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Humble Choice - June 2024
June 2024's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.
| Steam Page | Opencritic | Steam Recent/All | Operating Systems | Steam Deck | ProtonDB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Risk of Rain 2 | 86 | 96/94 | Win | ✅ Verified | 🎖️ Platinum |
| Knights of Honor II: Sovereign | 78 | 76/78 | Win | 🟨 Playable | 🎖️ Platinum |
| LEGO 2K Drive Awesome Edition | 72 | 62/87 | Win | ✅ Verified | 🎖️ Platinum |
| Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector | 76 | 89/83 | Win | ✅ Verified | 🟨 Gold |
| Miasma Chronicles | 73 | 79/72 | Win | 🟨 Playable | 🟨 Gold |
| Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical | 76 | 94/91 | Win | ✅ Verified | 🟨 Gold |
| A Guidebook of Babel | N/A | 97/96 | Win, Mac | 🟨 Playable | 🎖️ Platinum |
| Empyrion - Galactic Survival | N/A | 79/61 | 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?
Risk of Rain 2 is definitely incredible! I really enjoy the game a lot. Definitely one of the better shooter roguelikes in the last couple of years.
The one I'm excited for is Stray Gods though, tbh, since it looked really interesting and I'm glad I waited. I missed story/choice games and I'm excited to go through it. It's tempting for me to just pick the bundle up early so I can get through it before I get too busy again haha.
RoR2 can also support up to 16 players in a Steam lobby! No mods needed, host just has to enter in a couple console commands. Been looking for >4 player games for the raid group while we take a break, we had fun with this the other day. It still scales with player count beyond 4 too.
Instructions
-Press CTRL+ALT+` at the main menu
-Enter the two commands separately, subbing X for your player count
sv_maxplayers X
steam_lobby_max_members X
-Go into Multiplayer and create your server, it should appear as having a max player count of whatever you put in the server browser.
-Stick this in your Steam Notes so you don't have to look it up
Wait actually?? That's super cool, I didn't even know that, I'll have to try this next time!
I keep wanting to like Risk of Rain 2, but possibly it's just not for me. I'm incredibly bad at it, and can never find the exit portal.
The teleporter gives off particle effects around it. They look like red sparks, though a few levels use different lighting that can affect the color.
You also tend to get a feel for it the more you play. The teleporter will usually spawn in flatter areas opposite the side you spawned in.
You learn a lot just by playing, and will build an intuition for the game and how it's played. Every death is a learning experience.
I think the easiest advice for finding the exit portal is probably just you need to play faster and not kill everything perfectly. Plus the more you see, the more you internalize what kinds of relics are good for you, so you spend less time reading. Basically practice makes perfect lol.
I'm a backer of Stray Gods, and I recommend it if you're up to sit back and enjoy a musical. A bit on the short side but it makes up for it with replay value (plus I don't blame them, making dialogue trees is a challenge, never mind song trees). Listen to a few songs and if you like them, then you won't regret it playing it
Risk of Rain 2 is an oldie but a goodie. It does make me wonder if there are actually a lot of people who are subscribed who don't already own it? The game did just get a big update, so even if you do already own it, it might be worth returning to. On the off chance you are new to the game and you're not feeling it, I recommend looking up how to unlock the Artifact of Sacrifice. Once unlocked, you can toggle it on to change a main mechanic of the game (enemies will now randomly drop items). I enjoyed the game a lot more with it on and probably would have stopped playing without it.
I'm prepared to be entirely whelmed by Lego 2K Drive. I was mildly interested in it before release but quickly lost interest when I saw the aggressive monetization (it released four different DLC season passes in a year). That's off-putting for me enough, but I have an especially hard time with stuff like that when it's in a game that clearly includes younger audiences (as this game definitely does). This bundle gives a mostly complete edition (but of course not actually complete), so that softens the game's avaricious edges a bit, but it also sounds like it's just not a great game in general. I'm prepared to try it out and move on quickly, but maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised?
If we have any strategy fans in the house, can someone explain to me what "fast-paced turn-based strategy" means from the description of Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector? To me "fast-paced" and "turn-based" feel like opposites?
