okay, it’s Steam Demos: June Edition: Final Destination. pt. 4 of 4. please dear god no more demos for awhile after this. i edited this too post long in my text window but it was meant to be a reply to the previous post in this thread:
anyway, here we go!!
Entropy
so i haven’t played Dread Delusion still (the previous game by this creator), but i was always intrigued by a haunted ps1-derived game just trying to go for a full on emulation of larger scale commercial game that existed 20 years prior, rather than either a half-baked imitation except with Cool Vibez or an arty lower budget variation. this kind of has a similar feel of just trying to fully be one of those older games, except instead of Morrowind it’s for a PS1/PS2 era JRPG. i don’t know what else to say other than this just feels like a full on JRPG of that era, and one of the pretty good (but not one of the best) ones.
this has typical JRPG turn-based battles, but there is a pretty decent amount of strategy involved. there are some mechanics involving recruiting party members positioning them, a sort of quick strike thing for initiating battles, ranged vs. melee attacks, etc. but nothing really out of the realm of how other JRPGs from that era might have experimented with in the battle system. certainly it’s not as complex as a full-on tactics RPG would be. it all kind of it feels like a mishmash of what has been done before in other contexts, though certainly implemented in a way that felt thoughtful and approachable. really the only modern change is that the game autosaves and respawns you at Souls-esque grave locations so you can’t savescum, you just kinda have to keep going on your attempt. if a side party member dies, then that’s that.
while the visuals are nice and a carry over from the sort of design of Dread Delusion… there is still a bit genericness or clunkiness holding it back from really feeling like it has its fully developed identity, and is not someone’s goofy attempt at capturing the vibes and systems of games of that era. i mean, it certainly has a lot of somewhat interesting design ideas, but the characters and story don’t really feel distinctive enough to really put it in the tier of someone’s passion project. it’s always going to feel just a little uncanny as a result. and the soundtrack doesn’t really live up to the standard of JRPG classics either.
playing all the way through the demo just made me feel like i should probably play through SMT Nocturne or Xenogears or whatever instead or this game when it comes out. that said, a game like this engaging me for that long is still an accomplishment. it’s probably the best you could hope for if you’re looking for another one of those games: not the top-tier absolute best but a pretty good one! there’s a lot to this game and i enjoyed my time with it, so i’m ranking it higher than what it sounds like i would from the text. but again, it just points me back in the direction of other stuff i should probably play.
rating: good-tier Y2K JRPG/10
Bad Pixels
this came up during February’s demo fest and me and my friend tried to play it, but it was awkward on a controller and a tv. i don’t know the exact history of this game’s development, but i know that it’s been around awhile. it’s made on Commodore 64 specs to be something that could have conceivably existed, with i guess enhancements used - so the visuals/sound/overall game approach reflect that. i think the download is like 3mb or something. which means it’s not really a conventional shooter with conventional shooter level design but a short mission-based game where you have to take out a certain amount of bad guys and leave villagers alive before finishing each.
the game can be pretty hard and requires sorta precise aiming to not instantly die to the outlaw bandits. you can recruit villagers for what appears to be a randomized amount of money to help become sheriffs and help fight guys for you, which is necessary given the amount of bad guys there are. inevitably some are probably going to die though, but you can pick up their bullets i guess. once you get a little more used to it, it’s not too hard to take down the bad guys - but it stays tense throughout, and is definitely something that’s easy to fail if you slip up a little bit. the second mission just required me to scour the map and kill one bad guy, and the third mission was more like the first. i’m imagining this game could be pretty interesting if there’s a good amount of variation between the missions, but i’m not really sure what they can do with the limited amount of elements in the game.
anyway, i had fun with what i played. the game loop is pretty simple and enjoyable, though not terribly deep. not sure if you can go in any of the buildings in the levels (though i did cross a river at one point), which is a bummer, but i do like the look of the game. it’s enjoyable and well-executed for what it is and certainly a cool technical project to have exist in the form that it does even if it’s not a top-tier experience for me.
rating: bury me with my money/10
About Fishing
it’s the next game from the Arctic Eggs creators, that i guess famously made Jon Blow blow ragequit the demo almost instantly on his stream because he couldn’t handle the controller calibration at the beginning. honestly even as someone who would have felt totally validated in like 2013 seeing how how dismissive and shitty JBlow openly is now about completely inconsequential shit it’s kinda sad how far that guy has fallen. but it’s all his own hand, of course, so i can’t feel too bad. but i digress.
