Just a very quick post today since normally I'd be at work at wouldn't be
posting at all. Instead, I'm on "holiday", which is to say I didn't
book any time off at all before the cut-off point so someone just gave me a
bunch of weeks and this is one of them.
That's how come I was able to spend the last hour playing through one of the demos I downloaded the other day, Lucy Dreaming. Fifty-two minutes to be precise. A very good length for a demo.
And it's a very good demo, too. Exemplary, in fact. If I was going to rate it specifically as a demo, I'd give it five stars.
It's not only the right length - long enough to get the measure of the game but not so long it feels like you've actually started playing it for real - it's also a satisfying gamelet in its own right. Playing through it feels like a complete experience and also like a tailored one, not a fragment of the full game ripped loose from context.
Which is a clever trick because in a way that's exactly what it must be - the introduction to the full game. Not even the first chapter, more like the prolog. Only you can tell it's been adapted for the demo, not just pulled out and dropped in as-is from the self-referential little asides that contextualize it as a version specifically designed to be played in demonstration mode.
Plenty of demos do that. They put up walls or pop up messages with some variation on "Not included in Demo". That's better than just leaving you to figure out why something isn't working but the Lucy Dreaming demo goes further. It incorporates the explanations into gameplay, so when you try to interact with something that's not relevant to the subset of the game you're being allowed to see, it tells you so within the same framework it tells you everything else.
Oh, alright then, I'll semi make one up. It was close to what I'm about to tell you but I can't remember the exact phrasing. You can take it that it was more amusing than what I'm going to come up with, though.
The whole demo takes place in Lucy's house. It starts in her bedroom and from there you can explore the upstairs landing, the downstairs hallway, the lounge and the garage. There are three more doors you can't enter - her brother's room, her parents bedroom and the bathroom. Oh, and the front door and the garage door, which lead to the outside.
The garage door is locked. The front door opens but there's just no option to go through it. Lucy's brother, Lloyd, is in his room and he's not about to let his little sister come in. Lucy very reasonably balks at going into her parents bedroom, commenting she doesn't even want to think about what they do in there.
That leaves the bathroom. You can try to go in there but when you do, Lucy tells you the bathroom isn't available in the demo. And then she adds that it's just as well she doesn't need a wee.
It's only a little thing but it adds to the feeling you're not just playing a demo but a short game that someone has really thought about. That's one example I can remember but there are a few more and they added to the sense that Lucy Dreaming is a game someone cares about.
But you can tell that from everything about it, really. One thing that often annoys me in adventure games is the way you can only examine objects that you'll need to use. Lucy Dreaming feels a bit like one of those open-world RPGs that claim if you can see somewhere you can get there, only in this demo that translates to if you can see an object, you can examine it.
That's a lot of work, adding a line or two of text to everything in the house and, again like those open-world RPGs that let you open every single container in the world, it risks annoying the player almost as much as making most of it inert would. If you're going to tag everything with a line of dialog, you have to make most of them worth the click and Lucy Dreaming manages to do it.
At least it does in the demo. Which, as I said, is less than an hour's gameplay. Whether the writer(s) can keep it up for the whole game I suppose won't be apparent until its too late, if you've been suckered into buying it by the attention to detail in the short version and it turns out not to be sustained. But then, we should be alert to that risk. It's there in every MMORPG ever made. The starting zones and tutorials are always the most complete and polished part of the game. Never judge an MMORPG by its tutorial.
Lucy Dreaming, of course, is no MMORPG. And anyway, I really don't think that'll be the case here. It feels like one of those hand-crafted labors of love that wasn't a labor at all to the people who made it. It has that sense of the creators having fun and of that fun transferring well to the audience.
Which brings me to the advertised "British Humour" (British spellings look really weird to me these days. I've been using American spellings for so long...). As a British person (That's what it says on my passport, anyway.) I'd have to say that I really didn't notice much "British" humor in the demo at all.
British accents, yes. Lucy herself speaks in a British accent that I found very easy on the ear. Not exaggerated for comic effect. Just a naturalistic Northern burr. The only other speaking part in the demo, Lucy's dad, only gets a couple of lines and those are enunciated in such a strained and peculiar way, as appropriate to the circumstances, I couldn't really tell what accent he had.
A British accent, though, even a Northern one, does not in and of itself constitute humor. There are plenty of jokes in the demo, some of them quite funny, but none that I noticed seemed particularly nationalized.
The house itself looks like a British house but I'm pretty sure it could pass for one in any number of other countries. It's a child's bedroom, a couple of hallways and a garage. How different, culturally, can those be between English-speaking nations? The lounge is the most British - English, really - of them all but even there it has a ceiling fan and I can't say I've ever been a suburban home in this country that had one of those. We don't get the hot weather to need anything like that.
As for the dialog, most of which is Lucy talking directly to you, the player, I'm pretty confident you could give the same script to an American actor and you wouldn't have to change more than the odd word or two. If it was the Britishness of the humor that sold you on the game, you may be disappointed. You're not going to see much of it in the demo. Can't say I was sorry about that.
Graphically, it's retro as has been the fashion in a large corner of the adventure game market for a while now. There's an admirable attention to detail and the color palette is easy on the eye. What's not to like?
Also, it is quite specifically an Adventure Game. There are several fourth-wall-bending gags about that. The demo is never afraid to go meta-fictional, another thing that predisposed me to like it.
Gameplay is rock-solid point & click puzzle-solving. Examine everything, pick up everything that looks remotely useful, figure out what to use on what. We all know the drill.
In the demo you have to complete half a dozen tasks to get Lucy ready to go to sleep. All of them are completely realistic, like putting on some calming music, getting her into some suitable nightwear and making her a warm drink. As you complete each one it crosses itself off a list, which made solving each puzzle feel oddly satisfying.
The puzzles themselves are very fair. Most are even rational, although I wouldn't have warmed Lucy's bedtime drink in quite the way the game expected. Then again, she's a small child. I can totally see a child doing whatever it was Lucy did.
No, I'm not going to tell you. Go play the demo if you really have to know!
Mostly, though, I thought I knew exactly what to do and I was almost always right. The problem was figuring out how to do it and the solution was usually guessable in no more than a couple of tries, which is the mark of a good point & click in my book. I never once had to look for a hint so I don't even know if there's an in-game hint system. If the whole game is as well-designed, you won't need one.
All in all, as I said at the start, this was an exemplary demo. Or maybe not because at the end of it, although I'd had a great time figuring out all the puzzles, I didn't immediately wishlist the game. That's because the demo gave me almost too vivid an impression of what it would be like to play the finished article and I wasn't sure I liked the idea of that as much as I ought to, if I was going to buy it.
Sometimes you need just a little grit to make the pearl. (Apparently that's not really how pearls get made but a cliche is a cliche.) I wouldn't remotely call this demo too slick or too easy but after I'd finished it I didn't get the feeling I needed to find out what happened next. Maybe the demo was too well-constructed and complete in itself
I might still pick the game up at some point but I have the feeling there are other Adventure games I might find a little more compelling. Still, don't let that put you off trying the demo. If nothing else, it's a fun, self-contained, satisfying experience all of its own.
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