The Stanley Parable and Watch Dogs are this week's Epic Games Store freebies

We've missed the Thursday mark, but there's still time to snag some free games over on Epic's shelves. This week, the house of Sweeney are giving away The Stanley Parable and Watch Dogs. One is a sprawling, meta-textual comedy narrative about control and the nature of stories themselves. The other has a bloke with a neat cap. You've got until next Thursday to grab 'em for free, at which time they'll be replaced by Figment and Tormentor X Punisher.

Developed by Davey Wreden and William Pugh, The Stanley Parable is a tangled web of jokes, endings, meta-commentary and non-euclidean office architecture masquerading as a walking simulator. Not to be confused with The Stanley Parable (Wreden's original Half-Life 2 mod) or The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe (a polished-up re-release from Pugh's studio Crows Crows Crows, due to release later this year), The Stanley Parable is still riotously funny even seven years on.

Hell, Nathan Greyson's The Stanley Parable review is an all-timer, too. In lieu of dropping a nice wordy quote here, I'll let you click over and take it in for yourself. Enjoy.

Watch Dogs the first is certainly a videogame from Ubisoft, as Graham wrote in his Watch Dogs review. Hailing from peak fatigue with Ubi's open-world tower climbers, it had some neat ideas regarding hackable environments. But it's honestly hard to recommend Aiden "Iconic" Pearce's Chicago slog over the decisively better Watch Dogs 2, which delivered a more joyful adventure concerning an endearingly dorky gang of zoomers.

But hey, it's a free little digital Chicago to explore - one that often convinced Graham that Watch Dogs was, perhaps, "too expensive to hate". That alone might be worth a download. Just don't expect a thrilling game behind the art.

Both are free to keep forever until next Thursday, at which point the great wheel of freebies ticks over once again. Your free games next week are sinister surrealist symphony Figment, and metal as fuck top-down demon blaster Tormentor X Punisher.

Disclosure: I'm fairly chummy with the folks over at Crows Crows Crows, including The Stanley Parable co-creator William Pugh. I have yet to befriend a real crow. It'll happen.