The Humble Microjumbo Bundle is a little different than most previous Humble Bundles, because two of the games in the package are straight-up free: Just give them your email address and enjoy. But a few bucks more will get you a number of other games, including some we've played in the past that we actually really enjoyed. 

DRM-free (that is, non-Steam) versions of Space Pilgrim Episode 1 and Pony Island are yours for the taking, or for a minimum of one penny (although that's kind of a dick move) you can also lay claim to Space Pilgrim Episodes 1-4. For $1, you get Steam keys for all of the above, plus Geometry Dash, Pony Island, and Oh... Sir! The Insult Simulator. 

And as usual, there's still more to be had for breaking the average price, which right now is just a hair over three bucks: Who's Your Daddy, Town of Salem, hack_me and hack_me 2, Devil Daggers, and Oh... Sir! The Hollywood Roast.   

None of these games are blockbuster fare, but Chris and James had a "good time" trying to keep a baby from dying in a multitude of horrible ways in Who's Your Daddy (they also found a giant floppy dildo, yes they did), Pony Island scored a whopping 91/100 in our 2016 review, and we declared Devil Daggers "the year's best game about shooting infinite skulls forever." Oh... Sir! is mostly about farts (the original, anyway) which may or may not be a plus depending on how you feel about these things. 

In any event, it's a very solid selection of games for less than the cost of a jumbo bag of chips. The Humble Microjumbo Bundle is live now and will remain on tap until August 22. 

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Achievement hunting on Steam is serious business. While Valve's storefront might not have Xbox's Gamerscore or PlayStation's Trophies, there are still plenty of PC gamers who appreciate the way Steam achievements challenge them to play games in new and interesting ways. Then there's the satisfaction of knowing you're one of just a small percentage of players who've explored every nook and cranny, maxed out every stat, or earned every gold medal a game has to offer. 

The thing is, a lot of Steam achievements are kind of boring. Kill 10,000 enemies, hit level 99 in every class, finish the game on Ultra Nightmare Hardcore difficulty—most of the objectives feel like they've fallen straight out of a free-to-play MMO's quest log. Even the rarest achievements are often little more than tedious grind fests, requiring you to play 500 online matches in a multiplayer game with no active player base, or fight alongside a game's developer when that developer has long ago moved onto their next project. 

These achievements aren't particularly fun to earn, let alone read about. But buried in Steam's massive catalog of games are some truly obscure, brutally difficult achievements that less than 0.1 percent of players have managed to accomplish. These are achievements worthy of the name. Most of us will never earn them, but we can dream.

Note: Total owners approximated from SteamSpy. Verified achievement stats through AStats.

Devil Daggers

Devil Dagger - Survive 500 secondsTotal Owners: 236,000 Completion Percentage: 0.1

For something you could complete in the downtime between Dota matches, frantic FPS Devil Dagger's one and only achievement has managed to defy 99.9 percent of players for well over a year now. That might seem odd given how simple its requirement sounds: all you have to do is survive for 500 seconds. I mean, I do that all the time. See. That last 500 seconds? I just survived that. 

But yeah. Surviving Devil Daggers is a wee bit tougher than running out the clock in real life. Despite the game selling for a mere fiver, just 0.1 percent of players have managed to avoid croaking for the 8 minutes and 20 seconds necessary to snag the 'Devil Dagger' achievement. Watching replays of those runs is equal parts mesmerizing and depressing, making it painfully clear just how amateur my own skills are. I could probably spend the next year playing nothing but Devil Daggers and still not come close to the graceful death-dealing of players like the world-record-smashing bowsr. When the apocalypse hits and the whole world goes to hell, I'll be the redshirt incinerated in the first ten seconds.

Crusader Kings 2

Not so Bad - Survive the End Times Total Owners: 1.4 million Completion Percentage: 0.1

Crusader Kings 2, champion of the grand strategy genre, is full of intricate, multi-layered achievements few players have managed to unlock. From installing a female ruler in the five baronies of the Orthodox Pentarchy, to trampling the Pope with a horde of elephants, over a dozen eclectic achievements are currently sitting at a completion rate of less than 0.1 percent.  

