A lot of rhythm games (which Glisynth is) are, when you get down to it, kind of the same thing.My own personal classification is to think of things in terms of dimensionality. Guitar Hero with its five tracks that notes come along is 5x1 dimensional and Muse Dash and UNBEATABLE are both 2x1 dimensional, whereas games like Osu! or HYPERBEAT are fully 2 dimensional, as they involve an element of positioning in addition to timing. Does that make sense? Maybe not, but it makes a certain amount of sense to me when examining the differences between games in the genre, and I don't think I've ever seen anyone else put forward their own classification for the differences. With not much mechanical difference between them, they tend to live and die on the presentation. In that regard Glisynth didn't do much for me, being cutesy but not particularly stylish.
Going just by looking at a video you might expect Glisynth to be similar to Beatmania or one of those touchscreen rhythm games with the way the notes come down at different x positions and the way the hold notes move back and forth, but there's actually no mechanical effect of what x position the notes come down in—all you have to do is press a key on either the home row or the top row of your keyboard at the right time depending on the color of the note. I think that this presentation actually has the effect of making the game much harder? With the only task on hand being to press essentially one of two buttons at the right time (and occasionally hold), Glisynth is actually less mechanically dense than similar games which occasionally require you to release a key to the beat as well, but nevertheless when trying out a higher difficulty song in Glisynth I had much more trouble than I've had in similar games. I can't tell if this is mainly about the levels/charts just being harder than other games or if it really is the presentation messing me up. To be clear, this isn't necessarily criticism of the presentation, just an observation that despite being mechanically less rich than similar games I found it much harder.
I don't think Glisynth has the sauce. There's nothing wrong with it, but the rhythm game genre is awash with games that do interesting things like A Dance of Fire and Ice and Rhythm Doctor, and also games that just have much better music.
A typing game where you type words to beat dudes up. Keys of Fury is, I think, a lot more about accuracy than speed compared to other typing games, as you take damage making any mistake, with only a small amount of health available to you. The pixel art presentation here hurts the game here beyond just an aesthetic consideration, as the font used for the letters has poor readability, reducing how fast you can make out what a letter actually is. There's a section where fruits are being thrown at you and you need to type a bunch of individual letters to hit them out of the air—something I've done many times easily and quickly in other typing games—that I slightly struggled with here due to the low-resolution font.
What makes for a good typing game? It was satisfying enough to have punches and kicks synced up to every one of my key presses, and the attempt at introducing a tiny twist with ninjas whose sentences disappear for a second as you're trying to type them was interesting and speaks to the kind of twists that might be in the full game. That being said, if you're good enough at typing then Keys of Fury is basically just... typing, typing things in order and making sure you don't mistype. Other typing games like Tyfortress: Tactical Typing have elements of target prioritization and of attention as a resource, where you need to be prioritizing fast enemies while still keeping an eye out for slower moving bosses with huge paragraphs—all elements which Keys of Fury lacks.
Sokoban!Translator's note: Sokoban means block pushing puzzle. The sokoban twist here is that you play as a sticky guy and any time you get orthogonally adjacent to any other sticky guys you stick together and now you're that shape, sort of like in Sokobond except without the chemistry theme. You have only a limited number of moves you can make to collect all the gems in the level before you instantly die and have to restart.
Sokoban has been done to death. You could probably sit down for a full half hour just thinking of possible twists or new mechanics for a sokoban game, and someone has likely already done every single one of them. Some of them are great games! The aforementioned Sokobond is great, Stephen's Sausage Roll is great, Paquerette Down the Bunburrows is mind-bogglingly hard for a cute game about bunnies, Void Stranger does insane twists like no other game, the list goes on and on. GluMe just does not present an interesting enough new idea for me to be interested in it, I didn't find having limited moves to be all that fun or represent engaging puzzle design, and the game lacks even an undo button, which if there was some kind of point to I couldn't tell.
A (kind of) one-button rage game obviously copying Getting Over It, except with your one button controlling pinball flippers which you use to send your character (who is trapped in a pinball) flying through a large maze with, of course, lots of opportunities to fall down and lose a bunch of progress.
I have a lot of respect for Getting Over It, and so I lack a lot of respect for the ways in which A Pinball Game That Makes You Mad seems to be copying certain elements from it while not really understanding the point. Bennett Foddy's narration isn't meant to taunt you in Getting Over It, and the game wasn't called A Climbing Game Where You Will Fall and Rage. Here's one of the very first things Foddy says in Getting Over It (referring to another game which inspired him), which I think is a decent summary of the ethos:
The obstacles in Sexy Hiking are unyielding, and that makes the game uniquely frustrating, but I’m not sure Jazzuo intended to make a frustrating game. The frustration is just essential to the act of climbing, and it’s authentic to the process of building a game about climbing.
In contrast, APGTMYM's narrator seems to be going mostly for smarmy taunting rather than Foddy's more philosophical comments on game design, motivation, and art.
That being said, taking APGTMYM on its own rather than just comparing it to its influences, it's honestly not bad. Pinball is an inherently... not random, but dynamic game where sometimes things just aren't realistically in your control, which can end up feeling a little unfair if it means you tumble back down somewhere and lose a lot of progress. To slightly mitigate that there actually is the option to "nudge" the entire world slightly left or right (like an actual pinball cabinet), which I think is a good feature. Despite losing quite a lot of progress more than once I never felt myself really raging, mostly because I was having a good amount of fun just going through the pinball obstacle-course world.
