About this site
Game Shelf introduces indie games to players, a few articles a month. Games made with and without AI are both welcome. Each pick carries a label saying where AI was used, so you can decide what you are comfortable with.
How we set the AI level: we read the developer's official disclosure, the "AI Generated Content Disclosure" section of a Steam store page or the AI rows of an itch.io page, and quote it word for word with a link. Level 0 needs an explicit declaration of no AI. If no disclosure is found, the game is marked "No declaration", which we never treat as level 0. We do not guess levels from screenshots or rumours.
Facts such as prices, dates and review counts are checked on the official pages and written with the date we checked them.
The operator also makes games. When one of them appears here it is always labelled "Operator's own game", on the site and in posts on X.
Articles are written in English. The Chinese and Korean pages are translated by AI and say so at the top; the English page is the original.
Run by Game Shelf. Corrections and questions: please use the form below.
For developers: sending a game key
If you make indie games, you can send us a key (Steam, itch.io or elsewhere). We may play the game and write about it.
We do not promise a review or a feature, and we do not promise to reply.
If we do write about it, the AI level still comes from your official disclosure. Sending a key does not change the level or how the game is treated. We never feature a game in exchange for money or advertising.
Please include the game's name, its store URL, and where your AI disclosure is (for example the "AI Generated Content Disclosure" section of the Steam page). Use the form below.
What we count
To see whether this site is useful, we count visits and clicks. We do not use cookies, and counting never asks for or stores your name or email address.
A small script on every page makes a random ID for each browser tab and keeps it in that tab's sessionStorage, together with the kind of page you came from (a search engine, another site, or none) and any ?ref= tag in the link. sessionStorage is cleared when you close the tab. The script sends these to this site, and with them we count, per day: one visit, each click on a store or official-site link and which game it was for (these links go through /go/ on this site), and changes to the AI level filter (the level chosen and whether games with no declaration are shown). The kind of source and the ?ref= tag are saved with the counts. The ID is saved only after it is mixed with the date and hashed, so the same tab cannot be linked across days. We do not save your IP address or your browser's user agent with these counts; the user agent is only read to tell bots from people.
The AI level filter remembers your last choice in your browser's localStorage. That stored value is not sent; only changes are counted, as above.
We also use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts page views without cookies. Cloudflare's privacy policy
If you send a message with the form below, we keep your email address, your name if you give it, and your message so we can read and answer it, until we delete them. A hashed form of your IP address is saved with the message to limit spam; we erase it once it is more than an hour old, when the next message arrives or when we next collect our numbers.