The latest, eight Humble Indie Bundle may well be one of the best yet, though that designation admittedly loses some meaning when it adequately describes the seven preceding bundles. The latest collection offers gamers pay-what-you-like for five highly regarded indie titles: Awesomenauts, Capsized, Dear Esther, Little Inferno, and Thomas Was Alone. In keeping with Humble Bundle tradition, those who step up to pay the average bundle price or higher receive a pair of bonuses: Hotline Miami and Proteus.
Most of these titles should need no introduction for the games-knowledgeable among you. Awesomenauts is a 2D MOBA from Ronimo Games that feels like it was cut from the DNA of a never-aired Saturday morning cartoon. Capsized is a beautiful 2D platformer that boasts beautiful art and satisfying action. Dear Esther is less a game than it is a reflectively creepy first-person hypertext narrative. Little Inferno, from Tomorrow Corporation, is built around… well… burning toys in a fireplace. Finally there’s Thomas Was Alone, a minimalist platformer that started as a Flash game and came to PlayStation platforms in April 2013.
All five of these titles are followed by hefty amounts of critical acclaim, as are the two bonuses. Hotline Miami, from Dennaton Games, is a top-down action-puzzle game in which players dish out carefully controlled brutal violence. Proteus falls more into the Dear Esther realm, offering up a 16-bit 3D world that players explore from a first-person perspective. It defies the goal-based structure that typically defines your average game (hence the Esther link), but you likely won’t care once you start exploring its always-random world.
As is always the case with these releases, simply head over to the Humble Bundle website to put down some cash. The average cost is $5.68 as of this writing. That’s a steal for any one of these games. For all seven though? Why are you still reading this? Go get it!