There are some strange design decisions which seem contrary to the ethos of being a rage game: namely, an option to slow down the entire speed of the game at any time, which would obviously make it easier to line up the ball with exactly where you want the flipper to throw it.Personally, I never used this feature. The game also optionally allows you to enable checkpoints, which strikes me as strongly contradictory. All this being said, despite having nowhere near as much artistic value as Getting Over It, I actually did have some amount of fun with APGTMYM, and might actually go back to it later to get farther into the demo.
A game about climbing in a megastructure, I thought Primal Echo displayed a lot of promise and is definitely worth checking out even if I had various problems with it. I recommend you just go play this demo, I'm not going to describe it in too much more depth. Instead, let's talk about some of the design decisions.
Telling you an anecdote from my time in the demo might be the best way to get at some of the issues I had. At one point while exploring I came across a button on the ground that, when depressed, held open a gate which slowly closed once the button was no longer pressed. Imagining that I might be left trapped if I didn't find a way to keep the button pressed, I turned around and made the climb back down to where I knew a large rock was on the ground, then climbed back up with the rock strapped to my back so that I could leave it on the button. I dropped the rock on the button, and due to janky physics it went flying off into the abyss. Instead of going back for another rock I just went into the room, and it turned out to be the intended progression path where you get another upgrade, and the fact that the gate closes behind you doesn't matter because there's another exit that loops back to a different part of the megastructure.
Let's go through that one at a time. First, there's no avoiding it, the physics for objects is just buggy. Objects that you just drop on the ground will go flying, and at one point I picked up a rock and began sliding backwards and floating through the air.In a strange coincidence, it looked almost exactly how the Bomb Clip glitch looks in Super Mario 64. That's not a matter of game design though, just implementation—more important is everything else going on there. In a game like Rain World, you explore a world which you're just alive in, not one that was built for you as the player. What this means is that if you're not careful, you can fall into pits that you can't climb back out of, you can get yourself trapped behind gates that close behind you, and so on. Basically, you need to actually be careful in your movement and keep an eye out for situations where you might get stuck.
Obviously in some sense all worlds in video games are built for the player, but hopefully you understand the distinction that I'm drawing here.
In Primal Echo, this is not the case, and I think on the whole the game is too forgiving—fall off a ledge into a bottomless pit and the fungus which has attached itself to your spine (and which serves as the game's unobtrusive tutorial and guide) will automatically rescue you, dragging you back to the last safe place you stood. Having gone back to test it, you actually can't die in the demo, which means that unlike in Rain World (where the titular torrential downpour comes along regularly, killing all creatures on the surface which have not found shelter), the developers can't trap you, because you can't die and reset. I played carefully and deliberately anyways, but the knowledge that any mistakes or careless decisions had no consequences to them made it difficult to get immersed in the same way as other similar games.
Compare the approach White Knuckle takes to making a game about climbing a megastructure: Primal Echo is more about exploration and has a more open and isolated atmosphere compared to White Knuckle's linear anxiety-inducing time-attack nature. That said, White Knuckle still manages to be more immersive: die in White Knuckle and your run is completely over, kicking you back to the very bottom even if you're a meter away from the very end. This punishing nature where any missed handhold might be the end of a 30 minute run means that when I'm playing White Knuckle I am locked in, which is how it should feel to climb a megastructure not built for your inhabitation.
Despite my criticism I still do think Primal Echo displays better design sensibility than many games, and I'm incredibly impressed with the scope of what it seems like the full game will offer. There are a large number of alternate paths in the demo with "not available in demo" next to them, which might help alleviate the feeling of linearity or like the game world was designed for you.
A pure puzzle game where you hop rabbits along and over each other to have them reach the exit in a limited number of moves. I don't know if my brain was fried from playing too many demos or if this is just another deceptively insanely hard puzzle game about bunnies like Paquerette Down the Bunburrows, but I got filtered by like the fourth level. I didn't really find the puzzle mechanics all that interesting anyways.
Q-UP is a satire of esports and ranked competitive games, where the "game" is just a coin being flipped, and the first "team" to get 3 heads or 3 tails wins. I didn't really find it funny at all, and if there was some kind of point being made I don't think it was made very coherently. I think there's actually some kind of "gameplay" here in the form of constructing a build which gives you more player XP and gold and such depending on various coin events? Personally, I'm aggressively uninterested in anything like that, and it's all a little too clicker-adjacent for me to want to dedicate any more time to thinking about it.For context, Q-UP is made by the devs behind Universal Paperclips.
A picture says a thousand words, so this video should be worth a few million.
Another game about climbing in a sort-of-megastructure (sort of just abandoned construction ruins), MOTORSLICE is a lot more Mirror's Edge flavored, with lots of physics-defying wallruns and wallkicks and pole swinging and such.
I think that despite what that high-energy clip might suggest, the value of MOTORSLICE is in being a chill game. There are a lot of spots where you can take a rest from climbing to trigger some slice of life dialogue segments between the protagonist and her camera drone. Personally, I triggered one of these accidentally at the very start while testing out my buttons and then immediately resolved to skip every single one of them from then on.Apparently, the protagonist is voiced by the same voice actress who was the English voice of 2B, in Nier: Automata. There was a little too much cute-girl-ism in it for my tastes, but it's admirable that the game lets you completely skip these segments if you're not interested.
