A little late again with this one but this month’s Choice is pretty great – and yes, I did grab it, and here’s why!
| Rank | Game | Developer | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Golden Light | Mr. Pink | Indie, Roguelike, First-Person, Survival Horror, Action |
| 1 | Jurassic Park Evolution 2 | Frontier Developments | Simulation, Management, Tycoon thing with Dinosaurs |
| 1 | Hero’s Hour | ThingOnItsOwn | Indie, Roguelike, Turn-Based, Strategy RPG, RTS |
| 1 | Monster Crown | Studio Aurum | Indie, JRPG, Collectathon, Pokémon-like |
| 2 | Demon Turf | Fabraz | Indie, 3D Platformer |
| 2 | BIOMUTANT | Experiment 101 | Post-Apocalyptic Open World, Action RPG |
| 3 | Edge of Eternity | Midgar Studio | Turn-Based JRPG |
| 3 | Rogue Lords | Leikir Studio, Cyanide Studio | Indie, Turn-Based Roguelike, Dark Fantasy, RPG |
This time around, I decided to go with a typical Top 3 sorta thing where “Rank 1” is games that I’m really excited for which are primarily why I’m grabbing this month’s Choice with “Rank 2” being “nice to have” and “Rank 3” being a title that is still cool but I’m not sure if I’ll play it anytime soon for reasons I’ll get into later.
Let’s start with Golden Light: Golden Light is an Indie Roguelike-Horror-Survival game where you try to save your loved one who’s fallen to the pits of some sort of purgatory. I’m not really all that sure about what exactly is going on but the mystery kinda makes me wanna dive deeper into the game.
You eat weapons and weird things and get bonuses for it. There are rules in place for different actions and frankly, it has got clunky combat but it’s clunky with a purpose. It’s difficult. It’s intense. I’m not good with Horror…
…and yet, I wanna dive deeper into it, weirdly enough. Is this about loss? Is this about depression? What does the story have to offer? No idea but I’m here for it.
Jurassic Park Evolution 2 is probably great. I didn’t even know that it released already and I loved Jurassic Park Evolution 1, so… Hell yeah! I got the first title in May of 2020 and played it for maybe two hours before not having time to play more and then getting distracted… but I wanna play more of it. It’s just my kinda jam.
And well, once I played more of the first game, I’m looking forward to playing the second game and hopefully it’s gonna be nice.
Just… Dinosaurs. You take care of dinosaurs, manage them, also have to manage funds and research. You modify them ‘saurs and make it so that they live longer or can deal with the cold better or other stuff… but you also have choices to make. You might turn this into a tourist trap but it’s dangerous if a dinosaur gets out. Similarly, scientists and the military (if I remember correctly) are also interested in the ‘saurs, so you gotta manage your favour with all the people that are into sauce, y’know?
Hero’s Hour is an interesting title with easy to get into but hard to master mechanics that require a lot of braincells that I don’t have.
I streamed a bit of it on my Twitch channel and it was hard for me to do the streaming thing on top of paying attention to all the enemies, the difficulty of combat, the management aspects of the game, as well as loot and resources I got.
My two braincells were rubbing really hard against each other and the sparks created by this were pure joy.
I really like Hero’s Hour and I already own it on either Epic Games or Amazon Prime Gaming… or both. But now I have it on Steam as well which means easy access to screenshots and achievements and stuff. More than anything, I’m just super excited to play necromancers and other heroes that summon things. It’s really fun!
Monster Crown is a fun Pokémon-like game… in fact, it’s one of the most Pokémon-like Pokémon-likes I’ve played in recent years with music that seems like it’s straight out of an unreleased Pokémon game and interesting combat, to say the least.
It’s possibly not quite as in-depth as Pokémon is since different types just don’t interact much with other types of monsters… but you can also breed them and create new subspecies that have their own strengths. Similarly, there’s a level-cap and team-exp and other features that you can turn off… and the monster designs are amazing.
What’s less great is how difficult the game gets at times with you losing a lot of items if you lose combat, meaning that you need to store items in an item bank and always manage risks and rewards when you go out exploring. At the same time, this gives the game a bit of an edge that was unexpected but welcome.
Similarly, some of the art (as seen in the screenshot above) looks less great but the majority of the game has a cute pixel-art style and very cool Monster Sprites, so I’m okay with the weird sprite art for humans.
Now… these following titles are – in my opinion – nice to have. My reasons for liking these are possibly somewhat shallow… don’t judge me.
That being said, Demon Turf is a 3D Platformer and I’m not good with 3D Platformers. In fact, it says on the steam page that it has humour but I’m not a fan of that, either.
BUT it’s 2D Sprites… in a 3D Environment.
That’s all. I love that. Gimme more of that. There are so many games out there that have this sorta thing going and I love it. I’d play the most frustrating shit in the world, probably, if it had 2D Sprites in 3D Environments.
But most of the ones I played from Rainbow Billy to Tinykin and Rogue Genesia were amazing, so I by proxy think that this one will be amazing, too, once I get to it.
As previously stated, shallow reasons.
BIOMUTANT? – Furries.
I’m not a furry but… the furry community is probably among of if not the most wholesome and inclusive community I got to know on Twitch and hence, I have good connotations with it. Recently, I played Dust: An Elysian Tail and I loved it.
So, when I saw some furry streamers play BIOMUTANT it looked great! Stunning, actually. Just so fucking pretty.
Buuuuuuuut it’s not in Rank 1 because I know for a fact that the camera controls and the movement are flawed. One may get used to the camera controls according to a streamer I trust in terms of games and stuff… but the actual combat apparently (at the time of its release) felt like it was always delayed, as if attack combos were just added into a queue with barely any time to react and do something else and stuff… and that could possibly be frustrating unless they fixed it.
Anyway, I’m gonna play this eventually… maybe even this year. I’m looking forward to it.
Edge of Eternity is a game I’ve heard about but I just can’t really relate to it all that much. It’s pretty and it’s a JRPG, I think.
Steam Reviews say that it’s got this “materia system from FF7” but I HAVEN’T PLAYED FF7… SO WHAT’S MATERIA?! WHAT THE HECK? ELABORATE!
Jokes aside, I googled and it’s apparently a magic gem system of sorts where you enhance abilities with monster drops.
The game apparently feels clunky. Apparently, the camera controls are weird. Apparently, it’s good for specific reasons and it’s bad for other reasons and it’s mixed in terms of reviews. The people that played it a lot (or even through it), loved it.
The ones that complain didn’t even get past an hour… apart from this one review that spent 54 hours on the game at the term of writing their review and a total of 108 hours at the time of writing this. This person wrote a negative review and their paragraphs are very long and I just couldn’t bring myself to read it all. Sorry.
Anyway, what I’m trying to get at is… I don’t really care about Edge of Eternity but friends told me it’s good, so I redeemed it and I’ll probably play it… eventually.
Last but not least, Rogue Lords is also there.
Frankly, according to reviews, it’s incredibly slow deckbuilding-action with not enough deckbuilding.
And a lot of it is slow because of how you move from point A to point B… and I kinda lost interest despite it having “rogue” in the name. You’d think I’d like that but I’m sure it’s actually a story reason and not a genre reason, right?
Look, the thematic is great and I’d love it probably but I don’t like the art style and hence I’m not super interested in it until I read more about it.
Alrighty, to sum it all up. There’s some really good games here and I’m looking forward to playing them. Other games are just added to backlog and I’ll possibly write about them again in the future.
Did you grab this month’s Choice? Let me know! Also, if you have any opinions on some of the games, let me know!
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.
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