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. 

A Rockin' Good Time - The Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll Demo

One reason I like reviewing demos is that they're concise. They're mostly either short stories or single chapters as compared to the full game's novel. Sometimes they're purpose-built but more often they're discrete segments pulled out of the finished work, usually the opening chapter or the introduction or the tutorial. 

It makes them very easy to assimilate, assess, analyze and review. It's neat and tidy and satisfying. I look forward to playing them and I look forward to reviewing them.

That's most demos. But then there are demos like Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll. 

Is it even a demo?  After about an hour I had to tab out and check to make sure I hadn't somehow downloaded the full game by mistake. When the sun came up on the fourth in-game day, I decided it was time I stopped. There was no sign the demo was going to.

Steam tells me I have 82 minutes played although I'm not convinced "played" is the most appropriate term here. Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll is a visual novel although I'm not convinced "novel" is the most appropriate term either. Heck, I'm not one hundred per cent sold on "visual"...

Whatever LMRnR is, it's not a game, that's for sure. It does have a handful of inflection points, moments when you appear to be able to change the flow of the narrative, but from an hour and twenty minutes I can only remember, at most, half a dozen. 

Being asked to make a decision about every fifteen minutes doesn't constitute a game by my definition. If anything, it reminds me of one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books, but only if someone had redacted almost all of the choices.

At this point I should step in to clarify that I really enjoyed my 82 minutes with Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll. I'm also okay with the visual novel format although I don't think it's necessarily the best option for a narrative like this. As a story, though, it's intriguing, entertaining and a bit of a page-turner. It's also absolutely nothing like I was expecting.

But what was I expecting?  The Steam Store sales pitch, which I quoted last time, doesn't give much away: "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!"

I realize now I'd taken most of my cues from just the title and that mention of the Eighties. I'd pretty much skipped over all the rest, the stuff about mystery, intrigue and so on. I'd somehow come away with the idea I was going to be playing a game where you put a band together and went on tour - something like that. 

Yeah... nope. There's nothing like that at all. Not in the first 82 minutes, anyway. What there is is a whole lot of story.

Here's my précis of the plot so far. I'd spoiler-warn it but this is the fricken' demo! The whole point of demos is to give stuff away so you can see if you want to pay for the whole thing, isn't it? To say revealing the plot of a demo is like spoiling the plot of a game is like saying trailers spoil the plots of movies. 

Oh, wait... 

You play as Nickolai, a senior in an elite Tokyo high school. He's Russian, as in both his parents were Russian, but he's lived in Japan since he was six, speaks fluent Japanese and is consequently treated neither as a local nor a foreigner, leaving him in some uncomfortable third space between.

Nickolai is one of those odd, semi-emancipated teens who seem to crop up a lot in Japanese narratives. He's eighteen, which where I come from would make him unequivocally an adult and he lives alone in the house his parents bought before they died. Big house, too.

Despite living as a self-supporting adult (On money left by his parents, I think...) he's still in the final year of high school and he behaves - in school, at least - in that very disconcerting way young adults mostly behave in anime, which is to say a bit like any young adult would behave here in the country where I live but also a lot like someone much younger.

In another familiar but bizarre trope of the form, Nickolai has a neighbor of the same age, Himitsu, who goes to the same school, who has a key to his house, who cooks his meals for him, walks to and from school with him, hangs out with him all the time, is in love with him maybe as a brother, maybe not that way at all, and who absolutely is not his girlfriend! Mostly because he's an idiot would be my take on it.

She's also half-Russian, which seems like a bit of a co-incidence, but then one of Nickolai's only two other friends is American, as is his ex-girlfriend, who we'll get to later. The school seems to be full of the children of non-Japanese VIPs as far as I can see.

Himitsu is not a stalker. We need to get that clear from the start. She rings Nickolai up at three in the morning because she sees his light on but she absolutely hasn't been staying up all night, watching his house. She just can't sleep. 

She comes into his house, uninvited, at three in the morning purely because she's worried abut him. And because she has a key. Which he gave her, so that's all quite alright and perfectly normal. And when she mumbles under her breath that since it's like they're living together, maybe she should move she absolutely isn't suggesting anything weird is going on in her head...

Actually, as is always the case with this trope, or at least in the few times I've encountered it, she's so very far from being a stalker that you want to grab Nickolai by the scruff of his neck and tell him how bloody lucky he is and how he should stop mooning after all the other much more melodramatic, enigmatic and just plain stroppy girls he seems to find far more interesting and pay her the attention she goddam well deserves.

