Category: Humble Choice

The advantage of forgetting to do this for nine months is that I can now wring out nine blog posts straight from the premise.

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is a no so hard it’s in that category of “is that an offer or a threat?”

Stranded: Alien Dawn is a colony-management sim where the premise is that you’ve crash-landed on an alien world and have to build an ad hoc colony to survive. I don’t hate this premise, but it’s too bare-bones to really hold my attention, and as a strategy game, it’s unlikely to be at that 5-hours-or-less threshold where I’m willing to give it a try out of only mild interest. How Long To Beat says 28 hours for main story + sides, which is usually how I play, and that’s way too long when my main reaction to the premise is “I don’t hate this.”

Coral Island is a Stardew Valley type farming game, and its primary selling point over Stardew Valley appears to be that all the NPCs are 20% sexier. That’s not nothing, but there’s no way I’m sinking 50-100 hours into a game just because it has some girl named Yuri who looks good in a bikini.

I’m close-ish to the age where Spongebob Squarepants: The Cosmic Shake could plausibly be dopamine poured directly into the nostalgia centers of the brain. I was too old for Battle for Bikini Bottom when it came out, though, so this kind of thing never stood a chance with me.

Lost Eidolons is a tactical RPG where you are a mercenary-turned-revolutionary trying to overthrow an evil empire. Its big selling point tactically seems to be elemental magic? There’s some sign of a strategic level to put the tactical combats into context, but it’s not super clear from the ad how much this is strategic gameplay like XCOM’s base management and research and how much this is just NPC dialogues used to carry a plot forward. The latter is also good, but I find the former is crucial to making a tactical game work for me. At 40-50 hours, Lost Eidolons is way too long for me to risk the strategic aspects being undercooked.

Astrea is a dice-based deckbuilding Roguelike with a cool art style and interesting sounding mechanics, but it’s also a Roguelike with a 20 hour completion time. I would’ve played your game if it were shorter.

Infraspace is a planetary colonization game where every single crate of minerals and tank of oxygen has a specific location, so you can’t just slap down extraction facilities and factories and expect the mines to pour carbon into a hyperdimensional inventory which the factories then pull from. You need to schlep the carbon from the mines to the factories, and then schlep the resulting carbon widgets to homes for consumption. That means that where we’re going, we’re going to need roads. I like the idea of Cities: Skylines IN SPACE but I am nervous about its 45 hour time-to-beat. Mildly spoiling the next bit, though, I am otherwise picking up no games in September, so I’ll do the thing I do sometimes and add it to the backlog, but with a mental note to shove it off to Regrets the moment it starts to drag. I’m indulging the possibility that it turns out to be a delight from start to finish, here, because that is a genuine possibility for me.

You Suck At Parking: Complete Edition is a racing game where the gimmick is that to win, and also it seems like to progress at all periodically, you have to park in a parking space that’s not much bigger than a single car. So not only do you have to be able to take corners tight and juke obstacles, you also have to be able to come to a complete stop in a pretty specific position in a hurry. That sounds kinda cool, but I don’t like racing games enough to want to explore the edges of the possibility space like this.

It’s the first Tuesday of August as I write this. What’s in the box?

Sifu is a kung fu game where you seek revenge for your dead family by decking a very large number of people in the schnozz. The three selling points I can identify are 1) You can pick a male or female character (they don’t spend a lot of time on this one, but it is the first thing they tell you about the game for some reason), 2) you have a magic amulet that brings you back to life every time you die, but ages you each time, and 3) the combat system doesn’t have any HUD indicators when something’s about to go wrong nor do enemies take turns attacking. Presumably, then, you have to pay attention to tells in their animations and crowd management is very important, although it doesn’t actually say that. The Humble Choice description definitely leans into the last part the most, with several paragraphs dedicated to how challenging the kung fu gameplay is. How Long To Beat says 8 hours, which is 3 hours longer than I’m willing to give this one, the risk that it’s not good enough to sustain its gameplay is too high.

High On Life is that one game written by one of the Rick and Morty guys where your gun talks to you. I’ve never thought Rick and Morty was particularly funny, and while I do like its exploration of sci-fi concepts, I like that because each individual episode is very short and often explores different concepts in its A-plot and its B-plot. High On Life is probably not staying glued to its single sci-fi concept of aliens trying to get high on humans somehow for its entire nine and a half hour run, but video games still tend to dwell on concepts much longer than TV shows do, and even concepts I like are going to get boring if they spend even 45 minutes on them. The fear hole was a pretty good episode, but it would be much worse if it were ninety minutes instead of twenty, even if two-thirds of those ninety minutes were combat.

Two or three times a year, Humble Choice includes a game that gives the whole bundle the flavor of one of those diabolic bargains or “would you rather” games. This bundle’s hidden poison is Gotham Knights, and neither of the two headliners are even pick-ups, let alone overshadowing the threat that I might accidentally install Gotham Knights on my computer. I’m assuming that Sifu is supposed to be a headliner since normally those are listed first, but it’s more obscure than usual, so my headcanon here is that the Humble Choice headliners are set up as far in advance as release day, like, Gotham Knights locked in their position in the August 2024 Choice clear back in September or October of 2022 when it was coming out, and by the time August 2024 was rolling around, Humble was having second thoughts about Gotham Knights being a headliner so they promoted Sifu to the #1 spot instead.

