New Itch Games Dec to March 2025

I. Dear Reader,

I missed an edition of this regular round-up of new games on itch. If this is the first time you’re seeing one of these: they are mostly games that came through this form. I haven’t played or read them but each of them has something that made me sit up and pay attention. This is a particularly bountiful episode because I would play all of these games.

Since it’s technically two editions mushed together, I’ve gone over the traditional ten game limit. Also, as usual, the list is in no particular order.

1. Deluge at Drizzle Distillery: There’s a magical storm at the holy water distillery! Oh no! An adventure by Mun Kao for Kala Mandala, his fantasy SE Asia setting.
2. Land in the Mist Starter Set: This is a horror game where you play through specific scenarios set in the real world between 1750 and 1850. The starter set contains all the rules and has an adventure, Of Pagans and Reindeer, set in Northern Finland in 1811. (Rat in a Suit / PWYW)
3. unfamiliar: A game of magical familiars who have lost or been abandoned by their wizardly masters. It’s partially inspired by We3 which is one of those sad comics designed to hit you right in the feelings. (Feature Creep / PWYW)
4. What Happened To Margot Kwan: This is a mystery for Girls at the Genziana Hotel, a PbtA game of maids in a hotel investigating the disappearance of one of their own. This moves the game to an American university town. Genziana Hotel is a really interesting game and this adventure/setting moves it into more explicitly Life is Strange territory. (Mynar Lenahan)
5. Tactical Espionage Action: Dice Goblin Games wrote 16 adventures for FIST, the occult espionage game, in two months. They include: infiltrating casinos, volcanic lairs, frigid research stations, colonial horrors, and of course, Satan trapped in a beach ball. (PWYW outside the bundle)
6. Alone in the Loop: A solo journalling game of a time traveler experience hope and despair as they explore the same loop over and over again. Great premise. (Paul Doyle / PWYW)
7. Mum Chums: A slice of life game about motherhood and looking after children from Tanya Floaker. It’s a real world game exploring real world themes, simultaneously high stakes and low stakes in the best way. (Unlimited community copies)
8. Faire Season 2: A group of historical reenactors at a Ren Faire-type event get pulled into an actual quest of myth and magic by the power of The Dream. It uses the Belonging outside Belonging system to explore our relationship to our roleplay alter-egos. (Okami)
9. Ringmaster: A Descended from the Queen game about a dark, magical circus. Honestly, that was enough for me. Like For the Queen, it revolves around a powerful NPC, the Ringmaster, and ends with a pivotal question: is the circus your home or your prison or both? (Spotless Dice Games)
10. One Of Us Will Die: A social deduction RPG of tragedy and fate. One of the characters, the Mark, knows they will die at the end but can’t say so. One of the characters is trying to kill the Mark before they can fulfill their destiny. The rest of the group are trying to save the Mark and maybe sacrifice themselves instead. (Titus Villanueva)
11. The Archivium: A solo dark academia game. By day, you’re a student. By night, you’re a guardian of a secret, magical library. You build out the archive and its weird classification system and play towards one of 16 endings. (Lich Light)
12. In Love With The Moon: The year is 1968. You are a team of scientists, crowded in an old castle where the air flows thick with LSD and there is a maze of rooms below you stocked with every scientific oddity, all for one purpose: to get you to the moon by whatever means necessary. (James Kerr / PWYW)
13. Ring-lationship Disc-ord: A game where you play Crokinole (!?) to tell the story of two people who are locked in an argument that stems from their past and identity. Truly one of the worst names for anything ever (I say this with love) but I am a sucker for using folk games to explore a story that resonates with their existing mechanics. (Colin Mancini, Sociable Turtle Games)
14. Codename: Cinderella: A cute one page game about espionage agents working for the Fairy Godmother to execute nursery rhyme-inspired missions. (Fuzztech)
15. The Burning of the Free Port of Dohn Amuran: This is an adventure for Grimwild from Natalie Ash. It’s a powder keg situation featuring a violent dockmaster, a free union of boat captains, and the adventurers with a chance to prevent bloodshed and broker a fragile peace.
16. Deadline: A GM-less, map-making, news-chronicling game. Play journalists who are capturing the story of a changing city with their headlines. The city itself is in the grip of an industrial revolution and all that entails. (Wanderers Tome)

I really enjoyed making this list. It just reminded me that there’s so many interesting games out there and I wish I had time to play them all. These designers are all doing fascinating work and making weird art. It makes me happy and I hope making this stuff made them happy too.

Yours two-at-once,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• Nothing this week either!

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• You too can support the newsletter on patreon!

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III. Links of the Week

• Another instantly useful post from Deeper in the Game: This time it’s a Campaign Conflict Generator that will work really well for my upcoming Apocalypse World: Burned Over game.
• Kieron Gillen has a fun post about RPGs as either high art or fanfic, with fanfic being the more interesting comparison strangely. I don’t think the dichotomy works exactly but I enjoyed engaging with it.
• Adrian Hon has a short post summarizing a paper about jubensha that talks about its highly scripted nature where the fun is “sense-making”.
• Not RPGs but: I enjoyed this post about the Oblivion mod that Terry Pratchett worked on during the last years of his life. People have written about this before but each time they do, I read it and smile.

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IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

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This newsletter is sponsored by the the wonderful Bundle of Holding.

• Feral Indie Studio have a bundle with their well-loved setting books like Into the Wyrd and Wyld, Cess and Citadel, Vast in the Dark, Ave Nox.
• Stillfleet, the 350+ page far-future weird scifi game, with its supplements.

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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!