Of Mice And Cats

 Next Fest is over. There was a lot of talk about the event being ruined by a glut of vibe coded AI games but I can't say I saw any sign of it myself. I thought it was an above-average edition, if anything. I can remember writing about one a while back, where I could barely find half a dozen games I wanted to try and I know there were a couple where most of the demos I was interested in turned out to be nowhere near as interesting as I'd thought they were going to be. 

This time around, everything I picked was at least fully finished and functional. That has not always been the case in the past. Everything worked, nothing crashed and I didn't come across any bugs or glitches. I got stuck in a rock once but I managed to get out. That can happen in any game.

The three demos I have left to review don't really have that much in common but I want to get this finished so they're all going to have to share a post and like it. I'll start with the best of the three, which is also the one that looks like it's had the most time and money spent on it. Co-incidence? 

 

Hela: of Mice & Magic

The full game is coming in December. If you think that would mean a polished demo, you'd be right. Slick, even.

In what I'd consider something of a bravura move, the demo announces up front that there's no save option. You're expected to finish it in one session. I've played demos like that before but they've generally just not through the implications. This is entirely deliberate.

It's a developer that's confident their game is going to charm you so instantly and hook you so hard you won't even think of stopping 'til it's over. You're going to play a cute white mouse with a backpack and you're going to like it!

And I did. Not for want of trying not to, either. Despite having an animal protagonist and a woodland setting, Hela isn't really my kind of game. Or at least it isn't in this demo, which, as the promotional video tacked onto the end makes clear, shows only a very small subset of the kind of gameplay on offer in the full version.

The demo offers a "short adventure" that turns out to be mostly a tutorial. It's quest-based action with no combat and a lot of puzzle solving. Most of what you have to do relies on movement. It's not exactly a parkour game but there's a lot of climbing, gliding and web-swinging à la Spider-Man. Or Tarzan. Are there any Tarzan games any more? Were there ever?

 

That wouldn't be a fair description of the game itself, which seems to have a lot more crafting, interaction with people and animals and exploration, as well as a greater emphasis on co-op play. Speaking of co-op, even the demo has a puzzle that requires four people but in an excellent twist, there's a mechanic whereby your mouse can clone himself to group with himself. Mostly, though, the demo is an extended tutorial geared towards teaching you the basics, while also letting you have a good poke around the forest on your own.

Once I realized the degree of latitude it was allowing me, I had a much better time. Initially, the whole thing felt very much on rails as my mouse (Who doesn't even get a name, let alone any kind of characterization or cosmetic options.) was shepherded into a big cave, where it looked very much as though he (She?) was expected to do a lot of swinging about on ropes. 

I was not happy. I did not want to swing about on ropes. I have never played a Spider-Man game so I can't say if this is the same mechanic but I imagine swinging on one rope is much like swinging on any other. And I do not want to do it.

Since I'm on the subject of mechanics in the game, they're very solid. I can't fault them. Any negativity you're sensing (And you're not imagining it.) comes entirely from my innate dislike of the activities themselves, not the way they're implemented. If this is the sort of thing you like elsewhere, you'll almost certainly like it here, too.

Fortunately for me, it turned out the game did not want to tell me how to things at all. Just what it was I had to do. The demo comes with a set of goals to be completed before you can finish it (Other than just by giving up and logging out, of course. It's not cursed...). All you have to do is fix two Altars and collect forty-eight glimmers. 

 

That sounded like a lot to me but it was fine. There are way more than forty-eight of the glowing yellow motes the Witch calls "glimmers" (The Witch is the person who gives you your backpack and sends you out to fix the altars in the first place.) and fixing each altar just requires one simple task. 

For the first Altar you have to literally fix a broken horn back on (A careless moose knocked it off.), with sticky resin from a very tall pine tree. You could swing up there on your rope, which is what I think you're supposed to but I just climbed the tree. It was a lot simpler.

The second altar wants its lantern filled with fireflies so it won't be scared of the dark any more (Awww!). Again, you could chase all over the place, trying to catch the annoying insects, but I just stood in one place and waited for them to fly past, then snagged them with my rope. 

All of that plus a fair amount of exploring - it's a big area - took me an hour and twenty minutes. It didn't feel that long. It was good fun. There's a lot more to do in the demo area if you want to stick around (There's an excellent full walkthrough here, which I'm pleased to say I did not need while I was playing.) including a number of mini-games, which reward glimmer, so you have a choice there if exploring's not your thing . There are also half a dozen rituals to complete, all of which require a scavenger hunt if exploring is your thing.

 

Visually, the game is delightful. It's supposed to be representative the of Swedish countryside, which I'm sure it is. I've never been further north than Edinburgh so I wouldn't know. It looks lovely, anyway.

It also ran very comfortably on my onboard graphics. The minimum and recommended specs are really low for such a good-looking game. I did have to turn the mouse sensitivity to the lowest setting because on the default it was slewing around wildly enough to give me motion sickness but it was fine once I toned it down.

Very observant readers may have noticed I said yesterday that Hela could only be played with a controller. That is nonsense. A hallucination. More evidence I may, indeed, be an AI. 

Actually, I'm not going to take all the blame. What happens, when you press Play on Steam for the first time, is that a big window pops up with a picture of a controller on it, telling you that's the way to play the game. If you close that window with the X in the corner, like I did, the game stops running and throws you back to your Steam library.

I took that as more than a hint that a controller was required, not just preferred. It isn't. It's just a badly programmed window. You're supposed to press the button in the window to close it but I took that to mean "Yes, Sir! I have a controller, Sir! And I will use it, Sir!" when what it actually means is "Fine. I've read that. Now get out of my way and let me play the game however I want to play it.". It plays perfectly well with keyboard and mouse and it knows perfectly well that's what you're using. A lot of fuss about nothing. That I made.

Even though I did enjoy it, I haven't wishlisted the game because, as I said, it's not really my kind of thing. Eighty minutes was plenty. If the whole thing is as well-done as the demo, though, I think it could be quite a hit. Nimgimli picked it for the Fantasy Critic League. I think he's got picked a good one.

 

Et Le Grain Mourut

This is a visual novel. It took me just under half an hour to finish the demo, including all the possible variations. I did not enjoy any of them all that much.

I was bored, to tell the truth. The story, such as it is, didn't really seem to go anywhere, not in the demo, although I could see the seeds being planted for later. Who just reads the first chapter of a book and then stops, though?

From memory, the gist is that a bunch of teenagers are a week from their final exams, after which they'll all graduate high school. The place is Paris, the decade the 1920s. Meanwhile, they all hang out in a bar after school (With the full knowledge of their parents) and some of them get drunk. I don't know what the legal drinking age was in 1930s Paris, if there even was one, which now I think about it seems unlikely, but it would be pointless to try and pin down the historical accuracy anyway.

 

This is a game that looks old but feels modern. For example, one of the students is making a film in which the rest are acting and he's hearing-impaired so he uses sign language, which all his friends seem to know. One of the others doesn't like the script of the movie because of its very "heterosexual" nature. I have no real way of knowing how historically accurate those attitudes and behaviors might be for Paris in the 1920s but I do know the way they're expressed feels very 21st Century.