In Blacktail, you play as Yaga, a Slavic archer-witch who gets exiled from your village and can choose to either become a guardian of the wilderness or to go the route that name implies and become a nightmare horror. I’m not sure why they went with the relatively generic “Blacktail” over just calling the game “Baba Yaga,” especially since, while looking up some of her legends to see if maybe the phrase “black tail” comes up in them (nothing after a quick Google search, but bear in mind my background research for these posts tends to be pretty sloppy), I found that Wikipedia claims that Baba Yaga is an ambiguous figure who is sometimes helpful, so the guardian-of-woods route in this game is actually also following the legends, not defying them. Gameplay wise, this game is promising to be a witch game with an emphasis on archery, and so far witch games have capped out at some survival-crafting games being decent witch games by accident, but at less than 10 hours, I’m willing to give Blacktail a chance to break the curse.

Astral Ascent is a Roguelite game and even kind of leans into the slow pace at which the story unfolds. They are attempting to be more deliberate with their Roguelite mechanics, so my outside guess is that Astral Ascent is probably one of the better B-tier Roguelites for people who really like that genre. I don’t really like that genre, though (I don’t dislike it, but I don’t like it so much that I want to play its middlingly-high entries), so for me, this game is going to be 20-30 hours of being a worse version of Hades.

Diluvian Ultra has managed the first half of a miracle: I am going to add a Doom-style shooter to the backlog. How Long To Beat has exactly one record of how long this game is, and that record says 5 hours, so if that’s even close to accurate then I will give this game a chance based purely on its cool aesthetic and ideas: You are a grimdark space fantasy prince, not a 40k rip-off but a guy who’d fit in in that universe, and you have been awakened from your slumber on your tombship by unknown attackers. It remains to be seen if Diluvian Ultra can manage the second half of this miracle, getting me to actually like a Doom-style shooter. This is episode 1 with promises of more as paid DLC, and I’m not committing to any of the DLCs even though the story is apparently incomplete without them, but honestly, if it can even get me through the first episode then that should be considered a win, given I very nearly rejected this game on its genre alone and only read the ad out of a sense of obligation towards being reasonably open-minded.

Universe For Sale is about a woman living in a colony in the clouds of Jupiter who can create universes in the palm of her hand. No sign of gameplay or what kind of actual conflict this leads to, since the images and video heavily emphasize the woman and the people she talks to, not the universes themselves. As near as I can tell, this is an adventure game that heavily emphasizes its strange, novel worldbuilding. Fair enough, but if I wanted a story told to me, I’d read a book or watch a movie. If you expect me to go to the hassle of clicking to advance the conversation every thirty seconds, I expect there to be a game to play.

This Means Warp is a sci-fi game where you fly a spaceship around to different asteroids and, uh, interact with them somehow. The game’s advertisement is focused relentlessly on how it’s playable with 1-4 players which, I get why that’s a primary selling point, but do you, uh, have other selling points? Well, okay, it also says it randomizes your adventures each time. There’s good reasons to do that, it means you have to master broad systems rather than memorizing specific maps in a more deterministic way, but it also means that the maps lack the handcrafted human touch and you can really tell the difference. This tradeoff alone is definitely not sinking the game, but it’s not a major selling point the way the devs seem to think it is, and the other major selling point is that I, the solo player, am kind of an afterthought to this multiplayer focused game. When the game lists its features as bulletpoints, it does have a third, and the third is “deep, strategic combat,” but it doesn’t say, like, how. Just that it has combat, which is hard. Optimistically, this might be a somewhat FTL-esque game, perhaps with more emphasis on crew combat over ship combat, and with a more light-hearted tone. How Long To Beat says it’s 12 hours long and also has only one rating, so I’m going to pass it by because that’s already longer than the 10 hours I might be willing to chance on this game plus there’s a possibility that the one rating left was an outlier and the real average time is 15 or even 20 hours.

These two pickups put me up to 156, which is still slightly disappointing since I was recently below 150 and then I decided I should play Deep Rock Galactic for three months. Still, the new pickups are short and I still have a few short games in the backlog (I’m playing Hi-Fi Rush right now and it’s not especially long). Plus, I like the look of both of the new pickups, even if Diluvian Ultra makes me nervous with its genre. Not sure if either of them deliver on their promises, but I like what they’re promising.

Finally caught up to the current month, a Humble Choice ongoing right now which you might hypothetically make a purchasing decision about based on this post! That’s only half the point of these, but I still feel kind of bad about dropping that half for three months. Oops.

Anyway, what’s in the box?

A Plague Tale: Requiem is an A Plague Tale game, so that’s one mark against it already. This is a game about playing French peasants, one of whom is cursed with rat swarms in some way vaguely connected to the Bubonic Plague. It is attempting to be a Sad Game and is also some kind of AAA production? It does look very pretty, but with its paucity of demonstrable gameplay I’d assumed this was just because indie games sometimes look surprisingly pretty. We’re in an era of graphics where you have to zoom in pretty far for the difference in a full console generation’s worth of resolution to be apparent. But A Plague Tale is even less defensible as a AAA production, which should be able to afford both nice graphics and some actual gameplay. I realize A Plague Tale does literally have some gameplay, but it’s so thin that you can’t even really assign it a genre except for something super broad like “adventure game.” So, I’m not adding this one to the backlog, is what I’m getting at.

Ghostrunner 2 is a first-person melee game. It looks cool, and part of me thinks that surely this concept wouldn’t get a sequel if the gameplay was as miserable as it sounds, but, man. A first-person melee game? Really? I can’t shake the fear that it’s as bad as it sounds.

