The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark and Nobody Wants to Die are this week’s Epic Games Store freebies

If you like tracking down baddies in games, you’re in luck, because the Epic Games Store is giving us a duo of detective games for free this week.

• Nobody Wants to Die
  • Release Date: July 17, 2024
  • Game Type: Detective, Adventure (some reviews suggest Walking Sim)
  • POV: 1st person
  • Party: Single player
  • DLC: The soundtrack is available for sale.

I haven’t played Nobody Wants to Die myself, and I had a tough time figuring it out just from the videos and screenshots. It features a Cyberpunk setting in New York, and you play as a detective trying to track down a serial killer. But exactly what the gameplay and solving entails is a bit of a mystery. It seems very similar to a game like Observer, where there’s some degree of wandering around within the environment while you hunt down rather obvious highlighted clues, but most of the detective work is all but on rails.

• Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark
  • Release Date: April 15, 2021
  • Game Type: Puzzle, Detective
  • POV: 3rd person, 2D sidescroller
  • Party: Single player
  • DLC: None, but Steam has the OST available for sale

This sequel to Darkside Detective has all the charm and weirdness of the original, but with lots more cases to solve. Really, isn’t that exactly what you want out of a sequel — the same as the original, but more of it? There are 9 new cases for Detective McQueen to solve in good ol Twin Lakes, and at least one of them involves a haunted carnival, so I’m here for it.