Also, I bought Stray Gods on its own recently (and of course haven't played it yet), so you're all welcome for me singlehandedly unlocking it to be in a bundle.
Finally, I've said this before but I mean it more with this bundle than I ever have: the Humble Choice selections are often really great indicators of how fantastic Proton has gotten. Every single game in this bundle is Deck Verified/Playable and every single game in this bundle has a Gold or Platinum ProtonDB rating. There's never been a better time to be a Linux gamer!
I tried out Lego 2K Drive.
The game has a very aggressive monetization scheme, but I'm happy to report that if you don't log in with a 2K account, you can (mostly) get away from that. None of the in-game store stuff works or even appears if you're not logged in, so it feels mostly like a standard game.
The game is whimsical and fun. There are several different open-world levels, each with a different theme and filled up with lots of different tasks. I appreciated that they weren't as limited as other racing games like Forza Horizon that just have different iterations of Race This Adjacent Stretch Of Road over and over and over again. In 2K Drive, one event has you dodging mines in the road; another has you rescuing people from zombie hordes Crazy Taxi-style; another has you hopping over fences on a farm (and you lose if you break any of the fences). It's a big car playground with lots of stuff to do.
There are also collectibles scattered across the levels, so the game is almost like a 3D platformer played with a car. You get a dedicated "hop" button so you can jump up and over things, which helps you navigate the world a lot easier and genuinely makes movement more fun. I started it up after my friends and I finished watching Deep Dip this weekend, and we started lovingly calling 2K Drive "Shallow Dip" since it had the same "carkour"-style gameplay, only with none of the actual challenge or skill needed.
There's a big problem with the game though, and it's why I stopped playing after a few hours.
Despite the monetization pushes being hidden from me because I didn't log in, that doesn't stop the game from being fundamentally designed around those pushes in the first place. After hours of play, I had accumulated tons of in-game currencies (of several types) that I couldn't spend at all. I couldn't unlock brick packs or buy new cars or anything like that because the stores are hidden without a 2K account. Meanwhile, you do get some non-currency rewards like new cars given to you as you complete races and level up, but these feel artificially limited. It's clear you're meant to supplement those by buying other things.
I didn't end up logging in with an account, so I don't know how far the in-game currencies I earned will actually go. Will I be able to buy most or all of what I want? Or will the game push me to buy stuff with my actual money instead? I don't actually know.
The other problem with this is that even though the game is technically playable without buying in-game items, I started to get into a state where I began second-guessing whether or not the game was worth playing. See, when I started the game, I easily beat a lot of the challenges. Then they started getting harder, and I started losing some. The game is a kart-racer, so I'm fine with some RNG messing things up every once in a while. As I kept playing though, I kept wondering whether I was losing because I needed to get better or whether I was losing because the game was subtly nudging me towards buying cars with better stats.
There's no way to tell whether this type of thinking is right or not, and the big problem with it is that, once it works its way into your head, it's hard to get out. In non-monetized games, the challenge feels like an understood, mutual contract between the game and the player. I could bring out my wallet and it wouldn't change anything -- the game doesn't care about my money and just wants me to "get good" instead. In monetized games, however, that's reversed -- it's hard to know whether skill has anything to do with it and instead payment looks like the optimal way forward.
Ultimately, this killed the game for me. It wasn't that the game was too aggressively monetized -- again, because I didn't use a 2K account all of that stuff was mostly shut off. It was that, because that monetization even existed in the first place, it cannibalized what I potentially could have liked about the game, because I wasn't able to play the game without second guessing its intentions.
2K Drive should have been a light, fun, easygoing game, but it couldn't stand out from underneath the shadow of the question: "Is the game designed to go against me?" I don't know the answer, but it doesn't really matter, because the issue is that the question even exists in the first place.
I’ve had a Choice membership for over a year and I’ve been thinking of canceling it since I barely use the discount and realized that a 20% discount isn’t really much compared to the savings of not subscribing. I just always missed the deadline. This is the first time in a long time that I got the choice on day 1 though. I loved the first risk of rain so I definitely want to try this out
Just FYI Risk of Rain Returns also has a 50% off coupon with this choice, which is a really good way to re-experience RoR! I really loved RoR:R, would recommend it :)