If you’re going to make a Starship Troopers game, you probably should make it about playing as the mobile infantry fighting the bugs in a story that, while it may have some satirical overtones in the background, plays it all pretty straight in the fore. That’s what Starship Troopers: Terran Command appears to be doing, and there’s not really room to do much else. It’s kind of like how the best Jurassic Park video game has the exact opposite message of the movie, except not as extreme: The Starship Troopers movie (and this game is definitely based on the movie, not the book – the aesthetic is straight from the film) also appears to play the premise straight and makes you pay attention if you want to notice the criticism underneath. Here’s the thing, though: Making a Starship Troopers game is not a necessity, nor is playing it, and I don’t particularly want to invest the time to play what looks like a good-not-great tactics game when the ultimate takeaway is that the whole war is the result of incompetent politicians, prolonged by incompetent generals.

Sticky Business is some kind of sticker tycoon/crafting game? I generally like these “imagine having a job that was super chill” kinds of things, but I’m not super into stickers or arts and crafts kind of things.

Zoeti is a turn-based Roguelite and I’m out. For the love of god, indie devs, stop making Roguelikes, I’d play your game if it was shorter.

Figment 2: Creed Valley is real sad that there Inside Out never got a good video game adaptation and has set out to be the change it wants to see in the world. Stage music is important both thematically and to gameplay, and it’s more of a hack and slash game than a literal Inside Out adaptation (it’s hard to imagine Joy socking negative opinions in the mouth). Time comes to the rescue on this one: At only four hours long, it’s easy to justify taking a risk on this game, even though I’m nervous that it’ll end up being all quirk and no substance.

This is the opener for Heretic’s Fork: “Dear Candidate, Thank you for submitting your application for the position of Hell’s Manager. We are pleased to offer you the job and extend a warm welcome to our team. As you may know, we have some overpopulation issues that we believe can be resolved with your help.” That’s really good. It sets a tone, standoffishly professional, none of that insincere “welcome to the family!” kind of corporatism, but the straightforward professionalism of “we’re evil but reliable, you’re in it for the money, let’s make a deal.” It finds room in the boilerplate to give a hint of what the gameplay is about. It has just one flash of the fantastical that pops right out of the page because it’s surrounded by banality. The game is some kind of tower-based strategy game but doesn’t quite seem to be a tower defense. That’s an okay genre, and How Long To Beat gives this one just four hours. I can take a chance on that just on the strength of the writing.

Hyperviolent is a Doom clone and shooters before Half-Life aren’t canon.

After several months of playing basically no games (my stats list Impire, Fallout, Amazing American Circus, and Far Cry 5 as my only completed games since January), my backlog is up to 158, firmly above the 150 I briefly got it below. Partly that’s because I played a lot of Deep Rock Galactic, which is nearly but not quite complete, but mostly it’s because I haven’t played as many games lately. For the first time in a while, though, I have quite a few games with an average playtime of less than 10 hours in the backlog, so I can probably get this back below 155 pretty quick.

Almost caught up! What’s in the box?

Risk of Rain 2 is a multiplayer Roguelike, so that’s two reasons for me not to bother right there.

Knights of Honor II: Sovereign is a medieval RTS/grand strategy game. Sounds like it’s in the same sub-genre as Total War? I haven’t even gotten through the Total War series, so I’m not interested in chasing down also-rans, something which comes up a lot.

Lego 2k Drive Awesome Edition is a racing game, so that’s me out. Lego games have a pretty good track record, not flawless but more hit than miss, and I feel obligated to tack on a half-hearted “maybe check it out if you like racing games” recommendation on the strength of that alone, but I won’t be checking it out personally.

Warhammer 40k: Battlesector really has me going back and forth. It’s 40k, which has had some of the best and some of the worst games attached to it. Games Workshop will give this license out to anyone willing to pay for it, seems like, and on the one hand I like that willingness to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, but it does mean the question of “should I try this game” is not an automatic “yes” just because I like the setting. It’s about Blood Angels versus Tyranids, and I’m not hugely invested in either faction. I appreciate the attempt to make vampire marines, but in practice the Blood Angels are just Ultramarines but red, and while I like the Tyranids in concept, that’s mostly because I like the Zerg, and I already have StarCraft. At 25 hours it’s not a dealbreakingly long game but it’s definitely one that had better be pretty good to justify that playtime. I’m hesitantly adding it to the backlog but giving myself a mandate to abandon it at first sign of being bad.

Miasma Chronicles is some kind of tactical RPG in post-apocalyptic America. It looks kind of pretty, but there’s not enough hooks as to what’s going on and why I should care to hook me on a 22 hour time investment.

I’ve seen some video essays on Stray Gods: the Roleplaying Musical on the assumption that it would take forever to go on sale or show up in a Humble Bundle or Choice, and here it is like six months later. I’ve had it all spoiled for me, but it’s only 6 hours long, so what the Hell, I’ll give it a play.

A Guidebook of Babel is some kind of quirky adventure game about gathering up memories as fuel for some kind of boat to the afterlife. I’m not super pulled in by the premise or the gameplay.

Empyrion: Galactic Survival is a game I already have and which is already in my backlog, but seeing the pitch here has me considering removing it. It’s a survival game set in space where you travel from planet to planet, and I like that setting and gameplay, but it’s 60 hours and the pitch doesn’t have even the ghost of a plot. Sure, I like peeling leaves off of trees and rubbing them together to make health potions, but I like doing that in order to, I dunno, reach the deepest depths of a volcano to retrieve a lost artifact, or build a weapon strong enough to kill an evil god. How Long To Beat lists a completion time at all which implies it can be completed, but there’s no option to say “this game is uncompleteable,” which means any number of people who simply never enter a completion time will never show up in the stats, so maybe everyone saying it takes 60 hours to beat are just plugging in the number for when they got bored.