About those other girls...

There's the one he "saves" from a gang of bullies, who turns out to be the Class President of the class he is in, which he doesn't even know! How does that work?! She can't stand him, of course, and she isn't at all grateful, quite the opposite really, but inevitably they keep getting thrown together all the same.

 

Then there's the girl who spills orange juice over him in the cafeteria and blames him for it. She turns out to be the daughter of the President of the School Board and the Queen of the School, which is news to him because he's only been at that school for how many years? She can't stand him either, so naturally they keep running into each other, at one point even hiding in a tiny cupboard together, something which causes both of them a great deal of necessary embarrassment.

But most importantly there's Catherine Winters. Catherine is Nickolai's aforementioned ex. The demo begins with an elegiac sequence about cherry petals drifting in the wind, which was what was happening the last time he saw Catherine. She left without explanation, was it a year ago? Maybe two? But now she's back, again without explanation, and back in his class, no less. Nickolai is very much not over Catherine. 

So, eighty minutes in and he's got four girls to juggle. Seems like it's going to be a high-school romance, right? Yeah, and it is. Except there are also the mysterious notes in misspelled Japanese left on his doorstep, followed by the even more mysterious phone calls in the middle of the night. It's not Himitsu this time. It's someone with a Russian accent, warning him Bad Things are going to happen because of Something His Father Did and he should Watch His Step.

Okay. Recap and recount. 

Love? Check. 

Money? No sign of any so far.

Rock'n'Roll? Coming to that right now.  

 

Orange-juice girl, whose name is Ellie, plays the guitar. Nickolai, who plays the bass, although by his own account not very well, runs across her in the music room at school. She's playing an acoustic guitar when both of them ought to be in class, an odd affectation that leads directly to the two of them squeezing into a cupboard together to avoid being discovered bunking off lessons by the Principal, who just happens to wander into the music room for a quick, secret conversation with another member of staff.

Nickolai thinks Ellie plays pretty well but he doesn't expect to see her fronting a glam rock band in a grungy back-street club. Well, why would he? Even though it's one of his regular hang-outs and even though Ellie's band, whose name I've forgotten but they're named after an anime robot, is headlining and even though Nick makes the point earlier that only local bands ever play at the club...

Even though, as I hope I'm making it clear, none of this really bears close examination, it does not matter a jot. It all works. I believed it at the same time I didn't believe it.

That's because the characters are all well-differentiated, convincing, believable within the local physics of credibility. Other people might not do these things but these people do and it feels right that they would.

The writing is crisp and clean except when it's Nickolai being about as flowery as any lovelorn adolescent feeling sorry for himself might be. The dialog is charming. The story trips along nicely. It's a damn good read.

There's also whole layer of very welcome meta-referentiality that really appeals to me. Nickolai is always making comparisons about the way similar situations would play out in manga and anime, usually without realizing that's exactly what is happening to him, only without the "magic girls" and superheroes.  

There are also lots of useful, explanatory notes on Japanese culture as seen from an outsider's perspective. That'll be because the developer is Russian, I imagine. I do find it slightly disturbing, how many games and anime I enjoy, initially believing them to be authentically Japanese in origin, turn out not to have been made by Japanese creators or studios at all. Probably says something about me or the culture or both.

Graphically the game is a real pleasure although it's pretty much a slide show in which most of the slides get repeated over and over. Occasionally something will move on the screen - a train crossing in the background, a character lifting a glass, but mostly everything is static. It's like looking at a series of pictures in a gallery. 

Good pictures, too. Every image is meticulously crafted with far more detail in the background than the narrative requires. I took a lot of screenshots because every new slide is as lovely to look at as the last. 

The controls are almost literally as minimal as it's possible to get. There are no instructions at all on how to play. The demo just starts and it's up to you to figure out how to get it to do anything but since all you really need to do is click the mouse anywhere on screen to make the next line of dialog appear, that's not a problem.

Once in a very long while you might have to choose between a couple of options like "Follow Her" or "Do Nothing", which just takes a click, but other than that there's nothing for you to do but read and watch.  If you were hoping to get up on stage and jam at any point, like I was, you're going to be disappointed.

Or maybe that comes later. I doubt it. You might get the option to "Join In" or "Just Watch" I guess.

