Welcome To The World Of Tims

this demo is also available on the yuropean steam storefront, huh.
One more version to ponder about, still no def idea which platform will get a physicsl release, only for the switch seems to be set over here.

I got the switch demo and damn is this rough. No offense but aren’t you only supposed to release a demo if a game is good?

I already played Deadly Premonition 2 recently and unlike that game there are nowhere near enough interesting things happening to justify that anachronisticly awful gamefeel

I’m betting that Balan is the final boss

2 Likes

The sheer anachronism of this thing actually had me excited for a bit but all the psychic duct tape in my head couldn’t hold the rose-coloured glasses together for more than 45 minutes. Yeah…this is a bad game. First thing I note in a game like this is the character movement and here the friction is flat, lacking a sense of acceleration, slope physics, etc. Feels like you’re a ghost dispassionately haunt-hugging the terrain. Maybe this could be forgivable if the levels were interesting to explore but no, they’re linear with half-hearted side paths with some dishonest geometry (some of the outer edges promising to reward a player’s piqued interest and platform-scrambling only to disappoint (sometimes the geometry, visually legible as fair game, lacks collision and sends you to the bottom of the map for daring to jump on)). Can you really call it a 3D platformer at that point?

So what’s left is this costume gimmick. And it sucks? Like each costume is such a specific and underpowered “key” for a very particular “lock” it reeks of lazy/cynical game design documentation determining the “fun” factor, divorced of anything relating to the simple joys of dynamic movement, environmental exploration or combat (with a few pages dedicated to things like “raise cute pets” because that’s more content padding but idk it didn’t seem too interesting beyond throwing the little creatures around). No effort is made to combine the costumes or integrate them into/build upon the player’s move set. One of the bosses demonstrates how you can either deflect a tornado attack with one costume or just toast them with another but both solutions are equally boring and lacking in any sense of trade off or tension. Maybe these things are elaborated on further into the game but the demo presents such a weak foundation I don’t think I’ll be grabbing this one unless it’s like $10 at some point. Thumbs down, Mr. Naka. Shades of Keiji Inafune’s Mighty No. 9 (with that Squeenix $$$ tho).

8 Likes

I want to enjoy this game as wholeheartedly as some people, I mean the giant farmer’s plotline almost hooked me, but it just feels bad to move around. There’s no momentum or rhythm and whenever I fell to my death I thought, “good.”

9 Likes

no other game has the sheer audacity to include something like Box Fox

for that reason, I stand with Balan

11 Likes

This game feels terrible and the first level looks like something you’d see in a fucking DeVry commercial

Fuckin Kameo was somehow more aesthetically tantalizing than this

6 Likes

Rudie high fives @notbov over and over.

6 Likes

I need to picket the release of this game like I’m a baptist hearing about pokemon

we can’t let him keep doing this to the children

6 Likes

Oh shit, yeah…good pull. There’s something about this one (NiGHTS had a similar thing when you’re running around as the kids) that does feel dreamlike and…removed in a way almost like playing an out of body experience, maybe that’s just me though. The way the music seems to be doing it’s own thing, like scoring an elevator ride you’re not on…plus the geometry warping effect in the farm level did make for A Vibe which counts for something but the gameplay is just too boring.

4 Likes

Also, did I miss an explanation re: the dancing animals you come across? I like those weirdos but they disappear when you get too close like a furry fata morgana.

1 Like

hmm

7 Likes

I must say that the grinning mascot « stylishly » beating up various non-aggressive shapes, with scored QTEs, in space, with no explanations given to why any of this is happening, is one of the most videogame things I’ve seen recently

5 Likes

there’s actually a bout in the demo where he fights Lance

I’m half-convinced you weren’t actually meant to get to it with the costumes included in the demo

I’m fully convinced Naka still wants to be making DBZ games

1 Like

What’s the point of making the “main” character gender-free if you have GIRL and BOY as the player characters

Yuji Naka more like :fu:

4 Likes

NiGHTS was genderless as part of some kind of vague new-agey Jungian archetype thematics.

Balan is just genderless because NiGHTS was genderless.

4 Likes

Goty 2021

12 Likes

for all of the game’s warts, it earned a lot of goodwill from me for not only having the different skin tones for the kids (yes it’s only four but it’s a start) (yes I guess I they could just a character creation thing but then I wouldn’t have Naka’s vision) but also they took the time to do the opening cutscene for each skin tone

also there’s a sheep costume. sheep are cool.

8 Likes

I love the character designs for the game, all the costumes and characters are incredibly cute. I love that the first world’s boss is an amalgamation of all the costumes from the first world. Really wish they were in a better game

2 Likes

all the levels in this have that horrible gloopy look of student portfolio pieces / highpoly blender remakes of abstract n64 spaces BUT i do like musicals and something about the characters in the trailer flying around while singing an incomprehensible song about step into the wonderworld / take a trip to balan’s world activated the videogame excitement neuron in my brain. also i’ve always meant to play billy hatcher. so i played the demo.

i enjoyed it! the movement was stiff and the levels of the first world were pretty generic but idk, even when i didn’t enjoy playing it i enjoyed trying to figure out what was happening. the dancing animals were charming and i appreciated that they just fade away on proximity rather than delivering somebody’s idea of relateable text or worldbuilding content. also that i had no idea what was happening in certain areas, where e.g. a bunch of animals gather around and a song starts to play and it’s like they’re expecting you to do something but there’s nothing you can do but jump. or the whole pet ball raising / finding thing. i fed a lot of crystals to the balls because it seemed to make them happy, or at least larger, which is the same thing, every so often their colour would change or one of them would start wearing a hat or something as well. if feeding crystals to an animal generates a positive sounding noise then you should keep doing it - videogames.

playing later areas and not being sure which parts of the geometry you were meant to step on, or how much it was expecting you to push at the limits of the janky-feeling animal costumes, was compelling to me in a weird way. i will probably play the full game and keep feeding crystals to the animals in the hopes that something horrible will happen.

17 Likes

Yeah, I kinda think I am hype for this game? Like, not the Switch version because good god is it rough, but a pc copy might be a thing that happens for me because there is just so much here that I kept stumbling into and none of it made any sense and that is good.

I did not find Box Fox tho.

2 Likes