Half-Life: Alyx, finally unveiled today by Valve, will be free for everyone who owns the Index VR headset. But what if you don't own an Index VR headset? For the next seven days, you can get Bad North: Jotunn Edition for free from the Epic Games Store instead.

Bad North is a stylish "real-time tactics roguelike" about an island kingdom (actually a whole bunch of islands) being invaded by Vikings. Your job is to hold them off while your people evacuate, a process complicated by the different designs and layouts of each island. Strategy is obviously at the heart of the matter but there's a strong element of puzzle game to it too, and as we said in our 78/100 review, it's harsh but fair:

"Moving troops feels like playing with a small box of toys. The soft wind and waves make each island feel like a lovely little haven, the cottages dotting the islands adding to the wholesomeness. It's all so simple and evocative. Sure, some ominous music plays and there's some blood stains after a battle, but it barely registers when the rest of what's on screen is so nice."

The Jotunn Edition includes the July expansion of the same name that adds new items to find, Commander traits, a new enemy type, "checkpoint islands," and more. It's free for the taking until November 28, at which point the 2013 platformer Rayman Legends will take its place.

For the record, Index non-owners also have the option of purchasing Half-Life: Alyx for $60, but I thought it would be nice to give everyone a tastes of the "free game" excitement. You're welcome.

We really enjoyed Bad North when it was first released for having such a pretty face hiding its super bad attitude underneath. Now, the deceivingly difficult little strategy game has gotten a rather large free update which the developers are calling the "definitive version" of the game. 

The Jotunn Edition of Bad North brings new features to both the easy and difficult ends of the play spectrum. On the easier end, Jotunn finally allows for sharing gold between units which was previously tallied only per unit. It also adds checkpoint islands where you can save your progress during a campaign without the threat of getting knocked all the way back to the starting island. 

For Bad North veterans, Jotunn grants a "very hard" difficulty which is unlocked only after completing the campaign on "hard." There's also some new meta progression in the form of "traits," smaller passive buffs for your commanders. Traits and items can be unlocked over multiple campaigns and equipped to your commanders as "starting upgrades" for your two commanders chosen at the beginning of a new campaign. 

You can read the rest of the changelogs for the update on Bad North's Steam announcement post. If you don't own the game yet, it's on sale on Steam, GOG, and Discord for 25% off in celebration of the new update.

Do not be fooled by the cute sound effects or adorable sprites: Bad North is not a lovely new friend. It's here to steal your time, beat you up and possibly burn your house down. At least, I wanted to burn everything down after I lost all my progress to a silly mistake for the third time.

It's a simple strategy game, almost closer to being a puzzler. You have to defend a little square island, or more specifically, the little cottages dotted around it. You have up to four units to hold off waves of Viking invaders. Bad North is about shuffling units around to make sure someone is on the beach ready to greet approaching enemies. Complications arise with more frequent waves and various enemy types requiring different units to counter. The real key to each battle is teasing out the choke points on the islands—placing your troops where they can make the biggest difference without wasting time marching them from one end of the island to the other. 

It lures you in with some breezy opening missions. Slow waves of opponents, easy odds, basic islands with clear layouts. Soon, a mission that looks the same as the last few has just one extra wave, one new type of foe, just a little extra something to catch you off-guard. You realise your progress has been crushed because of one bad decision, sending you back to start the campaign all over.

Your units are only groups of eight or so little dudes, and with each fight they diminish. You need to send them to a house to replenish or risk losing them forever, but while they're recovering their numbers they're unable to respond to any attackers. Making the call at the wrong moment will cost you dearly. Lose all your units and it's game over, right back to square one. 

It's an extremely harsh punishment for a game with such a gentle presentation. Moving troops feels like playing with a small box of toys. The soft wind and waves make each island feel like a lovely little haven, the cottages dotting the islands adding to the wholesomeness. It's all so simple and evocative. Sure, some ominous music plays and there's some blood stains after a battle, but it barely registers when the rest of what's on screen is so nice. 

