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I can’t do italics in titles, so I have to clarify here that the intended reading is “Farslayer Ghislev isn’t that hard.” Farslayer Ghislev is a Bhaal cultist in Baldur’s Gate 3 who can ritually cast a mass Power Word Kill that instantly kills all enemies within the area of the ritual zone. Having more than 100 HP doesn’t help the way it does against regular Power Word Kill, the ritual only takes 6 rounds to complete, and fighting through the dozen-odd enemies standing between you and the farslayer is totally impractical.

This fight took me three tries, and while I hate long resting in the middle of a plot arc (despite there being no consequences for doing so), in this case that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Farslayer Ghislev wiped me out the first two times, despite generally wrecking the encounter otherwise. That’s more attempts than most boss fights in the game took (the fight a few minutes later with Orin, Bhaal’s chosen avatar, was easier), but also I didn’t have to swap out party members or back out to buy teleportation arrows or any of the other stuff online guides said to do later. You can absolutely win this fight with your standard party, you just have to know how the ritual works. For some reason, in all the threads of people talking about how to beat this encounter with teleportation tricks or by having an invisible character sneak ahead to assassinate Ghislev or whatever, no one ever brings up what seems like the intended solution: Get all your party members out of the death zone before the ritual is completed. There are lots of nooks and crannies that are outside the ritual zone scattered around the edges of the arena. You are going to have to fight your way through some affected areas, but fighting through five or six baddies to reach the next safe zone is doable in a way that fighting ten or fifteen to clear the whole encounter in one go is not.

Like, that gate that the Bhaal invoker sits on top of flinging dagger clouds at you. Bust that thing open and get your party safely on the other side and you’re out of range of the ritual. There’s only like three guys between the start of the encounter and that location, and you can fight the strangler and his lackeys safely from there. After taking those guys out and waiting out the ritual, you can try to sprint across the bridge to punch through Maiming Abby and her mooks and it’ll probably be fine, but you can also cling to the edges and fight them from inside the ruined building – which is outside the ritual area. At that point you’ve killed every single Bhaal cultist except Ghislev, and even if he sees you emerge from the ruins (he didn’t see me), you’ll have a full six rounds to take out one guy.

Side note, I wish the nautiloid artillery had the really clear boundaries that the Power Word Kill ritual did, it is super annoying trying to get characters in safe zones during the ascent up the High Hall.

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.

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.

Immortals of Aveum is a first person spellcasting game. Apparently the magic system involves chaining attacks together in some kind of interesting way. It doesn’t sound awful, but I’ve got a million other games to be playing before I touch something that might be kinda neat.

I guess it’s first-person shooter month at Humble Choice, or it was back in February, at least, because Trepang2 is an FPS where you have both guns and superpowers like super strength and bullet time. I always feel slightly bad dismissing a game like this because fuck FPS’s unless of course they are Borderlands or Far Cry games, in which case that’s fine (the Far Cry series has completely collapsed even for me, but you get the point). Those series’ happen to hit specific things I’m looking for that Trepang2 doesn’t, but Trepang2 definitely seems like it’s got more artistic integrity to it, so it does feel slightly weird passing on it when other, objectively worse games made it on the list for purely subjective reasons. That’s how things are, obviously, but I didn’t have anything more specific to say about Trepang2, so here we are.

I’m glad to see the Total War series trying out new and relatively obscure eras like they are with Total War: Pharaoh Dynasties. I hear it’s one of the weaker entries in the series, but hey, I’d rather a weak Total War game in a fresh setting than yet another Total War game set in Rome, medieval Europe, or sengoku-era Japan, even if it is 10% better than the last installment set there.

Fabledom is a fairy tale city-builder, and this one gets to sneak in on the grounds of its 13 hour playtime. That’s pushing it for something that seems kinda charming but not amazing, but I like city builders and this is a reasonably new take on the genre at least in aesthetic, so sure, I’ll throw one weekend at it.

Griftlands is a deckbuilding Roguelike, and as with every single one of these fucking things, it’s got a cool looking art style (although, I have to say, not as cool as most in this genre) and no sign of any breakout mechanics that would justify sinking in the 30 hours How Long To Beat says I should expect to take finishing it. Yet another casualty for the “I’d play your game if it were shorter” pile.

Tales and Tactics “blends squad-based autobattling with Roguelike stra-” OH GOD THEY’RE EVERYWHERE

Naheulbeuk’s Dungeon Master is a Dungeon Keeper-type of game, and I’m really waiting for one of these to really embrace the surface incursion the way Dungeons II and III did, except good. In particular, it’d be neat if you could tunnel up from the dungeon layer to the surface layer at any point, the same way you can tunnel out new corridors and chambers. Naheulbeuk’s Dungeon Master isn’t that, it promises no surface gameplay at all, but it’s only 12 hours and I like the genre, so, sure, I’ll try it.

My Little Universe is a dungeon crawler in which you play as one of those colored 3D stick figures you see in shitty mobile games. I’ve got plenty enough dungeon crawlers to not have to resort to this kind of aesthetic.

Both Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy II have official explanations for where their monsters come from. In the first game, they come from the instability of the four elemental crystals. In the second game, they are summoned from Hell by the evil Emperor Mateus. And the monsters seem to have been mostly scattered around haphazardly from an old AD&D Monster Manual with little thought put into where they were placed. But if we ignore that and take a closer look anyway, what does the placement of the monsters suggest about the world?

