If you turn on – and update – your Evercade VS today, you’ll get a neat little surprise. A star icon will appear on the left hand side of the screen – go there and you’ll find the Evercade Game of the Month, which you can play throughout April absolutely free!

This month, the game on offer is the charming puzzler Tapeworm Disco Puzzle, which casts you in the role of a nightclub owning Earthworm who lives in a cassette tape. It’s a satisfying little puzzle game which really ramps up in difficulty around level 20, when the worm starts moving forward on its own through a fiendishly designed, very deadly maze. Up until that point, it’s a relatively relaxed and unhurried experience, though a few levels prior to that you’ll need to have some nifty moves to rescue wandering fleas from certain doom.

Though the game’s save states will only work while it’s the Game of the Month, that’s plenty of time to play through a large chunk of it – and, with passwords also given for each level, when Tapeworm Disco Puzzle is released as part of the Indie Heroes Collection 2 later this year, you’ll have given yourself a nice head start in this charming and inventive game.

Offering a free monthly game is another excellent example of the Evercade VS being one of the finest, best value consoles on the market right now. Not only does it – along with the original handheld console – bring back previously scarce, sometimes very expensive retro games alongside the more familiar titles, but it brings lesser known indie titles to a much wider audience than they’ve previously had.

The Evercade VS is, in my opinion, an absolutely essential piece of kit for any gamer who appreciates classic game design.

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