No-One Expects The Seventies Discotheque

To avoid stretching this whole thing out to an unreasonable length, I'm going to ram the last two Next Fest demos together in one, final post. They don't really have a lot to do with each other, apart from both being point-and-click adventures of a sort, but even that's more coherence than any two random demos deserve, so I guess it'll do.

First up, let's take on Dancing Bones which, when you stop and think about it, is an odd name for a game set in the Old West. But then, it isn't really what you'd call a traditional western. There's a sub-genre generally known as "Weird West", where fantasy or sci-fi tropes are spot-welded onto a backdrop lifted wholesale from the traditional Hollywood version of the 19th century American myth and I guess that's where Dancing Bones fits.

It has some pure fantasy elements, with one character styling herself a "mage" and another talking about grimoires, but it also leans towards alt-history with mention of "the Inquisition", a body that seems to have a more than nominal connection with the infamous historical institution. In the demo, or at least in the section of the demo I was able to play, most of this stays in the background, although I did get the sense of some kind of oppressive Roman Catholic hierarchy lurking in the background, possibly in full control of the Americas, North and South.

I don't recall any actual magic spells or mythical beasts, just some talking cows. Although I think the only talking they did was mostly in the main character's mind. He'd clearly been spending far too long hanging out with them, without benefit of human company.

In fact, what I spent most of  my half-hour in the demo doing was his chores, all of which involve cows. The character you get to play is employed as some kind of stable-hand or cowman and the demo opens with you picking up bales of hay to feed the animals and dusting the cowshed for cobwebs.

Which is fine as far as it goes. I appreciate the need both to introduce players to the controls and to set the scene but I would question whether it's the best use of an opportunity to show your game to potential players (And buyers.) at an event like Next Fest. If the bulk of the game is actually all about supernatural entities, magic spells and adventure, perhaps it might be better to showcase a segment from later in the game, when at least some of that stuff is actually happening.

As far as those controls go, they're fine. I did have to go into the settings to reduce the camera swing a bit but other than that everything felt comfortable. 

 

Visually, the game is delightful, as I'm sure the screenshots show. The whole thing has either a sun-bleached desert vibe or a sepia-toned old photograph feel, both of which feel wholly appropriate and look great. The character models are quirky and characterful and the backgrounds are just as detailed as they need to be and no more. I particularly liked the journals, books and maps, all of which are charmingly rendered. 

The writing is solid. I did get the occasional feeling it might have been translated but no amount of research (About five minutes on Google...) has been able to reveal the identity or origin of developers "Lotter". The plot, which barely gets going in the part of the demo I saw, involves a sick sister who may very well be cursed, and a mysterious Mage, who turns up unexpectedly and invites herself into the family home.

 

At the point I had to log out I'd reluctantly teamed up with the Mage to travel to see some shaman who might have information on my sister's condition. Since the Mage was wanted by the Inquisition, I imagine shenanigans were about to ensue but first there was also the option of going round the surprisingly sizeable town, picking up jobs from the locals before we began, so there might be at least some element of open-world gameplay too.

Really, there could be anything. There has to be much more to the game than I was able to explore in my short time with the demo, as this developer blog about recent additions suggests. There's no release date yet and it very much looks like a game still in full development. I enjoyed what I saw but I didn't get far enough even to be sure where it was all going. 

I've wishlisted it, as much to see how it develops as anything.

 

The final demo on the shortlist was Death On The Nile and I found it highly confusing. For a start, I thought I knew the plot, having both read the original novel when I was a teenager and listened to at least one radio adaptation much more recently than that, albeit still a few years back. What I played didn't tally with my expectations or memories at all.

When I've read or listened to it before, the location was a cruise ship in Egypt and the time was the 1930s, so I certainly wasn't expecting the game to open in a discotheque with a discourse on the mirror-ball, which the game quite accurately describes as having been invented in the early 20th century and having had a good run through the 1920s, before falling out of fashion until a revival in the glory days of disco, fifty years later, when it became known, for obvious reasons, as the disco-ball.

This, I can only assume, is offered as some sort of justification for re-imagining the story in the 1970s. The demo itself takes place entirely in a London nightclub, something that once again completely threw me. Neither the Nile nor indeed death itself make any kind of appearance at all.

 

Had I seen Kenneth Branagh's 2022 movie of the same name, I might have worked out what was going on. According to Wikipedia, that film opens with a scene in a London club, in which some of the same characters I met in the game do some of the same things. That's in 1937, though, and it's a jazz club. Disco does not feature. (And to be strictly accurate, Wikipedia tells me the very first scene in the movie takes place during the First World War but I don't feel any need to be pedantic about it...)

What with all of that, I was on the back foot from the start. I also had to go into settings yet again to stop the camera yawing and pitching as though we were on a ship at sea. Why the defaults are set so high (Or maybe low.) in these things beats me but it happens a lot.

Visually, the game is a bit of a mixture. The backgrounds and environments are quite convincing and the characters look very era-appropriate but the animations are so poor as to be distracting. Everyone lurches about like zombies, arms flailing and bodies twitching. It's even worse when they're not supposed to be dancing.

 

The perpetual bad disco soundtrack is disorienting, too. I like disco but not like this. I had to turn it down after about ten minutes, something I rarely do in games. If you're going to set a scene in a disco, you might at least get the music right.

