itch.io bundle recommendations

i have bought some large itch.io charity bundles! a lot of people have! however, the thing about these bundles is that they're enormous and it's kind of intimidating to look through them and figure out what you actually want to play.

polygon & colin spacetwinks wrote some recommendations, and here i am doing some also!
my goal is to eventually give every game a try; this will take a very long time.

a list of the bundles that i have:

that's a total of 1,914 different video games! there are many games present in multiple bundles.

here is a tool that will auto-claim games from the bundles so they'll show up in your itch.io inventory, and here is a bundle browser, which collects all of the bundles and lets you sort them by tag, genre, and other information. i highly recommend you use these two tools to make your life much easier!

click the thumbnail to go to the game's itch.io page; click the game's title to display my little mini-review. games with a star (★) are my TOP favorites.

about my taste

i think it is helpful context to have a general sense of what someone's taste is when they're reviewing or recommending things! in my case, it's important to note that there are a lot of genres of game which i can't really evaluate because i simply do not enjoy them, no matter how good they might be.

i do not enjoy: roguelikes, platformers, fastpaced realtime action games, shooters, abstract art games, retro pixel art, or metroidvanias.

i do enjoy: simulators, exploration games, management games, puzzles, narrative games, rpgs, "casual" games, interactive fiction, dating sims, and turn-based combat.

→ for even more context, click to see a list of some of my favorite games of all time! ←

mainstream bignames

  • Persona 3 & Persona 4
  • Breath Of The Wild
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses
  • Animal Crossing: New Horizons
  • The Sims 4
  • The World Ends With You
  • Professor Layton
  • Ace Attorney series
  • Portal & Portal 2
  • Mass Effect 1, 2, & 3

indie games

  • Papers, Please
  • Long Live The Queen
  • Black Closet
  • Sunless Sea
  • Cook, Serve, Delicious!
  • Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor
  • Recettear
  • The Yawhg
  • 80 Days
  • Return of the Obra Dinn
  • Hypnospace Outlaw

recommended!

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Astrologaster

a silly and surprisingly stylish game where you guide "doctor" simon forman through astrological readings to give people dubious medical advice! there are songs and relationship dramas. it's based on historical documents, which is quite fun! good if you like horrible histories or hark! a vagrant or sawbones, i think.
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A Short Hike

this game is lovely! very pleasant soothing vibes. you play as a bird going on a hike in a national park. you make friends on your way to the top of the mountain. it's very pretty and nice to explore, and the characters are all quite sweet. it's bigger than i thought it would be when i started! not huge, of course, but sizable. it reminds me of breath of the wild and animal crossing. i love to climb up a mountain and glide down and fetch things for people. vv good stuff.
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Art Sqool

a drawing game! you walk around a weird colorful 3D environment and do art assignments for your robot art teacher, who grades it based on mysterious criteria. there's no narrative or much structure, a bit closer to a toy than a game, but it's a fun way to loosen up and feel creative in a low-stakes way. interesting visuals, very funky, and definitely worth a try.
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Baba Is You

a great logic puzzle game! not that this needs much of a rec since it's well-known and everybody likes it, but it really is good and fun. there's a nice variety of difficulties in puzzles, so even if you get stuck on one and ragequit there are others to play.
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Beglitched

a super cute match-3-ish game with a bunch of neat added mechanics, simultaneously simple and challenging. it can be frustrating and i got stuck a lot, but in a fun way where you feel clever and accomplished when you figure out how to complete a puzzle. you are doing favors for a glitch witch, defeating hackers and spammers in her online networks while trying to figure out who and where she is!
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Cook, Serve, Delicious 2!!

