Category: Humble Choice

I try to write and schedule these Humble Choice reviews early in the month on the off-chance that someone reading it might decide they’d like to buy it based on my post, and while my ability to assess the Humble Choice is constrained by the fact that these are mostly games I haven’t played so I’m forming opinions based on the marketing in the Humble Choice itself, I do try to go over things with an eye towards answering the question of whether or not a hypothetical reader should buy the Humble Choice.

This month the answer is no.

It’s less pithy to elaborate, but of course this does come with the usual caveats that this depends a good deal on how much your tastes much up to my own. I do have to say, though, this seems like a very weak month for the Humble Choice. Not quite a total bust, but pretty damn close. Let’s take a look.

The Quarry Deluxe Edition is our first warning sign of things to come. This is not a video game, this is a CGI slasher flick with some quick-time events tossed in. It’s not a David Cage production so it doesn’t have David Cage’s problems with terrible, pretentious writing (nor, for that matter, the stench of him creeping on Elliot Page for five hours straight), but it’s still got the fundamental problem with the David Cage premise: Choose-your-own-adventure is not a good format for interactive storytelling. The original CYOA books (and related series’ like Fighting Fantasy) were only any good because they were a low-tech solution for an era in which Gameboys were expensive and struggled to deliver a narrative in limited memory space, and in the modern era you should either read a real book or play a real narrative-heavy video game on your phone. CYOA-style video games had an even smaller window in which their existence was at all justified, the brief era when the ability to deliver narrative via gameplay was so constrained by underdeveloped hardware and art that an FMV game whose only mechanics were CYOA could sell itself on immersion. Even then, they usually backed themselves up with adventure game puzzles.

Even when these CYOA games manage to pack in enough interesting decision points to be worth playing, it’s basically always the case that you could’ve taken the same decisions and built a better, more interactive game around them. It wouldn’t have looked as cinematic, but if that’s your critical selling point, then your art was supposed to be a movie. I get that people expect indie films (animated and otherwise) to be given to them for free on YouTube which is untenable for most projects, thus necessitating some kind of interactivity to be bolted on to haphazardly push the project into a medium that people will actually fucking pay for, but the end result is still an unwieldy Frankenstein.

Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes is the same thing concept with the same problem. Totally different plot, but it doesn’t even matter what the plot of these games is, if it’s CYOA is DOA.

Metal Hellsinger is the second big name title of the bundle after the Quarry. It’s an FPS with a heavy metal album cover style (similar to Doom) and an emphasis on metal music. I like all of these things decently well, but none of them are particularly a hook for me. If I had to play only games from this bundle for the whole month of October, Metal Hellsinger would probably be the one I spent the most time on, but if I ask myself if I would rather play this than Just Cause 2, the answer is no. And that’s with Just Cause 2 being easily the weakest one of the series (unless Just Cause 4 completely imploded somehow, haven’t played that one), but we’ll get to that in another post.

Rebel Inc: Escalation suffers from already being a PC adaptation of what is already my favorite mobile game. It’s a good strategy game, very good at escalating difficulty so that it doesn’t hit you with a wall but does demand mastery of complex systems if you want to beat the higher difficulties, and it doesn’t take too long to play, which makes it perfect for long bus rides. The PC version seems to be pretty much exactly the same but with some heavier weight graphics and also it looks like the only purchase option is to buy the whole thing all at once rather than unlocking things through piecemeal microtransactions (the mobile version lets you do either). I guess it’s neat that I have a version on PC now? And in fairness to my “is the October Humble Choice worth getting” question up front, the problem with this game isn’t that it’s bad, it’s that I already have it. On the other hand, though, the problem is also that this game is really good at being a mobile game. Things which are bonuses on my phone, like its very quick (for a strategy game) playtime, become drawbacks (if only minor ones) on PC. I’ll still play this game plenty on PC, I’m sure, but only because I already paid for the Humble Choice (I have an annual subscription) so I may as well, but, like, I already played this game all the time on my phone. It’s my go-to for a strategy game that won’t distract me for more than an hour or two. It’s not just that I already have it, it’s that if you want it yourself, I recommend getting it on phone over the PC version.

