I’m Kinglink and it’s June, which means it’s time for the Humble Choice June 2023 Review.

Before we dive in I’ll apologize, I do feel like I’m on the cusp of getting sick, I’ll be using some trickery to make this video out but I wanted to make sure I could release this video without any delays to share my opinions with all of you and hope you enjoy it.

As always, I’ve played all the games in the Humble Choice for at least an hour, I’ve played a couple of them on Game Pass before, and now I can share my opinions with you. 

I’m going to just dive into the video, with the game already on screen. 

Ghostwire Tokyo. A stylish FPS fighting demons.

Ghostwire Tokyo starts with a strange mist that makes people disappear.  A spirit whose name is KK inhabits the body of a guy named Akito, who is trying to find his sister.  This is an interesting story, but Ghostwire Tokyo also tells it with a ton of style and great art designs.  The city feels like a real neighborhood in Tokyo, and the entire game oozes a great style.

On the other hand, this is an FPS and it seems to play it pretty safe with that.  You’ll shoot enemies, and while you are using spirit power, you’re mostly just playing a shooter.  At the end of the time I got a Bow and Arrow but I don’t know if that will change too much.  The game has a bit of horror, and while I enjoyed those parts, I’m not normally a horror fan, so my enjoyment may be a bad sign.  It’s probably not up to par with how scary the studio’s previous titles are.

Pick this up if you want to see a great-looking game and an interesting story.  The gameplay might never reach a top tier, but this game’s story makes me want to play more, and the design of everything so far has pulled me into the experience.  I’m curious what will happen next, and how the game will present it to the point I’ll be returning to see more. 

Remnant: From the Ashes – Complete Edition. A post-apocalyptic souls-like with some interesting twists

Remnant: From the Ashes focuses on being a souls-like game.  Enemies will be relatively strong, and players will have to focus more on avoiding attacks than fighting through them.  Players will have melee weapons along with ranged weapons with limited ammo, though the ammo replenishes at checkpoints so it’s not a scarce resource.  There’s also a randomization system, in which players can reroll the world, which can change which bosses appear, the map layouts, and items.  There are also four difficulties, and with the Complete Edition, there is also a survival mode, adventure modes, and additional campaigns. 

Even with all that, this is still souls-like so it will be challenging.  I’ve heard it can be significantly harder for solo players, as this is intended to be a multiplayer game.  Others have said it’s not too bad as a solo, so I’m not sure.   So far I’ve found unique enemies but nothing that has heavily stood out, though I’m hoping to see even more. 

Pick this up if you want a Souls-like especially if you want to partner up with friends.  This supports teams of up to four people, though I don’t think there’s an invasion mechanic.  There’s enough here to feel like a fresh take on the souls-like formula so it’d be worth a try, but at the same time, it’s really for people who already like the genre.

Curse of the Dead Gods.  Not just a simple Hades clone.

Curse of the Dead Gods looks like someone took a popular game with Hades and just tried to imitate it, but that is missing everything that Curse of the Dead Gods does differently.  The map screen between rooms is done similar to Slay the Spire.  Weapons can be traded out in the middle of a run and have randomized stats.  There is also the Curse system, in which the player will get four “curses” with quotation marks, as many of them can also benefit the player and a fifth major curse that’s guaranteed to be more brutal. 

Instead of having a multi-act structure, players can select from multiple dungeons, each one having a different set of enemies and a unique boss.  Each weapon feels different, and there are a few progression systems for players to buy into to unlock stuff.  

But at the end of the day, this is another rogue-lite and if you don’t like the genre, this likely won’t change your mind.  It’s a little more punishing, while the player has a health bar, there are traps, enemies, and multiple damage systems, including the corruption which will add curses, and when a run starts to go badly, it’s hard to recover sometimes. 

Pick this up if you like rogue-lites. I played this originally on Game Pass and enjoyed it. Now playing it again I’m having an even better time.  I compared this as the Saints Row to Hades’ version of Grand Theft Auto.  It’s a slightly weaker game, but some people are going to enjoy it more out of the two, and there’s no reason players have to choose between them.  You can easily enjoy both. 

Honey, I Joined a Cult.  All hail the great Chet GeePeeTee.

Honey I Joined a cult is pretty funny.  It starts with a disgraced cult leader escaping getting plastic surgery, and thus forming a new cult, which you run.  You have the cultists that you can order around and followers who you bilk for money.  The entire game plays like Prison Architect, where you build out the structures of the cult, and run the day-to-day operations, and is pretty accessible. 

But if you’ve been watching the screen, this is ultimately a tycoon or management game.  You build the objects, and just wait for your characters to use them.  You can order people around but the main part of the game is similar to Simcity, or Cities Skylines, build it and just wait for it to work out.  The game also has a tight tutorial but after that the game just lets players experience what feels most like a sandbox.

Pick this up if you like Tycoon games.  I enjoyed the idea here, the writing is well done, and the style works.  Even the idea of running a cult is more of a theme than anything but there are solid ideas at the core of the game, and if you like the art style this should work for you.   However, there will be a decent amount of time waiting for things to happen in the game as well, even at full speed. 

