The Best Free Games of the Week

This week's banquet of free games contains a delicious meal for one, a bullet hell buffet in the bloody, spacey BloodSpace, suddenly thousands of herdlike diners solving puzzles to get their puds, a drive-thru arcade game, and an adventure where you feed horrible things to even more horrible creatures. Er, bon appetit!

Chef by DinosaurFriend

A fantastic little claymation short that asks you (you being a chef) to prepare a dinner for a singularly fussy diner, who isn't all that fond of hot sauce, or being poisoned to death. It's a one-minute game: you select the ingredients, you watch Chef chop and prepare them, and then you see how your efforts go down. The animations, especially the facial expressions, are particularly good, while the joins between the video and the hyperlinky interactions are almost seamless. Most importantly though, Chef is funny–really funny. I had a big stupid smile plastered all over my face the whole way through.

BloodSpace by Kayabros, Amon26, Erdoğan Cem

BloodSpace is bullet hell shmup from Kayabros and Gyossait developer Amon26, with a rockin' metal soundtrack by Erdoğan Cem Evin. As you'd expect from something featuring art by Amon26, there's a lot of gothic imagery on offer here, and by that I mean a lot of black and red and pulsating slimey things–perhaps it's to be expected that it's a really quite punishing game as well. There's an interesting power-up system in place, which grants a different temporary ability based on which three coloured thingies you pick up from enemies first. You're terrorised in your relentless march upwards by a snakey space monster, who will likely get the better of you in the end. (Via IndieGames)

Psyche E by Juniper Jolliper and Ryan Melmoth

A short first-person adventure that starts with your character losing their penis, and ends with...actually, I'm not entirely sure what happened there at the end. Something to do with a mirror, after I fed feces to the sunflower and gave that thing a rock to eat. This is a game in which you store objects in your scrotum, and while that probably tells you all you need to know about this short item-swapping point and click, know that this is a very silly, scatological, stupid and childish game, and I enjoyed it a great deal for precisely those reasons.

Suddenly, Thousands by Omiya Games

There are Suddenly, Thousands of you in this smart, inventive puzzle game about the wisdom of crowds, and while that's not entirely accurate–it's more like Suddenly, Tens, at least when the game gets going–there are indeed quite of lot of sheep-like people to manhandle here. It's a puzzler where everyone you control moves and jumps at the same time, that is unless you click on them individually (or in a group) to turn them into inert statue things. There's a lovely serene quality to Suddenly, Thousands' switch-activating, trap-avoiding, crowd-jumping puzzles–and a pleasantly abstract yet characterful art style to go with it.

Late Night Driver by david_is_neato

An arcade puzzler that asks you break the first rule of driving and bash into other cars from behind. (That is pretty much the first thing they advise you not to do when you begin learning.) Bashed cars will bounce around the road, knocking into other vehicles who will then hopefully knock into other vehicles, multiplying your score and giving you something pretty to look at from behind the safety of your dashboard. The key is to hit the cars with the red lights, and avoid the ones with the white ones–a neat bit of visual signposting that makes Late Night Driver a terrifically easy game to pick up and play.