Free Game! City of Brass on Epic Games Store

Become a daring thief in City of Brass, a first-person action adventure from senior BioShock developers. Armed with scimitar and a versatile whip, you’ll lash and slash, bait and trap your way to the heart of an opulent, Arabian Nights-themed metropolis – or face certain death as time runs out.

There are times when a game being free is nearly beyond belief because it’s like giving away pure gold. There are also times when a game is free because that’s precisely how much gold it’s worth. In this case, City of Brass is absolutely the latter.

I’m not a big fan of rougelike games at the best of times, and dislike Dark Souls gameplay, as well as anything with boss battles. And that’s basically all City of Brass is, a grueling roguelike with an insane number of spike traps waiting to drop you to an untimely death.

But you don’t need to take my word for it: the game’s free, so you might as well grab it and check it out for yourself. While the overarching game isn’t one many are likely to stick with, it does provide a couple of pulse-pounding hours of sweat-drenched gameplay before you inevitably grow bored.

Assuming you decide that you actually love City of Brass and find yourself wanting similar gameplay, there are more than enough rougelike options out there to make you feel right at home. You’ll find elements of City of Brass in the Bioshock games, as well as in big titles in the field like Dark Souls.

If you want something a little different, however, but with similar principles underlying the brutal trap-centered nature of the game, consider Spelunky 2.

Spelunky 2 builds upon the unique, randomized challenges that made the original a roguelike classic, offering a huge adventure designed to satisfy players old and new. Meet the next generation of explorers as they find themselves on the Moon, searching for treasure and missing family.

The Epic Games Store has been around for a while, the lesser-known alternative to Steam, the nearly-ubiquitous platform for game purchases since it launched in 2003. But, where Steam originally existed and launched to promote Valve games, Epic Games Store launched in 2018 and quickly rose to success on the Fortnite franchise. At the time of Epic’s launch, Steam took a dramatic 30% cut from the sales of video games through their platform! This hurt both game designers and users, just wasn’t very nice. But the folks behind Epic realized something excellent: they could take a much lower cut and still have a profitable business. This led them to fast domination of the indie market, as small publishers flocked to the far better terms offered by Epic.

Mega Discounts

Epic Games Store offers some seriously incredible discounts on a regular basis, in addition to all the normal discounts one would expect on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the usual holidays. But the most exciting is their weekly free game or add-on, which simply harpoons all competitors.

When I first heard about this free game, I thought that can’t be real. They must only offer tiny indie games. Not at all, dear reader. Not. At. All. Epic frequently lists unbelievable A-lister games on their weekly deal, as well as sometimes offer two free games instead of one. In addition, just because a studio is smaller doesn’t mean the games it makes aren’t impressive. I’ve picked up some of my favorite new games, for free, from this platform, and most of them have been made by smaller studios (or as side-projects for teams from big studios).