The Itch.io summer sale includes Thumper and The Signal From Tölva for cheaps

Games. You want them, Itch.io sells them, and to facilitate that process it's put 606 of the things on sale.

I like that they've taken the polar opposite approach to Steam's shenanigans for their own summer sale, and surrounded the discounts with absolutely zero guff. I know some people buy into the badges and whatnot, but after years of Valve's bombarding me with cutesy treehouse animals, those avatars have started landing on the manipulative side of corporate fun. Read on for my picks from this refreshingly minimalist sale, which include the likes of heart-squelching rhythm action-game Thumper and soul-squashing robo-shooter The Signal from Tölva .

I'll jump into some informed recommendations in a second, but it's worth taking a minute or two to scroll through the discounts and see if anything catches your eye. I'd never heard of Jump Gunners, for instance, but after seeing Mike Bithell describe it as "the beautiful child of Towerfall and Worms" I've grabbed it for the next time I have local multiplayer-inclined friends over.

Onto stuff I actually know is good! Thumper is going for 60% off at $8. It's a mesmerising rhythm-action game that'll make you feel both incredibly small and incredibly skilfull. You control a dimension jumping time-beetle as you jump and skid to the beat of a hellish soundtrack while psychedelic monsters and geometry consume reality. Well, that's my reading of it - Alec has his own.

The Signal from Tölva is 50% off at $10, and offers some of the best moody robo-wandering money can buy. It's sort of about shooting robots with laser-rifles and hacking them to be your friends, but it's really about exploring a bizarre and atmospheric husk of a planet while piecing together a sci-fi mystery. The devs recently released a free expansion, though Rich McCormick wasn't blown away by it.

For a mere $1, you can pick up the even stranger Rusty Lake Hotel. I haven't played it, but if Adam still haunted these parts he'd tell me that was an oversight:

"Rusty Lake Hotel is a murder mystery game set in a creepy hotel in which everyone is for dinner. That’s the hook and it’s such a good hook that even though I’ve finished the entire game twice I can’t remember being annoyed by any of the puzzles. I probably was, but it didn’t matter because I had to see what happened next.

This is the strongest recommendation I can give to a puzzle game. Please play Rusty Lake Hotel."

As would John.

I'll stop there, but I've obviously only scratched the surface of a sale that's 606 games deep. Feel free to do some digging for yourself.

Disclosure: Jim Rossignol was one of the people who made The Signal from Tölva, and also happens to be a co-founder of this website. I've never met him though, so my opinions are pure.