I could review the demo of Sky: Children of the Light but there doesn't seem much point. It's not a new game, just new to Steam and the PC. It's been out for years on iOS, where it launched in 2019. Since then, there's been an annual conversion to a new platform, with the game coming out on Android in 2020, Switch in 2021 and PS4 last year.
This year it's the turn of PC gamers to enjoy this "open world social indie adventure game ". I guess XBox users will have to wait until 2024.
Anyway, it's been out for long enough that anyone who wants to know what it's about can find all the information they need easily enough. There's a lengthy Wikipedia entry and Metacritic(Where the game scores a healthy 82 from critics although only a mediocre 7.4 from players.) has links to more than enough reviews for anyone.
Even so, I might still have added my opinion to the pile if I thought I had anything of value to contribute but I don't. I played for forty-nine minutes and for the whole time I was there I never really understood what I was doing or cared very much about finding out.
The graphics are very pretty. On the running theme of whether these demos look better in game or in screenshots I'd have to say Sky looks equally impressive in both. I certainly enjoyed looking at the expressionistic scenery, although it felt more like wandering through the Rothko room at Tate Modern than travelling through an actual landscape.
There's some kind of storyline or narrative but it mostly washed over me along with all the pastels. There were stars and constellations and elders and spirits and lot of similar new age tropes. It was like being back in the early 'nineties (Which, of course, was like being back in the mid-sixties.)
The mechanics were straightforward enough although I didn't find the controls entirely comfortable. Again with "E" for Use Object? What's wrong with "F"? My index finger drifts across to F a lot more naturally than it stretches up to E but maybe that's just me.
Movement was okay but not as smooth as I'd expected. There's a common practice of game designers that I don't much like; using movement as a form of progression. It's off-putting to have to do everything clumsily and awkwardly just because you're new. I mean, it may be more realistic but what does realism have to do with any of this?
Again, I wasn't paying the instructions as much attention as I should have been but I'm fairly sure there was some kind of progression tied to flight, which is a key feature of the game. I remember my wings levelling up a couple of times and there was an energy mechanic I never understood. I'm very much of the school that believes if you can fly in a game you should just be able to darn well fly!
The subtleties of movement were just one of the things I never got to grips with. Mostly I just brute-forced my way around, hammering the Space key repeatedly to jump over small obstacles on the ground and veering from side-to side as I leaned hard on the "A" and "D" keys in flight.
Other than my issues getting from one place to another and not really following the plot, I didn't figure out how to use the shops or the "Shared Space", which seemed to be a form of housing. I failed to save my work there, somehow, so all my decorations whipped back into my inventory when I left.
A big part of the game is communicating non-verbally with other players but I had a certain amount of trouble working out who were players and who were NPCs. I did eventually manage to swap candles with someone or whatever it is you do but I had no idea what it meant. It certainly didn't create any feelings of togetherness, just a sense of mild confusion.
As with the Moomin game, I'm happy to have had the chance to try Sky: Children of Light, if only to discover that it's not a game I'm likely to enjoy. My feelings about it are quite similar - it's probably very good for someone but that someone isn't me. As Sheldon Cooper might say, I'm not a hippy.
Above all, while playing both games I found myself thinking "Why am I doing this?" Neither of them were sufficiently tactile to be fun to play for the sheer exhillaration of the experience; neither had a compelling storyline; both had mechanics that felt awkward and repetitive.
I realise I've played a lot of games over the years and enjoyed many a lot more than this, even though they were objectively much worse. I do wonder sometimes if perhaps I'm just beginning to experience a kind of gamer's ennui. There might be only so many times you can go to the well and hope to draw fresh water.
Then again, I didn't have the same concerns in any of the other demos this time around so perhaps it's just that these two games aren't that great. A lot of contributors to this reddit thread seem to think that's true of Sky.
I don't think I'll de-wishlist Sky. It is free to play after all so it's not like there's money to worry about. De-wishlisting seems kind of rude, anyway. I haven't removed Snufkin yet even though I said I was going to. It feels a bit harsh, somehow.
Still, I don't think there's any real chance I'll play either of them again, free or not.
I've been looking forward to Next Fest, that divertissement of dainty demos laid
on by Steam once a quarter. Since I
discovered
the event in the winter of '22, courtesy of Kluwes at
Many Welps, it's become a fixture on my gaming calendar for a couple of reasons.
