This is Alien Soldier,
I was going to link to the steam page of Alien Soldier here which was part of the SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics collection, but it appears to have been de-listed. I encourage you to find alternative ways to play this classic game. full stop. What that means is that it's a 2D run-and-gun action game which is basically a boss rush start to finish, with very brief levels between bosses. You switch between different shot types depending on the situation, switch gravity to cling to ceilings, and dodge and sort-of-parry enemy bullets to proceed. I expect that most people have not played Alien Soldier, but I hope you can trust me when I say that it's an excellent (if brutally hard) 2D action game, and to the extent that Disaster Arms blatantly copies it, it is better for it.
If you're the kind of person that's allergic to playing "old games" then Disaster Arms might be a chance for you to experience a great 2D action game. If you've already played Alien Soldier or it also looks interesting to you then hey, two cakes.
What if you took a shmup and removed any focus on shooting or dodging bullet patterns, and just had bombs? Also remove levels, you only play for two minutes at a time?In fairness, this might not be true in the full game. The Steam page mentions multiple different levels, but this was unavailable in the demo. Well, turns out it would be really uninteresting. Skip this one.
The astoundingly rare non-roguelike deckbuilder card game. In One Turn Kill you're playing attack cards to deplete your opponent's health bar in—you guessed it—only one turn, or you lose. Rather than relying on some resource like action points, in One Turn Kill your resource is the number of cards in your deck: each time you play a card it draws you more, and you instantly lose when you've decked yourself out.You also lose if you've left yourself without the ability to draw any new cards, i.e. you only have 0 cost cards in your hand. Elements of strategy are introduced in cards that shuffle other cards back into your deck, various synergies with discarding and cost-discounting other cards, and special abilities that you'll pick up between battles. Lest you think this is purely a game of solitaire against an increasing health bar, some enemies introduce little twists like requiring you to deal a certain amount of damage within a real time limit or instantly lose, necessitating you to think fast.
One Turn Kill I found actually fairly challening: I didn't even fully beat every encounter contained within the demo. Failing a run sends you back to the start, where you have the opportunity to tune your deck with any new cards you may have gained, which will surely be necessary: given the inherent limit of the number of cards you can play before losing, I'm not actually sure that the deck I built was theoretically capable of winning some later encounters. I downloaded this demo blind, but it strongly impressed me—I recommend you give it a try if it sounds at all interesting.
This is a vtuber fangame, which it took me a little bit to realize. I'm always impressed by the amount of effort put into vtuber fangames: Idol Showdown—another Hololive fangame—released a few years back and seemed actually incredibly polished and well-made, which is no easy feat for a fighting game. I'd say that Chrono Gear has a similar level of polish.
It's a 2D action platformer where you hack, slash and dash your way through levels that seemed vaguely reminiscent of Sonic zones, with lots of verticality, multiple paths, and occasional stage elements like giant wheels that you can take a ride on. Along the way you'll be fighting random enemies that I'm pretty sure are vtuber memes or in-jokes, and encountering all of the lovely Hololive ladies themselves in the form of boss fights or allies. There are some time control elements in that you can slow down an area around you or speed yourself up, something which occasionally interacts with level objects, similar to but not on the same level as Touhou Luna Nights. Vtubers aren't really my thing so I don't think I'll be picking this up, but Chrono Gear is another impressively well crafted fan-game.There's even a fully 2D animated opening to the game—I'm not sure whether or not it was made specifically for Chrono Gear, but I suspect that it was. Vtuber fans truly are built different.
When your city gets invaded by demons and your legs cut off, you'll have to partner with a demon to escape the ruined city and make it back to your family in this well-animated 2D metroidvania.
If you check the steam reviews for the demo, you'll see a lot of negative reviews talking about the clunky movement. They're not wrong—the movement is decently clunky, but personally that's something that I'm able to look past. Although you will be doing a lot of platforming in POSSESSOR(S), it's not a game about the platforming. There's a lot going on here: great art direction, music, and character design. The story didn't grip me, but neither did it waste my time, which I have a lot of respect for. This is from the developers of Hyper Light Drifter and Solar Ash, both of which were pretty well received.I didn't really care for Solar Ash, personally.