Eternal Threads.  A game where choices matter.

Eternal Threads is a strange game where players time-travel back to a night when six people died in a fire.  The goal is simple, save everyone, and the only way to do this is to view events and sometimes make choices.  Those choices will change which events happen, and potentially the fates of characters.  While this is a straight story-based game, you’ll be able to explore the house as you learn more about each of the characters.

At the same time, the game feels like it wants to be a horror game, except it’s not.  Like not even trying to be, it just has this feeling of horror for some reason.    The acting in the game works, but it feels a touch cheap and could have been better, the same is true for some of the animations, and a few times the naming of the scenes feels callous.

Pick this up if you like story games, especially that voyeuristic style that Her Story and Immortality has, or games like Gone Home and What Remains of Edith Finch.  It doesn’t reach those same levels, but it still is an interesting experience, and I hope this team will be able to produce a second game in the genre because this is pretty unique, and with a larger budget, this would stand out as something very unique. 

GRIME.  A 2d Souls-like game with a push for parrying. 

GRIME starts differently than most souls-like, instead of knocking down the first few enemies with your weapon, GRIME has players practice parrying.  GRIME has a really interesting mechanic with its parry that lets players take abilities based on enemies.  It’s just one of many ways GRIME stands out.  In addition to a Souls-like, this is also a bit of a Metroidvania, at least according to how many times I’ve seen it on that subreddit.  So far it’s a typical side scroller but I imagine players will unlock more abilities over time. 

The game is also pretty hard as you would expect, though I was able to get to the first boss and take him down in a pretty epic fight.   There’s also no real penalty so far for dying, so players can grind up points to level up abilities pretty easily.  There’s an interesting style to the game as well, and some people might be turned off by it, but it’s an intriguing game so far. 

Pick this up if you like a decent challenge, interesting monsters, and a very solid Metroidvania.   It’s an odd beginning and the characters are weird, but there’s also an interesting boss design and the map has a lot of nooks and crannies to explore.  This is a surprisingly good game, and I’m glad I finally got a chance to check it out. 

It also just added a new free DLC which adds a new game plus an additional boss, so that would be worth checking out as well. 

Turbo Golf Racing.  Rocket League for golf, with all the issues that it creates. 

Turbo Golf Racing is a title I played on Game Pass, in playing it again, I remember it is a solid idea, take car sports and make it work for Golf.  Here you try to hit a large ball into the cup.  Rather than worry about strokes, this is purely a race to see who can do it the fastest, and with interesting abilities and courses, the experience works… at first. 

The problem with Turbo Golf Racing is there are not enough courses to the point that I saw repetition after only thirty minutes of playing online.  The single-player offerings are only basic time trials and while there are missions, none of them will take too long.  The player base is a bit dead as well.  I believe the game uses bots, signified by the gears on screen, but I was usually finding a match with between three to five real players, and the bots would almost always finish last.   Rocket League succeeded by having a single course and forcing players to master it and the controls.  Turbo Golf Racing has just enough courses and not enough players that there’s probably never going to be the level of competition here. 

Pick this up if you want to play an interesting Golf game for half an hour or so.  After about thirty minutes I remember why I didn’t go too deep with this title, and while this is on the third season and still in Early Access, even with DLC already, this is really just a grindy experience before long, and the levels are interesting the first time, but hardly something I wanted to play for hours, especially with how often the same ones come around. 

Meeple Station.  A space sim game that never really gets started. 

Meeple Station has players running a space station with workers on it, trying to explore the vast enormity of space.  At least that’s what I think it’s supposed to be.  Players can choose jobs for their characters, build out their stations, and potentially fly to other planets, and trade.  

At least that’s what I think is the intent.  Meeple Station appears to have some issues.  I question if there even is a real campaign mode, as I couldn’t find a way to get any missions or requests to happen after starting the game.  Admittedly I was forced to skip most of the tutorial due to time limits, but even so, the game is pretty straightforward in concept, but with a lack of a solid UI to tell the player what is going wrong.  There are also no achievable goals from what I saw, and researching just didn’t work for me at all so I couldn’t build anything beyond what was available at the beginning of the game.   The only bright spot is when characters were suicidal and just spaced themselves. 

I wouldn’t pick this up, Even if you get the bundle, there are better simulator games, and this game almost feels abandoned at this point.  Maybe it’s broken, maybe I got hit by a bug, or maybe I just don’t understand how to play it, but it didn’t seem worth the effort to get going in the game, and outside of watching your crew fling themselves out of an airlock there’s not much else to see here. 

And that’s what we have for the Humble Choice of June 2023.  It sucks to end on a downer, but the fact is, that’s probably the only game I don’t like. 

Let’s start with a surprising Isthereanydeal.com list… surprising because two of these games are worth it just from the fact they have never been below 12 dollars, those are of course the headliners, Ghostwire: Tokyo and Remnant: From the Ashes.     The rest of the games retain a good value, except for GRIME and Meeple Station. 

Though I do know that Ghostwire: Tokyo was on PlayStation Plus in March 2023, I usually don’t consider games on those services because they’re not on the PC itself. 