I really like Love, Money, Rock'n'Roll. It tells a compelling story through likeable characters and pretty pictures. As with many visual novels I've "played" I'm far from convinced it's a game or needs to be one. It'd be a perfectly good manga or anime. 

I'll finish the demo for sure. I might well buy the full game at some point. 

I'd much rather watch it as an anime, though.  

We're On A Road Trip To Nowhere

Given my current circumstances, I've had to abandon my usual plan to play and review half a dozen demos from the current Next Fest. Instead, I'm limiting myself to a more achievable two or three. I already had a couple of definites in mind, one of which was Outbound.

The game's Steam Store page describes it as "a cozy open-world exploration game set in a utopian near future". I spent a few minutes yesterday, skimming the list of demos on offer and the first thing I noticed was just how many games like this there are now. I started at the top of the "Browse All Titles" list and worked my way down and eight of the top ten were some kind of survival sim. 

Of course, that's a list tailored to what Steam believes is likely to interest me. If I look at the options without being logged in, I get a much broader selection of genres. Even so, I notice I'm getting no point-and-click demos and very few tactical rpgs, both of which I play more than survival games. That's because there are far fewer of them, I'm betting.

In a crowded marketplace, most of the survival games make some vague attempt at grabbing attention with a trope or quirk that supposedly makes them special. Scanning down the list again I see, in order from the top, pirates, creature-collecting, medievalism, Old West, space, ranching and, after an unscheduled interruption from something that's not a survival game at all, Outbound, whose USP is that you drive a camper van.

I've often fantasized about buying a camper van and heading off into the unknown, just driving around, stopping anywhere that seemed interesting and staying as long as it stayed that way. That was what attracted me to outbound the first time I heard about it.

I have to say my fantasies of a life on the open road have never included making tools, on a workbench in the back of the camper, out of scrap metal and bits of wood picked up from the side of the road so I can repair broken barriers, clear fallen trees or rebuild collapsed bridges. Nor did I imagine I'd be living on berries scrounged up from the undergrowth or fueling my van with fallen tree branches I'd have to feed into some weird device in the engine compartment.

For that matter, I hadn't envisaged the van itself turning into some kind of Wacky Races house on wheels. One of the goals of the game appears to be to turn your compact camper into a traveling farmhouse-cum-luxury-apartment. Like this:

Who would live in a house like this? Professor Pat Pending, perhaps?

That monstrosity isn't my van. I doubt you can build anything like it in the demo. It is the ambition you're expected to have for your vehicle, though. I took the picture from the Steam Store page, where it's presumably supposed to trigger desire rather than, as it does in me, disbelief. 

After 78 minutes, my camper was much more modest. I hadn't built anything outside the van at all, just a couple of utilities inside, neither of them anything I would have envisaged needing on a road trip. Would you expect to build a trash compactor and a sawmill inside your camper van?

It's obvious Outbound has no interest in simulating an actual road trip, at least not in the demo, and since the demo is basically the first of the four biomes scheduled for launch, I guess the same will apply to the finished game. There's nothing particularly unusual about a lack of realism in a survival/crafting game but what did surprise me a little was the complete absence of any kind of plot or narrative.

I think all the games in this genre I've played have had some kind of story. It's not always very deep or convincing but there's at least a nominal reason for you to be pushing forwards, beyond a simple drive for self-improvement and desire to see what's over the next hill. In Outbound, as far as I can see, that's all there is.

Well, perhaps not exactly all. There may not be a narrative but that doesn't mean there's no structure. There are lots of short and medium term goals, called Objectives and Side Tasks, respectively. Objectives are things like "Build a Recycler on a Counter". Side Tasks are cumulative actions, such as "Light four campfires". 

The game constantly prompts you to make the next tool or utility and you really have no choice when you find an obstruction blocking the road. That happened to me three times in the first hour I played, meaning I had to make myself a wrench, an axe and ten planks before I could carry on driving.

As well as tasking you with removing obstacles, the game also asks you to visit specific locations, not all of which are close at hand. In other games, this would be part of a storyline but in Outbound there's no ostensible reason to go to any of them other than that the game is telling you that's what you need to do. Chances are you'd have gone there anyway, out of curiosity, though, so it doesn't feel as directive as it might.

When you get to the location, you may find something of practical interest. The Firewatch Tower had a blueprint terminal, for example. Blueprints are needed to make new tools and utilities and, well, anything, really. To download each blueprint you need a token. You get tokens by picking up litter and feeding it into your trash compactor. I guess they did say it was the near future.