I didn't love the demo, but it was undeniably pretty well made, so I guess my point here is that if the only thing you're put off by here is the negative reviews, I don't think you should let them stop you from checking it out.
As a lover of the Zachtronics games, this was a big letdown. Despite clearly copying the Zachtronics formula, mechanics from Opus Magnum and the vague setting of SHENZHEN I/O, Kaizen seems to have learned all of the wrong lessons.
Every single one of the puzzles in the demo is far, far too easy, with no room for the kind of problem solving or variation in solutions that people actually play Zachtronics games for. Pictured to the right are two different solutions for the very first puzzle in Opus Magnum:
Even if you've never played Opus Magnum and barely understand what you're even looking at, surely you see the entirely different approaches. Notice how both are optimized for different metrics? Again, this is the depth of variation in problem solving within the very first puzzle: there is no excuse for Kaizen to not have a puzzle even approaching this level of depth within its entire demo. Every puzzle in Kaizen has its solution histograms as a single bar, as there is one and only one clearly correct and optimal way to create the final product. The beauty of Zachtronics games is not that they are puzzles with one single solution to be found, but problems with multiple different (and varyingly effective) ways to approach a solution.
Another lesson not learned from Zachtronics is regarding the story. In SHENZHEN I/O (which Kaizen most resembles in terms of story), you get little snippets of plot from quick little emails before and after solving a puzzle, from the technical documents necessary to solve some of the puzzles, and in some cases you get light worldbuilding elements from what you're actually constructing: designing a microcontroller for a window that automatically opens and closes depending on the level of dangerous smog outside tells you a lot about the world you're in without any clunky or hamfisted dialogue. In contrast, Kaizen spends far too much time on story sequences and dialogue that is unsubtle and does not establish any kind of interesting atmosphere or mood.
It takes effort for me to not be interested in a Zachtronics-style game, but Kaizen seems to have actually managed it. If there is anything close to an interesting game here, none of it was represented within the demo.
This was a real personal letdown for me. As a huge fan of developer Modus Interactive's previous game Knight's Try, I was looking forward to this. Unfortunately I have nothing but negative things to say about it. It's a retro-styled bowling game where you can slightly influence the motion of your ball after its initial impulse, with spinsNo pun intended. on the format like special bowling ball power-ups you can collect like a bomb ball or a boost ball, and played on stages with various hazards and atypical lanes.
I found the abilities mostly pointless and the ball difficult to control in motion—my most successful strategy was getting a good initial angle and not trying to influence the bowling ball afterwards at all, which is really not an interesting way to play a game. Frankly, everything felt clunky. I don't think at any point I was really enjoying myself. I'm not the kind of person who would tend to get a bowling game in the first place, but I saw a lot of great design in the developer's previous game Knight's Try, and I was hoping that I would see some of that same vision here.
Occlude is a variant solitaire gameSimilar to the games within the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection. containing various hidden rules you can only determine through experimentation, and with occult theming.
Not a lot to say here—the solitaire itself is fun enough, the theming creates a great atmosphere. I didn't play enough to really dig into any of the hidden rules, but this was already a game I expected to at least look into when it came out anyways. I think you already know if this kind of game is the thing for you or not. If "variant solitaire", "hidden information" or "rule discovery" sound like the kind of things that appeal to you, consider this an invitation to check it out.
Touhou ~ Dreams of a Sunflower describes itself as "Touhou meets Dark Souls", which is more or less pretty accurate. It's charmingly very jank, and throws a lot of system mechanics at you pretty fast.
