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. Other than 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 the demo and that included several minutes 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 so 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 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 go 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 two 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, reall;y, 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...

Tumbling Dice

 The second half of the current update landed today and it took me forty pulls to get Akane, which was the very first thing i did when I logged in this morning. It felt pretty good, let me tell you. 

It also made me feel, once again, that it might be worth reiterating my personal experience with gacha games, which is that I can mostly get the characters I want without having to get my credit card out. This bears repeating because it's not the narrative I hear when I'm reading about the genre in the gaming press.  

In the six months since the game started, there have been five characters released that I wanted and I've been able to get four of them right away - Hotori, Lacrimosa, Linko and now Akane. The one I missed out on was Iroi but there I have to say I really didn't try very hard. I could certainly have got her, and for free, if I'd been that bothered. I just didn't want her that much, apparently.

To go over it again, because I do like to repeat myself, the way it works in Neverness To Everness is that if you fail to get a banner character in your first 70 pulls, your chance increases to a minimum 20% (Okay, 19.59% if you want to be fussy.) and the number of tiles you can land on to win increases as well. If that doesn't do it in another twenty pulls, pull 90 is a guaranteed win.

From the outside, that might still sound rough. Seventy pulls? Ninety? That's a lot! Well, yes, you'd think so. But not really. It's generally reckoned to be one of the more generous versions of the system, particularly because there's no 50/50, meaning once you hit that hard pity cap, you will get the character, not just have a fifty-fifty chance. 

When I started rolling for Akane this morning, I had fifty Solid Dice in hand to try for her It's one for every pull, as you'd expect. I'd picked those fifty dice up without particularly trying. I got them from login rewards and just by playing. I also had some left over from previous banners, when I'd bought some with in-game currency and then hadn't needed to use them all.

I rolled my first ten and got nothing. I could just have kept rolling but my mind doesn't work that way. Since I'd started with fifty dice, I didn't want to finish with anything much less than that. I'm in this business because I like to see numbers go up, not down.

Solid Dice are easier to get than you might think, though. You can, of course, pay real money for them but why would you when you can buy them with a couple of in-game currencies. One of those currencies is called Anulith and you get Anulith for doing all kinds of things - achievements, events, mini-games. They hand it out as compensation for downtime, even. It's very common. 

The exchange rate between Anulith and Solid Dice is 160:1. A hundred and sixty Anulith gets you one Solid Dice. When I logged in this morning I had over 18,000 of the things. 

That's enough to buy well over a hundred Solid Dice. And I already had fifty. If I had the absolute, worst luck imaginable, so long as I kept rolling, I'd still be guaranteed to get Akane and I'd have almost enough dice left over to guarantee the next banner character, even if I had the worst possible luck twice in a row. 

By then, of course, I'd have acquired whole stack of the other currency you can use to buy Solid Dice with, because you get it by rolling on the gameboard. Not to mention all the extra Anulith I'd have saved up by the time the next banner arrived. Six weeks playing every day gets you plenty.

As it happens, when Akane suddenly burst onto the screen, I was still thirty pulls short of soft pity seventy. I closed out with forty Solid Dice in hand and about 16,000 Anulith still in my account. As I said, I was pretty happy about the way it turned out.

It would be a different story if I wanted every character. That would drain my resources, I'm sure. But as I discussed in the Linko post I linked above, I don't usually have much of a practical use for the characters I roll on. I just pick the ones I find particularly appealing from the way they appear in the storylines, which is unlikely to be all of them or even most of them. Ironically, the only one I didn't manage to pull, Iroi, was the also the only one I wanted mostly for practical purposes. It almost certainly explains why I didn't go on trying for her for long.

It would also be different if I cared about the weapons, I imagine. Those use a different currency and it's one I don't seem to generate easily through my playstyle. I'm not sure if that's something I could change by playing differently or if it's where Hotta try to make their money. If I was into weapons, I might well have to spend some actual cash to guarantee getting the ones I wanted. (Full disclosure - I barely begin to understand how the weapon system in NTE works...) 

And honestly, I'd be fine with spending some money on the game. I was talking to Mrs. Bhagpuss a couple of days about it. She's playing June's Journey and she was pissed that the Halloween event there seemed to have been specifically designed to fall just barely short of being doable without spending real money. 

Part of the entertainment value in the game for her is seeing how far she can get without spending anything at all and tactics like that are guaranteed to make her more determined than ever, never to give them anything. We both agreed that we wouldn't have the same reluctance to spend a few pounds here and there if the game seemed like it wasn't bothered either way.

