FREE Games of the Day #1 April 24th, 2019

[Paul Rudd]

Today I will be starting a new series here at linustechtips. It will aim to provide FREE games every single day. The games will be from a variety of genres and of random quality. Some days I may provide demos. Some days I may provide episodes. But no matter what, they will always be completely FREE. The majority of these games you've probably never heard of. It's time to change that. And if I miss a day, I will make it up to you.

 

So without any more fuss or delay, here we go...

 

Game #1 Backbone will be a FREE game on Steam in 2020.

 

Developed by EggNut, it's a noir-inspired detective adventure. You'll step into the shoes of anthropomorphic raccoon and private eye, Howard Lotor, and explore the beautifully rendered 2.5D pixel art environments of dystopian Vancouver. Howard Lotor is smart, self-assured and set in his ways. Caught in the tedium of day-to-day life, he’s resigned to the abuses of the authoritative regime in power and compliant with the systemic inequality that permeates society. But a string of cases that grow progressively more outlandish will put his worldview to the test. 

It's a new take on point-and-click adventure, featuring stealth, exploration, and extensive branching dialogues inspired by classic CRPGs. As Howard, you must traverse the diverse districts of a now walled-off Vancouver, sniff out clues, collect evidence, interrogate witnesses, and choose which leads to follow. 

Inspired by film noir, the game will submerge you into its dark dystopian atmosphere. Every animation in the game is handcrafted frame by frame, and environments are modeled after real streets of Vancouver, BC. The breathtaking combination of high resolution pixel art and 3D effects like dynamic lighting, pouring rain, volumetric fog and neon lights bring the sprawling city to life. The original doom jazz soundtrack will keep you on the edge with the enveloping veil of bebop and cinematic soundscapes, where every sound tells a story.

 

Lucky for you, the Backbone Prologue was released to Steam TODAY, April 24th, 2019. A prologue is pretty much a demo but more like an introduction, separate from the game itself.

 

Game #2 Lonely will be a game released to Steam TOMORROW, April 25th, 2019. Price-tag remains unclear.

 

Developed by Bill's Game, it's is a puzzle-platformer game, which contains 20 game levels. In the game you'll have the ability to control time reversal. You'll need to go back to the past, cooperate with yourself, and shuttle through parallel worlds, to cross the platform, cross the abyss and solve the puzzle switch to move forward.

 

Lucky for you, a Demo for Lonely was released to Steam TODAY, April 24th, 2019. It can be found on the right side of the page from the Lonely link above.

 

Bonus Game #3 Escape Lala is a FREE game released to Steam 2 MONTHS AGO, February 14th, 2019 and has 45 Positive reviews.

 

Developed by DuckbearLab, it's a point-and-click adventure escape room game with a nostalgic feel. It's not just any ordinary escape room game, it's full of charming handcrafted pixel-art graphics and animations. It contains puzzles with magical twists that take inspiration from classic point-and-click adventure games of the 90's. You wake up inside a magical cave, full of mysteries. You remember nothing, but you know one thing for sure, you need to escape. Escape Lala. When you start to struggle, keep looking for the gold coins scattered around the cave and use them to reveal hints. Try to find them all and use them sparingly to get a better score at the end of the game.

Some dude name Paolo Paglianti said this about Escape Lala, "Every now and then comes some title that reminds us of the times of LucasArts and Sierra. Escape Lala made us relive that magic."

 

Miss the good old point-and-click adventure games? Then you'll definitely love Escape Lala 2 which is still under development.

[JZStudios]

Backbone is genuinely intriguing.

It's in UE4 which is interesting. The Prologue is clearly a work in progress though. The pixel art is nice, and it's using UE4's layer system so lights give off shadows. It also uses some other UE4 preset post-processing effects. The game doesn't run particularly well, and I was in the 20 fps range, some audio hitches occured, and the game crashed 25 minutes in with a pop-up error report titling it "Unreal detective game." There's also some typos and grammatical errors. I thought "dam" was a typo until I saw every instance of the word is spelled that way. Maybe that's how Canadians spell it? Damn=dam?

On the plus side, the aesthetic is nice, the few characters I talked to seemed to have personality and were well written, typos and errors aside, and the music is the typical noir detective jazz music.

 

Lonely looks like something I played on Newgrounds a long time ago... but not as good.

Escape Lala could be decent.

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

2 hours ago, JZStudios said:

 

Lonely looks like something I played on Newgrounds a long time ago... but not as good.

Escape Lala could be decent.

