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Humble Bundle – Day of the Devs
Jan. 6th, 2016 05:34 pmThough the games collected in this bundle were a little random, for a cross-genre puzzle game fan (such as myself) it was a solid collection.
Escape Goat 2 - In the list of appropriately-named games, this tops the chart: You’re a goat and you need to escape [from a gothic castle full of puzzles and mystically-trapped sheep]. It’s a puzzle-platformer with a bunch of cute gimmicks, including a helpful mouse who moves in certain patterns and a magic hat that lets you swap places with it. There’s also some flexibility in what order you do things and you can opt to skip a branch if it frustrates you, which I always approve of.
Lumino City - The sequel to Lume, with the same style of artwork made of papercrafts and physical models. It's very pretty. Also, the puzzles are far less obtuse, and the game is set up in a much more linear, episodic sort of way--you travel from one part of the city to the next, solving people's problems as you go. There isn't much plot beyond "help people and find granddad", but it's not really the sort of game that requires more than that. Also, Lumi is very good about lampshading her crazy ideas / solutions to problems. Overall, it’s greatly improved over the first game. (And yes, I only got the pun in the title after saying it out loud.)
Hack 'n' Slash - A Zelda-style three-quarter view game featuring an adventurer named Alice and her sprite companion Bob. She's armed with a USB Sword that allows her to hack objects she encounters, such as blocks (to make them pushable), bushes (to set them on fire) and enemies (to make them harmless, helpful, or dead). As the game goes on, you get artifacts that let you see the object overlay of the game, and you get deeper into the game-hacking process by effectively editing subroutines. The hacking puzzles become really annoying programming puzzles by the end of the game--you never need to be particularly good at the slashing, but being able to actually figure out how to change an algorithm to break it but not break the world is critical. As should be unsurprising for a game you can actively hack, it's not the most stable of games. It soft-crashes reasonably often and just lets you go back in time, but it also properly crashed when I tried to exit the game a bunch of times. Important note: You can hack blocks to push a negative number of squares, which pulls them backwards. This is necessary to complete the game. And I wasted a ton of time--and got pretty frustrated--because I didn't realize it.
Costume Quest - Halloween goes terribly awry when monsters mistake your candy-corn-clad sibling for a real giant candy and cart them off. You must trick-or-treat to snag lots of candy, battle monsters in adorable "your costume becomes real" battle sequences, bob for apples and complete sidequests to stop the forces of Repugnia and get your sibling back. (The gender-neutral language is because you can play as either sibling, and the opposite-gender one gets kidnapped.) The battle scenes use timed hits but have relatively limited options otherwise--no items, and only one special move (that charges over time) per costume, which means that your battle options are limited and successfully executing the timed hits is critical. Semi-limited XP (as there appear to be limited monsters/quests, but you can actually backtrack once you get to the second area) but the candy you get from smashing trash cans and mailboxes respawns. (I dislike limited XP, because not only are you prevented from getting ahead of the difficulty curve, you're pretty much required to fight everything lest you end up permanently behind it.) There's about 5 hours worth of game, maybe a little more if you're slightly more thorough than me, and I think that's a good length for what it is.
Mercenary Kings - I think this was the only game in the bundle I actively disliked, and I don't think that's because it was a bad game so much as it was optimized for different things than I necessarily would. It's a side-scrolling action platformer divided up into missions, with a playstyle that reminded me of classics like Bionic Commando or the Contra series, but the number of buttons really demands a controller (the keyboard layout is NOT intuitive) and the general layout isn't appealing to me. (Modern-day military isn't really a theme that appeals to me in any media, it occurs to me to note.)
Overall: Day of the Devs was a REALLY solid bundle and I totally got my money's worth, with only one clunker in the bunch.
Escape Goat 2 - In the list of appropriately-named games, this tops the chart: You’re a goat and you need to escape [from a gothic castle full of puzzles and mystically-trapped sheep]. It’s a puzzle-platformer with a bunch of cute gimmicks, including a helpful mouse who moves in certain patterns and a magic hat that lets you swap places with it. There’s also some flexibility in what order you do things and you can opt to skip a branch if it frustrates you, which I always approve of.
Lumino City - The sequel to Lume, with the same style of artwork made of papercrafts and physical models. It's very pretty. Also, the puzzles are far less obtuse, and the game is set up in a much more linear, episodic sort of way--you travel from one part of the city to the next, solving people's problems as you go. There isn't much plot beyond "help people and find granddad", but it's not really the sort of game that requires more than that. Also, Lumi is very good about lampshading her crazy ideas / solutions to problems. Overall, it’s greatly improved over the first game. (And yes, I only got the pun in the title after saying it out loud.)
Hack 'n' Slash - A Zelda-style three-quarter view game featuring an adventurer named Alice and her sprite companion Bob. She's armed with a USB Sword that allows her to hack objects she encounters, such as blocks (to make them pushable), bushes (to set them on fire) and enemies (to make them harmless, helpful, or dead). As the game goes on, you get artifacts that let you see the object overlay of the game, and you get deeper into the game-hacking process by effectively editing subroutines. The hacking puzzles become really annoying programming puzzles by the end of the game--you never need to be particularly good at the slashing, but being able to actually figure out how to change an algorithm to break it but not break the world is critical. As should be unsurprising for a game you can actively hack, it's not the most stable of games. It soft-crashes reasonably often and just lets you go back in time, but it also properly crashed when I tried to exit the game a bunch of times. Important note: You can hack blocks to push a negative number of squares, which pulls them backwards. This is necessary to complete the game. And I wasted a ton of time--and got pretty frustrated--because I didn't realize it.
Costume Quest - Halloween goes terribly awry when monsters mistake your candy-corn-clad sibling for a real giant candy and cart them off. You must trick-or-treat to snag lots of candy, battle monsters in adorable "your costume becomes real" battle sequences, bob for apples and complete sidequests to stop the forces of Repugnia and get your sibling back. (The gender-neutral language is because you can play as either sibling, and the opposite-gender one gets kidnapped.) The battle scenes use timed hits but have relatively limited options otherwise--no items, and only one special move (that charges over time) per costume, which means that your battle options are limited and successfully executing the timed hits is critical. Semi-limited XP (as there appear to be limited monsters/quests, but you can actually backtrack once you get to the second area) but the candy you get from smashing trash cans and mailboxes respawns. (I dislike limited XP, because not only are you prevented from getting ahead of the difficulty curve, you're pretty much required to fight everything lest you end up permanently behind it.) There's about 5 hours worth of game, maybe a little more if you're slightly more thorough than me, and I think that's a good length for what it is.
Mercenary Kings - I think this was the only game in the bundle I actively disliked, and I don't think that's because it was a bad game so much as it was optimized for different things than I necessarily would. It's a side-scrolling action platformer divided up into missions, with a playstyle that reminded me of classics like Bionic Commando or the Contra series, but the number of buttons really demands a controller (the keyboard layout is NOT intuitive) and the general layout isn't appealing to me. (Modern-day military isn't really a theme that appeals to me in any media, it occurs to me to note.)
Overall: Day of the Devs was a REALLY solid bundle and I totally got my money's worth, with only one clunker in the bunch.
