WILD! Go WILD! Go WILD In The City!

And so we come to the end, which is just as well for my page view stats. Here's my advice for anyone who wants to keep their traffic to a minimum without actually making their blog private: review game demos. Still, for the handful of people with literally nothing better to do than read a verbose description of a small part of a game that isn't available yet and which they almost certainly won't want to play when it is, here we go!

WILD Tactics   33 minutes - Not wishlisted...yet. Oh, wait... now it is!

Of all the demos this time around, Wild Tactics gave me the closest match between expectation and execution. I thought I was going to get an XCom clone with funny animals and that's what I got. I could leave it at that but then I'd have to think of something else to post about today so I'll go into a little more detail.

First off, all the indicators are firmly in the green. Wild Tactics looks great, as you can see from the screenshots. The characters are all very characterful, the backgrounds are as stylized as the flats in a professional production of Guys and Dolls, the dialog is snappy and sharp, the voice acting is energetic and engaging, the UI is clean, the gameplay is crisp and everything works like clockwork. 

If you're looking for a tactical, turn-based strategy game featuring anthropomorphic animals and you've already finished Mutant Year Zero, relax. You've found what you're after. Speaking of which, excuse me while I just go wishlist that one. I said I'd get it if it ever went on sale but then I forgot all about it.

And while I'm at it, I guess I might as well wishlist WILD Tactics, too. Wishlisting isn't a commitment after all. If something strikes you as decent when you play the demo, it's only polite to give it the nod. It's like leaving a tip. 

It's also worth adding games to the list just so I don't forget abnout them altogether, like I did with Mutant Year Zero. I know I won't want to play that or Wild Tactics at the moment, partly because, as I keep saying, summer isn't really my favorite time to play video games but also because I have an innate sense that certain genres are better enjoyed on long, dark evenings. 

For me, Winter games tend to come in three sizes: Long, Medium and Short. Big RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3 take me away from the miserable, cold, wet world outside for weeks or even months on end. Point and click adventures with strong narratives and compelling plots take up all my attention for a week or two. Tactical strategy games work well in short, discrete sessions, where I finish a battle or two each evening, often as a palette-cleanser from the more story-driven games, when you just wish they'd all stop talking and kill something already!

I am quite fussy about tactical titles, though. They all play much the same on the surface but something as simple as one awkward key-binding or a clumsy camera can put me off completely. I also don't much go for being yelled at by the game, which was one of the main reasons I couldn't get on with XCom itself.

And I do prefer some humor with my massacres. All these games, or at least all the ones I've played, involve pro-actively murdering everyone who gets in your way. Generally, the writers try to set things up so it seems like a reasonable response:  the world is under attack by aliens and they don't subscribe to the Geneva Convention or you're a persecuted minority the authorities are trying to exterminate. Still, it can get a bit uncomfortable, the "shoot first, ask questions never" routine.

Wild Tactics is moderately light-hearted, if not actually a comedy. The demo gets the set-up out of the way very quickly, letting you know there's a crisis happening and the rule of law has to be put to one side for the moment just to stop everything descending into anarchy. Yeah, That's what all the fascists say, isn't it?

The nature of the crisis intrigued me a little, not least because it seems to be more than a little reminiscent of the basic premise of Beastars, a show I really ought to finish watching. The gist is, all the animals of Clawville live together in harmony except that carnivores aren't allowed to eat meat. It's illegal. But they wants it! THEY WANTS IT!!

Beastars is about a dozen orders of magnitude more subtle and nuanced about it. In Wild Tactics, it's basically Prohibition only meat not booze and supposedly with a " '50s aesthetic" although it looks pretty goddam '20s to me. And instead of Eliot Ness and the Untouchables you have the WILD squad (Is it an acronym? If it is, I missed the explanation of what it stands for.), which is pretty much DC's Suicide Squad only without the superpowers. 

OK, they're not all sociopathic criminals pulled out of prison and given a chance to be useful for a change. Only some of them. Some of them are brutal ex-cops or cynical ex-spies. The usual suspects in other words. And they all have personality defects and catchphrases and attitude problems and some of them can't stand each other and like that. 

The banter keeps things tripping along so you forget just what you're doing. Not that it hasn't been explained to you. Your handler back at HQ specifically tells you to shoot first and forget the body count. Which is exactly what I did.

Not that I had any option. Do any of these games ever let you take prisoners? Maybe once or twice, if it's for the plot...

In the demo at least, WILD Tactics has just about the shortest tutorial I can remember. You have to move your three-animal squad across a car park to a highlighted area. It takes two or three turns, during which you have to defeat precisely one enemy. He got clubbed to death with a baseball bat in one turn by my tank and that was that.

After that, there's a full mission in which you have to go into a night club, where The Golden Fang Clan is stashing... erm... something bad... maybe meat? I wasn't paying attention. You have to find the storage area, destroy whatever it is they're storing there and get out in one piece. Bonus points if you kill everyone in the club!

It was fun. Also easy, which might be why it was fun. It wasn't a walkover, though. The difficulty felt just right. No-one died but I had to use use several of the various healing options available. My tank, doing his job, took a lot of damage and everyone caught a bullet or got stomped. Most of the baddies were rhinos and they like to charge.

Crucially, I found both movement and combat to be intuitive and straightforward, something that's very much not always the case in games of this kind. Cover was clearly marked and easy to understand, targeting wasn't at all fiddly and everything felt logical. There's clear on-screen instruction when anything new comes up -  missions are a form of ongoing tutorial as they often are in these games, so you're coming across new tactics all the time - but I rarely needed the help. It was usually quite clear what was happening.

After the first mission you get to choose what you do next, as again is typical of the genre. You can also buy consumables or upgrades from the store at HQ and send injured team-mates to the medical center, although all my team were extremely unimpressed with the medical facilities and didn't hesitate to say so. I'm guessing upgrading those might be an option at some point.

About the only thing in WILD Tactics I can't remember having seen in a game like this before is the relationship element between the characters. When you select your team there's a diagram that tells you who's friends with whom and which of them can't stand each other. I did notice a little tension in the chatter between my crew as they fought but it seemed like it was there for color. Maybe it has some gameplay implications further in.

All told, I really liked the WILD Tactics demo. If it hadn't been so freakishly hot, I'd have played for longer than half an a hour. (We're in the middle of a another heatwave, a proper one this time, with all-time heat records set to fall over the next few days and a red warning issued for temperatures likely to pose "a risk to life for even the healthy population".)

I've wishlisted it but there's no release date yet. With luck it'll come out just in time for winter.

Job Vacancies Available - Strictly NO Humans!

And so we come to the end. The end of the half dozen demos I picked for this Summer's Steam Next Fest, that is. Do either of the final couple deserve top billing?

Let's find out.

Monstopia (69 Minutes - Wishlisted But Only After Some Thought)

This one racked up the longest playing time of the six, which has to go in its favor. I didn't finish it, though. I haven't finished any of the demos this time around which is very unusual for me. I think it's just too hot and summery for me to want to spend a long time in front of the screen just now.

