Humble Choice – January 2024

Remember when I said I would try to get the Humble Choice posts out earlier? Well, it’s January 31st and exam season is here, so I only just got some time to write this post… Next month is a new month. New Month, new me. I’ll do better.

So, this month’s Choice has quite a few interesting titles in there and I ended up grabbing it. There are also a few titles in there that I don’t really care all that much about… and one that I already own. Either way, here’s my ranking based on my interest in the games.

This doesn’t mean that one game is better or worse than another but rather just shows how much I’m looking forward to trying out each title, if that makes sense.

Ranking

Rank	Game	Developer	Genre
1	OTXO*	Lateralis Heavy Industries	Action Roguelike, Top-Down Shooter, Indie
1	Roguebook	Abrakam Entertainment SA	Indie, Roguelike Deckbuiler, Strategy, Card-Based
2	Twin Mirror	DON’T NOD	3D, Narrative Experience with choices
2	The Red Lantern (currently 82% off)	Timberline Studio	Indie, 3D, 1st Person, Exploration, Narrative Experience with choices
3	Two Point Campus	Two Point Studios	Indie, Simulation, Management, Tycoon?
4	Aragami 2	Lince Works	3rd Person, Stealth, Action
7	Hell Pie	Sluggerfly	3rd Person, 3D Platformer
8	Marvel’s Midnight Suns Digital+ Edition	Firaxis Games	Turn-Based Tactics, RPG, Deckbuilding?

*own this already, bold text: stuff I actually like

Marvel’s Midnight Suns

Let’s start with the last entries there. This month’s choice has a lot of high value games in there… and Marvel’s Midnight Suns definitely raises the worth of this month’s Choice. The standard game costs 60€ already but we get the Digital+ Edition through this month’s Choice which is worth 80€. On top of that, we also get a skin for Doctor Strange but I don’t know who Doctor Strange is.

I fell out of love with Marvel a long time ago. I used to be a huge fan of the movies from the original Spiderman and the Iron Man movies to the original Hulk movies and even the first Captain America film. I liked a lot of it. I used to be big into X-Men and even more into Fantastic Four. I never got into comics but I did watch a fair few of the cartoons as a kid.

With all that said, I just have no connection to the franchise anymore. The movies don’t seem all that great. I watched the new Spiderman movies with my partner and her sister and they were just really predictable. Spoilers, I jokingly said that it’d be a shame if “this Mysterio guy turns out to be a hoax and he is actually the villain of the movie for social media or whatever” and I never thought that would actually happen… but it did. During the credits, I then jokingly said “what if he just doxes Tom Holland now?” and HE DID!

So, that happened… but it happened with other movies, too… and I also kinda just lost touch with everything surrounding the movies because they just aren’t that great. There are some dramatic moments that get interrupted by silly jokes and weird cut-ins and whatnot. Marvel is pulling Netflix there.

But this isn’t the movies. This is a turn-based Tactics game with Deckbuilding… but I just really cannot connect to the franchise and thus I really don’t see why I would play this over other tactics games, including Bad North (which I’m enjoying a ton) or Floppy Knigths or Tyrant’s Blessing.

And with all that said, the trailers are just cinematics. I don’t see gameplay. The screenshots I could find are kinda bland. I don’t really know what the game is like, so I’m not interested in playing it anytime soon. If someone were to say “hey, this is actually great and you’d like it”, I’d try it out but for now, it goes into the list of keys to give away… or possibly the pile of games to eventually play.

Sorry for the rant.

Hell Pie

When it comes to 3D Platformers, I’d argue that I like them. I suck at certain ones, sure, but I also really enjoy the creative ways in which smaller developers these days try to bring the genre back to live.

In recent years, we’ve had a few very cool games in the genre release to modern computers, including Tinykin, Boti: Byteland Overclocked and The Pathless. I’ve also more recently played SM64 again on my N64 while I was at my parents’ place.

There are great 3D Platformers out there and as such, I’m not at all hesitating about Hell Pie because of the platforming aspects of it… but rather because of the humour.