the game starts you out in a tutorial as a kid where you learn the basics of fishing, and you talk to your slightly busted dad as he lounges in a chair and explains to you the basics of fishing - and offers some curly fries as a reward. aiming your fishing line can be pretty jank at times for me, though it was hard to know if i was just missing something fundamental about the controls or they really were that fussy. it is something i continually struggled with a bit throughout the demo, so i’m not sure if it’s just the demo or i kept misunderstanding how the controls worked. but once you grab onto the fish it’s not very hard - you basically just have to aim in the correct direction and let go of the line when it gets red and about to break. might get more difficult as the game goes on, but i didn’t really have problems reeling fish in.
after you fish for a little bit you have a sequence as a kid where you discover someone… wraaapped in plaaaastic. and then it goes forward to where you appear to be an adult in your 20’s and you live in a small rural town. i didn’t finish the demo, but the town you’re in had kinda a nice vibe, i liked fishing in the main creek near the church. casting the line never stopped feeling jank, but everything else around the game - the look and feel, the general vibe and suggestion of where the story was going, and even catching the fish once you cast the line felt nice. there’s just an overall vibe to the experience that draws you in, a feeling of both calmness but like there’s all this strangeness just below the surface that you’ll eventually be tapped into.
but yeah - in spite of my complaints about not quite understanding how to cast my line, this is a really promising game. from what i’ve seen it feels more substantial than Arctic Eggs, because of where the narrative might go. the combo of the fishing being mostly pleasant and the deeper narrative stuff was working really well for me. so it’s definitely pretty high on my list of games to be excited about. definitely a game where you want to play more because you’re not really sure where it’ll go, which is one of my favorite feelings.
rating: fishing in the Black Lodge/10
Fallosophy
that’s right, it’s the game that sells itself on the hard-hitting combination of pinball and philosophy. i discovered this via Summer Game Fest this year and was intrigued. my mind was racing imagining the ways this game would integrate pinball with philosophy. it turns out the answer was… being a Getting Over It clone. i guess that’s not surprising!
after getting over… the initial disappointment that it wasn’t something more esoteric, i kinda started to get into this game. it’s not quite as cruel as Getting Over It. the progression you make seems to stick a little more, even though it definitely makes you do some sections absolutely perfectly and can send you back a bit of a ways. there was one section in particular that definitely forced me to quit eventually out of frustration for having to repeat it a billion times and get the timing absolutely perfect on hitting one of the balls. but the overall experience doesn’t feel designed to where sending you back all the way to the beginning feels very plausible. i’m sure it can happen, but it certainly didn’t in my 40 minute or so playthrough.
the philosophy started fairly light, but ramped up a bit more as i got further. i couldn’t attest to the validity or depth of the philosophy presented - it’s definitely in the Bennett Foddy mold, tho a little more abstract. but some of the thematic elements did get more interesting as it went on. one part plays the melody of Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring as it sends you down a pachinko like construction if you fail to hit your ball in time. it was a nice sort of comic relief. also there are parts where you have to activate objects in a certain order, or engage in a very particular sequence of events to proceed further. i can imagine it getting more frustrating as the game progresses, but it was mostly pretty simple from what i played and added something interesting to the overall game loop.
overall, i think this was a pretty good experience. it feels reasonably thought through, and on the higher end of a Getting Over It clone. i wouldn’t put it in my absolute top tier, but it’s worthy of a play if it sounds interesting to you.
rating: hitting (ball) over it/10
Brazilian Drug Dealer 4
i heard a friend recommend Brazilian Drug Dealer 3 and i bought it because it was cheap. but tbh i was a bit resistant to playing it because it gave off… meme energy. like a lot of the New Blood crowd gathering around hyping the next big game from The Genre Name I Refuse To Say can give stuff a bad vibe. i ofc like the idea of a pirate Quake mod turned commercial retro FPS but the marketing was a bit over the top. anyway, i’m really glad i played this demo - because it was great! really it helped bring back my faith in the power of the retro fps a little bit after not liking SPRAWL zero or Zortch 2 much at all.
