Exploring the itch.io Collection #5

It’s been a while since I last did one of these! I figured I would do one to fill in while I make my way through larger games that take longer to finish.

Last month, I spent an entire week re-making the list of games in my collection over on itch.io, because I felt the original was incomplete and I wanted to make it feel right. The result? Well, instead of about 800, I actually have 1269 games to check out. That’s without counting the 80 I covered last year, or the other 26 I already had on Steam and which I have either already played or will play in the future, for a grand total of 1375 games. …I know, that’s a lot. And more than 500 of them don’t have recorded times on HowLongToBeat.

Most of today’s article was written last year. I added to it after every super-short game I played. A few of the ones covered here, though, have been played this past week. I can’t promise to cover 80 games like this once again in 2026, but any progress will be good. Especially with those revised numbers.

As stated in the Index, I have this page where anyone can see the games I have already tested on the platform. You can always go back to it to see how much progress I’ve made in that collection, or which games are coming up in the next article. I still include a link to every game I discuss here, since I am giving visibility to everything I cover in these articles, and you can go check out each one. Even if I didn’t like one of them, you can go check it out for yourself; maybe YOU will enjoy it!

Experiences

Can I at least get a glass of water to help that
block of brick and sand down?

The Indifferent Wonder of an Edible Place: In the fashion of taking a metaphorical image for a real issue and making it literal, in this game you are someone who eats buildings to make them disappear. This is accompanied, and inspired, by a poem from 1960, translated to English in 1983, about the historical erasure done by the state of Bombay. In the game itself, you are told to eat specific numbered pieces of a large tower. If you don’t eat the correct piece, your character gets poisoned and is incapacitated for a moment. You can use the scope with the right-click button to figure out where the next “correct” piece is. Either way, this is history you’re making disappear, with no way to get it back.

If you see a giant green eye under war trenches, I think you
may be suffering from something worse than PTSD.

Please follow: A walking simulator/horror/puzzle combo in which you play a lone soldier venturing into the tunnels dug by the enemies and find… something. Deeper into the tunnel, there are puzzles involving worms, giant leeches, and other supernatural stuff. This short exploration ends with a freaky acid trip. The game’s look is very “early 3D” of video games (think N64 or PS1), the sound design grossed me out the entire way through, and the visuals…. Jesus, that’s freaky. It’s horror alright.

Waiting For The Loop: An interactive short film about a woman creating, over her lifetime, an AI capable of passing for a human being. The singularity. You occasionally have choices to make, such as deciding whether to make IAC (the AI at the center of this story) consider itself human or a program; whether it’s to be released to the public after its first successful Turing tests; and whether to give it away to the government when it’s requested. This short film leads to interesting questions, even if the path taken by AI in recent years, with Large Language Models, turned out to be vastly different (and a LOT less interesting!).

INDEPENDENT VIDEO VIDEO GAME: This is a parody of artsy independent films, with a pretense of interactivity. In-between shots of still life and meaningless talks about purpose and art and whatnot, you’re often given choices to make – choices that don’t even tie with what was discussed just before them. I think later questions do change based on previous answers, but that’s about it. After trying this one, my verdict is: …Meh.

6 pack of craft games: These super-quick games were made by a solo dev who greatly enjoys the process of creation and who wanted to share their previous projects, however short. Special mention to Incense which, in order to add a “soothing” stick of smoking incense, ends up blocking most interactions with your screen. Nothing here really stands out.

...I think I accidentally summoned an Elder God.

Anomalies: A very experimental program about creating, well, anomalies. Moving sliders to adjust as many settings as possible and then seeing what gets created. The resulting creature, or thing, looks completely alien and will also emit “music” that is just as randomized. Nice and can make pretty cool visuals, but I guess it keeps the attention for only a few minutes. I might have liked being able to at least zoon in and out to better see our creation.

An Outcry, Prelude: This game is now free, and the only descriptors from the creator themselves are that it’s bad. And… yeah. It does feel like something made as one’s early development efforts, as if to try a visual novel-like program. The story makes little sense, the whole thing is voiced without much emotion, and there are only two choices that can be made, the last of which is manipulated. The only thing done well is the creepy overall tone.

Social reach

    Let's see, how do I make a capuccino again...

Koshka’s Kofe: Catarina inherits from her recently-deceased father the family business, a little coffee shop that he dedicated himself to entirely after the passing of his wife, Catarina’s mother. His absences in her life are something she resented him for. This short story explores more about why people choose to do what they do, and the need for closure. Throughout, you’re given coffee recipes to make, and you can only go off of basic how-to blackboards in the work area. This one’s sweet, though since I know nothing about coffee, I had to figure out some terms on my own since they didn’t include instructions. I might have liked a gradual increase in recipe difficulty as well. All in all, this game can be finished in under 15 minutes, but it had potential for far more than that.

The NPCs in this game, if we can call them that, are
various degrees of unsettling and bizarre.

You used to be someone: An autobiographical product about the time its creator had a major depressive episode. The character is struggling to find the motivation to do anything, avoids social contact as much as possible, and has only negative outlooks on things. Thinking about better days from the past, and projects that never reached fruition. You can explore the small neighborhood (it’s at night, so most places are closed), then go back home to end the game. By putting you in the shoes of someone going through this, the game teaches what it feels like, and how the mind is affected by such an episode. For someone who’s lived through such depressive episodes, this must hit close to home.

Plain games

Gotta Crush 'Em All!

