playing(listening) to BB King recount his life in person.
15 Likes
just finished Chapter 2 of Deltarune.
iām not really sure what i think of this game, yet. i also remember that i didnāt much care for Undertale until my second playthrough and then going through the āReal Endingā stuff. the end of Undertale really sold me on the game and convinced me itās worthy of the hype, but iām wondering if Deltarune will be able to hit that same kind of peak.
i guess i feel like DR is maybe a game designed with UTās fans in mind in a way that is tangible and not necessarily off putting, but does make it feel a little less vital or interesting
game has made me laugh a bunch, though
2 Likes
I decided to try out some Steam Next Fest stuff for the first time, and tried this game called Spirit X Strike.
This is one of the best Dragonball Z games Iāve ever played, even though it has the aesthetic of Fist of the North Star. As someone who is bored of how many games bank heavily on parry mechanics, I think this is the first one in a while that made parrying feel fun again. You have to have both spatial and timing awareness because you have to choose from multiple defensive parries/options based on the kind of attack coming at you, but the game does not give you much of a grace period for doing a successful parry, like most games (whether though an invincible animation or by making enemies back off and not attack).
The game will spawn many enemies, and they can all attack you at once, and you need to parry each attach individual, with the right defensive option, in the right order of attacks, with the right timing. It means you need to retain spatial awareness- you will be attacked by people off screen! And despite the combat areas being giant empty boxes, they give you a neat fast traversal option via just-dodging ranged attacks, which allows you to trigger essential an instant transmission/teleportation to the attacking enemy. This lets you hop from one group of enemies to the next very easily.
Extremely simple and straightforward, but it works well as a power fantasy. Also the game puts piles of boxes everywhere so you can knock enemies into them to explode the piles of boxes.
8 Likes
played the āmina the hollowerā demo and found the movement to be weirdly smooth in a way that was off-putting to me. turns out it doesnāt care about pixels e.g. minaās pixels here are not aligned with the bg pixels
like i get why they did it that way (low pixel counts can look very jerky in motion, especially fullscreen on big monitors) but idk it does NOT move like a gameboy game. like, it effectively has a really big resolution, just with really blocky objects. itās an uncanny valley for me and and thus fails being the linkās awakening nostalgia bait that itās clearly marketed as.
game itself plays fine enough i suppose ā i picked what seemed like the worst and hardest weapon to use (hammer) and it was indeed that. i got through the demo with it but not without quite a few deaths to bosses. itās pretty clearly souls inspired, not just with the corpse runs but like animation commitments, common enemies that can surprise you with super aggression, high commitment heals, etc.
16 Likes
I beat Vanquish on normal mode, which Iād never played before and started because I didnāt want to give up on Mikami after The Evil Within. It was a lot of fun and struck me as what RE4 Mercenaries mode would be if it were expanded out to an entire game. I was sad when it ended so soon, if it had been able to sustain itself twice as long or had some really compelling multiplayer of New Game+ mode I feel like it would be an all-timer.
My only real criticism other than the length is the way the upgrade system works disincentivizes you to use the weapons you actually want to upgrade. I picked up on this early enough that I had some fully upgraded weapons by mid-game and felt slightly overpowered.
The Evil Within felt like a bad Xbox 360 era Western developed RE4 clone but the ways in which Vanquish riffs on Halo and Gears of War were very agreeable to me, even charming. It came out in 2010 and represents something like the last gasp of George Walker Bush is murderer art, two years into the Obama era. To offer plausible deniability, W. is played by Hillary Clinton, and the Neil Breen Fateful Findings style ending where she pulls out a gun to shoot herself, hesitates so you think itās going to be a fakeout, then shoots herself anyway but the camera tastefully whip pans away from her corpse, only to cut to a new angle that lingers on her perforated skull while dollying back to show her blood splatter on the American flags in the background, made me laugh out loud several times. The end credits where you shoot asteroids with the devs faces on them is one of the cutest things Iāve seen in a modern game.
