I Am The Captain Of My Fate, Gawd Help Me.

Not to spoil the ending but please read this post all the way through before forming any judgment on the demo or the game as a result of anything I might have written...

And finally, the demo I only chose to make up the numbers, Captain Pawsome. It's very much not the sort of game I usually play but I had a great time. 

The game's Steam page describes it as "a cozy 2D fishing game where you play as the cat", which makes it sound as though there's always a cat in games like this, only sometimes you don't get to play them. For all I know, that may be true. As I said, it's not my regular kind of game.

Not my first cat. Also I'm pretty sure they mean "Button" not "Bottom".

The first surprise was that there's a form of character creation. I was expecting to play a specific cat, the eponymous Captain Pawsome, no less, and indeed I did but you get to choose a variety of Pawsomian features such as the color of his fur, the way he styles his whisker and what his belly button looks like.

I made him into a blue-black cat with short, straight whiskers and a quirky, half-amused smirk. Then, as is all too common with most games where you get to fiddle with the appearance of your character, I barely looked at him again.

That wasn't because I couldn't see his face. Unlike the MMORPGs I'm used to playing, where character creation could more usefully concentrate on offering options for the back of your head than the front, given that's what you'll mostly be staring at for several thousand hours, Captain Pawsome is a 2D side-scroller. 

This place sure isn't going to get a Blue Flag.

I used to think I didn't like those much but I've had to re-assess my opinion of late. The format is actually very comfortable both to look at and control. It certainly gives you a good view of your character, albeit not in the round.

The Captain Pawsome demo seems to be yet another where all they've done is cut the Introduction and Act One away from the rest of the game and send it out into the world alone. I want to say it includes the tutorial as well but for once, honestly, I could have used more instruction. Such tutorial tips as you get don't go nearly far enough in explaining some of the basics.

You start on your boat, which is falling apart. It's patched and leaky and overgrown with weeds. There's a cabin and a bedroom and they're both inexplicably made of brick. Why? No idea. How? Never explained.

Does that look like the inside of a ship to you?

You'll learn later that Act One mostly consists of repairing and refurbishing your ship to meet maritime standards or at least to satisfy the Commander, a cat four or five times the size of any other cat in the port, who stands about on the dock 24/7 telling you what to do. By the time that happens, though, there's every chance you'll already have begun fixing the place up for yourself.

Before I even met the Commander I'd fished up a whole load of tin cans and wooden planks. I started out to go into town and see what was what and along the way I naturally pressed LMB for some reason or other and next thing I knew I was fishing. Nothing in the game told me how to do it. 

Nothing told me how to cast or reel in or anything. To be fair, instruction really isn't necessary because the controls are highly intutive and immediately satisfying. It's one of the better implementations of fishing I've tried and I've tried a few. Still, you'd think a game that's all about fishing might begin by explaining how to fish, wouldn't you?

I didn't actually take any shots of me fishing so here's one of me jumping instead.

I say "fish". At the start it's fishing only in the metaphorical sense of the word. On the end of your line there's no hook, just a magnet. The extremely polluted harbor is awash with tin cans, old floorboards with nails sticking out of them and clumps of general detritus, all of which are handily magnetic. 

I quickly worked out how to get them to tag on to the end of my line and how to reel them in, an activity that becomes more compusive the more you do it. At this early stage it's quite hard to lose something you've caught, although not impossible. Soon I had a bag full of rusted metal, sodden wood and sundry garbage.

I also had a roller skate and a tennis racket, both of which sparkled and glowed underwater in a way that made it obvious there was something special about them. There was. They were worth money!

Pretty sure that wouldn't float.

Once I'd found the Commander and had a chat with him I discovered I needed seaweed to catch actual fish. Seaweed grows on the seabed or on underwater rocks and has to be tugged free, which makes sense. What makes less sense is that you can do that with your magnet and that fish want to eat it when it's attached to your line. 

Do fish eat seaweed? Hang on... I'll google it... oh, yes, some do! Okay, I'll give them a pass on that one. 

With bait, you can catch fish. The Commander wants you to catch five. I did that. It was easy. Then he wants you to sell them. That's got to be easier still, right? I mean, in video games when you want to sell something you just offer it to any shopkeeper and they buy it. They all have unlimited funds, never sleep and buy whatever crap you want to get rid of. It's how it's always been.

This is what happens if you let cats become town planners.

I'd already been to the shops. There are several and the Commander sent me to one for something. I can't remember what. Bait, I think, although since you can catch fish with seaweed and it's free that doesn't make much sense either. Maybe I should have made some notes.

Whatever it was, I knew where the shops were - on the upper levels of the town, where you have to climb up ropes to get to them because obviously all sailors love climbing ropes and anyway everyone is either a cat (Also known to love climbing.) or a bird (Can fly.) so why would anyone live on the ground?

