An itch to play

Where to start with the biggest bundle in the history of videogames

We curate the very best from the biggest videogame bundle ever

There has never been – and for the foreseeable future, at least, may never be – a better-value collection of videogames. Online independent game store Itch.io’s Bundle For Racial Justice And Equality was set up in response to the ongoing protests against racial discrimination and police brutality, with proceeds split evenly between the NAACP Legal Defense And Educational Fund and Community Bail Fund. Hundreds of creators initially contributed 740 games to the paywhat-you-want package, which set a minimum donation of $5. By the time the bundle’s campaign ended, more than 1,700 games from nearly 1,400 creators were included, the total raised coming to $8.1 million. (Naturally, at least some of that total came from Edge; with Itch.io supporting a gifting feature, it was the perfect excuse to nudge our long-suffering friends into playing our less mainstream favourites by firing bundles into their inboxes unprompted.) Watching it all unfold has been a rare highlight in a difficult year – this was an astonishing, unprecedented and deeply heartwarming collective effort from the industry and its fans.

Its hundreds of thousands of buyers will no doubt have been left with one very tricky question: where to start? There are plenty of obvious choices. Matt Thorson’s much-adored platformer

Celeste is there, rubbing shoulders with Adam Robinson-Yu’s wonderful A Short Hike. Critical darlings such as Night In The Woods and Super Hexagon are present, too, alongside Edge favourites like Signs Of The Sojourner, Gnog, Quadrilateral Cowboy and Nuclear Throne. Supergiant’s Pyre was a welcome late addition that surely helped push it over that $8 million mark.

All of which still leaves, well, 1,700plus options to choose from. So what of the rest? It would take months to play them all. With our readers in mind, then, we’ve decided to comb through the bundle ourselves, and pick out not only a selection of games that are well worth your precious time, but that we haven’t previously covered in detail in the pages of this magazine. If you’re spoiled for choice, we suggest you consider the 20 titles across the page. We’ve offered up a range of genres, from narrative-focused adventures to comedic skits, tower defence to abstract puzzlers, shooters to toy games and beyond. Should time permit us to search further, we’ll be sure to spotlight any hidden gems we’ve failed to unearth this time around. And do feel free to write in and let us know what we’re missing: in the spirit of this bundle’s cause, if we all work together, perhaps we might find what we’re looking for sooner rather than later.

This was an astonishing, unprecedented and deeply heartwarming collective effort