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. 

Another Summer, Another Next Fest

Here we go again. Can't say I'm feeling as thrilled as I might be. Could it be they run these a tad too often? Maybe the whole idea of dumping a couple of thousand demos in a big heap on the floor and expecting everyone to pick through them to find everything worth trying, then finish playing it all before the end of the week is a bit much.

Or perhaps it's just that Next Fest is an event that fits more comfortably into the darker evenings and damper days of winter than the bright, light, warm summer months. But maybe that's just me. 

Whatever, I did manage to pick my half-dozen demos on Monday evening. I was working yesterday so I had no chance to play any of them but that's okay, I guess. Six demos, six days left. Should be able to get through them all, I'd hope.

First, though, why don't I list them all so we can see what we're looking at? Conscious of how predictable I am, I did make some slight attempt at variety although as usual I haven't even poked my head out of the foxhole of my comfort zone. 

I'd give notes on my methodology, if I had one but all I did was look at the Recommended For You banner first, then scroll down the Browse All Titles column until I lost the will to carry on, at which point I regressed to selecting some familiar genres and sub-genres from the drop-down menu. 

I think I'd only looked at Point and Click and Turn-Based Strategy titles before I'd filled my quota. Usually I throw in Visual Novel, RPG and a few others but I didn't need them this time. I did check out the eleven demos listed as MMORPGs but most of them didn't seem even remotely like anything I'd include under that heading. I did pick one from that pot and it was the obvious one. I'll start there.

Spiritvale - "A class-based action MMO inspired by classic RPGs. Explore a fractured world of monsters and ruins, build your own playstyle, and fight alongside friends in real-time, cooperative combat."

I'd seen an itemm or two about this one at MassivelyOP so I recognized the name but that was about all. Nothing they've written about it has caught my interest so far. 

I had the vague impression it might be some sort of cozy crafting and building game but reading the detailed description on the Store page it seems a lot more combat-focused than that. In fact, based on the screenshots and videos they're sharing there, it would  appear to be a game where babies fight monsters. Weird. I guess I'll find out more when I play it. Can't say I'm looking forward to it much.  

Over The Hill - "Explore the world in the golden age of offroading. Drive iconic vehicles from the 60s to 80s by yourself or with friends through challenging trails and beautiful scenery."

Remember Outbound from last time? Here it is again! Let's just hope they remembered to put a game in there this time.

Unfair, I guess, but I have bad feelings towards Outbound thanks to the way it majorly underperformed when I picked it for Wilhelm's Fantasy Critic League. Over The Hill looks slicker and more like a driving game. I like driving games, in theory, although I'm very, very bad at them. At least in this one you're meant to come off the road.

Hawthorn -  "Former developers from Bethesda, BioWare, and Naughty Dog bring you the sandbox RPG realm of anthropomorphic animals and fairy creatures. This early Proof-of-Concept Demo is an intentional look back at where Hawthorn's development journey began and an invitation to shape the future of Hawthorn!"

Now this one does look interesting. Made by people who might possibly know what they're doing for one thing. And right up my street with all the anthropomorphic animals and the heavy twee factor. 

The downside is that it's in super-early development. We're not even talking alpha here, just "proof of concept". That means if it's good it'll be a long wait but also it could change out of all recognition by the time it gets here. 

On the other hand, if it's bad, I guess it could get better. Acorn cup half-full and all that.

The Fifth Bell - "The Fifth Bell is a premium 2D point-and-click mystery adventure set in 1994 Europe. Investigate hidden mechanisms, decode historical clues, and stop a forbidden instrument before it is awakened."

This could not look more like a classic Point and Click from the '90s. It's even set in the fricken' '90s! Someone obviously looked at Broken Sword and thought "We could do that!" I hope they're right. 

This is also an interesting little test-case for AI use, judging by the AI statement at the end of the description. In the previous paragraph, I was about to type "and the graphics look fantastic" when it occurred to me to check if they were hand-drawn or if AI was involved. 

It's instructive that it even occurred to me to wonder. It's not a thing I normally think about so something must have triggered in my backbrain. It was the only demo on this list where it even occurred to me to check. And guess what?

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

"Pre-generated AI tools were utilized to create the foundation for the 2D background art, character sprites, and audio. All of these raw assets were then extensively edited, cropped, and manually integrated by hand to ensure they perfectly fit the game's mechanics, atmosphere, and engine requirements."