The shoot-em-up or bullet hell genre is almost universally restricted to two dimensions, for good reason. It's just not easy to dodge bullet patterns in an interesting way in a fully 3D environment in the same way you can in 2D. Among other reasons for why that is, it's just not easy to even visually understand 3D bullet patterns, much less dodge them. The 2D playing field of a traditional shmup provides a complete overview of the experience, whereas 3D games have to rely on often finnicky camera systems, not something you want to be devoting mental energy to when you're trying to dodge something like this. Dreams of a Sunflower here gets around most of that problem by leaning on the side of being a little too easy, and including a fairly generous parry option which cancels out a bullets in a small sphere.
Really, I admire the ambition on display here. This is something of a wild combinations of genres and while it is incredibly jank, I would still describe it as surprisingly playable given what I would expect, although I don't know that I would recommend that you check it out.
A 2D pixel art "souls-like" metroidvania with boring combat, sluggish movement, and not one single interesting or unique facet for me to expound upon here. I guess reading the Steam store page it's supposed to be connected to Adventure, for the the Atari 2600?As features prominently in Ready Player One. The game is published by Atari, but I'm not actually sure what that "connection" practically means.
Skip this one unless you really really love uninspired 2D "souls-likes".
I was talking to someone who said that he skipped this one because it looked like a Hollow Knight clone with bad movement, which I thought was a shame. I think that there's some serious artistry on display in Gurei, and that it is much much more than anything like a Hollow Knight clone.
In the first place, Gurei is a pure boss rush game. Wander around the hub area and you can pick any one of a number of bosses to fight by entering its arena. After defeating it, you'll receive a totally unique power based on it like a shield, a dodge attack, or a bow, and from then on every other boss will be powered up. You have a limited number of lives and receive more after each boss you kill, but fall to zero and all your progress will be over.
I think the mechanics here are incredibly well designed. The continual powering up of each boss is no joke—rather than just increased health or damage dealt, the bosses receive entirely new moves and phases, meaning there's real strategy as to what order you want to tackle each of them in.
The art direction is great, the minimal dialogue presentation is great, the mechanics seem thoughtful, the boss fights seem tightly designed. I'm not sure I would have heard about Gurei had I not dug through the Next Fest demos, but I think it's a certain buy for me when the full game does end up releasing.
Now on to the new stuff. Fair warning: the main character has a gigantic ass. My typical heuristic is that a creator's horniness when making a game is inversely correlated with its quality, so if you tend to think the same way and that puts you off you'll just have to trust me that the game is actually quite interesting. If that doesn't put you off and it actually makes you more interested, great to hear it.
Speaking of Picross, this is a bit of an excuse for me to shill the first Voxelgram, which I have more than a few hours in. Voxelgram is 3D Picross.Or 3D Nonograms, if you'd rather not contribute to brand genericization. Much like the jump from Picross 3D to Picross 3D: Round 2 on the 3DS, in Voxelgram 2 each puzzle contains two different colors of blocks you'll be solving for. Apart from that, it's basically the exact same as the first game. There are a lot of nonogram games out there, but as far as I know, the games I've listed so far are the only ones which have 3D nonograms?
I'm not really sure how to shill this. If you enjoy Picross, you probably don't need me to sell you on 3D Picross: adding another dimension really does enhance the enjoyment, and there's an almost tactile feeling of quite literally chipping away at a puzzle, like you're sculpting the solution from a block of marble. If you haven't played Picross, jumping right into the deep end probably isn't the best introduction, but consider this an invitation to check it out. I will say that the Voxelgram games are fairly well put together: you might expect solving puzzles like this in 3D to be fiddly, but the controls for marking and slicing in and out of the blocks are responsive enough that I flew through a lot of the demo puzzles in under a minute. One area in which the 3DS Picross 3D games do remain ahead of Voxelgram is that the objects you solve for in Volxegram look incredibly shitty compared to the cute models in the 3DS games, but apart from that I would say Volxegram takes the gold in almost every other category: convenience, controls, number of puzzles, accessibility and quality of life features, so on.
