Itch.io Summer Sale 2026 Recommendations

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Steam and Itch.io are doing their regular summer sales! Plenty of other folks have done Steam sale posts online so I thought I would do one for Itch.io since I like that they take a smaller cut from sales, have a lot that isn’t on Steam, and it’s DRM-free. I’m only including games that are on sale and not really talking about Pay-What-You-Want or free stuff this time. Some of these were already mentioned in the bluesky thread I did but I’m adding more to the list as well. Apologies in advance for the lack of organization!

black and white pixel art of a woman next to a downed power line
Midnight Scenes: The Highway

I am a massive fan of the Midnight Scenes series, an anthology of short horror point-and-click adventure games that can be played in one sitting. You can start with any of them so I’ll just link to the developer’s page where you should just grab the one that sounds the most interesting to you. I reviewed the first game, The Highway, here.

LOVE is a challenging minimalist platformer that also features options to make it approachable to folks like me that aren’t so great at platformers. I like replaying the game and getting better times and love the soundtrack and simple graphics too. There’s two sequels. It comes with a Steam key

Captain Disaster in: Death Has A Million Stomping Boots is a very funny sci-fi point-and-click adventure. While it’s technically the 2nd in the series (first one is free and worth a look too), I think you can also start with this one if you want. Comes with Steam key. A 3rd game is in development and the developer’s Steam page also has short stories set in the universe.

BOSSGAME: The Final Boss is my Heart is an excellent queer arcade game about lesbians fighting monsters in dungeons and features art from so many artists I’m a fan of. It’s very challenging but has lots of options to make the game easier if you just want the story.

Indiepocalypse is a monthly zine compiling experimental indie games, art, and writing and commissions a new game each month as well. Grab the issue that sounds most interesting to you!

The Employment Collection is a compilation of games focused around work, capitalism, and the job market. The newest update also adds a solo ttrpg I worked on!

two people outside a hospital. One person is saying "This hospital is strangely silent for a medical facility."
Devil’s Hideout

I am a big fan of Cosmic Void’s adventure games and could recommend any of them but I’ll pick Devil’s Hideout, which is a horror adventure game that sorta feels like something you’d find on VHS in your local video store. Wrote a review of it here.

If you like Picross then you’ll probably also love Squekross, Picross with a cute mouse as well as some home building elements. It comes with a Steam key

I don’t think I’ve walked this stretch of road before is a short walking sim where you walk through past memories and reflect on them. I’ve even reviewed this one before.

Videoverse is a visual novel set in a WiiU-like user interface. One of my favorite VNs! Comes with a Steam key

top down view of a snake and asteroids and space ships

Snake-a-roid is a very straightforward arcade game that mashes together Asteroids and Snake. It works very well! Also comes with a Steam key

All the cool people are making websites these days! Consider making that easier with Bimbo

Grid Ranger is a shmup arcade game featuring some fantastic vector graphics

a woman standing in a bedroom and there is a man standing there too

The Crimson Diamond is an adventure game strongly inspired by the Sierra classic The Colonel’s Bequest. Some of the best EGA art I’ve seen in a game and I love that it uses a text parser

first person view of a ship shooting at a purple ship in space

Liberation is a very approachable open world space sim that happens to be funny too. I bounce off a lot of space sims because they’re too complex for me but I think this is a nice middle ground between that and arcade space sims. Inspired by the classic show Blake’s 7, which I really should watch someday. The original version of Elite was a big inspiration too.

Kitsune Tails is the perfect spiritual sequel to Super Mario Bros 3. I think it nails everything that made that game feel great but it’s also doing it’s own thing and is very queer.

co-open is a very sweet game about a kid’s first time buying groceries on their own. Really loved exploring the space and checking out all the art. Very relaxing soundtrack too. I need to replay this one with my kids.

floating bowling alley with stone heads floating too

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game that nails the N64-era of games better than Super 10 Pin. It matches the aesthetic of those games perfectly. but having a bowling game in space just feels like something you’d play on the console too.

I never mentioned the Power of Pride Bundle on here and technically it’s not part of the summer sale but it does wrap up this month. For $60 (or the $10 bundle) you can get tons of queer games.

pixel art of an old desktop computer

Second Hand Computer is a digital toy featuring lots of games you can play with in a fake retro computer through a DOS-like OS.

If you like first person dungeon crawlers, consider checking out Islands of the Caliph. It was very easy for me to pick up and start playing and I was happy to see a game based on Middle Eastern folklore.

