When In Spain: Intruder In Antiquonia

Steam's most recent Next Fest only lasted a week and by the time I noticed it had started it had already been up and running for a couple of days. As I said then, five demos seemed like a reasonable number to get through before it finished but I downloaded seven anyway.

As it turned out, even five would have been optimistic. I only managed to play through three before the gates slammed shut on the last day of February and thanks to the arrival of Guild Wars 2's third expansion, End of Dragons on the same day, so far I've only posted my thoughts about two of them, Albert Wilde: Quantum P.I. and Crowns and Pawns. 

The third, which I'm going to talk about today, is Intruder in Antiquonia but we'll get to that in a moment. I just wanted to reassure everyone I will still be covering the rest of them, eventually. I checked this morning and three of the links are still in my Steam Library, working, even though the festival is over. The fourth, Children of Silentown, has been removed but the demo itself remains up on the game's Steam page. You don't get off that easily!

So, Intruder in Antiquonia, then. Hmm. This is an odd one but then aren't they all?

One of the more interesting things about playing through a series of game demos in quick succession like this is the way it highlights the choices different developers make about what to promote or withhold. It must be a difficult decision, whether to push what you feel is your strongest suit in the hope of setting the hook or whether to keep the bait out of reach to make it seem even more tempting.

I thought it was strange that the Crowns of Power demo focused so heavily puzzles in a very restricted and everyday environment, when the bigger part of the game's appeal seemed to be reliant on exotic locations, plots and characters. The demo for Intruder in Antiquonia takes almost exactly the opposite approach. Not only are there are no puzzles whatsoever, the introduction specifically warns you it isn't possible to use any items from inventory at all.

What you can do is visit a number of locations and talk at some length to a number of characters as you try to unravel the beginnings of a plot. In theory, given my preferences, I probably ought to have responded more favorably to this approach but I found myself distracted by several factors, some within the control of the developers, others not so much.

I did mention in the first of my Next Fest posts that I thought "Intruder in Antiquonia" was an awkward title. I was basing that mainly on the heavy-handed allusion to "antiquity" in the name of a town known to reject modern technology. What I didn't know then was that the game comes from a Spanish developer, Aruna Studios based in A Coruña. 

That changes things. Firstly, it means all the dialog and text in the game, including the title, is translated. Secondly, it makes the name of the town a more nuanced pun than I realised. In English, "Antiquonia" sounds like the kind of name a very unimaginative children's writer might give to the setting for their dull fantasy novel. In Spanish, it sounds like it might be an actual place. I've stayed in Antequerra several times, for example.

I know Spain very well, having been there maybe thirty times or more since I was a small child, not to mention being, technically although not in any culturally meaningful manner, half Spanish. Ironically, Galicia, the province where Aruna Studios is based, is literally the only part of the Spanish mainland I've never visited.

That may or may not explain another of the distractions that kept me from engaging fully with the demo as I was playing. I've spent a lot of time in a lot of small Spanish towns and I can't remember many of them looking much like Antiquonia. I spent more time than I'm sure the developers intended trying to figure out whether that was because the graphics, which manage to be both extremely detailed yet oddly generic all at the same time, were just not very convincing or whether it might be that small towns in that particular part of Spain, unfamiliar to me, really do look like that.

To make things even more confusing, some of the setting looked more like the Cotswolds villages close to where I live than anything I've ever seen in Spain. It made for a disconcerting experience but one that may be unique to my own particular set of circumstances. It's a truism to say we bring more to art than we take from it but truisms are truisms because they're true.

Seperating the objective from the subjective is an impossibility, of course, but attempting to sail as close to that gravity well as possible without being sucked into the kind of philosophical black hole no traveler of the thoughtways ever escapes, I'd have to say I did not find the graphics "beautiful", as advertised. 

That's not to say I didn't like them. I did. I thought they were charming and idiosyncratic in the way Richard Scarry's illustrations can be. They have something of that child's instructional primer about them, even though there's not an anthropomorphic animal in sight. 

The exteriors, as I said, had a somewhat generic feel to them but the interiors, by contrast felt as though they were probably taken from photographs. The illustration of the tree on the side of the desk in the clinic reception area looks entirely too specific to be other than drawn from life.

Except that, when inspected, it gives a message relating to keys. I couldn't help wondering whether, when the full game appears, one of those keys might not be needed for the plot and maybe that was why it was there. It's impossible to know because all such interactions have been excluded from the demo.

All we have to judge the potential of the game by, then, are what it looks like and what people say to each other and therein lies yet another distraction. The English translation is good but it's not always idiomatically perfect. 

For example, the highly-structured Spanish hotel system has a whole category called "Hostal", which correctly translates into English as "Small Hotel". "Hotel", however, has a much more specific meaning in Spanish, while the very similar "Hostel" has an equally specific meaning in English. Navigating these subtleties requires whole paragraphs of explanation in guide books.

In the demo the obvious false-friend is used and it made me wonder what was going on. The implications of an amnesiac being sent to "a very nice hostel" by the authorities are very different indeed to the same person being sent to "a very nice small hotel." In real life that might lead to an embarrassing misunderstanding. In a game it sets narrative expectations.

The narrative itself, I found intriguing. The protagonist, Sarah, is found unconscious on the road into town. She's taken to the local clinic, where she's dignosed with retrograde amnesia, meaning she can remember general facts and processes but not specific personal details. She doesn't know who she is or how she got there, in other words.

As the demo proceeds, Sarah wanders around talking to people and it emerges the name on her I.D. card is made up of bits and pieces of the names of other characters living in Antiquonia. One of them is at the center of a mystery involving a girl, who went missing years ago. Could that girl be Sarah?

Someone has reserved Sarah a room in the hotel under the name on her obviously false I.D. although it's a room you never get to see in the demo, something I found quite annoying. Other than that, I was able to visit all the locations I felt I wanted to see. There aren't many, just the reception areas of the clinic and the hotel, the town square, the police station, the convent on the hill and the appartment of the paramedic who, conveniently, has just about the only internet-capable computer in the technology-hating town.

I won't go into all the details of what you can do and what you learn from doing it but I will say enough was revealed that I would certainly have carried on trying to unravel the plot had the demo not come to a sudden stop after about forty minutes. Play enough of these point&click mysteries and too many similarities can start to push through the surface but characters with personality will do a lot to push those similarities back out of sight, which is what happened here.

Once again, based on the demo, this is a game I'd happily play if I got it for free but for which I can't really see myself paying money. That must be very disappointing for a developer to hear, although possibly not as much so as "I wouldn't play it if you paid me."

I also suspect that the Spanish small town setting of Intruder in Antiquonia contributed a good deal to my interest, even if it did confuse me more than somewhat as well. It's possible that the game's obvious technical limitations, (The animations are particularly basic.) the occasionally stiff translation and the sometimes lackluster graphics would have led me to a more negative response had I not felt such an affinity for the locations and the characters.

On finishing the demo I didn't immediately wishlist the game but having thought about it some more as I wrote this post it seemed worth doing. I may not buy the game but I don't want to forget about it, either. It's supposedly due out fairly soon, "Q2 2022", so I'll watch for that and for whatever reviews follow.

I guess that means the demo did its job.

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.