I’m Kinglink in the shortest month, which means it’s time for the Humble Choice February 2024 Review.

Now this is a great month with several huge titles and a lot of value, but I’m getting ahead of myself.  I’ve done an 8-hour stream on Twitch, played through these games, and I’m also familiar with four of them due to previous experiences, so I’m ready to talk about who will like these games, why you should or shouldn’t check them out, and who they are going to appeal to.

With that being said, let’s start with the title already on screen, a game I fully played through on Xbox Game Pass, and that means I’m a fan. 

Life is Strange: True Colors.  True colors shining through.

Life is Strange can be a bit of a roller coaster and while each title is an independent story, they all revolve around a few things.  They are “choices matter game” where the choices affect the journey more than the destination.  One of the main characters has special powers, in this case, a form of empathy, where our main character can read minds, oh and licensed mostly indie music which, yeah I’m going to try to avoid here. But that’s just what the game is. 

True Colors though is extremely good at what this series does.  Creating interesting and somehow relatable characters, a good universe, and a drama that will pull the player into the story with minimal effort.  You start to care for every character in the game, and the world is well-built so that it flows naturally.  It’s well-written and has a unique style to its dialog which feels refreshing. 

At the same time, admittedly True Colors does little to stand out on its own.  It falls back on a romance triangle that feels a bit like a trope at times.   There’s great writing, but the entire fifth chapter feels rushed, and the big twists in this game just don’t feel like they make the impact the team was hoping for. 

Pick this up if you like narrative stories or if you enjoyed any of Life is Strange.  Yes, I sound like I have issues with this game, but I still enjoyed my time with it and would consider playing through this again.  Just because it wasn’t remarkably different from the franchise, doesn’t make it bad, and the writing works extremely well when it is supposed to. 

Scorn.  Feeling like the work of H. R. Giger and Junji Ito combined.

Scorn is not a game I like.  Usually, I start with the positives of a game, and that is one.  I hate Scorn because I hate horror, and especially body horror.  This game is a bit too bloody and also extremely unnerving.  The level designs I feel are off-putting and in general, I don’t enjoy this, but I’d also say for all of that, it’s exactly what people are looking for in this genre, and if so, they will almost certainly like this title. 

I’ll also say that points of this game remind me of the darkest moments of a Call of Duty game, or Spec Ops The Line.  You know those impactful moments where you’re forced to do something personally distasteful for story reasons? That’s here too, and again, it’s done for the same reasons, to be unsettling but I feel like it’s more appropriate here.

At the same time, there are some issues I have to bring up.  One big issue is that it’s a little hard to figure out what you’re trying to do or what you are missing mostly due to how alien the world feels, but I think that’s an interesting decision and helps unsettle the player.  The one actual negative is taking that further and saying that it’s sometimes easy to miss things, not because of the universe, but because if you’re not standing in the exact right place you might not notice it. . 

Pick this up if you like body horror, I mean if you’re looking at the screen and not liking what you’ve seen, this isn’t for you, but there’s going to be a decent number of people who will look at this, and can’t wait to play it or already have and… yeah for those people, this game was made for you. 

Destroy All Humans 2! Reprobed.  Updating a PS2 game for modern audiences, kind of. 

Destroy All Humans 2! Reprobed is the follow-up to the Destroy All Humans Remake from Humble Choice April 2022, and it feels almost similar in quality.  Take a PlayStation 2 game, update the visuals and graphics, and attempt to retain what made the original stand out such as voice acting.  The experience here is good and delivers on the sequel.  While it’s not a completely different experience it still delivered a game for players that wanted a second helping of this franchise. 

Still, when I say modernized the game, there are limitations, the game still has the old fade out at the end of missions, some of the gameplay elements are a little static, and there’s an older feeling to the game.  Now I love Playstation 2, it’s what I’m spending a lot of time playing currently, but if players don’t have a love for that era in gaming, this is going to feel quite rough.  Also Destroy All Humans 2 was not as great as the original, so in that way, it’s a bit of a step down.

Pick this up if you like the original Destroy All Humans, especially the remake, and want more.  I think they did a better job with the remake here, but the original sequel was a touch weaker, so it evens out.  The humor also feels a little dated, not cringy necessarily, but I don’t know the last time I heard or thought about hippies from the 60s.   It’s just not a reference that’s common in 2024.

