A Girl And Her Dog

I did it! I went to the cinema to see the Supergirl movie. The first time I've been to the cinema since before the pandemic and even back then it wasn't like I was going often. Maybe once a year, if that.

It wasn't always that way. I used to see a lot of movies on the big screen. Well, on a screen bigger than a TV at least. Screens in the '70s could be tiny. There might actually be TVs bigger than that now.

When I was at university it's probably not too much of an exaggeration to say I went several times a week. That was because I was at Cambridge, a collegiate university, and every one of the 30+ colleges had its own Film Society, most of which showed a film pretty much every week during term. I saw a lot of classic films and subtitled foreign movies that way and I saw some of the big, new releases (Like The Empire Strikes Back and Superman.) at the actual cinema in town, too.

After I graduated and moved back home, all through the 'eighties I lived in the middle of a big city with at least three arthouse cinemas and a couple of commercial cinemas all in easy walking distance. I saw a lot of films all through that decade. 

By the '90s I'd moved. I didn't have a cinema I could easily walk to any more. My cinema-going was slowing down but I still used to get to the pictures maybe six or eight times a year. By the turn of the century that was down to two or three and by the time Covid shut the cinemas I was already going a whole year between visits.

So, yes, it certainly takes something special to get me to make the effort, these days. Why Supergirl? And was it worth it? 

First question: I guess Supergirl because I've always liked her and also because I didn't make the effort for Superman last year. I felt I owed it her. Plus the trailers made it look hella fun.

As for the second, Hell, yes! I loved it! No, I fucking loved it! It was everything I hoped it would be and more. The movie, that is. The cinema experience itself? Ehh... that was okay.

But then, what can you expect when you see a movie at half-past nine in the morning? I was literally the only person in the screening. It was in an out-of-town multiplex with a dozen or more screens and my showing was in one of the smaller rooms. Still big enough for about 130 people though. Or it would have, if anyone other than me had wanted to see Supergirl right after breakfast on a Thursday. 

I'm quite a proponent of the value of seeing a movie as part of an audience. I know it has its downsides but you don't need an evolutionary biologist to point out the synergies of a shared experience. There's also the Big Screen Effect, where the more of your field of view the image occupies, the harder your brain finds it to separate the image from reality, which is great for immersion. 

Whether it's worth leaving your house to watch a movie alone, on a screen that's not really all that big, well that's another question. I just didn't want to have to wait six months for the DVD to come out. Although I will be buying that DVD. This is a movie I'll be watching more than once.

So much for the experience. What about the movie? So I liked it. Big deal. Why did I like it? (Might be some mild spoilers in this part but nothing very specific. Probably safe to carry on.)

For a start it's a good movie as a movie, which is very definitely not something you can say about all superhero films. Probably not about most of them. Supergirl has a coherent, linear plot. It starts at the beginning and goes through to the end with precious few diversions. 

There are some well-judged flashbacks that add depth and nuance to the narrative and illuminate certain things about the central character and that's it. None of the usual darting about from place to place and time to time you usually get in comic-book movies. Also it's quite a small cast which helps to keep things focused.

The movie's an adaptation of Tom King's Woman of Tomorrow, a strong story in itself, but the movie script cuts a lot of the sometimes over-complicated to-and-fro of the comic. It condenses the action from a few weeks to just three days. The ending, which we'll get to, is very different. I think Woman of Tomorrow may be a better story but sticking closely to it would make for a much worse film. 

That's one of the big, BIG problems with superhero movies in general. Comics have so much more time to tell their stories and so much more freedom to be completely confusing about it and get away with it. Comics fans are nothing if not tolerant of cruft. They relish it, for the most part. The kind of excruciating detail that has comic fans arguing deep into the night just about kills any movie stupid enough to include even a small fraction of it. 

Supergirl keeps things tight. The plot is a revenge arc yoked to two coming of age stories and the writers and director wisely recognize that's plenty. Even so, they still manage to throw in an origin story and make it feel like a natural progression. Origin stories wreck far too many superhero movies. If you're going to do it, this is how. Really, really good work.