the vibe of the world design is extremely Cruelty Squad, except less mechanically demanding - it’s a Quake mod, after all. the level design felt fast, compelling, and playful throughout. there’s a good deal of variety in the levels, even if the overall feeling of the game is similar, and the way it handles stuff like doors or saves is really funny and adds a lot of flavor to the experience. especially the sort of awkwardly translated english text, both in the object names and in the occasional little bits of story that come through, worked well for me. i obviously miss a lot of the Brazilian references, but it doesn’t really matter if you don’t get them either.
the core gameplay is basically just Quake with sprite replacements - i guess the movement was faster and more speedrunny feeling. which lent itself to more spread out, linear, vertical open-air levels vs. the more mazy dungeons of a lot of Quake maps. i played on “normal” and found it pretty easy, but not in a bad way - the level design really moved me quickly from one level to another without getting boring at all. actually surprised how much better it felt about that than a lot of Quake maps that i’ve played that want you to fight the same millions of enemies in relatively boring indoor tech rooms and hallways. there’s a ton of jumping and verticality to this game which gives it an entirely distinct feeling even if the core combat and weapons are basically exactly the same.
it may feel cheap or low effort to have a commercial game that’s really just a Quake TC but it actually works tremendously in the game’s favor, because the core gameplay is so solid enough for it to do a bunch of goofy weird broken stuff around it. such is the power of Mods in general. i think it helps that tbh i was feeling like commercial retro FPSes weren’t really exciting me anymore since Slayers X so it’s nice to play one i was genuinely really into again to remind me what i like about these kinds of games. the parts that i liked most about DUSK had a similar sense of quick pace and anarchy to it that this does well. and also all of this reminds me of why mods are so important to me.
i like how kinda broken it can be too - like sound effects or music won’t load in spots in a way that will give you an error message that seems to be deliberate. there’s one place where i just had to sit and snipe a bunch of enemies or they’ll just instadeath you. or that the demo just loops back to the first level with basically no fanfare. again, the glory of mods.
anyway, i guess i need to go back and check out Drug Dealer 3 now. but yeah, this was a pleasant surprise and near the top of my list of most enjoyable demos. not much to add - a good experience for me all around.
rating: cruelty squad (pirate favela edition)/10
walk
a short but likable little clicker game. i had been aware of this person’s previous games and thought this was at least worth looking into because it looked pretty unique from the screenshots. little squares pop up gradually over a blue void and you just have to click on the requisite squares and do the tasks a certain number of times to unlock the next one. each square plays a little animation related to outdoor activity - the first one is a walk, some are about are spotting a dog, going down stairs, picking up notes from a bird’s song, opening doors etc. they each have their own little thing you have to do and way the animation plays out - like some require you to move the mouse or drag and drop things in a particular order. but all are simple.
feel like it might be too insubstantial or too much of a straight clicker to fit into the Nuovo category in IGF that tends to be friendly to experiences like this. like as a former juror i know getting nominations there demands diving a bit deeper and doing something a bit more complex than just a very cool animated/laid out clicker game. that Strange Jigsaws game is a good example of something that’s similar but goes deeper with its idea in a design sense, even in the presentation is a little bit more plain there than here. but there is still a decent amount of variety of different little interactions, and who knows what the final game will include. the demo i played was only like 9 minutes but i can’t imagine the full game would be that long.
anyway i found this likable! you might find this gimmicky or too simple, but i appreciated it for what it was.
rating: click/10
Boreal Tenebrae Act 0
i first became aware of this game series(?) around 2020 when Boreal Tenebrae Act 1 came out. the look of that game really caught me off guard, i think in a good way? it was one of the first games i saw where i wasn’t even sure how this type of thing existed - like the the mix of presumably a more ambitious middlebrow game about nostalgia with the kind of fractured psychedelic aesthetic of weirder walking sims that were usually much more lo-fi and smaller scale just seemed like something i hadn’t seen anyone else try. but i thought i could be extrapolating too much from the screenshots. and i heard mixed things about the game itself (tho i remember Jake Elliott of KRZ fame saying he liked it) so never played it. i think i own a copy back from one of those older itch.io bundles but i never got to it and promptly forgot about it until seeing this game now.
but anyway, weirder looking 3d games have become a lot more common now in the era of Cruelty Squads and Peripeteias so i thought i might just have been misremembered this one as having a weirder or more unique look than it actually was. turns out no - it’s actually just as weird as i expected, and still feels different even at this point. you control a few different characters - two sisters and a cat who you can switch between, and each can carry different items. the younger sister carries a camera around her at all times and wants to get into trouble - i guess that’s her main personality trait, while the older sister is a bit more responsible. the writing kinda jumps in right in the middle so you don’t know exactly what’s going on or who is being referred to (tho it’s not as bad about that as Janet Demornay was), but you have a sense that this place is a dead end rural hometown of the two characters. there’s a mix of a sort of enigmatic tone with something more slice of life that is jarring but interesting.
