I remember very well the original heyday of the Humble Bundle. It was maybe eight years ago when that first bundle came to be. That first bundle, which brought us some OG indie goodness in the form of now-classics like World of Goo, Lugaru, and Penumbra. That first bundle, which raised something like 1.3 million dollars for charity. It was a great product put together by some brilliant people at a great price: whatever you wanted to pay for it. The Humble Bundle made no pretenses—it was not proud. It was not in your face. It was, as the name might suggest, humble.
For a while the Humble Bundles were great. Coming at reasonable intervals with some pretty cool games, I was happy to drop a tenner two or three times a year on them. Key pickups were Edmund McMillen’s The Binding of Isaac, the criminally slept on S.P.A.Z, and then of course Psychonauts. Like many of you, I would be at a complete loss were I tasked with counting the collective hours that Humble Bundle games have taken from me. But as the bundles became more frequent, I found that the…quality declined. Not to say that the games were bad—there aren’t a hell of a lot of bad games included in Humble Bundles. Sure, there have been a few games that were included as early access titles and ended up as abandonware, but that’s not so big of a deal to me. Like I said, the games themselves weren’t the problem. It was that the bundles themselves became more and more predictable. I can’t tell you how many times Dustforce or Metro 2033 have been included in the bundles (actually I can. Dustforce has been in four bundles while Metro 2033 has enjoyed places in three of them). As I purchased the bundles my Steam library swelled like a digital pimple—full of so much gunk that I had no interest in wading through. Eventually I had accrued so many keys, and so many redundant keys at that, that I stopped checking the Humble Bundle altogether.
Then I heard about this new monthly thing. A bundle every month seemed like it would only compound on the issues that I already had with Humble Bundle. Boy was I wrong. I wish so badly that I had heard about this earlier, because I just saw February’s bundle and I am fucking REMISS to have not gotten in on this. A cacophony of wonderful single player experiences like Life is Strange, Tacoma, and Humble Original Fortune 499, which I am for some reason very excited about. And if you commit to the next bundle (which costs like 12 bucks) you get Dark Souls III with DLC to boot. I feel like a fucking advertisement right now but damn did they really do us dirty with this one.
I’m back on the Humble train baby, and the next stop is Anor Londo.