No, when I say that the value of MOTORSLICE is in chilling out, mostly I'm talking about the climbing itself. If you were to order climbing in different video games on a completely made-up axis, MOTORSLICE's would end up a lot closer to Uncharted than Mirror's Edge, and certainly nothing even close to White Knuckle. Basically, it's just not that hard or interactive? This isn't necessarily a problem, it's just why I say that the value mostly comes from chilling out and appreciating the scenery, the drum-n-bass music, and the atmosphere.
The value is certainly not in the combat, which struck me as completely unnecessary and immensely boring, as enemies both kill you in one single hit and die in one single hit. Killing them is a matter of walking up to them and pressing the attack button once, and maybe pressing the dodge button once if you misspaced your attack. I happened to read the patch notes for the demo and noticed that apparently there's a parry, which strikes me as slightly misguided. The game blocks you off from progressing with an invisible wall unless you kill all the enemies—I think this is justified with the lore being that you're here to destroy all of the machines, but it feels pretty arbitrary.
Probably the highlight of the entire demo was grabbing onto that boss shown above as it's moving about trying to flatten you, it's a very cool set piece and seems impressive to me on a technical level. I'd apologize about spoiling it, but I'm pretty sure it's in the trailer on the store page.
The best way I can describe Rebel Engine is it's a bit as to ULTRAKILL as Hi-Fi Rush is to Devil May Cry. No, it doesn't have rhythm game elements, I mean that it's a more cartoonisly stylized, more narrative-focused take on the genre, in this case being "spectacle FPS". Again I'll eschew describing it too in-depth and just encourage you to play the demo yourself.
I think that the decision to have reloading a gun rely on firing a different is a smart one, as it mechanically encourages the kind of weapon swapping combos that people love about ULTRAKILL without relying on the player caring about a style meter. In practice though, I felt that something felt slightly off about the weapon swapping—I think it might be that the input buffer for firing immediately after swapping is too short, meaning that it sometimes felt like an input got dropped if I shot before the weapon switch animation was fully completed. Throwing enemies into other enemies is also a very stylish way to fight, but I found that the hit registration on the enemy being thrown into seemed either inconsistent or like it needed to be incredibly precise, which was frustrating.
There's a strange option to have your camera view snap to enemies turned on by default, which I find incredibly bizarre. I don't know if it's meant for people playing on controllers or something, but despite disabling it I still occasionally could tell that my view was snapping, which felt terrible and threw me off every time it happened.
Sorry, am I sounding too critical? It's easier to note flaws in something which is otherwise fairly good, just go play it.
Another pure puzzler, this time with some Metal Gear Solid VR mission aesthetics. You move around a grid and have to hack all of the chess pieces (which move automatically like the pieces they are) before making your way to the exit. On each stage the game will list additional restrictions you can complete the puzzle under in order to get extra stickers, like "complete the stage in only 6 moves". These restrictions actually end up making things far easier, because they give you constraints to work within. Being told that a puzzle can be solved in 5 moves gives you quite a lot of information as compared to if you were just left on your own, so it wasn't hard to just find the line that immediately solves every stage in the minimum number of moves, immediately getting all of the stickers. I solved every puzzle on offer in the demo and thought they were fine, although I don't think I was really sold on the full game.
It's Hotline Miami. If you like Hotline Miami, probably you'll like this? I haven't actually played Hotline Miami, so I couldn't tell you, although I guess that means I can tell you that Jackal was fun enough on its own without any kind of nostalgia value.
My impression of Hotline Miami is that a lot of the enemies are pretty static and you have to find some way to approach them without getting shot, whereas in Jackal the enemies are constantly swarming you, which makes it really easy to just camp a corner with a baseball bat and just swing them all down as they come to you. Not a very stylish or blood-pumping way to play, but beyond a player bringing their own intrinsic motivation to play stylishly I don't think there was any incentive to not do this in every stage.
The levels in Jackal are randomized each time you play them, which I think is a bad idea.I don't mean that they're randomized each time you die and reset, but once you beat a level if you come back to it later or if you restart the campaign then they will not be the same as before. I think part of the appeal of a game like Hotline Miami is getting that perfect run on a level where you have your line all planned out and then you execute it flawlessly. In Jackal, coming back to a level that gave you a lot of trouble doesn't allow you that chance for mastery, because it'll be completely different. I feel like I notice a lot of game developers reaching for randomization or roguelite elements as a way to offer their game replayability, and I think that this is a perfect example of the way in which that can be completely counterproductive.
Other random thoughts: there are a lot of pedestrians and bystanders littering many of the levels, who run around scared. They can get in your way and also block bullets (from you or from the enemies), which I think is a nice dynamic little touch. When I played I went out of my way to not kill any of them just because I thought it'd be more interesting, but as far as I can tell there's no mechanical effect or penalty from whether you kill them or not. Maybe in the full game there'll be some hidden ending based on if you killed any or not, but I doubt it—personally I think they're a great addition and let players do their own self-imposed challenge, and get that slight bit more immersed in the world.
Finally, this happened to me, and I'm still a little salty about it:
If you could see that alligator among those bodies then you have better eyesight than I do. Anyways, check Jackal out, you might like it.
A "battle royale" typing game where if you make too many mistakes a dude standing menacingly over your desk will play russian roulette with your head. In a room with a bunch of other typists who also have dudes standing over them, if you type your way to the end of the text first you live, and if you're anything other than first you get shot in the head and lose.
Is this really a battle royale? There's no element of interactivity with the players you're playing "against" except for the fact that voice chat is enabled. I won the first three or so of my matches which felt great, and then I got to experience what it was like to not be the fastest typist in the room: you just get immediately stopped, told that you lost, and ventilated.