It's hard to determine whether the deceptive nature is part of the point or harms what initially seems like a pleasant, laid back strategy experience. You respond to oncoming attackers carefully but easily—a nice alternative to more demanding strategy games. Yet that all turns on a dime with one single mistake. The consequence of failure feels at odds with the leisurely pace of combat.

There is a campaign map, randomly generated with each new game, to worry about between missions, where you apply upgrades and choose what island to tackle next. You get more rewards depending on how many cottages survive at the end of a level. You use those to level your units, allowing you to specialise into pikemen or archers, and pick special abilities like a diving attack from clifftops. It's all pretty straightforward but, like the missions themselves, doesn't suffer mistakes. Pick the wrong island or ability then tough, that's it, no do-overs. 

Bad North is currently only available through Discord, which caused me some problems when first trying to play the game. Many seem to be able to launch without issue, but Bad North did not work for me at first—and with no error message to explain why. When it did start working, it did so without reason or explanation. I also experienced a few crashes over around a dozen hours of play. Nothing major, but frustrating all the same.

If you can stomach the harsh consequences for failure then Bad North is a great little strategy game, perfect for playing on a break or in short bursts. I keep restarting in spite of the failures and the resets, so that probably speaks volumes for how compelling it is. There's just something about watching those little sprites batter each other that keeps me coming back. At least until I burn my house down.

Note: An earlier version of this article stated that DRM on Steam is mandatory for developers. This is not the case. The article has been corrected.

The Discord Store went online this week, offering a curated collection of games including several limited-time exclusives that won't be available on other digital storefronts until later this year. Real-time strategy Bad North is one of those exclusives, but after purchasing it I learned that it includes DRM that currently prevents players from launching the game if they're not connected to the internet and logged into Discord.

Not all games bought through Discord will necessarily have DRM: according to this developer portal and confirmed via email by a Discord representative, Discord's DRM is optional for developers. A member of Raw Fury confirmed in their Discord channel that Bad North uses Discord's DRM, and I received confirmation that another singleplayer Discord exclusive, Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption, does as well.

I tested the DRM with my copy of Bad North. I exited Discord and tried launching Bad North from its root folder, but when I did, it launched Discord first, and only launched the game once Discord was connected. I closed both the game and Discord, disconnected my internet, and tried launching Bad North from its folder again. Discord launched, but since it couldn't connect to the internet, it simply spun on the connection screen and Bad North wouldn't launch at all.

There's good news, though: a representative for Discord told me via email that an offline mode for Discord games "is coming soon so players will be able to access their games even offline." 

In the wake of issues like loot boxes, gated content, and microtransactions, DRM isn't talked about as much as it used to be, but I still feel that you should be able to play singleplayer games wherever and whenever you want, even if you don't have an internet connection. That makes offline mode for Discord an important and much-needed feature. It would also be useful for players if a game's store page listed whether or not the developer has opted into Discord DRM.

Discord has shared the opening salvo of its 'First on Discord' games that'll launch exclusively, for a limited time, on its new storefront later this year.

We already knew about Bad North, which I've contemplated picking up on Switch for a few months now while the wait for a PC version goes on. There are six others. First of all, there's real-time card game Minion Master (trailer here) which features co-op, and is free of charge on Discord—I'm not sure how the 'first' element applies here, since the game is in Early Access as well, but you have to pay for it on Steam. 

Then there's Mad Machines, which looks like a mix between Rocket League and robot fighting. There's also stylish deathmatch shooter At Sundown, where you look for enemies in dark environments. It looks like a fast-paced, deadlier version of Wii U game Nintendo Land's Luigi's Ghost Mansion mode. Here's the trailer for that one:

There's also third-person action game Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption, which is launching on consoles in October, then later on PC. On a superficial level, it reminds me of a From Software game. But which one? Damn, I can't remember the name right now. Another offering is King of the Hat, a 2D multiplayer game where you use your hat as a weapon against other players—here's the trailer for that one. 

