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.

Three Down, Three To Go

No point hanging about. I ripped through two of the six, chosen Next Fest demos last night and knocked off a third this morning. My speed run was helped by the fact that my PC crashed after each of them, twice when I was just re-logging . That's an issue with the machine, not the games, but it gives me a great reason to stop where I'd normally have carried on until I'd finished the whole thing.

None of these demos require completion for judgment, anyway. It's very clear with all of them after just a few minutes what the game is trying to be and how successful it is at being it. And since none of the three is trying to do anything new, other than cross-breed a couple of genres that don't usually sit together, they're all a pretty easy read.

On with the micro-reviews.

Over The Hill (23 minutes - Not wishlisted)

I could just refer everyone to Nimgimli's comment on yesterday's post for this one and save myself the trouble. Here, I'll quote him so you don't even need to click through: "It is almost EXACTLY Snowrunner with worse graphics, right down to the controls for the Winch and stuff being exactly the same."

I haven't played the game Over The Hill is trying to emulate so I'll take Nimgimli's word for the similarities. What I can say, with confidence, from personal experience is that, while it looks quite a lot like the game I was comparing it to, Outbound, the way it plays is completely different.

In Outbound, you drive around some lovely scenery in a camper van, doing some extremely simple tasks and occasionally stopping to remove the odd obstacle, like a fallen tree, or to fix something, like a collapsed bridge. It's a relaxing, chill experience - too much so for many, judging from the reviews. In Over The Hill it's all obstacles and no roads. Getting from A to B is the gameplay.

Over The Hill is not, as I thought it would be, a driving game. It's a puzzler. The driving, such as it is, is incidental to the puzzle of getting your vehicle past an endless succession of obstructions - mud, water, rubble, loose sand - just so you can drive for fifty yards before you have to do it again. 

The inducement to keep moving seems to be to reach various marked points on the map and see what's there. It could be something you can add to your vehicle - I found an antenna - or a fast travel point. I imagine it could be all sorts of things but I'll never know because by the time I'd reached the end of the tutorial I'd had more than enough. 

At that point the demo tells you you've acquired the ability to choose where you'd like to start from the Main Menu but when I went back to do that the game crashed and I felt no inclination to try again. I'm still in the market for a relaxing, easy driving game with a lot of pretty scenery but this isn't it.

Spirit Vale (50 Minutes - Not wishlisted)

The one MMORPG on the list this time, Spirit Vale is less than a month away from an Early Access release on Steam. Is it ready? Hard to be sure after less than an hour but, yes, I'd say it probably is.

It's going to be a very familiar experience for anyone who's played any traditional MMORPG before, too. You're not going to need much instruction getting to grips with this one. The art style is about the only mild surprise. 

As I said yesterday, the humanoid characters look disturbingly like babies. Ok, toddlers. If they had the license for the IP, it could be Rugrats: The MMO. 

Character creation is pretty good. There are seven classes, all of which can specialize. It's the usual suspects - Ranger, Warrior, Mage and so on. I picked the Summoner, who can become a Necromancer when they grow up, mostly because they get a cat for a pet. (It turns out they also get a dog and an angel. I'm not complaining)

There are a lot of hairstyles, colors, eyebrow options, eye shapes and so on, laid out in a grid so you can click through them and immediately see what your character would look like. That was fun. 

I can't remember if you get to choose gender or body type. If I did I don't remember it. I suspect the classes might be gender locked. It's a bit of a moot point anyway, given the character models. That was why grandmothers used to knit pink or blue booties, wasn't it? They'd need more colors of wool these days, of course.

Once you're through with character creation it's out into the world. You start in town and you get pretty much no instruction on what to do there. It's OK. You don't need any. It took  me about thirty seconds to figure out where the 1-5 starting zone was and thirty more to go there so I could start killing things. 

And that's where it gets really old school.  Oh boy, have they gone all-in on the dopamine hits! XP flies in, levels rack up, mobs drop clothes and weapons and runes and potions and everything has a ton of stats you can read and compare. If grinding mobs for xp and loot is your thing you'll be in murder hobo heaven!

If there are quests, I didn't get any. I didn't need any. I didn't want any. I got myself a sword and pair of pants, worked out how to sit to heal, spent some points on spells so I could summon all three pets and then I ran around killing anything that moved. 