There's a fun tactile nature to the typing and the atmosphere is good, but as a battle royale it really leaves a lot to be desired. In a way it's barely any different than TypeRacer, but even TypeRacer lets you finish out what you're typing if you're not in first place.
You type about five lines at a time before being faced with an enforced waiting section, which I'm not sure what the point of was—possibly the waiting is longer the faster you are, as some attempt to balance the game out? If that was the case I didn't ever notice a difference in how long I had to wait depending on my position. Mostly I found myself getting annoyed at these waiting sections, as if the point of them wasn't to slow down players in the lead, they mostly came across as just padding the match time.
I ask again: what makes a good typing game? Even as someone who types with an average words per minute of 140 and who has wasted far more of my life on TypeRacer than anyone should, I still lost a few matches to some other typing gods out there. Getting completely stopped, told that you lost, shot in the head and then booted back to the main menu is frankly not all that fun, so I can't imagine that the many typists slower than me are having all that much fun. I thought part of the appeal of the battle royale genre was that other players naturally take each other out, so occasionally even if you're not the best player in the lobby you can just survive long enough and end up clinching out a victory. That will never happen in Final Sentence.
I think Final Sentence needs some kind of twist, some different mechanic, something different than what it has now.
It speaks to the addictive nature of the automation genre that I spent a long time completing everything on offer in the Exofactory demo despite it having perhaps the worst presentation, tutorial, UI, and many other aspects out of any demo that I've played.
A list of complaints:
Your game can't have a bunch of voice acting when your microphone is horrible and has constant white noise in the background.
You should not have your tutorial consist of voice acting which you can't skip but also can't go back to review, also interspersed with random philosophical tangents about whether the robot I control has real desires or not.
You should not assume that your automation game whose audience primarily consists of people with hundreds of hours in Factorio does not know how to use an interact button.
You should, nevertheless, inform the player of which button opens the inventory, rotates pieces, switches camera views, and so on.
I could go on, but I probably shouldn't. Exofactory feels like a game that could not possibly have ever been playtested with anyone who the developer hadn't explained everything to first. It's a bit like if Factorio's protagonist was more like the protagonist of a triple-A game, constantly talking to himself with lines like "I'LL FOCUS ON FINDING SOME ORE FOR NOW, HMM LET'S UNEARTH SOME BLUEPRINTS FOR A MINING MACHINE" and you couldn't place down any miners or drillers before he finished his monologue.
There are some cool ideas here, like the player character being a drone where you can build more drones and switch between them to instantly "move" to a different part of your factory, but it's clear that Exofactory needs far more time in the oven.
Crashout Crew is an Overcooked!-like about piloting a forklift and stacking boxes to fulfill orders in a warehouse all with some slight theming of taking a stab against Amazon and hustle culture and such. Gameplay-wise it's not quite as ruthlessly efficiency-focused as something like Wilmot's Warehouse, but nor did I find it as frantically chaotic as Overcooked!.
I think it's well polished. The intended experience for these kinds of games is typically couch co-op, which Crashout Crew lacks. There's online co-op but no random matchmaking, so I ended up just playing the demo myself. I'm not sure how representative of the overall intended experience this really is, but I still enjoyed myself. A lot of the fun in Overcooked! comes from stage hazards and strange kitchen layouts that you have to work around, and Crashout Crew has some elements just like that: you'll end up having to pick modifiers like whether you want meteors to rain down on you occasionally, or if you want some of your boxes to become haunted by ghosts and throw themselves around. In the first stage you're just moving plain boxes of fruits, but the second already sees you moving onto boxes filled with bees and jars of honey, all of which will smash apart if you're too careless with them.
I think the lack of couch co-op is a pretty big blow: I've never felt the desire to organize an online session of a game like Overcooked! with any of my friends, but if you're just hanging out at someone's place it's a pretty fun game to just throw on. I feel basically the same way about Crashout Crew: not something I think I'd encourage my friends to buy so we could play together, but if it had couch co-op I bet we'd all have a pretty good time playing it. I recognize that there are technical issues involved with getting that to work, as the levels in Crashout Crew don't all fit on a single screen and thus would require some kind of split screen or very zoomed out camera, but I can't deny that it feels like a big oversight.
Starting us off we have Homura Hime, a character action game. Action games like this are in a bit of a sad state for me as an enjoyer of games like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta because it seems like the only ones still being made are irredeemable gacha trash like Zenless Zone Zero, which I have no interest in. Homura Hime certainly reminded me a lot more of the latter than the former, with anime stylings and constant interruptions from your shrine maiden companion character who I'm certain you're meant to find adorable, but whose dialogue I mostly found completely worthless and skipped.
Also mostly worthless is basically everything you do in the demo between fights, including platforming segments glued together with a context-sensitive grappling hookAre there people who still find these to represent interesting gameplay or some kind of cool feature? At least the platforming segments in Hi-Fi Rush had some timing elements to them, the ones here you could basically sleepwalk through. and boxes you can smash to pick endless amounts of useless shit up. Still, beyond all the crust, at the core of it Homura Hime actually did have enjoyable enough combat for me. It's nothing outstanding, there's the standard fare of color-coded attacks you'll need to either parry or dodge (as in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance), but there was one aspect that actually did strike me as original: occasionally an enemy will pull you into a sort of 3D bullet hell segment sort of reminiscent of Furi or the bosses in Nex Machina where you need to tightly weave back and forth between bullet patterns or occasionally jump over lasers and such. I thought this had something of a nice rhythm to it, with you wailing on a boss up close while dodging and parrying, and then having a section of more forced dodging, and I could see it being more interesting in the full game with some more complicated boss encounters.
