Humble Choice December 2020: Pick’n’Mix Rundown

Overcooked! 2 is the follow-up to the popular party game that really refines and improves the original formula. There’s still madcap cooking antics. It’s still best enjoyed with friends. But the addition of online multiplayer, extra levels, more chefs and extra abilities like throwing ingredients helps really elevate this to a must-play for groups. Particularly nice given that local multiplayer is still a dicey prospect.

You can find Overcooked! 2 for about a tenner on sale, which isn’t a massive saving. Combining that with the additional DLC this Choice comes with makes it a decent value pick, particularly if you have friends with it. You can grab this in Game Pass for PC if you’d rather, too.

Action-RPG Children of Morta is a lovely pixel-art dungeon-crawling spectacle, and sure to please fans of games like Moonlighter or Diablo. With a few different characters to play with unique playstyles, there’s enjoyable hours of blasting bad guys and grinding loot to be had here.

The price of Children of Morta has been coming down steadily in sales over the last few months. You can now find it below a tenner regularly – around £9 most commonly. The game is also in Game Pass for PC too, if you’re a paid-up subscriber.

Fans of Gameboy Advance classic Megaman Battle Network, take note. One Step From Eden fuses the grid-based battling of that game with Slay the Spire rougelike deck building. It’s an interesting marriage – one of the things I loved with Slay the Spire was the slow deliberation of your next move, which this game does away with in favour of pacy dodge-and-attack battling. But if that sounds great to you, it’s a well-built game.

One Step From Eden was previously offered as a demo on Humble Choice, so go and take a look if you’re a long-term subscriber. Otherwise, the game was released this year, so no big price drops so far – just dipping under £10 once on Steam. Worth the Choice if you love deck-building with a twist.

Solid, jumpscary horror game. The Beast Inside relies quite a lot on the jumps, but set in a decent-looking world, it’s worth a look for genre fans. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s worth activating your Choices for alone, though.

This one has a demo, so you can try-before-you-pick, at least. It’s not often reduced below £10 either – only having been reduced that much once in the last year. So at the moment, it represents a relatively good value pick for horror fans – but give the demo a whirl before activating your month for this.

Indivisible is a fusion of platforming and turn-based RPG combat that provides a twist for fans of either genre. While it doesn’t execute as well as a dedicated game might in either category, it’s still a fun change – reminiscent of Child of Light or even some of the Mario RPGs, with a nice hand-drawn aesthetic to pull it all together.

On sale, you can find Indivisible for around £15 – making it one of the more expensive Choices for the month. However, it’s also in Game Pass for PC if you’re signed up to that. Only being a year old, you might see further discounts in the near future – but it’s probably a while before it comes down below a tenner.

Shining Resonance Refrain is one in a long line of JRPGs from SEGA, and is a remaster of the 2014 PS3 game. It plays like a 2014 game, but fans of JRPGs who’ve not picked this up before will have an enjoyable blast through an almost by-numbers representation of the genre.

You can pick this up on sale for around £8 fairly regularly – I wouldn’t be surprised to see it on sale for around that during the Steam/Humble end-of-year sales. SEGA have a fairly good rep for cutting prices more and more over time, so if you’re on the fence, I’d expect it to go lower eventually. Depends on your appetite for JRPGs.

More JRPG-ness, Zwei is another old-school RPG remastered and re-released for newer PC audiences. The cutesy, chibi style will appeal to fans of the genre, with ARPG combat instead of the turn-based fare found in other titles this month. Another for the JRPG historians amongst us.

The sale price for this (and the other Zwei game below) is usually £7.50, making it a bit of a middle-ground between worthwhile for fans, while not quite being cheap enough to impulse buy. If you’re activating anyway for the JRPGs within, this will be worth getting. But better value is found elsewhere this month.

A refined offering over the other Zwei game above, this is another re-released game – this time from 2008. Better graphics, gameplay and general quality of life make it an interesting offer – particularly if you’re picking up both Zwei games as Choices this month. More classic JRPG fare.

As above, you can find Zwei: The Ilvard Insurrection on sale for £7.50 fairly regularly. This isn’t a massive price drop, but if you’re into JRPGs you’ll likely be activating anyway because there is a lot here for fans this month. If not, save your picks.

Tabletop Playground is a weird one. It’s like a modernised, slightly better Tabletop Simulator. The problem is that TTS’ strength now comes from years’ worth of Steam Workshop support and hundreds of games being downloadable into the game now – whereas this new game doesn’t have any of that yet. Hard to recommend – the potential is there, but it might be many years off competing.

In Early Access still, Tabletop Playground can be found on sale for about £9. However, again, the comparison with TTS doesn’t do it any favours – £6 for a better supported game. I’d get it as a wait-and-see title, but if you actually want to get a tabletop sim, wishlist TTS and wait for the sales.

One of two short, cutesy mystery games. It’s kinda a great introduction to the genre for kids and is a very silly bite-sized game for everyone else. Takes about an hour to finish, and won’t really test your brain in the meantime. Not one for depth/challenge/skill!

Bite-sized game at a bite-sized price. Regularly-priced, it’s £4 (or £7 in a bundle with the sequel, below) – well within my normal impulse buy bracket. You can even pick it up on sale for £3, or £6 in the bundle. If you’re on a limited-Choice plan, pick other games and grab these on sale!

See above, really. Frog Detective 2 delivers you a new story in the same vein as the first game. Short, sweet, simple. What’s not to love?

The pricing remains pretty much the same too – £4 regular, £3 on sale, in a bundle with the first game available too.

The extra game for the month is The Corridor. It’s a quirky, funny 30-minute game that was a nice little addition to the bundle, but it’s not exactly a new “game”. Probably worth clicking the image and reading up about it to see what I mean!