Mumble Mumble...Secret Plans... Mumble Mumble...

Yet Another Fantasy Title (aka YAFT) ought to be called Yet Another Generic RPG Parody or possibly Didn't We Beat This Horse To Death Back In The 'Nineties, Already? Seriously, how many of these things are there? It's a bona fide sub-genre all of its own. 

The question isn't whether this particular one does anything original. None of them do anything original. Being original isn't the point. In fact, being original would be a design flaw. 

Judging by the numerous examples I've sampled since Simon the Sorcerer back in the early 'nineties, the point of a genre parody is to stick as closely as possible to the gameplay, characters, graphics and storyline of a "straight" title in the same genre so as not to frighten away customers, then to slather the whole thing over with bad puns, pratfalls, slapstick routines lifted wholesale from old Three Stooges movies and plenty of dialog borrowed from previous parodies already familiar to the target audience.

Even thirty years ago, making one of these parodies was an incestuous, inverted process. The aforementioned Simon the Sorceror, one of the most successful entries in this heavily-plowed field, is a parody of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, itself a parody of genre fantasy. And according to Wikipedia, Simon himself is based on Rowan Atkinson's Blackadder, also a parody! It's a parody of two other parodies!

I'd ask how much more self-reflexive it could get, only self reflection is almost never a factor in any of these games. Preening in a mirror over how smart and clever they are is more the way they tend to roll. 

With all that in mind, does the YAFT demo make it seem like this is going to stand out from the gurning, guffawing, giggling pack? Well, kinda... although not necessarily in a good way.

For a start, the game identifies as "an open-world action adventure game", which does make it a little different from most nominally similar titles I've played. I've tried point & click parodies, turn-based combat parodies, XCom-style parodies and visual novel parodies but I think this is my first "action adventure" parody. It might also be my first open-world parody although I saw pretty much nothing of the open world in the demo, which is extremely directive, or it was for at least as far as I was willing to go along with it.

The game opens very promisingly with a visually delightful cut-scene in which two characters punt a raft down a river. Perspective is bird-in-the-sky, as is the rest of the game, with a box for dialog showing a line drawing of the character speaking. So far, so stylish.

Unfortunately, my ability to concentrate on what was being said was shattered by the voice acting, which I took at first to be the untranslated original from whatever language the game's developers must speak. Polish, presumably.

I tried to attune my ear to it to see if I could figure out what language it could be. It sounded vaguely Germanic or Eastern European. I was so focused on the sound I barely took in the text, which relayed the conversation in perfectly good English, so I missed most of the set-up. 

By the time the raft reached the starting village I'd worked out why I couldn't place the language. There wasn't one! It's either a couple of people gargling and making word-like noises that aren't really words or it's artificially generated nonsense. It doesn't really matter which. Either way it's intensely annoying.

I left it on for just long enough to establish that, yes, every NPC spoke that way. Then I switched off all spoken dialog in the settings. If that had not been an option, my time with the game would have ended there.

With welcome silence established, other than background sound and music, neither of which were either irritating or enjoyable enough to have left any mark in my memory, I set about playing the game, which seemed determined to double down on the bad first impression it had already established.

It may just be me, but I'm not sure it's the wisest design choice to have the very first thing the player-character has to do, on reaching the first built-up area, be a stealth challenge. I mean, not unless you're making an actual stealth game and even then you'd probably want to begin with a tutorial of some kind.

That isn't actually the very first obstacle. Just the first one in the starting village. Where you wake up in a haycart with all your belongings missing.

Before that, immediately after landing your raft, you have to fight some orcs. I think they were orcs, anyway. That turns out to be one of those unwinnable scenarios so beloved of game designers, where you win some fights with a few underlings and then their boss comes along and one-shots you. Always a nice introduction to any game.

