What I'm (Not) Playing...

Now I'm done with Baldur's Gate 3, it's time to get back to where I was before I interrupted myself. So, where was that, exactly?

I bought BG3 on New Year's Day. It was the last in a line of Steam purchases I handily laid out in a post on the same day, saving me the trouble of listing them here. Except that's kind of what I'm going to do anyway.

There's a nice, neat, round dozen titles in the screenshot I used, which for convenience and out of laziness I'll repeat below. Of those twelve games, six haven't even been installed yet, much less played. The untouched half-dozen are:

Dustborn

Spire Horizon Online

Cat Detective Albert Wilde

Brok the Investigator

Penny Larceny: Gig Economy Supervillain

Sovereign Syndicate

 

I looked at most of them last night, wondering which I ought to play next. My immediate preference was Sovereign Syndicate, (Currently available in a double deal with Esoteric Ebb if you haven't got either.) which I remember from a previous Next Fest as being quite entertaining, but when I saw it was a 10gb download I balked. 

Why was that? I have plenty of drive space. 10gb on Steam generally takes a few minutes at most. I could have made a coffee and come back to an installed game. And yet it seemed like it would be too much trouble. 

I flipped through the rest. Dustborn is 25gb so that was a non-starter Albert Wilde is 13gb. Ditto. I didn't want another MMORPG so Spire Horizon Online was out. (We'll ignore Ashes of Creation for the same and other obvious reasons.) 

Brok was only 2gb and Penny Larceny just 500mb. It was a toss-up between those two until I noticed three of the games were already installed. Can't get a smaller download than no download at all.

Of the three, Steins;Gate I already played (For 38 minutes.) and it bored me rigid so forget that one. If I want to read a book I'll just read a book and a better book than that, too. That left Beyond Two Souls and Road 96. 

As I said in the post linked above, I have literally no idea what Beyond Two Souls is. Nor do I have any clue where I heard about it or why I added it to my Steam library, much less why I installed it. I certainly haven't played it. I don't need Steam giving me a Time Played of 0 minutes to be sure of that. 

Looking it up, something I didn’t bother to do when I wrote the previous post, apparently, I remember now that I came across it when I was reading about Elliot Page (Ellen Page at the time the actor played the lead role in the game.) although why I would have been reading about him in the first place remains a mystery. It's an action-adventure a little over a decade old. Apparently there's a TV series in development. I might wait for that. 

Road 96, though, I could remember. At least I could remember how I heard about it and why I downloaded it. Tyler F. M. Edwards wrote about it on his blog last November and I thought it sounded right up my street. Naturally, having taken possession of the game, I felt no immediate desire to do anything with it, least of all play it, which is how these things usually go with me.

By dint of already being there, ready to play, and not being a completely unknown proposition, last night was Road 96's big chance. I logged in, answered a bunch of the kind of questions they ask you at training seminars, started to watch a cut scene and then Mrs Bhagpuss came in and said tea was ready so I logged out again.

Actually, the game wouldn't let me log out. I had to tab out and kill it from the taskbar, which didn't endear it to me. These days, games that can neither be paused nor closed down at an instant's notice don't make it far up my playlist. Still, I won't let that put me off. Road 96 will get another chance. Just not right now.

Observant readers may have noticed there's one game on the list I haven't mentioned. That's Slay the Spire. I have actually played that one. For exactly an hour.

I bought it because a) several bloggers I follow have raved about it and b) it was super-cheap. Having bought it, I had the bright idea of seeing if it would run on my laptop. In theory, not many games will. 

As I wrote back on January 2, 2025, I bought a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad T480 to replace my incredibly ancient laptop. The T480 is about as far from a gaming laptop as you can get. It has integrated graphics and, according to Can You Run It?, can't run pretty much anything I own on Steam.

Except it can. Officially, the T480 can't, for example, run the Esoteric Ebb demo. It doesn't meet the minimum spec. Only, I played the demo very comfortably for over an hour on the laptop with no problems at all. It doesn't meet the min spec for Slay the Spire either but it runs the game perfectly.

The problem with Slay the Spire isn't running it on the laptop, which is the only way I'm likely to play it, last thing at night before I go to sleep, when there's nothing I want to watch on the streams and I'm not in the mood to go looking for new tunes on YouTube, meaning it's already right at the back of the queue. No, the problem with Slay the Spire is that it's a bit dull. 

It is, though, isn't it? I've put in exactly an hour so far and it's just fights. And they aren't very interesting fights. It's not very pretty to look at, there's no plot to speak of and the fights are all the same. I'm guessing it ramps up as you go along but to get far enough to see that happen, it would have make me want to keep playing and if it hasn't managed to do that in an hour, chances are it's never going to manage it. I may come back to it some day but it doesn't seem likely. 

So, after all of that, what am I playing? EverQuest II, of course.

