Super Adventures in the Humble Choice Bundle

This week on Super Adventures, I'm writing about some games from the Humble Choice bundle (formerly known as Humble Monthly). Not because I'm getting any money for it, in fact they're not even from the current bundle. I just felt like writing about a few games at once and needed a theme to tie them together. It seemed like a better idea than "games with 11 letters in the title" or something, plus this way there's more chance you already own some of these games and haven't gotten around to trying them yet.

I'll be showing off seven games, but I assure you that I played each of them for as long as I usually do; they got a full hour, sometimes even two! You might not think that this is long enough to properly judge a game and I don't really disagree, but it was long enough to finish a couple of them. So I'll be able to give you a proper opinion on those two at least.

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198X

Developer: Hi-Bit | Release Date: 2019 | Played on: Windows Despite how it looks, 198X isn't a scrolling beat 'em up in the style of Final Fight and Streets of Rage. Well, not for long anyway. The game features five retro games like this, each one looking absolutely beautiful, sounding amazing, and playing... fairly well. Well they're more like retro demos really, as you only get the first stage of each. Long enough to reach a boss fight. The stages are surprisingly elaborate considering how quickly you move on to the next game; they really do feel like the real deal, with all the enemy waves and boss attacks you'd expect. Except I think they got the name wrong; it's called 198X, but these visuals are clearly good enough to be from the 90s. Fortunately (for me) the shoot 'em up stage isn't quite as harsh as an actual arcade game, as it lets you keep your weapons when you die! You can even take a few hits before you blow up, which is good, because I did. Especially when I reached this bastard. I think the games generally get more difficult as you progress, with the auto-running shinobi platformer later on giving me the most trouble. I've no clue what arcade game this is inspired by, but I think I hate it! I mean it was fun at first, leaping over pits and slicing ninjas, but when it started giving me three lanes of hazards and instant death spikes I really started to resent the fact it restarted me right at the beginning of the current section each time. You can walk through the Final Fight level blindfolded as long as you know how to flying kick, but this will actually test your memory and reflexes. After every game you earn the next piece of the story, though maybe calling it a 'story' is overselling it. You get awesome pixel art and a bit of narration, as the Kid talks about how arcade games let them escape the suburbs, for a little while. The Kid isn't very happy with their life, can't find any enthusiasm for their school work and... oh shit, I just spoiled half the game's story. The narration's pretty good and you can see the quality of the visuals for yourself, but if you're expecting anything to happen you'll be disappointed. In fact it only barely hints at what's made the Kid so sad and nostalgic for their childhood that they spend their free time wandering the streets, hanging out by the video rental place, and playing cutting-edge arcade games. I expected the arcade games to play some part in telling the story, and I feel like they kind of do, but it's usually limited to subtle hints you'd maybe catch on a replay. The game works better during the few times they tie in overtly and I think it's a shame the game didn't go more in that direction. Or they could've pulled a Retro Game Challenge/NES Remix and give you meta challenges to complete within the games. It doesn't help that the game turns out to be part one of the story! Though it feels more like part zero. It's barely interested in setting anything up, never mind giving you any kind of resolution. That art though... 198X took me just under two hours to beat (I got stuck on the auto-running stage for a while), so it won't ask for too much of your time, but a fair amount of it will be spent listening to a teenager talking about the malaise of suburban life in the 80s. You'll have to decide for yourself whether that's a positive or a negative. If you just want to play some classic arcade games you'll be better off with MAME, but the game's a work of art in its own right and even though I'm too young to be nostalgic for the 80s I don't regret playing it.

Horizon Chase Turbo

Developer: Aquiris | Release Date: 2018 | Played on: Windows Horizon Chase Turbo is like a classic OutRun/Lotus style race 'em up with the slickness of a modern smartphone game. Uh, it's better than I made it sound. It doesn't even have in game purchases (that I'm aware of)! Unlike OutRun it has you racing laps, and you're also collecting pickups on the track along the way. Not as weapons; they're mostly just to improve your score so you can unlock more stuff. Though there's also a spare nitro refill occasionally, plus fuel cans. You actually have fuel in this, just like Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge! It's a weird choice I reckon, but the only impact it has on gameplay is that you can't afford to ignore every pickup you see. The gameplay is classic pre-3D racing, with any resemblance to actual driving physics being purely coincidental, but that can be fun... for a while. The game gives you plenty of races to race, non-licensed cars to unlock, upgrades to earn and times to beat, but I found it lost my interest very quickly because of how simple it is and repetitive it is. Then I'd come back later and give it another 20 minutes. I'm not sure how I'd rank it among games like OutRun and Lotus because to be honest I was never that into them, but it's better than the OutRun stage on 198X I'd say. It helps that the cars are more keen on going around corners without clipping something and flipping over. Also there's no bloody checkpoints! If you're into classic racing games because of those classic racing game visuals this might not be what you're looking for as it's got a weird look all of its own, but if it's early 90s gameplay you're after, this kind of nails it.

