Almost caught up! What’s in the box?
Risk of Rain 2 is a multiplayer Roguelike, so that’s two reasons for me not to bother right there.
Knights of Honor II: Sovereign is a medieval RTS/grand strategy game. Sounds like it’s in the same sub-genre as Total War? I haven’t even gotten through the Total War series, so I’m not interested in chasing down also-rans, something which comes up a lot.
Lego 2k Drive Awesome Edition is a racing game, so that’s me out. Lego games have a pretty good track record, not flawless but more hit than miss, and I feel obligated to tack on a half-hearted “maybe check it out if you like racing games” recommendation on the strength of that alone, but I won’t be checking it out personally.
Warhammer 40k: Battlesector really has me going back and forth. It’s 40k, which has had some of the best and some of the worst games attached to it. Games Workshop will give this license out to anyone willing to pay for it, seems like, and on the one hand I like that willingness to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, but it does mean the question of “should I try this game” is not an automatic “yes” just because I like the setting. It’s about Blood Angels versus Tyranids, and I’m not hugely invested in either faction. I appreciate the attempt to make vampire marines, but in practice the Blood Angels are just Ultramarines but red, and while I like the Tyranids in concept, that’s mostly because I like the Zerg, and I already have StarCraft. At 25 hours it’s not a dealbreakingly long game but it’s definitely one that had better be pretty good to justify that playtime. I’m hesitantly adding it to the backlog but giving myself a mandate to abandon it at first sign of being bad.
Miasma Chronicles is some kind of tactical RPG in post-apocalyptic America. It looks kind of pretty, but there’s not enough hooks as to what’s going on and why I should care to hook me on a 22 hour time investment.
I’ve seen some video essays on Stray Gods: the Roleplaying Musical on the assumption that it would take forever to go on sale or show up in a Humble Bundle or Choice, and here it is like six months later. I’ve had it all spoiled for me, but it’s only 6 hours long, so what the Hell, I’ll give it a play.
A Guidebook of Babel is some kind of quirky adventure game about gathering up memories as fuel for some kind of boat to the afterlife. I’m not super pulled in by the premise or the gameplay.
Empyrion: Galactic Survival is a game I already have and which is already in my backlog, but seeing the pitch here has me considering removing it. It’s a survival game set in space where you travel from planet to planet, and I like that setting and gameplay, but it’s 60 hours and the pitch doesn’t have even the ghost of a plot. Sure, I like peeling leaves off of trees and rubbing them together to make health potions, but I like doing that in order to, I dunno, reach the deepest depths of a volcano to retrieve a lost artifact, or build a weapon strong enough to kill an evil god. How Long To Beat lists a completion time at all which implies it can be completed, but there’s no option to say “this game is uncompleteable,” which means any number of people who simply never enter a completion time will never show up in the stats, so maybe everyone saying it takes 60 hours to beat are just plugging in the number for when they got bored.
That’s two pickups, except maybe just one because one of them is sort of a negative pickup? I haven’t decided for sure to remove Empyrion, though. I always give these things a while, because once it’s gone from my backlog I might never come across it again, so I want to be sure I want to unload it without even trying, not just that I am briefly annoyed with the concept because I’m having a bad day. Either way, I got a few new games out of this.
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