The game is more of a mystery-puzzle-solver than a straight point-and-click adventure although it's really both. The mystery part is pretty well done or at least it's quite patient with players like me, who can't be bothered to do the actual detective work. So long as you talk to everyone until the little check-mark appears by their name to let you know they don't have anything more to tell you, you can button-mash the actual case-board until things match up. 

I was on Story difficulty, the default, so maybe there are more challenging ways to play but I found it quite time-consuming enough as it was. I didn't feel like I wasted much time but it took me fifty minutes to solve the mystery of the disappearing emerald engagement ring. Or, more realistically, it took me about half that long to figure out what had happened and the rest to get all the game's ducks lined up so it would agree with me.

And I quite enjoyed it. The dialog and the plot aren't great but they aren't bad. The characters feel very hollow but having read a lot of Christie in my youth I wouldn't expect a huge amount of depth. She's a much better writer than she's often judged but finely-drawn characters were never really her thing.

There were a couple of attempts to add something for the player to do besides interview suspects. There's a whole  mechanic where you add the names, activities and secrets of various characters to your little black book, although at no point did any of it seem to have any effect on anything. Maybe it does later.

There were also a couple of times when I had to eavesdrop on people, which meant shuffling backwards and forwards until two images of the sonic pattern of their conversation lined up. It made Poirot look as if he was having a seizure and seemed like a very bad way to go about things if he was trying to avoid drawing attention to himself but I guess it was the 1970s. They probably just assumed he was on drugs.

The game's take on Hercule Poirot was what really took some getting used to for me. I'm much more familiar with the David Suchet version, a small, dapper man in a smart suit and tie. I had heard that Branagh's interpretation was somewhat... different and that's clearly the inspiration here. This Poirot was certainly dressed for the occasion in his Saturday Night Fever white suit. I'm surprised he wasn't doing the Hustle.

Technically, the demo performed very well. There were no bugs or glitches and the fairly complicated sequences of events held together pretty solidly. That bodes well for the finished game, which I think could be quite entertaining, if you like that sort of thing. 

Personally, I found the setting too claustrophobic and the characters too annoying to want to spend a lot more time with any of them, so I didn't wishlist it. I'd certainly take it if it ever crops up as a giveaway on Prime Gaming, though. It's exactly the sort of game that might.

And that's Next Fest done for another three months. Let's all gather back here in October and do it over again.

Anyone Available To Get Some Kid's Cat Out Of A Tree?

At the risk of initiating a vortex of anticlimactic disappointment, I'm going to begin with the best and work back. Seems like a bad idea until you consider the very real possibility that events, circumstances or just good old ennui could see leaving the best 'til last turn into leaving the best 'til never. 

Dispatch was, by a number of country miles, the best of the six demos I downloaded and played for this June's Next Fest but it would have been one of the best in any batch. As a demo it could hardly have done a better job of giving a glimpse the game good enough to make me think it was something I needed to see in full. 

Structurally, the demo seems to be an early, although possibly not the opening, sequence taken from the finished game, the kind of slice a lot of developers lift out to put in the shop window, with varying degrees of success. It works exceptionally well here for the simple reason that it's a very solid and entertaining introduction that slips its tutorial functions in almost unnoticed. Demos that are basically just the tutorial rarely convince.

The whole thing only takes about twenty minutes but it packs an enormous amount in without ever feeling overwhelming. The first half is a visual novel with the looks of a quality animated movie or TV show and the script and voice acting to match. The characters are immediately relatable and recognizable, the dialog is witty, the jokes land and the whole thing just rips along.

There's a fair amount of player-interaction in the form of dialog choices, all of which come with a timer. You have to pick one of three responses and, depending on your reading speed, you only have just about enough time to read them all and consider the implications for a moment before you need to pick one. This sounds as if it might be stressful but I didn't find it so in the least. I generally dislike timers but in this case it added a sense of welcome urgency to what can sometimes feel like a fairly rote and purposeless process.

It did raise two issues, however, both of which occurred to me almost as soon as the mechanic appeared: do the choices affect later gameplay and what happens if you don't pick one in time? 

As to the first, according to the description on the Steam Store page "In Dispatch, every decision you make influences the unfolding narrative. From banter in the breakroom to life-or-death situations in the field, your choices affect your relationships with the heroes, their allegiances, and the path your own story takes." That's quite fluffy, I'd say. You could easily have all of that inside a purely linear narrative. There's certainly no way to know for sure from the demo how much, if at all, any of your "choices matter", to use the infuriating jargon of the genre.

The second, though, what happens if you dither so long you time out on the response, I really should have tested it while I was playing. It's a big mark in the demo's favor that it never even occurred to me to do it until after I'd finished. I was much too invested in the story to start messing around with the controls for science.

Luckily, the demo still works even though Next Fest has ended, so I just re-ran the first few minutes to try it out. All that happens is the choice defaults to whatever's first in the list. You could just sit back and watch it all play out in front of you like a movie if you wanted.

At least, you could until you got to the second half, which is when the game comes in. Unlike a lot of visual novels or walking simulators, there really is a game here, one that requires you pay attention and click buttons at the right time.

The set-up for Dispatch is that you play an ex-superhero, one who used to have a mechanized suit that gave him powers but doesn't any more, although how he came to lose it is not disclosed in the demo. You're now reduced to taking a job at what is effectively a superhero call center. Your new job (The demo shows you arriving on your first day.) is to sit in an open-plan office in front of a screen and field calls from the public asking for super-heroic assistance. 

