Month: May 2025

Bombrush Cyberfunk is a game about using sick BMX skillz to tag hard-to-reach places with graffiti, thereby defeating the police. This is the kind of stupid I’m absolutely in for at 10 hours of playtime.

Old World is a character-driven historical strategy game, so it’s basically Great Man Theory: The Video Game. I don’t hate this as much as that joke might imply, it’s a video game, I think it’s fine to highlight famous historical figures and if that means Ea-Nasir single-handedly triples the output of copper in Babylon or something else stupid, then anyone who thinks that game mechanic was a strictly accurate reading of history has only themselves to blame. On the other hand, this is basically just off-brand Civilization running into the problem yet again that I don’t like the 4X genre enough to dive into the experimental games, if only because 4X games take so long to play. Old World has a couple of neat new features that might plausibly make it better than the Civ games, but unfortunately “might plausibly” is not good enough to justify a 40 hour playtime.

Atlas Fallen: Reign of Sand is an action RPG taking place in cool desert-y environments with some kind of mythological theme. The ad’s not long on details besides the genre and general vibe, but at a little under 20 hours, I’m willing to grab it on the grounds that I don’t have a ton of action RPGs and this one is pretty. EDIT: Never mind, keys are exhausted. I didn’t realize this would be such a problem if I sat on Humble Choices for a few months.

Crime Boss: Rockay City is a looter shooter about doing crimes in Florida. The singleplayer campaign is Roguelike, which is usually a dealbreaker for me, but it seems like it’s mostly Roguelike in the sense that you enter a procedurally generated level, either win or lose at crimes, and get some kind of permanent upgrade for your trouble. Crucially, I’m pretty sure the progression here is not that you start out dying in the first 20% of the game and then gradually punch deeper and deeper in until you get a clean run all the way through. Maybe I’m reading it wrong, but we’re going to find out, because this one goes in the backlog.

The Invincible is a story-driven adventure game about exploring a desolate planet with some kind of deadly secret, loosely based off of some kind of Polish novel. Even 5 hours would be pushing it for that pitch, and at 8 and a half, the Invincible is way too long for me. If you’re going to be as heavily story driven as this game implies it is – no gameplay, narrative only, Final Destination – you should aim for a movie length of 3 hours maximum. If you need to be longer than that, add some real gameplay. Animations for cool retro sci-fi science tools don’t count, you gotta add some resource management or something. Although, for this kind of thing, it might be better to just cut down the length. A lot of Netflix TV shows that were eight hours long would’ve been improved by losing at least two of those hours.

Moonstone Island is a monster collector game, and this one dies because of its 40 hour playtime. There’s some stuff about procedurally generated islands and alchemy and it’s got a lot more new ideas than most monster collector games (it’s not one of the ones that would benefit from being able to use actual Pokemon because its ideas are different enough that a whole new set of creatures to collect improves the experience) and at 20 hours I would give it a shot, but 40? Everybody sing along: I would play your game if it was shorter.

Inkulinati is a strategy game inspired by medieval manuscript illustrations. Its downfall is the way that it promises to be really difficult and deep, because if a game’s selling point is “dog man with sword and shield fights galley carried by cows” then I don’t actually want to break my brain figuring out how to make that fight swing my way.

Venba looks like one of those video games that should’ve been a short animation, but it’s easier to get video games Kickstarted, so they tossed in some gameplay. This one specifically is about an Indian immigrant trying to connect with her son through cooking, which sounds like a perfectly good story, but my backlog isn’t nearly so thin that I’m gonna start shoving in cleverly disguised short films to fill out the ranks.

Monster Prom 3: Monster Roadtrip continues my collection of Monster Prom games trickling in through Humble. These games are super easy to finish, but have tons of content to go digging for before you’ve experienced everything. They’re funny and reasonably well written, I’ll play one real quick now and again and I don’t mind having Roadtrip in my collection, but it doesn’t go into the backlog because I don’t want to 100% them and the only completion point short of that Herculean undertaking is to finish a single 20-30 minute playthrough.

Warhammer 40k: Dark Tide is Left 4 Dead in Warhammer IN SPACE. I liked Left 4 Dead and I like Warhammer and I like IN SPACE so this is definitely worth a try.

I’m not sure how far back the Persona series was good, but I’m confident that Persona 4 Golden is still in the good zone. Persona 3 isn’t in this Humble Choice, but it’s also pretty well regarded. No one ever talks about the first two, though, so I have my suspicions about them.

