The Cool Free Games Thread

[Komma Chameleon]

In this thread, share links to cool, free games you've played. Help other people find neat stuff!

Suggested rules:

• One game per post. Start with its title and a link (using the [ url ] tag), then explain what's neat about it. Include a screenshot if you can.
• Include content warnings in a spoiler tag, especially for horror games.
• Only post games that you've actually played a good bit and recommend! We're looking for quality over quantity here, not just things you've heard might be good.
• Not allowed: games that are only temporarily free. Freemium games (gacha, battle pass, etc).
• OK: pay-what-you-want games. Games with minor ads. Demos, so long as they will probably still be playable a year from now. Mostly-free games with a one-time "bonus" DLC.

The Game List

Moonring (below)
Yume Nikki
Murder Dog IV: Trial of the Murderdog
Meritous
Dominoid
A Dark Room
Motel Snooze: Suite Dreams
Ultra Fight Da ! Kyanta 2
Super Crate Box
Alien Swarm - Reactive Drop
Annalynn MD
Road to Druaga
Iji
Cave Story, again
Cookie Clicker
NetHack
Chiki's Chase (iOS and Android)


---

Let's get started with...

Moonring
Fluttermind, 2023
Steam, itch



Moonring is a turn-based, bump combat dungeon crawler that takes some cues from the old Ultima games. There's a storyline with a fixed overworld, but the dungeon layouts are random. It's pretty juicy for a free game, and I think its fantasy pantheon (which forms the basis of your skill tree) is pretty awesome. Forge your own path, Dreamless, and challenge the five gods of Caldera!

[ElTipejoLoco]

Yume Nikki
KIKIYAMA, 2004-2012
Steam, Yume.Wiki, Yume Nikki Online, REM-9: The Yume Nikki Randomizer



An RPG Maker 2003 game that tossed away the turn-based random encounter parts of the engine it was built on in favor of exploration of surreal environs and some light puzzle elements based on said environs reacting to collectible transformation items known as Effects, and essentially inspired a whole slew of fan games and imitation.

The game has been translated to English twice officially and twice unofficially, as well as a slew of other languages by fans. I recommend playing it via the browser in Yume Nikki Online as that's the route of least resistance if you're not on an operating system that can run RPG Maker 2k3 titles comfortably- it's running via Easy RPG Player's emscripten web assembly implementation and has some quality of life features that might be interesting to people who like things like Achievements/Trophies (if they make an account), or who like having easy access to maps and stuff on the wiki on the fly. If you want to not play while seeing or being seen by other random people in-game, you can toggle on Private mode to stop anyone not on your Friends list from rendering, or Singleplayer mode to stop even Friends list peeps.

I've yet to give the REM-9 rando a try, but it's there: It runs its own executable that I think essentially spits out a Yume Nikki version (one of the two fan translations of Yume Nikki, this time by vgperson) that you can then play either via Easy RPG Player's desktop release or the actual RM2k3 executable generated. Adds some replayability and optionally some additional conditions to running through Yume Nikki's effect collection requirement for seeing its credits sequence, though the game's evergreen even if you just opt to wander around and seeing what may or may not happen while you play it instead.

[Beancatte]

I dont really have the energy to do the fancy formatting everyone else is doing here, but:

Murder Dog IV: Trial of the Murderdog

From the same mind that brought you Space Funeral comes a court drama you're not likely to soon forget. If you know what you're doing you CAN actually defend yourself... or go for the more viseral routes you'd expect from a character named "Murderdog"

Usage of clay models really sets this apart from this devs other work.



https://thecatamites.itch.io/murder-dog ... murder-dog

[Trysdyn]

Meritous is an old, old school open source PC roguelite that was developed by a solo dev as a sort of learning project for C and SDL.

It shows its age a bit in 2025: you're constrained to 800x600 resolution, gamepad support is questionable, and so on, but it's still one of my favorite little free curiosities.

You're a psyker dropped into a 3000 room randomly generated dungeon with little direction aside from "finding the three keys and get the cursed seal". The three keys are spread throughout the dungeon in boss rooms you can identify from their general room shape. Once you have them, you can place them on special pedestals in three other special rooms to find the cursed seal; then exit the dungeon to win.

Your only method of attack and defense is danmaku bombs you charge up by holding the attack button. The more you charge, the stronger the blast, and the longer it takes to cool down. You level up by collecting experience from defeated foes and finding a place to spend that experience on stat upgrades.