The jobs vary wildly, from PAs for businesses to pet rescue to armed robbery. You assign available heroes from your roster and send them to do the job. All your team have different powers, skill sets, aptitudes and red flags so fitting the right hero to the right job is crucial. So is managing them as they do it. 

Sometimes you can leave them to get on with things on their own but on some jobs you need to be available to take their calls and provide specific advice in real time on tactics such as whether they should go for a full frontal assault or sneak round the back. When they've succeeded (Or in my experience made a complete hash of things.) its down to you to review their performance.

And that's it, in the demo anyway. It's a lot harder than it sounds because the calls just keep on coming and pretty quickly it all starts to fall apart. Every job has criteria that ought to be met but good luck with that! It goes from a thoughtful selection process to a juggling act to a series of compromises and finally just comes down to sending whoever the hell is available.

Or it did for me. I imagine the idea of the full game is that you get better at doing your job as you gain experience but by the end I was just glad to be able to send anyone to stop the bar fights or get the little girl's cat down from a tree.  

It was almost always obvious which hero would be best-suited to a job but I'd usually find I'd already sent them out on the previous call and they were still on it. Or they'd messed up and were recovering, because they may be superheroes but they still need time to decompress after every mission. And then sometimes they'd just go off somewhere without telling me where or why...

It's the kind of gameplay I generally dislike but I thoroughly enjoyed it here, for a couple of reasons. Firstly it was funny. The heroes are, frankly, not the cream. They all have issues. Some of them have more than others but there's not one that you'd really trust to go where they're told and do what they're asked without close supervision. They all chatter on comms all the time and none of them is at all impressed with you, your history or your performance.

The humor made it feel like fun but the main reason I didn't find it stressful in the way I would have expected was I couldn't see how my performance mattered. There didn't seem to be any penalty for screwing up that I could see so after a while I just leaned into it and stopped worrying that I was sending the ex-thief who can turn herself invisible to go deal with the robbery at the jewellery store. I can only assume that how well you perform in your role as a dispatcher does matter in the full game but it doesn't seem to mean much in the demo.

The doing-your-job segment lasts most of the second half. Then there's a brief return to the visual novel before a final montage sequence kicks in as a kind of coda. It's full of what I assume must be scenes from the full game and it makes it plain there's some sort of over-arching plot and narrative and that the visual novel aspect isn't merely a framing device for a superhero-skinned office sim. 

And the clips in the montage are really good. They're like scenes from a movie and it's a movie I'd like to see. I went straight to Steam after the demo ended and wishlisted Dispatch immediately.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that the demo is professional and the game looks to be the same. The people behind it include writers and directors of Tales from the Borderlands and The Wolf Among Us among others. They know how to do this sort of thing. 

If the writing is good, the graphics are easily its equal. The character design is excellent and the aesthetic is exactly right, all clean lines and flat surfaces like a good superhero show ought to have. The UI is uncluttered and intuitive and there's a wealth of lore and background material, all presented in a very approachable and attractive style.

Altogether a first-class demo for what looks like it could be a first-class game. Especially if you're a superhero fan. 

Or a fan of low-status, poorly-paid office work, I guess. I bet someone is. 

The Dirty Half-Dozen

For the first time since I started picking, playing and reviewing Next Fest demos, I'm in the happy position of being able to rank them as well. I've now played - or at least tried to play - the full half-dozen and this is how they pan out:

1. Dispatch - 26m

2. Dancing Bones - 35m

3. Death On The Nile - 51m

4. Solo Leveling - 26m

5. Elevator Music - 16m

6. Board Game Society - 29m

Let me unpick that list a little. For a start, the time I spent playing each demo doesn't necessarily reflect how much I enjoyed it. Some of them were linear and that's just how long it took. Others were seemingly open-ended and the time noted is how long it took me either to decide I'd seen enough or to feel I'd had enough. 

There was also one I would willingly have played for longer, if I could have gone back after a break and started from where I'd left off. Unfortunately, my progress wasn't being saved, so to carry on I'd have had to start again from the beginning. I really hate when demos do that without warning you what's going to happen before you log out.

Undisputed #1 and fully deserving a post of its own, which it will get, or at least that's the plan at the moment, is Dispatch, the self-described "superhero workplace comedy". Just to spoil my own reveal, I really liked it a lot. 

Possibly by co-incidence, possibly not, it didn't just feel like the most interesting demo I played this time but also the most professional, It was slick as heck. I would happily have gone on playing it for a lot longer but even counting the montage sequence promoting the full game at the end, twenty-six minutes was all I could squeeze out of it. Obviously, this one went straight onto the wishlist and I'm fairly sure I'll end up buying and playing it, too, although probably not the moment it comes out.

At #2 and a fair way behind comes Dancing Bones, the weird western. This was the one that I stopped halfway through and then couldn't pick back up from where I left it. Based on where it felt like it was going at the time, I'd guess there's at least an hour's gameplay in the demo, maybe more. That one I'll also try and review separately. I took lots of screenshots and I'd hate to waste them. I'm going to wishlist this one but I suspect I won't get around to buying it.

At #3 and about as far behind Dancing Bones as Dancing Bones is behind Dispatch, we have Death On The Nile. I might just about get a full post out of that one, too. Depends how short I am of ideas this week. Maybe half a post. I'm not sure it merits a whole one. 

