itch.io has regular browser games here: https://itch.io/games/platform-web

itch.io also has PICO-8 games that can be played in the browser here: https://itch.io/games/tag-pico-8

Many of the top PICO-8 games are de-makes of popular titles, so that might help. Here’s a list for de-makes: https://github.com/pixelbath/pico8demakes.

Celeste seems like your best option, but there are a handful of games with the “Narrative” tag here: https://itch.io/games/tag-narrative/tag-pico-8

You don’t need to offer solutions when complaining about something not working or feeling right, jfc.

In fact, most developers kinda hate when you offer suggestions, because they don’t like armchair developers.

Agree that they can never fully address it, but it would be nice if they made it easier to block publishers and developers (who do not have a publisher or dev page set up, like Sega) and filter on things like “Requires 3rd-party DRM” that appear in the gold boxes in the Steam UI. Currently, I follow multiple curators who flag games for things like Denuvo. But, it would be nice to have that built into the filters and store preferences, when the info is available. If users could easily filter out bad actors, then it might discourage the bad behavior. Valve might not do any of that because it would probably strain their business relationships. So, I don’t know.

That was definitely the impression that I got from the reviews and it’s a shame.

My theory is that they’re not actually trying to make games. They are trying to make money printers.

The developer took that one down to focus on their health, they said. https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/only-up-creator-reveals-they-are-removing-the-game-on-steam-due-to-stress-2284288/

I think you’re exactly right - it is the combination of money + little oversight that is the big problem. Warframe seems to do a good job with tennogen but they limit it to only cosmetic mods and seem to be pretty restrictive about what they accept into their store. I don’t see how you could have good oversight for a game with as many mods as something like Skyrim has.

I am not disagreeing with the premise that it’s fair for someone to be paid for their work. However, during the Skyrim paid mod controversy (on Steam), I learned that there a lot of situations where having paid mods did hurt the modding community and created ethical concerns.

• Mods were being stolen and sold by people that were not the actual mod authors.
• Mods were being sold that depended on larger, more complicated mods to function, but the payment was not shared with the larger mod.
• Mods that had multiple contributors were being sold by an individual who was not sharing the money with the other contributors.
• Players were concerned about being asked to pay for bug fix mods when the developer should be fixing their own game. This is of course, was not the modders fault and does not mean their bug fix mod wasn’t valuable or deserving of pay, but many felt the developer should pay for it, not users.

I would also point out that it wasn’t just greedy players that complained about paid mods - a lot of modders thought it went against the spirit of modding because of how it harmed collaboration in the community. Suddenly, they couldn’t trust that others would not steal their work or profit from it unfairly. And, that seems like a reasonable take to me, given all the abuses that modders claimed happened in the short time that paid modding was a thing for Skyrim on Steam.