In The Dark Forest

In Brief
In The Dark Forest is an Isometric defense shooter, where you have to defend your home against waves of zombies. You can see a video of game play HERE and HERE

In The Dark Forest
In The Dark Forest is a defense shooter, where waves of zombies attack you from the right. You start with a lone rifleman, who has to periodically reload his weapon. Shoot using the Ctrl key. You start with a barricade that keeps nearby zombies from entering your compound, but after attacking it several times the barricade can be destroyed. Killing zombies earns you gold which you can spend it the shop; either on new weapons, upgrading them and other defensive items like mines exploding gas/petrol canisters and bear traps. To access the shop press the Tab key. There are three weapons available from the shop, a Winchester, Automatic rifle and a shotgun, each one can also be upgraded to increase its damage, increase the rate of fire and and increase the clip/magazine size. You already have the Winchester rifle. You can move your rifleman around the compound using the WASD keys. Once you've purchased new weapons you can access them using the 1,2 & 3 keys. Pressing Esc key takes you to the main menu where you can turn off sound effects and music and change the game language from English to Russian. The game defaults to English. When closing the game down, it will save your progress unless you have died, or you can opt to start a new game, but this will overwrite your progress.

You can also increase the speed of your characters movement and the reloading speed. Each upgrade can be improved several times. Increasing your clip/magazine capacity in increments of 2 from 8 to 10 and 10 to 12 etc. I haven't figured out what the maximum you can upgrade for each item, but its at least 4 times.

Damage using one bullet starts at 0.5 and requires 4 rounds to kill this reduces to 3 rounds for $270. You can also improve the amount of damage a bullet will do that enables you to drop a zombie or other attacker using fewer rounds; spending $570 on the second upgrade will enable you to drop an enemy using only 2 bullets (the amount of damage = 1.1). The next upgrade costs $1170 and does a damage of 1.4 that requires only 1 bullet to drop the zombies. The flying attackers are harder to hit, partly due to their smaller size and erratic movement, but they take fewer shots to destroy.

From wave 4 things become a little more difficult because the attackers move from side to side constantly, making it harder to shoot them. After Wave five you receive a message saying Attackers repelled, then a new set of waves starts, this time with more attackers.

You can see the number of bullets left in your weapon via the HUD located at the top of the screen. You can also see the amount of damage your compound barrier has left and the number of attackers you have dispatched to oblivion.

The game is a keyboard only game; however, if you have a multi buttoned mouse you can program your mouse buttons to emulate the various key bindings used in game.

Other Stuff, mainly Games.
The latest free games from Epic Games is a clicker game called Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms. If you install and start the game before the next game changeover this coming Thursday, you get around $100 worth of extra's. You'll find details of the game HERE.

Please see Delenn's threads for other Steam and Non Steam freebies HERE and HERE respectively. She posted details of a free Steam game yesterday called Nubarron The adventure of an unlucky gnome, which is a good looking side scrolling platformer with very positive reviews from the Steam community, which you can read HERE.

There won't be new freebies every week from these sections apart from the Epic games, but it is worth keeping your eyes open regularly for details. Delenn usually posts details when a game is being offered free for a temporary period. These include games from Good Old Games, Ubisoft's uPlay client, Valves Steam client, EA Games Origin client and other indie developers. You'll find hundreds of freeware games of all arcade and indie genres on Itch.io and Caimans Games as well as other sources. Check out the game discussion forums for older posts HERE (the sticky section is useful). Many of the earlier posts may be out of date with respect to the links I and others have provided to the free games; however, you only need to know the name of the game to find most of them via other sources. Many of those games from 2008 to around 2017 were posted as part of a project to supplement the lack of weekday games when the game giveaway stopped giving games away around Easter 2008 (due to the financial crisis) until November 2019 when Falcoware stepped into the weekday slot, with the occasional limited (restricted to a specific number of Steam keys) free AAA and decent indie arcade games game from Steam starting back in 2017; (for example lucky winners have had Warhammer Vermintide 1 & 2 plus DLC for version 2, Dreadlands, DLC for World of Tanks and World of Warships, The Last Roman Village, ADM: Angels, Demons & Men and the sequel ADM 2: When Worlds Collide, U-BOOT 1945, Mount & Blade: Warband, Immortal Unchained, Onion Force, 1993: Space Machine, Runaway VR, Jump Step Step, Megamagic: Wizards of the Neon Age, Tree of Life, Star Vikings Forever, Rogalia, Alien Hallway 2, Cargo Cult: Shoot'n'Loot VR, Bold New World, several Forge of Gods dlc packs e.g. Team of Justice Pack, The Apotheosis Project, TangramsVR, Mighty Party dlc, UnnyWorld - Founder's Pack, SteamWorld Dig, Minion Masters, Dreamals: Dream Quest, Destroyer: Invasion, MIND SHIFT, Madrobot X, MIND BLOX, MIND TWINS - The Twisted Co-op Platformer, Next Up Hero, Runaway VR, ZBlitz with 1000 Gems, Conan Exiles as well as others).

I've not posted details of any Indie Gala freebies since my older computer went on the Fritz back in October last year. Since then Indie Gala have added quite a lot more free games, some of which are definitely worth downloading. You can find the latest freebies HERE and their showcase list, which includes all the freebies still current; (many of which have been included for a couple of years now) HERE.

It’s worth adding these links to your favorites and checking regularly for available freebies. Most are only free for a specific time. If you miss the deadline you’ll miss out. Once added to your account, they are yours to keep. :)

Notes on Security
I scanned a zipped copy of the installed game and it found zero hits from 59 antimalware engines. The downloaded executable may include some low level adware that only opens your browser to Falcowares home page after the game has installed, but does not inject any malware into your system. When your browser is opened to Falcowares home page it earns them some money, part of which is given to the developer of the game for allowing the game to be given away free. You can see the results of the scan via the following link:

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/c344186424ace38472a5966fc340b837fde8048a9774df430b1652d244387a5c/detection