Author: terry

STEEP STEPS

by py4d.

STEEP STEPS is a multiplayer mountain climbing game. Use your ladder to climb up higher and higher, and cross dangerous gaps. But be careful – fall, and you go all the way back to square one!

So this is basically a bit like a well made Bennett Foddy esque frustration game, in Roblox. But what makes it really special is the same thing that makes all Roblox games special: it’s multiplayer! It’s not just you climbing the mountain with your little ladder, it’s all of you! And the game is completely neutral – you can help each other out, or you can hinder each other. You can triumph together, or you can fail together. Absolutely brilliant.

(one small tip: you can press Shift to activate shift lock, which makes ladder placement a lot easier)

[Play on Roblox (account signup required)]

(via Roblox Underrated Games, thanks!)

My top 10 free games of 2022

Surprise! I’m doing a 2022 best of list!

Making these kind of lists is really hard for me; hard enough that last year I just ended up not doing it at all. Ultimately it’s a totally subjective thing – I played lots of freeware games this year, and the games I ended up picking are the ones that I found myself thinking about the most afterwards. Or, in some cases, just the ones that I remember having a lot of fun playing. Your mileage may vary! I dunno! Look, the site literally has my name in it.

Anyway, without further ado, here are my top 10 freeware games from 2022:

10: The Looker
(by Bradley Lovell)
9: Return of the SLIMEPIRES!
(by Sophie Houlden)
8: Ears of the Killer
(by garmentdistrict)
7: FRANKEN
(by samanthuel)
6: Blink
(by JUSTCAMH)
5: GUNCHO
(by Arnold Rauers and Terri Vellmann)
4: DOORS
(by LightningSplash and RediblesQW)
3: COLDLINE
(by Adam Pype and Viktor Kraus)
2: BABBDI
(by Sirius Lemaitre and Léonard Lemaitre)
1: Mosaic
(by sunil and Corey Hardt)

BABBDI

by Sirius Lemaitre and Léonard Lemaitre.

The only way out of the vast, brutalist city of BABBDI is by train – if you can get hold of a ticket.

Exploring Babbdi is a delight. It pulls off this amazing feat of feeling like a tightly designed videogame, but at the same time, like a real place that doesn’t care that you’re there. It’s packed with carefully placed secrets, progression enabling items in the exact right place, every building carefully planned out. But also; like nothing was planned, like this city was always here, and you just happened to come along.

Absolutely floored by this – one of the most inspiring things I’ve played this year.

[Download for Windows (Steam)]

(via FreeGamePlanet. Thanks, as always!)

Noelle

by taco360.

Ho ho ho! It’s a new holiday themed Celeste Classic mod, from the creator of last year’s Forever Red!

It’s fairly common for Celeste mods to be implausibly difficult, so I think the most important thing to tell you about Noelle is that it isn’t – I completed this one in my first try, in about 15 minutes, getting all the strawberries that I could see along the way. Reading the comments, it seems like there’s maybe some more difficult optional content buried here, but the main route is fun, well designed, and, refreshingly, pitched at an average player!

[Play online (Lexaloffle BBS)]

Level

by Toombler.

“Level” is the game behind the first panel of the 2022 Confounding Calendar, an advent calender of tiny puzzle games, one for each day of December. Last year’s selection was great, so I’m excited to keep up with this year’s presents!

I really like the opening game this year – simple, novel, and perfectly constructed. An elegant start to the puzzling season!

[Play Online (itch.io)]

POTTERGAME

by Kate Barrett.

With Twitter in it’s death throes right now, some people I follow have been using the final days to retweet some of their greatest hits, for posterity. Which for me, has meant finding out about a bunch of cool stuff that I missed the first time around.

This is a Harry Potter parody game, made with assets ripped from one of the commercial games. It’s hilarious. Highly recommended!

[Download for Windows (glorioustrainwrecks)]