Goopty Goo: A puzzle platformer in which you control a goo creature with the ability to break crates with its head. Move left and right with A and D, jump with Space, and stomp with S. There is a catch, however; if there is more than one crate, little Goopty can NOT land back on the ground until all the crates have been broken. It’s a lot more difficult that way, and forces the player to think of a “path” to take on top of balancing the character’s jumps carefully. In the second half, exploding crates with a time limit are introduced – better act before they blow up! Yeah, this one was great. Short, like all the games here; but there are many puzzles. Some will make you wonder how to break all the crates, while others will be more of a skill thing of breaking everything without landing back on the ground. Loved this one!

A mower's work is never over. The grass always grows.

Greg the Clumsy Ghost: Greg is a ghost possessing a lawnmower. He has been secretly taking care of the local park’s lawn. You play him with WASD, and your task is to pass over every square of tall grass in the level (and collect the blue ring). You have a timer to do it, and hitting obstacles makes you lose a few seconds. Will you be quick enough to finish all 15 stages in one go? This one’s nice and simple, I liked it.

10mg: Sealed Estate: 10mg is a series of 10 games that can be finished in about 10 minutes. In this one, your character ends up in a mysterious mansion after a car crash and must find their way around despite the darkness and the air of… something being horribly wrong. The flashlight you find can be used to either break eye blockades, or bring other eyes towards you. There are a few puzzles here, though only one proved to be a real challenge. It’s an alright product.

The clever puzzle in this game is that the Snake can teleport
between two orange barriers, with limits. You then have to
figure out the best path to move to the next room.

10mg: SNAAAK: You play a snake in a deserted lab. Something weird happened here. And it probably has to do with your “character”… which is the Snake from the classic arcade game Snake, where you eat squares and grow longer, until the snake’s mouth hits its side. Here, instead, you encounter teleporter puzzles and segments of stealth where you move around to evade the blasts from security robots.

Cramped bathroom, cramped screen.

Midnight Scenes: The Highway: A series of bite-sized horror games by Octavi Navarro in black and white. In this first point-and-click, protagonist Claire Barnes is driving on the highway when she encounters a fallen electric pole with live electricity still. It blocks the entire road and she can’t drive onwards unless she cut the power. The only option? Visit the nearby farm, but judging by the car crash in the yard and the “Missing” child posters, something happened here… Very stylish, very nice point-and-click, somewhat easy but still fun, and aside from opening and ending narrations it’s all done without text.

Spiky donuts: Safe for consumption! Just don't touch 'em.

Toaster Jam: A puzzle/arcade game in which you play as a toaster looking for toasts. The toaster is propelled in the direction you click with the mouse. If you don’t catch at least one toast within two clicks, you can’t jump anymore! Darn 2-slice toasters… You must avoid hazards in the area, such as spiky donuts and forks, maneuver despite the bouncy bagels, and make your way around using portals (blue and orange, a classic shout-out). You have access to boosts such as the jam that sends you flying fast in one direction, and coffee which stops the toaster from moving and will send it careening much faster in the selected direction. 40 levels, three endless modes, a level editor, unlockable toaster skins… this one may be quick, but it's super darn fun, I strongly recommend it.

Location Withheld Demake: A “demake” (lower-quality version) of its creator’s project, in this one you’re trapped in a bedroom with strange case files detailing horrific things happening to people. It is only by checking the info around the room and decrypting the passwords to access additional files that you can figure out what happened. A successfully spooky little horror puzzle game.

Shrine to Anubis: A pixelated platformer in which your intrepid adventurer protagonist ventures into a pyramid filled with deadly traps… and the undead spirit of an Egyptian deity. Make your way around, look for piles of gold to steal, square off against Anubis, then escape the pyramid in an epic finale! Like every game here, it’s short, but damn fun. It starts deceptively easy but amps up the difficulty real fast.

Classic boss stupidity: You can't hurt it, but its own room can.

More work mail I have to sign off on...

Celestial Correspondence: Even in Heaven, you can’t escape junk e-mail. This game was created during the Toronto Game Jam of 2020. You play as Remiel, an angel that manages the e-mail systems of Heaven. This involves forwarding e-mails, occasionally with your signature; filling in Captchas; and, of course, deleting all the junk, because the afterlife has no IT to get rid of it all. You lose a life if you make a mistake with an e-mail (reading/forwarding junk, or ignoring/deleting a legit one). Funny concept, though the only goal is to survive as long as possible – and getting a good score along the way.

Pantslessness spotted! Run! Run!

Ripped Pants at Work: You are a new employee at a cubicle farm… and you rip your pants, which explode off your body. Your task is to find a suitable replacement pair. No need to worry about size, just find something lying around. Make your way around, avoid being seen, until you finally find free trousers. Keep hidden in shrubbery or behind walls – if you are seen by someone for too long, your embarrassment levels spike, your face goes red, and you get fired! There’s decent work put into the stealth part of this game, and after you find the first pair (which feels more like a tutorial), you are thrown into the full world, where you can hunt down every single pair of pants not already worn. I didn’t go and seek out every pair, but I did enjoy playing this one; it’s very funny.

Wolves, zombies, bats, and even something that looks like a
runaway mower! Or... whatever that is.

Grime House: Meant to evoke the old-school era of gaming, this top-down horror/survival game has the main character be captured by an evil hitchhiker. The game has a health system… which is almost useless, since many threats are insta-kills and, against the others, the player has no mercy invincibility frames, so they get hurt just touching an average enemy repeatedly in a few seconds. You have to press an arrow twice for the character to move in that direction. The extra sanity system says it can cause other things to happen around the character, but I haven’t seen much of that. You do get a gun to defend yourself with, as the latter half has a lot of enemies; but like moving, the act of shooting is of variable efficiency. When you press Space, sometimes the character will shoot, sometimes he won’t. This one is not designed well, and has lots of issues. But it is a full product, and some ideas are fine, could have been executed better is all.

That’s it for this one. Hopefully I’ll have more articles ready soon!