#browser playable

[reanimatestar]

non-exhaustive list of top x things on itch.io that fuck severely

[cpunch71]

yes i am a web developer :3

[tillman]

X advance is the funniest thing in the entire world to me did you guys know the only english release to include the endings for the story routes was the fucking gameboy advance release.

[waffliesinyoface]

i was looking for allegedly easy VNs to try and start with to learn japanese and

hm?

hmm?

this idea is possibly incredibly stupid. but so am i, so. 始めるぞ！！

[orteil42]

hey! if you've been following me for my game dev stuff here's an end-of-year summary

i would've liked to release a lot more things this year but between me moving and other life events i've been a little tight on focus and that's before accounting me being just very slow as a person!

nevertheless, here's what's been accomplished this year:

Cookie Clicker android update - this one was a LONG time coming and is the main reason i'm not writing this year off as unproductive. i've put a lot of care and time into it and i can say i'm proud of that release. some of it will help improve Cookie Clicker on web and Steam in future updates, ie. full offline idling and UI rework. a second, sizeable mobile update is planned at some point later to add sugar lumps, minigames etc

substantial headway on Cookie Clicker's dungeon minigame! it's been a lot of gameplay + layout tests, some resulting in design dead-ends ie. this whole "making the world map in Blender" notion i had. it's regardless seen the most progress it's had in a long time; i'm hoping next year will have me keeping my ambitions in check and keeping it simple enough for a proper beta release. sorry i couldn't make it happen this year again!…

various prototypes that started off as minor side-projects for a laugh or as code warmups but turned out oddly solid? i'd really like to keep pursuing some of these next year to the point where i can start showing off screens and playable alphas. said prototypes include an embeddable music composer/player, a painterly mini-photoshop and some kind of Pokemon-lite with level editor, all browser-based

a good amount of other behind-the-scenes Cookie Clicker-related stuff i'm hoping i get to disclose next year

2025 will see me starting fresh in a new town and hopefully with a steadier outlook on the way i get things done. i've started a good amount of new stuff this year that i'd like to finish in the next one. i'm writing this when i should be packing to visit my family for christmas i'll be right back

[failbettergames]

sometimes i forget

that in the modern realm of games, fallen london is nigh unique for being:

free

ad-free*

browser playable

literally if you own anything that can get on the internet, you can play fallen london in it. people used to play it in the browser inside Eve online.

and you never have to pay for it. notwithstanding, about 6% of our players spend on the game eventually. which is a BONKERS number versus every other free game i’ve seen numbers for.

*there’s one (1) advert but it’s a static image that links to more of our games in the same universe, so i’m choosing not to count it. in the context of “watch this video to get 50 dollarydoos” it does not register at all.

anyway, play fallen london

[vergilberg]

hi i made a Conclave fan game for my games class called "Dean Thomas Lawrence, Turtle Collector: A Conclave Fan Game."

it's pretty short, and was made in puzzlescript! it's also playable in browser, no need to download anything!

there's also a bit of yaoi in there.

play it here!

[mistercrowbar]

Everyone, VN-ified!!! Very satisfying to have a lineup of all the body types together, even if it's a little like they're posing for a class photo haha.

Swear to got I'm going to have the VN scene out tomorrow unless I physically combust. It will be playable in browser and I'll see about putting a recording of it on youtube too. I'm excited!!

[harunayuuka2060]

*When Idia accidentally hacked MC's social media accounts and saw everything related about the dorm leaders*

Idia: ...

Idia: Ortho, do you think we should share this or not?

Ortho: Do you mean to the other dorm leaders?

Idia: Yes. These are pretty neat.

MC: Guys, have you noticed anything weird today?

Ace: Yeah. It was quite obvious, honestly.

Epel: Vil gave you a kiss on the cheek and thanked you.

Deuce: Rosehearts-senpai smiled at you warmly and asked if you would like to study with him.

Jack: Leona-senpai ruffled your hair, and Kalim-senpai almost hugged you to death.