The first, as I've said before, is that I find these bite-size morsels surprising satisfying in themselves. Although I almost always end up adding a
couple of the games to my wishlist, so far I haven't bought too many. Contrary, I'm sure, to the intentions of the developers, that first, sweet taste often fades long before the full feast reaches the table. Maybe releasing demos so far in advance isn't the best sales strategy.
The best of the rest, whose ultimate fate I don't follow,
remain with me, if at all, only as short, self-contained experiences, valid in their own
right but needing no further expansion. Beyond that, there remain only my own bad choices and a few plain, bad games, either way best forgotten.
Or possibly they're just bad demos. I mean, it is theoretically possible for a developer to
mess up the demo but get the game right. It would be interesting to know how often that happens. But let's not get side-tracked, for once.
The second reason (I had two, remember?) is that demos are great for blog
posts. On average they take 30-60 minutes to complete, which means I can play
the demo and write up my thoughts about it all in the same session. They're
also easy to summarize and explain - or they should be if they're any good, given their very reason for existing is to act as a shop window
for the game they represent.
Demos make it significantly easier for me to write those short, pithy posts I
consistently complain about not being able to do. Even better, Next
Fest contextualizes the posts and adds a semblance of structure, turning every
quarterly event into a Feature Mini-Series here at Inventory Full.
Okay, that might be over-playing my hand a little. It's not as if I've been
consistent in the way I've handled reporting the event over the last twenty
months. Maybe I should have thought about that before now...
I do usually begin with a post listing the demos I've chosen, giving some
reasons for my choices. This is that post. Before I get to the names of the
games, though, I will just say that I found this Fall's selection
disappointing.
The event lasts a week, from the 9th to the 16th of October, and I was
planning on playing a demo every day. I thought the hard part would be
trimming my choices down to seven but that turned out to be wildly
optimistic.
I spent the best part of an hour last night and almost as long this morning,
going through the full slate, using all kinds of keywords and tags but also
just starting at the top and scrolling down. Two things happened:
I kept seeing the same demos over and over again because Steam's
categorization system sucks and I could barely find anything I could imagine
playing even for the length of a demo.
Most of that is down to me. My gaming tastes are a lot narrower than my tastes
in most entertainment media. I really only enjoy a handful of genres and I'm
pretty picky even within those. Even so, I found this quarter's choices
unusually uninspiring.
It was honestly a struggle coming up with half a dozen demos I was willing to
try and fully half of those were games I either already had wishlisted or have
been following for years. I'm certainly not complaining about getting the
chance to try three games I'm already interested in but that's not really
what I think of as the point of Next Fest.
It also means that after a couple of hours of fine-combing the options, I
could only come up with three new-to-me titles I felt were worth a look. And
honestly, two of those I really only picked to make up the numbers. I'm sure
that by the time the event ends, someone else will have posted a review of a
demo I would have loved to try that I never spotted - it happens every
time - but unless they do it soon it'll be too late for me to add it to the
roster.
Until and unless that happens, my picks for the latest Next Fest are as
follows:
Might as well start at the top. I've had this on my wishlist since the day
I heard about it. We're massive Moomin fans in this house and have been since
childhood. The house is peppered with Moomin memorabilia and I get
emails from the official Moomin Shop pretty much weekly.
You have to be very cautious with Moomin Merch. Not only is there a very wide
variance in quality but there are subdivisions between the original comic
strips, the novels, the TV series and the movie. Mostly my interest lies with
the novels although I have the highest respect for the comic strips, which
pre-date the prose. I'm more ambivalent over the TV and movie Moomins although
I'm not discounting their own intrinsic merits.
Snufkin: Melody of Moominvally leans heavily towards the end of the
franchise that interests me, at least visually. I guess I'll find out if it
also works that seam narratively when I play the demo.
The game self-describes as "an ambient and wholesome experience for both kids and adults", which sounds unequivocally appealing. It "combines open world-mechanics with puzzles, stealth and melodic elements", which sounds more like something I'll need to see for myself before
approving.
Which is the whole point of having a demo, right? Super-looking forward to
this one!
