Bitsy Fest Jam post-mortem: My Favorite Games

The Bitsy Fest Jam ended on October 15th, with 42 games created. First of all, I wanted, on behalf of my co hosts and I, to thanks every participant to the jam, even people that couldn’t release their game in time

It’s been over a week now, and I played every single one of the games. And I have to say: the bar of quality is through the roof. There are so many incredible pieces of interactive fiction made for this jam. I wanted to make a short blog post to highlight a few of my favorites entries in the jam, but it has been a nightmare to pick which one, because they are all great! I am not exaggerating things, as I write this, I took notes of games I wanted to talk about, and “honorables mentions”. Almost half of the games are here.

On what criteria can I judge the games? On its length? Bitsy is made for short experiences, and some of my favorite Bitsy games are very very VERY short. A straightforward experience with minimalistic graphics, this is what Bitsy was made for. Should I judge the games on the technical aspect? There are a lot of bitsy “hacks” out there to add features to the core engine, so a Bitsy game can look very different from one another, but a “vanilla” bitsy game is no less impressive.

In the end, here is my one and only criteria for a game to make it to the list: the vibe. That’s all, I’ll trust my gut to choose the games I want to highlight. I am sorry in advance for anyone who didn’t make the list, it doesn’t mean your game wasn’t worth playing, because they all are.

As a reminder, the theme was Museum. There are a lot of ways the theme can be approached. A museum, as an idea, conjure a well defined set of tropes in our mind, that can be endlessly rearranged or reinterpreted. When we strip everything tangible and get to the core of the concept, a museum is somewhere to look at notable things, in a non chronological order. They can be tangible places for everyone, or personal inner spaces. They can tell a story, or they can just be mazes to get lost into.

So, without further ado, let’s start with the…

Honorable mentions

The Fifth Floor, by Marcomix

The first fangame of the Museum of Screens??? Okay there’s more than that, it’s a detective story with an actually great twist I won’t spoil, but it caught me off guard and work well within the fiction.

mew’s under the truck, by npckc

A great exploration of videogame urban legends of the late 90s, a topic close to my heart, so close I made two bitsy games about it. But this one is way better than both combined, visually and technically.

Skelective Engineering, by danwinters

A simple, yet very funny game with an original mechanic that work very well within the limits of the Bitsy engine! You have to reassemble skeletons of humans and animals for an exhibition, but you are barely qualified in the matter. Will you get fired? Probably because it is way funnier to mess up than to actually try to win.

Museum of Everything, by Valeriy Petrov

A museum containing everything, that is a bold claim, but this one does. It is a procedurally generated museum, creating an endless supply of art pieces made of different materials, showing different scenes, to give different moods. This game is, in my opinion, gorgeous, the pixelart is very well done, and there are some non randomized events in some places to discover.

EXTREMIS EXHIBIT, by Lucretia Rage

A short visit to the last museum humanity will ever build. It is very short but quite sad, a contemplation on the end of the World, what it means for humanity, but most of all, what we mean for us, as an individual.

RELICS, LIKE VULTURES, by raven

You are a scavenger in a post apocalypse world, and you explore the ruins of the Old orld to find scraps for the Museum of Scavengers. I found the story so charming, told through dialogues with the various characters you go explore the world with. They are full of personalities, hopes, dreams, and their own view of the world.

Now, it is time for what you are here for…

My favorite games of the jam

I have a back hernia, by rrrrroseazerty

That’s right, the first game submitted to the jam, just one day after it started. And it stuck with me for the entirety of the jam, because it is for me the best showcase of the power of Bitsy: A short story that get straight to the point.

I like museums, I like going to museums in real life, and I adore when there are fictional museums in videogames. In an ideal world, a museum is a place for everyone, to look at pretty things, or learn. Often both. But real museums are not neutral places, and not always good places. And they often do little to nothing to accommodate people with disabilities. It really suck.

There were quite a few games in this jam about how museums are bad in real life, whether because they stole historical artifacts from foreign countries, or because the concept of a museum is to isolate beauty from the rest of the World. All of those are valid criticism. It is this game that stuck with me, because it got straight to the point. Like a joke, there is a simple setup: you want to go to the museum. You realize the experience will be terrible because of your back hernia. Then payoff: you decide to tell the museum to go fuck itself, and you go home. And I kept thinking about this for weeks now.

The Museum of Mid 2000s Forum Signatures, by Niandra!

How could I not love this game? Just by reading the title I knew the game would speak to me on a personal level.

Like many of my generation, I frequented online forums. The culture of forums was way different than what you see on online communities nowadays. And this virtual museum is about forum signatures, a delightful feature adored by every forum user. It was the space under every one of your posts, where you put everything you wanted. Often poorly made montage of videogame characters. Some would call “cringe” the pictures shown in the museum, and sure it is very funny to look at them now, it is a very silly museum that made me laugh a lot. But those images were, above all, earnest. It was the way to express their personalities, their place in the community, or just for joking around.