12 Likes
I think Vanquishās length is so short to incentivise multiple playthroughs and experiment with the arsenal upgrades by run. It feels closer to a Metal Slug or shmup weapon upgrades in my mind than a Gears of War.
I miss games that do retractable weapon animations. Switching weapons in that game is so good
6 Likes
streamed some Steam demos yesterday (and played a few others before that). here are my impressions!
Perfect Tides: Station to Station
this is apparently a sequel/spin-off to an adventure game called Perfect Tides, which is like a slice of life point and click adventure game about being a millennial teenager growing up in some sort of (probably east coast US) island town. i think it was originally based on, or at least spun-off from a webcomic named Octopus Pie. i had not heard of that or played Perfect Tides but the developer follows me on social media and i saw this on one of the Summer Game Fest streams so figured iād check out the demo.
this one the same character is going to college in the big city (clearly modeled after NYC) at a school thatās an NYU-sort of equivalent in the year 2003 though she still lives at home - due to the price - and has to commute in. the style of the artm and general sensibility is clearly very LucasArts, though a little more realistic and less cartoonish than that. the amount of writing is also a heavier aspect of the game than a lot of point and click adventures - almost approaching visual novel or interactive fiction territory, which i wasnāt fully prepared for when playing it.
anyway, it definitely felt like a pretty well realized portrait of a character and nostalgia for a certain era (i guess sheād canonically be like two or three years older than me at the time). in the demo you go through one day as your character sort of monologues to herself throughout about her various insecurities and relationships to different people. you wake up from crashing at your friendās apartment in the city and have breakfast, you got to work at the library, you have a class, and then you awkwardly socially stumble through a party filled with people you donāt know - as your extremely needy boyfriend who still lives at home calls you on the phone multiple times.
there are some mechanics for conversations - basically you can have important conversations with particular people where you can bring up key points and either unlock or add new conversation nodes to talk to them about. i guess this is kind of just simulating the idea of improving socially so it adds some sort of depth to the game. thereās also a lot of pixel hunting and clicking on everything in this game to read its description which definitely gives it depth, but is a bit overwhelming. probably doubly so when i was streaming and trying to read a lot of text.
iām not sure how much of the clicking on stuff is strictly necessary, but sometimes it does unlock key conversation nodes that help you progress. i got stuck a couple of times on very easy/simple things just because i didnāt really know exactly what kind of adventure game it was and what the game expected of me. finishing the demo also took me way longer than i expected - like a couple hours. everything seems mostly to be straightforward though - more just like clicking on the right thing than solving inventory puzzles.
overall, i liked it and would recommend it if youāre comfortable doing more reading than youād expect for this type of game.
Super 10 Pin
this one was a struggle for me. i played a walking sim by this developer years ago called Sanguine Sanctum that i thought was okay but not amazing. but i was very much okay with the painstaking attempts made at recreating N64 nostalgia if it meant playing a goofy and creative bowling game.
but the difficulty balance is all off - after a relatively normal first stage, the second stage i really struggled for like 25 minutes. the controls for moving the ball work fine if youāre going straight but are really hard to deal with if thereās any sort of curve. i was so frustrated because i assumed i needed to get a certain score to move onto the next stage and i just couldnāt get anywhere. i later found out that a) i could just move onto the next stage regardless of my score and b) that the slightly confusing graphic design of the meter at the bottom left of the screen was one of the things that made it hard for me to understand a basic mechanic of the game, but that wasnāt the only problem.
after that brutal second stage, it went back to mostly fun and creative stages i was expecting. one with a loop, one some with water or other hazards. honestly plenty of cool ideas for a wacky alternate bowling game. but thereās always this awkward realm in between in very much trying to accurately be a game that could have come out in 1998 and it just letting itself be a fun and creative bowling game with a lot of variety that it never fully squared for me. at times the nostalgia really hit me as cool - in others, it felt like it was holding the game back. iām not sure how much it being bowling really helps things - it just made me want to play something that was more immediately creative and interesting like Super Monkey Ball tbh.