I went to all of them and none of them was buying. There wasn't even a sell option. I stumped around a bit, fuming at the iniquity of it all, then I tabbed out to look up "How to sell in Captain Pawsome".  I found nothing. Either no-one else had a problem with it or no-one's playing the demo.

Don't end a sentence a preposition with.

Eventually, entirely by chance, I happened to notice that the vendor who sells furniture for your boat has an aquarium for sale that he describes as "A place to put your fish for sale in!". He doesn't want any money for it, either, which is just as well because until I was able to sell my fish I wasn't going to have any.

What he did want were five tin cans and five old planks. He didn't say why. Maybe he makes his furniture out of them. Luckily, I had plenty of both from when I was teaching myself how to fish so I bought an aquarium. Then I spent a frustrating few minutes trying to figure out how to place it on my ship. Or anywhere.

I tried the deck, the cabin, the hold, the dock, the main street and anywhere else I could go. Everywhere said "Cant Build Here". Yes, without the apostrophe. As I was trying various spots in the hold, however, I noticed there was already an aquarium there. 

Well, where can I build then? Just tell me!

Funny. You'd have thought I'd have spotted that the first time I went inside. And there was also a sort of stand or display cabinet right next to it. And some strange cats were wandering about my boat, too. And going inside!

I was very vague about what was going on at this point. I though what might have happened was that reaching the stage in the tutorial where the Commander asked me to sell the fish might have made the aquarium and the stand spawn in the hold. Or maybe it happened when I bought the aquarium. Maybe you just needed to have it in inventory for it to appear in the boat. 

Or maybe the aquarium and stand had been there all along and I hadn't even noticed. I'm not playing through the whole demo again to revisit all the possibilities but that last one, at least, I can check. Hang on again while I make a new character and see if the sales counters are there from the start...

Wait a minute... what's going on?!

 

Oooookay....

Let's start again. Disregard pretty much everything I've said up to now. It's nonsense. I'm an idiot.

Here's the thing: when you very, very first log in after character creation, you don't appear, as I said, on your boat. There's a very important part I forgot: you appear on a bare stretch of rocks with a door (Screen left.) and some boxes blocking the path (Screen right.)

When I played the first time, I simply went through the door and appeared on my boat, after which everything above happened just as I described except for two things:

1. The Commander, whose full name is Commander Tuna-Breath, does explain how your boat got wrecked (A huge storm.) and tells you he's going to help you get it fixed up. That part I completely forgot.
2. The sales stands, aquarium and display case, are already in the hold of your boat. That part I just missed altogether.

You may well look surprised, Captain. Try paying more attention to your surroundings.

If, instead of going through the door, you jump over the boxes and carry on along the rocks, there's a whole fricken' TUTORIAL that explains absolutely everything I've just complained about not being explained, including how to fish, how to shop, how to sell and one very important detail I never discovered for myself, namely that if you press TAB it opens your inventory! I was wondering why I didn't have anywhere to put my stuff!

Geez. What a maroon.

At this point I think I'll just extend my deepest apologies to the developers, Chicken Launcher and the publisher, Awaken Realms, and sidle quietly away. 

I will just hang around long enough to say Captain Pawsome seems like it will be a really good game and that most of the problems I had with the demo were entirely my own fault. 

Don't think I'm meant to be all the way up here.

Not all of them - there was a bug where I got shot into the sky and had to restart from the last autosave - and I think the Tutorial could be made a little more obvious, with maybe an "Are you sure you want to skip the tutorial?" when you blithely try to walk through the door. Also, I still don't see why the interior of the ship is made of brick...

Anyway, I've wishlisted the game. It looks like it'll be a lot of fun. 

And that concludes October's Next Fest. The overall choice wasn't great but I thoroughly enjoyed most of the demos I picked and even when I didn't I learned something useful about the games so I guess that makes the operation a success. It also made for some really enjoyable and easy-to-write posts. I hope they were amusing/informative/useful (Delete as applicable.) to read, too.

Looking forward to the next Next Fest already.

Fishing For Fun : Next Fest In Fall

I've been looking forward to Next Fest, that divertissement of dainty demos laid on by Steam once a quarter. Since I discovered the event in the winter of '22, courtesy of Kluwes at Many Welps, it's become a fixture on my gaming calendar for a couple of reasons.

The first, as I've said before, is that I find these bite-size morsels surprising satisfying in themselves. Although I almost always end up adding a couple of the games to my wishlist, so far I haven't bought too many. Contrary, I'm sure, to the intentions of the developers, that first, sweet taste often fades long before the full feast reaches the table. Maybe releasing demos so far in advance isn't the best sales strategy.

