Yooka-Laylee and Void Bastards are currently free on the Epic Games Store • Eurogamer.net

If you’re looking for a couple more video game freebies to shove unceremoniously into your almost certainly already overstuffed ‘to do’ pile, Epic has you covered, with Yooka-Laylee and Void Bastards currently free on its PC store.

Yooka-Laylee, if you’re unfamiliar, is a spiritual successor to Rare’s beloved platformer Banjo-Kazooie – and was developed by Playtonic, a studio founded by a number of ex-Rare veterans. Lizard and bat replace bear and bird in Yooka-Laylee, but the formula will be immediately familiar to Banjo-Kazooie fans, setting players loose across a number of sprawling, predominantly platforming-focussed worlds as they embark on an perky, old-school collectathon in search of missing Quills.

All in all, it’s a decently entertaining adventure (although its superb side-scrolling sequel, Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair, is far superior), and one that Eurogamer contributor Edwin Evans-Thirlwell called a “sumptuous, diverting homage to a bygone era in game design that should keep fans of the old school hooked, even if it doesn’t set the world on fire.”

As for Void Bastards, it’s a comedic “strategy-shooter” from Blue Manchu, the studio led by the former design director for BioShock and System Shock 2, Jonathan Chey. It sees players – in the role of a space prisoner forced to do an AI’s bidding – plotting a course across the stars, stopping off at (usually deadly) points of interest along the way.

“On board derelict spaceships you’ll plan your mission,” explains Blue Manchu, “taking note of the ship layout, what hazards and enemies you might encounter and what terminals and other ship systems you can use to your advantage…

“Move carefully through the dangerous ships, searching for supplies and manipulating control systems. React to what you find – will you detour to the generator to bring the power back online or will you fight your way into the security module to disable the ship’s defenses? Choose carefully when to fight, when to run and when just to be a bastard.”

Yooka-Laylee and Void Bastards are free to add to your Epic Games Store library right now until next Thursday, 26th August – at which point a new set of freebies will take over, in the form of cooking-themed resource management puzzler Automachef.