like a few other games, you probably know this one already, but it deserves a recommendation nonetheless. the cook serve delicious games are great! they're fast-paced cooking/restaurant simulator game where you use the keyboard to make food. i've been playing this on steam for years and love it; there's funny flavor text and a lot to do. no story, just food.
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Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor

i'm so excited that this was bundled, because i adore it and think everyone should play it. this is a scifi simulator game about being a spaceport janitor, haunted by a skull that screams at you all the time. walk around, incinerate trash, pray, buy things, sell things, avoid the cops, write in your diary every day. the visuals are really outstanding. this is one of those games that's nice to just play to walk around looking at stuff. there's so much to look at, the colors are wonderful. it has a very meditative soothing feeling. if you like settling into a game environment and that feeling of inhabiting a specific place, i think you'll really enjoy this game!
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Dujanah

abstract arty existential mixed-media game about loss and war and machines and a bunch of stuff; you play as dujanah, who is trying to find out what happened to her husband and daughter (who were shot to death). it's sad and strange and uncomfortable and v good. features claymation, felt, pencil drawings, glitch art, and a super strange soundtrack. this game is very weird but not totally bizarre or impenetrable! i think it's a great art game for people who're not as into the super experimental super weird stuff (like me).
apparently the content and story stuff can vary from playthru to playthru and it has multiple endings maybe? lagged a bit on my low-end laptop but wasn't unplayable.
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Eternia: Pet Whisperer

a comedy friendship sim about meeting and adopting a bunch of talking animals. i had extremely low expectations of this - gimmicky comedy western dating sims are pretty much never good - but i was pleasantly surprised! it is actually funny and i enjoyed it a lot. the frill-necked lizard is my favorite. it's short and definitely worth playing through every "route".
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Fortune-499

this game is kind of difficult to describe. you play as a fortune-teller working in a dull office job, and you "battle" by playing rock-paper-scissors. you use your deck of fortune-telling cards to influence the outcome of the matches. it's really interesting!! it's tutorialized very well in the game and quite fun and not quite like any other game i've played, which is always exciting i think.
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Heartbreak High: A Break-Up Simulator

a comedy breakup simulator by alec robbins (of mr. boop fame)! it's exactly what it says on the tin. you are dating everybody at school, and you have to break up with them all before the end of the day. it's very silly and i enjoyed it a lot! the hand-drawn UI adds a really nice charming touch to the whole thing i think.
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ISLANDS: Non-Places

a series of surreal interactive art pieces making already-eerie nonplaces (parking lot, baggage claim, waiting room) somewhat more unsettling. lots of ambient rustling and clicking and beeping noises. i thought it was nice but strange. this is one of those things that's maybe not exactly a "game" per se but there isn't a better word for the thing it is. it's neat! i have a particular fondness for liminal spaces, and this really captures the whole flavor perfectly.
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Kids

weird half hour long thing where you just push people into pits. more an animation than a game, really. it's oddly satisfying and at times unsettling and has a unique visual style. neat!
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Last Word

a comedy rpg set at a mysterious dinner party at a mansion sort of like in clue, in a world where conversations are fights and getting the last word gives you power. unique and fun gameplay! there's some fun details to poke around at and i love the concept!
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Lizzi Crossing Classic

a combination of minesweeper and picross! super simple but very fun, especially if you like these types of logic puzzles. i wish there was music, but ah well.
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Long Gone Days

a very good-looking rpg about war and belonging! i played it when it was still in development, and thought the first 7-8 hours were great. i really enjoyed it! it's fairly dark and very violent, but it still has a lot of Friendship and isn't completely bleak which is nice and impressive for a near-future scifi military dystopia, haha. there's some interesting mechanical stuff going on, as well no random encounters at all and a system where you have to manage your party's morale, which both actually work!
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Loot Rascals

a roguelikeish thing that I ENJOYED!! i was so surprused! this is a fun colorful card-based game where you're in space. the levels are procedurally generated and there is permadeath, but with a neat and simple and intuitive combat system. i'm very bad at it and find it quite difficult, but fun nonetheless. i don't know if it would be hard for someone who likes roguelikes. this used to have some online functionality, but it was discontinued in 2021. i think the game probably still plays well enough without it, but i haven't tried it recently so i don't know for sure!
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Luck Be A Landlord

a pixel-art slot machine roguelite. you spin the slots over and over again, adding symbols as you go, hoping to get enough coins to pay the next rent payment. lots of combos and fun ripple effects, a good fiddly way to spend your time! it has something of the addictive one-more-spin quality of a slot machine, but it doesn't have microtransactions or anything like that. it's just a timesink. i really enjoy this game! i might buy it on steam too so i can have the achievements, honestly.
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Milkmaid of the Milky Way

