the human psyche that will leave you seeing red by the time you’re blue in the face with the tremendous challenges of this nonstop one-stop edge of your seat hard-boiled condiment noir visual novel.

Life is hard since sauce was illegalized. Only your sentient can of seductive soda keeps you on the brink of emotional survival as you run your undead groomer business. Liches need combing, but is it worth it?

I really felt this game on a deep level because I like sauce, y’know? When the protagonist was talking about people being sad because they don’t have sauce, I thought to myself, yeah, not having sauce IS sad. Barbeque sauce, special sauce, ketchup, thousand island, ranch, sweet and sour, mayo, salsa, soy, these are all part of the rich tapestry of our lives and that’s what this game is ultimately about. And friendship. Don't forget friendship.

 

Rebirth: The Tibetan Game of Liberation by Sakya Pandita, interleaper

I don't usually get to credit dudes from 700 years ago when I'm posting freeindiegames stuff. This is a Twine port of an ancient Tibetan boardgame about the cycle of reincarnation.

This boardgame was devised in its original form by the Tibetan Buddhist theologian Sakya Pandita in the early 13th century CE...it uses the form of a simple die-governed race game to model the physical and metaphysical geography of the world as understood in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology, and the stages of enlightenment or initiation by which one approaches Nirvana. The game board itself can be considered a mandala.

Rebirth is a simple but informative game full of evocative options like descending into Bondage Hell or becoming a hungry ghost.

On a roll of 1, the time is right to emanate oneself into the world to bring the Dharma among humans.