Weekly Overview of the Bundle For Ukraine | Gaming
I Played Every Game in the Bundle For Ukraine
Another Postmortem
In 2023 I finished one of the largest projects I’ve ever started, then spent a month reflecting on it. I then decided, apparently to prank myself for April Fools, to start another bundle. I told myself that this time would be different. No longer would I labour for 2.5 years to complete a bundle. No longer would I be bound by writing articles every day. No longer would I worry about writing so much and being stuck in a loop.
How naïve of me.
Over the past ~40 weeks I’ve gotten to explore an entire new set of games, and similarly to last time it ends with a whimper more than a bang. Yet I would be lying if I said I wasn’t excited to see how everything shakes out. After all, while the journey is where the growth and experience occurs, the destination is where you can reflect and explore. It’s time to look back on the entirety of this bundle, compile all the data like I did before, and close the door on this entire adventure.
Unlike last time, however, I feel not a sense of closure and relief, but of excitement and celebration in seeing the end of the journey and putting an end to this wild ride. There will be a lot of comparisons to the previous bundle and its postmortem, but that’s out of habit. I’ll try to keep myself focused on the present as much as possible.
So crack open whatever you want, and let’s get this party started.
Part 1: Data Collection
Data is a funny thing, since whether you like it or not it will always be generated. It’s up to you to see if you want to collect and quantify it, and it just so happens that I’ve gotten quite good at both. The program I created by using Selenium incorrectly worked just as good as it did the first time, but this time I was able to tweak it to highlight duplicates in the spreadsheet. Unfortunately that meant not getting a sweet picture of the command console being full of entries, but you give and take.
Sure I never got that mythical automation done to make the spreadsheets easier, but the manual aspect helped to ensure that I would keep updating it no matter what. I decided to also avoid expanding into new territories and kept with the core that I refined from the previous database, which allowed for it to go much faster.
Obviously this is all the forward facing data, the filtered data I felt would best serve anyone that just wanted the most straight forward information. Under the hood is all the fun stuff, the data that I collected for me and my friends that was much more personal and opinionated. It was the one updated first to make sure that the ‘vanilla’ one was clean before it went public, a ‘test’ server if you will.
So let’s get to the initial breakdown of this bundle and start revealing all the fun stuff. I teased it in the last post but now it’s time to start getting into the specifics.
Video Games
To the surprise of nobody, video games came out on top in this bundle, totaling a strong 565 entries. It’s understandable given itch.io is primarily seen as an alternative storefront to Steam that gives indie designers more freedom and accessibility for publishing their works. However, this underground aesthetic does mean that many of the AAA titles don’t always make their way to this store, so you end up with a marketplace thriving on the creativity of the smaller folks.
Of the 565, there are quite a few entries that have been tagged in various ways that need to be addressed as ‘not really played’. I kept my arbitrary rules from last time, so any titles that required an emulator to play that wasn’t built into the install was avoided. This time, however, I ensured that it was more obvious so they were tagged visibly as ‘N/A’. There were 7 this time that were given this tag, with two of them being NES games and two others were VR titles. All 4 required software/hardware that I didn’t have available, so they were listed as such. The other 3 are unfortunately titles that don’t exist anymore, with one of them being flat out deleted. I have no clue what it was, the creator and the item are listed as (deleted).
Thankfully, these are the only entries I had troubles with. The biggest struggle was getting some of the games to download or be recognized by my computer, and that hurdle was easily crossed.
Surprise! It’s exactly what you expected: the bundle was dominated by the same four genres as the last bundle, with Adventure and Puzzle dominating the dominators and Narrative/Arcade filling in the top four. If you’ve played a game at any point in your life, I guarantee that you can easily fit any single game within your library within these four categories. After all, they’re the most ‘tried and true’ game genres, with straight forward design philosophies that can be iterated and expanded with ease to execute mechanics of all kinds.
Thing is, these four are vague and exploitative as genres, and can easily be coupled with other genre titles to make things like ‘Puzzle Platformer’ and ‘Narrative Adventure’. This word cloud focuses on the individual words that appear the most, and since genre can be a combination of various words I wanted to showcase just how many times I used certain words to describe a game.
