This is so concise and user-friendly - awesome work!
Also, thank you very much for adding in the explanatory link about the Territorial Acknowledgement, I learnt a lot from it! I've seen them around on itch.io before but never had clear context about how they get developed, why they're important (beyond general best practice), and how they should be delivered, since I don't encounter them much as someone from the UK. I'm glad I have a better understanding now.
A fun TTRPG premise that captures almost exactly the vibes I would hope for as a former British highschooler. It spans a range of tones to choose between, and has a strong understanding of the nuances of varied British and UK school cultures (yes, it knows the difference!)
It doesn't seem to be a full release (file is labeled V0.9), but it's definitely in a playable state and has enough suggestions of different events to keep the hijinks coming - skip to the back for these if you want to find them efficiently. I especially loved the silly/fantastical twists on the plot hook prompts, featuring some delightful fusion options such as "demonology club actually summons something" x "hockey team desperately needs a win" = "newly summoned demon recruited to hockey team as star player!"
The main downside in my opinion is that it's a bit too hefty for a casual, no-prep one-shot game. Billing itself as "A simple tabletop roleplaying game" feels a little misleading when there are 60 pages of content.
The text does encourage you to craft your school in advance of play, but I don't think this is essential - whipping one up with the random tables would be pretty easy, as long as you already have a passing understanding of what British/UK high schools are like. (If you don't, there are helpful and detailed explanations available in the text, and these would definitely be worth reading ahead of trying to run a game.)
There's a lot to sift through here. While all of it is nicely written and has been carefully considered, I think a stronger developmental edit could've managed to pare this down to under 20 pages. The NPCs section could've used a random-tables approach to help with speed-generation, rather than only giving a few example characters, and I don't think their stats system add much. Similarly, I think the dice roll system for resolving actions and social obligations is a bit more fiddly than I would ideally like, but it may well feel smoother in play than in reading.
Another gripe of mine is that the three-aspect character generation system makes it pretty much impossible to generate a character of below-average social standing or one who rules with an iron fist rather than winning hearts and minds. In doing so, it erases a lot of real-world highschooler types from being player-character material, relegating those archetypes to supporting cast NPCs or non-existence, and that frustrates me.
I would have really liked to see a set of serious-tone plot hook options in there as well, as it's possible to do teenage hijinks comedies that work these in for contrast and deeper themes - I'm thinking of examples like The Young Offenders, The Dumping Ground, The Boy In The Dress (the TV adaptation, not the TERFy book), Teechers, the modern CBBC adaptation of Malory Towers, etc.
Overall, I think there's strong potential and a lot to be enjoyed here for anyone who's drawn in by the title. A more condensed version would go a long way to facilitate zero-prep one-shot play, but there's a real appeal to the current detailed version too. 4/5 stars - excellent.
Please can you make it possible to paste writing into the text entry box that accompanies star ratings?
It's really frustrating when I forget this issue exists and write review content in any other area (e.g. in a collection listing, in a comment on the game page) and then can't just copy it over into the ratings/review box.
I'm sure writing things out from scratch is fine for people who only leave brief reviews, but when you get more detailed than a sentence or two, it quickly becomes grating or even impossible to type the whole thing out again for no good reason, so then people miss out on those reviews.
According to the information here, it sounds like the creators both collaborated with The Nicaraguan Sign Language Project when designing the game, and give all proceeds from the physical edition to them too - having raised over $15,000 so far. (Quote below for ease of reference.)
So it really seems like they've made a solid effort to avoid the things raised as hypothetical issues above - and it makes sense that they wouldn't consult ASL users in Bay Area for a game related to the formation of a linguistically unrelated sign language from Nicaragua, especially when they had consultants from the NSL community.
"All publisher proceed from the physical version go to support sign language education in Nicaragua, currently The Nicaraguan Sign Language Projects (NSLP). This has raised more than $15,000 in donation to date. Thorny Games thanks the NSLP for their guidance and input on game design."
Wow, I really loved this. The writing is fantastic and really expresses a lot of the nuance in being a multiply marginalised queer person!
I'm glad I tried a replay and made it to Ending 3 - I definitely wouldn't have got a proper sense of it if I'd just given up after getting Ending 5 on my first playthrough!
When trying to sift through a large charity bundle's contents, I noticed that filtering to "Games" (as opposed to "Physical Games") did not yield only digital-native game results (video games, interactive fiction, etc.). Instead, lots of TTRPGs had been mistakenly included in this category, rather than put into "Physical Games" with most of their peers.
I can totally empathise with how this happened - the labels are unintuitive, so it's no wonder that some devs would default to "Game", and it would be unreasonable for the bundle creators to go through over 1,000 submissions to quality-assure their categorisation.
