Odin (182)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 City of Brass, and Total War: Warhammer, but next week’s games have already been revealed. Rogue Legacy and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter will be free April 7th-14th, 2022.
Rogue Legacy is a genealogical rogue-"LITE" where anyone can be a hero. Each time you die, your child will succeed you. Every child is unique. One child might be colorblind, another might have vertigo-- they could even be a dwarf.
That's OK, because no one is perfect, and you don't have to be perfect to win this game. But you do have to be pretty darn good because this game is HARD. Fortunately, every time you die all the gold you've collected can be used to upgrade you manor, giving your next child a step up in life and another chance at vanquishing evil.
Rogue Legacy is inspired by games like Castlevania, but it takes things so much farther, offering a roguelike experience that twists the genre by giving you the ability to continue playing after your character has died through their child, and their child, and… It’s an extremely clever title in the genre and is just as much fun now as when it was first released. Getting it for free is a superb deal.
Cellar Door Games concentrates on creating innovative platformers and, with the big hit of Rouge Legacy, it only made sense that they would eventually create Rogue Legacy 2. If you’re a big fan of roguelike games, platformers that bridge classic gameplay nostalgia with modern design, or games that are just plain hilarious and fun, you’re probably going to love the sequel to this week’s free game.
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).
