Crowns And Pawns: Completed

Here's a rare event. I finished a game! Yes, I know. Doesn't happen very often, does it? And even more unicornly, it's a game I wishlisted after playing the demo in a Next Fest. And then I bought it. And now I've played it. Seriously. What are the chances?

The game is  

Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit   

Inevitably, it's a point and click adventure, very much in the classic style. The demo reminded me strongly of the Broken Sword series, which I consider to be the gold standard for the genre. I'm always on the lookout for games that follow closely in that tradition, which is why I wishlisted it. 

The weird thing, though, is that when I reviewed the demo back in February of '22, I wasn't all that enthusiastic. In my summing-up, I described it as "...quite bland... adventure gaming by numbers" and concluded "... if it turned up for free on Amazon Games or Epic or somewhere like that... I'd probably play it.... I'm not sure I'd pay money for it, though."

But I did. I payed £8.49 for it on Christmas Day 2023. I can't remember buying it but given the purchase date I suspect I got a Steam Gift Card or similar for Christmas that year. Don't remember that either. In the same purchase I also bought Tails Noir: Preludes, which I've started but haven't finished. Maybe I'll get back to that one next.

Crowns and Pawns took me just under eight hours to complete, which works out at about a pound an hour. Looked at objectively, it's not great value. It's cheap enough, sure, but I've played Star Resonance: Blue Protocol for almost exactly as long and it hasn't cost me anything. 

I pick on that one specifically because I was playing it in between sessions of Crowns and Pawns and enjoying it just as much but I could name-check any F2P title, really. Is it any wonder smaller studios struggle to get attention for games when they have to charge money for them and there's so much of equal or higher quality available for free?

But... there are no major Free to Play publishers pumping out endless, throwaway point and click adventures. Not that I know of, anyway, although if there are any, I'd love to hear about them. For the dedicated teams hammering away at all those intractable puzzles and coming up with endless streams of witty one-liners, I guess the main problem would be all those giveaways from Amazon Prime Gaming. Prime seems determined to hoover up every P&C game ever made and hand it out for free to bulk out the ever-decreasing value of their offer.

 

Except, like having a show that goes into syndication back in the golden age of network television, having your five or ten year-old adventure game picked up by Prime or Epic might be the payday the developers were always hoping for. How much do they get, I wonder?

It seems the actual numbers are safely tucked away behind NDAs but this reddit thread, which includes a couple of replies supposedly from developers who've taken the shilling, suggests it's a flat fee upfront with some sort of payment for new accounts registered (In the case of Epic.). Whatever it is, for most of the aging adventure games I claim, it has to be a bonus. None of them are going to be generating much in the way of new sales by now.

So, was Crowns and Pawns any good? Yes, it was, thank-you for asking. 

I didn't like the opening, which had nothing much to do with the rest of the game. I can see why they didn't use it for the demo. If they had, I'd never have wishlisted it, let alone bought it. I disliked it so much, I stopped playing after I finished it and didn't pick the game up again for more than a year.

I suppose out of politeness I should insert a spoiler warning here. Like anyone cares...

The game begins with that peculiar "Prologue" set in Chicago, in which Milda, the protagonist, and her friend and roomate Dana, meet some annoying jerk about some job Dana is trying to get. There's a whole lot of infuriating business where you have to stop a busker from playing, get some guy a drink, print out fliers and pack your bags, none of which I found remotely amusing or entertaining and all of which seemed to take fucking forever.

Having played the whole thing now, I can see it's supposed to be giving you some backstory to Milda and Dana's relationship, setting her friend up to be a useful contact later in the game, but why it all needs to be presented in such a tedious fashion beats me. It feels like a different game altogether and a much less enjoyable one.

Once you get past that, though, the remaining 90% of the game is pure adventure. Milda arrives at her dead grandfather's cottage in Lithuania (Big spoiler - he's not really dead!), all of which you can read about in that demo review I linked earlier because the demo is pretty much that whole chapter.

From there the action moves to the capital, Vilnius, then to Belarus (To fix the result of an ice-hockey game.) and then to Siena in Italy. All with trips back to Vilnius in between. You get to see a lot of Europe, some views of which, particularly the many churches you have to break into along the way, look to have been taken directly from life. 

