Interesting games on itch.io: June 28

I’m a big fan of itch.io for the freedom and open platform that it allows for developers to be creative, experimental, and directly canvas the audience for feedback for games that are not yet ready for primetime on Steam and its ilk. In addition, itch.io allows you to be transgressive, subversive, and downright dangerous. It’s a true “art gallery” for game ideas and creative developers, and it should be celebrated for that.

What makes itch.io a little difficult at times is finding things that are interesting to play. Discovery is a real issue when great ideas are buried among high school projects and nasty little efforts to scam a quick buck from players. With that in mind, I thought what might be helpful to readers would be if I did a brief write-up of interesting games that I’ve come across on itch.io each week. In many cases these games will be unfinished or “in development,” but I’m highlighting them because they promise something special and are well worth keeping on the radar.

Note: I also haven’t played these games. I highlight them as interesting based on the itch.io description and concept. Where I find the time to do actual reviews or other coverage, I will compose separate articles on the game in question. These aren’t so much an endorsement (or piece of criticism) as they are a head’s up.

Naturally, if you want to pick up a couple of the Dee Dee visual novels while you’re there on itch.io to support our work here, I would be eternally grateful! There’s a new one that recently came out, Sade!

Comic Company Manager

It does look really good, too. It’s a first-person point-and-click adventure title, that takes the relatively uncommon step of using real photographs of real environments to provide the setting. The developers have implemented ambisonic audio to create a full surround sound effect, and there’s even VR support for maximum immersion. The developers have also promised complex puzzles and, of course, Cthulhu himself. Whether you would actually want to see Cthulhu in VR or not remains very much the question.

Next up we have a striking little game, featuring gorgeous low-resolution pixel art and what may well be a fascinating little story. Imaginaria is a game about life on an Antarctic station, developed from the first-hand account of life on such a station in the real world. It is “equal parts visual novel, point-and-click adventure, walking sim and documentary,” and the “documentary” bit is perhaps the most fascinating. I mean, who hasn’t been intrigued by what life must be like in Antarctica?

Finally for this week, we’ve got a game that is turning some heads on itch.io indeed – 10-103: Null Kelvin has already seen a huge number of comments and video playthroughs, and it has been generally very positive in tone. You can play this one in your browser, or download it, and it’s a horror-themed game with a neat pixel-art vibe.

It’s one of those “you need to explore an abandoned research facility” action 2D games, and those are common enough, but based on the comments there are a couple of qualities that have helped it to stand out: players seem to love the atmosphere of the game, the lore and storytelling, and it seems like it’s also quite the challenging experience. Currently, this game is only available on freeware sites or itch.io, but I would imagine, just based on the fan following that it clearly has, that it’s going to go places from here.