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Epic’s weekly game giveaways are now as familiar a part of the PC gaming landscape as eye-wateringly expensive graphics cards and Half-Life 3 conspiracy theories. But this week’s offering is a little bit different.
For starters, there are three games to download and keep for free this week, rather than the traditional two. The first is Arcadegeddon, a cooperative rogue-like shooter developed by IllFonic and released in 2023. This is already available for free anyway, but you get $20 worth of the in-game currency ‘Arccoins’ with this download. The other is River City Girls, the well-liked side-scrolling beat ’em up originally launched in 2019.
The main event, though is Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, a clicker take on Dungeons and Dragons where parties of DnD characters fight enemies and extract hoards of gold from their corpses, while you mainly unlock new characters and faff about with their formations. Jody ran a few quests with it back in 2017, noting that “Idle Champions is a game designed to play itself. It even carries on in your absence when you shut it down, welcoming you back with a pile of gold the heroes earned while you were away.”
But Idle Champions appears to have grown quite a bit since then. Recently, it added the central party of Baldur’s Gate 3, letting you click away the hours with Astarion, Shadowheart, Karlach etc.
Like Arcadegeddon, Idle Champions is a free-to-play game, so the Epic giveaway similarly gives you a bunch of extra stuff gratis. Considerably more extra stuff, in fact. Alongside the Lobita the Guardian Familiar pack, which adds a friendly canine companion to your party, the giveaway also furnishes you with a total of 9,760 Platinum, the game’s premium in-game currency. Combined, these extras are apparently worth over $100, and that doesn’t include the value of River City Girls or Arcadegeddon’s $20 in Arccoins.
In short, it’s a hefty chunk of free stuff. It may seem like an awful lot to give away, but Epic’s free games programme has been apparently working wonders for getting users to spend money on the platform elsewhere. Epic’s Tim Sweeney explained this himself in a call with press last year, stating “you might think that this would hurt the sales prospects of games on the Epic Game Store, but developers who give away free games actually see an upsurge in the sale of their paid games on the store, just because their free game raises awareness.”
On the subject of raising awareness, I’m going to finish by highlighting that next week’s free games include Botanicula, Amanita Design’s hilarious microorganism adventure game from 2012, and possibly my favourite point and click ever. If you want to keep track of all Epic’s free game giveaways for 2025, make sure to regularly check into our Epic Store free games list.
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Kurt Indovina
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