You’ve probably heard by now that the Epic Games Store has got into the habit of giving away free games every week or so, and with the occasional hiccup here and there, this has been going on for about a year and a half now. Starting today, you can get Tacoma and Next Up Hero.
Tacoma is a forensic sci-fi adventure from Fullbright, the studio that made Gone Home. In Tacoma, you explore a empty space station, searching for clues about what happened to its missing crew. Over the course of the adventure, you’ll learn about their private conversations and communiques, their inner lives, and what wound up on happening that led to the station being abandoned.
It’s not a long game, but it’s beautifully realised and quickly draws you into the lives of its ghostly characters, who you’ll mostly hear in echoes and footage reconstructed from surveillance cameras and other data. It’s certainly worth a look, and at the low, low cost of completely free, it’s a steal.
Next up is Next Up Hero, a beautiful little hand-drawn co-op dungeon crawler in which you can recruit other players’ fallen avatars into a ghostly army to bring into battle. Each time someone dies in Next Up Hero, they leave an echo (where have we heard this before?), but this time these can actively aid you in your quest.
This little RPG game, as well as Tacoma, will become available for free on the Epic Games Store July 23, probably at or around 8:00 PDT / 11:00 EDT / 16:00 BST.
In the meantime have a look through our list of the best free Steam games if that’s your preferred platform.