The first Tuesday of the month has come. What’s in the box?
Midnight Suns is a game from the XCOM guys about tactical combat against international terrorists except your squad is led by an ancient fantasy hero revived to continue their struggle with an evil sorceress in the modern day and the rest of your squad are all Marvel super heroes and you need to have dating sim style hangouts with various Marvel characters to upgrade them. Jesus, this pitch started out so strong and just went more and more downhill and the funny thing is that the first two of the three video games that got pitched sound like they’d both be pretty fun individually but like a mess when put together, and then you add on top of it the Marvel team-up thing. The only way super hero team-ups are ever good is when you do it with the decade-spanning patience of the Thanos Saga, giving each hero room to breathe in their own millieu before bringing them together against a threat powerful enough to command all of their simultaneous attention. Even then, it’s difficult to ram the X-Men into things, themed as they are after mutant oppression and yet no one seems to have any trouble identifying that the Fantastic Four are technically not mutants. I’d be there for a game that did Iron Man, Doctor Strange, or Wolverine but trying to start your franchise with all three is too much even before we add the occult urban fantasy theme on top of that.
Two Point Campus is a game about running a university. You stamp down buildings, hire professors, students arrive, it’s all got a vaguely Sims-esque vibe where the fundamental premise is downright mundane but sometimes a student walks around in full plate armor and I can’t tell if they’re a theater major or if you just get medieval knights attending your college sometimes. One of the screenshots is of a misty castle which implies you can make your university look like Hogwarts, which mainly just accentuates that this would be much cooler if it were a wizard university instead of a regular one, but since no one’s made a good wizard school game yet (Spellcaster University was okay, but surely we can do better), I’ll content myself with this one.
Aragami 2 is a ninja game of some sort. You have magical shadow powers and use them to fight bad guys. Details are extremely scarce. I like the idea of a ninja stealth game, and the fact that it’s a sequel suggests this idea was good enough the first time around to justify more attention, but that’s no guarantee that the second game didn’t bungle things. At 17 hours on How Long To Beat, it’s just a few hours too long for me to take a chance on it. The general rule I’m gravitating towards is that a 5 hour game is worth a look if it has even one cool hook, 10-15 hours is short enough to be worth investigating if I’m on the fence, but more than 15 hours and I had better be confident I’ll be glad I started by the time I stop.
OTXO is a Roguelike topdown shooter, and that is all I needed to know to not be interested. I did read the rest of the Humble Choice description because my guess as to what these games are like based on the Humble Choice ads alone misses hard enough and often enough without me further handicapping myself, but none of the rest of it is bringing it back from being a Roguelike.
Roguebook is a Roguelike deckbuilder, points for honesty in the title but I don’t need another Slay the Spire.
The Red Lantern is about dog sledding in Alaska. I think the first person dog sledding they show in the game is a fantastic foundation for a sail-y around-y trading game except instead of a boat you have a dog sled and four good boys to pull it and your cargo of fish or whatever across the tundra. Unfortunately that’s not the game they actually made, it seems more exploration focused? Brevity saves the day, this game is less than 3 hours long according to How Long To Beat, and that is short enough that I’ll try it just because first person dog sledding looks fun.
Hell Pie is Conker’s Bad Fur Day except they couldn’t get the copyright to Conker so they did some demon thing instead. The whole irreverent edgelord thing is less cringey when it isn’t taking itself seriously, which Hell Pie isn’t, but it’s still not particularly fun. I imagine the target audience for this game is literally Conker’s Bad Fur Day fans and I never played that game. “What if a mascot platformer said farts” is not a particularly shocking or subversive premise these days and I have no nostalgia for the days when it was.
Twin Mirror is…Jesus, I’ve read the description twice and I’m still having trouble parsing what the actual gameplay is supposed to be. Seems like it might be a choose-your-own-adventure kind of game, where sure, you can walk around interactive environments and all, but the game is progressed by dialogue choices or other A-or-B decision points, but that’s not really something they say and more something I’m guessing based on the premise and the absence of any other gameplay mentioned or depicted. The major theme is an inner conflict in the protagonist between getting along with people or seeking the truth of the mystery behind his hometown, which he’s returning to after some time away. They do make it clear that your actions (whatever the medium for those actions actually is) determine which way the protagonist leans, but my immediate problem is that it is pretty reliably the case that when people want to ignore the truth, it is usually because they are trying to throw somebody under the bus, and the second most common reason is that they said something off the cuff, hung their pride on being right, and then mounting evidence reveals that they are in fact wrong and they can’t handle it.
The second one seems pretty common in academia, but I don’t usually have to care about that. The first is a million different versions of “the American Civil War was about states’ rights,” and the inescapable reality is that pretending this was true didn’t work. Whatever the hypothetical merits of indulging a delusional narrative of the Civil War in exchange for everyone agreeing that racism is bad, the fact is that the South remains a festering swamp of racism to this day. I use that example because it’s a big political issue that people have heard about which saves me from having to describe personal dramas without providing any identifying information, but regardless of whether the issue is some big political topic or why Joe Q. Psuedonym never brings snacks to D&D night, the outcome is always that whoever pushes the lie about what they did in the past is never trying to save face and move on, they always want to use the lie as cover to continue the shitty behavior.
I realize this is a weird swerve to take from the actual premise of Twin Mirror, but it’s the thing that springs to my mind when someone asks me about telling lies to preserve social harmony, and the fact that the game is probably not going to engage with that at all is exactly why I doubt I’d enjoy it.
Two pickups brings me up to 156. I’m honestly not sure if the next month or two are going to see the backlog shrink or grow, and not just because I can never be sure whether the next Humble Choice will bring five new games or none. For various tax-related reasons fairly specific to my pipeline, it’s a bad idea to launch a big project to Kickstarter in October, November, or December, so I’ve been struggling through small installments in what turned out to be an unpopular series and spending a lot of time working on the stuff I’d launch in January, and now it’s January and I have a bunch of stuff ready to go but also no idea which of it will be well-received enough to justify expansion. This could end up being a theater-at-2PM month or a flee-to-Peru month and I have no idea which it will be until my Kickstarter launches on January 9th.
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