As you can see, I spent the longest playing it of all the demos and that's entirely because it took me that long to finish. I found it about equal parts entertaining and annoying. I didn't wishlist it, mainly because I can't imagine actually wanting to play thirty hours or more of it or however long it's likely to take. As a standalone short story though, I'd tentatively recommend it. 

Now for the three I am not planning on giving posts of their own. I guess I'll have to go into a bit more detail. The top three ranked themselves but I feel the placings in the lower half of the chart are much more arbitrary.

#4, Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive, is perfectly fine for what it is or at least what I take it to be from the demo. It seems to be a pared-down MMORPG with a very heavy focus on "dungeons", all wrapped up in an extremely meta shell.  

There's a perfunctory introduction, which I'm pretty sure takes for granted that anyone playing will already be familiar with the source material. It covers the absolute basics, which appear to be that you died in real life and got offered the chance to come back as a video-game character. How and why isn't explained. It's just a framing device to get you into an endless sequence of fights, as far as I can see.

For the demo, the text is available in English (Decently translated.) but the voice acting isn't. It's in a choice of two languages, neither of which I could identify with any confidence, although one sounded like Japanese to me. I muted the voice-over after a couple of minutes anyway.

It didn't really matter because there was very little dialog or story in the near-half-hour I gave it. It was just a string of instances one after another in which the goal was just to get from the entrance to the exit so you could do it again only harder. Every room was a cavern with nothing much to look at and all the mobs in each "room" were the same - ants in the first, scorpions in the second, werewolves in the last one I did before I stopped.

Most of the fights started with a huge bunch of mobs that did almost no damage, followed by a boss that did more but mostly still not anything to worry about. Even with no real time to study my abilities or learn the controls, none of the fights was hard. One boss did have me drinking two health potions but I didn't die to any of them. 

Combat itself felt quite good. I found the controls reasonably intuitive, with the key binds feeling more than usually comfortable  - all letter keys for the main attacks and specials. The number keys supposedly summon... something. Or maybe someone. Nothing seemed to happen when I pressed them. 

I was doing a bit more than pure button mashing but not much and it was non-stop frenzy but quite manageable. Whether it's fun or not probably depends on your mental age. If it's somewhere between ten and fifteen you'll probably have a great time. Twenty-five minutes of it was more than enough for me, though,and since it showed no signs of stopping or changing I called it a day before I got to the end. Whether the demo ever opens out into any kind of open world or develops any kind of plot I can't say but clearly the aim is to showcase the combat, which it does pretty well. I didn't wishlist it but it ends up as a free to play title I might give it another look.

At #5 comes Elevator Music. I strongly suspect this will turn out to be a good game. It's visually very well-designed, the writing is solid and the set-up is promising. I'd have liked to have been able to play the demo all the way through. Unfortunately, I just could not figure out how the controls worked.

There's a short introduction, to which I clearly did not pay enough attention, and then you're left to get on with things. The idea is that you operate the lift in a skyscraper with more than thirty floors. That's your character's new job and it's their first day. 

People get in and tell you what floor they want and you take them there. You're advised to plan your movements for efficiency and you get tipped accordingly, although what you need the money for I have no idea. Those are the basic mechanics but there's a plot, too. There's a peace conference being held in the building and all your passengers are delegates or officials or hotel workers. As they talk to each other and to you, I think you're supposed to be able to pick up what's going on and maybe eventually influence the outcome.

Which all sounds very interesting - if you can get the lift to work. I could not. I could get it to go up or down but not to stop where I wanted it.  Not reliably, anyway. I had a lot of trouble trying to figure out who wanted to go where so the idea of planning the trips went straight out the window. Or maybe down the lift-shaft.

I was already starting to find it all quite frustrating even before I managed to get the lift stuck completely. I couldn't get it to go up or down no matter what I did. If I'd been enjoying myself more I might have tried harder to figure out what I was doing wrong but instead I took it as a welcome opportunity to give up altogether.

I suspect that even if the game is much better documented when it goes live and has a much clearer tutorial and more intuitive controls, I'd find the underlying mechanics too restrictive to have a good time playing it. Let's be honest - not many people dream of becoming an elevator operator and there are better ways to spend your time than pretending to be one, no matter how important the people getting in and out of your car might be. 

 

And finally at #6, the game that turned out least like I expected, Board Game Society. When I chose this, I thought I was getting some kind of visual novel or point&click adventure, in which a bunch of Breakfast Club-inspired high-school stereotypes somehow end up playing board games and adventures ensue. God knows how that would work. 

The only part I got right was the high-school stereotype bit and as far as I could tell those have literally as much impact on the game the dog or the boot do in Monopoly. You just pick the one you like and... er, that's all. 

There's a very brief, wordless introduction that appears to suggest some kind of Jumanji situation in play, where a bunch of kids get sucked inside an actual board game. You get to pick one of the stereotypes (Which are quite nicely represented.) and then it's all about moving around a board, killing monsters and finding loot.

The game is intended to be multiplayer and you get a couple of warnings that although it can be played solo it won't be nearly as much fun. I can vouch for that. Playing it alone isn't a lot of fun although I wouldn't say it was no fun at all. 

I could have played with others. There's a Party With Randoms option (I think it does actually use the word "Randoms".) but I thought I'd at least get the feel for it on my own before I subjected myself to that. Then, by the time I'd finished I couldn't see how it would be all that much more entertaining with strangers, so I didn't bother.

