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.

I feel like the more of these posts I write, the more inclined I am to describe games in terms of other games. But even without that, it would be hard to play The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human, a metroidvania set in a system of beautiful undersea caverns, and not think of Aquaria.

Oh, it’s not the same as Aquaria. It’s shorter, it’s more pixelated, and the balance of gameplay is more tilted towards massive boss fights. And, most importantly, it’s far-future sci-fi instead of fantasy. The player character, who you never actually see, returns from a time-dilated space voyage in a sort of space submarine that doubles as a regular submarine, only to find that the human race has died out. This time around, when you find submerged ruins of a lost civilization, the lost civilization is ours. Douglas Adams once had a character come to understand the destruction of the Earth on a gut level by concentrating on just the destruction of McDonald’s. One room in this game has a wee pixelated McDonald’s as part of the background art. It has a similar effect.

It’s a bleak game. There is literally no hope of making things better. It’s far too late to save anyone. So instead you just pursue the implicit goals of the environment, exploring and fighting colossal sea monsters, and while you’re at it, why not torpedo some innocent fish? It’s not like there’s anyone around to care. Even challenging the bosses carries some sense of wantonness, destroying simply because you have nothing else to do. The one vaguely positive prospect is pursuing the mystery of what happened, finding recordings that give you gradual insight into how it all ended.

It all ended mainly because people couldn’t manage to cooperate on anything, even in the face of global catastrophe, instead polarizing into technocrats and eco-terrorists and devoting their efforts to fighting each other. Several of the bosses are relics of this time, monsters either man-made or inadvertently spawned, bearing witness to the sins of those they outlived. When the surviving humans eventually managed to build a vast machine capable of solving all their problems, it looked at the state of the world and decided humanity wasn’t worth saving. You confront this machine at the end, and it’s just as disappointed in you, for the destruction you’ve wreaked to get that far.

But for all its bleakness, it’s a pretty enjoyable game. It’s nice and explorey, and, as I’ve mentioned, has boss fights that truly give a sense of immensity. It strikes me that the underwater environment helps here: it gives the game an excuse to make movement in general slow, and that helps it to seem ponderous.