When I said right at the top of the post that it was time to get back to where I was before I got assimilated by BG3, where I was back then was deep in the latest expansion for EQII, Rage of Cthurath. The last time I posted about that was on December 27, right before I started buying new games on Steam with the Steam cards I got for Christmas. 

At the time, I'd just finished the main storyline of the expansion and I was thinking about getting the final level needed to hit the new cap of 135. The Signature Questline itself leaves you stranded less than halfway through 134. Or it did me, anyway.

Since finishing BG3 I've played a couple of sessions of EQII, one of which I spent almost entirely working on side quests, quests started by dropped items and repeatable quests. I think I played for about an hour and a half doing those and I made barely 10% of a level.

Seriously, it was like the bad old days! It felt like grinding xp in Ye Olde EverQuest a couple of decades ago. I found myself checking the xp bar after every hand-in to see how far it had moved. 1.2% seemed about the average. And I had a 100% xp bonus potion running!

The conspiracy theory explanation would be that Darkpaw have intentionally made getting to the cap as awkward as possible so as to slow people down and keep the subs rolling in and/or increase sales of xp potions in the Cash Shop. Except that makes no sense because surely most regular players will have an annual subscription, if they didn't buy one of the Lifetime Subs that sold like hot cakes every time they were offered. And everyone has more free xp potions from Veteran Rewards than they know what to do with. 

I suspect it's more likely the current xp drought is a response to the complaints that poured in during the period when the signature questlines gave enough xp to hit the cap before you got halfway through. MMO devs have a long history of slewing back and forth, reacting and overreacting to customer complaints so as to be sure no-one is ever satisfied. This is probably just another example.

It's bloody annoying, whatever the reason. I was really in the mood to play some EQII but a session of that nonsense put the dampers on my enthusiasm pretty quickly. I will get Mordita, my Necromancer, to 135 but now I'm thinking I might wait until the new Game Update arrives in the hope it comes with a bunch of new quests that give decent xp. It's currently in beta so I shouldn't have long to wait.

In the past, that wouldn't have been an option. My Berserker has rarely been able to handle the increased difficulty level of a post-expansion GU right out the gate. The Necro, though... she feels a lot more capable. It's why I wanted to switch to her as expansion lead in the first place.

I haven't even upgraded any of her spells yet and she's strolling through the solo expansion content. If I take some time out to harvest enough rares for my Sage to make Expert upgrades for her key spells, I'd hope the new solo content that's coming ought to be in her range. 

And of course, harvesting rares is very relaxing. And satisfying. I can do it for hours in a kind of zen trance. What with that and decorating her new house, which is what she spent most of my second come-back session doing, I ought to be able to keep myself amused for a while.

It does make me wonder what I bought all those Steam games for...

The Minotaur Takes A Cigarette Break

Some games look really great in screenshots. Sovereign Syndicate isn't really one of them, which is a shame because it looks very good indeed while you're playing it. It uses a kind of angled, overhead perspective and has a fixed camera with no zoom function and also displays a huge dialog box all down the right side of the screen, all of which means it's next to impossible to get a shot that doesn't look... well, like a video game.

Sovereign Syndicate - SS for short - shares a good deal of its gaming DNA with its most obvious influence, Disco Elysium. I had exactly the same issue getting good shots to illustrate posts when I was playing that one, too. 

Not that that should put anyone off; it's purely a reviewer's problem. From the player's point of view, the whole thing looks stylish and feels very comfortable. I just mention it because I have a particular aversion to showing the UI in any game unless the UI is what's under discussion. But that's just me. For the purposes of a review, it's probably better to show the whole screen as it would appear if you were playing. Truth in advertising and all that.

On with the review, then. Of the demo, that is, although since a demo is supposed to be a shop window for the full game, I suppose it's fair to collate the two. 

Sometimes I feel I'm reviewing the demos as standalone mini-games rather than extended trailers for the finished product, which is hardly suprising given that's pretty much how I think of them. In this case, very unusually, I've played the demo twice, all the way through. I almost never do that. Why would I? More cogently, why did I?

In this instance it was because my first run-through made me realize I might have missed large sections of the demo even though it told me I'd completed the whole thing. That's always a possibility with games of this kind - visual novels, adventure games, mysteries, choices matter, whatever you want to call them - but not usually in the demo.

On my first playthrough, I got to the Game Over screen without having gone through a door I opened right at the beginning. Almost the first thing I did, after my character awoke from a drugged and drunken stupor, was open a padlock on a door next to him, where he was lying in a heap in the street. (Sets the tone, doesn't it?)

For various perfectly sound reasons I ended up not going through that door. I left it for later as I explored the area outside and somehow managed to play for three-quarters of an hour, a decent length for a demo, only to arrive at the ending without ever going back to the start

Tonight, after I came home from work and finished my tea, I sat down to write this quick review of the demo, which was when I realised I wasn't ready to do it until I'd seen what was on the other side of that door. I started over and once more rolled the dice to finesse the lock.

