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Humble Choice - December 2023
Sorry for the delay in posting this month.
December's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games:
| Steam Page | Opencritic | Steam Recent/All | Operating Systems | Steam Deck | ProtonDB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Expeditions: Rome | 81 | 82/88 | Win | Playable | Platinum |
| Midnight Fight Express | 76 | 82/91 | Win | Verified | Gold |
| ELEX II | 65 | 61/75 | Win | Unsupported | Gold |
| Nobody Saves the World | 80 | 87/91 | Win | Verified | Platinum |
| The Gunk | 70 | 86/86 | Win | Playable | Platinum |
| The Pale Beyond | 78 | 96/91 | Win Mac | Verified | Platinum |
| Last Call BBS | TBC | 95/95 | Win Mac Lin | Playable | Native |
| From Space | TBC | 88/67 | Win | Verified | Platinum |
Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?
The Gunk looks interesting. I’m a sucker for a cleanup game (I thoroughly enjoyed Island Saver, for example) and I tend to like shorter experiences. The reviews all saying that it’s not long enough are actually positives for me.
Also, I’m curious to try out Last Call BBS. I enjoy Zachtronics games in theory. In execution I’m quickly reminded, as I make my way through them, of how not smart I am and then spend the remainder of my time playing solitaire instead of advancing in the puzzles. This one looks a bit different from previous games in that it’s more scattershot, so I’m curious if that will give me and my less than stellar puzzle-solving more points of entry than usual.
Well, I can officially say that The Gunk looks cooler than it is.
I played for a bit over an hour and chose to drop the game. It didn’t engage me.
For one, the titular gunk is just an obstacle. You suck it up and then move on — that’s it. In other cleaning games there’s planning and rhythm to your cleanup. You get some choice in how you go about things (what Eve Rodsky would call “CPE”), and it makes the actual execution itself satisfying. Here it’s just that the gunk is in the way and you need to clear it so you can advance. I didn’t get the “cleanup” feeling that I wanted at all from the game.
The other is that the game promises upgrades. It sets you up at a little base early in the game and you learn how you can collect resources from the world and improve your stuff. It falls short here in two ways.
The first is that, immediately after establishing this little base camp, you go on a mostly linear path away from it that doesn’t allow you to go back to it. You’re separated from being able to upgrade your stuff all while you’re out collecting. Not only is that frustrating, but this section is way too long. It has a plot reason for being like that and helps build interpersonal tension between the two main characters, so I get why they did it, but it really feels at odds with the game’s systems.
The second issue is that the stuff you need for upgrades is composed of in-world resources that become available once you clear the gunk, but they’re only in specific areas that feel deliberately chosen by the devs. When you clear an area it becomes lush and overgrown, so the resources you get afterwards feeling both “planned” and sparse is completely at odds with the wilds the game wants you to think that you’re in.
Also, in typing this out, I realize there’s a third issue: the upgrades simply aren’t that exciting. Some of the first ones you have available to you are simply clear more gunk and clear gunk slightly faster and move slightly faster.
The game simply didn’t excite me, so I’m moving on from it.
The one thing I will say is that I think it’s clearly aimed at younger audiences, so I’m well outside the target market. I do think it would be a good kids’ game because of its simplicity.
I like your comment about Zachtronics games. They start out really good, and then I usually get stuck somewhere around the 1/3 to 1/2 point and just stop.
Actually, I think it may not because of how smart you have to be, but whether or not you want to play a game that is like a day job. I remember Spacechem in particular. It starts out very fun as you figure out the puzzles to make molecules. But then they put another layer of puzzles on top of that to combine the molecules across factories. And then another layer on top of that. At that point it takes too much time and mental investment to continue.
Opus Magnum was supposed to be simpler than Spacechem but it ended up being too complicated to be fun too (for me).
Again, I'm not saying that the games are too hard to figure out if I want to spend the time. But if it starts feeling like work, I'm out.
But the solitaire games are fun lol. They are little puzzles that you can complete without feeling like you should be paid for it.
I've been wanting to write a web/app version of Sigmar's Garden in Opus Magnum for the longest time, it's such a nice time killer
I loved Opus Magnum initially, but once I unlocked Sigmar’s Garden — the game’s chill, easygoing solitaire game — my playthrough was completely derailed by it. 😂
I got sidetracked and put literal hours into it instead of continuing the main game. By the time I was ready to jump back in, I was already so removed from the puzzles I’d played earlier that the momentum was gone.
Zachtronics games are, for me, a nice reminder to be humble. They help me realize when I’m out of my depth. I do think I’m smart in other ways, but they help me remain aware that I’m not the kind of smart that they demand. And that’s completely okay!
I dip my toes in their waters, enjoy the preliminary puzzle buildup, then duck out to solitaire when their challenge starts to exceeds my abilities (which is generally earlier than I’d like to admit). And it’s not a terrible experience by any means! I’ve always genuinely enjoyed it.
I enjoyed Nobody Saves the World for a brief moment on Gamepass and I'll probably try and find time to play through it on my Steam Deck once I get it in! honestly the other games look kinda eh, but I do miss a good Civ like to Expeditions Rome is also on my list
Expeditions Rome is a turn-based tactical game, not a 4X. It's more like X-COM than like Civ.
goes to show what happens when i just glance at the screenshots lol. either way my brain is itchy so it'll be good i hope!