I’m Kinglink and it’s the beginning of October, so it’s time for the Humble Choice October 2022 Review. 

As always there are 8 games to play, and I’ve played each game for an hour on stream, and now I can tell you who will like each title and which games are worth checking out.  This being the month of Halloween perhaps we’ll have a little horror, very little. 

This month was an instant purchase for me.  I’ll talk more about why at the end but the headliner is pretty major, speaking of which let’s just get into the games, with the one already on screen being where we start.  Take it away. 

Deathloop.  Time loops with a Dishonored style. 

Deathloop traps the player in a time loop, each time the player dies the game starts over giving players a single day to explore four different areas and try to break the loop.  The day takes place over 4 segments and each area changes throughout the day. The focus is on getting the player to discover how to take out each of the eight targets.

Deathloop is hard to explain and after the four hours I played on Game Pass so far, I’m probably just out of the tutorial, though I’ve said that multiple times before.  This is an engaging and interesting game, and it has all the same style as Arkane’s previous titles, Dishonored. 

Pick this up if you like the idea of time loops, or stealth, while you might be able to go guns blazing eventually, you’re going to have to be cautious in this title at first.  Also, there’s a lot of swearing, like enough I feel I must bring it up here. However, the story is solid and the writing is excellent.  I’m excited to play more, and I’m glad to have this in my library. 

Monster Train.  An excellent card battler with some great designs.

Monster Train may remind people of Slay The Spire, as that’s the most common Deckbuilder, and that is part of Monster train, but also Monster Train has a bunch of variations on the formula, focused on summoning creatures and defending a train where monsters move on to the next lane after each round of combat.  It’s a fresh system that will surprise players and give them a new experience. 

I beat my first run after 90 minutes and was proud.  I believe I got some amazing luck with a few events and that helps.  Other players say this is easier at the beginning than Slay the Spire but will get decently challenging by the end.  The character designs, synergies, and strategies I used in my first game were exciting and I want to see more. 

Pick this up if you like deck builders. There are five factions, as well as a sixth in the DLC that is included with the purchase.  The DLC comes as a different key in case anyone wants to split them up, and while I won the game, all I want to do is sit down and try to tackle the game a second or third time and see what else it has in store for players. 

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope.  I’m not sure this is how they intended the game to come off. 

Little Hope is the second of four Dark Pictures Anthology, if you played Man of Medan you should be comfortable here.  The game invoves players walking around, making decisions changing how each group member feels about each other and ultimately who survives.  There’s a decent amount of choices involved, but most of the game is more of a movie than a game.

The problem is Little Hope isn’t scary in the first hour.  I found it rather funny.  There’s a point where you have to choose between two characters, and both of those deaths are unintentionally hilarious.   I also think I already guessed a rather major twist, but I’ll avoid discussing it here. 

Pick this up if you like bad horror movies.  This isn’t an amazing horror movie like Get Out, but it’s also not as bad as the Room, however, the fact I was joking about the game, rather than being terrified by it, is a rather bad sign.  That being said, I probably would come back to this to watch more, which is also perhaps a bad sign since I hate horror. 

Disciples: Liberation.  A tactical battle game, which feels like Heroes of Might and Magic 

Disciples: Liberation is an RPG with a tactical battle system where players command their characters and units to take on enemies.  The game starts with an assassination mission but then changes quickly to an attempt to build a home for the characters requiring the characters to form alliances with different races.  The story here is pretty interesting as well. 

Disciples Liberation has a good system where players have to hire units from their base and use them to fight in the battles, and units who die will be permanently lost. However, I had more of a challenge keeping my main character alive, though that won’t end the game.  There’s also a controversial “auto win” when you overpower enemies, which I prefer, but I know people disagree with it. 

Pick this up if you like turn-based tactics games, especially those on a hexagon grid.  This gave me a hard nostalgia for Heroes of Might and Magic but this feels like it was done right.  Though where most RPGs are about the story, people will have to look more to the combat here to decide if it’s right for them, which is why I’m showing it.

Maid of Sker.  Oh no, a scary monster, who can’t see.

Maid of Sker is a survival horror game.  But it’s one that I think I can say is worse than the original Resident Evil in every way.  The story is the player is coming to the Sker Hotel to find his love, Elizabeth.  However something has gone wrong and enemies are wandering the halls, listening for trouble as if they’re blind. 

And this is where the problem lies .  The enemies present no challenge, crouching and holding your breath will avoid detection almost 100 percent of the time.  With the enemies defeated, there’s no challenge, just a chance to walk around the hotel and collect the needed items in a large inventory.  The save system which is comparable to Resident Evil, here is a Phonograph, only there’s no ink ribbon so you can just save as much as you want. 