There are Download Towers along the road and as far as I can tell, each tower offers specific items. I needed to make planks, for which I needed a Sawmill, but I couldn't find the blueprint until I went a long way up a side road to a tower I wouldn't have otherwise have passed. 

The rooftop patio of the surprisingly well-appointed Firewatch Tower, where I found two of three items I needed.

I'm not sure if the placement of blueprints is randomized or not. When I couldn't find the one I needed, I watched a YouTube video of someone else lookingg for one and they found theirs in the Firewatch Tower. When I was there, all I got was a blueprint for a food mixer. Of course, the game is still in development so maybe they just changed the locations.

The terminals in the regular towers are immediately accessible but the one in the Firewatch Tower required me to find three items first before I could switch it on. That was about the only puzzle I came across, if you can call a scavenger hunt a puzzle. Maybe there's more of that sort of "content" later but so far it's been the exception.

And that's OK. The game bills itself as "cozy" and describes the setting as "utopian". Threat of any kind doesn't enter into it and I very much doubt challenge does, either. You're on an extended vacation in some beautiful scenery, living off the land, which is exceptionally hospitable, providing everything you need. 

If that's not enough to keep you entertained, you probably need to look for another survival/crafting/exploration game. The good news there is you won't have to look far!

I really enjoyed the Outbound demo. Not that I've finished it. The map looks huge. It feels like I've hardly started to explore it. 

And exploring it is a pleasure. The landscape is very pretty, with a simple, attractive aesthetic that employs a lot of flat surfaces and plenty of saturated color. Sunrise and sunset are particularly delightful and night is a gorgeous, rich, velvety blue-black that feels oddly safe.

But then, the whole game feels safe. Not only are there no enemies, in nearly eighty minutes I didn't see another human being at all. Not one NPC. Very little wildlife, either. I think I saw a rabbit, once.

Perhaps more surprisingly, there are no other vehicles. I had the road to myself.

Just as well. I was driving in the middle of it half the time. Controlling the van isn't difficult but it's not particularly smooth or intuitive. There may have been some lurching. I might have hit a few rocks. 

Fortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way to damage the camper. Or to hurt yourself. If this is a survival game at all it's very much survival-lite. 

In true survival-sim style, though, there are a couple of meters that have to be kept topped-up. One for you and one for the van. Your meter measures how hungry you are and so, I suppose does the van's. It tells you when you're running out of fuel. What happens if either hits zero I can't say because I didn't let it happen but I doubt it's anything very bad.

The absence of anyone at all to communicate with does give the demo a somewhat lonesome feel. The game is co-op four up to four people, though, and in the full version of the game you get a dog to accompany you on your travels, so the final version ought to be a lot more social. (There's an apology at the start of the demo for the dog not being available yet.)

Leave the door open all night if you want. It's not like anyone's going to steal anything.

I really enjoyed Outbound. It wasn't exactly what I was expecting but I liked what I got. I didn't run into any bugs or glitches although my overall impression was that there might need to be some optimization before launch. The controls and movement felt a little off at times although not in a way I could really put my finger on.

I have some minor concerns about the complete absence of any kind of narrative structure, too. Not that the game necessarily needs one if it's supposed to be a building/crafting/survival sim. No, it's the use of the term "road trip" to describe the gameplay that worries me. I can't imagine how you can have a road trip without a goal or a destination or a purpose. Road trips always tell a story.

Without a story, it's not a trip, just an existence. And that's probably how the game should be framed; as a life-sim. You're not really going anywhere, just driving aimlessly around some beautiful countryside, enjoying your freedom. Honestly, who needs anything more?

I already had Outbound wishlisted. There's a decent chance I might even buy it, one day. If I do I'll definitely wait until I can have a dog to share my adventures.

Ride Your Pony - The Equinox Homecoming Demo

Apologies for the expected interruption to normal posting. Predictable real life issues. Situation likely to continue, at least for a while.

Without that, Monday would have seen a post about which demos I'd chosen for the current Steam Next Fest. Unfortunately, as yet, I haven't picked any. I did have a browse through the list yesterday on Tuesday (This post having been delayed a further day due to more hospital visiting.) but I was on my laptop, sitting in a side-room at the hospital as I waited for my mother to go through various scans, so it was a bit hard to concentrate.