Continuity is another bane of superhero franchises. James Gunn has been tasked with rebooting the DC Cinematic Universe so of course this film has to dovetail with the recent Superman movie, something it does perfectly. David Corenswet, an excellent Superman, appears just as often as he needs to and there's just enough cross-fertilization to bang home the message of his own recent movie, that Superman needs to be a force not just for good but for restraint and tolerance.

Supergirl is a force for good and also a bit of a wild card. There's an argument to be made that she's tolerant and restrained, alright: just of the wrong things.

As her mother, Lara, tells her just before she dies and Supergirl leaves doomed Argo City in a pod with her puppy, she needs to be good but she doesn't need to be nice. And she's not nice. But she's more than just good. As Ruthye tells her late on, she's kind. Kind and good does it for me. Screw nice.

I know some Supergirl fans won't like it. Supergirl's been nice all her life. Too bloody nice if you ask me. 

Well, some Supergirls have. This is the other big, BIG problem with superhero movies. Any superhero a mainstream audience recognizes will already have been a dozen different people in the comics before they even get to the screen. And like Swifties, comic fans always have their favorite eras. 

I've known Supergirl since I was about five years old. I have a couple of favorite eras myself but I think this is my favorite now. Milly Alcock is a superb Kara. She looks the part but that's easy. Any blonde can wear the suit. But as she says to Ruthye "It's just a suit". 

Except it's the suit. Not anyone can wear the suit. She can. Magnificently, she spends almost the whole movie not wearing it. She strides about looking seriously cool as fuck in a duster coat. Then, when she puts on the suit, it's like the sun coming up. And you know what happens when the sun comes up. Well, you will if you watch this movie.

Many, many things about the writing and the acting worked for me. I love Kara's pub crawling bad girl act. I love that it isn't an act and yet it so obviously is. Also isn't it interesting she calls it a pub crawl not a bar crawl?

I think the way the movie goes through a whole sequence of adventures with Supergirl winning fights without her powers is genius. She isn't just a badass because the yellow sun made her one. She was born badass is my guess. And if she wasn't, hardship and trauma made her one. I bet on both.

Her relationship with Krypto is just wonderful but so is the relationship she builds with Ruthye, the thirteen year-old orphan who just watched her whole family getting slaughtered and plans on doing something about it. Of course, that relationship also relies on Ruthye and Eve Ridley is stone solid in the part. They're mirror images, through a shattered mirror. 

It should be said that I'm a sucker for these kinds of stories. People doing the right thing, even when it's not the easy thing, just makes me happy. And also makes me cry. I cried a lot during Supergirl. At one point I actually sobbed. I was glad I was the only one there. 

I tend to cry a lot at movies, though, especially when anyone does something unselfish or noble or when something happy happens. Sad things tend not to do it for me or not to the same degree. I didn't tear up when Krypto got shot but I did when Supergirl told him "See Buddy? I told you I'd be back" at the end.

I laughed a lot, too. Out loud. There are some great lines. I think I missed a couple when Lobo and Supergirl were exchanging quips mid-fight. Fights are loud in cinema-sound. Jason Momoa as Lobo is... well, he's Lobo. He doesn't get to do a lot else but then when was Lobo ever anything but Lobo?

While I'm praising the plot and the writing I'll also mention a couple of things that absolutely don't ring true and yet ring completely true in comic book terms. Kara shouldn't win some of the fights she wins without her powers. Ruthye absolutely shouldn't win her one fight. They're both fighting way out of their weight class. But they win and they should win.

They win because they're heroes. Heroines. Whatever. They win because comic book stories are myth. If you don't get that you're probably watching the wrong movie.

And then there's the ending. This hasn't been too spoilery so far but here's a big one. I'll stick something under this paragraph in the edit so there's a break and you can leave if you want.

 So. At the end, Kara kills Krem. Krem's the main villain. He has no actual personality, no backstory, no arc. He's evil. That's it. Oh, and nasty. The two aren't always the same. 

