Dear god I’m behind on these.
I’m definitely getting Victoria 3. It’s probably the Paradox grand strategy game I am the least interested in, but I am still interested, and I already paid for it back when I renewed my subscription last year, so I may as well.
I’ve gone back and forth on the Callisto Protocol and ultimately decided that it just sounds too generic. A survival horror game set on a prison space station that’s very moody and atmospheric. It sounds like a cool video game idea someone had in 2005 and it took them 19 years to bring it to life and I’m happy for our hypothetical developer that they finally made it happen but I do not care to play a survival horror game on the bleeding edge of twenty years ago.
Humankind is a Civilization knock-off that emphasizes greater customization for the civs. I’ll give it a go. It can’t really be played to completion, but I’ll still get it in my backlog and call it complete once I’ve finished a game of it.
Fashion Police Squad is a 90s shooter with the gimmick being that you’re the fashion police firing better outfits onto people who wear socks with sandals or whatever. That’s not a bad gag, but it’s not so good that I want to have it retold to me for four and a half hours. A playtime that short is usually small enough for me to go for it just on style and humor, which the game does have (from what I can tell from Humble Choice marketing pitch, at least), but I consider all shooters before the original Half-Life to be non-canon so this one always had a bit of a mountain to climb for me, and it doesn’t have enough style and humor to climb it.
Terraformers started off on a bad foot with me because the last couple of times I’ve tried a terraforming Mars themed game it has been bad. I was going to push myself to give it a shot anyway because there’s nothing wrong with the premise, but oh, over 20 hours of gametime according to How Long To Beat. That’s too long to take a chance on when its only marketing is “we’re super excited about Mars so we made a game about it!” Points for enthusiasm, but 20 hours is too long to try it out for that alone.
Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga is a tactics RPG that looks like it’s pitched pretty hard at people who want more Fire Emblem. That’s fair, they only release one of those games every 2-3 years, it’s pretty easy to get ahead of it, but I haven’t even played the actual Fire Emblem games. I want to give them a shot sometime but it’s not the kind of genre that holds my attention to the point where I go diving into the also-ran league with games like Symphony of War. Maybe I’m walking past the Project Wingman of tactics RPGs and actually this is the one you play if you play any of them at all, but these games are dummy thicc so I’m not risking it.
Coromon is a Pokemon knock-off game. I mentioned in my post on copyright that games taking inspiration from Pokemon are forced to create an all-new set of monsters, and this takes up most of the space the average fan has for new ideas, which means the game has to be a knock-off in all other ways, and if I wanted a game that was “Pokemon, but kind of mediocre” then I’d play Sword and Shield.
The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is a point-and-click adventure game and right there my interest has expired. I’m kind of nostalgic for sitting in an unfinished basement at the age of fifteen, too young to drive anywhere with functioning internet, getting my desk and laptop set up in the new house and playing Trilby’s Notes because that’s what I had, but this genre isn’t actually good and Hob’s Barrow is promising to have standard adventure game rub [thing] on pixel gameplay.
So…Christ, are Victoria 3 and Humankind my only pickups? On the one hand, those games can be played for hundreds or thousands of hours, but on the other hand, they lack a clear completion goal, so they don’t really fit cleanly into my backlog at all. This is a quirk of my “Complete or Regrets” mandate, though, which very few people follow. So in terms of “is this Humble Choice any good,” the answer is yeah, Victoria 3 has a phenomenal pedigree and Humankind looks interesting. Just kinda sucks for me in particular.
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