Pacific Drive is STALKER, but Oregon. That’s not really true, the STALKER influence is obvious but the gameplay is unrelated. It’s funny, though. What Pacific Drive actually is is a survival game where you and your car drive around the Pacific northwest towards a psychic disturbance that’s creating supernatural treasure – that disturbance is the part ripped straight out of STALKER. The ad really emphasizes customizing your car and also seems to suggest that multiple expeditions are expected. It doesn’t say Roguelike, so I’m not releasing the hounds, but at minimum it’s Roguelikelike, which is enough for me to pass on it.
Homeworld 3 is a space RTS that looks very pretty. While it does indeed look very pretty, I’m not signing up for a 9 hour game on visuals alone. If all you have is spaceships and starfields, then even if they’re really nice spaceships and starfields, I’m still only there for maybe 2-3 hours, tops. Interactivity gets a bit more patience out of me than if this was just animation, but not that much.
Wild Hearts is Monster Hunter, but with samurai, I guess. The aesthetic is definitely noticeably different, but it’s a game where you go out and hunt monsters, and I’m not nearly at the bottom of all the content that the actual Monster Hunter games have to offer and don’t see any reason why I’d want to go for Wild Hearts over that.
Tales of Kenzera: Zau does seem to have legit gameplay, but the story is described as being based on Bantu legend and pulling from the writer and actor’s own experience with grief, and the gameplay is described as rhythmic combat with two magic masks each of which seems to have one power – fiery spears from the sun mask and enemy freezing for the moon mask. That’s probably not literally everything, but the ad definitely emphasizes the writing and acting with the only description of the gameplay being a reassurance that it is present. I wish we could figure out how to get these people set up with animation studios and distribution, because I’d be perfectly happy to watch Zau as a 90 minute animated film, but I do not want to play it as a 5 hour video game.
Gravity Circuit wishes it was a classic Mega Man game and I’m not a huge fan of classic Mega Man games.
Sir Whoopass thinks that not taking things seriously counts as a joke. Obviously not taking things seriously multiplies your options for jokes a lot. Being able to have IRS agents come after your high fantasy adventurer could potentially lead to some jokes and you wouldn’t have that option if you were trying to tell a straight-faced story. But there’s no actual jokes in the pitch. It’s all just “the protagonist’s name is Sir Whoopass and there’s IRS agents and we called the MacGuffin ‘the Legendary Villain-Beating Artifact(tm)” and hey, good job, you have successfully established a satirical tone that has gotten me in the mood for jokes. Feel free to start telling some any time. Sooner would be better than later, in fact.
Racine is an RPG/praying card game, and no, that wasn’t a typo. Your praying cards invoke some kind of divine power to protect you, and that is how you fight in this game. That’s a cute bit of wordplay, but other than that, I don’t see much in the way of selling points.
Cavern of Dreams is trying to be a 3D collectathon platformer in the same general style as Mario 64 and Spyro the Dragon, right down to the blocky graphics. I say it’s a collectathon, but apparently it has “collectathon elements,” which betrays a worrying lack of commitment. I’m also not super thrilled with the decision to intentionally have garbage graphics. People have been able to make pixel art, even low-quality 8-bit pixel art, do good work for indie games, but that’s because pixel art at that level is something that someone can teach themselves good enough for a game carried by other elements. The advantage of 8-bit is that you have fewer pixels to draw on each sprite. That’s not really how 3D works. It’s generally easier, not harder, to work with more polygons instead of less, because you’re not placing each triangle yourself, you’re just telling the computer “make a cylinder” and it will do that with smoother sides than if you had less polygons. A 3D collectathon was always going to be a tough sell for me when I’ve still never beaten Super Mario Sunshine, and intentionally making your game look worse out of pure nostalgia is digging that hole even deeper.
They also make a point of saying that there’s no combat in the game, and holy shit, are we still, in 2025, acting like absolute commitment to non-violence is a virtue? Cozy games are one thing, situations where violence would be out of place because you’re farming or whatever, but this isn’t that, you can still fall into pits and get crushed by boulders and stuff. Even if the game just happens to not have enemies in it because the designers had no ideas for any that were fun to play, are people really getting misty-eyed for specifically the part of our childhoods where adults flat-out lied to us about conflict resolution?
By the time this post goes live, there will be additional Humble Choices out, but at this point I’m caught up as of the time of writing, and my backlog has shot up all the way to 166. Turns out that not playing games for like nine months isn’t great for shrinking the backlog. I’ve whittled away at Deep Rock Galactic a lot, and deciding to go for 100% of the milestones means that one has been an absolutely massive undertaking, but it’s nearly done, plus I’m playing other games in between for the first time in a while, so probably the backlog will start shrinking again – although I notice I’m not stocking up on a whole lot of sub-10 hour games. I do have a ton of 10-20 hour games, but I’m not super likely to finish 10 of those in a month the way I can for 5 hour games. Oh, well, ultimately the point is not to get the backlog to 0, just to focus on playing new games instead of sinking back into replaying old stuff forever.
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