But I think it would be pretty easy for the itch.io team to address this for the future by updating the labels to be clearer. It would definitely help the customers who buy big bundles like this and need to sort through their contents!
"Digital games" might still be a bit too ambiguous as a replacement for "Games", as PDFs are technically a digital format and most TTRPGs etc. are provided this way on itch.io. However, "video games and digital-native narratives" would be a pretty clear explanation of what this category is supposed to contain (even though I realise the length is a bit annoying, and not everyone would know the term digital-native at first). If you further split it into "video games" and "digital-native narratives", it could make it much easier for fans of these subcategories to filter to what they're interested in (and filter out what they're not). However, it might create a false and reductive binary unless you allowed for creators to select both options where applicable.
"Physical games" is also not super clear, as it implies a need for print-and-play that isn't strictly applicable to TTRPG materials, since these can be run simply by referencing the PDF without printing it. Changing this to something like "board games, card games, TTRPGs, storygames, lyric games and journaling games" would be a lot clearer - but again, perhaps a bit long.
Splitting that into separate categories might be tricky unless you allow for creators to select multiple items in that list. (For example, some deckbuilding board games are also card games in a sense, but not purely card games since they feature a board. There's substantial overlap between storygames, TTRPGs and journaling games - especially in cases where a game has options for solo or group playstyles.)
Edit: this issue is also affecting the "Book" category - pretty much everything in the bundle under that category is a TTRPG or materials to support one, rather than a more conventional book (that does not feature instructions for a TTRPG or similar game). Splitting "Book" into "Fiction", "Non-fiction" and perhaps "TTRPG" - or redirecting creators to the TTRPG section if that is a category under "Game" - may go some way to address this confusion in future.
Thank you for your consideration! :)
Thought-provoking lyric game that raises questions about the nature of fiction, tabletop roleplaying games, and our obligation to help other people. Minimum price $1, community copies sometimes available.
I liked this overall, though I couldn't really figure out the jellyfish element - perhaps unsurprisingly, as I struggle with lots of non-literal aspects of art. I still enjoyed trying, anyway. The concept of the drowning stranger is a familiar one to me, so that aspect clicked much more easily and I enjoyed the evocative scene-setting and narrator's interruptions to it, and the ending section was a neat rallying call to action (though less topical now - perhaps if a new edition ever comes out, it could feature different suggested action points).
I'm still a newcomer to lyric games in general, so I'm not putting my usual rating out of five at the end of this. Still, I found Jellyfish Are Not Real really interesting and well worth the $1 cost of checking it out.
Short and sweet lyric game that creates a simple framework for reflecting on hope and anxiety about upcoming visible changes in yourself. Community copies are available.
I'm not someone who really 'gets' lyric games in general, though I'm trying to learn more about them from the Lyrical Ludology podcast because I think experimental art is interesting. However, this one appeals to me because it has straightforward enough parallels (with coming out, transitioning, getting surgery scars, getting a new visible aid for a disability, or simply changing up your personal aesthetic) that I feel like I can get what it's going for.
This is a resource I might use to introduce a young person to any of the concepts I just mentioned. I feel like it's playful and straightforward enough to make an appealing independent activity for creative writing and emotional intelligence and drawing skills, while also providing a great springboard for deeper discussion.
I don't think I can rate lyric games out of five like I usually do for other games, because I just don't feel confident enough in my understanding of the movement (or, honestly, most individual games in it!) but I'd say this is worth checking out if the above has piqued your interest.
A short free essay on Downtime in Blades in the Dark games - it's clear, well thought out, and written from a place of genuine enthusiasm for these games. I especially appreciated the consideration of themes relating to critical perspectives on power. 5/5 stars - outstanding.
Having played in a campaign of Band of Blades (a Forged in the Dark game) where our GM and players were quite inconsistent in how we approached Downtime segments, it was oddly reassuring to read about other groups running into similar moments of excessive focus on mechanics, or just not having enough inspiration for a notable roleplay segment.
Bittersweet and delightfully unsettling system-neutral one-shot scenario for 1-2 players. It's hard to pitch without spoilers, but if you have mixed feelings about leaving your hometown, this is definitely worth checking out. 5/5 stars - outstanding.
