my Steam demo stream tonight was a bit of a disaster and i had to cut it off way short because of internet being weird due to the storm and my computer just being generally unable to handle doing two things at once. but i did manage to play a lot of demos for Next Fest regardless. my goal was playing about 30 demos and i think i managed 20 so far, but there’s still several for me to check out. anyway here’s a first batch of impressions:
Zortch 2
i haven’t played Zortch 1 but this had the vibe of a b- or c-tier retro FPS from the late 90’s and early 2000’s - sort of in the Quake 2 mold except with bigger maps and more enemies, like a Serious Sam type of game. both the level design and the enemy design just felt so reminiscent of a particular era: the opening area was a giant brown dam where enemies kept spawning in in different parts of the map as you sniped them from afar. kinda had the vibe of a wave shooter in a multiplayer map. but then it changed to more typical hallways and stuff. i wasn’t compelled enough to play more than about 20 minutes - maybe because i died and didn’t feel like restarting the whole play-through, and it was the first demo i booted up.
certainly felt like a game that knows exactly what it is and what it’s going for, but maybe isn’t as wacky or as strange as you might hope given the name and the story behind it. there’s a possibility it gets more that way later - but i also think the Cruelty Squads and the Northern Journeys, or even Slayers X have increased my expectation for retro FPS games being a bit more ambitious in their weirdness and not just emulating something that could have conceivably already existed in the 90’s. so just felt very b or c-tier overall.
rating: it’s okay/10
Akashic Slingshot
another one i found from a previous demo fest in a pile and intrigued me enough to finally check it out. visual style is reminiscent of a lot of tigsource era indie platformers - not anything you haven’t seen before perhaps but it was enough to draw me in initially. the music is more hi-fi and maybe a little generic, but it works pretty well for what the game is anyway. i like how you can customize your little pixel character. game’s sensibility reminds me a little bit of something like Glum Buster, though a bit less weird.
this is one of those gimmick platformers with one central gimmick. the main thing you do is aim and shoot your slingshot at enemies with your mouse, which the game has you do in various different kinds of settings. the stage design is pretty good, with a variety of different hazards. the two environments in the demo are pretty different from each other - one’s some kind of forest, the other’s a futuristic city where you bounce around on jump pads. the city has a target practice area where you can test your slingshot aim, but otherwise these stages are pretty straightforward.
the main focus are the bosses - which are much harder than anything else in the game. the game is one hit kill, which doesn’t matter so much in the stages when you just respawn where you were. but it makes you do the entire boss battle over. the first one is a little challenging but very doable. the second battle (pictured above) is way more like a bullet hell and has multiple phases. still doable, but very difficult and i eventually called it quits after getting a little tired of repeating it so many times.
overall, i wasn’t blown away but it was reasonably well done. and it had heart and a kind of slightly off-kilter vibe that just reminds me a lot of the tigsource era. maybe a bit more hardcore than i was expecting, or its audience would be expecting - but also maybe that adds to the appeal a little, i dunno. but overall it’s just nice to see people still making games like this more than anything else.
rating: pretty good/10
KIDDO
this is another older demo i’d been holding onto to check out eventually. it’s a point and click adventure, and the sensibility is like some combo of a 90’s slacker comedy like Normality and an Amanita Design game. the visual style is really nice, as you can tell from the screenshot, and the audio design has a very distinct feeling to it. you’re a slob man who has a weird little mask in his quite large apartment (at least in the demo) who is close to eviction and whose dog decided to run away because you were too lazy to feed him.
your character is one of the stupidest people in the universe and seems confused by doing basic tasks. the environment is littered with objects you can look at, but only a limited amount you can interact with - which is a little initially confusing. can be a little hard to know what you can pick up and what you can’t, so you can miss important stuff. i am amused at how you seem constantly just barely away from accidentally killing yourself out of stupidity. the ending to the demo also basically involves you poisoning your character.
the puzzles can be a little challenging to wrap your brain around, though rewarding when you figure them out. one of the puzzles involving moving locks around was way too hard/unforgiving for me, though - and i definitely had to look up a solution. maybe it’s just not my type of puzzle though, i dunno.
but other than figuring out what you need to pick up/how to solve one of the puzzles, i really liked this game. the visual and audio design were great, and i loved just how ridiculously stupid and reckless your little guy was. it was a little more like an edgy comic and less Whimsical like things in this visual style tend to be, which i honestly welcomed. it was also weirdly one of two things i played in that session that were focused on slacker shut-ins. i can relate to this a lot in my current state of Depression and financial precarity.
