EVEN MORE Steam Demos!! Steam Demo impressions pt. 3 of 4. doing 1 more of these posts after this.
Penguin Colony
was soiled a bit by my ill-fated attempt at streaming but i still had a pretty pleasant time with this. you control a penguin who wanders around the arctic. you waddle pretty slowly but you can slide along the terrain to move much faster. you can also switch to any other penguin when you pass by. you’re like the collective will of the penguins, the soul of the penguins. you can even pick small penguins to get in some areas the big ones can’t get into - but the small penguins can’t swim. i think small penguins going in water is like the closest thing to any sort of “death” in the game - even the stamina meter you have is pretty generous. tho it is funny to hear the loud grunting sounds the penguins make when you bump into the terrain. i don’t know if actual penguins make that sound or not, but i’m curious now.
mostly what you do is pick up little collectables that bring up words on the screen, and the narrator cuts in to give you some abstract thoughts. i wandered around for about an hour and reached the initial area the game guiding you towards - which is like some sort of Nazi encampment that’s decaying and falling apart, and the Nazis are dying of the cold. after that i wandered further to pick up more collectables. i’m not sure if the demo really had a set ending or it just let you wander after that. this is a bit like a Breath of the Wild in terms of letting you go anywhere but it’s the snow and much simpler. there are little spots where only small penguins can go that i missed because there weren’t any small penguins in the area, so i imagine there are more little details and secret areas to find. but generally it’s pretty wide open and a lot of the landscape looks like itself (other than a few minimal signposts here and there).
the Nazi stuff isn’t so foregrounded at all in this demo - you only see it when you hit upon the camp. the collectables you pick up say words like “native” and “colonist” etc but it’s a little hard to know how that relates to the overall story, because the narration that kicks in intermittently from Disco Elysium Voice Actor is pretty abstract.
i enjoyed my time with this game - i like the arctic environment and felt like the game did a very good job capturing a sense of place that i haven’t seen another game like this really do. i would like to know more about the backstory behind the Nazis in the game. it’s enough to compel me further, but also i felt a little lost wandering around without very clear signposts and wanting a little more substantive story. still promising, if a little more low key than i expected.
rating: lost in the arctic (neutral)/10
Mym’s Sword
this is by Linker of Elephantasy/Elephantasy Flipside fame. this is extremely Zelda, of the original variety. i feel like all of Linker’s games capture the mystery and crypticness of a lot of 80’s games but in a slightly cuter, more approachable way (that doesn’t sacrifice the weirdness or try and make it too Mainstream Polished like a Tunic does). this is no exception. you’re a little cute blue guy who can bounce around. you have a sword you control with the control stick that will autoswing if you bring it out around monsters, but can be a bit unwieldy to aim. you can also pretty easily lose your sword - either when an enemy knocks it out of your hands, or when you die (where you’ll be respawned to the nearest door you’ve entered from and you have to go back and pick up the sword from where you died).
some areas are top down, like Zelda 1. some are sidescrolling, like Zelda 2. also has a bit of a Link’s Awakening feel how much it switches between the two in a slightly playful way. but this game is far less railroaded in a linear fashion and far more open-ended. there are no “dungeons” as far as i can tell - it’s one big open world, and the contours are a little confusing. the game also has ring items, similar to the items that gave you special abilities in the Elephantasy games. i only was able to pick up a couple in the playthrough before it ended. it seems like the main feature of the demo is that it’s time gated, vs. having a limited area you can move around in. i didn’t mind this because it let me feel like i could wander pretty far off track and get a sense of what the actual full experience will be like.
it would be interesting to know how big the map for this game is. it does feel deceptively simple at the beginning, before getting more interesting and complex. i wouldn’t say this in the case of many games but for this one i think the bigger the map, the more this game kinda works at what it’s trying to do. the contrast between the cute approachability and crypticness/indifference whether you find some things works well. that sort of Goonies 2 feeling of relatability and approachability mixed with incomprehensible complexity i like. i think there’s also similar territory to Melos Han-Tani’s or Sylvie’s games… but the former tends to be more conveyed, and the latter tends to be more explicitly rage platformery. these games are more about exploration and discovery, in environments that seem really simple and leave a lot to the imagination.
anyway, this is not a maximalist masterpiece or anything and may not be for everyone. but within the realm of retro 80’s influenced games, you can still feel a very specific creative voice guiding it in a way that no other game quite feels like. i know it definitely grew on me by the end after initially feeling a little indifferent about it. so tl;dr if you like Linker’s other games you’ll like this too.