Also, there's a designer commentary available if you're curious - that's how I found out about this game: https://podcastaddict.com/dice-exploder/episode/199739884
This is such a fascinating and cool game! :D
The only thing that threw me off while reading it is this section:
"Stories are myths, holidays, and rumors about some aspect of Crop Cultivation. These stories are sometimes used to teach a moral, establish history, or plant an idea in the heads of the populace. [...] Similarly, the holiday of Thanksgiving in the United States stems from celebrations of a successful harvest, but has its origins in Protestant penance ceremonies. These Stories can be indirect byproducts of the people who work in their cultivation, or at least from beneficiaries of the cultivation process."
I was really surprised that no mention is made here of Indigenous American perspectives on Thanksgiving, nor how the dominant version of its historic origin story is heavily altered to cast it in a more positive light. (See for example https://blog.nativehope.org/what-does-thanksgiving-mean-to-native-americans as a starting point, though I would suggest reading more widely from a range of Indigenous sources on this topic.)
I hope you'll consider looking into this and updating the Stories section with more information on these points. I think Thanksgiving could be a really brilliant example of the complexities that communities bring to food-related stories, and how the beneficiaries' perspectives can vary from the cultivators'.
Explanation of details here for anyone who needs them: https://thetransfemininereview.com/2025/07/24/itch-io-nsfw-ban/ In short, this negatively affects various NSFW content creators who rely on itch.io as a haven for queer creative works.
If you want to try and fight back against this, consider contacting the payment providers - they're the ones with the power here, itch.io has very little agency in this situation. Apparently it took Collective Shout about 1000 calls to convince the payment processors this needed to be done, so there's now a counter-effort to outdo them - information, including customer service phone numbers for the payment processor, can be found here: https://bsky.app/profile/iantos.bsky.social/post/3luondx46tk2v
I'm glad! ^_^
I can offer some basic guidance, but it will never be as good as getting a specialist consultant with relevant lived experience (e.g. visual impairment, Irlen Syndrome, dyslexia...) to look over the specific document in question, so please bear that in mind. With that said, brace yourself for an infodump!
The Centre for Excellence in Universal Design suggests that you avoid placing background images behind text and use a line-height of at least 1.5 times the text size – this provides enough ‘breathing space’ for users to be able read text comfortably. (Source: https://universaldesign.ie/communications-digital/web-and-mobile-accessibility/w... )
Minimum default 'clear print' font size is 12pt, but bigger is better - especially for people with visual impairments. Consider making a large-print version if possible - that's 16pt Arial or bigger. For a beginner-friendly checklist, see https://www.sensorytrust.org.uk/resources/guidance/designing-with-clear-and-larg... and for more in-depth information on clear and large print standards, see the guidance documents here: https://www.ukaaf.org/service/large-print/
For a more thorough technical breakdown of reader-friendly design choices for dyslexia, including good typefaces to use, see the British Dyslexia Association's style guide: https://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/advice/employers/creating-a-dyslexia-friendly-wor...
When selecting a background colour for digital display, aim for off-white/cream as a default - this is more accessible for people with Irlen Syndrome than white, but still allows for personalised coloured filters to be used over the top if needed. If you want to go the extra mile, you can provide a variety of versions using the different colours that are recommended by experts - see the row of pastel-coloured glasses icons at the top of this website for examples. https://irlen.com/
To create a printer-friendly version, remove the tinted background so you just have black text for the printer to focus on. (People may have their own coloured paper of choice, and nobody wants to waste colour ink or wind up with unwanted greyscale backgrounds.)
For guidance on margin sizing in digital media, you can try https://uxmovement.com/content/how-margins-and-line-lengths-affect-readability/ to help you get started
It's always good to make sure that your PDFs are screen-reader friendly (see this guidance for a thorough walkthrough https://www.gov.wales/how-create-accessible-pdf-documents).
However, for poetry - and especially when the creator is a performance poet, with the skills to do their work justice - an even better option is to record an audio file that delivers the work as intended, rather than trusting to the text-to-speech of a screen-reader, which can be quite 'robotic' and monotonous. There's some specific guidance for recording poetry available here: https://ypn.poetrysociety.org.uk/features/how-to-record-a-poem-like-a-pro/
I hope this is helpful! :)
Interesting TTRPG set in a speculative-fiction future version of the Mojave Desert, 200 years after the revolution that narrowly prevented a nuclear apocalypse.
There's a lot to explore here, with plenty of material to hook potential players.
The setting forms a major part of the game's appeal and is established well in just two pages. To summarise, social priorities have shifted away from capitalism and most communities are smaller and more supportive of their members - save for the outsiders who form bandit gangs or delve into the ruins of the Old World to seek relics that can grant them the power to raid resources and claim territories for themselves. Fortunately, the Dunewardens - nomads with the means to help people and the urge to do so - travel between settlements to help deal with problems.