Ace: And we shouldn't forget Azul-senpai giving them a discount coupon.

Ortho: Also, Malleus Draconia visiting your dorm with lots of presents in hand.

Ace: Seriously, what did you do for them to act like that?

MC: I don't know?

MC's posts/social media activities about the dorm leaders:

Has designed a plushie for Riddle, and was hoping to start soon in making it

Created a personalized ad that would help promote Mostro Lounge

Has bought a pair of comfortable slippers for Leona (but Kifaj told them that the size was a bit small for his feet)

Has drawn a cute sketch of Kalim and Jamil and is planning to give it to them before they return in their own world

Made an inspired makeup palette solely for Vil

Collecting lores about gargoyles that they could share with Malleus

Released a gaming app (playable in a browser) where users can interact with cats, befriend them, and start their own story. Two of the cats in the game resemble Idia and Ortho.

[jcollinswrites]

New update 10/01/25

Chapter 3 is live on the Weeping Gods public demo!

What's new:

73 000 words added to the demo and the entire Chapter 3 is playable

You can finally meet the last RO, Ahmose, properly

You will also meet the creator of the crystals

You can investigate the theft, succeed or fail, it's up to your choices

You can discover some secrets about the ROs, and see a very different side to some of them

Get a new weapon (to borrow! lol)

Old saves don't work. You have to start new ones. Additionally, if you run into an "achievement not declared" or "non-existent variable" error, save the game, restart, and reload. You should also delete the cogdemos website's cookies from your browser.

This is also a good opportunity to remind everyone to READ THE CONTENT WARNINGS AGAIN. There are new ones in the list that will be present in Chapter 3. If you are sensitive to any of the issues present, stop reading the game.

LINK

Good reading! ❤️

JC

[ophanimkei]

Meat Girl is released!

Your roommate disappeared a few months ago and you go out into the cold looking for her. You find a strange girl and many things made of meat.

This is an RPG Maker game made for the yuri jam and frigid cold jam! It's completely free, playable in browser, and I'd be so very happy if you played through and left a comment with your thoughts!

[sea-grunks-dating-sim]

ITCH.IO:

YouTube (Playable!):

Please let me know what you think! Comment, message me, etc! I’m super excited hehe !! 💙

The response to the demo will determine how we move forward with a full game!

[boxturret]

BMOP: A history of the Abandoned Koro

Now that things have all come out, and the project is well and truly over, I thought I'd take a moment to talk a bit about something I worked on in the game, the "Abandoned Koro" area, now that there's video footage of a playthrough I can easily reference.

I suppose as a quick primer, I was with the BMOP team from around March of 2021 to November of 2022, serving as both 3D art lead and Level design lead for a time. There's a post out there about my experiences with the leadership of the team that I mostly stand by still, I do feel bad for how the project ended, and I have come around a bit to remember the positive times more than the negative, but that doesn't erase what happened.

So to begin, when I came on level design was a fairly inactive sub channel of the game development discord, some ideas got tossed around occasionally, but not much seemed to be happening, before I'd joined there was a rough map drawn up by the then current level design lead.

It was very basic stuff, there was a version of this map in engine that had been extruded a bit to make it a kind of playable space, one area had some trees on it and some random platforms.

One area that interested me greatly was this part in the south, the so called "Abandoned Koro"

The rough idea being that it was the Le-Koro seen in the GBA game Bionicle: Quest for the Toa, that had been abandoned in favour of the one seen in the browser game Mata Nui Online Game and the cancelled PC game Bionicle: Legend of Mata Nui, as the one in QFTT had a lot of wooden structures while the one seen in the other two was more like a woven nest.

At the time I was just a 3d modeller, and had never really done any real level design, but the concept just really inspired me, so I went off and in blender sketched out a possible level layout for this area.

I made a bunch of renders and wrote out how I thought the level could work, which can be seen in this document HERE.

For a quick overview, the idea was you'd enter the area, the bridge would break, you'd have to clear a river to activate the water wheel on a large mechanical tree that would allow you passage upwards, and then navigate through the Nui-Rama infested ruins of the village before coming to a cave.

