Next week’s Epic Games Store freebies bringing arcade management and Welsh folklore horror
If you just can’t get enough of those Epic Games Store freebies, here’re some more for your list; Epic has revealed an upcoming twosome of arcade management action and Welsh folklore horror when its latest batch of free titles arrives next week. And, before that, grid-based, turn-based deckbuilder Floppy Knights is currently available to download and keep for zero pee.
Starting in the present, Rose City Games’ Floppy Knights casts players as Phoebe, a brilliant young inventor with a robotic arm for a best friend, who’s trying to save up enough money to leave home. To meet her goal, Phoebe must smash through armies of monsters using her titular tangible projections, all summoned from floppy disks. The result is a mix of tactical turn-based battling and deckbuilding that Eurogamer said “oozes fun, plain and simple”, back in 2022.
Floppy Knights is free to download and keep on the Epic Games Store right now, and will remain so until next Thursday, 18th July. After that, two more freebies take its place:
- Arcade Paradise
- The Maid of Sker
Nosebleed Interactive’s Arcade Paradise is a sort of hands-on, first-person management game challenging players to turn their family’s run-down laundrette into a thriving arcade. Your time is split between keeping the laundrette running – manually collecting trash, washing and folding clothes, unclogging the toilet, and so on – in order to scrape together the cash needed to buy new arcade cabinets and expand your empire. Which is where you’ll spend the rest of your time: messing around with Arcade Paradise’s 35 fully playable arcade games (with more available as DLC). Christian Donlan liked Arcade Paradise a lot!
As for The Maid of Sker, it’s a Welsh-folklore-inspired slice of stealth horror that tells the supposedly true tale of Elizabeth Williams, who’s said to have have died of a broken heart after being locked inside her home by her controlling father. The action picks up in 1898 when players must explore the shadowy halls of Sker Hotel, sneaking about the place to avoid a cult of enemies that react to sound. Eurogamer contributor Vikki Blake was lukewarm on this when it released in 2020, calling it an “effective if unadventurous slice of rural horror”. So there you go.
To recap, The Maid of Sker and Arcade Paradise are next week’s freebies (yes, I totally got muddled up first time around), and Floppy Knights is free now – just remember to claim it before Thursday, 18th July, when it’s all change.
