There's Always Time For A Tune Or Two

I had every intention today of writing a lengthy post about two more of the Steam Next Fest demos, Brok the Investigator and Hill Agency: PURITY&Decay. I played Hill Agency yesterday and my plan was to play Brok this morning, then post about both, since I could see some correlations between them.

It's eight in the evening and I have just finished the Brok demo. It didn't take me all day - I did other things, too -  but it did take  a hair under four hours, all of it solid gameplay. It may be the longest demo I've ever played. 

As a consequence, I don't have nearly enough time to finish the post I wanted to write. There's no point even starting. 

I don't even have time to write a shorter post focusing on just one of the demos. I'm working tomorrow so it's going to have to wait until later in the week and now that I think about it, the last remaining demo, Yoko Redux: Dreams of a Blue Planet, looks like it might factor into the conversation too, so I probably ought to play that first as well.

Even though I broke the posting every day streak, I don't want to get into the habit of missing days when i intended to post, so I thought I'd just share a few tunes I've enjoyed over the last week. I can get that done in the half hour or so before we take the dog for a walk. Or I could if I stopped rambling.

Eat Slay Chardonnay - NOBRO - I heard this on Radio 6 the other day, while I was chopping up vegetables. It's a wonder I have any fingers left. It was chosen by someone out of PUP. Didn't catch his name. Ninety-seven seconds of pure exhilaration. It's not often I think a song could be longer but I could do two and a half minutes of that.

Destination Boyfriend - Slagheap - If NOBRO are the Ramones, who are Slagheap? The Desperate Bicycles? Swell Maps? We've Got A Fuzzbox?Yeah, probably Fuzzbox.

Remember when people would go around wearing those passive-aggressive "Punk's Not Dead" buttons? I bet no-one's doing that any more.

I Was Neon - Julia Jacklin - I've been digging into Julia's back catalog since I heard her previous single, Lydia Wears A Cross, kicking myself for not discovering her sooner. This is her latest, a mesmeric motorik meditation that reminds me very much of my long-time favorite, Jane Weaver. 

I have a post in mind that's a kind of follow-up to the one that mentioned Dad Rock. It's going to feed off this article in The Atlantic, which I came to by way of this post at Stereogum. By all means, read up in advance. Then if I never get around to writing the post it won't really matter. 

I mention it because its not just old bands hanging on forever that's the problem. It's styles, too. 

Not Harry. I don't mean him. Although...

Wet Dream - Harry Styles - Wet Leg are opening for Harry Styles on his Australian tour. The world can be such a strange place, can't it? Rhian and Hester have already finished their second album, too. Is that even weirder? I think it might be. I like Harry Styles, by the way. I think everyone does, now.

Dolly - Kevin Morby - While we're on the subject of weird covers, try this. An Americana version of a Tierra Whack tune. Although, when you hear the original, it's really not that big a leap. Tierra's something special, alright. In fact, let's have her as well, live from the dollhouse.

And finally...

Canción De Entretiempo - Lisasinson - If that doesn't make you smile, nothing will. I believe I may have said that about Lisasinson before but that's what they do, isn't it? Make people smile.

It helps if the mere sight of those Spanish Don & Miki books give you an instant nostalgia hit, of course. I used to buy them when I went to Spain or France in the hope of finding some Carl Barks reprints. Sometimes I thought I had. Of course, the artists were never credited so I was never sure.

And now it's time to walk the dog. Next time - demo time! 

Maybe...

Art For Art's Fake

Late last night, Wilhelm alerted me to an internet fad that's apparently been all over Twitter for a couple of weeks. Not that I'd know. I'm not one of the Twitterati. 

Maybe I should have known, even so. When I followed the links, first to the version of Dall-E that Wilhelm favors and thence to Craiyon, its new home, I realised the whole thing was part of something I already have bookmarked, the GPT-3 Demo Showcase.

As with a lot of aggregators, there's just too much to wade through there. Over three hundred AI-related apps using the GPT-3 large language module made publicly available by Open AI last year. I'd been riffling through a few of them in idle moments, playing around with various "writing assistants" and chatbots, but I'd been under the impression everything there was purely textual.

