Free Games
Table of Contents
Free-to-Play (F2P) Games
I’m not going to go over the most common examples or the items you can find in the Steam “Free to Play” section. Instead, here are a few games that I really enjoyed:
- Cave Story is one of my favorite games of all time and while it has been re-released and remastered a number of times as paid versions, the full original game is still available for free.
- Holocure is a Hololive-themed Vampire Survivors-like game with its own special twist. It has unlockable characters via a gacha mechanic that uses the free in-game currency. It is completely free-to-play and contains no microtransactions.
- osu! is a rhythm game heavily inspired by Elite Beat Agents. You play the game by clicking notes with your mouse or a tablet.
- Songs can be downloaded on the “beatmaps” section of the site.
- Clone Hero is a rhythm game heavily inspired by Guitar Hero. It supports Guitar Hero and Rock Band controllers but also keyboard.
- My favorite way of playing is binding the buttons to the F1-F5 keys and the strum bar to ENTER, and holding my keyboard upside-down like a guitar controller.
- Songs can be downloaded from sites like Chorus Encore.
- Browser Games
- Neal.fun is the home of some fun and interesting projects such as the Absurd Trolley Problem Game, The Password Game, and Infinite Craft, all of which you’ve probably seen online somewhere already.
- Fan Games
- Pokemon Fan Games - Not to be confused with ROM hacks, these are Pokemon-like games created in RPG Maker, which make them standalone and don’t require emulators.
Free Games from the Epic Games Store
The Epic Games Store gives out 1-2 free games every week. These are free to redeem and are your to keep on your account forever. Most of the time, these are indie games; however, they have given out AAA games before such as Death Stranding, The Evil Within 1 & 2, and Ghostwire: Tokyo.
Itch.io
Itch.io is the home of hundreds of thousands of free games. There are games of all sorts of genres and quality on there so browse around and find something that interests you. A lot of these can even be played directly in your browser.
Some notable examples are the original versions of indie hits Celeste and Spelunky, and popular Hololive fangames that you may have seen streamed by Holomem like the aforementioned Holocure, Delivering Hope, Mumei ≠ Gura, Councilrys RPG, Protostar Twilight, and Flare Nuinui Quest.
Demos
Depending on the length of the demo, these can have enough content to last a full stream. For shorter demos, you can even do a sort of game preview “showcase” of multiple demos. You can find a list of games with long demos here.
However, one of my favorite “demos” is…
Final Fantasy XIV
The most expansive “demo” ever, the FF14’s free trial has been meme’d to death but if you’re looking for an MMO to pick up, I personally feel like it can’t be beat. It’s a game very focused on story and can have very long cutscenes, so keep that in mind. However, the community is generally very patient and helpful to newer players.
The free trial includes the base game and the entire first expansion, totaling over 100 hours of gameplay, with some restrictions to your account. These restrictions are not content-based but account-based, including being unable to create or join a guild, use the player marketplace, or trade with other players. You can refer to this video that goes over what these restrictions mean.
Emulation & ROM Hacks
You can Google this.