What happens is that you click directional arrows to move around the board and as you land on various spaces, things pop up. Mostly monsters that want to kill you but sometimes crystals or chests or keys to open the chests. Monsters also sometimes drop keys but mostly they drop consumables like molotov cocktails or weapon upgrades like baseball bats or chainsaws.

When you pop a monster, there's a fight. You each roll a six-sided die, your various bonuses are added and the higher score wins. I lost only the first fight, when I had no idea what was going on. After that I won every time and it wasn't even close. By the time I had the chainsaw, nothing could touch me.

And I enjoyed it. It's mindless fun but mindless fun is still fun. The UI and character graphics are nice but the game-board itself feels very lo-res, which did put me off a bit, but I can't help feeling that if the whole was slicked up it might be quite addictive. You can see by the numbers that I went on playing for a lot longer than I needed just to review it, so I must have been enjoying myself. 

The main problem I had with it, other than the ugly look of the thing, was that I couldn't quite see the point. Solo there's literally no reason to play at all, other than the in-the-moment fun of the fights and  to get through each level to see the next. The only score or win condition relates to playing against others. You play to get crystals and that's it. The player with the most wins.  

If there's only one of you that's not really much of a motivation but I can't see it being much fun with "randoms" either. Unless you're pathologically competitive, you'd need a bit more of an incentive than that, I'd have thought. It might work quite well between siblings or friendly rivals, though, where bragging rights and crowing come into play. 

I didn't wishlist this but I didn't dislike it either. Could be fun for the right person int the right circumstances. I'd likely play a prettier version with a few good voice actors yelling out amusing one-liners here and there and some kind of win condition for solo play. 

And that's it for Next Fest until next time. Except for the three full reviews I still have to write. Look forward to those later in the week, then, I guess... 

I'll Take Six To Go - Better Make Them Small Ones.

Well, that sure snuck up on me... is something you'll only ever hear me say when I've been playing a game set in the Old West. Which is what I've been doing for the last half hour. 

To be strictly accurate, it was the demo of a game. And it's more like the Alt-West than the Old West because there's magic but we'll get to that. First, back to what it was that snuck up on me.

The Summer Next Fest on Steam, that's what. I am so out of the loop with everything right now, all because of this damn obsession with making music with AI. I can barely drag myself away to go to work or write this blog so there's not much chance I'm going to stay on top of anything else.

I don't suppose I'd know Next Fest was on even now, if I hadn't spotted something about it on MassivelyOP yesterday. Not that I looked at whatever they were on about. I just saw the headline in my feeds and went straight to Steam to see how much I'd missed. 

Four days! I'd missed four days, nearly. And it only lasts a week! And I'm working all weekend, so that left me just yesterday evening, today and Monday to pick a bunch of demos and play them, all so I can write about them here. 

I did the first part, the choosing, last night. It was surprisingly easy, which makes a change. From my perspective, Next Fest seems to swing wildly from being stuffed full of games that look like they might be interesting to having hardly any at all and this one's a glut.

It took me less than fifteen minutes to settle on half a dozen demos that looked like they might make a reasonable selection both for my own interests and to write about. I could have taken twice or even three times that many, if only I'd thought there was any chance of playing them. There have been Next Fests where it's taken me a couple of hours to find even half a dozen I could contemplate spending time with.

For these posts, usually I take on about half a dozen, play the demos all the way through if I can and then write the kind of ridiculously long, over-detailed reviews that anyone in their right mind would save for release. Then I wishlist the ones I like and never think of them again, Or if I think of them, I never buy them. Or if I buy them, I never play them.

Seriously, I should go back through all the Next Fest posts I've written one day and write a follow-up about which games ever came out, which I bought and which I played. It would be like a pyramid, with a huge base of demos I reviewed at the base, going all the way up to a point for the handful I ever played in full. If indeed there have ever been any. Can you have a pyramid with just a base?

With barely any time to play the demos, I decided I wouldn't insist on playing any of them all the way through. Hardly anyone who posts about demos ever does that because most people actually treat demos as a vehicle for deciding if they'd be interested in the finished games, not as games in their own right. 

Not insisting on finishing the things turned out to be a very sound idea, when I actually tried playing some of them. I've played three so far, which means, since I only picked six, I'm already half-way through! Almost back on track...

I'll save the reviews for another post because the blog doesn't have a timer running the way Next Fest does. Makes more sense for me to get through all six before writing about them for a change. And I can already say that they're not all going to need a post to themselves. When I've finished, I'll be better placed to pace myself, too. Some of the demos might only need a paragraph or two while others might require the full treatment.

For today's post I'm just going to list the six and give the set-ups. There is a seventh, BitCraft, but that one came with a head start and I've already played and posted about it. Still counts though!

In the order I picked them, here are the six complete with their Steam Store Page descriptions and a screenshot, which is just about all I had to go on when I chose them:

 

Dispatch : "Dispatch is a superhero workplace comedy where choices matter. Manage a dysfunctional team of misfit heroes and strategize who to send to emergencies around the city, all while balancing office politics, personal relationships, and your own quest to become a hero." 

The first demo I picked and probably the one I'm most looking forward to playing. There are a lot of familiar buzzwords in there and it could turn out to be quite generic but I'm hopeful. I do love a good superhero comedy.

 

Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive - "Solo Leveling, the webtoon with 14.3 billion views worldwide, is now an action RPG game! Help our hero grow from his humble E-Rank beginnings." 

I mostly picked this because I've put the manga on the shelf at work countless times and I've often wondered what it was about. I had no idea it was a webtoon.