It seems not. Craiyon is an "AI model that can draw images from any text prompt", something like the Artflow app we all had so much fun with a few months back. Except that where Artflow only generates portraits, Craiyon attempts to visualize anything you suggest. 

It's not content with a single try, either. Craiyon gives you nine different versions in a classic comic-book grid, something which creates, in my mind at least, an almost subliminal expectation of some kind of narrative progression. It adds to the general surrealism of the process, as if it wasn't surreal enough already.

Even though it was late, I couldn't resist playing about with the thing right way. I did a couple of runs at the Dall-E Mini site before moving to Craiyon, beginning with this one:

 

I wasn't entirely convinced. Most of the shots look a lot like Tony the Tiger but not much like they've been drawn by Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes. #7 looks something like Hobbes. I'm not sure any of the others do.

I was curious as to why several of the shots have distorted, almost cubist faces. Nothing in the seed should have suggested it. As things progressed it became obvious at least a degree of facial distortion was just about guaranteed, no matter what seed was used. I still don't know why. Maybe the AI's on something.

Still on the tiger trail, I tried Shere Khan next. Once again, I couldn't really see much - or any - of Bill Watterson's influence in the result. I started to wonder whether Craiyon really knew who Bill Watterson was or what his drawings looked like. Of that, more later.

There followed a very unsuccessful series of attempts featuring Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Gidget. In only one was either of them even vaguely recognizeable. This one.

 

The AI seems to think "various" means "identical" but it's very keen to prove it knows what a witch is. In # 4 it seems to have given Sabrina two hats to wear and by the last frame it has at least managed to come up with a color other than black. Still, not very impressive.

 

Back to the drawing board, by which I mean more cartoon characters. I was wearing my Stience T-shirt so Bean from Disenchantment was the first one I thought of.

It seems that being the lead character in a successful Matt Groening animated series is no more a passport to fame than landing a long-running role as the face of a once-feted mmorpg. The AI had no more idea who Bean was than it recognized Firiona Vie's name when Wilhelm pointed it in that direction. Of course, the fact that I got the name of the show wrong (As I nearly always do.) might have had something to do with it. 

 

[Edit: I just reseeded it with the correct name and got this:

My apologies to the AI. I am an idiot.]

It clearly knew what a  kite was, anyway, so I tried again with someone I thought was bound to be famous enough to be pictured flying one: Elvis. 

I really like those. It's nice to see Elvis looking so happy. 

 

Since the AI was clearly at home with Elvis, I thought I'd give it a chance to show off. It was plain from Wilhelm's post that one of the app's great strengths was cloning the signature styles of famous artists. If Bill Watterson wasn't famous enough, how about Banksy? The internet loves Banksy.

Wow! That's just about perfect. It would make a great poster. Or a mural.

It was at this point that I had a brainwave. Maybe Craiyon didn't know who Bill Watterson was but how about his most famous creations? How would it be if I asked it to draw Elvis not in the style of Bill Watterson but in the style of Calvin and Hobbes?

Oh boy. It loves Calvin and Hobbes! So much so that it barely remembered to put Elvis in at all. That's not "Elvis in the style of Calvin and Hobbes" so much as Calvin and Hobbes with a very brief cameo by the King.

Since Craiyon was so into them, I gave it another chance to indulge itself.

 

 

Apart from the distortion, those are very good fakes. It wouldn't be all that hard to add some speech bubbles and turn them into a strip. It's easy to see the potential for mischief, something Calvin might love but I'm pretty sure Bill Watterson wouldn't.

 

I thought maybe it was time to move away from cartoon characters and copyrighted material. Since Elvis worked so well, how about a couple more rock stars?

 

I didn't specify "...during a pandemic" but Craiyon decided to add masks anyway. Other than that it's a mind-blowingly accurate visual record of an incident that never happened and probably never could have happened. I'm particularly impressed by the way it correctly interprets the preposition in all but two of the pictures.

Time to step down hard on the surreality pedal. I'd been keeping my texts short and to the point. I decided to go long and complicated instead.