Well that's probably why it's free

[Paul Rudd]

4 hours ago, JZStudios said:

Backbone is genuinely intriguing. It's in UE4 which is interesting. The Prologue is clearly a work in progress though. The pixel art is nice, and it's using UE4's layer system so lights give off shadows. It also uses some other UE4 preset post-processing effects. The game doesn't run particularly well, and I was in the 20 fps range, some audio hitches occured, and the game crashed 25 minutes in with a pop-up error report titling it "Unreal detective game." There's also some typos and grammatical errors. I thought "dam" was a typo until I saw every instance of the word is spelled that way. Maybe that's how Canadians spell it? Damn=dam? On the plus side, the aesthetic is nice, the few characters I talked to seemed to have personality and were well written, typos and errors aside, and the music is the typical noir detective jazz music. Lonely looks like something I played on Newgrounds a long time ago... but not as good. Escape Lala could be decent.

It looks intriguing, that is certain. The work in progress is expected when the release is in 2020. I played it for about 20 minutes or so and noticed the fps drop you speak of. It only dropped to around the 18-20 fps range in the very beginning during a loading screen. When I walked in front of the theater where all those nice looking lights are, the fps dropped to around 36-46 and once I got past it, the fps immediately returned to the locked 62 fps. It seems to be very stable at 62 fps in most places during gameplay so it's not bad so far. I'm guessing the fps drop has to do with either the post-processing effects, the volumetric fog or the dynamic lighting(what I'm leaning towards). They don't have any graphic settings to mess around with in the prologue but hopefully the final product will have those particular graphic settings for us to tweak until the fps remains stable. Glad you pointed this out and I also noticed other people point the crashes out as well in both the reviews and the community hub. They described them exactly as you did here with that same error message. I only played 20 minutes so I haven't experienced any crashes yet.

 

I did notice the minimum system requirements seem a bit high for a pixel art game like this and I think that has to do with maybe UE4 and the effects they've implemented into the game. As you said, they don't all look as nice as they could look so lets hope they let you tweak those individual graphic settings to our liking.

 

My PC specs more than meet the minimum requirements so there's not much usage going on with my hardware(around 30-50%) on both the CPU and GPU but out of curiosity, what are your PC specs? To be sure you have at least a 2.5 GHz CPU and better than a GTX 950.

 

As for Escape Lala, play it. Just play it. I would say more here, but, just play it. Decent is not the word I would choose to describe it, I will say that.

 

And Lonely is included in this first topic of this series because it will be releasing to Steam tomorrow and a demo was released today. And if you read the very top of this topic, you will notice that I included, "The games will be from a variety of genres and of random quality." I don't consider Lonely to be a poor quality game and I also don't consider it to be a high quality one. I do consider it to have some sort of innovation involved with it though. The graphics are not as bad as they appear to be at first glance and the soundtrack does suit the game. As I also mentioned above, "I'm not sure of its price-tag." I would think it will be around a $0.99 - $2.99 game. I really like the misspellings in the trailer. And I can't tell if they did it on purpose because of how obvious the 2nd misspelling is. We won't know unitl tomorrow.

[Paul Rudd]

1 hour ago, OrbitalBuzzsaw said:

Well that's probably why it's free

Lonely may or may not be free. I'm leaning towards a small price tag. Have you actually played the demo yet? There's a point where you actually learn how to play the game. When it happens, innovation hits you like lightning. There's more to it than what meets the eye.

[JZStudios]

3 hours ago, OrbitalBuzzsaw said:

Well that's probably why it's free

Don't know if the second game is actually free. This is just a demo it seems.

1 hour ago, Dr. Historic Low said:

It looks intriguing, that is certain. The work in progress is expected when the release is in 2020. I played it for about 20 minutes or so and noticed the fps drop you speak of. It only dropped to around the 18-20 fps range in the very beginning during a loading screen. When I walked in front of the theater where all those nice looking lights are, the fps dropped to around 36-46 and once I got past it, the fps immediately returned to the locked 62 fps. It seems to be very stable at 62 fps in most places during gameplay so it's not bad so far. I'm guessing the fps drop has to do with either the post-processing effects, the volumetric fog or the dynamic lighting(what I'm leaning towards). They don't have any graphic settings to mess around with in the prologue but hopefully the final product will have those particular graphic settings for us to tweak until the fps remains stable. Glad you pointed this out and I also noticed other people point the crashes out as well in both the reviews and the community hub. They described them exactly as you did here with that same error message. I only played 20 minutes so I haven't experienced any crashes yet.

 

I did notice the minimum system requirements seem a bit high for a pixel art game like this and I think that has to do with maybe UE4 and the effects they've implemented into the game. As you said, they don't all look as nice as they could look so lets hope they let you tweak those individual graphic settings to our liking.