 

Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile - "Death on the Nile is an adventure-detective game, offering a fresh twist on Agatha Christie’s famous story. Set in the lively 1970s, play as Hercule Poirot and detective Jane Royce as they solve two connected mysteries. Dive into a journey filled with intrigue, deception, and unexpected revelations."

It's really rare to see a video game adaptation of a famous novel these days, let alone one I've actually read, albeit more than fifty years ago. Very curious to see what they've done with it. I can't say the screenshot above reminds me of anything I remember from the story, which was set in the 1930s as I recall. I think they may have made some minor adjustments...

 

Elevator Music - "You're the newly-hired elevator operator at the Matterhorn Hotel in Dernich. You make it go up, go down, go fast, and go slow. And yet by the end of the week, you'll have been the deciding factor in either devastating continental war, or an uneasy peace."

This one has a great title and a great promo poster. I had very good feelings about it. And I've already played it, so were those good feelings justified? You'll have to wait for the full review but - SPOILER ALERT - I lasted seven minutes.

 

Board Game Society - "Board Game Society is a turn-based RPG soaked in 80s VHS horror vibes. Play as a misfit crew of teen archetypes — the goth, the jock, the nerd, and more — as you explore the cursed forest of Timber Falls. Roll the dice to fight monsters, collect loot, and race to defeat the Boss."

I picked this because I thought it was going to be like The Breakfast Club. Once again, I've already played it and - SPOILER ALERT - it is not.

 

Dancing Bones - "Wild West, ancient magic, non-linear plot, puzzles and colorful characters are all waiting for you in “The Dancing Bones”! Deep drama and humor intertwine in a unique world where every choice you make changes the story. Are you ready to uncover secrets, break curses, and change your destiny?"

Last but definitely not least (Played it, liked it, more later.) comes this one set, as I said at the top of the post, in a version of the classic American West that also includes magic and, apparently, the Spanish Inquisition. I've put in half an hour so far and I'm more than happy to carry on until the demo ends.

That's the lot and given the time constraints, I should probably stop writing about them and get back to playing.

It's Punk, Jim...

And so we come to the final demo from the recent Next Fest. I won't say I've saved the best for last but it is the one I spent the longest time playing. A shade under two hours and it could easily have been longer.

The game in question is 

Solarpunk

and the first thing I have to say about it is... what the heck is it with the "punk" thing?  I just typed "punk" into the search field on the Steam store and here's what came up, just on the first page:

• FragPunk
• Evilpunk
• Mech Punk
• Noir Punk
• WizardPunk
• TeamPunk
• Ocean Punk
• CatPunk
• WastePunk
• WastelandPunk
• CraftPunk 

Sometimes it's all one word, sometimes there's mid-word capitalization, sometimes it's two words - but what does it mean? I understand suffixes in general. I know where "gate" comes from, when you're trying to suggest some kind of scandal, and "core" is self-explanatory if you're trying to emphasize  focus but "punk"? What's "punk" about most of these games, in any sense of the word? 

That's not a rhetorical question. There is an answer. I looked it up. The problem is, the answer makes no sense. 

Here's what Google says the "punk" suffix means:

"a combining form extracted from cyberpunk used to denote a rebellious, alternative genre or aesthetic in speculative fiction, art, fashion, etc., and added to a word that names its distinctive theme, often a form of technology: steampunk solarpunk hopepunk."

That definition even uses the name of this game - Solarpunk - as an example. Only I just spent two hours playing the demo and there is absolutely nothing about it that could rationally be described as "rebellious" or "alternative". If I had to stick a label on it, that label would be "cosy", which is about as far from "punk" as you can get.

I won't derail my own post any further, other than to say there's a long and intersting discussion on the topic on this Reddit thread if you want to dig into it further. I was already toying with the idea of  posting something about this before I ever heard of Solarpunk because it's been getting on my nerves for a while now but I think this little rantette may have gotten it out of my system, at least for the moment, so you've been spared the full two thousand word essay on the subject.

On to the game. If it isn't rebellious or alternative, just exactly what is it?

It's a twee survival game with cute airships, that's what. Set among an archipelago of islands floating in the sky, of course. What else would it be? If there's anything less rebellious or alternative in gaming in 2025 it would be hard to think of it. I guess it could be a PvPvE extraction shooter...

Is it a good survival game? Hard to tell from the demo, really. I mean, let's not kid ourselves here. They're all the same at the beginning, aren't they? Pick up some sticks, pick up some stones, make yourself an axe and a pick, chop down some trees, break some rocks, make a workbench, build a shack, realize you're starving, pick some berries, scoop some water...

All of that. As these things go, I thought it asked a little bit more of me than some, although the notes on Steam say certain mechanics have been "adjusted" for the demo, so presumably the game proper asks even more. 

For example, the night is quite long and I couldn't do a lot while it was dark. That was offputting, until I managed to make a shelter, put a bed in it and sleep through the hours of darkness. Hunger and thirst seemed quite insistent, too. I didn't quite die of either but the edges of the screen went red a couple of times. There was no shortage of water on my island but berries were hard to come by until I tilled the land and planted some. Ditto cotton, which I needed for some of the key tasks. It's not Valheim but it's not as easy as the child-friendly graphics suggest it might be, either.

The demo is the tutorial, give or take, and it's quite an extensive one, although the game seemed to think the instruction phase had finished well before I did. I think I got a message at one point saying the tutorial was over and then it just seemed to carry on. Or maybe I imagined it.