Once again, I was impressed. "Ann of Cleves" doesn't feature but then I did spell her name wrong. I guess you can't tell it's a Thursday, either, or what they're talking about, but it's definitely night-time, they're obviously having a discussion and that could as well be The Factory as anyplace else. The rabbits, the monkey, Nico and Andy are all clearly recognisable, even if facial distortion is at an all-time high.

It freaked me out a bit. It's like set of contact negatives from a photo-shoot for Interview magazine, one that was judged too disturbing to publish. It was getting properly late by then so I decided to call it a night before things got any weirder.

This afternoon, just before I started on this post, I ran a couple more ideas past Craiyon. Rather than leave you with the unsettling images above, here's something decidedly more cheery. And colorful. Boy, is it colorful!

 

Doesn't that have a weird Rembrandt/Vermeer feel to it? Ferris looks as if he's wearing a ruff in #2 and a cassock in #7. There's an awful lot of Scooby and not so much of the gang. I can make out Daphne in #3 and Velma in #5, I think, but if Fred or Shaggy are in there anywhere, I'm afraid I can't see them.

 

Saved the best for last there. I'd have that on my wall, blown up to poster size. That and the Banksy. I love the way Scooby seems to be wearing clothes in most of his shots.

As I said about Artflow, this would really integrate wonderfully with Occupy White Walls. I really ought to look into that. I think it might be doable. Whether or not it would be legal is another matter altogether.

You Might Think This Is Funny...

This is still supposed to be an mmorpg blog, although you'd barely know it these days. The traditional kind of content Inventory Full used to feature has dropped right off. Now it's all single-player games, TV shows and music. I guess it's hardly surprising, given I'm barely playing any mmos right now. 

I'm still playing a little EverQuest II every day but that's about it. I think I've logged into Guild Wars 2 maybe twice in the last three or four weeks. If I'm honest, that's been on the cards for a while. For a few years now, just about the only thing keeping me going with GW2 has been its honored position as the only mmorpg Mrs Bhagpuss plays any more. Now she barely plays, I don't either. 

That makes it sound as though either or both of us might be done with the genre and the hobby but I don't believe we are. It's more a combination of getting the puppy, some glorious summer weather and a general lack of anything very exciting going on in the mmorpg scene right now. 

It's some contrast to this time last year, when new mmorpgs seemed to be popping up faster than I could download them and there was excitement everywhere over fresh content, expansions and controversy. No doubt those times will come again, which will at least give me plenty to write about, but they'll have
to come when the weather's less enticing and the dog's old enough to be trusted where we can't see her for extended periods.

That'll just be me, though. As for Mrs Bhagpuss, I think she might be out for the duration, at least until and unless Pantheon ever comes up with an affordable, playable option. I was going to say "ever launches" but let's not get ahead of ourselves. I'll settle for an alpha or beta buy-in package that costs less than a hundred dollars. 

We may be backsliding but the genre itself seems to be in a better place than it has been for years. World of Warcraft is facing the greatest crisis of its lifetime and it's almost certainly no co-incidence its main competitors are prospering. Final Fantasy XIV, Elder Scrolls Online, Guild Wars 2 and a few more have done very well, not picking up Blizzard's scraps so much as snatching the food from their table and running off with it.

It's long been postulated that WoW's success wrecked the prospects for the genre, raising commercial expectations to an unsustainable degree, setting restrictive paramaters for what an mmorpg could be and generally sucking all the air out of the room, as a 500lb gorilla will. It's taken a long time but maybe now we're finally beginning to get a picture of what the hobby would have looked like had WoW been the modest success that was the best everyone, even Blizzard, imagined it was capable of back in 2004.

All of this makes for a somewhat abstracted introduction to the next demo on the Next Fest list, the unattractively-named Genfanad. The name's a contraction of Generic Fantasy Adventure, which should be enough to tell you it's meant to be funny but also that it probably isn't.

I don't have a great deal of time for genre parodies of any kind but fantasy parodies are the worst. They tend to be self-indulgent, cliqueish affairs, full of smug in-jokes and obvious puns. Some of the best-known examples that I've tried - the Simon the Sorceror series comes painfully to mind - have done nothing to convince me the whole concept is anything other than A Bad Idea.