Lamplighter’s League is getting close to breaking out of my usual dismissal of tactical RPGs that don’t have a strategic layer like XCOM, but while its alternate 1930s setting is interesting and fun, it’s also nearly 40 hours long.

Cassette Beasts is a monster collector game with a fusion mechanic. While I think the cauldron of creativity that’s sprung up around Pokemon modding and knock-offs could create some really good games, I also think it’s a headline for why copyright should be shorter: While there’s a ton of cool ideas for new directions to take the genre in, they really struggle to come up with good monster sets. Cassette Beats doesn’t seem like it’s beating that rap.

The Book Walker is about a writer whose ability to write has somehow been revoked (legally? Supernaturally?) after he is found guilty of “an unspeakable crime,” so he strikes a deal with a mob boss to steal things by venturing into books. Cool idea for how to hop around different settings, but it seems like it’s mostly adventure puzzle bullshit? No thanks.

Karmazoo is some kind of multiplayer platformer thing that tries to encourage people to be nice to each other. I’d take a chance on it if it were short, but How Long To Beat lists no completion time at all, which suggests it might be an endless thing, or else that it’s really unpopular, to the point where not one person who’s beaten it has an active HLTB account.

Hexarchy describes itself as a 4X deckbuilder. There’s way too many other 4X games for me to get through before I even look at the experimental fringe like this.

You know those mobile ads that have the mother and her daughter stuck out in the cold and you have to help them warm up, but then the game the ad is attached to is some match-three game with nothing to do with what was in the ad? Garden Life reminds me of those ads for some reason. The art style is way better and it’s just about gardening, no kid in sight, but for some reason I get a similar vibe from the protagonist. Anyway, I’ve enjoyed zen-grind games in the past, but the whole gardening thing just doesn’t speak to me.

I played Station to Station. You connect different resources together using train stations and rail lines, in an attempt to use the shortest possible lines and the fewest possible crossings, while also trying to avoid cliffs, forests, rivers, etc. etc. It’s a puzzle game that makes a pretty little train set to look at when you’re done. It’s possible to fail a stage, but the par goal is pretty easy. You can go for an achievement score if you want, but I rarely bothered. It’s basically a digital model train set but with gameplay, and I enjoyed that for the ten hours it lasted me.

I also played Dredge. It’s a Lovecraftian fishing game where you sail around a couple of different islands of radically different climates fishing up regular fish, and about 5% of the time instead of a regular fish you get a creepy mutated fish. The creepy mutations are caused by a dark conspiracy that’s nearing the completion of its horrible ritual, which you are unwittingly moving towards completion. As is pretty standard for Lovecraft, you’re pretty much doomed no matter what you do, but in the good ending everyone else is basically fine. There’s a twist in the game that I really enjoyed because of how not hidden it is. There are several clues which are put right in front of you and which are dead giveaways as to what’s really going on if you notice them, but which are sufficiently far in the background that you might not notice them. I also like that, if you get the dialogue that reveals the twist, there’s options to say that you already figured it out, rather than requiring you to be surprised. Part of what makes this mystery work is that the solution is dead obvious once you find any of the right clues, so while the game will sigh and roll its eyes and tell you exactly what’s going on if it has to, it also lets you say “I know” with a thousand-yard stare because you understand the doom that is upon you and you’re here to see things through regardless.

Fabledom is a fairy tale city-builder. You start with a few villagers around a cart full of resources, and you have them dig a well, build some houses, put up an inn, and before long you’re blocking out space for a theater to improve the happiness of the block of rowhouses you’ve squeezed into an awkward place on the map because you want a population nearby the prismatic liquid extraction site you set up because you need more magic juice for your wedding. Also, the main quest line of the game is to get married to one of the other rulers, who emphasize different parts of the gameplay.

The final objective to get married is identical for all of them, and I wanted to see all the content, so I left every single one of them at the altar except the last one, Sir Payne the Dark Knight, because his difficulty was listed as the highest. Sir Payne’s quests require you to build a bunch of structures that make your citizens less happy, but by the time I’d gotten to him I was so overbuilt that maxing out happiness at 100% was easy even for the people I imprisoned in dungeons for fun. I don’t mean the overall population had maxed out happiness because those people were a rounding error or something, I mean I imprisoned fully 5% of my population for giggles and each individual prisoner was still a maxed out 100% happy because they were really thrilled with the even distribution of street cafes in the city. You don’t usually get this kind of kink representation in games like this.