The tree was something I poured a lot of time in to, its worthy of its own post at some point in the future.

Now I'll be honest, I was super nervous about releasing this document to the team, I thought I was overstepping my bounds. I was just a relatively new 3d modeller on the team, I didn't have the right to be talking about level design, but to my surprise people were really receptive to it, and I very quickly got added to the level design team¹.

I ended up doing a rough blockout in engine. This was back in the time before Lewa had been chosen to be the main player character, so it was still Tahu.

This was the first time I'd ever touched Unreal, so it took a while. That's why the sky is black, I didn't know how to add a skybox.

I never got in to level scripting, but as a proof of concept, I think it was successful.

You can see that in this version of the level it had already progressed, now there was the idea of using the Pakari to break the dam, so finding it was the first task on the ground.

This version wasn't in the actual demo map, because as I said before the demo wasn't really very fleshed out at the time. One thing my map showed though was that the demo was way too big. The level design lead at the time had decided the size based on how long it took to get around the map as a perfectly flat plane with no terrain, at max run speed, with no obstacles. This is a very flawed methodology to say the least. Having an actual level with things scaled to the character really started to show the holes in this, and eventually, once I became lead, the demo area was massively shrunk.

Here's a version from just a month later. The version is now part of the new, more compact demo area, but its mostly barren at this point.

This version was actually completely rebuilt from the ground up because it had been decided to try out voxels as a basis². They were a pain to deal with and this was overturned eventually. I'd say in total, including the 3d sketch I did, I re-built this map maybe 4 times.

One benefit of voxels was it was trivial to have caves, so this is where the idea of the pakari being found in a cave started to emerge.

As I continued to play and refine the demo it became clear how much the movement systems would need to be tweaked. There seemed to be this idea in the team that everything could be done separately and bolted together later, so character moment was all handled by someone jumping around on some big blocks in a test map whereas level design was off doing their own thing, but it really wasn't working. So while the movement felt good in a vacuum, actually putting it in context really exposed a lot of issues. You could easily jump over any enemy you could come across, as said earlier maps had to be huge in order to make the world seem big while you were running at full speed, and after about 3 jumps you'd be 20 metres in the air.

At this point the idea still was to have the entire island of Mata Nui be one large open area you could freely explore, so the sheer size of the maps resulting from the over powered movement was a major issue. I lobbied very hard to have things pulled back and eventually they were.

its a bit out of order, but here's the demo area from closer to when I left. Its a fraction of the size of the original map

Here's another video from a month later.

As much as it pains me to say it, this is basically it in terms of meaningful development. By this point Lewa had been locked in as the playable character, and the movement had been dialed back to a more reasonable degree, so I was able to really start trying to refine the area. This is where I ran in to a fatal issue.

No one else wanted to play the game.

And what was worse barely anything worked.

The level is still in what I would call a grey box state. I used a couple tree trunk assets I'd made here and there, and put in a big canopy asset from one of the many asset packs we had for a bit of ambience, but it was all still very basic geometry, easily changed or modified.

Unfortunately, there's only so much you can do for playtesting your own area. You built it: you know where everything is, what's supposed to happen, where you're supposed to go. You can try to pretend to play it as a new player, but that only gets you so far. I was hoping people on the team would play it and provide feedback³, but outside of maybe one or two people a handful of times⁴, trying to get any really feedback was was a futile effort.

The thing was that this area was very complex. If the demo was a vertical slice of the game as a whole, this area was itself a microcosm of the demo⁵. It had platforming, puzzle solving, combat, mask powers, the lot. Now unfortunately for me, barely any of those systems actually worked.

As an example, this long ledge was for a long time a stand in for vine swinging, then rail grinding⁶, then was ultimately just replaced by a platform.

So things had kind of hit a wall. I couldn't properly design areas with combat in them until combat existed in a more stable state, I couldn't design platforming sections until platforming worked in a consistent way. I couldn't even adjust the overall flow of the level because everyone else basically refused to give feedback.