All off which would be absolutely fine if the game was entertaining. Unfortunately, I found it just a bit dull. I did read all the text, of which there's a lot, but after a few minutes I was skim-reading it at the fastest I can read, which is pretty fast.   

Nothing really happens and it doesn't help that the graphics, while very well-done, are also mostly static. Movement is limited to some nice two-dimensional models of the characters that slide on and off like the cardboard puppets in a model theater. Most of the backgrounds are sepia photographs of the period. It's done very cleverly but it's not to my taste.

It's also a long time before the player is required to do anything but read and watch. I thought there were never going to be any inflection points but eventually a couple of choices appeared.  

 

Normally, the way I play visual novels, I'd only ever have seen the choices I made but the game does have one mechanic I really liked and would love to see more widely used.

There's a somewhat misleadingly-labelled "Skip" button at the foot of the screen. I pressed it for some reason and instead of it skipping whatever I was doing at the time it flipped through the whole section of the game I'd just finished at extreme speed. Just a few seconds. 

I used it to retry all the options and there are some significant differences. You'd be able to cycle through every possible combination in a fraction of the time using that button. Seems like a great idea to me.

Other than that, I liked the art and design in the Portrait collection. As you talk to various characters (Or rather listen to them talk to you.) some of them become known to you and you get to add their portrait to  your journal. There appear to more features like that - there are tabs for several anyway - but I didn't see any of them in the demo.

Once again, Et le Grain Mourut seemed like a competently-made game that may well be a delight for someone. Just not for me. My loss, I'm sure. I didn't wishlist it, obviously.

 

The Brilliant Detective Milo

And finally, another perfectly good demo I didn't much enjoy. On paper, this one should have been my sort of thing but in practice it didn't do a lot for me. 

It's an investigation game featuring cartoon cats. The setting, which is confusingly explained, at first in a really quite badly-done comic strip and then, even more confusingly, in numerous cut-scenes featuring conversations between the cats, is a police station in Mew York. 

Yes, there are cat puns. A lot of cat puns.

In an entirely unbelievable set-up, you play a British private investigator, brought across the Atlantic to help catch a serial killer. Somehow, the not-Sherlock cat knows one of the detectives from way back and his pal invited him. I couldn't follow it and frankly I didn't try.

The gameplay consists of a series of interrogations. You read the crime report, witness statements and suspect dossiers and then you ask your questions. One of the suspects is always guilty. You just have to decide which. Once you pick, you then get an immediate verdict and your score is adjusted accordingly.

 

Every interrogation relies on you spotting certain clues. A very simple one would be that the crime report mentions the victim was struck by a right-pawed assailant and the dossiers note that one of the two suspects is a leftie. As the demo goes on, the number and complexity of clues you need to spot increases. It's a puzzle-matching game, effectively.

I found it reasonably easy to spot the clues but I didn't find it fun. Stressful, yes. My main problem was that although all the paperwork has the suspects' names clearly shown, those names don't appear on the interrogation screen. I could never remember which cartoon cat was which, leading me to condemn at least one innocent kitty because I couldn't remember which of the suspects was which. You can flip back during the investigation to check but would it really be so hard to put a name card on the desk in front of them?

It didn't help that the plot makes absolutely no sense. There's supposed to be a serial killer at work but every day Milo, if he gets it right, sends another killer to jail. And then the next day there's another killing That's not a serial killer - that's some kind of death cult! There is, inevitably, much talk of copycats...

I also found the game unexpectedly and unpleasantly graphic in its descriptions of the murders. Obviously, a game like this is always going to be inherently violent but the constant references to the victims having been "declawed" and the discussions over whether that happened before or after they were killed sat uncomfortably with the cartoonish art style and the generally humorous tone.

 

Visually, I also found The Brilliant Detective Milo somewhat aggressive. There are a lot of sharp angles and there's a good deal of chaos in the layouts. The colors aren't over-bright but the palette sits unrelentingly in the red zone. I found it tiring to look at after a while.

Not that long, though. I played the demo for a little less than forty minutes. I hadn't finished it by then. I'd just had enough.

Once again, I don't think it's in any way a bad game. It's well-made and everything works as it's supposed to. It's just that I didn't get much out of playing it other than some mild anxiety over making the wrong choices and a sense that I'd rather be playing something else.

I ought to try to remember, next time Next Fest rolls around: I don't like detective games nearly as much as I think I do, even if the detective is a cartoon cat. I didn't wishlist it, naturally.

In fact, I only wishlisted one demo this time, Kat Domino, and I very much doubt I'll buy that when it comes out. I mostly wishlisted it to give the developers that minimal push a tick on a Steam wishlist apparently provides.

It was literally the least I could do. 

Let's Talk Demos - And When I Say Talk...

 Next Fest ends today. Of the eight demos I selected, I've played six. The two I haven't tried yet are ArcheAge Chronicles, which is a 38GB download and which I never really meant to include as part of the official count and Hela: Of Mice & Magic, which can only be played with a controller. 

I do have a controller but when I went to look for it yesterday, I couldn't find it. I'll have another look today. That said, just knowing it's the only way the game can be played loses me most of whatever interest I had, so I might not look all that hard.

I wrote about two of the demos, World of Slime and Never Wither, on Thursday. I reviewed them together because they're both creature-catchers. They also have similarly open-ended demos with no specific end-point. I played each of them only for as long as I felt I needed to get a feel for what they were about. I haven't logged into either of them since, even though there's plenty left to do, so I doubt I'll be adding either to my wishlist.

Today, I'm going to lump the remaining four demos together, on the grounds that they're all Point&Clicks of some stripe or other. Apart from their broad genre, they aren't all that similar. Two are genuine, traditional Point&Click adventure games, one's a visual novel and the other's a police procedural focusing entirely on interrogation.

Taking them in the order I played them:

 

The Other Side of the Wall

This is one of the adventures. It's set in a single-sex (Male.) private school in the 1980s. The school is run entirely by Roman Catholic priests. You can guess where this is going, I bet.

Well, it's not. Or not in the demo, anyway. Not that the demo goes anywhere much. Very little happens at all. 

It took me just over forty minutes to finish and that included several minutes spent watching a YouTube video to figure out one of the puzzles. Here's the thing; I love Point&Click adventures but I'm really not very good at them, even after many decades playing the damn things. It's very rare for me to get all the way through one without having to consult a walk-through or watch a video of someone else who's better at it than me. In fact it's probably never happened. 

I don't mind that. It doesn't put me off. I like to get as far as I can on my own without becoming frustrated and then, when I start to run out of ideas on what to do next, ask for hints. Usually just a nudge is enough but if I still can't figure it out I'm fine with looking up the full solution. The fun for me is in watching it all play out more than it is in solving the puzzles on my own. It's like how magic tricks are always more interesting when you know how they're done. Or is that just me?

 

That said, I feel it can hardly be in a game's best interests, if someone who enjoys adventure games can't even get off the first screen without looking something up. I've played a couple of demos like that. Luckily, neither of the two I picked this time was quite that awkward but I still had some problems getting going. 

It wasn't clear in either of them how to get started. For this one I just wandered about aimlessly, waiting for something to happen. It was quite a while before anything did. I looked at everything and talked to everyone and it all felt a little bit aimless.

