Of Mice And Cats

 Next Fest is over. There was a lot of talk about the event being ruined by a glut of vibe coded AI games but I can't say I saw any sign of it myself. I thought it was an above-average edition, if anything. I can remember writing about one a while back, where I could barely find half a dozen games I wanted to try and I know there were a couple where most of the demos I was interested in turned out to be nowhere near as interesting as I'd thought they were going to be. 

This time around, everything I picked was at least fully finished and functional. That has not always been the case in the past. Everything worked, nothing crashed and I didn't come across any bugs or glitches. I got stuck in a rock once but I managed to get out. That can happen in any game.

The three demos I have left to review don't really have that much in common but I want to get this finished so they're all going to have to share a post and like it. I'll start with the best of the three, which is also the one that looks like it's had the most time and money spent on it. Co-incidence? 

 

Hela: of Mice & Magic

The full game is coming in December. If you think that would mean a polished demo, you'd be right. Slick, even.

In what I'd consider something of a bravura move, the demo announces up front that there's no save option. You're expected to finish it in one session. I've played demos like that before but they've generally just not through the implications. This is entirely deliberate.

It's a developer that's confident their game is going to charm you so instantly and hook you so hard you won't even think of stopping 'til it's over. You're going to play a cute white mouse with a backpack and you're going to like it!

And I did. Not for want of trying not to, either. Despite having an animal protagonist and a woodland setting, Hela isn't really my kind of game. Or at least it isn't in this demo, which, as the promotional video tacked onto the end makes clear, shows only a very small subset of the kind of gameplay on offer in the full version.

The demo offers a "short adventure" that turns out to be mostly a tutorial. It's quest-based action with no combat and a lot of puzzle solving. Most of what you have to do relies on movement. It's not exactly a parkour game but there's a lot of climbing, gliding and web-swinging à la Spider-Man. Or Tarzan. Are there any Tarzan games any more? Were there ever?

 

That wouldn't be a fair description of the game itself, which seems to have a lot more crafting, interaction with people and animals and exploration, as well as a greater emphasis on co-op play. Speaking of co-op, even the demo has a puzzle that requires four people but in an excellent twist, there's a mechanic whereby your mouse can clone himself to group with himself. Mostly, though, the demo is an extended tutorial geared towards teaching you the basics, while also letting you have a good poke around the forest on your own.

Once I realized the degree of latitude it was allowing me, I had a much better time. Initially, the whole thing felt very much on rails as my mouse (Who doesn't even get a name, let alone any kind of characterization or cosmetic options.) was shepherded into a big cave, where it looked very much as though he (She?) was expected to do a lot of swinging about on ropes. 

I was not happy. I did not want to swing about on ropes. I have never played a Spider-Man game so I can't say if this is the same mechanic but I imagine swinging on one rope is much like swinging on any other. And I do not want to do it.

Since I'm on the subject of mechanics in the game, they're very solid. I can't fault them. Any negativity you're sensing (And you're not imagining it.) comes entirely from my innate dislike of the activities themselves, not the way they're implemented. If this is the sort of thing you like elsewhere, you'll almost certainly like it here, too.

Fortunately for me, it turned out the game did not want to tell me how to things at all. Just what it was I had to do. The demo comes with a set of goals to be completed before you can finish it (Other than just by giving up and logging out, of course. It's not cursed...). All you have to do is fix two Altars and collect forty-eight glimmers. 

 

That sounded like a lot to me but it was fine. There are way more than forty-eight of the glowing yellow motes the Witch calls "glimmers" (The Witch is the person who gives you your backpack and sends you out to fix the altars in the first place.) and fixing each altar just requires one simple task. 

For the first Altar you have to literally fix a broken horn back on (A careless moose knocked it off.), with sticky resin from a very tall pine tree. You could swing up there on your rope, which is what I think you're supposed to but I just climbed the tree. It was a lot simpler.