The one I want to shout out, though, is the 'Not so Bad' achievement awarded for surviving the End Times. Ostensibly, you unlock this achievement by surviving the rise of the Prophet of Doom and the Black Death he's convinced will destroy humanity. A Crusader Kings player going by the username Xolotl123 on Reddit, however, inadvertently earned themselves the achievement due to their investment in high-quality hospital care and their imprisonment of the Prophet for disturbing the peace. The Prophet then hanged himself, but not before sending the player a letter that read: 'If you are reading this letter, I am with God, or with Lucifer..., if so, then you were right. If not, then I was right.' 

I've not had the time to play Crusader Kings 2, but after reading this story, I think I'm going to have to clear my schedule. Any game where you can avert the End Times through hygiene is a winner in my book. 

Rising Storm / Red Orchestra 2

Bringing a sword to a sword fight – As an American soldier kill an Axis soldier wielding a Katana, with a Katana. Stick it to Tojo – As an Allied soldier, kill 100 Axis soldiers with a bayonet. Total Owners: 2.7 million (unreliable due to free weekend) Completion percentage: 0.1 - 0.2

Rising Storm's focus on historically authentic, asymmetrical WWII combat means that, naturally, American soldiers do not spawn into the battlefield with katanas. In order to get one, you have to defeat a Japanese soldier who's carrying one. And in order to get the "Bringing a sword..." achievement, you then have to pick up their katana, find another Japanese soldier with a katana, and then defeat them with the weapon of their ancestors. It's a hard scenario to concoct in an FPS where rifles and grenades are the preferred way to fight.

Bit.Trip Beat

MEAT.BOY SMELLS - Get a perfect in 1-1 using only a game pad.Total Owners: 311,00Achievement percentage: 1.6

Heresy! An achievement that requires ditching the holy mouse and keyboard for a filthy gamepad? What does BIT.TRIP BEAT take us for, console players? Everyone knows a good M+K combo is the only way to play. Sure, it makes driving games a bit twitchy, and performing combos in third-person action games can be tricky without analogue sticks, and fighting games don't always work so great, and stealth sequences tend to be a little wonky with WASD…

Okay. So maybe gamepads aren't that bad. Still, locking an achievement to a specific piece of hardware is a surefire way to tick off achievement hunters. The BIT.TRIP devs found that out the hard way with the game's 'SIXTH.SENSE' achievement, which required players to beat a level using Razer's short-lived Sixense motion controller. The backlash to 'SIXTH.SENSE' drove the devs to delete the achievement from Steam completely, which technically makes it one of the rarest achievements out there. Not quite as rare as a game with motion controls that don't feel like total garbage, but still…

The Stanley Parable

Go outside - Don't play The Stanley Parable for five years Total Owners: 2.1 million Number of achievers: 2 verified through AStats (6.9 percent on Steam) 

Games are meant to be played—we usually take that much for granted. It's a little odd, then, when a game actively encourages you not to play it. Odd, however, is what The Stanley Parable's all about. I mean, one of the game's endings involves running back and forth between two buttons for four hours. And that's not to mention the pointed commentary on the nature of free will and the human tendency towards obeisance. Like I said, odd. 

The Stanley Parable's weirdest elements, however, are definitely its achievements. In addition to an achievement simply entitled 'Unachievable' (paradoxically earned by 3.9 percent of players), there's the 'Go outside' achievement that tasks players with not playing the game for five years straight. Since The Stanley Parable released in October 2013, no one can legitimately earn this achievement until October next year. Of course, that hasn't stopped some unscrupulous Steam users from setting their computer clocks forward to unlock the achievement early.  

Cheating to not play a game? I guess some people will do anything for their sweet cheevos. 

Garry's Mod

Addict - You have wasted a year of your life playing GMod! Total Owners: 13.2 million Number of achievers: 9 verified on AStats (1.8 percent on Steam) 

You can do a lot of things in the 8760 hours that make up a single year. You could play 105,120 matches of Rocket League. You could marathon the entire current run of The Simpsons—all 617 episodes—38 times over. You could hitch a ride on a rocket and fly to Mars, with enough time left over to plant the seeds of an interplanetary rebellion. 