There's a lot of business with seals (The kind you use to put wax on documents, not the ones that honk horns in the circus - if you live in the 19th century.), codes, invisible ink, secret compartments... all the good stuff you expect from the genre. You have to read old books and look at old pictures and compare this with that and come to conclusions.

All of which requires a considerably more robust and coherent UI than the one you're given. I ended up using a walk-through quite a bit. I almost always knew what to do, I just couldn't figure out how to make the game do it. Often the way with these things, I find.

Some of the mechanics seem to get forgotten along the way, like the notes function on Milda's phone, which you sometimes use to combine facts you've discovered so as to learn something new but which mostly just seems to sit there, doing nothing. Or maybe I missed a bunch of stuff. That's always possible.

If so, it wasn't anything that got in the way of finishing the story, which ends in ludicrously dramatic fashion with a seismic collapse in a cave beneath the vaults of a church in Vilnius. The game begins like an episode of a failed sitcom starring two wacky girls just out of college and ends like the climax of an Indiana Jones movie. It's a bit of a leap.

One thing I did like about the ending is that you get the choice of grabbing the eponymous, extremely valuable and possibly magical but also allegedly cursed crown or letting it fall into the abyss, to be forever lost. I chose to let it go, which gave me an achievement only 17% of players have got, so I'm guessing greed wins out for most people there. Or possibly megalomania. 

The whole plot feels far from convincing throughout. There's something about KGB psychotronic experiments and a history professor who wants to rule the world using telepathy. There's a hint of magic that could just be an over-active imagination and an awful lot of quite detailed historical information concerning the Baltic States. Religion comes into things a lot and so does architecture, not to mention the rules of ice-hockey. It's all quite educational.

Mostly the puzzles are logical and realistic - for the genre. There are a couple of annoying "action" sequences involving precise timing that I could have done without. Also, if you're going to require a librarian to go to the far end of a library to retrieve a book so Milda can do something while she's away, I'd suggest not making that book the Necronomicon. That was one I had to use the walk-through for because I assumed it was a joke. 

Speaking of jokes, they're pretty good, on the whole. I wasn't rolling around but I did chuckle a few times. Milda and Dana have several good exchanges and Milda's friend Joris, at whose apartment in Vilnius she stays (Nothing happens between them, or not in my play-through it didn't, anyway.) has a droll sense of humor.

Altogether, I had a good time playing Crowns and Pawns. I've played plenty of worse adventure games. It's strengths are the graphics, which are very pleasing throughout, the characters, who are all either likeable or boo-hiss as appropriate and the setting, which is original.  

The mechanics are mostly very sound. Using items from inventory and combining them is intuitive and straightforward. Most things work as you'd expect. Movement is mostly walking slowly but you can double-click to move instantly from location to location including, within scenes, from door to door, which is very welcome. It's just a few of the more elaborate options that don't feel as polished as they could be. 

One innovation I can't recall seeing in a point&click game before is the option to change Milda's appearance, just as you would in an RPG. They could have made a bit more of that, I thought. If the game tells you about it, I missed it. I only discovered it by accident when I noticed Milda had left her travel bag by the sofa in Joris's flat.

I clicked on it out of curiosity and it opened a window where I was able to change her clothes, style her hair and add accessories. As far as I could tell, what she wore didn't make any difference (Except the one time she had to make herself a fake hockey fan shirt so the driver would let her on the bus.) but as you can tell from the pictures, I made good use of the option anyway.

I also notice now that two of the slots, bracelets and earrings, are empty. That suggests I must have missed something along the way. I don't think I care enough to go back and look for whatever it was I missed. 

The game has a "Mostly Positive" rating on Steam and I think that's fair. I feel mostly positive about it too. Would I recommend it, though? 

Well, for a Point&Click fan, yes I would. It does more than enough right to keep the craving at bay for a few hours. For the casual player, though, probably not. There are a lot of similar but better options out there. And quite a few of them are free. Or will be if you wait long enough.

Jumpstyle Is Not A Crime

Since I ran up against the buffers in Nightingale I've been game-hopping like crazy. Typically, when I was spending all my time in one game, I complained about feeling trapped. Now I'm back to jumping between half a dozen games it's giving me the jitters. There's no pleasing some people.

