itch

Game making tools are as simple as they can get at the moment, which allows everyone to put their creativity to work and share it with the world. Naturally, the indie game market has exploded in the last couple of years, thanks to tools like Unity and even the free Unreal Engine SDK. Not all of them are brilliant, but some have managed to take everyone by surprise and leave a mark on the industry.

itch is a basic application designed to help you easily download and organize games purchased from itch.io. They do not even have to be paid games in order for you to be able to do this, which means that even demos and free games are part of the deal. While the application is not as complicated as other platforms, such as Steam or GOG Galaxy, it certainly does enough to make your life easier.

As you might expect, you need to be logged in with an itch.io account in order to view your collections and download games, and you can even use multiple profiles if you wish to do so. The games you add to your library are stored and displayed in a special category, but you can also browse the most popular releases on itch.io directly from the app, which is obviously helpful.

When it comes to actually downloading the games and installing them, itch still has a few minuses in this regard, but only because the app is still early in the development stage. Not all file types are supported when it comes to installation, but you can do so manually if you find yourself in such situations. It is possible to select a custom install location, in case you are not happy with the default one.

Interface-wise, everything is as simple as possible, since there's only a handful of buttons and menus at your disposal. Besides being able to browse through a few different lists, the only other settings concern your itch.io profile and the install locations. Hence, it shouldn’t take you more than a few seconds to figure out how everything works, which is obviously a plus.

Even if itch is not as complete as it could be, things are bound to get better in the future. The app does exactly what it needs to do right now, namely to help you easily download and organize the desired games in your library.