Even more demo reviews! If you somehow missed part 1, you can find it here. As before, games with a star (★) next to them in the table of contents are ones I recommend checking out mostly without qualification. ⊕Table of Contents:
- Glisynth
- Keys of Fury
- GluMe
- A Pinball Game That Makes You Mad
- Primal Echo ★
- Rabbit's Hop
- Q-UP
- MOTORSLICE ★
- Rebel Engine ★
- Into the Dataswarm
- Jack's 510 Racing
- Jackal ★
- Final Sentence
- Exofactory
- Crashout Crew

Glisynth 🔗

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.

Keys of Fury 🔗

⊕

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.

GluMe 🔗

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 Pinball Game That Makes You Mad 🔗

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.

Primal Echo 🔗 ★

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.

Rabbit's Hop 🔗

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 🔗

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.

MOTORSLICE 🔗 ★

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.

Rebel Engine 🔗 ★

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.

Into the Dataswarm 🔗

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.

Jack's 510 Racing 🔗

A very jank very kusoge racing game. An AI-generated rock ballad started playing on the main menu and didn't stop even once I started racing.

It's not good. Kind of funny to play (not to sound mean-spirited), but yeah, not good.

Jackal 🔗 ★

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.

Final Sentence 🔗

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.

Exofactory 🔗

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 🔗

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.