In Final fantasy I, monsters can be split into three categories: Fiend-aligned, fiendspawn, and wild animals. Wild animals might be driven to some kind of madness by the four fiends who are corrupting the elemental crystals, but they aren’t created by them. Fiendspawn are corrupted elemental beings directly tied to the theme of at least one of the four fiends. Fiend-aligned creatures are intelligent beings who’ve decided to take the fiends’ side of the war for reasons that are usually not at all clear, although we can glean some clues that they’re probably associated with nearby bosses.

Corneria

In the starting kingdom of Corneria, we encounter goblins, which the NES version called imps, but there was a really strict character limit, so we should probably think of this as a synonym for imp that was easier to cram into six characters (the same reason why what are clearly complete, animate skeletons are called a “bone”). These creatures are visibly armed with forged weapons, so they’re some kind of intelligent monster, and they’re found primarily in and near the areas controlled by the rogue knight Garland. They aren’t especially in theme with the earth in general, nor with the Lich’s undead theme, and the more powerful goblin guards get more common as you get closer to Garland’s stronghold in the Shrine of Chaos while the less powerful goblin NOS is found exclusively here in Corneria, so I think of these guys as a pre-existing population in Corneria that sided with Garland in the Cornerian civil war and whose full-time soldiers show up far from home in the armies of the Lich, but whose part-time militia or bandits (the ones just called “goblin”) are found exclusively in Corneria near their homes.

Likewise, while the wolves found in the Cornerian wilderness are clearly a wild animal, the warg wolves and werewolves suggest intelligent creatures with a goblin association, and they appear exclusively in places that also have goblins, usually goblin guards. Since wolves aren’t really earth-themed or undead themed, my assumption is that the goblins, warg wolves, and werewolves are all aligned with one another somehow, an alliance that reaches across the large southern sea of the game, because encounter density suggests that they have a large population in Elfheim. Since werewolves are people who can transform into wolves, it’s possible this is a power that goblins have exclusively, but given where they show up, it’s probably something that renegade elves do as well. The ability to turn into werewolves might also be a dark power taught to them by the Lich or a curse placed upon them by the corrupted power of the earth crystal.

The Cornerian region also has skeletons, ghouls, zombies which are clearly fiendspawn of the Lich, giant spiders and mad horses, which are probably affected by the elemental imbalance somehow but are still probably ordinary wild animals, and gigas worms, giant burrowing monsters that might be wild animals or might be fiendspawn from the Lich as a force of corrupting earth, particularly since worms eating corpses is a whole thing.

Pravoka

The region surrounding the port town of Pravoka gives us giant lizards, cobras, sharks, and slightly different giant spiders, which are wild animals, “big eyes,” which are beholder-ish bizarre aberrations and which I’m going to label as fiendspawn of the Kraken because they’re found exclusively at sea, pirates and buccaneers, which are intelligent creatures loosely aligned with the fiends in that they impede our heroes’ quest to stop them, even if only in an effort to rob them, and sahuagin and red sahuagin. Sahuagin might be an intelligent race that’s chosen to side with the fiends, but they might also be fiendspawn of the Kraken, and since the Kraken has been stomping around for centuries at this point, it’s splitting hairs a little bit to say one way or another – the sahuagin’s origin might be that the Kraken created them to terrorize the world, but they are now a civilization that has existed for centuries.

The Lich, contrariwise, has recently awakened, prompting the quest of our heroes, so it would be a huge difference if the goblins and ogres we see early in the game were fiendspawn rather than pre-existing creatures who decided to join forces with the Lich.

Elfheim

Speaking of ogres, we first start to see them around Pravoka and we’ll see a few of them later on near Melmond, but they’re most heavily concentrated in and near Elfheim along with the werewolves. The Elfheim region is also where we first find ogre chiefs, which the NES version called GrOgres, presumably short for “greater ogres,” and while I usually assume that the NES version is constrained by harsh character limits, in this case it makes considerably more sense: These greater ogres are, like goblin guards, found in far away regions with no other ogres, which suggests that these are full-time professionals that the Lich can move around, while the ordinary ones are part-time militia who have to stay close to home.

The primary danger in Elfheim is the Marsh Cave and the dark elf king Astos. There’s no sign of any other dark elves and Astos doesn’t look at all like an elf in his combat sprite, so “dark elf” might just mean “renegade elf” here, in the same way that Garland is a renegade knight from Corneria. I always thought it’d be cool to replace the ogres with dark elves, though, make it an actual conflict between two different kingdoms.