Combat felt more like an ARPG than an MMORPG. Most of the time I was surrounded by hordes of mobs, me and my dog, killing as fast as we could go. The mobs were supposed to be "Neutral" but sometimes they attacked us anyway, which was fair because most of the time my dog attacked them without either being provoked or told to do it. 

Sometimes one or other of us got overwhelmed and died. If it was my dog, I just resummoned him. If it was me, I respawned in town and ran back. If there was a death penalty, I didn't notice it at my low level so it didn't seem to matter.

I did that for a while until I was too high for the first zone and then I moved to the second. There's a map that makes the place look huge but the zones are tiny. As for levels, they've got them marked as high as 135 on the map, although that would be a weird place to cap. 

I got to Level 10/Job Level 7 before I stopped, by which time I could easily kill Level 16 mobs. Job Level drives your points allocation for new spells and abilities. I spent lots of points on spells, not all of which I figured out how to use. I did work out that you can upgrade your pets. My dog started out as a puppy and ended up looking like a werewolf. I wasn't convinced it was an improvement. 

The whole thing was ridiculously enjoyable. It's like an MMORPG from the early 2000s on fast-forward. It reminded me particularly of one of the earlier imported titles I used to enjoy, Eden Eternal, which I'm amazed to see is available on Steam now. I might have to take a look.

And I might still be playing Spirit Vale now, if I hadn't somehow bugged the game taking a screenshot. I toggled the UI off and nothing I could do would get it to come back on, so I logged out to see if that would fix it, which caused my PC to crash because that's what it does with all games now, until I add the executable to Windows Defender's exclusion list, which I'm too lazy to do for demos.

That broke the spell and I have had the sense and self-discipline not to go back and start again. So far. I have also not wishlisted the game because the last thing I need is to start playing another addictive, old-school MMORPG. If you still want to play like it was 1999, only with prettier pictures, you could do a lot worse.

Hawthorn (44 Minutes - Wishlisted and signed up on website)

If you look this one up, you'll find it widely described as a cross between Stardew Valley and Skyrim. That probably tells most people everything they need to know. Unfortunately, those are two games I've never played so it doesn't do much for me.

The demo is what the developers, NEARstudios, describe as a "Proof of Concept" build. It's what they... but no, why paraphrase? Let them explain:

Considering the provenance, there's a lot here already. I only played for about three-quarters of an hour because I had to stop so we could go pick up Beryl from the dog-groomer but I was clearly nowhere near the end. Had I not needed to do something else, I'd happily have carried on. If this is Proof of Concept, I'd say the concept is very firmly proven.

The gameplay loop as as seen in the demo ought to be easy to describe but now I try to pin it down it feels a bit more slippery than that. It's a segment taken from somewhere in the middle of the game, apparently, and it certainly has that in media res feel to it. 

There's a big feast coming and you, playing an anthropomorphic but quite realistically envisioned woodland animal, seem to be the facilitator. Animals keep coming up to you and making suggestions, which you follow but only to set things up. You decide where things like the feast table and the chairs go, choose the menu and generally make sure all the basics are in place. Then the other animals do all the gathering and the building to pull whole the thing together.

Before any of this starts, there's some chatter about some animal who's about to leave town and all the time you're trying to get the feast organized, animals keep running up to you and offering suggestions or just wanting to "have a word". It's like Animal Crossing Pocket Camp only with somewhat more realistic graphics. 

Frequently, I found myself talking to a new animal before I'd had a chance to do whatever the last one wanted but none of them seemed to remember what they'd asked me for, anyway. They'd often come back before I'd even started with another idea they wanted to try out. 

The Owl wanted to take me fishing, which I'd have liked to try, since he said we'd do it with me riding on his back and him swooping low over the lake so I could grab the fish out of the water. That never happened but I did go to tea at his house. It was only after I'd accepted that it occurred to me an Owl inviting a Mouse for a meal might have unpleasant connotations but I needn't have worried. It's not that  sort of game. 

Oh, yes, I didn't mention I was playing a Mouse, did I? The options in the demo are Mouse, Owl or Otter. Each has a unique specialty - mice are tool-users, otters can swim and fish, owls can fly and be ridden by other characters as mounts - but you also get to choose Traits and Quirks at character creation to personalize your character. 

