The Stack

Probably anyone reading this blog knows, but: Itch.io has a truly monumental bundle going right now, called the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, consisting of “1,659 items” (as of this writing; the number keeps going up ¹The final count is 1704. ), mostly games, many of them good, for a minimum price of $5, all proceeds going to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Community Bail Fund. It’s running for just two more days. A more ambitious games blogger than myself could spend the rest of their life blogging just about this bundle.

Since such a massive collection is in obvious need of curation, people have been posting lists of their picks on social media. I figure I might as well do the same here. I’m not saying these are the only games in the bundle worth playing, just that they’re the ones that I personally have played and would recommend to others.

• Interactive Fiction and other largely text-based stuff
  • Voyageur: There are quite a few choice-based space-exploration games out there, but this is probably the most polished. Sort of a cross between 80 Days and FTL.
  • What Isn’t Saved (will be lost): A sci-fi meditation on memory and difficult choices. Almost unbearably tense.
  • Wheels of Aurelia: I’ve mentioned this one in passing before. It’s an interesting experiment in interactive dialogue: you’re talking while you’re driving, so your attention is split and the conversation is affected by what turns you make and how fast you go. Set in 1970s Italy, with a story very concerned with the politics of that time and place.
  • Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once the Fat Lady Sings”: Claymation adventure game detective musical with interactive sung dialogue that actually manages to fit the beat of the background music.
  • Extreme Meatpunks Forever: A lo-fi Visual Novel about gay fugitives in a messed-up world, peppered with mech-fighting action sequences where you try to shove fascists off cliffs. I don’t usually have a lot of patience for VNs, but Meatpunks has a unique energy.
  • The Quiet Sleep: Hard to describe. It’s an abstract system for telling stories by means of resource acquisition on a hex grid.
• 2D Platformers
  • Celeste: Previously. Extremely polished, the pinnacle of Matt Thorson’s 2D platformer career. Tough as nails, but paradoxically kind-hearted.
  • And Yet It Moves: Previously. Puzzle-platformer in a rotatable environment with a torn-paper aesthetic.
  • Pikuniku: I’m only a little ways into this, but it’s a metroidvania with a very strong aesthetic. Characters are simplified in a way that complements their comically blunt demeanors.
  • BasketBelle: Previously. Intriguingly combines shooting hoops with platformer mechanics.
  • Four-Sided Fantasy: Another high-concept puzzle-platformer, based on giving the player control of whether the screen has wraparound or not at any given moment. It’s a device that turns out out to have more legs than it sounds.
• Other Explorey Environments
  • Oxenfree: I’m not wild about horror movie tropes, but the interaction and dialogue system is definitely worth a look.
  • A Short Hike: A charming and relaxing mountain climb in a recreational area with anthropomorphic animals. Kind of like a one-sitting single-player Animal Crossing.
  • Minit: A high-concept action-adventure, exploring what uses a game can make of short time constraints. Very well-done formal experiment.
  • Anodyne: A light, fanciful action-adventure, similar to an early Zelda game in both mechanics and graphical style, but more wry and deliberately surreal.
  • The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human: Previously. Melancholy 2D underwater metroidvania. Just you and a submarine against immense monsters amidst the ruins of human civilization.
  • Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, And The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist: Fourth-wall-demolishing first-person nonsense from one of the Stanley Parable people.
• Other Puzzle Games
  • Mu Cartographer: Previously. Recommended for anyone who likes fiddling with unlabeled controls to figure out what they do.
  • GNOG: A collection of pure jiggery-pokery puzzles themed around grotesque headboxes.
  • Adjacency: One of those abstract puzzle games with soothing ambient music. Simple mechanics, but gets very tricky (in ways other than increasing the number of parts).
  • Puzzle Puppers: Basically, numberlink with elongated corgis. Has some complications beyond that, like teleporting tunnels, but that’s the essence of it.
• Not cleanly categorizable as any of the above
  • Art Sqool: More satisfying as an aesthetic than a game, but worth a look just for that.
  • Nuclear Throne: One of the best action-roguelikes out there.
  • Glittermitten Grove: A delightful fairy management sim. I hear it has some secrets. Maybe you’ll have better luck finding them than me.
  • Windosill: Previously. Short, dark, surreal twitch-and-wiggle game from Vectorpark.
  • Metamorphabet: Another Vectorpark game. I don’t like it as much as Windosill — it’s pitched more at the kiddies, so it stops short of giving them nightmares. Still worthy, though.
  • Quadrilateral Cowboy: A satisfying hackery game, and one of the few cyberpunk games to take the “punk” part to heart.
  • Old Man’s Journey: A peaceful and aesthetically pleasing travel story where the main mechanic is raising and lowering the level of the ground.
  • The Hex: Six videogame characters from different genres meet at an inn to witness a murder. I didn’t think much of this at first — it seemed indulgent, and the mini-games built around each character not well-developed. But it won me over with its increasing complexity, deepening story, and pervasively sinister atmosphere.

Mu Cartographer is a lovely little user interface puzzle. You’re presented with a screenful of knobs, sliders, and radio buttons, and have to make sense of them with no instructions. There’s some guidance provided by blue outlines indicating useful configurations, but only experimentation will tell you why they’re useful or how to accomplish them.

The largest element on the screen, the game’s focus, is a circular window into an algorithmic landscape. Various of the controls alter this view in various ways — the most straightforward being controls that scroll your view around, or zoom in and out, but there are also ways to change the color map, or the height of the hills, or the turbulence. This stuff makes it seem less like a real landscape and more like just a model that you’re manipulating, but the game counters this with story. Certain discoveries within the UI also reveal journal entries by three people lost in the world you’re manipulating, recording their terror and awe at the shifting mountains, their determination to somehow map the place anyway.

After a certain point, however, you’re pretty much figured out the mechanics, and the game settles into a loop, iterating on established tasks in a search for landmarks that are only visible when everything is configured just right, and their attendant journal entries. This phase of the game lasted longer than I would have liked, but it’s still a fairly short game for all that. One thing worth noting: There is a part of the UI that’s essentially a hint system, providing pointers to the landmarks, but using up a limited supply of fuel to do so. I didn’t understand what the fuel gauge was indicating until it was empty. If I had, I might have used it differently, saved it up for the times I was really stuck. On the other hand, maybe the initial floundering stages were the part where I needed it the most. It’s hard to say.

The ending… well, in a sense, there isn’t one. There definitely isn’t a roll-credits moment, but that’s not what I mean. There’s an endgame after you find all the landmarks, a new set of options that let you unlock a semi-hidden epilogue for each of the three explorers, summarizing their condition. But nothing changes for them. They’re still just as lost as when you started. It’s the sort of ending that leaves you wondering if that’s all there is. And to be clear: I’m not complaining. It’s kind of haunting. I suspect this ending will stick with me more than a conventionally satisfying one would.