I had a pleasant chat about literature with the priest who teaches English in the school. It later turned out I needed him to point me towards a a certain poem someone had hinted I might do well to study but at the time I didn't know that, of course. I just stood there, chatting with him about literature for no apparent reason. It was odd.

 

As usual, with no other plan in mind, I just worked my way around every location, examining, interacting, picking things up and putting them in my pockets and talking to everyone who'd talk with me about anything they wanted to talk about. I also tried to use anything I had with anything I could use it on, which didn't take long because I only had three things.

It all felt even more aimless than usual with no overarching plot or mystery to give it shape. Eventually I found my way to the eponymous hole in the wall between the all-boys' school and the all-girls school next door, which none of the boys is allowed to visit. (Yeah. Go figure.) I had a very elliptical conversation through the hole with an unseen girl who wouldn't even tell me her name. 

To get it out of her, I made my way back, via another conversation with the literary priest, to my room-mate, who was paying another of the priests to get him cigarettes. He made me the middle-man in the transaction and that got me the book of poetry the first priest had told me would have the poem I was looking for, which would in turn tell me what I had to get next, so I could give whatever it was to the girl on the other side of the hole in the wall and she'd finally tell me her name.

Yeah, that's an adventure game alright. Can't fault the gameplay. Very traditional. 

 

Visually the game is functional rather than attractive. I thought it all looked a bit flat. The colors are muted and the environment feels a bit schematic but it does a job.

The writing is good, if oddly literary. The conversations with the English-teaching priest goes way beyond what's necessary for the plot. You get to know his thoughts on Maya Angelou, Henry Miller, J.D. Salinger and several other 20th Century authors. As for the book of poetry, you get to read two entire poems by Yeats...

He's chatty and so is the girl behind the wall and the room-mate. The voice acting is about as functional as the rest of the game. It does a decent job but it's not especially memorable. I enjoyed it well enough at the time but now, a few days later, I couldn't even remember if the game was voiced at all. I had to go to  YouTube to check.

I finished the demo without ever being entirely clear where the story might be headed. Or, really, what the story was. Usually there's some kind of threat in these things or at least a mystery but this felt more like a slice-of-life. Nothing wrong with that but it'd be unusual for an adventure game not to include... well... an adventure.

It didn't really feel all that eighties, either, mostly because the setting is both visually and thematically unconnected to that any decade. Institutional buildings, formal gardens, uniforms... none of it triggers much of a nostalgic response. Consequently, when the dialog mentions the names of bands or comments on behaviors that might be considered "of the time", it all feels a bit dropped-in.

Overall, I thought it was fine but it didn't make me want to play the full game. I haven't wishlisted it.

 

Kat Domino: Agent of S.H.E.L.L 

This was my favorite of all the demos this time. I liked the design, the aesthetic, the gameplay and the setting. I was less sure about the writing or at least one aspect of it.

It's not that the writing is poor in any way. It's not. It's pretty good. It's just very punny and extremely fond of pop culture references, most of which feel somewhat dated. There are a lot of Monty Python and X-Files gags, for a start.

I find a little of that kind of thing tends to go a long way, even when it's done well. When it's done badly, I find it embarrassing and hard to get past. This isn't anywhere near that awkward, thankfully, but it did sometimes make me cringe a little. 

 

The background lore is solid and engaging (You can read some of it on the Steam Store page.) but there are only a couple of hints about the plot in the demo. It looks as though Kat is going to find that her Scully-like cynicism about the paranormal is going to be put to the test. 

As for the actual storyline, there isn't a lot of that either. The demo opens with the eponymous central character in her office, where she (Eventually...)  gets a call from her boss, telling her she has to go to Reception to collect a new recruit to the organization. The demo ends the moment you step out of the elevator into the reception area. You never even get to see the person you're supposed to meet. 

It took me just under an hour to get to that point. Once again, it included a few minutes of watching someone else on YouTube solve a puzzle I was having trouble with. I'd missed an interactable, which is so easy to do when there's nothing you can press to make them all light up. I also spent a lot of time before that just going backwards and forwards, revisiting locations and re-examining things in the hope of spotting something new as I tried to figure the puzzle out for myself. 

But most of the fifty minutes went on examining things and talking to people for the first time. There's a lot of text to read and a lot of voiceover to listen to but that's just how good adventure games roll.

 

The gameplay and the mechanics will feel extremely familiar to anyone who's played a Point&Click adventure before. There's a surprising amount to click on for a demo, all with fulsome descriptions to read or to listen to Kat read out loud for you. 

[And that, I'm going to warn you right now, is going to lead to me falling down an entirely unnecessary rabbit hole in a few paragraphs' time. If the developer is reading this, something that's always a risk when reviewing Next Fest demos, I apologize in advance. Just trust that it's all going to turn out alright in the end.]

The building Kat works in is actually a deep silo or perhaps an under-sea structure of some sort. Reception, where she's headed, is on the top floor, at the surface. Everything else is buried or sunk or whatever it is  Judging by the portholes, I guess it's under the ocean. It certainly looks like the inside of a submarine, with all those metal walls.

The action, such as it is, consists entirely of getting a colleague of Kat's, Layla, to move out of the way so Kat can take down a poster on the noticeboard so she can get to the code for the elevator which is pinned behind it. That involves finding a rubber chicken, a walnut shell and a feather, which she has to paint blue. Once again, let me remind you, this is an adventure game.

 

All of that was good fun, even if I did have to look up one of the solutions. When you finally get to the end of the demo you receive a performance review. You, the player, that is, not Kat. You're rated on things like Sarcasm and Patience, which the game calculates from the responses you make and things like how often you skip dialog. That was a nice way to wrap the whole thing up.

And now we come to the voice acting. Talking about it ought to be worth another short paragraph or two at most. Somehow it's not. It's the rest of the post. 

Like The Other Side of the Wall,  Kat Domino is fully voice acted. I really liked the dry, sarcastic tone but I found myself spending too much time altogether, wondering whether the voice I was hearing was a real person or AI. 

I really wasn't sure and I was sufficiently curious that, after I'd finished, I checked to see if there was any indication of AI use on the game's Steam page. There was not, so I googled it and got a response (Ironically, generated by Google's AI, Gemini.) telling me with great confidence that although there was some minor use of AI in some of the background material, the actual voiceover in the game was done by human actors.

 

So far, so clear. Only when I came to write this post, I wanted to include the quote and link to the source that supported it. So I ran the same query again and guess what? I got a different answer.

Now Gemini told me, with equal confidence, "Yes, the developer has disclosed that the voice acting for the project utilizes AI." Except the link it gave me as evidence went to an Instagram post about a different game entirely!

Seriously, I didn't want to derail my own post, yet again, by talking about the inadequacies of AI search summaries but this just keeps happening. I thought for a while we were getting to the point where these summaries could be trusted but clearly not.  Perhaps it's just Gemini. Maybe I ought to switch to ChatGPT for this sort of inquiry in future.

In an attempt to get to the bottom of it all, I put quotations marks around the title in the query to try and force Gemini to look at the right game. That got me something close to the original summary Gemini gave me yesterday. It recanted the allegation that AI was used for the voices at all, going back to its original contention that 

No, the voice acting in the actual game demo for Kat Domino: Agent of S.H.E.L.L. is not AI-generated. According to community compilations of non-AI game demos featured in the October 2026 Steam Next Fest, the developers explicitly hired an actual human voice actress for the game's voiceover. While the developers have used AI voice synthesis for temporary social media promotional reels and background narration online, the core point-and-click adventure game itself relies on hand-drawn art and human voice talent.

