If you’re hankering for some freebie action to see you into the weekend, you might want to point yourself toward the Epic Games Store, where you can procure a helping of arcade management and grid-based, turn-based deck building for the sum of zero pee.
More specifically, from 11th July (that’s today, unless you’re reading it in the future, in which case apologies for the confusion) until next Thursday, 18th July, the following titles are free to download and keep via the Epic Games Store:
- Arcade Paradise
- Floppy Knights
Arcade Paradise, from Nosebleed Interactive, challenges players to turn their family’s run-down laundrette into a thriving arcade, one shiny new cabinet at a time. As such, your time is split between keeping the laundrette running – manually collecting trash, washing and folding clothes, unclogging the toilet, and so on – in order to scrape together the cash needed to expand your arcade empire. And all 35 of the available base game cabinets are playable. Christian Donlan liked Arcade Paradise a lot!
As for Floppy Knights, from Rose City Games, it casts player as Pheobe, a brilliant young inventor with a robotic arm for a best friend, who’s trying to save up enough to leave home. It’s a goal that, for reasons, involves smashing through armies of monsters using the titular tangible projections summoned from floppy disks. It mixes tactical turn-based battles with deck building. “Everything about it feels light and approachable, Eurogamer said back in 2022, “[it] oozes fun, plain and simple.”
So if either of those take your fancy, you’ve got until next Thursday to add them to your Epic Games Store library. After that, a fresh set of freebies is due to take their place, with Welsh folklore-inspired first-person horror game Maid of Sker currently confirmed by Epic.