I haven’t had a really good Humble Choice since July of last year. The kind that makes me go “holy shit, I would’ve paid $12 for any one of these games and there’s two of them plus extras.” July 2023 brought me the Outer Worlds and Yakuza 4 Remastered, plus Merchant of the Skies and Ozymandias. And not for nothing it also had Shotgun King, although I already owned that one, and Roadwarden, which I can find no fault in except that I just couldn’t have any fun with it for no reason I can articulate. On the other hand, December brought me Midnight Fight Express, the Gunk, and Elex II. I liked Midnight Fight Express and the Gunk was okay, but I wouldn’t pay $12 for Midnight Fight Express by itself and I wouldn’t pay more than, like, a dollar for the Gunk, so whether or not that one proves worthwhile in retrospect is going to depend a lot on how much I turn out to like the Elex series. January? I liked Red Lantern and Two Point Campus, but probably only to the tune of about $5 each. November? Legend of Tianding was worth at least $10, maybe $12, all by itself, and while I haven’t tried Hardspace: Shipbreakers and Souldiers, Tianding is a pretty good start. October? Total bust, though admittedly only because I already had Rebel Inc. September? Basically a total bust – Autonauts vs Piratebots was okay, I guess. August? Tin Can was worth $5, but that’s it.
Man, what a rough track record, I was thinking to myself as March dawned. I’ve had a couple of good games out of this, but I’ve had a lot of total dud or near-dud months lately.
Apparently whoever was running Humble Choice was listening, because March was a really good month.
Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin – Ultimate Edition already had colon cancer even before they tried to wriggle out of it by em-dashing the ultimate edition. I don’t like the Age of Sigmar setting. I hear it’s gotten much better than its initial release, but ultimately it’s still an epic confrontation between good and evil, and I have lots of other, better options than Warhammer for that. If you’re doing epic fantasy, you immediately stand in the shadow of Lord of the Rings – good fucking luck getting out from under that.
But then we get to the good stuff with Nioh 2. Nioh as a series kind of lost its reason to exist when Sekiro came out, with FromSoftware themselves making a medieval Japanese Soulslike game, but FromSoftware doesn’t make games fast enough to be my entire gaming diet, so Nioh still gets to slip in on the grounds that eventually I am going to get around to beating Sekiro and I will probably still want to be a ninja-samurai-onmyoji Soulslike protagonist when that happens.
Back to a dud with Saints Row, which is not a PC release of the original Saints Row, a GTA knock-off with decent comedy dialogue but mostly only academically interesting for the series it was setting up. It’s the reboot version, which is just a sad shadow of its former self from a company that can’t live up to their old glory nor can they, apparently, bring themselves to move on to new projects.
Citizen Sleeper is a TTRPG-inspired RPG about dystopian space capitalism. If it were a full 20+ hours, I would be nervous about sinking that much time into a game whose ultimate criticism of capitalism runs high odds of being incoherent and stupid, repeating bits of arguments that other, smarter media have made without understanding them. How Long To Beat clocks it in at less than 10 hours, though, so I’ll give it a shot.
Black Skylands is an open-world sandbox topdown shooter in a steampunk setting. This sounds like a ton of fun but also like it might be way too ambitious for a small studio to pull off. How Long To Beat says it’s about 17 hours long, which suggests they’ve kept the scope under control, and is also short enough that I’ll take a chance on it despite some mild misgivings.
Soulstice is an action game with a dark tone and a vaguely anime-esque setting, although not a particularly anime art style: Two sisters are bonded into a chimera, one sacrificing her body to become a ghost to give the other tremendous physical strength. They use this power to fight an army of occult-themed monsters called wraiths. It seems like it’s leaning on atmosphere and exploration, the art direction looks decent, but I am nervous that this is one of those projects that has one or two cool ideas and nowhere to go from there. How Long To Beat says it’s also about 17 hours long, which is pushing it, but I’ll add it to the backlog with a note to ditch it as soon as it starts to wear out its welcome. That’s the condition I put on Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel, and I fucking loved that game.
I get a very similar vibe from Afterimage. This is a fantasy game with a more overtly anime (though not extremely so) art style and while Soulstice’s emphasis on exploration implies it might be a Metroidvania, Afterimage is more direct about it. They don’t use the word, but they do list exploring a non-linear world and deep RPG mechanics in a sidescroller action combat system as some of their key features, so it seems pretty clear this is the progeny of Symphony of the Night. At over 25 hours long on How Long To Beat, this is past the usual “take a risk” threshold for me, but I’ve been able to enjoy Metroidvanias whose execution was pretty amateur in the past, so I’m picking up Afterimage on the assumption that this will be like that.
Destroyer: The U-Boat Hunter is a game about protecting Allied convoys from German submarines in the Battle of the Atlantic during WW2. It leans heavily on realism and simulation, which means how much I’ll enjoy it depends heavily on how long it is. At 5 hours, absolutely. At 10, pushing it, but worth the risk. At 20, no way I’m reaching the end. But does it even have an end, or just escalating difficulty? Hard to tell, and How Long To Beat has no data on this. I’ve done a deeper scan of internet reviews to try and make up for it, but they’re all pretty old, so it’s hard to say how many of the flaws have been patched out in the meantime. The flaws they mention are pretty damning, though: Not enough content, emphasis on realism means there’s not much drama, just a lot of screen babysitting. I’m picking it up anyway, but with the expectation that it will either be marked “complete” in 5 hours or less because there’s no real stopping point so I can mark it complete any time I want, or else that I’ll have to make a new category for it, “technically not a regret but only because I had academic curiosity about the game mechanics that was satisfied even though I have no interest in finishing the game.”
EDIT: And after 50 minutes with Destroyer I can confirm that yes, it is an interesting simulation, but it is not actually particularly fun to play. This is certainly in part because allied ships glow bright red, like extremely bright red, to the point where they blot out everything else if you’re anywhere remotely near them. You spend a lot of the game looking at instruments so you can get pretty far without noticing, but sooner or later you will need to do something on the bridge while close enough to allies that their light blots out important displays. There might be an option or something somewhere to fix this, but a quick scan revealed nothing obvious and I’m not having enough fun to bother sinking even five minutes of troubleshooting into this.
The six pickups this month brings me up to 154 153. None of them are particularly short, either, except sort of Destroyer, which I’m going to play for a short time regardless of how long the campaign technically is. Even so, if I focus entirely on unloading games acquired in March before the April Humble Choice, it’s unlikely I’d get through them all. This is the first time in, like, a year that my backlog has unambiguously grown. On the one hand, if my backlog grows more often than not, that means there are games I want to play that I’ll never get around to. But I’m always worried that I’ll start getting too focused on the number of games in the backlog, and end up refusing to admit new games into the backlog in order to stay ahead. It’s good to see that, yes, while it does make me slightly sad to see the backlog number launched so firmly back above 150 when I’d just gotten down below, I am ultimately still letting in games that seem like they’ll be good. Of course, the real test is to look at how many of these games turn out to actually be good, but that’ll take a while.
Chamomile Has A Blog 