It’s the first Tuesday of August as I write this. What’s in the box?
Sifu is a kung fu game where you seek revenge for your dead family by decking a very large number of people in the schnozz. The three selling points I can identify are 1) You can pick a male or female character (they don’t spend a lot of time on this one, but it is the first thing they tell you about the game for some reason), 2) you have a magic amulet that brings you back to life every time you die, but ages you each time, and 3) the combat system doesn’t have any HUD indicators when something’s about to go wrong nor do enemies take turns attacking. Presumably, then, you have to pay attention to tells in their animations and crowd management is very important, although it doesn’t actually say that. The Humble Choice description definitely leans into the last part the most, with several paragraphs dedicated to how challenging the kung fu gameplay is. How Long To Beat says 8 hours, which is 3 hours longer than I’m willing to give this one, the risk that it’s not good enough to sustain its gameplay is too high.
High On Life is that one game written by one of the Rick and Morty guys where your gun talks to you. I’ve never thought Rick and Morty was particularly funny, and while I do like its exploration of sci-fi concepts, I like that because each individual episode is very short and often explores different concepts in its A-plot and its B-plot. High On Life is probably not staying glued to its single sci-fi concept of aliens trying to get high on humans somehow for its entire nine and a half hour run, but video games still tend to dwell on concepts much longer than TV shows do, and even concepts I like are going to get boring if they spend even 45 minutes on them. The fear hole was a pretty good episode, but it would be much worse if it were ninety minutes instead of twenty, even if two-thirds of those ninety minutes were combat.
Two or three times a year, Humble Choice includes a game that gives the whole bundle the flavor of one of those diabolic bargains or “would you rather” games. This bundle’s hidden poison is Gotham Knights, and neither of the two headliners are even pick-ups, let alone overshadowing the threat that I might accidentally install Gotham Knights on my computer. I’m assuming that Sifu is supposed to be a headliner since normally those are listed first, but it’s more obscure than usual, so my headcanon here is that the Humble Choice headliners are set up as far in advance as release day, like, Gotham Knights locked in their position in the August 2024 Choice clear back in September or October of 2022 when it was coming out, and by the time August 2024 was rolling around, Humble was having second thoughts about Gotham Knights being a headliner so they promoted Sifu to the #1 spot instead.
In Blacktail, you play as Yaga, a Slavic archer-witch who gets exiled from your village and can choose to either become a guardian of the wilderness or to go the route that name implies and become a nightmare horror. I’m not sure why they went with the relatively generic “Blacktail” over just calling the game “Baba Yaga,” especially since, while looking up some of her legends to see if maybe the phrase “black tail” comes up in them (nothing after a quick Google search, but bear in mind my background research for these posts tends to be pretty sloppy), I found that Wikipedia claims that Baba Yaga is an ambiguous figure who is sometimes helpful, so the guardian-of-woods route in this game is actually also following the legends, not defying them. Gameplay wise, this game is promising to be a witch game with an emphasis on archery, and so far witch games have capped out at some survival-crafting games being decent witch games by accident, but at less than 10 hours, I’m willing to give Blacktail a chance to break the curse.
Astral Ascent is a Roguelite game and even kind of leans into the slow pace at which the story unfolds. They are attempting to be more deliberate with their Roguelite mechanics, so my outside guess is that Astral Ascent is probably one of the better B-tier Roguelites for people who really like that genre. I don’t really like that genre, though (I don’t dislike it, but I don’t like it so much that I want to play its middlingly-high entries), so for me, this game is going to be 20-30 hours of being a worse version of Hades.
Diluvian Ultra has managed the first half of a miracle: I am going to add a Doom-style shooter to the backlog. How Long To Beat has exactly one record of how long this game is, and that record says 5 hours, so if that’s even close to accurate then I will give this game a chance based purely on its cool aesthetic and ideas: You are a grimdark space fantasy prince, not a 40k rip-off but a guy who’d fit in in that universe, and you have been awakened from your slumber on your tombship by unknown attackers. It remains to be seen if Diluvian Ultra can manage the second half of this miracle, getting me to actually like a Doom-style shooter. This is episode 1 with promises of more as paid DLC, and I’m not committing to any of the DLCs even though the story is apparently incomplete without them, but honestly, if it can even get me through the first episode then that should be considered a win, given I very nearly rejected this game on its genre alone and only read the ad out of a sense of obligation towards being reasonably open-minded.
Universe For Sale is about a woman living in a colony in the clouds of Jupiter who can create universes in the palm of her hand. No sign of gameplay or what kind of actual conflict this leads to, since the images and video heavily emphasize the woman and the people she talks to, not the universes themselves. As near as I can tell, this is an adventure game that heavily emphasizes its strange, novel worldbuilding. Fair enough, but if I wanted a story told to me, I’d read a book or watch a movie. If you expect me to go to the hassle of clicking to advance the conversation every thirty seconds, I expect there to be a game to play.
This Means Warp is a sci-fi game where you fly a spaceship around to different asteroids and, uh, interact with them somehow. The game’s advertisement is focused relentlessly on how it’s playable with 1-4 players which, I get why that’s a primary selling point, but do you, uh, have other selling points? Well, okay, it also says it randomizes your adventures each time. There’s good reasons to do that, it means you have to master broad systems rather than memorizing specific maps in a more deterministic way, but it also means that the maps lack the handcrafted human touch and you can really tell the difference. This tradeoff alone is definitely not sinking the game, but it’s not a major selling point the way the devs seem to think it is, and the other major selling point is that I, the solo player, am kind of an afterthought to this multiplayer focused game. When the game lists its features as bulletpoints, it does have a third, and the third is “deep, strategic combat,” but it doesn’t say, like, how. Just that it has combat, which is hard. Optimistically, this might be a somewhat FTL-esque game, perhaps with more emphasis on crew combat over ship combat, and with a more light-hearted tone. How Long To Beat says it’s 12 hours long and also has only one rating, so I’m going to pass it by because that’s already longer than the 10 hours I might be willing to chance on this game plus there’s a possibility that the one rating left was an outlier and the real average time is 15 or even 20 hours.
These two pickups put me up to 156, which is still slightly disappointing since I was recently below 150 and then I decided I should play Deep Rock Galactic for three months. Still, the new pickups are short and I still have a few short games in the backlog (I’m playing Hi-Fi Rush right now and it’s not especially long). Plus, I like the look of both of the new pickups, even if Diluvian Ultra makes me nervous with its genre. Not sure if either of them deliver on their promises, but I like what they’re promising.
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