But the unfortunate thing is, in August of that year they'd released a teaser trailer.

And that trailer had gotten hundreds of thousands of views.

This is where the whole development of this game really went off the rails. Now there was this push to get things in a presentable state, start set dressing and making final assets so things could be shown off.

But I refused. Everything was too up in the air to commit to set dressing, this is why block out exists, if the jump changes height its no big issue to grab the couple cubes an area is made out of and shift them up or down, if combat is found to need more space its easy to make things bigger, or add or take away walls. If something is confusing things can be shifted. Once set dressing starts now you're dealing with dozens to hundreds of objects being scattered about, even the smallest tweak can lead to a mess.

Not to mention set dressing raised its own series of issues, from plants triggering the IK on the toa's feet, making their knees go up to their chin when walking through a bunch of ferns, to collision volumes being oversized or offset, meaning that big rock face they just added has now created a massive invisible wall in another area. Once the addition of some plants caused all ledges within a wide radius to no longer work⁷.

It was a miserable state of affairs. My mental state rapidly deteriorated as I fought against this, I became very short tempered and irritable, and eventually near the end of 2022 I was kicked from the team. It was such a relief honestly.

I think the tragic thing is, set dressing is actually quite a fast process. The starting area went from looking like this to something quite like the final in about a month?

But you can't show off the first screenshot on twitter⁸.

I guess I'll spare a quick moment to talk about the final version seen in the video.

Its at 46 minutes in if the link doesn't work

Its...fine? The assets they've made are all good, though I think they lost the QFTM inspiration along the way. The thing that stands out to me is just how...little its moved on from 2022. Just look how much progress was made in like 3 months, compare that to now, 3 years later. Temporary platforms I placed are still in the exact same spot. I do find the addition of a matoran with a key for the cave to be a not great addition, if only for the fact that you need to find a tiny green man in amongst the overwhelming greenery to proceed.

One part I found quite amusing was the final enemy encounter. It was supposed to be this large hut, probably Matau's, that had been completely overtaken by a hive, and Nui-Rama would spawn constantly from it until the encounter was over.

There were a lot of concepts drawn up, but I guess it just...never happened. I also don't know why there's waves of fikou there either, that was after my time I think.

So that's really all I have to say about that version, it looks okay. Its still clearly unfinished. It kinda works more than it did when I left, but its shockingly not that much different, outside of some new assets.

I'll be honest, I did intend this to be more of a happy, reflective post, but when watching part of the developer commentary a quote stood out to me.

"Traditionally you would kind of have really basic blockout for an environment and play test that to see how the level design is working. Because of the the situation we had we were kind of forced to just go ahead with set dressing and prettying it up and everything so if it were in a perfect world I would have loved to have gotten to do some more play testing early on but we did what we could with it. And I mean you basically had to just blindly trust the process because many systems weren't working at the time things were designed." -AN UNKNOWN BMOP DEVELOPER (2025)

And I just fundamentally disagree. This was a fan project, there were no deadlines but those that were self inflicted. This process they blindly trusted just lead to a thing that on the surface looks okay, but is still riddled with bugs that were well known for years. I've seen some people on the team say the game was 90% completed, feature locked, just 3 more months of polish and it would have all been working, but from what I've seen of the game I really doubt it. They say themselves in the commentary that there's bugs they've been fighting for nearly a decade still rearing their head.

So yeah, its not exactly a happy tale. I'm quite proud of the work I did, I learned a lot, and met a lot of people I'm still friends with to this day. Its a shame the project had to end this way, and I'm sad everyone's work has gone to waste, but I'm also not going to pretend this was some amazing project that was struck down right before achieving greatness.

But most of all: Fuck you lego.

If you're interested in seeing a few more of the things I worked on in my time with BMOP, go HERE. I may post more publicly about some of them in the future, who knows. I have a post about the regional Kini temple I designed and built for the game HERE. Also some renders I did for some of my game design reports HERE.

