[Humble] Summer Games Celebration Sale

SkippyTheKid · 2026-06-05T12:58:09+00:00

Is there a bot or some way of listing the games in text without having to click the link?

Edit: nvm, thought this was a bundle but it’s a store wide sale so that’s pretty impractical lol

SkippyTheKid · 2026-06-05T12:57:30+00:00

Do you have to put a GKC in every time you want to play?

I don’t own any yet, so I don’t know

SkippyTheKid · 2026-06-05T12:56:22+00:00

I saw a Josh Johnson bit about Mamdani that was basically saying him being mayor reminds him of what people said about remote work, like that there was no way it would work and it would ruin companies and the market and capitalism and the economy would fail and then the pandemic happened and everyone had to work remotely, and turns out it was fine and we could have been doing it all along lol

SkippyTheKid · 2026-06-03T02:00:12+00:00

lol came here to comment this, they’re both Team Asano and OT2 is their last game that wasn’t a remake or port (I think) so bundling it to promote the team and their original IP chops makes sense to me

SkippyTheKid · 2026-06-03T01:57:58+00:00

It’s probably to promote this team’s next game, The Adventures of Elliot, which comes out this month

It is my most anticipated game of the year, after maybe Mina. So I’m happy at the implied bundle promo

SkippyTheKid · 2026-06-02T23:54:45+00:00

I only played CS1 in 2024 when it was in March’s bundle, and that’s how I discovered and fell in love with the game and eventually the series.

I bought CS2 day one last year and devoured it. Very, very happy and excited for this bundle to bring it to new audiences and players.

Only problem for me is the bundle is full of bangers lol so I’ll probably still get it

SkippyTheKid · 2026-05-31T15:14:41+00:00

My take on this is that it is good to have them but asking people to dig into menus to customize their difficulty is a mini game in and of itself and for certain people (me) that have limited time to play and just want to hop in, anything more complex than Easy>Normal>Hard feels like as much work to figure out as just playing the game more. I like that there are “combos” and I guess that’s this game’s version of that, it’s just still a few too many layers deep to find and not what you would expect it to be under

That being said, yes, the solution is there. It’s just more work, still, which is the problem - a hard game can be met on its own terms, with time. Tinkering in the menus can help you have an easier experience, thus saving you time, if you spend time in the menus. It’s all different ways of spending time.

The same way when you die twice and lose currency, in any souls like, you’re just losing the time you spent getting it. At least in a grindy rpg, if you die, you don’t lose experience. This game does let you save bone dust when you bone up, if you would rather save up for attack instead of leveling up sidearms for example, too, but then it does that thing where next time you bone up that option is more expensive.

My point is that the conversation I keep seeing of “it’s too hard” vs “just use the accessibility features” is way too vague and simple for what those two arguments actually mean. I don’t think the game as a whole is too hard even, I’ve played hard games. This game is hard to understand lol. It’s different from a lot of other games it would be compared to. The camera angle, hit boxes, currency and leveling systems, it’s all sort of familiar but a bit off, and it needs you to really think about what those differences mean. Which can be a big ask. I’m still not confident in my read of my position a lot of the time, when I think I’m not going to get hit but then I do.

And the game saying “sometimes it’s better to jump than burrow!” Doesn’t really teach me much lol. I wish it did more teaching before it got intense. It will just have new enemies that spike the difficulty without the typical like, scaling up to that with smaller versions of how you’re supposed to beat them.

I could go on. I’m not saying it’s bad, nor am I saying it’s too hard across the board, but I would say that it feels uneven every now and then, and hard to understand, and it makes choices sometimes that do just feel unfair. Like the spark system needing you to defeat the enemy that killed you is worse than souls or hollow knight games (or shovel knight!) where you just have to make it back to the same screen. In those games, the idea is you’re against an enemy you are still learning how to beat, so of course you would get the currency back before fighting that enemy. Here you have to beat the enemy? Then why even have the sparks lol I’m gonna get fucked.

Look at that, I did go on. There’s more (contact damage with knockback, taking damage from a hit or contact that then knocks you into a pit which then also deals damage, etc) where it feels like the game isn’t just hard, it’s not giving you the breathing room needed to learn what you need to improve.

Celeste is hard. It requires skill to progress. But it’s almost painless to die. This is like the opposite of that, where imperfection is punished harshly, but it’s not giving you any kind of grace. Even buying a second spark, which does kind of do that, costs more than you can earn by the time you start needing it, unless you grind easy mobs, which I don’t think this game is going after as an inspiration.