Now isn't that interesting? Somehow I could just sense it. 

The results are excellent so does it matter? It will to some people but if the game is good, will Point and Click fans deprive themselves of the pleasure of playing because of the faint, lingering AI taint? Looking forward to finding out if makes any difference to my enjoyment or appreciation as I'm actually playing rather than just thinking about it.

Monstopia - "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."

I deliberately didn't search for detective games this time. I've played enough demos now to be fairly sure I don't like them nearly as much in practice as I do in theory. I read plenty of detective novels and watch plenty of detective shows but I'm not one of those people who tries to figure out who did it before the reveal and it turns out that having to do all the investigating yourself doesn't feel so much like having fun as like having a really tedious, annoying job to do.

This one appealed to me for the setting more than the detection, anyway. The set-up reminds me of Dead End: Paranormal Park and I just happened to be wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Courtney on the front as I was picking my demos so it felt like a bit of an omen. (Omen might not be the best word to choose when you're talking about things demonic...) Courtney's my favorite demon, by the way. Who's yours?

The gameplay sounds unusual, too. Not sure I've ever conducted a job interview in a game before let alone a whole series of them. Got to be better than interviewing suspects although I wouldn't be surprised if there's some of that in there, too.

Wild Tactics - "A character-driven turn-based tactical strategy game where planning and positioning decide every fight. Lead a squad of wild agents with shady pasts through high-pressure missions, manage their relationships, and make hard calls that shape every operation in the crime-ridden city of Clawville."

I have to say, this one looks great. More anthropomorphic animals, a 50's neon noir sheen, strong visual design and allegedly a "killer soundtrack" although I'll withhold judgment until I hear it. Gameplay looks solidly X-Com, which is fine with me. I liked the combat in that game. It was everything else I couldn't stand.

And that's the six. I do still have a couple of other demos in hand that I downloaded a while ago and haven't gotten around to playing yet, so I might throw one or two of those in as well. Depends how much I have to say about these six and how much time I have to play.

I might, if I can bring myself to do it, try not to write two thousand world reviews of all of these as though I was reviewing the finished game. Really goes against the grain to keep it short but posts on demos are about the least-popular thing I ever publish here. Even music posts do better. And it does seem a bit like overkill, going into that much detail over a demo that takes maybe half an hour to play. I'd quite like to do what other people do and keep it down to a paragraph or two for each of them

 Yeah. We'll see if that happens...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In The Event...

Just three days ago, Kay at Kay Talks Games was looking at Steam's Hidden Object Fest and saying how nice it is that the platform hosts such events for anyone that cares to put one together. I have no interest in hidden object games but the post started me thinking about how quite a few bloggers in this part of the 'sphere, myself included, jump on Next Fest just about every time it rolls around and yet hardly anyone mentions any of the other Steam "Fests" or events.

I don't even have any idea how many there are, much less what they're about. Is there always one running, every week for the whole year, except when there's a seasonal sale on? More than one? And why doesn't Steam really publicize these things? 

There's that pop-up window that appears the first time you log in that tells you about some promotion or other, usually some kind of sale from a specific publisher, but even when Next Fest runs I sometimes have to dig around a little to find it.I certainly never seem to get any emails about Steam events, whereas other publishers deluge me with press releases and promos (/wave Square Enix.)

Did you know, for example, that there are two events on right now?  One is getting the pop-up treatment and the other isn't. Unless , of course, they're taking turns.

The one in the shop-window today is Lovecraftian Days, "The fourth annual celebration of the widespread influence of the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the cosmic horror genre in gaming ", hosted by Fulqrum Publishing. I'm not a big Lovecraft fan but I clicked through anyway, just to see what was there and after I pushed my way through the inevitable forest of tentacles, I came to Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened.

I'm a lot more interested in Holmes than I am in Cthulhu. A 90% discount on a £39.99 game from 2023 with a Very Positive rating seemed like a tempting prospect. I was pondering on whether I'd actually get around to playing it when I spotted a banner across the top of the game's Store page. It read   

Hmm. Weird. A Sale Event within a Sale Event? What was that all about? 

So I clicked on the banner. It took me to the expanded version, which looks like this:

Half an hour's browsing later and here I am, writing about it. I have a couple of things to say and the first is, who knew there were so many crowdfunded games? 