¹-I say team, it was maybe two other people who were barely around. ²-I'll be honest here: Some people wanted to have the entire map destructible so that they could have Bohrok dynamically destroy it. For the post game DLC after we'd finished this Zelda sized free fan game⁹. ³-💯👍👀 isn't helpful feedback at the end of the day. Its supportive I'll give you that. But sometimes you need more. ⁴-One person on the team even outright refused to play the game until final release, to "save their first reactions for their stream"... ⁵-idk if its clear at this point but the "demo" is, was, and now always will be the entirety of the existing game. Oh there were ideas for other things, but nothing concrete ever materialised⁹. ⁶-You know, like Sonic⁹ ⁷-The ledge's over sensitive detection for something blocking it is one of the most frustrating things about the game's development for me. ⁸-You absolutely can show off real development stuff, there are lots of people who find that fascinating. ⁹-This game was nothing if not ambitious.

You see that kind of mop is called a "Bee Mop", because of its sponge's resemblance to honey comb.

[prokopetz]

Your post about indie games immediately took me back in time to when I was younger and repeatedly playing the majesty of colors and this one other flash game that I cannot for the life of me remember the name of so I figured I’d pop in in case anyone else remembered it

You’re playing as a girl who was drowning iirc and could choose to swim to the surface. There were jellyfish and stuff trying to keep you down. There was a tumblr post including it and the majesty of colors and a few other games that I’d found and saved to my drafts on an old blog, but it’s been lost to time now

(With reference to this post here.)

I'm about 95% sure you're thinking of Daniel Benmergui's Today I Die (2008). It's unfortunately not been made available via the author's itch.io page, and the page for it on their personal website has been busted since 2022, but if you have a Flash emulator installed in your browser, you should be able to dig a playable snapshot from before it broke out of archive.org's Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20211001000000*/http://ludomancy.com/today/index.html

(Like I said, just pick a snapshot from 2021 or earlier.)

[courtesycalling]

In Pbouxhkiir Night on the Primox Alpha, you'll wager the fate of the Earth in a friendly game of Pbouxhkiir.

I made this game together with @wyntonyang and computeruser for a game jam. Please go check it out!

Features:

Sci-fi comedy!

Four endings!

Rude and crass language!

Riveting space-card gameplay!

About 5 minutes long!

Playable in browser!

[k20spock]

Gecko’s list of free video games you should play right now

Hi I’m gecko I like video games and I like not paying 60 dollars for them so here’s a list of some free games I’ve unearthed and liked. Enjoy

(most of these are small, more obscure games made by a few people or even just one person, so support the creators if you can!! Some of these do have a pay what you want model)

Hikeback (Itch.io) 

You see a hitchhiker flagging you down during a long, lonely drive through the countryside. No matter how you choose to handle the situation, you end up back on that road. And then again. And again. And again, until you find a way to escape a loop of violence and self-sabotage. Hikeback is a visual novel inspired by the fable of the frog and the scorpion, and it takes about an hour to reach the ending. It’s available on Windows, Mac, Linux, and browser, and there’s a detailed list of content warnings on the game’s itch.io page. One of my strongest recommendations, Hikeback is an incredible experience, and it was made in only ten days!!

Purrgatory (Itch.io) (Steam)

Find ways to pass the time in an inexplicably cat-themed but otherwise pretty dull afterlife, and befriend its other inhabitants. Purrgatory can hit hard when it wants to, but it’s mostly a relaxed point and click game that takes about a few hours if you want the true ending (which you do). And also I really don’t like recommending things going “it’s rep!!” and not elaborating on what the thing is actually about, but Purrgatory does have a mostly explicitly LGBT+ cast and Korean characters by a Korean artist. It’s been a few years since I played Purrgatory, but I remember it was an incredible experience, and since then, even more people can play it because it’s been fully translated into Spanish and Simplified Chinese! It’s available on Windows and browser.

