The Scratching That Itch series is where I randomly select and write about one of the 1741 games and game-related things included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The Bundle raised $8,149,829.66 split evenly between the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Community Bail Fund, but don’t worry if you missed it. There are plenty of ways you can help support the vital cause of racial justice; try here for a start. Lastly, as always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

It’s now been five years since I started the Scratching That Itch series, and as is my yearly tradition, I’m taking stock of our progress towards racial justice. Oh boy. Donald Trump, despite being a convicted felon and a racist piece of shit, is president of the United States again. He immediately decided that any efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion are now illegal. He also appointed a tech billionaire, who openly made a nazi salute on stage and on live television, to randomly shut down federal programs and government offices. Now they’re mad at each other and fighting on social media like toddlers. Government funding for research is being slashed or held up in red tape. Non-white people are being quietly erased from historical records. Trump’s administration has started trade wars, despite not knowing how trade works. Because they are idiots. U.S. Citizens are being rounded up and deported to foreign prisons, immigrants are being illegally arrested, and when the public protested these actions in Los Angeles (good!) the administration sent in the National Guard and Marines. I knew we would face backlash in the fight for racial justice, but I didn’t think we’d have literal fascists put in charge.

And that’s just what’s happening in America. Elsewhere, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, as does Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The Israeli military just seized a ship bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza, because they want the Palestinians to starve to death. It’s bad out there, folks. We can’t stop fighting back against racists, against bigots, against fascists. Stay strong. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

I also randomly picked and wrote about 29 games and game-related things from the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. That’s four more than last year, and the first time that the pace has actually gone up. I hope that means I’ve reached a sustainable pace for the series moving forward. This brings our total number of selections to 217, over 12% of the entire bundle. Read on for some of my favorite picks from year five below.

Best Tool For Making Anti-Fascist Art: Electric Zine Maker

Made by alienmelon, also known as Nathalie Lawhead, Electric Zine Maker is exactly what it sounds like. A program for making one’s own zines. Specifically, zines made from folding a single sheet of paper. There are 12 different folding schemes, but the Elecric Zine Maker takes care of that, letting artists design each page and then automatically placing them in the correct position for folding. Import images, use drawing tools, apply effects, or even dive into the “authenticity settings” to imitate aberrations from low-quality printers or cheap photocopiers. It’s incredibly easy to throw together a zine with this, and I encourage any artistically inclined readers to check it out. Read my full post about Electric Zine Maker here.

Best Takedown Of Big Tech: Danger Crew

Sneaking in right at the end of the year, Danger Crew is an old-school Japanese-style role-playing game about being a programmer. Go to work, meet other programmers, and battle them in turn-based hacking duels. Oh, and try to uncover what that nefarious big tech company is up to (spoiler alert: it’s not nearly as evil as what our actual tech companies are doing). The duels in Danger Crew reward different strategies that take advantage of simple combinations of appropriate abilities, and the story emphasizes being kind and standing up to injustices, no matter how small. A short and lighthearted adventure full of jokes about the tech industry. It includes the original soundtrack too! Read my full post about Danger Crew here.

Best Game About Finding Peace: Corinne Cross’s Dead & Breakfast

Showing up right at the start of the year, Corinne Cross’s Dead & Breakfast is an adventure game about helping ghosts move on into the afterlife, and it’s lovely. Explored in a side-scrolling fashion and presented with beautiful watercolor art, it puts players in the shoes of the titular Corinne Cross as she house-sits for her mom’s neighbor. But it turns out the house used to be a bed & breakfast, and it still has a bunch of ghostly guests. Over the week she’s staying there — with some light time management elements — Corinne helps each ghost face their death and let go of whatever they’re holding on to. But she’ll have to face her own tragedies too, as the living community is still reeling from a recent passing. Written with a deft hand, Corinne Cross’s Dead & Breakfast never shies away from grief and loss, but maintains a positive tone. It’s got memorable characters, multiple endings for each ghost, and most importantly, breakfast. Read my full post about Corinne Cross’s Dead & Breakfast here.

Best Rough Diamonds: Moonstone Deep and Benjamin of Blackstone Edge

This pair of games may not be the most technically polished, with their fair share of bugs and a mishmash of art assets, but they make up for it with imagination and ambition. Built with RPG Maker, they strain against the edges of what that tool is capable of by offering wildly branching stories. Choose where to go, who to trust, what to prioritize, and the outcomes can be vastly different, up to and including major characters dying and events proceeding without them. The games are also refreshingly fast-paced for Japanese-style role-playing games, with small but dense locations, and some pleasing ability combinations in their turn-based battles. Benjamin of Blackstone Edge even features (should players choose that path) the overthrowing of a tyrannical leader, which is sounding pretty good right now. Read my full posts about Moonstone Deep and Benjamin of Blackstone Edge here.

Best Collective Art Project: Utopias: Navigating Without Coordinates

Made by AAA, a now-defunct software art collective (although some members continue under new collective Fantasia Malware), Utopias: Navigating Without Coordinates is a strange and surreal compilation project. Each of the nine members of the collective created a playable experience, inspired by the concept of utopia, and then connected them together. Wander strange planetoids, talk with dogs, listen to the artists’ musings, destroy heavy industry by attacking it with plants, and more. Utopias is also beautiful and visually striking throughout its short playtime. This is the kind of thing you can only find on itch.io, and it’s weird and wonderful. It comes with the original soundtrack too. Read my full post about Utopias: Navigating Without Coordinates here.