Fortunately for the blog, on Monday I did manage to spend some time with a demo that came out just before Next Fest, the intriguing "horse mystery" mmorpg Equinox Homecoming. I didn't quite finish the demo but Steam says I played for 86 minutes, which certainly seems like enough to form some kind of judgment.

And that judgment, to pre-empt the entire post, would be largely favorable. I really enjoyed my hour and almost-a-half with the game, which ran well, looked good and seemed like a lot of fun, at least as far as it went, which wasn't all that far.

The demo would appear to be the opening of the game, the tutorial mostly, although there doesn't seem to be anything to stop you just riding around the island, exploring, if you want. I didn't because I was mostly following the quest prompts but I did get lost a few times, wandering through the woods and it all looked very pretty.

But that's getting ahead of ourselves. Let's start where all good MMORPGs begin, with character creation. It's fairly basic as these things go. You pick a feature from a list rather than fiddle with an infinite number of sliders. But that's fine. 

 

More than fine, actually. I was able to get a character I felt comfortable with very easily. Sliders are overrated in my opinion, especially in games where you effectively spend 95% of your time staring at the back of your character's head, although to be fair to this one, you get to see plenty of your character's face in the many cut scenes.

Once you've settled on your character's appearance and given them a name, you need to do the same for your horse. The equine appearance options are more limited but there's still a good choice. Assuming you care about what your horse looks like, of course, which it's probably safe to assume most people laying down £25 for the full game definitely will.

And so to the game itself, where one of the oddest things is that the name you gave your character never gets used in the game itself. I named my character Flora and the avatar I was looking at was definitely the one I made but every dialog, voice and text, called her Alex.

That would be fine if it was an RPG but it doesn't make a lot of sense for an MMO. It looks as though your personalized character identity applies to you as a player, in chat and when grouping (Assuming there is grouping - I didn't see or do any.) but all the player-characters are the same person for narrative purposes.

Can that be right? It does seem weird. I guess I ought to go go into the game and check... Nope. That's not right, either. It might be what happens from someone else's perspective - no-one spoke in general chat while I was testing it - but when I spoke, whatever I said was attributed to the generic "You". 

Minor point, perhaps, but it does bring up the question of why Equinox Homecoming needs to be an MMORPG in the first place. The developers are adamant that's what it is, to the point where they removed the "single player" tag from the Steam description to avoid confusion.

 

Except it feels a lot more like a single-player game in the demo. It has a central narrative driven by quests that focus entirely on Alex, as would be typical of a solo RPG. There's no indication you can group up for these and if you could, it would make no sense. Everyone would be the same person.

In other MMOs that might not matter so much. Grouping would revolve around fighting enemies that need  more than one person to defeat. Only there's no combat in this game, none at all. 

Unless there are multi-person puzzles, like the ones some games have where require several people to stand on separate pressure-plates at the same time, there wouldn't be any need to group up with other players.

There are lots of races but, in the demo at least, they're all time trials. You don't compete directly with other players, just with yourself or to climb the leader board. There are guilds called Riding Clubs but what they do I have no idea. The multiplayer element to the game seems nominal at best. 

I just did a little bit of mild research on all of the above points and it seems most have been contentious for a while. There are Steam threads questioning the rationale behind the naming convention and wondering if and why the game is an MMORPG. 

The devs who have answered have mostly offered some variation on "Because that's how it is." There's even a suggestion from a developer that anyone who wants to play the game as a single-player game can just select an empty server and play on their own, although they don't guarantee there will always be empty servers. It makes me wonder why they have so many servers in the first place if some of them are always empty.

I've side-tracked myself a little, focusing on these odd inconsistencies, which makes it sound as though I didn't enjoy my time with the demo. The opposite is true. I thought the world looked very attractive and felt like it would be a pleasure to explore, albeit not so much of a pleasure as to make me go and do that right away. 

 

I found the plot interesting, the writing engaging, the mechanics solid and the gameplay entertaining. I also thought the voice acting was good. Naturalistic. Convincing. Not overdone. 

The plot, which as many reviews on Steam make a point of mentioning, is unusual for a horse game and probably not suitable for a very young audience, involves the central character, Alex, as she returns to the island where she grew up to try and find out what could have happened to her eccentric mother, now missing for reasons unknown. 

Alex, who I would guess to be in her very late teens or possibly her very early twenties, left after a blow-out with her mom over the bizarre way they'd been living. Inconveniently, Alex runs out the door right at the moment when her mother is offering to tell her everything, which at least alerts us to the fact that there's something to be told. 