That’s two pickups, except maybe just one because one of them is sort of a negative pickup? I haven’t decided for sure to remove Empyrion, though. I always give these things a while, because once it’s gone from my backlog I might never come across it again, so I want to be sure I want to unload it without even trying, not just that I am briefly annoyed with the concept because I’m having a bad day. Either way, I got a few new games out of this.

Yakuza: Like A Dragon is…uh. That’s just the (literal translation of) the Japanese series title. Was the Japanese version called Like A Dragon: Yakuza? Is this game Yakuza: Yakuza? Anyway, I like this series, so I don’t mind having another installment of it in my library.

Hi-Fi Rush is yet another installment in what is both my most and least favorite meta-genre of video games: The beautiful gem born of incredible talent and sincere passion that leads almost immediately to the studio being shut down. Get up on the pedestal with Bloodlines, you deserved it/were too good for this sinful Earth!

Steelrising is…a Soulslike about a clockwork automaton who helps the French Revolution fight against King Louis’ mecha-army? This sounds bizarre and wonderful and I absolutely want to try it.

Loddlenaut is about being a scuba diving janitor cleaning up an alien ocean from the pollution of a megacorporation. I could get behind this if it was a pretty game, where the gameplay is mainly an excuse to go through a location seeing what’s happened, but it’s not.

King of the Castle is a multiplayer party game. I don’t have a group to play these games with and don’t like playing with strangers, so it’s dead out the gate.

Bravery and Greed looks kinda cool but its ad copy is all over the place. It jumps right into explaining that it has classes with their own unique movesets that involve things like parries, dodges, and attacks. Then it has a header that tells me it has both PvP and PvE content, which is also where I learn that the plot of this game involves finding runes for the Sky Fortress. Sounds like an excuse MacGuffin hunt to frame the gameplay, which is fine, but weird that I found it buried in a description of its modes. Then it explains it has a skill system with some cool-sounding, thematic skill trees, but the next header is about how you can buy permanent upgrades with gold, so wait, is this a Roguelike? How Long To Beat says 6.5 hours to beat the main story but nearly 30 hours to beat the main story + extras. I usually gravitate towards the main story + extras length, so this is a huge time investment for something with a pretty confused pitch and which only musters up “huh, looks neat” even when it’s hitting hardest. I’ll pass.

Amanda the Adventurer is some kind of analogue horror thing. It looks absolutely hideous. They call it “classic 90s-style animation” but I watched Reboot and it looked way better than this. Anyway, it’s a puzzle game, and while it seems like the puzzles are mostly a vehicle for the horror, it also seems like it’s not the kind of horror I like. I like survival horror games, atmospheric horror games, the progeny of Silent Hill, mostly. This seems more like the offspring of creepypasta.

Mediterranea Inferno is a visual novel about three young men going on a road trip to Italy to recover from the trauma of the pandemic lockdowns. I know some people were genuinely, seriously negatively affected by the lockdowns, but also it’s become a fad in certain online spaces to pretend this was a universal experience and it very definitely wasn’t. So it’s possible that this game believably depicts people who actually did suffer trauma from prolonged near-total isolation, but it’s also possible that this game will try to convince me that being significantly inconvenienced is basically the same thing as trauma, and when I have over 150 games left in my backlog I do not feel like rolling those dice.

This month started really strong with three easy pick-ups and then fell off hard, but three pickups is still pretty good, so I’m not complaining.

Dear god I’m behind on these.

I’m definitely getting Victoria 3. It’s probably the Paradox grand strategy game I am the least interested in, but I am still interested, and I already paid for it back when I renewed my subscription last year, so I may as well.

I’ve gone back and forth on the Callisto Protocol and ultimately decided that it just sounds too generic. A survival horror game set on a prison space station that’s very moody and atmospheric. It sounds like a cool video game idea someone had in 2005 and it took them 19 years to bring it to life and I’m happy for our hypothetical developer that they finally made it happen but I do not care to play a survival horror game on the bleeding edge of twenty years ago.

Humankind is a Civilization knock-off that emphasizes greater customization for the civs. I’ll give it a go. It can’t really be played to completion, but I’ll still get it in my backlog and call it complete once I’ve finished a game of it.

Fashion Police Squad is a 90s shooter with the gimmick being that you’re the fashion police firing better outfits onto people who wear socks with sandals or whatever. That’s not a bad gag, but it’s not so good that I want to have it retold to me for four and a half hours. A playtime that short is usually small enough for me to go for it just on style and humor, which the game does have (from what I can tell from Humble Choice marketing pitch, at least), but I consider all shooters before the original Half-Life to be non-canon so this one always had a bit of a mountain to climb for me, and it doesn’t have enough style and humor to climb it.

Terraformers started off on a bad foot with me because the last couple of times I’ve tried a terraforming Mars themed game it has been bad. I was going to push myself to give it a shot anyway because there’s nothing wrong with the premise, but oh, over 20 hours of gametime according to How Long To Beat. That’s too long to take a chance on when its only marketing is “we’re super excited about Mars so we made a game about it!” Points for enthusiasm, but 20 hours is too long to try it out for that alone.

Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga is a tactics RPG that looks like it’s pitched pretty hard at people who want more Fire Emblem. That’s fair, they only release one of those games every 2-3 years, it’s pretty easy to get ahead of it, but I haven’t even played the actual Fire Emblem games. I want to give them a shot sometime but it’s not the kind of genre that holds my attention to the point where I go diving into the also-ran league with games like Symphony of War. Maybe I’m walking past the Project Wingman of tactics RPGs and actually this is the one you play if you play any of them at all, but these games are dummy thicc so I’m not risking it.

