(Image credit: Bytten Studio)

If you feel like Pokémon lacks any real contenders in the videogame arena, it’s possible you haven’t been paying attention. Monster Hunter Stories is where it’s at if you ask me, but heavy hitters like Shin Megami Tensei and Digimon Story are constantly furnishing creature collector fans with new bangers. If you want to usher in the new year by dipping your toe into the scene, the latest Epic Games Store free game is Cassette Beasts—you can claim it here until tomorrow, December 28.

PC Gamer’s Lauren Morton wrote up impressions on the game back in 2023 and called it "a pretty sick Pokémon remix," shouting out its nonstandard element types like plastic, glass, and glitter. Instead of taming wild animals, you transform into monsters you’ve "recorded" to cassette tapes.

Even without all that, the addition of online co-op gives it a firm leg up over the genre’s biggest entrants, and the musical aesthetic (the battle UI is navigated via an in-game cassette player) gives it a flair all its own. Its last major update was earlier this year in April, but it’s still pretty hopping for an indie tribute to Pokémon: it just crossed the "over 1.1 million units sold" milestone in November.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

Justin first became enamored with PC gaming when World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights 2 rewired his brain as a wide-eyed kid. As time has passed, he’s amassed a hefty backlog of retro shooters, CRPGs, and janky ’90s esoterica. Whether he’s extolling the virtues of Shenmue or troubleshooting some fiddly old MMO, it’s hard to get his mind off games with more ambition than scruples. When he’s not at his keyboard, he’s probably birdwatching or daydreaming about a glorious comeback for real-time with pause combat. Any day now...

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