10 Most Underrated Free To Play Games

When you’re on a computer connected to the internet, you’ve got access to an endless amount of free video games, more than you could ever play in your lifetime.

That said, there are a massive number of free games that are great, unique experiences that usually fly right under everyone’s radar, lost in a sea of other games.

There are free multiplayer games, platformers, and beautiful adventure games out there that you’ve never seen before, or that get unnecessary amounts of vitreal.

That’s what this list is a compilation of, just a bunch of free games you can play that get overhated, unfairly ignored, and are generally incredibly underrated.

10 Grapples Galore

Fun and Funny

Grapples Galore is a silly arena shooter where you almost exclusively move around the map using your dual grappling hooks, swinging and propelling everywhere.

It means both you and the competition feel incredibly slippery, but the rather generous nametags and outlines make lining up shots not feel totally impossible.

It’s got incredibly goofy animations, contrasted by the polished and fun movement and shooting, making it quite a goofy time to mess around with friends.

It’s, unfortunately, somewhat obscure. Any time I’ve hopped on, there are only around 30 players online, which is luckily enough to get a few full lobbies and the full experience.

9 I Wanna Maker

Endless Platforming

The modding and fangames scene for the old-ass indie game, I Wanna Be The Guy, has gotten so extensive, with I Wanna Maker being a pretty great example.

It’s inspired by I Wanna Be The Guy and Mario Maker, letting you create or play a variety of platforming levels with unlimited potential for creativity.

It has such a robust editor that allows just about anything to be made, is way less restrictive than Mario Maker, and has the same janky physics you’d expect.

It’s a little bit obscure, and levels are usually quite difficult, which is to be expected given the source material everyone here is working with. But, even still, there’s a lot of fun to be had here.

8 Endless Sky

Soaring In Stars

Endless Sky is part text adventure, part space crew simulator, and complete wish fulfillment for anyone looking for a massive time sink that doesn’t want you to pay a single cent.

It has you talking with interesting characters with massive walls of intricate dialogue, propping them aboard your space vessel, and taking them where they need to go.

You can also deck out your ship with whatever you’d like, whether that be to make it a better merchant vessel, passenger ship, or a battle station capable of taking on pirates.

It’s fully open-source and free, though the text adventure and space simulation genres aren’t exactly the easiest to get into, which leads to this game getting ignored pretty often.

7 Museum of Other Realities

Walking Through Beauty

I didn’t want to put Museum of Other Realities too high on this list, since, while it is free, it does require a VR headset, making it not as free-to-play as the other games are.

That said, it’s such an excellent showcase of interactive art pieces you can play around with and experience with friends, that I’d be remiss not to include it here.

If you’ve got VR and a PC that can run it, it’s genuinely incredible, and something that had me gawking in awe at the various exhibits whenever I walked through them.

It’s got a massive amount of really intricate and varied art pieces to explore, and while that makes it kind of a walking simulator, if anything, it’s a damn good one.

6 Picross Touch

Perfected Puzzling

Picross is one of those underrated series that I think deserves more respect and admiration as a whole, and Picross Touch is pretty good at demonstrating why Picross is great.

It’s a rather simple game on the surface, having you use the numbers on the top and side to determine the placement of squares on the board, with every puzzle solvable with logic alone.

I think that Picross Touch, in particular, is a pretty decent version of the game, namely for the sizeable amount of community-made puzzles, meaning you’ll never run out of stuff to do.

The actual base game puzzles are just alright, and it doesn’t have support for coloring the image after you’ve finished it, but otherwise, it’s a damn solid version of a great game.

5 NaissanceE

A Trip Through Space

NaissanceE is a very odd game, having you navigate corridors and mazes comprised of the default Blender cube, with the navigation itself being a bit of a challenge.

It’s a bit of a puzzle platformer, with most of the navigation requiring you to use your limited light sources to figure out each room’s layout before you can continue.

It’s quite trippy, with each environment feeling a little unreal at times, and it’s wild what they can pull off with nothing but textureless cubes and lighting.

It’s got some really atmospheric scoring, which makes the whole experience unsettling, and even though it’s not the most in-depth game ever, it’s a great example of doing a lot with a little.

4 Pink Hour/Heaven

Management Said It’s Great

Kero Blaster is a game you might not have heard of, made by Studio Pixel, the team that made Cave Story, and Pink Hour plus Pink Heaven are spinoffs of that game, both completely free.

These are short and sweet, arcadey run ‘n’ gun titles with very similar music and art to the free version of Cave Story, and I’d recommend them to any fan of that game.

Pink Hour will only last you around 30 minutes for full completion, and it’s just a fun romp through a stage and a boss where you retrieve your document before coming back.

Pink Heaven, on the other hand, is much more extensive, having multiple stages, different upgrades, and a slightly more in-depth story, and it’s really fun, even if it’s just a Kero Blaster promo game.

3 BlasterBeat

Blasts Per Minute

BlasterBeat is an arena shooter where you shoot to the beat, like in a game like BPM or Metal Hellsinger, making sure to keep that rhythm while killing other people.

It’s incredibly obscure, despite the awesome concept, given zero people were online when I hopped on, and it has less than 800 reviews on Steam.

I genuinely can’t see why, as this game feels great, is incredibly polished, and felt fun when I forced other people to play it with me; plus, it’s got tons of customization.

The best part is the workshop songs because even though there aren’t too many, shooting down someone else and slashing them to death up close hits differently when listening to E1M1.

2 Tanks: The Crusades

We Play

If you ever ask anyone who played Wii Play what the best part of it was, you’ll hear a whole mouthful about Tanks every single time, and Tanks: The Crusades is like an expanded version.

This game gets swept under the rug frequently, despite having similar physics, bouncing to the original Wii Tanks, and a massive bevy of new features.

There are several crusades with levels similar to the original. You can create your own levels, play through procedurally generated ones, or play in online multiplayer.

It’s not got the crunchy sound design of Wii Tanks, but it’s still fun to strategically bend shots around corners and hit enemy tanks, and it’s especially fun to overwhelm your friends with a barrage of bullets.

1 Dweller’s Empty Path

A Hidden Gem

A sequel to another banger free game, Escaped Chasm, Dweller’s Empty Path is a game made by Temmie Chang, who you might know of for making all the good art in Undertale.

It’s got an extremely charming Game Boy aesthetic, and it’s a quaint interactive adventure, where every route sprawls into a million lovely bits of dialogue, and with an incredibly engaging story to boot.

It’s just an incredibly lovely world that I crave to see more of. Every character feels so wonderfully made, and every situation you get put in is incredibly engaging, especially following traditional JRPG heroes on their quest.

Plus, Toby Fox worked on the soundtrack, so you already know it has some incredible music that’ll get stuck in your head for years to come. It’s just an A+ title all around.