 

My PC specs more than meet the minimum requirements so there's not much usage going on with my hardware(around 30-50%) on both the CPU and GPU but out of curiosity, what are your PC specs? To be sure you have at least a 2.5 GHz CPU and better than a GTX 950.

 

As for Escape Lala, play it. Just play it. I would say more here, but, just play it. Decent is not the word I would choose to describe it, I will say that.

 

And Lonely is included in this first topic of this series because it will be releasing to Steam tomorrow and a demo was released today. And if you read the very top of this topic, you will notice that I included, "The games will be from a variety of genres and of random quality." I don't consider Lonely to be a poor quality game and I also don't consider it to be a high quality one. I do consider it to have some sort of innovation involved with it though. The graphics are not as bad as they appear to be at first glance and the soundtrack does suit the game. As I also mentioned above, "I'm not sure of its price-tag." I would think it will be around a $0.99 - $2.99 game. I really like the misspellings in the trailer. And I can't tell if they did it on purpose because of how obvious the 2nd misspelling is. We won't know unitl tomorrow.

It's a good start for sure. The prologue just has minor issues, but otherwise the aesthetics, writing, characters, music, and story in the prologue are all pretty good.

The FPS drop is frankly bizarre. The theater area with all the lights is 3D, rendered at assumingly 1080, so there's no pixelation of angles. All of the lights also throw off shadows, so I'm wondering if there's just a shitload of dynamic lights in that area that makes it freak out. Otherwise they do use a lot of other stock UE4 pp effects which I always think look a bit crap. The smoke is fine, but the weird low-res light shafts and lens flares I'm not a fan of.

 

20 minutes in and no crash you say? Try another 5 minutes, that's where mine happened. It hit my GPU so hard it killed my audio and I had to reset my AVR. I've never had a game crash do that before. I also got stuck not being able to progress because I think I chose the wrong line of questioning and didn't get the information I needed to proceed and the game didn't give me an option to ask about it.

My PC is a FX-8350@4.2 and a GTX 960. Even still, a pixel art game with a few 3d effects should run better than that. I get better framerate in The Witcher 3.

 

I was going to try Escape Lala and give a little mini-review, but Lonely really looks like a worse version of a Newgrounds game. Also it's made by a Chinese guy, so I'd bet on typos and mispeling.

[Paul Rudd]

1 hour ago, JZStudios said:

The smoke is fine, but the weird low-res light shafts and lens flares I'm not a fan of.

I totally noticed these too. Something weird is going on with the light shafts and the lens flares could use some adjustments. I think if they can fix these things they will earn their spot in the game if you know what I mean. The lens flare seems new in a game like this.

1 hour ago, JZStudios said:

20 minutes in and no crash you say? Try another 5 minutes, that's where mine happened. It hit my GPU so hard it killed my audio and I had to reset my AVR. I've never had a game crash do that before.

Sounds like something they can patch and should be able to if it's reported to them. Could be related to your AVR. Especially if my game doesn't crash.

1 hour ago, JZStudios said:

I also got stuck not being able to progress because I think I chose the wrong line of questioning and didn't get the information I needed to proceed and the game didn't give me an option to ask about it.

Uh oh, that's like the last thing I remember doing. I want to say I just rushed through the bouncers questioning and just kept making random choices(which I didn't do with anyone else). Which I now feel like I regret. I stopped playing once I got to the end of the 1st alley and then had to go back into the city and go past some dude in some booth that Howard said he shouldn't be seen by. I think the tutorial at this moment pointed out how to run with the shift button so I'm assuming I will have to run past the guy or a consequence may occur.

1 hour ago, JZStudios said:

My PC is a FX-8350@4.2 and a GTX 960. Even still, a pixel art game with a few 3d effects should run better than that. I get better framerate in The Witcher 3.

Your CPU more than meets the minimum requirements but your GTX 960 just does meet them. And I know system requirements are not approximate but at the same time, even for a game like this, and since they're using all these dynamic lighting and especially post processing effects, it's possible that the recommended requirements might just be a GTX 960 or possibly a 970. And this is a good thing provided they let us tweak the graphic settings to suit our hardware and liking on the final release in 2020. And I understand you can get better frame rate in the Witcher 3 but again, you're also able to tweak the graphic settings in that game. Just a shot in the dark here really, maybe I'm wrong but if I'm right about these things, hopefully the devs can take note of them and look into fixing them. Or like I said, let us fix them with the magic of tweaking individual graphic settings. Either way, I hope that we're onto something here and can be of help to these devs. This makes me glad the game is not releasing until 2020. Gives us a good 8 months to report the issues.