Beacon Pines.  A unique take on the Mad Libs of old. 

Beacon Pines was a surprise for me when I first played this.  The main mechanic of the game is that players can take Charms, essentially words that they discover by exploring the world, and then use them to fill in the blanks at junctions in the story.  

This sounds simple, but the main goal is to explore different branches of the story to take the narrative in different directions and then return to the branching point and try different words.  The story is well written and there’s a lot of charm in the game, as well as a great mystery at the center.  While I’ve only seen half of it previously, I need to go back and play this whole game.

At the same time, this game has a very narrative focus on storytelling and world-building but still requires players to go through the world searching for the words to use.  Also, the game can feel repetitive at times, and admittedly the game does a good job avoiding that, but going back into the story means having to see some of the same content a second or third time. 

Pick this up if you want an interesting or unique narrative experience.  I can’t think of many games like this, because this does something fresh and new.  The story here is extremely compelling and the mysteries are ones that players will feel a need to unravel and see what’s going on. 

There is No Light.  Which is a shame because the art here is great. 

There is No Light has players exploring a dark underground area while they fight their way through a horde of enemies.  While the game does feel a little like a souls-like there’s an interesting difference where players are supposed to attack to disrupt many enemy attacks, and that’s something I like here.   There are tight cramped areas, as well as arenas but the entire time the player is traveling through larger areas with a decent number of waypoints.

However, I’m not sure if the story here is bad, or if I just rushed through it. I’m willing to accept the latter, but I also think that the important beats of the story could have been told better, the cutscenes with no text and just silence didn’t help much.   Also while I enjoyed the combat, I’ve heard several people call it simple, and it is at least early on, which is what I like about it, but I feel like that’s too reductive. 

Pick this up if you want an attack-heavy Souls-like with great graphics but still a bit rough around the edges.  I found it entertaining but I also can feel this is going to struggle to find the right audience because it’s not as punishing as Souls-like but still is trying to live in that world.   There’s also a LOT of text that you can skip, but you’ll be missing the whole world-building. 

Children of Silentown.  A unique art style… just unique. 

Children of Silentown is a game where players take on the role of Lucy who lives in a little village, where strange things are going on.  It sounds like people are disappearing and Lucy is having nightmares but it’s not clear why.  The gameplay is done in a point-and-click adventure style where Lucy has to explore the world and solve a variety of tasks from helping her mother cook to getting groceries.  

But that’s kind of a problem, in the first hour, I feel like nothing happened and while there’s a big mystery, the gameplay lacks anything interesting.  This is a simple point-and-click puzzle game but even there, the solutions are rarely unique or deep, if anything they force players to click on everything and hope they find something interactive.    There’s a strange song mechanic but nothing gripped me in that first hour, and the art style is… I mean you can see it, this is strange, right? 

Pick this up if you want a point-and-click adventure game.  People do seem to like the story here, but I’m not sure why, and honestly, I don’t feel like returning.  The graphics don’t help the game, though I’ve heard people praise them, I have no clue what they’re talking about.  Ultimately this just feels weak for the point-and-click genre and doesn’t have a story that I feel like I have to discover, so I won’t. 

Oaken.  Tile-based Slay the Spire. 

That’s right, Oaken is a Deckbuilder, and that means comparisons to Slay the Spire, because… yeah, it is Slay the Spire on the map.  However Oaken also has hex-based combat where units move around a grid, and there are interesting mechanics at work here.   The tutorial took me about 40 minutes, but once the real game starts it’s decently challenging, and that’s going to make some players struggle.  

There are good risk vs reward trade-offs such as using a card more than one time in a battle makes you lose the use of the card until the next boss has been reached.  How you summon your characters or lay out the board has a lot of tactical depth. There’s also a Relaxed mode which seems like the easy mode if you want a little more help.

At the same time, this is still a deck builder rogue-lite under the hood, while the combat is different, when you die you restart and have to rebuild your deck.  Also, there are only two playable heroes which feels a bit light.  Oddly enough, having only one may not have had this problem.  I’ve mostly seen the tutorial but the main game got hard enough that it’s just stacking huge negatives on me extremely quickly.  Maybe it’s luck-based, but I get a bad feeling here. 