Pick this up if you want a very weak horror game.  I hate horror, but this didn’t scare me, it just bored me more than anything and while there are jump scares, it’s rarely good.  All I could think about is how effective Playstation Resident Evil was with the cinematic of the zombie turning his head slowly, and yet Maid of Sker probably didn’t even reach that level.  It’s also only a four-hour title. 

Epic Chef.  A bit of Battle Chef Brigade, with Stardew Valley. 

Epic Chef starts with the player coming to town to take over the cursed home.  It turns out it’s cursed to grow crops extremely fast, which is actually a good thing.  From there, players will set up a small farm to grow ingredients and then cook food.  Of course what use is cooking food if players can’t compete in ultra battles similar to the Iron Chef as you can see on the screen.

And the thing is, all of this works well.  The writing here had me laughing quite a few times, on screen you have a horse acting as the judge.  The ideas and story are well written and the characters are unique.  You never know what you’re going to run into next.  The cooking mini-game could be better, but there’s enough to do in Epic Chef that it seems worth playing through just for the writing. 

Pick this up if you like farm or life simulators.  As interesting as the cooking part of the game is, at the end of the day you’ll have to grow the food and maintain your farm to get an influx of ingredients, and that’s going to be a big component here.

Railroad Corporation.  Connecting the country to make a profit. 

Railroad Corporation is focused on giving the player a small sum of money and forcing them to maximize their use of it to build a larger network of train stations.  The money here is tight enough that a few bad or early purchases can sink you.  The way the network of trains works is very clean and creates an ability to focus more on building the network than micromanaging it. 

At the same time, the first level had almost no challenge and gave me an obscene amount of time to beat the level, while the opening threatens the player with tight time controls.  I’m sure the game will get harder, but this is far more of a management sim or a city planner where a major piece is waiting for money to come in, and building lines for the trains. 

Pick this up if you like games similar to Cities Skylines, once you build up a network and set up routes, you’re mostly watching the trains passively.  There’s a good resource management challenge with the money, but outside of not overspending, and making sure you react to new opportunities this probably won’t be too challenging. 

Golf Gang.  An unpolished speed golf game. 

Golf Gang has players running through 8 courses of 18 holes of golf.  The primary mode scores players based on a combination of shots taken and time used.  There is a classic golf mode based on shots, and a time-only mode available as well.  Each course has a few interesting concepts which work and multiplayer is available. 

Unfortunately, the game lacks polish.  The main menu looks like a placeholder.  Courses usually repeat designs, to the point I think that their length could have been cut in half.  Controller support feels broken, or limited, to the point where it’s unusable.  And the multiplayer is dead.  I did enjoy playing the classic golf mode, but it ultimately made me think about playing Golf with Friends instead.

Pick this up if you have some friends, I’m sure this game is better with a group of friends, but as a standalone title, I probably would pass on it.  After playing a full course I found myself bored from the repetition and in general the game isn’t that interesting. 

And while that’s all eight titles, we of course have one final game to look at.  Last month Humble Games released a new title Moonscars on Humble Game Collection.  You can play there or on Game Pass, which is what I did.  Let’s take a look. 

Moonscars. It’s a souls-like Metroidvania. 

Moonscars remind me of Blasphemous.  Adapting the challenging Souls formula to a 2d game isn’t a new thing, but it works well here.  Moonscars will punish players but also includes enough features that players should be able to master it.  The most essential move is a parry that will let players inflict huge damage on a risk-reward system. 

Moonscars loses me on its story though.  The game constantly tries to tell this large story but doesn’t introduce players to the narrative concepts.  It’ll be a great story for someone who studies all the lore in Dark Souls but is a bit too present to be ignored by everyone else.   This is also decently hard, where I’ve spent at least three hours and have yet to reach a boss, but have grown bored of it a couple of times. 

Pick this up if you like the Souls formula and want to play a solid Metroidvania of that style, there are a lot of fresh ideas here, but at the end of the day, the world-building wasn’t interesting enough to make me want to continue.

And that’s what I have for the games this month.  I will also mention that, similar to releasing Moonscars immediately into the Humble Game Collection, SIGNALIS, a survival horror game,  will also release into the same collection on October 27th, so if you’re a subscriber and want to check that one out, you have a chance.  Now, what about the actual bundle? 

Personally, I bought this bundle a second after it came out, and obviously I always do that, but this I for a specific title.  I played Deathloop while looking at it for Game Pass, and wanted it on my Steam account, it’s a 60-dollar title and the historical lowest is only twenty dollars.  That’s a great deal.  Everything else was irrelevant. 