The games I'm "playing" just now (Although that's a very fancy word for what I'm actually doing when I log into some of them.) are:

• New World
• AdventureQuest 3D
• Once Human Closed Beta 3
• EverQuest II
• Nightingale
• The Dungeon of Nahalbeuk: Amulet of Chaos

I don't have one of those fancy apps that tallies exactly how much time I spend in each of them but I can say with a fair degree of confidence that it isn't a lot. I doubt it's more than a couple of hours altogether most days.

As well as those six, I have a mental list of about twice as many games I feel I ought to be playing - or could be playing - or was in the middle of playing before I stopped for no good reason. Those include:

• Valheim
• Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit
• Tales Noir Preludes
• Imposter Factory
• Lake
• My Time At Sandrock

There are more - potentially a lot more - but that's a round dozen so I'll call it there, just so I have time to give a little gloss on each of them, starting with the ones I'm at least managing to log into once in a while:

New World - I came back for the Spring event and kind of hung around. I've been logging in most days to do the rounds of the settlements and festival camps so I can pick up my freebies, especially the tokens. I've bought some of the furniture I wanted and I have a couple more days to get the rest. I need to remember to spend everything I've earned because the event currency vanishes along with the event itself a tthe end of April.

Other than that, I've done a few quests and I feel like I might carry on and do a few more, just for the fun of it. Questing in New World is generally entertaining and I see new quest markers everywhere I go. Unfortunately, I'd need to buy the expansion to level any further and I think it's a bit steep at £25.  I'm somewhat discouraged to do too much questing while the xp goes nowhere so I'll probably shelve this one soon in anticipation of whatever the Big Announcement in June might be. Maybe that will make it feel like it's worth buying the DLC.

AdventureQuest 3D - I log in every day just to collect my three daily chests. There are two reasons I keep doing it: 1) The first chest always gives some cash shop currency and I want some for housing items and 2) AQ3D has by far the fastest login process I've ever seen. 

Seriously, it's like lightning. I wish every MMORPG was even half as fast. I just timed it and it took 28 seconds from Pressing "Play" in Steam to looking at my character in game. I can log in, get my chests and be back in Steam in under a minute although I don't usually go quite that fast. Of course, I'm not actually playing the game but there's certainly nothing being put in my way if I wanted to, which is more than I can say about a lot of games - *cough* Lord of the Rings *cough*

Once Human CB3 - I logged into this one for the first time in a couple of weeks last night and my house was gone! That was a shock. It turned out to be more of a feature than a glitch, though. It seems that if you don't log in for a while (I don't know what the time-limit is.) your house automatically gets copied and stored using the system designed for moving home. 

All you have to do to restore it is find a new spot and put down the blueprint and it magically reappears, just as it was, with all the furniture in the right place. It seems like a very ingenious solution to the endless problem all games with open-world housing have, namely absentee homeowners. This way, no-one has to look at hundreds of abandoned homes and all the best building spots can be taken by people who are going to use them.

Once Human has a lot of clever design features like that. Yesterday I ran across the game's ingenious solution to that other annoying trope of so many F2P MMORPGs, player-owned strip malls. You must have seen them; dozens, scores, hundreds of stalls put up by players to sell their goods, all crammed together in a particularly ugly form of urban blight.

In OH, players sell from pick-up trucks on which they place vending machines. These fit so well into the post-apocalyptic environment, already littered as it is with broken-down vehicles and machinery, it took me a good while to realize what they were. They also have the benefit of all being different. I haven't found out how you get one yet but it looks as though once you have one, you can furnish and decorate it like a room in your house. I wonder if you can also drive about in it? There are vehicles in the game, so I don't see why not.

I want to do at least one more full post about Once Human soonish, so I'll leave it at that for now. I don't plan on playing much more of CB3 but that's only because I want to save my enthusiasm for when the game goes live. I did do some exploring yesterday, though, which is where all the pictures in this post came from. It's fun just driving around on my motorcycle, looking at the scenery. I might do some more of that before the beta ends.

EverQuest II - I'm in and out of this one as usual. This morning I finished the Signature Questline from the current expansion, Ballads of Zimarra, which would normally be a big moment. Instead it turned out to be something of an anti-climax. 

For one thing, it's the first expansion for a long time where finishing the Sig hasn't also put me at the level cap. My Berserker is still only half way through Level 128. For another, there isn't a big, explosive ending to the storyline - just a regular fight with a named mob I wouldn't even call a Boss, followed by a hand-in, at which point you get a pop-up telling you the Sig line is finished.

