Yume Nikki is a 2004 adventure game created by pseudonymous Japanese developer Kikiyama. The player controls a girl named Madotsuki and explores her dreams, collecting 24 effects that change her appearance and equipment. Random events also occur throughout the game in the form of cutscenes and unique gameplay sequences. The game was developed using RPG Maker 2003 without a traditional plot or battle system. Gameplay instead focuses on exploration of the dream world.
Itch.io is a website for users to host, sell and download indie video games, indie role-playing games, game assets, comics, zines and music. Launched in March 2013 by Leaf Corcoran, the service hosts over 700,000 products as of April 2023.
Kitty Horrorshow is the pseudonym of an independent video game developer. Releasing her games on the distribution platform itch.io, she specializes in the psychological horror genre, with her games focusing on surreal and atmospheric horror in the aesthetic style of early 3D videogames.
Doki Doki Literature Club! (DDLC) is a 2017 freeware visual novel developed by American independent game studio Team Salvato for Linux, macOS, and Windows. The game was initially distributed through itch.io, and later became available on Steam. The story is told from the perspective of a high school student who reluctantly joins the school's literature club on the insistence of his childhood best friend, and is given the option to romantically pursue three of its four female members. Doki Doki Literature Club! features a non-traditional plot structure with multiple endings and unlockable cutscenes with each of the main characters. Although the game initially appears to be a lighthearted dating simulator, it is in fact a metafictional psychological horror game that extensively breaks the fourth wall.
Ravenfield is a first-person shooter game developed by Swedish programmer Johan Hassel, who goes by the pseudonym SteelRaven7. It was released on 18 May 2017 as an early access title for Windows, macOS and Linux.
Butterfly Soup is a visual novel developed by Brianna Lei and published in September 2017 for Windows, macOS, and Linux. The game has the player follow the perspectives of four LGBT Asian-American girls in Fremont, California, alternating between their first year of high school in 2008 and when they were young children. The coming-of-age story shows them as they join a baseball club and centers on the romance between the main character, Diya, and her friend Min.
Nathalie Lawhead is an independent net artist and video game designer residing in Irvine, California.
Dustnet is a 2019 asymmetrical, action, sandbox video game developed by Canadian studio SCRNPRNT. The game explores the theme of "dying" or disappearing multiplayer video games and their player bases, with the gameplay being set around a copy of the Dust II multiplayer map, originally created for Counter-Strike in 2001.
Grimm's Hollow is a 2019 role-playing video game developed by Mahum Najam under the alias "Ghosthunter". It was released as freeware on Steam and Itch.io on Halloween for Microsoft Windows, running on RPG Maker 2003.
Mackerelmedia Fish is a 2020 experimental ARG-like browser-based video game developed by Nathalie Lawhead. The game explores themes and settings related to 1990s and early 2000s Internet culture, especially the loss of digital history through deprecations and data decay. Some of the game is directly implemented on a website's open .htaccess directories, while other portions of it take the user through other previous art projects by Lawhead, such as an application titled Electric Zine Maker.
Among Us is a 2018 online multiplayer social deduction game developed and published by American game studio Innersloth. The game was inspired by the party game Mafia and the science fiction horror film The Thing. The game allows for cross-platform play, released on iOS and Android devices in June 2018 and on Windows later that year in November. The game was ported to the Nintendo Switch in December 2020 and on the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S in December 2021. A virtual reality adaptation, Among Us VR, was released on November 10, 2022.
Terra Nil is a strategy video game developed by Free Lives and published Devolver Digital for Android, iOS, and Windows. The game was released on March 28, 2023.
Puppet Combo is an American independent video game development studio founded by Benedetto "Ben" Cocuzza in 2012 as Pig Farmer Games and based in Brooklyn. Puppet Combo's games, such as Nun Massacre (2018) and the critically acclaimed Murder House (2020), are mostly survival horror games developed solely by Cocuzza and modeled after early PlayStation games and VHS. They are also frequently inspired by 1980s horror films, specifically grindhouse and slasher films. Puppet Combo primarily releases their games through Patreon and Itch.io. Cocuzza launched Torture Star Video, a video game publisher for lo-fi horror games, in 2021.
Butterfly Soup 2 is a visual novel developed by Brianna Lei and published in October 2022 for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It is the sequel to the 2017 Butterfly Soup, and begins shortly after the conclusion of the first game. It has the player follow the perspectives of four LGBT Asian-American girls in Fremont, California, alternating between their first year of high school in 2009 and when they were young children. The coming-of-age story centers on the romance between Akarsha and her friend Noelle, their struggles with their parents' expectations and influence, and their experiences as second-generation immigrants.
No Players Online is a short horror game released on Itch.io, a website for distributing indie games. It was created by Belgian university students Adam Pype and Ward D'Heer and sound designer Viktor Kraus as part of the Haunted PS1 Jam in November 2019. Initially intended to be a twenty-minute horror game, the developers continued to expand the game into an alternate reality game (ARG) involving cryptic messages and secret passcodes. Players quickly solved the ARG on a dedicated Discord server.
Sucker for Love: First Date is a parodic dating sim and horror-themed visual novel developed by indie developer Joseph "Akabaka" Hunter, and published by DreadXP. It was released on January 20, 2022 for Windows and December 19, 2022 for Nintendo Switch. The game revolves around a young man who obtains a pink version of the Necronomicon, and begins performing rituals to summon moe anthropomorphic beings from the Cthulhu Mythos, such as Ln'eta, a female version of Cthulhu, sacrificing his body parts and ultimately threatening the world with annihilation. The game received generally favorable reviews from critics, who praised its writing, voice acting and artwork, but criticized its short length, glitches, and low emphasis on romance for a dating sim. A sequel further exploring the Cthulhu Mythos, Sucker for Love: Date to Die For, was announced later in 2022.
Haunted PS1 is a series of video game compilations curated and published by Irish video game developer Breogán Hackett in collaboration with independent developers on the indie games website itch.io. The most notable releases, Demo Discs, are annual compilations of independent games from various genres influenced by the graphics and visual presentation of the PlayStation. The Demo Discs series received praise from several websites for their niche theme, variety of titles and novel method of distribution, with a number of games from the releases receiving sufficient attention to lead to further development and commercial release on their own merit.
