20 Minutes Till Dawn is currently free to keep from the Epic Games Store

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A worthy Vampire Survivorslike

Vampire Survivors was a big enough sensation that it instantly inspired a horde of similar games to spawn. 20 Minutes Till Dawn was one of the more worthy: a topdown, 2D roguelite with a similar sense of spectacle and progression, but with traditional weapon aiming.

It’s currently free to keep from the Epic Games Store.

Head over to its store page before 4pm GMT tomorrow (January 3rd) and you can add it to your Epic Games account for free. It’s part of Epic’s ongoing holiday freebies, with a new game given away each day.

20 Minutes Till Dawn is normally £4 (and has been previously discounted), so this isn’t necessarily a huge saving. It is a fun game, though, and meaty enough to be great value even if you’re handing over a few quid. That’s in part because, like its inspiration, you can unlock new characters and passive boosts, and then combine those into builds in interesting ways.

Alice O fell for the game pretty hard back in 2022, where she found that killing the framerate was its “secret real win condition”:

It took a while. Though I’d played for 12 hours (plus more in the demo before launch) and had ostensibly won all the way up to difficulty level 9, I hadn’t won in a way that mattered to me. I hadn’t yet managed to do anything so daft that even the game took one look at my screen and said, “Whew, hold on, give me a moment to catch up here.” It feels good to finally win
20MTD’s developer is now working on a spin-off, Emberpath, which abandons the striking art style while seemingly maintaining the progression systems. It has no release date yet.