Undertale meets Necrodancer in free game Everhood

(Image credit: Tom Sykes)

Everhood is a lovely surprise. It's formatted like a 16-bit JRPG, meaning you'll walk around a world from a top-down perspective, chatting to locals and occasionally getting into battles. But every other aspect of JRPGs has been ditched: there are no stats, no items, no levelling, no spells. Instead, every battle is a tense rhythm game.

Battles are purely defensive: you win, seemingly, by exhausting your opponent. As they fling waves of energy from the top of the screen, your one-armed doll character reacts by hopping left or right, or by jumping, to avoid them. Get hit three times and you die (although your health will restore if you don't take damage for a while).

The strange disco underworld, the colourful characters and the font reminded me of Undertale, while the banging soundtrack, and general musicality evoked Crypt of the Necrodancer. It's a great combination, and hopefully we get to play an expanded version of the concept one day.

For more great free experiences, check out our roundup of the best free PC games.

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.