Most of the time, when it comes to Humble Bundles, I tell people to stop being so damn cheap and just buy the whole thing. In the case of the new Humble TinyBuild Bundle, however, I will make an exception. The full collection is a good deal, as usual, but if you're really only willing to spend a single lousy dollar, then this is the place to do it. 

That $1 will get you The Final Station, a Russian post-apocalyptic zombie survival train ride that I absolutely loved: It's weird and dark and intense and just a little bit janky, and when it was all over I had a lot of ideas about what might have happened but no definitive conclusions about what actually happened. It's really good stuff, and for a buck it's well worth the price of admission on its own. But it's not on its own: You'll also get Punch Club, Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor, and Speedrunners, all very good games in their own right. 

Beat the average and you'll add Hello Neighbor, Streets of Rogue, Cluster Truck, Party Hard, and the Party Hard: High Crimes DLC, or max it out at $13 and tack on Party Hard 2 and Graveyard Keeper, the game that enabled Chris to plumb depths of depravity he previously didn't realize he was capable of.

The Humble TinyBuild Bundle is available until June 4. Check out The Final Station launch trailer from 2016 (because that's really what I'm here for) down below. 

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The Humble Unity Bundle, featuring games built with the Unity game engine, is maybe not the most excitingly-named Humble Bundle of all time, but it's definitely one of the better packages to come along in a very long time. For $1, you'll get Oxenfree and Aer: Memories of Old, plus Inventory Pro, UFPS: Ultimate FPS, and FlowCanvas, which are not actually games but asset packs from the Unity Asset Store. 

Things start to get interesting when you beat the average price, which is already over $10. That'll get you Wasteland 2 Director's Cut, The Final Station, Last Day of June, and three more Unity asset packs: Realistic Effects Pack 4, Ultimate Game Music Collection, and GameFlow. 

At the top tier of $15 (and given how quickly the average price has climbed, you might as well just go right to the top) you'll also get Torment: Tides of Numenera, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, and four more Unity packs: Discover Unity Game Development – From Zero to 12 Games, uMMORPG, Heroic Fantasy Creatures Full Pack Vol. 1, Universal Sound FX, and Gaia. 

The bundle is clearly aimed first and foremost at people who are making games for fun and/or profit, but even if that's not your bag there's a lot here to like. Wasteland 2, Final Station, Torment, Shadow Tactics, and Oxenfree are all excellent, and Last Day of June and Aer are quite good too. Your mileage may vary, obviously (Unity is nothing if not flexible) but there's really not a weak entry anywhere to be seen. 

The default charity for this bundle is Girls Who Code, but you can switch it to something else if you'd like. It's available until 11 am Pacific on September 18. 

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info.

I really enjoyed The Final Station, the end-of-the-world train ride across a broken, haunted Russia—not just because it was good (it really was), but because I went into it with reservations, detailed in my preview, and the final release addressed nearly all of them. Even so, I wasn't really expecting it to get any kind of DLC, so I'm very pleasantly surprised that it is. 

The Only Traitor sounds like a parallel tale: While the train is making its journey to The Final Station, in the DLC you'll be driving some classic muscle across the shattered world in search of the last remaining shelter. The gameplay in the trailer looks very similar to that of the original, but the Steam listing promises new locations and enemies, some trips through "familiar places," and—this is the big one as far as I'm concerned—"more clues about the mystery of Visitations." 

The DLC will also handle passengers quite a bit differently than its predecessor. In The Final Station, you could rescue and transport multiple passengers, and while they were incredibly difficult to keep alive, the train carried equipment that could convert scavenged supplies into food and medical kits. In The Only Traitor, survivors will be more distinct as characters, with unique personality traits, stories, and skills—including crafting—but you can only ride with one at a time. Tough choices are no doubt in store.

The Final Station: The Only Traitor will be out on April 19, and will sell for $7. 