I won't be picking up Homura Hime, but if you're more into these anime-styled action games than I am, maybe check this one out. It took me about a half hour to beat the demo, skipping basically all dialogue.
A 2D metroidvania with a lot of similarities to Hollow Knight, I have nothing but positive things to say about Constance.A lot more than I would have to say about Hollow Knight itself, actually. Everything here is well put together, from the art to the movement to a large amount of meaningful quality of life features. As an example, clicking in the right stick immediately pops up the map in miniature, with the right stick itself letting you scroll around, all while still moving about in the overworld.
This might sound small, but it's just seamless, and it represents the kind of polish visible throughout the entire game. Another example would be getting a camera early on, which lets you take a screenshot, pinning that screenshot to where it was taken on the map, with the ability to keep more pictures pinned at a time being something you can find upgrades for throughout the world. Any metroidvania fan knows the pain of a game having a poorly implemented in-game map where items or important features aren't marked. Arguably keeping track of things like this in your head without any sort of map assistance is a skill the game could test you on, but in practice taking screenshots is something already natively available on basically any system people play games on.If you're going to include a map in the first place, it's already a concession against the notion of testing players on memorization. Personally, I have maybe hundreds of screenshots of La Mulana 2 in addition to pages and pages of handwritten notes, and I genuinely can't imagine someone beating the game without doing the same. My point is, if players already can and do take screenshots to make note of something, it might as well be built into the game, and the system here for doing so is brilliant.
The combat and movement feel great. You have your basic Hollow Knight slash (horizontal-only, though) and later unlock a longer-range poke which can also go up and down. That poke makes use of your stamina-like paint meter, which you also pull from to dash, either on the air or on the ground. The enemies are built nicely around your mechanics, with some enemies needing to be doused in paint from your poke before they can be hurt, and some needing to be dashed through and hit from behind. Certain environmental hazards also require you to hit them with a paint attack to dodge them, to get past them, or as part of a timed platforming challenge. I think the design space is pretty wide open, and I was impressed with what I saw in the demo, so there are sure to be even more tricks in store in the full game.
There's probably more I could talk about here (like some of the the surprisingly difficult optional platforming challenges), but I think I've said enough. I was strongly impressed by Constance having not really had any expectations, and I'm now looking forward to the full game. The demo took me about 25 minutes to beat.
A cross between a bullet hell and a roguelite deckbuilder, Decks of Dexterity ends up with the worst parts of both and the charm of neither. You play as a square moving around a square arena dodging other squares and picking up the correctly colored squares so that you can take your turn in the deckbuilding part of the game. I didn't find much interest from the angle of a good bullet hell—some patterns are undodgable and require you to make use of teleports (which you can get access to using your cards, when it's your turn), and none of the patterns were all that interesting. As for the cards, they basically all involve you shooting bullets back at the boss, without much variation and without the choice of which card you play seeming to really matter much: for an average pull from the starting deck, for instance, you can choose to shoot 9 bullets, or shoot 6 bullets and get an instant teleport to somewhere else. Obviously like any roguelite deckbuilder there'll be tons to unlock in the full game, but as was presented in the demo, the decisions I made didn't really seem to matter much. Worth noting is that when it comes time for you to take your turn playing cards the entire game pauses for you to make a decision, so if you're a shmup fan looking to get into the zone of dodging, that won't really be a thing here.
If you're at all halfway competent at dodging squares being shot at you, I don't think there's much of interest on offer here. The attempt at genre fusion is praiseworthy, but in this case I don't think it landed.
A bit like Devil Daggers in a fully 3D environment with the aesthetic of Star Fox, in Death in Abyss you pilot a ship and try to survive while destroying vaguely virus-like creatures as you're assailed from all directions.
This is a curious one for me. Unlike Devil Daggers where your only goal was survival, Death in Abyss is a campaign divided into various missions, which feels like it takes away from some of the elegance of just trying to survive as long as possible. The game is also astoundingly hard, and I died many many times and barely made it through the first mission in my time playing the demo. Part of that difficulty might be an unfamiliarity with dodging in a fully 3D environment, which you'll need to be competent with to proceed. Death in Abyss even includes a button for switching the camera to a rear-view, from which you can shoot backwards while still piloting your ship forwards. Even as a veteran of shooters you may find it a bit of a trip to get used to looking back to shoot and then changing direction while looking forward. More than few times I dodged directly into enemies after switching views, having slightly confused myself on what direction moving my mouse would actually take me.
It's obvious the game takes a lot of skill, and I found the challenge on offer extremely tough but pretty much fair. My only trepidation would be with regard to the campaign structure, but I don't think it warrants all that much concern.
Key Fairy describes itself as "A hand-drawn, pacifist, folkloric, bullet-hell", all of which is true except for maybe the bullet hell part. As a forest spirit nymph thing you'll be merrily slip sliding and grappling hooking your way around some lush but ominous 2D environments where occasionally you'll be trapped in a room with some enemies which you'll need to dodge as you collect the stars they occasionally give off in order to damage them and complete the encounter. Definitely not "bullet hell" in any of the 22 minutes that I played, although the movement did have a very great sense of momentum to it with the grappling hook, which made exploring around fairly enjoyable in and of itself. It really seems to be to be more about the exploration than the combat, as well as the interactions with the curious creatures you come across. You'll be collecting keys and lanterns and bits and bobs all while forward and backtracking your way through the forest on your journey.