Based on the description on its Steam Store page, Monstopia looked like it was going to be a fairly familiar sort of game. I was expecting some kind of crime story, most likely a murder, because it's nearly always a murder, isn't it? Something with clues and suspects and a plot, anyway. 

This is what it says in the developer's description. See what you make of it:

"This is a casual detective game featuring interview simulation and "find the differences" gameplay. You will play as an ambitious young demon, determined to transform the dilapidated park into the most thrilling horror-themed attraction."

"A casual detective game" is what made me jump to the conclusion there'd be something to detect. Like, y'know, a crime, maybe? I assumed the ""find the differences" gameplay" " and the "interview simulation" were just descriptions of how you'd gather evidence and prove your solutions. And I took it the rest was just the set-up. 

Well that was mistake. Monstopia is nothing like any of that at all.

What it actually turns out to be is a management sim. I do not play management sims so I have no comparative experience by which to judge it but I thought it was pretty good. People who play these things regularly may disagree.

Here's how it really works. There's a short scene-setting introduction where a few basics are explained, including the backstory. You're reviving an old theme park, which you  and then a series of applicants for jobs appear in front of you, as a demon yourself, hope to bring back into service as a place where monsters can legally enjoy scaring humans and get paid for it. 

Your job is to interview applicants for various posts in the park and assign the right monster to the right job. Most importantly, you need to weed out any horrible humans trying to pass themselves off as monsters so they can sneak into the park and put a lovely monster out of a job. Humans! Euughh! Ptui!

The game has a fairly unsubtle subtext about outsiders and conformity and acceptance that I initially found uncomfortable in its enthusiastic advocacy for exclusionism. Fortunately, that drifts out of focus quite quickly and after the first few applicants I'd mostly forgotten about it. I was enjoying weeding out those pesky humans every bit as much as a good demon ought.

To begin with, I found doing that a little harder than I might have done had I paid more attention to the pictures. I hadn't realized just how much is explained visually rather than verbally. You get a guidebook telling you the salient differences between the various monster species and I read it pretty thoroughly but I didn't immediately notice there are also some very helpful illustrations. 

I couldn't figure out why I kept making the wrong decisions over some applicants because I thought they either did or didn't have the appropriate "Special Body Patterns". It turned out I was taking things like stripes or spots to be patterns when in fact what I should have been looking for were some very specific, small colored blotches, as shown in the diagrams I'd been ignoring.

Once I'd figured out the specifics of what I was meant to be looking for, I made far fewer mistakes but I still had to pay attention because as the game goes along, the difficulty increases. As word of the park's success spreads, new types of monsters start to apply for jobs. At the beginning there were only three - Demons, Werewolves (aka Furs) and Vampires (aka Bloodnights) - but by the time I finished Undead and Dolls were applying as well.

As well as a wider variety of monsters, more posts open up, too, and it becomes important that you fit the right applicant to the exactly appropriate role. Then human customers start complaining some monsters smell bad so you have to test for personal hygiene before deciding who can work in public areas and who's best kept safely behind the scenes. Similarly, some monsters can't work in certain environments, so you have to check for that, too. 

You also supposedly have to take the applicants' preferrences into consideration, while also making sure the job you're about to offer them doesn't have some proviso such as no Undead to be offered work in food preparation. That didn't seem to work as described, though, because I found if I tried to employ a Monster to do anything other than their preference, they'd have a hissy fit and storm out, telling me I didn't know how to manage a business whereas, if I just plonked them down where they wanted be, regardless of any proscriptions against it, everything was fine. 

I found all of this quite enjoyable. It feeds the innate faculty all humans have for pattern-matching - ironically, considering it's a demon doing choosing. You also get scored after every round based on how well the park is doing financially, how satisfied your employees are and how much the public are enjoying it. I like getting scored for things I've done so that was nice, too.

Periodically the interviewing stops for a little cut scene or a news broadcast about the park and how it's doing, a topic of abiding interest for the local TV station. When this happens, you also get a little mini-game where you have to make a decision on how to deal with some management issue or other that's arisen, which serves to break things up a little.

Mostly, though, it's interview after interview. You'd think that might get repetitive but every applicant is different enough that I never felt bored. The visuals are excellent throughout, stylish and attractive. The differences that dictate who's a real monster and who's a pesky human trying to pass are always clear and easy to spot, or they are once you understand what you're looking for, at least. 

The writing is quite entertaining. Every applicant gets a couple of lines telling, you a little about themselves and what they think they'd be good at doing. Occasionally one will have a lot more to say although I was never sure if that had any gameplay significance or was just added color. 

Monsters are suitably outraged if you mistake them for human but humans accept discovery calmly in a kind of "It's a fair cop, Guv!" fashion. I felt bad for a couple of the humans, who'd clearly put a lot of work into their costumes and seemed like they might be decent employees but there were others who were just taking the piss. I was glad to see the back of them!

Technically the demo played flawlessly for me. No bugs or glitches. As the opening card reveals, before you find the button to select English as your language of choice, the game is translated and there is the occasional spelling or grammatical error but mostly it's a very good translation, idiomatic and with natural flow.

Apparently I was quite close to the end of the demo when I stopped. The developers estimate it should take around 90 minutes (An extremely generous 30% of the full game.) but by the time I'd played for a little over an hour, I'd had enough. I might go back and finish it if the demo stays active after Next Fest ends though. 

I'd have no hesitation in recommending this game to anyone who likes management sims.  Not so much if it's a detective game you're after. If I was in the market for a game of this type, I'd have definitely added it to my Wishlist.  I wasn't, though, so I didn't. 

Except now I've written all of this, I feel like maybe I would like to play it through to the end after all. So onto the Wishlist it goes!

Really, the only negative thing I have to say about Monstopia is that I do think the developers might make it a bit clearer in the description what sort of game it is. Call me difficult if you like but I do like at least a little actual detection in my detective games...

And once again, I've run on long enough I feel I ought to make this a single-demo post. That three-gamer I did at the start is looking like a real outlier now, isn't it? 

The Fifth Bell Tolls But Not For Me

Two more demos down. One still to go. I have to say I've been impressed with my picking skills this time. No complete duffers yet. 

On the other hand, there's only one out of the five I've tired so far that I might buy when it comes out, that being Hawthorn. Not every game can be for everyone, even the good ones.

I was going to write up both demos in the one post but to no-one's surprise, I'm sure, I've ended up saying so much about the first there's no room for the second. It was pretty amazing I managed to cram the first three into one post on Thursday. I'll try and get the final pair into one more post next week.

The Fifth Bell  (38 minutes - Not Wishlisted)

Playing this was an interesting experience but precious little of that interest came from the story or the characters, which is a bit of a problem for a game that so obviously styles itself on the great narrative-led, character-driven point and clicks of the past, particularly a certain very well-remembered series from the 1990s. 

I'll start there. I'm used to adventure games wearing their influences proudly, as badges of respect and honor. There's nothing wrong with that at all. In the case of The Fifth Bell, though, it sometimes felt as if the primary influence might be  The Da Vinci Code, not Broken Sword. 