You could also spend every one of those 8760 hours playing Garry's Mod in order to unlock the 'Addict' achievement. And when I say playing, I don't just mean booting up the game and letting it idle in the menu. You have to be connected to an active server for your time to count. Unsurprisingly, the hefty investment involved has kept the achievement's completion percentage at just 1.8 percent, even with achievement hunters over at AStats devising strategies for minimizing the resources used by Garry's Mod so you can leave it running in the background while you tend to other tasks. 

I have to wonder, though, how many people left their computers on while they were working or sleeping solely to unlock this achievement? At a modest estimate, 8760 hours' worth of electricity would cost roughly $210 USD, which is a whole lot of money for a single achievement. Kind of puts all those pesky microtransactions to shame, doesn't it? 

Train Simulator

DLC scenarios Total Owners: 995,000 Completion percentage: 0

Speaking of money, Train Simulator boasts some of the rarest achievements on Steam, but that's not because they're brutally difficult or stubbornly obscure. Heck, the achievement descriptions make it pretty obvious what you've got to do: the 'It Works For Dogs!' achievement reads 'Awarded for completing scenario [RailfanMode] Barking. It's not like the game's unpopular either, with nearly a million owners on Steam and a median playtime of a respectable 7.5 hours. 

No, what makes Train Simulator's achievements so rare is that fiendish friend of ours: DLC. Train Simulator is notorious for having the most expensive DLC on Steam, with its total value currently sitting at $6254.43 USD. Worse, Train Simulator ties many of its achievements to its DLC, leading to a wealth of 0 percent and 0.1 percent completion rates across the board.  

But that $6254.43? I'd want a real honest-to-god train if I was forking over that much cash. If it was anything like Train Simulator, though, it'd probably lock out the train whistle as premium DLC. Steam whistle: only $0.99 per toot! 

Ark: Survival Evolved

Artifact Archaeologist – You personally retrieved all Eight Artifacts! Total Owners: 4.7 million Completion Percentage: 0.2

A whole lot of people play ARK: Survival Evolved, and yet even the most common of its seven achievements has been earned by less than 5 percent of players. But while 95 percent of ARK players haven't defeated the game's first Ultimate Life Form, 99.8 percent remain vexed by its toughest achievement: 'Artifact Archaeologist', rewarded for retrieving every Artifact in the game. It sounds simple enough, but this is where ARK's nature as an Early Access game comes back to bite it on the rump.  

According to the achievement description, there are only eight artifacts in ARK: Survival Evolved. This isn't true. There are 14 artifacts in total, 10 of which can be obtained through normal play, 3 which are locked to the Scorched Earth DLC, and one which can only be spawned through a console command. For a game that has already seen its fair share of controversy, ARK has left quite a few achievement hunters pretty disappointed. Still, at least they can take solace in the giant bees that have just been added to the game. That's something, right?  

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Dragonrider - Tame and ride 5 dragons Total Owners: 11 million (unreliable due to free weekend) Completion percentage: 0.8

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you've played Skyrim, or at least heard enough about it to understand the game's premise. You're the dragonborn, you need to save the world from an evil dragon, yada yada yada. In short, the game basically revolves around dragons. 

How, then, is the achievement for riding dragons so rare? Only 0.8 percent of the millions of Skyrim players have tamed five or more of the mythical creatures and taken to the skies, which makes exactly zero sense to me. Who wouldn't want a dragon as their personal chauffeur? It's not like you'd have to worry about anyone jacking your scaly pal; any thief foolish enough to try would be charred to a crisp before they could shout Fus Ro Dah. I guess Skyrim players are just too busy getting busy and fighting Macho Man Randy Savage to spend their time becoming certified dragon pilots. 

Black Mesa

Rare Specimen – Send the Hidden Hat to Xen. Total Owners: 500,000 Completion percentage: 2.1 percent 

Hats are all the rage these days. I have it on good authority from my stock broker that the hat economy is only going to go up—and that's coming from a man who wears a top hat, so you know it's legit. My wardrobe is already full of baseball caps, bowler hats, fezes, and beanies, just waiting for the day when my fabric fortune will be ready to claim. The only thing I don't quite understand is why my broker keeps mentioning Dota. Eh, never mind. I'm sure it's nothing. 

