Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Oops, we very nearly missed the boat on the latest Bundle In A Box, which ends within approximately 10 hours of the time of writing. If you fancy a pay-what-you-want grab-bag of lesser-known indie curios and delights, you should get on that right away. Dinner Date and Phantasmaburbia are perhaps the best-known of the main contents, though really I’m on board for anything called Necrotic Drift Deluxe.
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Bundle bundle bundlenews! Indie Royale have launched their latest, hoping to soak up the cash for another collection of out-turned pocketed developers. This time it’s the Evolved Bundle, because, um, they’ve called it that. And it’s a good-un. In there you’ve got the utterly splendid puzzler Unmechanical from Talawa Games (check out our review), Tale Of Tales’ super-creepy The Path, Fatshark’s latest, Krater, Turtle Cream’s Sugar Cube: Bittersweet Factory, and physics puzzler OIO from Uncanny Games. Which I’d say is the best pack they’ve had in a while.

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The new Groupees bundle includes loads of games but I haven’t even heard of most of them. It’s a ‘pay what you want’ deal, although the minimum price rises as you add more games from the selection. Two games will set you back a minimum of $1.50 and the reason I’m posting about it at all is that buying any two adds La Mulana to your order as a freebie. If you don’t know about La Mulana, I’ll consider that at least partly my fault because I’ve been meaning to write down wot I think about it for months but, somehow, I always fail. I am a failure. La Mulana, however, is a roaring success. If you like Spelunky*, Metroid or Dark Souls, you should spend $1.50 to buy La Mulana.

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As opposed to not-indie games. Apparently there’s controversy when bundles aren’t indie, though I’d appreciate the ill sentiment more if Indie Royale did it, what with the whole indie in the title thing.

Anyway: the line-up for the Indie Royale Winter package is Greed Corp, Hamlet, BIT.TRIP Runner (isn’t that in everything now?), Conquest of Elysium 3, Leave Home and They Breathe. Seeing as I ruined basically hit-attraction techniques by putting all those names above the cut, I’m going to stuff some videos of each of those games below instead. Then I will be high on hits, beyond my wildest possible hit-based dreams. (I don’t have any hit-based dreams, I’m not Rupert Murdoch even if I am almost as crabby).
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The Indie Royale returns with The Stuffing Bundle, which makes me think of stockings brimming with gifts rather than breadcrumbs and sage shoved inside a carcass cavity. My headline-dominating opinion is that the three released chapters of The Dream Machine are the stand-out content and on this very site you can read what John and I said about the game in the dwindling days of 2011. The remainder of the stocking is filled with Children of the Nile, Anomaly: Warzone Earth, Puzzle Agent 2 and Adventure Apes and the Mayan Mystery. As I write this, minimum price is £2.99.

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Earlier this year, a collection of game developers formed a loose collective called The Indie Buskers. Taking requests from the shouting face of the internet, each of them coded a game in 48 hours and the results were released in a bundle of the ‘pay what you want’ variety. Well, the buskers are back with new games and, as with the last event, the ideas that the crowd yelled in their direction are seventy billion times more imaginative than ‘sequel to your most financially successful project’. Quotes of a Molydeuxbious nature below and a game where you really must talk to the monsters.

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Groupees have a bundle of Halloween gaming for your perusal. It’s actually more seasonal than the ongoing Indie Royale collection, primarily because this one contains a game called Manor of the Damned, which is exactly the sort of name Halloween entertainment should have. Psychological, nuanced horror is for every other day of the year. Disappointingly, Manor of the Damned is a retro ARPG rather than Realms of the Haunting for a new era. The standout is probably Cryostasis, which is an imaginative first-person chiller that will utilise its fancy ice effects and poor optimisation to bring your computer to its knees. Those can be yours for $1, but spend at least $4 and you’ll get more, as detailed below.

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This is incredibly unfair to the other games in Indie Royale’s Halloween Bundle but the reason everyone should buy it is because Pathologic is in there. Ice-pick Lodge’s disease-ridden horror story takes place in one of the most bizarre and fascinating environments ever crafted, and the game is either brilliantly and intentionally brutal or beguilingly broken. Probably both. For what is just shy of £3.00 (at the time of writing), you’ll receive Pathologic, side-scrolling changeable adventure Home, characterful puzzler MacGuffin’s Curse, retro ARPG Evil Quest, and Telltale’s strongest Sam and Max series – The Devil’s Playhouse. But you only needed to know about Pathologic, right? There’s a video below, because bundles have videos now.

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Somehow bearing the numeral ’6′ after it, despite there having been at least 40,000 Humble Bundles by this point, the latest in the wildly successful series of pay-what-you-want indie grab-bags is go right now. Torchlight is the headliner, which is some funny timin’ what with the sequel being pretty darn close now, and it has sterling support from Rochard, Space Pirates And Zombies (aka SPAZ), Vessel and Shatter. Pay more than the average – which currently sits at around $5 – and you’ll get Dustforce too.
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And so the bundle war without end continues. Demonstrating the sort of timing that probably makes everyone involved want to carve WHY WHY WHY into the trunks of every tree they pass, today seems the release of two accidentally rivalrous indie bundles. Both contain games I am allowed to officially deem ‘rather good.’
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I don’t think I said ‘bundle’ more than once a year before Humble got fused to the front of the word and started the never before known phenomenon of selling similar things in conjunction with one another. Indie Gala 7 contains Rig’n'Roll, Space Rangers and Reign: Conflict of Nations, with a fourth game added next week, but paying over the average also adds Death to Spies, Death to Spies: Moment of Truth, King’s Bounty: Armored Princess and UFO: Afterlight. Given that the average is currently $6.92, that seems worthwhile for anyone interested in Armored Princess. Consider the rest bonuses perhaps? I don’t get on with those UFO games and I haven’t actually played the first Space Rangers so all I know is that it’s not the second, which is one of the best things money can buy.