I’m in a weird place where it actually kind of stings now to open up a bunch of new video games from the Humble Choice if I haven’t been playing very many. Like, oh, shit, this might get me back over 170 because I didn’t really play much. Partly I’ve been busy, partly I’ve been moving (mostly my father but also some of my stuff) and my PS3 controller has been packed up for a while, which means I’ve hardly been playing anything.
But I’m not going to let myself pass on good games just to make a number move in the direction I want it to, so I’m definitely grabbing The Outer Worlds. It’s kind of surprising I don’t already have this one. While I’ve heard that it isn’t as good as the pitch of “the guys behind KotOR 2 and Fallout New Vegas finally have enough clout to make their own thing from scratch” would imply, I’ve still heard pretty good things overall and I like RPGs.
TemTem is another one of those games that looked at the stagnation of Pokemon and smelled opportunity, in this case making that Pokemon MMO that everyone always said they wanted. I don’t actually want that, although I can see why people who like competitive battling would. Instead of fighting a bunch of mono-type gym leaders in a game that’s basically 20 hours of tutorial and then you fight the Elite Four, the Champion and Elite Four can be the five actual best players on the leaderboard and the gyms can be special battlegrounds with specific restrictions on what kind of types, moves, items, etc. etc. are allowed in the battle and gym leaders can be whoever’s on top of the leaderboard for that specific set of restrictions. Then you can focus the PvE mode on battling Team Dildo or whatever, assuming you don’t want to ditch PvE content completely, which would not be unreasonable. Battles against a criminal organization Hellbent on world domination make sense as a situation where 2-8 trainers would team up, though.
I have no idea if TemTem actually does any of this, though, because I don’t actually care. While I enjoy the design challenge of sketching out a concept for PvP focused Pokemon game, I just don’t like PvP very much and it especially doesn’t play well with my desire to finish games and move on. Worth noting that TemTem doesn’t even advertise itself as PvP focused (its gyms are PvE, although it does feature competitive battling at all), which kind of leaves me wondering…why, then? Why else would you make your Pokemon game an MMO? The premise is all about competitive battling! The draw of a fantasy PvE MMO is that it’s a setting where a bunch of adventurers teaming up to raid a dungeon is, like, a thing that happens, and connecting you to a bunch of other players means that you can have that experience (or else consciously choose not to). What’re you teaming up for in TemTem? When in the Pokemon setting do 2-8 trainers team up to take on a gym?
In fairness, it’s totally possible the game has answers to these questions and I’m just not looking close enough to see them. Their description of their competitive battling does suggest their design has more intelligence to it than “people say Pokemon would be a cool MMO so let’s make something that is exactly that with no further elaboration.” I’ve got too many games in my backlog already to roll those dice, though.
I don’t have Yakuza 4 Remastered yet, and that’s a neat get since I’m picking at the series right now. This definitely falls into the category of “you already know whether or not you want a Yakuza game and don’t need me to tell you about it,” though.
Roadwarden seems like something I should enjoy, but something about the pure brown desaturated look is really off-putting to me. It’s a text-with-illustrations RPG about exploring a mysterious peninsula in a dark fantasy setting. This should be my jam, and I’m forcing myself to add it to the backlog, but also making note that I have a weird unsettling feeling about it. When I get around to actually playing it, I’ll ditch it if the feeling persists in play, even if I can’t figure out why. I’ll be disappointed if my blogpost on Roadwarden ends up being as uninteresting as “this game gives me bad vibes for no reason,” but if it does in fact give me bad vibes for no reason, then I’m not going to play it to the end out of some deluded obligation.
Kraken Academy‘s pitch is all about its setting and says nothing about its gameplay, which says “adventure game” to me. It’s only five hours, but I already picked up a bunch of games this month, I really don’t need to bog myself down with a genre I dislike even if the writing could hypothetically save it.
Merchant of the Skies is one of those trading type games where you have a boat of some kind and fill it up with stuff that’s cheap to take it to somewhere it’s expensive to sell it up and use the money to buy a bigger boat until you have the biggest boat of all and enough money to retire to a private island or buy China or something. This one is set apart by two things: First, your boat flies, and second, you get to buy little buildings at different locations. I like this genre, it doesn’t get a whole lot of love (or at least it doesn’t cross my radar much), and I like both of those new twists on the standard concept, so this is a get for sure.
Ozymandias: Bronze Age Empire Sim is a 4X game, and those are a huge time commitment. It’s also not really something you can play to completion, since there’s no particular campaign (and a campaign for a 4X game would be pretty unwise anyway). I’m going to get it for my collection, but I won’t add it to the backlog, since it can’t really be meaningfully completed.
I already have Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate. It’s a fun time-waster that only takes like 15-30 minutes. I think it might be possible to complete, but I definitely haven’t bothered and am not going to. It’s a game where you are a Chess king and have to defeat all the enemies alone, but luckily you have a shotgun, and also that shotgun converts killed enemies into cards that allow you to move like that enemy for one move. So, if you use your shotgun to kill a knight, you can get on that knight’s square to pick up a knight card, which you can play to make a knight move. You can only have two cards in your inventory at once, so you usually want to fill them up with queens, but gameplay being what it is, sometimes you shove a bishop in there because it’s nearby and it’s better than nothing. You can only fire your shotgun twice before you have to reload and if you get checkmated, you lose. Also your opponent is a fucking cheater who will sometimes move like five pieces at once, but in fairness you do have a shotgun, and you can tell which pieces are about to move because they’ll wiggle a little in advance.
This does indeed bring my total backlog over 170 to 171, although a lot of the new games are short enough that I should be able to get things back below 170 provided I actually play any video games in the month of July.
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