Humble Choice – July, 2024

Oh, damn, it’s already the end of July and… oh look, you can still grab, this month’s Choice on Humble Bundle! My post isn’t completely irrelevant!

This month’s Choice features a plethora of interesting titles that I felt a bit mixed about, so I waited a bunch but I did think that I was gonna grab it… and then auto-renewal happened and I am not opposed to the idea of keeping the games, essentially, after thinking long and hard about this. So no refund this time!

Anyhow, I’m skipping the devs and stuff because I do link to the Steam Page and you can see that there… instead… how about just my personal rank based on interest from me + the game name (and link) + a genre-description of what it looks like to me?

I’ll try this, I might stick to this.

Rank	Game	Genre
1	Zoeti	Turn-based roguelite deckbuilder
2	Ghostrunner 2	Fast 3D-Platforming Action-Adventure
3	A Plague Tale: Requiem	Narrative experience with action and stuff
4	Sticky Business	Casual indie stickershop sim
5	Heretic’s Fork	hellish deckbuilding tower defense game?
6	Starship Troopers: Terrain Command	Starship Troopers RTS game
7	Figment 2: Creed Valley	Cute Puzzle Exploration game
8	Hyperviolent	Retro-esque boomer shooter

Much of the Same?

So, as per usual, it’s a bit of a colourful mix but nothing really stands out on its own.

Yes, A Plague Tale Requiem and Ghostrunner 2 give a bunch of value to the whole thing… Still, as per usual there is some type of roguelite deckbuilder in there, something casual, something action-heavy, some more experimental titles.

Then there is something story-based, I guess… but I don’t know, bundles have been “mid” lately and this one just barely got me interested enough – even with me probably giving away a bunch of stuff.

You had me at roguelite!

I’m putting Zoeti at the top here because the art style is cute, the game is published by Akupara Games (and those guys know their stuff!) and it’s a roguelike deckbuilder… and I have a lot of those… which is not a bad thing… that just means I play a lot of them.

Zoeti is a turn-based roguelite that features a deck of playing cards used to create combos and activate skills in the heat of battle.

Abilities cast in battles are associated with a poker hand and as such, you upgrade, purchase or quest for new skills for your runs, discovering synergies and trying to overcome these harder and harder fights…

Now, this sounds like Ballatro but without any of the deck-manipulation, right? Well, apparently not so much. I’ll still rank it highly because I have a big interest in playing this game but SV over at cubic creativity wrote a post complaining about it, as he tends to do, so perhaps there’s some extra insight for any of y’all that actually want to hear thoughts about games uttered by people that actually played the games.

Cyberpunk Ninja

I loved Ghostrunner 1. So, looking forward to playing Ghostrunner 2! I think I wrote a post at some point either about Ghostrunner being available in a choice or about the demo for it. No idea! But that said, if I didn’t write about it yet, then here’s a quick rundown:

You slice and dice through enemies in a 3D environment, making use of dashes, sprints, jumps, wallrunning, parries, slashes, projectiles, etc. to get through to the end of the level and at times kill a bunch of enemies. The soundtrack is fantastic. The graphics are very nice to look at, just like Tom Ellis, and I really enjoyed the difficulty of the first game, on top of it encouraging me to play it more by showing how fast friends of mine got through the levels.

Ghostrunner 2 is probably just more of the same with an expanded story, new mechanics and some interesting concepts based on the trailers I’ve seen… So looking forward to this one!

But also, I’m not sure how “indie” it is, so I just had to put it after Zoeti and I didn’t wanna put them on the same rank as I often do because it then confuses me about whether the next game is rank 2 or rank 3 now… Anyway, I digress.

Rats, Rats, Rats…

A Plague Tale is a series of games that are critically acclaimed. I never played them. I know there’s rats in them. I like rats. I have no clue.

The first game, A Plague Tale: Innocence, was free on Epic Games a while ago and I grabbed it but never installed and played it. I’ll eventually get to it, I guess. That said, if you want to grab the first game at a huge discount, it’s currently 80% off on Steam!

Do you need to have played the first to play the second? I think so. I don’t know. I probably won’t play it until I’ve played the first but that’s just me. I think games, even sequels, should be enjoyable on their own, even when you didn’t see the story of the first game. In that way, there’s probably a flashback or something to the first game or some form of summary… if this game is any good, that is. Either way, I’ll eventually know and then I’ll write about it here! Huzzah!

That’s one sticky penny!

Sticky Business was something I was aware of as a game. It looked hella cute and I played a demo a while back. It was announced during the wholesome direct that I watched a while back and I wanted to play it for sure as something casual and relaxed to wind down with.

…anyway, now I have it. Nice.

I don’t know much about it but I’m sure it’s as cute as it looks. I’ll play it eventually.

Hell yeah!

I know that this is the lower half but that doesn’t mean that these games are necessarily all that bad. Uhm… but just based on the store page, I don’t really know what game Heretic’s Fork is but I’ll probably play it sometime soon since it appears to be a deck-building-based tower defense game…?

Reviews are very positive on Steam, so it can’t be that bad, right?

It’s just that aside from the general aesthetic, I the store page didn’t convey enough to me here. Oh, also, reviews say it’s roguelike. If it wasn’t for that, this’d be lower. I’m biased, I know.

Spiders!

I have no idea about starship troopers or clones or uh that stuff, so I have no idea what this is about. Is this Star Trek or Star Wars?

Anyway, there appear to be spiders, so this is low. I’d be super interested in the game since it’s an RTS and I miss Starcraft 2… :(

But spiders. No. Never. I mean, alien insect-like spiders but oof still bad.

I might still play it though. Perhaps the game will teach me Clingon so that I can communicate with people better.

Last But Not Least

I’m getting drained, honestly, but I wanna get this post out today. I haven’t written posts in a while and I really have nothing to say about both of these games.

Figment 2 is probably cool but I’d like to play the first game and I don’t own it, I don’t think, so that’s something. I’m not sure what the games are about because they’re tagged and described as “action adventures” but that’s the least-convincing combination of two words… Ever.

Like, that could be literally anything from Monster Hunter to Hollow Knight.

Anyway, Hyperviolent is bad, I’ve heard. There’s a ton of cool Boomer Shooters out there but this one is in Early Access and hence unfinished. Why should I play this one and not just Serious Sam? I literally have all of the games up to SS4. Why should I play this one and not just Doom? Like, the OG games, or Duke Nukem or any other games. Even modern takes on the genre like Immortal Redneck and Forgive Me, Father are doing a better job at conveying fast movement and like… boomer shooter vibes I guess. I don’t know.

SV wrote a nice review on Hyperviolent, so check that out.

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All in all, I don’t think that this is a bad month… but it’s also not good, necessarily. I’m mostly grabbing this month because I wanted to try out Sticky Business, Ghostrunner 2 and Zoeti. Plague Tale is here for Completion’s sake and uh Heretic’s Fork is indie, I guess, but the others are just filler which is… whatever, I guess.

Hope you enjoyed this! I need to type posts out quick since the summer heat is killing me in my attic-flat.

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.