It's Punk, Jim...

And so we come to the final demo from the recent Next Fest. I won't say I've saved the best for last but it is the one I spent the longest time playing. A shade under two hours and it could easily have been longer.

The game in question is 

Solarpunk

and the first thing I have to say about it is... what the heck is it with the "punk" thing?  I just typed "punk" into the search field on the Steam store and here's what came up, just on the first page:

• FragPunk
• Evilpunk
• Mech Punk
• Noir Punk
• WizardPunk
• TeamPunk
• Ocean Punk
• CatPunk
• WastePunk
• WastelandPunk
• CraftPunk 

Sometimes it's all one word, sometimes there's mid-word capitalization, sometimes it's two words - but what does it mean? I understand suffixes in general. I know where "gate" comes from, when you're trying to suggest some kind of scandal, and "core" is self-explanatory if you're trying to emphasize  focus but "punk"? What's "punk" about most of these games, in any sense of the word? 

That's not a rhetorical question. There is an answer. I looked it up. The problem is, the answer makes no sense. 

Here's what Google says the "punk" suffix means:

"a combining form extracted from cyberpunk used to denote a rebellious, alternative genre or aesthetic in speculative fiction, art, fashion, etc., and added to a word that names its distinctive theme, often a form of technology: steampunk solarpunk hopepunk."

That definition even uses the name of this game - Solarpunk - as an example. Only I just spent two hours playing the demo and there is absolutely nothing about it that could rationally be described as "rebellious" or "alternative". If I had to stick a label on it, that label would be "cosy", which is about as far from "punk" as you can get.

I won't derail my own post any further, other than to say there's a long and intersting discussion on the topic on this Reddit thread if you want to dig into it further. I was already toying with the idea of  posting something about this before I ever heard of Solarpunk because it's been getting on my nerves for a while now but I think this little rantette may have gotten it out of my system, at least for the moment, so you've been spared the full two thousand word essay on the subject.

On to the game. If it isn't rebellious or alternative, just exactly what is it?

It's a twee survival game with cute airships, that's what. Set among an archipelago of islands floating in the sky, of course. What else would it be? If there's anything less rebellious or alternative in gaming in 2025 it would be hard to think of it. I guess it could be a PvPvE extraction shooter...

Is it a good survival game? Hard to tell from the demo, really. I mean, let's not kid ourselves here. They're all the same at the beginning, aren't they? Pick up some sticks, pick up some stones, make yourself an axe and a pick, chop down some trees, break some rocks, make a workbench, build a shack, realize you're starving, pick some berries, scoop some water...

All of that. As these things go, I thought it asked a little bit more of me than some, although the notes on Steam say certain mechanics have been "adjusted" for the demo, so presumably the game proper asks even more. 

For example, the night is quite long and I couldn't do a lot while it was dark. That was offputting, until I managed to make a shelter, put a bed in it and sleep through the hours of darkness. Hunger and thirst seemed quite insistent, too. I didn't quite die of either but the edges of the screen went red a couple of times. There was no shortage of water on my island but berries were hard to come by until I tilled the land and planted some. Ditto cotton, which I needed for some of the key tasks. It's not Valheim but it's not as easy as the child-friendly graphics suggest it might be, either.

The demo is the tutorial, give or take, and it's quite an extensive one, although the game seemed to think the instruction phase had finished well before I did. I think I got a message at one point saying the tutorial was over and then it just seemed to carry on. Or maybe I imagined it.

There didn't seem to be much of a storyline - in fact, at this remove, a few days later, I can't recall if there was any kind of narrative at all. I don't think there wast but I guess there could have been... but it would have had to have been somthing so unremarkable I've already forgotten everything about it.

There is a structure to gameplay beyond simply surviving, all the same. The demo offers a number of suggestions as to what you could do, the most compelling of which is obviously to build your own airship so you can get off the damn island and go look for somewhere more interesting. You can also build ladders of seemingly infinite length that require no support, so maybe you could skip the airship and just make a bridge.

I didn't think of that at the time so I made an airship. It took me maybe an hour and a half to get airborn. For the rest of the time I was failing to fly it. 

This is not one of thiose games where you just get in your ballon and steer it like World of Warcraft before Dragonriding. It requires actual flying skills, something I do not have and which it's clearly going to take longer than the natural length of the demo to acquire.

I did at least manage to lurch and yaw my way across the sky far enough to establish that, in the demo, there's not really anywhere much you can go, anyway. You can see other islands in the distance but if you try to get closer a whole mesh of electric-blue lines criss-crosses the sky and there's a message telling you onward travel isn't available in the demo.

The only place you can go is to another, larger airship. It's easily visible from your island and I'd wondered what it was from the moment I noticed it. It turnes out to be a home and garden hanging from two large gasbags. I did eventually manage to get to it but I wasn't able to dock, due to my own incompetence with the controls, so I had to jump out of my ship and hope I didn't miss.

Luckily I landed safely in the back yard. Less luckily, when I'd finished looking around, I couldn't find any way to get back to my ship. I had to jump over the side and kill myself so I could re-appear at home in bed, which I'd earlier set as my respawn point.

Inbetween the two leaps into the unknown, I fully explored the mystery airship, something that took me about thirty seconds. It's a shop. Unfortunately, it was closed. I peered through the window but no-one was home. Something else not available in the demo, obviously.

And that's a bout it, I think. There's not an awful lot more to say. Solarpunk: it's a survival game. That just about covers it.

Actually, I think that should be a survival sandbox. Reading the full description on Steam there's no suggestion of any gameplay other than exploring, building, crafting and farming. The farming and automation options look quite extensive but there's no hint of a story, not even the flimsy pretence for one most similar games throw in as a sop to convention. Maybe that's what's supposed to be rebellious about this one.

