Is it Really Worth it? Serenity Forge Emotional Impact Bundle

Last week's top-rated bundle was Humble Bundle's Serenity Forge Emotional Impact Bundle, scoring an impressive 7.4/10. It also has an unusually large number of items, with 16 games and 2 DLCs. Another unusual thing for such a highly rated bundle is that a couple of the games have Mixed reviews on Steam.

Let's go game by game and see if the rating is justified!

LISA: The Painful

A miserable, hilarious post-apocalyptic RPG set in the wasteland of Olathe, where you are forced to make choices that permanently affect the game. You make sacrifices to keep your party members alive, like losing limbs or taking a beating for them, and you can recruit up to 30 party members. There is a Painful mode for an extra challenge and a Painless mode for a story-focused experience. You also get LISA: The Joyful as DLC, the finale of the series, where you set out to punish the world that has treated you wrong.

In the short time I've spent with it, I already had to choose between saving a party member's life and keeping all my belongings. Since I hadn't hoarded that many items yet, I chose to save my party member, even though he was pretty useless in combat.

Speaking of combat, it's what you'd expect from a turn-based RPG, with attacks, special attacks, buffs, and debuffs. There's some humor mixed in, too. For example, one of the debuffs makes a character cry.

Overall, this is one of my favorites in the bundle, and I intend to finish it.

My playtime: 0.5h • Will I keep playing? 👍

Achievement count	% owners completed	Median completion time
68	1%	30h

Death's Gambit: Afterlife

The expanded edition of a hardcore 2D action platformer with deep RPG elements. You play an agent of Death and fight your way through the undying guardians of Siradon, with 7 classes, 100+ talents, 20 bosses that get a harder Heroic mode after you beat them, and over 30 weapons. Afterlife adds 10 new levels and 5 new bosses on top of the original game. You also get the Ashes of Vados DLC, an epilogue to the story with a new boss fight, a platforming challenge level, a horde mode and a boss rush mode.

I owned this game before but only played it for around 2 hours. It's basically 2D Dark Souls, and while I love Souls-likes, I haven't found a single 2D Souls-like with satisfying combat. Still, it's a decent game, though.

My playtime: 2.3h • Will I keep playing? 👎

Achievement count	% owners completed	Median completion time
43	6%	50h

Long Gone Days

A modern-day JRPG set in the real world, about human connection during war. You follow Rourke, a young man trained from birth to be a sniper for The Core, a subterranean paramilitary state, who learns on his first mission that the organization is far from noble. Intense RPG combat is mixed with slower, slice-of-life gameplay, and language barriers between civilians play a big part in the story.

I went into this game blind and was prepared to hate it after the initial gameplay, which involves super simplistic enemy sniping using keyboard controls, with no mouse support. Thankfully, things get much better once we're introduced to classic turn-based combat shortly afterward. The world seems interesting, and the game looks great. I think it's worth the 10-hour commitment to finish it.

My playtime: 0.5h • Will I keep playing? 👍

Achievement count	% owners completed	Median completion time
44	5%	22h

Smile For Me

An unconventional point-and-click adventure where you play a heartbroken clown in an abstract world and talk by nodding and shaking your head. You help the troubled residents of the Habitat by solving their puzzles and cheering them up, while trying to de-mask the mysterious Doctor Habit before The Big Event.

You basically solve puzzles to figure out how to make the other characters happy. In just half an hour, I've already encountered a nice variety of puzzles, and the game has a beautiful art style. I can see why it has Overwhelmingly Positive reviews, but it didn't really click with me.

My playtime: 0.5h • Will I keep playing? 👎

Achievement count	% owners completed	Median completion time
24	21%	5h

Centum

A narrative-driven adventure with an unreliable narrator. You are a prisoner in a cell and have to escape, but the narrator's hints may be lies. Every click and decision is remembered, and your choices shape the behavior of an artificial intelligence and lead to different outcomes.

I really liked the sureal atmosphere, but not much else. I somehow managed to progress in the game without really understanding what's going on. Gameplay is a weird mix of puzzles and some arcade gameplay, but looking at the Steam reviews, it seems that the game later on becomes just a visual novel.

My playtime: 0.5h • Will I keep playing? 👎

Achievement count	% owners completed	Median completion time
30	7%	10h

Arcadian Atlas

A tactical RPG about the choices people make for love and power, set during a civil war that tears the kingdom of Arcadia apart. Two lovers are torn between the queen they swore fealty to and the princess who has risen up to take back the throne. You recruit troops, customize their classes and train your army for the battles ahead.

The "We have Final Fantasy Tactics at home" game. I ran into some technical issues, including one freeze, and the controls aren't great. There's also no option to speed up the animations, which makes the battles drag. There might be an interesting story here, but I can't be bothered to keep playing.

My playtime: 0.5h • Will I keep playing? 👎

Achievement count	% owners completed	Median completion time
40	7%	13h

Lifeless Planet & Lifeless Moon

Two sci-fi adventures from Serenity Forge inspired by classic science fiction. In Lifeless Planet, an astronaut lands on a planet reported to be rich with life, only to find a barren wasteland and an abandoned Soviet-era Russian town. Lifeless Moon is its spiritual successor, a 3D platformer where an Apollo-era astronaut finds an oddly familiar desert town on the Moon and explores anomalies and collects documents with the help of a jetpack to uncover the mystery.

These are very similar games, if you liked one, you'll probably like the other. In my opinion, the gameplay and the cheap looking assets ruin the attempts to create a great atmosphere. For example, if I follow the power cord, turn on the generator so that the ladder drops from a tower and then climb the tower to get a school key on the top I can't really take the game seriously.