Shutter Stroll is an incredibly chill photo taking experience. You don’t need to beat any levels or do goals, you just explore beautiful environments and take photos.

If you like Terry Cavanagh‘s games like VVVVVV, Egg, and Dicey Dungeons, check out his Other Games. This collection features so many bits that I’m happy to see packaged together like flash games and one made in Downpour. It comes with a Steam key.

Inspector Waffles is a very nice point-and-click adventure where you are a cat that is a detective. I also just like how much you rely on clues and interact with your notepad to solve mysteries, like a detective! A lot of detective adventure games don’t actually do this!

Super Video Golf is a solid golf game but more importantly, I think the artwork is a fantastic recreation of the early 3D poly look of early to mid 90s PC games. I just saw that it got DLC last year so I should pick that up. It also comes with a Steam key.

Metavaxx is a twin sticker shooter that also borrows elements from Minesweeper as you explore infected cells and try to clear them out while avoiding enemies (or intentionally shooting those blocks I guess). Comes with a Steam key.

If you’re like me and love Zelda 2, you should consider the Gunmetal Arcadia games. I think they do an excellent job recreating the combat and aesthetic of that game. These also come with Steam keys. And then go play the demo for the upcoming Enigma Heart for more Zelda 2.

Ok, that’s the end of the recommendations. I hope you found something new to check out!

Caper in the Castro thoughts

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Developer: C.M. Ralph
Year: 1989
Genre: Adventure
System: Mac

menu screen for caper in the castro showing someone leaning against a lightpole and text saying "It's not just a game, it's a gayme!"

Caper in the Castro is a short point-and-click adventure game created in Hypercard and the earliest known queer game, so I thought it would be fun to check it out during Pride Month. You play as the lesbian detective Tracker McDyke who must find her friend, the drag queen Tessy LaFemme. It’s a very straightforward adventure game where you navigate up and down a street, going into buildings and poking around for clues. Since it was a simple game built in Hypercard, it doesn’t have any inventory items and progress is gated by various notes you take in the game that you will need to use elsewhere. There are death scenes that will force you to restart the game but it’s incredibly quick to get back to where you were before.

game screenshot set outside a bar at night. The bar is titled "The Gayme Room"

I have known about the game for a while but never actually sat down to play through the entire thing and I’m so glad I did. Any flaws the game may have from the lack of depth or the fussy parser, which you briefly use at a few points, was easy for me to overlook because of how charming the game is. I am an absolute sicko for this era of Macintosh games and Hypercard and I loved the art. The game was obviously made at a really dark time and the game encourages people to donate to AIDS charities as a form of paying for the game. I get very emotional seeing people creating queer art during this time and the fact that this was created to be charityware to help others was very moving to me. I was a baby during this time so I also always appreciate any queer art and writing that lets me see what the queer community was doing at this time. The game itself is very campy and messy in a way I really enjoyed (other than the dated language the author apologizes for on the Archive.org page) and I think it would fit in very well with what a lot of experimental queer games that folks are making on Itch.

I’d recommend it, especially if you are interested in queer and/or retro adventure games. It’s not the tightest puzzle design given that the author was working with a limiting tool they didn’t have a ton of experience working with, but I think the art and writing are very charming and it’s an interesting time capsule.

Caper in the Castro is available for free on the Internet Archive and you can repay the author by donating to your LGTBQ+ charity of choice.

Things Every Video Game Should Have

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

This is not going into the manifesto jam because it’s more of a goof but at the same time I do get excited about this stuff anytime it shows up so maybe it’s entirely serious.

A Moose – Well yeah, obviously. Playing as a moose is the best part of Wacky Wheels and Moose Life is one of the best Llamasoft games.

That song from The Incredible Machine 2 – Maybe you can’t get this exact song for licensing reasons but throw a New Age song into your game. Your players will thank you.

FMV – Doesn’t have to be a lot. You don’t need to get Malcolm McDowell in your video game. Even a tiny bit of stock footage of a train will make me happy.

Samples, possibly unlicensed – I love all the samples that show up repeatedly in Llamasoft’s games. I feel like some of them are maybe unlicensed but clearly no one has said anything yet because they keep popping up. Build up a nice little library of sound effects and other assets that you keep throwing into your games and people can recognize. Folks get annoyed about asset reuse and they’re wrong and should be pushed into a volcano.

