The Epic Games Store is doing its last double freebie this week, at least for now, giving everyone a copy of Hyper Light Drifter, the tricky pixel RPG, and the turn-based tactics game, Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden. 

I've only ever admired Hyper Light Drifter from a distance, because it looks like the sort of thing where my lack of dexterity will only ensure a plenitude of deaths and a lot of frustration. It sure looks pretty, though!

Mutant Year Zero is more my speed. It's a bit like XCOM, but with even more RPG nods and a whole exploration layer. The titular mutants also include a cynical duck with a top hat. There's a fair amount of sneaking, as you'll usually be outnumbered, and there are typically lots of opportunities to set up ambushes in real-time before you dive into the turn-based shootouts. 

Like a lot of interesting games that have come out over the last year, I've only had time to skim the surface, but Alex Wiltshire had a lot of good things to say about it in his Mutant Year Zero review. It only appeared last December, so getting it for free now is an absolute steal. 

They'll both be free to keep if you grab them by August 22, when they'll be replaced by classic dimension-hopping platformer, Fez.

Questions like “What if a moose could breathe fire” are the ones that keep me up at night, and fortunately, Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is about to answer that one specifically with a new DLC set to launch in July.

Seed of Evil adds a new story campaign to last year’s Fantastic Mr. Fox-meets-XCOM adventure, and introduces a new mutant named Big Khan, a tough-as-nails moose with his own special abilities and synergies.

The expansion’s story is centered on a new menace in the Zone, and takes a cue or two from Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. A malevolent plant seems to be abducting people—friends and enemies alike—and replacing them with twisted copies made of plant tissue. Big Khan calls them “pod ghouls,” and he doesn’t seem to like them much.

Fortunately, one of the mutations Big Khan has available to him is called “flame puke,” and it does exactly what it sounds like it does: He spews a jet of fire over a wide area, setting anything organic alight.

Seed of Evil comes out July 30 alongside the Nintendo Switch launch of Mutant Year Zero.

The farm animal tactics game Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is quite good: Maybe a little shorter than it should have been, but "a tense, absorbing and atmospheric" game in the style of XCOM. Even so, the front-facing weirdness of the thing—characters include an anthropomorphic duck, a brutish, bipedal boar, and a literal stone cold fox—may have put some people off. 

The obvious solution is to give people a chance to try to try the game without paying for it, which of course is why we're here—because a demo is now available on Steam. It's about a 3GB download, and it sounds like it's a pretty thick slice of the game: Funcom said it includes "all content from the beginning of the game, up [to] and including reaching the Ark." 

The "Download Demo" button isn't very prominently featured, but it's there, buried on the right-hand sidebar of the Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden Steam page, just above the list of Steam features. Hit that and you're off to the races. The recently-announced Stalker Trials "challenge mode" expansion, with scored progress through specially populated maps, leaderboards, and a handful of new options and bug fixes, is also now available and free for everyone. 

A pig, a duck, and a mutant walk into a bar. Pripp’s Bar, to be precise, located on The Ark, the last safe haven amid the crumbling ruins of a world ravaged by global nuclear warfare and a deadly pandemic. That's a scene that'll play out a few hours into Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, but it just as likely could've happened more than 30 years ago. The new game translates the Swedish tabletop RPG Mutant, originally published in 1984, into an XCOM-like tactical strategy game.

Much of the actual RPG gameplay from the tabletop game, most recently published as Mutant: Year Zero in 2014, was changed, streamlined, or abandoned in the genre shift. But the classic 80s post-irradiated setting and lore are much the same. Here's the backstory you might not get if you just straight in, and how the new game differs from its origins.

The Zone and Eden

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is heavily based on the 2014 Mutant Year Zero RPG, which is actually a prequel to the original Mutant from 1984. That game took place in the 2560s, when the world had rebuilt after its apocalypse. Where did the Swedish creators draw inspiration from? Another tabletop RPG called Gamma World from the late 70s, which D&D creator Gary Gygax actually wrote adventures for. Also, the DC comic Kamanda, created by Jack Kirby.