Alex hasn't been back since. Until now. Oh, and let's not forget  a girl has been found dead in the woods and a bunch of wild animals have been killed and mutilated, too. It's a mystery, as Toyah would say, and a spooky, disturbing one, too. It's lucky Alex's mom trained her in survival techniques by leaving her alone in the woods overnight when she was ten years old...

So, this is not exactly a cosy game where you look after your horse and ride around in some beautiful countryside, although it is that too. You need to groom and feed and care for your horse, which is how your horse levels up, because this is an MMORPG for reasons, so of course there are levels. 

Also, you want to look after your horse, don't you? Otherwise why are you even here?

 

Except you don't have to look after your horse at all. Or rather, you do if you want your horse to level up but the game tells you not to worry if you forget or can't be bothered because not looking after your horse has no gameplay implications. Again, weird design choice.

It's clear even from the demo that Equinox Homecoming incorporates many of the standard tropes of the genre. The MMO genre, that is. I wouldn't know what the tropes of the horse riding genre would be. 

There are plenty of NPCs and as usual they'd like you to go do the little jobs they don't have time for, mostly in a  quid pro quo fashion, where they give you goods or services you can't afford because you seem to have come home from wherever it is you ran away to with no money. Most of those same NPCs also collect something for some reason and they're keen for you to find lots of whatever it is they're after and bring it to them for some benefit as yet undisclosed, since I didn't do it.

That employs the standard "pick stuff up off the ground" mechanic we're all familiar with - plants, flowers, feathers, all the regular litter. It leads me to suspect there may also be crafting but I didn't see any sign of it in the demo. 

Once you have your horse (A loaner from your friend.) and have everything you need (Like a saddle.) and the game has made sure you know how to stay on and turn corners without falling off, it's on with the mystery. Investigation, for me at least, mostly involved following prompts. It seemed very linear but it is only the tutorial phase so I wouldn't read too much into that.

There's quite a sizeable town on the island, which I found it a lot easier to explore on foot rather than on horseback. It looked pretty good to me but there are plenty of complaints in the reviews of the demo on Steam that claim the game is made up of standard UE5 assets. Even if that's true, they've been employed effectively enough, so I don't quite get what the objection would be.

 

There are also complaints that the game uses generative AI, something the developers have categorically refuted. Accusing games of using AI is becoming a problem, not least because allegations often seem to rely on nothing more than someone thinking an image looks like it was done by AI. There was plenty of bad art in games before generative AI was ever thought of and plenty of humans couldn't agree on whether art made by other humans was any good or not anyway, so saying something is "obviously AI" isn't really a convincing argument.

More concerning is the announcement, flagged on the opening splash screen of the demo, that the game is leaving Early Access and launching for real in barely a week's time, on 5 March. In EA, Equinox Homecoming has a Very Positive rating on Steam from over 700 reviews (The demo, separately rated, is Mixed but from just twenty-five.) but many of those positive reviews specifically talk about the game being "promising", having "potential" or being in a good state "for an Early Access title".

From what I've seen in the demo, the game would appear to be mostly complete and free of major bugs but as I said at the start, the demo isn't much more than the tutorial. Tutorials and the first few hours of MMORPGs are frequently far more polished than the rest of the game at launch. I have no way of knowing if that's the case here and neither will anyone else who plays the demo.

With that caveat, if the full release lives up to the demo and if the developer, Blue Scarab Entertainment, continues to add content and update the game in the manner of an MMORPG, then it might be a pretty good game. 

Whether it will be a pretty good MMORPG is another matter. I still can't really see why it needs to be one at all.   

Next Fest - Nighthawks At The Demo

I sorted my Steam Wishlist by "Date Added" this morning and Nighthawks came out as the oldest game on there. I added it almost six years ago, on January 15, 2021. If there were any games on the list before that, I must either have bought them or removed them but I guess it's entirely possible I started using the Wishlist just to keep tabs on Nighthawks, which is the game I've most wanted to play ever since I first heard about it.

In fact, I just checked and there's a post from November 2020, actually called "Wishlist", in which I talked about games on my wishlist that had recently gone on sale. None of which I ever bought and none of which are on there now, either. At some point, my wishlist became dominated by games whose demos I played and liked during Next Fest. I do sometimes add other things but not very often. 

Nighthawks, though, was one of those exceptions, not that it's done me much good up to now. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first opportunity anyone's had to give the game a try in the seven years since the Kickstarter campaign offered a "proof of concept" demo back in 2018.

