OK, Let’s see if I can remember how many steam demos I played over the last three days to unlock a steam badge on my profile
Buccaneers Shipshape: I don’t know what makes belt scrollers good. I don’t want to know. This game is 11MB and I give it 5/5 stars for being a videogame that finally acts like a fucking adult.
Frontier Hunter: I want to know if these devs were one of the contractors for Bloodstained, and are building this game on that code, because it is a shameless ripoff of basically every design decision in Bloodstained. Even the real time rendered cutscenes are staged the same way. I’m probably going to buy this.
I also discovered that for some reason I own the game this is a sequel to, Tower Hunter, and played it for the first time. It’s also inspired by typical metroidvania design, except that you lose all your weapons and boosts on death, but any potency upgrades you’ve made to those will remain the next time you find them in the dungeon. It’ll probably get annoying to have to run through the same dungeon layouts each death, but it’s been enjoyable for the first few runs. I am also kind of suspicious that Bloodstained was also supposed to have a rougelite alternate mode that ended up getting cancelled.
Cult of the Lamb: Is this a Binding of Isaac-like? The combination of dodge length and enemy attack telegraphs feels very odd to me, which leads me to believe this is taken from some other popular game that normalized it. Not clear if the dungeon/home base mechanics are built around doing single runs, or about making incremental upgrades at the base while the dungeons reset on death. Probably not going to be my cup of tea.
Fashion Police Squad: Everything about this game feels great except for playing combat effectively. Each enemy in the game has a lock-and-key approach: because each one is committing a specific fashion crime, only a specific fashion weapon will help them. Also the main interaction with the maps is finding scenery to jump over fences, no broken/false walls or anything like that. Mechanically everything’s in a good place, they just need better design.
Shred & Tear: I played the game because it had a mecha musume on the title art. I apologize for nothing. This is the kind of game that can be described as having too much graphics. The maximum UT4 experience. Honestly it should have leaned into its perv angle harder than just having squid minions bounding around. Speaking of perv, by default the main character is armored, and wearing a skintight bodysuit. The options menu allows you to, cosmetically, remove half or all of the body armor, but not the bodysuit. Her portraits in game show her with full armor, but no bodysuit. Seems like the developer hands out the password to go the rest of the way if you join the discord.
The Courier: probably not going to be a full game, feels like it was made just to play around with developing a game in Unity. Lots of objectives to pick up or poke at on the island, but can’t see how the full game would last longer than 20 minutes.
On the plus side the dev also didn’t put too much time into stresstesting it, so it is trivially easy to get out of bounds everywhere. I found a robot wandering around the void behind one of the interior cells, and thanks to the bike’s uncapped acceleration and a broken quarterpipe found an easy way to get the bike airborne at maximum velocity.
Too Good For School: I still don’t know what makes a good belt scroller, but you can cancel every animation into a dash, including a dash, and it feels good to just juggle forever. The final game is probably going to have too much stuff to level, but it’s also teasing the ability to do interior decorating in the girls’ apartment, and I don’t think any belt scroller since Ane-san’s had that, so I’m sold. Literally sold: in a fit of madness I backed its kickstarter a year ago.
Pocket Wheels: another toy, but more likely to be a real game. Mascot platformer, but with a toy car protagonist. The only unique control aspect is that if you brake while doing a hard turn you do a spinning side-jump. Going to need much better controls to be worth following.
Heart Abyss: One hit death side scrolling action game with instant restarts. Impressive gore. I think that’s what they put the most work into. Might be more to the game after the intro but I’m not a fan of the instant-death-instant-restart genre.
Dave The Diver: There is a weird amount of game in this game. The primary game is a side scrolling diving game in randomized levels with the usual underwater mechanics of limited air, depth, and angry fish. Each weapon has its own mechanics, and there’s a sushi restaurant management game inbetween levels that your upgrade currency comes from. Based on hints from the demo there’s going to be more management stuff like a farm as well. Slightly too talky, but probably going to buy this one if it gets fleshed out as much as it implies.
Above Snakes: Building game in the old west, with a first nation protagonist. Doesn’t feel like it though, since they start the game alone, and just start doing the typical colony building gameplay of chopping down trees and building a house. Its gimmicks are a) there’s also zombies, which has scattered the local settlers and b) the game takes place on TTG looking biome tiles you hand place. By the end of the demo the number of tiles I had placed was causing the game to chug, so it’s probably going to need a redesign to fit a full game.
The demo also has filler text so bad that it bears mentioning. They only have ~100 written lines in the demo, they really should have gotten a native english speaker in to punch it up.
Agent 64: They made this game play weird on purpose and I love it. I don’t care if this is the wrong way to design a game, no one else is going to make one of these, so I appreciate that they’re doing it. Hopefully the base game includes some interesting levels building off the language of goldeneye/PD, and that they aren’t just expecting the player base to use the map editor to do it for them.
Slayers X: As Hypnospace was to Geocities, this is to the AOL portal for Duke Nukem 3D. I love the joke of a shotgun that fires broken glass, and you get ammo for it by breaking windows.
Destroy All Humans 2: Played this just to get a screenshot of the gas price at the gas station. The game starts with an honest to god splash screen saying “This game is a product of its time, and we are preserving it not because we agree with its message, but because to do otherwise would be to pretend it did not happen.” The start of the game didn’t seem that bad to me, so I guess there is Some Shit sitting in the back end of that mediocre time waster that even THQ Nordic was worried about.
Anger Foot: DN3D Mighty Foot game. The game’s physics has just enough irish on them so that they are predictable, but never result in exactly the same reactions. I’m not in the mood for it now, but it seems like a decent hotline miami style quick action game.
Roots of Pacha: Another attempt to make a building game that’s not colonialist. Rings hollow, since “contribution” just turns into a number, that you then spend as if it was money, so the only real difference is that from the start of the game you have 40 named NPCs to keep track of instead of a dozen. Predictably bland writing for all of them too; yet another crime of people seeing Stardew Valley’s success as justification for not putting proper Story of Season’s scale of work into their writing.
