Take a hike in a strange desert in free wild west adventure Red Desert Render

(Image credit: Ian MacLarty)

There's a big ol' desert to escape to in Ian MacLarty's Red Desert Render, a game of Wild West exploration and secret-snuffling inspired by the developer's out-of-bounds adventures in Red Dead Redemption 2 Online. This pay-what-you-want desert hike is pretty glitchy, but that seems to be intentional. How will reality distort as you trudge and roll your way around a pleasingly enormous and  largely empty tract of land?

I said trudge, and you'll be doing that in first or third person—the former option handy for when you want to appreciate the lovely views, and the latter useful for your secondary method of traversal, the roly poly. Yep, at any time you can press a button to curl up into a ball. Roll yourself down one of Red Desert's enjoyably massive hillsides—in fact, it's one of your goals when you start up the game.

Obviously, it's up to you whether you aim for those peculiar objectives, or sack them off and find your own fun in this pleasant, laid-back exploration game. But if you've a free day, it might be worth spending some of it getting lost in a wild, wild west world. (Thanks, RPS.)

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.