It has trains, it has...definitely not zombies, Tinybuild s Alex Nichiporchik told Tom when discussing The Final Station at PAX South this year. What it does have is an end-of-the-world-type scenario, swarms of infected , a whole load of sidescrolling and shooting, and a sprinkling moral dilemma. You rescue survivors and, with the resources you ve gathered, you have to make a choice: are you going to use these resources to make sure your survivors live? Or do you just say screw it and get out?

The Final Station is out now, so I guess you ve got the chance to answer that question yourself. Here s the game s launch trailer to aid your decision.

"Travel by train through a dying world. Look after your passengers, keep your train operational, and make sure you can always reach the next station," explains The Final Station's official site. "Make your way through swarms of infected at each station. Explore mysterious and abandoned stations looking for supplies and survivors.

"The real question is whether or not you'll help the survivors get to their destinations...or let them die and loot their bodies. Sometimes people can be more trouble than they're worth."

In his preview of an early build, Andy cited reservations regarding the credibility of the risk vs reward concept Nichiporchik touches on above; however did note that there was something legitimately intriguing in the overarching idea. At the time of writing, Steam reviews are Very Positive , which would suggest the majority of players thus far agree with the latter.

The Final Station is out now on Steam for 10.99/$14.99.

I was a little iffy on The Final Station, the end-of-the-world horror story about driving a train across Russia to rescue survivors from glowing-eyed shadow-zombies, when I previewed it last month. I very much like the concept, but what I saw of the actual gameplay didn't really work for me, in particular the linear level designs and inability to make any meaningful choices as I explored. But previews are not reviews, and pre-release games are not finished, and so I continue to hold out hope that it will achieve (or at least come close to) its potential when it goes into full release on August 30.

The Final Station is made up of five chapters, broken up by visits to inhabited stations that provide access to gear and upgrades, and also fill out the story. The difficulty of the game comes from its station design you never see what s behind a locked door and are always running low on supplies, publisher tinyBuild said in the launch date announcement. If you use up that last medkit on yourself, odds are one of your survivors will die due to injuries. If they die on your train (during travels between stations), you can loot them for a small reward. However, if you get them to their destination they will give you a much more tangible reward. (Maybe an upgrade for your gun?)

I hope it works out. It feels like there's a very intriguing, very Russian story hidden away in there, and it will be a shame if it ends up buried under sub-par gameplay. More information about The Final Station can be found on Steam or at tinybuild.com.

My name is Ivor. I'm an engine driver. I'm wheeling my vaguely-futuristic train through the grey, hushed landscape of post-holocaust Russia, stopping at stations to search for survivors and tend to their needs. It's a grim, bizarre, and occasionally beautiful place, enshrouded in fear and mystery, and also the kind of setup for a videogame that I absolutely love. I went into The Final Station, a 2D, side-scrolling, retro-styled action-adventure game, with very high hopes. But after a few hours with the recently-released preview build, I'm worried it's not quite all its cracked up to be except where the story is concerned.

Stations along the route can't be bypassed, so I was forced to explore all of them, even when shortages of ammunition and medkits left me ill-equipped to deal with the spooky, wraith-like Infected lurking in their halls and closets. And it's really exploration in name only: The layout and contents of each individual station is the same from game to game, and the paths through them are almost perfectly linear. The goal is to find the four-digit code that unlocks the train and allows it to move to the next station in the line. Each code is hidden in increasingly unlikely and convoluted circumstances Bob wrote it down and stuffed it in his pocket before he nipped into town to buy a pack of smokes, and the world ended while he was out and you re stuck until you track it down.

Once you do, you can be on your way, or if you prefer, you can keep poking around and maybe dig up some food, medicine, ammo, or money, all of which will make life on the rails a little easier. Supplies are scarce, and the Infected are not, which can make for some very tense (read: frustrating) moments. Getting a handle on melee combat helped ease the ammo pressure, but the hand-to-hand fights, which are simply a matter of running back and forth past infected and timing right-clicks to punch them as you go by (and hopefully not getting clobbered in kind), aren't much fun.