As for the games, I’m personally quite happy with the list.  There are 6 games I’m considering returning to.  That’s extremely high and I think there’s a high-quality bar this month.  However, when this choice goes wrong, it goes pretty wrong. 

There’s also some interesting pairing.  Souls-like fans can play Remnants from the Ashes, and GRIME, and Sim fans can enjoy Honey I Joined the Cult and Meeple Station. 

With that said, let’s get to the tier list.   The usual list of tiers, with the games I think are worth the full bundle price, the strong contenders, the average games, and the misses.  As always these are my choices and about the value players will get out of the game, not necessarily how much they normally cost. 

Starting with the misses… It’s the same game you’ve been watching.  Maybe I’m an idiot, maybe I should have spent the whole hour playing a boring tutorial, maybe I got hit by a strange bug, but I think Meeple Station is broken,  I spent an extra 15 minutes I didn’t have trying to get the game to work after streaming, and it’s still stuck.   Even if it wasn’t, it’s not worth your time. 

This brings us up to the Average games, and there’s only one here.  Turbo Golf racing.  As a concept this sounds great, after playing it for an hour, I don’t think many people will stick with this game.  The player base is dead, and there’s only a limited number of courses.  The fact that after thirty minutes of playing online, I had seen courses repeated already is a bad sign, worse I saw one course three times.  It is a good concept though. 

And this is what we look like after two tiers. We’ll move on to the Strong Contenders and we’ll start with Honey I Joined a Cult.  This is a clever idea for a game that seems to work.  There’s a large research chart filled with different ideas players will be able to use, running missions on the local populace sounds good, and there’s good humor even if the idea is running a corrupt cult.  Not bad. 

Next up we have GRIME, which won me over with its style and combat.  I’m usually not a fan of parry mechanics, but GRIME got me to embrace it.  The battlers are intense and the exploration is interesting.  It does blur that line between Metroidvanias and Souls-like games, but that’s a good thing, after all, one of the most famous Metroidvanias, Hollow Knight does that same thing.  This is worth a try. 

And the top of the Strong Contenders, Eternal Threads.  Maybe higher than it should be but this is the game I’ll probably pick up this weekend and play through first.  I am a sucker for games where I feel like your choices matter, and they do here.  The only thing keeping it from being higher is the acting and animations are weak, but still, I’m curious about what secrets are hiding in the game. 

And that’s where we are.  We have three games left and let me say, I’m quite happy with this list so far, so let’s finish it off.   Starting in third place… Remnant from the Ashes.  This is a solid Souls-like, and I’m curious to play more. The randomized nature of the levels and bosses will give this a good replayability, and I’m also hoping to figure out how the co-op works, once I get there.   It’s got an interesting story as well. 

Second place goes to Ghostwire: Tokyo.  It’s the style.  I said it multiple times and I mean, there are a lot of interesting ideas already in this game.  The slender man-inspired enemies, the Japanese schoolgirl outfit without a head, and yet it’s more intriguing than horror, which makes me very excited to see more.  I hope it can keep up the interesting pace so far. 

This leaves us with one game, and honestly… It’s Curse of the Dead Gods.  I love Hades as you probably all know, and yet Curse of the Dead Gods is just different enough to get me to dive deep into a completely different game.  I’ll probably have to grind a bit for the game’s upgrade currency, but there’s a good mix of level enemies and enough new mechanics to keep this fresh.  This is probably the game I’ll sink the most hours into out of this list. 

Wait.. .how did you get out of there?  Oh no, my only weakness… being unplugged.

Ugh finally got out of that jail cell, oh sweet, the evil AI has almost finished my video so I don’t have to do it now… Maybe the real friends are the AI who try to take over your youtube channel.  Wait, you didn’t do the video editing… damn you Skynet!

In all seriousness, I was not lying at the beginning of this video my daughter has strep, I started to feel it, so I decided not to do a full recording, and gave an AI a shot at impersonating me.  I’m actually curious how did it do?   For a first attempt I’m a bit impressed, though I feel like it lacks some of my limited emotional range.

But that’s where I’ll have to leave you for the Humble Choice this month.

If somehow you aren’t interested in this choice, or you want more, I’ll pop up the Pixel Pride Bundle that just came out on Wednesday.  I will say Celeste is an amazing game that’s going for 7 bucks.  You can get the whole list for 12.  Admittedly I’m not a huge fan of Boyfriend Dungeon and haven’t played the rest.  If you’re interested check it out on Humble Choice if it’s before  June 28th and if you want to discuss it in the comments, just keep it respectful.  

Other than that, thanks for watching and I hope you enjoyed this video.  Last month I was hoping to have a video, before going on my first major vacation in three years, I’ll see how this month turns out.  And hey without E3 I’ll have more time… I’m not bitter, why do you ask? 

If you’re interested in more from me, consider subscribing and ringing the bell.  Liking, sharing, and commenting are always appreciated. And I promise, I won’t be using an AI voice unless I absolutely have to… or people prefer that voice to mine, which I wouldn’t be that upset about.

I’ll pop up some more videos if you’re interested in seeing more from me in my own words and voice.

See you next time.