Year Zero is set around the year 2270, approximately 200 years after everything went to hell, but before much of anything has been rebuilt. (Coincidentally, post-apocalyptic RPG Fallout 3 is set in the year 2277, 200 years after a nuclear war).

The PC game begins with the Ark’s crucial engineer missing, and several threats looming on the horizon. The most common are the zone-ghouls, barbaric nomads who wear full body suits and gas masks and wield primitive weapons. Zone-ghouls are the most common enemy in the wasteland though usually only found at night, as they take damage from sunlight.

One of the biggest threats from the tabletop RPG that appears in the game is the Nova Cult, a group of psionic mutants who have converted an ancient underground missile silo into a holy sanctuary. It’s a classic doomsday cult, and players must carefully deal with a deranged holy leader who has her finger on the launch button.

In Mutant: Year Zero all roads lead to Eden, a mythical location that’s drawn directly from the core rulebook. Many of the RPG’s locations are designed to be ambiguous and easily organized into one square mile zones. Those zones are filled with various dangers and treasures amid ruined cities and countrysides for the players to explore. Eden is one of the few set locations that’s intricately detailed, not unlike a dungeon crawl in Dungeons & Dragons.

Without spoiling too much, the tabletop's Eden holds secrets for the player characters while introducing powerful new threats and a worthy antagonist in Doctor Retzius.

Getting to Eden and discovering its truths represents an overarching metaplot for the RPG, and a fun long-term goal for a party to work towards, though a campaign certainly doesn’t have to end there.

Pen-and-paper classes and mutants

In the RPG, players can choose between eight roles, such as the tech-savvy gearhead, the smooth-talking fixer, or the, uh, resilient slave. Player characters put point into skills, acquire role-specific talents, and evolve special mutations.

In Road to Eden, all your party members are stalkers, a combat-focused role whose primary job is to explore the dangerous wasteland and hunt down food and artifacts. Mutations play a key role in making each stalker unique, creating an effective skill tree as you level up. Most are lifted directly from the rule book, including insect wings, frog legs, and puppeteer.

Be thankful: In the tabletop RPG these mutations are randomly conferred from a large list, though all of them add fun new abilities and features that can be used both in and out of combat. 

Mutated anthropomorphic animals like Bormin and Dux help make the post-apocalyptic world stand apart, as otherwise Mutant is heavily reminiscent of other post-nuclear RPGs such as Fallout and Wasteland. Interestingly, mutated animal player characters aren’t a feature in the core rulebook, but were later introduced in an expansion, Mutant: Genlab Alpha. Considering the age of the pen-and-paper RPG, it's quite a new addition: the expansion was just released in 2016.

Nine animal tribes were added in Mutant Genlab Alpha as new player races, including rats, bears, and even badgers, though curiously ducks and pigs are nowhere to be found. The animals have a different origin and a different starting area than the mutants of the Ark or the zone-ghouls prowling out in the Zone, which is why Bormin and Dux haven’t found anyone who looks like they do whenever they venture out of the Ark.

You'll find "artifacts" out in the zone, which are mostly everyday objects from the world of “the Ancients” before the fall, and an easy way for the apocalyptic world to inject some much-needed humor, as our heroes have no clue that a boombox is not, in fact, an explosive device. In the tabletop RPG, found artifacts are rare and valuable, ranging from a chainsaw to an air mattress. They work like magic items in Dungeons & Dragons, often granting skill bonuses and other special effects, in addition to contributing towards new projects and facilities in the Ark.

Road to Eden translates these projects into a list of upgrades and discounts at a shop in the Ark, after finding enough artifacts. It's a specific example of how, broadly, the tactics game adapts and simplifies components from the RPG. Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden scratches the surface of the RPG while incorporating many of its biggest themes, locations, and factions.

Let’s get it out of the way. Yes, that’s an anthropomorphic pig and a duck, and yes, you can play as a fox, too. Ha! But you’ll forget their inherent ridiculousness as you start to explore Mutant Year Zero’s skeleton-strewn Sweden and face its stern tactics challenge. Very quickly Bormin was simply my gruff stalwart tank, Dux my sharp-eyed, crit-dealing sniper, and Farrow my sneaking shotgunner. God, I love that gang.

