We’re talking about itch.io’s Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality:
It costs a minimum donation of $5. It includes about 800 games (so far, more are being added every couple of days).
All the money goes to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Community Bail Fund. It’s raised almost $5mil as of this writing.
It includes some prominent indie games, little indie gems, some game dev asset bundles, many tabletop RPG pdfs, game jam games galore, and tons of other junk.
It’s also been a mess to sort through because itch’s systems can’t quite handle a bundle this large.
So if nothing else, this thread is good for spreading the news of games that have been added and for recommending games in the bundle that are worth playing.
I was asking this in the bargain thread before: Has anyone played Democratic Socialist Simulator? It was one of the games highlighted on the first page this morning so I figure someone thought it was worth highlighting.
Also, I don’t think the NCAA is involved in this at all :)
A rec list that I blatantly stole from the Bargain Thread (as of last viewing, it didn’t include anything from the latest dump of ~500 new things):
and one that I blatantly stole from Reddit:
Haven’t been in much of a gaming mood lately, but will hopefully get out of that funk in the near future and have some personal recommendations to add.
I’ll highlight a few games that aren’t the obvious ones. Sorry for repeating myself a little bit from other threads:
Walden is a thoughtful and quite deep open-world game based on Thoreau’s time at Walden Pond. It beautifully recreates full day/night and seasonal cycles. It gives you a lot of activities to do, from spotting wildlife to gardening to tracking down Ralph Emerson’s lost library books (it’s slightly less silly than that sounds). It’s not edutainment. It’s a real game, well-designed, and worth playing.
Mu Cartographer was the first game I ran across in what has become a small genre, most prominently in the form of Observation and In Other Waters: Here’s a mysterious user interface… Figure it out. It’s modest, but a very satisfying exploration game.
Starseed Pilgrim was an indie darling five or so years ago when it came out. You’re standing on a chunk of floating blocks and you can plant a variety of seeds to do stuff. The point is to figure out what the seeds do and how to make them work for you. And even to figure out what the goal itself is, which is pretty obscure at first. Perplexing, but rewarding.
Orion Trail is a very silly and more casual FTL clone. I don’t know if there’s much more to say than that.
Plant Daddy is a small real-time game of growing plants in your apartment. The plants are randomly generated with a lot of different properties, and you can actually analyze them to learn the random seed that determines their qualities and share that with others so they can grow the same plants.
And I’m going to tell you again to play Wide Ocean, Big Jacket! You have no excuse now. It’s a maybe an hour and a half long and brilliant.
The philosophy behind it speaks to me. Basically, it’s a 60fps loop with a reasonable set of game primitives and some state management. Building up your game by iterating your small codebase is intuitive.
Oh I meant to say, in case people aren’t aware: One feature of itch is that you can create custom Collections. So one way to organize things and not forget about games without having to wade through that big bundle list all the time is to go to a game’s page and select “Add to Collection” and put it in a group. I have a “To Play” and a “Good Stuff” collection, and I almost wish I’d made a couple tiers of games that look like they’re worth trying out. Play Sooner/Play Later.
Of course, you still need to know the game exists to get it in a collection, and you’ll also need to figure out how to get it into your library so it knows you own it. And that’s the really frustrating part of the process right now.
I’ll recommend the PNP RPG Troika! It’s a very weird, surreal sci-fi/fantasy world that reminded me of The Book of the New Sun, with a wonky old school rule-set. I haven’t played it, but it’s a pleasure to read with clever world building built deep into its character creation, spells, and monster list, but never explicitly conveyed.
Are you drawing a distinction between games and other things? Because as of your writing the bundle was at over 1400 items. :)
A couple RPGs worth highlighting:
From the creator of Six Billion Demons and a couple other folks. Extremely well regarded mech RPG with excellent, weird art.
One of the best indie RPGs in the world right now, a super smooth being-a-criminal-gang game set in a freaky sunless demon-blood-punk city. Inspiration for a bunch of hacks like Scum and Villainy, Band of Blades, Copperhead County, and Beam Saber, none of which are in the bundle AFAIK but are also worth checking out if Blades is your jam but you’d like to apply the mechanics to a different theme.
Ok, I signed up for an account at Itch, and downloaded their launcher. And it won’t install. “Something went wrong. Invalid file request”. Hmmm, I was going to get the bundle, but I’m now I’m not sure.
Edit. I tried it a few more times, and I was getting a different error each time. I get the impression that their file server is overwhelmed by the demand. So maybe I’ll forgive them and try later.
