Itch.io's mega-bundle

[elf]

Itch.io's Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality has a little over 24 hours to run right now, and over 1700 games for a minimum donation of $5. It currently stands at over $6.5 million dollars raised, which will be split 50/50 between the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Community Bail Fund.

We plan on talking about these games for MONTHS. Maybe years. There's a lot of games, including several award-winners, a lot of games with unique groundbreaking ideas, and a whole swarm of charming little games obviously made for a single focused interest and very nicely shared with a wider community.

How to Find Stuff in the Collection:

• I made a list of the whole set as a Google Spreadsheet (up to June 11; it's about 50 games shy of the current collection, and there'll probably be a few more by the end)
• Someone built a Show Me a Random Game widget, which has filters!
• Prokopetz' 30 game list of "so... what's good in this set?" He didn't stop at 30 because that's all, but because 30 is a good start and "all the good games" would be overwhelming.

Misc Other Info
The set includes more than 30 single-player tabletop RPG games; I'm eager to try all of them.

The two largest downloads are Stardrop, 9gb, and Play with Gilbert, 4gb. Most games are well under 1gb. Some games are... tiny. Very tiny. As in, "two-page PDF" tiny.

There are 20+ soundtracks in the bundle, including one attached to a ttrpg.

There are two ARGs (alternative reality game) in the set: The Missing Locksmith, which looks like a nice "chase these clues onto the real internet" game, and BRKÖUT , which I thought was an homage to Atari 2600 games until I watched the trailer.

There are four escape-room games. Three desktop widgets to entertain or annoy you. 24 LARPs, to get you away from your computer.

62 works of interactive fiction (not counting visual novels; those are a separate category, with some overlap), 3 anthologies of short stories, 3 light novels, and 12 comics.

I hardly ever play "video games" and I love this bundle because it's got so many things that are in my range of interest. I don't look on "video game" stores/platforms for these things because I know they're buried, hard to find in the endless list of adventure RPG things and MMOs and first-person shooters and tower-defense games.

There are 38 items tagged "Walking Simulator." I am so looking forward to playing these.

...and now I have a comm to talk about them, instead of flooding my regular readers with babble about games they may not care about.

Anyone reading this - what games in the set look interesting to you? What are you looking forward to trying?

Comments

[melannen]

I have only looked at the first six pages or so, but honestly the thing I'm most excited about so far is the pixel art fireplace simulator. It just sounds really relaxing. :D

[elf]

I wish I liked pixel art; there'd be so many more games that I could enjoy. :(

I plan to try out the fireplace sim anyway because it does sound nice.

[felyn]

The "Alone in..." solo RPGs really got my attention, mostly because they are so simple and can be played anywhere. I've posted 2 gameplays for them so far, one for Alone Among The Stars and the other for Alone in the Ancient City. (AAtS isn't in the bundle, so I ended up buying it and a couple other hacks for it separately.)

Otherwise, mostly For The Honour and Glitter Hearts RPGs. I owned Blades in the Dark already, and it's great.

The solo RPGs in general are gonna be my besties, I think. I don't have a virtual gaming group, and no one's meeting IRL right now!

[elf]

I am going to try so many of the solo ttrpgs. Just looking into the descriptions, I can see categories and themes showing up.

[alexseanchai]

the random clicky up there (thanks for link!) presented me with Soma Spirits: Rebalanced which is tentatively intriguing? by which I mean I have been playing for two hours and I have two save files because an hour-ish in there's a key decision point (signposted enough in advance I could play one route far enough to catch some of the implications, save slot 2, go back to slot 1, and play the other way).

[elf]

I had fun poking at the randomizer with various filter settings but have been too busy to try any of the actual video games. Am so looking forward to it; so many of them look amazing.

[quietmoon]

There are so many things in this bundle that I would have just never found otherwise. I think that's what I'm most excited for! It includes indie darlings like Celeste and Night in the Woods, but there's all this other cool stuff that you'd never find on platforms like Steam (or at the very least, not without intensive searching).

I was especially excited to see One Night Stand included - it's one of my favourite games, and I'm happy this bundle gave it some more exposure.

[green_knight]

I just want to say thank you for doing the work and making it public; I'm completely overwhelmed by this bundle but would like to take the time to enjoy at least some of the offerings.