Try Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden for free

The farm animal tactics game Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is quite good: Maybe a little shorter than it should have been, but "a tense, absorbing and atmospheric" game in the style of XCOM. Even so, the front-facing weirdness of the thing—characters include an anthropomorphic duck, a brutish, bipedal boar, and a literal stone cold fox—may have put some people off.

The obvious solution is to give people a chance to try to try the game without paying for it, which of course is why we're here—because a demo is now available on Steam. It's about a 3GB download, and it sounds like it's a pretty thick slice of the game: Funcom said it includes "all content from the beginning of the game, up [to] and including reaching the Ark."

The "Download Demo" button isn't very prominently featured, but it's there, buried on the right-hand sidebar of the Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden Steam page, just above the list of Steam features. Hit that and you're off to the races. The recently-announced Stalker Trials "challenge mode" expansion, with scored progress through specially populated maps, leaderboards, and a handful of new options and bug fixes, is also now available and free for everyone.

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.