Let's Talk Demos - And When I Say Talk...

 Next Fest ends today. Of the eight demos I selected, I've played six. The two I haven't tried yet are ArcheAge Chronicles, which is a 38GB download and which I never really meant to include as part of the official count and Hela: Of Mice & Magic, which can only be played with a controller. 

I do have a controller but when I went to look for it yesterday, I couldn't find it. I'll have another look today. That said, just knowing it's the only way the game can be played loses me most of whatever interest I had, so I might not look all that hard.

I wrote about two of the demos, World of Slime and Never Wither, on Thursday. I reviewed them together because they're both creature-catchers. They also have similarly open-ended demos with no specific end-point. I played each of them only for as long as I felt I needed to get a feel for what they were about. I haven't logged into either of them since, even though there's plenty left to do, so I doubt I'll be adding either to my wishlist.

Today, I'm going to lump the remaining four demos together, on the grounds that they're all Point&Clicks of some stripe or other. Other than their broad genre, they aren't all that similar. Two are genuine, traditional Point&Click adventure games, one's a visual novel and the other's a police procedural focusing entirely on interrogation.

Taking them in the order I played them:

 

The Other Side of the Wall

This is one of the adventures. It's set in a single-sex (Male.) private school in the 1980s. The school is run entirely by Roman Catholic priests. You can guess where this is going, I bet.

Well, it's not. Or not in the demo, anyway. Not that the demo goes anywhere much. Very little happens at all. 

It took me just over forty minutes to finish the demo and that included several minutes watching a YouTube video to figure out one of the puzzles. Here's the thing; I love Point&Click adventures but I'm really not very good at them, even after many decades playing the damn things. It's very rare for me to get all the way through one without having to consult a walk-through or watch a video of someone else who's better at it than me. In fact it's probably never happened. 

I don't mind that. It doesn't put me off. I like to get as far as I can on my own without becoming frustrated and then, when I start to run out of ideas on what to do next, ask for hints. Usually just a nudge is enough but if I still can't figure it out I'm fine with looking up the full solution. The fun for me is in watching it all play out more than it is in solving the puzzles on my own. It's like how magic tricks are always more interesting when you know how they're done. Or is that just me?

 

That said, I feel it can hardly be in a game's best interests, if someone who enjoys adventure games can't even get off the first screen without looking something up. I've played a couple of demos like that. Luckily, neither of the two I picked this time was quite so that awkward but I still had some problems getting going. 

It wasn't clear in either of them how to get started. For this one I just wandered about aimlessly, waiting for something to happen. It was quite a while before anything did. I looked at everything and talked to everyone and it all felt a little bit aimless.

I had a pleasant chat about literature with the priest who teaches English in the school. It later turned out I needed him to point me towards a a certain poem someone had hinted I might do well to study but at the time I didn't know that, of course. I just stood there, chatting with him about literature for no apparent reason. It was odd.

 

As usual, with no other plan in mind, I just worked my way around every location, examining, interacting, picking things up and putting them in my pockets and talking to everyone who'd talk with me about anything they wanted to talk about. I also tried to use anything I had with anything I could use it on, which didn't take long because I only had three things.

It all felt even more aimless than usual with no overarching plot or mystery to give it shape. Eventually I found my way to the eponymous hole in the wall between the all-boys' school and the all-girls school next door, which none of the boys is allowed to visit. (Yeah. Go figure.) I had a very elliptical conversation through the hole with an unseen girl who wouldn't even tell me her name. 

To get it out of her, I made my way back, via another conversation with the literary priest, to my room-mate, who was paying paying another of the priests to get him cigarettes. He made me the middle-man in the transaction and that got me the book of poetry the first priest had told me would have the poem I was looking for, which would in turn tell me what I had to get next, so I could give whatever it was to the girl on the other side of the hole in the wall and she'd finally tell me her name.

Yeah, that's an adventure game alright. Can't fault the gameplay. Very traditional. 

 

Visually the game is functional rather than attractive. I thought it all looked a bit flat. The colors are muted and the environment feels a bit schematic but it does a job.

The writing is good, if oddly literary. The conversations with the English-teaching priest go way beyond what's necessary for the plot. You get to know his thoughts on Maya Angelou, Henry Miller, J.D. Salinger and several other 20th Century authors. As for the book of poetry, you get two read two entire poems by Yeats...

He's chatty and so is the girl behind the wall and the room-mate. The voice acting is about as functional as the rest of the game. It does a decent job but it's not especially memorable. I enjoyed it well enough at the time but now, a few days later, I couldn't even remember if the game was voiced at all. I had to go to  YouTube to check.

