so now i’ve gone completely overboard with playing thru way more Steam demos before Next Fest stops - far more than i’ve ever done for any one of these.
perhaps this comes from my increasing curiosity about the dice roll nature of playing these demos and actually hitting gems like Funi Raccoon Game or Hark The Ghoul. or perhaps it’s just to stave off looming existential despair for another day. maybe i should just make a bigger post somewhere else about all of them, i don’t know.
but anyway, i felt really called to actually play a bunch of these games this time for some reason - so hopefully you all can get some kind of benefit from that.
Danchi Days
it’s Melos Han-Tani’s (my Unearthed Treasure Room partner)'s new game/side project(?) while Angeline Era is still in the works. i almost missed it on one of the streams because it looked so unassuming. Angeline Era has Analgesic (Melos and Marina’s game production name) going in a far more explicit action game direction, but this is much more in line with something like All our Asias - a narrative game with light action puzzle and exploration elements. tho this has gameboy advance-ish graphics that are more similar to something like Anodyne 1.
you play as a little girl who lives with your dad, grandma, and brother. at the very beginning, your grandma trains you as a little girl to scan the environment to read things you see. the system for “looking” in this game is distinct from just clicking on objects - you have to aim at things to “look” at them which is kind of interesting. and then she teaches you to like, summon magical dust out of the environment which enters you into these simple top-down minigames.
after you solve a few of those, you fast forward several years and your grandma now is completely incapacitated in a wheelchair with dementia. your brother has turned into a surly teenager and tells you to let go and that grandma is gone, but your character is still obsessed with the idea that she can cure her grandmother’s dementia. it’s pretty sudden shift that happens and an interesting dark twist for what is otherwise a very upbeat game - honestly i think it works really well and it made me pretty teary-eyed throughout for something that is kind of a lighter experience.
anyway, your character decides to resurrect these Danchi festivals your grandma used to run before she got dementia. you discover some imaginary monster companion who helps you along, and your dad helps you set up a website and make invitations to other people and post updates about the festival planning. you spend the rest of the time wandering around the facility your grandma lives in and connecting with the various older people who live there and inviting them to the festival. in between, you do those little action puzzle minigames occasionally. there’s also a Hypnospace Outlaw-esque element of the game where you learn new info that you look up on your little pocket PC and read other people’s personal websites that talk about who they are to help make connections with them.
so there’s weirdly a lot going on, and a lot of complexity in this game. but in terms of like super engaging action or puzzle stuff, it’s very light. in some ways the game kind of feels like a twee and somewhat insubstantial “cozy game” but there’s also a dark undercurrent to it that is clearly inspired by stuff like Mother 3 and kind of about dealing with the concept of dementia. someone in one of the Steam reviews said “finally a cozy game that is actually about something” - so it’s kind of a weird mixture, and hard to talk about. it’s hard to know how much it will go into the psychological storytelling element of things, or it’s just the setup.
so anyway - it’s a pretty interesting game that won’t be for everyone, because the action and puzzle elements are pretty light and not particularly challenging. but it also definitely feels unique and not quite like anything else i’ve played (other than other games by Melos/Analgesic).
Struggle
this game has a cool concept, where you have to drag yourself along on floating debris in first person to move yourself in space and reach your goal - sort of like GIRP in space or something. unfortunately, in practice it all felt pretty flat to me. i just kinda dragged myself around and progressed somewhat before invariably running out of momentum and having to reset back to the beginning over and over. i think how much i moved and where i could grab on the objects sometimes just felt kind of arbitrary, and the movement never approached that nice or tactile feeling - it was a bit slidey and stiff. it felt more like i was just trying to break the game with some unintended strategy than it felt at all like i was being strategic or using what was intended.
but yeah - sadly there’s no JUICE! the juice - it ain’t there. it feels a bit stock Unity/Unreal to me - like a student project basically. something you’d say “hey this is a cool idea” to a student but then have difficulty conveying why exactly it didn’t come off to them as intended. a portfolio piece, or whatever you want to call it.
from the trailer it looks like there are other objects that you can use to help anchor yourself and move yourself around - from a fire extinguisher, to an axe. i never found either, and i’m not sure if either were in the demo tbh, tho maybe they were. though i did have some chain thing that grabs onto the floating debris in space to presumably help anchor you. but it only seemed to work when it wanted to - sometimes it just didn’t really seem to do much of anything and sometimes it reset me the point where i chained on. i got kinda too frustrated with it that i decided to let it be and give up on really trying to use it.
anyway, after awhile i just didn’t feel that motivated to continue. you win some, you lose some.