The Marsh Cave also gives us a wide variety of undead and giant animals like scorpions, our first slimes which come up all over the place and which I’m pretty sure are naturally occurring cavern hazards in this world, and the piscodemon, which looks like the mind flayer in every version including the NES, but which is called “wizard” in the NES version. These guys are the boss in the Marsh Cave, and their staves and robes and magical capabilities all suggest intelligence, but they don’t seem to be aligned with Astos the way the ogres seem to be. Astos needs you to go into the Marsh Cave to retrieve the crown that the piscodemons are camping on and there are no ogres in the Marsh Cave, which suggests that the Marsh Cave’s piscodemons and the ogres outside are not aligned. We’ll see them working together in the Lich King’s stronghold later on, though. So, it seems like Astos is the leader of the ogres and the piscodemons, despite also being vassals of the Lich, are at war with him. I say they’re vassals of the Lich, but in fairness, the damp circumstances we meet them in, the squid faces, and the fact that their name means “fish baddies” (pisco- meaning Pisces meaning fish) suggest they might actually be Krakenspawn – but they show up pretty much exclusively in places overrun with the undead, so that suggests they might actually be Lichspawn again.

Since this is also where we find the greatest density of werewolves, it’s also possible that the intelligent fiend-aligned creatures are mutations caused by aligning with the fiends, so the goblins in Corneria and the ogres and piscodemons in Elfheim are humans and elves (respectively) twisted by the corrupt magic of the earth crystal, which would also explain why the dark elf Astos looks so freaky and weird.

Melmond

The Melmond area is right on the Lich’s doorstep and gives us tigers and hyenas, which is ecologically weird but still naturally occurring wild animals. The Lich’s stronghold in the Cavern of Earth gives us mummies and cockatrices, who, funny enough, are only ever encountered together, and who will be returning in the Mirage Tower in the desert of Tiamat, the first of the fiends to awaken. They also crop up in fixed encounters in the Kraken’s lair, but in the Mirage Tower, they’re just a regular random encounter. This suggests that the mummification method of undead-ification predates the Lich King’s awakening by some time, a form of dark magic that fiend-aligned people worked out for themselves long before the Lich King started reanimating skeletons, zombies, ghouls, and wraiths en masse. And also that the cockatrices are their pets, somehow, in the same way that goblins have a whole thing about wolves in their culture.

The Lich’s stronghold is also the first appearance of earth elementals and gargoyles, clearly fiendspawn of the corrupted earth crystal, the minotaur, which we’re encountering here for the first time but which, based on their world map spawns, are native primarily to the Crescent Lake region, and the trolls, who are not only found near Crescent Lake but also in the northeastern continent (devastated by Tiamat) near both Lufenia and Gaia. Regular minotaurs are not found on the northeastern continent, but zombie minotaurs are, specifically near Lufenia. The Lich’s awakening is relatively recent, years instead of centuries, but clearly there’s been enough time to move some troops around, because the zombie minotaurs are zombies and therefore Lichspawn.

For the intelligent fiend-aligned races so far, we’ve been able to sketch out a pretty clear homeland for them: Goblins are from Corneria and are never found elsewhere unless they’re soldiers. Sahuagin are found throughout the oceans. Ogres are found most often in Elfheim, but also spread throughout the mountains near the Ice Cave and Pravoka. Living minotaurs are found exclusively in Crescent Lake (or the Cavern of Earth, where the Lich employs them as foot soldiers).

But trolls have a wide range going from Crescent Lake across the sea to Lufenia and the impenetrable valley of Gaia, reachable only by airship. In fairness, Gaia has an utterly bizarre grab-bag of overworld encounters that’s going to need its own explanation because almost nothing there makes sense, and Lufenia also has lots of strange foreign monsters, but I need to stick the troll homeland somewhere. We’ll also see palette swapped sea trolls in the Onrac region where the Kraken lurks, especially underwater. From all this, I conclude that the trolls are originally from the Gaia Valley or perhaps Lufenia and were early allies of Tiamat, who have been moved around the world by fiends of both air and water. They patrol what’s left of Lufenia with zombie minotaurs on loan from the Lich even as the Lich got several of them in return to help guard his Cavern of Earth, got transformed into sea trolls to serve as the shocktroops of the Kraken, and got airdropped into the Crescent Lake region to guard the sleeping Marilith once the Warriors of Light started stomping around. It’s possible to reach Crescent Lake before the Cavern of Earth, but you probably won’t actually go there until after, and since the game’s programming doesn’t really handle updating encounter tables easily, we can do a little handwaving and even say that the trolls only arrived after the death of the Lich, when the Marilith wakes up early and fiend-aligned forces start shuffling troops around to try and harden her stronghold against the Warriors of Light, who’ve just proven they can kill a freshly-awakened fiend.

The Cavern of Earth is also where we find our first gigas. This is a themed set that includes hill gigas, fire gigas, and ice gigas. The fire gigas is very well behaved: They live in Gulg Volcano and are otherwise only found in the Temple of Chaos as part of a grab-bag of monsters clearly recruited from all over the world. The ice gigas lives exclusively in the Ice Cave except when they live in Gaia Valley, halfway across the world. The hill gigas doesn’t have an obvious home. They show up in the Cavern of Earth, but also near Lufenia, in the Gaia Valley (again!), near Crescent Lake, in Gulg Volcano, and near the Citadel of Trials, another section of Tiamat’s northeastern continent. They’re very dense in Tiamat’s continent and otherwise almost never found on the world map, only in dungeons, although they do show up, and fairly commonly even, in Crescent Lake. My explanation for this is that they are native to the northeastern continent, probably the Gaia Valley in particular since that place is full of mountains, but they spread through the whole thing. They were another early fiend-aligned race like the trolls and were recruited in large numbers by the Lich to defend the Cavern of Earth. When the Lich was defeated, surviving hill gigantes fled towards Gulg Volcano to regroup and try to defend the Marilith from the Warriors of Light.

