Humble Bundle - Square Enix 3

I’ve been sitting on reviews for this bundle for years, and I think it’s finally time to admit that The Last Remnant is the only thing in it I really care about that’s left. After years of sitting on the Just Cause Collection (a series of 3D action games), Murdered: Soul Suspect (a murder mystery) and Front Mission Evolved (a robot fighting game), I’ve decided I’m not interested in the time or hard drive space necessary to try and cull them.

There were two games in this set I particularly enjoyed:

Gyromancer - It's Puzzle Quest. That's all. There's a plot about pursuing rebels into an enchanted forest, and you rotate the gems to make the matches rather than swapping them, but yeah, it's just Puzzle Quest. I'm okay with that! I played a few hours and I may go back and play more later.

Yosumin! - A casual game sorta based on Othello, where you need to match the colored squares in four corners to capture everything contained in that rectangle. Everything is variations of that, and the quest mode has a bizillion stages and an excuse plot about retrieving broken stained glass fragments. (I have to wonder if there's a mobile version of this--it screams to be a mobile game, because you only want to play a couple of games at a time and each only takes a few minutes.)

This bundle also included Life is Strange, which I had bought separately, and several Tomb Raider games, which I was never particularly interested in playing. (I didn’t even buy the top tier of the bundle—Square-Enix has purchased a bunch of studios that make games I don’t really like, and it’s those games that tend to end up on sale for Steam.)

I’m Not Sure Where I Got This – A Steam Queue Cull

I periodically look at my Steam collection (which I’ve sorted into various buckets of games I played and liked, games I played and disliked, games I paid real money for and should actually invest time in, etc.) and notice that I have a bunch of games that I’ve lost track of their provenience and really am not interested in playing them. Here’s a selection:

Amnesia: The Dark Descent - First person survival horror. Given I hated A Machine For Pigs, I think I can safely file this away.

Crazy Machines - This came in its own bundle with both the sequel an assortment of DLC; it's a brainteaser game based around building Rube Goldberg-esque contraptions. I’ve sat on it for years because I initially found the controls clunky and the puzzles non-intuitive. I’m not going back.

Infinite Air with Mark McMorris - This is a snowboarding simulation game. I haven’t a goddamn clue where it came from.

Skullgirls Endless Beta - This came with the bundle that gave me Skullgirls, and I didn’t like that enough to test their new stuff for them.

Stealth Inc 2: A Game of Clones - A stealth platformer that’s been on my list forever and I’m not going to play.

Abyss Odyssey - I exchanged this Steam key with somebody on Talking Time for some other Steam key; it seemed vaguely appealing as a Metroidvania about searching through a vast abyss (apparently dreamed into being by a sleeping warlock). What really turned me off was the controls, which are much more like a fighting game—enemies have a lot of durability and require a variety of attacks to get past their guard. I can see that working for somebody else, but it doesn’t do it for me.

Tempest is an open-world 3D “pirate action rpg” that I’m guessing I missed in a bundle at some point, but I’m not enthusiastic about it.

(I think I’ve been getting a bit overwhelmed lately by the amount of backlog I have that I’m not actually that strongly interested in. I’ve played a lot of what’s available for cheap on Steam over the past few years, including a lot of crap, and I’ve clearly grown tired of “Yeah, I’ve seen this before, I don’t like it, next.” I’ve been buying fewer bundles because fewer of the titles seem new or interesting.)