It's rare to see a mostly-utopian world in a TTRPG, but this one seems to strike a good balance between its hopeful tone and the lingering potential for conflict. Sadly, there are no example adventures, NPCs or more specific locations detailed in this text, which feels like a bit of a missed opportunity.
The system and its mechanics are quite detailed, spanning about 16 pages - fans of crunch will likely enjoy getting to grips with this, while others may find it somewhat daunting. Fortunately, the character sheet helps to present key information about PCs and their resources in a straightforward way.
Overall, Dunewardens presents an intriguing world and a strong premise for getting players straight into exploring it. However, its success will rely heavily on a GM who's both willing to familiarise themself with the extensive mechanics and to fill in the details of the setting and its inhabitants. 3/5 stars - enjoyable.
Intense free-verse poetry chapbook focusing on queer and neurodivergent experiences.
From an accessibility perspective, the narrow margins and colourful, shifting backgrounds are not ideal for readability. There is a one-page printable version (with a separate, $0.50 cheaper itch.io listing) which removes the colour, but the monochrome backgrounds still have enough texture to be an issue for some readers and the font size can get quite small.
The writing style is more of a tsunami of consciousness than a stream, which will probably appeal to some readers and overwhelm others. Still, there is beauty to admire here even if you fall into the overwhelmed camp (as I do). Here are some personal highlights -
On queerness and suburbia: what our friends call the straight people zoo / in the suburbs that lie just past normal / five minutes from human kindness [...] we were just a couple hours, / or lifetimes, from freedom [...] my soul is flooded with what was once here / but too defiantly alive to stay.
On chosen community: we are all too bright to see, to categorise [...] the light shines on the faces of the joyously alienated, / the queer, and this is home.
On being trans: even our autonomy is illegal. we crowdfund // for gender-affirming care, knowing every moment of transition / could be our last & our forever & we are all too gay for this
On autistic relationships: 8 letters that have absolutely been said & implied in every moment that you / infodump at me & how do allistic people even date & desire is simply the / unstoppable flow of enthralled passionate divergence
Overall, this is a collection of compelling poems with a lot of interesting ideas to express. It would be nice to have a more accessible version available so more people could explore it comfortably, but in the meantime I hope those who can do so give it a chance. 3/5 - enjoyable.
Basic meta-TTRPG where you play as a reality-hopping agent who gets transported into the persona of your player character in another TTRPG system of your choosing.
The product description did not make the fact that this is a meta-TTRPG clear at all, which seems like a major oversight. This game cannot stand alone and is not anywhere near as narratively involved as its description might imply - for a start, any 'unimaginable challenges' involved will be coming from an unrelated TTRPG.
This leaves only 'personal struggles' (a d8 random table of fairly universal concepts such as 'health scare' or 'financial trouble'), a thin optional meta-plot (generated via three d8 random tables), and a minimal character creation and progression system (pick a basic archetype, pick one of their two possible abilities - which can be used to help your character in the unrelated TTRPG - and gain XP to buy the other abilities).
The monochrome visual presentation is effective in establishing flavour, though one segment of the trifold is white text on a black background - not the most printer-friendly choice.
Overall, while this is technically a playable product, the product description fails to set appropriate expectations and the game itself lacks enough content to deliver on the intrigue of its premise. 1/5 stars - avoid.
You're welcome - it's a really cool idea! I picked up the Ukrainian hospitals charity bundle the other day, so I'm taking a bit of time to sift through it for things that catch my attention. The hope is that reviewing some items in the giant bundles can make it a little easier for folk to navigate them!
I've heard that assertion before, but when I asked the person who said it to provide the basis for it, they cited a Twitter thread that actually featured an itch developer firmly establishing the opposite. I'm open to shifting my review behaviours if there's evidence that this is a genuine issue, though, and I realise the algorithm could have been changed since last time. Do you have any evidence you'd like me to take a look at?
You're welcome, and thank you! It's lovely to get such a positive and prompt response.
There are still a few formatting quirks that could be improved, if you're interested - details below.
For example, the smaller text describing the function of Skills is not ideal accessibility-wise (some people struggle to read anything below size 12).
There seem to be various instances where the between-paragraph spacing hasn't applied - I suspect you may have used soft returns, which don't trigger it like hard returns do, but a 'find and replace' may resolve this. You can find some examples in the Inspirations section and Skills section.
There are also a few cases where indents have remained (see, for example, the bottom paragraph under Skills) - my guess is that these were manually applied using the tab button or spacebar, and will probably need to be manually removed.
Finally, additional spacing below a section heading would ease the reading experience slightly.
