Slime Rancher is free right now on the Epic Games Store

If you're on PC and in the mood for a freebie, Epic has revealed the next two games to be made available for nowt on its store: Slime Rancher and Oxenfree.

Up first is Slime Rancher, available now until March 21st. If you've not yet had the pleasure, Slime Rancher an exceptionally odd, yet oddly engrossing, experience that plays out something like an extremely chilled first-person farming game. Except, your farm is on a distant alien planet, and the bulk of your responsibilities involve breeding (and cross-breeding!) strange gelatinous goo balls known as Slimes.

There are plenty of regular farm-like things to do, including growing crops to feed to your Slimes and earning cash to expand your facilities in order to accomodate more breeds, but a significant part of the adventure involves exploring the colourful wilds outside your ranch.

Here, you can accrue valuable resources, hunt down treasure, and hoover up (literally - most of Slime Rancher's interactions involve your wonderfully tactile vacuum nozzle thingy) exotic new breeds of Slime to rehouse back at the farm.

As for Epic's second free game of March, it's developer Night School Studio's excellent walkie-and-talkie narrative adventure, Oxenfree.

Oxenfree is a kind of part-teen-movie, part-supernatural-thriller that follows the adventures of a group of friends as they attempt to party the weekend away on an isolated island - an off-season tourist resort - but start to experience increasingly strange phenomenon.

It's hardly action-packed stuff - mostly you'll spend your time walking between key locations on the island - but it tells a gripping yarn, and its likeable cast are pleasingly well-defined.

That's in large part thanks to the breezy, wonderfully written dialogue, which is near-constant, impeccably voiced, and flows surprisingly naturally, even as you make choices to steer the direction of each conversation throughout the experience. As an added bonus, Oxenfree does some nifty things with its new-game-plus-ish second play-through option too.

Oxenfree, if you're at all intrigued (and haven't picked it up already, given how often the game has been heavily discounted or given away by this point), is free on the Epic Games Store from Thursday, March 21st to Thursday, April 4th.

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