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How good is Flashback? So good that a couple of years ago we literally asked how it could possibly have been so good (opens in new tab) in 1992, the year the sidescrolling sci-fi epic from French developer Delphine was originally released. And if you’ve never before sampled its delights (or even if you have, way back when), you can now do so for free courtesy of GOG, which is giving Flashback away (opens in new tab) for the next couple of days.
Flashback follows the running, leaping, rolling adventures of a man named Conrad, who’s battling a secret invasion of shapeshifting aliens in the year 2142. What made it stand out, though, was its rotoscoped animations, which gave characters an unusual fluidity of movement overtop of hand-drawn backgrounds. It also offered an unexpected variety of gameplay: It begins like a straightforward platformer but eventually opens up into more of a metroidvania, with non-combat areas to explore and increasingly complex puzzles to solve.
As a side note, Flashback also bears a number of visual similarities to Another World (opens in new tab), another sci-fi platformer released by Delphine the year before (and which, to be blunt, I think is the superior game). Despite occasional confusion on the point, the two games aren’t actually connected.
Anyway, the point of all this is that it’s a really good game, and until 9 am ET/1 pm UTC on June 23, you can snag it for free from GOG. This is the 2018 update, which includes all sorts of new graphical enhancements, remastered audio, and a “rewind” function for when things go wrong, but if you want to give the old-school hardass route a try, an option to play with the original graphics and sound (and “unforgiving difficulty”) is also available.
The Flashback giveaway is part of GOG’s ongoing Summer Sale (opens in new tab), which runs until June 27 and has discounts on individual games, game collections (including our very own! (opens in new tab)), and publisher packages, plus regularly rotating flash deals. There’s one more free game scheduled after this one, too—it’ll go up on June 24.
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