12
votes
Humble Choice - July 2026
July 2026's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.
| Steam Page | OpenCritic | Steam Recent/All | Operating Systems | Steam Deck | ProtonDB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sea of Stars: Sunset Edition | 89 | 80 / 89 | Win | ✅ Verified | 🎖️ Platinum |
| TUNIC | 85 | 91 / 91 | Win, Mac | ✅ Verified | 🎖️ Platinum |
| Neon White | 89 | 97 / 98 | Win | ✅ Verified | 🎖️ Platinum |
| Police Simulator: Patrol Officers | 57 | 71 / 76 | Win | ✅ Verified | 🟨 Gold |
| Drop Duchy - Complete Edition | 81 | 86 / 90 | Win | 🟨 Playable | 🎖️ Platinum |
| Sledders | -- | 84 / 94 | Win | 🟨 Playable | 🟨 Gold |
| Dicefolk | 78 | -- / 89 | Win | ✅ Verified | 🟨 Gold |
| Our Adventurer Guild | -- | 97 / 95 | 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?
Another month, another massive W for proton. Honestly, at this point in time, I am genuinely shocked when a game (that's not bogged down by anticheat) doesn't run on linux. How good!
I got this month's bundle as well, since Sea of Stars and Tunic have been on my wishlist for a while, so I figured why not! For this longer, winter nights. Dicefolk looked cool too.
This leaves me with the following games:
Neon WhiteDrop DuchyOur Adventurer GuildGames remaining from June's bundle:
Construction SimulatorIf you'd like any (even multiple!) of these games, please reply to this comment and I'll DM you the redeem link. Please note that some of these games may be region locked.
Pretty much any time I see a Gold instead of a Platinum on Protondb now, it's because all the reports are old. From this bundle, Police Simulator's last report was 10 months ago. Sledders was 7 months ago. Dicefolk was 2 years(!) ago.
As someone who used to obsessively put in reports a long time ago, I pretty much stopped because, like you identified, nearly everything Just Works™ now. It's to the point where, if I see a lack of Protondb reports, then I assume the game works. I figure if it didn't, people would log it, but if it does, most people don't bother (they're too busy playing!).
It would be nice if Steam had a first-party system beyond the Deck Verified/Playable icons. They know what OSes are being used and when Proton is running a game, so there's probably a way to automatically flag games as "likely works on Linux" or something based on aggregate player data.
So another wonderful part of SteamOS that doesn't get as much attention is gamescope. That's because compositors are boring, but they're also a mess (if X11 or Wayland sound familiar, those are the main two). Using different compositors can cause a working game to persistently stutter, or not even work at all. For a while on Ubuntu, Unity games just wouldn't boot under my default install and I had to swap my compositor.
So now I'm on Bazzite with Game Mode available. I generally just take Deck playable/verified as applicable to my desktop though and compatibility has been 1:1 with my deck. Now that SteamOS is available, I think it'd be more feasible to have a "SteamOS Playable" badge.
Nothing about gamescope is specific or limited to SteamOS though, you can run it on any distro you want. I'm running it on Void Linux (and ran it on Fedora and Debian in the past) perfectly fine.
One minor gripe I have about SteamOS is that it is based on Arch and ships with the AUR enabled. Which is, as we saw last month, a potential source of threat that the average user who follows youtube tutorials might not know about.
But yes, it's amazing! Gaming on linux has come a super long way!
Oh absolutely, it just isn't part of your typical default install, my intent was to point out a complication of a "likely works" badge using OS and that SteamOS would be the easiest way to communicate it to folks that aren't thinking about compositors as it guarantees gamescope is accessible. But thanks for clarifying, some meaning was lost while editing down!
I quite like Bazzite being Fedora based and immutable, seems like it'd be a better fit for the typical end user, but I get why they started with arch (though yeah please disable AUR by default)
Could I get Neon White please? That one looks really fun!
Mind if I get Our Adventurer Guild?
May I please ask for Drop Duchy?
I see Our Adventurer Guild is taken...
I'd like to try out Construction Simulator. That was one of the "huh, maybe I'd give that a shot" titles from last month for me.
One more for the hype train: Neon White is a banger.
The story and characters weren't really my cup of tea, but the gameplay and soundtrack were excellent. It's the kind of game where the better you get at it, the more fun it is. Fluidly pulling off an amazing run through a level is immensely satisfying.
Wow, this is a killer month! I can speak to a few of them:
I haven't played the others, but they look good too!
The only one of these I have any familiarity with is Tunic, and I think it's kind of a modern masterpiece. It seems like a simple action-adventure game at first, but over time reveals many layers of hidden mechanics and puzzles in very creative ways, culminating in some truly amazing final moments. I couldn't put it down.
oh and a banger soundtrack, too
I enjoyed Sea of Stars! It had some good things going for it, but nothing so exceptional that I'd call it a must play if it doesn't catch your attention, 3/4. If you've played The Messenger, SoS is by the same folks and ties into it.
My bestie really loved TUNIC and Neon White. I wasted a bunch of time due to an implicit communication issue with TUNIC, which frustrated me from appreciating the rest of the game. It wasn't even a puzzle, I just thought it wanted three things when there were only two.
I was pretty excited about Sea of Stars back when it first released, but I bounced off it pretty early because of the writing. The game slams you upfront with pages of dialog from characters who lack their own voices (as in their lines all read as if they're being spoken by the same person, i.e. the writer), which is basically an automatic failing grade for me in a story-heavy RPG. It's a bummer because the rest of it looked super promising.
Interesting take on things. Sea of Stars is the only RPG I've been able to get into for years. The last one I enjoyed this much was Evoland II. I would say it has a similar self referential, tongue in cheek nature to the dialog, story and characters.
There is a storyteller aspect to the game, which kind of makes sense for the "same voice" you mentioned, but not really.
I've always struggled with wall of text RPGs, even if they're voice acted. I'm not sure why. For instance I've tried to play through Planescape: Torment multiple times and I just can't deal with it. I'm not making any claims about Planescape as a game, or in any way comparing it to Sea of Stars. I'm just using it as a reference for the type of dialog that is wildly different from SoS, and is likely more similar to what you felt it was lacking.
Yeah, I think my biggest critique of the game is that the two main protagonists don't have much character. If prompted, I couldn't describe them besides "orange sun boy with blade" and "blue moon girl with staff". The free DLC tried to improve this, but it came post game -- too little too late and felt weird since they acted like they had been strongly characterizing them the whole time.
Their best friend is great though, I considered him the real protagonist. It still had some heartfelt moments for me, engaging combat (once I picked the proper settings), and fun story beats, but unfortunately, it's no masterpiece.
Man, I just bought Sea of Stars during the summer sale. I guess this month is a skip for me.
That said, the game is fantastic so far. I was worried it would be too slow or something but it's definitely a great JRPG in my first 10ish hours of play.
Game deals always demand a sacrifice -- clearly it was your purchase that let the game appear in this Choice! Thank you for your service. 🫡
It was only a matter of time!
This month seems like a strong haul. Not strong enough for me to buy it, but the top three games are all big hits based on what I hear about them.
Also, I'll note that Let's Game It Out played Police Simulator: Patrol Officers five years ago. No clue how much they've smoothed it out since he last played it (if at all), but that might be a fun one to play just for people who like messing around with janky games.
Adding on to the endorsement train, Drop Duchy is a fun little puzzle game that stacks (hah) tetris and deck building mechanics while making positioning matter as well. It's a bunch of things to work out all at the same time in a way that I quite enjoyed