But the rest of the bundle is shockingly great as well.  There are a lot of major hits, and I am looking forward to playing a bunch of them.   With this being October, I’m sure some people were hoping for more horror, and while there are two horror titles, they both are lacking something… you know, the horror.

I honestly think Humble may finally be back to delivering us top-tier bundles.  Last month was great with Just Cause 4 and Crusader Kings 3, but I think this one has its beat.  However, we still should look at how the games shake out.   So let’s take it to the tier list. 

And yeah, I got a lot of feedback last month.  And while I was going to compare the games to consoles, fair enough, let’s go back to a typical tier system and I’ll avoid putting a Big Mac on the screen right now. 

Just to give you an overview, the top tier is still the games that you should buy the bundle for if you’re interested in any of them.  The middle tier is worth it but maybe not worth the whole bundle, if you see two or three that interest you, pick the bundle up, and the bottom tier… Yeah. let’s try to forget about them, I know I will. 

Speaking of, we have two games in the bottom tier this month called the Also-Rans.  The first is Golf Gang.   I can see someone playing this with friends and having a good time, but I don’t feel that’s an appropriate metric.  Several golf games are better than this with friends.  This came out only a few months ago, and it’s a situation where I feel almost anything else would have been better than this.  

The other game in the Also-Ran is Maid of Sker.  I found nothing that interesting in this game, and while I died to the first monster because of a mistake, I rarely was detected after that. It’s a survival horror game that would struggle to compete against a 20-year-old title, and at four hours long, it doesn’t stick around that much either. 

So let’s take a quick peek at the tier list after these two games.  The bottom tier is for stuff I wouldn’t recommend to anyone and that’s what those two games exhibited.  We’ll move up to the next level, the Solid Add-Ons.

The bottom of this tier is The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope and the fact is this was almost at the bottom tier, but there’s one person I would recommend this game to.  Myself.  I’ll almost definitely be returning and playing through this.  But it’s also pretty weak at the same time.  

The next step up on the Add-Ons is the Railroad Corporation.  I liked designing the tracks and trying out different things.  The game optimized the usage of the railroad lines so the focus is on running the business, and I appreciated that. 

The next up is Disciples: Liberation.  I enjoyed this one, but need more time to get comfortable with it.  However, if it’s trying to be in the same genre as Heroes of Might and Magic, which I think it is, it also resolves some of my biggest problems with that genre, and I appreciate that.  The focus on the units, rather than worrying about the stacks of units makes this much more playable. 

The Top of the Add-Ons is Epic Chef.  I laughed hard at this game and enjoyed the battles.  I’m still in the tutorials after that hour, but I’m probably going to come back and see even more of this.  Also, this scene with Jesus might upset some people but I found it extremely funny. 

And this is how the Tier List looks after the Add-ons,  So let’s take a look at the last two games, which I call the Bundle Sellers, and find out which is the strongest of the month. 

The bottom of the Bundle Sellers is Monster Train.  There are only two reasons it’s the bottom.  It’s a cheaper title, and it’s a little easy, and again maybe that’s just RNG luck.  However, I want to play a lot more of this game and had a great time already.  There appears to be a ton to do here, and 25 difficulty levels with even more challenges as you go on. Honestly, I spent 90 minutes on this game when under a time crunch, because I wanted to keep going.  That’s as strong of a review as I can give. 

Which only leaves one, and of course, it’s Deathloop.  People keep talking about getting a major AAA title and a FPS, well here’s Deathloop that still goes for 60 dollars.  Arkane knocked this one out of the park, and if the only negative I have to say is that there is a lot of swearing, well that’s a pretty safe bet.  I’m excited to own it, and now the only question is, when will I have time to play it? 

Which leads us to one last look at this lovely Tier List, and while it’s not as stacked as last month, I obviously prefer this month’s line up and I hope you do as well. 

And that’s what I have to say for Humble Choice October 2022.  I wasn’t kidding when I said I was extremely happy with this selection and I’m looking forward to seeing if Humble can keep this streak up.  Two months in a row with strong bundles is good and maybe we’ll see even more. 

So about half of the viewers of this video are not subscribed, and I get it, maybe you’re not sure about my content, or if you enjoyed yourself, that’s ok.  But what I can say is I will keep making this video series and hope you are getting something out of it.  If so, let me know in the comments.  

I also am trying to post these reviews individually to my Kinglink Shorts channel, it depends on how much time I get to do that, but if you’re more interested in Youtube Shorts, I’ll throw that channel’s link in the description, it’s the same videos, just cut for a phone and 1 minute a game. 

I’ll pop up some further videos for you to check out if you’re interested. 

See you next time.