Mutant Year Zero has a great blend of sardonic humour, grim detail and cartoon excess, a balance inherited from its venerable pen-and-paper RPG source, Mutant. Or, more specifically, its 2014 update, in which players take the role of mutant Stalkers wandering The Zone years after an environmental catastrophe, plague and a nuclear war has hit.

So yes, let’s get the other thing out of the way: the setting is third-hand STALKER. But again I forgot it as I got to grips with Mutant Year Zero’s meeting of realtime exploration and turn-based strategy. Here’s the idea: the world is divided into lots of discrete but connected areas as you set out to find a member of your settlement, The Ark, who’s gone missing. You’ll encounter enemy encampments, weapon chests, and caches of scrap and weapon parts, which act as currency to buy gear and upgrade your weapons back at the Ark, to which you can quick-travel.

This setup gives the world a coherence that’s lacking in most turn-based strategies, and I also like its persistence: once cleared, areas remain safe. But it also means that between fights you must ponderously run through undergrowth in search of the scrap you’ll need to afford vital medikits and grenades. The environmental detail often repays the time spent exploring, in abandoned campsites and discovering a skeleton propped up at a bar, but I wished movement is faster so I could more quickly get to the tactics meat of the game.

Mutant Year Zero’s key addition to the XCOM format is a new take on stealth. And it makes a huge difference. Combat starts either when you purposefully initiate it or if you blunder into an enemy’s awareness radius, which you can make smaller by crouching. This presents an opportunity to twist the encounter to your advantage by scouting the area to find vantage points, and it gives a fantastic sense of involvement in the ensuing fight, because so much results from the situation you set yourself.

Take one encounter I fought in a city. I found Dux could get into a building and take a position upstairs with a great view of the street, while below Bormin and Farrow acted as bait for raiders who streamed out of their base and into Dux’s rifle sights, each shot bolstered by the accuracy and critical bonuses he got from having a height advantage.   

Bormin, meanwhile, used his Stone Skin mutation, or skill, to shrug off incoming damage and Farrow used Sneak to get around the flanks and Silent Assassin to raise her critical chance. Each character’s skill tree pushes it into certain specialisms, and some skills are wonderfully baroque: Moth Wings allows Dux and Farrow to sprout wings and take flight for the duration of their shot, giving better lines of fire, while Selma’s Tree Hugger can root enemies to the spot.

I also found a lot of mileage in ambushing isolated stragglers, using quiet weapons such as the crossbow to take them out before they called for help on their first turn. Well, initially anyway. Tooltips continually remind you how important this strategy is, but against higher level enemies you can’t deal enough silent damage to kill them in a single turn and everyone in the vicinity is alerted.   

In fact, Mutant Year Zero too often leans on adding hit points to enemies to raise the stakes. There’s a good number of different types, from molotov-throwing pyros to telekinetic leaders, medi-bots to armoured tanks. Each demands different strategies, but by the mid-game most are introduced and I found the majority of the challenge came in figuring out how to eke more damage out of my weapons. The answer lay mostly in fussy fiddling with add-ons to raise critical limits and give chances of setting raiders on fire and EMP-stunning robots. 

And then the game ends. I found the story, such as it is, fulfilling enough. But in the 15 hours it took me to complete on Normal, I’d only just bought a couple of late-game skills and had barely used the other two characters; I wanted a chance to explore them. Coupled with plenty of little launch-period bugs which sometimes made upper floors invisible and could get confused about where I could move my characters to, I felt Mutant Year Zero isn’t quite finished.   

I could do an Iron Man permadeath-and-no-saves run and I started a Hard one, but still, it doesn’t fully deliver on its potential. But it’s also very good at addressing things many strategy games falter at, always ensuring you have information to make good decisions and using clear hit rules. While it lasts, Mutant Year Zero is a tense, absorbing and atmospheric new member of the XCOM family. I suppose wanting more of it is a good problem to have.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is the XCOM-style "tactical adventure" with the wisecracking duck and the angry pig. But they're not the only heavily-armed mutant animal weirdos in town. Funcom dropped a new trailer today that reveals the game's third fur-and-gun-bearing character, a stone cold fox who goes by the name Farrow. 

