This week you could get two horror games for free! Rental and Content Warning both launched for nada (albeit for a couple of days only in the case of the latter). Nate and I have both done work for free in the hope someone would retrospectively pay for it, so on this episode of the Electronic Wireless Show podcast Is it worth it? Is this how the internet is going to work from now on? Plus, what are some of our favourite free games? There are a bunch.

We also talk about the science that suggests people process visual information at wildly different speeds (I know I shouldn't have said that some people just 'see more fasterer' or whatever reductive thing I said, please don't email me), Nate teaches me about some weird cryptids, and we recommend some sweet non-video game stuff, as per usual.

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'The Wild Bastards' is about the best name I've heard for a gang of alien outlaws in a space-western, good enough that let's skip past the fact that the game was announced last year and we've only just noticed. Wild Bastards is the follow-up to Void Bastards, 2019's roguelikelike first-person shooter about a prisoner in a corporate nightmare forced to raid derelict spaceships on a wild goose chase. This time, it's leaning into crime, jaunting across the galaxy to resurrect a game of legendary outlaws, the Wild Bastards. Allow me to repeat that name: the Wild Bastards. Alright, now come watch the gameplay trailer.

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A terrible confession: I almost fell asleep during the presentation for Motion Twin's Windblown. This wasn't really Motion Twin's fault. It was the afternoon of day four at GDC, my adrenaline reserves were spent, and there I was, in a warm, shuttered hotel room, with two men gently bombarding me with French-accented details of synergies, stackable trinkets and i-frames (I'm aware that the scenario I've just described is probably somebody's kink - let's move swiftly on).

Windblown itself is an airy, bright fusillade of Saturday morning cartoon vibes, a series of breakneck arena fights waged on procedurally generated island chains floating against a whirlpool sky. It's all shaping up very nicely, and if I'd been playing the demo, I'm sure it would have woken me up better than any emergency deluge of instant coffee. But watching somebody else tear through this stratospheric world simply overloaded my depleted senses, and I came perilously close to nodding off.

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Tropes aren't actually bad, right? Like, I'm not actually mad that a lot of games use 'the world is ending and you have to save it' as an inciting incident. When people complain about something being 'tropey' I think often what they're complaining about is that the work isn't putting any kind of interesting spin on the tropes. Great God Grove is a weirdo puzzle game where you have to stop the world from ending, and the only way you can communicate is by sucking up things people say to you and then firing them back out of your news cannon. It's coming to PC in 2024. Jolly good.

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In response to gold generation and item exploits in action rpg game Last Epoch, developer Eleventh Hour have released a statement on Steam admonishing those responsible and reaffirming their commitment to preventing further exploits on "both a technical and user level."

The statement, which also mentions nefarious goings on involving the very much banned RMT (real money trading), details the recent fixes released to combat these issues, as well as the identification and banning of accounts found to have broken the game’s terms of service.

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I’m not saying that Zuzu, the star of melancholic 2D adventure Skaramazuzu, is definitely inspired by that Adventure Time bit where the deer takes off its hooves like gloves. But I am saying that if it were, it’d have my full support, because the freak deer deserves to live on forever, even as a shadow wandering a gothic purgatorial landscape in an unrelated game.

We got a trailer for this one a few weeks back, and the game itself just dropped on Steam yesterday. It’s got that specific blend of Hollow Knight: Silksong -esque maudlin and whimsy that I personally love, skirting around the edges of both without slipping too readily into Tim Burton territory. The artstyle is crisp and wintery, the writing is goofy, and everything that moves looks like it evolved from the same dead tree branch. Feast your hooves on the trailer below:

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Pocketpair have released a new Palworld update, Steam version v0.2.0.6, which introduces the monster-catching survival game's first Raid Boss, a gloating Gothy squid-lady by the name of Bellanoir. She'll be available to conjure by using slabs at new Summoning Altars. Be prepared for a tough fight, especially if you opt for the "extreme" version of the boss. Bellanoir can't be captured, but she does drop a Pal Egg on defeat.

This is a chunky update, with a bunch of new items and tweaks to the building system, Pal falling damage, shop prices, player drops on multiplayer servers, and the user interface - for example, you'll now see how many of a Pal you own when you aim a Palsphere at one. You can also now cancel a Pal's break simply by picking them up and throwing them at the worksite - truly, a scene from Dickens. All the new stuff is in addition to the usual bugfixes, fresh anti-cheating measures and quashing of exploits: no longer will you be able to massively increase your attack power while riding Pals under certain conditions.

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Last time, you decided decisively that the spell Fireball is better than a button to unlock all unlocks. I should have known because our dear old friend Fireball is always there for us, always readily available, always keen to punch someone in the face, neck, and chest with a lump of solid fire. Thank you, Fireball. I love you. This week, it's a question of anxiety. What's better: security cameras following your every move, or shopkeepers annoyed when you don't buy anything?

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Classic management sim series RollerCoaster Tycoon will now be published solely by Atari, making the reborn retro video game company the new stewards for the theme park franchise as it marks its 25th anniversary.

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Presumably, the remake of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic can’t hold up a newspaper with today’s date to prove that it is actually doing okay and hasn’t been quietly disposed of in a tax report somewhere, Warner Bros-style. As such, it falls to the head of current developers Saber Interactive to promise that the long-in-the-works Star Wars game is still “alive and well”.

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