Not me, for sure. I mean, I feel like I ought to have known but I really didn't. When I think about it, though, it seems obvious. I must read about a new fundraiser at least every few days and those are just the ones in the genres the niche gaming sites I follow feel the need to cover. Anything that's not some kind of MMO or RPG probably isn't going to ping my radar at all.

Then there's the spread. These are games old, new and yet-to-be. There are some titles in the sale that have been around for years, names you'll recognize, like My Time At Portia or Sunless Sea. There are games just about to launch that you also might recognize by name, things like Outbound or Your Crown Is Mine, both out in May. And then there are the games with no launch date at all, just "crowdfunding soon". Games from developers who, presumably, would still like you to chip in so they can get them finished. 

There were more games than I could readily evaluate. I scrolled through what seemed like hundreds of titles and didn't get to the end. I'm not sure how many crowdfunding platforms for games there are. They can't all be Kickstarters, surely?

Those were the games the event organizers were hoping you might buy or fund but of much more interest to me were the demos. I only knew there were demos because one of the sort categories is "Top Demos". I started scrolling and it went on and on. If those are the top ones it makes me wonder how many there might be with the middle and bottom ones thrown in. 

And that was when I started to wonder why we make such a big deal of Next Fest if there are always dozens of demos just waiting to be played. I like playing and reviewing demos and it's a long time between Next Fests or it can feel like it. It'd be good to have another snack of them between-times.

So I had a look at what they had and I picked a few. Not too many. I can't be sure of finding the time to play, let alone review them.  For Next Fests I usually go for six to eight but this time I settled on four,

And they are:

Lucy Dreaming - "Discover a dark family secret and rid a young girl of her nightmares in this splendidly British point & click comedy adventure. Playing as sharp-witted Lucy, explore both dreams and reality to meet all the colourful characters who'll help you solve puzzles, gather clues and find a murderer."

When it comes to games, normally I just have to see the words "British" and "Comedy" in the same sentence and I'm on to the next. It almost always means labored Monty Python or Terry Pratchett pastiches and I'd had more than enough of those by the '90s. I liked the illustration for this one, though, and the title. And it's a point&click...

I watched thirty seconds of video. It was... mildly amusing, no more than that. But much more importantly it wasn't Pythonesque. Or Pratchetty (Can that be right?) 

I heard Lucy say "I bloody love queuing, me!" and I was in. Self-deprecating irony and cultural stereotyping! Now that's British comedy! And the developers, Tall Story Games, are based in Telford, so they'd need a sense of humor....

Phoenix Springs -  "Lose yourself in Phoenix Springs – a modern point-and-click set in a mysterious neo-noir world. It begins with an investigation: find your brother Leo. You already know where it ends."

Arthouse point&click with an aggressively over-designed visual style. Featured review quotes on the Store page from the New York Times and the Guardian. Ah, I know where we are!

I'm always up for a bit of pretension and the voice-over on the trailer is deliciously dry. Just hope it doesn't take itself too seriously.

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!"

Didn't even look at the video. Saw the title, read the description, hit download.  

It's just as well I didn't. I have watched it now and if I'd had to listen to that caterwauling racket, I'd most likely have passed. Visuals are good though. If the story is too, maybe I'll play it with the sound off.

Habromania - "A dreamy Alice in Wonderland-inspired RPG that follows 19-year-old Alice as she tries to escape the surreal, cozy hellscape that is Wonderland—hopefully with her sanity intact."

Not even sure this one is in the event. I might have just grabbed it when I was looking at the Store before this all started, when I was checking the price of Equinox: Homecoming, whose demo (That I wanted to finish.) no longer works since the game launched. I'll almost certainly grab it if it goes on sale again at a decent discount.

Back to Habromania: it looks charming but I'm curious as to why Alice is nineteen. that seems weird. In the books she's seven, which is one hell of a leap. Would any of the story work if Alice was an adult instead of a child? Then again, there are so many versions of Alice, I guess by now she's whatever people want her to be.

And that's the lot. If I play them I promise I'll write about them but I'm not promising I'll play them. I probably will, though. I mean, how long does it take to play a demo? 

Oh, and Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened? Never did get around to buying it. 

Stars (Out Of) Reach

This is going to be a very short post. Although I've said that before...