I finished the demo without ever being entirely clear where the story might be headed. Or, reall;y, what the story was. Usually there's some kind of threat in these things or at least a mystery but this felt more like a slice-of-life. Nothing wrong with that but it'd be unusual for an adventure game not to include... well... an adventure.

It didn't really feel all that eighties, either, mostly because the setting is both visually and thematically unconnected to that any decade. Institutional buildings, formal gardens, uniforms... none of it triggers much of a nostalgic response. Consequently, when the dialog mentions the names of bands or comments on behaviors that might be considered "of the time", it all feels a bit dropped-in.

Overall, I thought it was fine but it didn't make me want to play the full game. I haven't wishlisted it.

 

Kat Domino: Agent of S.H.E.L.L 

This was my favorite of all the demos this time. I liked the design, the aesthetic, the gameplay and the setting. I was less sure about the writing or at least one aspect of it.

It's not that the writing is poor in any way. It's not. It's pretty good. It's just very punny and extremely fond of pop culture references, most of which feel somewhat dated. There are a lot of Monty Python and X-Files gags, for a start.

I find a little of that kind of thing tends to go a long way, even when it's done well. When it's done badly, I find it embarrassing and hard to get past. This isn't anywhere near that awkward, thankfully, but it did sometimes make me cringe a little. 

 

The background lore is solid and engaging (You can read some of it on the Steam Store page.) but there are only a couple of hints about the plot in the demo. It looks as though Kat is going to find that her Scully-like cynicism about the paranormal is going to be put to the test. 

As for the actual storyline, there isn't a lot of that either. The demo opens with the eponymous central character in her office, where she (Eventually...)  gets a call from her boss, telling her she has to go to Reception to collect a new recruit to the organization. The demo ends the moment you step out of the elevator into the reception area. You never even get to see the person you're supposed to meet. 

It took me just under an hour to get to that point. Once again, it included a few minutes of watching someone else on YouTube solve a puzzle I was having trouble with. I'd missed an interactable, which is so easy to do when there's nothing you can press to make them all light up. I also spent a lot of time before that just going backwards and forwards, revisiting locations and re-examining things in the hope of spotting something new as I tried to figure the puzzle out for myself. 

But most of the fifty minutes went on examining things and talking to people for the first time. There's a lot of text to read and a lot of voiceover to listen to but that's just how good adventure games roll.

 

The gameplay and the mechanics will feel extremely familiar to anyone who's played a Point&Click adventure before. There's a surprising amount to click on for a demo, all with fulsome descriptions to read or to listen to Kat read out loud for you. 

[And that, I'm going to warn you right now, is going to lead to me falling down an entirely unnecessary rabbit hole in a few paragraphs' time. If the developer is reading this, something that's always a risk when reviewing Next Fest demos, I apologize in advance. Just trust that it's all going to turn out alright in the end.]

The building Kat works in is actually a deep silo or perhaps an under-sea structure of some sort. Reception, where she's headed, is on the top floor, at the surface. Everything else is buried or sunk or whatever it is  Judging by the portholes, I guess it's under the ocean. It certainly looks like the inside of a submarine, with all those metal walls.

The action, such as it is, consists entirely of getting a colleague of Kat's, Layla, to move out of the way so Kat can take down a poster on the noticeboard so she can get to the code for the elevator which is pinned behind it. That involves finding a rubber chicken, a walnut shell and a feather, which she has to paint blue. Once again, let me remind you, this is an adventure game.

 

All of that was good fun, even if I did have to look up one of the solutions. When you finally get to the end of the demo you receive a performance review. You, the player, that is, not Kat. You're rated on things like Sarcasm and Patience, which the game calculates from the responses you make and things like how often you skip dialog. That was a nice way to wrap the whole thing up.

And now we come to the voice acting. Talking about it ought to be worth another short paragraph or two at most. Somehow it's not. It's the rest of the post. 

Like The Other Side of the Wall,  Kat Domino is fully voice acted. I really liked the dry, sarcastic tone but I found myself spending too much time altogether, wondering whether the voice I was hearing was a real person or AI. 

I really wasn't sure and I was sufficiently curious that, after I'd finished, I checked to see if there was any indication of AI use on the game's Steam page. There was not, so I googled it and got a response (Ironically, generated by Google's AI, Gemini.) telling me with great confidence that although there was some minor use of AI in some of the background material, the actual voiceover in the game was done by human actors.

 

So far, so clear. Only when I came to write this post, I wanted to include the quote and link to the source that supported it. So I ran the same query again and guess what? I got a different answer.

