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Developers can even choose to make their Itch.io games free or offer a pay-if-you-want scheme. While this can be used to release free versions of paid games, like a trial version, many developers choose to release full-fledged projects for nothing at all. This makes them some of the more popular games on Itch.io, but only a few are actually worth playing.
Updated September 28, 2021 by Erik Petrovich: The Itch.io platform is a brilliant innovation in the industry of indie gaming. It’s an easy way for developers from all walks of life to get their work out there (and have it actually be noticed) and its offerings are much more put together than many free gaming platforms out there. While all of the following games are free to play, most offer a suggested price to support the developers. If you have the extra money it’s well worth supporting these developers for putting in the effort to create completely unique experiences that Triple-A developers can’t emulate. Games like Friday Night Funkin, Doki Doki Literature Club, and Faith are all perfect examples of games that made it “big” while being based on this platform.
13 Get In The Car, Loser!
Suggested Price: $10. 00 Gameplay/Genre: RPG
Get In The Car, Loser! is a name-your-price game with a particularly colorful (and modern) twist. Its active-time RPG mechanics feel fine-tuned compared to the turn-based RPGs it was inspired by, and its LGBT-centric story, characters, and aesthetics feel just as modern. It’s one of those good Itch.io games that puts its own spin on a classic genre.
It’s a bombastic road trip adventure through a fusion of modern and fantasy settings as players go from being at the Gas Station refueling the eponymous car to battling the Machine Devil with the Sword of Fate. The creator of the game describes it as a game about “discovering yourself, whatever the f**k that means”.
12 Right Click To Necromance
Suggested Price: $2. 00 Gameplay/Genre: Hack N’ Slash
Right Click to Necromance is a simple game with a simple concept - left click to control your skeletal army, and right-click to use your necromancer powers to resurrect your fallen enemies. It was created for the Indie Speed Run jam in 2015, and was amazingly developed in less than 48 hours. It’s one of the best Itch.io games made in such a short time span.
While the game itself was made by one person, two others worked on the game’s music. It’s impressive to see what such a small team can accomplish in such a short amount of time, and it’s well worth checking out for its totally unique gameplay.
11 FAITH
Suggested Price: $2. 00 Gameplay/Genre: Horror
FAITH is a lo-fi horror game that takes major inspiration from the MS-DOS and Atari era of video games, though it’s something quite unlike the innocent offerings of that time. Despite its graphical style, it’s one of the most spooky games on the Itch.io platform, and it’s surely one that will stick with horror gaming fans.
It currently has three chapters, though the third chapter is still in its demo phase. The game is technically free, but by paying only a dollar to the developer, players get access to a deluxe version of the game, a number of cosmetics, the game’s eerie soundtrack, and access to updates earlier than others.
10 Friday Night Funkin'
Suggested Price: $5. 00 Gameplay/Genre: Rhythm/Music
Friday Night Funkin’ is one of the most popular indie rhythm games ever released, and for good reason. It’s got a huge amount of customization, the controls are perfectly intuitive and responsive, and the game’s variety of mods and custom tracks make it nearly infinitely replayable.
If gamers haven’t already seen this game in action, it’s well worth checking out for the art style and music alone. It’s regularly updated and has a huge following, despite being made by a tiny team, and it is regularly featured in the top 10 Itch.io games on the site’s front page.
9 Juice Galaxy
Suggested Price: $5. 00 Gameplay/Genre: Open-World RPG
Juice Galaxy is a mind-bending exploration sandbox with an art style reminiscent of the PlayStation One and fluid physics-based animations and models. It’s a really wacky game that might take some time to get used to, but it’s worth it.
The game has RPG elements and a large and varied enough world to keep the player engaged for a few hours. It still receives regular updates, and as one of the best free games on Itch.io, it’s worth checking out, even if its psychedelic and abstract style makes it hard to get into at first.