NTE manages to give the impression it isn't bothered whether you spend money or not. I'm sure the developers are extremely bothered but they know better than to show it. And it's an excellent game. I've been playing it with considerable enjoyment since it launched. It's probably my main game right now, in so far as I have one. 

And yet, so far, I haven't spent anything. I just keep playing it. Pretty much every day. And enjoying it hugely, too.

Compare that with EverQuest II. It's theoretically free to play and yet I pay an annual subscription of around £80, for which I get a few perks I use and a lot I don't. On top of that, I just paid another £30 or so for the annual expansion. 

I barely play EQII at all at the moment and even when I do it's sporadically, in short bursts. I'm paying over a hundred pounds a year for a game I don't play very much and nothing at all for one I play all the time. At this stage, it's more of a tradition than anything. 

Clearly, I need to take a long, hard look at my priorities. If I'm going to spend money at all, particularly on a game that claims to be free to play, wouldn't it make more sense to spend it on the one I'm actually playing? 

Except, as with Mrs Bhagpuss, I kind of get a buzz out of not paying. Getting something for nothing adds value in a weird way. I've written a post for each of the banner characters I've won because winning them was exciting. Would I write posts about characters I'd just bought in a store?

So why was it exciting? Apart from that great feeling when you think you're getting away with something? I think a lot of it is because it gives the illusion of gambling without the risk.

As I've laid it out above, getting the characters you want is guaranteed. There is no actual risk, provided you're selective and don't just want everything all the time. You can't really lose. It just might take you longer or cost you more but if it's not real money you're spending, that's not going to spoil your enjoyment too much.

Even so, getting them faster or more cheaply than the odds suggest you should is exciting. Gambling isn't only popular because of the winning. The gambling itself is a thrill. Not to mention that the way they've set it up, rolling on the game-board with all the animations and the feel of an actual board game, is entertaining in itself. It feels oddly... wholesome.

Here's a question to which I already know the answer. If I could just buy all the characters from the in-game store for a set amount, would I? If they just cost, let's say, $10 each. Something reasonable like that.

Most likely I wouldn't. I'd still want them but I'd immediately fall into "But do I want them that much?" mode. And from there it's a short trip to "Do I need them?" and the answer to that one is almost always no. I'm really, really good at going without things. Going without is often more satisfying than getting, for me. It's almost a problem, sometimes.

I'm not saying I wouldn't buy characters, ever. I'm saying it's less than likely. I'm also saying I'm almost certain that, if I did, I wouldn't get as much value from it as I do from winning them, even though I know the win is guaranteed. Every time I played a character I'd paid money for, or got them out for a screenshot, I wouldn't get that momentary glow of pleasure I do get now, at least occasionally, when I remember how I rolled for them and won. Instead, I'd be more likely to remember they cost me money and I doubt that would add any sparkle to my day.

But Hotta doesn't sell characters in the store. They sell packs of currency you can use to buy dice to roll for them. The convoluted system - paying real money for crystals to trade for Anulith to swap for Solid Dice so as to be able to roll for more characters - distances the whole financial transaction sufficiently that it would certainly work better for me, psychologically. 

But then we come back to the fact that I don't need the extra rolls. If I had more Solid Dice I'd end up rolling for characters I wasn't that crazy about. I'm already getting the ones I really want. For free.

I think if I was going to throw some money Hotta's way, which I'd be happy to do, since I'd like them to keep on adding content to this excellent game that I'm having such a good time playing, I'd probably have to look at buying some of the outfits. Cosmetic purchases somehow slot into a different receptor in my brain, as I think they may do for many gamers. Buying characters seems off, somehow. Buying dresses is fine!

As is often the case with post like this, I'm not so much addressing an audience here as I am having a conversation with myself. Last time I rambled on about this same topic, someone (It'll either have been Mailvaltar or Nimgimli, those being about the only two people who ever comment on NTE posts.) told me in the comments that you can buy stuff in the store with PayPal. That removes the only real concern I have about giving money to free to play publishers, namely giving my financial information to a somewhat unknown company. Situations like this are exactly why I made a PayPal account in the first place.

I have almost no cosmetics in NTE and I would like some. In today's update we all got an outfit for Akane, which was great, especially since I now have the character who can actually wear it. Regular readers may remember (They won't. Ed.) that when I was rolling for Iroi, I got her outfit but not her, so this is a big improvement. 

The problem with any of the outfits, though, is that 90% of the time, I'm only going to be playing Flora. So maybe I should buy her some new clothes... 