What makes it cool is despite being a huge random dungeon, you can sort of read the runes on the dungeon layout and find your way to special rooms if you get a feel for how the generator works.

I wrote way too much about the game, exploring it, and routing it for a speedrun at one point.

There's also Archipelago Randomizer Support for it.

Grabbing the first youtube video without commentary or end-game spoilers...

[SlushieCat]

I'm a huge fan of falling block puzzle games (there's gotta be a good name for that genre, right?). A game came out recently that does some interesting stuff called DOMINOID. You drop dominoes into groups of 4 or more to clear. Lots of combo potential here, especially with the ring mechanic. The trailer explains it all really well.



Should totally cost money. It's really well made with fantastic art and music. Check it out!

[Cayman]

A Dark Room
Doublespeak Games



A minimalist, browser-based text adventure. What starts as a very simple idle clicker game slowly grows into something much greater. I can't speak much more on it without spoiling anything, but it's surprisingly engrossing and pulls off some interesting CSS wizardry. A little hidden gem that can be fully completed in just an hour or two.

[DizzyCrisis]

Motel Snooze: Suite Dreams by PixelRye



A furry Yume Nikki-like about exploring the dreams of the people staying at a mysterious hotel to try and soothe your nightmares. Fantastic art, cute characters, and a great soundtrack!

Content warning for some suggestive/fetish themes (though for some, that might be an upside), but nothing explicit.

[Beancatte]

Ultra Fight Da ! Kyanta 2

A fighter that mostly uses a simple input layer to crank up the pace of the game to absurd levels. Genuienly really well put together despite obvious shitpost vibes. Rollback patch has been in development for a long ass time but I hope we'll see it someday.

[ARBco]

Super Crate Fight is an oldie but goodie arcade platform shooter where you pick up random weapons and try to survive. Your score is how many weapons you pick up, forcing you to constantly switch gears. And as an arcadey game, it's quick to try out!

[Moot]

I am going to cheat and link a post I already made because i didn’t see this thread

Alien Swarm - Reactive Drop

it’s a free top down coop alien blasting game with a ton of content available which is mostly all you need to know, but the other post has a lot more info about it which I’ll leave over there because there’s no point sticking it all in here again

[Lolo De Puzlo]

Annalynn MD,

Annalynn is probably IMO the best Neo-Retro game and this spinoff tries to put a spin (heh) on Pac-Attack like how the original was a spin on Pac-Man.

Fun little SNES style Falling Block.

[SlushieCat]

Road to Druaga

Many people, just hundreds of billions of people over the billions of years the earth has existed have been asking "Okay but what if Dragon Buster was a Druaga series game?"



Here you go. Dragon Buster is now, actually, a Druaga game. You play as Gill. You jump and slash and find items and get upgrades and it's definitely in my top 100 games of all time. It's very good.

[DrgnBeauty]

Iji


iji is one of my absolute favorite indie games; it's a side-scrolling shooter featuring a young woman turned cyborg soldier trying to defend what's left of earth as an alien war threatens it. it has a great story with pacifist and... very much not pacifist routes, a very rockin' soundtrack, a lot of fun weapons to play around with (from shotguns to a literal fucking nuke), and pretty solid level design (tho some are a bit big and sprawling). definitely a great game, especially for the low, low price of Zero Dollars And Zero Cents.

[DizzyCrisis]

(is it okay to post after i've already given one? ah, screw it, someone needs to mention it!)

Cave Story - 洞窟物語


A game that, in this space, probably needs no introduction. One of the classic indie darlings (and released on WiiWare!), Cave Story is an excellent run-and-gun platformer with cute visuals, a bangin' soundtrack, and a great story to boot (though I've never beaten it)! Its enhanced version with redone music and visuals, Cave Story+, is paid, but the original is still free to this day - and if you ask some, the better version of the game anyway.

jack i love you so much. please hook up with king.

[Faith]

I mean. Cookie Clicker. Right?

I have spent a frankly unconscionable amount of time playing this game. It’s not just the game that mainstreamed idle games; it perfected them in the same stroke. Absolutely love the dopamine of chaining together bonuses and multipliers to create thousands of years’ worth of baseline cookie production in a matter of seconds.

If you haven’t touched Cookie Clicker since 2013, you should really give it a whirl again. Orteil has been regularly updating it, even all these years later, and it’s a perfectly-crafted little Skinner box. A+ game design, would obsess over it for another year again sometime.

