Humble Choice – July 2023

New Month, new Choice – and this time I’m not quite sure if I’ll grab it even though there are plenty of great games available!

Okay, so, first up: I own Roadwarden and Merchant of the Skies already… I even wrote a review about Merchant of the Skies over here back in 2021, so uh, yeah.

Roadwarden is amazing. It’s incredibly chill and a feast for any fan of story-driven narrative experiences. It borrows a lot from RPGs and Visual Novels with background that are slightly animated and you rolling dices at times for different actions.

You step into the role of the titular “Roadwarden” in this foreign land.

It’s a risky and lonely journey but you embrace it while delivering messages, keeping the roads safe and burning human corpses to prevent them from arising as undead beings.

Frankly, it’s incredibly well-written in my opinion and the way it’s made is pretty!

I played the demo for hours and then recently got the full game from the devs and I highly recommend it. Had I not gotten a key out of the blue like this, I probably would have gotten it right now on the sale as it’s 33% off, at the moment.

Merchant of the Skies is a much shorter and more casual experience but I also really enjoyed that, as you may be able to tell from my review. The idea is that you’re a merchant on a skyship. You explore the skies, buy at low prices, sell at high prices, stock up and fulfil quests. It’s just incredibly chill and casual and I also highly recommend that game!

Yakuza 4 is great, from what I’ve heard. I haven’t played it yet. I own the games up to Yakuza 3 and I’m incredibly excited to eventually replay 0 again before making my way up to the other titles that are living in my backlog.

That said, if I were to skip this month’s Choice, I’d probably grab the bundle deal on Steam to complete my collection. There’s a bundle discount of 75% on the games and I’d be able to get Yakuza 4, 5 and 6 this way. That’s pretty great… for 15 bucks which is just a little above what Choice costs.

And I mean… I loved Yakuza 0’s story and really wanna replay it. It had me at the edge of my seat at times, I even cried a little when something happened. I don’t know much else about the other games apart from the fact that they’re equally popular if not more.

Okay, so, Outer Worlds… probably a great game, especially as it’s developed by Obsidian Entertainment and it’s sitting at mostly positive reviews… but hear me out: It’s so darn draining to play Open World games of this size.

Exploring this huge world, shooting enemies and having to do something in the story… idk. The sheer time commitment and energy planning required here is kind of a deal-breaker.

I’ll probably write a post on that at some point, especially so that I can just link to it whenever I rank an Open World game lower than other games in these posts here, to much controversy, just based on my own preference that I keep explaining like this.

Anyway, Ozymandias is probably a great game. It’s published by Goblinz Publishing who just kinda publishes everything that I like. I’d probably enjoy Ozymandias a whole lot but I just can’t be arsed to learn a new 4X/Grand Strategy game at the moment and hence I’d pass on this/rank it lower. Again, not a bad game. I’d imagine it’s great but 4X takes a while to learn.

Shotgun King… also not a bad game. It’s just on the lower end because of the many, many, many, many chess-based roguelikes I’ve played over the years. Frankly, I enjoyed the demo not all that much either, so I’m just passing on it. It’s just not my flavour of roguelikes.

Kraken Academy… is published by Fellow Traveller who are incredibly cool and publish a lot of great narrative experiences. That said, watching the trailer and reading about the game didn’t quite reveal to me what the game is about or how it plays. I’m kinda confused.

It’s an RPG, I think, and most of the reviews have low playtime, I guess, so that’s cool. I’m just not sure if I’d enjoy it… not to mention that it’s tagged with “Dark Humour” and that is always very hit or miss.

Last and possibly least, Temtem.

Frankly, I’ve enjoyed reading Bel’s posts on the game… but that was quite a while ago. I’m not sure how big the player base is at the moment if there are still cool people playing it, and how the state of the game is.

Friends only told me negative things about the game, so I’m really hesitant to place this anywhere near the upper half of the ranking. Apparently, they took all the tedious things from Pokémon-like games and kept them while throwing everything else away.

Look, if you like the game, power to you. I just don’t know if I have the spoons for it, personally.

Not to mention that Moonstone Island is releasing in Q3 of this year! And I’m hyped for that! Hence, that’s a clear recommendation to wishlist the game and buy it and all that!

Also, Cassette Beasts already is out since April and it’s currently 20% off on Steam. Oh, look, two other pokémon-like games that I personally enjoyed a lot more when I played the demos!

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Overall, this is a good month. I’m just unsure if I wanna go for the games here or if I just grab Yakuza 4 in the bundle deal together with Yakuza 5 and 6 for just a little above the price of this month’s choice.

Owning two out of eight games is kind of a dealbreaker since I don’t really care all that much about the other titles. I guess I’d be open to try The Outer Worlds but at the moment, I just don’t have the time for it anyhow.

This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.

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