Green_Knight's Solo Adventures

https://itch.io/b/3481/solo-but-not-alone-6

I promise I can stop any time.

This is definitely a bundle of solo games, and I’m getting the ‘my dance card is full’ feeling; yes, a lot of these games look very yummy, but so did the last two bundles I’ve posted and there will always be more interesting games.

I have around 80 games in last year’s bundle, and several more bundles to go through. I *do* feel I’m making progress, but at the (maximum, unrealistic) rate of 1 game a day, I probably have a couple of years’ worth of itch.io bundle games. Never mind games I got from elsewhere, solo play I’m improvising, and games I play with others.

One thing this does is cure me of FOMO. Not yet in the ‘must buy all the things’ sense; I am not quite at the point where I will not buy a dedicated solo bundle; but I’m no longer buying other games even if they’re just a quid (or a couple of quid).

But now that I have them, I find myself wanting to process them, and having made a good start (I have done reviews, however short, of 40+ games) I want to continue, so I can reduce my mental load.

That means being ruthless. My ‘one topic a month’ project is not going too well; I got side-tracked this month and started on a different game so I’ll have to re-configure everything, and I’ve found a few more games/game styles that I wanted to add, so I’m now looking at September 2027, and I’m not even *trying* to find themes.

But there’s also a tremendous sense of achievement, of taming a mountain of STUFF and turning it into a library of choices; I’m starting to get a feel for which mechanisms work for me; what I like to do when I’m out of brain, what I want to borrow for a longer campaign maybe, how I can augment my practice.

In the long run I think I’ll end up with a pile of solo journalling things along the lines of Froggy Hat, With Iron Teeth or The Disguised Frog - good, wholesome, short fun. (This selection picked by scrolling down the list of reviews); but also hopefully with a pile of games that can form the baseline for longer adventures/more in-depth stories.

In the end I suspect I will end up in a similar space as Geek Gamer in this video – not with the exact resources, but with a similar pattern of I pick a general feel, I find a way to get the story started, pick a ruleset, build a character, and do some worldbuilding in any order.

While it's only fair (and educational) to play each solo game as it is intended (games not intended to be soloed will need amendments anyway) in the end, I see myself taking note what I particularly like about each game and then taking the best bits and making a story from them.

I'm not there yet, but I'm getting closer.

Path to Education bundle

This was one of those bundles I only discovered because I was looking at a game and spotted the ‘get this in a bundle’ link.

Does seem to contain a fair amount of solo RPGs. For $10, all you need is 3-4 games you like to have gotten your money’s worth, the other 100+ are icing on the cake.

I spotted a couple of whimsical cat games and one based on T.Kingfisher’s Paladin: Sold.

https://itch.io/b/3299/palestinian-childrens-relief-ttrpg-bundle-for-pcrf

I’m going to start logging bundles with solo games when I come across them, because I cannot find them using itch.io’s site search (they have a lot of bundles so I only hear of them by chance or when someone mentions them on Bluesky.)

I have no idea what is in this bundle or how many of the 250+ items are actually solo games.

Some things will not be games (but assets, poems, zines), some may be resources I already have (there seems to be a certain overlap between bundles), many items will not be useful to me (pixel art, windows games) or things I just don’t like.

It’s highly unlikey that I won’t find $10 worth of fun in this bundle, and it’s for a good cause (I can't actually vouch for the charity, but it seems legit to me).

For me, exploring the Solo Roleplay space through Indie games has given me a lot of stuff to think about. It’s nice to have an abundance of things to play with and try out.

On the downside, these bundles can be exhausting, so I recommend planning how you’ll organise and process them beforehand. Make the decisions by category so each game becomes ‘where does this fit’ instead of 'what is it, how do I want to categorise this, does it make sense to split things like this or that'. If you're interested in horror, have a horror folder, simple as that.

I get anxious at the thought of missing out, so I will download everything that isn’t a Windows/Android/Linux game and then shuffle them to backup and forget about them.
My current categories are

– 3rd Party Games These need games I don’t own, or need at least an understanding of them, I may look at them later to see whether it’s worth getting the base game and I may never get around to that. (Eventually, I will look at Thirsty Sword Lesbians).,
– Assets (a very few photos, mostly pixel art, some sound tracks that may be useful, wallpapers… all in all, another category that I'll shuffle to backup.)
– Books and Zines. Worth a look. A couple of people publish LGBT+ novels on itch.io, much to my surprise, and there are a number of zines and poems and short stories in these bundles that may be worth reading once. Will take a closer look later.
– Character Creation Tools. I’m not looking for another, I’m over the moon with Colorful Characters, but it's worth keeping them where I can find them easily.
– DnD supplements. May be for other systems, too, but basically monsters and NPCs and locations; things that may need tweaking but that spark ideas.
– Multiplayer Games. If it's obvious that this game needs a group – and many indie games are about social interactions – it goes here.
– Safety Tools. Very small category, not every bundle has one, but they're things I want to be able to find easily.
– Solo Games. When a description is ambiguous, the game goes here. This is the category I'm most likely to process; and I'd much rather reject games and move them to multiplayer or other categories than have solo games hidden in multiplayer and never find them. I expect a good many of games in this folder to not be soloable (or not be games); that's fine.
– Video Games. I download the Mac version only, but most of them are pixel art, and I don't play pixel art. Some are browser games that are amusing for a few minutes. These get shuffled off my hard drive as soon as a bundle is processed; may never look at them again.