I Remember When It Was All Fields Round Here...

In the words of Friedemann, its lone and single-named developer, Summer House is "a small game with no goals or challenges". Having spent half an hour with the demo, I'm not sure I'd even call it a game at all. It's more of a construction set or maybe just a toy.

That's no kind of criticism. Not everything needs to be a game and frankly there are quite a few things that say they are that I wish wouldn't. Sometimes it's enough to play with the Lego. You don't have to tell a story with it.

With all that, there is some minimal form of progression. It's not flagged up and it took me by surprise when it happened but it's there. 

Gameplay consists of selecting construction pieces with the mouse and placing them onto the screen to make buildings. If you keep at it, eventually you get new pieces. That offers some minimal incentive to carry on building beyond the sheer pleasure of turning nothing into something.

If a big notice telling me I'd opened a new possibility hadn't popped up in the center of the screen, I'm not sure I'd have noticed. The control system is incredibly simple and at the same time quite vague. You select one of the icons on the left and then click LMB and a object of approximately the kind you'd expect appears on your cursor: a wall, a roof, a door, a window...

Each time you click, you get a different object until eventually you get back to where you started and the whole sequence goes around again. It sounds annoying but I found it very easy to get used to and even easier to use. If you would like more immediate access to the specific item you're after, you can click the magnifying glass for a full screen of everything in that category instead.

All the pieces fit together flawlessly. If they overlap it still works. You can move them about as much as you like to get an exact fit but just about everything I placed already looked like it was in the right spot. 

The whole thing is side-scrolling 2D with a very convincing depth of perspective. Considering you can only place items face-on, the results are amazingly nuanced. I did wish there was a way to place items at right angles to the PoV so I could put windows in a side wall but it may be I just hadn't placed enough pieces for access to something like that to appear.

The demo only gives you one of the three scenarios from the full game; The Sea. The other two are The Mountains and The City. After a certain point, a big "Thank You for playing the Demo" popped up and I thought I'd hit the time limit but after I cleared it I was able to carry on just the same as before.

I ended up playing for a shade under half an hour, by which time I'd built up the entire sea front. I could have gone on building but as you can see from the picture immediately above, I'd begun to move past charming, unspoilt Mediterranean fishing village into over-developed tourist trap so I thought I'd better stop.

The game is set to release exactly a month from now, on 8th March. From what I saw in the demo, it's certainly ready. I wishlisted it but I'm not sure I'll buy it. 

I find it hard to say how much use I'd get out of something like this. It does what it sets out to do just about perfectly but whether what it's doing is enough to hold my attention for more than an hour or two is something I don't think I'd know until I tried. I suspect that I'd start to feel I was wasting my time after not too long but that seems to be an increasing theme for me with all video games these days. It's no reflection on Summer House.

As for how much it's going to cost... I couldn't find any indication at all on Steam. You would think that would be pertinent information for a demo of a game about to go live next month. Maybe the developer is just too relaxed to think of such things. If they spend all their time playing Summer House that seems entirely possible.

(Almost) Nobody Here But Us Chickens

I spent a painful half-hour on Monday night, trying to find half a dozen demos from the current Steam Next Fest worth the download. They had to be demos I thought I might at least get far enough through to have something to write about. 

It was hard work. If the Fall batch was bad, this one is worse. 

There were plenty of survival titles I could have taken a look at but I think I might be a bit survivaled out right now so I gave them a pass. A couple I seriously considered have since been covered by Scopique. Nothing he had to say made me feel like going back and getting either of them.

I could barely find any traditional point & click adventures at all. Maybe they were all in the Storyteller's Festival. Perhaps you can't be in that and in Next Fest as well. Or maybe there just weren't any new ones. I think Next Fest is for unreleased games and come to think of it, most of the ones in the Storyteller's Festival were for games already out.

There were a few MMOs/MMORPGs. I thought about it but they looked very generic. I might be done with trying things just because they blow the MMORPG dog whistle. 