This also turns out to be wishful thinking. Or hogwash, if you prefer. 

The game is listed in a community-sourced Reddit post about demos in Next Fest that don't use AI but I could find no source anywhere for any developer statement specifically on voice acting in Kat Domino. The developers have made such a statement about the art but not the voice.

 

Because I find this sort of thing interesting, I have just spent half an hour doing my own digging, using my findings to push Gemini into doing the job it should have done in the first place. It was made harder for me by the fact that the developer, Evil Axis Game Studio, which is actually two people in Granada, Spain, only seem to use Instagram and TikTok to promote their work, two platforms with which I have little familiarity and, in the case of Instagram, limited access. 

As is well-known, AIs are exceptionally bad at parsing social media, which seems to be the root of the confusion in this case. Honestly, I'm tempted to give Gemini a pass on that. It's a minefield, even for humans.

Eventually, I forced this revised summary out of Gemini, which I think is about as accurate as it's likely to get:

"There is currently no definitive, verifiable source confirming that the voice acting in the game is human. The truth is that the developers, Evil Axis Game Studio, have not officially published any cast list, voice actress credits, or a definitive statement confirming whether the dialogue in the game demo is fully human or assisted by AI voice synthesis"

In other words, Gemini doesn't know. And neither do we. Gemini did at this point provide several more paragraphs of explanations as to why it doesn't know, all of which appear to be accurate as far as I can tell. It's just a shame it didn't do that at the beginning. It would have saved me most of the morning.

The irony is, the reason I started all this in the first place is that I like the voice-over. Kat herself speaks with a timbre and resonance that I find aurally pleasing. The intonation and expression is characterful. Who or whatever is behind it is particularly good on sarcasm and irony. I don't actually care all that much whether it's a person or a machine. I'd just like to be sure. 

 

The voice-work does occasionally exhibit a slight lack of affect that gives it an interesting edge, particularly when Layla is talking, and there are some moments when the sonic texture becomes a little resonant. I was kind of hoping it was AI because that would explain those slight strangenesses. Which, again, were things I liked...

Whatever the provenance, I prefer the voiceovers in Kat Domino, by some distance, to the obviously human voice acting in The Other Side of the Wall. Not that there was anything wrong with it but I didn't find it quite as engaging, somehow. 

Maybe I'm really an AI and I don't realize. It happens all the time in Philip K. Dick stories...

The voiceover and the text do sometimes differ, too, which is a thing that often happens in games in development. Not that infrequently after release, too. I don't think that's evidence either way. And in the end, without a cast list or a definitive statement from the developer, it's only a subjective impression. For me, as a player, it's not even anything I'm particularly exercised about. I'm only bothered because I have to write about it and I know other people care a lot more than I do.

The real problem from my perspective is the distraction it causes. Instead of talking about whether the game is fun and worth playing, here I am, talking about whether it's "authentic" or "real" or "human" at some metaphysical level I can't entirely quantify or even confirm exists. Even though I find it interesting to consider these things on an academic level, and it's fun playing online detective, trying to find out the truth of it all, in the end what matters is whether the game, however it was made, is any good or not.

Based on the demo, I think Kat Domino is going to be a good game. Good enough for me to add it to my wishlist, anyway. Which I have now done.

And the other problem with all this AI talk is that it's made the post run so long, the other two demos are going to have to wait. I think I have a lot less to say about both of them but I may be wrong. I wasn't expecting to have so much to say about these two! 

Once Around The Isles of Abyss

 As I mentioned in yesterday's post, Once Human is the latest game to rejoin my ever-lengthening list of daily should-plays. Unlike Dragon Nest Classic or DC: Dark Legion, this one's not much of a surprise. I'm always on the verge of going back to Once Human. It's a truly excellent game, hugely underrated and unfairly ignored. 

True, Starry, the developers, did their best to scupper the whole thing with a long series of bizarre choices over crucial aspects like persistency and continuity. Their stubborn determination to keep to that ill-considered model almost certainly held the game back from becoming as popular and successful as it might have been, but those flawed philosophies have largely been rescinded now, leaving the game in a much more comfortable, if still somewhat unnecessarily complicated, place.

Which is not to say Once Human is doing badly, even so. After two years, peak concurrency on Steam has rarely dipped below 20,000. Over the summer it was more like 30,000 and the new addition to the game, Isles of Abyss, a huge content drop they're even calling an expansion, has improved on that again. The peak for October so far crests 40,000. A lot of games would be very happy with those figures and especially with that consistency.

Even so, it always seems to me like a game that's flying under the radar. I think there's a lot of confusion about what sort of game it is. Is it survival/crafting? An FPS? An MMORPG? Open world gacha?

Yes.  

 

It's all of the above but if any of those elements is putting you off, feel free to discount it. Well, possibly apart from the crafting part. I'm not sure how far you'd get if you tried to avoid doing any crafting at all. Might be interesting to try, though.

As for the rest, you can pretty much pick and choose. Survival is mostly a case of remembering to eat and drink so as to avoid a debuff or to get some bonuses. If you don't like guns, just use a machete or a baseball bat. Melee works fine for most mobs, so long as they aren't up in the air but even then you can use a bow. 

If you like grouping, there are instances and world bosses that encourage it. If you don't, you can do everything on your own with a bit of GW2-style hot-grouping, once in while. There is a gacha system but it's just a way to get gear and not the best way, either. There are no gacha characters to collect. The only character you'll need is the one you made at character creation.

I feel i need to reiterate all this because even I forget just what a great game Once Human is until I play it again. It's just so much fun. And it all works. The vehicle driving is so good compared to most games that aren't actual driving games. The setting and the lore are quirky and weird and surprising. The scenery is gorgeous. The world is huge and open and fully explorable at your own pace and in peace, for the most part. Best of all, the dress-your-darling game is second only to The Secret World's.

And now there's an ocean to explore as well. Isles of Abyss adds sea travel, through a scattered archipelago of islands, large and small, in boats you build yourself. That's the bait that brought me back and so far, five hours in, I've been very happily hooked.

Coming back after many months, I had the option of moving an existing character out of the scenario where I'd left them or starting afresh with someone new. I chose the latter. It seemed like the best plan since all cosmetics, house items, and a few more things, are shared across the account, and because each scenario always seems to begin again from Level 1 anyway. (It actually says "Level 50" against my new character but all her skills were back at zero and all the mobs she's fought so far have been between Levels 1 and 5. That 50 is notional at best. Might even be a bug.)

Once my new character, who I named Califa, was ready to step into the world, I was very pleased to see an option to skip the tutorial. It's a really good tutorial but I've done it at least half a dozen times now and I'd be quite content never to do it again. If you skip it, you do miss out on the gear it gives you, but that's never going to be much of a setback.

The new scenario begins at the point where the old one used to end, tipping you out into the sky above the world. Only this time you don't get to glide down to a point of your choosing, hanging from the talons of your cybercrow buddy. In Oceans of Abyss you just fall into the sea. 

And sink. Which is when the woman in the picture at the top of this post appears out of nowhere to dive down, grab you and bring you back to the surface. A few brief words and she dumps you on a raft and disappears again, leaving you to find your own way to shore.