Baby Steps
not much to say on this one that hasn’t already been said by others. i kinda beelined to the area where the demo ends and you can’t go further right away and didn’t realize how much other stuff there was. so i wandered around a bit more, mostly getting lost and not finding much of anything in particular. eventually i was kinda just sick of not getting anywhere and flailing around to nowhere in particular that i decided to leave it there. i know there is more to do and see, so maybe i’ll come back to the demo at some point before the thing comes out.
i do like the sense of humor in this game. i think the little intro cutscene thing is so funny - the delivery of the line “family meeting, let’s go!” from the guy’s dad is perfect (even tho the dad also sounds like he’s in his 30’s lol). i felt a bit like that when i was living at home for a year or two after college. but somehow it makes your character kind of abject enough to where you don’t feel too bad about the amount of bodyshaming it’s doing. it does feel like a “next gen” version of a Bennett Foddy project while still keeping its fundamental weird uncanniness that Getting Over It has. kind of what you’d imagine a late 00’s Adult Swim flash game would be if it turned into a AA or AAA-adjacent thing.
the movement is pretty intuitive too, in its own way. definitely pretty easy to pick up not as intentionally clunky as Getting Over It. and it is really hilarious to watch your guy flail around and groan. but i can tell that i’m not stretching my real life flesh body enough and straining my wrists too much from too much computer time, because after a few of these physics based games the movement started to hurt me. the older i get, the more my wrists just do not have the endurance for some of these kinds of games.
but anyway, definitely something i enjoyed and will come back to in spite of getting kind of lost aimlessly wandering. hopefully next time i’ll have a little more patience to wander and find more substantial things in the environment.
Death In Abyss
i think i saw this on one of those Eek3 streams? the demo is not for this specific Next Fest but from last year, like some of the others that i’ve played. it’s a dark lo-fi PS1 style action game where you’re this little flappy mech ship in the dark underwater and you move around and shoot grotesque Eldritch-like monsters. from the menus at the beginning that look like something out of Armored Core, it appears to have different missions - but there’s only one that was available in the demo.
the tutorial starts you out blowing up these large barnacle creatures that don’t seem to do anything or serve any purpose in order to get you used to moving around. eventually you’re thrown into waves of various bitey barnacley monsters and your job is basically just to kill them and survive as long as possible before you die. bigger monsters will appear predictably at certain times, the further you get along in your progress. basically this gameplay seems closest to something like Devil Daggers, but underwater and with six degrees of movement.
to be honest, i was terrible at it and didn’t have the patience to grind to see what happened when you reach 100%. i’m not sure if the apparent multiple missions are going to have different goals you can progress through or if it is primarily just a bunch of different scripted arena challenges in the vein of something like Devil Daggers. whatever it is, the style and sensibility are very cool and it’s definitely worth checking out if you like that sort of game. i just didn’t really have the patience to continue - i think with those visuals and atmosphere i was hoping for something a little more mission based. but it is pretty straightforward, and i didn’t really struggle to understand what the game was expecting from me - so maybe i’ll come back to it later.