Farrow is literally a fox, but the "Silent Assassin" moniker feels a bit off the mark: The quietest thing she uses in the trailer is a shotgun. That's presumably more for cinematic effect than anything else, though, because even though she very clearly comes off as a heavy hitter in the video, the PR blurb says she specializes in "stealth and assassination … with skills and gear that make her adept at quickly and quietly dispatching her foes." 

Farrow won't be available at the start of the game, but can join your squad after she's been discovered in the Zone. And apparently she won't be the only one, as Funcon said she's "one of the recruitable characters" that players will encounter in their travels. 

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden comes out on December 4, and it looks very strange but also very good: Wes played a demo last month and described it as "fun, funny," and "challenging from the get-go." You can find out more at mutantyearzero.com. 

The end-of-the-world tactical adventure game Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is coming on December 4, and today publisher Funcom shared the lowdown on what sort of hardware you'll need to play it. The system requirements are pleasantly light, and Funcom helpfully suggested that if your current rig can't match up, "maybe now's the time to look into updating your hardware." 

The Minimum: 

• CPU: Intel Core i5-760 / AMD Phenom II X4 965
• GPU: Nvidia GTX 580 / AMD Radeon HD 7870
• MEMORY: 6GB RAM
• DISK SPACE: 8GB

The Recommended:

• CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K / AMD Ryzen 5 1600X
• GPU: Nvidia GTX 970 / AMD Radeon RX 480
• MEMORY: 8GB RAM
• DISK SPACE: 8GB

Beyond those basics, the Mutant Year Zero Steam page indicates that the game will run on Windows 7 (or 8, if you're still rolling on those wheels), but you'll need the 64-bit version. And before you ask, there are a lot more people running 32-bit Win7 than 64-bit Win8, so yes, it's relevant.

We spent some time with a demo for Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden earlier this month, and enjoyed it quite a lot—although the duck jokes got tired pretty quickly. If you want to see more, Funcom also recently dropped a new 15-minute "Scraplands" gameplay trailer that you can dive into below.

A pig, a duck, and a mutant lady walk into a camp full of angry ghouls. There's no punchline—just a game over screen, because those ghouls lit me up with rifles and molotovs before I got a chance to move. Dux? Barbecued. Bormin, my gruff boar scavenger? Skewered. Selma? Also barbecued. Look, these ghoul guys live out in the Zone, what survivors in Mutant Year Zero call the wasteland of this particular post-apocalypse. Point is, they don't discriminate who they set on fire.

Lesson learned: in Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, as in XCOM, the turn-based strategy game that heavily inspired it, positioning your characters behind cover is vital to staying alive. Unlike XCOM, though, Mutant Year Zero is part RPG and part stealth game, and my real mistake was failing to sneakily start the fight on my own terms. Most of my battles in Mutant Year Zero start with a few minutes of tense sneaking, where I position my party close to the enemy before triggering an ambush, allowing me to get the drop on them and attack first.

With silent weapons, like Dux's crossbow, you can pick off an isolated enemy and then end combat and move freely again, a technique I found satisfying every time I pulled it off. It also felt vital, because at least in the first couple hours of Mutant Year Zero's demo, I was always outnumbered, and a couple shots were enough to take down any of my characters. Medkits were in short supply. 

Even with careful planning, it's easy for fights to go wrong. I've had enemies flank me when I had my characters too spread out, and getting lit on fire deals damage over time that's especially brutal. In the fight above, I got out by the skin of my teeth, even though I silently took out two patrolling sentries before tackling the main batch of ghouls.

Judging by its early hours, the combat in Mutant Year Zero doesn't feel like it'll have nearly the depth or breadth of XCOM, with its classes and many weapon types and upgrade trees for both your base and your soldiers. But it does feel deep enough to stay engaging, because the fundamentals of XCOM-style strategy games are just so strong. I was always weighing the trade-off between moving out of danger or taking a shot, of risking a shot now or using "overwatch" mode to hit an enemy when it charges at me, of using a precious medpack or trying to scrape through a fight without getting downed.

