The obvious advantage of these periodic, time-limited events over the always-on demos on the game pages is clearly the attention they draw. In this small corner of the blogosphere alone I count at least four bloggers who've posted at least one Next Fest report this time around and I can think of two or three more who've covered it in previous events. By contrast, almost nobody posts about random demos they might have tried in the fallow months between festivals.
I hereby pledge to make more of an effort to play and review demos of interesting games as and when I find them, not just when Valve fires the starting gun. It shouldn't be hard. I really enjoy demos. They're kind of like singles as compared to albums: much shorter but much punchier, the good ones, anyway. Like singles they're also a lot easier to sum up in a couple of pithy paragraphs, plus you can bundle a bunch together and make up a full post with a lot less effort than reviewing a whole damn game.
Going into this most recent Next Fest, I was somewhat unimpressed with what
was on offer but either I picked exceptionally well or I was mistaken. I've now completed another three demos, leaving just one to go, and
once again they're all winners.
For a while, I wasn't expecting to be anything like that positive about the first of today's batch, Life of Delta, and I still have some serious issues with the demo itself, even now I'm feeling a lot warmer towards the full game. If I was tasked with coming up with a demo that would entice people into wishlisting an adventure game, I'm not sure I'd begin by locking the player in a single room with no dialog and almost no interactions and then ask them to solve a particularly long, awkward puzzle before they could even get out of the door.
Not to overstate the difficulty but even after I became sufficiently irritated with my lack of progress to go watch a YouTube walkthrough, I still couldn't do it. In the end I gave up and went to bed and that was almost as much of the demo as I saw. Luckily, after a night's sleep I decided to give it one more try. Suddenly it was easy.
Why? Did I have a dream revelation of some kind? No. I already knew exactly what to do the night before. I'd watched someone do it on YouTube ffs. The reason I hadn't been able to solve the puzzle, which involves watching multiple icons to see which ones light up to match a pattern, when you click on a button, is that the visual difference between the lit and unlit icons was all but indistinguishable in artificial light. It was only in the morning, with sunlight streaming through the window, that I could tell which ones were "On" and which were "Off".
The reason I persevered is that Life of Delta opens with a gorgeous cut scene, good enough to make me wish it was the start of a whole movie. The in-game graphics are also excellent. The trailer shows a little of both.
Once I'd finally freed myself from the first room, everything else went about as smoothly as any other point and click adventure game. The controls are intuitive and the rest of the demo has interesting conversations, manageable puzzles and plenty to see.
The music and background sounds are fine, too, but for once I won't be praising the voice acting; not because it's bad or because there is none but because all the robots speak in a kind of Charlie Brown-adult mumble. It's a common but very risky choice. Sometimes, as in the SteamWorld games, it's so incredibly distracting I have to mute it but here it works pretty well. I imagine it must save a bomb on paying professional voice actors, something that's only going to get more controversial in years to come - not that AIs are the only threat to employment for the game voiceover specialist...
The Life of Delta demo took just 48 minutes, well over half of which was spent in that first room. Even so, I saw more than enough to mark it "Recommended". I'm going to save myself the trouble of trying to find an unobtrusive way to say the same about the other two. I'll just get it out of the way now: they're all three "Recommended".
Second in this batch comes the game I mentioned at the end of my last post, Pitstop in Purgatory. I was slightly wary of this one, not being crazy fond of afterlife fantasies, but it very quickly won me over with a combination of characterful images, clever writing and solid voice acting.
Before I go any further there's something I ought to mention. To myself. I literally just found this out right now, when I searched for the trailer on YouTube for the post. Actually, there are several "somethings" that need to be addressed:
-
Pitstop in Purgatory launches on Steam in just three days.
- The full game is already available on Itch.io.
- I already own the blasted thing!
The graphics, which didn't immediately appeal, quickly grew on me. They look like either pastels or chalks. The settings are as constrained as you might expect from a purgatorial scenario but the richness of the illustration offsets any serious claustrophobia.
Mechanically, Pitstop in Purgatory plays comfortably with no noticeable glitches or hiccups, a sign of a game that's already been released. The character you play, Astrid Braid, used to be an actor but her recurring role in the drama of life has just come to an end. As she struggles to come to terms with the fact of her own demise, Astrid meets a cast of self-centered shadows, all of whom have a lot to say, none of which is of very much help.
Troubled by visitations in her sleep (Yes, there is sleep in purgatory. In your own bed, no less. Also, there's drink. Sounding quite cosy now, isn't it?) it seems Astrid may be destined for something better than everlasting limbo. Or is it something worse?
It took me 38 minutes to take Astrid as far as she could go, namely the bar and her bedroom. Whether the entire game takes place in those two locations, which would at least be thematically appropriate, or whether the nether stretches further is something I guess I can discover at my leisure, now I know I own the game. Not much point wishlisting it on Steam, either, although had I not just made my great discovery I certainly would have.
Thirdly and lastly comes Foolish Mortals. This one also has a supernatural setting and a historical one as well, although I can honestly say I didn't notice until half-way through. The action takes place in Lousiana in the 1930s but I'm so used to seeing the New Orleans cliches in TV shows and movies I took the clapboard houses and paddle-steamers to be nothing more than contemporary set-dressing. It was only when the Maitre D' at the Captain's Club started going on about Prohibition that I realised we'd stepped back in time by almost a century.
Since we're in the Louisiana swamplands, the plot necessarily revolves around voodoo. How could it not? The demo opens in something of a flurry, mid-quest with, three out of five ingredients for a voodoo summoning already in your bag, along with an empty soda bottle and one or two other things. It's taking in media res to extremes. For a moment I thought I must have missed a step but no, that's where the demo begins, although maybe not the game.
The full game is set to feature "more than 30 fully voiced characters...over 70 gorgeous hand-drawn locations..." and offer "a full-length experience, with a gameplay time equal to Monkey Island and Broken Sword." I still haven't played Monkey Island but the Broken Sword titles were an immediate point of reference for me here.
It's a long demo for a long game. It took me almost an hour and a quarter to gather the remaining ingredients and complete the spell, at which point... ah, no, I'd better keep that part to myself. The puzzles weren't over-complicated or illogical although they were adventure-game unlikely. It's very much a positive point in the game's favor that I completed most of them without referring to the extensive and elegant in-game hints, a feature I only discovered close to the end.
The voicework I would describe as solid rather than exceptional. It does have very much the light tone of the Broken Sword games, albeit without that series' signature banter between two leads. Maybe that's coming later. As for the visuals, I think "gorgeous" is more than fair for the paintings, documents and other full-screen illustrations. The locations themselves are neat and attractive but perhaps leaning more towards the functional than the decorative.
As for the plot, always a key feature in games of this nature, the demo sets things up nicely. Once again, I don't want to give too much away, but there's a development at the very end that suggests a significant change of direction from what I'd been expecting until then. I'm certainly curious to find out what happens next.
Foolish Mortals is scheduled for next year. There's a Kickstarter running. It's only just started but with 24 days still to go it's already well past the modest £12,000 target, the pot standing at £20,575 as I write.
I won't be backing it. They definitely don't need my money to get the job done. I will be wishlisting the game on Steam, though. It's exactly the kind of thing for a long, winter's evening.
That just leaves one demo left from the seven I chose five days ago. It's
called Unusual Findings and I'm pleased to say the demo's still
available even though Next Fest has ended. I'll try and fit in a review
somewhere. Who knows? maybe it'll be good enough to merit a whole post of
its own.
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