Mechanically, there's certainly nothing to frighten the horses. It works like every other survival game. I can't recall any surprises or even moments of puzzlement, where I couldn't figure out what to do. It's textbook. I also came across no bugs or glitches and everything worked so it seems very competently put-together.

One thing that's missing is personalization. There's no character creation in the demo. My character was completely anonymous and also invisible, since I couldn't find any option other than first-person. There must be one because the game is multiplayer and there are videos on the Store page where you can see other players and what certainly looks like the player-character, too. 

Character models definitely exist but whether there's any sort of character customisation in the full game I can't say for sure. It would be crazy if there wasn't, wouldn't it? 

I can already imagine waht clothes in the game would look like. Aesthetically, Solarpunk is extremely coherent and consistent. Too much so, in my opinion. It looks lovely but it all looks much the same. The color palette is restful on the eye but rarely shifts far from blue-green-yellow. Design-wise, everything looks charming and homespun. It's a toddler's picture-book come to life.

I did only see the tutorial island, of course. It might be that different islands have different aesthetics. That would make a big difference. I've looked at the screenshots on Steam and watched the videos, though, and there isn't much sign of variety there. All the same, it is a beautiful game. It seems a bit unreasonable to complain that the developers have chosen a look and then stuck with it. 

All things considered, Solarpunk seems like it should be very successful. All the necessary parts are there and they're all in the right order. If it doesn't take off, that's most likely because there are more cosy survival games these days than people willing to play them. I think we probably passed peak Survival and peak Cosy a while back.

Nevertheless, I had a good time playing and I might well play again. The demo is open-ended so I could carry on for a while longer but I'd really like to see a few more islands. Always assuming I could figure out how to fly the airship, that is. It's definitely not a given that I could.

Wishlisted and Recommended, if you're not survivaled-out already.

Money On The Table - The Stars Reach Kickstarter So Far

I still have one more demo from the now-ended Next Fest to cover but I think I'll save that for another day. Time to catch up with what else has been happening.

How about that Stars Reach Kickstarter campaign then, eh? Have you been following that? I have, even if I haven't posted about it since it went live or logged in to any of the many playtests, at least a couple of which seem to happen every other day now.

As I write this, the total raised stands at just over half a million dollars. That's two-and-a-half times the ask with three weeks still to go. It sounds very impressive but I'm not wholly on board with all the back-slapping and high-fiving that's been going on. 

Obviously it's far, far better to have smashed the target so quickly than to have failed to meet it by the end of the campaign but I suspect any marketing expert would be quick to point out the sheer speed at which it fell just means they didn't ask for enough. I'm not sure the big banner at the top of the page screaming "FUNDED IN LESS THAN 1 HOUR" is quite the brag they think it is.

I was certainly surprised by how low the target was. I was expecting a minimum seven figures. It's hard to see how $200k could either convince investors of pent-up demand or pay for a significant amount of further development.

But then, I'm just a player and a customer. All I know of development costs are the huge numbers I see quoted for the cost of bringing other, similar games to market. Tens, even hundreds of millions. This seems like pin money by comparison but I guess Raph and his team have been in the business long enough to know what they need. I hope so, anyway.

An interesting point of reference here might be Monsters & Memories, the indie game hoping, as so many have done before, to re-create the supposed glories of the Golden Age of MMORPGs. Or, more specifically, to remake EverQuest, which is very clearly what they're doing, even if they don't come right out and say so. It's even more Everquesty than the (Surprisingly successful.) Pantheon. 

Niche Worlds Cult (Great name!) issues regular, incredibly detailed updates on how the game is progressing. I'm signed up and I got a press release just yesterday telling me, among many, many other things, that since work on the game began in 2020 they've spent $104,725 on development. Last year they spent  $37,217.10.

NWC hopes to be "one of the most transparent companies in the industry" and they have a whole page on their website dedicated to laying out the exact costs in considerable detail. It makes for interesting reading, especially the part where they explain that the whole thing is being funded out of the pockets of the founders, that they have all the resources they need to finish it, and that therefore they don't need to raise any more from outside investors. 

They do hope to make their money back one day but they seem sanguine even about that. M&M will eventually be a traditional subscription-based MMORPG and they say even "a small subscription base" will be sufficient to keep development rolling after launch. 

Having played the game briefly during a few of the frequent open events, another of which is coming in April, I am astonished by just how much they've done for so little. Of all the retro-MMOs I've seen, quite a few now, this is the one I feel is the most likely to achieve its goals, both successfully re-creating that authentic early-MMORPG feel and also maintaining the necessary stability to keep it going.

M&M and that other stalwart of the retro scene, Project Gorgon, demonstrate that a few truly dedicated individuals really can make these kinds of pipe-dreams come true. More importantly, they prove it doesn't take millions, let alone the near-bankrupting of a whole state; it just takes a very clear game-plan, some realistic goals and the ability to focus on what can be done, not what would look oh so cool if only it could be done.

Where Stars Reach stands on the spectrum that stretches from the gritty, unspectacular sustainability of M&M and P:G at one end to the crash-and-burn object lesson of Curt Schilling and 38 Studios at the other remains to be seen. Right now, it feels as though there's a pretty solid base for a game in place but what's there still doesn't look all that much like the game that's being hyped - and boy, is it being hyped!

Rather than read yet another puff piece in the fan press or another of the gosh-wow press releases I receive pretty much daily now, yesterday I took a look at the latest version of Stars Reach's proposed development timeline on the Kickstarter page. It's very near the end of the long campaign statement so you may well have missed it. I had.

The timescales are even shorter than I realized. I already didn't see how they were going to hit their dates and that was when I believed there were still a couple of years to go before full launch. Instead, the campaign predicts Early Access by the summer, while the game is still in alpha. Beta would then follow before the end of the year and the full launch "in the first half of next year". 