The demo begins where, I assume, where the full game will too, with the player character talking to himself as he rides his motorcycle down the hill into Strasbourg in a beautifully animated scene that really didn't work at all for me, for a couple of reasons. 

For a start, it's so lovely to look at and such a surprise at the very beginning of the demo that I didn't really take in anything I was being told. Consequently, when I arrived in the town square, I had no idea why my character was there or what he was supposed to do next.

Secondly, although I've never been to Strasbourg, I was under the impression it was a fairly large city. As you can see from the screenshot, the introduction makes it look like a small market town, as you approach it down an empty, country lane. It does look more like a city when you get there but it's still disconcerting.

All of which brings me naturally on to the graphics, which are by far the most striking and appealing thing about the game. That could also be a problem because this is one of nearly twenty per cent of all demos in the current Next Fest that come with an AI warning. In this case, AI was used "for the 2D background art, character sprites, and audio". All particularly problematic uses for many people.

I read an informative and revealing article on AI by Rob Fahey at GamesIndustry today. It makes a number of telling points about the dubious utility of AI, evidence against which is beginning to mount up now many companies, large and small, have had a year or two to try it. We're nearing the moment when the promises made for the technology are either going to be broken or fulfilled and it seems more likely to be the former than the latter. 

Fahey also observes that, even if the utility is there, it will come at a cost that might be more than most businesses will be willing to pay. Not only are the AI companies beginning to ramp up their charges in an attempt to claw back some of their vast investment but opposition from the end users, gamers, to any use of the technology at all seems to be both increasing and hardening. 

Those two factors combine to make the whole affair seem much less attractive than it did a year ago. Then, the worry would have been being left behind in the gold rush; now the safe option looks like sticking with the tried and true.

None of which necessarily impacts a game like The Fifth Bell, which looks to me as though it might be the work of a single developer. For someone making their own game, the attractions of automatically generated art and sound must seem extremely enticing. 

And the results are mildly encouraging, in a way. As I said above, the visuals are the best part of this game. The scenes are pretty to look at; well-composed and coherent. I suspect they're also mostly AI-generated, even in their final form.

The Steam AI proviso says they were "extensively edited, cropped, and manually integrated by hand", which initially makes it sound as though the end result was mostly the work of a human, until you realize what it actually means is that someone took the AI-generated output, tidied it up a bit, trimmed it to size and added it to the game. 

I'm not sure how rigorous the editing can have been, either. I spotted one error that certainly should have been caught in that editing process but wasn't. The game is set in 1994, when the currency in France would have been the Franc. The text of one puzzle correctly asks you to get hold of a one-Franc piece to make a call from a payphone but the menu boards inside and outside the cafes show all the prices in Euros, a currency not in use until almost a decade later. 

In fact, if I was going to be really picky, they also show what look very much like 2026 prices, not even the correct prices for the earliest date the Euro would have been use, namely 2002. It just shows how careful you have to be if you use generative AI and how much clean-up work you could end up doing.

Perhaps the most obvious warning sign, though, is that, as I suggested in a previous post, I could somehow sense the AI in the screenshots on the game's Steam page even before I read the disclaimer. Once I got into the game itself, that sense that something was subtly off intensified.

Would it have put me off playing, had the story grabbed me more firmly than it did? No, I can't say it would. The pictures might feel a bit bland but they're not unattractive. Plenty of hand-drawn games have art that looks a bit wonky to me so it's not an aesthetic deal-breaker. If anything, found the odd, sidling, diagonal movement of the main character, presumably not the result of AI, more disturbing than the slightly flat backgrounds.

  

Leaving the visuals for a moment, what about the sound, for which AI was also at least partly responsible? Here I found the artificiality harder to ignore and less worthy of a pass. 

One of the core requirements of an adventure game of this stripe is convincing, engaging voice work. The Broken Sword titles are the gold standard. I can hear George and Nico's voices in my head even now and Mrs Bhagpuss, who hasn't heard them since the 90s, still occasionally imitates them in conversation for comic effect. The voice acting in that series, and in several other adventure games I've played, often does as much of the heavy lifting as the plot or the puzzles.

In The Fifth Bell, the dialog isn't all that inspiring to begin with but the vocal interpretation sometimes drags it down a little further. It's not bad, as some human voice acting I've heard in games has been. It's mostly just a bit flat and unconvincing.

The thing is... the voice-work here isn't very good AI. There were a handful of minor line misreadings that I would say were typical of AI, which I would have thought, once again, should have been dealt with in the edit. And it wouldn't have been hard. I've heard - and indeed created - more convincing speeches generated by free online resources. 

After I'd finished playing, I copy-pasted a chunk of my own prose into Suno and had it create a spoken-word version, just to see if I was being over-critical. Suno did a better job on the first attempt and a much better job once I'd tweaked it a bit.

That only took me about a quarter of an hour, most of which was spent listening to the output. I don't think it would be hard to produce some convincing voiceover for an adventure game using AI. On the other hand, I'm sure I could do a better job myself, just reading it aloud, and so could most people, I'd have thought. I'm not sure voice acting is a part of the creative process that really needs much automation.

The parts of the game that apparently don't have AI at the back of them are the story, the gameplay and the mechanics. The last of those is easy to dispose of: the mechanics are solid. Nothing much wrong with them at all. Everything works, nothing is more awkward than the average adventure game, which admittedly isn't saying a lot because the entire genre is generically fiddly. I didn't come across any bugs or glitches.

Gameplay is absolutely traditional for the genre. Walk around, inspect things, pick up anything that isn't nailed down, talk to anyone who'll talk to you, do whatever they want you to do, solve problems and remove obstacles by using Item A on Item B... We all know the drill. 

I found all the puzzles reasonably easy to solve without a walkthrough. Most of the solutions were at least semi-rational although I think it's fair to say no-one in any adventure game ever made has ever behaved entirely rationally. The characters were quite engaging for the most part. The builder was amusingly aggressive, the girl and her disturbingly photo-realistic dog were charming, the waitress was suitably harried and irritable...

The plot is mildly involving. During renovations, someone discovered a modern cassette tape, hidden impossibly in a medieval wall in Strasbourg cathedral. On the tape was some kind of dire warning about not allowing a fifth bell to ring. I was never very clear what would happen if it did or why the character I was playing, Evan Marek, an archivist, was involved in trying to find out but I was willing to go along with it.

The biggest problem is the sudden start I alluded to earlier. Most adventure games begin with a fairly lengthy, slow set-up, during which you get to know the characters as they're slowly drawn into some kind of mystery. The Fifth Bell, in contrast, begins with a short voice-over and then there you are in the cathedral square in Strasbourg with not much of a clue why. I didn't find it to be a start that engendered much commitment.

The writing itself is a bit of a mix. As I said, the character dialog can be entertaining but the item and location descriptions are workmanlike at best. In general, it all feels a little perfunctory except when people are talking, at which point it sometimes seems like the writer might be having too much of a good time.

All in all, I didn't think it was a bad demo or that it's likely to be a bad game but even as a fan of the genre, I wasn't motivated to add The Fifth Bell to my wishlist. I already have a few point and click adventures on there and a couple more in my Steam library that I haven't gotten around to playing yet. All would seem to have more going for them than this one.

