If a spooky, puzzle-filled co-op game set in a snowy world sounds right up your street, or a single-player narrative featuring anthropomorphic animals better takes your fancy, Epic Games has two free PC games on offer this week.
Epic’s first free title is Beacon Pines, a gem of a story game that has you playing two characters at once: the book’s protagonist and its reader. It’s incredibly unique, replicating a choose-your-own-adventure novel by allowing you, as the reader, to flip back through the pages of a hand-drawn storybook to redo outcomes that main character Luka experiences.
As you work to uncover the game’s mystery, you’ll meet and learn about townsfolk that jibber jabber away in a nonsensical, Animal Crossing-style language. While exploring, you’ll collect words known as charms that serve as different tokens to slot in at specific points in the story. Doing so alters the narrative and pushes you down a different path. What’s particularly great here is that, instead of having the option to simply replay a story to see what’s changed, Beacon Pines actively encourages you to discover what’s going on at the town’s spooky warehouse.
To do so, you’ll interact with a page in the book called The Chronicle, a branching tree that shows all your previous choices and gives you the ability to change outcomes, learning even more about the world. It’s a brilliant little feature, and is one of many reasons that this freebie is an absolute steal.
Looking for something new to play with a pal instead? Co-op puzzler We Were Here Together is exactly what you need. Set in the frozen wastes of the Antarctic, you’ll awaken to discover an emergency flare, and will set out together to figure out what’s going on, armed only with a walkie talkie each.
With huge puzzles to solve, the walkie talkie is the main form of communication you’ll have in order to help one another, making working well together a must. You can chat over Discord if you prefer, and while it doesn’t take away much from the core experience of using the walkie talkie, speaking plainly is still a much-needed skill.
As you work through each puzzle, you’ll eventually come upon a spooky-looking castle that splits you up for the remainder of the game, forcing you to communicate your surroundings in order to link back up. Get ready with this one, as you’ll be interacting with a haunted house, a maniacal jester, and cracking mind-bending puzzles in order to escape.
Beacon Pines and We Were Here Together are available for free via the Epic Games Store between Thursday, August 6 and Thursday, August 13 at 8am PT / 11am ET / 4pm BST / 5pm CEST. Both are yours to keep once claimed, so head here to grab them while the offer lasts.