thereās also a bit of the fatigue i have when i hear like, the Bomberman Hero soundfont being used in the music and stuff like that or specific menu or graphics that are clearly obviously calling upon other games from the N64 era. beyond it definitely bringing me back to playing games in my friendās basement when i was 12, iām not exactly sure the purpose of evoking some of those touchstones. itās just weird to watch a lot of this stuff become a walking cliche - i donāt think i was ready for that. and i donāt want to take it for granted because i am and have always been a defender of games from that era to people who dismiss them. but i tend to feel just kind of weird about the end result of a lot of this nostalgia.
so yeah - mixed on this game overall. it still has potential but i dunno that iād return to it.
TRIP
a short demo where youāre stuck in a timeloop on a train with a cast of a handful of colorful cartoony characters and have to find your way out. thereās basically one main puzzle you have to figure out and then a second part that feels kind of like something out of an increpare game made in Unity circa 2012 - somewhere in between horror and something else that is a lot more abstract and hard to describe. like an existential horror type of experience. i kind of missed that feeling from a lot of these games.
this one surprised me overall - in a good way. the animation is good from a craft perspective but also doesnāt feel too cutesy or fussed over, and doesnāt detract from the weirder segments of the experience. and the demo really left me wanting more. so def recommended, and something to watch for in the future.
MillenniumDream
itās another one of these dang liminal games where you wander around uncanny spaces. this one looks cheaper than a lot of the other ones - but the main difference here the spaces are heavily based around capturing spaces in China around the period of the millennium. and it does do a good job of feeling like a snapshot in time. if space aliens come down to earth centuries later and played this game, they might know what itās like to live in China in the year 2000 in a large apartment complex just from experiencing this game. the ambient environmental noises do a lot to capture that.
the game also ran pretty bad on my computer - i canāt tell if this is just because i need to fix some things or this is poorly optimized, or both. so i didnāt play more than about 20 minutes.
but anyway - if you want to play one of these liminal wandering games, you could certainly do worse. this isnāt just a pure environment simulation - there are surreal āhorrorā-esque elements i guess with the glowing green exit signs and some of the soundscapes but theyāre pretty light even compared to other games of this kind. mostly the draw is how much the environments make you feel like youāre immersed at a very particular point in time.
Hark The Ghoul
this is a Kings Field/Shadow Tower-like that i saw on the Future Game Show stream and decided to try out in spite of not having a ton of experience with those kinds of games. and iām glad i did - because this was REALLY dope.
the level design was great - so much interconnectedness and multiple pathways that connect up and go different places. great little secret placements and stuff too. as a Doom wad player i feel like i can immediately perceive good level design like that and it made me extremely happy. and YOU CAN KICK THINGS!!! you can kick enemies, and you can even kick around boxes to help you reach secret areas.
all the systems in the game felt well considered and not just like they were aping something to ape something. the combat was well balanced and challenging in spots without being too difficult. the upgrades and save points felt well placed. and the two main areas that i saw were substantially different in mood and feeling - i especially really loved the atmosphere of the city area where you have some friendlies and some enemies, and there are a lot of environmental details like animals dying in the street.
the music is also very good. the visuals are good - particularly the color palette felt exactly right for this kind of game. really i donāt have enough good things to say about this game - itās exactly the kind of thing i want to find on Steam out of the blue and play. just please play the demo, and buy it whenever the full version comes out (supposedly sometime in 2026). this is gonna be a gem and i really canāt say enough good things.
