Salutations, superhero aficionados and text-adventure buffs alike, and welcome to your experimental daily dose of strange new game design. Originally created as part of Itch.io’s Linux Games Jam 2017 and updated into a more polished package, The Spicy Meatball Saves The Day [official site] is a short text adventure adventure about a superhero making a stop on the way home to rescue people from a burning house.
The twist: It controls like an FPS.
RPS Feature Momentum, resistance, lift
There are various ways to make a war game realistic. Battlefront do it with blue-chip ballistics and subtle spotting mechanics, Panther Games with plausible AI and plenty of command friction, Eagle Dynamics with sophisticated flight models and painstakingly reproduced avionics. We Are Muesli built Venti Mesi with the help of real Milanese memories and the free WW2 ‘narrative docu-game’ is incredibly powerful as a result. Read the rest of this entry »
Fancy driving a tram through picturesque mountain villages populated by cats? Course you do! What you want is Short Trip [official site], a new free browser-based game from Alexander Perrin. It’s a delightful hand-drawn tram simulator rolling through hamlets and forests, over streams and up hills, taking in the sights and sounds. Just the ticket on a Monday! Read the rest of this entry »
One of the better ‘peer through a camcorder viewfinder while hiding from spooky monsters’ horror games which shambled out of the early tensies, Outlast [official site] is free for keepsies if you grab it in the next two days. Hit the Humble Store before 6pm on Saturday (10am Pacific) and you can nab both Outlast and its prequel expansion, Whistleblower, in DRM-free and Steam key forms. This freebie is to celebrate the end of Humble’s summer sale, which I understand has a great many games going cheap. But not as cheap as free. Read the rest of this entry »
On an afternoon trawl of cool free projects I came across Cabin [Itch.io link]- a “fleeting experimental game about spending time in a cabin” in which you can “relax”, “drink a beer”, “stare at the moon” and “paint the sky”. I’ll admit that it was the latter which was of most interest as I can do the other three IRL once the sun sets. Read the rest of this entry »
As one of the last hoorah’s of Humble’s End of Summer Sale, the store is currently offering Tim Schafer’s classic mind-entering platform game Psychonauts absolutely free. Read the rest of this entry »
TerraFire is one of my indelibles – a game that never leaves my hard drive. As almost a decade has passed since it was last lionised on RPS, there’s a chance some of you may be unaware of its free, gravity-steeped delights. Let’s put that right. Read the rest of this entry »
Team, we have six hours to pull this job. Gav, you’re running interference. Bev, you hack the cameras. Kev, you blow the door. Maeve, you’re on the safe. If we do this right, we’ll all saunter out of here in slow-motion carrying black holdalls filled with free copies of wonderful heist game Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine [official site] as our theme song blares and, just behind us, rozzers rush in to find the safe empty. But we’ve only got until 6pm today (10am Pacific). At 6, the alarm goes off, the security gates slam down, the floor is electrified, the dogs are unleashed, and we’ll have to pay if we fancy a play. Read the rest of this entry »
Whether you love wizards or loathe the jumped-up magicians, you might fancy a crack at Mirage: Arcane Warfare [official site]. For the next 24 hours, the magical follow-up to historical first-person murderfest Chivalry: Medieval Warfare is yours to keep forever if you click a button on Steam. It will let you: 1) pretend to be a wizard; 2) murder a great many wizards. Mirage sales have been less than developers Torn Banner Studios had hoped for, see, but they want to spread the word so hey, here, it’s free – grab it while you can. Once the free period ends, it’ll get a huge price cut. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s a tiny recommendation in the form of The Last Kart [itch.io link], a little kart racer game where the only thing to do is race your 2D air taxi thing round a track decorated with silhouetted… gibbets? Read the rest of this entry »
Like Roots in the Soil [official site] tells two stories at once: you watch two men, one older and one younger, walk the same route through the same city. If you click and drag the mouse you rotate the camera between their two perspectives. It’s a really cool mechanic that is used to tell a short story about how the setting has changed over time, with some poetic writing and a happy ending. It’s completely free from developers Space Backyard, and worth having a look at.
The old man is walking through a desolate place, with crashed cars and smog everywhere, and he’s got a rifle slung over his shoulder. The younger chap sees a different version – a futuristic, serene space. The question is: how are they linked?
