itch.io: Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality

UPDATE: The bundle has expanded considerably, and now includes over 1,500 items. It’s also raised over five million dollars. I’ll be adding new items to the lists below as I find them. If the thing’s still running at the point you’re reading this, do check it out: it’s a rare chance to get over $9,000 worth of goodies for as little as five bucks (though I really do hope you’ll chip in a bit more), all while supporting a great cause.

For the next nine days, itch.io is running a Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, with all proceeds going to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Community Bail Fund. There’s already been an extraordinary level of support (just over a million dollars – though that’ll probably become hilariously out of date even before this post is published). If you want to contribute to the cause, I feel as though this is a good way: I suspect that the sheer scale of the endeavour and the number of people involved will give it a reach that individual donations wouldn’t be able to match.

I’m not kidding about how big this is, by the way: it’s quite possibly the largest bundle of any kind ever put together, with over 700 games (and various other things) on offer. One thing to mention would be that some of these items are free or pay-what-you-want anyway: my own contribution, Draw Nine, has never had a price on it. Bundles on Itch are less about getting a fantastic deal and more about gathering together items for some kind of cause or on some sort of theme.

That said, this particular bundle offers over $3,000 worth of items for just $5, so it is also a fantastic deal. Please do consider bunging in a little extra if you can afford it, though: this is a truly extraordinary amount of work that’s being offered up and some of these titles would be worth much more than a fiver on their own. Itch has put together their own selection of top titles to look at, but since this is my blog and clearly you’re reading it, here are a few of my picks:

Games I’ve played and liked:

  • Far From Noise: a neat little narrative thing.
  • 2000:1: A Space Felony: a murder mystery set on board a spaceship (which appeals to me for obvious reasons), with a particularly clever way of asking you whodunnit.
  • Switch ‘n Shoot: a one-button shoot ’em up that was a bit of an inspiration for Bananarchy.
  • Quadrilateral Cowboy: a cyberpunk heist game in which you wander into buildings and steal stuff using gadgets controlled through commands you type into a computer inside the game.
  • Astrologaster: you are an Elizabethan astrologer and your main influence upon the game is giving people horoscopes. The historically exact stars can be interpreted in a bunch of different ways, some of them hilarious.
  • Once Upon A Crime In The West: by the creators of 2000:1: A Space Felony. It’s not set in space but it’s still pretty murder-y.
  • Super Hexagon: a simple but fiendishly challenging game. Definitely consider installing the Android version – it’s best in small bursts.
  • BEACON: a (nearly) top-down shooter in which you start over with a clone of your character whenever they die, mutating a little each time.
  • Gladiabots: another EGX discovery. This one involves using a flowchart-style system to set up the AI of a team of arena battle robots. It plays a lot like an old Flash game I really enjoyed back in the day (but now can’t remember the name of).
  • A Normal Lost Phone: Yet another thing I initially found at EGX (but later got through a Humble Bundle). This is a neat narrative game wrapped in an extremely elegant package: play it on Android to get the full experience.
  • TANGLEWOOD: A modern release for the SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis. It’s a solid platformer that really does capture the magic of that ’90s generation of consoles (probably because it’s a ROM created for that specific hardware).
  • LYNE: An elegant puzzle game – and another good little time-waster to have on your phone.
  • BFF or Die: I met the developer at Reading Comic Con while showing Girth Loinhammer’s Most Exponential Adventure and had a little go. Definitely a game to pick up with your friends!
  • Octodad: Deadliest Catch: This thing was on PS4 shortly after launch and was available on a demo console while I was working at a game shop. You play a loving father desperately trying to conceal the fact that he is an octopus in a suit. Good, clumsy fun. (It apparently began as a student project, also included in the bundle!)
  • Can Androids Pray: Red: A brief but brilliant interactive experience.
  • FORGET THE BRAKES!: A pleasingly fiddly game in which you control two train carriages joined together with what I can only assume to be bungee cord.
  • Annwyn: The Otherworld: I’ve been following this title across various events and having a go pretty much every chance I get. It plays a whole lot like The Sentinel (originally for the BBC Micro).
  • Receiver: I’ve written about this one before. It’s a first person shooter in which your weapon is given a truly absurd level of detail: pretty much every major component has its own button to control it. The result is an agonisingly challenging game that’s nevertheless great fun to tackle.
  • River Tiles: A free browser game. It’s not immediately obvious how to play even with the instructions, but makes for an engaging little puzzle after a bit of trial and error.
  • Electric Zine Maker: Does what it says on the tin.
  • Don’t Move: It’s been a while since I played this, but I remember it being very clever.

