Games. You want them, Itch.io sells them, and to facilitate that process it’s put 606 of the things on sale.

I like that they’ve taken the polar opposite approach to Steam’s shenanigans for their own summer sale, and surrounded the discounts with absolutely zero guff. I know some people buy into the badges and whatnot, but after years of Valve’s bombarding me with cutesy treehouse animals, those avatars have started landing on the manipulative side of corporate fun. Read on for my picks from this refreshingly minimalist sale, which include the likes of heart-squelching rhythm action-game Thumper and soul-squashing robo-shooter The Signal from T lva . (more…)

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.>

The Rusty Lake games are beautifully macabre creations. Hotel is my favourite, I think, though Roots is perhaps more ambitious. If you haven’t played them, you should play both. Here’s why…

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Rusty Lake Hotel [official site] is a game I have meant to write about on RPS for so long. I missed its release, and found it by luck on my phone when searching for interesting escape-the-room games. And wow, did I find interesting. And not only did I discover the incredible Rusty Lake Hotel game, a dark and devastatingly creepy murder mystery adventure, but also their catalogue of remarkably unsettling and often brilliant free Cube Escape games. Each release fits into a larger mythology that feels ominously huge and yet barely understood, awful stories of gruesome deaths and mysterious looming bird-headed figures, time-bending weirdness, and an overriding notion of cruelty that’s hard to quantify. In short, they’re completely wonderful. So I enter Rusty Lake: Roots [official site] with a great sense of anticipation. Here’s wot I think:

… [visit site to read more]