Videonauts
another demo for our highly productive queer Canadian furry friends resnijars, who are responsible for games like Salad Fields and Mibibli’s Quest. they usually don’t disappoint, but their previous demo for their RPG game Mythic Mire (which has apparently been released now already??) was really insubstantial and felt like it had one or two less weird or unique things about it vs. other things they’ve done. so i kinda skipped over this one initially, until now.
like with Mythic Mire, this demo is also pretty short and light on content. but otherwise - i really liked it! it’s more in the surreal RPG maker horror/puzzle adventure genre, close to something like Ib. you go around a surreal mansion like environment and solve fairly basic puzzles while following around one character with amnesia. i liked the ending of the demo - it’s a little bit of a funny shock that implies a deeper, darker story there.
otherwise, it’s not anything too grotesque or shocking. but it did feel well done, and it’s closer to the genre of things i like to play. so i’ll probably want to check this one out in the future when it comes out. i still need to get to their larger scale Metroidvania/search action game Stardust Demon from last year eventually.
White Knuckle
more climbing/physics based games. it’s like a GIRP rougelike in 3D, with gritty lo-fi graphics and monsters. you grab onto ledges with each hand and they have a certain amount of stamina that runs out the more you climb and then resets when you rest. you start in this grey industrial tunnel-like area, and eventually once you progress past the first few ledges a voice will come on and make some cryptic announcements and a sort of blackish grey ooze will rise throughout the level. your job is to continue to move and not fall into the ooze - otherwise you die and start over. the levels appear to be generated from what i can tell - or at least, i got different layouts the few different times i played, past the first area.
once you reach the top of a particular era, the floor will close and i think temporarily stop the ooze and the cycle will reset again. but if you die, you’ll go all the way back to the beginning. there are also tools the game gives you that presumably help anchor you and make it easier to climb up - like a sledgehammer, a fireaxe, and a saw. though i didn’t really have the patience to figure out how each one worked, but i’m sure they’re useful in taking care of some of the monsters that appear later.
in general, climbing is pretty engaging once you get used to it. but also because of my aforementioned Fucked Wrists i didn’t really have the patience to play for more than 20 or 30 minutes. i did reach an area where there were actual enemies that try to track you down, and half-life 1 hanging barnacle type things that can grab you and eat you. so it seems like the challenges get more complex and interesting as you move on. presumably that’s where some of the items come in as well.
i do think because of the predominance of more interesting climbing games to me personally - from Beton Brutal and to Lorn’s Lure (which both have similar brutalist aesthetics), and also to Baby Steps, this one may get lost in the shuffle a bit. tho the demo seems to be relatively popular, so i dunno. i guess rougelikes appeal to a lot of people, tho this is one genre i’m okay with not really messing with them in. still very much seems worth checking out if you have the endurance/patience and want to try out a challenging climbing rougelike, though.
Eclipsium
it’s a walking sim. i saw this trailer pop up on youtube labeled as part of the PC Gaming Show around SGF but i don’t know if it was actually part of the stream or not. the visuals are very notable - they have a very specific kind of pixel dithered lo-res look that’s very striking and adds to the uncanniness of everything you wander through - like you’re looking at it through a foggy window. it really helps the environments feel specific to this game, and not generic or stock like a lot of first person walking sims can. i don’t know if it’s haunted PS1-adjacent or not but it certainly could be. it especially looks similar to a couple other games i’ve played in those compilation that involve manipulating the environment with your giant lo-framerate rendered hand like this one does.
this one is a bit hard to summarize? you start out outside on a camp in a mountaintop and eventually descend into some uncanny looking red caves. you wander around the uncanny caves for awhile and light various torches and then you reach a sort of industrial warehouse area, and solve various puzzles to lower the water. there’s a bit of non-euclidean navigation throughout that’s cool. also if you die by falling into a pit or a hazard, the game puts you in a clone of your room and puts the entrance to it by some nearby area which is a cool effect.
after i got through the warehouse, there was a section with some sailing on a boat to a different island and a cool surreal horror setpiece and that’s where the demo ended. while this is walking sim with light puzzle solving at its core, and it’s not going to show you anything you haven’t seen before - it’s def a compelling and interesting enough experience and feels high effort enough to be a unique experience. i like that, even tho it is uncanny and somewhat horror adjacent, it kind of has a bit more of subtle magical realism to it and doesn’t go for outright horror as much as just general atmosphere. definitely one of those games where it doesn’t spell anything out at all and you can read into it however much or little you want. in other words - blessedly free of Lore.
but yeah kind of low-key good experience overall. as far as relaxing wandering games go, even if it’s a more linear experience i prefer this to Gecko Gods. the atmosphere and setpieces were cool, and all the non-euclidian stuff when it popped up really added a lot to the experience. there were a lot of other games i played that experimented with various kinds of frustration and difficulty, so an experience like this was much appreciated.
so yeah, even if it didn’t blow my mind i thought it was a good fairly beefly little demo experience and i would likely come back to the full game.
