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Itch.io is the best place on the Internet to find games you’ve never heard of that are unlike anything you’ve ever played.
The creator-friendly storefront is home to games from tiny indie creators, many of whom are using it to publish their first attempts at making a game. As such, it’s a hotbed of experimentation, creativity, and the exploration of ideas and themes that would never make their way into a polished triple-A title. The best Itch game I played this year was called He F****d The Girl Out Of Me, and that title should give you a good indication of the kinds of games you can find on the platform. Which isn’t to say that all Itch games are explicitly sexual or queer, but they do often approach the topics that mainstream games ignore, and with frankness. They tend to have more in common with zines than Zelda.
Itch games are ‘indies,’ but that’s a broad category. It encompasses solitary creators developing alone like Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone and huge teams like Fall Guys creator Mediatonic, which was independent until getting bought by Epic in 2021 — despite having more than 200 employees. Itch indies are the kind of indie I’ve always found most interesting. They aren’t always the most polished games, but they are able to take the wildest swings on subject matter and mechanics. Because they’re often made by one person, they don’t attempt to be remotely commercial.
For that reason, Itch games often remind me of the films of Maya Deren, whose debut Meshes of the Afternoon (co-directed by her husband, Alexander Hammid) was included on last year’s Sight and Sound list of the best films of all time. Critics voted the experimental short the 16th best film ever made, and filmmakers ranked it 62nd. When you hear experimental film, you may think of movies that have been made since the ‘70s and ‘80s, films like David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire. I know that, for a long time, when I thought about films made before the late 1960s, I thought exclusively about Hollywood movies. Films like It’s A Wonderful Life that, while excellent, we’re clearly shot on soundstages and aimed at a wide audience.
“I make my pictures for what Hollywood spends on lipstick.” – Maya Deren
But Deren released Meshes of the Afternoon in 1943 — three years before It’s A Wonderful Life. Shot in black-and-white and, in its original version, without any audio track, Meshes is 14 minutes of incredibly subjective, dreamlike filmmaking exploring what exactly the self is with avant garde techniques. As Deren stumbles up a staircase, the camera angles back and forth, simulating the feeling of being on a listing boat. The film loops back on itself several times, as Deren watches other versions of herself pursue a shadowy figure with a mirror for a face. Eventually, there are four Derens huddled around her table, using compositing tricks that weren’t new but still look impressively believable despite the film’s age. Especially given that the short was made in Deren and Hammid’s home, on a budget of, in Deren’s words, “what Hollywood spends on lipstick.” In 2023, anyone with a cell phone can make a movie. But making your own film in 1943 was much rarer. She was making “indeie films” before the term was in popular use.
That pioneering spirit remains inspirational, and lives on in filmmakers who pick up a camera and just go shoot something, and in game developers who teach themselves how to build a game by downloading Godot, or watching Blender tutorials, or loading up Mario Maker and putting levels together. In the same way that self-taught developers making games for themselves may flout conventions around how ‘things are done,’ Deren’s films were completely unlike what Hollywood was making. They often have no music and no dialogue, instead telling non-traditional stories entirely through images. If you like games like Virginia, Inside, Cocoon, Tunic, or Hyper Light Drifter which communicate their narratives wordlessly, you should look to Deren as an ancestor. If you want to see what an indie filmmaker was making 70 years before the rise of indie games that embodied the same ethos, you can find Deren’s films online for free — not unlike many games on Itch.io.
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