The Best Free Online (in-browser or downloadable) Games

THE DEVIL + HANNIBAL LECTER = DAMNABLE LECTER

aw damn, did anyone do sasquatch + michael myers yet (it's an abomichael snowmyers)

you'd think Shrek would combine well due to Neil C's Smash Mouth/Shrek memes, but it just adds "shrek" to the start or end of everything.

neil shreked me.

Family is a neat little investigate em up (kind of like a mix of Hypnospace Outlaw and Obra Dinn) where you have to figure out who the members of a bunch of fictitious British indie bands from 1985-1995 by listening to their songs and reading articles about them. The details are all really good and the fake songs aren't half bad (and all seem to match up with real world equivalents). It can be played in browser or downloaded for free and takes about 30 mins to an hour to beat.

https://owl-skip.itch.io/family

Pretty fun, excellent concept and good music. Couldn't figure out the last five.
Love that Kate Bush-inspired "Easy Tiger" cover art.

Ha, yeah, this was fun. Impressive that they recorded stuff for each band. I did find it ran horribly, full of lag, on my computer though.

thanks for this; i put in a good and enjoyable hour right up until the last five... those required lots of trial and error but i finally got it right... there's no clear answer to who Dova Pavlova's drummer is! Turns out it's the replacement drummer for Easy Tiger if anyone's having issues there. That, plus the other member of Klanger, gave me fits but it's a good feeling to turn the key.

https://familygame.bandcamp.com/album/family-game-soundtrack

https://dreadpon.itch.io/banners-begone

it's a clicker! it will only take you about an hour.

pretty good. i like that you have to sort of puzzle out where each gate basically is

https://ifcomp.org/comp/2020

here's an online multiplayer RPG that you play inside of a tweet

just smuggled my ENTIRE GAME into this "video" embed tweet, enjoy https://t.co/tYhXidt2Ur

— 𝕃𝕆𝔸𝕄 ʟ5 💧🌱 (@ClayLoam) December 11, 2020

cool, just as a technical exercise!

Was 2020 a bad year for free games? Would there be enough for a top 5 list?

releasing games on itch.io/steam/mobile stores for a small fee is pretty easy now. lots of developers taking that route.

Call of Duty Warzone #1

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1289310/Helltaker/

A silly, funny, cute and short puzzle game about forming a harem of demon girls. Great music. Can't remember exactly how this came to my attention, but I think it got some kind of recognition during awards season/year-end best-of lists.

it's a good time!

has anyone tried this?
https://tocogames.itch.io/infinitepizza

https://okogame.ch/
^full screen plz

https://rob1221.itch.io/chessformer
fun if you like sokoban more than you like chess (I do!)

good stuff!

i hit a few stumpers but i should go back

this game is simple and stupid and i cannot win

https://dotsandboxes.org/

something i firefox(?) means i don't see chosen lines, which makes it extra difficult. but i wonder if it's one of those things you can't win, like Nim, if you go first and the computer plays perfectly?

is that only 2^24 combinations. actually, fewer given there's got to be an equal number of 0s and 1s. um, perhaps not because order is important.

or is it 24! which is 6e+23 which is a few more.

You can switch who plays first, doesn't make a difference to my miserable performance.

After googling and getting it to show some hints I can now beat it fairly reliably going first or second, but I suspect only because the computer makes the same moves every time, I'd probably still be shit against a decent human player.

i have been doing these, train track puzzles, which i first saw in the guardian on saturdays

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/tracks.html

nineletterword.tompaton.com/random

has a questionable word list.

http://lalo.li/ddd/
click to make ball barriers. use the ball barriers to help the falling ball hit the black ball. now work around the obstacles. rinse repeat.

^^^ good one, feels like something out of the heyday of this genre/thread. got to 30 points and called it a night.

also scrolling through thread i had a nice little nostalgic moment for that wacky weekend in May 2013 spent, with the rest of the folks itt, totally hooked on the strange abstract world of Candy Box.

oh god

i'm so bad at that ball one. infuriating

this is like a cross between katamari damacy and whatever that game was a few years ago where you were a blob that got bigger by eating other blobs:

https://hole-io.com/

I like it

That Dots and Boxes, I won playing a 2x2 square arena lol

I enjoyed hole.io a lot. Probably too much. I was meant to do some work today.

*shakes fist at ledge* (but thank you)

Wait, it isn't hole.io, it is hole-io dot com. Looking forward to the .io being some dodgy porn site that I've now said I enjoy a lot on the internet.

Luckily I am way too bad at the bouncy ball golf game to get addicted to that but it's a pleasingly simple concept.

oh man a friend and i went head to head on hole.io big time when it came out on mobile, whenever that was. good times

check out the non-free game donut county too.

wow, hole-io is very very compelling

goddammit. now i'm a double silver star. if anyone sees a giant karl malone on there, that's me. i'm getting pretty good at "Classic" mode - I almost always get 10 or 20 stars

:(

I just realized I've been playing most bots, probably. every time i start near other "players", i notice almost all of them make a straight bee-line toward something, instead of exploring the surrounding area for the smallest objects (a strategy that leads to victory almost every time). speaking of "victory almost every time", i'm starting to become suspicious that....sigh

however i will continue destroying these bots until i am triple silver star.

for tonight.

there's a solo mode which is just you against the scenery.

i find some scenes have nothing small and you really struggle to get started. and when you are large it gets laggy. maybe I'm just terrible.

no, those are problems for me too. the bot theory is helpful actually, i'd wondered about those mysterious high-speed bee-lines towards stuff. but hey, computer opponents have been a mainstay of video games since the golden age. just think of them like the ghosts in pac-man and enjoy the loop of chomping stuff and getting bigger.

It is pretty easy to win unless you get born somewhere with no small stuff but yeah still satisfying. Solo mode is harder, best I've managed is about 75% but I've only tried two or three times.

i got to the 80% threshold, but it's VERY map-dependent. like what you want is to be in one of the maps with a ton of marsh grass and bamboo to just chow down on at the beginning.

yeah, there's one map where the little marsh grass is actually worth +2 at the beginning, while the bigger trees and things like that you can barely swallow are only +1

and there's another map where I can't seem to get past 30% no matter what.

one suggestion for this game is that they could put the title of the map somewhere when you play it! if you're playing on rando, sometimes it's tough to know where you actually are.

i did submit a tip to the developer and asked them about the possibility of creating private rooms, or somewhere where you could count on more humans

the maps have titles on the maps page. pretty generic though. sci-fi. vikings. japan...

the sci fi one looks like it has lots of large buildings but they are actually prefabs, made up of smaller blocks, which slip down nicely.