It's been a long time since I took a look at Stars Reach. I'm pretty sure it will never be a game for me, no matter how much they tart it up and fill it out, but even as a curiosity it was already wearing very thin last time I played.

Still, I haven't forgotten about it completely, not least because Playable Worlds keep on sending me emails about how things are going. I can't fault them for information flow, even if some of their priorities seem a little skewed. Is it really a good use of resources to pump out detailed guides on how to roleplay specific races when the game is still in pre-alpha?

There was a big flag - yellow if not actually red - back in February, when layoffs were announced. The whole industry is struggling as we know, so that wasn't as much of a surprise at is might have been, but having to let people go before you're even out of pre-alpha does seem like it might indicate a more serious problem.

Then this week I received a couple of slightly strange emails. No, that's underselling it. I got five in five days. 

One was a promo for the new update - The Crucible - which looks like a substantial revamp of the starting experience. That's something they've been tweaking for a while but this would seem to be the finished version. Well, the latest finished version, anyway. I'm sure it won't be the last.

The email describes the update as "a big one" and suggests now would be a great time to "jump back in" if you've been away for a while. I think the last time I played was September 2025. I guess six months counts as a while. Seemed like it might be worth taking another look.

I gave it a little thought but I didn't do much about it beyond re-install the client in case the mood took me to log in. Then I got another email, telling me there were a thousand more keys available for new testers. That didn't interest me personally. The last thing I need is another key for Stars Reach. I already have three and it's confusing enough. I only use one and I'm not even sure it's the one I paid for with my Kickstarter pledge.

I did wonder why they were inviting more people, though. In the past, I think key giveaways have been part of a promotional drive of some kind. Or maybe they were short of testers?

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, Stars Reach is one of those rare games in development where you can see how many people are playing. That's because it's only available on Steam, which means a public day-by-day record of activity via the Steam Chart. 

I may be misunderstanding something about the testing process and Steam here, in which case please feel free to correct me in the comments. I certainly hope I've got something wrong because the Steam Chart doesn't make very encouraging reading.

I'm not sure I've looked at the charts for SR before. I certainly don't remember the numbers being so small. Can it really be true that the most players ever online at the same time was fewer than two hundred? 

In a way, that makes a little more sense when you consider the testing schedule of a year ago. The server was only up for a few hours at a time, a few days a week. I certainly found it very inconvenient so I guess others did, too.

For the last few months, though, uptime has been much longer, with the server staying up for days. And yet the numbers have been falling quite dramatically. The average number of players online had barely ever hit double figures and February saw an all-time low.

I'm finding these number very hard to accept. Surely there have to be more people playing than that? I must be missing something.

It would explain the recruitment drive, though. And so would the next email I received, which warned me one of my keys was about to expire. I'd never claimed it and now Playable Worlds was purging unused testing spots and "releasing unused keys on March 31 to make room for new players."

Whether there are any new players waiting to take them up remains to be seen, although I notice there was an uptick in interest with the Crucible update, almost a 50% increase in concurrency. Or fifteen more players, to put it another way.

There's a recent reddit thread that asks "Whatever happened to Stars Reach?", a question Raph Koster dropped by to answer. His comment begins "We are still working away, putting out updates every three weeks like we have been for the last 18 months. The game is open to testers most days of the week." 

As many commenters in the rest of the very well-mannered thread suggest, though, there's a very long way to go. Several make the point that there's no game there yet, nor indeed much sign of what game will ever be there. That was my main reason for dropping back from testing. 

A new player experience, though, a tutorial - that I could test. It's likely to be a relatively directed, coherent, finite sequence of curated events because a tutorial pretty much has to be, even in a sandbox. I thought I'd give it a go and get a post or two out of it.

And I have, in so far as this is a post about my experience of the new update. As I said, it's going to be short - or it would have been, if I hadn't bulked it out with all that background detail.

Here's a screenshot that accurately represents most of my time with the update so far:

That's character creation. All of it, apart from a bunch of meaningless flavor questions and a few "Under Construction" screens. If there's any actual character creation going on, I didn't get to see it.

Even so, it's more of the update than I got to see after I gave my mustard-colored rectangle a name and went to log into the game-world. All I got then was this:

And here's the bug report I submitted after trying multiple times to log in:

The game goes to Character Creation but the only thing it allows is adding a name. All panels are blank. From there it goes to the loading screen with "Attaching Camera" etc. All four items read 0% and stay that way. I left it for fifteen minutes with no change.