The writing is a little twee for my tastes, which is not to speak ill of it, just to recognize that it's not really my thing. I could easily see how this could be completely captivating for a lot of people, it has the feeling of being something that people point to as a hidden gem.
BOMCAT is a single screen arcade-game where you run around and throw bombs, clearly inspired by Donkey Kong—the original, where Jumpman goes over the barrels and rescues Pauline. As someone who probably respects the original Donkey Kong (and classic arcade games in general) more than most, I didn't feel like this one had a ton of sauce. The bomb trajectory when throwing was a little hard to predict which gave the entire thing a feeling like I was constantly scrambling rather than doing anything really well considered. The goal in every stage of BOMCAT is to blow up all of the computer terminals, which is a little weird and doesn't feel quite as natural or as elegant as Donkey Kong's "reach the top" or "get rid of all of the supports so the dude falls". I guess the computers are like shield generators for the giant octopus kidnapping your girlfriend? It feels a little random.
Still, like any great arcade game it's easy to just pick it up and start playing, so if this one looks at all interesting to you, maybe check it out.
I'm committed to reviewing every demo that I play here for various reasonsIn part just as personal record, in part out of a probably misguided notion that a negative review might help someone avoid wasting their time, in part because if I were a game developer for something which might be highly obscure, I'd prefer to see someone give some thoughts on it somewhere—even if highly negative—rather than have the writer decide that it's not even worth talking about., which occasionally means reviewing a game like this. This is... not good or worth spending a lot of time or words on. I'm not trying to come across as insulting, but it has the feeling of a game made by a young child who might forget to make things make sense to someone else, because everything makes sense to them (feel free to guess how I would know what that feels like). If you can get more than 10 minutes into it, you're far more patient than me.
I download some demos based completely on a whim or just based on the tags (this one had the tag "spectacle fighter", which is not true), so occasionally I see stuff like this. It's fine, occasionally coming across some jank is in the spirit of Next Fest I'd say, not like it cost me anything.
Continuing on with the theme of jank, here's another one I downloaded because of the "spectacle fighter" tag. It's meant to be a sort of PvP character action game—I spent a while going through the tutorial and checking out the various characters, all of which do actually have some pretty cool designs to them. Unfortunately the game ran at about 19 FPS for me, and despite waiting for a while to try the PvP with another real person, I never ended up getting matched with anyone. There was an option to play against a CPU, but I decided to just move on to the next game.
Maybe one day I'll come back to this one if the technical issues get worked out / I can actually fight someone else? It honestly seems promising.
I am a gigantic fan of Enhance, the developer of this. Tetris Effect is one of my favorite games of all time, and now Lumines has been given the Tetris Effect treatment.
Let me take a step back.
Lumines is sort of an arcade survival puzzler similar to Tetris. Rather than dropping tetronimoes to clear lines, you'll be dropping 2x2 blocks onto a wide playfield. Each individual square of those 2x2 blocks will be one of two colors. Your goal is to drop your blocks such that the individually colored squares themselves form into 2x2 squares (or larger). Then, a scanline constantly moving from left to right across the screen will clear the colored squares away—you know what, it might be easier to just show you (to be clear, this is footage from the previous Lumines game).
If you couldn't tell from the video, Lumines is a very musical experience, and in a lot of ways it's basically the precursor to Tetris Effect. The music is synced up to your actions, with every rotation or movement of a piece playing some click or tap or drum hit that's unique to the song being played, and after you've cleared enough blocks the stage will seamlessly transition to the next visual theme and corresponding song. I personally never could get good at Lumines in the same way that I'm good at Tetris, but with absolute bangers in the game like SHAKE YA BODY, I hear the music in my soul, or even Lights, it almost doesn't even really matter—it's fun just playing and seeing how long I can survive.
Lumines Arise is Lumines back with a slick new coat of paint, a brand new original soundtrack from Hydelic, and one or two new game mechanics.There's now a "burst" meter you can build up to clear a bunch of blocks in an emergency, sort of similar to the ZONE mechanic in Tetris Effect. I'm here for all of it. If any of this sounds at all interesting to you, I encourage you to check this out: playing Tetris Effect has gotten me into a pure flow state of connectedness with a game in a way that nothing else ever has, and I could feel the same thing in the stages of the demo available here for Lumines Arise.
Playing a lot of demos, you lose patience pretty quickly for games wasting your time. It's surprising how often developers don't put their best foot forward, starting off with some long dialogue or unimpressive cutscene which doesn't represent the gameplay or stand as being very interesting on its own. That's why A Fox Tale is so refreshing to me, despite being a pretty standard platformer. It's just a platformer, you move from level to level quickly if you can make the jumps, there are some optional collectibles which involve harder jumps, and it's all a little Celeste inspired with a wall cling, climb, and airdash you get later. I don't mean to give the impression that I don't care for story or dialogue—there is dialogue and a story being told here and I liked it well enough, but I liked it in part because it breaks up the levels rather than preceding them, doesn't overstay its welcome, and isn't any more complicated than it needs to be.
A Fox Tale is simple, but well done. Sometimes you just wanna jump.