rating: zelda (original flavor (positive))/10
Janet DeMornay Is A Slumlord (and a witch)
the dev jerks removed the access to demo which APPARENTLY doesn’t even let you play the game anymore even if you already have the game installed. i really hate that Steam does that - it feels kinda gross. so negative points for that alone. no reason to do that. one other demo did that as well but it was at least available over on itch so i got to play through. but i played most of what was here before i couldn’t access it tho, which was also kinda soiled by my stream kinda being a disaster. but i was able to look up the end of this game’s demo, so i consider it played.
anyway, this game was made by the same developer as Queer Man Peering into a Rock Pool.jpg which i played for IGF judging and is recommended. that’s a sort of surreal art game about dementia (i think?) with a unique visual style and is like a 1-2 hour experience. this one has a great concept - i guess it’s about the younger tenants of some woo woo slum lord lady who does pottery and paper mache. the art style also really drew my eye - it’s one of the ones i saw during the summer E3 fest and stood out, so i had higher expectations for this one.
ofc it didn’t help that i was playing this while annoyed about my stream not working out, but i found this one’s reliance on slightly cryptic puzzles a little more frustrating. Queer Man Peering is more of a straight walking sim and i think it worked out well for that game. the puzzles are a bit hard to understand in this one, and i’m not sure how much they really add to the experience. there was one particular one about moving around mannequins to get the right silhouettes in a projector screen that i got kinda stuck on (it turned out i was missing some extra part of the puzzle) so that was a little annoying.
it’s a little bit of a shame the puzzles aren’t amazing because everything around them is at least pretty interesting. i wanna know more about the slumlord lady. i don’t feel like i learned much of anything about the tenants - they seemed a bit interchangeable, but maybe that’s elucidated in the final game. it certainly wasn’t in the demo though. everything kinda felt alien and hard to connect with, which i’m not sure is what they were going for. maybe this demo was jumping in the middle of the experience, but it felt kinda hard to understand what any of this was from a narrative perspective.
i guess i’ll hold off judgment for later whenever this does get eventually released. as it is, i really like a lot about this game but think it fumbled the execution a little bit. feels both really overbaked and a little underbaked at the same time, if that makes sense. also don’t remove demo access please.
rating: immaculate look + concept, frustrating execution/10
Piroot
a game i clicked on purely because of the weird pyramid in the screenshot above made me curious to find out what was going on. in this case, i’m glad i did investigate further!
like Akashic Slingshot, this has a very indie game 1.0 vibe. i think this project was actually started back closer to that era, which is part of why. it’s a 2d platformer, psuedo-metroidvania (tho maybe slightly more linear?) where you roll a ball around to navigate through the environment. think some of Nifflas’s games. you’re a robot who is being commanded remotely after a shipwreck to examine an alien planet. whoever is commanding to you does talk to you a bit more than you’d expect, and it is a little annoying to have a “Snaaaake?? SNAAAAAAAAKE???” message every time you die. but the game implies you’re a robot who can be respawned anyway in one of those messages so i don’t know what the big deal is.
the visuals are not necessarily anything to look at, but this is one of those games where almost everything feels tangible - there are lots of little interlocking mechanical pieces. one little miniboss you experience in the demo is a breakout/arkanoid clone which i thought was neat. the rolling of your main ball character is pretty satisfying even if it’s sometimes it’s easy to overshoot and hard to navigate to where you want to. once you gain the ability to shoot, the blocks you can shoot have satisfying ways they break into little pieces. i also liked how the enemy AI worked and like trying to size up them to shoot them before they shoot you. felt like a good deal of effort was put into that aspect of things.
the demo is pretty short, and the environment (while dense) might not be anything to write home about. it’s also a well-worn genre and i doubt you’d see anything you haven’t if you haven’t played games from that era. but i did like how much it had that feeling of indie games 1.0, like this humble platformer that feels intensely personal and has its own strange sort of elaborate philosophy behind its creation. even if these games don’t get much notice anymore, i’m glad they still exist. as it is, this game lives up to those older Nifflas games pretty well, even if it feels slightly more generic and doesn’t match the tone those games have.
rating: humble ball/10
Endacopia
this has a bit of that Undertale+Digital Circus Gen Z vibe, but in a good way. it’s a point and click adventure that has some of the detail and quirkiness of classic LucasArts adventures etc but is also a bit streamlined and non-standard. you have three different ways of interacting with everything - talk, look, or grab. a lot of things in the environment you can click on and they do goofy animations, which is a nice touch. this game has a little bit of a similar tone to KIDDO (maybe this one is a little more kid-friendly) but i think i prefer it because the timing of everything is much sharper and the puzzles are less cryptic. there is a bit of a 90’s multimedia thing going on with it overall in how all over the place it is with little interactions.