Thanks again for taking the time to make edits, it's awesome to see a dev take accessibility seriously! :)
Bare-bones journaling game in which you play a wizard trying to get through a STEM-style career journey.
Prompts are minimal, with almost nothing to draw upon for inspiration, and mechanics boil down to two counters ('finances' and 'sanity') and two simple random tables of four possible positive and negative outcomes for your studies/applications.
The game ends when you either gain enough finances to comfortably retire, or lose enough sanity to 'snap' and get excommunicated from the magical community (and possibly die). While the underlying critique is clear, the lack of nuance does not serve the writer's case nor create a compelling set of narrative outcomes for the player.
There is remarkably little exploration of the magical aspect of the premise. Aside from a sprinkling of the words 'wizard/magic' throughout and a 'topic inspiration' list of 167 keywords, which are a mix of STEM terminology and words associated with magic, this game relies entirely on the STEM part of its inspiration. Even if it were being marketed as a pure STEM-career simulator, there's just not enough depth here for a successful journaling game.
Overall, Career Wizard has a premise with genuine potential but doesn't deliver on it in its current form. Perhaps with further development and a lot of playtesting, it could grow into a richer journaling game. At present, however, it gets 1/5 stars - avoid.
A wordless interactive comic where the narrative branches are determined by rolling a d6 (or just picking a number between 1 and 6, if you're so inclined).
The clickable PDF works well and the art style is cool, but what story there is can be pretty much boiled down to 'a humanoid fights some monsters and some people, maybe after getting resurrected once or twice'. Fans of action scenes will likely enjoy taking a look at this, but people who prefer plot or characterisation may be underwhelmed. 3/5 stars - enjoyable.
An ominous two-page tarot-based storygame where you play as rural folk in Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century - and your dreams predict the future.
The mechanics provide a neat mixture of randomisation and dire certainty - Judgement and The Devil are always in the mini-deck you draw from, which should contain three cards per player, but the other cards can be anything from the remaining Major Arcana. This makes for a sensible limit on the game's duration while enhancing its replayability, since you'll likely get different prompts in future playthroughs.
The prompts are strongly inspired by the traditional associations of each card. This may be a source of appeal for tarot enthusiasts, but from a narrative perspective it does result in fairly short, binary prompt options - a little more depth could have made this even better, though the constraints of limited space are also a major factor when dealing with 22 prompts. I suspect that slightly fewer options (e.g. a d10 random table) could have worked well in this regard, but the drama of drawing tarot cards is very appropriate for the theme of prophetic dreams.
It's always good to see guidance on tone, possible content and safety tools. A little more development of the setting would be helpful - especially for players who lack familiarity with Ireland's culture and history - but that's not a dealbreaker, since it's fully playable regardless.
Overall, Devil's Dreams provides a strong concept and the scaffolding needed for players to deliver on it, as long as they're capable of improvising the imagery and events of dreams to fit a theme. If the premise appeals to you, it's well worth checking out. 4/5 stars - excellent.
A playful mockery of the cyberpunk genre.
While there is a playable framework of a game in here, the unintuitive organisation of the eight pages of content makes it more difficult to get to grips with than it should be. The eye-searing yellow background (and lack of a plainer alternative version) is an accessibility issue that could have easily been avoided.
Overall, there's a certain appeal to Curvopunk, but the execution issues prevent a higher score at present. 2/5 stars - serviceable.
Short cosmic horror solo TTRPG about exploring the void and trying not to succumb to the toll it takes on your psyche.
At four pages plus a character sheet, this is a little more complex than a one-page game but almost as easy to pick up. The mechanics make sense and the thematic depletion of your capacity to succeed the longer you explore (via decreasingly powerful dice) is very satisfying.
The main frustration of this game is also thematically appropriate - there are only the merest hints of what you might encounter in the void, so it's up to you to try to figure out what your character is experiencing. While there is value in leaning into the fear of the unknown, this runs the risk of falling flat if the player's imagination struggles to populate the void with sufficient horrors. An optional table of slightly more specific prompts could have helped reduce the chance of this issue.
It's always good to see built-in safety guidance and content warnings. It's fantastic that the 'Succumbing' mechanic is described as a representation of the mental impact of exploring a space not native to your reality, and that the player can make a 'Grounding' check to mitigate this - and recover their ability to do so by spending time closer to their own reality. It may seem like a small thing to those without mental health conditions, but this is such a refreshing approach compared to old-fashioned 'Sanity/Madness' tracks that just creep inexorably upwards in traditional cosmic horror games.
Overall, Cthonaut offers a good starting framework for an adventure in the void, but your mileage may vary depending on how inspired you are to flesh out the details. 3/5 stars - enjoyable.
