A bundle of games aiming to raise money to aid the United Nations’ Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in their efforts to help Palestinian refugees is set to go on sale via Itch.io next week. Just over 380 games are part of it, including the likes of Coffee Talk, Lucifer Within Us, and a cow life simulator that features an alligator who’s really into arson.
Organised by Junch and the South East Asian Games for Good initiative, the bundle’s dubbed Play for Peace – Games for Palestine. It’s taken over 10 months to come together. The result’s a 382-game strong bundle that includes a huge variety of creations that contain not a whiff of AI or NFTs.
“The people of Palestine continue to be subjected to hostility, destruction of homes, critical infrastructure, and devastasting loss of lives,” reads the Play for Peace bundle’s freshly-published Itch listing. “We, as a games community, will bring together our incredible games from across the world, for a charity bundle with proceeds that go directly to Palestine aid and relief.
“We are partnering with UNRWA USA, who will receive the funds and grant them to UNRWA (UN agency) in support of direct humanitarian aid in Palestine. Together, the game dev community and UNRWA USA will raise awareness on the situation in Gaza, spotlight our communities, and the devs participating in this charity drive.”
In addition to the games I mentioned in the intro – the cow life sim’s definitely worth checking out – the bundle includes everything from lesbian devil-hunting action, courtesy of fittingly-named boss rusher Bossgame, to tabletop adventures like Stirring the Hornet’s Nest at Het Thamsya. A couple of others that’ve caught me eye are Street Cleaning Day: Rat’s Revenge, a wave-shooter about a rodent fending off soapy bubbles, and I Get This Call Every Day.
The latter’s a point-and-click simulation of its creator’s experience working in a call centre, featuring “terrible art [which] conveys a terrible work environment” and the choice of whether to “lose politely or lose spectacularly”.
If that brutal reality isn’t for you, there’s also Fit For a King, a Henry VIII simulator that offers the chance to marry everything, execute everything, and/or spend it all. “While Fit For A King could have been full of lazy, bargain bin Blackadder jokes, it’s got a wonderfully dadaist edge to its humour instead, and an indefinable atmosphere I could only call early 2000s web game energy,” former RPSer Nate Crowley wrote of that one. Or, there’s Virtua Blinds, which looks like it could be the greatest thing I’ve never played.
As the bundle’s curators wrote: “All of it represents the creative expression of artists and developers who want to help raise money through their art for one of the most important causes of our time – freedom and the ending of genocide in Palestine.” The Play for Peace – Games for Palestine bundle will be on sale from 5PM BST/12PM ET/9AMPT/6PM CEST on September 2nd, and will cost $8.