the camera is fixed in most places, and the movement seems a bit stylized and low framerate. which can make understanding where you are and moving around a little strange. this is presumably only primarily a big issue in spots where action is part of the game, because the attacking animations highlight the low framerate animations especially. but that kind of section came up only briefly in the demo, so it’s hard to know how deep it gets into it. generally it seems more like an adventure game/walking sim with some horror elements underneath the surface. i don’t know if the game will entirely deliver on what it’s promising, but i also don’t know if that really takes away from what the experience is either.
but yeah, there is something strange and different to the universe of this game. it doesn’t quite feel like anything else. the demo is a little short and a little jank but the experience is just as memorable, if not even moreso than just looking at the screenshots would suggest. it’s certainly a way more interesting take on this sort of thing than Mixtape or other on-rails narrative games about nostalgia. so if it seems interesting to you, very much worth checking out.
rating: Mixtape on acid/10
Dreamer’s Wake
this is one of those wildcard games i pick early on in Next Fest in the first few days where Steam gives you the entire demo list randomized and it’s mostly junk but there’s occasional interesting stuff that pops through. usually i bookmark anything that looks kinda interesting or unique to check out later and never end up doing that. or i do and the game is passable but not that interesting, or it’s (in the case of Lullabies Made of Static or one below) kind of an outright disaster. this was one of the exceptions were the game turned out to be genuinely really interesting.
this game is a sort of exploration-focused 3d platformer where the environment is littered with a bunch of objects you can pick up and add to your glossary to call back. the objects start out black but after you’ve unlocked them they have this kind of interesting shader effect to them, as do a lot of the things in the environment overall. maps are kinda open ended where you can pick up a bunch of different objects and fling them at random enemies who appear. the main map i was on that’s childhood bday party themed got a little more dangerous with cannonballs and stuff but it kinda felt so big and slow paced that the cannons weren’t exactly the focus? i managed to jump past a bunch of obstacles and make it to the next map before the game crashed and the demo didn’t save my progress, so i declared myself done.
there is a bit of Baby’s First Unity game stiff jankness to this. but then some of the visual effects and stuff are pretty interesting. the music was also pretty cool? from looking up the creator, it seems like one of their first projects of someone who does more visual art and music vs. games? but then they have a couple other games listed on Steam that are coming out around the same time in different genres, so who knows. i also was worried this would be vibe coded because it has a little bit of that feeling, but it’s certainly not listed anywhere on the page if that’s the case.
but yeah, i’m not really sure i’ve played anything quite like this game. it has a somewhat similar feeling of general sandbox playfulness to Katamari Damacy or last year’s Funi Raccoon Game, though it’s not as like… developed or refined as either of those. and there’s a bit more of an outright hazy dreaminess to it, which the audio adds a lot to. also a lot of the objects you pick up do different things - like let you fly around the map or make you jump higher. it seems like there’s at least some design around that - some attempts to make the levels feel more “designed” even if it’s not quite as fully developed as it could be. overall it’s a little broken but in a somewhat interesting way? and there’s definitely more there than you’d expect.
but yeah, games like this are why i trawl through Steam Next Fest demos. if i hadn’t dug through random piles of demos i would have never played this game, and my life would have been slightly dimmer for it. i’m not sure if it’s a masterpiece (and i’m still a bit worried it might be vibecoded etc) but i’d still recommend checking this demo out because it’s fairly interesting fever dream i haven’t really seen anything like and i’m sure the creator could use the plays.
rating: budget katamari fever dream/10
Hypnogogia: Broken Dreams
another game where i knew of the previous entry in the series and i think own it on itch.io thanks to a bundle (you might too!), but never played it. wasn’t really sure what to expect, but i know other people like the first game so i had a reasonable amount of expectations going in for this to be good. this was another unfortunate example where the devs unceremoniously removed access after Next Fest in spite of me already having the game installed… i don’t like it, folks!! thankfully the same demo is still freely available on itch.io, so i’ll give the dev a pass on this one.
