i guess its itchio creator day so here are some payable games i liked that you should check out if you want to play a videogame videogames 2023 how to find videogames top games 2023 for you
VALDRAM - SORDID TEETH MEMORIES
valdram's big delirious seeming magnum opii are still in the works but in the meantime you can check out some of their smaller works as PWTW (pay what thou wilt). sordid teeth memories is a short jam game with a really beautiful look that does some funny and surprising things around camera perspective and navigation.
CAM - COPPER ODYSSEY
printmaking-themed rpg maker game that's both beautiful and has a really loose, funny structure. my favourite example of the game's sensibility is that theres a part where someone tells you you can examine library bookshelves to see if anyone left money in the pages and then right when you resign yourself to clicking on invisible walls, someone in the very next room hands you $500 and says "sometimes it really is that simple" and turns into a rock. extremely good.
LINTILION - SHRINESPARK
another rpgmaker renaissance game by the musician of copper odyssey, again with a really enjoyable and goofy attitude towards game abstractions coupled with the pleasures of an actual well structured and written adventure tale... like stumbling on a really fun webcomic
SEALEFT STUDIOS - SLEUTHHOUNDS
not much to say it's just someone's endearingly lowkey anthro adventure game series. i had a lot of fun with it.. very pleasantly sincere without the affectations of sincerity-as-aesthetic
ROMAN - GOBBO GOES ADVENTURES
powerfully inscrutable, by the developer of 2002's (!) Funny Pizza Land 3D... i have still not been able to untangle any of the mysteries of this one but it's inspiring to see one of the original weird game pioneers still doing their thing
JENNIFER RAYE - IMPERISHABLE MEMORIES
another set of memories to compare / contrast with the sordid teeth kind, kind of recalling older gamemaker type stuff that felt like getting charged glimpses into an inner fantasy life with all these touhouesque characters you don't really have a reference for charging around emotionally brawling with each other as represented by a set of scrapbooky shooter levels, except now with the even greater level of visual chaos that 3d gamemake software can provide. i liked it despite never being able to beat r-type - ign.com
DROQEN - 31 UNMARKED GAMES
world's finest simulation of the digging through unlabelled floppy disks for a computer type you're unfamiliar with experience.. the individual microgames are offbeat and compelling feeling but it also puts a lot of emphasis on the process of sorting through and rearranging them, naming and putting stickers on the different disks, finding ones that dont work or that you have to come back to
LILITH ZONE - CRYPT UNDERWORLD
what is there to say... the best to ever do it imo. i tried writing up a while back about how liliths games function as memory machines - this one is even denser and more charged but also has a surprisingly fun and lighthearted return to "gameyness", gratuitously stupid systems blasting thru rich dioramas and turning everything into chaos. recommended attendant reading: tw adorno - late style in beethoven