Adventure narrowly beat out Puzzle this time, and is a genre equal parts easy to visualize and hard to quantify. Adventures are titles that allow players to move through a world, usually having another descriptor in front to better describe the experience. A Puzzle Adventure could be a game where you move through a world full of puzzles to find a boss, whereas an Action Adventure could invoke a ‘God of War’ aesthetic.
Puzzle is much easier to visualize in your mind’s eye as games where the main focus is to solve difficult problems through different game-specific mechanics. They can be sliding puzzles, picture puzzles, or even puzzles within other genres. Narratives are similar in this vein as they steer the focus on the game towards a literary feeling, a game that involves just as much reading and listening as it does ‘playing’.
This is all to say that how I feel about these games and the genres I apply to them is arbitrary and subjective: I cannot simply state that one title is objectively an action adventure without going into a thesis explaining what an ‘adventure’ requires to exist. It’s why new genres keep coming into existence, and why many of these new genres end up being mashups of games that pioneer them. It makes for clumsy phrases, but they invoke an immediate understanding: I’m looking at you, Metroidvania, Roguelike and Soulslike.
‘Software’
When you take out the video games, you get the most controversially named grouping I made in software. In hindsight I should’ve called it something like ‘everything else’, but that felt even more vague and silly. In reality its ‘the entries that aren’t video games and cannot be played digitally’, but that is a mouthful that cannot be typed quickly, so I decided to just be wrong instead.
When I was doing the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, I struggled with ‘genres’ quite a bit. Genres are already a difficult thing to quantify, so having an entire group in which some of the entries don’t even match each others’ medium made it somewhat impossible to stick to the same formula.
Instead I focused on their function, seen as the 4 categories (formerly 5) from above. Of course this came with its own complications, as not every ‘Tabletop Game’ looks the same and many of the categories had some seriously conflicting overlap. After quite a bit of deliberation and keeping with an internal system, I was able to sort them out to create that graph above.
Tabletop Games: The category encompassing every entry that involved playing a ‘physical’ game that may involve a table, physical media, and/or in-person interactions. This includes TTRPGs, board games, LARPs, journaling games, and many more, leading to an understandably dominant showing. We’re talking 317-entries dominant, 73.8% of the entries within the non-video game section.
Asset Packs: the easiest to identify thanks to their simplicity: do they offer an asset of any kind to assist with the creation or process of something else? It was the third largest group in the bundle, but that isn’t as impressive as it sounds when you see the numbers. After all, at the halfway point I was seriously worried that there were barely going to be any Asset Packs given how dismal their showing was. They were able to clock in at 60 entries, but that’s only 6.2% of the entire bundle which isn’t a lot when you think about it.
Reading Material: a group with a bit too much overlap with Tabletop Games, but differentiating through identifying the intent of the material. While TTRPGs want to be shared and played, Reading Material encompassed anything that wished to only be read by a single individual, something that divulged all manners of information. We got light novels, text books, zines, and more here, all for your reading pleasure. Too bad the numbers don’t support the notion of having that many, for at 39 entries it only made up 3.9% of the bundle’s total.
Miscellaneous Software: as always, Misc. is a group where the headscratchers go. The bizarre entries that confuse you from the beginning when you hear that they were downloaded from an indie gaming website, let alone from a video game charity bundle. The most basic of the group were OSTs (Original Soundtracks), but this time around we got programs to help you organize, an interactive album, a deck of cards, and even a video player. This category never makes it big, so having 16 (1.6%) entries is still solid.
For those who remember last bundle’s postmortem, I continue to ‘pour one out’ for the lost category Game Engines, for none appeared this time. May they rest in peace.
Alright, now for the fun times
I continued many of the trends from last time with this bundle namely due to habit, but also because my reasoning for starting this journey remained the same. I wanted to shed some light on the bundle for my friends who were confused what would even be within a bundle with over 1000 entries, and while this bundle only had 997 the principle stayed the same. I still have a friend that likes to see what games he can play and beat within a lunch break, and I’ve always been curious about games and their approach to length.
