Loop Hero and Bloons TD 6 are this week's free Epic Store games

If you’re not one of the many PC players already Baldur’s deep in a certain RPG spectacular and you’re looking for some amusement this weekend, the Epic Games Store has unveiled a fresh batch of freebies to download and keep, which this week take the form of developer Four Quarters’ RPG oddity Loop Hero and Ninja Kiwi’s vibrant tower defence adventure Bloons TD 6.

Starting with Loop Hero, it’s a fantasy RPG with a twist; the twist being your heroes are stuck automatically navigating the procedurally generated world, battling monsters, and so on, in an endless, literal loop. You don’t have a whole lot of control over what they do, but as they down enemies you accumulate loot to boost their stats and – more importantly – collect cards to place in the world that introduce new encounters and perhaps new bonuses to be exploited on successive loops. Reach a certain point and you fight a boss, then on it goes.

That’s the very basics of it, at least, and Eurogamer’s Christian Donlan quite liked its peculiar, grindy progression when he reviewed it back in 2021, slapping it with ye olde Recommended badge, and calling it a “deeply knowing game whose designers pluck at your obsessions as if they’re idly reaching into a piano case to twang the strings”.