I am not using a VPN. I have verified the files, which are correct. I have re-installed on both an SSD and a mechanical HDD. Nothing makes any difference.

I used to play on a different computer with no such issues. This is the first time I've tried on this newish machine, which meets the required specs. I can play any other game I have on Steam with no issues. The problem is just with Stars Reach.

Before sending in the report I did a bit of googling to see if it was a known issue. All I found was one person on Discord with the exact same problem but he fixed it by disabling his VPN. I haven't used a VPN for a long time so that was no help.

If I was really motivated, I'd boot up my old PC, which ran Stars Reach just fine, and see if the same problem happens there. That's what a dedicated tester would do. But I'm not that invested. 

It's a bit annoying, the way it always is when you can't play a game you were thinking of playing, even if it was only an idle thought and you didn't really want to play anyway. It's happened to me countless times over the years. I'll soon forget about it and move on to something that does work.

It would have been nice to check out the new update, all the same. I do like a new tutorial. They're so easy to review.

Maybe after the next patch. It's surprising how often these things fix themselves. And if not, well, I guess it isn't going to matter much. It's likely to be a while before there's a game there, anyway. If there ever is.

 

ADDENDUM: After reading Wilhelm's comment below, I thought I'd try redeeming one of my other keys to see if that made any difference. The terms and conditions state you can only activate one Stars Reach key per Steam Account but it doesn't specify one per person so I just made a new Steam account and completed the registration with that.

Then I downloaded the game and hit Play and guess what? It worked first time!

Well, actually second time because I used the same character name and it was rejected as already being in use, which suggests my previous attempt got at least as far as the database that holds the names and therefore that that version is also in some way "live". Unless someone else is calling themselves Floradelle, of course, but I very much doubt that.

I tweaked the name a little and was able to log in just fine. Well, until I managed to get disconnected, anyway. But after that it was fine! 

I notice that the name of the game in the two accounts is different. The original just says "Stars Reach" whereas the new one says "Stars Reach Playtest". I have two separate installs of the game on the same drive but in different Steam folders. Both accounts show all my games, even though they use different email addresses. It's very confusing...

Anyway, now all I need to do is play through the tutorial and I'll be able to write that post after all. There's something to look forward to!

Steam Spring Sale - Bargains And Skips

The first I knew about the Steam Spring Sale this year was when I saw a post about it yesterday from Kay Talks Games. I didn't even remember there was any such thing as a Spring sale on Steam. If you'd asked me, I'd have said there was one in the Winter and another in Summer and that was it. Shows what I know.

There is a Spring sale, though. It started yesterday, even if it's not quite Spring yet, the way a lot of people count it. But let's not get into that one, right?  

Valve's version of Spring only lasts a week, from now until March 26. I understand from bits and pieces I've picked up over the years that prices in the sale used to change as it went along, just like they do in a physical sale, with the real bargains coming right at the start or close to the end. 

From what I heard, that just led to everyone keeping their credit cards in their wallets in the hope of picking up a real bargain in the last day or two, so as far as I can tell they put a stop to it and the discounts stay the same all the way through. On that assumption, there didn't seem any point in waiting, so I jumped right in.

It seems to me like there are a few obvious ways to approach a Steam sale. You either go straight to your Wishlist and see what's been marked down or you hit that handy Deep Discount button on the front page. I guess you could also take a look at the high profile Recommends banner that runs right across the top, too. I did all of those, starting with my Wishlist. 

Wishlists are weird, aren't they? Kind of a misleading title. Developers want to see their games wishlisted because it boosts the profile and players often just want to keep an eye on games they have no intention of buying. It's more of a notepad or a promotional device than a shopping list, sometimes.

I have thirty-three games on mine, down from thirty-five as of last night. They split into three loose categories, grouped by how likely I am to buy them. There are the the ones that aren't out yet that I'm keeping an eye on, the ones I definitely want but only at the right price and then there's the rest. Those I probably will never buy at any price but they're on there just on the off-chance they might go to 90% off at some point and I won't be able to resist.

I guess I could cull that last group. I do sometimes drop a few things I'm sure I wouldn't play even if I got them for free. Mostly, though, it costs me nothing to leave them on there so that's what I do.