 

What is your CPU and GPU usage during game play? Mine are both around 50% and seem as expected using an i5/1070.

1 hour ago, JZStudios said:

I was going to try Escape Lala and give a little mini-review, but Lonely really looks like a worse version of a Newgrounds game. Also it's made by a Chinese guy, so I'd bet on typos and mispeling.

Ya' gotta try both of these games. Escape Lala has really got me hooked to the P&C genre and the looks of Lonely are like judging a book by its cover. The moment I loaded up Lonely, the graphics alone surprised me. As I played it, it started to veer into the direction of a dud but out of nowhere it became a little chaotic but at the same time, somewhat mesmerizing. Wow, I rarely find use for the word mesmerizing, let alone spell it correctly. That word fit perfectly there for what I experienced.

[JZStudios]

1 hour ago, Dr. Historic Low said:

I totally noticed these too. Something weird is going on with the light shafts and the lens flares could use some adjustments. I think if they can fix these things they will earn their spot in the game if you know what I mean. The lens flare seems new in a game like this.

Sounds like something they can patch and should be able to if it's reported to them. Could be related to your AVR. Especially if my game doesn't crash.

Uh oh, that's like the last thing I remember doing. I want to say I just rushed through the bouncers questioning and just kept making random choices(which I didn't do with anyone else). Which I now feel like I regret. I stopped playing once I got to the end of the 1st alley and then had to go back into the city and go past some dude in some booth that Howard said he shouldn't be seen by. I think the tutorial at this moment pointed out how to run with the shift button so I'm assuming I will have to run past the guy or a consequence may occur.

Your CPU more than meets the minimum requirements but your GTX 960 just does meet them. And I know system requirements are not approximate but at the same time, even for a game like this, and since they're using all these dynamic lighting and especially post processing effects, it's possible that the recommended requirements might just be a GTX 960 or possibly a 970. And this is a good thing provided they let us tweak the graphic settings to suit our hardware and liking on the final release in 2020. And I understand you can get better frame rate in the Witcher 3 but again, you're also able to tweak the graphic settings in that game. Just a shot in the dark here really, maybe I'm wrong but if I'm right about these things, hopefully the devs can take note of them and look into fixing them. Or like I said, let us fix them with the magic of tweaking individual graphic settings. Either way, I hope that we're onto something here and can be of help to these devs. This makes me glad the game is not releasing until 2020. Gives us a good 8 months to report the issues.

 

What is your CPU and GPU usage during game play? Mine are both around 50% and seem as expected using an i5/1070.

Ya' gotta try both of these games. Escape Lala has really got me hooked to the P&C genre and the looks of Lonely are like judging a book by its cover. The moment I loaded up Lonely, the graphics alone surprised me. As I played it, it started to veer into the direction of a dud but out of nowhere it became a little chaotic but at the same time, somewhat mesmerizing. Wow, I rarely find use for the word mesmerizing, let alone spell it correctly. That word fit perfectly there for what I experienced.

I'm not too keen on light rays. Unless the scene is very dusty/foggy they're usually overdone. I also feel like in that instance it would probably be better to just make it pixel art. Lens flares are also annoying, but the apartment was the only place I noticed it.

 

There's only 1 area... well, main area. The entire demo is only ~1 hour. You run into an "old friend" in the alley who gives you some hints, and you have the option of asking A or B. I initially chose B and I couldn't go back and choose A again. After resetting the game I chose A, then proceeded with B. So I don't know if it was caused by the crash or if it's just a weird oversight.

 

Also, I run TW3 on at least high, including hairworks ~40fps. There's no logical reason a sidescroller pixel game should bring me to 20. I haven't checked my CPU/GPU usage, but if you're only at 50% and still hitting low framerates they definitely work on optimization. I'll try out Escape. I've had enough Super Time Force and Braid to skip Lonely.

[Paul Rudd]

10 hours ago, JZStudios said:

There's no logical reason a sidescroller pixel game should bring me to 20.

What about a 2019 pre-release sidescrolling pixel art post processing dynamic lit lens flaring prologue without tweakable graphic settings that is most likely a separate introductory section from the 2020 release of the actual game itself? Especially when the drop to 20 is right near certain dynamically lit, post processing areas of the prologue. Seems pretty fair and sensible if you ask me. Just needs some optimization.