I don’t mind humour, despite being German, but much rather, I find it difficult to gauge whether a game is for me or not when it is tagged with “humour” on Steam.

More than anything, I’ve looked at a review for Hell Pie because it did look interesting and it appears to be the case that the game actually does feature a lot of potty humour… you know very childish jokes… Honestly, that ruins it for me.

As an example, I did enjoy Breathedge to a degree but the “humour” (if you can call it that) really ruined it for me. Frequent fart jokes and jokes about “woke SJWs” or whatever really, really didn’t have a place in the game. The game can be funny, morbidly so in fact, but it frequently overstayed its welcome and as such, I just really disliked it in the end because of that.

According to Good is a Geeek, the humour is refreshing in a world of super serious games but personally, I don’t see how crude and gross humour with animal dismemberment and poop jokes and whatnot is actually all that good. I feel like you move on past that at a certain age and as such, this game is just not for me.

Aragami 2

So, yes, I can count and, no, it is intentional. I wanted to really clarify that Aragami 2 and the other games are good and that I find them better than the other two, so there is a gap with hypothetical other games of varying degrees of qualities and features that make me wanna play them. You just can’t see them. Only highly intelle- kidding.

The first Aragami game was an interesting game, for sure. It combined the ninja aesthetic with stealth gameplay (duh.) and added some action into the mix. It felt good and it was fun and as such Aragami 2 is probably also fun.

But all that said, I’ve heard through the grapevine that friends of mine (who I trust) disliked some aspects of it, including the newly added multiplayer which felt weird, the janky hand-to-hand combat with parries and whatnot, as well as the incredibly repetitive nature of missions later on in the game.

The game has 40-odd missions, apparently, and at some point you’re just done. Keep games short, please. Don’t add filler! Thanks!

All that said, I still am looking forward to playing this, though, because I do think that the aesthetic and the general game design choices made are pretty good and appealing to me. I do wanna play Aragami again at some point on stream, and to then follow it up with Aragami 2 sounds like a great idea.

Two Point Campus

I really like Tycoon-type games and Simulations with lots of building and management and all that stuff. I used to play a lot of tycoon games online that were made using flash but… yeah… rip flash.

With that in mind, I never actually played Two Point Hospital which I own thanks to a previous Humble Choice month… but it did look fun!

Two Point Campus is much of the same but with a school instead of a hospital, so I am looking forward to trying this one out. I’ve seen MarginWalker2k2 play it on stream quite a while ago and as such, I do think I will enjoy it in my own time sometime.

There’s not much else to be said here. There is humour in the game, too, but it’s not crude or gross or anything. Almost as if you didn’t have to rely on shock humour (like pulling out goat horns from alive goats) to get a laugh or reaction out of someone… hmmm

The Red Lantern

This one is 80% off at the time of writing this, so if you wanna check it out for yourself without actually getting this month’s Choice, now’s your chance to get it for a few bucks in this economy.

Anyhow, this one is a narrative-driven dog-sledding game about survival where you and five doggos try to find your way home. I’ve heard it’s good and short from some people and that it is an interesting walking simulator. You don’t really “play” the game but it’s more like a movie that you watch because you don’t actually have all that much control over stuff.

The reason why the game isn’t higher is that it suffers from a rather big issue: The wording of choices.

I’ve seen it in a few other games, actually, that you’re presented with a choice or two but the wording makes it difficult to understand what you’re actually going to do if you select that choice. There is a review from January 16th on Steam by someone named “SunsOfOld” who lists a few examples, including encountering a Caribou that you may wanna hunt – but it survives the first shot and as such, you have the choice of shooting it again or not doing so.

So, just like SunsOfOld, I’d imagine that we can let it bleed out (which seems more cruel) or we shoot it again (to end its suffering at the cost of bullets). Instead, the game actually has you just leave it to die in the wild, wasting a bullet when you say that you won’t shoot it again.

Stuff like this can be difficult. There is also a roguelite element apparently and again, SunsOfOld (as well as other folks) did find it rather frustrating.