More accurately, I flipped a Tarot card. That's the conceit the game uses to represent RNG skill checks. It makes for an attractive visual trope and it's aesthetically in keeping with the milieu. How it's in any material way different from just rolling a dice I couldn't say but it makes a change.

I made the roll (See? It's still always going to be a "roll" even if it's a card.) and this time I made sure to go through the door right away. As it turned out, there was about as much to see and do on the far side as there was in the area I'd explored the night before. More, probably. 

There's a third potential route out of the opening location as well, meaning the demo could be even bigger, but although the game suggests it's possible, I haven't been able to find the means to pass the electrified fence that seperates the starting location from werewolf territory, which may be just as well.

This, of course, is a fundemental problem with both "choices matter" games and with those that use some form of skill check to determine if and when content becomes available. Sovereign Syndicate, which employs both branching dialog trees and skill rolls, also uses stat thresholds to block or enable certain options, meaning what you get to see and do depends a great deal on both chance and choice. 

It's an approach I welcome in theory if not always so much in practice. In most games that allow it, my clear preference is for a single playthrough, during which I hold my character to an imagined set of values and try to make all choices accordingly, whether or not they're in my best interest as a player. I like to think of the game as a window into a world where these things happen, not a workshopped rehearsal, where the actors go over and over the same lines until they find the ideal reading.

That does tend to collapse all the options although not generally as conclusively as happened during my first playthrough, where I made a choice that had me killed outright. To be fair, I did opt to "take the death dose" so I can't say I wasn't warned.

Curiously, in my second playthrough that option was greyed out. I hadn't passed some threshold that would allow my character even to consider such a course of action. I think I wasn't "world-weary" enough. Had I not played again, I wouldn't have known about that mechanic because in my first run-through, nothing was forbidden. In my second, several things were. 

I'm sure the game explained it at some point. The demo seems to be the opening of the game, which also acts as its own tutorial. There's always a lot to take in with games of this kind and it takes me much longer than a couple of hours to get to grips with the complex mechanics, which is, of course, a big part of the appeal.

All of this will be quite familiar to anyone who played Disco Elysium, as would the grimy, decaying urban setting, the heavy reliance on drugs and alcohol, the whispering voice in the back of your character's mind and the general sense of bitter disappointment and degradation. Even the color palette and font choices are reminiscent.

To that list you can also add an ominous and portentous running commentary and a writing team who know a lot of unfamiliar words and want to be sure you know about it. In the case of Sovereign Syndicate they're so keen for you to notice their impressive vocabulary, they highlight every word or phrase they suspect you might not know in yellow so you can mouse over it for a gloss.

I found that very irritating after a while, particularly since some of the words and phrases were quite ordinary or used inaccurately or mis-explained. The action takes place in a version of Victorian London but unlike another of Crimson Herring's obvious influences, Failbetter Games, the faux-Dickensian language isn't always employed either precisely or appropriately. I put this down to the designers not working in their first language until I looked them up and found they were Canadian.

Of course, SS takes place not in our Victorian London but in an alternate reality. In that context, as that eminent Victorian, Lewis Carroll might have put it, their words mean exactly what they say they do, so there's really no point my taking issue with their usages or definitions. 

Even so, if I had give Crimson Herring a single note as a result of playing the demo it would be that there should be an option in the finished game to turn that bloody highlighting off. I found it both distracting and annoying. Yes, of course you can just not hover your mouse over it but that would requires a real-life Self Discipline check I'd frequently fail.

Speaking of Self Discipline, it is indeed one of the four "Humours" that act as your basic stats, the others being Animal Instinct, Wit and Spryness. On my first playthrough Self Discipline was the one I emphasized, which makes me tediously predictable. I played Disco Elysium in exactly the same, strait-laced, humorless fashion. I'm not sure why I feel compelled to role-play the po-faced killjoy in every game that allows it and I probably don't want to find out.

In the second round, instead of primly refusing all temptation, I stole, drank and took all the drugs I was offered, which is probably why I was unable to "Take the death dose". The game clearly thought I was enjoying myself far too much to want to end it all. In my defence, the first time around I wasn't really filled with terminal ennui. I just didn't believe drinking the stuff would actually kill me!

I do like a game that lets you end yourself rather than do something you don't want to do, just because a mysterious stranger tries to bully you into doing it, but it does rather put a crimp in proceedings if there's also no Save function. There isn't any in the demo, at least as far as I could tell. There's an autosave but that's it.

Naturally, I would have saved before drinking the fatal draft if I could because I'm not a complete zealot. Since the option wasn't there, it was fortunate that I only had to replay the last conversation to get back to the fatal choice: to dream or not to dream. Come to think of it, I guess that was the autosave...