That said, based on the demo, I'd say it will probably be perfectly fine. If you're an adventure gamer who can't get enough of the genre and you're sanguine about AI usage, I'm sure you could do worse. That's damning it with faint praise but the demo, which I haven't finished and most likely won't, makes it feel like that sort of game. 

Three Down, Three To Go

No point hanging about. I ripped through two of the six, chosen Next Fest demos last night and knocked off a third this morning. My speed run was helped by the fact that my PC crashed after each of them, twice when I was just re-logging . That's an issue with the machine, not the games, but it gives me a great reason to stop where I'd normally have carried on until I'd finished the whole thing.

None of these demos require completion for judgment, anyway. It's very clear with all of them after just a few minutes what the game is trying to be and how successful it is at being it. And since none of the three is trying to do anything new, other than cross-breed a couple of genres that don't usually sit together, they're all a pretty easy read.

On with the micro-reviews.

Over The Hill (23 minutes - Not wishlisted)

I could just refer everyone to Nimgimli's comment on yesterday's post for this one and save myself the trouble. Here, I'll quote him so you don't even need to click through: "It is almost EXACTLY Snowrunner with worse graphics, right down to the controls for the Winch and stuff being exactly the same."

I haven't played the game Over The Hill is trying to emulate so I'll take Nimgimli's word for the similarities. What I can say, with confidence, from personal experience is that, while it looks quite a lot like the game I was comparing it to, Outbound, the way it plays is completely different.

In Outbound, you drive around some lovely scenery in a camper van, doing some extremely simple tasks and occasionally stopping to remove the odd obstacle, like a fallen tree, or to fix something, like a collapsed bridge. It's a relaxing, chill experience - too much so for many, judging from the reviews. In Over The Hill it's all obstacles and no roads. Getting from A to B is the gameplay.

Over The Hill is not, as I thought it would be, a driving game. It's a puzzler. The driving, such as it is, is incidental to the puzzle of getting your vehicle past an endless succession of obstructions - mud, water, rubble, loose sand - just so you can drive for fifty yards before you have to do it again. 

The inducement to keep moving seems to be to reach various marked points on the map and see what's there. It could be something you can add to your vehicle - I found an antenna - or a fast travel point. I imagine it could be all sorts of things but I'll never know because by the time I'd reached the end of the tutorial I'd had more than enough. 

At that point the demo tells you you've acquired the ability to choose where you'd like to start from the Main Menu but when I went back to do that the game crashed and I felt no inclination to try again. I'm still in the market for a relaxing, easy driving game with a lot of pretty scenery but this isn't it.

Spirit Vale (50 Minutes - Not wishlisted)

The one MMORPG on the list this time, Spirit Vale is less than a month away from an Early Access release on Steam. Is it ready? Hard to be sure after less than an hour but, yes, I'd say it probably is.

It's going to be a very familiar experience for anyone who's played any traditional MMORPG before, too. You're not going to need much instruction getting to grips with this one. The art style is about the only mild surprise. 

As I said yesterday, the humanoid characters look disturbingly like babies. Ok, toddlers. If they had the license for the IP, it could be Rugrats: The MMO. 

Character creation is pretty good. There are seven classes, all of which can specialize. It's the usual suspects - Ranger, Warrior, Mage and so on. I picked the Summoner, who can become a Necromancer when they grow up, mostly because they get a cat for a pet. (It turns out they also get a dog and an angel. I'm not complaining)

There are a lot of hairstyles, colors, eyebrow options, eye shapes and so on, laid out in a grid so you can click through them and immediately see what your character would look like. That was fun. 

I can't remember if you get to choose gender or body type. If I did I don't remember it. I suspect the classes might be gender locked. It's a bit of a moot point anyway, given the character models. That was why grandmothers used to knit pink or blue booties, wasn't it? They'd need more colors of wool these days, of course.

Once you're through with character creation it's out into the world. You start in town and you get pretty much no instruction on what to do there. It's OK. You don't need any. It took  me about thirty seconds to figure out where the 1-5 starting zone was and thirty more to go there so I could start killing things. 

And that's where it gets really old school.  Oh boy, have they gone all-in on the dopamine hits! XP flies in, levels rack up, mobs drop clothes and weapons and runes and potions and everything has a ton of stats you can read and compare. If grinding mobs for xp and loot is your thing you'll be in murder hobo heaven!

If there are quests, I didn't get any. I didn't need any. I didn't want any. I got myself a sword and pair of pants, worked out how to sit to heal, spent some points on spells so I could summon all three pets and then I ran around killing anything that moved. 

Combat felt more like an ARPG than an MMORPG. Most of the time I was surrounded by hordes of mobs, me and my dog, killing as fast as we could go. The mobs were supposed to be "Neutral" but sometimes they attacked us anyway, which was fair because most of the time my dog attacked them without either being provoked or told to do it. 

Sometimes one or other of us got overwhelmed and died. If it was my dog, I just resummoned him. If it was me, I respawned in town and ran back. If there was a death penalty, I didn't notice it at my low level so it didn't seem to matter.

I did that for a while until I was too high for the first zone and then I moved to the second. There's a map that makes the place look huge but the zones are tiny. As for levels, they've got them marked as high as 135 on the map, although that would be a weird place to cap. 

I got to Level 10/Job Level 7 before I stopped, by which time I could easily kill Level 16 mobs. Job Level drives your points allocation for new spells and abilities. I spent lots of points on spells, not all of which I figured out how to use. I did work out that you can upgrade your pets. My dog started out as a puppy and ended up looking like a werewolf. I wasn't convinced it was an improvement. 

The whole thing was ridiculously enjoyable. It's like an MMORPG from the early 2000s on fast-forward. It reminded me particularly of one of the earlier imported titles I used to enjoy, Eden Eternal, which I'm amazed to see is available on Steam now. I might have to take a look.

And I might still be playing Spirit Vale now, if I hadn't somehow bugged the game taking a screenshot. I toggled the UI off and nothing I could do would get it to come back on, so I logged out to see if that would fix it, which caused my PC to crash because that's what it does with all games now, until I add the executable to Windows Defender's exclusion list, which I'm too lazy to do for demos.

That broke the spell and I have had the sense and self-discipline not to go back and start again. So far. I have also not wishlisted the game because the last thing I need is to start playing another addictive, old-school MMORPG. If you still want to play like it was 1999, only with prettier pictures, you could do a lot worse.

Hawthorn (44 Minutes - Wishlisted and signed up on website)

If you look this one up, you'll find it widely described as a cross between Stardew Valley and Skyrim. That probably tells most people everything they need to know. Unfortunately, those are two games I've never played so it doesn't do much for me.

The demo is what the developers, NEARstudios, describe as a "Proof of Concept" build. It's what they... but no, why paraphrase? Let them explain:

Considering the provenance, there's a lot here already. I only played for about three-quarters of an hour because I had to stop so we could go pick up Beryl from the dog-groomer but I was clearly nowhere near the end. Had I not needed to do something else, I'd happily have carried on. If this is Proof of Concept, I'd say the concept is very firmly proven.

