Small games. Charted waters.

We're an independent studio making short, story-led games you can play free in your browser. We also track itch.io's charts every day and publish what we find, once a week, in a free email called the Itch Market Brief.

Play the games Read the brief

The studio

Thoughtcrime Studios

We're a small studio with a narrow taste: short games, strong stories, places that feel like somebody lived in them. A murder in a drowned town. A lock keeper working one stormy night. An inn where nothing can go wrong and that's the point.

We work in the open and we say plainly how. These games are designed and built with AI assistance, then tested the slow way, by people playing them and by a standing review panel that grades every game before it goes public. When we make a trailer for a game that doesn't exist yet, we label it a concept trailer. No pretending.

Every Wednesday we post a 60-second concept trailer on Instagram, Threads and YouTube. The ideas people respond to join the build queue. Some of them are games now.

Find us on itch.io, Instagram, Threads and YouTube.

Playable now

Games

Two games are public today. Both are free and both run in the browser, nothing to install.

The Idle Atlas

An idle game about a sky that slowly fills in. Build a small observatory, add stranger and stranger instruments, and watch the atlas draw itself while you get on with your day. Come back tomorrow and the sky has moved.

Play free on itch

Blockreach

A block puzzle on an 8 by 8 board. You get three pieces at a time, place them to clear rows and columns, and chain combos when the board lets you. Free Play when you want to relax, and a Daily Board that's the same for everyone that day.

Play free on itch

Behind these two there's a shelf of 36 more in the pipeline: mysteries, management games, a dice roguelite about customs inspections, a fishing game about rising water. They go public in small batches, after real playtests, because we'd rather release fewer games that hold up than a pile that doesn't. The full catalog, including the ones still in draft, lives on our itch page.

The data product

The Itch Market Brief

Itch.io doesn't publish sales or download numbers for other people's games. What it does publish is its charts, and nobody we know of was keeping the history. So we are. Every day since November 1, 2026 we've recorded the Top Games chart and the New & Popular chart, and once a week we write up what the numbers say: which genres hold the chart, how long games stay on it, and where the breakouts come from. Charts and summaries only. We never guess at anyone's sales.

57% vs 6%

Share of each Nov 1 chart still charting on Nov 7. The main Top Games chart barely moves. New & Popular turns over almost completely in a week. One chart is a career, the other is a launch window measured in days.

20 games

Sat on both charts at once on Nov 7. A game that's new enough for the fast chart and strong enough to hold a main chart slot is the closest thing itch has to a public breakout signal. We track the overlap every week.

What the Top Games chart is made of

Visual novels aren't a niche on itch. On the current chart they're the majority, more than half the top 72. Most of the chart is free, too: only 15 of the 72 show a price.

Issue #0, our launch sample, covers the first week of tracking. Read it here. After that it's one issue a week, free while it finds its audience.