Gecko Gods
i mentioned this one on here earlier, and someone else in this thread talked about this game. i saw it on a Wholesome Direct stream years ago and itās one of the few games that stood out to me because i like lizard and puzzle so i was waiting for a demo - which is finally here. itās basically exactly what youād expect - youāre a little lizard who wanders around a large temple-like environment and solves puzzles. once you complete all the puzzles, you unlock a boat to sail to other island - which is the end of the demo.
the puzzles are pretty easy overall - this is definitely something that a kid could play. and your lizard movement is very forgiving because you stick to walls - even if it can be slightly awkward at times. the main difficulty really just stems from wandering around the large environments and figuring out where you need to go, and how to successfully complete each puzzle. just figuring out the environment and not getting lost was the main challenge for me. but you canāt get hurt from falling or anything like that. there are occasional enemies you can fight, but it doesnāt really seem to matter very much. you can also collect currency by smashing a billion pots - which might have a purpose later on but didnāt really matter in the demo.
anyway - if you want a relaxing little time wandering around an island and solving light puzzles, this did a pretty good job of that. this basically effectively delivers on the promise of what i saw in the trailers - nothing more, nothing less. i could imagine it getting at least somewhat more complicated and interesting though, so iād be probably down to check out the full game when it comes out.
Funi Raccoon Game
@hellojed mentioned this earlier so i def wanted to check it out. itās cool! someone in my chat called it Glorious Trainwrecks-core which is apt. sort of like if TRIP was a higher effort/more polished looking increpare game, this is like a higher effort/more polished Glorious Trainwrecks game. maybe āpolishā seems silly to say if you look at the screenshot above, but you know what i mean. itās a version of that that is more commercially accessible, for better or for worse.
you basically have these chaotic environments with different objects you can pick up and interact with, and different entrances to other side areas you can find - either hidden or out in the open. some areas involve little environmental puzzles you have to solve, some just involve platforming. sometimes you can talk to the the different objects or people as well. there was one main area in this demo as far as i could tell - Norwich - and everything was based around it. the sound fx and music were also very goofy and fit the game well, along with the billboards and general graphic design. def feels like a lot of little funny layers and secrets to this game. thereās very clearly an anarchic internetty sensibility to the humor in the game ala Goat Simulator or something, but it is also very much its own thing.
tbh what i liked the most about this demo is how much liked how this game was very much its own thing - not trying to model itself after other games obviously. what i liked about so many indie games circa the late 00ās/early 2010ās is how they were trying to do very novel or unusual takes on games in a sort of anarchic way, but that kind of went away after awhile. this def feels like itās bringing back that sort of lineage. in an era of so much obvious nostalgia aping of particular games from 20-30 years ago i couldnāt be happier to see some of that come back.
so yeah - fully recommended! good game!
===============
overall i unequivocally recommend Funi Raccoon Game and especially Hark The Ghoul to just about anyone - really, two games that surprised me and have every sign that theyāre going to be very cool when finished. also provided youāre a fan of their respective genres (text-heavy point and click adventure and increpare-esque puzzley walking sim) i can easily recommend Perfect Tides: Station to Station and TRIP as well.
Gecko Gods and MillenniumDream are perfectly fine experiences that were also exactly what i expected and Super 10 Pin has plenty of potential, tho it let me down a little with the difficulty balancing and some other stuff. iāll probably try to check out a handful of more demos (esp Baby Steps) before the end of Next Fest on my own, but i at least hit the main ones.
19 Likes
Iām gonna write about some more demos, too, but I decided to stop playing the demo for Absolum because I really, really want to play the hell out of the full thing, whenever it eventually comes out. Holy shit what a cool game.
6 Likes
Room Escape: Red Riding Hood is a (if you hadnāt guessed) room escape style game, though you arenāt really escaping a room but rather just, messing with items in a scene. Itās very simplistic and while the puzzles are more or less ālogicalā (including a few funny ones) just about every element is a kind of a non sequitur
And apparently the game takes place inside of a weird mashup of those bizarre mobile game ads and a pharmaceutical commercial
(Filling out this list is your primary objective)
Thereās a bonus hard mode after you clear the game once but I just wasnāt feeling it enough
9 Likes
Okay some more demosā¦
Baby Steps: The sense of humor in this game gives me anxiety. I canāt explain it. Itās not bad! It just very uncomfortable, hahaha. Iāll get in a good walking rhythm and fuck it up and eat shit. I guess thatās not too different from real lifeā¦
Mina the Hollower: Pretty much what I expected. Itās alright. Maybe floatier than Iād like.