I had actually forgotten the game was ever on Kickstarter. It's being developed by point and click adventure specialists Wadjet Eye Games in collaboration with Richard Corbett, one of the people behind Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies. With a pedigree like that, it hadn't occured to me crowdfunding, would be needed but lots of things that don't seem to make sense happen on Kickstarter.

The campaign did fund successfully but only barely, limping across the $125k threshold with a final total of just over $136k. I'm never really sure what low numbers like this mean for a game in development. Clearly that sort of money's not going to have kept the lights on for the last seven years and if it was to raise the game's profile, seven years with not a word about how things are going doesn't seem like the best way to build on the publicity of a successful Kickstarter.

Then again, it wasn't supposed to take seven years. The estimated delivery time was May 2020, less than six months after I added it to my wishlist. Five years later, this demo is pretty much the first I've heard of it. So, was it worth the wait?

Oh boy, yes! It's exactly what I was hoping for, a beautifully designed, elegant, classy package that's great to look at, listen to, read and play. I found the demo highly immersive and thoroughly engaging. If it wasn't already on my wishlist then it certainly would be now.

Stylistically, it's gorgeous. Beautifully designed without being over-elaborate. And every screen is a painting. I don't think it's a co-incidence that the name of the game immediately brings to mind that famous work by Edward Hopper, either. It's as though they've taken those "concept art" illustrations so many games use to get people excited and then used them in the finished game, instead of replacing them with much less interesting graphics as is the usual way of such things.

This also seems like a moment to say something about AI. I've always expressed a qualified interest in the use of AI in the creative process. I'm not out there with my pitchfork and flaming torch, yelling about how it's a sign of the end times. I make AI images for my own amusement and find quite a lot of them aesthetically pleasing.

It's just a tool, though, and one with considerable limitations still. No AI-generated image is going to stand up to competition like this. These pictures have a warmth (Ironic, given the setting and subject matter.) and a humanity (Ditto.) that AI, at least so far, can't match. I very much doubt we'll be seeing AI-generated images in games that rely on illustrations for ambience or impact any time soon although I've played plenty of games where the human-created pictures were nothing to write home about, so there may be some bleed-through around the edges..

The writing is similarly characterful, oozing with personality and leaving no-one who's played any of the Fallen London series of games in much doubt over the provenance of this one. It's a pretty fair bet that anyone who's interested in Nighthawks will be more than happy to read the equivalent of a novel's worth of prose in order to play it but just in case anyone's in any doubt, that's exactly what's expected of you. 

Several novels, in fact. 800,000 words. That's half as long again as War and Peace, always cited as the benchmark for a very long novel. Of course, this being an RPG with multiple starting points and branching plot-lines, you're never going to have to read all those words in a single play-through.

As I began the demo, it felt for a while that it was going to be all reading, all the time. I'd been playing for a fair while before the first voice actor piped up. Once the dialog began, though, the game turned out to be fully-voiced. The voice acting is good, too. Not flashy or overdone and enjoyable enough that I wanted to hear it all, even though I'd sometimes read to the end of the conversation before the actor had reached the end of the first sentence.

The game is set in the one city where it's acceptable to be a vampire.Vampires have recently been revealed to the human population as facts not fantasies but that doesn't mean they've been accepted, let alone welcomed. Tolerated is the word and not even that by everyone.

Since this is an RPG, the demo begins with a series of questions you need to answer and choices you have to make to decide who you're going to play. I've always liked these systems, where you express a variety of preferences and dislikes and select some slivers of back-story for the game to weave into a personality you can build on. It takes all the effort out of coming up with a characterization.

The demo itself is probably quite replayable because of this. The end card suggests you might like to go round again with a different "Sire" to see what happens. I haven't done that yet but I very well might at some point. It'll be something to do while I wait for the full release, which is still "TBA".

Only having played the one character so far, I'm not sure if everyone starts at the bottom of the heap but I certainly did. No masked balls or opulent bedrooms dripping with velvet, brocade and crystal chandeliers for me.  

 

The demo begins in the filthy backstreets of Cradlebridge as you search for some traitor your sire has tasked you with finding. Your home, such as it is, is a flophouse room in the ironically-named Halcyon Hotel and your evening meal is the bitter blood of an old woman.