My playtime: 0.5h • Will I keep playing? 👎

Game	Achievement count	% owners completed	Median completion time
Lifeless Planet	15	10%	11h
Lifeless Moon	17	40%	3.5h

Tacoma

A sci-fi narrative adventure from the creators of Gone Home, set aboard a high-tech space station in the year 2088. You explore how the crew lived and worked through 3D recordings of their lives that you can rewind, fast-forward and walk around in, piecing together a story of trust, fear and resolve in the face of disaster.

Since I'm mostly interested in gameplay, a walking simulator needs to be really good to grab my attention, and Tacoma just doesn't cut it.

My playtime: 0.5h • Will I keep playing? 👎

Achievement count	% owners completed	Median completion time
12	24%	4h

Gone Home

A story exploration game set on June 7th, 1995, when you arrive home after a year abroad and find the house empty. You open every drawer and door and examine objects to uncover what happened to your family, learning their story from what they left behind.

Another walking simulator from the same devs as Tacoma, this time set in a fairly normal house (it has secret passages and way too many rooms) instead of a space station. I liked the '90s setting and the music, but the story just didn't grab me.

My playtime: 0.5h • Will I keep playing? 👎

Achievement count	% owners completed	Median completion time
10	17%	4h

Paratopic

An experimental first-person horror adventure with retro 3D graphics and a cursed, fever-dream atmosphere. You cut between short vignettes, like smuggling VHS tapes across the border, photographing a rare bird or killing a man in the back room of a diner, as the stories of three characters slowly intersect.

There's no way to save your progress in this game, so I decided to play a bit longer than I did with the other games and finish it. You also only unlock achievements when you complete a run, so plan ahead if you're going for 100% completion.

Even after finishing it, I still have no idea what's going on in this game. It's not worth buying the bundle for, but worth playing through if you decide to get it.

My playtime: 45min • Will I keep playing? 👎

Achievement count	% owners completed	Median completion time
20	27%	2h

Cyanide & Happiness - Freakpocalypse (Episode 1)

The first game in a point-and-click adventure trilogy from the creators of Cyanide & Happiness, full of dark humor. You play Coop, a weird, unpopular, ginger-headed orphan who wants to make the world a better place, but nobody likes him, school sucks and his attempts to help only make things worse.

I used to read Cyanide & Happiness comics, which are super short and use just a few words per panel, so my biggest surprise was how much dialogue there is in this game. The characters just keep blabbering. Some of it is funny, but most of it isn't. The gameplay is classic point-and-click, which doesn't excite me too much either.

The game has mixed reviews, but many of the negative ones complain about the next episode not being available yet. The developers posted an update recently confirming that Episode 2 is in the works.

My playtime: 0.5h • Will I keep playing? 👎

Achievement count	% owners completed	Median completion time
55	12%	12h

Return to Ash

A narrative-driven visual novel about emotional storytelling and relationships. Ashleigh wakes up in a hospital room that has turned into an endless white void and finds she feels better than she has in years. You forge bonds with others trapped in this afterlife and face trials from a masked being calling itself Death, and your decisions shape how her story ends.

I don't usually play visual novels, and I would never have bought this game outside of a bundle. However, I like the story and characters, so I'll stick around and finish it since it's only about an hour long.

My playtime: 0.5h • Will I keep playing? 👍

Achievement count	% owners completed	Median completion time
6	Not enough owners	4h

Neversong

A hand-drawn action-adventure by Thomas Brush, creator of Pinstripe. Peet wakes up from a coma to find his girlfriend missing and investigates the screams coming from Blackfork Asylum, fighting bosses, monsters and violent grown-ups with a baseball bat across six levels to a piano-centric soundtrack.

I like the visuals and the soundtrack. The gameplay is pretty basic, but fun enough. At around 4 hours to complete, I think the game can keep my attention for that long.

My playtime: 0.5h • Will I keep playing? 👍

Achievement count	% owners completed	Median completion time
11	9%	10h

Four Sided Fantasy

A puzzle platformer about the limits of your screen, where you can wrap the screen so that exiting on the right makes you emerge on the left. A man and a woman try to find each other through four seasons, each one changing the rules of the screen wrap.

Even though it's only about an hour and a half long, I don't think I'll keep playing. The screen-wrapping mechanic is cool and creates some nice puzzles, but even in the first half hour, the game starts slowing you down by forcing you to screen-wrap instead of letting you simply run to the right. The lack of any kind of story doesn't help either.

My playtime: 0.5h • Will I keep playing? 👎

Achievement count	% owners completed	Median completion time
7	37%	2h

Luna's Wandering Stars

A planetary physics puzzler with a full level editor and online level sharing. You use orbital mechanics and powers like changing gravity, creating black holes and opening wormholes to move moons around and collect enough asteroids to finish each level, with rare golden asteroids for an extra challenge.

I like how the game taunts you when you fail a level or calls you lucky when you succeed. It's also very player-friendly, making it easy to restart and tweak your setup from the previous attempt. Overall, it's a decent puzzle game, but not really for me.

My playtime: 15min • Will I keep playing? 👎

Achievement count	% owners completed	Median completion time
55	3%	12h

Verdict

Looks like quantity does lead to quality in this case! With so many games, you're bound to find a few you like. I ended up enjoying only 4, but they were among the most expensive items in the bundle, bringing the total value to around $30 (also including DLC). That's 2.5x the asking price of $12.

My Score: 7.2 / 10

See the full Serenity Forge Emotional Impact Bundle breakdown

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