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 Cities: Skylines, but next week’s game has already been revealed. In Sound Mind will be free March 17th - 24th.
In Sound Mind is an imaginative first-person psychological horror with frenetic puzzles, unique boss fights, and original music by The Living Tombstone. Journey within the inner workings of the one place you can’t seem to escape—your own mind.
Following in the footsteps of psychological horror games like Silent Hill and Alan Wake, In Sound Mind offers a mind-bending exploration of the mind. Despite a few rough edges, its gameplay, twisted landscape design and excellent artistic style, and clever narrative all blend into an unforgettable and chilling puzzle-shooter.
We Create Stuff is a studio with a longstanding love of the puzzle and horror genres, and their prior work includes the deliriously fun Portal: The Flash Version, which was started as a fan project before Portal was even released, and also the free Nightmare House 2 a “mod” based on Valve’s Source Engine.
They really broke out of their shell with In Sound Mind, however, and if you’re looking for truly similar games, you’d be best off heading toward Alan Wake for a great narrative punch accompanying thrilling suspense action.
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).
Odin (181)It’s that time of the week again, and that means it’s free PC game day over at the Epic Games Store!
