Amateur sleuths should feel right at home in this week's best free games round-up, which also finds time to explore infinite cities, play a normal game of basketball, and search for a misplaced form on a frozen wasteland. Enjoy!
Generative City by LineKernal
This is a little like Dying Light, only without all those pesky zombies that kept getting in your way, and those silly textures that made everything feel like real life. It's a city, or infinite cities really: a place to explore and jump and run around in before you suddenly become trapped in the floor. OK, so there are a few collision issues in LineKernal's interesting experiment, but those are easily remedied, in a fashion, by hitting N to restart the city—to regenerate a new procedural metropolis. I love running around in half-formed games like this one—perhaps you do too?
Jenny LeClue by Mografi
On the evidence of this free playable 'teaser', there's reason to be very excited for the upcoming Jenny LeClue, a beautiful adventure game concerned with mysteries, kid detectives, and nominative determinism (it's not as if Jenny LeClue was going to be a butcher). This is a self-contained mystery that begins with you (LeClue) breaking into some guy's house, to nose around and rifle through his stuff. By the sounds it, there's a pleasant mix of typical pointing-and-clicking and choose-your-own-adventuring going on in the full first episode, and you'll get a nice taste of it here.
Camp 1 by Waxwing Games
If palette nerds are a thing, then I am a big fat palette nerd—I mean, just look at the lovely colours in Waxwing Games' oppressively moody Camp 1. It's an Adventure Game Studio point-and-click about “bureaucracy, penal labor, isolation and desperation”, and it's the best-looking one of those I've seen. The setting, the frosty colour palette and the tight-knit cast make this a particularly claustrophobic adventure, and one you should play post-haste if you enjoy bleak science fiction.
Regular Human Basketball by Powerhoof
Nothing to see here, it's just a normal game of basketball between two regular humans, using a standard-issue ball the size of a Sherman tank. Explore the desert environment a little, however, and you just might come across a B-ball aide banned by the NBA for the last twenty years. Yep: giant mechs, which you can manoeuvre using the handy buttons located on their insides. Once you and your teammates/opponents are safely ensconced in said robo-players, this becomes a very pleasing and mechanical physics-focused local sports game. If the devs sound familiar, that's because they're responsible for multiplayer dungeon-'em-up Crawl, AKA that game where Gaben gets his revenge.
Maquisard by Julian Hyde, Angela Lee, Terry Li, Andrew Struck-Marcell, Wyatt Yeong, Kailin Zhu
I feel like the developers of the stylish, funny Maquisard must have played Capcom's Gregory Horror Show at some point—that or the stealthy, deductive snooping genre is finally returning of its own accord. They certainly watched Wes Anderson's excellent Grand Budapest Hotel, of which Maquisard borrows quite a lot. It borrows the general look of the film, it obviously borrows the hotel setting, and it borrows the diligent lobby boy at it core. However, it's a smart game of snooping and deduction rather than one of evading Willem Dafoe—which is where it reminds me of Capcom's stealthy horror adventure. You're tasked with deciding which of the hotel's guests is a big old spy, and you do this by listening at doors, marking their likes and dislikes in your handy notebook, and hiding behind plant pots and dropping eaves on their conversations.
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I haven't played the latest episode, but I think it's also worth mentioning that David Grund's World's Dawn (a Harvest Moon-like life sim) has recently been updated with a third free season that takes the game into Autumn. I've written about the series before, and it's worth a look if you're a fan of digital farming, and JRPG-style town simulations. Grund is running a Kickstarter to try and improve the look, sound and polish of the game before its fourth and final season, but that will be released even if it doesn't reach its goal.
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