Rayman Origins is free on the Ubisoft Store right now

Rayman Origins
(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Rayman Origins is available as a free gift from Ubisoft right now, as part of its rolling 35th anniversary celebration. 

The cartoon platformer is available for free on the Ubisoft store through December 22 at 9 am local time, and the offer only applies to the PC version of the game. Thankfully, since Rayman Origins originally came out in 2011, its recommended system requirements - which include a graphics card with at least 128 MB of memory - are quite modest by the standards of today's best gaming PCs.

Rayman Origins takes the series back to its roots as a 2D platformer, letting players take control of the eponymous hero, his big pal Globox, or a small but fierce Teensy. All stages can be played either in single-player or via drop-in/drop-out local co-op, which makes this an especially good offer to capitalize on if you're looking for some new games to play with family over the holidays.

It was followed in 2013 by Rayman Legends, another cartoon platformer, which remains the last main entry in the Rayman series. OK, you might also count the Rabbids games as Rayman titles, since they started off as Rayman's enemies, and there's been more of them since then - but the swoopy haired, floating-hands-and-feet hero has been largely absent from Ubisoft's output since then.

To be fair, Ubisoft already has a lot on its plate just with the franchises that it's made games for recently, including kicking off Assassin's Creed Crossover Stories with the first centuries-spanning meeting of Eivor and Kassandra.

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Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.