It is, however, much more fun than having to sneak past a bunch of guards, all of whom are looking specifically for you and none of whom you can fight, should they catch you. That's what you have to do if you want to get from one side of the village to the other. It's not difficult but it is extremely annoying. If, like me, you don't find it amusing or entertaining, you're so out of luck because when you've successfully managed to avoid the first lot of guards, your reward is to do it all again with some more, only this time wearing a hat that makes you look like an idiot a dragon.

This is what I meant when I said that although the game is nominally set in an open world, I didn't get to see any of it. There's certainly a large settlement there on the riverside, with explorable streets and what look like some interesting events going on, but it's pretty hard to appreciate, let alone explore, any of it when it's covered with large, moving circles, entering any of which immediately results in a "You Failed!" message and a trip back to the last save-point to try again.

The demo is also very linear. You have one task on screen at all times and when you complete it you get a new one. I guess you could choose to ignore the plot and just go exploring. I kind of wish I'd done that but not enough to go back and see what would have happened if I had.

Added to all that, the controls are wonky enough to be perpetually annoying. They work and there are several options to change them but I tried all the variations and none of them worked anything like well enough to feel intutive. In the end I found the one where you have your character follow the mouse pointer when you press W to be the least awkward. (It was still awkward.)

The NPCs also seem to have some serious pathing issues. They don't stroll about in the time-honored pseudo-random fashion of digital extras; they oscillate a few paces one way, a few paces the other, as if they've forgotten whether they turned the gas off when they left home but can't decide whether to go back and check.

From there the plot progresses through a number of set pieces. I released a wolf from a cage in the village so it could chase away the guards from a bridge. I fought and accidentally killed The Chosen One and stole his horse. Actually, it was his unicorn, although I don't think that particular wrinkle ever got a mention.

Soon after that, though, I was tasked with stealing an actual horse and riding in pursuit of an escaping bandit, which was where I and the game finally parted ways. Up to then, I wouldn't exactly say I'd been having fun but it was tolerable and other than fighting the controls it hadn't exactly been  hard. 

I'd learned one spell, a lightning bolt, which was easy and fun to use. I'd found all that was required of me in melee combat, at least at this early stage, was to hammer LMB and wave my sword from right to left while advancing on any enemy, who would quickly dice themselves to death before they could get to me.

The plot, to the limited extent it reveals itself in the demo, seems solid enough. Ne'er-do-well thief with semi-powerful friends gets into trouble with the king and has to flee the city whereupon, through a comical case of mistaken identity, he's taken for a rampaging dragon that's terrorizing the kingdom. In defending himself, he accidentally slays the would-be dragon-slayer and is forced by circumstances to take on the mantle of Chosen One which, as I'm sure the game goes on to demonstrate, is not the best of fits.

Except I'm never going to see it play out because I can't ride a sodding horse well enough. I even switched the difficulty setting to "Easy" and I still couldn't do it. The controls are awful, the horse gets stuck on scenery all the time, the bandit you're chasing disappears off the screen and there's no indication which way he went. 

You have maybe fifteen seconds before you lose all track of him and get the dreaded "Quest Failed!". I got it four or five times before I thought "You know what? I really don't care."

YAFT may not be a bad game. It certainly looks pretty and it's well-enough written for the genre in which it sits. It may not be original but the "action" gameplay does at least give it some distance from the myriad of similarly-themed titles I've played. 

It's hard to say whether the plot would eventually evolve from actual fantasy into genre parody but from what I saw in the forty-nine minutes I spent with the demo, the title felt distinctly unironic. As for the advertised "pop culture references", they were conspicuously absent, which was probably just as well.

The demo, at least, really is Yet Another Fantasy Title. I guess you have to give them points for accuracy there. And after those forty-nine minutes, I didn't hate it. I just felt tired of it and I didn't want to play it any more.

Needless to say, I will not be wishlisting this one. I wouldn't want to put anyone off trying it, though. I suspect that if you're able to work the controls with more facility than I was and if you're more comfortable and familiar with action gaming than I am, you might find something here to enjoy.

Just do remember to turn the voices off before you even start.

(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.