Free Bundle Magazine

The Free Bundle indie showcase comes again with five new games, all awesome but…wait, not a single one of them is free!? How come? Well, the age of the free games has ended for the independent developer movement. Sad, true. Do not despair though: there are still plenty of free games on platforms like Steam, PlayStation Store, Nintendo Switch Store and even on Microsoft Store!

The games we will cover in this section, though not free, belong to small and medium teams of independent artists. They need your support to compete with the big studios. So, how can you help? By spreading the word, of course! They have bet on you by creating some of the most impressive entertaining titles that, we promise you, will leave you specheless.

While most AAA games get all the attention, we feel it is our duty to mention these small studios and their passion for gaming. Here they are, Cabrera Brothers’ Free Bundle five most awesome games this winter (plus, a bonus game!)

My Time at Portia

Developer: Pathea
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Windows, Linux

Having a sandwich outdoors isn’t a sandwich anymore, Bradbury wrote in his Dandelion Wine. How much true that short sentence can hold for some of us who have played hours Harvest Moon back while we were young and wise and knew everything there was to be known about life.

One can play hundreds of farm games and soil will always feel as fresh as that first summer afternoon we planted our tomatoes in Harvest Moon. Luckily, there are games like My Time at Portia to water our inner child and watch it grow each morning.

But careful, this is not any farm game: you inherited the family farm, yes, but not of any country you know. Portia is different. Quite different. This is an RPG village and you are destined to live the adventure of a lifetime when joining the community of Portia.

“This is an RPG village and you are destined to live the adventure of a lifetime when joining the community of Portia.”

What else can any gamer ask other than the chance to see your own little business grow, find love, meet new friends and attend local festivities in a town of dreams? These are just a few of the many things you can experience after a long day of work at your little farm of Portia.

Throw that gun away, stash that dagger someplace dark, put down the grenade launcher and grab your watering can: tomorrow night there is a festival night at Portia, we better take care of our farm today!

Griftlands

Developer: Klei Platforms: Windows

There is nothing man yearn the most than the ages of the pirates. Absolute freedom comes with a cost, though. It was true then as it is in Keli’s Sci-Fi world of Griftlands, where we control a group of mercenaries in a dynamically generated universe that changes depending on our actions and decisions.

Battles are turn-based, tough and fun like they should be. The unexpected twist: instead of killing your enemies quick and simple, what you will want to do is to put all your efforts on subduing them. After all, a captain needs his crew.

“…as for your skills as a mercenary, fighting and exploration will be as relevant in GriftLands as your silver tongue.”

One aspect of the development to keep track on is that this turn-based RPG is being moldered by some of the folks behind “Don’t Starve”, so a unique kind of fun is obviously already ensured. As for your skills as a mercenary, fighting and exploration will be as relevant in GriftLands as your silver tongue. You will have to make sure to look after your profits, not only on your victories, as Griftlands’s sandbox economy constantly adapts to what is happening in the game.

As with Don’t Starve, Griftlands will surely become one of those games that you must have in all your platforms.

Warhammer: Vermintide 2

Developer: Fatshark
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows

You step out of the fortress and run into the forest after making your way through its labyrinthine narrow corridors being careful not to trip over the bodies of your fallen comrades. Death lurks on that forest. You can smell it even with your helmet on. The entire area is infested with the vermin.

It might seem like you are running away from them, but you are not falling back though. You are leading the hordes into an open area, a place where you can have a fair fight. For a normal soldier that is at least six at the time. For a hero like you, that means around a dozen.

“Death lurks on that forest, you can smell it, even with your helmet on. The entire area is infested with the vermin.”

The only thing you have at hand to make it out of this one alive are your armor, your faith, and your guns. Big fat guns. Lots of them.

Underworld Ascendant

Desarrollador: OtherSide Entertainment
Plataformas: PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Windows, Linux, Mac

If there is a team we can trust will deliver the original experience of the old role-playing games, these are the guys behind the video game Underworld Ascendant.

While there has been some noise on the lines about it “not being a revolutionary RPG of the likes of Skyrim”, we should not forget that was never the initial intention for Underworld Ascendant. What we have here is the purest example of “what used to move us as players back in the day” in direct conflict with “the wonders of today’s gaming trends”.

Or “sandbox multiplayer games with loot and a complex perks system”, versus “what RPG games were supposed to be, fun”.

Most games have steered away from those old scrolls of unwritten rules that game designers used to follow when they conjured their fantasy worlds into our hearts. It’s that many of them came from the old role-playing games of pen and paper, not from playing Fallout 3. That is how game designers nowadays have chosen to walk a more linear path, a more forgiving path, just with the newer adventurer in mind to whom they consider to be some kind of porcelain doll.

“…(This) is a purest example of what used to move us as players back in the day…”

Underworld Ascendant doesn’t. This is a hard role game, one that will make us fall in love with the dungeons for the second time. That doesn’t mean that the new adventurers cannot sit at the table to play, only that if they do they better know what’s on the road ahead: they will walk into the battlefield with the best of the best and that there won’t be a squire carrying no one’s shields.

Here, everyone carries his own sword.

They Are Billions

Developer: Numantian
Platforms: Windows

Your settlement is under attack! Today’s sixth wave of zombies weakened your defenses, you better get moving fast! Place traps, rebuild fences and make sure to save some of your resources to come up with something new for the next time they come howling to your door because this is no simple RTS game: they are billions!

“They are billions” is a classic strategy in real time in its purest form, the kind that should have been made from the times of Command & Conquer but somehow eluded the video game industry until now.

“…swarms of hungry zombies are coming for you, whether you are ready or not.”

Build, operate and expand your own settlement of survivors in this steampunk world carefully planning your defenses: the swarms of hungry zombies are coming for you, whether you are ready or not. Those of us who have not gone sick with this infestation have a responsibility to rebuild mankind from the ground up before its too late, so hurry up and play They Are Billions before its name changes to We are billions and there’s no one left!

BONUS: Sunless Skies

Developer: Failbetter
Platforms: Microsoft Windows, Linux, Macintosh operating systems

February 2016. From nowhere, without the slight hint that was going to be an awesome month, Sunless Sea was published. The fun tsunami caught many players from all over the world with its original post-apocalyptic setting and its original gameplay, worthy of a second, perhaps even a third installment. Two years later and we are again, being impressed by Failbetter and its unexpected twist to the franchise.

“Sunless Skies fulfills every young science fiction fan’s ambition of commanding a starship through the vastness of the stars”

In this new installment, we will enter deep space. What are you not convinced? Wait to hear this: steamboats capable of flying in the immensity of the night and beyond alfa centauri. Yes! Sunless Skies fulfills the ambition of every young fanatic of the science fiction to command a starship across the sky.

Keep your crew well feed, watch your engines, stay on course and don’t burn your wings when you pass near the sun!