Prey and Jotun: Valhalla Edition are free on the Epic Games Store today

This week’s freebies at the Epic Games Store are Arkane Studios’ interplanetary immersive sim Prey and Thunder Lotus Games’ Viking ’em up Jotun: Valhalla Edition. You’ll be able to nab them for zero currency later on today, but for now there’s still time to grab last week’s complimentary game, Terraforming Mars. Check the Epic Games Store at around 8am PST / 4pm BST for the changeover.

Arkane’s Prey is a bananas alternate timeline immersive sim from 2017 where JFK dodging the magic bullet results in some significant changes to the Space Race. Creepy morphing aliens called the Typhon have escaped containment in orbit around the Moon and, notably, you can turn into a cup among the other items lying around the game’s Talos I space station. It’s been on Game Pass for a while, but if you want to own it forever, then now’s the time to do it. Personally, composer Mick Gordon’s banger opening track Everything Is Going To Be Okay is worth it alone, to my mind.

John (RPS in peace) recommended Arkane’s pulp sci-fi reimagining in his Prey review. “Prey is a game that’s smart about almost every aspect of itself, and yet with that, so crucially modest,” he said. “It doesn’t yank the camera from you, doesn’t force you to sit through cutscenes, doesn’t demand you sit still and listen to its backstory. It’s content to be itself and let you find it, which is a damned rare treat in this hobby.”

Meanwhile, Thunder Lotus’s action-adventure Jotun: Valhalla Edition is full of big elemental lads trying to stamp you straight down into the floor of the underworld. You play dead Viking Thora, as she tries to redeem herself by battling the five aforementioned giant lads, or Jötunn, so she can please the gods enough for them to let her into Valhalla. The Valhalla Edition also has an extra mode which ramps up the challenge when taking on Jötunn. The whole game is hand-drawn and is bloody marvelous to behold. There’s a huge sense of scale between Thora and the giants she battles.

Alice Bee thought Jotun was strong enough to be part of her band of the best Viking games. “The fights here have such an impressive feeling of scale that you really have to marvel at them,” she said. “Thora seems genuinely tiny next to the huge, menacing bosses that defeating one feels like a genuine act of giant slaying. And the animation and art is really lovely, such that you might actually spend too much time admiring your enemy instead of giving them a big wallop.”

prey other Jotun: Valhalla Edition are free to claim on the Epic Games Store from May 12th to May 19th. enjoy