God I hope most of these demos donāt time out (itās why I went ahead and played some of Mina)ā¦I only got so much time and so much gaminā in meā¦
7 Likes
They should make a Baby Steps Crossover with Bebeās Kids. Bebeās Steps. hang on my phone is making the āMissile Lockā noise again
5 Likes
Yes, exactly! You managed to articulate something I failed to in my post about it above. You could actually feel the personal sensibilities of the dev come through rather than just their memory of another game being replicated. I found that so refreshing about it. Feel like other developers could learn a thing or two from this one ā Have your own fun in making things and donāt feel so constrained to imitating other stuff so much!
4 Likes
Baby Steps is good, they have made a wholly unlikable protagonist so whenever they (i?) fall down a cliff I donāt feel bad for them. I think it would be too distressing if they were likable. Very much feels like they went for a more mechanical dive into what made Death Stranding good for me: traversal mechanics and making small decisions on where to go. In Baby Steps the small decisions are literally foot placement. I wasnāt able to get past a major section in the demo because falling means having to clamber back up half the mountain and I can see that being a major time sink.
6 Likes
The demo for Space Adventure Cobra: The Awakening is everything I expected it to be, both good and bad, in that itās French slop licensed platforming game, but lovingly done for an excellent old ass anime in a way I would only expect a French slophouse studio to do.
Iām probably sounding mean here, but itās a very rote platformer (with weirdly tiny characters!), but with levels and segments sandwiched between brutally cropped video of the anime series. It rules. Itās not a very fun or good game, Iām not sure if it will shape up to be so. And you know damn well Iām gonna buy it. Love that Cobraā¦
7 Likes
Iāve been trying and playing many games this next fest, mostly in the arcade/score attack realm.
The game that has the most potential for me is Steel Carnelian. Its an awesome dreamcast era, 3D run and gun. The aiming is done with a kind of rail-gun style aiming, where the camera is mostly fixed. Its a little rough, rn, but the potential is strong for the devs to make something stellar. I think they nailed it.
Some of the team worked had worked on the game, Splatter.
While not technically a part of Next Fest, I tried out a game called Fireball 2. Its a simple game, but how the art and music and gameplay mesh together is just magical. Its one of those things you gotta just put in your hands to experience. Only downside with it is you canāt change the colors of the playfield and thereās nobody playing the game rn, so the online leaderboards only have my scores.
It has a demo though, so try it out! I think the game is criminally underrated.
Oh and apologies for the accidental reply.
3 Likes
i finished ghost song today and i feel kinda weird about it. there were parts that i really liked and parts that i thought were really dogshit, and now that iāve had a bit of a look at the gameās history i feel even more conflicted.
the moment-to-moment is great imo. i was disappointed when the game finally introduced a double-jump but then came around once it introduced another one and then another one; very silly. the combat is chill and i think the game looks pretty good; great colours and shapes, and a really killer audioscape to sell the whole thing.
however, here is a comparison between the current trailer:
and the one from 10 years ago:
like come on dude.
turns out the dev was working in some limited engine called stencyl, which was useful for a non-programmer dev but quickly became impossible to use for a project of this scale, so he had to scrap everything and start again in unity. thatās rough, but idk exactly why it meant that he couldnāt keep any of the original assets. very weird.
the gameās still pretty cool. loads of secrets and mysteries, and the story wraps up in a very respectable way, without feeling the need to exposit (even if you get the secret ending). unfortunately the voice acting is fraught, and thereās like a weird prevalence of aggressively east-coast american accents, which felt jarringly out-of-place.
i actually first played this on gamepass and was originally kinda mild on it, but then i kept thinking about it once i stopped playing, so i decided to buy it on gog (bless all devs who put their shit on gog or itch, ily) and iām glad i did, but iām still unsure if i really have that strong an opinion of it. i donāt know how to explain it but like, i think it does a lot right, and itās respectable, but iām still kinda mild on it! how are both of these true! idk.
i hope the dev gets to make more stuff. smaller stuff, that doesnāt ruin their life for 10 years.