It is a pretty slow game, though. While happiness does impact the rate of immigration, that rate is going to be really slow no matter what you do, and it’s easy to get a kingdom full of empty buildings that spread your workforce thin and chew up your spare resources until your entire economy grinds to a halt. A lot of the time you just have to wait a few minutes, even on the highest game speed. I found this annoying, but it has a really nice fairy tale aesthetic to it, and while that isn’t my favorite aesthetic, I do really like city builders and I can appreciate that the aesthetic was done really well even if I prefer things spooky.

Also, make sure you’re maxing out the size of your farms. Yes, they’re really big and expensive when maxed out, they’re supposed to be. Go slow and save up, the size will make sense when you’ve got a city center stamped down somewhere surrounded by acres and acres of farmland. It looks great.

I played Gas Station Simulator, which is a game that makes me wish for a perfected world where we didn’t need copyright at all. That would be a terrible idea, but Gas Station Simulator is really good at making a dusty old gas station that feels authentic and detailed, and then the only gameplay they have to put in there is managing a gas station. That’s what the game said it was, so I’m not complaining, I just feel like the highest purpose of this game is to be a tech demo of a gas station location that other people could drop into their own games.

I also played Evil West for about fifteen minutes before concluding that this is just a regular linear third person action game that wishes it was a movie. If it had done what most linear third person action games do and laid down to die for me, I might’ve given it an hour, but it had the twin sins of being both uninteresting and hard. Being a vampire-hunting cowboy sounds cool, but ultimately I was just punching zombies to death with a giant metal fist. My cowboy hat wasn’t really translating into any ability to do cowboy things, and the whip was only used at specific spots to do an Indiana Jones style swing across a gap. Cool and all, but they could’ve just removed the chasms from the level design, take out the whip entirely, and no actual gameplay would be lost.

Remnant II has dropped the “From the Ashes” subtitle. I feel like I heard a lot about Remnant: From the Ashes, but I have retained none of it. It’s not in my Steam library or on the wishlist, not that the wishlist has seen an update in years since I started focusing on the backlog. Both From the Ashes and Remnant II are under 20 hours, which I, with some trepidation, have decided is short enough to try just on the grounds of its strong aesthetics alone, but this is another one of those where I’m setting a hair-trigger to kick it into Regrets because I’m kind of on the border of whether or not I care enough to play it to completion, so it had better hook me fast.

Persona 5 Strikers gets in on the grounds that I’ll try basically anything related to Persona. It’s getting in on the same “but I’ll kick it to Regrets at the first sign of trouble” condition as a lot of games have gotten in lately, though, because this is a spin-off and sometimes spin-offs are garbage.

Jusant is an “action-puzzle climbing game” and I do not see myself enjoying the sub-genre they’re trying to carve out there.

Domekeeper is a Roguelike. It’s some kind of mining-and-defense Roguelike, and if I were looking for new Roguelikes this one would be a frontrunner, but I am aggressively not looking for new Roguelikes.

Jack Move is a cyberpunk JRPG that seems…fine, I guess? It’s only 6 hours long, which would normally be short enough for me to shrug my shoulders and roll with it, but somehow nothing about this game is hooking me.

I’m redeeming the code for Station to Station but not adding it to the backlog. It’s a puzzle game where you connect trains together, focused on chill vibes and voxel graphics, and that’s the kind of thing where I might play a round or two of it between bouts of work or while listening to a podcast, but which I probably won’t care to see through to completion. How Long To Beat does say it’s only a 10 hour game, though, which suggests it’s beatable and not even that long, but if this ends up being a Mini Metro thing where “beaten” just means “every level unlocked,” then I might happen to get there eventually but I’m not going to worry about whether or not I do. Although that does mean this could be one of the games that jumps directly into Complete without ever even being in the backlog.

Remnant Records looks like someone did what I always wanted Phasmophobia to do: Make a spooky ghost investigation game in which you actually exorcise the ghost, not just identify it. Phasmophobia’s setup isn’t as dumb as it seems at first glance, the idea is that there’s an exorcism team that goes in after you finish to solve the problem, and if you gave them the wrong type of ghost, they’ll notice because the exorcism is different for different types. But that still means you aren’t there for the exciting climax where the ghost is defeated. Like Phasmophobia, the ghosts are procedurally generated and it’s not clear that it’s possible to actually beat this game (the game is in the How Long To Beat database, but has 0 completions, so that’s no help), so I’m not sure if this is something like Station to Station where I’ll play it but not worry about completing it. I’m putting it in the backlog provisionally, but it might end up getting out of the backlog without going to Complete or Regrets on the grounds that I misunderstood whether or not it could be completed.