Video games, it turns out, are just as keen to cash in on the hat craze. Black Mesa, the fan-made recreation of the original Half-Life, adds in the 'Rare Specimen' achievement that tasks good old Gordon Freeman with locating a hidden purple top hat and lugging it all the way from the Black Mesa Research Facility on Earth to the alien dimension of Xen. It might not sound that tricky, but apparently Gordon's more interested in trivial things like saving the world instead of securing his future in the hat economy--only 2.1 percent of players have carried the top hat all the way to its new interdimensional marketplace. 

Wait, that gives me an idea. What if I started selling digital hats instead of physical ones? Ooh, I think I'm onto something here. I better stop typing before someone beats me to the punch… 

Look, I feel bad about this. I thought Devil Daggers came out late last year—November, maybe—and not in February. Had I remembered that it came out in 2016, I'd have argued strongly for it in almost all of our Game of the Year categories, including Best Racing Game, Best Overwatch, and Darkest Dungeon.

In my defence the period from December to February is dark, oppressive, life-sapping and haunted by tentacle-skull-spider-monsters and so is Devil Daggers. One run, one hour, one day tends to blur into every other run, hour, and day. Time both passes and doesn't pass, when you're down there in Skull Hell, but time is paramount: all that matters is surviving just that little bit longer. You internalise the patterns and learn to cope. You start firing before the spider-creature appears, because it got you last time but it won't get you again.

Devil Daggers is a very good game.

It's Pure Quake, basically. It is to Quake what the blue meth in Breaking Bad is to regular meth, except it's real. You spawn on a circular platform in Skull Hell surrounded by darkness. Laughing skulls spew from skull pillars and you fell them by spraying hot daggers from your extended palm. Distant chittering presages the arrival of the skull spider, which you slay by spraying its chest-skull.

More skulls follow, and more skull pillars, and then the skull worm, and then several skull spiders at once, and then... I don't know what happens after that. That takes us up to about 180 seconds, which is as long as Devil Daggers has ever lasted for me in hours upon hours of play.

I'm also not sure if they're really called skull pillars or skull spiders or skull worms: I've never had to write their names down before. Instead I've picked up an instinctive knowledge of that one arena and its denizens, what they sound like, where they come from, the specific combinations of strafe and jump and shoot that kills them before they kill me. This game gets under your skin and you don't forget. It's like learning to ride a bike. In Skull Hell.

(Case in point: I just loaded the game for the first time in a couple of months and clocked 153 seconds on my first run. It's like no time has passed at all. It might as well still be February. Shit.) 

It is flawlessly designed, in that it achieves all of its ambitions. It looks perfect—like running an old-school FPS on a too-large, busted monitor—and sounds better. You can play it by ear. The initial panic of survival gives way to mastery as you learn to pause between shots, rocket-jump, hop, shotgun, collect shards, etc.

It's the successor to similarly punishing time trial games like Super Hexagon, but a little stranger, a little subtler, a little less brutally digital in the way it doles out failure. You can enjoy it for its feel even if you're terrible at it, and I've felt strangely compelled to avoid videos of five-minute-plus runs because one day I want to see those things for myself. I want to earn every inch of territory I've claimed in Skull Hell.

Devil Daggers feels timeless, which is the best excuse I've got for forgetting that it came out this year. It's one of those games that is always a good idea, that should always have a place on your hard drive. It costs $5, for heaven's sake. This is your reminder, and mine, that it exists. Go play Devil Daggers.

Devil Daggers remains an enigma. We were taken with its opaqueness when it was released back in February: you stand in an arena and fight waves of hell beats by shooting energy out of your hands, there's no plot, and most only survive a few seconds. Death means restarting. The idea that there might be more to Devil Daggers that we haven't seen because no one's survived long enough to see it is pretty compelling.

The leaderboards smartly include replays of the best runs so you can watch them for yourself if, like me, you'll never survive longer than a minute and we've been keeping track of the players' progress since Devil Daggers released. Back in March we posted an impressive 10 minute world record run.