This time, however, I decided against trying to estimate how long a game actually ‘took’ and instead gave it a much snappier title: “Can I beat it within an Hour?”
So why the simplification that makes this graph so much more boring than previous ones? It all comes down to a combination of my altered philosophy for this bundle and ‘objectivity’. I stated at the beginning that this overview would be a much more straightforward look at the games, boiling down my opinions into smaller bites to avoid burnout. This meant that looking at the games for their true length felt a bit disingenuous to do, so I stuck with the more objective approach.
This lead to the chart above highlighting the 565 titles within the gaming section, which is very straightforward to read now that there’s no ‘1–2 hours’ categories. Games that I deemed unable to be finished within an hour took the lead with 358 entries or 63% of the bundle. Many of these titles were propped up by 1–3 hour games such as extensive puzzle titles, visual novels, and simple action games. Games that pushed the 10+ hour tag from the previous bundle were few and far between, but if those are what you were looking for the RPG and Survival Exploration games have you covered.
A subsection of games does need to be highlighted for this style of comparison: the ‘Infinite’ titles. These are your roguelikes, your survival crafting open world games that have no true end state outside of your own imagination. These were divided by looking at their specific gameplay loop rather than the game as a whole. Is it an arcade rail shooter that technically goes forever, but the core concept is uncovered within the first hour? Or is it a basebuilding game that has you constantly scaling new tech trees that may take hours to complete? It’s 100% the most subjective part of the listing outside of my own biases and pacing, and subdividing it felt a bit unnecessary. You can dispute it yourself if you’d like in the database, for what better way to use a database than to argue about the stated values?
Part 1.5: Duplicate Comparison
Throughout this postmortem, you’ll have noticed my constant mentioning of ‘the other bundle’ and ‘previous postmortems’. This is equal parts a crutch of mine and a purposeful nod to previous writings. It’s hard for me not to constantly think about the last time I looked at data of this nature in a similar way, nor can I stop myself from thinking about how this bundle and the last compare. Unfortunately it means that it is harder to make this postmortem stand out on its own, so I decided to try and limit a lot of this discussion to this section here.
All of the data I’ve shown above is a collective of all entries no matter how I’ve written about them, but that’s all about to change. Welcome to the great duplicate debate.
Bit of a squished graph isn’t it, but it gets a very strong point across: of the 997 entries, the top five groups are the only ones that have visible percentiles. The king of the group is, as you might’ve expected, video games not seen in the previous bundle. Taking up nearly 38.2% of the bundle and accounting for 381 entries, it’s understandable that new games not originally seen would be a major component of a bundle that came out years after the previous. The second largest group, Tabletop Games, uses the same logic to dominate the software with just shy of 300 entries or 29.9%.
Where the bar graph helps to clear things up is the third largest category, video games previously seen in the Racial Justice and Equality bundle. It cannot be understated that while the duplicates began to thin out towards the end, they dominated the earlier pages with a total of 184 entries. For context, that’s more than every other duplicate group put together, and all of the new entries from Asset Packs, Reading Material, and Misc. Software. I don’t want to speculate too much, but I’d assume that it’s a combination of previous bundle donators feeling strongly about causes and wishing to continue donating, along with the fact that these bundles are primarily ‘video game’ focused.
By far the largest disparity, and arguably the most interesting piece of data to come from this, is in new Tabletop Games vs. Duplicates. With new entries accounting for nearly 30% you wouldn’t be wrong to assume that it would stick with the average trend that seems to appear when looking at the rest of the ‘New Vs Duplicate’ data. If Video Games went from 38.8% to 18%, a 20% drop could be expected of Tabletop games, meaning that the number of duplicates should be around 10%. Unfortunately, it instead is 1.9%. Enough to be a larger group than Miscellaneous Software, but that doesn’t account for much.
There’s a few theories I have, mainly centred around the above concept of the bundle being much more ‘video game’ focused, but that doesn’t change the shock I had when seeing just how few duplicates were appearing for this category.