The best of the rest, whose ultimate fate I don't follow, remain with me, if at all, only as short, self-contained experiences, valid in their own right but needing no further expansion. Beyond that, there remain only my own bad choices and a few plain, bad games, either way best forgotten.

Or possibly they're just bad demos. I mean, it is theoretically possible for a developer to mess up the demo but get the game right. It would be interesting to know how often that happens. But let's not get side-tracked, for once.

The second reason (I had two, remember?) is that demos are great for blog posts. On average they take 30-60 minutes to complete, which means I can play the demo and write up my thoughts about it all in the same session. They're also easy to summarize and explain - or they should be if they're any good, given their very reason for existing is to act as a shop window for the game they represent.

Demos make it significantly easier for me to write those short, pithy posts I consistently complain about not being able to do. Even better, Next Fest contextualizes the posts and adds a semblance of structure, turning every quarterly event into a Feature Mini-Series here at Inventory Full.

Okay, that might be over-playing my hand a little. It's not as if I've been consistent in the way I've handled reporting the event over the last twenty months. Maybe I should have thought about that before now...

I do usually begin with a post listing the demos I've chosen, giving some reasons for my choices. This is that post. Before I get to the names of the games, though, I will just say that I found this Fall's selection disappointing. 

The event lasts a week, from the 9th to the 16th of October, and I was planning on playing a demo every day. I thought the hard part would be trimming my choices down to seven but that turned out to be wildly optimistic. 

I spent the best part of an hour last night and almost as long this morning, going through the full slate, using all kinds of keywords and tags but also just starting at the top and scrolling down. Two things happened: I kept seeing the same demos over and over again because Steam's categorization system sucks and I could barely find anything I could imagine playing even for the length of a demo.

Most of that is down to me. My gaming tastes are a lot narrower than my tastes in most entertainment media. I really only enjoy a handful of genres and I'm pretty picky even within those. Even so, I found this quarter's choices unusually uninspiring. 

It was honestly a struggle coming up with half a dozen demos I was willing to try and fully half of those were games I either already had wishlisted or have been following for years. I'm certainly not complaining about getting the chance to try three games I'm already interested in but that's not really what I think of as the point of Next Fest.

It also means that after a couple of hours of fine-combing the options, I could only come up with three new-to-me titles I felt were worth a look. And honestly, two of those I really only picked to make up the numbers. I'm sure that by the time the event ends, someone else will have posted a review of a demo I would have loved to try that I never spotted - it happens every time - but unless they do it soon it'll be too late for me to add it to the roster.

Until and unless that happens, my picks for the latest Next Fest are as follows:

Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley

Might as well start at the top. I've had this on my wishlist since the day I heard about it. We're massive Moomin fans in this house and have been since childhood. The house is peppered with Moomin memorabilia and I get emails from the official Moomin Shop pretty much weekly.

You have to be very cautious with Moomin Merch. Not only is there a very wide variance in quality but there are subdivisions between the original comic strips, the novels, the TV series and the movie. Mostly my interest lies with the novels although I have the highest respect for the comic strips, which pre-date the prose. I'm more ambivalent over the TV and movie Moomins although I'm not discounting their own intrinsic merits.

Snufkin: Melody of Moominvally leans heavily towards the end of the franchise that interests me, at least visually. I guess I'll find out if it also works that seam narratively when I play the demo.

The game self-describes as "an ambient and wholesome experience for both kids and adults", which sounds unequivocally appealing. It "combines open world-mechanics with puzzles, stealth and melodic elements", which sounds more like something I'll need to see for myself before approving. 

Which is the whole point of having a demo, right? Super-looking forward to this one!

Sky: Children of the Light

This is also on my wishlist and I've mentioned it here before. It's a known entity, having already been a big success on Switch, Android and iOS. It also holds the Guiness World Record for "Most users in a concert-themed virtual world", although Guiness World Records certainly aren't worth what they were when I was a kid.

Sky is an MMO although possibly not an MMORPG. The Steam page describes it as "a peaceful, award-winning MMO designed to help players meaningfully connect with one another." Wikipedia goes into detail about the mechanics employed to support and encourage those meaningful connections and they are many. I imagine I'll just stump around on my own, talking to no-one, as usual but we'll see. Maybe there'll be Kool-Aid.

The graphics look lovely, which is what mainly attracted me to the game in the first place, shallow butterfly that I am. I'm hoping the open-world exploration will be entrancing enough on its own without any need to get involved in all that awkward "socializing" but as with Snufkin, for once I'm genuinely glad to have a demo available for a game I was already thinking of buying. It'll be very good to find out these things before I spend money.

Ship of Heroes

This is the one just about everyone reading this is likely at least to have heard of already. It's one of several in-development "spiritual successors" to the much-missed super-hero MMORPG City of Heroes. At least, CoH was much missed until it inconveniently returned as an exceptionally successful emulator project, thereby holing most of the would-be alternatives below the waterline.