Risk vs reward decisions are meant to be the basis for much of The Final Station's tension, but it never adds up to much because you can t leave a station and move on to the next without doing a nearly complete circuit through it anyway. The tough calls that are supposedly at the heart of the game are largely non-existent: At one point, I discovered a note warning me not to go to the subway, which was fine, because subways are generally bad news in a post-apocalypse anyway except, whoops, I have to go to the subway, because it's the only way to continue through the level. (And of course it's packed with infected.)

Foreshadowing is fine, but suggesting that I have a choice in the matter, and then almost immediately taking it away is just irritating. I get that there's a story to be told, but I came into The Final Station expecting that I'd have some control over my destiny, and moments like this are an explicit reminder that for the most part, I do not. Similarly, I didn't have the option to reject potential passengers in order to preserve resources; the people I talked to decided for themselves whether or not they'd join my train, without any input from me. (Joke was on them, though: Most of them died long before we made it to our destination.)

Keeping the people I picked up alive was the other half of my job as an the engineer, and that was both trickier and more tedious than I expected. They are (or were, as it almost inevitably turned out) incredibly delicate. People who by all appearances were in good health when I picked them up would starve to death between stations if I didn't bring them food, or suffocate if I failed to adequately monitor the ventilation system. My assumption is that these survival mechanics are meant to inject drama and tension between stations, but it just doesn't work in its current state. It's entirely superfluous, and even silly: These people will literally die in their seats rather than get up and open a window. Death comes so quickly and of such easily avoidable causes that I quickly stopped caring. I became like William Hurt in A History of Violence, staring down at the fallen and wondering how they possibly could have been so stupid. (It didn't help that it seemed not to matter whether they lived or died anyway.)

So The Final Station is very linear, and a bit dull, and the segments aboard the train fail to add anything to the experience but a bit of pointless busywork. In spite of all that, I want to see more. The preview build isn't complete the dialog is largely placeholder, mechanics are still being worked on, and it only covers the first, shortest chapter of the game and more importantly, I really feel like there's something legitimately intriguing in it. The preview only hints at it, but The Final Station's world was pretty clearly a mess well before disaster struck. And the end of the world isn't necessarily as bad as it sounds, either. Cities continue to function, with people going about their business, some of them apparently unaware that anything untoward is happening at all. There was also a late-preview surprise that was genuinely disturbing, and subtle enough that I almost missed it.

That's why I'll keep following along, and look forward to playing the final release, whenever it comes out. I wish it was for a better reason than a vaguely-formed hope that its potential will coalesce into something worthwhile, but unless and until the stations become more fun to play through, and I m given some proper freedom to make the decisions that move the game forward, the mystery of this grey, broken world is The Final Station s only real hook right now.

I spoke to founder Alex Nichiporchik at PAX South about what makes a TinyBuild game, and the new stuff they're working on now. I also got to play the sequel to Lovely Planet, a very impressive game called The Final Station, and learned that Clustertruck is now being published by them. Watch the full interview above to hear what's cooking.

I still think there's life in the zombie apocalypse. I'm not sure what the idea to refresh the shambling undead will be, but maybe The Final Station's freight train is the thing to do it. I'd rather this than Fallout's Thomas the Tank Engine at any rate.

The Final Station looks like FTL by way of This War of Mine and Teleglitch. You ride a train through a dying world, stopping off at stations to gather supplies and more useless mouths to feed, provided you can fight through the infected hordes. There seems to be some pleasing nuance to the pixellated zombie combat. By the time you pull off again, you'll need enough food make it to the next stop.

That's the sort of focus that appeals to me in a survival game. Like Chris, I find the relentless, directionless demands of DayZ and The Long Dark's alpha sandbox exhausting after a while, so narrow windows to accomplish an objective and get the hell out sound divine. And that's my feature suggestion, if it's not already in—if you don't get it together in time, the train should leave without you, Stargate Universe-style. What else creates tension like a treacherous, ticking timer?

The Final Station is due sometime in summer, which is the accuracy I expect of most National Rail services.