Sneaking in at 4th and 5th and finishing up our little duplicate side-tangent are Asset Packs and Reading Material respectively, with their modest numbers rounding out to 5 and 3% before we start getting a bit too granular. These smaller numbers serve as a highlight that many duplicates simply were not entries from any of the other categories, especially when taking into consideration how few duplicates began to appear in the latter half of the bundle.
Part 2: Game Discovery
As always, one of the most exciting things about bundles is they act as a gifted mystery box. What’s inside this fascinating list of nearly 1000 entries was anyone’s guess, and you never knew if the next page would contain your new favourite obsession. Originally my interest in indie games was purely work related, expanding my knowledge of titles to better be able to work within them.
However, as time wore on (and stable employment occurred) it became more of a curiosity to what new strange ways creatives could turn a simple idea and alter it beyond original recognition. I became fascinated in a slightly twisted way with just how strange some of these games could be, even if they didn’t grab my immediate attention, especially when I was able to recognize either a developer or an idea. Hell, I wasn’t expecting to find childhood FLASH games in here, but that’s half the fun.
I normally highlight the games I knew coming into the bundle prior, but the duplicate section above somewhat taints that idea. However, of the new titles, there was somehow another game that I already owned sitting in this bundle, and it’s going to be the first game I talk about.
Kitfox Games is a studio I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a few times at conferences, and I bought Moon Hunters back in the mid 2010s after enjoying it immensely in a 4 player co-op game with friends. Over the past few years I’ve constantly come back to it as one of those fantastic ideas manifested; a co-op game that thrives in choices and story, where individuals can alter the story by accident, and you keep performing a new plot over and over again.
Kitfox is a studio that likes to ask strange questions about the games they make, put them into a small title full of polish and wonder, and then leaves you wanting so much more by the time it ends. While Moon Hunters isn’t the game I played the most in 2023, it is easily the one I’ve played the most in the bundle.
Moon Hunters wasn’t the only game I owned from the new entries, as Thunder Lotus’ Jotun also was a game I had grabbed earlier. Unlike Moon Hunters however, I’d never played it til this bundle inspired me to. Other titles I was acutely aware of before the bundle includes Nina Aquila: Legal Eagle, TowerFall, Baba Is You, SUPERHOT, Lucifer Within Us, Don’t Escape: 4 Days to Survive, and Sonny.
Every other title to my knowledge is a game whose familiarity was name only, if even that. They were games I’d either never heard of or had only heard in passing because of studio mention. Quite a few of these titles I left on my machine to continue playing after I’d moved on to a new page. Currently I’m sitting at ~30 titles still available for me to try out, not including duplicate games I still enjoy to this day.
Unfortunately, after reviewing many of the itch.io client hours, it appears that many recordings of my playtime have not registered properly, so the numbers may be smaller than expected. Such as…
Outside of Moon Hunters, The Wratch’s Den from page 12 easily accounted for the most time played within the bundle, as both me and my brother played it a bunch. Its fun blend of simplicity and strategy allowed for different ideas to flourish with just enough RNG to keep each ‘run’ weird and wonderful.
Unfortunately, uninstalling the game made all of the data from itch.io wipe — the client only tracks how long that specific executable has been run, rather than the program as a whole. I know I reached at least 10 hours, but I can’t prove it…
So taking our number one spot through numerous technicalities is actually SPACE / MECH / PILOT — THE UNIVERSE DRIVE 1.0. This isn’t discounting this little game from page 20, however, as it is one of the most interesting idle games that I’ve ever played. So naturally it was running in the background while I was playing other games and tabbing over to it to catch up with my new best friend Kato. It engages with you in such a sincere way that you might not even realize you aren’t ‘playing’ it in a traditional sense.
Taking the runner up spots are two very different games in page 27’s Sonny and page 24’s Summer in Mara, but they do share one thing in common: I played them both offline during internet blackouts, so their real numbers are closer to 5 hours each. I knew why I’d like Sonny thanks to having played the original and adoring the reconnection to a childhood I used to have, but Summer in Mara was a sleeper hit. Games about management were ones that balanced on a knife’s edge for me. They either hooked me in or I dropped them immediately.