Coromon is a Pokemon knock-off game. I mentioned in my post on copyright that games taking inspiration from Pokemon are forced to create an all-new set of monsters, and this takes up most of the space the average fan has for new ideas, which means the game has to be a knock-off in all other ways, and if I wanted a game that was “Pokemon, but kind of mediocre” then I’d play Sword and Shield.

The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow is a point-and-click adventure game and right there my interest has expired. I’m kind of nostalgic for sitting in an unfinished basement at the age of fifteen, too young to drive anywhere with functioning internet, getting my desk and laptop set up in the new house and playing Trilby’s Notes because that’s what I had, but this genre isn’t actually good and Hob’s Barrow is promising to have standard adventure game rub [thing] on pixel gameplay.

So…Christ, are Victoria 3 and Humankind my only pickups? On the one hand, those games can be played for hundreds or thousands of hours, but on the other hand, they lack a clear completion goal, so they don’t really fit cleanly into my backlog at all. This is a quirk of my “Complete or Regrets” mandate, though, which very few people follow. So in terms of “is this Humble Choice any good,” the answer is yeah, Victoria 3 has a phenomenal pedigree and Humankind looks interesting. Just kinda sucks for me in particular.

It’s like a week after the Humble Choice dropped even as I write this, closer to two by the time it gets posted. Fell behind a bit, but you should still be able to grab it by the time this post goes live, so what’s in the box?

Hipster Walking Simulator: True Colors is the third installment in the Hipster Walking Simulator series. These games have good voice acting, pretty good animation and character design, and reasonably engaging plots, but there’s so little actual gameplay that the ideal way to experience them is on YouTube. Even then, I’ve usually got other shows I would rather be watching (I’m still not done with TNG, just for starters), but I don’t know why I would ever want it in my Steam library even if I did decide I wanted to watch them.

Scorn is an atmospheric, non-linear survival horror game. They really emphasize the maze-like nature of the world and the importance of paying attention to small details, which is good in theory, but also means they really need to get the execution right in order to avoid frustration. How Long To Beat says it’s only six hours, though, so I’ll give it a try. This is exactly the road I went down with Industria, but ultimately the time investment is low enough that I can afford to take this risk.

Destroy All Humans 2 is the sequel to a game that was already wearing out its welcome by the time the credits rolled on the first one. I like the concept, but there’s way too much emphasis on specific story missions, with the open world being vestigial. There’s hardly any side content and what there is are mostly very gameplay-heavy challenges that focus on mastery of the meh mechanics and never let me go on an open world rampage. I can, of course, just decide to go on that rampage of my own initiative, and that’s enough that I don’t feel completely disappointed with the game, but I’d much rather have side missions for things like “blow up every building to completely raze this location to the ground” (y’know, destroy all the humans) rather than “blow up X buildings in Y minutes.” I still have in my ideas file “Destroy All Humans But Better” as something I might try to make someday if I ever get the funds to go into video games. This would not be an entry-level project but it does seem like it’s doable on an indie budget. Anyway, if Destroy All Humans left me desperate for a sequel I wouldn’t have walked away from it thinking “eh, gimme $50k and I could do better.”

Beacon Pines is a choose-your-own-adventure sort of game where you are reading a book and also making decisions about the protagonist of that book? Not sure how it all adds up and the mechanics sound thin enough that I don’t care to find out.

There Is No Light advertises themselves on their 25-hour play length, which is immediately a mistake because I am way less likely to take a chance on 25 hours as compared to Scorn’s 5. Their other advertisements are their pixel art (good, not great) and that they have a combat system. They’re very proud of this combat system, but they don’t really tell me anything about it in their pitch. Basically the only thing I’ve learned about this game is that its creators are bad at marketing, and I’m not taking a risk on 25 hours for that.

Children of Silentown is a game about a little kid who is scared of the woods and uses point-and-click adventure mechanics, which are the mechanics you add to a visual novel when you want to pretend you’re a video game but don’t have the first idea how to add actual gameplay. Adventure games still sometimes rescue themselves based on their story (and the best ones are basically just visual novels that allow you to explore locations freely, which I think is usually an unambiguous improvement to them), but I’m not taking a chance on it for a game I’ve never heard of.

Oaken describes itself as having a “Roguelite, hero-oriented campaign with deck management.” Now in their defense, they have a pretty cool art style and if I hadn’t already played Slay the Spire I might’ve given this one a look, but I have already played Slay the Spire and I don’t want a game that tries to be longer.

Snowtopia is a ski resort tycoon game. I often grab tycoon games just for a lark and hey, I liked Two Point Campus decently, but I do feel like ski resorts are finally getting over the threshold where I just don’t care. Tycoon games are rarely well-balanced and usually end up being either too easy or too hard. A too-easy tycoon game is still fun as long as I like the thing I’m building, but I don’t ski and I don’t care to.

That means my only pickup is Scorn, and meanwhile a bunch of games developed unfortunate technical difficulties this month. Grime I spent a while trying to troubleshoot before giving up because, ultimately, while it’s a perfectly good Metroidvania and I would like to play the second half of it, I don’t want it so badly that I’ll slog through any more troubleshooting for it. In Between the Stars I was just starting to get invested in the game’s setting and plot when I ran into a bug that killed the whole save and which has been outstanding for four years. That leaves me with exactly 150 games in the backlog, including the pretty short Scorn.

The first Tuesday of the month has come. What’s in the box?