This is also on my wishlist and I've mentioned it here
before. It's a known entity, having already been a big success on Switch,
Android and iOS. It also holds the
Guiness World Record
for "Most users in a concert-themed virtual world", although Guiness
World Records certainly aren't worth what they were when I was a kid.
Sky is an MMO although possibly not an MMORPG. The Steam page describes
it as "a peaceful, award-winning MMO designed to help players meaningfully connect
with one another."
Wikipedia
goes into detail about the mechanics employed to support and encourage those
meaningful connections and they are many. I imagine I'll just stump around on
my own, talking to no-one, as usual but we'll see. Maybe there'll be
Kool-Aid.
The graphics look lovely, which is what mainly attracted me to the game in the
first place, shallow butterfly that I am. I'm hoping the open-world
exploration will be entrancing enough on its own without any need to get
involved in all that awkward "socializing" but as with Snufkin, for
once I'm genuinely glad to have a demo available for a game I was already
thinking of buying. It'll be very good to find out these things before I spend money.
This is the one just about everyone reading this is likely at least to
have heard of already. It's one of several in-development "spiritual successors" to the much-missed super-hero MMORPG City of Heroes. At least,
CoH was much missed until it inconveniently returned as an exceptionally
successful emulator project, thereby holing most of the would-be alternatives
below the waterline.
That's what you get for taking a super-hero death at face value. Did they not
know a "dead" super-hero always comes back?
The passage of time plus the cost of development already seemed to have seen
off most of the would-be wearers of the new super-hero MMORPG cape anyway. The
emulator's runaway success merely confirmed what most people probably already
thought, which was that none of these projects would ever see full
release. As this demo suggests, however, like a good super-hero, SoH isn't going
under without a fight.
I'm not personally interested in playing the game if
and when it launches. Despite being a lifelong super-hero fan, I don't
actually like super-hero games very much. They rarely seem to capture anything
about the genre that attracts me to it, usually feeling much more like a
mish-mash of gaming tropes smushed inelegantly into a lump, like a parked car crushed
by the Hulk when he needs something to throw.
The only thing that's ever held my attention in a super-hero game is a direct
connection to a pre-existing property, usually one published by Marvel or DC. Without those IPs doing
the heavy emotional lifting I find it very hard to care about the generic
caped and costumed crimefighters of the likes of Champions or City of Heroes.
I also don't really see Next Fest as a particularly appropriate platform for
MMORPGs of any stripe. I want to be in and out of a demo in no more than an
hour, tops. The real demos for MMORPGs are alphas and betas, even the shortest of which have traditionally taken up at least a whole
weekend of my time.
Nevertheless, I feel almost bound by duty to give this one a look, even though
the trailer they've created specifically for Next Fest is terrible. I
guess there's still a chance the gameplay may hook me and I'll play all week
but I doubt it. I imagine it'll get the same hour or so the rest get and
that'll be plenty.
And those are the three games I already knew. Now for the three I'd not heard
of, at least two of which I can I genuinely say I'm still not all that interested in, now I have.
I'll be playing the demos for those two more in the hope of being surprised
by joy than in the expectation of having a great time.
This is the one I'm most hopeful for, although I only spotted it right at
the end, when I was about to give up the hunt. Its Steam page calls it "A Victorian steampunk RPG with tarot cards instead of dice" which ticks a number of my boxes, albeit some of them with fairly faint pencil.
Graphically it looks great, all fog, brass and blunderbusses. Mechanically it
sounds intriguing, with a "tarot card chance system" that allows for
problem-solving by way of "combat, persuasion, magic, explosives".
Steam, in its often fatuous attempt to compare the game with something else
I've played, offers up Disco Elysium, a frequently-made comparison that
almost never stands close examination. This time, though, looking at the
screenshots, I can see the clear influence, if only in design. The developers also claim the Baldur's Gate and Divinity:Original Sins series as role models, which is at least topical, if nothing else. It'll be
interesting to find out if anything of that stands up to experience.
I'd be a deal more excited about this one if I hadn't just spent 98 hours
playing Dawnlands. It looks to be another of the myriad of games hoping
to bottle some of Valheim's magic, although in this case it's a brew heavily laced with Amazon's New World. The trailer makes much of the active
combat, weapon types and skill system but also of the voxel-based world and
all the building prospects that affords.
I'm in a bit of a bind with these kinds of games. I find them very compelling.