It transpires there's a reason for that. The Signature Quest might have stopped but the quest faucet is still jammed full on. Other NPCs nearby immediately sprout feathers over their heads and everything carries on as before. I looked ahead on the wiki and there are tons more quests of all sorts in the expansion, many in direct line of sequence from the Sig. 

I'm not sure why they've done it this way although no doubt there are reasons. It's fine with me, anyway. Now I can just carry on chipping away until I eventually hit 130. I'd like to get it done before the Anashti Sul server arrives in June. That shouldn't be too hard...

Nightingale - As I said the other day, the changes they've made aren't significant enough to get me back playing regularly again. I would like to re-visit all the vendors so I can buy stuff directly from the UI in future, though. That would be a project in itself.

The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: Amulet of Chaos - The wild card on this list, being both the only game that's both solo and offline. It's also the one I've been playing the most. I've had a session most evenings, usually lasting a couple of hours, which is sometimes as long as it takes to finish a single battle.

I really like the gameplay. It's one of those XCom-style, turn-based, tactical group combat games, only with a high-fantasy skin. Lots of setting people on fire, knocking them down and hiding behind things until someone blows them up. All of that.

It's also - loosely - a parody and I was wary of what that might mean in the way of "humor" but it's largely okay. The voice acting is just the right side of amateurish and the jokes rise just above embarrassingly cliched. I wouldn't call it witty or original but it raises the odd smile and the characters... have character.

The game also seems to go on forever. I feel like I've been playing it for months. I know I'm doing all the side quests but I feel if I wasn't my party wouldn't be tough enough to handle the main quest so it doesn't feel like that's much of an option. Anyway, I'm enjoying it and I hope one day I might even finish it.

And now the ones I'm thinking - but not doing much - about...

Valheim  - Wilhelm writing about this one again reminds  me I ought to go back and at least take a look at the Mistlands. I had a terrible start with that biome, although from what Wilhelm says that was likely the developers' intention. 

I'm not even going to bother trying to play the game properly any more but luckily I don't need to because I've switched all the mobs to Passive, meaning I can go explore without fear of being jumpd on by a spider the size of an elephant, moving as fast as a cheetah. I mean, does that sound like fun to anyone?

I was tempted to go back and have a wander around yesterday but then I thought about the final biome, Ashlands, which is in testing now and should be going live in a matter of weeks. It probably makes more sense to wait for that and then explore both biomes together. If I do, I won't be switching mob aggro on for that either, I'll tell you that for nothing!

Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit - I bought this in January. Haven't even logged in yet. Every time I see it in my Steam Library I feel uncomfortable. Maybe I'll start on it as soon as I finish Naheulbeuk.

Tales Noir Preludes  - I bought this around the same time and played it right away. I was really enjoying it but then I stopped, for no reason I can recall. I keep meaning to carry on from where I left off but somehow I never do. Must try harder.

Imposter Factory - Much the same story for this one, although I got further before I stopped.

Lake - And this one! I have no idea why this keeps happening. I have a post in mind to write about Lake, too. Something very odd happens in it. Twice, in fact. 

I thought I might already have posted about that but search suggests I haven't. I guess I could tell you what the Odd Thing is now but there's still the outside possibility it might happen more than twice, so I really ought to finish the game first, just in case.

My Time At Sandrock - Will I ever play this damn game? I very much doubt it. 

I almost wish I hadn't bought it, now. I feel like its whole schtick has been done by so many other games, I can't really see the point. Then again, the My Time At... games probably do it better than most of them, so why play any of those, when I already have this one installed? 

And there we have it. Not so much a post, more of a to-do list. Maybe putting it all down on paper will even inspire me to get some of it done.

I kinda doubt it but you have to try something, don't you?

Let The Sun Shine In: The Crowns And Pawns Demo

Another day, another demo.  Actually, I played this one a couple of days ago. I've been saving it for Sunday so I'd have something quick and easy to post after work. 

The demo in question is Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit, a point&click adventure claiming to model itself on the classics. From what I've seen so far it doesn't seem an unreasonable claim but I do have a few reservations before I climb on board the bandwagon.

My main reason for holding back lies with the nature of the demo as a demo. It's exceptionally professionally produced, as slick as whatever unsavory simile for slickness you care to employ, but I'm not sure it told me nearly as much about the game as I felt I needed to know.