a short (2 hours or so) point-and-click adventure about a girl and her cows who get abducted by aliens. short n sweet, and pretty nice to look at! but the big notable point about this game is that it is written entirely in RHYME, like a storybook! i think that's very fun and kooky, which is a good way for point and clicks to be in my opinion.
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Mini Metro

a minimalist train line management/sim/puzzleish/casual game. extremely easy to learn, deceptively simple, and a lovely combination of relaxing and challenging. it kind of scratches the same itch as a sudoku for me. i've played hours and hours of this on steam! definitely recommend giving it a try if you like train games.
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Minit

puzzleish adventhreish little game where you die and start over every 60 seconds. a lot of fun and doesn't take a lot of brain energy or time, without feeling annoyingly easy!
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Night In The Woods

melancholy exploration game where you walk around a small town feeling bad. it's about poverty and mental illness and being a 20-something and having friends. you've probably already heard about this one a lot, it's won a lot of awards and is rather popular. but just so you know, it deserves all the praise and is indeed That Good!
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Octodad: Dadliest Catch

NOBODY SUSPECTS A THING. remember qwop? octodad is kinda like that. you are an octopus disguised as a man and you must flail your way through life without arousing suspicion, which is difficult because you are an octopus! very silly and very fun. an absolute classic. if you like goat simulator or untitled goose game or anything along those lines, it's definitely worth a shot! i think this is one of the best of that genre of comedy making-a-mess games.
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One Night Stand

an Actually Good western visual novel!!! (these are not common.) a short and small but detail-rich character study. you play as a hungover dude who wakes up in a girls bed with no idea who she is. you can poke around her stuff and talk to her to try and figure out who she is and what's going on. it has stylish rotoscoped animations that i found very appealing. a thing centering around m/f content has to be pretty goddamn good for me to recommend it, and this is that.
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Overland

resource management/survival simulatorish game, a little bit like oregon trail and a little bit like the walking dead. it's a zombie apocalypse roadtrip with weird rock monsters instead of zombies! any game where you can have a dog in your party has a leg up, so this gets big bonus points. the game is somewhat difficult but not maddeningly so, which i love in a simulatorish game! party members can permadie but you can also start each level over as many times as you want and it's turn-based, so it's got a nice strategy-puzzle setup that i like.
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Pikuniku

a colorful simple puzzle-adventure-exploration kind of game. i played it on the switch, before it was bundled! it's quite short and doesn't have a lot going on, but it's a fun little game and made me smile a lot when i played it. there's collectibles and lots of cute blobby fellas to pal around with.
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Pyre

supergiant games's pyre! this is one of the biggest names in the bundle. it's not the most popular of supergiant's games - it wasn't a huge hit even before hades completely eclipsed all their other work - but it is still good. pyre is about... well, it's hard to really describe what it's about. it's an rpg (sort of) about playing sports (sort of) to earn an escape from purgatory (sort of). it's as wonderful to look at and listen to as other supergiant games, and it does a lot of interesting things. it's a weird game and not my favorite supergiant game (that'd be transistor), but absolutely worth a try.
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Red Embrace

its full name is "Red Embrace (BL Visual Novel)", which is what it is. it's about sexy vampires! this is a very normal BL dating game. if you like bl/yaoi, you will not find anything exceptional at all about this game, but you will probably enjoy it. it's SUCH typical predictable cheesy BL, but it does a good job at being that! if you don't like yaoi/bl, you will definitely hate this. it's not breaking any molds, lol. i found it very charming - i'm a sucker for a delinquent with a heart of gold type, so i played rex's route and enjoyed it a lot.
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Secret Little Haven