Does that sound realistic? I guess you'd have to be at Playable Worlds to answer that. As a tester, I'd say the current pre-alpha build is fun and it makes a good shop-window for the campaign but it bears little resemblance to the game as described in the Kickstarter. 

Last time I played, there were just four planets. The full game is supposed include "thousands", but they are going to be procedurally generated so I suppose that's just a scaled-up version of what's there already. That doesn't apply to the political system or the economy, though or, crucially, spaceships, none of which are in the test build as yet. I'm not sure there's even a way to talk to other players in-game yet. There wasn't a couple of weeks ago.

The spaceships are the bridge too far for me just now. That sounds like a huge jump from anything that's in the game. They'll apparently be flyable either solo or with a crew and there will be "massive fleet battles". Until I read that yesterday, I wasn't aware the scope of Stars Reach was going to intrude upon the territory of EVE Online or Star Citizen. Seems I was wrong, although I guess it all depends on what they mean by "massive" and, for that matter, "crew".

However you look at it, it does seem like a heck of a lot to add in just nine months, by when the game ought to be in Beta and therefore "feature complete". On the positive side, and referring back to the very low target asked by the Kickstarter, maybe these aren't the kinds of problems you solve by throwing money at them anyway. I'm not sure having several million more dollars by the end of this month is going to make those massive fleet battles happen any faster. 

It might even make things worse, if previous hugely successful campaigns are any guide. Feature creep and over-enthusiasm have killed plenty of similar projects or at least made them take a lot longer than they might have done had they had less money to throw around. At least the Stars Reach stretch goals don't look like they'll cause any unnecessary problems - so far they seem to be re-skins of existing assets or things that would have needed to be done anyway.

If all that sounds negative, I should mention that I threw in my $30 dollars on day one. I am a backer, or a "Reacher" if you prefer, since that's the title my $30 bought me.

It seems like a very low risk investment in a game I'm more and more convinced I'll never want to play much anyway. Even if Playable Worlds do somehow manage to hit all their marks (And the Kickstarter does end with the traditional caveat that "feature delivery may miss target dates."), I suspect I'll have already seen more than enough of Stars Reach by then.

I don't imagine I'll want to spend a huge amount of time playing Monsters & Memories, either. The further I get from 1999, the less I want to go back. Or 2003, either. 

I would say, though, that there's a greater chance of me stumping up for a subscription to play a game that reminds me of EverQuest than there is of my buying a Property Pass to own a house in the heir apparent to Star Wars Galaxies, a game I never wanted to play to begin with.

Whether I want to play either game or not is irrelevant, anyway. I'd like to see both succeed, if only because a lot of people would clearly have a great time with them if they do. I just don't think I'm likely to be one of them.

I do enjoy writing about them, though. And I'm always happy to be proved wrong, if being wrong means I get to have a better time than I would have done had I been right.

Working For The Man (For A Given Value Of "Man")

Four down, three to go. Time to double up and get this done. Well, almost done.

These are two demos I admired more than enjoyed. One of them I might possibly play, the other I definitely wouldn't but they both seem like well-made, well-designed games. Just not really my sort of thing, either of them, for quite different reasons.

Both games made me uncomfortable, one physically, the other emotionally. That was clearly intentional in one case and entirely accidentally in the other. In one I enjoyed the gameplay but not the story. In the other the story was fine but the mechanics gave me problems. 

In neither case was any of it the fault of the games themselves. They just didn't fit well with my tastes and preferences. I'm certain other people will have a much better time with one or the other although I suspect there won't be too many people who'll thoroughly enjoy both.

Kentum

Kentum is a side-scrolling survival platformer. Well, that's what I'd call it. The developers, Tiön Industries, call it a "2D craftervania adventure". I assume that means something to someone in the audience it's intended for but it's just a noise as far as I'm concerned.

I picked it because it looks good, has an art style I like and because the description mentions "a snarky AI". Being a lifelong fan of the work of Philip K Dick, I do like a snarky AI. 

On the evidence of the demo, I wouldn't say this one is all that snarky. It's more like an overbearing, insensitive boss, which isn't quite as entertaining. Maybe the balance of the relationship between the AI and the player character changes further into the game but for the demo it was strictly "go there, do that" with not many smart comments or comebacks on either side.

The set-up is pretty simple. Familiar, too. Technical fault in the cryosleep system leads to maintenance tech oversleeping by a few thousand years. Mission fails. Spaceship crashes. Happens all the time. 

When the ship eventually runs out of power and crashlands, leaving the sole crew member (That's you.) to knock up a shack to live in and figure out how to live off the land, it means standard survival game rules are in play: hit stuff to break it, pick up the bits, turn them into something useful. Also pick every flower and kill every animal so you have something to eat. It's them or you and you certainly haven't shown any signs of caring about anyone but yourself up to now, have you?

The survival gameplay loop is all but indestructible by now. It's freaky how addictive it still is, every single time. Will it ever get old? No sign of it yet.

If that's all there was to the game, I'd have wishlisted it, even though I'm very far from short of survival sandboxes. Indeed, the final demo I have left to review is another. No, I declined to add it to my list because Kentum is also a platformer. You get nothing without figuring out where and how to jump on every new screen. That's where the game lost me.

I didn't really have any trouble with the jumping. It's pretty easy as these things go, at least it is in the demo. I just didn't find it very entertaining. More irritating, really.

If I'm going to be exploring, looking for things to collect and bring back to base for a crafting session I'd far rather do it in three dimensions, in a landscape that makes at least some attempt to replicate believable geology. The combination of two artificial forms, 2D side-scrolling and platforms, only being able to travel left and right across a screen that looks more like it's showing a schematic than an environment , always having to jump up or down to get anywhere, was never going to instil a sense of immersion in me. More like a sense of "how much longer before I can stop and do something else?"

