itch.io Recommends: start the new year with new games!
Welcome to 2019! We can take a collective sigh of relief as we made it through the Running Man gauntlet that was 2018. Let’s start the new year off with something positive and talk about some great games to help ease you into this brave new year.
The Tomorrow Corporation catalog
Ok this one isn’t a game but three of them. You may have missed it during the excitement of the Winter Sale, but we worked with Tomorrow Corporation to bring their entire catalog to itch.io. That’s right, now you can play Little Inferno, 7 Billion Humans, and Human Resource Machine through the itch app or DRM-free.
My favorite of the trio is Little Inferno (I love burning things and Sugar Plumps is a precious child), but all three have a unique brand of dark comedy that resonates throughout. If you’re not interested in burning everything you own, you can also check out Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans: a pair of worker automation games that become brain melting programming puzzles that can inspire even the most code-averse players. I’m a huge fan of everything this crew does, and once you get hooked on the Tomorrow Corporation library you will be too.
Homerun Bun
This is one of the purest recommendations I can make. Homerun Bun is a simple high score game where a rabbit with a bat hits a ball into the air and collects money once that ball hits the ground. You then spend the money you collect on new bats, balls, and clothes. Honestly, all of this is pretty common stuff, but I couldn’t stop playing.
When I started playing Homerun Bun I thought I’d spend a few minutes on it and then move onto something else, but when I exited the game after collecting everything from the in-game store I found out an hour had been taken from me. Watching the scarf wearing rabbit move back and forth across the screen trying to catch the ball before it slams into the ground and sprays out money creates an unbreakable flow that only stops when you pause the game to pick out a new bat.
Northbury Grove: King’s Comfort
80s-style horror games are in something of a renaissance right now. I don’t know what happened, but the past few years have seen an explosion of vhs filters, wood-paneling, and questionable fashion choices. Northbury Grove: King’s Comfort is the newest entry in this strangely popular genre, and one of its best. Following up last year’s Northbury Grove, King’s Comfort is a horrific crawl through an abandoned motel. All of the usual first person horror trappings are here, you’ve got a spotty flashlight, something is stalking you, and you’ll wander around a dense but small area — but King’s Comfort polishes all of these ideas to a mirror sheen.
In recommending this game I also want to recommend the Scythe team as a whole. It’s easy to miss the fact that both Northbury Groves came out during 2018 but it’s an important thing to realize. With the steps between these two games, I can’t wait to see what comes nest.