It's a dramatic opening and it really works to set the mood. Just don't ask any awkward questions about how you got there in the first place because you won't be getting any explanations. Maybe they were all in the tutorial.

Who cares, anyway? I already know the set-up. I don't need the details. I just need to get this raft to shore and start building myself somewhere to live. 

 

Remember the raft in Valheim and how much we all hate it? This is not that raft. This is a sea-car. You grab the tiller and the thing just goes! It's not exactly hydrodynamic, being a bunch of logs bound together in a square, but Once Human isn't pedantic about real-world physics, thank god. 

I did notice later - a lot later - that there's a little image in the corner of the screen with a Valheim-style puff of wind to show wind direction, so presumably that has some impact. I can't say I was aware of it, though. And anyway, this being a game with technology, you can always add an engine.

But that's jumping ahead. First you have to land and get yourself set up. That all goes along exactly the same as it's always has in just about every survival game. Punch some trees (No, you get an axe from the get-go. And a pick.) Find a spot to build. Put up a shelter. Add a bed and boom! You're home.

Except this time you also get to build a boat. This is the part I didn't see coming. I mean, I knew you were bound to get a boat. I just though it'd be like the car or the motorcycle. You'd be given one in a quest or you'd craft one at a boatyard. 

Nope. You make a boat the same way you make a house. It uses the same building system. Hit B and you'll find there's an extra tab. Open that and see a whole lot more tabs inside. Build-a-Boat Workshop!

 

You start with your raft and just... add more raft. You use wood from trees you chopped down to bolt on more sections, just like you lay out the foundations of a house. 

Your boat, unsurprisingly, ends up looking more like a floating platform with a shack on top, at least at first. I made some half-hearted attempts to make mine look like more boat-like but then I just wanted to get on with the plot (There is a plot.) and for that I needed to go visit some other islands, so for the time being I have a big raft with a roof.

I have seen other boats going by that look more... ship-shape. Even then, they look pretty unwieldy but it's early days and I remember from the original game that houses didn't start to look like they hadn't come in a flat-pack until people had worked their way quite a long way up the tech tree. Sleek yachts might be the reward for all that effort. 

In the meantime, I'm fine with my floating shack. It's a pig to turn sometimes but get it pointed the right way and it really travels. The plot, such as it is (It doesn't seem to be much yet.) has you adding a harpoon gun and then a cannon with the intention of destroying (Or maybe it should be killing.) one of the evil lighthouse monsters that fixes everything to the archipelago like a nail. Even the dead,

That odd image isn't my flight of fantasy. It's how Malla, the woman who rescued Califa from drowning, explains it. Until all the lighthouses are destroyed, no-one's going anywhere. So that's my goal. 

No, that's Malla's goal and now it's probably Califa's too but my goal is to goof around, explore the islands, build a house and a boat and maybe settle down in some picturesque spot next to the ocean. Of all the post-apocalyptic survival games I've seen, Once Human would offer one of the more manageable chances for a comfortable and possibly long-lived existence, I think. 

You can travel a long way without really meeting anything you have to kill or that wants to kill you and you can do it in comfort, in a car. There are resources everywhere in abundancy, a functioning economy, some pretty safe settlements and the weather is generally not that terrible. 

Of course, there are monsters in all the ruins, armed militias who shoot on sight and the occasional eldritch or intra-dimensional incursion. And there's no shortage of seriously weird entities that might do just about anything. But a lot of those turn out to be really quite friendly and co-operative, or they are once you whack them a few times and stick them in a glass cabinet. 

Plus there's some really good music to listen to on a variety of excellent radio stations. That's something you don't get in Valheim. You can get a radio for your house and every vehicle in the game is wired for sound, even the most basic raft. Don't ask how that works. Just enjoy the vibe.

And the vibe in the islands, it turns out, is blues rock. Why? Don't look at me! 

For some reason Drifter FM, the default radio station that starts up as soon as you take the tiller, plays nothing else. It's like the early seventies out there on the ocean, those hazy, stoner days before punk blew the smoke away. I have no idea why someone thought blues rock would make an appropriate soundtrack for sailing the ocean because it really doesn't. But I'm enjoying listening to it, anyway. I don't get to hear a lot of blues rock these days, not since I was about fourteen, really, so it makes a change. 

Outside of the expansion itself, a lot's changed since I last played, from the really striking new loading screen to a complete revamp of the way blueprints are acquired. I'd go into it in detail but a) no one reading this cares and b) I barely understand most of it yet myself. 

You also get a choice of classes or roles (I forget what term they use.) at character creation. That's not quite as new. I do, vaguely, remember when it came in. 

I went with Beastmaster. I'll often pick a pet class if there's one on offer. It's nice to have company. You get a choice of three animals: a boar, a bear and a deer, which  has to be someone's idea of a joke. All we need is a rat and it's the animal population of the starting zone of every MMORPG in history.

The bear is a tank. I had a think about that because a tank would be handy but I really do not like bears. The stag apparently can come on long journeys with you. I couldn't, at the time, figure out what that meant although now I think it means it's the best mount. I didn't realize you could even ride the animals until I got into the game and found a saddle in my backpack.

In the end, I picked the boar. I don't like boars much more than I like bears but this one apparently is great at foraging for you and digging  up rare items. That sounded too good to miss. So far, all he does is wander around my house and get in my way but I have yet to put any points into training him. I'm sure he'll learn to be useful one day. 

 

One thing that was new to me and that I do understand is the addition of some new poses to the in-game camera. Using them freezes the shot, with your character in a fixed pose, as if caught in motion. I spent quite a while playing around with that. It makes for some excellent shots. 

It would be easier to use if I wasn't playing on GeForce Now, of course. I love playing on NVidia's servers but just about the only thing I don't appreciate is the way all my screenshots go there. Mostly I can use GeForce's own screenshot function, which sends the file to my machine but if a game uses an in-game camera, like Once Human or Neverness To Everness, all doing that gets me is a record of what I see in game when I'm using it, which is not at all what I'm after.

For Once Human, there's an easy workaround. As you take the shot with the in-game camera, there's about a second when the UI vanishes completely before the framed photo appears. I just hit the button to take the shot, then hit the NVidia screenshot button a fraction of a second later and it gets me exactly what I need. There is a Hide UI function but it's part of the in-game camera controls, so that's not really much help. 

 

Anyway, what with boat-building and the exploring and the playing with the new poses, I'm having a ton of fun in Once Human, all over again. As I keep repeating, I have too many good options for gaming just now so it's difficult to say whether this one is going to push past the rest but I'm into it for now. It's a very drop-in, drop-out kind of game, anyway, so I'm not feeling under any pressure to go one way or the other.

If anyone reading this has thought about playing the game before and not gotten around to it yet, or maybe didn't want to get too involved because of the whole impermanence issue (Now fixed.) this would be a great time to give it a go. I do recommend it. I think it's probably my favorite survival/crafting game, even including Valheim. It's also a proper MMORPG, if that's your bag.

Okay, This Is Getting Ridiculous Now...

