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Humble Sales Are Very Dangerous – Part One
So, the Humble Store has been having an end-of-summer sale, with new deals on all sorts of Steam games each day. Which, in practice, means I’ve been buying 2-3 games each day, for a couple of dollars each. $2 games are fantastic, because either I play them for a few hours and get my money’s worth, or they’re lousy and I’m not really out much.
DLC Quest - Lots of fun. It's a cute little platformer / search-and-find game, and the gimmick is that pretty much every aspect of the game is DLC…that you buy with the in-game coins. So the coins become plot tokens that allow you to proceed. It’s impossible to die in the first part and you get infinite respawns in the second; the challenge is mostly in finding everything. It takes less than two hours to do everything, but I also paid less than a buck for it, so I think I really got my money’s worth.
Home - Despite the heavily pixelated graphics, this is a very atmospheric horror game with a very flexible plot. A man wakes up in a strange house and encounters evidence of multiple grisly murders as he gets himself home. It plays in an exploration / adventure game style, but with a “choose your own adventure” sort of flare in that how the later sequences play out (and what variant of the ending you get, and what the whole story means) are dependent on the choices you make. Takes about an hour; play it in one go with the lights off.
Richard & Alice - A relatively simple adventure puzzle game that’s all about the story: The world is broken and the stow never stops; and Richard is in an underground prison when a woman named Alice is brought to the cell across from his. Over the course of several days and numerous flashbacks, we learn how they got there. There are five endings, but it’s very easy to lock yourself out of three of them. Content warning for child suffering—this is not a pleasant game for the parents of young children.
Eryi's Action - Ever heard of Kaizo Mario Brothers, the romhack specifically designed to kill you by screwing with your expectations? Yeah, that’s what this was modeled on. You not only can die on the first screen, but you can die in multiple ways. You can die on the map screen. You can die trying to get power-ups. You need to set up the stage ending very carefully or you’ll die leaving the stage. While it looks like you get 3 lives, they’re actually infinite—the numbers just keep going negative. It took me to -83 to get through the first two stages. And it’s the kind of thing that passes through frustrating and into hilarious very quickly—each time that you get through something tricky only to discover there was another layer to it. Eventually, you’re all blasé, “Oh, of course the floor explodes. Oh, of course this power-up kills you. Yeah, I should have seen that random spike coming.” I’ll never beat this, but I was amused playing it.
Little Inferno - This seems like a little nothing of a game—you order things from a catalogue, put them in your fireplace, and burn them. But the tone seriously reminds me of The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing, in that everything’s straddling the line between cute and creepy…and then it’s just creepy. Also, burning things and trying to find combos is both strangely soothing and strangely addictive.
DLC Quest - Lots of fun. It's a cute little platformer / search-and-find game, and the gimmick is that pretty much every aspect of the game is DLC…that you buy with the in-game coins. So the coins become plot tokens that allow you to proceed. It’s impossible to die in the first part and you get infinite respawns in the second; the challenge is mostly in finding everything. It takes less than two hours to do everything, but I also paid less than a buck for it, so I think I really got my money’s worth.
Home - Despite the heavily pixelated graphics, this is a very atmospheric horror game with a very flexible plot. A man wakes up in a strange house and encounters evidence of multiple grisly murders as he gets himself home. It plays in an exploration / adventure game style, but with a “choose your own adventure” sort of flare in that how the later sequences play out (and what variant of the ending you get, and what the whole story means) are dependent on the choices you make. Takes about an hour; play it in one go with the lights off.
Richard & Alice - A relatively simple adventure puzzle game that’s all about the story: The world is broken and the stow never stops; and Richard is in an underground prison when a woman named Alice is brought to the cell across from his. Over the course of several days and numerous flashbacks, we learn how they got there. There are five endings, but it’s very easy to lock yourself out of three of them. Content warning for child suffering—this is not a pleasant game for the parents of young children.
Eryi's Action - Ever heard of Kaizo Mario Brothers, the romhack specifically designed to kill you by screwing with your expectations? Yeah, that’s what this was modeled on. You not only can die on the first screen, but you can die in multiple ways. You can die on the map screen. You can die trying to get power-ups. You need to set up the stage ending very carefully or you’ll die leaving the stage. While it looks like you get 3 lives, they’re actually infinite—the numbers just keep going negative. It took me to -83 to get through the first two stages. And it’s the kind of thing that passes through frustrating and into hilarious very quickly—each time that you get through something tricky only to discover there was another layer to it. Eventually, you’re all blasé, “Oh, of course the floor explodes. Oh, of course this power-up kills you. Yeah, I should have seen that random spike coming.” I’ll never beat this, but I was amused playing it.
Little Inferno - This seems like a little nothing of a game—you order things from a catalogue, put them in your fireplace, and burn them. But the tone seriously reminds me of The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing, in that everything’s straddling the line between cute and creepy…and then it’s just creepy. Also, burning things and trying to find combos is both strangely soothing and strangely addictive.