Traits are useful abilities like being fitter (More hit points) or being able to carry more (Larger inventory) and Quirks are disadvantages like being dainty (Fewer hit points) or being scared of mushrooms. (I took that one.) You get one Trait for free but if you want more you have to take a Quirk for each one as a counterbalance. 

There's housing, too. Really lovely, characterful, delightful housing. My Mouse must be pretty important. Her house is the biggest in the village. It's fricken huge! You can decorate but I didn't figure out how. 

The whole game looks gorgeous, especially for something at this early stage of development. It also played very smoothly for me. Character movement was fluid, the UI was intuitive and even with very little instruction, it was easy to figure out what to do and how to do it. 

The writing is good. All the animals have personalities that come across clearly in the way they express themselves as well as in what they want to talk to you about or what they tell you about themselves. They gossip about each other all the time, too. It feels very much like a village.

I'm guessing the presence of stats and particularly the way there are both hit points and a trait to increase them means there's some kind of combat in the game, although there was no hint of it in the parts of the demo I saw. I don't know how big the world is or what's out there, though there are hints in the conversations. One character talks about having lived in the city, for example, but whether that's somewhere you can visit I have no idea.

I'd love to find out. I have high hopes for this one. It's immediately enjoyable and it has a very obvious potential market. "What if Stardew Valley but Skyrim?" is an irresistible elevator pitch.

The problem would seem to be whether it will ever get the funding it needs. There was a successful Kickstarter last year, when the total came in at double the ask, but that's still only $400k. And according to an update in February, the team only includes five full-time devs. Is that enough money and/or enough people?

I hope so but I guess we'll find out. 

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...

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. 

A Tale Of Two Demos

Next Fest is over for another few months. The timing was bad for me. I didn't get to play many demos. I did, however, manage to spend some time with two I was very interested in; a couple of games that looked very different on the surface but which turned out to be much more alike than I expected.

The two titles are Esoteric Ebb and Zero Parades For Dead Spies. The latter, as I explained in an earlier post, is the follow-up to the much-garlanded Disco Elysium, produced by what's left of the same studio, Za/Um, while the former is merely "inspired" by it. 

So, on the basis of the demos alone, which does a better job of continuing the legacy? The original or the copy?

I won't bury the lede. The copy wins by a mile. 

Both the demos are huge. I put just under an hour into Zero Parades and twice that into Esoteric Ebb. In both cases it felt like I'd barely gotten started. In large part that's because they each require an enormous amount of reading and, in the case of ZP, listening. 

Whether the maps are extensive in the demos I can't say. I barely got past the opening areas of either. I suspect there's plenty more I could explore but in each case I felt I'd seen enough, albeit for very different reasons.

With Esoteric Ebb, I didn't want to carry on much further because it's very likely I'll buy the full game. There was an option at the beginning of the demo for progress made there to be carried over and I took it, but I'm not sure it worked. Since I don't want to have to do all that reading again, I think I'll wait until I have the game installed before I carry on (Although I did install the demo on my laptop so I could carry on playing it in bed last night...)

I could buy the game right now if I wanted, of course. It went on sale yesterday. It's been well-received so far, with a Very Positive rating on Steam and a score of 88 on Metacritic. From what I've seen of the demo, that's well deserved.

 

Esoteric Ebb doesn't look much like Disco Elysium in screenshots or sound like it in the description. It's an RPG with a cartoon aesthetic that's very European. It reminds me of any number of strips in publications like Pilote or Metal Hurlante back in the '80s. 

It's also solidly placed in the fantasy genre, even if the specific stripe of fantasy is "post Arcanepunk", whatever the hell that is. It has magic, spells, levels, classes, all the standard RPG trappings, although if you're expecting a standard RPG, you're going to be very disappointed.

Zero Parades, on the other hand, looks almost exactly like Disco Elysium and takes place in a very similar setting. Possibly in the same world, I'm not sure. If you're expecting a faithful sequel you're going to be, once again, very disappointed. 