Six months later, the world record isn't much longer not that it isn't an impressive and hypnotic display of FPS skill. The current best run is 872.4143 seconds, a little over 14 and a half minutes, and was achieved by player Sojk a couple days ago (watch it above).

Devil Daggers is still being updated, with top-down replays and new enemies added just last week enemies most of us will never see outside of a replay, of course.

Ultra fast-paced 90 s-style arena shooter Devil Daggers is easily one of this year s best horror action games. Everything from its horrendous pixelated monsters, chilling soundtrack, and frantically-paced set-tos make it one of my all-time favourites, which is why I m impressed with the additions brought by its latest update. The v3 update introduces Linux support, new enemies, a list of bug fixes and a pretty cool top-down replay feature.

Devil Daggers v3 update is now available! Includes Linux support, new enemies, top-down replays, stats, fixes, more pic.twitter.com/YnBT6KID2xSeptember 19, 2016

The latter is the pick of the bunch which load replays as normal, however also allows you to alternate between the generic first-person view and a new bird s eye one which spans the entire knife-scattered hell-bound battlefield.

The folks at Eurogamer captured the following footage which shows off the new replay workings in motion:

Death in Devil Daggers frequently comes courtesy of being swarmed from behind so this addition, besides being pretty neat, has practical value too when analysing past performances. Perhaps we can expect to shave a millisecond or two from our top scores?

PC Gamer UK returns to the fallow fields of Poddington-on-Cast. It s an idyllic place, and, as the days stretch on and the hot takes bloom, the team wonder if they ve finally found peace. Alas, a cutlass is no substitute for a scythe, especially when thrown at a head with unerring accuracy. The screaming of skulls distracts from the toil of manual agriculture. And what s with all the seeping, toxic gas? As if that all wasn t enough, it turns out the money s gone bad

You can get Episode 1: Tom Clancy's The Podcast here. You can also subscribe on iTunes or keep up with new releases using our RSS feed.

Games discussed: Tom Clancy s The Division, Hitman, Stardew Valley, Devil Daggers, No Man s Sky.

This week s podcasters: Samuel Roberts, Tom Senior, Phil Savage, Andy Kelly

Expect a new episode every Monday, unless something goes horribly (or even mildly) wrong. Apologies for the fact that, this week, Phil sounds distant, as if speaking from an ethereal realm or nearby hallway. We ll sort that out for next week s show.

Thoughts? Feedback? Requests? Get in touch at pcgamer@futurenet.com, and use the subject line Podcast , or tweet us via the links above.

Intro music this week is the Deus Ex theme. What will Andy decide to use next time? Tune in to find out.

Even though Devil Daggers appears to be set in some Lovecraftian hellscape, people are eager to stick around for as long as they can. Case in point is DraQu, whose world record run is embedded above. He manages to survive for a record 612.4779 seconds (or a bit over ten minutes), which is roughly seven seconds longer than the current leaderboard runner-up.

It's fun to watch Devil Daggers played well, because it shows stuff that I'll never see myself as a godawful player (I think my record hovers around the ten seconds mark). With that said, there are spoilers in the video, if that concerns you.

For a bit of context, here's the leaderboards at the time of writing. DraQu has held the top position since March 2, and it looks like they might keep it for a while yet. Last time we checked back in February, Bonecarver's world record was 485 seconds. 

Devil Daggers is a first-person, retro backpedal-'em-up set in an unspecified hellplane that released yesterday on Steam after a few months on Greenlight. An average player (like me) might survive between 45 and 60 seconds in this horrific twitch-FPS nightmare, but b0necarver is not average. b0necarver, who I propose we label "The Man Who Circle-Strafed Hell Itself" or "The Michael Jordan of Hell," currently holds the record for the longest run in Devil Daggers, which you can watch in-client through its leaderboard, or in the video above. 

Even if you haven't played Devil Daggers yet, the run, which beats its nearest competitor by 51 seconds, borders on hypnotic: the equivalent of watching Satan do 360 noscopes for eight continuous minutes. May we all aspire to such sick, mind-fraying skull slaying.