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Priceless Play - the pick of the Itch Bundle For Racial Justice And EqualityHey, $.003 is basically free, right?
Hey, $.003 is basically free, right?
Before we kick off with my $.003 recommendations, thanks for being cool about this brief aberration in the Free Games Roundup! If you aren’t in a place to donate right now, I totally get it. Thankfully, there’s botha pretty hefty archiveof Priceless Play to turn to for free games,andmany of the developers who contributed games to the bundle also have free projects. I recommendWhere the Goats Are, Oleander Garden’sPAGANseries, and theElectric Zine Maker (and almost everything from Nathalie Lawhead). Also, itch plans to release a list of Pay What You Want games from devs who wanted to support the bundle with free games. So keep your eyes to the skies for that one. Okay, great, let’s carry on!
Democratic Socialism SimulatorfromMolleindustria
I had a lot of fun with Democratic Socialism Simulator. It’s put together in a super clean package, using a lot of the same core mechanics asReigns. Swipe left, swipe right, and try not to fall into a deficit. Sometimes I feel like I can get so in my own head about politics and the State Of The World At Large, and so it can be a breath of fresh air to have a lizard and a peacock in my presidential cabinet telling me what to do.
MendelfromOwen Bell
It took me far too long to realise thatMendelis called Mendel because it’s basically a game about Punnett squares. Thus, I can only assume that this is a game where you play first-person as the Moravian Augustinian monk, Gregor Mendel, in space as he collects and hybridises the local alien flora. I kid, but the heart of the joke stands.
Mendel is a delightfully colourful, minimalist, and procedurally-generated sandbox game where the goal (if there is one) is to combine cool-looking plants (that you can name!!!) together into other cool-looking plants with Mendelian inheritance. It’s extremely chill, and reminds me of all the fun parts ofNo Man’s Skywithout any of the pressure. You grow your strange little garden, you watch the buds blossom and trees reach skyward while a synth harp plinks away.
A New LifefromAngela He
I’ve played a number of Angela He’s games (and a lot of them are free!), which always manage to make me feel some type of way. Her illustrations are stunning, but her ability to strike an emotional resonance with small animations and particle effects tip it all over into pure artistry. She’s never been one to shy away from difficult topics in her games, with some featuring stories about intimate partner violence, self-harm, or suicidal ideation.I’ve written about my own conflicted feelings about how these topics get tackled here (and so has Jay!), if it interests.
A New Life tells the stories of two women who meet in college, fall in love, get married, and grow old together. Sometimes. Sometimes they don’t, sometimes there’s a global morbigavirus, and sometimes old age just catches up with you too soon. A New Life is a game about choices to varying degrees, and sometimes I find that games about choice take themselves too seriously. That’s not the case with A New Life – it has just enough humour and just enough care and I’ve got just enough of a soft spot for stories about lesbians in tech to not really mind any overt lessons in choice. That, and sometimes I really wish I could undo the morbigavirus.
The Floor is JellyfromIan Snyder
Sometimes it’s good just to bounce around.