the demo is pretty short but there’s a lot happening in it. a lot of fourth wall breaking stuff that could be viewed as a bit overbearing, but i think it works. there was a part where i had to hide from a monster and the monster asked me (the player) where my character was hiding, and i told him the wrong cupboard. i dunno, that kind of stuff is cool to see when done well. it feels like something that actually plays with what the medium of games is in some interesting way, rather than just as a cheap lols the meme joke.
ofc the tone may not be for everyone - it may be too a little too dense with wackiness in the final thing. but overall i thought it was a really promising game! possibly my favorite of the bunch other than KNIGHT LOBSTER. it has a similar sense of its own very particular and surprising creative universe it has cultivated, and left me with a feeling of mystery and wonder about what could come next.
rating: wacky ^_^(positive)/10
Rizz Dungeon: Skeleton Key to My Heart
queer dungeon crawler that emphasizes romancing monster girls and putting them in your polycule. obviously the pixel art has a lot of work put into it and looks pretty nice. the actual dungeon crawling was pretty light compared to the tutorial and the combat. i have a hard enough time with the idea of a singlecule to ever desire a polycule, and i’ve been around other people’s disaster polycules too much so this was already not for me. also it can be pretty hard to tell what the game wants you to say when you’re flirting with characters, so failing and passing can feel pretty arbitrary. that is kind of a problem when you’ve designed so much of your game around trying to read what these cardboard cutout monster girls want. also the balance between normal combat and romance feels kind of arbitrary design-wise. there’s also a SFW psuedo sex scene that is just more of the guessing game element that i don’t like and think is kinda lame. i guess i like how personalized the different monster girls are, that it develops their personalities more. but i’m not invested enough in this game to care about that.
tbh maybe i just resent the pandering of this game, or feel like it’s just trying way too hard. it’s not like it’s poorly executed on a craft level per se, it’s also just kinda suffocating. i of course like that there’s more games focused on these kind of queer romances on the often right wing gamer cesspit platforms, but it’s so cutesy and fanfictiony and doesn’t feel real enough for me to care about any of the romance stuff in it. also if you’re going to go full bore on the romance element, why even have combat at all? why not make it so that all you can do is romance other characters? maybe that would just further expose the weakness of those mechanics - that it depends heavily on guessing. and they need the scaffolding of a well worn genre to hide that. but i guess i feel like i’m spiritually much more aligned with Knight Lobster than this because there was an actual sense of mystery and discovery and danger and the game wasn’t smothering me like it is here.
i would like queer romance games that actually feel dangerous and feel somewhat emotionally plausible (even if they’re fantasy) and not just like cutesy. it’s possible that this gets more that way as you go on, but i wasn’t set up to really expect that or want that from his game. maybe it’s also just that i’d also have more respect if this was a full on adult game and not a cutesy SFW version. i mean i obviously know why it isn’t given the realities of adult games in this current marketplace, but it kinda exposes the hypocrisies of the whole marketplace of the moment around this kind of experience. i’m sure it’ll be popular regardless, as these things often do, in spite of my objections. and it still won’t be for me.
rating: no polycules for me/10
Delta
this is a ps1-styled 3D game where very cool cyber anime guys and gals tell you how to do various incredibly difficult speedrunning techniques in order to eventually help you proceed through courses that are like surf-map style time trials. most of the time i spent with the tutorial hopelessly struggling through their instructions. it is weird to see a commercial game made off of stuff that comes from modding and niche scenes, but i do appreciate their commitment to trying to walk you through understanding how to execute some of these tricks and letting you try in slow motion, and also giving you video with some kind of like directional orientation that lets you try to repeat what they did in vain. i like how they say “check this out” when they show you the videos - it seems like they’re really impressed with how cool what they’re doing is, which makes me want to be a cool cyber anime gal and pull them off as well.
but it’s incredibly demanding to really ask me to put my time into doing that. like i thought these were things you learned from speedrunning games where these were not intended ways to progress through. you do them in spite of the game, and that’s part of what’s fun about it. so it’s weird to have somewhat generic looking courses made around that. even though i do appreciate the y2k hacker look this game is going for.
maybe the idea is this game is a way of bringing you as a player into doing what you do here in other realms of speedrunning and multiplayer games and making it more accessible, which i could see the purpose of. i mean it’s hard for me to exactly know how some of this stuff translates directly over to other games and engines, but i’m sure there’s at least some crossover (because these tricks weren’t easy!!). but then, again, the appeal of learning some of those techniques is that you’re acting against the will of the game. when it becomes the text of the game to do them they sorta lose their appeal. at least it tries to deal with that by making you feel like a cool cyber hacker by doing them, though, so if it’s going to work in any context i could imagine it working in this one.
anyway, i kinda strangely admired what this game is trying to do. not sure how it will work for other people. but it’s not for me either.
