Guide to October's Humble Choice Part Two

Welcome to part two for the month of October, where we’ll be covering the last six games remaining on the Humble Choice! If you haven’t already check out part one of the article below, clicking the “previous” button.

GARAGE: Bad Trip

Steam price: £15.49/$19.99
Mostly Positive (247; 74%)

GARAGE: Bad Trip is a violent, gory, zombie survival game that plays from a top-down perspective.

You play as Butch, a drug dealer that wakes up in the back of a car in what seems to be a zombie apocalypse. You go on to find a health pack to heal yourself and then carnage ensues.

It plays similarly to a survival horror, though you are expected to beat up your first zombies with your fists until you get your first weapon, and from then on you start rapidly getting more.

Although the gameplay can be kind of fun, GARAGE: Bad Trip's name lives true. It really is a bad trip to play it. The story is a joke; very poorly written. Characters interact through notes that are written in a very unrealistic manner, and overall the game just feels like it's meant to be a joke.

There is even a part where you take some drugs that were laying around, get high and get this sonar vision that truly just rubbed me the wrong way; it was then that the game completely lost my interest.

Should you claim it?: Honestly, if the lack of story and kind of shoddy graphics aren't a deterring factor, the gameplay is okay enough to claim. There were two bosses we encountered, but they were nothing to write home about. If you have a spare choice and the gameplay or graphics catch your attention, you could go for it, but it doesn't bring anything new to the table in terms of innovation, nor is it the first of its kind.

The Textorcist: The Story of Ray Bibbia

Steam price: £11.99/$14.99
Very Positive (571; 86%)

The Textorcist: The Story of Ray Bibbia -- Bah, from henceforth it shall be mentioned as The Textorcist lest I cry myself to sleep tonight.

Let's try again: The Textorcist is a typing bullet hell, which makes it quite a difficult game to play.

My wife and I are pretty fast typists. Both of us know the keyboard by memory and have above average typing speeds, upwards of 80 WPM.

This may sound like it's starting to become boastful but bear with us. The Textorcist has you playing an exorcist named Ray Bibbia, who uses his words to exorcise the demons (and humans) that he fights. To fight, you must use your keyboard to type down the prayer that he says to hit enemies, while also pressing shift whenever you want him to move around to dodge the bullets coming your way. Meaning you'll have to be holding down the shift key while clicking WASD to have Ray move out of harm's way, for each hit you take, one of your letters gets deleted and you have to retype it.

If you do happen to get hit, however, you'll drop your Bible. This will prevent you from typing further and being able to dish out damage, forcing you to move out of your way to recover it and be able to continue.

The game—despite our expertise with the keyboard—was quite hard. Perhaps if we didn’t know the keyboard enough, this game might be borderline impossible, making it a very niche game.

Should you claim it? Absolutely! It has been one of the easiest ones to recommend thus far!... If you are fast at typing and enjoy these sorts of games. Not knowing the keyboard, having to read what the prayer is, being careful to write it properly, all the while keeping in mind the bullets coming your way that you have to stop typing to dodge make this a very difficult game unless you meet certain criteria. If you have these skills, The Textorcist might be an amazing game to play, with fun puns and unique combat. If you don't, this game will be very challenging.

Tools Up!

Steam price: £15.49/$19.99
Mostly Positive (496; 77%)

Tools Up! is a co-op game very similar to Overcooked. You are timed to renovate an entire house, and the tasks are generally painting the walls, adding the flooring, removing old wallpaper to replace with a new one, and loads more.

The game tries to make each of its levels unique and fun. In the early stages, each newly implemented mechanic has its own level that allows you to get used to it. It's up to you and up to three friends to finish in time; alternatively, you can disable it altogether.

My wife and I had a lot of fun playing, throwing stuff at each other and overall trying to be a good team. However, this one takes quite a bit of focus, meaning you and your friends might not be able to talk to each other lest you make mistakes that will cost you the run; although maybe that's just my wife and her singular brain cell.

Should you claim it? Tools Up! feels very alike to Overcooked - with its similarities, however, comes the dependency on co-op. This is a problem because the game doesn't actually have an online co-op and unless you have someone to play with, the game might be less fun. However, even then, Tools Up! works as a nice game of trying to renovate a house with a game style that I would compare to a much more simplified House Flipper. So it might still be worth your choice if you like those kinds of games.