Crescent Lake

The Crescent Lake region is mostly full of leftovers from the Cavern of Earth. I like the story this suggests, in the same way that Corneria being the goblins’ homeland suggests an alliance with Garland, of defeated minions of the Lich making their way to the homeland of their minotaur comrades and flooding the area near Crescent Lake in an effort to clean out the Marilith’s region and secure the place against the coming attack of the Warriors of Light.

We also see ankhegs here, which could be earth-aligned fiendspawn, but since we never saw them or anything like them anywhere near the Lich, I’m going to assume they’re wild animals. The rivers have “ocho” plant monsters, hydras, piranhas, and crocodiles. Some of these are definitely wild animals, and the hydra might be too, because magic. Even the ocho could be a natural hazard of the rivers, which are in extremely rugged terrain and thus might just be an ordinarily dangerous place. It’s not really clear which fiend would be responsible for ochos, but the presence of a neochu in the Flying Fortress of the Lufenians suggests that it’s probably a naturally occurring monster that was already around before the fiends, which the Lufenians modified. Hydras could definitely be Krakenspawn, but if ochos are just a thing that happens, then hydras can be, too – nothing about the rivers near Mt. Gulg suggests that its monster infestation is a recent problem, this part of the map is super remote and hard to navigate.

Gulg Volcano

In the Marilith’s lair in Gulg Volcano, we get ogre mages for the second time – they were also in the Cavern of Earth, but there was a lot to talk about there, so I shunted these guys here instead. We only see ogre mages in three places, two of them are fiend lairs, and the third is in the desert on the northwestern continent, in the Kraken’s quadrant of the map but too far from the water to be meaningfully connected to him. The ogre mages in the Cavern of Earth and Gulg Volcano are probably fiend-worshipping mage-priests. Being random encounters suggests a persistent population in the desert near(ish) Onrac, but there’s no other ogres there, so I would interpret this as some kind of pilgrimage site with a semi-permanent population. For some reason, ogre mages – and only ogre mages – come journey here with such regularity that you can put down roots and start a community based on, essentially, tourism.

Also in Gulg Volcano we get some straightforward fiendspawn, like the fire elemental and the horned devil (a gargoyle palette swap), as well as things that suggest their originals might be fiendish because Marilith was able to make palette swaps of them: The pyrolisk is a palette swapped cockatrice, which suggests the cockatrice is a Tiamatspawn, especially since the Mirage Desert where you find Tiamat is full of mummies, who show up with cockatrices a lot. The pyrohydra suggests that maybe the hydra really is a Krakenspawn. On the other hand, the Hellhound is a palette-swapped hyena, but it’s probably not actually related to the hyena, they were just saving time by doing a palette-swap and it’s actually just a regular Hellhound. The lava worm and the fire lizard are clearly Marilithspawn, but I don’t think they’re necessarily mutations of regular worms or lizards (although the gigas worm is plausibly a Lichspawn anyway).

We also first encounter dragons, here, in the red dragon. Dragons are found exclusively in dungeons in a way that might suggest they’re fiendspawn, created by the fiends to garrison specific locations and otherwise ignored, but there’s one obvious problem with this, which is that Bahamut and several non-fiend aligned dragons exist, and one less obvious problem, which is that the ice dragons have no obvious fiend to be attached to. So, dragons are a partially fiend-aligned race where Bahamut remains on Team Crystals but a significant chunk of dragons flew off to join Tiamat, and later signed up with other fiends based on elemental allegiance, so a bunch of red dragons showed up to help Marilith when she woke up because Tiamat said so.

I think it’d be cool if the Marilith leaned more heavily into the demonic angle for more of her fiendspawn, her dungeon is full of a whole lot of “animal but fire” where the Lich has undead armies and the Kraken has aquatic horrors.

Ice Cave

The Ice Cave has a ton of ice themed enemies: Frost wolves, ice gigantes, ice dragons, and the remorazz. But it’s also full of undead, including some old favorites like bloodbones, ghasts, and mummies (with their cockatrice pets!), plus some new hits like wraiths. It’s got the mind flayer (“sorcerer” in the NES version), which is clearly an upgrade to the piscodemon we last saw in the Marsh Cave, as well as some original flavor piscodemons. There’s also dark wizards here, who are palette swaps of Astos, suggesting they are dark elves. Last time we encountered piscodemons, it was as Astos’ enemies, who he tricked us into killing for him. We also meet the evil eye, here, a beholder-looking monster who is not a palette swap of the big eyes from earlier, and whose concept art makes them very definitely a straight-up beholder, no hiding it (the actual in-game sprite is less obvious about it, though).

We’ll later meet more mummies, dark elves, mind flayers, and evil eyes in Tiamat’s stronghold in the Floating Fortress, and we’ll also encounter a lot of ice gigantes on her continent (though not in her stronghold). So although there’s some Lich King forces here to help bulk things up, this seems like it’s definitely an outpost of Tiamat’s still camping on some ancient Lufenian stronghold they destroyed centuries ago, which is why you can find the parts needed to repair the airship here.