I especially like that Mutant's stealth system lets you keep characters in hiding, one-by-one, when you trigger a fight; it's possible to reveal one character and draw the enemy towards you, then pop a closer one out of cover for a good flanking shot. But again, there's risk, since enemies that get too close can discover you.

Where the game really differentiates itself is in its RPG elements: exploring the Zone, a gorgeous and moody forest full of rusted cars and mossed over buildings, and listening to your characters chat with each other. They each have unique upgrade trees of mutations. Dux gets an early ability to trade some accuracy for a guaranteed crit, and a mid-tier skill lets him grow wings to reach high places or make long range sniper shots. The trees are simplistic, with just one or two abilities per tier, but do give you enough choice to nudge a character towards one playstyle or another.

And there's the potential for an interesting story as you try to save the Ark, a ramshackle city that houses the remnants of society. Near as I can tell, that's, like, 50 people, so things haven't been going great so far.

What I'm a little worried about is the exploration and RPG aspects of Mutant Year Zero never growing much more complex than what I've seen in its first two hours. I love the mood of the Zone's forest, but it's mostly devoid of interactable objects except the scrap you find to upgrade your equipment with back home. There's so far no decision-making other than "how do I start this fight" and "which character upgrades should I pick."

I like making those decisions, but for a game based on a pen-and-paper RPG, I'd hoped for characters to talk to, quests to find out in the world, and some degree of agency in how I shape my adventure. So far, I haven't really seen any of that. But maybe sidequests more sophisticated than what I've done so far—venture slightly off the beaten path to find a bit of loot—will come after the opening hours.

The personality, at least, I already mostly love. Dux and Bormin have a fun go-getter/grizzled veteran rapport, item descriptions are playful, and the ghouls you go up against spout off plenty of deranged ramblings. One thing, though: I really hope there aren't 30 hours of ducking duck puns ahead of me, because that particular line of jokes is already getting old after two.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is out in a month's time, on December 4.

The direct XCOM comparison doesn't quite work for Mutant Year Zero. The oddball sci-fi tactics game incorporates elements of real-time stealth, which serves and intelligence-gathering phase before combat is joined. The latest video covers the details, and there's an explanatory blog post on the Mutant Year Zero site.

"Sneak attacks and ambushes are crucial throughout Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden. Ambushes allow you to isolate enemies and kill them away from their companions, hopefully without raising an alarm in the process," reads the post.

"The difficulty level is quite high, even on the Normal setting, and your characters aren’t supersoldiers. They can take a bit of a beating, sure, but if you get swarmed, they will die quickly. You should observe your enemies’ patrol routes and habits as you sneak around so you can set up the perfect ambush."

The oddest moment in the trailer sees the sniper duck grow moth wings so he can gain crit bonuses by hovering above enemies. The second oddest thing is the alarm enemy with a trombone strapped to his face. Gotta respect that mutant ingenuity.

Mutant Year Zero is due out on December 4.

Samuel refers to Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden as "Duck XCOM" in his August preview, which is not a terrible way of putting it. But if you'd like a rundown of what it's all about that's maybe not quite so economical, Funcom has dropped a new trailer showcasing exactly—mostly—what it's all about. 

The video demonstrates both real-time exploration and turn-based combat, which the developers are attempting to blend in a way that enables varied and efficient gameplay. 

"What we're trying to do a little bit different," co-director David Skarin says in the video, "is to take the initial part of a tactical combat game, where you're kind of setting up and planning your thing—we put that part into real-time to speed up [the game]. That gave us the opportunity to tell the story while you're the voyeur. As [former] Hitman developers, we know that this works really well, right—like when you're walking through, we can also tell a bit story while you're setting up your ambush." 

As for what it's all about, Skarin is a little less forthcoming. The game is based on the Mutant pencil-and-paper RPG series and will generally follow its "meta-plot," but it will be left to players to explore the world and discover what's actually going on—and how everything ended up in such a state.   

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden comes out on December 4. Hit up mutantyearzero.com to find out more.