The second altar wants its lantern filled with fireflies so it won't be scared of the dark any more (Awww!). Again, you could chase all over the place, trying to catch the annoying insects, but I just stood in one place and waited for them to fly past, then snagged them with my rope. 

All of that plus a fair amount of exploring - it's a big area - took me an hour and twenty minutes. It didn't feel that long. It was good fun. There's a lot more to do in the demo area if you want to stick around (There's an excellent full walkthrough here, which I'm pleased to say I did not need while I was playing.) including a number of mini-games, which reward glimmer, so you have a choice there if exploring's not your thing . There are also half a dozen rituals to complete, all of which require a scavenger hunt if exploring is your thing.

 

Visually, the game is delightful. It's supposed to be representative the of Swedish countryside, which I'm sure it is. I've never been further north than Edinburgh so I wouldn't know. It looks lovely, anyway.

It also ran very comfortably on my onboard graphics. The minimum and recommended specs are really low for such a good-looking game. I did have to turn the mouse sensitivity to the lowest setting because on the default it was slewing around wildly enough to give me motion sickness but it was fine once I toned it down.

Very observant readers may have noticed I said yesterday that Hela could only be played with a controller. That is nonsense. A hallucination. More evidence I may, indeed, be an AI. 

Actually, I'm not going to take all the blame. What happens, when you press Play on Steam for the first time, is that a big window pops up with a picture of a controller on it, telling you that's the way to play the game. If you close that window with the X in the corner, like I did, the game stops running and throws you back to your Steam library.

I took that as more than a hint that a controller was required, not just preferred. It isn't. It's just a badly programmed window. You're supposed to press the button in the window to close it but I took that to mean "Yes, Sir! I have a controller, Sir! And I will use it, Sir!" when what it actually means is "Fine. I've read that. Now get out of my way and let me play the game however I want to play it.". It plays perfectly well with keyboard and mouse and it knows perfectly well that's what you're using. A lot of fuss about nothing. That I made.

Even though I did enjoy it, I haven't wishlisted the game because, as I said, it's not really my kind of thing. Eighty minutes was plenty. If the whole thing is as well-done as the demo, though, I think it could be quite a hit. Nimgimli picked it for the Fantasy Critic League. I think he's got picked a good one.

 

Et Le Grain Mourut

This is a visual novel. It took me just under half an hour to finish the demo, including all the possible variations. I did not enjoy any of them all that much.

I was bored, to tell the truth. The story, such as it is, didn't really seem to go anywhere, not in the demo, although I could see the seeds being planted for later. Who just reads the first chapter of a book and then stops, though?

From memory, the gist is that a bunch of teenagers are a week from their final exams, after which they'll all graduate high school. The place is Paris, the decade the 1920s. Meanwhile, they all hang out in a bar after school (With the full knowledge of their parents) and some of them get drunk. I don't know what the legal drinking age was in 1930s Paris, if there even was one, which now I think about it seems unlikely, but it would be pointless to try and pin down the historical accuracy anyway.

 

This is a game that looks old but feels modern. For example, one of the students is making a film in which the rest are acting and he's hearing-impaired so he uses sign language, which all his friends seem to know. One of the others doesn't like the script of the movie because of its very "heterosexual" nature. I have no real way of knowing how historically accurate those attitudes and behaviors might be for Paris in the 1920s but I do know the way they're expressed feels very 21st Century.

All off which would be absolutely fine if the game was entertaining. Unfortunately, I found it just a bit dull. I did read all the text, of which there's a lot, but after a few minutes I was skim-reading it at the fastest I can read, which is pretty fast.   

Nothing really happens and it doesn't help that the graphics, while very well-done, are also mostly static. Movement is limited to some nice two-dimensional models of the characters that slide on and off like the cardboard puppets in a model theater. Most of the backgrounds are sepia photographs of the period. It's done very cleverly but it's not to my taste.

It's also a long time before the player is required to do anything but read and watch. I thought there were never going to be any inflection points but eventually a couple of choices appeared.  

 

Normally, the way I play visual novels, I'd only ever have seen the choices I made but the game does have one mechanic I really liked and would love to see more widely used.

