To avoid stretching this whole thing out to an unreasonable length, I'm going to ram the last two Next Fest demos together in one, final post. They don't really have a lot to do with each other, apart from both being point-and-click adventures of a sort, but even that's more coherence than any two random demos deserve, so I guess it'll do.
First up, let's take on Dancing Bones which, when you stop and think about it, is an odd name for a game set in the Old West. But then, it isn't really what you'd call a traditional western. There's a sub-genre generally known as "Weird West", where fantasy or sci-fi tropes are spot-welded onto a backdrop lifted wholesale from the traditional Hollywood version of the 19th century American myth and I guess that's where Dancing Bones fits.
It has some pure fantasy elements, with one character styling herself a "mage" and another talking about grimoires, but it also leans towards alt-history with mention of "the Inquisition", a body that seems to have a more than nominal connection with the infamous historical institution. In the demo, or at least in the section of the demo I was able to play, most of this stays in the background, although I did get the sense of some kind of oppressive Roman Catholic hierarchy lurking in the background, possibly in full control of the Americas, North and South.
I don't recall any actual magic spells or mythical beasts, just some talking cows. Although I think the only talking they did was mostly in the main character's mind. He'd clearly been spending far too long hanging out with them, without benefit of human company.
In fact, what I spent most of my half-hour in the demo doing was his chores, all of which involve cows. The character you get to play is employed as some kind of stable-hand or cowman and the demo opens with you picking up bales of hay to feed the animals and dusting the cowshed for cobwebs.
Which is fine as far as it goes. I appreciate the need both to introduce players to the controls and to set the scene but I would question whether it's the best use of an opportunity to show your game to potential players (And buyers.) at an event like Next Fest. If the bulk of the game is actually all about supernatural entities, magic spells and adventure, perhaps it might be better to showcase a segment from later in the game, when at least some of that stuff is actually happening.
As far as those controls go, they're fine. I did have to go into the settings to reduce the camera swing a bit but other than that everything felt comfortable.
Visually, the game is delightful, as I'm sure the screenshots show. The whole thing has either a sun-bleached desert vibe or a sepia-toned old photograph feel, both of which feel wholly appropriate and look great. The character models are quirky and characterful and the backgrounds are just as detailed as they need to be and no more. I particularly liked the journals, books and maps, all of which are charmingly rendered.
The writing is solid. I did get the occasional feeling it might have been translated but no amount of research (About five minutes on Google...) has been able to reveal the identity or origin of developers "Lotter". The plot, which barely gets going in the part of the demo I saw, involves a sick sister who may very well be cursed, and a mysterious Mage, who turns up unexpectedly and invites herself into the family home.
At the point I had to log out I'd reluctantly teamed up with the Mage to travel to see some shaman who might have information on my sister's condition. Since the Mage was wanted by the Inquisition, I imagine shenanigans were about to ensue but first there was also the option of going round the surprisingly sizeable town, picking up jobs from the locals before we began, so there might be at least some element of open-world gameplay too.
Really, there could be anything. There has to be much more to the game than I was able to explore in my short time with the demo, as this developer blog about recent additions suggests. There's no release date yet and it very much looks like a game still in full development. I enjoyed what I saw but I didn't get far enough even to be sure where it was all going.
I've wishlisted it, as much to see how it develops as anything.
The final demo on the shortlist was Death On The Nile and I found it highly confusing. For a start, I thought I knew the plot, having both read the original novel when I was a teenager and listened to at least one radio adaptation much more recently than that, albeit still a few years back. What I played didn't tally with my expectations or memories at all.
When I've read or listened to it before, the location was a cruise ship in Egypt and the time was the 1930s, so I certainly wasn't expecting the game to open in a discotheque with a discourse on the mirror-ball, which the game quite accurately describes as having been invented in the early 20th century and having had a good run through the 1920s, before falling out of fashion until a revival in the glory days of disco, fifty years later, when it became known, for obvious reasons, as the disco-ball.
This, I can only assume, is offered as some sort of justification for re-imagining the story in the 1970s. The demo itself takes place entirely in a London nightclub, something that once again completely threw me. Neither the Nile nor indeed death itself make any kind of appearance at all.
Had I seen Kenneth Branagh's 2022 movie of the same name, I might have worked out what was going on. According to Wikipedia, that film opens with a scene in a London club, in which some of the same characters I met in the game do some of the same things. That's in 1937, though, and it's a jazz club. Disco does not feature. (And to be strictly accurate, Wikipedia tells me the very first scene in the movie takes place during the First World War but I don't feel any need to be pedantic about it...)
What with all of that, I was on the back foot from the start. I also had to go into settings yet again to stop the camera yawing and pitching as though we were on a ship at sea. Why the defaults are set so high (Or maybe low.) in these things beats me but it happens a lot.
Visually, the game is a bit of a mixture. The backgrounds and environments are quite convincing and the characters look very era-appropriate but the animations are so poor as to be distracting. Everyone lurches about like zombies, arms flailing and bodies twitching. It's even worse when they're not supposed to be dancing.
The perpetual bad disco soundtrack is disorienting, too. I like disco but not like this. I had to turn it down after about ten minutes, something I rarely do in games. If you're going to set a scene in a disco, you might at least get the music right.
The game is more of a mystery-puzzle-solver than a straight point-and-click adventure although it's really both. The mystery part is pretty well done or at least it's quite patient with players like me, who can't be bothered to do the actual detective work. So long as you talk to everyone until the little check-mark appears by their name to let you know they don't have anything more to tell you, you can button-mash the actual case-board until things match up.
I was on Story difficulty, the default, so maybe there are more challenging ways to play but I found it quite time-consuming enough as it was. I didn't feel like I wasted much time but it took me fifty minutes to solve the mystery of the disappearing emerald engagement ring. Or, more realistically, it took me about half that long to figure out what had happened and the rest to get all the game's ducks lined up so it would agree with me.
And I quite enjoyed it. The dialog and the plot aren't great but they aren't bad. The characters feel very hollow but having read a lot of Christie in my youth I wouldn't expect a huge amount of depth. She's a much better writer than she's often judged but finely-drawn characters were never really her thing.
There were a couple of attempts to add something for the player to do besides interview suspects. There's a whole mechanic where you add the names, activities and secrets of various characters to your little black book, although at no point did any of it seem to have any effect on anything. Maybe it does later.
There were also a couple of times when I had to eavesdrop on people, which meant shuffling backwards and forwards until two images of the sonic pattern of their conversation lined up. It made Poirot look as if he was having a seizure and seemed like a very bad way to go about things if he was trying to avoid drawing attention to himself but I guess it was the 1970s. They probably just assumed he was on drugs.
The game's take on Hercule Poirot was what really took some getting used to for me. I'm much more familiar with the David Suchet version, a small, dapper man in a smart suit and tie. I had heard that Branagh's interpretation was somewhat... different and that's clearly the inspiration here. This Poirot was certainly dressed for the occasion in his Saturday Night Fever white suit. I'm surprised he wasn't doing the Hustle.
Technically, the demo performed very well. There were no bugs or glitches and the fairly complicated sequences of events held together pretty solidly. That bodes well for the finished game, which I think could be quite entertaining, if you like that sort of thing.
Personally, I found the setting too claustrophobic and the characters too annoying to want to spend a lot more time with any of them, so I didn't wishlist it. I'd certainly take it if it ever crops up as a giveaway on Prime Gaming, though. It's exactly the sort of game that might.
And that's Next Fest done for another three months. Let's all gather back here in October and do it over again.
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