rating: too cyber cool for me/10
Crescent Break
developer resnijars has been on a bit of a tear with putting out games lately, but to kinda diminishing returns. several of their last few games have just felt a little underbaked. tho i have yet to play Stardust Demon, which seems much more substantial than a few of their other more recent ones. basically every game they make is in a different genre, which is admirable but can have mixed results depending on how much time they put into a given game. i do wish they were more well known though - none of their games besides Mibibli’s Quest from many years ago ever seemed to have much visibility, which kinda bums me out. i was a big fan of Salad Fields in particular.
this is more of a straight 2d platformer rougelike. i guess the closest comparison point to any of the other games i played in this round of demos was Blood Dungeon. but this is much more Mega Man influenced (a lot of the movement is similar, like your character slide), and you die very quickly if you’re not careful. i do like a lot of the abilities you have - from being able to jump up high with a beam to blowing up terrain around you. the environment does feel pretty dynamic and hazardous, which can be a good or bad thing depending on the implementation.
but there is a stiffness to it as well, and it’s really easy to die really quickly. i think it takes awhile to balance these games into something that feels more loose and fun in the way something like Noita or Spelunky is. but resnijars has been making stuff pretty quickly so i’m not sure they will really spend the time on this game to try and get the balance right - and maybe it’s just not what they’re going for anyway. it’s also possible with more time spent i could get better at this. i think this is something that’s probably meant to be more hardcore than a lot of rougelites are. but the stiffness of it was preventing me from wanting to invest more time in trying to get better at this.
but anyway, i’ll keep this one installed and i might come back to it later to try and see if i can at least get further into it. as it is, it has potential to be another interesting alternate take they can be really good at doing of a popular a genre… but it also might end up feeling underbaked like a couple of their more recent games have. so we’ll see.
rating: has potential/10
Virtue and a Sledgehammer
woke is back… with a vengeance. after seeing @Felix mention this game in the E3 thread i thought i’d give it a go. you’re a physically tough butch woman who goes back to her hometown with the desire to smash everything in sight. and that’s pretty much what you do - you smash everything! all the buildings, and the people in the town who are represented by robots. in the midst of this, there are different memories you need to find and activate in the midst of the rubble. it’s honestly pretty straightforward - like a walking sim, except with way more smashing. but i think it would kinda take away from what the game was if it wasn’t that straightforwardly devoted to smashing and narrative, smashing and narrative.
there’s some story involving your sister who is possibly a sociopath and her possibly being involved with your mother’s death, and your family not being great about your whole identity/presentation and the rural hometown you’re from being filled with asshole bigots. it’s a bit hard to tell the exact contours of the story from the demo tbh, which can make it a little hard to tell why exactly you’re smashing. but it is really satisfying to smash some of those robots in the face when they say a particularly lurid or bigoted thing at you. one robot in particular who is a bartender just hits you with a huge string of invective and it is VERY satisfying to brutally smash him. another one complains about the tree huggers ruining Spain. this is obviously an anti-right wing game if it wasn’t obvious by that point, even if it doesn’t state that on the tin.
the robot choice is interesting. i guess they were trying to get around depicting real world violence by depicting bigoted hometown shitheads as robots. i’m not sure if that really makes it any better, maybe it’d just distract people from having a debate about the ethics of you murdering innocent (but asshole bigoted) people with a sledgehammer. even as it is, some of the robots cower and run away from you - which kinda made me not want to attack them tbh. but the moment i was starting to feel morally complicated things about all the smashing i was doing, one of them would say something bigoted and it would drive me to want to smash them again. also it’s easier to justify doing it when a lot of them attack you first anyway (tho i am destroying their houses).
i think games like this are really the only appropriate responses to right wingers who whine and complain that a game’s costume options or inclusion of LGBTQ people at all means its woke trash or whatever. stop trying to be nice and appease them and thinking the better person will win - just make a game where you’re directly smashing them. i’ve been just wanting games like this about identity and marginalized experiences that are less twee and escapist and more directly confrontational for a long time. this is the sort of energy that is going to be needed to take on the right wing globally, so it makes sense why you’d want to channel it into a game.
so yeah it’s a bit simple and i didn’t really understand many of the contours of the plot yet but i’m really glad this game is being made, i enjoyed the experience quite a bit, and it’s definitely near the top of my list.
rating: woke cubed/10
anyway i’m going to come back with one final review/ratings dump of Steam demo impressions probably tomorrow, and then i’ll give my overall rankings for my favs and least favs. still undecided whether i want to turn a handful of these into a longer blog post or not yet, but i’ll have to see how i feel. might be interesting also to compare vs. demos i played for this last year.