Grab four great games for free with your Twitch Prime subscription, with the July 2019 Games with Prime.
PlayStation Plus. Games With Gold. Humble Monthly. The Epic Game Store’s frequently rotating rack of freebies. It’s easy to lose track of all the places you can regularly get free video games. (That you sometimes might care about.)
There’s another one you need to remember: Games with Prime. (Well, you might need to remember Twitch Prime first.)
Twitch Prime is what you get when you link your Amazon Prime-enabled Amazon account with your Twitch account. Mostly, you get digital tat and cosmetics. Currently, for instance, you can get some baseball game for a team called the Spears (we think that’s made up?) in The Division 2, or a horrible unicorn puffer jacket for new character Wattson in Apex Legends, or some gawdy co-ordinated equipment for Call of Duty: Blacks Ops 4. There is occasionally some useful stuff – like three months free of a Nintendo Switch Online subscription – but mostly, it’s tat.
Did you know that you can get free games with Twitch Prime, though? They’re (imaginatively) called Games with Prime, and this month, there are four of them.
Cultist Simulator
This is the big ticket item in a Games with Prime collection featuring some solid indie games. Cultist Simulator, a “game of apocalypse and yearning” from Failbetter alums Alexis Kennedy and Lottie Bevan, has been a massive success. It won’t be for everyone – it’s a slow-paced computer card game, filled with lore and melancholy – but like all the best cults, once they get you through the door and give you the hard sell, Cultist Simulator is very hard to walk away from.
The Escapists
Team17’s brilliant prison escape management simulator has a sequel now, but that doesn’t mean The Escapists isn’t worth your (hard) time. It’s a great introduction to the series if you’re not familiar with it, and if you’ve only played the second game or its expansions, then you’re missing out on some excellent, foundational simulation.
For the King
For the King is a rare beast: an RPG that you can play solo or cooperatively. That alone makes it worth the price of entry, but when the price of entry is free in Games with Prime? It’s hard to say no. It also blends a mixture of strategy and tabletop styles into its general RPG witches brew, so there’s something for (almost) everyone here.
Yooka-Laylee
Yooka-Laylee, from Playtonic and mostly staffed by veterans of Rare, is the spiritual successor to Banjo Kazooie. But other than the characters being different (well, in name only) it’s quite literally the successor to Banjo Kazooie, for better or for worse. That means dodgy cameras, flaky controls, and lots of irritating kid-friendly noises; but also, a game with a lot of heart that is beloved by many with a penchant for N64-era character platformers.
These four games are all available on Games with Prime right now, and will run through until August 1, 2019. (When they will presumably be replaced with some new games.)
If you don’t have Amazon Prime, you could always sign up for a month’s free trial, then cancel it afterwards. Here’s a link for the UK trial, and here’s one for the US, just in time for the big Prime Day sale hijinks. (Shhh! Don’t tell Amazon we’re recommending that!)
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