Spirit of the Island is a Stardew Valley-ish sort of game. It trades out the farm focus in particular for being on a tropical island and doing an assortment of different activities, which might make it more of an Animal Crossing thing. Either way, its big problem is that these games are big and I don’t have room for very many of them in my life, and I’ve already got Stardew Valley and Graveyard Keeper so that’s two strikes against it already. Spirit of the Island mostly seems like it’s trying to be a digital vacation to a generic tropical island, it even has a focus on rebuilding the island’s tourist industry, but the art really isn’t carrying that for me. It doesn’t really look like Hawaii or the Bahamas, it just kinda looks like a forest, and that’s a death knell to my interest in the game. I don’t usually care that much about graphics one way or the other, but for the “digital vacation” genre, it’s important you actually look like the place, and this looks like a generic video game. Plus, while it has some focus on the tourist thing, it also says you start out by making a farm, and while “agriculture and tourism” is hardly a weird economy for an island to have, if you’re trying to set yourself apart from Stardew Valley, probably best to lean on the second one.

Lords and Villeins is a medieval city builder whose main selling point is that you don’t manage individual villagers, but instead manage households and families. That is not a terrible selling point, but the mechanics are clearly derived from Prison Simulator, with the placement of individual walls and pieces of furniture. That worked for Prison Simulator because the prisoners don’t have any control over their environment, you do, so being in charge of the placement of each bed and showerhead is in theme and makes the place feel like a prison. Feudalism is not famous for the personal liberties granted to its subjects, but they can still decide where to put their own bed and whether or not to build a shed. Particularly with the theme of being a feudal lord managing households rather than individual villagers, my only interaction with their housing arrangements should be to slice the fiefdom up into plots of land, assign them to families, and declare what the annual tax on them shall be. Then it would be up to the families to figure out which part of the land should be tilled and which part should have the cottage built on it. Prison Simulator was a fun game, but that doesn’t mean its mechanics can be slapped onto any theme and you’ll get a good game out of it.

A Juggler’s Tale is a puzzle game so I immediately don’t care. For the “should you get the Humble Choice this month” question this response is particularly informed by my personal tastes, writing the entire genre off in a way that most people won’t, so maybe this game can save the bundle for some people. It certainly looks kind of charming. Not liking puzzle games to begin with, I couldn’t really tell you if the premise of controlling a puppet using strings is a good idea or not. At first glance it seems like it’s mostly just an annoying control scheme but I didn’t take a second glance, so hey, maybe it works out.

Mr Prepper is a game about building an underground bunker and…starting a nuclear war? A big rocket in an underground silo features heavily in the screenshots. I guess maybe the idea is to escape to Mars? Or else that you need to cause the apocalypse to avoid the embarrassment of having gone to all the trouble of building an elaborate apocalypse bunker and then the apocalypse never happens. The game doesn’t seem to have the level of self-awareness to make that joke, though. Like, it seems to be playing the prepper fantasy completely straight. That doesn’t necessarily mean the devs believe in prepping personally, but the prepper fantasy is just yet another variant on the delusion that some coming apocalypse will see the world near-instantly dominated by the fantasist’s preferred political regime either emerging from the ashes or universally adopted as a necessity to avert doom. Its main draw is that an apocalyptic event validates all of your very specific beliefs, and I find that inherently annoying – if you generally believe correct things, you will probably not need to imagine being validated one day, and you will definitely not need to invent doomsday scenarios as a key component of that fantasy. I don’t really want to spend 25 hours on a basebuilding game whose only selling point is that it uncritically embraces the viewpoint of someone petty and naive.

That is zero pickups this month, leaving the backlog at 160 on the dot. I guess it’s just as well, since I didn’t end up playing many games this month. The only game I even slightly considered was Spirit of the Island, and the more I looked at it the more confident I was it would end up being something like the Forest, where there’s a version of this game I would’ve liked but actually delivering the parts that interest me doesn’t seem to be a priority for the devs at all.

June’s Humble Choice has arrived. What’s in the box?

Ghostwire Tokyo is a game where you are a psychic in Tokyo and there are ghosts you need to bust. It’s defintely pitching itself as a digital vacation to Tokyo. I don’t know if I need another one of those when the Yakuza/Like A Dragon series is already like twelve games long, but the gameplay is clearly very different and the supernatural elements should give it a noticeably different style, so I’m happy to drop this in the backlog and get into it once I’m sick of Yakuza games.

Remnant: From the Ashes is described online as an action roleplaying game, although it doesn’t much look like the Diablo style from the screenshots. It’s some sort of RPG and has a cool-looking aesthetic and it’s only 10-15 hours long, so I’ll stick it in the backlog and give it a whirl even though I can’t really tell what it’s about, since the Humble Choice description spends two of its three paragraphs informing me that there is expansion content in the bundle, and that first paragraph mostly just tells me that the game is post-apocalyptic and has both solo and multiplayer co-op modes.