There's a somewhat misleadingly-labelled "Skip" button at the foot of the screen. I pressed it for some reason and instead of it skipping whatever I was doing at the time it flipped through the whole section of the game I'd just finished at extreme speed. Just a few seconds. 

I used it to retry all the options and there are some significant differences. You'd be able to cycle through every possible combination in a fraction of the time using that button. Seems like a great idea to me.

Other than that, I liked the art and design in the Portrait collection. As you talk to various characters (Or rather listen to them talk to you.) some of them become known to you and you get to add their portrait to  your journal. There appear to more features like that - there are tabs for several anyway - but I didn't see any of them in the demo.

Once again, Et le Grain Mourut seemed like a competently-made game that may well be a delight for someone. Just not for me. My loss, I'm sure. I didn't wishlist it, obviously.

 

The Brilliant Detective Milo

And finally, another perfectly good demo I didn't much enjoy. On paper, this one should have been my sort of thing but in practice it didn't do a lot for me. 

It's an investigation game featuring cartoon cats. The setting, which is confusingly explained, at first in a really quite badly-done comic strip and then, even more confusingly, in numerous cut-scenes featuring conversations between the cats, is a police station in Mew York. 

Yes, there are cat puns. A lot of cat puns.

In an entirely unbelievable set-up, you play a British private investigator, brought across the Atlantic to help catch a serial killer. Somehow, the not-Sherlock cat knows one of the detectives from way back and his pal invited him. I couldn't follow it and frankly I didn't try.

The gameplay consists of a series of interrogations. You read the crime report, witness statements and suspect dossiers and then you ask your questions. One of the suspects is always guilty. You just have to decide which. Once you pick, you then get an immediate verdict and your score is adjusted accordingly.

 

Every interrogation relies on you spotting certain clues. A very simple one would be that the crime report mentions the victim was struck by a right-pawed assailant and the dossiers note that one of the two suspects is a leftie. As the demo goes on, the number and complexity of clues you need to spot increases. It's a puzzle-matching game, effectively.

I found it reasonably easy to spot the clues but I didn't find it fun. Stressful, yes. My main problem was that although all the paperwork has the suspects' names clearly shown, those names don't appear on the interrogation screen. I could never remember which cartoon cat was which, leading me to condemn at least one innocent kitty because I couldn't remember which of the suspects was which. You can flip back during the investigation to check but would it really be so hard to put a name card on the desk in front of them?

It didn't help that the plot makes absolutely no sense. There's supposed to be a serial killer at work but every day Milo, if he gets it right, sends another killer to jail. And then the next day there's another killing That's not a serial killer - that's some kind of death cult! There is, inevitably, much talk of copycats...

I also found the game unexpectedly and unpleasantly graphic in its descriptions of the murders. Obviously, a game like this is always going to be inherently violent but the constant references to the victims having been "declawed" and the discussions over whether that happened before or after they were killed sat uncomfortably with the cartoonish art style and the generally humorous tone.

 

Visually, I also found The Brilliant Detective Milo somewhat aggressive. There are a lot of sharp angles and there's a good deal of chaos in the layouts. The colors aren't over-bright but the palette sits unrelentingly in the red zone. I found it tiring to look at after a while.

Not that long, though. I played the demo for a little less than forty minutes. I hadn't finished it by then. I'd just had enough.

Once again, I don't think it's in any way a bad game. It's well-made and everything works as it's supposed to. It's just that I didn't get much out of playing it other than some mild anxiety over making the wrong choices and a sense that I'd rather be playing something else.

I ought to try to remember, next time Next Fest rolls around: I don't like detective games nearly as much as I think I do, even if the detective is a cartoon cat. I didn't wishlist it, naturally.

In fact, I only wishlisted one demo this time, Kat Domino, and I very much doubt I'll buy that when it comes out. I mostly wishlisted it to give the developers that minimal push a tick on a Steam wishlist apparently provides.

It was literally the least I could do.