If I’ve spoken highly of your work in the past and it’s in the bundle but not mentioned here, do let me know. With over 700 items to skim through, there’s every chance I’ve missed it!

Games I hear are good:

I won’t bother trying to describe these for the most part, since many are already well known and in some cases that’s as much as I can say about them.

Things I just discovered that look neat:

For these I’ll let you know what it was that caught my eye, but obviously my opinion of them doesn’t mean much at this point.

  • Widget Satchel: You play a ferret in space. Enough said.
  • Croissants: I’m getting Infinifactory vibes from this. It seems to involve more pastry, though.
  • Test Tube Titans: Wrecking cities using procedurally generated, physics-controlled monsters? I’m in!
  • Purple Noise Echo: Looks like an interesting strategy game. Still in development, but the screenshots look pretty polished and I get the impression the developer has a good handle on what they’re setting out to create.
  • BearFX Explosions | Pixel VFX Pack: One of many selections of game assets included in the bundle, this one is exclusively made up of 256×256 animated pixel art explosions. I don’t know about you, but I can always use some more explosions.
  • Spring Falls: A chilled-out puzzle game. Having had a surprisingly good time with Evergarden, I’m keen to see another take on the hex-based landscape with flowers puzzle genre.
  • Dogs Throwing Swords II: Three Barks to the Wind: I’m a big fan of games with strange, unwieldy titles, and this one looks like a neat take on the side-scrolling shoot ’em up as well.
  • Kenney Game Assets: 20,000 game assets (including 3D objects, sprites, and fonts). I recognise some of these from the GDevelop 5 tutorials I’ve been using – I trust the other several thousand are similarly polished.
  • Mewnbase: Basically The Martian, if Matt Damon were a cute little space cat. Still in development, but also the kind of thing that looks fun just to mess around with, so the inevitable bugs hopefully shouldn’t get in the way of having a good time.
  • Game Development Cheatsheets – 2018 Edition: Possibly a tad outdated by now, but these still look as though they could be handy for anyone looking to get into working in games (or anyone who’s around a bunch of other people looking to get into working in games).
  • Throw Cubes into Brick Towers To Collapse Them: Do I really need to explain?
  • Golf Peaks: An intriguing card-based golf-themed puzzle game.
  • Helium Rain: This looks like a fairly ambitious space game. I’m mostly just interested in the zero-g piloting.
  • Crest: A god game where (if I understand correctly) your only influence lies in the commandments you give your followers at the very beginning.
  • Attrition: Tactical Fronts: Despite the title, this appeals partly because it promises short, small-scale hex-based battles. (If you’ve ever played anything in the Civilization series, you’ll know that sort of thing has a tendency to drag on longer than is ideal.)
  • Ungrounded: Looks a lot like Prune.
  • Hero Generations: An RPG in which each turn represents an entire year of your character’s life (so your whole quest is more of a family tradition than a one-person job).
  • Glitch Brushes: Dithering and Text: A nice, varied selection of glitchy-looking brushes. Not sure what they’re for in terms of Photoshop/GIMP/etc. but I’ve never had too much trouble getting this sort of thing working in the past. (If this looks useful to you, check out Glitch Pixel Brushes II and Glitch Brushes: Maze & Organic Textures as well.)
  • Flash Point: Fire Rescue: A turn-based tactical squad game that doesn’t involve shooting stuff for once! I’d actually be entirely happy to have one more XCOM-style title to try out, but having seen what Invisible Inc did with the format, I’m keen to see another more innovative take on it.
  • A Day in the Woods: Same developer as Flash Point. This one is hex-based and looks a little more like a digital board game (which is weird, because Flash Point actually is a digital version of an existing board game, apparently).
  • Salvage Solitude 8140: A slightly rough-looking first person space station repair thingy. The game itself seems to involve gradually expanding the number of habitable rooms available to you, which I think could be neat, and it was made in a month using the experimental Linux version of Unity which gets it some brownie points from me.
