Next Fest ended two days ago but if you google "Steam next fest dates october 2024" like I just did the top link is from Steam itself and it says "Next Fest October Live Now!". If you click, it takes you to a much better-designed and organized list of demos than I was able to find there when the event began.
It tells you which were the most-played demos of the event, which is undeniably interesting to find out but I can't help thinking I'd rather have had access to such a clear and comprehensive selection before the event began, rather than after it had come to an end.
I've never looked at the post-event summary before but clearly I need to make that a part of the process in future because there are several demos on the list that look a lot more interesting than some of the ones I picked, going in. That's not to say I didn't spot them then, although there are a few I don't recall seeing before. It's more that the presentation here is much more snappy and attractive than it was in the muddled and messy version I had to pick my way through ten days ago.
Fortunately, a lot of the games on the list still have an "Install Demo" button so it's not too late to go take a look. I may well do that. If I remember this next time, which I'm pretty sure I won't, I may also skip the actual Fest itself and just come along for the after-party. It seems like that's where the good stuff happens.
Meanwhile, I still have four demos to write up. I've played three of them, for a given value of "played", and the demo for the last one is still available, so I ought to be able to do my duty and report on the full seven. I'm sure that sets your mind at ease.
I am not, however, going to dedicate a post to each of them. I could. You know I could. But I'm not going to because no-one cares enough to read two thousand words on a demo for a game they're not interested in playing and and that includes me, particularly if you swap the word "read" for "write".
The three demos I've played but have yet to write about are The Precinct, Ad Memoriam and Story Crafter. And here they are.
The Precinct appears third on the "Most Played" list, which looks to me as if it's been sorted to show the most most played at the top. I'm not surprised. It's slick, professional and has a clear and obvious appeal to a broad audience.
The demo opens with a briefing taken straight from Hill St. Blues, the TV cop show which, in my opinion, the game most resembles, although it's plainly an amalgam of a number of well-known 80s police procedurals. You play a rookie just starting at the precinct where your father was a highly-regarded, much decorated hero, something that may or may not play into the plot, if there is one.
I wouldn't know. I played for just over three-quarters of an hour and didn't get out of the tutorial. If there's a narrative it didn't reveal itself in the short time I was there.
The demo, as far as I played it, was entertaining enough but it did seem to go very hard on the nuts and bolts of policing. There were the expected video game pleasures - shoot-outs with bank robbers and high speed car chases - but there were also lengthy sections where I was checking if cars were illegally parked, handing out spot fines or escorting perps to the station house for booking. It felt closer to a simulation than an action game at times.
In fact, my gritty partner, who'd ridden with my dad in the good old days, told me I'd done good. I guess he missed the part where I couldn't work out how to fire my gun so I just walked into a hail of bullets and clubbed some bank-robbers into unconsciousness with my billy club. Or the time I got stuck in a yard and rammed through the fence to get back onto the street rather than turn the car around.
I enjoyed my time with The Precinct but I stopped because I'd had enough. It's too detailed for my taste and the graphics, while superbly detailed and rendered, are too small to stare at for long. I'm pretty sure I'd get a stress headache if I tried playing the game for real.
All told, though, it seems like it does exactly what it sets out to do. I think it will be a success.
Ad Memoriam I'm not so sure about. I lasted less than twenty minutes with it. It's a detection game with a very odd premise: a rock band at whose every gig there's some kind of fatal accident.
From the trailer, I expected to be spending my time with a couple of twenty-something women with a podcast but one of them gets killed in the first five minutes. The more annoying one, luckily. She's the latest victim of the curse of Ad Memoriam, which is the name of both the game and the band. I'd have given a spoiler warning for that but it happens so soon into the demo there hardly seems any point.
The graphics are okay but movement once again is quite stilted, an unfortunate feature of many of the indie games I seem to pick, and the backgrounds, such of them as I saw, anyway, which wasn't much, are static and not particularly detailed. The focus seems to be on the characters, who are all depicted in great detail.
The writing seems fine. There's certainly a lot of it. The voice acting is also fine until it starts doing that really annoying thing where all you hear is a quick "Yep" or "Sure" at the start of a long paragraph that you then have to read for yourself.
A lot of demos (And some full games.) do this and I wish they wouldn't. I'm guessing sometimes it's to save costs and other times it's because the full voiceover isn't ready yet. Whatever it is, it's never preferable to plain silence. Please stop.
Minor complaints aside, nothing about the graphics, the writing or the voice acting would have prevented me going further with the demo. What had me logging out never to return was the gameplay. Or, more specifically, the implementation thereof.