 Yesterday, I posted about a game I'd never heard of before but which I'd suddenly started playing, out of the blue. I was complaining about how I had so many ideas for posts, I didn't have time to write them all, so finding yet another game I felt like I had to mention wasn't helping. With hindsight, I might also have given some consideration to the impact adding another title would have on my already overburdened gaming schedule itself. 

But, hey, what's one more game, right? I'm officially retired now. That means I have two more days in each week to do anything I want, on top of the five I already had. (Yeah, right...) Why not play more games?

Still, there are limits to how many I can meaningfully shoe-horn into to my rota (That's a rota I don't actually have because I am really not a rota kind of person, I feel honor-bound to point out). At time of writing yesterday, DC: Dark Legion had just become either the eighth or the eleventh game in my "Currently Playing" list, depending how realistic I was being. How many more could there be?

So, then I saw this at MassivelyOP. Dragon Nest Classic. Longtime readers may remember my repeated runs at Dragon Nest in its myriad forms, too many of those posts being about the trials and tribulations of finding a version that would let me play it. 

The first mention of the game on the blog - or at least the earliest I added a label for it - was way back in 2011 in a post entitled "Are You Still Playing That Old Thing?" It was a list of all the MMOs I was either playing or thinking about playing or had decided never to play. There are two dozen of them. I don't appeared to have learned much about time management in the last decade and a half.

Or maybe I have. I mean, I'm down to half that now...

Back then I said "Thought about logging in. Couldn't remember my account or password details. Couldn't be bothered to look them up. Didn't log in." I believe I would have been talking about the first version of the game I played, which probably pre-dated the blog entirely. That version was just called Dragon Nest.

In the years after, the game changed publishers, regions and names several times. Sometimes it would let me make an account, sometimes it wouldn't. From memory, I think I had another run at the original game on a different account, then I played Dragon Age Origins for a bit and later Dragon Age Mobile. That may or may not have been the same game as Dragon Nest M, which I also played.

And then there was Dragon Nest 2: Evolution, which I'd forgotten all about, even though I was playing as recently as 2023. I was enjoying it a lot according to my posts. No memory of why I stopped except that I think I had to play it through Google Play and that extra layer always acts as a drag anchor after the initial excitement of getting to play something new wears off. I'd go go back for another look but it's too late now. DN2:E closed down last year.

There's no killing Dragon Nest for good, though. It regenerates like Dr. Who, coming back in a different form each time. Except this one's a throwback instead of an evolution. 

 

Dragon Nest Classic is supposed to be the original game, the same as it was when I first played it, except for some quality of life improvements. There's a Level Cap of 32 and not all the classes and sub-classes are in yet. I'm assuming after that, if there's sufficient interest, later content will be added in the same order as it appeared in the game the first time around.

Of course, as soon as I heard about it, I had to go check it out. And it was already there, waiting for me. Kudos to MOP for bringing it to my attention at all but it was a case of better late than never. The new-old version was already up and running by the time the news filtered out to my usual sources. That at least meant I didn't have to bookmark it to come back when the servers were ready. They were already up.

Given my previous experiences with the various companies that have had a hand in running the franchise, I was expecting a whole lot of problems getting into the game at all. That did not happen. I did try a couple of my old accounts first, never expecting them to work and there my expectations were met in full. With that formality out of the way, though, I made a new account and off I went, no trouble at all.

Classes are gender-locked in the Classic version so, since I wanted to play a female character, I had a choice of Cleric or Sorceress. I picked the witch. I have a feeling that's what I've picked every time although I'm not sure the classes were the same in every version, nor if they were always strictly male/female only.

Everything felt very familiar. The starting town for Clerics and Sorceresses is called Mana Ridge It's not all that big so it's easy to get to know the layout and I've been through it many times now. Many, many times. I knew where I was immediately.

I ought to. Every time I've played, I've gotten through the start of the game and then either wandered away or got kicked out before I got very far. I did have one run where I made some meaningful progress through the storyline, up to the part where you leave the first town by airship and go to the big city, Saint Haven, but usually I stall somewhere around the second town, Calderock Village.

Actually, until today I always thought Mana Ridge was the only starting village but I read the launch day patch notes and I noticed they refer to "Prairie Town : Starting area for Warriors and Archers". Warriors and Archers are both gender-locked male so it's entirely possible I never played either class and therefore never saw the other starting area. I'll have to start an alt and check it out. You can have as many as sixteen characters.

The truth is, even though I've probably put dozens of hours into the various versions, I haven't seen all that much of the game. I never was all that bothered about making progress. I've just always liked the way the game looks and plays. I especially enjoy the tactility of the combat.

Dragon Nest was the first action MMO I really felt comfortable playing. It was largely responsible for my change of attitude concerning action versus traditional tab targeting. Now, I genuinely enjoy both styles. I can even play action-style almost as competently as I can tab target, which admittedly isn't saying much.

Despite my long and patchy history with the game, I hadn't really thought about it for years. I certainly wasn't expecting to be playing it again this Autumn. But once I started, I was back. This is very much the version I remember, my favorite of them all. 

Except for one huge difference: the translation.

This is the North American version of Dragon Nest and I believe that's one iteration I was never able to access before. I seem to remember it being region-locked, when some other company had the European rights. Now it looks like all the versions are under Eyedentity. If there's any region-locking, it isn't affecting me.

I'm guessing the NA version has always had this translation, which is really excellent. I don't imagine it's new for Classic. Come to that, I'm not sure it even is a translation. It might be a complete re-write. 

I remember the original having one of the goofiest translations I've ever seen. It was English but not as it's ever been spoken. It was so wonky I couldn't always understand what it was even trying to say.

It didn't help that it always seemed as though the game had a very complicated plot involving time travel and time paradoxes. An early quest involved fixing a device so the player-character could talk to someone in the future and the two of them were always arguing but I could never really follow the nuances. 

This version has none of that. Instead, my Sorceress seems to be a lying, cheating, duplicitous gambler with a heart of corroded steel. She's daggers drawn with her old teacher and she's out for what she can get. Actually, they both are. Everyone in the village is either sarcastic, snarky or flat-out rude and all the factions despise each other. 

I loved it. I laughed out loud several times. I hope the whole game's as well-written as the opening section. If it is, I might get a lot further this time. 

Of course, that's always assuming I can fit Dragon Nest Classic into the schedule. It's not even the last of the recent glut of new or returning games I'm having to incorporate, somehow. There's just been a massive content drop in Once Human and I was playing that last night and this morning. 

I'll be posting about that one next... unless something else turns up first. The way it's been going, I wouldn't be surprised.

Too Many Games. Let's Play Another!

I find myself, suddenly and unexpectedly, in the happy position of having far more ideas for posts than I'm likely to find time to write. Is that a happy, position though? Better than the alternative, I guess.

Ideas are coming so fast now I can't keep up with them all and it doesn't help that new ones seem to be appearing by the day. I certainly wasn't expecting to be posting this afternoon about a game I'd never even heard of until this morning, that's for sure. But that's what's happening.

I generally start the day by flipping through Feedly to see what's turned up overnight. Among the posts this morning was this one at MMOBomb about a game called DC: Dark Universe.

As a life-long DC fan, just about any mention of the IP gets my attention so I was pretty excited to come across a DC game I'd never heard of. I followed the link in the piece to find out what it was all about...

...and it was absolutely no help at all. 