this is a (mostly) first person exploration game with some light action and puzzles - it has the vibe of a Zelda dungeon but without the combat. definitely a decent amount of carrying boxes around to stack them to get some place, or swimming from place to place while you have limited breath. while it’s not a totally relaxed pace, this is still a game i imagine you could play with kids and they’d appreciate it. other than it being vaguely furry-coded with your bunny character or some of the rats you talk to in the sewer level it’s very straight down the line and comprehensible. there’s a sense of “wonder” that feels perhaps a little too generic and nostalgia-based for me but i can see it working on someone younger. like a diet Zelda dungeon.
i played for about an hour and got to the point in the screenshot in the second sewer stage where things seem to open up a bit before deciding i needed to go to bed. unfortunately the demo doesn’t save so i guess i’m not coming back to it. i did like some of the dialogue with the rats in the sewers and the general design of the environment - i guess had a little bit more character to it, even if the game still felt a little generic in places. it’s weird to say a sewer level made a game more interesting to you, but there you go.
overall, this demo kinda defines “pretty good” to me. there’s nothing offensive about it, it is competently made and does have a bit of a nostalgic 90’s multimedia vibe. but it’s also an a little more generic interpretation of things you’ve seen before. i guess similar to Entropy (tho i liked that one a bit more) in how i have to give props for being a well-executed version of what it’s going for when there are a lot of games that aren’t. but at the same time, it just made me feel like i should go back and play more of the things it’s emulating. but like i said, maybe a game worth playing with kids or something similar.
rating: vaguely pleasant/10
Heavydelic
gosh this sure looks beautiful and that is the only reason why i bothered with this because it very much belongs in the “why does this even exist?” category. feels like someone who makes comics and other visual art kinda awkwardly throwing a game project on steam that barely has anything in it i guess just hoping to gauge interest? gamers are famously not very kind to this, especially when you just launched your game on early access without much in it. i already knew this was the case from the reviews the Steam demo got, but had to check just to make sure it wasn’t a bunch of hater opinions.
you run to the right and attack some fan guys who seem to infinitely spawn in, and that seems to be basically it for the demo. i had more fun studying the interface of the main menu or reading the little included worldbuilding zine. unless this significantly changes over the course of its existence, maybe this person should stick to doing comics or animation - you don’t have to do a game! or maybe they should just make a short walking sim and not try to make any sort of action platformer? hard to say, because i don’t even really know what they’re trying to go for here. there’s not much there in general.
so i dunno, baffling. i still probably enjoyed the existence of this thing more than Lullabyes Made of Static because of the very cool art style and included zine but it’s in a similar “i’m not sure why this is even here” category.
rating: much better off as a cartoon or comic/10
anyway, there you have it. 31 Steam demos played and reviewed. there are still a ton left on my list to eventually check out, so it truly never ends. but i feel like i went above and beyond what either i or someone who isn’t getting paid to do this would ever normally do. no one can ever tell me i didn’t try to dig deep into the depths on these. so take that, haters and losers!!!
here are my overall rankings of all the demos played in this session, from favorite to least favorite:
Summary
Liz Thumb of Approval:
KNIGHT LOBSTER
Endacopia
Brazilian Drug Dealer 4
About Fishing
Virtue and a Sledgehammer
Mym’s Sword
Entropy
Blood Dungeon
Dreamer’s Wake
KIDDO
Boreal Tenebrae Act 0
Solid, with potential for greatness:
Neverway
Fallosophy
Bad Pixels
the machine that BREATHES
Hypnogogia: Broken Dreams
Penguin Colony
walk
Piroot
Normal Golf Game
My Beautiful Faraway, Please Don’t Be Cruel To Me
Janet Demornay
Akashic Slingshot
Crescent Break
Not for me:
Delta
Wind Runners
Rizz Dungeon: Skeleton Key to My Heart
Zortch 2
$$$://somnialys i am tired, so i bought a couple of dreams
sprawl ZERO
Heavydelic
Lullabies Made of Static
and here’s a backloggd list of games demos that have still yet to come out that i give the Liz Thumb of Approval to, including stuff i played in previous years:
https://backloggd.com/u/ellaguro/list/steam-demos-that-got-the-liz-thumb-of-approval/
and yeah, a blog post may or may not be coming in the near future highlighting the most interesting ones to talk about from this bunch. depends on how burnt out i am thinking about steam demos. i hope you all got something out of these posts though.