I can lose hour after hour to the explore-gather-craft-build loop. They do
seem to have a natural cut-off point, though, after which interest just drops to
nothing. I'm good so long as there's a new biome to discover and explore but
once that stops I can't really see the point of hanging around.
That's obviously not going to be a problem with a demo but conversely there's
going to be no incentive whatsoever to put in the kind of determined effort
the genre demands if you hope to get anywhere. I'll be interested to see if the
developers have done anything to circumvent that problem for the specific purposes of filling
this shop window.
If not, I guess I'll just be running around, dressed in rags and taking a lot
of screenshots. I can think of worse ways to spend an afternoon.
And finally, for a complete contrast, here comes Captain Pawsome. I
did quite deliberately pick this as something I wouldn't normally play, so I 'd
have something a little different to post about for a change, although now I come to write about it, I'm not as convinced as I was about just how different it's going to be.
You might be surprised how hard it was for me to find something that was both
"different" but that I could also stand the thought of actually
playing. I was. I looked at dozens and dozens of possibles and dismissed them
all in a matter of seconds with "Nope" or "Not likely" or "No way in Hell!"
This one has several merits from my perspective. The titular Captain is a cat.
I like cats. Gameplay involves fishing, crafting and collecting. I like all of
those. There doesn't seem to be any jumping, puzzling or combat of any kind,
which means the whole thing should at least be functionally completable by me
although whether I'll have the patience to catch all those fish is another
question.
On the debit side, the music is really annoying but I guess I can turn
it down. Or off. Other than that, it looks like it could be fun.
Those are the demos I've chosen. All I have to do now is play them. I suppose
I'd best get started.
Today's post is a bit of a follow-up to
one I wrote back in May, which was itself the forerunner to
this one
from a couple of days ago. It was going to be a "First Impressions" too,
only now it's not, for reasons that will become apparent.
At the time, I said I'd wait until Coreborn went into Early Access to
give it a try "if it's cheap enough". The date set for EA was 18 July and I'm
pleased to say that date was met. The game is now
available to play on Steam, where it will cost you £15.95 (Do your own conversion to Dollars, Euros,
Groats or whatever it is they use around your place.)
That's the introductory sale price. There's a 24% discount until 25 July, when
it goes back to the full £20.99. Presumably it's 24% off rather than the far
more comfortable 25% so as to get a discounted price that ends in a five.
Numerology is real.
I had the opportunity to
play the game
during the last Next Fest. I was pretty hot on it but even so I
wasn't planning on jumping onboard the first passing build. I said I was
going to "keep it in mind for a later, more fully-functional release, particularly
one where progress won't be wiped."
The Early Access FAQ, which is gratifyingly open and straightforward, makes it
more than clear most of the content isn't just unfinished - it's unstarted.
There's a long road yet to travel before we reach anything you'd call
completion: "We anticipate the game being in early access for one to two years", they say, which, if previous experience is anything to go by, might easily
stretch to four or five.
Add to that the proposed payment model: "Once we leave Early Access, we intend for the game to be free to play" and I don't feel much like throwing money in Coreborn's general direction.
It is an odd place we've reached, isn't it? We pay to play unfinished content
that we could have for nothing if we'd only wait until it's done. It's lucky
for the developers that most gamers seem to have the attention span of a
kitten on ritalin and the patience of a toddler having a meltdown.
Coreborn reminds me a little of Project: Gorgon in that it's starting out
with a very playable base game but also with big intentions to add many more
features. As several bloggers of note have found out, that kind of slow,
incremental development, even when sustained with admirable determination and
consistency, can lead to a feeling of disconnection.
There never seems to be a good time to commit to the game in the way it
requires because everything is constantly in flux. The game is always going to
be better if you hold off for a while. No-one with any self-control can ever
get going.
I own a copy of Project:Gorgon thanks to backing the final
Kickstarter but I've barely played it since it went into official Early
Access, more than five years ago. If that seems like a long time, the P:G EA
FAQ is even more unflinching in its honesty than Coreborn's: "Based on our experience with the game's development to date, and accounting
for the quantity and quality of content and polish we aim to hit, we expect
that Project: Gorgon will be in Early Access until it's ready."