Cardian Islands

The Cardian Islands themselves, as well as the western edge of Tiamat’s continent where the Citadel of Trials is located, is packed with wild animals that require no special explanation beyond Tiamat having wiped out Lufenian civilization centuries ago leaving the wilds to overgrow the whole region. Hydras and ochos pop up again, along with manticores, wyverns, wyverns’ palette swap the wyrm, basilisks, sand worms, and barettas (or ankylosauruses, for some reason this dinosaur and only this dinosaur gets retconned to be a fantasy creature after the NES version). The wyverns/wyrms in particular might be Tiamatspawn rather than wild animals, and if we assume from its presence on the Floating Fortress that neochus are some kind of ancient Lufenian science experiment, then wyrms might be modified in the same way.

Less straightforward in this region is the weretiger and the sphinx. We’ve had sphinxes in the Cavern of Earth and Gulg Volcano, but never on the world map before, and this is the first time we’ve met weretigers. We’ll meet rakshasas later on, which are to weretigers as warg wolves are to werewolves: A stronger palette swapped version whose name implies that they are the pure strain version of the thing that a were[thing] sits at the halfway point from humanity. Since we only find these guys near the ruins of Lufenian civilization, the weretigers are Tiamat-aligned Lufenians using lycanthropy (felinthropy?) to survive in the wilderness of their ruined civilization, while sphinxes are either Tiamatspawn or else a Tiamat-aligned race native to the Yahnikurm Desert in the heart of Tiamat’s territory.

Citadel of Trials

This place is weird, but that’s probably because it’s a menagerie set up by Bahamut as part of some weird test of worthiness. That’s kind of a dumb way to hand out prestige classes, but that is the actual story: Bahamut sends you to the Citadel of Trials to prove your worth and the only thing you accomplish there is getting a rat tail. We have a lot of monsters that we’ll see again in the nearby Mirage Tower or Flying Fortress, like medusas, mummies, and mind flayers, the horned devil returns, plus here we see one of the only appearances of the zombie dragon. If I wanted to rewrite this section, I would make it a holy sanctuary of the dragons that Tiamat corrupted, but the official story is that it’s a challenge given by Bahamut, so presumably all these guys are here either from wandering in from nearby or else by Bahamut’s power.

Onrac

In the desert near Onrac we find those ogre mages mentioned earlier (and they have Hellhound pets they brought with them from their primary temple at Gulg Volcano), plus several wild animals like the sabre tooth tiger, ankylosaurus, and remorazz.

In the rivers near Onrac, we find a bunch of wild animals like crocodiles and piranhas, plus the neocho. This is the only place we find a neocho on the world map, and it’s in the rivers leading up to the waterfall dungeon, where we’re going to recover a crucial bit of Flying Fortress tech from an abandoned robot. However that thing got detached from the Flying Fortress and wound up here, it must have brought some neochos with it, enough to start a breeding population (they’re plants, so it might’ve just been some seeds spilling out onto the wrong part of the river).

Waterfall

Everything in here is a Mirage Tower expat except the green dragon, which is found exclusively in here and the Chaos Shrine, the latter of which gathers monsters from all over the world. We’re not that far away from the Caridan Islands, so this is probably the home of several green dragons working for Tiamat and the rest are Mirage Tower forces left here by Tiamat after wiping out some Lufenian holdouts.

Sunken Shrine

As the end of the game gets closer, most of the monsters we’re encountering for the first time are, by definition, not in very many parts of the game. Even so, the Sunken Shrine has very few repeats even in the Tiamat sections still ahead. Here we have mostly just straightforward Krakenspawn like water elementals, wild animals like sea snakes and sea scorpions (lobsters in the NES original), and the appearance of the new ghost enemy. The Lich had lots of ghost-y things, but the enemy actually called “ghost” is exclusive to the Sunken Shrine and thus must be some kind of drowned soul who belongs to the Kraken instead of the Lich because they were never buried in the earth. We also see the sea trolls, which we’ve talked about before as indicative that the trolls have probably been fiend-aligned for a long time, as well as the sahuagin priest (or sahuagin prince, depending on your version), indicating that this place holds religious or political importance to the sahuagin in the same way that Gulg Volcano and the Cavern of Earth does for the ogres. Plus the deep eyes, which confirms that the big eyes is some kind of Krakenspawn, although not really what else it might be or do.

We also encounter the water naga here. Water nagas are never found on the overworld map and their spirit naga counterparts are found in the Flying Fortress. We don’t otherwise get any signs of Lufenian influence here, so I don’t think nagas were made by the Lufenians, but rather they’re fiendspawn: Water nagas are Krakenspawn and spirit nagas are Tiamatspawn.

Valley of Gaia

We’ve talked about this place before because it helps make trolls, hill gigantes, and ice gigantes hard to place, since all three of those monsters show up very far away. I ultimately decided that this is probably the hill gigantes’ homeland, since they’re found on the overworld here and there’s lots of mountains nearby. Most monsters here are airborne, like wyverns or manticores, so that requires no special explanation, but what the Hell are the ice gigantes doing here? There’s no particular reason to retreat to this particular remote and secluded part of the world after the Ice Cave gets sacked (although we do at least know the Ice Cave has been sacked – you can’t get here without the airship, which you need to complete the Ice Cave to repair). I realize that coming up with an explanation for these things is the whole premise of this post, but I can’t come up with anything better than “gigantes are elemental creatures and spontaneously generate anywhere their element is common,” which I would think is fine and even kind of interesting as it would presumably make them renegade crystalspawn, but there’s no storm gigas or air gigas or anything like that.