Well, mine was, although I immediately regretted it. Very early on, you get the choice to let the woman go or sink your fangs into her and since I was somewhat nervous about the low levels in my blood-meter, I opted for the latter. Her blood turned out to be barely worth drinking but the act of taking it from an unwilling victim locked me out of any chance of becoming one of those benign vampires who only drinks from consenting donors.

I guess that makes this one of those "Choices Matter" games although I can't say for sure that it would have mattered that I made that specific choice. I might have preferred a warning at this very early stage, all the same. But then, I did know I was doing a Bad Thing. I just chose to do it anyway. I shouldn't complain when the obvious consequences followed.

The gameplay is harder to describe than it could be. Nighthawks is consistently labelled "an RPG" and it has a lot of the tropes and mechanics of one but it also shows its Wadjet Eye detection/adventure heritage quite strongly. There's a good deal of opening drawers and looking under beds for evidence or clues in the demo as well as an even greater reliance on long conversations in which you tease information out of the various people you meet.

Mechanically, the game uses a system similar to the one I mentioned in a couple of other demos this time around, where instead of moving around a room and clicking on things to see what they do or examining them to find out what they are, you select much the same kinds of actions from a list. This seems to be the way some developers are handling things these days and I like it - up to a point.

I'm guessing that's the influence of  the Visual Novel genre, where there has to be something for you to click or you might as well be reading a book but there's not much leeway for independent thought or action. Not that there's much more of those in traditional adventure gaming. You do have a lot more freedom there to wander around, poking things, picking them up and putting them in your pockets but in the end there's generally only one solution to the puzzles and only a set number of ways you can combine the objects.

The downside of the "select an action from a menu" approach is that it feels more obviously linear. It's possible that, in the full game, selecting one option might close down others but in the demo I didn't notice that happening. I ended up clicking through everything in the end. On the positive side, though, it avoids all those super-annoying times where you just keep looking at the same things over and over, trying to figure out what the hell to do with them. Or, worse, where gameplay turns into a minute inspection of the screen, pixel by pixel, just in case you might have missed something.

On balance, I think I prefer to have all the options laid out in front of me, whether that's done, as in Nighthawks, with a menu or as in some games by having a key that makes all the interactable objects light up. In the end, I want to have fun and hear stories, not solve puzzles.

That said, it may well be that the finished game will offer a mix of mechanics. There is one screen in the demo that deviates from the pattern. When you walk into the bar at the nightclub, instead of a menu and dialog panel on the right, there's just a full screen picture with "Talk to Bartender" along the bottom. Maybe they haven't finalized everything just yet.

The eventual game is supposed to have some elements of management simulation, where you end up running the nightclub. There's no hint of that in the demo, where the club is very firmly in the hands of an undead mobster. How you would come to be the one in charge instead of him is not immediately obvious.

You do get to see something of the game's combat system, which is nominal at best. It's the purest of RPG combat, where the game decides everything on the basis of your stats and gives you the result without any active involvement required from you, the player. 

I made the mistake of taking on a couple of masked ant-vamp vigilantes even though the game warned me I was over-matched. There was a lot of grunting and thumping and blood-spatters all across the screen as they kicked my ass. Later, I sparred with a vampire enforcer in the boxing ring. That went a lot better although the visuals and sounds were identical.

I'm more than happy with that sort of combat in a game of this kind. It sure beats some irritating quick-time event involving a lot of meaningless button-mashing. You do have access to certain special abilities, called Gifts, too, so there may be some way to bring those into play during combat although I didn't come across anything like it in the demo. I did get to use my Beast Within gift once but that was during a conversation. (Well, if you call being shot at a conversation...)

The full game has upwards of eighty voiced characters, ten companions you can ask to join you and "Multiple adorable rats, some of which you can pet." In the demo I think I met maybe half a dozen NPCs, only one of whom I could have teamed up with, had I so chosen. (I did not.) Didn't see a single rat, adorable or otherwise. 

That took me about three-quarters of an hour. I would have carried on for longer but the demo has a timer in the form of a clock that ticks away in the background, warning you not to stay out too late in case the sun comes up and presumably turns you into a pile of ash. 

I'm speculating there - the exact mechanics of vampirism in the game aren't laid out in the demo. It may not be about extreme light-sensitivity at all. The game wanted me safely tucked in bed by midnight, which seems like an unnecessarily cautious margin for error.

I had a great time with the demo. The full game is clearly going to be epic. It's likely to be one of the few games on my wishlist I buy at full price as soon as it becomes available. Can't offer any better recommendation than that.