I was. I was more than willing to cut Za/Um some slack over the controversies that have dominated all news about the studio for the last couple of years. I haven't really been paying that much attention the details, the rights and wrongs of the whole affair. I was just hoping whoever was still using the name would come up with a worthy successor.

On the evidence of the demo, that's not happening. The whole thing felt like a second-rate imitation to me.

Not the visuals, which are up to the standard of the original and look very much like it. Nor, really, the gameplay, which was fine as far as it went. Superficially, Zero Parades is Disco Elysium 2.

The problems start with the writing. It's not bad by any means but it has that awkward sense of trying just a little too hard to be something it doesn't quite know how to be. 

Disco Elysium was truly, genuinely, effortlessly unhinged. That was its glory. By comparison, Zero Parades reads like a bunch of familiar tropes, layered over with a thin veneer of by-the-numbers weirdness. It's like a student review version of a hit show - earnest, eager and unconvincing.

The very premise gave me trouble. Making the game about spies imparts a totally different spin from Disco's police procedural. In DE, you start out as some kind of burned-out detective, stuck with a much slicker partner, working a dead-end case in a no-hope town. In ZP you're some kind of disgraced super-spy, who's just been woken from cryo-sleep and sent on a mission that's gone wrong even before it's begun.

I can see how these are supposed to be equivalents but they really aren't. One is grim, gritty and bleak. The other is exciting, dramatic and adventurous. Still, the settings are equally down-at-heel and the central character equally adrift from the course they're supposed to be following, so that oughtn't to matter so much.

The reason it does matter is that all the info-dump about the political background, so subtle and complex in Disco Elysium, is here thrust at you in wodges of dull jargon that doesn't give much of an impression of nuance below the surface. What was kept to the background in the earlier game is foregrounded here and I found it off-putting, like having to sit through a series of political lectures when all I wanted was to get on with the plot. Or, indeed, find the plot.

Worse than the uninspired writing, though, are the voice-overs. I talked a little about the truly awful narration the last time I wrote about ZP and it absolutely does not improve on further hearing. None of the other voices are anything like as bad but neither is any of them much good. After about half an hour, I couldn't take any more. I switched the voices off altogether. That is not something I do often or feel I need to.

Mechanically, I did like the demo. The controls feel intuitive, it's easy to spot things you ought to investigate and the character animations are very impressive. The game looks good and plays well. Arguably, better than Disco.

 

The problem was, nothing I was doing seemed all that interesting. Long before I decided I'd had enough I'd stopped caring about the political situation people kept talking about and the constant references to spycraft were no more welcome than they are in any game. I just don't find spies a very interesting bunch of people, I guess. As for the mission, it never got started.

It's possible all of the things I'm complaining about are artifacts of the slow-burn design Za/Um is famous for. Disco Elysium took hours and hours to warm up and didn't really get its hooks into me until about twenty hours in. 

But it had something, right from the start. An edge, a sparkle, a glint. A mystery, just out of sight, that I couldn't ignore. On the evidence of the demo, Zero Parades doesn't have anything like that working for it.

Esoteric Ebb, on the other hand, very much does. Even though it opens with that exhausted and exhausting cliche, the main character waking up on a slab in the morgue, it grips from the start. 

Mechanically it's very similar to Zero or Disco. You wander about, looking at stuff or talking to people and every time you open a dialog with a person or an object you're set to spend the next few minutes clicking and reading. Seriously, if you aren't the sort of person who's ecstatic at the thought of starting a five-hundred page novel, you'd be better off looking anywhere else than at any game that claims to be inspired by Disco Elysium.

 

There are two huge differences between Esoteric Ebb and Zero Parades, though. Firstly, in EE the text is cynical, satirical, witty and frequently genuinely funny. Secondly, there are more than ample opportunities to make choices and choose responses that feel like they might change something.

There are even dice to roll. Where ZP has some indecipherable process involving mental states and meters, none of which seem to be under your direct control, EE has RPG stats and ability checks. And amazingly it manages to integrate those into the process without detracting from the aesthetic.

Another huge advantage EE has over ZP, especially in a demo, is a clear and comprehensible plot. Well, not so much a plot as the starting point for one. And in that way, it's a lot closer to Disco than Zero. 