It’s also possible the ice gigantes are associated with Tiamat somehow. They’re found on Tiamat’s northeastern continent except for the Ice Cave, which you would think would be their primary home, but might also be a place they were left to garrison after hunting down some Lufenians, since we do find the parts to repair a Lufenian airship there.

Lufenia

This is also a place that’s already come up because of how hard it makes it to place other monsters. we find some spillover monsters from the Yahnikurm Desert nearby, but also trolls and zombie minotaurs. Zombification was the Lich’s schtick and living minotaurs are only found in the Cavern of Earth and near the Crescent Lake area, so I have no idea what zombie minotaurs are doing up near Lufenia, far from both the minotaurs’ homeland and the Lich’s stronghold. I’d swap these two around, having zombie minotaurs be weaker and found in the Cavern of Earth and near Crescent Lake, thus suggesting that they are the Lich’s troops, and stronger living minotaurs found here, thus suggesting that this is their homeland. That’s not how the game works, though, so I guess the Lich created zombie minotaurs and deployed them exclusively to a fringe sector of Tiamat’s continent for some reason.

Yahnikurm Desert

In contrast to the last two overworld map areas, this one is super straightforward: We got a bunch of wild animals like allosaurs and tyrannosaurs and wyverns and sand worms, and since civilization was destroyed here a full 400 years ago, no special explanation is required for how that happened.

Mirage Tower/Flying Fortress

We’ve already talked about several of the monsters that have presumed origins here: Mummies are presumably from here because they’re an undead type associated with the desert and found here, in places associated with the Lich King, and nowhere else. Since they’re mummified, these guys were probably fiend-aligned Lufenians buried here centuries ago, awaiting the coming of the Lich and the corruption of the Earth Crystal so they could be reanimated. Also they have pet cockatrices. Not totally clear why, but cockatrices consistently appear alongside mummies – maybe it was a gift from Tiamat for being some of the first fiend-aligned creatures. We also see black knights alongside nightmares, one presumably riding the other, and later death knights riding the same, presumably elite Tiamat cultist warriors, the fiend-aligned Lufenian descendants of those guys who eventually became mummies. There’s lots of golems and mechs like the “guardian” and “sentinel” mechs as well as the nuclear-armed WarMech (a weapon to surpass Metal Gear).

We’ve got blue dragons, swayed to Tiamat’s side, and “dark fighters,” who are palette swaps of Astos again and thus presumably dark elves. If “dark elves” are just elves sided with the fiends, then the split between dark elves and Elfheim may have happened some time ago, and these guys have been in the Floating Fortress for a while, and we also encounter mind flayers and evil eyes just like we found in the Ice Cave, suggesting that these guys are Tiamatspawn, not Lichspawn or Krakenspawn.

But we also see vampires down in the Mirage Tower, and while I didn’t discuss him back in the Cavern of Earth, the first vampire we encountered was unambiguously a Lichspawn, and one of the Lich’s top lieutenants at that. Not only is the vampire back as a standard enemy, he’s also joined by a vampire lord (vampire wizard in the NES version). Where were all these guys when the Lich needed them? Hellhounds and pyrohydras, both Marilithspawn, also show up, but as returning monsters, they’re much more easily explained: They retreated here (presumably picked up by some point, since the Flying Fortress is flying and can probably move around) after the death of the Marilith.

Medusas are here, which we first encountered in the Citadel of Trials, and while these sure seem like some kind of Lichspawn, we’ve never seen them until now, the Floating Fortress, heart of Tiamat’s power, so…I guess they’re Tiamatspawn? That seems thematically wrong, but from their placement in the game, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion. I’d like to say they’re Lichspawn who retreated here after the destruction of the Lich, but just like the vampires, that raises the question of where they were when the Lich was still animate.

The chimera is found exclusively in here, and this is also the only place we find the neocho besides the rivers leading to the waterfall dungeon, another Lufenian holdout location. The chimeras and neochos are both probably Lufenian experiments, genetic/biological tech in the same way that the sentinel bots are more standard hardware tech. The manticore might be as well, but since it’s found outside the Flying Fortress, it could also just be a magical beast in a magical setting.

Fixing It Up

Probably mostly by coincidence, Final Fantasy 1’s monster placement mostly tells a story of which monsters are native to where, with a handful of exceptions that mess up everything. So if we ignore fitting it all in perfectly and instead just try to make something loosely FF1-shaped while having an actual history and place in the world for the random encounter monsters, what does that look like?

Goblins live near Corneria. They side with the rogue knight Garland along with several undead monsters to kidnap the Princess Sara of Corneria and blackmail the king of Corneria into a standoff while the power of the Lich creeps out from Melmond.

Pravoka is ruled by pirates who have an Innsmouth-style corrupt bargain with the sahuagin that answer to the Kraken. Dark elf raiders are also prowling about from when they stole Matoya’s eye so she couldn’t heal the wood elf prince.