On learning that Genfanad was not only a parody mmorpg but also a Kickstarted one, I wished I'd thought twice before including it in the half-dozen I chose for this series of previews. I'd probably still have picked it anyway. It is, after all, an mmorpg and I'd feel I was being derelict in my duty by avoiding it. Also, as I suggested at the start, I could do with all the help I can get in keeping this blog on the mmorpg rails.

It was with very little enthusiasm indeed that I hit Play on Genfanad this morning, for more reasons than my dislike of the premise. Today is the hottest day of the year so far, something I realise would cause snorts of ironic amusement from readers in other parts of the world, should I be foolish enough to quote the thermometer. 

It's hot enough to make it uncomfortable for me to sit at the PC, anyway. My study is in the front of the house, which gets the full glare of the sun from sunrise until early evening and it's the second-hottest room in the house. Fortunately, I've recently revived my old Splashtop installation and refreshed the account on my ancient laptop, meaning I can, theoretically, play any game anywhere in the house.

For reasons not entirely clear, I played Genfanad sitting on a hard chair in the kitchen, laptop resting on a wooden chopping board placed across my thighs to protect me from the inevitable overheating. The dog, suffering considerably more than I from the heat, lay flat out on the wooden floor, a fan pointed straight at her. All the doors were open but there was no breeze.

In those less than ideal conditions I played Genfanad with attention and enjoyment for a whole hour, the time it took me to work through the lengthy and comprehensive tutorial that forms the first part of the demo. I only stopped because a) I was getting cramp and b) the dog was starting to wake up.

I'd read that Genfanad was at heart a Runescape parody. I have played Runescape but only for a few hours so I'm very much not in a position to comment but of course I'm going to anyway. It didn't remind me of Runescape all that much at all. It reminded me more of several, mostly-forgotten, isometric mmorpgs I played back when getting to play any mmorpg without having to pony up a sub was a chance not to be missed. All of them looked pretty much like this.

Spoiler! (As you'll see when you read on.)

The screenshots tell the story. It's all angled, overhead views of buildings whose roofs disappear when you enter them. Movement is point-and-click, NPC conversation happens in the chat box (and also overhead, in a hard-to-read point size.). Crafting, combat and spell casting involve selecting targets, items and objects then right-clicking to get a menu so you can do something with them.

I'm not sure how early a build this is. The release date for the game on Steam is "2022" so not all that early, you'd think. It plays robustly in the tutorial, although the parodic nature of the project makes it hard to be certain what's genuinely unfinished and what's a joke. 

For example, there's a whole bit about how there's no fishing because it hasn't been Kickstarted yet, which is clearly intended to be amusing but may also be true. I was less sure about the various objects I examined that returned, instead of a description, a data string ending in "TBD", which I took to mean "To Be Done". If that's a joke, it's a very dry one.

What surprised me most about Genfanad wasn't how enjoyable it was to play. I already know how immediately absorbing the very early stages of an mmorpg can be. As the developers put it on the Steam store page, "We know that what you really want is a generic fantasy world, filled with exciting tasks like chopping wood, blacksmithing, and fishing (when we get around to developing it). ", which is so close to the truth as to be embarrassing both to them and us.

Oh, goodie! Achievements!

What I wasn't expecting was that the whole thing would feel so immediately cozy and comfortable. I'm probably more than averagely sensitive to fonts and UI elements, by which I don't so much mean bad ones put me off as good ones pull me in. I found the basic elements of Genfanad, the way it looks, warm and welcoming, very much not always the case in projects of this sort.

It's notable how everything in the UI, from the fixed elements to the windows that pop up are rounded at the edges. They look as though they've been hand-carved from wood by skilled artisans, then sanded off so no toddlers hurt themselves running into the sharp corners. The text is clear and easy to read, the font unfussy yet characterful. Everything presents in warm, earth tones, rich browns, ripe yellows, giving a feeling of fullness that's somehow satisfying and comforting.

It's a game that invites you to settle down and take your time, which is just as well because it took me five minutes to get out of the first, locked, room. I'm still not sure how I managed it. 

The entire cell consists of a bed, a mirror, a door and a window. Nothing else. Examining the door tells you there must be a key somewhere but I was damned if I could find it. I was reduced to googling the answer, which is not something you want to be doing in the first location of a demo and even less so when Google has no more idea than you.