The gameplay loop as as seen in the demo ought to be easy to describe but now I try to pin it down it feels a bit more slippery than that. It's a segment taken from somewhere in the middle of the game, apparently, and it certainly has that in media res feel to it. 

There's a big feast coming and you, playing an anthropomorphic but quite realistically envisioned woodland animal, seem to be the facilitator. Animals keep coming up to you and making suggestions, which you follow but only to set things up. You decide where things like the feast table and the chairs go, choose the menu and generally make sure all the basics are in place. Then the other animals do all the gathering and the building to pull whole the thing together.

Before any of this starts, there's some chatter about some animal who's about to leave town and all the time you're trying to get the feast organized, animals keep running up to you and offering suggestions or just wanting to "have a word". It's like Animal Crossing Pocket Camp only with somewhat more realistic graphics. 

Frequently, I found myself talking to a new animal before I'd had a chance to do whatever the last one wanted but none of them seemed to remember what they'd asked me for, anyway. They'd often come back before I'd even started with another idea they wanted to try out. 

The Owl wanted to take me fishing, which I'd have liked to try, since he said we'd do it with me riding on his back and him swooping low over the lake so I could grab the fish out of the water. That never happened but I did go to tea at his house. It was only after I'd accepted that it occurred to me an Owl inviting a Mouse for a meal might have unpleasant connotations but I needn't have worried. It's not that  sort of game. 

Oh, yes, I didn't mention I was playing a Mouse, did I? The options in the demo are Mouse, Owl or Otter. Each has a unique specialty - mice are tool-users, otters can swim and fish, owls can fly and be ridden by other characters as mounts - but you also get to choose Traits and Quirks at character creation to personalize your character. 

Traits are useful abilities like being fitter (More hit points) or being able to carry more (Larger inventory) and Quirks are disadvantages like being dainty (Fewer hit points) or being scared of mushrooms. (I took that one.) You get one Trait for free but if you want more you have to take a Quirk for each one as a counterbalance. 

There's housing, too. Really lovely, characterful, delightful housing. My Mouse must be pretty important. Her house is the biggest in the village. It's fricken huge! You can decorate but I didn't figure out how. 

The whole game looks gorgeous, especially for something at this early stage of development. It also played very smoothly for me. Character movement was fluid, the UI was intuitive and even with very little instruction, it was easy to figure out what to do and how to do it. 

The writing is good. All the animals have personalities that come across clearly in the way they express themselves as well as in what they want to talk to you about or what they tell you about themselves. They gossip about each other all the time, too. It feels very much like a village.

I'm guessing the presence of stats and particularly the way there are both hit points and a trait to increase them means there's some kind of combat in the game, although there was no hint of it in the parts of the demo I saw. I don't know how big the world is or what's out there, though there are hints in the conversations. One character talks about having lived in the city, for example, but whether that's somewhere you can visit I have no idea.

I'd love to find out. I have high hopes for this one. It's immediately enjoyable and it has a very obvious potential market. "What if Stardew Valley but Skyrim?" is an irresistible elevator pitch.

The problem would seem to be whether it will ever get the funding it needs. There was a successful Kickstarter last year, when the total came in at double the ask, but that's still only $400k. And according to an update in February, the team only includes five full-time devs. Is that enough money and/or enough people?

I hope so but I guess we'll find out. 

A Rockin' Good Time - The Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll Demo

One reason I like reviewing demos is that they're concise. They're mostly either short stories or single chapters as compared to the full game's novel. Sometimes they're purpose-built but more often they're discrete segments pulled out of the finished work, usually the opening chapter or the introduction or the tutorial. 

It makes them very easy to assimilate, assess, analyze and review. It's neat and tidy and satisfying. I look forward to playing them and I look forward to reviewing them.

That's most demos. But then there are demos like Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll. 

Is it even a demo?  After about an hour I had to tab out and check to make sure I hadn't somehow downloaded the full game by mistake. When the sun came up on the fourth in-game day, I decided it was time I stopped. There was no sign the demo was going to.

Steam tells me I have 82 minutes played although I'm not convinced "played" is the most appropriate term here. Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll is a visual novel although I'm not convinced "novel" is the most appropriate term either. Heck, I'm not one hundred per cent sold on "visual"...

Whatever LMRnR is, it's not a game, that's for sure. It does have a handful of inflection points, moments when you appear to be able to change the flow of the narrative, but from an hour and twenty minutes I can only remember, at most, half a dozen. 

Being asked to make a decision about every fifteen minutes doesn't constitute a game by my definition. If anything, it reminds me of one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books, but only if someone had redacted almost all of the choices.

At this point I should step in to clarify that I really enjoyed my 82 minutes with Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll. I'm also okay with the visual novel format although I don't think it's necessarily the best option for a narrative like this. As a story, though, it's intriguing, entertaining and a bit of a page-turner. It's also absolutely nothing like I was expecting.

But what was I expecting?  The Steam Store sales pitch, which I quoted last time, doesn't give much away: "Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll: the romanticism of the Eighties, mystery and intrigues, betrayal and sacrifice, hatred and passion — all this and more in the new game from the creators of the legendary visual novel Everlasting Summer!"

I realize now I'd taken most of my cues from just the title and that mention of the Eighties. I'd pretty much skipped over all the rest, the stuff about mystery, intrigue and so on. I'd somehow come away with the idea I was going to be playing a game where you put a band together and went on tour - something like that. 

Yeah... nope. There's nothing like that at all. Not in the first 82 minutes, anyway. What there is is a whole lot of story.

Here's my précis of the plot so far. I'd spoiler-warn it but this is the fricken' demo! The whole point of demos is to give stuff away so you can see if you want to pay for the whole thing, isn't it? To say revealing the plot of a demo is like spoiling the plot of a game is like saying trailers spoil the plots of movies. 

Oh, wait... 

You play as Nickolai, a senior in an elite Tokyo high school. He's Russian, as in both his parents were Russian, but he's lived in Japan since he was six, speaks fluent Japanese and is consequently treated neither as a local nor a foreigner, leaving him in some uncomfortable third space between.

Nickolai is one of those odd, semi-emancipated teens who seem to crop up a lot in Japanese narratives. He's eighteen, which where I come from would make him unequivocally an adult and he lives alone in the house his parents bought before they died. Big house, too.

Despite living as a self-supporting adult (On money left by his parents, I think...) he's still in the final year of high school and he behaves - in school, at least - in that very disconcerting way young adults mostly behave in anime, which is to say a bit like any young adult would behave here in the country where I live but also a lot like someone much younger.

In another familiar but bizarre trope of the form, Nickolai has a neighbor of the same age, Himitsu, who goes to the same school, who has a key to his house, who cooks his meals for him, walks to and from school with him, hangs out with him all the time, is in love with him maybe as a brother, maybe not that way at all, and who absolutely is not his girlfriend! Mostly because he's an idiot would be my take on it.