Best First-Person Toddling: Bonbon

Bonbon is a short horror game that casts players as a toddler in 1980s Britain. This is a brilliant idea, because it allows developers Aetheric to play with the ways that reality and fantasy can blur in the mind of a young child. The way a darkened bedroom could be hiding any manner of frightening things. But also the way fantastical things might not be frightening, and would be accepted without question. Bonbon plays out over several discrete scenes, which players explore in first-person, and I’m not sure I fully understood what these scenes were trying to tell me. I suspect that’s my own failing rather than Bonbon’s, however, and I respect the craft that went into it. I recommend it to any intrigued readers, but be sure to check the content warnings first, and be warned there are some jump scares. Read my full post about Bonbon here.

Best Use Of Lavender: Escaped Chasm

Escaped Chasm is a short and spooky game about a lonely girl and the world she imagines. It’s by Temmie Chang, who is more famous as the artist for popular indie games Undertale and Deltarune. Her skills as an artist and animator on on full display here: scenes are rendered in lovely shades of lavender, and frequent cutaway scenes are filled with gorgeous full-screen artwork or even full animated sequences. It sounds great too, as she’s recruited some high-profile friends (including Toby Fox himself) to score different parts of the game. As her first attempt at developing a game, Escaped Chasm is simple, and sets up the premise for a longer game Temmie wants to eventually make. It’s not clear if the green-tinted sequel Dweller’s Empty Path (which is not in the bundle) is that game, as I have yet to check it out myself; perhaps it is just another step along the way. But it’s a step I want to take, because Escaped Chasm is excellent and affecting. And not too scary, if you were worried. Read my full post about Escaped Chasm here.

Best-Written Relationship: POM SIMULATOR 9000

Somehow, we avoided getting any games made with Twine in the first four years of Scratching That Itch, and then got three of them in year five. POM SIMULATOR 9000 is the best of that bunch. The relationship between protagonist Diego Foxglove and his girlfriend Calliope is shockingly well written, as they both struggle with some difficult problems. Developer d Marie takes the time to develop their characters over the course of the story, giving room for conflict, conversation, and growth that feels more genuine than most games I could name. POM SIMULATOR 9000 touches on a lot of themes common in queer or marginalized communities, as both Diego and Calliope face constant judgement from others that inevitably shapes their thinking. Oh, and there’s also a threatening alien fungus, and transformations into a pomeranian. Naturally. This one runs longer than I expected, so be sure to keep its browser tab open if you try it out. And make sure you heed its content warnings (blood/gore, swearing, mild sexual themes, body horror, racism, and mentions of abuse, drugs and violence). But it’s well worth playing through. Read my full post about POM SIMULATOR 9000 here.

Best Bouncing (And Also Best Left-Handed Game): Goopty Goo

You know how, in the old 2D Mario games, you could sometimes bounce off the heads of several enemies in a row, without touching the ground? Well, Goopty Goo is a game entirely about doing that. Each single-screen platforming level tasks players with stomping on each goo cube without hitting the ground. It only takes a few minutes to play through them all, but Goopty Goo is great fun while it lasts. I like its red-and-orange sunset silhouette art, and the little details that occasionally emerge from the clouds in the background. Mostly, though, I like it for the pure joy of executing a perfect sequence of bounces. It’s also (unusually) set up to be played with one’s left hand, so any lefties out there are in luck. Read my full post about Goopty Goo here.

Best Game That’s Still In Development: Gataela – Demo

Stumbling upon a demo five years after the bundle ended usually means that the full game either released a while ago, or was abandoned. So I was surprised to discover that Gataela appears to still be in active development, with regular bi-monthly updates on progress from developers Atemly Games. And the demo left me intrigued to see the final product. It’s a Japanese-style role-playing game, but rather than going for a retro pixel art look like so many others, it has beautiful high resolution hand-drawn artwork. It’s well written too, showing rather than telling as it establishes its world and characters. By the time protagonist Zack left the town of Vuni to seek aid for its hungry residents, I was fully invested. The battle system and character leveling didn’t impress me as much, with lots of options that didn’t seem to make much difference. But I want to know what happens next, and with fast-paced fights that aren’t random, combat never got in the way. I’ll be keeping an eye on this one to see if a full release appears. Read my full post about Gataela – Demo here.

My Favorite Pick From Year Five: Rym 9000

One thing I’ve enjoyed about Scratching That Itch is the way it gets me to try games I wouldn’t normally choose. For example, I’d never put serious effort into learning the intricacies of the infamously difficult shoot ’em up genre, until I started rolling a few of them here. Games like Zenodyne R and RISK SYSTEM would have seemed too hard back then, but I wanted to give them a fair shake for Scratching That Itch so I persevered, and I began to understand the appeal. Now, I find myself choosing a shoot ’em up as my favorite game of year five. Rym 9000 isn’t quite as hard as the aforementioned examples, but it retains the genre’s focus on repetitive arcade challenge and mastering intertwined systems to survive its sequential stages. It’s also a stunning visual spectacle: gorgeous pixel art erupts into chaos as energy weapons crackle and space warps around them. The plentiful explosions twist and writhe, spewing glitchy graphical effects. Yet somehow the action never becomes unreadable: sustained fire fades out the beautiful backgrounds and leaves only the player, the enemies, and their weapon fire. Rym 9000 sounds great, too, pulling lo-fi synth music from Roex’s back catalogue to accompany the action. And, naturally, there’s a bizarre story behind it all, full of warring families and alien encounters and the once-in-a-millenium “moon blink”, when the moon sprouts a giant eye for a few seconds and blinks at Earth. Rym 9000 does have some flaws, most notably the occasional crash that forces players to start their run over from the beginning, but I found myself really liking it anyway. It’s not even that punishing, so those who aren’t shoot ’em up adepts might still enjoy it. Read my full post about Rym 9000 here.

That’s it for year five of Scratching That Itch. If I can keep up the average pace of the first five years, it will only take about 35 more years to cover the entire bundle. But I’m more likely to maintain the pace of the last two years, which means I’d need about 56 more years. Better get started!