 

EDIT: Okay I just spent 13 more minutes(really enjoying this prologue btw) without crashing but I didn't go anywhere I haven't been yet except past the cop in the little booth and to the end of the street where some pig store owner is. What I found out was that my CPU usage was always at about medium ranging from 39% up to as high as around 57%. My 1070 power fluctuates from 70% to as high as 90%(so your 960 may be going beyond 100% power) while the usage fluctuates from 44% to as high as 77%. The VRAM usage on the 1070 is almost always at a stable 2078-2085 MB(nearly 2.1GB). RAM usage starts at just over 4GB and just kept climbing as I played and reached around 5365 MB which seemed expected. I also noticed that latency is a bit higher than most of the games I play at 15-17 ms and rises to 27-29 ms the moment fps drops in front of the theater. This is common latency but it does seem odd to not be at my usual 11 ms but around 15-17 most of the time.

 

So I do have one question about your 960. Is it the 2GB or 4GB 960? If it's the 2GB 960 and there's no way to change the graphic settings(they could all be at ultra), that 2GB VRAM could be the culprit of your crashing. And/or the power of your GPU could be hitting and maybe going beyond 100%(common to make games crash). Just a wild guess really. I think this is totally fixable with in-game graphic settings. If there was any.

 

I didn't notice anything to change in the Nvidia control panel of Backbone. Just a few things that are application controlled that you could possibly lower VRAM or GPU power usage with but I doubt it. There's no post-processing or dynamic lighting to lower, that's what I was mainly looking for. AA is already off by default. I also couldn't find any config files in the game folder itself so no dice changing settings there either.

[JZStudios]

13 hours ago, Dr. Historic Low said:

What about a 2019 pre-release sidescrolling pixel art post processing dynamic lit lens flaring prologue without tweakable graphic settings that is most likely a separate introductory section from the 2020 release of the actual game itself? Especially when the drop to 20 is right near certain dynamically lit, post processing areas of the prologue. Seems pretty fair and sensible if you ask me. Just needs some optimization.

 

EDIT: Okay I just spent 13 more minutes(really enjoying this prologue btw) without crashing but I didn't go anywhere I haven't been yet except past the cop in the little booth and to the end of the street where some pig store owner is. What I found out was that my CPU usage was always at about medium ranging from 39% up to as high as around 57%. My 1070 power fluctuates from 70% to as high as 90%(so your 960 may be going beyond 100% power) while the usage fluctuates from 44% to as high as 77%. The VRAM usage on the 1070 is almost always at a stable 2078-2085 MB(nearly 2.1GB). RAM usage starts at just over 4GB and just kept climbing as I played and reached around 5365 MB which seemed expected. I also noticed that latency is a bit higher than most of the games I play at 15-17 ms and rises to 27-29 ms the moment fps drops in front of the theater. This is common latency but it does seem odd to not be at my usual 11 ms but around 15-17 most of the time.

 

So I do have one question about your 960. Is it the 2GB or 4GB 960? If it's the 2GB 960 and there's no way to change the graphic settings(they could all be at ultra), that 2GB VRAM could be the culprit of your crashing. And/or the power of your GPU could be hitting and maybe going beyond 100%(common to make games crash). Just a wild guess really. I think this is totally fixable with in-game graphic settings. If there was any.

 

I didn't notice anything to change in the Nvidia control panel of Backbone. Just a few things that are application controlled that you could possibly lower VRAM or GPU power usage with but I doubt it. There's no post-processing or dynamic lighting to lower, that's what I was mainly looking for. AA is already off by default. I also couldn't find any config files in the game folder itself so no dice changing settings there either.

It's a 2gb. But again, considering how basic the geometry and texture resolution is, even with semi-dynamic lighting there's no reason for it to be in the 20s. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter on UE3 and UE4 redux with high res photogrammetry and lighting, The Witcher 3 on high-ultra including hairworks and texture+dynamic lighting mods, Dying Light with hordes of 3D characters and more dynamic lighting, Dirt Rally with intensive FX and smoke/dust, PCars 2 with more dynamic day/night cycles, full weather system, and dynamic headlights for each vehicle, BeamNG with a full physics simulation, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, etc. all run at significantly higher framerates than a 2.5D sidescroller. And it's not even Trine.

Not to mention that at the very least I play Dirt Rally, BeamNG, and Project Cars on triple monitors.

 

Unreal is by default a horrendously poorly optimized engine, but Ethan Carter managed to pull it off for the most part. All I'm saying is the final product can't be that poorly optimized to literally run worse than The Witcher 3 with hairworks.

[Paul Rudd]

1 hour ago, JZStudios said:

All I'm saying is the final product can't be that poorly optimized to literally run worse than The Witcher 3 with hairworks.

And what I'm saying is, this prologue is completely separate from the final product. Thus, the drop to 20 fps(36 for me). You'll see what I mean in 2020.