There didn't seem to be much of a storyline - in fact, at this remove, a few days later, I can't recall if there was any kind of narrative at all. I don't think there wast but I guess there could have been... but it would have had to have been somthing so unremarkable I've already forgotten everything about it.

There is a structure to gameplay beyond simply surviving, all the same. The demo offers a number of suggestions as to what you could do, the most compelling of which is obviously to build your own airship so you can get off the damn island and go look for somewhere more interesting. You can also build ladders of seemingly infinite length that require no support, so maybe you could skip the airship and just make a bridge.

I didn't think of that at the time so I made an airship. It took me maybe an hour and a half to get airborn. For the rest of the time I was failing to fly it. 

This is not one of thiose games where you just get in your ballon and steer it like World of Warcraft before Dragonriding. It requires actual flying skills, something I do not have and which it's clearly going to take longer than the natural length of the demo to acquire.

I did at least manage to lurch and yaw my way across the sky far enough to establish that, in the demo, there's not really anywhere much you can go, anyway. You can see other islands in the distance but if you try to get closer a whole mesh of electric-blue lines criss-crosses the sky and there's a message telling you onward travel isn't available in the demo.

The only place you can go is to another, larger airship. It's easily visible from your island and I'd wondered what it was from the moment I noticed it. It turnes out to be a home and garden hanging from two large gasbags. I did eventually manage to get to it but I wasn't able to dock, due to my own incompetence with the controls, so I had to jump out of my ship and hope I didn't miss.

Luckily I landed safely in the back yard. Less luckily, when I'd finished looking around, I couldn't find any way to get back to my ship. I had to jump over the side and kill myself so I could re-appear at home in bed, which I'd earlier set as my respawn point.

Inbetween the two leaps into the unknown, I fully explored the mystery airship, something that took me about thirty seconds. It's a shop. Unfortunately, it was closed. I peered through the window but no-one was home. Something else not available in the demo, obviously.

And that's a bout it, I think. There's not an awful lot more to say. Solarpunk: it's a survival game. That just about covers it.

Actually, I think that should be a survival sandbox. Reading the full description on Steam there's no suggestion of any gameplay other than exploring, building, crafting and farming. The farming and automation options look quite extensive but there's no hint of a story, not even the flimsy pretence for one most similar games throw in as a sop to convention. Maybe that's what's supposed to be rebellious about this one.

Mechanically, there's certainly nothing to frighten the horses. It works like every other survival game. I can't recall any surprises or even moments of puzzlement, where I couldn't figure out what to do. It's textbook. I also came across no bugs or glitches and everything worked so it seems very competently put-together.

One thing that's missing is personalization. There's no character creation in the demo. My character was completely anonymous and also invisible, since I couldn't find any option other than first-person. There must be one because the game is multiplayer and there are videos on the Store page where you can see other players and what certainly looks like the player-character, too. 

Character models definitely exist but whether there's any sort of character customisation in the full game I can't say for sure. It would be crazy if there wasn't, wouldn't it? 

I can already imagine waht clothes in the game would look like. Aesthetically, Solarpunk is extremely coherent and consistent. Too much so, in my opinion. It looks lovely but it all looks much the same. The color palette is restful on the eye but rarely shifts far from blue-green-yellow. Design-wise, everything looks charming and homespun. It's a toddler's picture-book come to life.

I did only see the tutorial island, of course. It might be that different islands have different aesthetics. That would make a big difference. I've looked at the screenshots on Steam and watched the videos, though, and there isn't much sign of variety there. All the same, it is a beautiful game. It seems a bit unreasonable to complain that the developers have chosen a look and then stuck with it. 

All things considered, Solarpunk seems like it should be very successful. All the necessary parts are there and they're all in the right order. If it doesn't take off, that's most likely because there are more cosy survival games these days than people willing to play them. I think we probably passed peak Survival and peak Cosy a while back.

Nevertheless, I had a good time playing and I might well play again. The demo is open-ended so I could carry on for a while longer but I'd really like to see a few more islands. Always assuming I could figure out how to fly the airship, that is. It's definitely not a given that I could.

Wishlisted and Recommended, if you're not survivaled-out already.

Working For The Man (For A Given Value Of "Man")

Four down, three to go. Time to double up and get this done. Well, almost done.

These are two demos I admired more than enjoyed. One of them I might possibly play, the other I definitely wouldn't but they both seem like well-made, well-designed games. Just not really my sort of thing, either of them, for quite different reasons.

Both games made me uncomfortable, one physically, the other emotionally. That was clearly intentional in one case and entirely accidentally in the other. In one I enjoyed the gameplay but not the story. In the other the story was fine but the mechanics gave me problems. 

In neither case was any of it the fault of the games themselves. They just didn't fit well with my tastes and preferences. I'm certain other people will have a much better time with one or the other although I suspect there won't be too many people who'll thoroughly enjoy both.

Kentum

Kentum is a side-scrolling survival platformer. Well, that's what I'd call it. The developers, Tiön Industries, call it a "2D craftervania adventure". I assume that means something to someone in the audience it's intended for but it's just a noise as far as I'm concerned.

I picked it because it looks good, has an art style I like and because the description mentions "a snarky AI". Being a lifelong fan of the work of Philip K Dick, I do like a snarky AI. 

