Epic has announced that Axiom Verge, developer Thomas Happ's wonderful, retro-styled Metroid-a-like, will be the next Epic Games Store freebie, starting on February 7th.

If you haven't yet had the pleasure of 2015's Axiom Verge, you really are in for a treat. It's an intricate, unabashed love letter to Nintendo's classic Metroid series - right down to the garish colour palette and retro-inspired 8-bit-meets-16-bit art style.

Axiom Verge's surprisingly involved storyline follows the adventures of a superbly sideburned Earth scientist named Trace, who wakes on a strange alien world following a laboratory accident. What follows is action in the classic Metroid mould: you'll explore a positively labyrinthine world of interconnected rooms, mowing down hostile alien life and gathering new abilities that will, eventually, permit access to new locations.

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