Forums are almost extinct nowadays. But they didn’t die by themselves. In fact, there were a few games in the jam about the death of the old Internet. And all of them had the same conclusion: The Internet is not dying, it is getting killed by greedy corporations. This museum was all fun and games until a small section at the end with only two things: broken images, from a website who shut down ten years ago.

I made countless things on the Internet over the years, but for the majority of my teenage years, I made Sprite Comics. I was in a community that created literally thousands of Sprite Comics. I met several of my closest friends on that forum. Back in the days, we hosted the comics we made on free image hosting websites. Today, almost all of them closed down without warning. Some of us kept our comics so we could reupload them, but countless work got lost.

Sometimes you find a community online, you pour your heart and soul to create something that only you could have made, only to lose it all because somewhere a guy decided he wasn’t making enough money, made a bad business decision and had to shut down a website. And there is sadly no way to go back.

MEMOSEUM, by sssemendyaev

This game is entirely made of visual poetry.

There are games that are in this list because I have a personal connection with the topic, or because I find the ideas fascinating. But there are also games in this list for the simple fact that they are meditative, serene experiences. There is almost no text, no dialog, no guidance on how to approach or even interpret the museum. You just experience it.

There is not much to say about the game because it say little, but at the same time it is a great experience, you go through different scenes, and when you are done you move on to the next one. There is a car driving at night, a field, space… The description said those are memories, places, videogames… I guess you can project what you want on those pictures. Because art is about what you feel as much as what the author intended.

The Museum of Found Things, by More Teeth Please

It is a very simple game with beautiful pixel art, a simple premise, and a meditation of lost things. When you lose something, where did it end up? In the Museum of Found things, of course.

The museum could exist in real life. There is no magical liminal space, no special effect aside from the strange ghost that guides you through. This is literally, a place where items were arranged thematically. Found things, of course. Things that are lost then found countless times, things that reappear at the right time, etc… The items are very mundane, and quite silly: car keys, socks, or hair ties. It is funny to think anyone would actually make an exhibition about this.

But that’s the beauty of videogame, isn’t it? The joy of making things that wouldn’t exist in real life. No one would make an exhibition like that, but in this game, it takes a different meaning, because all things lost and found are not necessarily tangible things. And some things lost should maybe left that way ?

The Museum of Magical Objects, by Rascal

There were a few detective games submitted to the jam, which make sense, museum heist is a fun trope. This game is an inversion of that. This is a detective game in which you are working at a magical museum, and you are curating a collection of cursed items. Your goal is to choose which item will be displayed, but you have to be careful: There is, among the items, an artifact that should absolutely not be displayed, but you have no idea which one.

This is a surprisingly in depth detective game, with no clear answer. Does this make sense ? You are dealing with magic, something that can’t be explained rationally. So, the items you are dealing with can’t be inspected with a rational mind. Each day you come to the museum, and you have to choose which item you think will not curse everyone in the museum, but you cannot know if the cursed item is among them. Maybe it will be part of the next day, maybe you already discarded it without realizing it. You can rely on scraps of information, by asking your colleagues about the history of the item, or the magical properties. You can also make the cat smell the items, which give… Not really any meaningful information… Or is it?

It is a very cool game with a lot of content for a Bitsy game, but in the end, I chose it not for what it is but for what it could be. I’d love to see a full length version of this game because it is, I believe, a very original gameplay loop that deserves to be explored more.

In 2023, I killed myself, by anaël

This is one of the most heavy games I played in 2023. Read carefully the content warnings before playing it. But I assure you, it is beautiful, and there is a happy ending.

The author states in the description that the game relates a personal experience that has been “romanticized for the sake of the story”. I don’t know how to talk about it, because while the details of the story might not all be true, the emotional core of the story feels true. And it is a deeply personal story. It takes a lot of courage to make a game this personal, to allow yourself to be vulnerable enough to put your raw feelings in a story for all to see.

There are a few games in the jam that took the approach of “games as inner spaces for memories”, like the previously featured MEMOSEUM. But unlike this one, this game is very explicit about this subject matter. It tells what the narrator feels as they go through their memories, good or bad. The small things that brought them joy, the darkest moment of their life… Sometimes the tone is heartwarming, sometimes it is sarcastic, with a sort of humor that reminded me of snippets of conversation from Undertale. Sometimes, it is bleak, hopeless, and very upsetting.

You might guess what the story is about from the get go. You can discover what it is about through exploration, or just read the description of the game beforehand. There is no big secret, the game is explicitly about growing up and discovering you are transgender. It is about putting words on your pain, understanding what you are feeling, that the desire to kill yourself means in fact, destroying the person people see in you.

You can visit the memories at your own pace, discover many secrets, or you can go straight to the exit. It is accessible from the beginning. Because there is only one possible ending no matter what. But it is a good ending, a hope for better things ahead, while letting go of the past.