Pick this up if you want another Slay the Spire game, especially one that’s more tactical.  Oaken delivers on that, but it’s always going to be a question of how punishing a game is, and while the first chapter wasn’t too bad, I didn’t get to see a boss and a couple of events were very costly.  There’s also mod support but there are only 9 mods that I saw and I believe the support has been out for 5 months.  

Snowtopia: Ski Resort Builder.  The Bunny slope of a management sim. 

Snowtopia has a good idea.  Take a Ski Resort, build out lifts, slopes, and trails for players to ski, and then simulate visitors enjoying the area.  They did something a bit crazy and did away with money so players can just build to their heart’s content.    There’s a variety of people, and when it works, laying out slopes is fast and relatively easy. 

But that’s just when it works.  Oftentimes it’s hard to lay down lifts or find the right place to put them, slopes seem to be hard to lay out and constantly complain about rocks, other slopes,  or lifts, and in general the map gets crowded fast.  Also, simple things like the ability to expand the walkable area isn’t available, there’s ways around this but it feels like a hack to put down a restaurant just to make a path between two locations, and chaining lifts together to get to the mountain or even to the top.

The developers have said they officially are done patching the game, but it feels unfinished and there are no special goals on any map, so it just feels like a simple sandbox mode.  It feels almost like pulling teeth to even set up the lift and runs, and after that point, it feels almost like it’s set in stone, that’s what the runs will be.  Even something simple like swapping out lifts for better choices isn’t allowed, so you’re mostly stuck with whatever you started with.   Oh, and the text size is extremely small, which made it hard to read on my TV screen, and feels like something that should have been there as an accessibility option.

Pick this up if… honestly if you get the humble choice.  This is not a game worth picking up on its own, and it’s a shame because conceptually this is a good idea, but the game isn’t designed well enough to be worth playing, and that sucks because designing a ski resort sounds fun, this just isn’t it.  There does seem to be a backstory to why this game has stopped development but it doesn’t matter, because at the end of the day, you’re paying for a product, and the product isn’t that good. 

This brings us to the end of the Humble choice and yeah, once again we end on a downer.  But it’s not all bad, we’ll come back to that later. 

However we can talk about some good news, and that’s, is there any deal (dot com), and the answer is, oh yes, there is.

I mean Scorn is currently 30 bucks, Destroy All Humans, Life is Strange: True Colors, and Oaken all are currently over 12 bucks, and most have never been lower than 10.  Heck Life is Strange still goes for 18 bucks at its lowest, so that’s a good value.  

Oaken by the way has been bundled before with the Fanaticall Platinum Collection, and is there currently for all of February.  You can get a bundle of games for cheap. Currently, you can get 3 games for 9.99, and Oaken is on the list.  If Oaken is the only game you want, that’s going to be cheaper, however, I see a lot of previous titles from Humble Choice in that list so you may have many of those titles. 

As for the Choice itself, there’s a good amount of narrative games again this month, Life is Strange, and Beacon Pines are solid, but there’s also Children of Silentown if you’re looking for it.  There’s a good amount of variety though and I’m pretty happy here. Beacon Pines, Destroy All Humans 2, and Life is Strange: True Colors, are games that I’ve wanted for a while. 

However, I will mention I know I wanted them because I played them on Game Pass, at least Beacon Pines, Scorn and Life is Strange: True Colors.  Owning, or whatever you call ownership on Steam is better than a subscription service, but at the same time, it does feel like this is the last chance for many of these titles to get some money for the publisher. 

Still, we have a Tier list to do, and like always the tiers are games worth The Full Bundle Price, The Strong Contenders, The Average, and The Misses, and yeah we have a miss, with an asterisk this month. 

The game that’s a Miss is… Snowtopia.  I’ve made the case why this isn’t worth picking up, it’s not, but you know.   Normally a miss is just terrible in every way, it doesn’t know what it’s doing.   And the thing is if you already bought the humble choice.  Maybe … just maybe check this game out if you like management games, there’s a few things here that are worth seeing even if there are problems. But it’s a miss because it shouldn’t have been part of the choice in the first place, and shouldn’t change your opinion on whether this Choice is worth it. 