As I discovered on my second playthrough, the game isn't going to allow you to skip the dream sequence. It's the pay-off. I thought there might be some way around it but if there was I didn't find it. Even though my relentless robbing and thieving left me with far more money than I'd been able to acquire by being morally correct, I didn't get any chance to spend it. Behaving like an amoral thug, willing to fight anyone over anything, didn't get me anywhere either. 

It did allow me to see a couple of mechanics I hadn't experienced in the first run-through, though. Fight sequences are determined by the draw of a Tarot card with the result being represented by a series of striking black and white illustrations. It's an elegant and appealing solution to the problem of representing physical confrontation in a mostly conversational game.

There's a more detailed description of the full game to be found at Crimson Herring's website than you can see on the Steam page but both of them mention the "open world" aspect of the game. Some of that openness is evident in the demo but the overall experience is more guided than it first appears.

If a game is going to offer a number of parallel paths all leading to the same end, it needs to be exceptionally well-constructed. On the evidence of the demo I suspect SS might need a little tightening here and there. 

There was one odd encounter with a watchman that didn't seem to make sense, as he told me I couldn't go any further but then ignored me completely when I did. I thought it was going to be a stealth encounter, where I'd have to time my movements so he didn't see me but we ended up jostling past each other on the stairs and he made no move to stop me or even to acknowledge my existence.

Perhaps more concerningly, on my first playthrough I came across a notice asking for information about two missing orphans, a brother and sister. I accepted a mission to find them, but the demo ended before I had a chance to do anything about it. On my second playthrough, I ran across the said sister, being menaced in a sewer. I frightened off her assailant and agreed to help her find her brother,adding a mission to that effect to my journal. When I emerged from the sewer a little later, I found the same notice about the missing orphans and it also added a mission to my to-do list, even though I'd just been speaking to one of the orphans in question. 

That wouldn't need to be a paradox if the game acknowledged the synchronicity but as far as I could tell it didn't. The again, I don't want to sound too critical because I can't be absolutely sure exactly what information was added to the Journal. I didn't check at the time and I can't go back and do it now because of the lack of a save function. I'd have to play through the whole thing a third time and I'm not doing that just for science.

Whether or not the writers have covered the conflicting quest issue or not, the fact that it felt jarring when it happened is an indicator that, while Sovereign Syndicate may remind me strongly of Disco Elysium it isn't really quite up there with its role-model, at least not yet. 

It's unfair to compare a completed game with a demo for a work in progress. It may well be that any anomalies of this sort will all have been ironed out by the time the game launches, which according the Steam Store is due to happen next January. What won't have changed by then is the quality of the writing which, while very good, isn't quite of a standard with Za/Um's exceptional work. 

From what I saw in the demo, Sovereign Syndicate is a well-written, well-constructed but moderately traditional adventure game, set in a striking but fundementally familiar setting. The Victorian steampunk milieu is lovingly realised and delightfully drawn but it's about as mainstream these days as high fantasy was fifteen or twenty years ago. Disco Elysium, on the other hand, is like nothing I've played before or since.

That's not a complaint, just an observation. I'd like to see someone make another Disco Elysium, sure, but until someone does, I'll happily take this instead. I like Victorian steampunk well enough and while it's done often it's not often done as well as this. I liked all the clunky, idiosyncratic automata with vapor hissing from their joints, the subterranean opium dens furnished in faded red velvet, the dark alleys poorly lit by gaslight and the grimy squares paved with flagstones...

There are strange cults and low-key magic and sparking electric fences built to keep the werewolves out... or is that in? The protagonist is a minotaur, the opium den is run by centaurs... there's plenty to keep even a jaded steampunk veteran guessing, although I suspect steampunk purists might bristle a little at the inclusion of quite so many mythical and fantastic beasts.

According to the website, the full game will offer a choice of three playable characters. The demo only offers one, the minotaur, who goes by the somewhat unfortunate name of Atticus Daley. I couldn't stop myself from thinking of him as Arthur Daley, the character so memorably played for many years by George Cole in the eighties' TV show Minder. I guess that's only going to be a problem for British players of a certain age.

For that reason alone, when the finished game arrives I'll probably play either Clara Reed - "a corsair with a checkered past" or Otto, an automaton. I imagine to get the full experience you'll need to play the whole thing at least three times, once as each of them.

On the evidence of the demo, that's something I might even do. I've wishlisted Sovereign Syndicate and there's a better than average chance I'll follow through and buy it. It may not be the new Disco Elysium but it's shaping up to be a pretty good game in its own right.

Fishing For Fun : Next Fest In Fall

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:

Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley

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!

Sky: Children of the Light

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.

Ship of Heroes

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.

Sovereign Syndicate

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.

Enshrouded

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.

Captain Pawsome

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.