Now Gemini told me, with equal confidence, "Yes, the developer has disclosed that the voice acting for the project utilizes AI." Except the link it gave me as evidence went to an Instagram post about a different game entirely!

Seriously, I didn't want to derail my own post, yet again, by talking about the inadequacies of AI search summaries but this just keeps happening. I thought for a while we were getting to the point where these summaries could be trusted but clearly not.  Perhaps it's just Gemini. Maybe I ought to switch to ChatGPT for this sort of inquiry in future.

In an attempt to get to the bottom of it all, I put quotations marks around the title in the query to try and force Gemini to look at the right game. That got me something close to the original summary Gemini gave me yesterday. It recanted the allegation that AI was used for the voices at all, going back to its original contention that 

No, the voice acting in the actual game demo for Kat Domino: Agent of S.H.E.L.L. is not AI-generated. According to community compilations of non-AI game demos featured in the October 2026 Steam Next Fest, the developers explicitly hired an actual human voice actress for the game's voiceover. While the developers have used AI voice synthesis for temporary social media promotional reels and background narration online, the core point-and-click adventure game itself relies on hand-drawn art and human voice talent.

This also turns out to be wishful thinking. Or hogwash, if you prefer. 

The game is listed in a community-sourced Reddit post about demos in Next Fest that don't use AI but I could find no source anywhere for any developer statement specifically on voice acting in Kat Domino. The developers have made such a statement about the art but not the voice.

 

Because I find this sort of thing interesting, I have just spent half an hour doing my own digging, using my findings to push Gemini into doing the job it should have done in the first place. It was made harder for me by the fact that the developer, Evil Axis Game Studio, which is actually two people in Granada, Spain, only seem to use Instagram and TikTok to promote their work, two platforms with which I have little familiarity and, in the case of Instagram, limited access. 

As is well-known, AIs are exceptionally bad at parsing social media, which seems to be the root of the confusion in this case. Honestly, I'm tempted to give Gemini a pass on that. It's a minefield, even for humans.

Eventually, I forced this revised summary out of Gemini, which I think is about as accurate as it's likely to get:

"There is currently no definitive, verifiable source confirming that the voice acting in the game is human. The truth is that the developers, Evil Axis Game Studio, have not officially published any cast list, voice actress credits, or a definitive statement confirming whether the dialogue in the game demo is fully human or assisted by AI voice synthesis"

In other words, Gemini doesn't know. And neither do we. Gemini did at this point provide several more paragraphs of explanations as to why it doesn't know, all of which appear to be accurate as far as I can tell. It's just a shame it didn't do that at the beginning. It would have saved me most of the morning.

The irony is, the reason I started all this in the first place is that I like the voice-over. Kat herself speaks with a timbre and resonance that I find aurally pleasing. The intonation and expression is characterful. Who or whatever is behind it is particularly good on sarcasm and irony. I don't actually care all that much whether it's a person or a machine. I'd just like to be sure. 

 

The voice-work does occasionally exhibit a slight lack of affect that gives it an interesting edge, particularly when Layla is talking, and there are some moments when the sonic texture becomes a little resonant. I was kind of hoping it was AI because that would explain those slight strangenesses. Which, again, were things I liked...

Whatever the provenance, I prefer the voiceovers in Kat Domino, by some distance, to the obviously human voice acting in The Other Side of the Wall. Not that there was anything wrong with it but I didn't find it quite as engaging, somehow. 

Maybe I'm really an AI and I don't realize. It happens all the time in Philip K. Dick stories...

The voiceover and the text do sometimes differ, too, which is a thing that often happens in games in development. Not that infrequently after release, too. I don't think that's evidence either way. And in the end, without a cast list or a definitive statement from the developer, it's only a subjective impression. For me, as a player, it's not even anything I'm particularly exercised about. I'm only bothered because I have to write about it and I know other people care a lot more than I do.

The real problem from my perspective is the distraction it causes. Instead of talking about whether the game is fun and worth playing, here I am, talking about whether it's "authentic" or "real" or "human" at some metaphysical level I can't entirely quantify or even confirm exists. Even though I find it interesting to consider these things on an academic level, and it's fun playing online detective, trying to find out the truth of it all, in the end what matters is whether the game, however it was made, is any good or not.

Based on the demo, I think Kat Domino is going to be a good game. Good enough for me to add it to my wishlist, anyway. Which I have now done.

And the other problem with all this AI talk is that it's made the post run so long, the other two demos are going to have to wait. I think I have a lot less to say about both of them but I may be wrong. I wasn't expecting to have so much to say about these two!