TAMASHIKA
ugh this game. along with Super 10 Pin, this is at the top of my list of games i fully anticipated liking but ended up mostly just frustrated by.
you go around these surreal undulating cartoony hallways and try to snipe a bunch of frog guys before they get you while dancey music pumps throughout. this is one of those games where the game is strictly linear and the pace is pretty quick - really emphasizing proper response time to (imo) an irritating degree. you have checkpoints that you need to clear and you need to get every guy in the right sequence before you can move on - otherwise you have to redo the same segment over again. it’s almost rhythm-game adjacent, but it’s more like somewhere in between that and a more conventional corridor shooter type game.
this game really likes to slap your hand with a “TOO SLOW” or “TOO FAST” message every time you slightly mess up the timing and try to parry a bullet from one of the frog guys or hit them with the knife when they try and rush you. you’d think it’s just a tutorial thing, but the game does it every time regardless of where you are. you can probably guess that that starts to feel pretty annoying after awhile, and like the game is being condescending to you for not doing the exact right movements. i think it would make vastly more sense to just have a life meter where you can take a few hits before it sends you back so the action doesn’t get slowed down, but what do i know??? i just wanna run through a surreal hallway and shoot frog guys, man. i don’t want to have the game constantly ripping me out and making me redo long segments where it lectures me because i swung my knife slightly too early.
it did get more bearable as i got used to things. but mostly it’s just that i learned if you shoot fast enough you can avoid having to deal with the stupid timing for most of the encounters. like with when you slash your knife at the frog guys who rush you, and you can even parry a lot of the faster shots that come at you. there’s a few more segments that you can’t avoid by shooting quickly, but otherwise it’s bearable. but then, that makes me ask why it has to be this way? it becomes less like a rhythm game and more like a shooter where you’re just slowly rounding halls and trying to snipe guys before they do anything. i’m honestly not sure if that’s intended, but it made the knife feel more useless and me feel like i was demonstrating my spite and breaking the game a bit by doing it.
anyway, it just felt like a missed opportunity, man. the area in between rhythm game and corridor shooter this tries to navigate just felt kind of awkward and like it couldn’t really commit to either. and you can tell (unlike with Super 10 Pin) that the developer just had a very specific idea for what they wanted to do in their head and that that probably won’t change at all before the game comes out. i don’t know why you’d go to all this effort to make a really cool vibe and then just constantly slap the controller out of player’s hands and scold them and make them go back to the start for swinging their knife too early. it’s just dumb.
Saborus
okay, i should have known what to expect when i added this to my wishlist last year after seeing it on some stream (i think the Latin American Game showcase?). i knew it was going to be jank, and potentially questionable. you’re a chicken in a meat factory and you run away from bad guy humans. i thought this would be fun and absurd. i wanted to free my chicken breatheren and take down the evil meat nazis.
instead i was just a chicken horribly dying from poorly conveyed platforming on jank physics objects in a sterile warehouse for an absurdly long time, or from getting chased down and stabbed to death and dying painfully in dark and hard to navigate hallways by the cackling human meat worker gestapo.
i don’t want to be too mean or presumptuous but this does feel like the product of an unwell mind. it feels honestly kind of evil. the way that the meat gestapo guards laugh at you when they chase you around is really disturbing, and not in the fun spooky way but in the “i feel like i’m being personally assaulted somehow” way. and for a game that is very obviously anti-meat eating they clearly don’t mind showing you giant dismembered chickens, or having your chicken make disturbing moaning sounds or flail around its head wildly when you get hurt.