Midnight Suns is a game from the XCOM guys about tactical combat against international terrorists except your squad is led by an ancient fantasy hero revived to continue their struggle with an evil sorceress in the modern day and the rest of your squad are all Marvel super heroes and you need to have dating sim style hangouts with various Marvel characters to upgrade them. Jesus, this pitch started out so strong and just went more and more downhill and the funny thing is that the first two of the three video games that got pitched sound like they’d both be pretty fun individually but like a mess when put together, and then you add on top of it the Marvel team-up thing. The only way super hero team-ups are ever good is when you do it with the decade-spanning patience of the Thanos Saga, giving each hero room to breathe in their own millieu before bringing them together against a threat powerful enough to command all of their simultaneous attention. Even then, it’s difficult to ram the X-Men into things, themed as they are after mutant oppression and yet no one seems to have any trouble identifying that the Fantastic Four are technically not mutants. I’d be there for a game that did Iron Man, Doctor Strange, or Wolverine but trying to start your franchise with all three is too much even before we add the occult urban fantasy theme on top of that.

Two Point Campus is a game about running a university. You stamp down buildings, hire professors, students arrive, it’s all got a vaguely Sims-esque vibe where the fundamental premise is downright mundane but sometimes a student walks around in full plate armor and I can’t tell if they’re a theater major or if you just get medieval knights attending your college sometimes. One of the screenshots is of a misty castle which implies you can make your university look like Hogwarts, which mainly just accentuates that this would be much cooler if it were a wizard university instead of a regular one, but since no one’s made a good wizard school game yet (Spellcaster University was okay, but surely we can do better), I’ll content myself with this one.

Aragami 2 is a ninja game of some sort. You have magical shadow powers and use them to fight bad guys. Details are extremely scarce. I like the idea of a ninja stealth game, and the fact that it’s a sequel suggests this idea was good enough the first time around to justify more attention, but that’s no guarantee that the second game didn’t bungle things. At 17 hours on How Long To Beat, it’s just a few hours too long for me to take a chance on it. The general rule I’m gravitating towards is that a 5 hour game is worth a look if it has even one cool hook, 10-15 hours is short enough to be worth investigating if I’m on the fence, but more than 15 hours and I had better be confident I’ll be glad I started by the time I stop.

OTXO is a Roguelike topdown shooter, and that is all I needed to know to not be interested. I did read the rest of the Humble Choice description because my guess as to what these games are like based on the Humble Choice ads alone misses hard enough and often enough without me further handicapping myself, but none of the rest of it is bringing it back from being a Roguelike.

Roguebook is a Roguelike deckbuilder, points for honesty in the title but I don’t need another Slay the Spire.

The Red Lantern is about dog sledding in Alaska. I think the first person dog sledding they show in the game is a fantastic foundation for a sail-y around-y trading game except instead of a boat you have a dog sled and four good boys to pull it and your cargo of fish or whatever across the tundra. Unfortunately that’s not the game they actually made, it seems more exploration focused? Brevity saves the day, this game is less than 3 hours long according to How Long To Beat, and that is short enough that I’ll try it just because first person dog sledding looks fun.

Hell Pie is Conker’s Bad Fur Day except they couldn’t get the copyright to Conker so they did some demon thing instead. The whole irreverent edgelord thing is less cringey when it isn’t taking itself seriously, which Hell Pie isn’t, but it’s still not particularly fun. I imagine the target audience for this game is literally Conker’s Bad Fur Day fans and I never played that game. “What if a mascot platformer said farts” is not a particularly shocking or subversive premise these days and I have no nostalgia for the days when it was.

Twin Mirror is…Jesus, I’ve read the description twice and I’m still having trouble parsing what the actual gameplay is supposed to be. Seems like it might be a choose-your-own-adventure kind of game, where sure, you can walk around interactive environments and all, but the game is progressed by dialogue choices or other A-or-B decision points, but that’s not really something they say and more something I’m guessing based on the premise and the absence of any other gameplay mentioned or depicted. The major theme is an inner conflict in the protagonist between getting along with people or seeking the truth of the mystery behind his hometown, which he’s returning to after some time away. They do make it clear that your actions (whatever the medium for those actions actually is) determine which way the protagonist leans, but my immediate problem is that it is pretty reliably the case that when people want to ignore the truth, it is usually because they are trying to throw somebody under the bus, and the second most common reason is that they said something off the cuff, hung their pride on being right, and then mounting evidence reveals that they are in fact wrong and they can’t handle it.

The second one seems pretty common in academia, but I don’t usually have to care about that. The first is a million different versions of “the American Civil War was about states’ rights,” and the inescapable reality is that pretending this was true didn’t work. Whatever the hypothetical merits of indulging a delusional narrative of the Civil War in exchange for everyone agreeing that racism is bad, the fact is that the South remains a festering swamp of racism to this day. I use that example because it’s a big political issue that people have heard about which saves me from having to describe personal dramas without providing any identifying information, but regardless of whether the issue is some big political topic or why Joe Q. Psuedonym never brings snacks to D&D night, the outcome is always that whoever pushes the lie about what they did in the past is never trying to save face and move on, they always want to use the lie as cover to continue the shitty behavior.

I realize this is a weird swerve to take from the actual premise of Twin Mirror, but it’s the thing that springs to my mind when someone asks me about telling lies to preserve social harmony, and the fact that the game is probably not going to engage with that at all is exactly why I doubt I’d enjoy it.

Two pickups brings me up to 156. I’m honestly not sure if the next month or two are going to see the backlog shrink or grow, and not just because I can never be sure whether the next Humble Choice will bring five new games or none. For various tax-related reasons fairly specific to my pipeline, it’s a bad idea to launch a big project to Kickstarter in October, November, or December, so I’ve been struggling through small installments in what turned out to be an unpopular series and spending a lot of time working on the stuff I’d launch in January, and now it’s January and I have a bunch of stuff ready to go but also no idea which of it will be well-received enough to justify expansion. This could end up being a theater-at-2PM month or a flee-to-Peru month and I have no idea which it will be until my Kickstarter launches on January 9th.

