A Normal Lost Phone Genre: Nonlinear narrative, found-object puzzle Bundle: Racial Justice Rating: 📱📱📱📱 (Content warning: high-level spoilers related to the themes of this game, which can be more surprising to encounter cold. However, I feel like the content warnings on the game itself already clue you in on some of it!) I've mentioned...

It's not possible to say whether an RPG session was MOSAIC Strict, because that strictness is a framework for writing, not play. Even so, when I started experimenting with writing under the paradigm, I wondered what it might be like to play a game whose formal rule set consisted only of compliant, attested modules. This week I got the ...

Prison of the Magi: Chapter 0 Genre: First-person adventure Bundle: Palestinian Aid Rating: 🗝🗝½. I finished it, but it was hard not to? You know what you're getting into with something titled "Chapter 0" and "More chapters to come!" in the teaser line: a short preview of some larger project the dev has cooking. Only time will tell if i...

Vampunks Genre: Goofy vampire hunting TTRPG Bundle: Racial Justice Sabe's rating: 🧛♀🧛♂. I guess I'd play it if it's the last day of a convention and it's the only table with open seats? Making an intentionally humorous tabletop RPG is not easy. The act of sitting around a table pretending that we're hunting vampires is inherently silly...

SC: Monster Pack 1 - DELUXE EDITION Genre: Art collection Bundle: Racial Justice Sabe's rating: 👼👼👼👼 Oh right, I'd forgotten about content packs! Let's go with the TTRPG rating scale, but where references to playing games map to "using this content". Seraph Circle, then! This is a collection of transparent-background image files with i...

The Crash of 20*6 Genre: Tabletop RPG supplement, system-agnostic but pitched to traditional D&Desque games Bundle: Racial Justice Sabe's rating: 💾💾 Ah, the first tabletop game I've run across in my "pick random" adventure! My "did it hold my interest enough to finish the game?" style rating scheme doesn't work very well for those, and...

Reverie Genre: Audio log exploration Bundle: Palestinian Aid Sabe's rating: 😴😴😴 Reverie is somebody's dream diary--presumably the dev's, but who knows?--broken up into tiny summaries, read aloud, and mapped out as a constellation of nodes in three-dimensional space. You travel to a node, listen to narration of a snippet of unconscious ...

ring ring Genre: Single-serving puzzle Bundle: Racial Justice Sabe's rating: ☎☎☎ ring ring encapsulates what it's like to install a random game from one of these bundles. What is this? How do I play it? How do I ring ring? In this case, it's a self-contained puzzle, a mysterious, hefty-looking old phone that you turn around and poke at...

Penance Genre: Oldskool FPS Bundle: Racial Justice Sabe's rating: 😈😈😈 This game is metal. So metal. The metaliest of metal. It's so metal, magnets stick to its unborn grandchildren. The spine is tapped out, motherfucker. Penance wants you to speedrun. To sprint through the rivers of blood, guns blazing, screaming at the top of your lun...

Affinity Genre: Jigsaw puzzle Bundle: Racial Justice Sabe's rating: ⭐⭐⭐ Not every indie title needs to break the box and think outside the mold. It's just as worthy to deliver a solid, enjoyable entry in a well-trod genre, and that's Affinity for the click-and-drag jigsaw puzzle. On each of its thirtyish boards, you'll be presented wit...

Pagan: Autogeny Genre: Atmospheric FPS/adventure Bundle: Racial Justice Sabe's rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Post-apocalyptic" games usually have a certain vibe that runs counter to the name. Either the apocalypse is sort of an ongoing status quo, and the action might best be described as "siege mentality porn", or it's about picking up pieces of a pa...

flirting Genre: Mini fiction Bundle: Palestinian Aid Sabe's rating: ⭐⭐⭐ There's not much to flirting. You see a sketchy pixel drawing of a couple of giant mecha hangin' out. You advance the text, reading a little dialogue that touches lightly but heartfully on some quintessentially queer topics. And then you're done! I'd recommend it a...

MORFOSI Genre: Stealth horror Bundle: Racial Justice Sabe's rating: ⭐⭐⭐ MORFOSI has a childlike quality to it: the writing is very simple, and the protagonist looks and moves like a Lego minifig. (Given it's tagged as a submission to the "Student Games Jam", I'm guessing it was produced on a short timeline with zero budget.) But "simpl...

TorqueL Bundle: Racial Justice Genre: Physics platformer Sabe’s rating: ⭐ Just when you think the well is dry for action-puzzle-platform gimmickery, a game like this shows up. In TorqueL, you pilot a square in 2D space. You can roll it from side to side, or extrude colored beams from any of its four faces to push off of surfaces. You k...

A new mega charity bundle has appeared on Itch, once again tricking tens of thousands of Gamers into momentarily not being horrible! For the minimum price of $5, you can support the United Nations Relief and Works Agency's efforts in occupied Palestine, and acquire more video games, tabletop RPGs, and miscellaneous doodads than it's po...