It's certainly one of the most commercially-minded demos I've ever played. Excised from the screenshot at the top of the post are the "Wishlist Now" and "Subscribe" buttons that appear at the bottom left and right of the screen respectively. They were in my line of vision for pretty much the entire time I was playing..

I acknowledge the clear-sightedness of the marketing department in making sure no-one's allowed to forget why the demo exists but their single-mindedness had exactly the opposite effect on me. I did not add the game to my wishlist, pretty much out of spite.

Chances are I will, sometime. It looks enough like a game I would enjoy playing for me to want to keep an eye on it. It's hard to be sure, though, because whoever designed the demo made a conscious decision to focus on one aspect of the game over all the rest.

The Crowns and Pawns' Steam page has a list of features that includes "a blend of history and myths set in a modern world, featuring real life locations all around Europe" but the demo takes place in a run-down, two-room cottage. The game also features "fully voiced dialogue" and "interesting dialogue choices" but the demo begins with a statement warning you won't be experiencing much of that in the chapter they've chosen to show.

What you most definitely will be doing is solving puzzles. When they tell you to expect "Classic point-and-click puzzles that involve finding items [and] creatively combining the contents of your inventory" they really aren't kidding. That's all you'll be doing!

It's also the first thing you'll be doing. Well, alright, strictly speaking the first thing you'll be doing is arriving in your rented car, walking up the path, finding the door to the cottage already open and stepping inside... only to find it's pitch dark and the lights don't work.

The solution... 

This is going to be a spoiler by the way... 

I'm warning you now so you can turn around and leave if you want to play this thing and work out all the puzzles for yourself... 

Everyone good now? 

Okay, the solution to the first problem isn't hard to spot. Right next to the front door there's a fusebox. In your inventory there's a bunch of keys. Open the box with the keys. So far, so extremely easy. Not so the next part, which did give me a little trouble. You have to move some dials around to meet a particularly unlikely set of conditions. I've fiddled with a fair few fuseboxes in my time and I've never seen one with rules like these.

The demo has been pulled straight from the game itself, where it's known as "Chapter Two." I'm guessing you won't be tasked with a logic puzzle within thirty seconds of logging in when the real thing arrives. I imagine there's a warm-up before you need to exercise your puzzling muscles in earnest. I know I could have used one.

The puzzle wasn't too tough, fortunately, or this would have been a much shorter and even snarkier review. It took me a few goes but eventually I had that "D'oh" moment so familiar to adventure gamers. As I was to realize several times during the hour or so I spent playing the demo, the difficulty of the puzzles wasn't going to be the problem. The nature of them was.

Adventure games have a few generic flaws, the most annoying of which are the aforementioned arbitrary win conditions, a blunt refusal to allow actions that are irrefutably reasonable and a corresponding insistence on irrational, usually convoluted, alternatives. Crowns and Pawns is definitely in line of descent from the classics as far as all of those are part of the tradition.

Let's just stick with that fuse box for now. If you entered a small cottage on a blindingly sunny day, would you expect to need to switch the lights on before you could see more than a foot in front of your face?  Does sunlight not go through glass in this version of Europe?

Come on, now. That's harsh. Surely there's a logical explanation? The cottage belonged to the protagonist's grandfather, who just recently died. Maybe there are blackout curtains at the windows. The shutters might be closed out of respect.

No, they are not. Neither of those things nor anything like them is true and you can be sure of that because you can see from the outside of the house that there are no shutters or curtains, something immediately confirmed from the inside, when you do switch on the light.  

Why the room is in total darkness defies not only logic but physics, as does the view from inside the room. As the screenshot below shows, from inside the cottage the sunny day seems to have vanished, replaced by utter blackness outside both the open door and window, even though, in the next room, as shown in the scene above, the artists have made a particular point of showing how brightly-lit that room is by the sunlight streaming in.

A game that prides itself on having both "beautiful hand painted art that comes to life with a touch of modern graphics" and "a world that reacts to your decisions" ought to work a little harder to feel like an actual place, rather than a stage set. There are several other occasions when a simple, straightforward solution to a problem is denied, sometimes by the game just not offering any such possibility but more frequently and far more annoyingly by a scripted response giving a spurious and wholly unconvincing explanation as to why it can't be done.