Disco Elysium begins with the player character knowing they've been sent to investigate a dead body hanging from a tree. Esoteric Ebb begins with the player character knowing they've been sent to investigate an explosion in a tea shop. From there, everything slides in all directions but at least you know what you're supposed to be doing. 

ZP starts with the mission you've been woken up for being terminated and your orders being changed to "Come back to base immediately". From there on, you're on your own. That theoretically gives you complete freedom to act but it mostly left me feeling confused and directionless. In Esoteric Ebb, I always had a purpose, even if mostly I kept getting distracted from pursuing it.

 

Perhaps the most surprising difference between the two demos is the way each explains the political and cultural background that's so important to them both. ZP either layers it in gnomic jargon, presumably intended to feel deep and meaningful but actually just coming across as obtuse and tedious, or reveals it through stilted, unnatural conversations, some no more enjoyable than sharing a bus ride with a conspiracy theorist.

The NPCs in Esoteric Ebb not only have much sprightlier conversational skills, they have much deeper dialog trees that range widely across a range of topics and still manage to keep most of them interesting and relevant. The dialog is far more naturalistic, too, albeit only by the terms of an RPG. The complex social, cultural, religious and political background bleeds through by osmosis. 

Which isn't to say there's no info-dump. There's plenty but it's handled almost wholly through highlighted key-words on which you can, if you wish, click to get a short explanation or gloss. It's like having an internal wiki for the game. I found it useful and enlightening.

I could go on but there's every chance I will, at some point, buy Esoteric Ebb, at which point I'm sure there will be more posts about it here. I wouldn't rule out buying Zero Parades entirely but given I can't even summon up the enthusiasm to finish the demo, that does seem unlikely.

If anyone else has played either of the demos, especially if they've also played Disco Elysium, I'd be interested to hear other opinions, particularly on Zero Parades. Maybe I'm missing something... 

Next Fest - What's A Little "C" Among Friends?

• Excuses for not writing the post I was planning to write #347: 

Six vans from the National Grid turned up outside our house this morning and a dozen workmen got out and started digging up the street so they could fix two faults in the electricity supply. Consequently, we had no power from eleven in the morning until four in the afternoon. And the dog ate my homework.

Before that happened, I had time to play the Next Fest demo I was most lookiing forward to, the one for Nighthawks, which I've had wish-listed for years. I was going to talk about that and also the other demo I've finished, A Tale of Dirty Whiskers, but Nighthawks, even the demo, deserves a lot more time than I have left to give it today, so this is just going to be a quick run through the cat game.

Attentive readers (There must be one or two.) will remember I said part of the reason I chose this demo was that it was voiced in Spanish and I thought it might give me a free language lesson. 

Guess what? It's not in Spanish. 

It's in Portuguese. I do know the difference, having been to both countries many times. I've always thought spoken Portuguese sounds very little like Spanish, unlike written Portuguese, which looks very much like Spanish indeed. I'm kinda surprised I mistook one for the other, even in the short clip I watched. I must be losing my ear after all this time not traveling.

It's a moot point anyway, because the game is voiced in neither. Well, it might be if you selected the "Portuguese" option at the start but since there's an "English" option and I have no interest in practicing my non-existent Portuguese, that's what I picked.

While I'm on the subject, I might as well deal with the translation up front. It's not great. It's not terrible but it's a long way from idiomatic and has some fairly unmistakeable errors. I was particularly confused by the way the player-character is consistently shown as "Detetive" in dialog scenes although when any of the other characters refer to him they use the word "Detective". 

I wondered for a while if Detetive was actually his name and it was some kind of post-modernist joke but I checked and "detetive" is indeed Portuguese for "detective", so I'm guessing it's just an error. Translation is clearly still a work in progress anyway. Whole passages of dialog are still in Portuguese in the supposedly English version.

It's all perfectly understandable (Well, the translated bits. The untranslated Portuguese maybe not so much...) so it didn't get in the way of the game for me. Not that there is much of a game in the demo. The Steam Store page doesn't really claim a genre for A Tale of Dirty Whiskers but I was expecting some kind of adventure-murder-mystery-detection-point-and-click affair. Instead, I think it might be more accurate to call it a Visual Novel because there's very little for the player to do except turn the virtual pages.