That's what you get for taking a super-hero death at face value. Did they not know a "dead" super-hero always comes back? 

The passage of time plus the cost of development already seemed to have seen off most of the would-be wearers of the new super-hero MMORPG cape anyway. The emulator's runaway success merely confirmed what most people probably already thought, which was that none of these projects would ever see full release. As this demo suggests, however, like a good super-hero, SoH isn't going under without a fight. 

I'm not personally interested in playing the game if and when it launches. Despite being a lifelong super-hero fan, I don't actually like super-hero games very much. They rarely seem to capture anything about the genre that attracts me to it, usually feeling much more like a mish-mash of gaming tropes smushed inelegantly into a lump, like a parked car crushed by the Hulk when he needs something to throw.

The only thing that's ever held my attention in a super-hero game is a direct connection to a pre-existing property, usually one published by Marvel or DC. Without those IPs doing the heavy emotional lifting I find it very hard to care about the generic caped and costumed crimefighters of the likes of Champions or City of Heroes.

I also don't really see Next Fest as a particularly appropriate platform for MMORPGs of any stripe. I want to be in and out of a demo in no more than an hour, tops. The real demos for MMORPGs are alphas and betas, even the shortest of which have traditionally taken up at least a whole weekend of my time. 

Nevertheless, I feel almost bound by duty to give this one a look, even though the trailer they've created specifically for Next Fest is terrible. I guess there's still a chance the gameplay may hook me and I'll play all week but I doubt it. I imagine it'll get the same hour or so the rest get and that'll be plenty.

And those are the three games I already knew. Now for the three I'd not heard of, at least two of which I can I genuinely say I'm still not all that interested in, now I have. I'll be playing the demos for those two more in the hope of being surprised by joy than in the expectation of having a great time.

Sovereign Syndicate

This is the one I'm most hopeful for, although I only spotted it right at the end, when I was about to give up the hunt. Its Steam page calls it "A Victorian steampunk RPG with tarot cards instead of dice" which ticks a number of my boxes, albeit some of them with fairly faint pencil.

Graphically it looks great, all fog, brass and blunderbusses. Mechanically it sounds intriguing, with a "tarot card chance system" that allows for problem-solving by way of "combat, persuasion, magic, explosives".

Steam, in its often fatuous attempt to compare the game with something else I've played, offers up Disco Elysium, a frequently-made comparison that almost never stands close examination. This time, though, looking at the screenshots, I can see the clear influence, if only in design. The developers also claim the Baldur's Gate and Divinity:Original Sins series as role models, which is at least topical, if nothing else. It'll be interesting to find out if anything of that stands up to experience.

Enshrouded

I'd be a deal more excited about this one if I hadn't just spent 98 hours playing Dawnlands. It looks to be another of the myriad of games hoping to bottle some of Valheim's magic, although in this case it's a brew heavily laced with Amazon's New World. The trailer makes much of the active combat, weapon types and skill system but also of the voxel-based world and all the building prospects that affords.

I'm in a bit of a bind with these kinds of games. I find them very compelling. I can lose hour after hour to the explore-gather-craft-build loop. They do seem to have a natural cut-off point, though, after which interest just drops to nothing. I'm good so long as there's a new biome to discover and explore but once that stops I can't really see the point of hanging around.

That's obviously not going to be a problem with a demo but conversely there's going to be no incentive whatsoever to put in the kind of determined effort the genre demands if you hope to get anywhere. I'll be interested to see if the developers have done anything to circumvent that problem for the specific purposes of filling this shop window.

If not, I guess I'll just be running around, dressed in rags and taking a lot of screenshots. I can think of worse ways to spend an afternoon.

Captain Pawsome

And finally, for a complete contrast, here comes Captain Pawsome. I did quite deliberately pick this as something I wouldn't normally play, so I 'd have something a little different to post about for a change, although now I come to write about it, I'm not as convinced as I was about just how different it's going to be. 

You might be surprised how hard it was for me to find something that was both "different" but that I could also stand the thought of actually playing. I was. I looked at dozens and dozens of possibles and dismissed them all in a matter of seconds with "Nope" or "Not likely" or "No way in Hell!"

This one has several merits from my perspective. The titular Captain is a cat. I like cats. Gameplay involves fishing, crafting and collecting. I like all of those. There doesn't seem to be any jumping, puzzling or combat of any kind, which means the whole thing should at least be functionally completable by me although whether I'll have the patience to catch all those fish is another question.

On the debit side, the music is really annoying but I guess I can turn it down. Or off. Other than that, it looks like it could be fun.

Those are the demos I've chosen. All I have to do now is play them. I suppose I'd best get started.