Took a break from Hitman to check out more of those Humble Monthly titles I gain access to every month. This list is not ALL Humble monthlies from the last three months… but it’s mostly that. The ones that aren’t are ones I borrowed from a steam library I have family sharing with, haha. Basically, I only played these indie games because I got access to them for far under their selling price. I do this every once in a while and the rule is I have to play each game for fifteen minutes. I played all of these way longer than 15 minutes and while I didn’t really love any of them, the ones that i hated were at least hateable in interesting ways.
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ScourgeBringer - roguelike with some neon monolith style art (you know what I’m talking about. Where a game has a lot of neon and everything is an Ancient Ruin) and some fun animations… unfortunately I don’t like the combat at all. I would love this for a platformer dungeoncrawler but every screen is just a tiny arena battle vs some floating enemies and you just do air dashes around constantly and curse when you bump into the walls. Oh well.
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Crown Trick - haven’t got deep into this but it’s a turn based light strategy roguelike. Pretty mediocre writing, and there’s way too much of it in the first hour. Early content is very simple. Steam screenshots suggest that the later bosses get very cool and complicated but I’m not sue how long I gotta play before I get to that stuff. I may dive deeper into it but I feel like I’ve seen a lot of this stuff before in many of the turn based roguelikes I’ve enjoyed over the years, and I’m not super interested in diving deep into another one right now. Art is cute though. And I think I could see this being an accessible entry to the genre for someone who hasn’t done turnbased roguelikes before.
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Shapez - conveyor belt automation game where you cut up shapes and paint them and rotate their halves and quarters around and stick em back together. The shapes in your factories combine and stack like pieces of paper in a collage, which requires you to do a lot of waste management and processing if you want to optimize… like, if the game asks for the right half of a square, you can cut a square and spin the left half twice and now you have two right halves. Unfortunately, I got sick of it all real fast because it’s grindy as hell. I should have known something was up when the start of the tutorial said something like “warning! this is not an idle game!!”… the problem is that the volume of shapes each quest requires you to produce is so large that it sure as hell feels like it should be an idle game. It’s interesting to me that the game has no mechanics that prevent you from treating this like an idle game, building a small number of factories… and just waiting for them to finish producing the massive resource caches you need for progress.
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Morbid: The Seven Acolytes - 2D action game which seems to contain the influence of… wait for it… dark souls!!! I have played many of these over the last five years!! This one is pretty ok. I played about an hour before running out of energy and I did like what they were doing with the environments a lot. There’s crouch sneaking and hiding in tall grass… most of my experience has been setting up ambushes for fishmen. The art is fun in an “everything looks muddy and there are fish lying around everywhere” kind of way. The enemies are fun looking. I kept getting my ass kicked by giant red octopi with glaives and shoulder pauldrons.
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Rise to Ruins - finally tried this out! It’s kind of odd. It’s a village sim/tower defense/god game kind of thing. Bits of it feel a little like outsider art, or like a space alien trying to operate in the settlement-manager genre… the UI is very underbaked in very weird ways, for example. I’m having a good time with it though, will continue for a bit probably! I have played it longer than anything else on this list.
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Hokko Life - painfully exact Animal Crossing clone. you appear on an island, chop trees, plant flowers, and recruit animal people to come live in little homes on your island. Almost every feature of Animal Crossing is 1 to 1 replicated here so far, except perhaps for the house debt thing. Instead, you get your first house for free after repairing it and buy houses for additional townsfolk to live in for a strict cash-and-supplies payment. So maybe that means that this is the real ethical Animal Crossing choice after all?? It also has much more robust furniture customization features, and those are a big part of its advertising. This makes me think that it is also aimed at the people whose Animal Crossing sophistication yearns for new horizons, rather than only PC gamers who don’t have a Switch.
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Eldest Souls - I saw people joking about this one’s name/aesthetic online a few days ago and immediately went to my Humble Monthly page because it seemed like the kind of thing that service would give away. It was! Yeah, it’s a Soulsborne 2D top down thing and it seems to be entirely bosses only? I defeated the first boss in one go, and then died like 20 times to the second boss, so I put it down for a bit. The thing is, if it’s bosses only, that means it’s also ripping Titan Souls (2015). Like, when you play it, this is very explicitly just Titan Souls x Souslborne. I wonder if the Titan Souls devs care? I hope not–they released Death’s Door recently, which is an advancement of their skills and good and fun in a way Eldest Souls has so far failed to be for me. I may return to Eldest Souls for a bit, because there’s some stuff about it I’m still trying to figure out if I like, but if I don’t kill that boss quick then this is as far as I’m gonna get in this one.