Curse of the Dead Gods is this month’s obligatory Roguelike, and as usual it needs either a killer hook or an extremely good reputation to get in the backlog. This one looks very trap focused, which is a new idea but is not overcoming my Roguelike fatigue.

I already have Honey I Joined A Cult. It’s Prison Simulator, but for running a cult. I’ve tried it a bit about two years ago and found it was a good foundation but clearly didn’t have a finished endgame, and then never went back to check if they fixed that. It’s still in the backlog.

Eternal Threads is a first-person puzzle game about time travel where you time travel through the days of a week to try and intervene in order to prevent some kind of disastrous fire. For some reason you can’t just prevent the fire, so instead you have to make sure none of the six people living in the burned house are trapped in it when it lights up. Cool concept, but I don’t like puzzle games. Eternal Threads is a sufficiently non-central example of a puzzle game that I could be talked into it with a recommendation (Case of the Golden Idol is technically a puzzle game, but I played it on recommendation and loved it), but barring that, I’ll give it a pass.

Grime is somewhat testing my limits for completion time for a game that has one really cool idea. Rollerdrome had one really cool idea, it was about five hours long, and I really liked it. Grime is 16 hours long according to How Long To Beat (by the Main Story+Extras but not 100% threshold, which is usually where I fall), and its one cool idea is that it’s a side-scrolling slicey-dicey sort of game where your weapons are alive and mutate in cool and creepy ways. I am intrigued but admittedly also nervous that I’ll play it through all 16-ish hours and then at the end find that it had worn out its welcome after 5 and I probably should’ve put it in Regrets then.

Turbo Golf Racing combines two genres I do not like in exactly the way the title suggests. Definitely a pass. Points for clarity, though.

Meeple Station pitches itself as Dwarf Fortress but in space. No, not like Rimworld, that’s an alien planet. No, not like Oxygen Not Included, either, that’s in an asteroid. Meeple Station is space space. You build a space station to support the needs of the meeples living in the station, make bank on trade, pirates show up to ruin your day, you ruin theirs back. These games are amazing when done well but awful when done poorly. I’m going to give this one a try, but much like Fobia I’m going to quit at the first sign of frustration. I don’t want this to be another Little Big Workshop.

That brings me up to 167 games total. A generally good trend after I confirmed that the Stronghold games after Crusader are bad. Well, Stronghold 2 is bad, and the general consensus is that the trend continues downhill from there (people are split on whether Stronghold 2 is bad, but they all agree it’s worse than Crusader and that it gets worse from there), and I decided to trust that consensus. I saw a tweet that says that every freelancer’s career slingshots back and forth from going to the movies at 2 PM to having overpromised so much work to so many people that you’re considering changing your name and fleeing to Peru, and I’ve been having a fleeing-to-Peru kind of month, but writing off three games in a series without playing them has gotten me caught up anyway. There’s a number of these “eh, I’ll at least check” sort of games in my backlog, so this might happen more in the future.

It’s the first Tuesday of May as I write this, so the new Humble Choice has dropped. What’s in the box?

Warhammer 40,000 Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters is a turn-based tactics game about Grey Knight space marines fighting some kind of Nurgle infection. Grey Knights are about the lamest part of the 40k universe, a Mary Sue faction with no new ideas but which tries to make itself specialer than the rest of the setting by fiat. The Grey Knights are just a space marine chapter and don’t need to be anything else except that, but their writers try to elevate them by making them a top secret branch of the Inquisition and use in-universe mouthpieces to talk about how much better the Grey Knights are compared to other space marines without actually coming up with anything they actually do that sets them apart. They’re space marines, they walk around in powered armor with chainswords and bolters and shoot monsters from heavy metal album covers, just like every other space marine chapter. Daemonhunters came with the bundle and it seems like it might be kinda like XCOM, so I will give it a try on the grounds that XCOM is great so a game trying to be like XCOM at least faintly has its heart in the right place, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out garbage. Particularly since it’s not clear how much influence the strategic layer of the game has, which always makes a big difference to how much I enjoy turn-based tactics games, and this one is already on notice for starring the Grey Knights.

Spiritfarer: Farewell Edition describes itself as a cozy management game about dying. It is a Sad Game, and I’ve heard that it’s good at it, and I’ll definitely give it a spin to see for myself.