Summer in Mara made me instead focus upon the tragedy of our little friend and the plight of her need to make friends on the mainland. I wasn’t rebuilding the island for me. I was doing it for her, and that was more compelling than any self-serving reason I could find.
Most other games didn’t break the 1–2 hour mark unfortunately, either due to time constraints or my own lack of interest, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying them. Which leads to an easy question: which ones did I like?
Games are polarizing by their nature, for you as the player will either resonate with them or feel nothing. Therefore, I couldn’t stop the critic in me, the intrinsic desire to give things a thumbs up or thumbs down. I titled this column ‘Personal Recommendation’, games that I knew I could recommend to anyone who would listen. Some of them I may not have liked, but I saw the massive merits in what they were able to do even if that style of game wasn’t my thing.
Unfortunately with this many titles there were bound to be some that had to go against the grain, with a few getting a somewhat ‘Mixed’ reaction from me. I tried to avoid this by being as decisive as possible, so believe me that when a game is labelled ‘Mixed’ it is because it was a bundle of games as an entry or it was so utterly confusing I didn’t know what to do with it. This is usually for criminally unique games like INDEPENDENT VIDEO VIDEO GAME from page 16 or Type The Entire Of Ulysses. That’s it. That’s the game from page 29. They sound insane, and are.
One part of this that uses the duplicate knowledge quite well is how much of the ‘new’ material are items I recommended vs titles from previous bundles that ‘bolstered’ the numbers.
It’s pleasantly surprising to see that I’m not a sourpuss when it comes to games, but I can’t lie and say that I expected to be so positive about so many entries. Duplicates made up a little over a third of the entries at 184, and over 20% of them were games I remembered fondly enjoying. For you math nerds, that’s roughly 60–70% enjoyment rate of the duplicates. Yet the new entries weren’t slouches either as I found 228 that I considered games I would recommend, which is nearly the same as the duplicate percentile.
It might be one of those perception things where you recall the negatives more than the positives, as just like last bundle I found myself confused as to how I recommended this many. Perhaps viewing 3000 charity entries over these past few years has softened me up, or maybe I’m just overly lenient. But I think I’m on to something with the idea about ‘perception’.
And so the truth becomes more apparent. Just looking at the blue and red it almost implies that I found more titles within the second half that I enjoyed while also somehow finding more that I didn’t. It was quite confusing at first, and a fantastic showcase of how data can be misleading, because once the duplicates were added the picture made way more sense.
Let’s break it down: in the first half, 145 of the 311 games are duplicates, which is nearly half. That makes it almost more impressive that the amount of recommended games I had in the first half is 111, or 35.6% of the first half. On the flip side, of the 255 entries only 39 of them are duplicates and 117 were recommended. While an increase, all of the duplicate numbers were made up in the ‘not recommended’ section which nearly doubled from 51 to 89.
Now with the duplicates added it follows the path of the previous bundle, but I find the original data to be a bit more compelling. Many of the duplicates that were added were titles I adored from the first bundle I looked at, so it’s interesting to see that without them this bundle is much more ‘average’ for me when standing on its own. The previously mentioned ‘game fatigue’ felt as if it set in faster, yet slower at the same time — I have the format to thank for that, even if it gave me fatigue in other ways.
While this word cloud doesn’t look that much different than the above in terms of weight, the first thing to notice is that it’s tighter. After all, we lost ~15 words, which isn’t unexpected.
The real fun is comparing which genres have larger representation in my recommendations than in the general. Let’s narrow in on the Big 5 — Adventure, Puzzle, Narrative, Platformer, and Arcade. Puzzle is sitting at the top at 52, and with its original size of 74 that makes a 70% recommendation rate amongst the puzzles. As expected of the only genre to change positions, it has the largest percentile amongst its peers. On the flip side, Platformer is the ‘weakest’ recommendation from me, as of the 44 entries I labelled as such I only recommended 20, or ~45%. The rest sat comfortably in the 60% range, which somewhat reinforced a hunch I had that while I may have come around on platformers, I’m still not really ‘into’ them.
This is without the duplicates, of course, so take this with a grain of salt. It’s just more fun to see everything.