EDIT: And after finishing writing this, I went to actually redeem the key, and the keys are exhausted for this project. This is supposed to be a temporary issue, but bear in mind I’m rolling in six months after the fact. Considering no one’s registered a completion on How Long To Beat, I wonder if anyone successfully redeemed this game. Maybe it’s haunted.

McPixel 3 is a WarioWare-esque game of smaller games. I don’t think they’re full on six-second microgames the way WarioWare’s are, but there’s no consistent throughline to the gameplay, just a string of self-contained minigames each lasting, I would guess, 2-5 minutes. How Long To Beat says it’s about 5 hours long, which is exactly short enough for me to give this thing a chance.

EDIT: I gave it a chance. I’m not really vibing with the game’s sense of humor, nor with the way nearly every minigame is an adventure game puzzle where you rub a thing on another thing. They’re having fun with it, at least, embracing the insanity by having the solutions often be stupid and encouraging you to discover every possible animation and ending by keeping track of every interaction you’ve discovered in a scene. It’s adventure game moon logic bullshit, but that’s the joke. The problem is that the jokes are only funny maybe half the time and I still have to play adventure game bullshit to advance.

This was supposed to be October 2024, but I clicked the wrong one by mistake, and it doesn’t really matter what order I go in, so fuck it, April 2025.

Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered is a historically interesting set of games, but I already know I won’t play these to the finish. They use clunky mechanics on purpose in much the same way Silent Hill 1 used limited draw distance on purpose, creating platforming that required a slow and methodical parkour, which was cool for how realistic it was. But, also, it was really hard and I don’t want to bang my head against it when I have so many other games to play. Also, I guess Lara Croft was a sexual awakening for a lot of twelve year olds back in the day, but I was eight, so it didn’t land for me at the time, and the cone-boobs definitely haven’t aged well. The remaster isn’t quite as geometric, but it definitely doesn’t look good.

Dredge is a game where you captain a fishing boat through treacherous waters to dredge up some kind of sunken mystery. You dodge danger in your little boat while hauling up spooky treasures of some kind. At 5 hours, this would be well worth a look, at 10 hours, I’m hesitant, but I’ll try it.

Aliens: Dark Descent is a xenomorph blasting real time tactics game that features persistent changes to levels and some amount of squad management. This is another entry into I’d Play Your Game If It Was Shorter, because at 25 hours, I’m nervous about the possibility that this game is going to be frustrating to do in real time. It’s got all the ingredients I want for a good XCOM-style tactical game, and it’s definitely possible to have a UI responsive enough and a pace moderate enough for real time tactics to work, but this is the kind of thing that could be really frustrating if it’s done wrong. Maybe it’s just got the ick from Colonial Marines way back when.

1000xResist is a game about Iris, the sole survivor of a mega-plague that came when giant humanoid aliens arrived on Earth, and the society made purely of her clones that struggles to survive even a thousand years later. It’s a heavily story-based game and also seems really horny, what with every single character being a literal clone of the exact same cute girl and the apocalypse brought about by fifty-foot tall alien women. I like horny, but there doesn’t seem to be anything else here, and I don’t like it so much that I want it by itself, and 1000xResist shows no sign of interesting gameplay nor does its plot particularly intrigue (apparently the story I summarized above isn’t totally accurate in some mysterious way, but, I mean, so?).

Nova Lands is off-brand Factorio. It’s got a pixel-y aesthetic that’s kinda cute, but I don’t love this genre enough to go chasing after also-ran titles when I already have Factorio and Satisfactory.

Diplomacy Is Not An Option is a game where you are under attack from twenty thousand orcs and have to build defenses to kill all of them. This feels like it has about as much depth as a really good Flash game from 2010, and that’s not worth a 25 hour time investment.

Distant Worlds 2 is yet another space 4X game. These are relatively easy to make from a graphics and programming perspective, so I get why they crop up a lot, but it’s practically impossible for the worldbuilding and game design to set it apart from Stellaris, Sins of a Solar Empire, Galactic Civilizations III (and maybe IV, which I just learned exists while doublechecking I got the name right), Endless Space 2, and, for that matter, Master of Orion III. Precisely because this genre is so easy to do computationally, a lot of the most ancient games in the genre still hold up. Distant Worlds 2 is already doing one thing right by being a numbered sequel, which seems to help, but the games are too long and the genre too densely stacked for me to take a chance on an also-ran.

Nomad Survival is off-brand Vampire Survivor. I never really got why Vampire Survivor was so popular. It’s alright, I guess, but there was a real craze for it and I never really saw it as anything but an adequate time-killer when I’m stuck on the bus with my phone.