Bought another bundle of games from Humble Bundle recently. It was an RPG based bundle. And I have tried all 6 of them now, so here are my quick reviews :

Cat Quest. A silly, cute Zelda-style ARPG (Action RPG) full of energy and charm and, of course, totes adorbs felines.

The plot is basically lifted straight from Skyrim: Oh no, the dragons have returned! Luckily, you have the Dragonblood, and therefore can defeat them. So it’s up to you to go around doing quests and getting strong enough to face them, and rescue your sister from the sinister white cat who abducted her at the beginning of the game.

Like any RPG, you have gear, weapons, spells. and all the other accoutrements of the genre. Originality is not the game’s strong suit.

Charm is! The art is cartoony, which matches the overal upbeat and silly mood of the game. The overall art style is a lot like Samaurai Pizza Cats, and while not quite as full goose wackadoodle as that show,. it has a similar sense of humour.

Verdict : I love it. Definitely a refreshing contrast to the gruim and dark games I usually play. I need more of this kind of silliness in my life.

Deep Sky Derelicts : Turn based strategy of the JRPG sort, with your people on one side of the screen and the baddies on the other, and picking various attacks from a menu, and so forth and so on.

The basic plot is…. complicated. More complicated than it needs to be, in my opinion. So let’s just say you’re the leader of a group of scavengers who explore derelict spaceships looking for salvage and lost technologies.

A bunch of plot stuff is happening as well, but you ghet the basic idea.

The art style is unpleasant, in my humble opinion. Everything looks grungy and diorty and is done in a depressingly limited palette of brown, black, and white.

The plot bores me. Obviously.

The fights are okay, I suppose. But I got sick of that style of combat a long time ago. And unlike other retro gaming elements, I have zero nostalgia for it. So….

Verdict : A hard meh. Would not recommend. Not my cuppa at all.

Immortal Planet : Another ARPG with another overladen plotline. This game, at least, has cleaner art and knows more than four colors.

But it otherwise made such a tiny impression on me that I had to look it up on Steam just to remember what it was all about.

It’s possible that if I didn’t have the bouncy and colorful Cat Quest to compare it to, it might have made more of an impression.

But as it stands, I can’t say I have much of an opinion of it at all. It seems perfectly fine and I am sure there are people who would love it, but I am not one of them.

Verdict : Medium meh. More of a shrug and “whatever” than anything else.

The other three after the break!

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Arright, time for the other three.

Two I’m going to kind of review together : Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity.

I am reviewing them together because they are quite similar in the fundamentals, and so I felt like I had to choose one to play first and uninstall the other.

I tried Tyranny first. It’s an isometric RPG much like Neverwinter Nights and the Baldur’s Gate series. Combat is realtime but semi-automated. Classic stuff.

But wow, is it dark, at least at the beginning. It takes place in a fantasy world where the evil overlord had basically won, and you play as a soldier in one of his two competing armies.

I assume it gets better eventually, because holy fuck, um, NOPE.

I don’t do evil. Nuh uh. No way, compadre.

But I might have made my way through this moral nightmare if it hadn’t been for the other issue I had with the game, which is that the character creation process takes for freaking ever and a day.

And I was not ready for it all. It started out with the sorts of things I am used to, like picking gender, race, character class, stats, and so on.

But then it added things like where you were born and what your background is and what your previous job was, and I am wondering if this is a video game or am I applying for an office job?

I just want to play the game, not date its daughter.

I got through all that, and figured okay, now I get to play the game.

BUT NO. Turns out I am not even halfway through yet! Because before I can actually play the game, I have to deal with like at least 20 hypothetical scenarios based on what I theoretically did during the last time people rebelled against the Tyrant.

By the time I finished all that, I wanted nothing to do with the game any more. Too bleak, too complicated, and too damned presumptuous of my time.

So I set my sights on Pillars of Eternity,  which is the same sort of game but nowhere near as bleak or as complex.

At least, compared to Tyranny

It’s a lot like Neverwinter Nights, a game I was playing a lot until recently, but I have gotten pretty sick of it after having played through all the originally released content, including all three DLC packs.

So in theory, there is still a vast ocean of free content out there in its modding community for me to experience, but for now, I am done.

“Pillars” seems like a good next step.

Finally, there is Hiveswap Part 1.

It’s fantastic. I adore it. It’s done in the spirit of the old 90’s adventure games like Sam and Max and Maniac Mansion^[1], and it is just has crazy and funny and wild.

You play a teenaged girl with an always-absent explorer father she resents and a dorky brother. They are playing outside when suddenly. holy shit, ALIEN MONSTERS.

With a lot more teeth than eyes.

Because they don’t have eyes.

They run into the house, and after various hijinks, our protagonist ends up activated the weird machine her father keeps in the attic and whoosh, she swaps places with some alien lady on another planet.

After that, things get kinda weird.

I thoroughly enjoyed the heck out of this game. It’s funny, its wacky, it is jam-packed with top notch comedy writing, and its style and wit suit me to a T.

My one complaint is that it is too short. And that’s a great problem for a video game to have. I went into it knowing it was just Act 1 of a larger story, and yet, I had grown so attached to the characters and the narrative by the time I finished it that when those credits rolled, I felt like crying.

So bravo, game. Few things get me to invest like that.

Verdict : It will break your heart, and I heartily recommend it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh wait…. affirmations. Dammit.

I count, I matter, I am a good person and benefit to the world, I am awesome, I am amazing, I am adorable, and gosh darn it, people like me.

That more or less covers it.