A 2D isometric boss rush game with interesting mechanics, Rubinite had a few too many interruptions for my tastes in its demo. You slash and dodgeroll around bosses, but the only way to do appreciable damage to them is to make use of a mechanic where you build up marks on the boss before performing a single slash which deals much more damage the more marks you have built up. Building up those marks involves being forced to stand completely still, with you building them up quicker the closer you are to a boss. I thought it all felt pretty good, and had an obvious sense of risk versus reward: if you want to kill the boss faster, you need to stand closer and give yourself less time and space to dodge.
It's clear the full game has some big ambitions, with an entire Hollow Knight-style charm system, world map, and an attempt at a narrative far deeper than you might expect for a boss rush game visible in the demo. This mostly didn't captivate me, but that's not to say that any of it was bad, just that in the context of a demo being a small vertical slice of an entire game that aspect was far less important to me than focusing on the gameplay.
I have a bit of an interest in purely one-button games, which Super Blowfish Castle is. I think it's an interesting design exercise to see the range of possibilities where the only interaction is a single button: Bauhaus Bonk, for instance, is quite a different game than Good Knight. Super Blowfish Castle is all about rolling a tiny fish through a toylike Rube Goldberg machine where the one button you press swings hammers, lifts flippers and pulls open gates in order to get the fish to the end of the course. The challenge here mostly comes from timing things right so that the fish doesn't fall off the track or crash into a gate you didn't open in time. It's not very challenging: I'd say the appeal lies mostly in the toylike nature of it, just watching the cute fish go through the obstacle course which gets more and more complex every level.
Soul Dier is a tactics game in the vein of something like Fire Emblem, except with guns. It's well made, but beyond having guns rather than the traditional melee combat of a standard TRPG, didn't seem to have any kind of unique twist or selling point to me. I played two of the combat missions on offer and they pretty much involved shooting the enemy, maybe moving into a position behind them to get extra damage, maybe moving into cover for my own damage mitigation. There were "spells", but they were also basically just variants on shooting guns. If you're a fiend for TRPGs or if the notion of a TRPG with guns sounds great to you then maybe check it out, apart from that I don't think there's much else to recommend.
Air Hares dares to ask: what if in a shmup instead of shooting enemies, you watered crops on the ground to grow carrots? Well, I can answer, it would be a lot less interesting. If the game actually involved independently targeting the ground while needing to dodge complex patterns it might have been a lot more engaging, but as it stands the only way to control where you fire is to fiddle around with your position so the game will automatically softlock onto tiles on the ground, rather than directly targeting them yourself. It's difficult to convey fully through words, but trust me in that it had terrible gamefeel. There also aren't really bullet patterns as in a traditional shmup, there are much fewer and larger enemies that try to charge into you, with dodging them involving just timing a button press. Skip this one.
Another one-button game, Jamp is a mobile game port. You control a little orb guy who automatically moves back and forth bouncing into walls and turning directions, with your button press controlling when it jumps. I guess you could call it an autorunner, if autorunners were more about ascending tricky platforming towers rather than moving to the side. Jamp was an incredibly short demo—I beat the three levels available in it and my playtime is listed as one single minute. I've now spent more time writing this review than I did playing it.
I did actually enjoy it and I think it's a fun concept, but I wish that it were more of a "real" game rather than being purely a mobile game port.
A puzzle game mostly about rotating square mazes divided into four sections in order to pass through them, although there are also some language translation puzzles which maybe hinted at something deeper than the mostly basic primary puzzles on offer. I always keep my eyes keenly peeled for any game like La Mulana,Or like Blue Prince, if you're more familiar. although I don't really think that this is a game like that. It seems much more straightforwardly like a progression of puzzle to puzzle, with you going up and down an elevator where each floor is another one of the main rotating square puzzles, with an optional sort of gravity-based sliding block puzzle also being on each floor. The formula of main puzzle + side optional puzzle on each floor was fine, but got a bit repetitive. The one language translation puzzle that I completed in the demo didn't really wow me, but the mechanics of it clearly left space open for something a lot more complicated.
I imagine that the full game will have some more depth, but personally I think I'll leave it for someone else to check out the full game and let me know how deep it really goes.
This is a sad one for me. It Consumes is an amazing concept, a Devil Daggers-like arena survival FPS in a pitch black arena where you need to send out a sort of radar pulse to even see enemies. The aesthetic is great, oppressive but with fairly good visual clarity while still remaining distinct from Devil Daggers.
Why is it a sad one, then? Because every so often once you've collected enough XP from defeated enemies, the game will screech to a halt, pausing entirely so that you can pick one of three perks:
This is horrible. It's maybe the single worst design decision I've encountered in every demo I've played, and it sullies what would be an otherwise incredible game. All of the action pausing every minute or so completely prevents you from getting into a flow state, it removes all tension as you context switch from frantic survival against hordes of demons and skulls into considering whether or not 15% extra damage or 15% more stamina recovery would be better for your build. Imagine if when playing Tetris, every 30 lines you cleared the game paused to let you ponder some upgrades. If you've never really gotten into the zone or gotten into a serious flow state playing a game you might not get why this is such a big deal, but trust me when I say that it's a feeling like no other, and that a game can get you into a state like that is high praise.
I hate Vampire Survivors for a lot of different reasons, but one of them is the proliferation of developers copying these kinds of pick 3 mechanics into games they have no business being in, like this. It all just feels misguided: Devil Daggers didn't need roguelite elements in order to be replayable—if anything, it was more replayable for the lack of them. Getting better at the game to get a higher time spent alive and a higher place on the leaderboard is motivation enough for a large amount of replayability. Similarly, if It Consumes wanted to include build diversity and different upgrades or such, that didn't have to come from pausing the action every so often: KILL KNIGHT was another Devil Daggers inspired arena survival game with different builds, but you just decided your build before you started playing.Personally, I'm not even really much of a fan of the way that KILL KNIGHT has a bunch of different weapons, but there's no denying that the way they chose to implement them was better than if they had paused the gameplay in order to have you decide while you were playing. Alternatively, upgrades could've just dropped into the level or come from defeating enemies, and you walk into them to pick them up, like Quake.
