I talk about games all the time but I am also crucially talking about commercial products. When I talk about TTRPGs or videogames, I’m usually talking about games that you can’t play for free, and that’s a bummer. I don’t like the idea that my writing about games primarily requires some degree of effort or money on your part to check, as it were, my working.
But there are some games I played this year that are free, and I think are interesting and cool and I’d like to make sure you know about them. In the tradition of Decemberween Twenty Twenty Threen, this Game Pile Post is just about a handful of freely available games that I like and want to recommend you try out.
I remember one year I made the Game Pile articles entirely games you could play at parties with friends for no money, like I had some kind of idea of how a Christmas gathering should go. My upcoming Christmas gathering is going to feature someone recovering from COVID though, so like, it’s on my mind how close I don’t want to sit to anyone.
Anyway, free games!
Hey, did you see this game going around a few months ago? Suika Game, or Watermelon Game if you wanna translate the Japanese, is a game in your Tetris and Threes genre. It’s playable for free in your browser, it’s very moreish and it’s also very aesthetically pleasant.
You don’t need to know anything about this game to play it. You can play it once and then know immediately if you want to try it again or strive to win it, or if you never want to see it again. It’s what I think of as a snack game — something you can chew through while you’re doing something else, like recovering from a rough day but when you’re not necessarily hugely engaged with something. Plus, unlike the more tidy games like Threes and Tetris, the fact this game is sloppy and erratic means you can always try to cover for a mistake with more sloppy, erratic play. Sometimes you’ll just get lucky and two things you hadn’t quite expected will tap one another and a chain reaction transforms the play state.
Time to time, now I know about this game, I will revisit it. I mean, to just get the screenshots for this article I just needed to show up and get a screenshot of it in a modestly complicated state, right? But I didn’t have a good screenshot so I went to play it a bit, then take a screenshot.
I wound up playing the game to a fail state four times before realising I was forgetting to get my screenshot, and took this screenshot, which, if you’re attentive, you will realise is of a fail state.
Corker of a game!
I am never going to have it in me to do a proper, comprehensive game pile about Moonring. It’s such a vast seeming game, it’s so dizzying in its scope, and, at least right now, it’s available for free.
If you don’t know what Moonring is, I kind of don’t either. Moonring is, to me, an Ultima-like RPG, with a complex text parser and an intricate world full of people who are looking for magical words or combinations of words to unlock particular pieces of lore. But that’s while there’s also actually an adventure RPG going on. It’s not just an enormous, elaborate, spatially differentiated videogame to what you might be used to, it’s one you have to learn how to experience.
I don’t think Moonring is for me, but it feels like a game that you should be aware of. It’s got the vibes of being someone’s favourite. Have you tried Dwarf Fortress? It may click for you in a similar way.
I liked Devil Express. It’s a short ish adventure, the kind of thing you can beat in one single session. It has a very deliberate pace and a particular type of comedy to it. The basic idea is that you’re a delivery wolf, named Worf, who has been sent by work to go do deliveries at a single location, doing ‘freelance deliveries.’ The way this works is basically a dialogue maze, where you spend time going around multiple stories of a building, talking to people one at a time, and connecting people’s needs to their gifts, you know, the kind of thing. It’s like a ‘use keys on doors’ kind of puzzle solving you may remember from other adventure games of the ilk.
I won’t spoil it! I thought it was fun, funny and charming! I liked the way that Worf handles the increasing weirdness of things and is used as a way to demonstrate to you what’s weird to Worf, and what’s normal to Worf. A wolf that does door to door delivery? A demon that runs a business? A flying eyeball? A teleporting gargoyle? Some of these things are strange, but really, Worf is just trying to get through the night and finish the job, y’know?
You might have seen the card game Orchard in board game stores, and you may have even seen it kicking around on review channels that like to talk about board games. It’s a cool little game, in the vein of a solitaire puzzler.
Did you know you can just have it?
For free?
Orchard has a completely free print-and-play version available. You have to print it if you want to play it but that’s kind of obvious, right? The game presents you with a growing puzzle that you lay dice on, and if you have d6es and a printer, you have everything you need for this game. Heck, if you have an older relative, and you might want them to start getting into puzzles as low-impact ways to enjoy themselves while also keeping their brains going, you could do worse than print this game out and make it for them, as a nice little craft project.
Eh?
Ehhh?