She's also half-Russian, which seems like a bit of a co-incidence, but then one of Nickolai's only two other friends is American, as is his ex-girlfriend, who we'll get to later. The school seems to be full of the children of non-Japanese VIPs as far as I can see.

Himitsu is not a stalker. We need to get that clear from the start. She rings Nickolai up at three in the morning because she sees his light on but she absolutely hasn't been staying up all night, watching his house. She just can't sleep. 

She comes into his house, uninvited, at three in the morning purely because she's worried abut him. And because she has a key. Which he gave her, so that's all quite alright and perfectly normal. And when she mumbles under her breath that since it's like they're living together, maybe she should move she absolutely isn't suggesting anything weird is going on in her head...

Actually, as is always the case with this trope, or at least in the few times I've encountered it, she's so very far from being a stalker that you want to grab Nickolai by the scruff of his neck and tell him how bloody lucky he is and how he should stop mooning after all the other much more melodramatic, enigmatic and just plain stroppy girls he seems to find far more interesting and pay her the attention she goddam well deserves.

About those other girls...

There's the one he "saves" from a gang of bullies, who turns out to be the Class President of the class he is in, which he doesn't even know! How does that work?! She can't stand him, of course, and she isn't at all grateful, quite the opposite really, but inevitably they keep getting thrown together all the same.

 

Then there's the girl who spills orange juice over him in the cafeteria and blames him for it. She turns out to be the daughter of the President of the School Board and the Queen of the School, which is news to him because he's only been at that school for how many years? She can't stand him either, so naturally they keep running into each other, at one point even hiding in a tiny cupboard together, something which causes both of them a great deal of necessary embarrassment.

But most importantly there's Catherine Winters. Catherine is Nickolai's aforementioned ex. The demo begins with an elegiac sequence about cherry petals drifting in the wind, which was what was happening the last time he saw Catherine. She left without explanation, was it a year ago? Maybe two? But now she's back, again without explanation, and back in his class, no less. Nickolai is very much not over Catherine. 

So, eighty minutes in and he's got four girls to juggle. Seems like it's going to be a high-school romance, right? Yeah, and it is. Except there are also the mysterious notes in misspelled Japanese left on his doorstep, followed by the even more mysterious phone calls in the middle of the night. It's not Himitsu this time. It's someone with a Russian accent, warning him Bad Things are going to happen because of Something His Father Did and he should Watch His Step.

Okay. Recap and recount. 

Love? Check. 

Money? No sign of any so far.

Rock'n'Roll? Coming to that right now.  

 

Orange-juice girl, whose name is Ellie, plays the guitar. Nickolai, who plays the bass, although by his own account not very well, runs across her in the music room at school. She's playing an acoustic guitar when both of them ought to be in class, an odd affectation that leads directly to the two of them squeezing into a cupboard together to avoid being discovered bunking off lessons by the Principal, who just happens to wander into the music room for a quick, secret conversation with another member of staff.

Nickolai thinks Ellie plays pretty well but he doesn't expect to see her fronting a glam rock band in a grungy back-street club. Well, why would he? Even though it's one of his regular hang-outs and even though Ellie's band, whose name I've forgotten but they're named after an anime robot, is headlining and even though Nick makes the point earlier that only local bands ever play at the club...

Even though, as I hope I'm making it clear, none of this really bears close examination, it does not matter a jot. It all works. I believed it at the same time I didn't believe it.

That's because the characters are all well-differentiated, convincing, believable within the local physics of credibility. Other people might not do these things but these people do and it feels right that they would.

The writing is crisp and clean except when it's Nickolai being about as flowery as any lovelorn adolescent feeling sorry for himself might be. The dialog is charming. The story trips along nicely. It's a damn good read.

There's also whole layer of very welcome meta-referentiality that really appeals to me. Nickolai is always making comparisons about the way similar situations would play out in manga and anime, usually without realizing that's exactly what is happening to him, only without the "magic girls" and superheroes.  

There are also lots of useful, explanatory notes on Japanese culture as seen from an outsider's perspective. That'll be because the developer is Russian, I imagine. I do find it slightly disturbing, how many games and anime I enjoy, initially believing them to be authentically Japanese in origin, turn out not to have been made by Japanese creators or studios at all. Probably says something about me or the culture or both.

Graphically the game is a real pleasure although it's pretty much a slide show in which most of the slides get repeated over and over. Occasionally something will move on the screen - a train crossing in the background, a character lifting a glass, but mostly everything is static. It's like looking at a series of pictures in a gallery. 

Good pictures, too. Every image is meticulously crafted with far more detail in the background than the narrative requires. I took a lot of screenshots because every new slide is as lovely to look at as the last. 

The controls are almost literally as minimal as it's possible to get. There are no instructions at all on how to play. The demo just starts and it's up to you to figure out how to get it to do anything but since all you really need to do is click the mouse anywhere on screen to make the next line of dialog appear, that's not a problem.

Once in a very long while you might have to choose between a couple of options like "Follow Her" or "Do Nothing", which just takes a click, but other than that there's nothing for you to do but read and watch.  If you were hoping to get up on stage and jam at any point, like I was, you're going to be disappointed.

Or maybe that comes later. I doubt it. You might get the option to "Join In" or "Just Watch" I guess.

I really like Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll. It tells a compelling story through likeable characters and pretty pictures. As with many visual novels I've "played" I'm far from convinced it's a game or needs to be one. It'd be a perfectly good manga or anime. 

I'll finish the demo for sure. I might well buy the full game at some point. 

I'd much rather watch it as an anime, though.  

A Warm Drink And A Comforting Toy - The Lucy Dreaming Demo

Just a very quick post today since normally I'd be at work at wouldn't be posting at all. Instead, I'm on "holiday", which is to say I didn't book any time off at all before the cut-off point so someone just gave me a bunch of weeks and this is one of them.

That's how come I was able to spend the last hour playing through one of the demos I downloaded the other day, Lucy Dreaming. Fifty-two minutes to be precise. A very good length for a demo. 

And it's a very good demo, too. Exemplary, in fact. If I was going to rate it specifically as a demo, I'd give it five stars. 

It's not only the right length - long enough to get the measure of the game but not so long it feels like you've actually started playing it for real - it's also a satisfying gamelet in its own right. Playing through it feels like a complete experience and also like a tailored one, not a fragment of the full game ripped loose from context.

Which is a clever trick because in a way that's exactly what it must be - the introduction to the full game. Not even the first chapter, more like the prolog. Only you can tell it's been adapted for the demo, not just pulled out and dropped in as-is from the self-referential little asides that contextualize it as a version specifically designed to be played in demonstration mode. 

Plenty of demos do that. They put up walls or pop up messages with some variation on "Not included in Demo". That's better than just leaving you to figure out why something isn't working but the Lucy Dreaming demo goes further. It incorporates the explanations into gameplay, so when you try to interact with something that's not relevant to the subset of the game you're being allowed to see, it tells you so within the same framework it tells you everything else. 

That sounds a bit vaguer than I meant but unfortunately (Or more properly the opposite of that.) I was so engrossed in the gameplay I neglected to take any screenshots when it happened, leaving me either to paraphrase from memory or fall back on a broad overview of the technique. 