It opens with a seven minute sequence that requires no input from the player at all and the entire demo only took me tem more minutes to complete, during which I did very little more. Mostly what I did was watch a bunch of odd-looking but nicely-drawn cat-people insult me and make snarky remarks about each other. It was quite entertaining.

The plot involves a family of cats whose mother has just died in what may or may not be suspicious circumstances. One of the family has hired a detective to investigate. That's you. 

The cat that hired you didn't bother to tell their siblings you were coming, on the very valid grounds that if they had, most of them wouldn't have turned up for the big family get-together. Consequently, none of them is very favorably disposed to talk to you, although they certainly are happy enough to talk in front of you.

Listening to them doing that is most of the demo. The rest is a bit of prowling around after they've gone to bed, looking for clues in traditional adventure game style. Except you don't actually move around the house as such. You just stand there and click some menu options. By co-incidence, this also turns out to be how Nighthawks handles the same process, although that's a bit like saying a butcher's bike is the same as a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide.  

The cats themselves are all very distinctive individuals, fun to look at and listen to. They look nothing like each other, which is explained by the possibility that their mother may have had many lovers. I did think that went a little further toward the "cat" end of the spectrum than anthropomorphised cat-people games usually tavel.

One of the siblings is a loud-mouthed drunk, albeit good-natured with it. One is some sort of goth-punk-emo teenager or twentysomething. Another is a dandy and there's a tough-but-maternal-looking one. The worried-looking, apparently well-balanced cat is the one that hired you. Oh, amd there's a cute kitten, too. Well, the game tells you he's cute. I wasn't convinced.  

In the seventeen minutes the demo gave me to do it, I didn't form much more of an impression about any of them than that but according to the description on the store page all eight of them are "deep and flawed". (Not the kitten.) Also, I don't believe I met all eight, although I could be wrong.

The whole thing feels a little ramshackle but not in a bad way. I wouldn't buy it but if I got it as part of a Prime Gaming offer I'd claim it and I'd probably end up playing it and enjoying it. The illustrations are charming and, if you allow for the shaky translation, the writing isn't bad, either.

I haven't wish-listed it but that's not really a mark against it. If you like quirky cat games, it'd definitely be worth taking a look at the demo. It won't take up much of your time.

My Next Fest Hot Picks

 

Those are my picks from this Autumn's Next Fest. All eight of them, which is probably at least two too many for me to get through before the event ends. Possibly more.

A week really isn't long enough for this, is it? I guess the idea is that you approach it the way Krikket does and only play each demo for long enough to decide if you want to wishlist it or not. That is the purpose of the whole affair, after all.

I can't help treating them all as small, self-contained games. Unless I actively dislike them, I'm going to do my best to play each demo through to the end. The lengths vary a lot but I'd guess most take 45-60 minutes to complete, with a few outliers being either much shorter or completely open-ended, with no obvious end-point.

That makes it unrealistic for me to try and fit more than a half-dozen or so into my weekly gaming schedule, unless I'm prepared to drop something in their favor. Some quarters, it's not much of a problem. There have been Next Fests where I've struggled to come up with six demos I'm interested in playing.

Mostly, though, I have to turn down a few that look quite interesting and it has to be remembered that the total number of available demos in every event is well into four figures. Even allowing for the fact that most of them are in genres I have absolutely no interest in playing, the handful I pick can barely be representative of anything.

Except it kind of is, anyway, because I always gravitate towards a couple of categories that never seem to have a huge number of demos available: MMORPGs and traditional point&click adventures. Sometimes I can hardly find any of either. Eight would often be a quorum.

Not this time! There were more of both than I could cope with and several look really promising. Games that looked like I'd enjoy them were positively jumping out at me. I made my selections in a matter of minutes. It helped that the whole thing seemed to be laid out and presented more coherently than usual, although that might just have been because several of the demos that caught my eye were in the "Recommended For You" section. That hardly ever happens. Maybe the algorithm has improved.

The eight I went for are:

Nighthawks

First in this list, first in every way. I've had this on my wishlist since January 2021 (!) and I'd honestly given up hope of ever seeing it. And now here it is. Or a demo, anyway. It's a Wadjet Eye title and almost certainly their most ambitious to date. The pitch is "...a deliciously twisted new take on vampire role-playing games as you take over a failing nightclub on the wrong side of the tracks, and turn it into your personal empire through seduction, intimidation, and careful use of secret supernatural Gifts" Might be a little too much on the management-sim side of things for me but I have very high hopes.