VERY VERY GOOD. MADE ME CRY. actual tears! this is the video game equivalent of holding a delicate baby bird in your hands. a trans teenager in 1999 talks to her online friends for a few days. it's so so sweet and the writing is so spot-on and it's so nostalgic and just... like... so sweet. this is a rare instance of a story about a trans person that i think would be legible and important and useful for cis people to engage with and was still appealing and engaging for me (a trans person). it absolutely deserves to be on any representation-focused rec list, but is also just really wonderful. heads up that there are some flashing & screenshaking effects that might be nauseating or migraine-/headache-inducing they can be turned down in the settings but not turned off completely as far as i can tell.
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Signs of the Sojourner

a deckbuilding game about travelling around a wasteland with (or without, if you want) a caravan of trucks, having conversations, collecting goods to sell in your shop at home, and getting to know people. has a good small cast of characters to get to know, and though the story is fairly short it has a nice replayability factor since there's a lot of sidestories to pursue in various ways. it reminds me of sunless sea the tone and atmosphere and etc are all really different, obviously, but it has a similar sort of premise/structure that i really like!
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Speed Dating for Ghosts

while this might seem like it's just going to be a quirky silly gimmick joke dating sim game, it's only half that. the ghosts have nice pieces of characterization, and it is a little bit melancholy and creepy and genuinely sweet in a very appropriate way for a game about ghosts. it is also funny, but it's doing something more interesting and less straightforward than Just a silly gag game.
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7 Second Haircuts

super quick little game where... well, what it says on the tin! you give seven second haircuts. it's fun. nothing extraordinary, but still - fun!

every other game

this is every other bundle game i've tried! these ones i wouldn't recommend - either because i thought they were just okay, they're not a genre i enjoy and thus can't judge, or because i disliked them or thought they were bad. most of them i tried and did not finish!

i don't want to be especially mean to indie games, but there are some that i have particularly negative feelings about. i will indulge my hater's heart a little bit and put a 🚫 next to games i strongly disliked and recommend not playing.

as above, you can click the game's title to see my thoughts on the games!

2064: Read Only Memories point-and-click in theory, visual novel in practice. this one's pretty popular but it didn't grab me! there's no auto-scrolling feature for the text, which is displayed one very short sentence at a time, so it's just frustratingly low. not much to do besides read the flavor text (which i didn't find interesting) and follow the story (which i also didn't find interesting). shrugs!

a completely normal dating simulation that is definitely completely sweet, innocent and normal a joke bad-on-purpose visual novel that i think was made by a kid? there's one joke that made me laugh.

A Mortician's Tale short visual novel about being a mortician. not much else to it. it's fine.

Airships: Conquer The Skies kinda complicated steampunk-ish ship-building strategy combat/resource management game. you build an airship and then fight other airships with it. i found it kind of janky and frustrating as well as being overly fiddly. i did like that you can customize your airship a lot and make it look really stupid, though. no story as far as i can tell.

🚫 Animal Lovera mediocre straight dating sim with nothing in particular that's good about it and quite a few glaring mistakes and writing fumbles. bad game.

Anodyne a zeldaish top-down pixelly adventure game. has some kind of mysterious story.

🚫 Arcade Spirits visual novel w/ dating sim components about working in an arcade. has voice acting and decent art. juvenile and cheesy and poorly-written and somewhat racist. i could complain forever about this. don't play it.

As We Know Ita dating sim with an interesting premise that fails to live up to it. repetitive and clunky, with very bad pacing.

BEACON top-down action game where you run around shooting robots. no story. has an interesting dna upgrade system type thing and a nice slick look and aesthetic. items and upgrades have well-written flavor text. i hate this kind of game but it seems good for people who like that kind of thing.

belonga forgettable small dating sim with only three love interests. the route i played was deeply bizarre and had a lot of very poorly-done mental illness PSA stuff.

Bestiary (Unspeakable)one of those games that's more like a toy than a game. you are given a picture of a funny-looking creature and a blank document which you can type in to name it and describe it. it's too freeform to be fun for me.

Bitcoin Miner: Remastered a very slick-looking idle/clicker game. it doesn't have any real sense of humor or fun flavor text, so it's a bit barebones; i prefer clicker games that have goals, like fill the oceans, or that are a bit more weird/funny. this one felt a bit too simple for my taste.

Brassica: A Marry Talean unfinished dating game, set up like a fairy tale. i really like the style and visuals, but it isn't a finished game so there's no real point in playing this. not very memorable.

🚫 Calico cutesy cat cafe / friend-making game. the controls were janky, the animations look weird, there are a number of spelling or translation errors, the characters are pretty much all the same, and i hated the cooking minigame. cute aesthetic though. i was REALLY disappointed in this one, i'd heard good things but it's just not good.