I'll have a think about it. I wish you could get NTE gift cards, like you can for some games. Then I could just put it on my birthday and Christmas wishlist. Problem solved!

And there we come to the end of another post in which I mostly talked to myself about things that ought to have stayed in my head. I guess the post I was planning to write, which was going to be about the update itself, including the latest chapter of the Whoots!!!! story, which I have already finished and which, once again, is excellent, and about which I have plenty to say, will have to wait until tomorrow.

Or even longer, since I have a ton of other ideas for posts just now. And to think I wasted a day on this one! Oh well, I guess I ought to leave the Whoots!!!! post a while longer anyway, so anyone who plays NTE will have had time to see it for themselves. Bound to be some spoilers. 

Yes, that's it! This post was a public service in that I didn't spoil anyone's game! 

No need to thank me! 

Next Fest Autumn 2026 - The Choosing

 As I expected, it took me an hour or so last night, flipping through the demos on Steam, to pick half a dozen from this Autumn's Next Fest to play and review  And as I also expected, it was a less intuitive and user-friendly experience than it could have been. It's not that the search and sort options aren't there, or that they don't work, so much as it's the way so many games are tagged with so many genres and styles it renders the process of sifting through them opaque.

I started by looking through the demos Steam had dumped into my Discover queue. There's a warning that says it takes Steam a couple of days to learn about the games before it can personalize the selection for individual users but if I waited until 18.00 on Wednesday for that to happen, I wouldn't have time to play the damn demos. 

Even without personalization, the Discovery queue seemed pretty well-tuned to my interests, although checking it again this morning, that seems to have been sheer good luck. I picked a couple from there, anyway. Or I think I did. I can't honestly remember. After you've looked at a few dozen demos it all becomes a bit of a blur...

After I'd done that, I stopped to have a think about what sort of games I'd like to play and what I might like to write about. And guess what? It was all the same ones as usual. Sorry about that. I know these demo review posts are some of the least-read pages on the entire blog - even the music posts reliably outperform them - but I enjoy writing them, so...

The genres I looked at specifically this time were Point&Click, MMORPG, Visual Novel and Turn-Based Strategy. The only sub-genre I looked at was Tactical RPG. This time I didn't try parsing anything by Themes & Moods. Usually I at least throw Cyberpunk in there but I'm a bit cyberpunked out at the moment. 

Oh, wait, actually that's not quite true. I did search 1980s for some reason. Just to see what was there, really. And I ended up picking something, too.

There seemed to be plenty to choose from in all my selections, although too high a proportion in some categories seemed to me to have not all that much to do with the genre they claimed to be part of. I did notice there were a lot more MMORPGs than usual, which I found surprising. 

 

Checking it again, the search for MMORPG brings up twenty-six results, more than half of which are what I'd call true MMORPGs. The rest look more like MMORTS  or co-ops but they'd all broadly count as MMOs. It does seem like a lot more than usual and there are some familiar names among them - ArcheAge Chronicles, Loftia, Spirit Crossing, World of Slime... 

There were a couple of very unusual MMOs in the list, too. I'd almost call them original. There's a platforming MMO, certainly the first I've ever heard of, called Springtale. It's a roguelite, too, so god knows how that works in an MMO context. 

I'm very bad at platformers so I didn't even consider that one but I did have a long think about Band Stage, a music game where you play instruments and perform, either solo or with a band, which apparently you can form with other players, like a group in an MMO. Again, I'm very bad at music games, so that would just be embarrassing for me and infuriating for anyone I was playing alongside. Plus the music in the trailer isn't doing an awful lot for me...

I could easily have picked all MMORPGs this time. There were plenty that looked interesting. The problem with MMO demos, when it comes to playing them for a Next Fest review, is that they take too long. Hours rather than minutes and even then it's often only enough to see the very early stages. Not exactly practical for my purposes. 

In the end I chose three, two of which are creature collectors. I didn't actually realise that until after I'd chosen them and I might only have taken one if I had but it'll be interesting to compare them, I guess.

The third was ArcheAge Chronicles, which I'm not going to review for Next Fest. For a start, it's nearly 40gb and I'm not sure I want to download it just for a demo. More importantly, it's the sort of game I could perfectly well install and play outside of Next Fest and most likely will, whenever I have the time to give it a proper look. 

Eight demos is probably two too many, anyway. Especially if they're any good. I'll stick to the following seven and leave AAC for later. Probably.

The seven I'm going to try and get through in the next week are listed in a little more detail below. I have now officially retired, so I have all my time to myself, and the weather forecast for the rest of the week is very poor, so I'll be indoors most of the time. Should be ideal! 