It is, as I write this, the first Tuesday of December. What’s in the box?

Expeditions: Rome is a turn-based tactics RPG with a historical setting. According to Bret Devereaux, official guy-who-would-know, its historical setting is pretty garbage once you get past the superficial elements. Bret’s standards for this kind of thing are very high, so failing to meet them isn’t really disqualifying, but it does mean that the game can’t justify its 50-hour time investment on those grounds. Its historical accuracy is good enough not to be marked against it, fine, but it’s not really a point in its favor, either – I already have plenty of games that get ancient Rome kinda right.

That key selling point stripped away, what’s left is a game constrained by its veneer of historical accuracy from having any rad wizards or dinosaurs in it, and while I love XCOM, much of what I love about it is that its turn-based tactical framework is linked together by strategic gameplay. Expeditions: Rome is also somewhere in the 40-50 hour length. For a time commitment like that, it needs a pretty strong selling point, and so far it seems to manage “eh, good enough” at best.

Midnight Fight Express is a third-person (pretty zoomed out camera, too, I want to call it isometric but I’m not sure that’s quite right) brawler game where you are a criminal and need to beat up like a million other criminals in order to save the city from crime. It takes itself more seriously than that, but the plot is still plainly a vehicle for the combat, which looks really good. By which I mean, it looks like it’s really fun to play. Actual graphics are kind of mediocre, but not so bad that they get in the way of the gameplay. How Long To Beat says it’s only six hours long, so this is an easy get.

Elex II is a post-apocalyptic science fantasy RPG, the sequel to a game that’s been on my wishlist for yonks. It got recommended to my by Steam and I wishlisted it so I wouldn’t lose track of it, but the state of my backlog being what it is, I never got around to buying and trying it. It was always a low priority, but not one that I want to totally give up on. I may as well pick up the sequel now, seeing as I’ve already paid for the Humble Choice. There’s decent odds that when I get around to this series, I won’t like it well enough to reach game two (and I don’t see any reason to believe I should skip the first game for this one), but there’s decent odds that I will.

Nobody Saves The World is an action RPG about a character named Nobody who saves the world by transforming into stuff. I’m really not feeling the gameplay hook, so I’m giving this one a pass.

The Gunk is a game about exploring a planet overtaken by the titular gunk. The only trace of gameplay I can find in the game’s Humble Choice pitch is that it involves using a power glove somehow. It’s less than 5 hours long, though, so I’ll grab it on the grounds that exploration is fun and that is real short, so I can take the chance.

The Pale Beyond is a game about a polar expedition that has to manage meager resources and political division to survive the harsh conditions of the South Pole. So apparently someone got so restless waiting for Frostpunk II that they decided they’d make it themselves. There’s no citybuilder gameplay or anything, but it’s got the same resource management core. This game doesn’t look bad, but I didn’t like Frostpunk so badly that I want to try out also-rans like the Pale Beyond.

Last Call BBS is, I guess, a nostalgia vehicle for 1995? I missed the BBS scene. The gameplay here is a collection of eight minigames, none of which look super compelling on their own.

From Space is a Boxhead game that’s put on a higher-graphics neon aesthetic in the hopes that no one will notice it’s a refugee from 2005. That’s probably unfair, the topdown horde shooter genre probably isn’t all knock-offs of a flash game I happened to play in eighth grade and which had already aged poorly by the time I was in tenth, and the Boxhead comparison is made pretty much purely because From Space is clearly in that genre, but that’s the only thing I can think of when seeing the game. The pink aliens don’t seem functionally different from the Boxhead zombies.

The bundle also comes with a 1-month trial of DC Universe Infinite, which looks to be one of those dealies where you pay a subscription fee for .pdf access to all of the comic books on record for a specific publisher. Maybe there are some specific exceptions, but broadly the idea is that the ravages of time have made catching up on comic book backlogs infeasible for anyone short of millionaire collectors, and sometimes not even then, so DC and Marvel now so digital access to a complete archive the same way companies sell streaming subscriptions. I’m not big into super hero comics, though. If something is going to be in comic book form, it should be visually stunning, and while super hero comics do sometimes have the kinds of characters and locations that are worth paying money to see, the vast majority of comic panels could be replaced with writing “Batman stood alone in the gloom of the Batcave” as prose and I would picture something basically identical to what the artist would’ve drawn. Certainly it is possible to draw something so evocatively that, even if it’s just a werewolf or something else where I have no trouble picturing it, the picture itself looks better than what I would’ve imagined just from the prose, but comic books are made on a tight schedule and the artists rarely have time to wring such work out of their canvas before they need to ship.

That’s three pickups, bringing my total up to 159. StarCraft games are long and so is Borderlands 3, and also I spent a lot of time in November watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. Two of the games are short, though, and I’m through the Borderlands 3 main campaign and into the DLC, so I can probably get this back to 156 before the end of December easy.

It’s the first Tuesday of the month, ish, and I’m coming off of October, when I decided I didn’t want to bother with any of the month’s games, and September, when I got Foretales and Autonauts vs. Piratebots and they were both kind of okay but they both badly overstayed their welcome. I had to go back and check a few of the earlier monthlies to confirm that this is a good idea, and it does look like I just happened to have two dud months in a row. How does November compare?