This was a game I already had wishlisted, but the demo blew my expectations out of the water. The closest point of comparison for what this game is is Pseudoregalia, a 3D platformer / metroidvaniaCoincidentally(?), also with furry main character designs. with a focus on movement and exploration, and a lighter focus on combat. I enjoyed Pseudoregalia a decent amount, so it's not lightly that I say that AEROMACHINA already seems to outdo Pseudoregalia in a lot of regards. It took me a while to get used to the movement, but once I did it felt great to boost, glide and bunny hop around the map. That map is also far more extensive than I thought it would be: I played the demo for about an hour and a half and didn't even get through it all.
There's a lot more I could say, but I'll refrain for now. If you liked Pseudoregalia, check this one out for sure.
A Chinese puzzle game where you move mirrors around and move into mirrors to navigate your way through a grid-based environment. Not too much to say about this one—It's charmingly poorly translated, but the puzzles themselves are a little easy to brute force by just constantly shuffling the mirrors around. It didn't wow me, but I did end up playing it for longer than I thought I would and solving all of the optional puzzles available in the demo.
Ever see those Trolley Problem memes that take the original premise and add some wacky and hilarious twist? I'm sure you have. If not:
The Trolley Solution asks: what if I made that into a game? The answer? It wears out its welcome about as fast as the trolley problem memes themselves do. I already don't really care for trolley problem memes—they're a little 'high school Facebook meme group'-tierToo specific a reference? I hope you get what I'm saying. for me—but even for someone who might be more inclined to find these funny than me, I'm not sure it can carry a game to being anything more than a tiny novelty. It's a bit like someone walking up to you and telling you 100 knock-knock jokes in a row: even if joke number 85 is actually really good, you're probably tired of the bit by that point.
In fairness, it does seem like The Trolley Solution makes an attempt to have variety: some scenarios are literally basic 'what would you do' questions, some are tiny little microgames like a shell game being played on the tracks, and some are slightly more involved. I Alt+F4'd after 13 minutes, when an extended sequence of me dodging people trapped on rails ended with my trolley bugging out, teleporting to a different rail and crashing into a wall, forcing me to redo the entire sequence. Does all of this sound hilarious to you? If so, give it a look.
This is a cute little demo.I checked this one out because I saw the game is being published by PLAYISM, who also publish some great games like the La Mulana series, the MOMODORA games, and games by Team Ladybug, all of which I'm a fan of. Not everything they publish is to my tastes, but they've earned some good will from me. In a mechanic pulled straight from the Newgrounds / flash game era, you can press a button to "record" your movements and then at any time start "playing them back", moving along the exact same path that that you recorded, although starting from your new position. The concept isn't revolutionary, but the execution is fairly good. I enjoyed the practically 1-bit visuals, the music was calming yet catchy and served very well as puzzle-solving ambiance, the puzzles themselves moved along at a nice pace, and there were some neat little secrets to be found. The demo wasn't long—it took me about 15 minutes to beat—but I came away with it with nothing but good things to say about MotionRec.
A shitpost in video game format. A lot of times people will say that the presentation of something is "schizophrenic", but this game truly warrants the description. In a way it's actually a little impressive to see something put together like this: a lot of games are shitty in mundane or annoying ways, but Funi Raccoon Game is shitty in kind of a hilarious way. The magic wore off a little quick for me, but I do think that this is worth checking out. (If you're a real gamer, make sure you crank up the "tinnitus" volume slider when you first boot up the game.)
Another demo I checked out blind for no particular reason, Dice Gambit is a Tactics / Strategy RPG with a bit of Rogue Legacy DNA in it, in that you grow and manage a family line of "inquisitors" who embark on expeditions to free not-Spain of weird paint monsters. Each turn you'll be rolling dice to determine which actions you can take (attacking, defending, moving, and a special attack), out of battle you send yourself and your heirs to an academy to level up and gain new skills and get +50HP and +2 rerolls and +3 gumption and so on and so forth.
It's obvious there's a lot to dig into here, but it's really not my thing. I found the presentation and characters a little annoying—a lot of the characters seem to be very intentionally modelled after stock anime tropes, which I didn't personally have a ton of patience for. That being said, I'd say it was fairly well-made overall, with a decently high amount of polish for what seems to be a small dev team. Give it a look if you're into this kind of thing.
