June Humble Choice

June’s Humble Choice has arrived. What’s in the box?

Ghostwire Tokyo is a game where you are a psychic in Tokyo and there are ghosts you need to bust. It’s defintely pitching itself as a digital vacation to Tokyo. I don’t know if I need another one of those when the Yakuza/Like A Dragon series is already like twelve games long, but the gameplay is clearly very different and the supernatural elements should give it a noticeably different style, so I’m happy to drop this in the backlog and get into it once I’m sick of Yakuza games.

Remnant: From the Ashes is described online as an action roleplaying game, although it doesn’t much look like the Diablo style from the screenshots. It’s some sort of RPG and has a cool-looking aesthetic and it’s only 10-15 hours long, so I’ll stick it in the backlog and give it a whirl even though I can’t really tell what it’s about, since the Humble Choice description spends two of its three paragraphs informing me that there is expansion content in the bundle, and that first paragraph mostly just tells me that the game is post-apocalyptic and has both solo and multiplayer co-op modes.

Curse of the Dead Gods is this month’s obligatory Roguelike, and as usual it needs either a killer hook or an extremely good reputation to get in the backlog. This one looks very trap focused, which is a new idea but is not overcoming my Roguelike fatigue.

I already have Honey I Joined A Cult. It’s Prison Simulator, but for running a cult. I’ve tried it a bit about two years ago and found it was a good foundation but clearly didn’t have a finished endgame, and then never went back to check if they fixed that. It’s still in the backlog.

Eternal Threads is a first-person puzzle game about time travel where you time travel through the days of a week to try and intervene in order to prevent some kind of disastrous fire. For some reason you can’t just prevent the fire, so instead you have to make sure none of the six people living in the burned house are trapped in it when it lights up. Cool concept, but I don’t like puzzle games. Eternal Threads is a sufficiently non-central example of a puzzle game that I could be talked into it with a recommendation (Case of the Golden Idol is technically a puzzle game, but I played it on recommendation and loved it), but barring that, I’ll give it a pass.

Grime is somewhat testing my limits for completion time for a game that has one really cool idea. Rollerdrome had one really cool idea, it was about five hours long, and I really liked it. Grime is 16 hours long according to How Long To Beat (by the Main Story+Extras but not 100% threshold, which is usually where I fall), and its one cool idea is that it’s a side-scrolling slicey-dicey sort of game where your weapons are alive and mutate in cool and creepy ways. I am intrigued but admittedly also nervous that I’ll play it through all 16-ish hours and then at the end find that it had worn out its welcome after 5 and I probably should’ve put it in Regrets then.

Turbo Golf Racing combines two genres I do not like in exactly the way the title suggests. Definitely a pass. Points for clarity, though.

Meeple Station pitches itself as Dwarf Fortress but in space. No, not like Rimworld, that’s an alien planet. No, not like Oxygen Not Included, either, that’s in an asteroid. Meeple Station is space space. You build a space station to support the needs of the meeples living in the station, make bank on trade, pirates show up to ruin your day, you ruin theirs back. These games are amazing when done well but awful when done poorly. I’m going to give this one a try, but much like Fobia I’m going to quit at the first sign of frustration. I don’t want this to be another Little Big Workshop.

That brings me up to 167 games total. A generally good trend after I confirmed that the Stronghold games after Crusader are bad. Well, Stronghold 2 is bad, and the general consensus is that the trend continues downhill from there (people are split on whether Stronghold 2 is bad, but they all agree it’s worse than Crusader and that it gets worse from there), and I decided to trust that consensus. I saw a tweet that says that every freelancer’s career slingshots back and forth from going to the movies at 2 PM to having overpromised so much work to so many people that you’re considering changing your name and fleeing to Peru, and I’ve been having a fleeing-to-Peru kind of month, but writing off three games in a series without playing them has gotten me caught up anyway. There’s a number of these “eh, I’ll at least check” sort of games in my backlog, so this might happen more in the future.