 

 

The Other Side of the Wall - "Julian Reed is a 13-year old student at a New England all-boys Catholic boarding school in the early 1980s. When people begin disappearing and no one else seems to remember they ever existed, Julian investigates, with the help of a girl he has never seen, separated from him by a wall."

This is the one I found by searching "1980s". It's a Point & Click adventure and the promo video was what sold it for me. It starts with a shot of some dork in a baseball jacket dancing in the foreground while in the background another kid sits at a desk with his back to the action, writing a letter. A decent quality voice-over reads out what he's writing and I found it pretty funny, especially the bit about him having all the Police albums. After that it shows some classic point & click gameplay which made me feel right at home. I have high hopes for this one. The video is  on YouTube but weirdly it doesn't have the voiceover there. Watch it on Steam for the full effect.

World of Slime - "World of Slime is a casual MMORPG where you capture, collect, and grow with all kinds of slimes. Find new slimes through field capture, synthesis, and fishing, then take them with you into battles, exploration, and puzzles." 

I knew of this one from MassivelyOP so it got a quick grab on recognition value. I think I might be regretting that, now I look at it more closely. Also, what is it with slimes? They are not cute, no matter how often people say they are.

Never Wither - "Experience unprecedented creature collection gameplay—Transform into almost any creature you see! Collect and raise fantastical creatures, and command them to farm, build, and craft. In this open world survival crafting game, Establish your settlement, become the last hope against the Corruption."

This is the other creature collecting MMO I chose (Probably more properly categorised as open-world survival/crafting.) and it looks a lot more interesting. Graphically, it looks very attractive and the gameplay has survival elements including base-building. I'm getting Palworld vibes. Also, I like the name. It's just odd enough to be intriguing. The demo is the whole first zone of the full game and they estimate 3-5 hours gameplay, more if you try to see and do everything. Another I feel optimistic about. 

The Brilliant Detective Milo - "A narrative-driven cat detective game set some time during the 20th century in a city rattled by the resurgence of mysterious murders. As head detective of the Mew York Police Department, it is your duty to put a stop to these killings and exhume the secrets buried deep in the shadows of the city…"

Cartoon cats, bad cat puns, comic strips... I wonder why I picked it? It looks great but the problem with detective games is I always think I'm going to enjoy them more than I do. I don't get on with those evidence boards and I'm just hopeless at figuring out who the murderer is. It's always a murderer, too, isn't it? It's never an arsonist or a blackmailer or a sheep rustler. 

Hela: Of Mice and Magic - "See the world through the eyes of a brave little mouse in this enchanting 3D co-op adventure. Explore breathtaking landscapes inspired by Northern Sweden, solve puzzles, and be a force for good in a land where heartwarming storytelling and the beauty of nature intertwine."

First cats, now mice. It says it's co-op but it can be played solo. I checked. Visually, it looks fantastic, to the point where I'm doubting whether it will even run on my machine. Of course I didn't check the minimum specs for any of the demos. Didn't even think of it. I might have to try re-installing the graphics card. If nothing else, this Next Fest is going to be a good test of whether I can trust this machine for gaming or if I really should think about getting a new one.

Et le Grain Mourut -  "A visual novel set in 1920s Paris. As summer draws near, young students are revising their end-of-year exams. Olivier is one of them."

Hmm. I did French up to the first year of university but it was a loooong time ago. I think that means "And the grain died." Let me see if that's right. Ah, close! It's "And the dead grain." Which still tells me absolutely nothing. 

It's a slightly strange demo in that it covers the first two days of the story and includes about 15% of the total text in the game but it doesn't include any "big branching paths", which is kind of the main gameplay in a visual novel.  They do say you can still make some choices, though, which is just as well. Otherwise it would just be a cartoon.

Kat Domino: Agent of S.H.E.L.L. - "Kat Domino is an agent of SHELL, the organization ruling the world. A routine mission will lead her where she doesn't belong, uncover things she was never meant to see, and unravel a conspiracy that could change everything she thought she knew. With a little luck, her trainee agent will survive"

Oh, look! Another cartoon cat! Who ever would have guessed? 

This one has more lore on the store page than all the rest put together. Someone is really invested in the world-building here. And it sounds great. Which is more than I can say for the trailer. I recommend turning the sound down. I hope there's none of that in the game or the music will be going off right from the start. Other than that, hitting all the right notes!

And there we are. Now all I have to do is play them. And then write about them.

Off I go.