Seriously, I wish people wouldn't do that. I mean, sure, I do it myself but, geez, don't do what I do. Do it properly!

The one hyperlink in the body of the post just goes to their section on strategy games. There are 114 games listed there and DC: Dark Legion isn't even one of them! The three links at the foot of the post go to articles about different games altogether. The final two links go to the same damn post I was already reading! 

FFS! I understand you want to keep readers inside your garden but if it's the first time you've ever posted about a game, at least link to the source! 

So I googled it and found the official DC: Dark Legion website. I mean, it wasn't hard... 

And the official website wasn't much better. It's lovely to look at. It's flashy and vibrant and exciting and entirely in keeping with what a website for a superhero game should be. But just try finding out any actual, hard information about the game there.

I couldn't even figure out what sort of game it was. There's no FAQ or Gameplay section. There's a page where you can flip through a few images of various heroes to see the name and date of the issue of the comic in which they first appeared, which is great and all but it doesn't tell you how to play the game.

What to do? I dunno. I guess... download, install and play? I mean, if you want to know what some machine you never saw before does, you press the big red button, right? We all know that.

There were options to install from Google Play or the Apple Store, or from a generic Android APK or Windows button. Since I was on the desktop, I naturally picked Windows. In retrospect, I should probably have gone for Google Play.

That's because the game, as I discovered, when I came to run it, opens in a phone-sized window. Perhaps unreasonably, I was expecting a full-screen option for Windows but then, at the time, I didn't even know it was primarily a mobile game. As I said, the website tells you nothing and the MMOBomb piece never mentions platforms at all.

The only reason Google Play might have been a better choice is that, from memory, I think it frames mobile games in a more coherent way for PC users. The straight-up Windows option for DCDL just plonks a window in the middle of your screen and it doesn't even fit. The bottom is out of sight and I couldn't find a way to move it. 

Not that it makes any difference. The tiny part that's missing doesn't have any controls or information you need. It's just aesthetically unpleasing to see it like that. Or, rather, not to see it.

The installation itself went very smoothly although the game has a surprisingly large footprint - nearly 9GB. That seems huge for a mobile game. Maybe the mobile client is smaller. It also wants you to install it on an SSD and it didn't give me an option which one - I have three inside the case and one outside. It just went straight for the C drive, which is not where I would have put it. 

All of that left me predisposed to feel critical about the whole thing. I almost cancelled the download at a couple of points, asking myself if I really needed the game at all. In the end, inertia carried me through and I'm glad it did. I don't have an exact "time played" for my first session but I've been playing it on and off all day. 

Once installed, it's a fairly seamless experience. I didn't even need to make an account. I'm playing as a "Guest" but I was assigned a user ID and I've logged in and out to check persistence and my progress has been saved. If I carry on playing, I'll probably sign up properly but for now, Guest status will do.

After a brief opening to set the scene (Earth being invaded by extra-dimensional threats under the control of The Batman Who Laughs.) the Monitor turns up and asks you a few gnomic questions. If your answers - and you do get a choice - have any impact on your character, I have no clue what it might be. 

You also get to name your character. My hero is called Floradelle, which is as good a name as many a hero in my opinion. The game uses her name in text but not, of course, in voice-overs, of which there are quite a few, especially in the opening stages.

And they're pretty good, the voice-overs. An awful lot of voice actors must pay the bills doing well-known super-heroes, which must be a bit like being an impressionist or a sound-alike. The starting line-up includes Green Arrow and Wonder Woman. Heavily involved in the cut scenes and dialog are Batman and Superman. Catwoman and Harley Quinn turn up before long, too. All of those have extremely well-known actors associated with them and everyone expects them to sound a certain way. They do sound that way here, too. Mostly.

So the game sounds good. Does it look good? Oh, yes. It looks great. I'm quite picky about interpretations of characters I know, let alone ones I like, and I have no complaints about any of these. 

In fact, I really like the whole aesthetic. The character art has the clean, sharp lines of a digital comic book and the UI and functional elements are very clear and easy to understand and use. The colors are really rich. I found the whole thing a pleasure to look at and listen to, all the time I was playing.

It's straight into the action when you start. Well, if you call upgrading a spare Batcave action. The core of the game appears to revolve around base building. The backup Batcave is massive and new rooms and even levels keep appearing. They all need to be upgraded, which makes up a lot of the gameplay. Later on there are shelters to be built on the surface, too. 

There's no tutorial as such and there doesn't need to be because the game constantly tells you what to press. All the gameplay I saw involves pressing something. I just sat there, following the prompts and upgrading whatever I was told to upgrade until eventually I opened the World map at Level 5, after which I was able to go outside and fight things.

Don't run away with the idea that that gave me freedom of movement. It's not an open world game. Reports come in of various situations that need handling, you select the next scenario from the map, teleport there and deal with it, then come back. 

And it works really well. There are schematic, three-dimensional representations of the area in which your characters stand like giants. You press a footstep icon and the game moves you to the next nodal point for an interaction or a fight and so the story proceeds to its conclusion. 

Fights themselves can be set to Auto, which of course I did. In all the time I played, none were even close. My team won easily. In Auto Mode you do still get to hit the buttons for the Ultimates, which in the early battles all trigger an animated cut scene. Very good they were, too, but I was just starting to think I might have seen enough of them when they stopped. 

I enjoyed the fights but the main reason I kept on playing was the story. It's nothing special - in my experience, super-hero stories in games almost never are - but it's not bad. There's the big invasion plot and a subplot involving who might have taken over the Joker's gang. 

The dialog is there or thereabouts in keeping with the characters as I know them and the plotlines, while familiar from about a gazillion other comic book tales, are engaging. Well, it they are if you like this sort of thing. Which, self-evidently, I do.

Since it's a mobile game, its fundamental purpose is to separate you from your money but so far it seems reasonable about the way it tries to do it. There's a gacha system to get new heroes and upgrade the ones you have, for which you can spend money if you want, but it kept giving me endless currency to roll with. Or, rather, to open Mother Boxes, that being the skin they've given the mechanic. IYKYK.

At one point Krypto swoops into a fight to turn the tide, which seems a bit random until you realise he's the character they're plugging in the store right now. The game does prompt you to go buy him but doesn't hassle you when you don't. 

The other way it wants you to pay for your fun is by speeding it up. Of course it is. Upgrades to the myriad rooms in your base all have timers. A lot of them are very short. Like two seconds short. A few, though, are a lot longer. 

The longest I saw was fifteen minutes. You can pay to speed that up. I didn't. I just tabbed out and did something else until it was over.

There's a lot more to it. A lot more. In common with most modern games (This one dates from 2025.) it's insanely busy. I'm not even going to attempt to talk about any of that. If I end up playing it for a while, maybe I'll come back to it when I understand more.

For now, though, I can say that I'm pleased to have been introduced to DC: Dark Legion and I don't at all feel I've wasted my day playing it. I had fun. 

If it will run on my phone, I might install it and play it there. I only have one good game on my phone right now - Animal Crossing Pocket Camp. I could do with another.

I just hope it's not really an 8GB install on Android though... 

One Of These Things Is A Lot Like The Other

 Ah, good old Steam Next Fest. Here it is again. One of the three weeks every year, when I get to play a bunch of demos for games I would never have bothered with otherwise and will never think about again. And I get to write about them, too, for an audience that's no more interested in the damn things than I am. Time well-spent, I'm sure.