Here's an example to make it clearer. I've had Smalland on the Wishlist for more than three years now. It's been discounted many times and it's currently 70% off in the Spring Sale. I still haven't bought it. So why is that?

Two reasons, the first to do with the game itself, the second with the price. 

Smalland is a survival/crafting/exploration game, where the USP is that you're tiny. It looks like it would be fun and it has good reviews but I don't have either the time or the inclination to play a survival game right now. If I did it would probably be Enshrouded. 

At full price, Smalland costs £29.99. With a 70%  discount it's still £8.99. Seventy per cent may be a massive markdown but £8.99 is still more than I want to pay for a game I'm only mildly curious about. The thing you have to remember about bargains is it's not how much you save that matters - it's how much you spend.

So, I didn't buy Smallands or half a dozen more games on my Wishlist even though they were 50% off or more. It doesn't mean I don't want them. It just means I don't want them right now or at those prices. Maybe one day, though, so they stay.

There were a couple I might have gone for, had there been more money off:  Wildermyth and Dispatch. I would play either of those but I'm not so keen I'd take them at 35% off, let alone 20%. Get to half price and then we'll talk.

I did want to buy something, though. I have some credit left from the Steam cards I got for Christmas. Quite a bit, in fact. I like to keep something in the pot for impulse purchases but not fifty quid. 

Luckily for me, there were two stand-out candidates. Games I've wanted to play since I heard about them. Games I can be reasonably sure won't just sit in my library for years, unplayed. One was half-price but the other was only 35% off. Was that enough?

Yes. Yes it was. Apparently I wanted to play Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer that much. That's a good sign, isn't it?

It's significant that both the games I bought from my Wishlist last night are sequels. (The other is Chicken Police: Into The Hive.) That makes them a low-risk option; known quantities. I remember the originals very clearly. I had a great time playing both of them. The reviews suggest both sequels are more of the same, possibly better. 

Also, and perhaps more important, they're both point-and-click adventures and I haven't played one of those for a while. I really like having one of those on the go. I generally find them more satisfying than visual novels, although it depends on how they're put together. The genres can feel pretty similar, sometimes.

I very nearly bought a third point-and-click adventure: Old Skies. I really want to play it but it was only 20% off and since I already had two similar games in my basket it seemed like it could wait a little longer. It's moving up the list fast, though. I might crack before the sale ends and get it anyway.

When I said earlier that I started with my Wishlist I was misremembering. I had a quick look at the Deep Discounts first. It makes sense to start there. Two or three super-discounted titles might have been all I needed and all together they might have come to less than a single game at half-price. There's only time to play so many games, after all. Why spend more than you have to?

In the event, there was only one game on deep discount I could imagine playing immediately: Pathfinder Kingmaker. It's another Baldur's Gate style isometric RPG. I've looked at it a few times and left it alone but at £2.66 (85% off.) it seemed like its time had come.

So I bought it. And only now, as I write this, do I realize my mistake. Yes, it was a bargain but not so much of a bargain as the bundle that includes the game plus all the DLC for £3.38. 

So I've just submitted my first-ever request for a refund from Steam. If it's approved, I'll buy the bundle. Maybe I won't like the game enough to want to play the DLC but if it's only going to cost me less than a pound I might as well be optimistic about it.

There just remains the question of when I'm going to play any of these games. Even though I make a pretty good job of only buying things I'm likely to get to sooner rather than later, it can still take a while. In the screenshot at the top of the post you can see two other games I'm kind of playing right now: Penny Larceny and Road 96. I'd had for a while before I got to them. 

I've played two and half hours of Penny Larceny so far. I'm enjoying it but it's a bit preachy, which puts me off a little. I was expecting a knockabout caper with supervillains but it seems to be more of a social satire. So far, most of the characters don't even seem to have any real superpowers, just a lot of angst and drama. The narrative tone can get quite judgmental at times, too, even when it's clearly trying to be just the opposite. Not sure they have the balance quite right.

As for Road 96, I'm really not having a lot of luck with that one. My played time is just 16 minutes because that's how long it took me to get to the part where you have to kick a ball and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I googled it and still didn't get an answer, or not one that worked, so either I'm bugged or I can't follow simple directions. Could be either.

And that's the state of play re my Steam Sale so far. A few more days still to go. I might yet buy something else. 

I should probably resist the temptation. I clearly have more than enough to be going on with.