It's a Balatro-like.I have not actually played Balatro myself, but I'd say I'm familiar enough with it for comparison. This is the first Balatro clone that I've looked into at all, though. Instead of creating poker hands, you're buying and selling a stock whose price is manipulated by various market events drawn from a deck that you add to each day. You dump all of your cash into the stock at the start of each day and sell all of your shares at the end, so by strategically rearranging the order in which your drawn market events trigger, your aim is to meet a continually increasing weekly quota of money made from your trades. If you draw a particularly unfavorable hand you also have the option to skip purchasing the stock for the day, although your drawn market events will still influence the price of the stock, which carries over day-to-day.
I do think that there is something mechanically distinct from Balatro here, and interesting in its own right. With four weeks of trading in the demo, it was only towards the end that I started to think about strategy on a deeper level, rather than just trying to pick good cards. I had been naïvely trying to tune my deck to only make the stock price increase as much as possible, but as you make more money from pumping the stock higher you're also unable to buy as many shares. Given that you start each trading week with a fixed amount of $1,000, the real strategy seems to be in tuning your deck so you can have days where you buy and pump the stock up as much as you can, then days you skip buying and crash the price of the stock so you can buy more shares the next day (again, given that the hand you draw still influences the price even if you don't buy).
I could see it being pretty addictive. The demo lasted me about half an hour and I was fairly engaged all the way through. I think that the presentation could use a little work: it's a little in-your-face when I think that this kind of game lends itself to a more understated presentation to really let you sit back, contemplate your decisions and get into the zone. When you finally have locked everything in and decide to execute your trades the music syncs itself up to your effect triggers, which was cute, although I wonder if it wouldn't get repetitive given hours of gameplay. I could also very easily see the vintage computer terminal aesthetic getting grating with time, and it was a slightly difficult at first to grok it all. That being said, Insider Trading still gets a recommendation from me. I hadn't heard of it before playing the demo and now I'd say I'm decently interested: if anything I've described sounds interesting, I encourage you to check it out.
Need even more demo reviews in your life? Read part two here.
The Steam Next Fest is back. I always like to play through the demos available to show some support for indie developers and keep on the lookout for any new great games, so this time I thought I'd write some quick reviews of the demos I play through.Last Next Fest I came away having found two pretty incredible demos for games I'm now strongly looking forward to: Rainchaser, a shoot-em-up in a similar vein to ZeroRanger with great music, and HYPERBEAT, an analog-stick based rhythm game with an incredibly striking aesthetic. I strongly recommend checking out both, although Rainchaser may be a little difficult if you lack experience with shmups.
I technically played the demo for this before Next Fest began, but I think it's still worth talking about. From the creators of Danganronpa, it's basically if Danganronpa were a tactical RPG instead of having class trials.It's really similar in styling to Danganronpa: teenagers kidnapped to a high school, a mascot basically shaped like Monokuma, character designs by Shimadoriru basically exactly like Danganronpa characters, time management exactly like Danganronpa, so on. Despite a pretty crawling start and some at times horrendous english voice acting, I was brought back around by the combat, which I enjoyed quite a lot. The gameplay is a lot closer to something like Into the Breach than Final Fantasy Tactics: on your turn you can move any of your characters in any order, limited by a small number of action points. Killing certain higher-health enemies refreshes an action point, making each turn a mini-puzzle in the optimal way to make as many moves and clear as many enemies as possible, typically while also trying to accomplish a secondary objective like protecting a generator or downed character.
In terms of the story, whisked away from your life in the Tokyo Residential Complex—an absolutely gigantic indoor structure with lights and ceiling panels that mimic the sky—you find yourself tasked by some mascot creature with defending the high-school-like building that you're residing in, one where for the first time you can see the real sky, and one surrounded by a gigantic wall of everburning purple flames. Beyond that wall of fire is nothing but ruins and strange alien creatuers called "invaders" who will occasionally mount attacks on the school, apparently trying to recover some precious artifact the exact details of which are kept a mystery. Not all of your fellow kidnapees are immediately on board with this, however, so you have to make do with just a few people for defense while trying to convince the others to get on board.