Each chapter ending with the player hanging out in a homoerotic hunt club – Maybe some explanation for this one. We all love the Hunt Club in Gabriel Knight 2 but I understand if you don’t want your player character needing to talk to any hunting enthusiasts or shitty libertarians, but I do really like when games have the player coming back to the same place to hang out with other characters so more of that please. It should also be gay.

Someone that taunts you – Your game should have some kind of asshole that keeps taunting you like Rudy in Funhouse or Sinistar.

Someone that hangs out – There should also be someone that’s just hanging out near the beginning of your game but doesn’t do a whole lot. Maybe they give advice if the player is stuck. You probably can’t license Peter Gabriel for your person that hangs out but they should probably be listening to music or reading.

Things It Should Not Have

AI usage – Even code. You’re still wasting massive amounts of energy and polluting communities if you use AI for coding. Fuck you, I won’t play your game.

The Manifesto Jam

~ mpklamerus ~ 2 Comments

The Manifesto Jam, where folks write manifestos on game design, is about to wrap up in two days and there’s already a lot of great stuff submitted. I don’t have a manifesto in me but I’ve been enjoying reading the entries. Some I agree with, some I don’t, but that’s kinda the fun of going through them all. I’m surprised none of the sickos (complimentary) in the adventure games community have made a manifesto. It’s a little fascinating seeing a couple people who don’t make games get mad at the jam when it’s not a thing that impacts them at all, unless people start taking these manifestos very seriously. Throw it in the pile of all the other stuff on Itch that Aftermath will continue to ignore I guess.

Maybe I should have posted about this earlier so that anyone who sees this can write their own manifesto but there’s still two days left, you can do it!

A Lost Man adventure game demo explores life during World War 1

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a soldier in an old church

Maybe I should play more adventure game demos. I almost never do because I figure that if an adventure game looks interesting to me and people like it then I’ll probably get it at some point and playing a demo would just spoil a chunk. But that seems a bit silly now after trying a few recently such as A Lost Man, a point-and-click adventure where you are a lost soldier during World War 1. The demo (available on Steam) gives a very brief look at the game and one or two puzzles but it made me far more interested in the game. I felt the game does an excellent job of conveying a place that is close to the front lines but isn’t quite pulled in yet. There is some dry humor but it’s not a silly game and everything felt tonally like it should. I wasn’t sure how I would have felt about the art but it looks really good in motion. My only real complaint about that is that I think it needs a run animation instead of making the player walk fast, but it’s a unique style I haven’t seen in other adventure games.

I’m curious about the stuff I see in the trailer that wasn’t in the demo. Everything I played felt very grounded, so I’m not sure how the more puzzle-like parts will work but I’m guessing that it feels more natural when it’s all spread out over an entire game and not in a very short trailer.

Anyway, the demo is very short (about 15 minutes) so consider giving it a shot if it sounds interesting to you. Maybe I’ll try to do some demo roundups on here during the next Steam demo event.

Enigma Heart Demo Bring Back Zelda 2 Style Adventuring

~ mpklamerus ~ 3 Comments
a woman in a temple by a pool

I have always loved Zelda 2. I realize it’s a flawed oddball in the series. It’s nothing like the rest of the games, other than the CD-i games (a post for another day), and it’s a bit too obtuse and difficult for its own good, but I always loved that it combines rpg elements with 2D platforming and weirdness of the boss design. So I was very happy to see that the Zelda 2-like Enigma Heart now has a demo. This isn’t really a review since I’ve only played for a little bit so far (and liked it), but since this style of game is so rare, with the only other Zelda 2-likes I can think of being the Gunmetal Arcadia series (Steam/Itch), I thought I would let people know about it. It’s very gay as well. You can get the demo on Steam and Itch.io.

On a related note, I also started poking at a Zelda 2 romhack called Zelda 2 Redux. It makes a lot of little tweaks like improved translations and adjusting the difficulty a little and it’s amazing how much these small changes can improve the game. If you bounced off the original game, maybe give this one a shot. If the changes in that are too drastic, there’s this one that just improves the translation.