If it wasn't for that, though, I'd be quite interested to see where the plot goes. Almost the first thing that happens when you begin exploring is that the AI insists you go towards the source of some signal it's receiving. That takes you to a deserted industrial complex, where a device re-programs the AI and gives it new instructions, none of which are to your immediate advantage. 

That and the fact that the company that made the game also seems to have taken over the entire world in the ensuing ten thousand years did intrigue me. It's a heck of a conceit. I wondered if it was just a gag or if they were going somewhere with it.

I didn't wonder enough to want to buy the game and play it to find out, though. It was kinda-sorta fun for three-quarters of an hour but by the time the Demo Over sign came up I'd had enough.

Not Wishlisted. Recommended for people who find both survival games and platforming fun. 

Inhuman Resources

The next game could scarcely be more different, apart from the overbearing boss part. It has one of those, too. I enjoyed it a lot more than Kentum. Until I found I wasn't enjoying it at all, that is.

Developers, Finnegan Motors, and Publisher, Indie Asylum, make a number of bold and sweeping claims for Inhuman Resources. They call it "a literary machination" and describe it as "an expansive choose-your-own adventure novel". It also comes with a content warning for "Strong language (swearing), textual descriptions of violent acts, textual descriptions of gore, light textual allusions to sexual acts". I would say that warning isn't strong enough. Not that I read it until afterwards, by when it was much too late...

I really liked this demo a lot, right up to the point where I found out what it was really about, at which point I kind of wished I'd never picked it in the first place. You'd pretty much have to be a hard-core body-horror fan to enjoy it beyond a certain point and I am very much not that. I'm good with the ethereal, spooky end of the horror spectrum but the bit where they turn someone inside out to let everyone have a good look is where I make my excuses and skedaddle.

It's not only the gore, either. Although I don't believe they use the specific phrasing anywhere in the description, this does seem to be one of those "Choices Matter" games. At least, the choices you make are going to matter in terms of whether you get much sleep at night after you finish playing it. 

I'm not sure choices matter so much in the usual sense of where they take the storyline. As far as the demo was concerned, I thiought it felt fairly linear, despite the description on Steam saying exactly the opposite. 

In fact, as I write this, I'm starting to wonder whether the numerous options I didn't take, mostly because I thought they would run the story into a brick wall if I did, might actually have opened up alternative scenarios that could have been less gruesome. I'd go back and check if the thought of going back to that world didn't creep me out so badly.

All my issues were with the content. I had no problems with the gameplay, the mechanics or the design. The game is good to look at, providing you appreciate the art deco aesthetic and have no qualms about spending hours staring at a series of beautifully designed lobby cards. 

You also very much need to be into reading to enjoy this game. When they call it a "novel" they aren't kidding. There's a lot of text. 

At the start I thought it felt quite over-written, not say over-wrought but after a while either the prose style calmed down a little or I became inured to its excesses and by half-way through I was quite enjoying it. Then the screaming started.

The plot is pretty good. Ne-er-do-well nephew, curerently spongeing of his aunt while living the life of a depressed and desperate failure, gets the chance to interview for a much-needed paying job at the company where said aunt works. Only problem being no-one is saying what the job is or even what the company does. It's Withnail and I without Withnail, basically.

Everything rolls along nicely, giving off some great corporate mystery vibes, until suddenly the story comes out of the tunnel and the true nature of the business and the job become apparent. I won't spoil the reveal but if you'd prefer your psychological horror to come without actual trepanning, I'd suggest you might want to give it a miss. 

I will, even though I do think it looks like it will be a pretty good game.

Not wishlisted. Recommended for true horror fans only.

Here Come The Martian Martians

I had quite different plans for today's post but Mrs Bhagpuss's PC decided to throw a shoe around Saturday teatime and I spent all yesterday evening and most of today trying to figure out what was wrong and put it right. I'm still not really sure but she's up and running again thanks to an old hard drive of mine that still had Windows 10 installed. A more permanent solution will have to be found but for now I can get back to what I was doing, at least until Beryl wakes up

Fortunately, when I said yesterday that I'd settled on the Next Fest demo on which I had the least to say, I may have been mistaken. That might be

Mars Vice

I had a lot of trouble with this one at first but it had nothing to do with the game or the demo. It was all me. I was trying to play it on the laptop, streaming via Splashtop and while it ran perfectly well that way, some odd glitch in the process meant I could only rotate the point-of-view camera about 270 degrees. 

That made moving around in the smallish spaces of the main character's apartment quite problematic and things didn't improve much when I got him outside. Given the annoyance and frustration it caused me, it's a point in the game's favor that I didn't just close it down and quit.

I wasn't sure if it was a bug in the demo or a fault at my end until I carried on the next day from where I'd left off, this time playing directly through the desktop client. Played as intended, full 360 degree movement was immediately restored and the whole thing suddenly became an order of magnitude more enjoyable.

Sadly, it turned out I'd already all-but finished the demo anyway. There was only about five minutes left. I probably should have started again from the beginning to give it a fair go - the whole thing only took me half an hour, even with the movement issues - but I felt I'd seen enough.

Mars Vice is an odd game, or at least the demo makes it seem like one. I can clearly remember everything that happened but I'm going to have to go look up the description on Steam to see what sort of game it is that the developers' think they're making. It certainly isn't all that clear from the demo.

They describe it as "a narrative adventure game" and I suppose it might turn into one later on but in the demo itself there's precious little narrative and absolutely no adventure. Come to think of it, there's not much in the way of a game, either.

As far as I can recall, the action consists of waking up and getting a call from your boss, telling you you ought to be at the Transference Port to meet a new colleague, who's just arrived on Mars. You have to find your clothes, get dressed, find your keys, go to the arrival area and find your new partner. Then you both get in the car to go to the office and the demo ends.

That's hardly an adventure, although it is more interesting than I'm making it sound. The setting is mildly unusual and the local customs more so. 

