⊕Table of Contents:
- Voxelgram 2
- AEROMACHINA: Test-Flight
- AiliA
- The Trolley Solution
- MotionRec
- Funi Raccoon Game
- Dice Gambit: The First Act
- Insider Trading Steam next fest is back already? Sounds like it's time to get back into the demo mine. There were a few demos that I played last next fest that I didn't get around to writing a little blurb on, so a quick shoutout to Squeakross: Home Squeak Home, a cute little Picross meets Animal Crossing game that's now fully out, and Metro Gravity, a sort of Mario Galaxy-like 3D metroidvania where you control gravity to fling yourself around. It's still in development, but the demo is decently expansive.

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.

Voxelgram 2 🔗

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.

AEROMACHINA: Test-Flight 🔗

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.

AiliA 🔗

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.

The Trolley Solution 🔗

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.

MotionRec 🔗

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.

Funi Raccoon Game 🔗

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.)

Dice Gambit: The First Act 🔗

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.

Insider Trading 🔗

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.