Hardspace: Shipbreaker is about breaking ships apart for salvage in zero-G. It’s got some kind of plot about debt slavery and unionization, so it’s not quite a space having-a-job simulator, but it seems kind of close. Disassembling spaceships with a blowtorch sounds kind of fun, I’ll give it a try, but I might bail out long before completing what How Long To Beat says is a 30 hour long story if the charm of the mechanics wears off after the first two hours.

WWE 2k23 is a game that you already know whether or not you want, and I do not want it.

Unpacking is a zen game about unpacking. You pull stuff out of a box and put it into a room until the box is empty. As you unpack in several new locations, an implicit story is told based on what things are kept, what goes away, and what gets added. I get why some people would want this, but I definitely don’t. I’m not a huge fan of block puzzles and if I’m going to customize a space, I’d rather be in charge of what goes into it than where exactly it goes, so Unpacking has my preferences on that exactly backwards.

Friends vs. Friends is a PvP game. I’m honestly not sure beyond that, seems like some kind of shooter? Cards are definitely involved somehow, but seem to be more of an upgrade system than the primary mechanic. I’m not looking super close, though, because being a PvP game means I already don’t care.

Prodeus is a Doom-style shooter, so I don’t care about that, either. I enjoy certain shooters, but Doom and its progeny is not generally amongst them. The weird exception is Doom 2016, which was cool, but it also emphasized recreating the vibe of Doom with modern mechanics rather than copying those mechanics.

The Legend of Tianding is a sidescrolling beat-em-up about Taiwanese Robin Hood. The bosses have “dynamic abilities and brutal attacks[,]” which is a problem because I like the style of this game but I’m not big into sidescrolling beat-em-ups, so my willingness to play this is pretty strictly limited to it being easy enough that I can breeze through without getting super invested in the genre. How Long To Beat says it’s only 5-10 hours long, so I’ll take a chance on it.

SCP: Secret Files is a collection of games whose only connective tissue is the SCP setting. That promises uneven quality, none of the games look very interesting mechanically, and I generally find the SCP tone to be overtly grimdark anyway. SCPs have no unified origin story and the basic SCP format strongly discourages portraying the Foundation as a faction fighting a war against an enemy rather than a catalogue of weird stuff they have locked up. Since the Foundation is supposed to exist in what is otherwise the real world, that suggests that the stuff catalogued in the SCP wiki is all the weird magical realism/urban horror stuff that exists in the universe, not just stuff sufficiently dangerous as to require containment. But there’s very few SCPs that aren’t designed to cause human suffering, which shows the author’s hand in a bad way. Rather than a universe that is both bizarre and indifferent to humans, the SCP setting taken in aggregate is a universe that hates humans specifically for no better reason than “because creepypasta.”

Some of the foundational anomalies are things like 682, the invincible monster, which has two notable attributes: It is invincible, and it hates humans. No particular reason. It just does. Even 387, the Lego pile, couldn’t escape having some horrific interaction with MegaBloks, concealed behind [DATA EXPUNGED] which is sometimes used for good effect, but is usually used for “I can’t think of anything interesting so please imagine something scary.”

And for every SCP-387, there’s ten like SCP-1459, a box which murders puppies for no reason. 1459 briefly gets close to being interesting when the method of puppy murder given by the user is “nuclear detonation,” but the detonation is entirely contained by the box, so what could’ve been someone jailbreaking the puppy murder box to do something potentially useful (but killing themselves and obliterating the box in the process) is scrapped in favor of just being a puppy murder box.

There are a lot of individually good SCPs, but they are all worse for existing in the SCP universe. Even SCP-682 is a decent regenerating troll monster by itself. The reaction of “oh, of course it hates humans for no fucking reason, just like everything else” only happens because, y’know, everything else hates humans for no fucking reason. Mix SCP-682 with a bunch of weird anomalies that are only situationally dangerous or totally harmless and suddenly its spite for humanity in particular stands out. Still a C-tier monster but not one I’d be embarrassed to use as a backup dancer or even as a monster-of-the-week.

The SCP wiki is all released under a Creative Commons Sharealike 3.0 License, so nobody needs permission from their community to use any of that content in any way they like. In theory, I could pick out a specific set of SCPs with the right blend of the strange but harmless, situationally dangerous, and unambiguously deadly as to suggest a universe full of bizarre anomalies some of which, by happenstance, are very very bad for humans. But the odds that any of the people who contributed to the Secret Files did that is basically nil. People who make SCP content tend to be pretty invested in the SCP community and want those guys to like their work first and foremost, and what the SCP community wants is not what I want.

Anyway, Souldiers is a Metroidvania, so I’m getting it on the basis of that alone. It’s also got a fun 16-bit fantasy style that I like, emulating 2D pixel graphics in the SNES era when they were getting really good rather than the NES era when they were easy to replicate in MSPaint.

That’s three pickups bringing my total up to 162. Legend of Tianding is a short game that should be easy to unload from the backlog in a weekend, and I’m nearly done with Zeus: Master of Olympus and getting through StarCraft 1 pretty quick. My pivot towards games I played but never finished as a kid (well, I finished StarCraft, but not the Brood War expansion, which is basically the second half of the game) probably has something to do with how dogshit my Kickstarters have been lately, and those games tend to be pretty long. Not only were games longer in general back then, but if the games were short, I would’ve finished them back in 2003 and wouldn’t still be wondering what the last levels are like. For similar reasons, if something from my childhood made it into the backlog, it’s probably a strategy game, becuase twelve-year old Chamomile didn’t have much trouble putting together how to beat Sephiroth in Kingdom Hearts, so it was just a matter of building up the muscle memory and reflexes to pull it off.