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Humble Choice - March 2024
March 2024's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.
| Steam Page | Opencritic | Steam Recent/All | Operating Systems | Steam Deck | ProtonDB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin – Ultimate Edition | 70 | 41/60 | Win | ❓ Unknown | 🟨 Gold |
| Nioh 2 - The Complete Edition | 85 | 87/88 | Win | 🟨 Playable | 🟨 Gold |
| Saints Row | 63 | 56/64 | Win | ❌ Unsupported | 🟨 Gold |
| Citizen Sleeper | 84 | 91/94 | Win, Mac | 🟨 Playable | 🎖️ Platinum |
| Black Skylands | 77 | 80/82 | Win | ✅ Verified | 🟨 Gold |
| Soulstice | 71 | 70/78 | Win | 🟨 Playable | 🎖️ Platinum |
| Afterimage | 76 | 77/80 | Win | ✅ Verified | 🟨 Gold |
| Destroyer: The U-Boat Hunter | N/A | 68/77 | Win | 🟨 Playable | 🟨 Gold |
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?
If you enjoy co-op games and if you have an interest in soulslikes, I can highly recommend Nioh 2. I have been playing it with a friend for the past half a year and have enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. It's challenging but rewarding, and I have fallen in love with its many, many systems. It has actually become one of my favourite games ever.
You can of course play it solo as well, which I guess is how it was originally intended to be played. But the co-op works really well. I'm hopeless with soulslikes, but I like to be hopeless in them together with a friend.
It is a long game though. We have put in about 90 hours so far and still have one DLC's worth of content to play from the complete edition. And some consider finishing the first playthrough as only finishing the tutorial. The game has constantly been adding new mechanisms, and in a sense the real game only starts in new game plus. As I understand it, once you play through the main game five times, with each new game increasing difficulty and changing how enemies behave, you unlock a completely new mode, with something like 150 extra levels. It remains to be seen whether we have the stamina or skills to get that far.
It's not a perfect game, of course. The game recycles levels for its optional missions, and the number of enemy types is quite small, so you end up seeing the same enemies over and over again, although in different contexts. There is so much loot that it becomes a little exhausting to manage, and the game has so many systems on top of systems that it can be a little too much sometimes. Although it does also allow for a lot of experimentation with different character builds and approaches to the game. The game is ruthless in combat, but very forgiving when it comes to allowing you to try out different setups. This allows you to eventually find a game style that works for you personally.
If you don't know Japanese history and folklore, the story can also be fairly opaque. Just about every character is a historical figure, and I think all enemy types, the so-called yōkai, are taken from Japanese folklore. They pretty much just get dropped into the story without much explanation, expecting you to automatically get the references. Fortunately for a non-Japanese player, the game does include a fairly exhaustive reference archive, where you can read about all of these people and yōkai that you meet, as well as the wider historical context that serves as the backdrop. The game has actually inspired me to start reading some books on yōkai and Japanese folklore.
I'll almost certainly pick up Citizen Sleeper. But if I'm being honest I'll put it in my collection of text-heavy super stylized RPGs that I will never play.
I don't know why I can't get into these things. I love visual novels, so the reading isn't a big issue, but I have a hard time investing into these things. On paper these games sound like they'd be perfect for me. I think one day in the future my brain will just kind of click and then I'll be able to get into them then.
I'm actually not a huge visual novel fan, although I do love text-heavy cRPGs. But Citizen Sleeper is more like a text-heavy tabletop / dice / time management game, and was one of the best games of 2022 for me. You should really give it a try. The writing in it is superb.
This is a weaker month for me, personally. The only game that really interests me is Black Skylands. Afterimage looks interesting but I tend to like my metroidvanias more focused on exploration than combat, and it seems like that leans more in the latter direction. Also, I thoroughly enjoyed previous games in the Saints Row series, but everything I've heard about this one is... not good.
For anyone into Realms of Ruin or Nioh 2, this is a pretty great deal. Both of them have historical lows well above $20, so if you're interested in even one of those then the bundle is a pretty solid deal for that game alone -- to say nothing of the seven others it comes with.
I actually liked the new Saint's Row. Bringing down the frenetic craziness made it more appealing in my book. It may not be quite as good as the earlier entries, but I don't really think it had to be to be enjoyable. The biggest problem I had with the game was the publisher, for reasons that are readily apparent to those in the know. My husband bought the PS5 version, so it will be nice to have the PC version available.
I remember Citizen Sleeper with fondness, having played it a couple of years ago. It's fairly well written and the dice mechanics are quite well put together. Not particularly long, but doesn't overstay its welcome. In fact, it left me wanting for more. In terms of mechanics, it's something like a single player digital board game with some light resource management, story-driven role playing, and plenty of text to read.
It's not a particularly challenging game but I enjoyed the world that it depicted and felt like I was making meaningful decisions for my character. That said, a friend of mine who is much more of a completionist/competent gamer than me found the game to be so easy for him that there were no meaningful decisions, as he just managed to do everything.
If you are looking for a story driven scifi game, and enjoy board game mechanics, definitely give this one a try.
This is a painful Humble Monthly for me. I've been wishing they'd put up a buyable bundle for a while (I'm riding on a 12-month Black Friday subscription from years ago), and three of the games (Afterimage, Soulstice, and Black Skylands) are perfect bundle riders: games I'd take but that are kinda too low priority to actually buy (especially since we already got Skylands for my partner back during early access when it was a better game, and Soulstice has been an Epic giveaway, so I've got that off-Steam if I ever get to it, and Afterimage may be decent but I've really got to stop buying "decent" metroidvanias that I'm not getting around to :). Then, there's Nioh 2, which is a solidly fantastic game right up our gameplay-focused alley, and at like half its historical low--a crazy price drop out of nowhere... Easy bundle carry.
But I already bought Nioh 2 so I could play with my partner, who got it first. We can't do anything with a third, and like I said, the other three games just aren't buy level for us. So, here's our best monthly in a while, and I'm still stuck not only passing but a little frustrated I could have waited a bit longer on Nioh to get such a better deal.