Moving up to the Average tier, the bottom of that is Children of Silentown.  This is a game where I played for an hour and I don’t feel like going back to it.  I miss good point-and-click adventure games.  This didn’t scratch that itch, unfortunately. 

The other game in Average is Oaken.   I don’t know, maybe I’m being hard on this game but I just think this game feels to be lacking something, it’s a good idea, but after seeing games like Monster Train do this with so much more effort, Oaken feels like it’s not as competitive.   I still enjoyed it though. 

And this is how we look after the Average tier.  This might surprise some people for a certain game missing, but we’ll see how the next tier goes, and there are two titles there. 

The bottom is There is No Light.  This is a nice solid game, but the enjoyment I feel for it is because of how attack-driven this game is.  Still, the art is good, and this game deserves more attention.   If you like the way Souls-like delivers its lore, I think you’ll like how this game tells a story as well. 

And the top is SCOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRN… Scorn.  Some of you might be surprised because I don’t like this game, but I have to respect it.  I don’t like it, but almost everything that I don’t like about this game is why fans will enjoy it.   This is gruesome body horror and it will be unsettling, I’m avoiding showing you the absolute worst here, it’s much worse at times, but that’s what people will want. 

And with that, we finish three tiers, with one to go, and three games there.  Let’s finish with the games worth the full bundle price. 

The bottom of this tier is Destroy All Humans 2: Reprobed.  Yes, this is a remake of a PS2 game and has a lot of those flaws, but there’s something about how they made Open World games back then that has been lost, maybe good for design, but there’s something about this game I find refreshing. Also, the voice acting is great. 

The middle of the full bundle tier is Beacon Pines.  I love the narration here, the writing, the mystery, the style, and I forgot to mention the art of the character in conversations.  This is a well-made game, and I’m a little surprised this studio hasn’t released anything else yet, but this game is worth checking out. 

And that leaves, of course.   Life is Strange: True Colors.  This is another well-told story, but the design, the writing, and the world delivers here.  There are tons of great moments and beautiful imagery.  There’s a unique idea of using Alex’s power, but it’s the journey here that works.  The ability to feel that this world matters and that you care what happens to people makes all of the Life is Strange games shine.  If you’ve played a game from this franchise, you know what I mean, and if you haven’t, this is a great place to start, and again you do not have to play the other games to enjoy this one.

And that’s how this tier list ends.  I always feel like I end up giving a headliner the top spot, but that’s also kind of why they’re the headliner, right?  

Before you go though, I will say this is a very narrative-focused Choice.  Destroy All Humans 2 and There is No Light does have a little action but if you’re understandably craving more, Humble has another bundle worth quickly talking about.  

Controller’d Chaos has 7 games, not 8.  Humble, come on coupons don’t count.  It’s only 14 dollars which is a couple of bucks more, and while Man Eater and Destroy All Humans have been in the Humble Choice, you may not have bought them.  

However, No More Heroes is made by Suda51 and is a pretty solid game.  Sunset Overdrive is by  Insomniac of Ratchet and Clank fame and truthfully deserves more attention.  I gave it a 4 out of 5, you can find my ancient video on it if you want to see it.  Ghostbusters the Video Game Remastered is what Dan Aykroyd called the real Ghostbusters 3, which is kind of cool.   

I haven’t played Orcs Must Die 3, and Rain On Your Parade is new to me, but essentially if you want more action, this is the way to go.  I’ll throw a link in the description. 

With that, we come to the end of our scheduled program.  If you enjoyed this I’m glad, consider subscribing so you can check out my video next month, and ring the bell so you get notifications.  Liking the video and commenting will always help.  And if you’re interested in how my 2024 has been going, decent.  

I put out two extra videos last month, I know I said I’d only ever do one, and apparently, I lied.   I talked about two sets of Retro games.  I talked about Dynasty Warriors 3, maybe the best Dynasty Warriors ever, and three Saturn games including Elevator Action Returns, a must-play, and Virtua Cop, Sega at their very best.  If you’re interested in hearing about those, click one of the videos on the screen now. 

Thanks for watching. I appreciate you staying to the end of the video and I’ll see you next time.