The game takes place on "a distant and futuristic Mars", although how and why Mars can be any more "distant" than usual isn't explained. Maybe it just hasn't been returning Earth's phone calls. Travel to and from Earth is via some kind of teleportation, or maybe remote cloning, whereby your persona is transmitted to a new physical body.

The gimmick is that you can pick just about any look you fancy, provided all your fantasies are fairly furry. Everyone is an animal or a chimera because you can mix and match animal attributes to get the exact look you like. This, clearly, is designed to appeal to a certain mindset, one with which I'm comfortable, so I found it all quite appealing.

More interestingly in terms of the storyline, the incoming Earther doesn't take to the idea at all. She stubbornly declines to join in with the anthropomorphic fun and insists on keeping the body she was born with, something the Martians seem to find both scandalous and shocking. Ground being laid there for an ethical debate later in the game, I fancy, although there's precious little hint of it in the demo.

Mars Vice is visually appealing, with a strong and coherent design aesthetic that carries through everything from the UI to the scenery. It's all flat, matte, pastel washes and self colors and it looks good. There's no extraneous detail but what's there is appropriate and engaging.

The protagonist is a Lionman, somewhat goofier than that animal's usual reputation, and the various walk-on parts cover all the expected bases from tiger to wolf to shark. Everyone's an animal but I did spot one customer who looked human other than for a pair of what appeared to be bat ears.

Gameplay, such as it is, consists almost entirely of long conversations, all of which are presented in the style of text messages, whether or not they take place in person or through a screen. It's a format we're all used to reading and it works well. NPCs also chat amongst themselves by way of comic-book speech bubbles, which adds nicely to the ambience.

There are a few hints along the way as to what the nature of the storyline might be, if and when it decides to make an appearance. The employees at Embody, the company that seems to serve as both animorph storefront and inter-system arrivals hall, clearly have some contractual issues going on that may or not shade into malpractice. Come to that, the whole "Come as you aren't" set-up, upon which modern Martian society relies, seems like it might be shakier than it should be.

Really, though, I came away with no clear idea what was likely to happen next. I wasn't even sure what line of work Dax, the player-character, was supposed to be in. Is he a policeman? If so, I'm mostly getting it from the title.

There's just about enough there to make me want to know more and it feels very comfortable and easy to play. As a demo it probably just about does enough. But only just.

Wishlisted, more out of curiosity than desire. Recommended, but only tentatively. I need to know more. Which is going to happen a lot sooner than I thought... I just realized Mars Vice is set to launch just three days from now on 6 March.

Mechs, Mechanics And Mayhem

By the end of Friday, to my own not inconsiderable surprise, I'd played through all the demos on my Next Fest list. There was I on Wednesday, wondering if I'd have time to get through them all before the event ended and now here I am, all done with three days to go!

Well, all done bar the writing-up, of course, which is going to take quite a bit longer than playing the damn things did but there's no deadline on that. I can feed the remaining five reviews in as and when I feel like it. 

It's not like there's any urgency, after all. None of these games is out yet. Some of them may never be, although I have to say that the completion rate for games I've added to my wishlist following demos I've played in Next Fests comes close to one hundred percent. My follow-through on buying them? We won't talk about that just now.

The only thing left to decide is which demo should I review today. The one I liked the most? The one I spent longest playing? The one I have the most to say about?

It can't be the one I thought was bad because there wasn't one. They were all good, in their way. I did a stellar job this time around, only choosing demos for games that look like they'll be worth buying one day.

And yet, I didn't wishlist them all. They may all be good games but they're not all going to be good games for me. I'd recommend them all, just not necessarily to myself.

Enough with the preamble. Time to pick a demo. And because I have other things I'd like to do this morning, I'll go with the one I probably have the least to say about. There's very little chance I'll be picking this one up when it launches some time this year but I'd be happy to hear more about it if anyone else does.

Nitro Gen Omega

I picked Nitro Gen Omega mostly for the graphics but also because the developers describe it as a turn-based tactical rpg. In my head, that means something like Solasta, Dungeons of Nahelbeuk or one of the several similar titles I've enjoyed in recent times. It also could be closer to the X-Com format and although I didn't get on with X-Com itself, I've had fun with other games that follow that model.

NGO (Unfortunate acronym...) isn't much like any of those. Not from the brief time I spent with it, anyway, which was just under half an hour. What it is, as far as I can tell, is an arena battler with RPG mechanics but nothing you'd call a storyline or a narrative.

Play begins with a highly stylised map, over which you fly in your airship. A tiny model of your airship. You can't land anywhere except certain designated areas. When you fly over those you get the option to land but if you take it all that happens is the view changes to another stylised map with some clickable locations. 

Selecting one takes you to a menu screen. You can recruit team members, effect repairs or buy stuff. I had no idea what I was doing so the first thing I did was buy a whole bunch of new team members. That was a mistake because I needed the money for other things later.

Everything works via static screens and menus. You can move around inside your airship but only by way of floor plans that, once again, let you to open more menus to access more activities, including some mini-games and entertainments.

I'd go into more detail about those but they all required money I'd already spent. There are several currencies, all of which you earn by undertaking missions, that being the core gameplay. Or I think it is. It's hard to be sure. I only took one mission and I failed it.

When I chose this demo from the list, the one thing I didn't pay attention to was the sub-genre. It may be a tactical rpg but it's specifically one in which you pilot giant Mechs. That makes it a first for me. As far as I can remember I have never played a Mech Battler in my life before.

On this slight evidence I'm very bad at them but I'm sure most entries in the genre aren't much like this, either. Combat, like everything in this game, feels extremely stylized and abstracted. There's no lurching around a batlefield, grappling other Mechs and blowing bits off them. Or rather there is but you can't see it happening. 