I do like roguelikes, don’t get me wrong, but I do not know if a narrative experience like this works with the roguelike element. Whereas your deaths lead to you progressing through dialogues and quests in games like Hades, this one sort of has you die over and over again until you learn how you are supposed to play the game so that you can eventually enjoy the story.

That seems like an odd choice. I will play the game eventually to form my own opinions. It looks really cute, too, so that’s a plus. But I will have tempered expectations.

Twin Mirror

Speaking of choices, DON’T NOD made a bunch of great games and I heard through the grapevine that this one is a let-down in comparison to other games, so I will have very low expectations of the story. I won’t expect Tell Me Why or Life is Strange levels of writing… Rather, I will just go in with very low expectations and see how the story actually unfolds.

The premise seems interesting, though, with you investigating a crime in a small town.

For anyone that doesn’t know, DON’T NOD makes a lot of narrative experiences and actually also publishes quite a few cool indies – and they made a series of games called “Life is Strange” as well as another title named “Tell Me Why” and they’re great, honestly.

Life is Strange had me at the edge of my chair a fair few times the first time I played it. Aside from that, the games do often introduce some sort of supernatural element to the game as well ranging from telepathy, time travel and telekinesis to other stuff. It’s interesting how these mechanics influence the actual storytelling.

On top of that, you are often presented with tough choices… really tough ones… and there are different endings that you get depending on what you do which is a good thing.

There are games, after all, like TellTale’s The Walking Dead or other games, that do act as if you have certain choices to make but in the end, you always reach the same road just a bit differently. DON’T NOD does that differently. Which is good.

Good games. Like.

Roguebook and OTXO

I wrote about Roguebook’s demo a while ago, and I did find it quite interesting. I played the demo again when it came out another time and noticed some issues with it but nothing that patches couldn’t possibly fix.

Anyhow, Roguebook is a roguelike-deckbuilder that has a squad-system in place, kind of. You command two characters and have to work together, exploring the world, filling out a map, managing resources and getting stronger to defeat the legends of the titular Roguebook.

Some issues that the game’s demo had was a lack of speed-up options that would enable to speed up the overworld animations. At the same time, some stuff seemed incredibly broken in the game… so balancing was required at the time. All that said, the game has been out for two years now and I’m sure they’ll have fixed the most glaring issues, right?

Oh and this game has Richard Garfield on board, the guy that made Magic: The Gathering. So, that’s cool!

As for OTXO, I don’t have much to say. If you enjoy a cryptic story, a great soundtrack and blood-pumping fast-paced Hotline Miami style top-down shooter goodness with roguelike mechanics, OTXO is the right game for you. I wrote a more in-depth review on it over here.

It’s really good.

Summary – and check out these other reviews by other people

This month’s nice. I’m grabbing it. I wanna formulate my own opinions on The Red Lantern and Twin Mirror, so looking forward to doing that eventually. I’m really excited to play Roguebook again but in full this time around, as well as Aragami 2 and The Red Lantern.

Anyhow, I wanted to also link to other reviews by folks again, so look at these cool people that wrote reviews for this not as late as me:

Naithin quite on the contrary to my opinions did actually really like the game and would recommend it! He explains it really well, too, so go check that out!

Paeroka wrote a review over here on Two Point Campus where she also compared it to Two Point Studio’s other game. Pae knows a lot more about these type of games than me, so highly recommend reading her views on it. Pae also wrote a piece on Twin Mirror, so give that a read, too, while you’re at it.

For Roguebook, you can check out Stalking Vengeance’s thoughts over here. He claimed that the game works, although just barely. It’s fun but lacks a bit of that excitement that other games have.

And well, last but certainly not least, Krikket wrote a lovely summary post here with all the different people’s opinions and her owns and even mine on the various games. So go give her a read. Krikket also writes a lot of amazing reviews and I’d give her blog a good review if I were to review blogs… in my head that sounds like a compliment, so take my word for it.

This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.

If you see this article anywhere other than Indiecator.org then this article has been scraped. Please let me know about this via E-Mail.