The Humble Treasure Trove is a series where we look into two games from Humble Bundle’s Trove; a collection of indie and AAA games that gets added to every month and can be accessed at any time as long as you have a subscription.
Roombo: First Blood
Roombas are helpful little robots that go around your house and vacuum your floors, but that’s their only function. What if your Roomba could also defend your house while you and your family go off on a Christmas vacation? That’s the question Roombo: First Blood seeks to answer.
Roombo: First Blood is an isometric stealth puzzle game developed and published by Samurai Punk. You play as a Roomba defending your owner’s home from robbers breaking into the house trying to steal their valuables.
Players can use the Roomba’s hacking powers to mess with electric objects in the house to act as traps. Items such as outlets could be used to electrocute or ceiling fans could fall and crush robbers.
After dealing damage to a robber, they will bleed all over the floor for you to suck up. When you suck up enough blood, you enter a blood rage. While your blood rage is full, you are able to ram into the legs of the robbers and damage them. This also does the same damage as your traps. However, blood rage is a backup in case you run out of traps and need to do that last bit of damage.
After you deal with all the robbers, you will be given 60 seconds to clean up all the blood and boot prints left in the wake of the burglars’ death. You don’t have to get the house completely clean within that time, but it does affect your ranking at the end of each level.
Ironically, the art of Roombo is quite cute. The cutscenes feature simple looking art that seems like it could be straight out of a children’s cartoon. The in-game art is colorful with high saturation, making it a funny background for the massacre that takes place.
Also, the music is well done and enhances the experience. It’s suspenseful when you’re sneaking around trying to kill the burglars. For a comedic effect, it switches to happy and upbeat tunes while you’re cleaning up meat chunks and puddles of blood.
My only issue with Roombo is that there is not much added in the subsequent levels. Once you’ve seen the first couple levels, you’ve seen it all. Despite that issue, I still enjoyed Roombo and would recommend it to anyone looking for a fun, light game to kill some time with.
-Logan Wilson
SanctuaryRPG
SanctuaryRPG is a game based on the classic text adventures from good old DOS days. It is, however, much more streamlined and accessible in comparison. It gives you the same ride with none of the frustration.
First of all, I love the visuals of SanctuaryRPG which are exclusively made with numbers, letters, and other keyboard symbols. It reminds me of old school rogue-likes and it really gives this game a certain charm. This game is a real showcase of how much you can do with so little.
Despite old-school visuals, SanctuaryRPG is in no way clunky or hard to figure out which is great! Unlike old text adventure games where you had to type full words to get some kind of reaction from the game, here you just type a letter or number attached to one of the options showcased on the screen. Hardcore text adventure players (if those exist) might disagree but I think this is a much better system.
But what do you do in this game exactly? Well, SanctuaryRPG follows a lot of standard RPG tropes. You go around with your custom created character by selecting different spots on your world map, slaying monsters, meeting different characters and gathering loot.
And yes, you get to create your own characters. First, you choose one of six different classes. Then, choose your gender (which gives you three different options which are always nice), body type, race, origins as well as looks. There are quite a lot of options, which really surprised me.
The gameplay loop is pretty standard. It consists of going to new places and fighting monsters just so you can level up, get new items and fight stronger monsters. Fights are quite easy to work out. You have 3 attacks, which differ depending on the weapon you are holding. During the fights, you chain the attacks to deal damage.
Once your combat chain is done, a monster can react in various ways. These can vary between charging up attacks, getting enraged or cursing you. Each of those reactions can cause different effects.
Every now and then you will also have a chance to reposition yourself. This won’t deal damage to the enemy but it will let you restore MP as well as occasionally avoiding attacks. You also have a heal which you can use instead of your attacks. Alternatively, you can run away from the fight by pressing 5, which can heal you, but you only have 3 uses of this ability before it runs out and it only replenishes upon leveling up. Once it runs out you still are able to run away from a fight but it won’t automatically heal you.
Story-wise, I found the story quite hard to follow if I have to be totally honest. It doesn’t seem to be the focus of the game anyway. The fun in the game I found to be the exploration (there are some secret areas in the game), fighting monsters and getting new loot. Standard RPG which is wrapped up in a very unique looking package which is definitely worth playing.
-Michael Pyre
If you’d like to check out the other Humble Treasure Troves, you can find them here.