Combat consists of selecting actions for each of the members of your team and placing them in "Timelines". When you've set them all you affirm your readiness and the battle plays out. You see some very good cut scenes and animations but they all play out with no further intervention from you.

I'm convinced it would be a compelling and satisfying experience - if I had any idea what I was doing. Like everything about the game, the battles are slick, stylish and gorgeous to look at. Unfortunately, I never had the least clue what I was supposed to be doing or, if I did, how to do it.

There's no blame attached here to either the game or the demo. It's basically the tutorial as far as I can tell and it does explain everything in considerable detail. I just couldn't follow most of it. Not in the time I was willing to spend on a demo, anyway.

The level of detail is overwhelming. There are so many stats, abilities and options and the developers, not unreasonably, assume a great deal of pre-existing genre knowledge that I don't have. I'm fairly sure I could pick enough up, eventually, to stumble through a few fights to some kind of result but it would take me a lot longer than I'm willing to give it, especially in a demo.

I don't feel as though it would be a good use of my time to play the full game when it arrives, either. Not because I can't imagine enjoying it but because it's clear that a huge amount of the appeal is going to come from building teams, training and gearing characters and generally min-maxing your way to the top. That that takes a lot of time, effort, research and commitment. Some people live for that sort of thing but I'm not one of them.

It's a pity because I absolutely love the visuals. Everything about the game is hyper-stylized, often to the point of incomprehensibility, which is always something I enjoy. The problem with hyper-stylization is, while it may be an aesthetic pleasure, it's not always very practical. One of the reasons I never knew what I was doing was the sheer amount of visual information on screen. The brutal learning curve required to make sense of it all wasn't helping much, either.

Visually, though, I was having a wonderful time. I loved the look of the characters, their idiosyncratic fashion sense, their volatile expressions, their sheer sense of dynamic exuberance. I loved the graphic design, especially the UI and the text, all of which explodes off the screen in a riotous chaos of sharp lines and angles. The color palette is unusual and sophisticated. The whole thing seems to have been design-led to an extraordinary degree and it very definitely works. Providing, in my case at least, that all you want to do is look at it, not play it.

Ironically, perhaps, given my overwhelming incompetence, the best moments of all came during the fights. That's when you get short cutaways to your team members in the cockpits of their mechs. These reminded me hugely of Neon Genesis Evangelion, perhaps the greatest of all mech tales. Especially when my team were losing badly, bouncing around the interiors of their Mechs, clawing their way back to the controls for one more, desparate, do or die try. 

Those scenes really brought back memories of watching Evangelion. Not surprising, I guess, considering develeopers DESTINYbit appear to have "borrowed" most of the title of that famous series for their own game.

There's clearly a whole lot more to Nitro Gen Omega than I was able to see for myself in my brief and unsuccessful run. There are other types of mission than battles, or I think there are, and there's a whole relationship system involving the characters in your team, for a start. I'll have to leave all of that for someone else to explore and post about, though. It's all to much for me. I know my limits. I just got two of my team killed. Best I quit while I'm behind.

Not wishlisted. Recommended, just not for me.

Rocket 88 (Or Should That Be 93?)

The second demo I tried was

Elroy and the Aliens

Ah! You worked that out already. By looking at the big picture at the top, no doubt. The one where the designer appears to have decided to use all their favorite fonts at once. And can't make up their mind on capitalization, either.

And yet, somehow, it kinda-sorta works, doesn't it? It has that wholesome, homespun look, like a poster your artistically gifted tween daughter worked up in art class for her middle-school drama club's end-of-year production. 

The whole game has something of that feel about it, with Elroy himself giving off some serious Shaggy-from-Scooby-Doo vibes and a strong Saturday-Morning-Cartoons-in-the-Eighties feel to the whole thing. It's actually set in an alternate 1993 but to my memory, nineties' cartoons were a lot gnarlier and nastier than the clean surfaces and wholesome personalities on show in this game. Nope. Looks like the eighties to me.

The other thing that struck me immediately about Elroy and the Aliens is how overtly cinematic it is. This seems to be a thing with modern indie games, particularly advntures and visual novels, but it's not always done as convincingly as it is here.

When I say "cinematic", in this case we're talking cartoons, of course, but the whole range of camera movements and directorial flourishes is there - pans, sweeps, close-ups, establishing shots - all that good stuff that makes you feel like you're being told a story. And it's not a bad story, either, at least from what I can tell from the demo, which is also the opening chapter, just as it will appear in the finished game.

Here's the gist of the plot: Elroy, an engineering buff, whose famous archeologist father went missing eighteen years ago when Elroy was only five years old, has built himself a rocket that he claims will be the first to leave the atmosphere and then return to land in the same place from where it was launched. He's trying to get funding for the project and to that end he's willing to be interviewed by a reporter from the local paper.

The reporter, Peggie, duly arrives, waking Elroy from a night's sleep on the couch that also serves as his bed because he has that living on pizza, sleeping in your clothes, student stereotype down pat. It's clear she's more interested in Elroy because of who his father was than for what he might be able to do with his rocket.

After a series of mishaps and corrections, the rocket is ready to go. The pair hide behind a door while Elroy launches the rocket by remote control. It goes up, goes wrong, comes down and blows a hole in the flat roof back where it started, so at least the bit about landing where it took off goes right, even if nothing else does.

Elroy is understandably bummed about all this, particularly with a reporter there to record it all, but Peggie is more interested in something she sees glowing in the hole in the ceiling left by the crash. Elroy pokes it out with a broom handle and they see the object they've found has a big button in the middle. Naturally, Elroy immediately presses it because why wouldn't he?

The device turns out to be a hologram projector with a message from his father, who it turns out isn't dead after all but trapped somewhere, following the success of the mission on which he disappeared, where he was trying to track down the truth or otherwise of some myth or legend I can't remember the name of right now.

