Humble Indie Bundle 17
Oct. 10th, 2016 04:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroI’ve had pretty good luck with Humble Bundles in general. Though to be entirely honest, I bought this one because I wanted to know what Octodad was like.
Hexcells - …This is Minesweeper. I mean, okay, the cells are hexes instead of squares, there’s some Sudoku-like variation in the later stages, each area is set rather than randomized, and the goddamn mouse buttons are flipped, but it’s essentially the same game. I’ve wasted far too much time playing Minesweeper and doing Sudoku and Kakuro puzzles, so this was clearly up my alley.
Hexcells Plus - Effectively an expansion pack to the first game. Six more levels; three dozen more puzzles. These puzzles are larger and harder, and add more kukuro-esque elements and the ability to trace lines and mark off “completed” numbers. If the first game is a warm-up, this is the main event.
Hexcells Infinite - Another set of 36 puzzles. This time it adds both the ability to swap mouse buttons and an “infinite” mode that generates puzzles from random (or non-random) seeds. It starts with beginner-level puzzles but the difficulty escalates very quickly. This is a cross between another expansion pack and a more definitive version of the game.
Super Time Force Ultra - In the same vein as Replay - VHS is Not Dead or several other puzzle-platformers, you can rewind each level and add in more characters / versions of yourself. Only this game is a shooter, so you have three characters with different weapons you need to get through each area with. Which means it has the parts I generally disliked about Replay and the parts I dislike about Trine combined into one game. Not so much my thing.
Expand - A bizarrely-controlled puzzle game where your keys map to "in" and "out" on a rotating disk, rather than cardinal directions. I see what they were trying to do, but I found it intensely irritating.
Galak-Z - A love letter to the original Atari game Asteroids with a plot, missions, and much more weapon variety. The controls are pretty decent--it tries to actually obey physics by giving you momentum--I'm just not very good at it. Also, they get huge credit for including both regenerating shields (so a single encounter doesn’t necessarily screw you for the entire level), and making touching the walls harmless (which is my problem with pretty much every other hard-to-control space sim ever).
Lethal League - This plays sort of like Smash Brothers, only instead of trying to hit the other players, you're trying to tag them with a ball that's bouncing around the arena. If you like multiplayer fighting games, I can see the appeal.
Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime - Multiplayer shooter in which you must work together to restore love--or at least a generator powered by it--to its proper place in the galaxy. Credit to them for offering a competent pet to assist you in one-player mode. It's cute, but I think it really needs to be played co-op. Perhaps when ARR is a bit older and more capable on a controller it could be a family game.
Nuclear Throne - Top-down shooter where you fight through various wasteland areas and waves of enemies to try to reach the “nuclear throne”. Decent variety of weapons and powers, but not much else to it. Reminded me of Heroes of Loot, but I liked that better.
Regency Solitaire - Do you like playing a zillion games of Solitaire with a pretense of story? Do you like simplistic Regency era drama? Then this is for you! (Note that it's not Klondike Solitaire; it's a variant more similar to Spit, and each area has a different layout and features like key-and-lock combos.) It seems simple, but I found it a pleasant little distraction--you can retry any given hand as much as you want, so it's not far off from playing a zillion games of Windows Solitaire, just a little more purposefully.
The Beginner's Guide - I'd call this a "horror" game, but it's entirely psychological--there are no jumpscares, nothing to fight, and no way to die; just a calm-voiced narrator explaining the history of a series of games and getting extremely meta. It was fascinating.
Octodad: Dadliest Catch - "You wear a disguise to look like human guys, but you're not a man, you're an octodad." This game takes deliberately poor controls (not unlike Ampu-Tea) and brings the ridiculousness level up to eleven: You're an octopus disguised as a man, and you must do normal human activities while flopping all over the place and speaking only in blurbles. I was sold on this bundle by the title of this game, to be honest, and in terms of absurdity, I wasn’t disappointed.