The demo is about 5 hours and managed to set up some big mysteries and endear me to most of the characters, so I'm almost certainly going to get the main game when it releases. Despite some heavy talent working there I've heard that the rest of what Too Kyo Games has put out so far has been bad, so here's hoping that this one manages to make the landing.
A character action game in the vein as Bayonetta, Devil May Cry or, perhaps most relatedly, Hi-Fi Rush, the main gimmick here is the ability to quick swap between characters to extend your combos or quickly recover from damage. As a moderate fan of these kinds of games I thought it had pretty decent gamefeel.Gamer cred check: I've played through most of Bayonetta, have beaten The Wonderful 101, and, in contrast to popular consensus, I bounced off Hi-Fi Rush after a few hours. The game obviously still has a long way to go, but I think there's a decent foundation there: the enemies were fairly basic and unchallenging and the sound design could use some serious work, but the underlying mechanics seem solid, with the boss fight at the end of the demo actually forcing you to make use of blocking, dodging, and all of your special moves. The visual aesthetic is sort of a western anime style and it's all themed around the main characters being in a band, but unlike Hi-Fi Rush there are no rhythm elements. Also unlike Hi-Fi Rush, the inter-fight traversal segments don't make me want to shoot myself. The demo took me about 20 minutes to play through.
This one is for the shmup fans. Another clearly ZeroRanger-inspired game, the gimmickI don't use "gimmick" in a derogatory way, just as a useful shorthand for and slightly less pretentious way to say "unique central mechanic". here is that you play as some kind of space samurai instead of the shmup-typical spaceship, and using your sword and invincible dash is integral to both scoring points and dodging attacks. The demo here was short, but it served as a good demonstration of the mechanics and difficulty on offer here. I think it's probably a little on the harder side, especially if you're a newcomer to the genre.
I see a weird, poorly translated visual novel slash point and click adventure and I guess that activates some kind of neurons in my brain that make me think that I have to try it. Turns out, it's... basically exactly what it seems like, a weird poorly translated VN. You're a robot whose AI is originally based on a person's brain waves or neural scan or something and you're exploring around a giant facility in the wake of some kind of violent disaster, so basically nothing we haven't already seen before a hundred times.As in SIGNALIS, for instance. I spent about 15 minutes hoping to see something that would really spark my interest and didn't end up seeing it, so that's when I stopped.
Another AI-themed demo, the concept here is that you're participating in a research experiment where you have to examine the responses of two participants to a series of prompts and determine which response—if either—was actually AI-generated. While I liked the premise and theming, this felt like way too small of a slice: there are 10 questions with pretty short responses, and as far as I can tell no matter how you categorize the participants' answers or what you do, you get the exact same ending. It's possible I'm missing something? The store page has screenshots much more interesting than anything contained within the demo, which took me 10 minutes total, having played multiple times to try to see if the ending would be any different.
Ultra super kusoge. A "Soviet inspired fantasy Metroidvania", this is the single jankiest demo I've maybe ever played. I found a way to gain infinite jump height literally within seconds of being able to control my character by timing attacks that give you a little bounce, almost like Super Metroid bomb jumping. The comparisons to Super Metroid end there, though, as while there's clearly a lot of love put into Ghost Hand, it has an asounding lack of polish. My sound cut out multiple times in the first five minutes, the camera is wonky and will randomly decide to stop following you or focus somewhere else, performing a walljump imparts you with an insane amount of momentum such that you'll be moonwalking for seconds after hitting the ground. I did end up spending about 50 minutes in the demo, only quitting after a boss that was definitely supposed to appear in an arena didn't appear leaving me trapped, even after I quit and reloaded. There's a lot of soul here, but I'll probably be giving this one a pass.