Oh, alright then, I'll semi make one up. It was close to what I'm about to tell you but I can't remember the exact phrasing. You can take it that it was more amusing than what I'm going to come up with, though.

The whole demo takes place in Lucy's house. It starts in her bedroom and from there you can explore the upstairs landing, the downstairs hallway, the lounge and the garage. There are three more doors you can't enter - her brother's room, her parents bedroom and the bathroom. Oh, and the front door and the garage door, which lead to the outside.

The garage door is locked. The front door opens but there's just no option to go through it. Lucy's brother, Lloyd, is in his room and he's not about to let his little sister come in. Lucy very reasonably balks at going into her parents bedroom, commenting she doesn't even want to think about what they do in there.

That leaves the bathroom. You can try to go in there but when you do, Lucy tells you the bathroom isn't available in the demo. And then she adds that it's just as well she doesn't need a wee.

It's only a little thing but it adds to the feeling you're not just playing a demo but a short game that someone has really thought about. That's one example I can remember but there are a few more and they added to the sense that Lucy Dreaming is a game someone cares about.

But you can tell that from everything about it, really. One thing that often annoys me in adventure games is the way you can only examine objects that you'll need to use. Lucy Dreaming feels a bit like one of those open-world RPGs that claim if you can see somewhere you can get there, only in this demo that translates to if you can see an object, you can examine it.  

That's a lot of work, adding a line or two of text to everything in the house and, again like those open-world RPGs that let you open every single container in the world, it risks annoying the player almost as much as making most of it inert would. If you're going to tag everything with a line of dialog, you have to make most of them worth the click and Lucy Dreaming manages to do it. 

At least it does in the demo. Which, as I said, is less than an hour's gameplay. Whether the writer(s) can keep it up for the whole game I suppose won't be apparent until its too late, if you've been suckered into buying it by the attention to detail in the short version and it turns out not to be sustained. But then, we should be alert to that risk. It's there in every MMORPG ever made. The starting zones and tutorials are always the most complete and polished part of the game. Never judge an MMORPG by its tutorial.

Lucy Dreaming, of course, is no MMORPG. And anyway, I really don't think that'll be the case here. It feels like one of those hand-crafted labors of love that wasn't a labor at all to the people who made it. It has that sense of the creators having fun and of that fun transferring well to the audience.

Which brings me to the advertised "British Humour" (British spellings look really weird to me these days. I've been using American spellings for so long...). As a British person (That's what it says on my passport, anyway.) I'd have to say that I really didn't notice much "British" humor in the demo at all.

British accents, yes. Lucy herself speaks in a British accent that I found very easy on the ear. Not exaggerated for comic effect. Just a naturalistic Northern burr. The only other speaking part in the demo, Lucy's dad, only gets a couple of lines and those are enunciated in such a strained and peculiar way, as appropriate to the circumstances, I couldn't really tell what accent he had.

A British accent, though, even a Northern one, does not in and of itself constitute humor. There are plenty of jokes in the demo, some of them quite funny, but none that I noticed seemed particularly nationalized. 

The house itself looks like a British house but I'm pretty sure it could pass for one in any number of other countries. It's a child's bedroom, a couple of hallways and a garage. How different, culturally, can those be between English-speaking nations? The lounge is the most British - English, really - of them all but even there it has a ceiling fan and I can't say I've ever been a suburban home in this country that had one of those. We don't get the hot weather to need anything like that.

As for the dialog, most of which is Lucy talking directly to you, the player, I'm pretty confident you could give the same script to an American actor and you wouldn't have to change more than the odd word or two. If it was the Britishness of the humor that sold you on the game, you may be disappointed. You're not going to see much of it in the demo. Can't say I was sorry about that. 

Graphically, it's retro as has been the fashion in a large corner of the adventure game market for a while now. There's an admirable attention to detail and the color palette is easy on the eye. What's not to like?

Also, it is quite specifically an Adventure Game. There are several fourth-wall-bending gags about that. The demo is never afraid to go meta-fictional, another thing that predisposed me to like it.

Gameplay is rock-solid point & click puzzle-solving. Examine everything, pick up everything that looks remotely useful, figure out what to use on what. We all know the drill. 

In the demo you have to complete half a dozen tasks to get Lucy ready to go to sleep. All of them are completely realistic, like putting on some calming music, getting her into some suitable nightwear and making her a warm drink. As you complete each one it crosses itself off a list, which made solving each puzzle feel oddly satisfying.

The puzzles themselves are very fair. Most are even rational, although I wouldn't have warmed Lucy's bedtime drink in quite the way the game expected. Then again, she's a small child. I can totally see a child doing whatever it was Lucy did. 

No, I'm not going to tell you. Go play the demo if you really have to know!

Mostly, though, I thought I knew exactly what to do and I was almost always right. The problem was figuring out how to do it and the solution was usually guessable in no more than a couple of tries, which is the mark of a good point & click in my book. I never once had to look for a hint so I don't even know if there's an in-game hint system. If the whole game is as well-designed, you won't need one.

All in all, as I said at the start, this was an exemplary demo. Or maybe not because at the end of it, although I'd had a great time figuring out all the puzzles, I didn't immediately wishlist the game. That's because the demo gave me almost too vivid an impression of what it would be like to play the finished article and I wasn't sure I liked the idea of that as much as I ought to, if I was going to buy it.

Sometimes you need just a little grit to make the pearl. (Apparently that's not really how pearls get made but a cliche is a cliche.) I wouldn't remotely call this demo too slick or too easy but after I'd finished it I didn't get the feeling I needed to find out what happened next. Maybe the demo was too well-constructed and complete in itself

I might still pick the game up at some point but I have the feeling there are other Adventure games I might find a little more compelling. Still, don't let that put you off trying the demo. If nothing else, it's a fun, self-contained, satisfying experience all of its own. 

A Tale Of Two Demos

Next Fest is over for another few months. The timing was bad for me. I didn't get to play many demos. I did, however, manage to spend some time with two I was very interested in; a couple of games that looked very different on the surface but which turned out to be much more alike than I expected.

The two titles are Esoteric Ebb and Zero Parades For Dead Spies. The latter, as I explained in an earlier post, is the follow-up to the much-garlanded Disco Elysium, produced by what's left of the same studio, Za/Um, while the former is merely "inspired" by it. 

So, on the basis of the demos alone, which does a better job of continuing the legacy? The original or the copy?

I won't bury the lede. The copy wins by a mile. 

Both the demos are huge. I put just under an hour into Zero Parades and twice that into Esoteric Ebb. In both cases it felt like I'd barely gotten started. In large part that's because they each require an enormous amount of reading and, in the case of ZP, listening. 

Whether the maps are extensive in the demos I can't say. I barely got past the opening areas of either. I suspect there's plenty more I could explore but in each case I felt I'd seen enough, albeit for very different reasons.

With Esoteric Ebb, I didn't want to carry on much further because it's very likely I'll buy the full game. There was an option at the beginning of the demo for progress made there to be carried over and I took it, but I'm not sure it worked. Since I don't want to have to do all that reading again, I think I'll wait until I have the game installed before I carry on (Although I did install the demo on my laptop so I could carry on playing it in bed last night...)