rating: good!/10
Neverway
this is one of the more high profile demos, because it’s the pixel artist from Celeste and Disasterpeace doing the music. i think i’m on record as not being a particularly huge fan of Celeste, but this is a completely different type of game. (i am a fan of Disasterpeace music though - hope he’s doing well lately).
your character is a depressed shut-in who lives in a city and loses her job and her partner because she decides to go dark and not communicate with other people. certainly not something i could ever relate to, not at all. early on you take the train into the city to grab your stuff, and i really liked the look of it. everything just has a really cold, sterile, cruel feeling to it. there are also life sim elements that come up in the beginning - basic stuff like eating and refilling your stamina. in general this opening section i think was my favorite part of the game - it really captured the world of this incredibly depressed person really well.
eventually on the train back supernatural things start happening and you go to some island that you get to name. there’s some like crafting/farming sim elements, it seems like. but mostly it just has you go through a combat tutorial for most of the rest of the demo that’s reminiscent of something like Hyper Light Drifter. i liked some of the crafting elements here, and the visual design remained cool throughout - but this is where the game started to lose me a little bit. the story went a little into anime nonsense at the end and the combat and crafting could be a little tedious. also the training environment just felt a little cliche in general.
but really, the visual design and the sound design were totally top notch. i’m happy to see Rich Vreeland doing more game music, and he seems to have moved beyond doing Fez-style stuff into things that are more intentionally grating and it sounds really cool. i really liked the visual palette too - it communicates a lot about what this game is going for, and some of the more detailed shots were really pretty looking.
but yeah - overall there were things about this game that were absolutely top tier, and then there were others that were a bit cliche. curious to see where it goes though.
rating: half-transcendent, half-mid/10
SPRAWL Zero
yeah… so i talked about this one already a little but it wasn’t for me. computer issues have been acting up, but i was able to play it for a good hour or so. i did want to play it because everyone was blowing their wad for this game. the action is relatively fast and the weapon switching mechanics worked well enough for what it was. there were one or two incredibly hairy situations that you got put into that it felt really good to get out of. not sure i really loved the use of bullet time - it felt kinda like just a mishmash, but it worked well enough for what it was i guess.
i guess the main thing is just nothing about this game isn’t something that’s been done before, but just in a mishmashed form. the visual design and somewhat generic city environment definitely brings back a certain era kind of early ps3/xbox 360 era but doesn’t particularly transcend it (and it lacks color, as Bachelor already pointed out). the story is like so aggressively stupid and meatheady but not in a way that feels like it lands some kind of ironic or campy angle on it. the combat was fast but did just make me think of how much more i liked the pace of Halo in these sorts of hairy encounter/checkpoint based approach to level design. i never particularly liked the whole Doom 2016 rip and tear approach to combat - it feels kinda shallow and like you’re clicking to win and get these elaborate violent animations. i guess less shallow than Call of Duty games or whatever, so that’s why people think it’s so great.
it also just makes me feel like all a lot of people want is a nostalgic version of things that existed 15-20 years ago, which bums me out. like this is the era of games that i got into indie games because i was alienated by them. i’m not particularly enthused about this era coming back as an object of uncritical nostalgia i guess.
rating: meh/10
My Beautiful Faraway, Please Don’t Be Cruel To Me
this is one that i discovered by random demo browsing that really stuck out, and i feel kind of of two minds about. it’s definitely going for that late PS2 Shadow of the Colossus/Haunting Ground type of look, and it achieves it very well. one of the best looking games of this type that i’ve seen. i would love to see more games with environments like this, but maybe i just appreciate the sort of craftsmanship that went into a lot of these early/mid 2000’s PS2 games this is borrowing from.
it’s basically a narrative walking sim with some Silent Hill/Resident Evil-esque puzzles. the world appears to be somewhat abstract, and there are different lost souls that you talk to. it starts in a church with an organ puzzle that i was too lazy to try and figure out, but was very Silent Hill. but then opens up to a more open-ended sort of haunted village in the hills environment shortly after - tho it seems to stay reasonably linear.
it appears to have multiple endings as well depending on different things you do. there’s a couple arguing, and a drunk lady in the woods you have to help out. the puzzle sensibility isn’t necessarily for me, and i’m not sure how i feel about the slavish devotion to capturing the very specific feeling of games of this era. on the other hand, it does look very cool in a way that other games of this type haven’t achieved to the same level. and i do this style works well for a moody walking sim, even if i’m not terribly into the writing in the game. there’s a lot of potential here, but i’m not really confident that the writing is going to realize it at all.
rating: immaculate vibes, okay game/10
anyway, i played way more games than this. but these impressions take way too long to write, i’ll stop there for now and come back later with more.