10 Likes
Iāve been playing Still Wakes the Deep this weekend also, having seen it go on sale and an expansion get announced. I like The Chinese Room. They always value a melancholic and alienating kind of horror experience that speaks to me more than something stupid like Outlast, if I really had to make a pained comparison. This one is reaching sublime levels of that melancholy, and eerie horror that are greater than any in their previous games. Just wanted to echo some of what you were saying here wourme. Iām not done yet, but impressed enough to pick up the expansion.
Also what a beautiful fricken spectacle it is. This new unreal engine is impressive and I honestly have no clue how this studio has impressed investors enough to fund a production that makes things look as good as this. Were their android games profitable enough and Everybodyās Gone to the Rapture that successful after ports and discounts??
6 Likes
so now iāve gone completely overboard with playing thru way more Steam demos before Next Fest stops - far more than iāve 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 itās 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 donāt 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
itās Melos Han-Taniās (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 Marinaās 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 ālookingā in this game is distinct from just clicking on objects - you have to aim at things to ālookā 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 grandmotherās dementia. itās 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. thereās 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 peopleās personal websites that talk about who they are to help make connections with them.
so thereās weirdly a lot going on, and a lot of complexity in this game. but in terms of like super engaging action or puzzle stuff, itās very light. in some ways the game kind of feels like a twee and somewhat insubstantial ācozy gameā but thereās 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 āfinally a cozy game that is actually about somethingā - so itās kind of a weird mixture, and hard to talk about. itās hard to know how much it will go into the psychological storytelling element of things, or itās just the setup.
so anyway - itās a pretty interesting game that wonāt 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 iāve 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 thereās no JUICE! the juice - it aināt there. it feels a bit stock Unity/Unreal to me - like a student project basically. something youād say āhey this is a cool ideaā to a student but then have difficulty conveying why exactly it didnāt 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 iām 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 didnāt 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 didnāt feel that motivated to continue. you win some, you lose some.
Baby Steps
not much to say on this one that hasnāt already been said by others. i kinda beelined to the area where the demo ends and you canāt go further right away and didnāt 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 iāll 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 āfamily meeting, letās go!ā from the guyās dad is perfect (even tho the dad also sounds like heās in his 30ās 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 donāt feel too bad about the amount of bodyshaming itās doing. it does feel like a ānext genā version of a Bennett Foddy project while still keeping its fundamental weird uncanniness that Getting Over It has. kind of what youād imagine a late 00ās 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 iām 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 iāll 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 iāve played. itās a dark lo-fi PS1 style action game where youāre 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 thereās only one that was available in the demo.
the tutorial starts you out blowing up these large barnacle creatures that donāt seem to do anything or serve any purpose in order to get you used to moving around. eventually youāre 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 didnāt have the patience to grind to see what happened when you reach 100%. iām 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 itās definitely worth checking out if you like that sort of game. i just didnāt 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 didnāt really struggle to understand what the game was expecting from me - so maybe iāll 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 Mibibliās Quest. they usually donāt 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 theyāve 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! itās 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 - itās a little bit of a funny shock that implies a deeper, darker story there.