In the end I cracked and started to ask for help in general chat. Before I finished typing the first word a huge window popped up, offering me a range of appearance changes for my character. I was so surprised I closed the window without thinking, whereupon a mesage appeared in chat telling me I'd found a key on top of the mirror.

With that key I was able to open the door and begin the tutorial, during the course of which everything went extremely smoothly. I'm more than willing to belive my key issues were a result of my own incompetence but even so I think it might be worth making whatever it is you're meant to do to get out of that first location just a little more obvious. 

About time someone remembered whittling!

The tutorial mainly covers gathering and crafting and does so in a moderately entertaining way. The mechanics as they're revealed are refreshingly simple and easy to follow and the NPC dialog is a lot less irritating than humorous NPC dialog can too often be in games that purport to ignore the fourth wall. 

In fact, if the Steam page didn't hammer it home so determinedly, I'm not sure I'd have pegged Genfanad as a parody. It seems no more fourth-wall-breaking or meta or even humorous than AdventureQuest 3D or Project: Gorgon, to name a couple of mmorpgs that don't take themselves too seriously. 

I like both of those games and somewhat to my surprise, I think I like this one, too. I'm certainly going to play some more of it, while the demo lasts. I believe at least the first part of the newbie hunting and questing area is included. I'll try and have a look at that and, if it's interesting enough, report back.

Not putting it on the wishlist yet, but I did opt in to the newsletter so I can keep an eye on how it develops. One to watch, if not wish for, then.

Another Time, Another Place

Two days, two demos. I impress myself.

Sanya, as the closing screen of the demo proudly proclaims, is "a wholesome adventure". There is, apparently, a whole "wholesome" games movement that's been around for a few years, now. Someone should probably mention it to Syp.

I found out about it from Krikket, who posted her top picks from this year's festival of wholesomeness a few days ago. It seems weird I hadn't heard of it before, given the number of gaming channels and blogs I follow but I guess it's true what they say - good news is no news.

Sanya would fit right in although, as it happens, the game doesn't appear to have been one of the ninety or so titles revealed during the Wholesome Direct event. The protagonist is a young boy, an only child, both of whose parents work. The setting is an unusual one - a small town somewhere in post-Soviet Russia back in the '90s, not long after the fall of the Communist regime. (Well, perhaps we should say "stumble" rather than "fall", given subsequent events.)

I never did find out what Space does.

The eponymous Sanya, short for Aleksander, which is what his mother calls him when she's annoyed with him, seems like a lonely child. His toys talk to him but mostly to warn him about being on his best behavior. His father seems to be barely present, something Sanya seems concerned about. His mother clearly loves him very much but she's equally clearly run off her feet with responsibilities and understandably prone to look unfavorably on any lack of co-operation by her only son.

One of the first things that happens in the game is that Sanya gets his own key to the apartment. His mother talks to him at some length about responsibility and how she and his father have decided Sanya is old enough now to have his own key but I got the distinct feeling that it's a decision born mostly out of necessity. With both his parents working full time, Sanya has little choice other than to become a latch-key kid.

That's a final year Sociology thesis waiting to be written right there, that picture.

Or he would if he actually went to school. The family has just moved into the apartment. Most of their possessions are still in boxes. Sanya hasn't started at his new school yet, something he seems, understandably, both eager and apprehensive about. 

I  found it very hard to gauge exactly how old Sanya was meant to be. The graphics, which are gorgeous,  resemble illustrations from an early 20th Century picture book. Possibly that's what children's literature looked like in Russia in the 1990s. Whatever the reason, it tends to make Sanya look more like a little old man than a child.

Based on the toys he has and the things he says and especially on the fact that he can read comics but finds books difficult, I got the impression he might be no older than seven or eight, which would seem very young to be given the key to the door and left at home all day, alone. There's even the possibility that when he worries about going to school he's worrying about going for the first time ever, not just the first time to a new school. 

Has she run that past Social Services, do you think?

That would make him very young indeed, although as I think about it I realize I have no clue what age children started school in 1990s post-Soviet Russia. (It's six now, according to this chart.) Maybe they didn't go until they were seven, as happens in some Scandinavian countries.