Whispers of a Machine

Developer: Clifftop | Release Date: 2019 | Played on: Windows Whispers of a Machine is a point and click adventure all about an augmented detective solving murders with the powers of forensic eyesight and super-strength (amongst other things). So it's probably the closest I've found to a Deus Ex adventure game. It's a modern style adventure game, by which I mean it looks and plays like it's from 1996 (with genuine 640x360 resolution visuals!). You can really tell it was made with Adventure Game Studio, but then so was Unavowed, Technobabylon, Primordia and the Blackwell series, so that's hardly a bad thing if you're into adventure games. There are far worse games to mimic than Broken Sword, especially if you don't like having a box of verbs to deal with. Plus the game lets you see all interactive objects by pressing a button, which I always appreciate. Though then it goes and spoils it by making you sweep a box across the screen to spot clues. You write down the clues in your journal and pick up items, and these form the arsenal of questions you can ask people about. You can basically talk to any character about anything, in a very professional way, which makes this pretty much the opposite of Sam & Max: Hit the Road on the detective adventure scale. In tone and gameplay, not quality. I couldn't help compare it to Disco Elysium as well, seeing as it's about a detective solving a murder in an alternate world with a lot of history to discover, and after playing it for an hour I've noticed it also has a similar amount of backtracking. Disco Elysium has fantastic, hilarious, thought-provoking writing though, and this kind of doesn't. I mean the dialogue's fine, good even, and the voice actors deliver it well, but it's about sensible people taking their jobs seriously. So it's pretty different to Thimbleweed Park as well. The game also lets you define your personality through dialogue choices, in a similar way to a BioWare game. You get to choose from an empathetic reply, an authoritative reply, and an analytical reply, and as you learn more towards one, you're pulling away from the others. I don't know what it affects yet, but the game does warn that your decisions are final and doesn't let you make your own saves to get around it. Whispers of a Machine seems like a decent enough game and I've been getting into the story, so I have to give it a thumbs up as well. Even if the shading on the character sprites is weirdly ugly, and it made me feel stupid by giving me a door code riddle I couldn't solve myself (turns out it wasn't 451).

The Hex

Developer: Daniel Mullins Games | Release Date: 2018 | Played on: Windows The Hex is basically what you get if you take the premise of 198X and do the exact opposite with it. Sure it's all about playing through a selection of short retro games, but here the art really isn't the main draw, there's no voice acting, the story is about the characters from the games themselves, and it's a bit weird. Also 198X keeps the games and the story separate for the most part and stays true to the genres its replicating, but The Hex goes off-road. I don't want to spoil what happens in it though, because I think a lot of the game's appeal comes from being surprised by what it's doing (it's definitely not trying to win people over with slick, addictive gameplay). Not that it's done anything really that weird or clever in the hour or so I've played it, so keep your expectations reasonable. It just likes to tell stories about the games during the games. It's very meta. Like 198X, finishing a game earns you an interlude, except here you control the character directly and have tasks to complete. Like here I had to carry a pie to a room. These tasks are made trickier by the way you can only hold one item, so I kept accidentally walking away with the wrong object when I investigated something shinier. C'mon The Hex, even the Dizzy games let you carry more than one thing! Barely. Like I said, the graphics aren't the selling point for this one (the animation is exactly as bad as you'd imagine from the screenshots) and the gameplay's not great, but I got into it pretty fast and I've been enjoying it. It helps that there's a bit of a mystery and I want to keep playing to see where it's the story's going. Someone's planning a murder... maybe, and you get to play as each of the suspects to learn their backstory. I only got as far as Chandrelle's RPG though so I don't know how it all plays out in the end. All I know is it's way longer than 198X, it's far more meta, and it actually has a plot.