Elfheim is split by civil war between dark elves who’ve sided with the fiends and the wood elves. The dark elves have undead allies from the Lich, plus the help of piscodemons sent by the Kraken. Many elves have been transformed into werewolves by the lycanthropic bite of warg wolves, ancient creatures of Chaos. The werewolves believe that after civilization is destroyed, only those transformed in this way will be able to survive in the new world of Chaos.

Melmond is besieged by undead forces of the Lich King, including mummified aristocrats of corrupted Lufenia finally reanimated after centuries of being entombed beneath distant sands, powerful vampiric elite warriors and mages, zombie minotaurs reanimated from the powerful beastmen of that continent, hill gigantes drawn from the foreboding mountains of the Valley of Gaia, goblins from Corneria, dark elves from Elfheim, ogres from the Gulg mountains, and trolls from Crescent Lake. It’s a vast army drawn from all over the southern continent aimed at wiping out civilization here just like Tiamat did to Lufenia.

Crescent Lake is the homeland of the trolls, and the Gulg Mountains to the north are the homeland of the ogres. Gulg Volcano is the main sacred site of the ogres, it is the fire gigantes’ home, and it is also where Marilith has awakened, corrupting the fire crystal and using its power to spawn an army of demons that have spilled out into the mountains and attacked Crescent Lake. She’s not nearly ready for a fight with the Warriors of Light, though, and neither is the garrison of ice gigantes left by Tiamat on a remote Lufenian stronghold, which the Warriors of Light use to repair the airship downed by her draconic minions here centuries ago.

That said, it would also be fine if Onrac was accessible by regular ship. Tiamat’s territory is accessible only by airship, but the Kraken’s can be reached by ship. There’s almost nothing to do here, so we’re going to make this place much more island-y. The Cardian Islands are still where the good dragons, including Bahamut, can be found, and the Citadel of Trials is now an ancient draconic sacred place seized and despoiled by Tiamat’s armies, full of troops found in the Mirage Tower.

Onrac is still here, but rather than a seaside town, they’ve retreated to the mountains near the waterfall dungeon in the heart of the biggest island of the Cardian Archipelago (still much smaller than the Onrac continent in the game as it is). That waterfall dungeon is another Lufenian outpost garrisoned by Tiamat’s forces, in this case mostly rogue dragons. Onrac avoids the shore because the water is dangerous, with the sahuagin having defeated the merfolk for rule of the sea ages ago. The spirits of the defeated mermaids lead the Warriors of Light to oxyale, they take a submarine down to the Sunken Shrine, the central landmass that the Kraken pulled beneath the waves when it destroyed the greater Onrac civilization centuries ago.

The Lufenian continent is still intact, but civilization there was laid waste long ago when Tiamat took over the Flying Fortress. The rakshasas of Chaos have transformed Lufenians into weretigers, who, just as the prophecy foretold, are now the only ones able to survive in the world of Chaos left behind by the annihilation of Lufenian civilization. The minotaurs’ homeland is in the southeast, near one of the last hidden outposts of Lufenians, while the hill and ice gigantes are native to the remote Valley of Gaia in the north, where another outpost of Lufenians is found. But mostly this continent is full of wild monsters, some spawned by Tiamat like wyverns and others just grown out of control like tyrannosaurs, growing wild in the ashes of civilization.

The Mirage Tower and the Flying Fortress above are guarded by the ancient mechanical war machines of the Lufenians, the rakshasas and the weretigers, the traitorous dragons, the mummified traitors reanimated by the Lich King, the Lufenians who twisted themselves into mind flayers while seeking genetic perfection and immortality, the chimeras and the neocho monstrosities they created while seeking to understand life itself.

And in the Temple of Chaos is found not only a gathering of all these, but also the Chaos mages and Chaos warriors, our own time’s traitors seeking to destroy civilization for the glory of Chaos that they might rule over the ashes.

Bonus Round: Final Fantasy II

While Final Fantasy I had a wide variety of what either clearly were or at least were implied to be intelligent monsters, several of which had presumably been around for centuries as they are associated primarily with the Kraken and Tiamat, in Final Fantasy II the monsters are said to be summoned from Hell by Emperor Mateus. It’s not stated exactly when Mateus did this, but everyone expects the Emperor to die when he is killed (he doesn’t, but that comes as a surprise), so the very longest these demons have been around is 50 years, and the Emperor doesn’t look particularly old, so it’s probably more like 5-20 years.

So while I do think the FF2 monsters can be split into wild animals, undead reanimated by demonic spirits, corporeal demons with bodies conjured entirely, and Imperial soldiers. You can use some amount of context clues to figure out which is which, like, leg eaters and vampire thorns could be conjured demons, but could also be wild animals, since they seem to appear only in places that are not actively patrolled by Imperial forces, like the world map, sewers, or ruins (and also, bafflingly, Fynn during its occupation, which recycles world map encounter tables and includes no Imperial soldiers), whereas goblins appear in the Imperial slave labor camp at Semitt Falls.

