Seven awesome games: name your price and give to charity

Humble Bundle Inc. is back with The Humble Indie Bundle 8, a collection of seven excellent independently developed and published games that run on OS X, Windows and Linux. The Humble Indie Bundle lets you set the price you're willing to pay, with all proceeds going to charity.

This isn't junk, either - there are platformers, a retro 2D shooter, experimental and atmospheric games, and a casual title that's just a twist different. Here are short descriptions of each game:

  • Hotline Miami - a 2D top-down action game that mimics the 16-bit shooters of yore. Gory, fast-paced and tough.
  • Proteus - Explore an exotic and mysterious island. Each time you play the world is different.
  • Dear Esther - An "experimental first-person adventure that is strongly driven by a fractured narrative."
  • Capsized - A 2D platformer in which you've crash-landed on a hostile alien planet and you have to recover the rest of your crew and make it out alive.
  • Awesomenauts - a 3v3 multiplayer platformer where you have to defend your base from attack while attacking your opponents'.
  • Thomas Was Alone - a puzzle-platformer with minimalist graphics (Thomas, the protagonist, is a red rectangle). One hundred levels to explore.
  • Little Inferno - Burn your worldly possessions in front of the Little Inferno fireplace. Burning things yields coins, which you can use to obtain new items to burn, like screaming marshmallows, explosive blowfish and more, or combine items to create new and interesting conflagrations, unlocking more items in the process.

Separately they'd cost $90, but together you can pick your price and give instructions on how you want the money distributed between the developers and two different non-profit organizations (Child's Play, which puts video games and systems into the hands of sick kids in hospitals, or the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group focused on defending personal rights online). You can also kick a tip to the Humble Bundle folks if you're feeling generous.

The Humble Indie Bundle is a limited time offer (you have two weeks left to take advantage of the deal).

Seven games, name your price - is that a good enough deal for you? Have you already bought the Humble Indie Bundle 8? How did you split up your money?

Peter Cohen