There was no shortage of  things calling themselves "Visual Novels" or "Interactive Fiction" but most of them were pornographic. There's altogether too much of that kind of thing in Next Fest, he said, in his best maiden aunt voice.

If I'm going to be honest, searching through the demos on offer this time felt, on occasion, actively unpleasant. I don't recall it feeling that way a year ago. I'm not sure if the curation has lapsed or if I've become more sensitive. Both, probably.

Eventually I did manage to find four titles I thought I might enjoy. Four. It's not much of a reward for thirty minutes of eyestrain, is it? And even then, one of them was a sequel to a game I've already played. At least I learned that's coming, which is something, I guess.

The four titles I ended up with were:

Copycat - "A wholesome, narrative-driven game about rejection, belonging and the true meaning of home. It follows the story of a newly adopted shelter cat who becomes the victim of an elaborate plan when a jealous, stray copycat steals her place in the household."

Keywords that drew me in: "wholesome", "narative-driven", "cat". 

Keywords that almost pushed me out again: "rejection", "jealous", "steals".

I'm really not in the mood for a game that tries to make me feel bad before it makes me feel good. I worry whether a game with that sort of story arc could even offer the necessary, positive emotional payoff in a demo. It wouldn't be the first demo I've played that shows you a bad time and then just stops, leaving you hanging with no catharsis.

The full description on the Steam page makes the full game sound brutal. After a whole lot of stuff about how "intimate, magical and hopeful" it is and how it's "perfect to cuddle up with on a rainy afternoon", this drops:

"Everything changes when Olive falls ill, and a stray copycat steals Dawn’s place in the home—forcing Dawn onto the streets."

Geez. And that's what we're calling "cosy" nowadays? And the trailer makes it look more like a horror game than anything. 

I may just have talked myself out of even trying this one. I have all the emotional trauma I can handle and more with My Daemon, right now.

Yet Another Fantasy Title - "Become a rogue in a fantasy action adventure game filled with absurd humor. Go on a quest to kill the dragon - and realize this is only the beginning. Learn spells from a wizard and brawling from an orc. Save the kingdom, destroy a ring, fight a monstrous beaver!"

Sounds safe enough. Maybe a little too safe. Is there even any satire or irony in learning spells from a wizard or brawling from an orc? The other way around, maybe...

 The question here is, do I really need another ironic, "meta" take on traditional fantasy RPG tropes? I mean, I am literally in the middle of playing one at the moment ("Literally in the middle of" in this case meaning I got half way through and stopped.) 

The trailer looks halfway decent, though, and sufficiently different in style and tone from The Dungeon of Naheubeuk that it shouldn't feel too much like going over the exact same ground. That umpty-tumpty hobbit music is going to get old real fast, though.

Chicken Police: Into The Hive - "A wild tale of loss, friendship, conspiracy, and... chickens?! Two rooster detectives are about to venture into the insect underworld to uncover a worldwide conspiracy, while also battling their inherent demons in this animal noir adventure satire."

Okay, now we're on solid ground! I really enjoyed the first Chicken Police game. It managed to be both satirical and a genuinely intriguing mystery, with well-rounded, well-written characters, good voice acting, a compelling plot and, best of all, a fascinating and somewhat unusual setting. 

There's a good deal about The Hive in the first game. It sounded a very curious place. It seemed to be a part of the city where even the police didn't want to go, a kind of ghetto for insects in a city attuned to vertebrates. I wanted to see more of it then than I had the chance. Now it looks like I'll get my wish. 

Summer House - "A tiny building game about beautiful lived-in houses. No rules or restrictions, just pure creativity."

I've already played this one. I'll save the details for a post of its own (Which will mostly be screenshots, I imagine.) but I liked it a lot. It's a toy, not a game, but it's a good toy.

And that's all the demos I'm going to try this time around. Probably. Unless someone else plays a good one I missed and posts about it. Then I'll just jump their train.