Having a villain so straightforwardly villainous and unredeemable simplifies things. I was sitting there wondering just how they were going to resolve the storyline without killing the bastard when Supergirl killed the bastard. She ran him through the neck with Ruthye's sword after talking Ruthye out of doing the exact same thing. Oh, and first she stabbed him somewhere else because of what he did to Krypto. "That's for my dog".

In the source material, Supergirl does not kill Krem. She sends him to the Phantom Zone where he serves three hundred years. At the end of Woman of Tomorrow, he's released as a very old man. And he's learned right from wrong. It took him three centuries but he's done it. Rehabilitation worked. 

He apologizes to Ruthye, also very old by now because living three hundred years will do that to you. She clubs him with her stick and then hits him a few more times when he's down. But she doesn't kill him. She, too, has learned something in three hundred years. 

That's a good ending for the comic. It would be a terrible ending for the movie. We're supposed to wait three hundred years for catharsis and then it's an old woman clubbing an old man while Supergirl stands by and watches? I don't think so.

All this Phantom Zone stuff, anyway - and the damn place has a history as complicated as Ancient Rome - just doesn't play on screen. It barely plays in the comics, frankly. Calling the authorities isn't going to fly. Who they'd even be in this scenario, god only knows. Clearly Krem and his crew are doing whatever they want already. If there was an authority capable of stopping them or holding them, wouldn't they be doing it already?

I'm 100% against capital punishment in real life but this isn't real life. It's myth. Krem has to die. There's just no other ending that's going to work.

I know some fans agree with that but think it shouldn't have been down to Kara to do the killing. Lobo's right there. He's up on a ridge, watching it all go down. Lobo, as Supergirl warns Ruthye when they meet him in a bar, killed his entire planet. If you want some killing done, he's your boy. 

Except if Supergirl lets Lobo do this one instead of doing it herself, it doesn't define her as somehow above the act, it devalues her as too weak to do the difficult thing herself. Plus Lobo already saved her from what looked like (But obviously wouldn't have been, somehow.) certain death. How many times is he going to fix things for her? 

The two  or the three moments in the whole movie I didn't like all make Supergirl look briefly like she's not in control but at least in those she's mostly just unlucky. If Lobo swooped down on his big bike and killed Krem for her, it would make her look weak and indecisive. 

Supergirl is neither of those things. She's angry and bitter and sad and good and kind and strong and brave and irresponsible and responsible and human all the way through. And she needs to kill Krem, so she does. She's good. She does the right thing and, in that situation, that's it.

It's possibly the most responsible thing she does in the whole movie, ironically. And then she goes home and tells her cousin she's grown up. 

Except she doesn't tell him what she's done. Superman wouldn't have done it and he wouldn't get why she did. Best he never knows. She doesn't tell him she's grown up either. Not in those words. She doesn't have to. That, he knows and we know. He can see it. We can see it. He can hear it. We can hear it.

Coming of age story, remember?

I could go on, at much greater length. Sometimes I wish I was back at college so I could write a dissertation on something that fires me up like this instead of bloody William Blake. I like Blake but I never wanted to write five thousand words about him. I'd happily write five thousand words about Supergirl. 

I won't though. I'll just say the music is great and so are the special effects, the fights and the mise-en-scène. A lot of the scenes are lit really dark but I always could see what was going on. It's a mood piece so it works.

I won't say it's a masterpiece. It's not that. It's a great movie though and not just a great superhero movie. It has the feel of those bleak, existential seventies films I grew up with; Five Easy Pieces, Brewster McCloud, Dog Day Afternoon. Like that. Except in space and with lots of people punching each other up into the air.

It was nice to be back in the cinema. I'm glad I took the trouble.  Maybe I'll go again. 

Sticking The Ending (Not Saying Where)

One of the beneficial side-effects of the recent heatwave was that I managed to catch up with some TV-watching, while I was downstairs keeping Beryl company. I finished the current (Fourth.) season of The Legend of Vox Machina and I finally got around to the final (Third) season of Good Omens. 