The legend was true but unfortunately for Elroy's dad, his partner wasn't. That guy, who now just happens to be the Mayor of Slope City, ran off, leaving the unfortunate archeolgist stranded with no way home. Stranded where, though? That's the question.

Dad tasks son with finding and rescuing him and Peggie, naturally, has to tag along for the story of a lifetime. And that's where the chapter and the demo ends, the rest of the game, presumably, revolving around that rescue operation and everything it reveals.

I remembered all of that without having to look anything up, which tells you a lot about how clear and straightforward the story-telling is. The writing throughout is very solid, playing to the strengths of the genres and media it draws from, while largely avoiding most of their flaws. 

All the characters are engaging. In the demo we meet just four characters (The full game apparently has more than sixty.) The ones in the demo are Elroy, Peggie the reporter, Elroy's neighbor who I kept wanting to call Mrs Kandinsky but who's actually called Mrs Kaminsky and Elroy's friend, a junkyard owner and software engineer, whose name I have completely forgotten. 

Every one of them is a stereotype but that's perfectly fine. Stereotypes are entirely appropriate for the style of the game and these are nicely individualized examples. They all have personality and charm, even though it's entirely the sort of personality and charm you'd expect them to have, before you ever heard them speak. The voice acting is equally solid and as firmly within expected operational paramaters, something that could never be said about Elroy's rocket.

Visually, the game is a joy. It has that hand-drawn animation look to it that's always so cosy and re-assuring. The scenes are all exactly as detailed as they need to be to feel convincing, without ever becoming overly distracting by way of unnecessary cruft. Animation is fairly basic but plenty good enough. In that respect, as in so many others, it feels true to the cartoons that so clearly inspired it.

As for the gameplay, it could scarcely be more traditional. If you like Point&Click adventures for what they do best, this is very much what you've been looking for. The mechanics and the UI are all well-designed, intuitive and comfortable. The problems are mostly practical, the solutions mostly logical, but none of it ever feels for one moment like something that could ever happen in real life.

In a Saturday Morning Cartoon, however, these are the sorts of thing happen all the time. It's marriage of two forms perfectly suited. No wonder so many P&C games go back so often to draw from the Saturday Morning Cartoon well. 

As must be obvious, I thoroughly enjoyed my half-hour with Elroy and his pals. This is a game I might actually buy and play, although maybe not quite as soon as just over a month from now, which is when it's due to go live.

Wishlisted and Recommended!

Cats In Spaaaaaace!

After yesterday's post I didn't hang around. I launched straight into the demos, starting with Adventures of a Cat in Space. 

Since it's supposed to be a family-friendly game, I figured it would be one of the quickest and easiest to play and I was not wrong. The demo took me fifteen minutes, end to end.

Adventures of a Cat in Space.  

I originally picked this one for three rather obvious reasons:

• There's a cat.
• There's space.
• There's Adventure.

The main reason I picked it, though, was because of what it looks like. 

To be honest, that was why I picked pretty much all of them, this time. I was on my laptop in bed and I didn't want to get into a lot of research so I just sorted the list by a few keywords and genres - RPG, MMO, Adventure, Point&Click, Visual Novel - and then chose the ones that either had names or screenshots I liked the look of. 

Shallow, I know, but you have to get it done somehow.

This one scored highly on both title and image but it also came with another, often-overlooked, advantage - associations with things I already know I like. Almost certainly unintentional and irrelevant associations but that's not going to stop the neurons firing. Marketing departments try to make things like that happen all the time but in this case I suspect any connections were being made in my mind only.

Seeing the name immediately reminded me of two TV shows I like - or rather one show and one segment: Dogs in Space and Pigs in Space (From The Muppet Show, of course.)  The visuals, as I watched the video linked in yesterday's post, evoked happy memories of Bob Godfrey cartoons, specifically Roobarb.

While the game does have Godfrey's trademark shimmering (Known in the animation trade as "boiling".), the stylistic similarity doesn't go much further than that and there seems to be no allusion whatsoever to either of the previously-mentioned animal-in-space shows. Nevertheless, in my head, as Elastica always liked to say, somehow a vital connection was made.

And I'm happy it was. Adventures of a Cat in Space (The Demo) is a fun fifteen minutes. 

The plot involves the attempts of a cat to get back home after chasing a mouse into a spaceship, accidentally launching it and ending up drifting in deep space. The pictures are pretty to look at, the puzzles are easy to figure out and the titular cat makes for a characterful protagonist. 

I don't much see the point of describing anything that happens in any more detail than that. It's fifteen minutes. If you want to know more you may as well go see for yourself.

The one very odd thing about the game is the music. I can't recall the last time I played a kid-friendly game of this sort that also came with an original indie-rock soundtrack. Music is, in fact,a core part of the game, described on the website as "a musical adventure". The full game will include a number of songs which, if they're all like the couple in the demo, should be a fun time for all.

The game is a bit of an arts and music fest all round. It's a collaboration between games designers Tall Story Games and "musical theatre specialists" Little Seeds and it's sponsored by Arts Council England. 

It also features voice acting by Arthur Darvill, a name the very Brit-focused devs imagine will be best known for playing Rory, one of Dr. Who's many companions, but which may well be more familiar to an international audience as Rip Hunter from the Arrowverse show Legends of Tomorrow.

As well as being a successful actor on television, Darvill is also an accomplished musical theater player, having won an Olivier Award for "Best Actor in a Musical". He plays the somewhat annoying computer in the spaceship and also sings the  title song, on which evidence I'd guess he's long cherished fantasies of being the lead singer in the kind of band likely to appear at DIY Popfests around the world. 

They'd love him in Japan, I bet. And Madrid.

Whether he sings all the songs in the game I don't know. Nor do I know whether every song is rendered in the same musical style. I really hope so, though. That would be reason enough to play it, even if the game itself wasn't as much fun as, by the look of the demo, it's going to be.