  • Epic Battle Fantasy 4: I remember playing previous instalments on Newgrounds and enjoying them, but it was so long ago that I’m hesitant to put this in the “games I’ve tried” section.
  • Warden: Melody of the Undergrowth: A highly polished looking action-adventure game by the developer of Attrition: Tactical Fronts. I’m noticing that the titles that stand out to me are often by the same handful of developers, so if you see something you like then do check out the creator’s other efforts!
  • The Twine® Grimoire: Volume 1: Detailed instructions on customising the appearance of games made with Twine 2? *Homer Simpson drooling noises*
  • BoomTown: A game that involves laying down trails of gunpowder in order to demolish buildings.
  • Hive Time: Bee-themed management/base-building sim.
  • DORFROMANTIK: another hex-based strategy with a board game look to it.
  • You Used To Be Someone: Looks absolutely nightmarish.
  • Cell Tune: A Conway’s Game of Life style simulation game.
  • Backspace Bouken: I’m keen to try pretty much anything that uses typing as a game mechanic.
  • Season’s Beatings: It’s kind of like Hotline Miami and it’s kind of like Superhot and for some reason it’s extremely festive as well. (It also has a truly excellent trailer.)
  • Orison of Mercury: Looks just a little like Seedship.
  • Silk: Boasts the largest handcrafted open world ever made!
  • Odd Realm: Looks a little like a more approachable take on the Dwarf Fortress game format.
  • Bewildebots: A puzzle game involving a bunch of robots that all follow your commands simultaneously. It sounds extremely frustrating.
  • Vaporwave Background Pack: A small selection of vaporwave wallpapers for your computer.
  • Mini Loops: Short loops of music. I can see these getting annoying if left running over and over, but they’re well constructed, work nicely together, and could pull a lot of weight in any game where you want to minimise minimise the amount of data that has to be included.
  • Bear-ly There: Scientifically accurate bear simulator. Bears move through a combination of ragdoll physics and uncontrollable rolling, right?
  • POM SIMULATOR 9000: An ambitious looking Twine game. I’m curious about it primarily to see how it works as a visual novel, but the story sounds interesting too!
  • Even in Arcadia: Another weird looking art game. I love this photo collage sort of style – it reminds me of the “world of the living” opening of Grim Fandango.
  • Penance: Low-poly first person shooter, with a vaguely Doom sort of theme going on.
  • Cluster Gun: One of those “build your own vehicle” construction games, but there are no engines or motors – you can only move using the recoil of your many, many guns.
  • SYSCRUSHER: Stylish cyberpunk first person shooter.
  • Bold Blade: A game revolving around a ridiculously oversized anime sword.
  • Airships: Conquer the Skies: Build your own 2D airship and use it in battles with destructible terrain.
  • Verdant Skies: Looks ever so slightly like a sci-fi Stardew Valley.
  • Crescent Loom: Another neat programming/creature-building/life game. I haven’t listed every one of these I’ve found, but there are a lot that share similar elements and they all seem to have something to offer. This one is also available free to play in-browser, though minus a few features.
  • A Hole New World: A nifty platformer. One of the gifs on the page suggests you can drop through the floor into a kind of underworld, where gravity is reversed.

That’s it for now!

I might update this post with new recommendations later on, given the sheer size of the thing: this is a small handful of titles I’m already familiar with (at least to an extent), plus an even smaller handful that happened to catch my attention while I was scrolling through looking for those.

The other thing to mention would be that if you have a game (or anything else) on Itch yourself, it’s apparently not too late to offer it for inclusion in the bundle (at the time of writing). It would be sensible to double-check this is still an option before posting in that thread, but if you have a project you want to contribute then do consider going for it. I’ve seen a few of these bundles attract huge amounts of attention from gamers, but this is the first I know of that’s involved this many developers.

FURTHER UPDATE: The bundle will not be accepting any more content. However, if you’d like to offer something in support, you’re encouraged to submit a project URL through the same thread as before. They’ll be included in a supporters collection due to be set up soon.

3 comments

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