Project Warlock

Developer: Buckshot | Release Date: 2018 | Played on: Windows When I first saw Project Warlock's wide array of retro palettes and CRT filter options I figured I'd leave them all off. I don't need those kinds of gimmicks. Then I loaded it up, saw the graphics and realised that this is an experience best left pixellated. I've seen a few retro-styled first person shooters (the excellent Duke Nukem 3D-inspired Ion Fury is the most recent I've played), but this has to be the first time I've seen someone go back before Doom to the Catacomb 3-D/Wolfenstein 3-D era. Everything's 90 degrees in this one. I Why would anyone do that? Do the level designers hate steps and slopes? Do they have an unnatural fondness for right angles? The game's so flat and grid-based it's practically a top down shooter. It does have textured floors though, I'll give them that. This screenshot here isn't entirely representative of the game as there's only a couple of enemies in it and I'm not stuck in a maze of narrow featureless hallways, but I wanted to show off how pretty it is sometimes. You don't think this is pretty? Try fighting your way out of a maze of narrow featureless hallways, then you'll get a new appreciation for it. It has actual modelled battlements! Oh damn, look, I've found some sloping walls! Plus it's hard to tell, but I think those islands over there might not have right angles. I'd jump over there and have a look, but... there's no jumping in this. So yeah, I have no idea why they tried to make this seem more primitive than the first good FPS, but the funny thing is the game actually works. It's like it came from a parallel universe where Catacomb 3-D had fast movement, strafing, an arsenal of satisfying weaponry, and really out of place reflection and lighting effects. It also has level ups, plus perks you can select when you return to base between levels. It's pretty straightforward to anyone who's ever played an RPG, but one thing I still don't get is why it has lives. Who wanted them to put lives back into first person shooters? I get the appeal of health kits, being able to carry all the guns at once, and a lack of quick saves, but lives? I should mention that the game does feature a regenerating health feature... in that you can upgrade your axe to steal life from enemies and then go to work on them like a mad lumberjack facing a unusually aggressive indoor forest. You can also upgrade your pistol into a magnum, unless you want to pick the other option and turn it into a flare gun instead. Every weapon comes with two possibilities, but you have to spend precious upgrade points that you find around the levels. This is complicated by the fact that you're a warlock with a gun in one hand and magic in the other, so you've got spells to buy as well. You can just use your mana as ammo for your magic staff, though the thing's pretty lame so I feel like you can find a better use for it. That's the kind of magic staff I need! Where's the upgrade that gives me that thing? I also want his power to drop fireballs on the whole level, or maybe he can just stop doing it to me. This guy's the first boss and I don't think he really appreciates that you've only got limited lives. Also his life bar's deceptive, as the first two times I emptied it he just switched to a different form! Regular enemies have a health bar as well, but fortunately they're not as much of a bullet sponge. I especially appreciated this when the boss level started filling up with them and I had to fight them all as well. A lot of this game is too advanced for the era it's imitating, but the enemies are just as dumb as you'd expect. They've got a bit of variety to them though, plus it seems that you get a different set to fight on each world, which is cool. Sometimes you get bored of fighting demons and want to shoot belligerent blocks of ice instead. See, there's those reflections I mentioned. To be honest Project Warlock put me off almost immediately with its scruffy visuals and basic gameplay, and it took a good two minutes before it finally won me over. After that point I loved it though. It's not all good, I've only been playing for an hour or so and I've already played through a sewer level and an actual maze. Plus there's been a few times where I've flicked a switch and then had to go off and figure out what it opened, and it doesn't mark the colour of locked doors on the map... in fact it barely has a map from what I can tell. But if you're in the mood for circle strafing, lobbing dynamite from distance, and popping out from behind walls to blast spiders with a shotgun, this has the potential to bring you great joy. As long as you can get past the graphics. So far I'd say it's better than Heretic and Rise of the Triad, and worse than Doom and Ion Fury, but that's just my own personal taste. Oh and it's way better than Wolfenstein 3-D obviously.