It's the usual detective game shtick of looking for clues, questioning suspects then putting it all together to draw conclusions, a process I don't particularly care for at the best of times. In this case, though, I just could not get the UI to co-operate reliably enough to decide whether there was fun to be had.
The instructions weren't all that clear and some of the buttons didn't seem to work. I quickly found myself in the irritating but all too familiar situation of knowing what I wanted to do but not being able to make the game understand.
I ended up with a gibberish result to my first investigation, non-existent error-checking having somehow allowed a mistaken key-press to select the same response twice. Worse, I couldn't find any way to delete my incorrect choice or even to clear the investigation board and start over. The only option was to accept it, at which point the game told me I was wrong and sent me back to try again.
I declined and logged out. I'm sure all of this will be fixed as the game proceeds through development but it isn't quite the game I expected and I'm happy to leave it behind.
Story Crafter I probably will keep more of an eye on. It's very odd but not unenjoyable and it's heading towards some areas of game development that interest me quite a bit. That said, this was another demo that didn't play out exactly as I expected.
It's described on the Steam store page as "an AI-powered online RPG combining simplified TRPG rules with advanced AI", something I feel I have to quote in full because it's not amenable to shortening, especially by someone who doesn't quite understand what it all means anyway. I had a mental image of an RPG that would generate itself in real time as I played, creating each response by leveraging the likes of ChatGPT and Dall-E-3.
Maybe that was over-optimistic but it is pretty much what the description on the store page implies: "Some images in the game are generated using AI, and AI is also used as the game host for text descriptions.". It does kinda-sorta do something like that but in more limited way than I was imagining. I think the word "some" may be doing more lifting in that sentence than you'd expect.
The description also suggests Story Crafter can be used to, well, craft stories; to create and run RPG scenarios of your own devising. If so, I didn't see it in the fifty minutes I spent with the demo.
The demo comes with four pre-set scenarios. I played two of them through to a conclusion. They all seemed to be horror-inflected to some extent, one of the two I tried specifically referring to the Call of Cthulhu rpg ruleset.
You begin by creating a character, who you can freely describe and which the game then pictures for you. There are a ton of stats to assign, too, and you get to write up whatever background for your character you fancy. I can't say I noticed much impact on the narrative from anything I wrote but maybe it depends what you go on to do and say.
From there the game seemed to follow a fairly set narrative in each of the scenarios I tried. By far the strongest aspect of the use of AI was in the parsing of whatever I said, which was most impressive. If any adventure game of the eighties or nineties had been able to parse player input like this it would have been a sensation. I can easily see generative AI being used successfully and extensively in this context in future. Quite possibly uncontroversially, too, since all it would be doing would be replacing some inferior software, not anyone's job.
Of course, for it to be of more than aesthetic value, the game itself will have to be capable acting on what it says, something it didn't appear to be able to do in the demo. For example, there was a moment early in the first scenario when someone tried to hire my character to do a job for him and I decided to try and hike the fee.
The fellow agreed to pay me the extra fifty dollars but later, when the game referred to the matter again, it reverted to the original sum. When not actively responding to things I typed in, the engine appeared to be running through a pre-written script rather than generating a new one on the fly.
The two scenarios themselves were... strange. The first one came to what I have to assume was the intended conclusion when the person I was talking to flung himself out of a window rather than go on talking to me. (Don't say anything...), at which point the game told me I had completed the Beginner Tutorial.
The second scenario never ended at all for the simple reason that I couldn't get out of the locked room someone had trapped me in. I spent a good while exploring it, trying everything I could think of, while the generative text once again responded very convincingly, as if it completely understood what I was trying to achieve, while not actually allowing me to do any of it.
As proof of concept, I found Story Crafter impressive. I have no doubt whatsoever that one or more of the big gaming companies will soon leverage the technologies we're calling AI to create a game engine capable of doing many of the things both gamers and game developers have been talking about for years.
I also think that, had the AI card not been played, whichever games had come to market with the ability to respond meaningfully in real time to player input would have been receive with adulation. You only have to look back at the excitement created by StoryBricks, something which in retrospect looks like a rudimentary attempt to do much the same thing. We all fricken' loved that idea, didn't we?
I don't imagine Story Crafters is going to be one of the games that changes the way we play but it's certainly an interesting project and I'd like to find the time to mess around with it some more. I could do with some different settings for the scenarios, though. Lovecraftian horror has never been a favorite of mine.
That just leaves one more demo to play: Au Revoir, the obligatory cyberpunk game. I'll try to get that one done later today - if I can tear myself away from Once Human, that is...
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