Humble Freedom Bundle

I bought this bundle mostly because I wanted The Witness, and I was rather irritated that I already owned a ton of the really good games that were in it. So, while I have a stack of Steam codes to give away, I thought I’d give the games I wasn’t familiar with a try.

The Witness is a blend of atmospheric first-person exploration game and maze-ish puzzle-solving game, in that you find screens with the puzzles on them and then need to solve them to activate other screens. There are many, many puzzles. The fact that you can’t die (and there’s edge gravity!) and the viewpoint “snaps” to most puzzles screens when you start them makes the first-person parts tolerable, and the scenery is beautiful. I think my biggest complaint is that part of each puzzle is figuring out the rules to that puzzle—in a lot of cases, once I checked a FAQ to find the theme to an area, the puzzles there became easy, but guessing at how you were supposed to solve them was maddening.

Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble - A pseudo board game where you recruit a team of girls (you play the “queen” of their private school circle) and investigate happening around the school. There are half a dozen mini-games when you meet with people, including exposing their secrets, taunting them, fibbing to them and flirting with them. It actually has an overarching plot and characters with actual personalities, but I didn't find them engaging enough once the minigames lost my interest.

No Time to Explain Remastered - A puzzle-platformer that, true to its name, explains nothing. You from the future arrives with a super blaster cannon, but gets caught by a monster before he successfully tells you anything. So you need to fight (mostly navigate) through short levels, avoiding death and pursuing your alt-selves. The fact that 90% of navigation is blasting yourself around with the recoil of your weapon is one of those unexplained things, but an amusing twist. You have infinite lives on most stages, but only three lives per boss before you need to retry. There are a lot of levels and the concept is cute, but I lost interest quickly.

Monster Loves You - A text adventure in which you decide on the actions over the course of a lifetime as a monster. Depending on your choices and actions, you can win the respect of the other monsters and become a leader of your race, or dissolve into slime to nurture the future young. There are some cute vignettes and there’s a lot to be said for being totally in control of the story (the achievements are 14 of the different possible endings), but I don’t think I need to play it over and over.

Thirty Flights of Loving - A 15-minute first-person foray into the adventures of a small-time criminal, his girlfriend and his best friend. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

7 Grand Steps - A wheel and token-based board game, which simulates social climbers over the course of generations in a primitive society. It's a neat idea, but goes on for waaaay too long, as once you've got the strategy down (teach your children well, stay in the middle of the pack, grab as many beads as possible), you just keep doing the same things over and over with slightly different symbols and stories. This would work better if it was condensed to, say, a three-round game that had a more distinct plot arc. I'm sure that having to delve through forty generations of mostly the same stuff is realistic, but it stops being fun.

Girls Like Robots - A block-arranging puzzle game with the gimmick that, among other things, girls want to be next to robots, but don't want to be next to nerds. This would be utterly forgettable if it were just, “put pink next to silver and avoid blue,” but the skin and the framing stories make it cute.

Team Indie - This is a delightful puzzle platformer, starring a cat and an assortment of indie game heroes, each with a special ability / movement style. You need to “layer” each character’s actions on top of each other to get through levels and collect gems and treasures.

Super Hexagon - Dodge the incoming walls of a hexagon. That's it, that's all.

Rocket Birds: Hardboiled Chicken - Shoot, dodge and eventually jetpack as a soviet-fighting spy chicken. I found the controls to be non-intuitive, and once you got past the goofy premise, there isn’t much else going on. Not bad, not amazing.

Waking Mars - I suspect that “metroidvania” is the closest genre to put this in, as it involves traveling through caverns of Mars, planting alien seeds and avoiding hazards. Neat concept, but not strong enough to pull my attention from other things.

Hand of Fate - A card-based dungeon-crawl action-rpg…yeah, hybrid genre much? Let me try again. You sit down at a card table and are set to various challenges, choosing which direction to explore in, gathering equipment and gold, and fighting 3D arena battles against various foes.

Overall: There were a lot of solidly good games in this bundle (including Stardew Valley, which may become my new most-hours record-holder), and while I wasn’t up for a dozen hours of any of the above, they were pretty much all fun to try and some might be worth revisiting. I got my money’s worth.

Humble Sales Are Very Dangerous – Part Eight

Overlord - The evil overlord has awoken following his previous defeat and long slumber! Unfortunately, his powers are weak and his tower is in shambles. He'll need to lead his minions out personally to retrieve his artifacts and conquer some new lands. I...was expecting more of a sim/rpg hybrid here, and this is mostly a 3D action game with the minion-commanding as a puzzle mechanic. I'm much less enthused about that. (Also, I hadn't quite realized exactly how much the parody H-game Overwhored was riffing directly off of this, beat-for-beat, rather than just generic tropes.)

Pixel Puzzles Ultimate - I have no idea where this came from (presumably one of the many bundles, and I just got it separated in my notes), but it’s exactly what it purports to be: Jigsaw puzzles, and lots of them. You can adjust the number of pieces, the pictures, whether pieces lock into place, and even if you need to rotate the pieces at all. That’s said…the point of jigsaw puzzles is that you do them with your fingers. They’re not actually pleasant to do on a screen.

LiEat - A short rpg / puzzle adventure in three parts about a lie-eating dragon (get it?) named Efina and her constantly-lying companion Leo. As people lie, those lies manifest as monsters you fight for XP. Each part is short (about an hour) and self-contained, though figuring out which event flag you need to trip next can be irritating. Also, the art style is such that I could barely tell any of the characters apart. There are some clever ideas here and it's short enough to not outstay its welcome, but I also found the puzzles either too obtuse or too easy, and the story is often too pretentious for its own good.

World's Dawn - This was on a list of games to play after Stardew Valley, but it's very much a poor man's RPGMaker version of Stardew Valley. It does most of the same things, but half as well, with less variety and a clunkier interface. You only have a limited plot for your garden and can't arrange your property; there's no crafting system; the food/stamina system is clunkier; there's no collection sidequest; there's no fighting monsters; etc. It makes me want to go back and play more Stardew Valley instead.

BONUS: Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon - This was a bonus game that came along with the Bloodstained kickstarter. The full game is a homage to the Symphony of the Night and later Castlevania games by their original creators. This was by a different design team and was intended to be (and, I think, succeeds at) a homage to the Castlevania 3: Belmont’s Revenge style of game. 8-bit style of graphics, controls that feel like a NES game, multiple paths and character-switching (though with modern conveniences like save games and “casual” mode). Though the difficulty level would be fair, if not for the fact that the game defaults to a really stupid mouse+WASD scheme and won’t recognize my controller put me off—hopefully, that’ll get fixed in a patch, and then I’ll revisit it.