and of course there’s other stuff i could mention - just how completely absurd the “story” i could experience was, that there was very obvious AI dialogue at the beginning, etc etc. but i really thought it would be jank and stupid in the fun and absurd way, and not like i’m in some particularly evil Neil Breen type guy’s world. Hitler was famously a vegetarian and i always found that a little weird, but i feel like i understand that a little more after playing this game. this is the sort of thing a Hitler-adjacent vegetarian could make lol.
anyway if you want to step inside the mind of someone you wish you hadn’t and feel like you’ve been sullied afterwards, this will certainly provide that experience!
Everdeep Aurora
on the very opposite end of the spectrum is this game i saw on a Wholesome Direct a year or two ago - one of the few from that stream that actually really appealed to me. mostly that was just due to the incredibly intricate and detailed art that uses limited color palettes really well. i kinda just figured it’d be a standard platformer that just happened to have a cool art style, so i passed over this one for awhile. i’m glad i came back to this, because that assumption was wrong! and this is why i like playing demos - you never really know what you’re going to get with one of these types of games.
the biggest thing i could compare it to is like a Wario Land-style game? you’re this cat character who has a double jump, and also this drill that has a fixed amount of power and you can break certain kind of bricks to navigate around to secret areas. you don’t really use it much in the demo though outside of one of the initial areas. after one of the first areas with these giant very well drawn characters in it, you jump your way into the windows of an abandoned mansion and play hide and seek with a few friends(?) or foes(?). i’m not really sure honestly what context this has in the story or what they mean, but it doesn’t really matter. the environments are nicely detailed and the navigation again does feel like something from a Wario Land game in the way those games often feel like everything is very tactile in spite of the details in the environment. there was even a nice little gachapon crane game you can play in one of the areas.
the demo is really short and just kinda throws you into the action without announcing anything. normally i prefer that approach tbh, tho it was slightly jarring in this case. the dialogue has a slightly uncanny thing to it, like it’s not someone who english is their first language - but i kinda grew to like it. it’s a little twee, i guess, but more just kind of strange. maybe this is just a result of the demo just kinda throwing you in to get a taste of the game without worrying about context, i’m not sure. i kinda hope it keeps that strange uncanniness though, because it made it feel a bit more surprising and unusual.
after you play hide and seek with the other monsters(?) and/or friends(?) you go to a different area and the demo abruptly ends. while the experience was short, i must say that i’m really intrigued. this one surprised me, and i don’t really know what to expect going forward. even if the demo is a bit short/abrupt, this is definitely one worth checking out the demo for and keeping an eye on. it feels like it could be something special.
Devil Spire Falls
if you see any info about this game, you probably know exactly what you’re getting. it’s a jank old-style first-person open world 90’s PC CRPG with generated worlds like Minecraft. it’s kinda in the mold of Elder Scrolls Arena or something like that i guess? there are a ridiculous amount of systems to keep track of in the game, from building your character’s stats to the myriad of things you can pick up and use, to all different ways you can interact with enemies and NPCs. i am normally way intimidated by games like this, though wandering around wasn’t too bad and i was able to get into the game and have some fun relatively quickly.
the worlds were pretty barren from what i can see, but the game is also pretty early on in development so that might change. i wandered around and picked some fights with some enemies. later i attempted to talk to one of the villagers and have a conversation using the quite odd but interesting conversation system before we all got massacred by these evil magic mushroom things. later i broke my dagger trying to fight a weird giant evil baby monster and ran away into a dungeon where i was quickly killed by some environmental hazards. the standard stuff you’d expect from a game like this.
but yeah, this feels very much like an idiosyncratic personal passion project version of a 90’s CRPG. it still seems pretty early on in dev - but if this sounds like your jam, it’s def something worth keeping tabs on. i was entertained by the amount of esoteric shit and systems that exist in the game from the small amount i played.
