Live Free, Play Hard: The Week's Finest Free Indie Games

Lots of games about being trapped in tight areas for some reason, guess it's just this horrid zeitgeist. Twine memorial.

Looking for more free games? Check out our round up of the best free PC games that you can download and play right now.

CONGRATULATIONS YOU ARE NOW A KOTAKU COMMENTER by Emily Gera

An eloquent riposte by Emily Gera that was a long time coming. Applies to most comment pages, yeah, but the specific spark that birthed it was the “...the men's rights activists that reared their head following #1reasonwhy”.

Shit, a woman is doing things on the internet, let’s get in our clown car and bounce on down to the comment section because by God it's time to Have An Opinion, because we're required by law to have an opinion on everything we see no matter how unfamiliar we are with the subject and not having an opinion would be embarrassing because it would be an admission of being less than completely aware of all knowledge in the universe.

Ah, I’m in love with this. A fine diversion until the day we finally realize our global feminazi empire of estrogenated biodomes where we manufacture evil robots to roam the earth and castrate all males or whatever.

Caesar's Day Off by Majus

A series of important Caesar moments that YOU control and all it takes is ONE finger. Some of the best visual wit I’ve ever seen in a game, like playing a cartoon.

Hardcore strategies like: up or down? Don’t fuck this up.

self portrait AM by gods17

From the creator of last week’s MASTABA SNOOPY, a surreal stream of consciousness (which can backfire a lot of the time unless it’s interesting, which this is) in the face of insomnia. Tortured and raw and real, a naked mind hallucinating in the dark.

I spin my web in jungle trees and catch explorers riding logs down the river. I make a game of it - how many pith helmets can I collect? The answer, of course, is like a billion.

Savior by mtarzaim

The idyllic village and the evil boss dungeon and nothing in-between, a condensed version of the JRPG experience.

But winning is not so obvious. The tropes and mechanics of JRPGS will not funnel you along a predictable route--instead they are elements of a puzzle. Every action resets the world in a flare of static. Each new interaction you discover gives you a point. As time goes on the inhabitants become restless, more aware of their prison, even violent.

Not much scarier than being an NPC with self-awareness. The rote becomes increasingly unbearable, forced to stand in one place and say the same things and you cannot die of your own volition because the code that makes you is immortal. It makes sense to kill the player character, if you can identify them. Maybe whatever godlike agency animates them will fill you instead, freeing you from your village. Superstition, sure, but it’s all we’ve got.

Spotlight by themushroomsound, Sergey Mohov, NoodleSpoon

Spotlight is like walking through a frozen play, a ring of light with props and literally wooden actors.

The play aesthetic works because instead of striving for realism, Spotlight works within the artificiality that 3D games struggle against as they straddle visceral out of the box spatiality and the burden of verisimilitude.

Everything is sepia and the actors are talking about the past, your past? You can walk off set but the endless dark is eery. Nothing out there.

So you return and figure out that the main verb in Spotlight is clicking on objects. This clicking feels like a fragile navigation of memory. Failure blurs your vision, which is confusing because we're trying to click on the right thing, whatever that is. Our entropic clicking coheres narrative through trial and error, layers of muted brown softly overlapping and building.

_____ by Rorschach\Larshe

Hope you're not claustrophobic. Maybe you are and you want to poke your psyche with delicious dread like when we can’t stop tonguing a loose tooth.

_____ is a creepy one roomer from someone who excels in mysterious closed spaces. This one in particular has a nasty element of disease to it, like being trapped in an overflowing hospital during a plague, air humid with dying lungs and bloody throats.

Indiestatik did an article/interview on the creator. I like his reiteration of minimal spaces, “...an in-game world that grows and develops with new creatures, rules, recurring objects one can recognise...”

Mind Game by gert_johnny

You’re a telepath with a list of nine things you have to accomplish before you die. Make a human think he’s a dog, rob a bank, that kind of thing. The way you do that is by looking at people’s thoughts and plucking them out like goldfish from a bowl. Take the bark out of the dog and put it into the man, for instance. For anyone who wants their own little stick figure Inception puzzler.

Cactus Block 2013 by chuchino

A series of chasms separates you from your goal. To cross those chasms you place blocks and jump across them. The catch is that each block has a chance of being a CACTUS.

How do I articulate the fun of Cactus Block? A specific pleasure--gambling crossed with platforming? I like games that get under my lobes and scratch a very particular itch that I didn’t even know I had.

And you got all these modes, like permadeath and blocks that fade from existence and cactuses that immediately shoot a bolt of lethal fire at you when they spawn.

Memorial by Travis McGill

Late night, less than a week ago. I’m glad I wasn’t able to sleep that night. I ended up browsing around aimlessly. Someone followed me on Twitter and I checked their timeline. They were talking about their brother’s recent death. They made a game to cope, to get through the first few days. It almost made me cry.

Why a game? The format works. Things unfold at the pace we’re dealing with them. A controlled scrapbook.

I mean, if you’re making something important it can be nice to have the power to say, look here, look at this, this matters, I want you to see it in this order. I want you to see it along the track of my own emotions and revelations.

Thanks for making this.