Catlateral Damage no story. just a cat going on a rampage knocking stuff over. pretty fun! not terribly engaging, but it's not trying to be. lots of cute cat pictures and collectibles, so it's good if you're into that kind of completionism collecty type stuff.

Celeste this game has won a lot of awards and lots of people say it is very good! i gave it a try and discovered that i still do not like platformers, especially not ones where you have to jump off walls.

Changeling a just okay straight visual novel. pretty much a YA fantasy novel, complete with secretly faerie snarky teen girl protagonist, handsome vampires, and basically everything you'd expect from that kind of thing. it's decent and has a lot of story content outside of the heterosexual romance options, and i think every romance route has multiple non-romantic friendship endings. LOTS of endings to unlock. not Amazing, but probably good for people who like stuff like the spiderwick chronicles or shadowhunters. too straight for me to play more than one route (i did ewan's), but decent enough that i finished it.

Clean ATTACK!a window-washing game with very frustrating controls. i think they're frustrating on purpose? and it seems like this game might be some kind of inside joke? i couldn't really figure it out. not especially fun. wouldn't recommend.

Crashed Lander i couldn't get my computer to open this!

Crest a godgame settlement manager type of game where your control is a bit indirect, as you have to manage your guys with decrees that can be misinterpreted or changed over time. i think this is neat! i also discovered through this (and odd realm) that godgames aren't as much my thing as other types of management/sim games.

Dates & Wiresa dating game set in a cyberpunk-style bar. apparently all the characters are from the dev's webcomic! it's probably pretty funny if you read the webcomic. if you haven't, like me, it's a bit more lacking as an experience. i think it's funny that all the characters are really annoying and bad dates, but it isn't very funny.

Death and Taxesi had this game on my wishlist for a while, actually. then i played it and... i actually don't remember anything about it. i was disappointed by it, anyway; despite it being extremely up my alley in many ways, it just didn't make an impression at all.

Democratic Socialism Simulator a simulator game where you have a job that I DIDNT like, amazingly. it's fine, but just kinda boring. too simple. art and ui are fine but nothing special.

🚫 Destiny Fails Us: A New Lifean unfinished dating game. the characters are all off-putting. there's an implied larger story at the end of this that doesn't have any real detail in it, but might be fun eventually? i'm unclear on whether this is ever going to be finished. i was unimpressed with the writing and dating options, and found a lot of it off-putting.

Don't Take It Personally, I Just Don't Like You: The Camping Tripa just-fine little visual novel demo that is absolutely not a finished game or even a complete experience as-is. the characters are solid and the teasers for the full game do make it seem reasonably interesting, although i'm not sure it's interesting enough to make up for the weird dirtbaggy move of putting a free demo in a charity bundle to advertise the full paid version whose proceeds are Not going to charity.

Dr. Trolley's Problem it's a bunch of trolley problems. i guess this is probably fun for the type of person who likes picking fights with the concept of the trolley problem, which i know is a type of person who exists? it all felt kinda pointless, since it's hard to take seriously without any kind of actual narrative or reason to play it.

Dungeons and Lesbians dating game, kind of? it only takes about twenty minutes to finish a "route" . I found the writing annoying. the game appears to have been taken down anyway, though.

🚫 Errant Kingdoma vaguely medieval-fantasy-ish visual novel with dating elements. over-promised and underdelivered. i could complain forever about this, but i'll keep it to this: the game is so bad that the devs felt the need to post a public apology for doing such a bad job writing it. it is not funny-bad, it's just bad.

EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER decently written and fairly interesting, bad but skippable gameplay, and doesn't hang together super well bc of how much of the character interactions are skippable. or maybe it's supposed to be mysterious? can't really tell. it wasn't finished when i played it, but now it is and has a sequel as well.

Flat Kingdom puzzleish actionish platformerish. you change shapes to do various puzzles. just didn't click with me.

From Orbit tower defense/resource-gathering strategy game in space w/ procedurally generated levels. no tutorial so it's kind of confusing trying to figure out what you're doing?? gathering rocks and getting killed by aliens mostly it seems. it's pretty hard, has no story, but has a fairly slick look and v simple UI.