As you can tell, Sanya is demo that made me think a lot. I found it fascinating. The developers are keen to stress its universality ("It’s a game about everyone who once was a kid.") but I found it incredibly specific to its chosen time and place, something that added hugely to my interest and enjoyment.

The demo is limited to the interior of Sanya's family's apartment, which looks really rather cozy, and the stairwell outside, which looks anything but. I found myself wondering whether their recent move indicated an upward or a downward trend in their lives but I don't believe there's enough revealed in the demo to make a judgment. 

That's always been Banksy's view.

I also don't get the sense that this is an inherently political game, designed to make specific points about regime change or social mobility. Those kinds of concepts just hang around in the background, inevitable, unavoidable, unspoken. Little things, like the graffiti in the stairwell, the hand-made notices pinned to the wall by people looking for work, even the rotary telephone that features in one of the action sequences, all add up to a compelling and moving picture of what life must (or might) have been like at that time, in that place.

How is it as a game, though? Pretty good, as far as I could tell from the forty-five minute demo. The UI is excellent; intuitive and natural to use without much in the way of instruction. The translation is first class, the dialog naturalistic and convincing. Most of the demo consists of Sanya talking to his mother, doing what she asks (Or choosing not to.) and running an interior monologue in which he reveals a good deal about himself and his circumstances.

There are no instructions on how to dial a number on this rotary phone. I felt absurdly pleased with myself when I figured it out.

From time to time the player needs to help Sanya do various things, for example sort his toys according to a set of somewhat arbitrary rules or find the number for his father's workplace and call him on the phone to ask if he's seen Sanya's toy dog. I thought he'd lost his real dog until an actual dog turns up in the stairwell during an action sequence involving some stealth mechanics and a cardboard box.

I enjoyed the action sequences and the puzzles well enough but, as with Cats and the Other Lives yesterday, I'm increasingly uncertain about the need for any of these segments in these kinds of narrative entertainments. I suspect I'd enjoy both Sanya and Cats even more if all I had to do was move the main character from location to location and trigger conversations.

It's a very small complaint, if it's even one at all. I guess as long as these things have no better distribution network than the existing "games" market, we're going to have to keep doing the odd puzzle and mini-game to get to enjoy the stories. So long as the result's as good as it is in Sanya, I can live with that.

Chalk up another for the wishlist.

Cats See Ghosts Sometimes

As I said in yesterday's post, the Steam Next Fest demo I was most eager to play, from the half-dozen I downloaded, was the somewhat oddly-named Cats and the Other Lives. That meant I was either going to indulge myself and play it right away or save it as a treat for the end. 

I indulged myself. This evening I played through the whole thing in one sitting. I didn't have much choice. As the demo warns you right at the start, there's no Save option. 

Oh, alright, I'm lying. Not about there being no Save option. That part's true. I didn't really play through the whole thing in one go. I wanted to but it's a lot longer than I was expecting. I'd been playing for about an hour when the time came to take the puppy out for her evening walk and it didn't seem like the demo was anywhere close to a conclusion.

Luckily, as with almost every single-player game ever made, opening the Options window acts as a Pause button, so I did that, took the dog out, came back, had a coffee and carried on from where I left off. As a result, Steam thinks it took me 2.7 hours to finish. In fact it was about eighty minutes. 

That's still a very hefty length for a demo. I've played whole games that were faster to finish than that. All of it was active gameplay, too. It's a tight, focused experience, with very little room for any of the usual backtracking, wandering about aimlessly, getting lost, puzzling over puzzles and general dicking about that usually pads out the run-time of any game, when I play.

I should qualify what I mean by "active gameplay". The somewhat fanciful description from the game's Steam Store page turns out to be surprisingly accurate. "Part interactive fiction, part Felis domesticus adventure" just about sums up this demo.

I spent most of the hour and twenty minutes listening to people having conversations. With each other, not with me. I was playing a cat. People don't have conversations with cats, not in this game. It's the diametric opposite of anthropomorphism. Also, by "listening", I mean "reading". There's no voice acting as such, just some muffled background mumbling from which an audible word very occasionally surfaces.