So unfair! That's not even how the event generally takes me. I always try to pick games I think I might enjoy and I've discovered plenty of good ones in past events, some of which I've gone on to buy and play. And writing about them is always fun. Still, if you found yourself playing two cutesy games about collecting tiny creatures, back to back, though, you might find yourself questioning your life choices, too.

The games in question are World of Slime and Never Wither. Both are tagged "MMORPG" on Steam. Both demos show the first playable region in its entirety, unaltered from the version in the full game as far as I'm aware. Both have gameplay that involves catching and collecting creatures, which you can then use to fight for you. Both games use a fixed view and have very small characters that are quite hard to see.

Although they're very similar on paper, I found the two games very different to play. I started with Never Wither, which I thought looked like the more interesting of the two but in my first session I didn't really get on with the controls. I spent more time trying to figure out how to so things than I spent doing them, which didn't make for a great first impression. It went better the second time.

That's who I'm playing? Cool!

World of Slime, which I played a couple of days later, felt immediately familiar. It looked and played like any number of games I remembered playing a decade or more ago. All the controls felt intuitive and automatic. I didn't have to think twice to figure out how to do anything.

Visually, both games look attractive and well-designed but Never Wither is the lusher of the two. That's not to say its portrayal of nature is more realistic. It isn't, particularly, but it is a little more subtle in its abstractions and richer in its colors and textures. On the other hand, it's far easier to see what you're doing in World of Slime.

Each game opens with a short cinematic. Really short, like maybe thirty seconds, tops. In Never Wither, there's a montage of partially-animated scenes in which some kind of undefined catastrophe overwhelms the world, while a melodramatic voiceover suggests you're the one who's going to have to do something about it. 

The scenes show all some impressive beast-people, all of them maybe a couple of metres tall and very imposing. Then, right at the end, your character appears: you're a small, yellow blob. It's bathetic in the extreme. I'd much rather have played one of the big guys but sadly that's not an option.

Bummer! Don't I even get a hat?

In World of Slime, the cinematic is even more of a slide-show but it's a lot more representative of the game itself and the story it tells is a lot more coherent and comprehensible. You're a small girl, traveling through a forest with your father, when you're both suddenly attacked by monsters. You, the girl, are knocked unconscious... and that's it.

The WoS introduction is wordless. No voiceover, no text. The pictures tell the story and they tell it clearly and efficiently. It does a much better job of setting up the game than the more ambitious but more confusing equivalent in Never Wither.

After the cinematics comes character creation. It's brief in both cases but choosing a hairstyle for a human character is a lot more engaging than picking the eye-shape for a blob. You can name your character in both games but Never Wither has a random name generator that I quite liked. After a few rolls of the dice, I selected Fox Flash for my blob. I called my little girl Flora. You can guess which one felt more like it could become a character I might care about.

With that out of the way, it's into the world and on with the tutorial. Since the demos are also the start of the games, it was pretty much all tutorial, at least for as long as I stuck with it. I played Never Wither for fifty-eight minutes, in two sessions, and World of Slime for forty-one minutes, in one go. That took me to Level 4 in both although what they mean by levels isn't necessarily comparable. 

Busted!

The gameplay is quite different in some respects. Never Wither is a Palworld-style survival/crafting game and World of Slime is a Pokemon-style creature-collector and battler. At least, I'm assuming it's a battler by the way you have to duel an NPC using creatures before you can leave the starting village.

Where they both converge is in the way you collect your creatures. Nintendo was very irked when Palworld chose to go with the throw-ball-at-creature method so you might have thought other developers would steer clear. Apparently not.

In Never Wither you pick up seeds from the ground and throw them using the Alt key. That sends out a targeting ring that you position over the mob before releasing the seed. I found it awkward and hard to get used to and visually it looks a bit different but it's fundementally the same mechanic.

In World of Slime you buy Cubes from a vendor, put them on your hot bar and throw them using whatever key corresponds to the slot you put them in. I found that a lot more natural to do, mostly because it looks and performs exactly like it did in Palworld back when I played. 

In both games you have to bash the mob you're trying to tame about a bit and then there's a few seconds while an animation plays to see if you've been successful in taming it. If you have, you can pick up the creature and add it to your collection. If not, carry on bashing because now it wants to kill you. 

This all sounds very familiar, I'm sure. So does everything else I found there was to do in both games. 

That seems like a lot... and also a very specific number.

In Never Wither, seeing as it's a survival/crafting game, you're just dumped out into the world with noting and you have to bootstrap your way to your destiny. You start by taming a couple of creatures, then you have to find a spot to place your mark so you can build a crafting station and start making things. You can put the creatures you've caught down there and they'll stay inside the bounds, wandering about. I'm pretty sure you can then set them to work, although I didn't get far enough into the tutorial to find out how.

You can also play as any of the creatures you catch, all of which have different abilities and all of which make looking at yourself feel a lot better than when you were a blob. That means picking the color of your blob's eyes at character creation was even more pointless than you thought, of course.

In World of Slime, seeing as it's a regular MMORPG, allegedly, although I was in a single-player world, you wake up in a village, having been rescued from the monster in the forest. You do remember who you are, for once, so that's nice. Even so, you still have to go around meeting everyone and doing things for them, either because they want you to prove you're trustworthy or because they're too damned lazy to do them for themselves. Looking at you, Allen!

Never Wither has no dialog that I could find. No quests, either. It has a panel of tasks that I was working my way through in traditional survival game fashion but that was all I saw. There might be some kind of plot or story later on but I saw no indication of it in the first hour.

World of Slime has a very acceptable and reasonable starting plot: you've lost your father and you don't know the way back home. You need the people in the village to help you with both. I can get behind that.

May I call you Bob?

WoS does have dialog and lots of it. The game originates in South Korea (The developer is TEAM42, the people behind Mafia42, just in case you've heard of that one. I hadn't.) so the dialog will all have been translated. It's a decent translation. I noticed a few idiosyncrasies but by and large it reads naturally enough. It reminded me a lot of the writing in several less well-known imported MMORPGs I played in the noughties. Those all had a certain slightly earnest tone to them that I find quite endearing and so does this.

Both games have plenty of collections,  journals, recipe books and talent trees to fill and fiddle with but it would be silly of me to discuss any of them in any kind of detail after such a short time with them. Both games also played very smoothly while I was there. I didn't encounter any bugs or glitches.

I liked them both. They seemed well-made and polished, with a clear idea of what they were supposed to be, but I'd have to be a lot shorter of things to do than I am right now to want to invest much time in either of them. It's not just that I've done it all before. Heaven knows, familiarity and repetition have never put me off playing anything. No, my main reason for not really wanting to carry on much further with either of them is mostly visual.

I don't have any issues with the aesthetics. Of the two, I prefer the look of Never Wither but they're both nice enough to look at... if you can see them. I can't. 

That's the main strike against them for me. The characters are far too small and the camera far too inflexible. I couldn't see what I was looking at half the time and I couldn't zoom in for a better look. I have plenty of negative things to say about Palworld but at least I know what the Pals look like. 

Other than that, I thought they were both fine. I won't be wish-listing either of them but I wish them well. Maybe Steam needs a well-wishing list...