Am I Nima
abusive mom simulator. you’re like a teenage?-ish girl who is actively being held hostage by her mother for some kind of scientific experiment reason. there’s an implication that you are violent and/or have behavioral issues and that’s why, though it’s hard to know if that’s the actual reason. you keep losing your memory, so you have this system where you can talk to your mom and bring up different conversational subjects that come up with the more stuff is brought up. it’s possible this is a “choices matter” kind of game, and what topics you bring up affect what happens - though i’m not really sure based on the demo. i had a couple conversations with the mom and like part where i looked around at objects at my room.
the demo is unfortunately short, but i identified too much with this protagonist and her relationship with her mom. particularly the way the conversation system kind of has this element of “things you can’t say”, like doing the correct performance in order to avoid violence or confrontation with an oversensitive parent. the way her mom uses shame (“i’m just trying my best”) and the hollow performance of being a supportive parent to gaslight about other abusive stuff is something i know i could relate to way too much!!! it’s actually rare you see this kind of experience effectively captured in game form, so i liked that.
honestly wish there was more to this demo, but that’s a good problem to have. definitely something i’m going to be checking out more of. glad i saw this pop up on the on one of the showcase streams at SGF this year. finding games like this that do a really good job exploring real life psychological conflict that you don’t see too much of games is exactly the reason to brave the bullshit and watch streams like that.
Complex 629
wow, what to say about this game? one of the strangest and most interesting things i’ve played in awhile. the platonic ideal of something just totally weird and inexplicable you find from digging through these things - the catching of the big fish. it wasn’t even on my list of things to play until i saw it come up on like my last browse through of the list of demos and was like “uh sure, might as well add this to the pile” and uh i’m really glad i did i guess!
i’m not sure i even want to describe this game too much, because it’s something people should play. you’re a blue guy with two giant hands who can move snow around with your mouse buttons, or hold other objects in them. you need to move the snow around to get yourself through these strange uncanny Yume Nikki like hallways and avoid a giant crawling monster who kills you if you get too close called “The Grandfather” who is presumably called that because they make a sound like a grandfather clock and have a clock on their head. you’re constantly picking up giant coins all over the environment that can help you buy various items that make some of the moving around slightly easier (tho not by much). you can go to various places like a giant market and a gym and talk to people who people say strange and uncanny things, though they sometimes are more cogent. the environment is just littered with stuff everywhere for unknown reasons. you also come upon these somewhat lurid journal entries sometimes.
it all feels like a fever dream from another universe. the grandfather monster really captures a creeping feeling of anxiety so well, and some of the cryptic and strange dialogue seem to capture something of a personal psychological state of paranoia. i think the creator is from Iceland, but i’ve never seen any other games by them. it is something that feels like you’re living in someone else’s head, though i mean that in the most positive sense here (vs. Saborus which feels evil). honestly it’s the closest something recent has come to reminding me of like a Yume Nikki or La La Land type abstract inexplicable experience for awhile. maybe anarchic 00’s weird free game nostalgia is really coming back around, if this and Funi Raccoon Game are any testament.
but yeah - if this sounds interesting to you, just play this demo. one of the weirder things i’ve come upon that i’m going to be thinking about for awhile. it’s kind of tedious and clunky i guess in some ways but it absolutely did not detract from the experience at all for me.
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that’s it for me! no more Steam demos for awhile! i am experiencing demo fatigue. i also attempted to play Outrider Mako, but the demo wasn’t in English so i didn’t get very far.
but yeah to me personally Everdeep Aurora, Am I Nima and especially Complex 629 were all ones that surprised me the most and are things i’d want to return to for that reason. Danchi Days, Babysteps, Eclipsium, and Devil Spire Falls were all good too, though they were more in line with what i expected. Videonauts was short but sweet and has potential as well.
White Knuckle and Death In Abyss are two things i didn’t have the patience for to play a lot of because they’re intentionally difficult, but some people here may be a lot more into them. Struggle and TAMASHIKA were disappointing for completely different reasons (one is underbaked and the other one is weirdly overbaked). and then there was Saborus, which was a… not good time. lol.