Bendy and the Dark Revival already has one strike against it, which is that it is a sequel to a game I haven’t played. I’m not vitriolically opposed to jumping into the middle of a series, but generally only if there’s some major tonal or gameplay shift partway through (the Far Cry series starts at 2) or something. It’s also a lot easier if the game is less heavy on the overarching plot between games. If I feel like playing a Zelda game or a Final Fantasy game I’m happy to pick up whatever looks coolest right now and don’t particularly care if I’m playing them outside release order or especially if Final Fantasy X is technically a prequel to Final Fantasy VII in a dumb and convoluted way. But the Bendy games are telling a continuous story, so if I didn’t play Ink Machine, I already don’t want to drop into Dark Revival.

And on top of that, there’s a reason I didn’t play Ink Machine, and it’s that I don’t like mascot horror. I respect the first Five Nights for making an intense experience out of a minimum of assets, the second and third games polished up the formula and developed the lore to provide greater context to why these animatronics are so spooky, but even by the third and fourth games there were severe signs of aimless sprawl for the sake of keeping a profitable thing going and by the fifth its gameplay was completely dedicated to freaking out Markiplier live on camera and its story had disappeared completely down a rabbit hole of convoluted lore whose primary purpose was to bait MatPat into making Game Theory videos. And Bendy saw how much money that was making and decided to get in on it. It’s not devoid of creativity (I don’t know if it has anything to say about 1930s-40s era animation, but at the very least it has some genuine fascination with it), but its primary goal is to be consumed not by its end audience, but by content creators who will make Twitch streams and YouTube videos about it.

Operation Tango is a co-op puzzle solver and while its aesthetics look kind of cool, that is not a genre of game I want to play.

Windjammers 2 is advanced Pong, which is kind of hilarious but not something I’m super interested in sticking into the backlog. I might end up toying with it a bit as a time-waster when I’m too tired to work but don’t want to boot up something heavy like Yakuza or Borderlands, but I’m not even going to try to finish it.

Builder Simulator, like most of the Having A Job Simulators that come through the Bundle, is something I’m sticking in the backlog for when I run out of Far Cry games to play while listening to a podcast in the background (only two left!), but may or may not stick with depending on how well it hits the zen vibes in practice.

Behind the Frame: The Finest Scenery looks like another one of those games like Gris or Where The Water Tastes Like Wine where it’s selling itself purely on its aesthetics with the only contribution of the mechanics being to either temporarily impede the unfolding short film or else to make it possible that you will accidentally choose an unsatisfying ending to the short film. Probably it should’ve just been a short animated film, but people who want animation expect to get it for free from YouTube or television, whereas indie gamers expect to buy their indie games. The mechanics, from what I can glean, are about being a painter and you go out into the world to find missing colors so that you can return to your studio and do some of what is essentially paint-by-numbers. It’s not like the game would’ve been better if it said “buy a tablet and learn how to make real art, asshole,” so I’m not complaining that this is unrepresentative of the real creative process, but I am complaining that it sounds like the gameplay was tacked on as a vehicle for the story and theme in an experience that didn’t really need or benefit from being interactive at all.

The Invisible Hand is a video game where you play a stockbroker and get ahead by breaking tons of laws. It sounds like it might have a reasonably astute critique of the modern finance industry, but its primary gameplay is spreadsheet management and its frame story is that you are a terrible person interacting with abstract financial instruments to make a variable representing your funds go up, and that is too nihilistic for me to bother engaging with even if it is a reasonably accurate reflection of actual attitudes in that industry.

That still leaves me at 169, a smidge under 170, although two of the three new adds are solidly mid-size games in the 20-40 hour range (Builder Simulator is shorter). Pace has been slow lately, mainly because Borderlands games, and especially Borderlands 2 with all its DLC, are real big and I’ve mostly been playing those. Probably not about to accelerate much because I only recently started Borderlands 3 and also I’ve also started playing the Yakuza games, and even though I am unlikely to bother being especially thorough with all their little mini-games, they aren’t especially quick games even if mostly sticking to the main path. As usual, I am slightly concerned by the idea that there are games I want to play but will never get to, but there’s no cure for this except to play lots more video games (turns out you need money to live) or to accept fewer games on the list (but kicking them out of the list because number-goes-up doesn’t actually mean I don’t want to play them anymore), so, eh, whatever.