Free Game! Cris Tales on Epic Games Store

Cris Tales is a gorgeous, indie love letter to classic JRPGs with a new perspective. Peer into the past, act in the present, and watch as your choices dynamically change the future -- all on one screen as you play! Beautifully hand-drawn 2D animations bring to life a world where your choices will change both the present and the future across more than 20 hours of gameplay.

There are several ways the team innovated on the classic formula. Players can see past, present, and future at the same time, so seeing someone in the present also allows you to see that person in the past (if said person was born at all), and how they will look in the future (or if they died). This also changes according to the player’s actions, so what the player does in the present can immediately change the outcome of a person or a place.

This also impacts the combat! Imagine an enemy that is poisoned. If a player sends that enemy into the future, all the poison damage that would have been inflicted slowly is instead dealt at once.

This is immensely cool and clearly shows that the devs built this project from sheer passion for the genre.

Modus is a powerhouse indie publisher comprised of AAA industry veterans, gamers, and developers who embrace indie’s golden age and want to produce the cutting-edge indie games from the best developers in the world.

Trine 4 is exactly that sort of magical work: a game that combines everything we love from classic platformers while brining in modern artistic and gameplay sensibilities.

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).