Concept: metroidvania-style game where you start out with the abilities of a standard cinematic platformer protagonist, and each upgrade gives you a standard action platformer ability – e.g., the ability to drop through thin platforms, the ability to control your momentum in mid air, a gun with unlimited ammo that doesn't oblige you to do a lengthy and immobilising reload animation every six shots, having an actual health bar rather than just dying to everything in one hit, etc. – such that your fully upgraded endgame toolkit is equivalent that of your average starting metroidvania character.
One of the earliest upgrades you can find is a pair of shoes that let you reverse direction instantly while running. Before collecting this upgrade, you have a long "slowing down and turning around" animation, and if you try to turn around while moving too quickly your character falls over.
I love how having one particular part of your body skeletonised is like a universal signifier of being a top-shelf evil wizard. "Wizard with a skull for a head" is timeless, skeleton arms are a fun modern twist, and even skeleton legs have their place, notably in Slavic folklore – and then of course there's the classic exposed ribcage, particularly if there's something weird or gross inside that you can strike for massive damage. If you're all skeleton, you're just a guy, but if you're only part skeleton, you're presumptively the most badass person in the room.
skeleton with a regular dick
Realistically, future archaeologists will probably figure out quite readily that you had yourself buried with a bunch of weird, anachronistic junk in an effort to deliberately confuse future archaeologists.
There is, however, a reasonably good chance that they'll invent a whole religion out of thin air to explain why it was important for you to confuse future archaeologists.
I love ironic valentines day cards, they're like the peak of comedy to me <3
Really good Twitter thread originally about Elon Musk and Twitter, but also applies to Netflix and a lot of other corporations.
Full thread. Text transcription under cut.
You encounter a group of 3 genies, and they each grant you one wish. One genie will grant your wish exactly as stated. One genie will ensure it’s cast exactly how you want. The final genie will twist it to ruin as much as possible. But you have no idea which genie is which.
So, I love looking through your game recs, and all of them look so interesting!
The only problem is that I have zero money at the moment, or at least zero that can be spent of games.
I don’t suppose you know any good/enjoyable games that are free or have a demo?
(There is only so much time you can spend doing housework or looking for work and I’ve replayed and replayed the games I’ve already got so many times)
It’s funny you should ask. Folks often ask me how the hell I have thousands of games in my Steam library, and the answer is, well, a substantial chunk of them are free to play. Many of them are very, very bad, but there are exceptions – I’ve placed links to the 120 or so that I’d actually recommend to other people under the cut.
A lot of these games are quite short (i.e., average playing time in the five to fifteen minute range), but they're free, so really that's good value for your money! Note: owing to the length of this list, I will not be including descriptions or content warnings – be sure to check the writeups and reviews.
I’ve marked my personal top dozen with asterisks (*). These aren’t necessarily the most approachable or well-constructed titles on this list, mind – just the ones I had the most fun with.
A few more that I've picked up in the months since I made the initial post, plus a number I overlooked the first time around. Again, I make no promises that any of these games are good – only that a. they're genuinely free to play at the time of posting, with no pay-to-win or DLC bullshit, and b. I enjoyed playing them.
I've mostly been playing commercial titles these past few months, but I managed to squeak in about a dozen free-to-play ones as well. As always, see below!
A small batch to kick off the year. I've included several pay-what-you-want titles published via itch.io in this set, which technically isn't free-as-in-free, but eh... close enough! Some of these are also game jam entries coded in just a few days, so set your expectations accordingly.


