Terry

My Free Game of the Week is 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 Free Game of the Week is 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!)

My Free Game of the Week is 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)]

My Free Game of the Week is STRG.SNEK, by @ToulouToumou.

You're a little snek, exploring a broken computer program, searching for delicious fragments of data.

This combination of "big explorable world" + "controls like snake" is really good. And not something I think I've seen before!

[Play online (itch.io)]

[Play online (newgrounds.com)]