It’s the first Tuesday of the month of May as I write this, although due to the backlog the June Humble Choice will be out by the time it goes live. We’ll catch up eventually. What’s in the box?
Thaumaturge: Deluxe Edition isn’t even trying to sell me on Thaumaturge itself, it’s purely an ad for the add-ons for the Deluxe Edition. I had to look up the game’s Steam page to figure out what it’s about. According to Steam, the Thaumaturge is a turn-based about a guy with spooky summoning and mind reading powers having some kind of occult adventure in early 20th century Poland. How Long To Beat gives it about 25 hours, which is not terrible for a genre and setting I like. Not so much early 20th century Poland as gothic horror for the setting, but early 20th century Poland is a perfectly good place for gothic horror.
Amnesia: The Bunker is a first-person horror game from the same people as did SOMA and the Dark Descent, which we have to specify because that’s not true of every Amnesia game. I get why Amnesia made waves when it first came out, but it’s not the breath of fresh air it used to be. I’m always happy to see these kinds of niche games sustain themselves, but it’s not my niche.
Evil West is a weird west action-horror game about vampire hunting in the American West. At a nice and spooky 13 hours long according to How Long To Beat, this is the kind of game I’ll pick up on grounds of the aesthetic just to see if they stick the landing even if the only thing the ad says about its gameplay is that it’s gory, pulpy, and somehow action-y. I’m on board for all of those things, but I would’ve appreciated, like, a game mechanic. This definitely feels like a game where how much I like it will be heavily influenced by how smooth the ride is. If it’s glitchy or difficult, it might end up in Regrets (unless it’s the kind of difficult that’s worth getting good at, but that’s always a risky gamble for a game to make), but if it’s easy and fun, then I’ll probably glide through it.
Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is a stealth real time strategy game where you command a bunch of pirates to sneak around the forces of the Inquisition in a cursed Caribbean. Stealth missions are not generally the fun part of an RTS, but I’m not totally convinced that the concept can’t work with a game built from the ground up for it. It’s also very character-centric, every single unit under your command is a named character with unique powers. That makes sense as a place to take the genre, but I generally like playing macro, taking and building expansions and pumping out armies to overwhelm an enemy without focusing too much on making this unit attack that enemy. I like the aesthetic and the flexibility in the campaign, but I’m nervous about a stealth RTS not working out for me, and the playtime is the nail in the coffin: 40 hours is too much. I don’t feel like this is the right place for “I would play your game if it were shorter” because it seems like every level was hand-crafted, so there’s no padding out a 2 hour experience to 10 hours using Roguelike mechanics, it’s just an actually long game. So it’s really more like “I would play your game if it were a different game,” which, I mean, yeah, obviously.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes claims to be the most funded game on Kickstarter on 2020, and I’m really not sure how? It looks like a pretty stock PS1 era JRPG, except that it came out in the 2020s when using 2D sprites on pre-rendered backgrounds in a psuedo-3D way is no longer a clever hack to try and wring better graphics from limited hardware while still having enough space for an expansive world. It just looks kind of primitive. We have the graphical horsepower to just make real 3D sprites that match the backgrounds. The plot description is some pretty standard evil empire threatens your homeland stuff, and while I’m sure it’s a perfectly good JRPG, JRPGs are long and I see no reason to believe this one in particular is worth the time investment when there are dozens of games just amongst the heavy hitters like Final Fantasy and Fire Emblem.
Star Wars: Bounty Hunter is our token acknowledgement of May the Fourth, I guess. I’ve talked about this game before because I’ve had it for about two decades now. I like it alright, although I don’t know if I’d recommend it. The fundamental mechanics are fine, but the bounty hunting system would’ve worked much better with more open-ended levels, and without that it’s just a third-person shooter with Jango Fett in it. A perfectly competent third-person shooter, but nothing special.
Ultros is some kind of…2D beat-em-up game? About a character who crashes into Sarcophagus, a “cosmic uterus” with the titular demon Ultros sealed inside. The main selling point seems to be the drug-trip aesthetic, but I have learned that while I enjoy games that have a setting whose vibe I enjoy, that is not the same as enjoying games that look cool. Ultros’ setting doesn’t seem that interesting, it just looks cool, and I don’t need to play it to look at the screenshots. It promises “brutal close-quarters combat” but I’m having trouble getting invested in it. How Long To Beat says 10 hours, and that’s too much when I’ve got a backlog this big.
Corpse Keeper is an action RPG where you control a roster of different heroes reanimated from decaying body parts by dark magic. Your heroes are constantly rotting away and you can only slow the process, never reverse it, so the more you use a specific guy, the faster you lose him. That sounds cool, but what makes me nervous is that it describes itself as “very challenging” and really emphasizes the time limit on a single run. This is the kind of game that absolutely must be as good as it thinks it is to be enjoyable. How Long To Beat has no record of how long this game is at all, and that’s pushed me off the fence to deciding against it.
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