Overall: This turned out to be an excuse to play variants of the default Windows casual games for a bunch of hours, though The Beginner's Guide got me to add The Stanley Parable to my wishlist.
Hexcells - …This is Minesweeper. I mean, okay, the cells are hexes instead of squares, there’s some Sudoku-like variation in the later stages, each area is set rather than randomized, and the goddamn mouse buttons are flipped, but it’s essentially the same game. I’ve wasted far too much time playing Minesweeper and doing Sudoku and Kakuro puzzles, so this was clearly up my alley.
Hexcells Plus - Effectively an expansion pack to the first game. Six more levels; three dozen more puzzles. These puzzles are larger and harder, and add more kukuro-esque elements and the ability to trace lines and mark off “completed” numbers. If the first game is a warm-up, this is the main event.
Hexcells Infinite - Another set of 36 puzzles. This time it adds both the ability to swap mouse buttons and an “infinite” mode that generates puzzles from random (or non-random) seeds. It starts with beginner-level puzzles but the difficulty escalates very quickly. This is a cross between another expansion pack and a more definitive version of the game.
Super Time Force Ultra - In the same vein as Replay - VHS is Not Dead or several other puzzle-platformers, you can rewind each level and add in more characters / versions of yourself. Only this game is a shooter, so you have three characters with different weapons you need to get through each area with. Which means it has the parts I generally disliked about Replay and the parts I dislike about Trine combined into one game. Not so much my thing.
Expand - A bizarrely-controlled puzzle game where your keys map to "in" and "out" on a rotating disk, rather than cardinal directions. I see what they were trying to do, but I found it intensely irritating.
Galak-Z - A love letter to the original Atari game Asteroids with a plot, missions, and much more weapon variety. The controls are pretty decent--it tries to actually obey physics by giving you momentum--I'm just not very good at it. Also, they get huge credit for including both regenerating shields (so a single encounter doesn’t necessarily screw you for the entire level), and making touching the walls harmless (which is my problem with pretty much every other hard-to-control space sim ever).
Lethal League - This plays sort of like Smash Brothers, only instead of trying to hit the other players, you're trying to tag them with a ball that's bouncing around the arena. If you like multiplayer fighting games, I can see the appeal.
Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime - Multiplayer shooter in which you must work together to restore love--or at least a generator powered by it--to its proper place in the galaxy. Credit to them for offering a competent pet to assist you in one-player mode. It's cute, but I think it really needs to be played co-op. Perhaps when ARR is a bit older and more capable on a controller it could be a family game.
Nuclear Throne - Top-down shooter where you fight through various wasteland areas and waves of enemies to try to reach the “nuclear throne”. Decent variety of weapons and powers, but not much else to it. Reminded me of Heroes of Loot, but I liked that better.
Regency Solitaire - Do you like playing a zillion games of Solitaire with a pretense of story? Do you like simplistic Regency era drama? Then this is for you! (Note that it's not Klondike Solitaire; it's a variant more similar to Spit, and each area has a different layout and features like key-and-lock combos.) It seems simple, but I found it a pleasant little distraction--you can retry any given hand as much as you want, so it's not far off from playing a zillion games of Windows Solitaire, just a little more purposefully.
The Beginner's Guide - I'd call this a "horror" game, but it's entirely psychological--there are no jumpscares, nothing to fight, and no way to die; just a calm-voiced narrator explaining the history of a series of games and getting extremely meta. It was fascinating.
Octodad: Dadliest Catch - "You wear a disguise to look like human guys, but you're not a man, you're an octodad." This game takes deliberately poor controls (not unlike Ampu-Tea) and brings the ridiculousness level up to eleven: You're an octopus disguised as a man, and you must do normal human activities while flopping all over the place and speaking only in blurbles. I was sold on this bundle by the title of this game, to be honest, and in terms of absurdity, I wasn’t disappointed.
Overall: This turned out to be an excuse to play variants of the default Windows casual games for a bunch of hours, though The Beginner's Guide got me to add The Stanley Parable to my wishlist.
