The Wonderful World of Itch.io
This is a love letter to the creators of free itch.io games.
There is something incredibly refreshing about spending an evening on the itch.io free games page. They’re little bite-sized pieces of game play, but its not just the novelty of springing from game to game, from genre to genre that makes a few hours on itch.io feel like a cold drink on a hot day. I love itch.io because it feels like a reprieve. I talked in my last post at length about how Cyberpunk 2077 represents the flaws with the game industry and ‘gamer culture’ in a major way. This time around I want to take a closer look at the alternatives.
Six Cats Under
Six Cats Under (Team Bean Loop) is both the most cheerful game I know of, and the most bittersweet. The basic premise is that you are an elderly lady who has died and you need to make sure your many many sweet kitties don’t go hungry. You achieve this by haunting your house as a poltergeist and getting those little kitty cats to eventually open the door and let themselves out. Six Cats Under takes the crazy cat lady stereotype of unmarried older women and uses it to explore a happy life we well lived. The game makes it clear that the old woman was not dissatisfied with her life, and these cats are not there to fill the void. She just loved cats, and lived surrounded by them. Six Cats Under did make me a little sad. It reminded me of those stories of the elderly who are left for weeks alone after they pass, with no one checking on them until they start to smell. Its an undignified and sad way to go and we hear about it all too often. For this woman though, its okay. All she wants for is for her sweet kitties to leave the apartment and then she’ll be at peace. No regrets, no unfinished business, no lamenting the path in life she chose. Playing in this woman’s domestic space, and using that domestic space to manipulate the cats according to their own distinct personalities is a joy. This game is a wonderful exploration of life and death. It is charming and happy. Importantly though, it doesn’t force you to be happy. You can be sad for the death of this woman, and either way it’ll comfort you.
https://teambeanloop.itch.io/six-cats-under
make sure its closed
The description of make sure its closed (corpsepile) reads ‘I made a short game about something that used to scare me as a child’. What stands out about this is something that I’m sure is the case for a lot of itch.io horror game creators - its a game about what scares them in particular. make sure its closed features a garage door that is tricky to close and something horrible just outside. The game is incredibly simple in its controls and execution. It feels a lot like a scary story someone might tell around the campfire but a really good one. While I can’t comment on corpsepile’s creative process, to me what comes across is a real authenticity, that corpsepile wanted to tell their players why they they were scared of the garage door. We all have our own garage door. A place in our homes or another place that we feel is otherwise safe that gets our minds ticking over outrageous but horrifying ideas that something might be lurking just out of site. For me, it was the corner where the stairs in our hose would go out of sight. make sure its closed puts you back into that childhood body and asks you to revisit that childhood fear, making it visceral and uncomfortably familiar.
https://corpsepile.itch.io/make-sure-its-closed
Kill the Ice Age Baby Adventure: The Game
This game is very silly and very funny. Kill the Ice Age Baby (kypello) is like walking though a strange fever dream. Kypello implores the player not to play - ‘you’ll lose braincells’ but having ignored their request I found myself very invested in seeing the end of the ice age baby’s life. The humour of this game comes primarily from taking established properties, characters, and even political figures and completely alienating them from their intended context. Ronald McDonald gives me speech in which he expresses his WWII opinions. The primary villain, the ice age baby, is a character who was once supposed to inspire warmth in audiences of the hit animated movie saga Ice Age is appropriated to become something so utterly divorced from the intended context. This is something that game studios cannot do. Not because they aren’t funny or clever enough, but because this sort of appropriation would result in legal headaches and would simply not be allowed. The beauty of Kill the Ice Age Baby comes partly from the fact that it cannot exist outside of the margins.
An assessment of the political implications of this can be found in a video on the McElroy brothers by let’s talk about stuff in which she addresses why corporate alienation is so effective - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nNYQc98Ftw
https://kypello.itch.io/kill-the-ice-age-baby-adventure-the-game
Browsing the free games on itch.io feels like the modern day answer to zine culture. They are organic, grass roots, and are often created in the margins. Just a quick browse of the Top Free Games Page will highlight just how often these games forefront LGBT+ characters, stories, and relationships (There’s This Girl by Angela He, one night, hot springs by npckc). They engage with topics that are often (or completely) ignored in larger game studios such as mental health issues (Adventures With my Anxiety by Nicky Case). They are sites for fans to express their love for other media (Transient - A Good Omens Fangame by Oemuff), and they can be satirical, or even scathing subversions of the world around us (Eat the Rich by Call Of the Void).
These games are small, but they feel like an escape from the alienation that bears down on large studios who produce games for mass markets. Much like zines, these games were made for the love of making games, and the love of whatever the game is about and it shows. Creators on Itch.io show us what videogames have the potential to be if we could all pursue what makes us happy rather than necessarily what will sell. Sitting down and playing these games allows me to briefly live in that world, and it is a joyful place to be.
https://itch.io/games/free
P.S - support game creators if you can! They do need to pay their bills at the end of the day!