Finally, there's Last Year: Nightmare, a '90s-set horror game where teenagers are hunted by monsters. This is probably the pick of the trailers for me, and it makes me wonder how it'll compare to The Blackout Club, which was announced earlier this year (but will likely have much less of a combat focus). Here's the trailer for that:

You can find full details of the First on Discord program here. No date has been set for the Discord storefront's release yet, but it'll be some time in the Fall. 

The final wave of vikings is about to land on my tiny blood-soaked island. If they destroy my last remaining shelter, I’m finished. I move my few surviving archers closer to the beach to help thin the vikings as they approach, then move my pikemen to plug up the narrow cliffside path leading to my camp. These vikings have shields so my arrows don’t do much, but my long pikes have better reach than the viking swords. My island gets a lot bloodier, but my pikemen get the job done. The island, and its soldiers, are mine.

Bad North sparkles during photo-finish gambles like these. It's a strategy game in which you defend procedurally-generated islands from waves of vikings using the few soldiers you start with and the squads you find on your journey—similar in some ways to Into the Breach, though realtime. And while its minimalist art gives it a cute look, Bad North is a vicious game. The waves of invading vikings ramp up quickly and you don't have much time to prepare between each one, and without a proper pause button—time is only slowed while selecting and placing units—it's easy to become overwhelmed. At the same time, Bad North is incredibly easy to pick up, which is developer Plausible Concept's real magic trick. 

I played through a few islands at GDC after artist Oskar Stalberg and programmer Richard Meredith showed me the basics, and initially everything was small and manageable. You start with two heroes leading two squads of about eight soldiers each. You encounter more heroes as you visit new islands, and if you successfully save their island, you get to add them to your ranks. Of course, there's permadeath on heroes: if their squad is slain, they're lost for the run. Finding a new hero is a big deal, so every island is an exciting goody bag. 

Stalberg tells me accessibility was always their priority. They wanted to create challenging scenarios, but to present them cleanly, without getting bogged down with stats and percentages. Heroes are a good example: They don't have HP bars or numbers indicating how many members are in their squad. Instead, those are one and the same. If you want to know how a hero's doing, just look at their squad. If they only have a few guys left, they're in trouble. 

Observation is key in Bad North. Stalberg admits some of the rules sound counter-intuitive on paper, but once you see them happen, you understand why and naturally start to play around them. Your archers, for instance, are pretty inaccurate until you upgrade them, so while they're strong against groups of enemies, they'll often miss individuals. As a result, a single enemy archer can kill two or three of your clumped-up archers before they finally nail him. A squad of archers is going to kill the crap out of one guy, but a squad is also a bigger target, so they can get torn to ribbons in the process. That's why you should always lead with melee units and have ranged units back them up.

After each battle, heroes earn gold individually based on their contribution to the battle and how many shelters you protected. Naturally, if a hero flees, they won't receive anything. That said, fleeing an island is sometimes the right call, even if it means losing a potential hero. Between islands you use gold to purchase upgrades for your heroes and their soldiers, meaning you don't just upgrade your archers, you upgrade this squad of archers. This results in intuitive, navigable skill trees that are just as clean as Bad North's art.

There are basic upgrades like more health for your melee units and better accuracy for your ranged ones, but also new cooldown-based maneuvers like a plunging attack for your swordsmen. That was one of my favorites because it made me recheck each island's terrain to find ledges for my swordsmen to jump off so they could skewer some vikings. Plunging attacks aside, leveraging the land is critical to successful strategies like my 300-inspired funnel assault. Islands are small but peppered with little details that can make all the difference, like hills, ledges and tunnels. You'll come across anywhere from 50 to 80 islands in a run—though you won't land on all of them—and while I only saw a few in my demo, the ones I did see felt distinct. 

It was a promising demo, and I look forward to more when Bad North launches later this year. You can learn more on the official site.