Brilliant indie game Oikospiel is free to keep for the whole of March

Oikospiel, which is on our list of the best indie games you can play on PC, is celebrating its second birthday by going free to keep for the whole of March.

It's about a group of dogs making a video game dog opera, and it doubles as a satirical critique of the game industry’s labor practices. It's as utterly surreal as it sounds. "Play as a German Shepherd named Pluto and explore the enchanted climates of planet Earth and the asteroid 433 Eros. Visit an Arctic Ocean wind farm, Kochiri Forest, a computer OS, a cluttered desk, a union-busting prairie in Kansas, a private jet, a flooded city at the North Pole, and many more fevered landscapes," reads the description on its itch.io page. That clears that up, then.

The camera is a nightmare to control but, as James pointed out in his playthrough, that's the point. The soundtrack is majestic, and reacts to your actions: it's composed by David Kanaga, who co-designed Proteus, another brilliant indie game.

To say more would be to ruin the constant string of surprises you'll find if you play it, but James' piece linked above is a good starting point if you want to learn more of the nuts and bolts.

If you want to jump straight in (it is free, after all), then you can grab it over on itch.io—you can still pay for it if you like, and any money will go to the international pro-union activist group Game Workers Unite. It usually costs $12.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.