Games featured in itch.io's unprecendentedly massive bundle with 100% of the proceeds going to the NAACP and bail funds for Black Lives Matter protesters.
Hi all, like many of you probably have I got myself a heap o' games from the Itch.io BLM charity bundle and then were suddenly overwhelmed with just the amount in there. So, rather than ask for help, I spent a good chunk of the last 24hrs going through every entry (it's currently 57 pages of files) and making myself a bit of a playlist to whittle down the list to a much more manageable number. After, I thought it might be good to have a forum place where people can pop links to their Itch.io collections links or even individual recommendations.
My list is lacking any table top RPGs (I have been out of the scene for a while so wouldn't know where to start), asset packs, visual novels and soundtracks - all of which there are lots of. I'd say my list is about one third previously played recommendations, one third I've been told to try out or they've featured on here at some point and one third "this thing caught my eye".
I've played around 8 games from the bundle so far and the two that I'd recommend of those are Diaries of a Space Port Janitor and Boreal Tenebrae. The latter I actually bought it on Steam the weekend prior, but now that it's part of the bundle I very much recommend it. The game is buggy, but the few issues I ran into were fixed by restarting. If you played and liked Night in the woods or Kentucky Route Zero it plays in the same thematic space as those and has a strong aesthetic as well. Took around 2 hours to complete Boreal Tenebrae so it's not a huge time commitment. Diaries was around 6 hours if I had to guess.
I didn't create an itch playlist, but I do have the following games downloaded to play throughout the week
I did a stream last week where I took a quick look at 6 games in it, if you want a direct example of some of them. But I will say out of that stream 10S is the one I've played the most of since. It's like a squash-breakout-bullet-hell arcade? Novel take on the action, but also just feel pretty good. And oozes with ominous style.
Ganbare Super Strikers got added in there later on, and it's a soccer tactics game? It's cool. It made me realize I remember how the offsides rule works, so I guess thanks Danny O'Dwyer. It gave me some real Kunio-kun series vibes, and I really look forward to trying the 2p mode.
Gladiabots is a neat... programming game? I didn't play much Gratuitous Space Battles, but I do own a copy of Carnage Heart for PS1. You're programming a team of robots with Scratch-style programming blocks, but to make them play team DM / domination / multi-flag CTF style game modes. I think programming is a fun challenge, but it can also make you feel real dumb when your dudes just stand there because you didn't realize none of your logic actually triggers from neutral. It's cool!!!
Vienna Automobile Society is a neat...I'm pretty sure it's a racing game. It's also kind of more a rhythm game? It's like an abstracted racing game, but not as far as like a F1 management simulation game. You only shift up and down and pick entry points on turns. Everything else is interpreted, and the things you do control have clear signaling in a really abstracted way that feel more like some of the racing board games I've played. Except it all happens in real time, so you have to react fast, or spend a lot of time doing practice laps to figure out what the rhythm of the track feels like. And THEN you add 3 other players and suddenly you have to worry about fighting for racing lines and crashes. Don't know much staying power it's going to have, but it's pretty clever!
Skeletris Hey, do you like an inventory tetris game? This is that. This whole thing is that. A basic rouge like but every item and passive stat upgrade is a puzzle piece. Have at it.
I still have like 50 tabs open just of stuff that caught my eye. Didn't think to make a sharable collection out of it, but that sounds like a good idea.
@lcom: I tried to go through the bundle list but navigating Itch.io launcher and itch.io site was cumbersome and decided I was just happy to donate/purchase the bundle for $50 and call it day. But I guess I will be check out Gladiabots and Skeletris. Those seem pretty interesting. Thanks for the list.
@merxworx01: My understanding is that it was basically the size of this bundle that caused them to impliment a search box on the "download the contents of your bundle" page. So if you already know the name of the thing you're looking for, you should be able to get right to it now!
Great recommendations here! I think the only one I've played is Night in the Woods so after buying this I tried getting some kind of overview by extracting all the titles into this alphabetically sorted list: pastebin
Hope it helps folks out to maybe discover some indie game they had heard of before (or wacky new ones).
I could possibly get the descriptions in there as well with some more work but I'm a little tired.
Found out that someone made a concept page so maybe this topic should live there?
Anyways, I made a backlog/highlights list of singleplayer games with story on GB because those are my jam and itch.io is an even bigger pain to navigate :) Might update it when I hopefully eventually get to playing some of these games.
If you're also into old computer stuff, there are a few Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum games in the bundle (with ROM/disk image files that you can copy to a real machine or use on the MiSTeR or an emulator of your preference), also a couple of NES and Genesis games:
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