They didn't have much in common other than that I wasn't one hundred per cent happy with the ending of either but since I can still just about remember what happened in each of them, I'm going to wodge the pair into this one post anyway.

There will inevitably be some spoilers so now's your chance to bail. 

Here, I'll stick in one of the trailers as a buffer, just in case.

The Legend of Vox Machina - Season 4

I'm starting to realize I've been watching this one wrong. I didn't even realize it was the people from Critical Role until sometime in Season 2 and even when I did, it didn't mean much to me since all I know about them is what I've read on blogs. Then, yesterday at work, someone ordered a couple of the graphic novel collections and I had a flip through one when I took it off the shelf, which was when it occurred to me the TV show presumably has greater resonance if you're already immersed in the backstory, of which there appears to be plenty.

I probably should have taken the time to watch at least a few episodes of the original YouTube series as soon as I figured out that was where the TV series came from but I never even thought of it until a few days ago. I guess I could start now. It's still there. I just checked.

Maybe I'll get round to it before Season 5 but for now I'm just going to have to treat the TV show as a stand-alone cartoon. And it is a cartoon, I guess, although we don't seem to use the term so much any more. It's not anime, that's for sure, even if you allow that anime can be made anywhere outside Japan.

The trouble is, I'm so used to watching anime now that regular cartoons can look slightly off, somehow, at least until I reacclimatize. The animation in Vox Machina S3 started out looking thin and flat to me so it didn't help that Amazon decided to spit it out in three episode chunks every Wednesday. I'd just get used to the storybook graphics and then I'd have to start all over again the following week.

What made it really awkward, though, were the commercials. Or, I should say, the placement of the ad breaks. I can handle ads in shows if the shows themselves have been created with specific narrative breaks designed to hold them, as used to be the norm with commercial television, at least in this country. It's harder to put up with the constant interruption, when the damn ads pop up seemingly randomly.

I complained about this last time I wrote about a Prime show, so I don't want to make this all about the ads again but damn! Just have set breaks FFS! It's not like I watch the ads anyway. If I'm watching on the laptop I tab out and read a blog or something but last week, when I was on the sofa in front of the TV, I literally brought a book. I went and got one when the ads started and from then on I muted the sound and read until until the ads went away.

Enough about the presentation. What about the content?

Confusing is the first word that comes to mind. There was a basic problem in that I couldn't remember much about the last series. I thought the recap at the start would help with that but it didn't, or not much. As the episodes went by I gradually remembered enough to figure out what was happening but it doesn't say a lot for Season 3 that all those dragons had completely faded from memory.

I remembered all the characters, though, and that's really 90% of the appeal of the show. You just wait for them to come on and do their schtick. It still worked to some extent but we seem to have hit the point where only bad things happen and everyone's either depressed or angry or despairing or all three at once, which somewhat limits the opportunities for merriment. In my opinion that doesn't make for great entertainment.

As always there's a world-threatening crisis but this time half the team wants nothing to do with averting it. Everyone's at odds with someone or having some kind of existential breakdown and it's all quite tiring, if not tiresome. 

Since most of the cast aren't making with the snappy one-liners and the class clown isn't even in most of the episodes at all, we get a new character who gets to do all the jokes all the time. He's incredibly annoying to begin with but of course there turns out to be More To Him Than We Thought. I did end up quite liking him but I also felt I'd been maneuvered into it, which is never ideal.

The plot ticks along nicely enough although parts of it never seem to make much sense until eventually it reaches what passes for a feel-good ending, at least in context of what's happened before... and then the writers pull the rug out from under it so fast the audience get carpet burns. 

Would a happy ending be too much to ask for? Yes, obviously it would.  

Here's the thing. If I wanted a bleak, miserable, downbeat animated show, one that would make me wonder why I'd bothered putting myself through the emotional wringer in the first place, if that was all the catharsis I was going to get, I could just go watch Bojak Horseman again. At least that way I'd be watching something that had earned the right to make me feel emotionally roughed-up, not some half-assed D&D nonsense with dueling heavy-metal guitar solos and characters who never stay dead.