None of this bothers me all that much. If it did I'd have stopped playing adventure games years ago. Even the very best of them are stuffed with moments like this. I do think, however, that it's a bad idea to have quite so many of them displayed quite so prominently in a demo. I guess you could credit the developers for exceptional honesty but the effect it had on me was mostly to make me question whether I could put up with it for a whole game.

By the end, though, I figured that, yes, I probably could. It has a lot going for it. The graphics are attractive to look at. I think "beautiful" might be pushing it but "pretty", certainly. The voice acting is solid, although the demo doesn't offer a wealth of evidence in that direction. Apart from Milda, the protagonist, (who talks to herself a lot and sounds uncannily similar to several other young, female protagonists in other adventure games I've played. Maybe they're played by the same actor...) there's only one other character, a disembodied voice on a walkie-talkie that someone throws through a window early on in the demo. A closed window.

The plot is interesting enough that I want to find out what happens next and Milda is a likeable-enough lead. The puzzles, despite my sarcasm, are probably less egregiously illogical than average and they're pitched about right for me in terms of difficulty. I would definitely download Crowns and Pawns if it turned up for free on Amazon Games or Epic or somewhere like that and I'd probably play it, too. 

I'm not sure I'd pay money for it, though. Everything about it does feel quite bland. It's a bit like adventure gaming by numbers. The demo works very well in convincing me the developers are fully capable of producing a good-looking, fully-functional adventure game, although I am a little troubled to learn the demo itself has been available in what appears to be identical form for at least a year and a half.

What the demo doesn't do is get me itching to play the full thing right now. Does that make it a bad demo? Maybe try it yourself and see what you think. It took me less than an hour. Or watch one of the many playthroughs on YouTube. I watched this one. That doesn't ask for much more than half an hour of your time.

Or you could just watch the new trailer, which takes less than two minutes and yet manages to makes the whole thing look a lot more appealing. I guess that means it's a good trailer.

Two demos down, five to go.

The Fest Next Time

Kluwes at Many Welps (Or, as it appears on my blog roll for some reason, I'm Not Squishy. I should probably update that...) was the first to alert me to the return of Steam's indie demo event, Next Fest. MagiWasTaken at Indiecator was next and no doubt a whole bunch of people will follow along soon enough. It's hard to resist such a smorgasbord of free gaming snacks, not to mention the way it makes for a series of very quick and easy to put together blog posts.

As I believe I've complained before, Valve does its very best to hide the festival in plain sight. I was logged into Steam all day yesterday and I still didn't notice it had started. Worse, even after I'd been alerted to its existence, it took me some time to find it on the chaotic "Features" page. I scrolled straight past it the first time.

I spent about thirty minutes flipping through the stacks of demos, looking for anything I might actually play. As usual, it was more of an annoyance than a pleasure. Even using the categories provided to winnow the chaff it's still heavy going and Steam itself does very little to make it easier. If there's a simple way to go back to the same place in the list after you've looked at a game's page, I couldn't find it.

You get what you pay for, as they say. I guess the upside of such an awkward, fiddly process is that it does save you from yourself. If it was easier, who knows how many demos I might have downloaded? 

As it was, I still ended up installing more of the things than I intended. My plan was to stick to just five. It seemed like a manageable number. Even with everything else that's going on I figured I ought to be able to play through five short demos and still have time to post about them before the festival ends and they stop working. They do that, some of them. 

I got caught that way last time. I missed out on a couple I left for too long. I don't think it's Steam's decision. I think it depends on the developer. Some of them are demos that are already up on Steam semi-permanently but others have been produced specifically for the event and switch off when it ends, or at least I think that's how it works.

In the end, I settled on eight titles. Seven I downloaded and one I added to my wishlist, not because I want to buy it but just to bookmark it for now. I chose not to install it immediately because the demo is gigantic by comparison to any of the others, over thirty times the size of the next-largest. That's because it isn't really a demo at all; it's the early access build of an mmo.

Tales of Wild is the game in question. Not, you'll note, tales of the wild, although since it's being developed by a Chinese studio that could be a wonky translation. Even though it's in the festival, I'm not sure it's really a demo and I'm not at all sure it's an mmo either. It's actually "an open world survival craft online game." because we really need another of those. I might get round to trying it at some point but I wouldn't count on it.