Nova Antarctica

A survival game set in Antarctica in the year 2900, where you play a child who's been sent alone to the South Pole to investigate a mysterious signal. Why a child? I have no idea. Maybe because despite the bleak setting, the game looks extremely cute and gameplay involves "the mysterious animals of Antarctica." One of the screenshots shows the child-protagonist wearing a space-suit and riding a wolf. Sold!

Atomic Age

 

One of several extremely good-looking demos in my pick. The visuals did contribute a lot to my choices as they always do but there's no point trying to play a great-looking game in a genre for which you have no affinity, so even the greatest pictures have to take second place to the gameplay. This one's "A futuristic, humorous, slapstick based point & click adventure in the shape of the 50th and 60th years." All of that sounds right up my street except maybe the slapstick. I do really like the phrasing on "50th and 60th years", which I think means the 1950s and '60s. It does describe itself as "retro and nostalgic" (For the characters, that is, not the player, which is a clever conceit, if hard to parse.) I have a feeling this one could be quite odd. I hope so.

Dark Rites of Arkham

Pretty much says it all in the title, doesn't it? And yes, it's exactly what you'd expect: a pixel art point&click (They cutely call it a "pulp&click".) in which "A macabre ritual murder puts Arkham PD detectives Jack Foster and Harvey Whitman to the test. As the investigation progresses, they will unveil a disturbing connection between the Salem witch trials of the 17th century and the end of humankind." I'm not a huge fan of Lovecraftiana but it's a safe and trusted setting for this sort of thing and I'm happy to give it a whirl.

Magic World

An MMORPG. Confusingly, not the first to call itself "Magic World", either. There were several MMOs in this Next Fest but this is the only one I went for and I'm not confident about it at all but the rest looked even less likely to be fun and I felt I really ought to try at least one of them. This one has a fairly traditional setting: "Expansive Open World – Explore mysterious lands, ancient ruins, hidden treasures, and battle dangerous creatures." Unfortunately, the devs also appear to want to re-invent the wheel by replacing all the tried and tested methods of combat with one that has you "drawing magical symbols with your mouse and combining them with key presses to unleash devastating abilities." I have seen this tried before and it was not a success. Also, I don't have room on my desk for drawing symbols with the mouse...

Dissimilar

I have a lot more faith in this one. It's "A unique blend of mystery, turn-based combat, and exploration" with gorgeous, hand-drawn art. I'm always looking for games with the kind of turn-based combat I so much enjoyed in the Dungeon of Naheulbeuk but they're very hard to find. This isn't exactly the same but it looks like it might have a similar feel. And even if it doesn't, the detection and exploration looks like it'll be fun.

A Tale Of Dirty Whiskers

 

There are always loads of demos featuring cats in every Next Fest, aren't there? Anyone would think there was some connection between owning a cat and playing video games. Hard to imagine. It was the feline factor that drew this to my attention but the main reason I picked it was that the demo seems to be in Spanish. Not the text, which is definitely English, but the voice acting. I don't speak Spanish but I know enough to pick out a few words and I was wondering if playing a whole game where the translation of what I'm hearing is right there in front of me might work like some half-assed kind of language course. And it's another point&click murder mystery, so there's that...

Aether and Iron

Not exactly leaving the best to last but quite possibly the best-looking. Gameplay-wise, it's a "decopunk Narrative RPG set in an alternate 1930s" with turn-based combat between flying cars, which sounds amazing and looking at the raves from the likes of PCGamer (“This tactics RPG set on a floating New York City could be the next great noir videogame.”) I guess it might turn out to be the best after all. Here are a couple more tantalizing comparisons:

“Aether and Iron Is Like Disco Elysium, Citizen Sleeper, and BioShock All at Once” - GameRant

“Aether and Iron has lashings of Bioshock and Baldur’s Gate 3...” - PCGamesN 

That's some heavy praise. It better be good after all that! 

I'd better stop typing and get on with playing or I'll never get through them all before the event ends. I'll be back with my judgments later - always assuming I can find time to write them up.