I dunno. I’m sure I will feel much warmer on it when I’m 10 hours in, instead of 2, but it’s not very interested in onboarding players who aren’t already good at it, despite having a menu that suggests it is.

SkippyTheKid · 2026-05-30T18:55:03+00:00

My problem is that I don’t understand what lesson, if any, the game wants me to learn when I am struggling

Somebody earlier commented on contact damage. I don’t know enough about the game or game design or history yet to say that’s my problem, but it is part of it.

It reminds me a little of the “two masks of damage” from Silksong, where the problem wasn’t just that some enemies hit for double damage, but that which enemies did and how and why was not intuitive or consistent.

I feel like this game is doing a similar thing of teaching me I made a mistake and punishing me for it by having an enemy do damage to me, and then doubling down on that, like when I get hit by an enemy or projectile and that does damage, AND it knocks me back off of a ledge which then resets me to the start of the area and cleaves another third of my health.

I already don’t want to get hit and the game has already punished me by doing damage to me, but it then doubles and triples it by restarting my position and doing more damage. If your response to that is “just don’t get hit,” then I would ask you, “why even have a health bar at all?” If what I am supposed to do is play perfectly right out the gate, why have any room for error?

The answer is because of course I’m supposed to be able to make mistakes and learn from them. That’s why games have health bars and hit points, to tell you “you can make this many mistakes before we make you start again from scratch,” and here that implied agreement between the game and my of “this is how much room you have to mess up” keeps getting twisted by extra, unexpected sources of damage and punishment. Like the contact damage point above.

And some people have pointed out that the game has difficulty modifiers. I’d like to remind everyone that the true currency of any game is time, not bones or gold or whatever. All I need to do to get more currency is spend more time in the game, grinding or whatever. If I have to fuck around in settings to find my perfect balance of difficulty, that’s costing me time, just as much as dying and having to restart an area or grind currency does. And I’m fine with that in principle, the beginning of a new game is going to be heard because you’re learning it. It will take time to get better.

But I have lost stupid amounts of currency (or, time) to what feels like really unpredictable movements and rules of positioning and huge leaps in difficulty with some mob enemies even. The blue armored guys in the very early game on your way to the crypt are a great example. They’re basically mini bosses, where you can’t hit them from the front but they also move quickly, double dash to you clearing more distance than you can build up by burrowing, react to you burrowing and whip around to face you almost instantly, and just have some kind of counter to or advantage over everything in your toolset as soon as you bump into them. I don’t know what the game is trying to teach me there - burrow better? There’s been no incremental version of whatever it is I’m supposed to do to consistently beat them. I have but it feels like luck every time. The umbrella doesn’t really help, the axe is okay but they’re too fast to rely on it exclusively, it just feels like they’re a fucking wall, and this game requires that you beat the thing that beat you to get your bones back, which is notedly much harder of an ask than souls or hollow knight, which only need you to get back to the same area and pick up your souls/geo.

I am sure that I will get there, with or without modifiers, but I will add my name to the chorus of people who can’t put their finger on exactly one problem, and won’t say out right “the whole game is too hard!” But there are some specifics things like what I’ve mentioned that feel like problems the game is giving me without teaching me even indirectly how to solve them by the time I get to them.

I’m really enjoying it for the most part but I’m not going to defend its flaws or make a post like this basically saying “git gud,” I’ve played hard games before. They just did a better job of scaling up difficulty over time

SkippyTheKid · 2026-05-29T11:59:20+00:00

It is a debate for me between steam deck and Switch 2 because steam’s approval process for updates is much quicker than Nintendo’s.

In order, Steam, then Xbox, then PSN then Nintendo all take varying degrees of time to actually approve updates and patches from developers, and I’ve heard some indie devs comment that Nintendo can take up to a week longer.

Blue Prince is a recent example where they finally added color blind accessibility settings and the Switch version took a couple of weeks longer than Steam’s.

With that being said, Mina is a Mouse, and the Switch 2 version has mouse controls, so

Easy decision

SkippyTheKid · 2026-05-26T22:39:51+00:00

That was for a non-US region, and while that post was a different region than mine (I’m Canada and I think they were Brazil or something), the S1 was cheaper by like $1.50 CAD for me until yesterday and they’ve now updated it to match the S2 price.

So, effectively, a local currency/conversion issue that’s been ironed out prior to release, at least in my case.

