Odin (181)It’s Thursday, and that means it’s free PC game day over at the Epic Games Store! Every week, Epic Games offers one (and sometimes more) free games, from indie greats to AAA titles that will blow your socks off.
This week, you can already grab The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and Rogue Legacy, but next week’s games have already been revealed. Insurmountable and XCOM 2 will be free April 14th-21st.
Confront various terrains as a lonely mountaineer and endure the countless dangers of climbing! Many tough decisions await you in a risky environment. Make your way up and down the mountain, overcoming insurmountable heights!
Insurmountable is an adventure roguelike with permadeath, in which the player has to overcome huge mountains. Thanks to the procedurally created environment, no two climbs are the same. Make sure that your climber stays alive by always making sure that your vital values don't get into the critical range.
This task is made more difficult by a dynamic weather system, day/night changes and a multitude of randomly generated events, where you never know in advance how they will end. Your decisions matter....every single one. Because anyone could be your last.
With beautiful graphics, a superb Hans Zimmer-style soundtrack, and just generally superb conceptual development underlying the play, this is one of my favorite pandemic-era games, and it’s really exciting to see it free on Epic. Insurmountable is one of those games that not everyone would leap at out of the gate, but it offers a unique and excellent gaming experience that absolutely won’t disappoint.
Curious Expedition 2 is a turn-based narrative roguelike that requires players to manage their resources and party members to keep insanity at bay and find glory.
While definitely vastly different than Insurmountable, some core gameplay concepts are similar, and they’ll both tackle the itch for a certain type of exploratory adventure game.
A grand discovery has been made: mysterious islands have begun to appear and vanish from the oceans as if by magic. The great Explorer Clubs are funding expeditions to these strange islands to bring treasures back for the 1889 World's Fair in Paris. Are you bold enough to join the adventure?
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.
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).