Also, Orteil hates microtransactions and gachas and NFTs and AI and posts like a real pro on his tumblr. He is probably the chillest possible dev to lead a project like this!!

[slightlyflightyone]

NetHack (1987)

NetHack is among the original “roguelike” games from a time when roguelikes in fact looked and played much like the original 1980 game Rogue. Think more along the lines of the tile-based, each-move-you-make-is-a-turn–based, randomly-generated, multilevel exploration of the Mystery Dungeon series than something like Spelunky.

Heavily inspired by Dungeons & Dragons with a somewhat more tongue-in-cheek flair, you build a character of your own and embark on a quest to delve into the depths of the fully randomized Mazes of Menace. Somewhere within this labyrinthine dungeon, you will find the Wizard of Yendor from whom you must retrieve the Amulet of Yendor and return it to Marduk, the creator deity. The story is simple and your motivation straightforward. All you need to do until you succeed in your task is explore and survive.

As an open-source fork of the earlier Hack, it’s playable on just about any computer system you can readily get your hands on from mainstream OSes like Windows or Linux to something more niche like FreeDOS or Haiku and the system requirements are barebones. The presentation remains entirely within a terminal by default, but there are available tile-based sprites if that’s a tad too dated for your tastes (check for nethackw.exe in the Windows version).

P.S. While it’s generally considered poor form among enthusiasts to look into anything as opposed to figuring it out for yourself, I won’t tell them if you occasionally refer to the wiki when you get stuck ;3

[Lolo De Puzlo]

Road to Druaga

Many people, just hundreds of billions of people over the billions of years the earth has existed have been asking "Okay but what if Dragon Buster was a Druaga series game?"



Here you go. Dragon Buster is now, actually, a Druaga game. You play as Gill. You jump and slash and find items and get upgrades and it's definitely in my top 100 games of all time. It's very good.

[NovaSquirrel]

Chiki's Chase is a neat runner mobile game for iOS and Android which has a cheap ($4 when I did it), one-time payment but can be played without it. I'll admit I don't know what the new user experience is like in 2025, but I see a review from last month praising it as "A great free game with basically no ads" so I think it belongs here.

I like how cute the game is, and how the gameplay has a lot of depth despite only having two buttons. It feels great to gradually accumulate upgrades during a run and I like how intense it can get when I'm doing really well but I could fall into a pit or get hit if I'm not careful. But it's still pretty forgiving and you do have multiple hit points.

Originally the one-time payment gave you the ability to earn currency that could buy hats and increase the number of upgrades you can have at once, but according to the changelog it looks like everyone can now earn the currency, and if you have paid you just earn it after a run, but if you haven't you can watch an ad to earn it? Doesn't sound like a big deal within the context of how the game works (you would want to max out the upgrades, but once you've done that you have no gameplay reason to earn currency anymore).

[EdenCoven]

Road to Druaga

Many people, just hundreds of billions of people over the billions of years the earth has existed have been asking "Okay but what if Dragon Buster was a Druaga series game?"



Here you go. Dragon Buster is now, actually, a Druaga game. You play as Gill. You jump and slash and find items and get upgrades and it's definitely in my top 100 games of all time. It's very good.

yeah what they said. the haha yes thing

[Raven]

Cave Story



Cave Story has a huge legacy as one of the earliest Indie games to get a large following online. Large by 2005 standards, anyways! It's a side-scrolling platformer shooter, with great music and charming NES-style artwork. It was made entirely by one guy, who goes by Studio Pixel (or just "Pixel"). It's fairly short, but very difficult in a few areas especially near the end. Give it a shot! It natively supports Windows (there's a patch for an issue with 11 under the "misc" section), as well as having Mac and Linux ports. If you're on Linux it might already be in your repositories idk.

Content warnings

Hidden text.

Brainwashing, child death

There's also Steam and Switch ports but those cost money and have a different translation so I'm not gonna say more about them.

[niss]

Road to Druaga

Many people, just hundreds of billions of people over the billions of years the earth has existed have been asking "Okay but what if Dragon Buster was a Druaga series game?"



Here you go. Dragon Buster is now, actually, a Druaga game. You play as Gill. You jump and slash and find items and get upgrades and it's definitely in my top 100 games of all time. It's very good.

oh HELL yes

ITT: druaga sicko meetup

edit: AND it runs in proton!!!