otherwise, itās not anything too grotesque or shocking. but it did feel well done, and itās closer to the genre of things i like to play. so iāll 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. itās 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, youāll 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 didnāt really have the patience to figure out how each one worked, but iām sure theyāre 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 didnāt 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 thatās 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 Lornās 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 iām 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
itās a walking sim. i saw this trailer pop up on youtube labeled as part of the PC Gaming Show around SGF but i donāt 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 thatās very striking and adds to the uncanniness of everything you wander through - like youāre 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 donāt know if itās haunted PS1-adjacent or not but it certainly could be. it especially looks similar to a couple other games iāve 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. thereās a bit of non-euclidean navigation throughout thatās 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 thatās where the demo ended. while this is walking sim with light puzzle solving at its core, and itās not going to show you anything you havenāt seen before - itās 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 doesnāt go for outright horror as much as just general atmosphere. definitely one of those games where it doesnāt 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 itās 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 didnāt 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. itās almost rhythm-game adjacent, but itās more like somewhere in between that and a more conventional corridor shooter type game.
this game really likes to slap your hand with a āTOO SLOWā or āTOO FASTā 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. youād think itās 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 doesnāt get slowed down, but what do i know??? i just wanna run through a surreal hallway and shoot frog guys, man. i donāt 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 itās 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. thereās a few more segments that you canāt avoid by shooting quickly, but otherwise itās 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 youāre just slowly rounding halls and trying to snipe guys before they do anything. iām honestly not sure if thatās 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 couldnāt 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 wonāt change at all before the game comes out. i donāt know why youād go to all this effort to make a really cool vibe and then just constantly slap the controller out of playerās hands and scold them and make them go back to the start for swinging their knife too early. itās 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. youāre 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 donāt 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 āi feel like iām being personally assaulted somehowā way. and for a game that is very obviously anti-meat eating they clearly donāt 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 thereās other stuff i could mention - just how completely absurd the āstoryā 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 iām in some particularly evil Neil Breen type guyās 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 hadnāt and feel like youāve 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 itād be a standard platformer that just happened to have a cool art style, so i passed over this one for awhile. iām glad i came back to this, because that assumption was wrong! and this is why i like playing demos - you never really know what youāre 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? youāre 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 donāt 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(?). iām not really sure honestly what context this has in the story or what they mean, but it doesnāt 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 itās not someone who english is their first language - but i kinda grew to like it. itās 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, iām 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 iām really intrigued. this one surprised me, and i donāt 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 youāre getting. itās a jank old-style first-person open world 90ās PC CRPG with generated worlds like Minecraft. itās 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 characterās 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 wasnāt 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 youād expect from a game like this.
but yeah, this feels very much like an idiosyncratic personal passion project version of a 90ās CRPG. it still seems pretty early on in dev - but if this sounds like your jam, itās 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. youāre like a teenage?-ish girl who is actively being held hostage by her mother for some kind of scientific experiment reason. thereās an implication that you are violent and/or have behavioral issues and thatās why, though itās hard to know if thatās 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. itās possible this is a āchoices matterā kind of game, and what topics you bring up affect what happens - though iām 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 āthings you canāt sayā, like doing the correct performance in order to avoid violence or confrontation with an oversensitive parent. the way her mom uses shame (āiām just trying my bestā) 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!!! itās 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 thatās a good problem to have. definitely something iām 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 donāt 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 iāve 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 wasnāt 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 āuh sure, might as well add this to the pileā and uh iām really glad i did i guess!
iām not sure i even want to describe this game too much, because itās something people should play. youāre 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 āThe Grandfatherā who is presumably called that because they make a sound like a grandfather clock and have a clock on their head. youāre 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 iāve never seen any other games by them. it is something that feels like youāre living in someone elseās head, though i mean that in the most positive sense here (vs. Saborus which feels evil). honestly itās 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 00ās 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 iāve come upon that iām going to be thinking about for awhile. itās 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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thatās it for me! no more Steam demos for awhile! i am experiencing demo fatigue. i also attempted to play Outrider Mako, but the demo wasnāt in English so i didnāt 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 iād 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 didnāt have the patience for to play a lot of because theyāre 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 aā¦ not good time. lol.
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