Part 3: Did I Actually Achieve Anything?
Honestly?
No, not really. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
The first bundle I did was out of a need for something different, something new. The pandemic caused me to be without a direction, and it gave me a solid foundation to explore new games and share fun facts with friends and family.
The Bundle For Ukraine was a project I did to prove to myself that I could do it again, to streamline the process, and to indulge in some sweet comparisons. The pandemic was no longer a defining factor of my life, and I no longer needed that ‘isolation’ to justify doing something like this. I wanted to simply prove that I did it once and it took forever, and I could do it again within a shorter time frame.
That shorter time frame was in under a year. For reference, the first bundle was ~1700 entries with 1083 video games, and it took me 2.5 years to complete. The Bundle for Ukraine is a 997 entry bundle, a little under 60% of the first, and I was able to complete this within 10 months. Sure there were fewer games to play overall thanks to duplicates, but with the new format I was able to take a monstrous project and compartmentalize it into something manageable, which is impressive in its own right.
I did get one thing done, though: I achieved what the first bundle couldn’t in having events occur in my life that ultimately derailed this entire bundle. Between travelling and acquiring full time work, I’ve achieved a goal I had almost forgotten about when I started back in 2020. And if that isn’t the cherry on top of it all, I don’t know what is.
Part 4: The Future
When I was at this part of the postmortem last time, it was with a massive sigh of relief that I had no idea what I would do next. I could finally take a break and put a pin on an entire chapter.
This time, it’s a bit different, because when I say I don’t know what will come next, I really mean that I have absolutely no intentions of doing a project of this scale ever again.
WOBFU is done, as it should be with its 997 entries now documented and recorded for all to see. The comparisons have been made, and the opinions have been crafted. The spreadsheet database will remain as a reminder of the work done, and could even be handy in the future if I need to reference something.
But this style of project will not continue. Rather, it can’t.
I can’t lie to myself and say that it’s possible that I could do another bundle. Even with the reduced format, the sheer amount of work it took to create this and maintain it was akin to a part time job. That was fine when I was under contracts, but with full time that’s just not as feasible. I’ve already started pulling away, and I’m glad that I was able to finish this before things got too hectic and it actually became derailed.
For the next month or two I’m going to relish in the fact that my free time is not dedicated to exploring new entries and relax. Take a vacation, if you will, by performing work. What a weird irony that is.
Here’s the thing though — I don’t think I can ever truly leave. Bundles and datasets have become entrenched in my life. Yet I know I would ultimately start to hate indie games if I tried to do this a third time, so I’m coming up with a compromise. I’ll have more details later as I scour for bundles and ideas, but I want to keep avoiding the pitfalls of charity bundles that I did from earlier. These bundles are meant to be a developer’s way of helping to give back to causes they care about, but blogs like mine can easily turn it into a reductionist statement on who donates and who doesn’t. That’s not fun. That just adds fuel to an unnecessary fire.
Developers care. Like a lot. Even in the face of the industry’s utter nonsense right now, they care about what’s happening in the world and outside of our industry. I want these bundles to showcase that, and I hope that by bringing these games to your attention that you’ve learned that too.
In the next month or so I’ll let you know what new crackpot idea I come up with. It’ll be much shorter than these ones, and I probably won’t even play the entire bundle. But there will be some wild indie shenanigans.
Part 5: Fin
It’s been a pleasure trying out something slightly different and revisiting games from a few years back, writing in a different format that felt strange but fun. There’s been so many fantastic games within these bundles, along with the fantastic people I’ve connected with — even if it has been more of a drive-by enjoyment than a full blown deep dive.
To The Ugly Monster and Oscar, I thank you for editing these nonsensically long entries, especially this one. You’ve given me a place that I can write about random indie games that many people will never see nor play, and giving people a new way to find out about games is always a blast.
To those that have joined me on this journey, from my friends who decided to question my sanity on doing round 2 of this bundle blogging, to the developers wondering why I’m pinging them on Twitter, thank you for reading. It hasn’t always felt good, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it.
I hope you had fun and got to experience all the best indie games can offer.
See you on the flip side.