On the evidence of the demo, I wouldn't say this one is all that snarky. It's more like an overbearing, insensitive boss, which isn't quite as entertaining. Maybe the balance of the relationship between the AI and the player character changes further into the game but for the demo it was strictly "go there, do that" with not many smart comments or comebacks on either side.

The set-up is pretty simple. Familiar, too. Technical fault in the cryosleep system leads to maintenance tech oversleeping by a few thousand years. Mission fails. Spaceship crashes. Happens all the time. 

When the ship eventually runs out of power and crashlands, leaving the sole crew member (That's you.) to knock up a shack to live in and figure out how to live off the land, it means standard survival game rules are in play: hit stuff to break it, pick up the bits, turn them into something useful. Also pick every flower and kill every animal so you have something to eat. It's them or you and you certainly haven't shown any signs of caring about anyone but yourself up to now, have you?

The survival gameplay loop is all but indestructible by now. It's freaky how addictive it still is, every single time. Will it ever get old? No sign of it yet.

If that's all there was to the game, I'd have wishlisted it, even though I'm very far from short of survival sandboxes. Indeed, the final demo I have left to review is another. No, I declined to add it to my list because Kentum is also a platformer. You get nothing without figuring out where and how to jump on every new screen. That's where the game lost me.

I didn't really have any trouble with the jumping. It's pretty easy as these things go, at least it is in the demo. I just didn't find it very entertaining. More irritating, really.

If I'm going to be exploring, looking for things to collect and bring back to base for a crafting session I'd far rather do it in three dimensions, in a landscape that makes at least some attempt to replicate believable geology. The combination of two artificial forms, 2D side-scrolling and platforms, only being able to travel left and right across a screen that looks more like it's showing a schematic than an environment , always having to jump up or down to get anywhere, was never going to instil a sense of immersion in me. More like a sense of "how much longer before I can stop and do something else?"

If it wasn't for that, though, I'd be quite interested to see where the plot goes. Almost the first thing that happens when you begin exploring is that the AI insists you go towards the source of some signal it's receiving. That takes you to a deserted industrial complex, where a device re-programs the AI and gives it new instructions, none of which are to your immediate advantage. 

That and the fact that the company that made the game also seems to have taken over the entire world in the ensuing ten thousand years did intrigue me. It's a heck of a conceit. I wondered if it was just a gag or if they were going somewhere with it.

I didn't wonder enough to want to buy the game and play it to find out, though. It was kinda-sorta fun for three-quarters of an hour but by the time the Demo Over sign came up I'd had enough.

Not Wishlisted. Recommended for people who find both survival games and platforming fun. 

Inhuman Resources

The next game could scarcely be more different, apart from the overbearing boss part. It has one of those, too. I enjoyed it a lot more than Kentum. Until I found I wasn't enjoying it at all, that is.

Developers, Finnegan Motors, and Publisher, Indie Asylum, make a number of bold and sweeping claims for Inhuman Resources. They call it "a literary machination" and describe it as "an expansive choose-your-own adventure novel". It also comes with a content warning for "Strong language (swearing), textual descriptions of violent acts, textual descriptions of gore, light textual allusions to sexual acts". I would say that warning isn't strong enough. Not that I read it until afterwards, by when it was much too late...

I really liked this demo a lot, right up to the point where I found out what it was really about, at which point I kind of wished I'd never picked it in the first place. You'd pretty much have to be a hard-core body-horror fan to enjoy it beyond a certain point and I am very much not that. I'm good with the ethereal, spooky end of the horror spectrum but the bit where they turn someone inside out to let everyone have a good look is where I make my excuses and skedaddle.

It's not only the gore, either. Although I don't believe they use the specific phrasing anywhere in the description, this does seem to be one of those "Choices Matter" games. At least, the choices you make are going to matter in terms of whether you get much sleep at night after you finish playing it. 

I'm not sure choices matter so much in the usual sense of where they take the storyline. As far as the demo was concerned, I thiought it felt fairly linear, despite the description on Steam saying exactly the opposite. 

In fact, as I write this, I'm starting to wonder whether the numerous options I didn't take, mostly because I thought they would run the story into a brick wall if I did, might actually have opened up alternative scenarios that could have been less gruesome. I'd go back and check if the thought of going back to that world didn't creep me out so badly.

All my issues were with the content. I had no problems with the gameplay, the mechanics or the design. The game is good to look at, providing you appreciate the art deco aesthetic and have no qualms about spending hours staring at a series of beautifully designed lobby cards. 

You also very much need to be into reading to enjoy this game. When they call it a "novel" they aren't kidding. There's a lot of text. 

At the start I thought it felt quite over-written, not say over-wrought but after a while either the prose style calmed down a little or I became inured to its excesses and by half-way through I was quite enjoying it. Then the screaming started.

The plot is pretty good. Ne-er-do-well nephew, curerently spongeing of his aunt while living the life of a depressed and desperate failure, gets the chance to interview for a much-needed paying job at the company where said aunt works. Only problem being no-one is saying what the job is or even what the company does. It's Withnail and I without Withnail, basically.

Everything rolls along nicely, giving off some great corporate mystery vibes, until suddenly the story comes out of the tunnel and the true nature of the business and the job become apparent. I won't spoil the reveal but if you'd prefer your psychological horror to come without actual trepanning, I'd suggest you might want to give it a miss. 

I will, even though I do think it looks like it will be a pretty good game.

Not wishlisted. Recommended for true horror fans only.