Other minor quibbles: rather than taking place on a floating platform where you immediately die if you fall off (again, like Devil Daggers), It Consumes just has some markers denoting the edge of the play area, and if you spend more than 10 seconds outside of that, you die. This strikes me as a less elegant solution, and a change that I'm not sure adds much—maybe it might've been unfair to have a harsh edge in such a dark game, but the edge could've just been lit up.
I want to be clear about something: there's no reason to copy everything that Devil Daggers did, because it already exists. I'm a firm believer that games should never be married to convention, and should always be willing to rethink or retool mechanics that might be popular, expected, or conventional. I bring up other games as comparison because identical mechanics might have completely different impacts in different games, like pausing to pick 3 in a build-centric game Vampire Survivors versus a more action-oriented one like It Consumes. For instance, giving the player a timer to return to the play area is also something Death in Abyss did, but having a soft boundary like that makes more sense to me as a solution when you're navigating a fully 3D environment to prevent the player from just running away in one direction.
I still played It Consumes for a pretty decent amount of time, longer than almost all other demos I played here, but I can't help but feel very sour on the missed potential.
Update: the developer of this game implemented a difficulty mode which completely eliminates any mid-game perk picking, allowing you to just play the whole way through without any interruptions and with only the upgrades you select before the game applied. I went back to test the game like this and I think it plays a lot better, so I feel like I can recommend this one mostly without any reservations anymore, whether you love the Vampire Survivors-clones or you just love intense arena shooters.
A text adventure where you play as a sort of Robocop-esque cyborg in a dystopian world. There's not really any twist or mechanical novelty here, Soulfused is basically just a text adventure with some nice UI to keep track of the map, your inventory, and some art for the people you talk to. Are there text adventure purists for whom all this stuff is casualization? I couldn't tell you, I'm not much into them. Soulfused was well done though, about the only bad thing I have to say about it is an ear-shattering machine static sound effect near the end of the demo that was far far too loud. If you're into text adventures or you just love the dystopian cyperpunk-ish aesthetic, maybe check this one out.
I'm not normally much of a fan of city builders, but something about The people of Sea, Sun & Salt really captivated me, and it ended up being the demo I put by far the most amount of time into. There's a very calming but almost melancholic atmosphere to it, with the warm Mediterranean theming and the guitar music backing. In the game you'll be placing down houses, farms and stone quarries at first just to build up your resources before moving on to building temples and fountains to build up your people's faith. There's a large focus on proximity, so you'll end up bulldozing some houses you placed down earlier to make way for bigger houses that hold more people, which you want to cluster around central buildings like the temple, or various government offices.
There's an easygoing feeling to it—I think that if I were to play a game like Cities: Skylines I might get decision paralysis keeping the game paused to really try to master plan everything out, but Sea, Sun & Salt really lends itself to just placing things down and rebuilding later, which for me ultimately gave the island I was building on a very organically made feeling. More parts of the island will come up from the sea giving you more land to build on over time, and you'll also unlock new (and often bigger) buildings as you go on. Again, given the proximity-based nature of how people's houses need to be close to the buildings they go to, you end up naturally developing what feel like different neighborhoods, all clustered around central buildings like temples.
As you develop more you're faced with various choices of which kinds of policies you want to choose and what buildings you want to have available, like choosing between those giant centralized temples or tinier (and smaller capacity) shrines. At the very end of the demo I was even faced with choosing between Democracy—whether I wanted the people of the island to choose their policies themselves, without any control from me—or Autocracy, where I could choose them myself. I don't think it's quite as deep as something like Civilization's policy tree choices, but I thought that it still added some nice flavor. The demo ended at that last choice, but based on the visual shown I had barely scratched the surface of the full development of the island and the eventual amount of choices and new buildings and such unlocked.
It's neat, and I had fun with it. The screenshots on the store page are a lot more beautiful than the shantytown-looking island that I developed, but there's no doubt it's a very beautiful and calming game, helped along immensely by the somber guitar/lute backing music. At various points I stopped micromanaging building placement and just observed the days pass as the people moved about: from their houses to the fields or mines, to a park, past the fountains, to the well, back to their houses. I recommend The people of Sea, Sun & Salt even if you don't consider yourself a fan of city builders.
It's sort of like Sonic the Hedgehog, with even the ability to roll up into a ball and spin dash. I thought it was fine, well done for a retro-styled platformer. It does the New Super Mario Bros thing of having each level contain three optional collectibles that require you to go out of your way to find them, and for the most part they were fairly well hidden (I didn't even end up finding all of them in the demo). There are also some fun twists I don't think I've seen anywhere else, like an autoscrolling stage where you can control how fast the stage scrolls, speeding it up or slowing it down if you pass by certain markers:
This was actually a lot tricker than you might expect, it ended up being by far the hardest stage in the demo. It seems like this is a sort of companion game or sequel to a game that already exists just called Polyroll, so if you're into retro platformers, this one seems worth checking out to me.
Is your insatiable lust for demo reviews still not fulfilled? Read part two of the October next fest reviews.
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.