8 Doki Doki Literature Club
Suggested Price: $10. 00 Gameplay/Genre: Visual Novel. . . . . Among Others
Doki Doki Literature Club is an innovative game, despite appearing like a normal Japanese visual novel. Without going too far into spoilers for the game, it’s much different than most people expect and well worth going in blind for.
If the visual novel gameplay bores players, just give it half an hour to an hour to really get going. It’s worth the ride, and the game’s popularity on YouTube and streaming platforms is a testament to that fact.
7 We Become What We Behold
Suggested Price: $2. 00 Gameplay/Genre: Simulator
We Become What We Behold is an open-source satirical game that puts its sights on the endless news cycles we experience all around us. It’s an extremely short game, but a great 5-minute experience for its commentary on how the media influences mass behavior.
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Taking pictures of people doing different actions affects the mini-society, and even gets into some harsh subjects subtly. It’s hard to explain, but it’s as intuitive as it is ingenious.
6 Baldi’s Basics In Education and Learning
Suggested Price: $10. 00 Gameplay/Genre: Horror
Baldi’s Basics in Education and Learning is one of the best games on Itch.io for horror fans. It creates its scares through the incredibly off-putting main character, Baldi, and the nightmarishly bizarre world the game takes place in.
It poses as a simple, badly designed children’s educational game, but after just a few minutes in-game the player finds it to be a much, much more sinister experience.
5 Gacha Life PC
Suggested Price: $2. 00 Gameplay/Genre: Social
Gacha Life is a very popular mobile game on both Android and iOS that functions as a blend of a virtual dollhouse and a social experience. Players can customize up to eight chibi-like characters with a variety of accessories and take part in online chat rooms with NPCs and other people alike.
The PC version of this game is much more limited than its mobile counterparts, though, and functions as more of a demo than a full-fledged game. It’s still regularly updated to this day, and is constantly becoming closer to the mobile version.
4 Terra Nil - Reclaim the Wasteland
Suggested Price: $5. 00 Gameplay/Genre: Simulator/Strategy
Terra Nil is one of the most innovative and unique simulator games on the Itch.io platform, and unbelievably it’s a name-your-own-price game. Terra Nil doesn’t task the player with building a city, managing a home, or living a normal life as other simulation games do. Instead, the player must rebuild nature in a classic early 2000s pixel art world.
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The player takes the control of an ecosystem under reconstruction with the goal to turn a barren wasteland into a paradise. It was one of the best games on Itch.io for a while, but Free Lives, the development team behind the game, have officially announced that a more robust version of the game will be launching on Steam with the help of publisher Devolver Digital.
3 Stick It To The Stickman
Suggested Price: $2. 00 Gameplay/Genre: Fighter/Roguelike
Stick It To The Stickman is a hectic single-player brawler with fluid stickman animations in a physics-based world. The game is a self-described rogue-lite where progress is reset after death, but some permanent upgrades stay between deaths.
It’s another game made by Free Lives, the creators of Terra Nil, and just like all of their games, Stick It To The Stickman is surprisingly deep for being a free indie game.
2 A Firm Handshake
Suggested Price: $2. 00 Gameplay/Genre: Art Game/Indie
A Firm Handshake is a short yet open-ended game with no real focus. The game tasks the player to shake hands with various people in an off-brown world, and things get a little bit weirder as the game goes on.
It’s hilarious, it’s got a good art style that exemplifies its simplicity, and it’s one of the few surreal games that actually make some kind of sense.
1 Coming Out Simulator 2014
Suggested Price: $2. 00 Gameplay/Genre: Simulator/Social
There have been a few games on itch.io that use the subject of Coming Out as an LGBT individual. The game Coming Out Simulator 2014 by Nicky Case, though, stands apart from the rest for its brutal honesty about “half-truths”.
The game puts the player in control of the game’s creator on the night of their coming out to their parents. The player can choose what to say and how to react to experience what it’s like in such a nerve-wracking moment, and it gets across those feelings of apprehension and judgment perfectly.
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