How Fish is Made (Itch.io) (Steam)

How Fish is Made includes incredible retro-style graphics, a sardine flopping around in a machine with a choice to make, a singing, cane-wielding, tophat-wearing, tongue-eating parasitic isopod, and a free expansion/trailer for the studio’s next game that’s like if Katamari Damacy was evil and also had fish in it. That’s the best I can do for a summary. How Fish is Made is available on Windows and takes about 30-45 minutes, but will itch your brain for much longer.

Stop Burying Me Alive, Beautiful (Itch.io)

A visual novel in which you are stuck between trying to convince your girlfriend you are not dead and she should stop burying you alive, and playing rat-themed card games with a woman you find living underground. The game doesn’t always do a great job walking the line between comedy and horror, but there’s some strong writing depicting a failing relationship and very strong artwork that makes this an easy recommendation. Stop Burying Me Alive, Beautiful is on Windows, Mac, Linux, and browser, and takes about half an hour. 

Caper in the Castro (Internet Archive)

Ok this one is pretty different, but fuck it, it was originally released for free in 1989 (with a recommendation to make a donation to charity instead) and is still free so I’m including it. Not enough people are aware that you can play the first known video game by and about gay people on your computer right now for free and it has that classic adventure game bullshit sometimes but it’s extremely playable and also funny as shit. Like it’s not just cool history it’s actually fun (sorry Gayblade). You play as a lesbian private detective named Tracker McDyke looking for your missing drag queen friend and you can get most of the doors in the game open by shooting them. People have made full walkthroughs for this game and how to get it working if you have trouble so there’s no excuse. Play Caper in the Castro.

Under a Star Called Sun (Itch.io) (Liminal Magazine)

A browser game made in Bitsy that’s extremely simple and only a few minutes long, but that’s all it needs to create a succinct, gut-wrenching depiction of grief. 

Hotel Infinity (Itch.io)

If you need more short Bitsy games you can play in your browser that are about death, you’re out of luck after this because I’ve only got the two. Hotel Infinity is more lighthearted, tasking you with checking in on your ghostly hotel guests, and helping one check out. It’s simple, but sweet and affecting. 

Water Womb World (Itch.io)

Back to marine life-themed horror. Water Womb World is about a man’s obsessive search for the Garden of Eden leading him to the bottom of the ocean. There’s a few brief moments of annoyance in the gameplay, but the atmosphere and visuals are fantastic. Fantastic enough I bought the shirt, because I like cool shirts. It's available for Mac and Windows, and takes about 15 minutes. 

Hyperhell (Itch.io) (Steam)

A rogue-like bullet hell with a hyperpop soundtrack. It’s a mess, but in a good way. A run can (allegedly, I am not very good at bullet hells and I wasn’t able to get all the way to the end) be under ten minutes, but the game is very replayable with its different characters, weapons, bosses, and DDR and fishing minigames. You might have heard of this one already because maia has a cameo in it, but it really is a fun, if slightly painful for your eyes, time. It’s available on Windows.

Magicafe HD (Itch.io)

Under a technicality, I haven’t played this one yet, but that’s because I played the original text-based version of this game and I didn’t know the dev had converted it to a full visual novel until right now when I went to recommend the original. I’m certain this version is even better! It’s a cute, simple visual novel about a girl trying to get to her job at a magical girl themed cafe, while dealing with the struggles of secretly also being an actual magical girl. Available on Windows, and lasts about half an hour. The original is available on browser here if you’re interested. 

Dedz0ne (Itch.io)

Ok, wrapping up on a weird one since this isn’t really a universal recommendation. Dedz0ne is a Yume Nikki/Splatoon fangame inspired by Dedf1sh’s backstory and the atmosphere of Octo Expansion in general. It came out before Side Order so it’s not accurate to it, but it’s a really neat game with great visuals and atmosphere. It’s available on Windows

And that’s it for now. There will probably be a sequel someday because I am unable to stop digging through free games. Or maybe a collection of not free but extremely cheap games (like under five bucks) I like. Who knows! I hope you found something that catches your eye here!