But, y’know, so? There’s not really an expansion of the setting there, beyond the bit where undead are demonic spirits called into dead bodies to serve Mateus. It’s not like with Final Fantasy I where I can sketch out the shape of societies that flesh out the game’s world and make it more interesting. The Final Fantasy II equivalent of that would be to flesh out not the monsters, but the towns, figuring out how the Kingdom of Fynn interacted with Paloom, Poft, and Bafsk before the Imperial invasion, and in the “fixing things up” bit I’d have Kashuan be more of an actual surviving society under Imperial occupation to make Gordon’s arc more relevant and also to make the total annihilation of the Deist dragoons a more unique thing – as it is, it seems like total destruction of society was SOP for the first couple of kingdoms and then Mateus got bored of that and switched to regular conquest, then got bored again and destroyed most of what was left with the Cyclone.

Against the Storm describes itself as a Roguelite city-builder, and I’m not really in the market for more Roguelites but I am in the market for more city-builders. Combined with its fantasy setting – not super typical for city builders, which are often medieval but rarely this kind of high fantasy – and the way in which you have to network multiple settlements together in a way that makes previous scenarios relevant while getting away from pushing the limits of the mechanics too hard by making a city larger than what you’ve got the tools to manage effectively, and this one is climbing out of the Roguelike hole to get itself into the backlog.

Tactical RPGs seem to be a whole thing lately. Jagged Alliance 3 is a modern warfare turn-based tactics RPG, about recruiting mercenaries for a conflict in a jungle country called Grand Chien. The vibes I get from the art are Latin American, but that name sounds like maybe southeast Asian is what I should be thinking of? I’m not really looking closely enough to tell, this is a tactical RPG selling itself primarily as being a revival of an old series of DOS RPGs from the early 90s, and while that’s basically the path that got us XCOM: Enemy Unknown, I don’t get the feeling that lightning struck twice here.

There is some kind of strategic map to the game, but the way it’s pitched implies it might just be a fancy mission select screen. That’s a nice touch, and I do think most media about wars would benefit from keeping track of and making it clear to the audience who controls what territory, especially in video games where it’s so easy to just have a map in a menu screen somewhere, but that nice touch is not the same as the kind of strategic gameplay I’m looking for, and I see no trace of mechanics for building fortifications or supply depots, although there is at least a reference to “training the locals” and you do have to control multiple parties, splitting up your available cast of 40 recruitable party members in a way that might require you to actually position them differently on the map. On the other hand, it might just be that you get a list of 3-5 missions at once and have to divvy your mercs up between them, and that’s not nothing, but it’s not enough to justify a 50 hour time investment.

Blasphemous 2 is an easy pickup, I loved the first Blasphemous and while I’m not clear how the adventure could possibly continue after the Penitent One was martyred at the end of the first game, I’m also not really invested in Blasphemous’ plot so much as just its vibe.

Beneath Oresa is a Roguelike deckbuilder. Is there a quota? As is standard for these things, the art style is very nice, and I’ll give the benefit of the doubt and assume the gameplay is pretty well balanced, but it does kind of seem like this is the genre people gravitate towards when they have cool art assets but no vision at all for what kind of gameplay to attach to them. The nature of these posts means I have to bring this up either in context of a specific game or not at all, and that feels kind of unfair to whatever specific game I choose – I have no reason to believe that Beneath Oresta in particular is using Roguelike deckbuilding gameplay as a default because any vehicle for the art style will do. But with the number of games in this genre that have strong art styles and nothing else much that stands out about them, I’m really strongly suspecting that some significant chunk of this genre is using the deckbuilding Roguelike thing as basically [insert gameplay here].

Fort Solis is a story-focused adventure game emphasizing its realistic graphics and which directly compares itself to a Netflix series. So, this is someone’s live action sci-fi TV show that Netflix said no to, so they took it to another medium to get it greenlit. “Not even Netflix would take it” is not as damning an indictment as it was a few years ago, but it’s still not a great look.

Boxes: Lost Fragments is a puzzle game where you are a thief in a mansion full of cool kinda eldritch-looking treasure chests and you have to figure out how to pop the suckers open. This sounds like a perfectly cool idea for a game, but I don’t like puzzle games.

Dordogne looks like a water painted children’s book, evoking that “but it moves!” reaction that modern games can do sometimes, perfectly mimicking an art style that we’re used to seeing only in still images or passively-consumed animation and making it come to life in response to your controller inputs. It describes itself as a “heart-warming narrative experience” and the narrative involves exploring childhood memories, so this is very much an adults-reminiscing-about-childhood game. Adulthood is built on adolescence is built on childhood, so if this kind of thing happens to be foundational to the person you are today, then, great, but it’s not part of my foundations.

The Pegasus Expedition is a story-driven grand strategy game about humans fleeing some kind of cataclysm on Earth in a giant space fleet that arrives at Pegasus Galaxy to discover that it’s in the middle of a galaxy-spanning war (one which the humans inadvertently caused, but the marketing doesn’t say how – not sure if that’s supposed to be a mystery or if it’s just too complex to sum up in a bullet point). We have a lot of 4X space games that have interesting worldbuilding, but this is the first one that’s offered a plot, so I’ll give it a shot based on that. I like this genre, just not enough to sink 40+ hours into one of them on the grounds that they might be 10% better at doing the exact same thing as the last five, but the Pegasus Expedition promises to combine the genre with a focus on telling a properly paced story in a way that intrigues me.

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.