Indie games digital storefront Itch.io is hosting a Holiday Sale, gathering over 500 discounted games "with a focus on curation". In turn, it hopes to marry "discounts on hot titles alongside lesser known gems". It's live now through December 26.
At the same time, the distributor is running the itch.io Selects bundle which collects five indie hits for just $10—otherwise worth $63.42 (with an 84 percent discount). Within, you'll get horror adventure Whispering Willows, the autobiographical Memoir En Code, survival 'em up Walden, gorgeous point and clicker Samorost 3, and Cosmo D's quirky narrative music game The Norwood Suite.
I caught up with Cosmo D recently to chat about his most recent game, the lovely Off Peak follow-up, The Norwood Suite. I found this response to keeping players guessing particularly interesting:
I don't ever want to explain what the game is in such explicit terms. Whether that's the environmental storytelling I'm doing or whether it's the symbolism around it, I trust players to come to their own terms. I love that. I like giving the players a sense that it's up to them. That it's their call, giving them just enough so that they have some dots, but then letting them connect those dots as they see fit. And maybe then having them talking about it—it's a little bit of theorycrafting, it's a little bit of water cooler talk.
I love that, having people asking: What do you think this means, or what do you think that means? It becomes more theirs if they have the space to claim some sort of interpretative ownership of the work and I think that's good. I want them to have that.
Of the Holiday sale, itch says: "The event runs from Monday December 18th at 10am PST to December 26th at 10am PST. As part of this promotional push we've reached out to all the developers on the site to encourage them to put their game on sale, along with creating a curated bundle of some of our favorite games. We've even updated our site colors to make sure everyone notices something is going on."