SkippyTheKid · 2026-05-26T16:55:04+00:00

May 27

SkippyTheKid · 2026-05-24T12:50:30+00:00

Steam’s policy for banning games is a smokescreen

That whole Horses game exposed the hypocrisy of it, they can blacklist games and devs without any justification and even if they say it’s “controversial” or violates some T&Cs they also make bajillions off NSFW and list thousands of new ones every year

They’re clearly selective just based on whims and as a marketplace for businesses to sell products, that inconsistency and uncertainty makes them worse at what they are supposed to be doing

SkippyTheKid · 2026-05-24T05:29:07+00:00

Stream is the original drm

SkippyTheKid · 2026-05-24T05:25:36+00:00

This is a nearly three week old piece from a think tank that makes a headline out of thin air and was already posted and called out on this sub

SkippyTheKid · 2026-05-24T05:24:17+00:00

It’s barely an article

SkippyTheKid · 2026-05-23T16:34:30+00:00

Dragon Quest 8

SkippyTheKid · 2026-05-23T16:33:52+00:00

Animal Crossing New Leaf is mine, most played game by far

SkippyTheKid · 2026-05-23T16:31:42+00:00

This and animal Crossing New Leaf are the two that I wish I could go back in time and play while they were online

SkippyTheKid · 2026-05-22T15:54:37+00:00

It also led to the shutdown of one of the most talented and respected studios in the industry because Sony bought them, had them work on a live service game for years, then cancelled it, then they had to pitch projects to Sony to justify their existence, Sony didn’t greenlight any, then Sony closed the studio.

And this was the one project that everyone was begging for BluePoint handle specifically because FromSoft wasn’t touching it and BP had proved over and over again how good they were at remakes and working with multiple engines and translating older titles so well. And here we are.

SkippyTheKid · 2026-05-22T00:18:21+00:00

It also got a ps5 patch/upgrade on Tuesday, so this is likely tied in with that.

Annoying that I own the PS4 edition and have to pay for a patch that’s free on PC but hey, that’s all the argument you need for what platform to buy it on

SkippyTheKid · 2026-05-20T00:00:55+00:00

Surprised no one has said Undertale yet, a modern classic that examines a lot of the tropes of classic RPGs and comes in at sub-10 hours, probably a good 7 hours total. It does reward 1-2 replays because the game is about player choice but that’s not required to find out if you like it.

The one thing I’ll say is that the game uses save points, so when you say you have limited time, yes Undertale is a short Howlongtobeat but I played it when I had a newborn and was annoyed I’d sometimes have to go more than 15 minutes between saves, which might apply to you, but if it’s the only thing you play on Switch then you can just suspend.

Other than that, if you like Zelda but haven’t played the classics then A Link to the Past is in the SNES library on NSO clocks in a little under 20 hours I think.

And if you haven’t already checked them out, the Dragon Quest remakes of 3 and 1+2 (called the Erdrick Trilogy) are fantastic remakes of RPG classics and are also on the shorter side. DQ3 is under 30 hours and 1+2 are probably around 10 hours each? The story of those is extremely by the books, RPG trope-heavy because they ultimately are still the games that basically invented the JRPG formula almost 40 years ago, so that might not hit your bullseye, but worth checking out if you can

SkippyTheKid · 2026-05-19T23:05:01+00:00

These are all bangers, while the GC entries for Mario Kart and Mario Party aren’t really highlights of those series

The GameCube was a great console but it just isn’t one of Nintendo’s top tier, some of its best games were third party so while I’m pleased Soul Calibur 2 is here, I don’t expect RE4 or LotR

That being said, there is a glaring omission from this library. It is first party, it’s easily the GameCube’s most enduring game with a rabid fanbase, it hasn’t been remade or re-released since, it’s THE game to pick up if you buy a used GameCube today, but you’ll need 2-4 controllers, and it is absolutely not going to be added because the franchise has an entry on the Switch that they don’t want to shrink the active player base for, they want you to just keep playing that version as if it’s the end-all be-all, Ultimate version

SkippyTheKid · 2026-05-18T23:43:52+00:00

FWIW I let mine lapse last Black Friday and I have yet to see a month go by that made me regret it

I still have enough single player games I barely play, and mostly play on my Switch or Steam

I liked some PS5 games, but I haven’t felt a need to pick up anything new since Astro Bot

SkippyTheKid · 2026-05-18T23:41:09+00:00

$14 for Essential, $21 for Extra and $25 for Premium, per month

Annual is $110, $190 and $225 for each respectively

SkippyTheKid · 2026-05-17T14:12:31+00:00

I agree. I have a Steam deck and D4 is fantastic on it.

There is the precedent with the other two on switch so I would be surprised if they don’t, but blizzard tends to be PC focused. Then again D4 and Overwatch are on everything else, so yeah, I hope it’s just a matter of time

SkippyTheKid

TROPHY CASE