The seven titles I did download are all adventure games, most of them point-and-clicks. Here they are, in no particular order:

Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit. "Legends of the past come back to life in this charming point-and-click adventure. Pack your bags and journey with Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit through modern day Europe to uncover the secrets of the king who was never crowned."

The first one I picked, mainly because the graphics are bright and cheerful and it looked like it might be light in more than one sense of the word. The last several times I've done this I've ended up with more badly-lit, horror-inflected games than would normally be my choice and I'd like to avoid doing that again if I can possibly manage it. Looking at the full description, I see it's "inspired by classics such as Broken Sword, Still Life, Syberia and others", which raises my hopes considerably. Let's hope it can live up to that list.

Night Cascades. "The city is on fire, and the Devil is to blame - or is it? Two women must solve an occult-themed mystery set in an alternate 1980s while unraveling the secrets of their past. Hunt for clues and interrogate suspects in this interactive yuri visual novel."

I had to look up "yuri visual novel" but it's nothing that wasn't already was pretty much covered by the LGBTQ+ tag. A 1980s setting, female protagonists, paranormal activity and a detective plot. Should be right up my street. About all it's missing is a cat. Oh, wait...

Albert Wilde: Quantum P.I. "Solve murders, flirt badly, maybe discover a wormhole to another universe? Also, you’re a cat. " 

This is the real outlier in the bunch. There's gameplay footage in the trailer of Albert driving a car and it looks more like a YouTube stunt than a video game. The music's fantastic, too. The game's set in the 1930s, it's in black and white and it uses a 4:3 aspect ratio, all of which I think is meant to make it feel like an early TV serial. It's also "First person controller from a cat's perspective", whatever that means. I'm looking forward to this one.

The Wreck. "Follow failed screenwriter Junon as she attempts to make it through the most pivotal day in her life. Relive the past, alter the present, and embrace the future - or watch Junon’s story end in a wreck."

I liked the graphics and its pitch - "a mature 3D visual novel about sisterhood, motherhood, grief and survival" - reminded me a little of Lake, about which I said "I really like Lake... The more games like this I play, the more I want to play." Don't say it if you don't mean it.

Intruder in Antiquonia. "Sarah doesn't remember who she is or how she got to Antiquonia. Help her solve the mysteries of her past as you explore this internet-hostile town to find the answers. A beautiful, hand-illustrated point-and-click adventure with a wonderful soundtrack."

I passed on this the first time. The title is awkward, the graphics look far from "beautiful" and we'll be the judge of how "wonderful" the soundtrack is, thank you. I'm not big on overselling. What got me to change my mind was this one line in the description: "Antiquonia, a fascinating town where the locals reject the Internet." Do they? Do they really? Why? Inquiring minds want to know!

Children of Silentown. "Children of Silentown is a dark adventure game that tells the story of Lucy, a girl growing up in a village deep in a forest inhabited by monsters. People disappearing is nothing uncommon here, but this time, Lucy is old enough to investigate on her own. Or so she thinks."

It was always too much to hope I'd get through this whole thing without a little horror creeping in somewhere. Not that I'm saying Lucy's a little horror. I'm sure she's lovely. They're nearly always called "Lucy", aren't they? I do feel I've played this game about a hundred times before or at least read about it. But then, I could say that about almost everything on this list and most likely everything in the entire Next Fest line-up. Originality isn't really much of a feature in indie gaming, is it? And who cares, frankly?  Not me. I'd rather see something familiar done well than something original done badly. This certainly looks the business. We'll see if it plays that way, too.

Lost in Play. "Go on a feel-good adventure with a brother and sister as they explore dreamscapes and befriend magical creatures. Lost in their imagination, Toto and Gal must stick together and solve puzzles to journey back home. This whimsical puzzle adventure game will make you feel like you're playing a cartoon!"

I'm not a hundred per cent sure about this one. The Steam page rams the word "puzzle" home every chance it gets and I'm not that big a fan of puzzling. I like point and click adventures where the answers are pretty obvious most of the time. The odd head-scratcher is okay but not in every scene. There's no dialog, either, which kind of undermines the whole concept of the genre to my way of thinking. Looks pretty, though.

And that's the lot. I might start on them tonight. If they turn out to be worth writing about then that's what I'll do. If I never mention them again, they probably weren't. Or else I never got around to playing them at all. One or the other.