Fugue In Void an abstract artsy type thing that I don't Get. it starts with a ten minute video that's mostly shapes slowly moving around and then you walk around some rooms. apparently it's only like an hour long but I got lost and was not invested enough in it to try and get unlost

Gladiabots programming-esque game where u make robots do fights. boring and kinda complicated. probably great if you like that kinda thing though?? no story or characters, not much color or aesthetic

Haque top down pixel art roguelike thing w glitch effects. shrugs.

Highway Blossoms f/f visual novel about a desert road trip slash treasure hunt. the love interest girl is the stupidest person on the planet and acts like a child so I stopped after like half an hour. maybe good if you like that kind of "born sexy yesterday" romance I Guess. i have absolutely no patience for it.

HRT Simulator 2023a short visual novel about a young trans man taking his first testosterone shot with the support of his friends. i did not find it funny or charming; enjoying it is 100% dependent on you finding it funny and/or charming.

Ise & Kai: Chosen Throneyet another unfinished dating game. this one centers around a rebellious princess in a vaguely medieval-fantasy world and her two love interests: a yandere bodyguard and a silly demon king. it's fine. it's not done, though, and might not ever be.

LAZA KNITEZ!! a jousting action game. no story just driving around with laser lances and guns smashing into other little guys. Fine but not my thing

Lenna's Inception a zeldaish game but the hero dies so some lady has to save the day instead. seems fine but I don't like pixelly Zelda games it turns out.

LongStorya visual novel about middle schoolers having middle school drama and accepting themselves and learning valuable lessons for children. probably great if you're 10-15; i am not.

Love Hues!mediocre dating game featuring an insufferable protagonist. there's a million of these and there's not much to say about them. would not recommend.

Mech_Romancera short visual novel about a mech pilot dating a robot. it's fine.

MewnBase its dont starve but youre a cat on the moon and theres no monsters (at least not in the tutorial version)! p good but i dont actually like dont starve that much.

Micro Mages 2d pixelgraphics platformer. autoscroller also.

MidBoss top-down turnbased pixelart dungeon crawler thing. you're a demon who lives in an adventuring dungeon. i couldn't get the hang of the controls.

Monstrata Fracture an unfinished dating game that broke partway through the route i was trying to play. cheesy run of the mill YA fantasy.

Mu Cartographer rather opaque game in which you try to figure out how to operate a weird fiddly alien interface while looking at a bunch of wiggly colors to piece together tiny bits of story. intriguing but made me nauseous, and the pieces of story you get are like 2-3 sentences so it seems like it'd be p time-consuming to get a better picture of whats going on.

NIGHT OF THE CONSUMERS first-person jumpscarey horror game where you work at a retail store. couldn't figure out the controls and found the look of it offputtingly ugly. not my thing. i'm really easily startled.

No Delivery another horror game about having a job, this time at a fnaf-esque pizza place with animatronics and stuff. a little confusing but i thought it was fine and reasonably enjoyable! no jumpscares, just a kinda silly "chuck e cheese but everythings covered in BLOOOOD" vibe. it's not actually trying very hard to be scary and is more like a kinda undertaleish vibe where you're just kinda palling around with ghosts and stuff. might play more of this one at some point.

Nuclear Throne topdown shooter roguelike type thing. idk.

Odd Realm top-down pixelly colony-building/resource management sim. kinda complicated and dull, didn't feel like finishing the tutorial. dont rly like these kinds of things, too slow and too much to keep track of. nice music though!

Oikospiel Book I you know that experimental avant-garde music thats just like, people screeching and banging on pots and pans and stuff? this is like that but in video game form. it's some kind of avant-garde art thing and is completely incomprehensible to me. feels like being trapped in a neural network's nightmare. i think it might be good, but i really couldn't say.

Peckin Pixels a very small chicken farming game. fun for the very brief time you play it; not much to it, though.

Pixrossa simple picross game! the puzzles were way too easy for me, but if you want to solve some easy picross puzzles... it has those.

Potion Commotionpotion-making game! a bit too simple/grindy for me.