I could buy the game right now if I wanted, of course. It went on sale yesterday. It's been well-received so far, with a Very Positive rating on Steam and a score of 88 on Metacritic. From what I've seen of the demo, that's well deserved.

 

Esoteric Ebb doesn't look much like Disco Elysium in screenshots or sound like it in the description. It's an RPG with a cartoon aesthetic that's very European. It reminds me of any number of strips in publications like Pilote or Metal Hurlante back in the '80s. 

It's also solidly placed in the fantasy genre, even if the specific stripe of fantasy is "post Arcanepunk", whatever the hell that is. It has magic, spells, levels, classes, all the standard RPG trappings, although if you're expecting a standard RPG, you're going to be very disappointed.

Zero Parades, on the other hand, looks almost exactly like Disco Elysium and takes place in a very similar setting. Possibly in the same world, I'm not sure. If you're expecting a faithful sequel you're going to be, once again, very disappointed. 

I was. I was more than willing to cut Za/Um some slack over the controversies that have dominated all news about the studio for the last couple of years. I haven't really been paying that much attention the details, the rights and wrongs of the whole affair. I was just hoping whoever was still using the name would come up with a worthy successor.

On the evidence of the demo, that's not happening. The whole thing felt like a second-rate imitation to me.

Not the visuals, which are up to the standard of the original and look very much like it. Nor, really, the gameplay, which was fine as far as it went. Superficially, Zero Parades is Disco Elysium 2.

The problems start with the writing. It's not bad by any means but it has that awkward sense of trying just a little too hard to be something it doesn't quite know how to be. 

Disco Elysium was truly, genuinely, effortlessly unhinged. That was its glory. By comparison, Zero Parades reads like a bunch of familiar tropes, layered over with a thin veneer of by-the-numbers weirdness. It's like a student review version of a hit show - earnest, eager and unconvincing.

The very premise gave me trouble. Making the game about spies imparts a totally different spin from Disco's police procedural. In DE, you start out as some kind of burned-out detective, stuck with a much slicker partner, working a dead-end case in a no-hope town. In ZP you're some kind of disgraced super-spy, who's just been woken from cryo-sleep and sent on a mission that's gone wrong even before it's begun.

I can see how these are supposed to be equivalents but they really aren't. One is grim, gritty and bleak. The other is exciting, dramatic and adventurous. Still, the settings are equally down-at-heel and the central character equally adrift from the course they're supposed to be following, so that oughtn't to matter so much.

The reason it does matter is that all the info-dump about the political background, so subtle and complex in Disco Elysium, is here thrust at you in wodges of dull jargon that doesn't give much of an impression of nuance below the surface. What was kept to the background in the earlier game is foregrounded here and I found it off-putting, like having to sit through a series of political lectures when all I wanted was to get on with the plot. Or, indeed, find the plot.

Worse than the uninspired writing, though, are the voice-overs. I talked a little about the truly awful narration the last time I wrote about ZP and it absolutely does not improve on further hearing. None of the other voices are anything like as bad but neither is any of them much good. After about half an hour, I couldn't take any more. I switched the voices off altogether. That is not something I do often or feel I need to.

Mechanically, I did like the demo. The controls feel intuitive, it's easy to spot things you ought to investigate and the character animations are very impressive. The game looks good and plays well. Arguably, better than Disco.

 

The problem was, nothing I was doing seemed all that interesting. Long before I decided I'd had enough I'd stopped caring about the political situation people kept talking about and the constant references to spycraft were no more welcome than they are in any game. I just don't find spies a very interesting bunch of people, I guess. As for the mission, it never got started.

It's possible all of the things I'm complaining about are artifacts of the slow-burn design Za/Um is famous for. Disco Elysium took hours and hours to warm up and didn't really get its hooks into me until about twenty hours in. 

But it had something, right from the start. An edge, a sparkle, a glint. A mystery, just out of sight, that I couldn't ignore. On the evidence of the demo, Zero Parades doesn't have anything like that working for it.

Esoteric Ebb, on the other hand, very much does. Even though it opens with that exhausted and exhausting cliche, the main character waking up on a slab in the morgue, it grips from the start. 

Mechanically it's very similar to Zero or Disco. You wander about, looking at stuff or talking to people and every time you open a dialog with a person or an object you're set to spend the next few minutes clicking and reading. Seriously, if you aren't the sort of person who's ecstatic at the thought of starting a five-hundred page novel, you'd be better off looking anywhere else than at any game that claims to be inspired by Disco Elysium.

 

There are two huge differences between Esoteric Ebb and Zero Parades, though. Firstly, in EE the text is cynical, satirical, witty and frequently genuinely funny. Secondly, there are more than ample opportunities to make choices and choose responses that feel like they might change something.

There are even dice to roll. Where ZP has some indecipherable process involving mental states and meters, none of which seem to be under your direct control, EE has RPG stats and ability checks. And amazingly it manages to integrate those into the process without detracting from the aesthetic.

Another huge advantage EE has over ZP, especially in a demo, is a clear and comprehensible plot. Well, not so much a plot as the starting point for one. And in that way, it's a lot closer to Disco than Zero. 

Disco Elysium begins with the player character knowing they've been sent to investigate a dead body hanging from a tree. Esoteric Ebb begins with the player character knowing they've been sent to investigate an explosion in a tea shop. From there, everything slides in all directions but at least you know what you're supposed to be doing. 

ZP starts with the mission you've been woken up for being terminated and your orders being changed to "Come back to base immediately". From there on, you're on your own. That theoretically gives you complete freedom to act but it mostly left me feeling confused and directionless. In Esoteric Ebb, I always had a purpose, even if mostly I kept getting distracted from pursuing it.

 

Perhaps the most surprising difference between the two demos is the way each explains the political and cultural background that's so important to them both. ZP either layers it in gnomic jargon, presumably intended to feel deep and meaningful but actually just coming across as obtuse and tedious, or reveals it through stilted, unnatural conversations, some no more enjoyable than sharing a bus ride with a conspiracy theorist.

The NPCs in Esoteric Ebb not only have much sprightlier conversational skills, they have much deeper dialog trees that range widely across a range of topics and still manage to keep most of them interesting and relevant. The dialog is far more naturalistic, too, albeit only by the terms of an RPG. The complex social, cultural, religious and political background bleeds through by osmosis. 

Which isn't to say there's no info-dump. There's plenty but it's handled almost wholly through highlighted key-words on which you can, if you wish, click to get a short explanation or gloss. It's like having an internal wiki for the game. I found it useful and enlightening.

I could go on but there's every chance I will, at some point, buy Esoteric Ebb, at which point I'm sure there will be more posts about it here. I wouldn't rule out buying Zero Parades entirely but given I can't even summon up the enthusiasm to finish the demo, that does seem unlikely.

If anyone else has played either of the demos, especially if they've also played Disco Elysium, I'd be interested to hear other opinions, particularly on Zero Parades. Maybe I'm missing something...