I guess now I have to watch Season 5, just to see how in hell they pull themselves out of the mess they've gotten into, although right now I'd have to say that looks pretty much impossible. Then again, as I just said, no-one ever stays dead for long in this show so I expect they'll manage somehow.

Let's just hope Amazon doesn't kill off the show itself before we get a resolution. Not that I could really blame them if they did. It's starting to look like one of those shows that's already gone on a bit too long.

Good Omens - Season 3

 

I say "Season" because that's what Amazon called it. It's one episode. Can one episode be a season? I wouldn't have thought so, no matter how long it is. 

This one's an hour and thirty-nine minutes. The length of an old-fashioned movie. And that's what it is, pretty much: a shortish movie. Not a very good one, either.

Oh, it looks quite nice. The production values are okay and the art department seems to have done a job of work although it looks mostly as though they're using the same old sets or no sets at all. And of course the two principals are great, Tennant and Sheen, and the supporting cast, which isn't all that huge, is fine...

The plot, though...

It makes sense until close to the end although it never feels very involving. It's more of an outline of a plot than the real thing. There's a murder mystery in Heaven that seems like it could be interesting until it gets solved with no real build-up or tension. Jesus comes back for the second coming and it's all a bit Life of Brian for a few minutes but then that just stops, too. 

No-one has much of a reason for doing whatever it is they're doing. They just amble along, making the right noises about why they're doing it without ever sounding the least bit convincing or convinced. The solution to the mystery, such as it is, turns out to be that an immortal got so bored of being immortal they decided to destroy the universe so they wouldn't have to keep on being bored.

And that would be it except for the coda, which is beyond stupid. I'd call it fan service if I thought any fans were actually being served. Okay, I'm sure some were. If all you ever wanted out of the whole thing was to see David Tennant and Michael Sheen holding hands as they slip peacefully into an idyllic, comfortable retirement together, then consider yourself served.

I mean, I'm not saying that wasn't sweet but to get there, first God had to be persuaded by way of some extremely dubious arguments from the would-be happy couple to destroy the entire universe, then she had to recreate it without being in the new one herself, which is a good trick if you can do it. Then all we had to do was wait 13.8 billion years (Or maybe it was 13.4 - I didn't take notes when the caption came up.) for the Earth to somehow go through exactly the same process not just of evolution but civilization too, so the now-mortal lovers could find each other in the same fucking bookshop and fall in love all over again! 

I don't know about you but I just can't quite see that happening, somehow. It seems like there might be a logical flaw in there somewhere...

I realize I'm slating one show for having a feel-bad ending and the other for the exact opposite but the awkward truth is neither of them made me feel good. Of the two, at least Vox Machina made me feel bad because something bad happened. Good Omens just made me feel bad because the ending itself was so bad!

We all know why, of course. Naughty Neil Gaiman and his unfortunate extra-curricular activities or proclivities or whatever it is that made Jeff Bezos feel queasy enough to decide not to go ahead with the full six episode season as planned. Heaven forfend Amazon should take any reputational damage from someone's antisocial behavior!

Even so, if that was the plot they were intending to stretch out until it lasted three times as long, I'm not sure a full season would have helped. Bad things generally don't get better just because they last longer.

And come to think of it, Season 2 wasn't all that great, was it? What did I say about it? 

Hmm. It appears I thought it was "short, rushed and incomplete... quite unsatisfying at times." If that's true, then I guess Season 3 should have been a dozen episodes at least.

Really, only the first Season stands up as coherent, complete and satisfying and that's the one Terry Pratchett co-wrote. He had nothing to do with Season 2, being dead at the time, but Season 3 is partly based on a plotline he and Gaiman hashed out in a hotel room thirty-five years ago. I kind of doubt it would have stayed like that if he'd had time to work on it.

All of that said, I quite enjoyed Season 2 for all its flaws and Season 3 at least helped a hot afternoon to go by passably enough. Pretty sure the whole thing would have a better reputation if they'd just made the first season as a mini-series and left it that, though. 

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.