Should your increasingly insurmountable library of video game freebies still not quite be tottering enough for your liking, Epic has revealed that Hyper Light Drifter and Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden will be available for nowt on its store next week.

For those that need an introduction, Hyper Light Drifter is the work of developer Heart Machine, and originally launched on PC back in 2016. It's an utterly triumphant top-down slasher that mixes evocative exploration and puzzling with tough, evasion-based combat. All of which unfolds across an enigmatic, beautifully crafted world that's ripe with mysteries and and secrets for the curious adventurer to discover.

It impressed Eurogamer's Christian Donlan enough for him to whip out his pulsating Recommended stamp when it passed across his desk for review in 2016.

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Developer The Bearded Ladies has unveiled the first expansion for its stealthy XCOM-alike Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden. It's called Seed of Evil, and is heading to PC, Xbox One, PS4, and Switch on 30th July.

Mutant Year Zero, which was inspired by the Swedish tabletop RPG of the same name, released last December. It won many a fan on release, thanks to its solidly designed turn-based strategy action - successfully combining stealth and combat - and its wonderfully engaging cast of animal misfits, as they journeyed across the post-human, post-apocalyptic world.

Earlier this year, The Bearded Ladies revealed that it would be bringing the game to Switch this summer, and while that's still the case, there's been a bit of rejigging of dates. Mutant Year Zero will now arrive on Nintendo's console slightly later than first announced, on 30th July.

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Personality goes a long way with games. Just an ounce of it can elevate a game from the crowd. And Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden has heaps of it.

This post-apocalyptic adventure is X-Com with a dash of stealth and exploration. It's based on a decades old tabletop game simply called Mutant which was itself rebooted into Mutant Year Zero a few years ago. It's very popular in Sweden, where the game's creators Bearded Ladies, hail from. While it provided the world Road to Eden would live in, this adaptation leans on one particularly potent characteristic of the tabletop game. One thing that just stands out immediately. The X-Com trappings are as solid a foundation as you can get but it's the world and the characters that held my attention. Because there's no getting round it, the first thing you're going to notice, the first thing everybody is gonna want to talk about with this game is the badass duck man.

These mutants are rightfully the star of the show but as eye catching as they are they're more than just a pretty(?) face for Mutant Year Zero, they're the beating heart of the whole game and the reason I stuck with it for a dozen hours to the credits. Called Stalkers, they're tasked with venturing out into the zone and scavenging supplies to keep humanity's last refuge going. A thankless task if the grumpy residents of the "Ark" are anything to go by.

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Microsoft has announced three new games coming to Xbox Game Pass.

The Gardens Between hits Microsoft's Netflix-style video game subscription service on 29th November - that's today!

It's a puzzle game developed by Australian studio The Voxel Agents, and launched in September 2018 for PC, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.

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Funcom's XCOM-like strategy game Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden will be released 4th December on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

This is the game with talking animals Funcom announced in a CGI trailer earlier this year. It's based on the pen-and-paper Mutant RPG, set in an overgrown, post-apocalyptic Earth where humans were wiped out and new species mutated to fill their bipedal boots.

Chris Bratt went to see the game at GDC earlier this year and talked to the developer, Bearded Ladies (what a name), about it. His half-an-hour of gameplay ought to give you a rounded idea of what to expect.

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