TOWNSQUEER Zine And Games Bundle Available for Limited Time

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two columns of text describing pressure inside someone's head
PARA//LAX

TOWNSQUEER, a bundle containing games and a zine put together by the folks at gamedev.lgbt, is now available on Itch.io for $20. It made me happy to see this community put together a bundle of wonderful games and immediately picked it up when it went on sale last night. I’ve played a few of the games before so it was nice to support those, as well as have a whole new batch of games to play. I wrote about PARA//LAX before, but I also really enjoyed other games in this bundle like the fmv documentary To All the Rocks That Bear Me, platformer Nice Disc, and the first person interactive fiction Breathe. Not only is it an excellent collection of games but I was impressed with the production of the zine as well. A great amount of effort was put into the layout and it contains a lot of writing from the bundle contributors about game development and other topics. I really can’t recommend the bundle enough. It’s good to support queer art of course, but I also just think it’s a very good deal for the amount of high quality games you’re getting and I think it coming with a few Steam keys is a nice little bonus too. Go check it out! It runs until June 15.

I hope the bundle is very successful and we see more volumes of this, even though the organizers have run into some headaches with Itch. I also hope it inspires other communities to do something similar. I know some Discords have organized bundles before but it feels extra special to me when a community that hosts their own site, whether it’s a mastodon instance like this or a forum, has their own projects like this.

first person view of someone riding a bike
To All the Rocks That Bear Me

Exit 8

~ mpklamerus ~ 1 Comment

Developer: KOTAKE CREATE
Publisher: PLAYISM
Year: 2023
Genre: Adventure
System: Windows

a business man standing in a long hallway

Exit 8 is a short first-person horror game where you are trapped in an endless repeating hallway and must escape. I was curious about the game after seeing that it got a film adaptation and was glad I finally checked it out. The core gameplay (literal) loop has you looking for any differences in the repeating hallway. If you see any, then you need to turn around and go back, otherwise keep walking forward. You have to successfully repeat this pattern eight times in a row, so you can get to Exit 8. If you fail a loop, it resets the counter back to zero. None of this is a spoiler, it’s all listed on the very first sign you see in the game. There’s really no plot here and it boils down to a Spot the Difference game where you are occasionally placed in danger. I’m being reductive in my description of the game but it mostly works for me. The game successfully creeped me out without doing any jump scares.

The main issue I have with the game, and one that I see plenty of other folks also state in their positive reviews, is that when you find a difference/anomaly, it’s temporarily removed from the game. This happens until you find them all, and then they’re all returned to the game and it becomes very easy to solve the game since you’re an expert at recognizing them. The part where this becomes an issue is that it eventually turns the game into a bit of a checklist of things to look for since you probably have entered a loop of spotting some of the obvious and more interesting differences, removing them from the game, and then missing a more subtle one and the counter being reset to zero. After repeating that a few times, you get into a flow that feels like a bit of a slog where you find one or two subtle differences, miss one, repeat until you find them all and everything is added back to the game and you win. It’s certainly possible that players do not run into this and beat the game before seeing everything, but if you do stumble into this cycle it makes the game very tedious for about 15-20 minutes. It’s unfortunate because most of the game does work for me and I’d still recommend it. It was very nice playing a horror game that only took 90 minutes and was creepy without stressing me out with health systems and monsters I need to fight. It just needed a little more to elevate it to being a great horror game.

Exit 8 is available on Steam, Switch, Playstation, Xbox, and smartphones

Frog Detective 2: The Case of the Invisible Wizard

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Developer: Grace Bruxner, Thomas Bowker
Publisher: worm club, SUPERHOT PRESENTS
Year: 2019
Genre: Adventure
System: Mac

a rhino named Mary saying "Have you heard of extortion?"

I continue to replay the Frog Detective series but this time with my middle child. This one has you investigating a parade in a small town prepared for the arrival of an invisible wizard that has been ruined and it’s up to you to find out who did it. It plays very similar to the first game, which is not a complaint at all because I really enjoyed that one. The mystery itself has a cute resolution and I liked exploring the small town at night more than the island in the first game. There’s a bit more to look at in this one so I felt it was a more interesting environment to explore. The game also features a little notebook that tracks clues for you and you can mark who you think is suspicious or not. None of this is essential to completing the game but it’s all very fun to play with and my 6 year old treated it all very seriously as she would change who was suspicious or not after talking with each person. It was the perfect game to play with her since it let her roleplay being a detective without having to make any actual decisions on who ruined the parade, which has a happy ending anyway. The game only takes 60-90 minutes to play too, the perfect length for something to play in a sitting. I always liked these games but I appreciated them a lot more after playing them with my kids.

Frog Detective 2: The Case of the Invisible Wizard is available for Windows and Mac on Steam and Itch.io, PS4/PS5, and XBOX.