For my money (That I paid more than half a decade ago.) Project:Gorgon has been
fit to be declared "ready" for years, now. MMORPGs are famously never
feature-complete and you only have to read
Stingite's many posts on the game
over at The Friendly Necromancer to appreciate just how much content
there is already. You'd have no problem settling down there and playing for
months
Should you feel like doing that, now would be a great time to start. The
game's
currently discounted a massive 75%, down from £30.99 to £7.74 (Someone's not scared of even numbers...). The
reason for the sale is
an unusual one. One of the founders is rather ill and they need someone to take a bit of
the weight.
And apparently sales really do bring in the money: "Our last sale went really well and allowed us to work with the indomitable
Nick — the engineer responsible for most of the last year-plus of QoL (Quality
of Life) improvements. Imagine what we can do with another Nick".
Even though I might seem to be cheerleading for getting in early, I have to say
I won't be taking my own advice where Coreborn's concerned. My experience
with P:G tells me I'd be better holding off until the game's a lot closer to
whatever counts as "done". Even the very
brief and perfunctory
look at the current EA build carried out by MMOBomb suggests it's pretty
much the same game I played in Next Fest and that was definitely going to take a
while before it was ready for primetime.
None of those caveats really apply to Sky: Children of the Light. It's not an
in-development title at all. It's a popular, critically-successful live game
already up-and-running on Android and iOS. The only thing that's
new about it is it's imminent arrival on PC.
Sky, as I'm going to call it from now on, is currently celebrating it's fourth
birthday and there's a party going on. Judging by the video developer
That Game Company chose to put up on YouTube, it's one you'd be well
advised to skip.
Seriously, it looks horrifically bad. Like someone took a blowtorch to
a Roblox instance. Don't take my word for it. Judge for yourself.
Why anyone would use something like that to promote their game beats me. Maybe
you need to be twelve to appreciate it - although even as I write the words, I
realise I'm insulting tweens everywhere. It looks more like the kind of party
a particularly culturaly inept parent might imagine a twelve-year-old would
like. Thankfully, the video is at least short.
The other video they put up to showcase in-game selfie feature, is is far more
appealing. I like these kinds of built-in photo suites more and more, to the
point that playing older games that don't have them is starting to feel a bit
strange. I'd love to have a go with this one.
After I watched the video I went to Steam to wishlist Sky, only to find I
already had. There was no news of a release date but as I was looking it
occured to me that maybe I didn't need to wait. Didn't I used to play Android
games on my PC with some app or other?
Unfortunately, Nox doesn't seem quite to have kept up with the times. It's
still there but it seems to be stuck on Android 9. The current version
is 12 with 13 due in August. I re-installed Nox and tried anyway but all I got
was the old favorite, "This app is incompatible with your device".
Nox isn't the only Android Emulator game in town, not by a long shot. It's not
even the best-known. That would be
Bluestacks. Back in 2019, when I first tried doing this, Bluestacks was supposed to be a
bit more effort to set up, which is why I went with Nox. I don't know if that
was really true then but now it's incredibly easy. Unfortunately, Bluestacks
won't run Sky for me either.I downloaded and installed Bluestacks X, the
version that runs in the cloud and also Bluestacks 5, the one that runs
on your own PC. That was the easy part.
The hard part was getting Sky to run on either of them. It was so hard, in
fact, I never managed to do it at all. I spent the best part of two hours
tinkering with all kinds of options, following suggested settings from the
official Bluestacks website, from reddit, from YouTube...
nothing worked.
After a lot of tinkering (Most of which I really enjoyed, if I'm honest,
although I'd have enjoyed it a lot more if any of it had gotten me into the
game.) I finally ran across
a reddit thread
that suggested Sky had been working fine on Bluestacks until about three days
ago, when an update screwed things up.
Timing. It's all about the timing.
There was a response to the thread from Bluestacks Support saying they were
looking into it so I figured the best thing to do would be to wait and see if
they'd fix whatever the update broke. I'll try and remember to give it a try
in a few days.
If that doesn't work, I guess I'll just have to wait for the Steam launch like
a normal person. It ought to be easy but of course it won't. You know the old,
familiar feeling; you can have a hundred games ready, all of them just begging
you to log in and have fun, but it's always the one that's unavailable for
some reason that you just have to play right now...
Sod it. I'm going to go watch The Owl House instead.
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