Hiveswap Friendsim

Steam price: £10.29/$12.99
Very Positive (1,024; 94%)

Hiveswap Friendsim is a visual novel set in the universe of Hiveswap or Homestuck - honestly, I can't tell if this is the same universe or if they're different or what.

The game features you, an unnamed protagonist crash-landing on the planet of Alternia, and your character has a very aggressive desire for friendship.

After getting your first set of dialogues where it is explained what has happened and what your character aspires for, you see a shadow approaching from the distance and you get to choose your first friend to interact with.

At the start of every one of the 18 volumes, you are allowed to choose from one of the two options, which usually is a choice between two characters apart from volume six, where one of the options includes two characters.

From what we understood, to play the game you are expected to advance until you get an ending. Once that happens, you can move on to the next volume. The problem is that apart from a few lines of text acknowledging what happens, there doesn't seem to be much more callback apart from that.

Should you claim it?: If you are a fan of Homestuck or Hiveswap, we can certainly see how charming this game might be. However, outside of being a fan of those things, we found this game to be the easiest to not recommend, despite the train wreck that Garage: Bad Trip was. Each character has a unique writing style that's meant to be quirky, and the writing is supposed to be funny but we just thought it seemed badly written and difficult to read. This was a definite pass for us.

Black Future '88

Steam price: £15.49/19.99
Mostly Positive (369; 78%)

Black Future '88 is a fast-paced action-roguelike shooter with pixel graphics. You have to climb to the top of the tower in a limited amount of time, lest your character dies.

I tried playing some solo runs first, before I learned how to get the co-op working and then got my wife in on the fun. The game is very fast-paced, with a very unique mechanic that every item you don't claim items from the ground they get given to the enemies and gives them an upgrade.

As new players, however, with the sheer amount of colours and things on the screen it made it difficult to process everything that was happening, making our runs very hard, and extremely short. We did get farther ahead in the co-op mode, and it was tons of fun.

There is an assist mode that we didn't touch that is meant to make the game more forgiving for anyone that isn't into the aggressively fast gameplay. I love it when developers give these options, so huge props to SuperScarySnakes for allowing that in their game.

Should you claim it?: The fast-paced gameplay is difficult to keep up with. You have a short amount of time to think about your next move before several things happen. You see a weapon on the floor that you might like? You have to claim it before the enemies do, and every second of consideration is a second less in your life that you can use to get to the top of the tower. Very hectic, but can be very fun. Perhaps the better we get at the game, the more fun it will be. My wife and I thought Black Future ‘88 to be one of the most fun in the bundle, and one you should definitely consider picking up if it sparks your interest!

Syberia 3

Steam price: £23.79/$29,99
Mixed (1,912; 49%)

Humble Choice is starting to get in the habit of giving games that are receiving negative reviews, and I believe this is a problem that should be brought to light.

Syberia 3 is the next of the Syberia games, and upon seeing the Mixed reviews for the title, I dove straight into the Steam reviews for answers.

44 of the recent reviews have a 40% positive rate, and it doesn't take a long time to find what everyone is complaining about: bugs making the game borderline unplayable. Even the positive reviews bring up the bugs. For a game released in 2017 to not address these issues is a huge problem.

Should you claim it? Syberia 3 is the latest in the franchise, and honestly everyone says that they deeply enjoyed the first two but couldn't get past the third, be it for technical or just gameplay problems. I would suggest claiming this game only if you really want to play the game, simply because this will be the only way you can get the game for free and not have it break because of the bugs, essentially wasting all of your money or having to replay it. I personally see almost no reason to claim it, even if you have some choices left, with much better games in the bundle to choose from. When we tried it, the game just felt bad to play with weird lines like always overusing the main character’s full name, or just absolutely shoddy lip sync.

And that is the end of our Humble Bundle Guide! Did you follow our advice? Did you just decide to ignore me and claim Garage: Bad Trip anyway? How much did you regret that decision, you rebel? Comment below! Let me know, and stay tuned for November's guide!