here’s some Steam Demo impressions, pt 2:
Normal Golf Game
not nearly as wacky as you might anticipate given the name of the game, but it was reasonably engaging. has a tone/style somewhere in between a more serious looking PC golf sim from the late 90’s and one of those weirder contemporary minigolf style games. the main thrust of the game is an extended tutorial where the omniscient voice of the creator (who also made the game Fruit Ninja) asks you to do a variety of different tasks. several ofc have the whimsical tone you’d expect, like landing the ball in a giant toilet or hitting a giant gong. but it kinda takes itself more seriously and is a little straighter than you might expect given that. which i honestly didn’t mind, because i think games like What The Golf? can play up the wackiness a little too much as a marketing thing.
probably the weirdest thing about this was the controls. trying to balance the golf club’s face to hit where you want to go is really difficult because it sways around in all kinds of different directions and you have to keep adjusting things. and you have to spin the mouse to hit the ball at all, which definitely takes practice and can be kind of hard to nail right. it does seem like a lot of thought was put into this side of things, though, and it felt reasonably deep given the obviously gimmicky nature of the game itself. which is probably what is most interesting about the whole experience - that it takes itself somewhat seriously as a simulation style golf game in spite of some of the wacky things it asks you to do. i find that actually kind of admirable because it implies a depth you wouldn’t expect.
it’s really hard to tell where the game goes given the demo, but i enjoyed it for what it was (i also like golf games in general though). i think the “Normal Golf Game” name makes it sound slightly more gimmicky than it is but i’d probably give it a mild recommendation.
rating: solid/10
Wind Runners
this was one that drew me in because of the extremely beautiful visuals. and yeah they sure do look pretty! you’re a tiny pilot who does tasks in a 2D side-scrolling shmup perspective. you appear to have different missions you take on, and there are some roguelite elements to the game. i would have been happier if it was a more straight stage-based shooter, i’m not really sure this is something i needed or wanted to be a rougelite. but i guess people are obsessed with retaining players for longer or whatever.
the controls were a bit of a struggle for me to get used to and it was just a little hard for me to tell what was going on onscreen at any given moment. it was fun to dodge stuff when i was able to execute somewhat effectively, but it was hard for me to get control of where the plane was at a given time. it felt a little floppy and arbitrary, and not as choreographed as i’d want. it’s possible there is just a steeper learning curve though - tbh i didn’t stick around to try and figure it out. while it’s fun to move your plane around fast it also makes everything feel kind of unwieldy.
perhaps this is a game whose creative direction feels a little bit too guided by what it looks like in the art direction vs. what it feels like to play? and that explains the roguelite mechanics and other things that just seem borrowed from many other games. or maybe, again, i’m just missing out because i didn’t stick around long enough to get a hang of what the game was. maybe someone else here likes this game more than i do!
rating: not for me, maybe for you/10
the machine that BREATHES
this is an old one that i had in my library for a long time - primarily because the person who made it used to reply and comment on my posts a lot online and i thought the art style looked cool. it was one of those things i was worried i might end up disliking and then feeling bad because the person followed me - maybe one reason i didn’t investigate further until now.
but anyway: that was not the case! this is sort of a strange Resident Evil like except top-down and even more minimal in terms of enemies and combat. the enemies are horrible hulking beasts who will track you down, so you sometimes just gotta tank to get around. you do pick up a weapon but the ammo is limited, as the usual template of Resident Evil goes. playing this did make me aware of how much you can adequately recreate the oppressive feeling of a lot of these kinds of games without having to go too overboard in the presentation. in fact the more minimal presentation really worked in its favor, if anything.
i either failed to activate a door that was supposed to activate or there was a bug so i kinda hit an impasse and didn’t feel like tanking a bunch more deaths through the enemies to try and figure out what had happened. but this did compel me a lot more than a lot of the much higher effort Resident Evil clones that have been depressing me to see more of lately. i liked the opening cutscene - in general the writing felt more engaging to me than a lot of games of this style.
this demo is older, so i don’t know if the game is still being worked on or not - but i hope it is! if nothing else than for the sake of the person who made it who follows me getting some success and visibility for something that is fairly “alt game” coded, whatever that means anymore.
rating: pretty cool/10
KNIGHT LOBSTER
this is a game with completely wild and wacky steam page that i found from a previous demo fest. i had a bit of trepidation about playing it because it thought it might just be a straight Vasily Zotov level fever dream psychological dumping ground that i wouldn’t know how to proceed with. or i thought it was going to have a completely impenetrable level of complexity, given that the game tells you itself to read the manual and there’s a supplemental website for it.
but actually it’s a pretty straight dungeon crawler. you get to chose your setup from the very beginning, which is admittedly kind of hard to anticipate given you haven’t played anything of the game yet. the visuals are pretty minimal raycaster 3d ala Wolfenstein 3D in an abstract environment with super bright colors and a bizarre fisheye perspective. you have the typical random encounters with enemies as you wander around the dungeon. i’m not a huge random encounter person, and i initially struggled to get anywhere before dying over and over, so i was going to chalk this up to not being for me. but eventually after using my ability to running away from a couple enemies i was able to reach the end of one of the floors where you could save and the game sorta opened up to me from there.