Splash Damage’s 2011 first-person shooter Brink [official site] is, out of the blue, now free. Swing by Steam and its yours for keepsies – it’s not a free-to-play conversion, just Brink being set free. Publishers Bethesda don’t say why they’ve done this (perhaps to celebrate QuakeCon this weekend?) but hey, thanks. Brink does Splash Damage’s usual Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory sort of class-based and object-driven action, this time taking it to a dystopian futurecity and introducing a natty parkour system. I didn’t play Brink for very long back in the day, but I do still fondly remember the parkour and bold, battered character faces. Read the rest of this entry »
Hey gang, if you missed Shadow Warrior the last time it was free, another chance is here for a few more hours. This is the 2013 reboot of the demon-stabbing FPS, to be clear, not 3D Realm’s original (which is always free). You’ve got until 6pm today (10am Pacific) to grab this free so chop chop.
The giveaway celebrates the launch of new missions and weapons for Shadow Warrior 2 in a free update last night. And that game’s on sale right now too. So many shadows and wars, so little time. Read the rest of this entry »
John might tell you that the highlight of the bargain Humble Bundle is a free copy of Pony Island, an “Oh I’d tell you what it is but even that would be giving too much away” game he declared the smartest game of 2016. Me, I’m here to tell you that the bargain bundle’s highlight is actually Devil Daggers, a deadly fast score attack FPS which feels like it escaped from an alternate timeline where everything’s all skulls and satans – and is RPS’s actual official Bestest Best game of 2016. Mate, you could have both of those — and more — for just a couple of quid. Mega-deal! Read the rest of this entry »
The web people seemed like a good bet. They’d be facing off against a lich and its minions, some triple-shot soldier types, and some windy warriors who can propel their enemies backwards. As it turned out, the web people were not a good bet. Their ability to snare their targets wasn’t much help when those enemies were firing twice as many bullets, could take twice as much damage, and could run rings around them.
Radar Theatre [itch page] is a pay-what-you-want game about placing bets on the participants in a gladiatorial battle and I am terrible at it.
Join a 1337 warez group and distribute some top bootleg games in b00tl3g kr3w [Itch page], a splendid little free game out now. Fire up your expired trialware IRC client, get chatting with your kool krack krew, read the NFO, slam that warez into an FTP, then have a little play yourself. It’s a short game so I won’t say too much but I laughed like a drain at these bootleg games. It’s funny and it’s free so hop to it. Read the rest of this entry »
I downloaded free game Solarium [official site] pretty much entirely on the strength of the following negative Steam review: “I didn’t play it very long, but it’s literally all about plants. I guess I should’ve read more reviews about it prior to downloading, but unless you’re really interested in learning about plants, I wouldn’t suggest playing.”
Literally all about plants! Learning about plants!
What I found was a kind of Encarta ’95 Mind Maze-ish style of game as a kind of odd fusion of slightly stilted graphics and educational information. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s something nice, but also depressing. I started playing The Evolution of Trust [official site], a short browser-based game, expecting it to show me why trusting other people is a good thing. Ten minutes in, it’s taught me that I need to cheat more.
It has you playing a quick ‘Game of Trust’. If you stick a coin into a machine, the person at the other side gets three coins, and vice versa. So, should you co-operate and play the slot, or cheat, withhold your money and hope the sucker on the other side is feeling generous?
Since every other games site is ecstatic to discover this week that the original Shadow Warrior is free, hey, we’ll post it too. I’ll ride that #trending content, blitz the bandwagon, disseminate to the viral limit, and zonk that zeitgeist until the SEO bursts. I know that Shadow Warrior has been free for four years now — a fact other sites seem to have missed — but I also know quite a few folks dig Shadow Warrior so sure, it’s helpful to remind people that it is free. Read the rest of this entry »
Spider-Man, they say. Spider-Man, they repeat. He does whatever a spider can, they tell us. Alas, spiders are incapable of releasing games on PC, so we’re not getting the Batman-lookin’ Spider-Man PS4 game that Sony flashed around at E3. Nope, our fanciest modern-day Webslinging™ option is a new virtual reality doodad promoting that there new movie Ian Hollywood has made. Spider-Man: Homecoming – Virtual Reality Experience [Steam page] is out now, a little doodad free for gogglenauts, and its launch mostly reminds me how much I like other games about swinging around. Read the rest of this entry »