I thought for a while about whether to wishlist this one. I enjoyed my fifteen minutes with it a lot but if I'm realistic, the chances of my actually buying it and playing it are slim. My wishlist is stuffed with games I added after playing the demos and then found, when the time came, that I'd probably already seen as much of as I wanted. A good demo does run the risk of sating demand, or it does for me, anyway.

Still, if Stars Reach has taught me anything, it's that there's value in wishlisting games on Steam, even if you never intend to buy them. Value to the developers, that is. And since it costs me nothing...

Wishlisted. And recommended.

Seven Into Six Will Go (Especially When It's Really Eight)

It's all happening this week, isn't it? The Stars Reach Kickstarter, Blade&Soul NEO and Steam's Next Fest all fell out of the bus together and I wasn't even around to see it. I barely even have time to go back over any of it today, really. Tomorrow, perhaps.

I did manage to pick my half-dozen demos for Next Fest though. I did it last night, on my laptop, in bed. Not ideal. Still, I got it done and here's what I went with:

Inhuman Resources 

 

"Take part in an expansive choose-your-own-adventure novel, where you’ll uncover the secrets of an anachronistic corporation reigning over a post-truth world. Solve cryptic riddles, make difficult choices, and do whatever it takes to escape the depths of SMYRNACORP with your mind intact.

With hundreds of possible story routes, multimedia content and interactive puzzle elements, INHUMAN RESOURCES aims to elevate the traditional reading experience to more immersive, engaging heights, without forgoing the satisfaction of reading a well-crafted story."

Elroy and the Aliens 

"This DEMO features the first out of ten chapters of Elroy and the Aliens. The Demo gameplay duration is approximately 30 minutes.

Elroy is a young rocket engineer whose father disappeared 18 years ago in suspicious circumstances. Peggie is a hot shot reporter with a knack for languages, history and research. Together, they uncover a secret that takes them on a journey of epic, world-saving proportions!"

Kentum 

"After a record breaking nap spanning several millennia, Kent finds himself in the year 10.000 with nothing but a stick and a very matter-of-fact robot companion. Tired, hungry and still employed he will need to explore the unknown in order to craft the machines that will turn his broken space module into a self-sufficient base of operations. And maybe kickstart civilization again, if he has the time.

Discover the wonders and the oddities of a vast, ever-changing world filled to the brim with quirky fauna, flora and climate events. Classify every animal, plant and mineral in order to help you survive the passing of seasons. Knowledge is your greatest weapon. But don’t try to use knowledge against certain animals, you WILL get eaten.

This demo lets players go through the opening hours of KENTUM, exploring its first region. The demo includes diverse fauna, dynamic weather events, the call to adventure, and a variety of machines to build. It also features various abilities that players will need to craft themselves, as well as the ability to create production chains using farms and automated machines."

Nitro Gen Omega "

"NITRO GEN OMEGA is a turn-based tactical RPG featuring an innovative timeline-based fighting system that blends deep tactical gameplay with the feeling of directing your own anime episode.

Humanity has lost the war against the machines. The world is overrun by them. What is left of the population has retreated to a few cities and outposts constructed atop of giant pillars. The end is coming - slow and inevitable - but for now, life goes on. People still need food, supplies, technology from the old world, or sometimes just something to get them going.

You are the commander of a mercenary crew, surviving by taking on contracts for the cities. Build and tune your Mechs. Recruit pilots and watch them bond aboard the airship: your mobile base. Complete contracts and engage in high-octane cinematic Mech battles featuring a unique Timeline system. Play solo or join a persistent online world featuring permadeath, where every character is procedurally generated."

Adventures of a Cat in Space 

"Adventures of a Cat in Space is a family-friendly point & click adventure. After being accidentally launched into space, a cat is on a mission to find their way back home. Along the way you will need to solve puzzles and explore distant planets across the galaxy to unlock original music and songs to power up your navigation system and get back to Earth in this cosy adventure purrrfect for all ages."

Mars Vice 

"2184, the Martian city of Pavonis: the place to be on the partly terraformed red planet. The Martian population decided to take evolution on a whole new path and turn their once human bodies into a plethora of shapes and forms: fully custom-built bodies to take on the challenges of living on a harsh new planet.

New Mars, with its subsidized transhumanism, would practically be a utopia if it wasn't for the rampant corporate greed and power-hungry police, all looking to take advantage of its fresh-faced populace.

Enter: Dax, civil investigator with poor impulse control, and his world-weary new partner, Anaya. 

Welcome to Mars! Don't ask too many questions."

Solarpunk 

"Solarpunk is a survival game in a technically advanced world of floating islands. Alone or together with your friends, you can construct buildings, grow food, craft gadgets and explore distant islands with your own airship.

Use sunlight, wind and water to create an energy system and automate your processes like gathering resources and watering your plants."

As observant readers will note, especially those who can count, that's seven, not six. And since I already played through the demo for Solasta II before the event even began, that makes eight games in my half-dozen. Good packing by anyone's standards.

As everyone will also notice, I have made no attempt to go outside my confort zone this time, although now I've seen the trailers, one or two of the games don't look quite like I imagined, last night in bed.... Anyway, there was a particularly rich crop of Point&Clicks, RPGs and Visual Novels this time around so I thought I'd take advantage of the opportunity. Next time there might be hardly any.

The question now is will I have time to play them all? I've missed the first three days and the damn festival only lasts a week. It really ought to go on for twice as long, shouldn't it? 

I'll give it my best shot, anyway. On the plus side, I am technically on holiday and I don't have any major commitments for the rest of the week, other than to put some shelves together for Mrs Bhagpuss. Then again, the weather forecast for the whole period is very good, so I might not want to sit around indoors playing games.

And with that, I'll be off. Best not waste time typing when I could be playing, eh?