Prince of Catsa pretty good dating sim; you play as a fairy whose prince has run away to the human world. you try to find him and along the way befriend various characters from shakespeare plays. not amazing and a bit clunky, but has some fun concepts.

Repurposea dating game set in the afterlife. i found it unfunny and the characters irritating.

songs and flowersa somewhat entertaining straight dating game; not excellent, but not awful. there are a couple of actually funny jokes, which is a significant accomplishment in the field of visual novels!

Roll+Hearta dating game about playing DnD, wherein you have to actually play through some DnD encounters. the first dnd battle broke in such a way that i could not continue the game. the option to skip the battles did not work. would not recommend, since the game was literally unplayable.

Seduce Me The Complete Storya straight dating game about a teen girl with a house full of incubuses. the boys are all unappealing and the fact that they are sex demons is basically irrelevant. weird.

Sidewordsword puzzle game. it's fine! not quite fun, though.

Sky Rogue a flight simulator where you fire missiles at things. pretty nice retro ps2-feeling aesthetic and peppy music

🚫 Slasher U: An 18+ Horror Movie Dating Sim Act Onenot only is this game unfinished, it's also nearly incoherent and completely depends on you already being familiar with and really fond of the dev's OCs. which i was not. the mechanics don't work very well at all and it's difficult to parse what's going on or what you're supposed to do.

songs and flowersa kinda cute kinda funny straight-dating visual novel. it's not good enough to recommend, but it is still better than most of the other visual novels i played from these bundles.

Starlight Shores very realistic portrait of a very ordinary group of teen friends having a bad evening at the beach, which is not especially interesting or fun to read for me but maybe for you. the player character is ridiculously passive and everyone acts like teenagers despite theoretically being adults.

Terroir a winemaking game about running a winery! it's fine. i found it a bit boring and lacking in mechanics.

Talk To Mefine. extremely clunky and bad at the beginning but kinda settled into a groove as it went on. mostly it is just about an unpleasant normal guy with brain problems having brain problems and kind of trying to date people to get over the brain problems but it doesn't work.

The Three-Body Problema short piece of interactive fiction about running around in the woods doing BDSM roleplay.

The Lost Art of Innkeeping an innkeeping management game. has a little bit of story. it's fun! nothing much to say about it, though. the story is so short it feels sort of extraneous. i had fun but wasn't wild about it, it doesn't have enough to do to be really grabby the way i like sim/management games to be.

🚫 The Space Between extremely tiresome pretentious narrative game about a dude wandering around w/ retro ps1 graphics. so dull I didn't bother to finish it even though I think it's quite short.

This Call May Be Recorded little telemarketing game. it's fine, but i found it a little dull and was hoping for more of a simulator game. eh.

Vilmonica pixel art evolution/life simulator with a bunch of funny alien monsters. i could not figure out how to play it and died.

Walden, A Game a first-person walking-sim/exploration game where you play as henry david thoreau, wandering around walden pond for some reason. it crashed twice when i was opening it and it ran very poorly on my computer, probably because the game has recreated the entirety (??) of walden pond in a lot of detail and is kind of intense. you can look at & identify plants and animals. has a lot of what i assume is direct quotation from thoreau's writing and letters sent to him. a nice idea seemingly well executed, but i do not care about thoreau and have been to walden pond in person many times, so all the plants and animals are already familiar to me. maybe nice if you have a hankering for a walk in the woods and also really love thoreau?

Wheels of Aurelia road trip/dialogue game set in Italy in the 70s. really nice art but extremely janky? I cannot figure out how I'm supposed to play it so the dialogue makes sense and am having a very hard time piecing together what it's about.

🚫 Whipped and Steamy Cosplay Cafea tacky visual novel/job sim about a bored girl who works in a sexual cosplay cafe. it's supposed to be funny; most of the jokes are just "you are being sexually harassed at work! how zany and wacky!" i find this genre of teehee wink-nudge sex-comedy that makes no effort to be actually sexy really obnoxious.

Who Killed My Father Academy!protagonist enrolls at a school to find out who killed her father. some mystery-solving elements, but they're disappointingly minor. some interesting concepts very boringly put together and the back half draaaaags.

WitchWay pixel art puzzle platformer.