Itch.io has some cool shit
I've been playing catch up on all my twitter bookmarks
Inspired by playing Xenosphere last month, and with a horiffic degree of choice paralysis in what project to focus on next, I took the weekend to work my way through my twitter bookmarks, where I had a score of recommendations for small indie-of-indie game projects, most of which are available on itch.io for free, or at least pay what you want.
And let me tell you, there’s some cool shit on itch.io! Stuff you can’t really find anywhere else. Here’s some of the games I played:
LXD Red Honey
Metroid-likes are ten a penny these days, but you can understand why. It’s a really fun, engaging format, and people are still finding ways to make the formula feel fresh.
This one has touches of Thomas Was Alone and Ultros about it. Tight platforming, moving and shooting, taking stock of the world around you, collecting resources to grow plants and find new ways to expand your exploration of the world and more efficiently navigate it.
LXD Red Honey was a joy to play, a game full of great little moments, and even though it can be quite punishing at times I still found myself encouraged to keep pushing on with it.
You can get LXD Red Honey here
Packing Up the Rest of Your Stuff on the Last Day at Your Old Apartment
I’ve waxed lyrical about Turnfollow games before. I adore Wide Ocean Big Jacket, and found Before the Green Moon a profoundly moving experience. This precursor to those games is a short, sharp exploration of the choices that have to be made when moving on.
You move around a bedroom, picking up items and packing them away. You have to pack carefully because you don’t have much room, and you quickly realise that you are going to have to make some sacrifices.
What goes and what stays is up to you. The emotional weight of those choices is up to you.
Much like the brilliant Unpacking, Packing Up tells a story through its gameplay, only here the story is your own. How that moves you depends on your own experiences with moving house, what a lifetime of objects means to you personally.
I cannot recommend this enough.
Sylvie Lime
Having recently listened to an episode of Eggplant: The Secret Lives of Games of which she was a guest, I feel a certain amount of shame that i’ve taken so long to engage with Sylvie’s work.
Her design ethos and the playfulness with which she approaches familiar tropes is nothing short of inspiring, and the apex of all this is a quirky puzzle platformer, Sylvie Lime.
This is a game about exploring the nature of games. A bizarre logic puzzle full of fake walls, puzzling abilities and a surprising amount of customisation in how you meet its challenges.
This is a really cool little thing, a game that feels both brand new and a beautiful homage to everything that came before.
Give this a shot, and let me know what you think.
Summoning Solitaire
Out of all the games on this list, this was the one I bounced off the most. Summoning Solitaire is a game about moving cards around a pentagram, in order to get a specific score.
It’s a clever reimagining of the rules of that one particular card game, something that requires a certain degree of strategic thought, but unfortunately I found the experience somewhat limiting, not to mention how frustratingly slow the UI is.
Selecting cards as text options in this the year of our lord 2024 is a baffling choice, no doubt intentional, but one that I found very annoying.
It’s a shame because I love the presentation of this, has a kind of haunted house vibe that looks really cool.
One for the sickos out there I’m sure.
Sudden Death
We need to have a conversation about visual novels at some point because they get so aggressively shit on by the wider gaming community despite having some of the most inventive, well written stories in the entire medium.
I get it, clicking a button to progress text is hardly thrilling, but there are so many examples of making the medium work for you in the creation of these stories that I find myself increasingly drawn to these projects.
Sudden Death is one such thing, a short story about gay sex, juicing and good ol’ fashioned football. Coupling traditional text boxes with news article style posts, comments sections and more kinetic visual elements to craft a really fascinating, quite dark story of love and trauma that you can read to completion in under an hour.
It’s all playable in browser too, so you don’t even need to do any downloading.
Commonweal
This is technically a demo rather than a full game, but in my brief time with it I found an incredibly cool, moody survival game about scouring a barren land for fuel for one big eternal fire.
There’s not a lot else to say about this game, it’s a hell of a mood. Dark, rain stricken wildernesses, dotted periodically with the remnants of communities that once existed. Somewhere out there, a whisper of a song plays faintly adrift a solitary radio tower.
Your character, tiny, frozen in the middle of all things unholy, the character model slowly, subtly turning blue as the cold and the wet gets to you.
The elation at finally finding a piece of fuel followed only by the dread of figuring out how to get back to the furnace without freezing to death.
What this expands into being I don’t know, but what’s here already is extremely evocative.
That’s it for this week. Truth be told I needed more time in the oven for this article on Scavengers Reign I’m working on, but let that be something to look forward to next week.
Until then, have a great week, i’ll see you again soon.