>observer_

Developer: Bloober | Release Date: 2017 | Played on: Windows This game really surprised me right near the start, when I discovered that the guy on the cover art didn't just look like Rutger Hauer, it actually was him. He provides the main character's gravelly voice and you hear him a lot as despite the first person view he does most of the talking. The hero is mind-reading cybercop who soon ends up locked inside a nasty futuristic apartment block just down the road from Blade Runner. I don't mean that literally, it's just that kind of future. The game's set in 2084, because it's 100 years worse than 1984 and just as 80s. I couldn't help but compare this to Whispers of a Machine as they're both about a detective with special forensic vision modes investigating a murder in a sci-fi future, but this takes a very different approach. For one thing it's first person view, though the quality of that view depends on whether you've been finding enough of the drug that keeps your cybernetics synced up. It seems more like one of those 'open every cupboard, spin every item around' style horror games, which isn't really my genre. Games like SOMA and Tacoma jump to mind (which were incidentally both given away in the Humble Monthly subscription in the past themselves). Fortunately opening doors is very satisfying, as you click to hold the handle, then move the mouse in the same way you'd move your arm. Opening cupboards is its own reward, which is good because I didn't actually find much inside them during the first hour or so I played the game. I found this plane lying on a table though! So that's good. Probably doesn't have anything to do with anything though; it's just there to say a bit about the occupant. I've also been knocking on doors and chatting to the occupants on their intercoms to learn if they know anything about the gruesome murder just down the hall, with similarly limited results. The game seems to be more about taking in the atmosphere and learning about the world than solving puzzles. Though I did have to find the code to a security system after I accidentally locked myself inside the crime scene! I found it in a walkthrough in the end, because I forgot the obvious clue and got bored trying the less obvious possibilities. Turns out it wasn't 0451. Oh, there's also this thing. It seems like modern computers do exist in this future, but the people living in this apartment block are generally at more of a Commodore 64 level. I've seen tapes, floppy discs and CDs lying around. And I've seen this damn game installed on most of them. You have to go through the maze, collect all the coins and get past the spiders to reach the princess, and you get a limited number of one-use flaming blades to aid you. But there's seven spiders and only two blades on this level so you can see how it's a little tricky. Fortunately this minigame's probably optional, same as all the emails and suchlike that you can read. I figured that this was going to be the game from now on: I'd find a clue, walk around the miserable, well-modelled apartments to the next room, mess around with the vision modes, play with the computer, and look around for the next clue, and maybe solve a bit of a puzzle while I was there. Then I ended up in the NIGHTMARE DIMENSION. Well, it's actually the inside of someone else's mind: half corrupted fragments of memories, half drug trip, half edgy horror movie. It's like the creepy interludes in FEAR and Far Cry 3, all flickery and surreal, except it drags on for ages and probably isn't great for people with heart conditions or epilepsy. I think Observer is leaning more towards walking simulator than adventure game, and it's more about the horror than the detective work. Or more about the atmosphere anyway. I don't know if I'd recommend it, I'm not even sure if I like it, but it's definitely dripping with style. Also blood.

A Short Hike

Developer: adamgryu | Release Date: 2019 | Played on: Windows A Short Hike should've been called NPC Island, because every few steps there's another one! All of them enjoying themselves, and being nice to you, and asking you to get them stuff. Actually only a few of the people I found wanted anything from me, the rest were just jogging, painting, building sandcastles etc. But you play as a penguin with a mission. You're waiting for a call, but there's no reception anywhere but the summit of Hawk Peak. To get up there you need Golden Feathers to increase your climbing and flying abilities, and to get them generally requires money. Fortunately there's treasure lying all over the island and you can sprint into a glide at any time to swoop around. You can also water plants with a watering can to turn them into springs to fling you into the air, dig holes with a spade for buried coins... in fact the only item I felt I was really missing out on was a map. The island's pretty big and finding 15 seashells is hard enough without also having to find the person who gave you the task afterwards. It's a really chilled out game with nothing really out to get you and no dangers. You just play around on the island for a while, hiking, climbing, swooping, fishing, racing, and playing whatever sport this is, until you're satisfied you've done everything you want to and gotten your phone call. I really had no idea what kind of game it was going to be when I started, I only knew that people said it was good, and they weren't lying! This one's an easy recommend if it looks like something you'd be into. It really is short though, as I was done with it in less than two hours.

CONCLUSION

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Right, I've said everything I can think to say about these seven games, so all that's left for me to do is to put them up against each other in battle to see which of them is strongest. Actually, I'm not going to pick a winner this time, or even do a top three, because they're all pretty good in their own ways (though I'd obviously pick Project Warlock, because it's a first person shooter and that's my genre.)

I feel like 198X and Observer brought the least joy into my life, but 198X made up for it by being a damn art gallery and Observer's a miserable cyberpunk horror game set in the most hopeless part of a bleak future, so joy wasn't really what it was going for.

On Metacritic the lowest scoring game was 198X with 63%, but the rest are all between 76 and 78, and they're all very positive or better on Steam. So, chances seem good that if you think you're going to like any of these games, you're going to like them. Though if you try any of them and end up hating them, feel free to tell me how wrong I am in the comments.

Oh by the way, A Short Hike and The Hex were both in itch.io's epic 1741 game/etc. Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, so if you bought it, you own them already.

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Thanks for reading all of that; it was a real test of endurance and you passed! Now as a reward you get to leave a comment for me in the box below. You could also take a guess at what the next game's going to be.

I should plug the Super Adventures Discord while I'm here. It's not all that crowded but it is technically active so feel free to drop by and say hi sometime.