the game has a map that gradually removes a fog of war every time you get close. once you reach a save point, you’re able to proceed to the next floor up the tower. you do have to balance how you use your spells vs. attacking but it becomes very manageable once you can get to a save point at the end of a floor to heal. and it becomes kinda fun to explore and see what items you might find in any given area. everything is very abstract but represents certain types of environments in the overall design and sensibility. they have colorful names too, like the one in the above screenshot called “Pierced Atrium” - or another that was designed like a sort of prison. it sort of has that Ultima Underworld/Wolfenstein 3D thing going on where it kinda lets your imagination run wild on what this particularly environment is and what purpose it serves.
i’m not a huge dungeon crawler person, but i felt like this game was more well designed and engaging than far more ‘polished’ looking entries into the genre, and felt perfectly approachable and fair in a way i didn’t really expect. and because of the weird presentation, it kinda creates a world where you don’t know what to expect - so it’s possible to feel surprised by what’s around the corner. even if it’s a pretty straight take on the genre in some ways outside of the total wackiness of its presentation. which is all that i really look for when i play Steam demos like this.
but yeah - i think this was the highlight of all the games i played so far. i kinda had to pull myself away from it because i started to get really absorbed after a certain point. it doesn’t seem like it’s had a lot of visibility (and the Steam page doesn’t really help with capturing what the game is), but i hope more people check it out.
rating: YES/10
$$$://somnialys i am tired, so i bought a couple of dreams
lo-fi 3D Yume Nikki style game where you play as a salaryman with a red cat head. the environments were a little generic but appropriately dreamy. the progression is way more linear and fetch questy than your typical Yume Nikki-like though, and i’m not sure it really hits that level of weirdness you want from these games. the writing wasn’t the worst but wasn’t anything particularly notable or something that would super draw me in. still appropriately moody sense of atmosphere that seemed reasonably polished and thought-out even if it all felt a little slight and student gamey.
i guess i’m happy to see more wandering Yume Nikki-likes pop up that have some degree of effort and thought put into them. especially in the midst of games that are much more mechanically demanding, i like to chill and wander around surreal environments more. so it fulfilled that promise, but didn’t exceed expectations in any other way.
rating: exists/10
Blood Dungeon
new game from Nidhogg creator Messhoff. you’re a little blobby character who flails around a level that does not actually appear to be randomly generated? even though it looks like it is filled with ladders and hazards and you autoshoot to kill enemies to collect their blood and coins to level up and get upgrades. basically it’s a bullet hell like game and you’re just trying to last as long as you can before you die. attempts can go on a fairly long time, because you get a fair deal of health - and bosses will appear after a certain point along with waves of enemies that will really start to ramp up the difficulty. and like many rougelites, you receive permanent upgrades the more you play - though they didn’t seem to make a hugely significant amount of difference that i would have expected.
i don’t know if i’m just grading on a curve because i played it in the midst of a bunch of other games that were less immediately engaging or interesting to me, or i don’t have the expectations for Messhoff games that a lot of people i know here in the city of New York have for his work, or i just haven’t played enough Vampire Survivor-likes to find this derivative or whatever. but i really liked this one - in spite of several friends saying they didn’t really at all. the dungeon made of just blocks and ladders made me think of Super Pitfall. i really liked the blobby flailing animation of the default gun man character you play as - and the look of the enemies as well. i like how easy it is to control him to maneuver around the environment, and the sort of risk/reward of camping around items and getting upgrades vs. just keeping your distance. i also liked how long the attempts were, though i’m sure it could get monotonous after awhile.
i couldn’t attest to how derivative this game is overall compared to Vampire Survivors, etc, but the controls felt nice and i just enjoyed wandering around the environment as chaos ensued. maybe got a little repetitive, but you were only limited to one stage and one character in the demo so that could change. so your mileage may vary - but i had a fun time, and this was one of the better experiences of the demos i played.
rating: fun/10
Lullabies Made of Static
an utterly baffling walking sim where you just wander around a giant city environment and all you have to do is collect one tape and then leave. there’s only one NPC to talk to, and their dialogue is pretty poorly written and talks about it being the end of the world or whatever. feels maybe like a student game except it seems like a lot of work went into the environment (tho perhaps just a lot of premade assets moshed together, but if that’s the case it’s A LOT of them). i wandered for at least a half an hour and couldn’t find the one place i was supposed to go because there wasn’t very clear signposts whatsoever. you can wander on a lot of the buildings and other areas but there’s nothing there, which is what makes it extra confusing. i even accidentally clipped totally out of bounds without trying very hard to because i thought i might need to scale a building to get up to the top somehow.
eventually i looked up the solution and yeah - i just missed the specific spot i was supposed to ride an elevator up to the top of a building. an entire playthrough of this could easily take less than 10 minutes. not even sure what this is a demo of, because it doesn’t really signpost any potential for something further. but again, some aspects of this feel high effort enough to just make me ask more questions. this is why i’m glad i play these games, though, so i can rule out the stuff that looks cool in screenshots but where there’s basically nothing there. very much a “i’m not even sure why this exists” experience
rating: why does this exist?/10
anyway, more demo impressions coming soon. there are a handful more i actually want to play soon too. i’m kind of burned out about the idea of writing up another big blog post about demos tho, because i spent so much energy trying to play all these fucking games. like it made me want to commit time to one game i actually want to play through all of instead of riding the wave of Steam demos. but we’ll see how i feel i guess.