A text adventure where you're not the one playing the text adventure, you're basically a sort of AI dungeon master for some idiot actually playing the game, making this really more of a CYOA as you decide how you want to respond to the player's antics. The main joke is that the guy actually playing is the worst stereotype of "gamer player character", instantly trying to murder shopkeepers, never reading any instructions and not even really being good at the game and so on, and you're supposed to keep the story going despite all of the player's idiocy. It was novel, although I don't recall it being particularly funny or coming across as very original. The entire game is voiced, with pretty good voice acting. My main takeaway was that I found the concept that I had to keep the game going instead of ruthlessly killing the idiot player a little annoying; after killing him once in a fight he underprepares for and doesn't pay attention to any of the mechanics of, you control the enemy he's fighting and have to pick the least optimal attacks so that the player survives. I'm coming across more negative than I felt after playing it, but looking back the gimmick wore a little thin in the 30 minutes it took me to finish the demo.
I dropped this one pretty fast. An "homage" toBlatant rip-off of, even down to the opening company logos and main menu. Come on, I like MGS too, but get at least some originality. the original Metal Gear Solid, the many flaws here show up very quickly. While the textures and stylings are done well and the game looks pretty good, it feels utterly terrible to play. The AI is stupid and ineffectual, the controls are lacking, the camera manages to be much worse than any Metal Gear Solid title without even the option to go into first-person to see someone who might be off-screen. It's clear that this one needs a lot more time in the oven.
One of if not the most polished demos so far, Is This Seat Taken? is a logic puzzle game about arranging people's seating while trying to accomodate everyone's various preferences, like wanting to sit in a window seat on a bus, or sit next to a friend, or so on. The presentation is minimalist but still cutesy, and they go farther with the concept than I expected at first. Starting with people just wanting a window seat or wanting to sit next to a friend, you're soon introduced to people with multiple preferences and people with behavior that affects the space around them, like playing loud music or not having showered. Then, faced with others with preferences like wanting to sleep or really hating bad smells, you shuffle them around until everyone is happy. Eventually you move on from cars and busses to seating people in a multiple rows of a theater, then a wedding with various tables and foods laid out.
None of the puzzles were really that difficult: it's the sort of puzzle where you don't really need to think a ton before making a move, you can just start putting people in place and then go back to re-sort and swap people around if necessary. Still, it was enjoyable enough, and there's an obviously large amount of design space that I imagine the full game will go deeper into. There's I guess supposed to be an overarching story told through inter-puzzle conversations where we follow one of the little shape person's journey to being an actor, or something, but it was pretty saccharine and uninteresting to me.I'm definitely not a "cozy game" guy by any means, although thankfully there really isn't much time wasted if you're only interested in the puzzles. Like I said, it came across as incredibly polished and well-made for what seems to be developer Poti Poti Studio's first game, so I might pick it up when it comes out. It took me about 20 minutes to beat the demo, including the bonus stage if you solve every other puzzle without mistakes.
This was a pretty unique one, a sort-of visual novel-style game where you wake up tied up in your basement and face some questioning from someone claiming to be your mom. Like one of those games where you drag elements together to make new onesAt the moment I can only recall this one, although I'm certain that there are more., you connect concepts together in your mind in order to gain new responses to your mom, as well as implicitly reveal more of the story by seeing what happens when two concepts combine. If combining "Nima" and "Dad" makes "Sorrow" or "Mom" and "Basement" makes "Experiment", you can start to piece things together on your own. There are actually a seriously large amount of concepts to reach: I might have spent upwards of 20 minutes not advancing any dialogue, just combining concepts together and puzzling out what was going on that way. In the demo there's only one route, with a predefined ending no matter what responses you give, but I can easily see how the story might differ depending on what you say. After you already have enough concepts and have a rough idea of what's going on I imagine that the real interest will lie in what responses you pick and what kind of character you choose to portray, but there was also a short point-and-click section, so who knows what kind of depths the full game might hold. In total I spent about 50 minutes on the demo, and not having heard of it beforehand and not even really being interested in horror, it made me pretty interested for the full game.