Aspen, the feline protagonist, acts very much as a cat would, assuming you believe cats can see ghosts, something many cat-owners certainly do. He's also either more lucid, more rational or perhaps just more serendipitous than the average housecat.  

A great number of the levers that move the plot forward rely on Aspen knocking over, breaking, jumping on or climbing up something. He pulls gratings off walls so he can go through ventilation shafts, goes out of one window and back through another to get to rooms he otherwise couldn't reach and generally manages to get himself everwhere anyone is talking about anything the player needs to know.

For the most part it all feels convincingly natural. Cats can wander around between peoples' legs without being noticed, even at a wake. No-one ever guards their speech because a cat might overhear. In a surprising number of ways, having a non-speaking, apparently non-thinking cat as a main character makes it easier, not more difficult to reveal the inner workings of a mystery.

Given the nature of some of what gets revealed, I strongly suspect that Aspen won't remain wholly, authentically animalistic for the duration of the full game. There looks to be magic afoot. The appearance of a statue of Bast on one of the mantelpieces is surely more than coincidence. For the demo, though, he's just a cat, pure and simple.

Although Aspen's actions facilitate the plot, there's very little for the player to do other than move from room to room. There aren't any real puzzles in the traditional sense of combining and using objects, solving riddles or opening combination locks. How could there be? Aspen's a cat. He doesn't have the capacity for abstract reasoning. He doesn't even have opposable thumbs.

He does, however, have a few abilities a human character wouldn't have. Aspen can sense if something's happening in another room. He can track people by scent if he can sniff something they've handled. He can see ghosts, yes, but if he wants to go outside or into a closed room, he still has to wait for a human to open a window or go through the door first.

There are a few action sequences. At one point you have creep up behind a lawyer as he's sitting on a toilet with his pants around his ankles, then jump on him so he gets up and throws you out of the bathroom. Right at the end of the demo you have to leap around some stuffed animal heads, trying to catch a cockroach. That one's on a timer and it took me about ten tries. 

I wasn't entirely convinced either of those added much to the narrative. It felt more like the developers thought they had to put something in to justify calling it a "game". On the other hand, I didn't think the action sequences took much away, either. They were kind of fun and not too hard and I guess there does need to be something to make players feel they're needed.

The true appeal of Cats and the Other Lives doesn't lie in the gameplay, anyway. It lies in the excellent dialog, the delightful graphics, the intriguing plot and the sheer pleasure of being a cat, doing cat stuff, like an actual cat. 

I won't waste time describing or praising the graphics. You can see for yourself. The screenshots give an excellent impression of the appeal. The animation and effects are equally satisfying. It's a joy to watch.

The plot, at least as much of it as you get to see in the demo, feels like something you'd expect from a fairly typical adventure/mystery indie game. There's a house that's a bit like somewhere the Addams Family might live and a family that wouldn't be out of place in an Agatha Christie novel. 

A patriarch has just died, the extended family is there for the wake and the reading of the will. There's a large cast of characters ranging from odious to adorable including a quirky aunt (You know she's quirky - she wears a checked flannel shirt to a funeral.), a sarcastic teenager, a cheating father, an elderly professor, a long-suffering Hispanic maid... and somewhere behind it all lurks the smell of ancient magick. Doesn't it always?

It reminded me a lot of Knives Out. That's not something I thought I'd ever find myself saying about a video game, least of all one where you play a cat. If that's high praise, I think it's well deserved. I thought this was an excellent demo. Let's hope it presagse an excellent game.

I've wishlisted it, naturally. It's scheduled to release out later this year, so I guess we'll know for sure soon enough just how well the game stacks up to the demo.

Six, Seven, Eight...

With six days left in the June Steam Next Fest, I thought it would be jolly clever to pick six demos to play and write about here. If Krikket can play and review one hundred indie games in a year, I can play and review seven demos in a week, right? I mean, I'm one down already! How hard can it be?

Yeah, I wouldn't hold your breath. As I may have mentioned about a thousand times, having a puppy in the house seems to create some kind of temporal vortex into which all free time is sucked. This post would have published four or five hours earlier than it did if there hadn't been so many dog-related activities to interrupt the process. The chances of my getting enough time to both play and review all six games before the event ends seem remote.

I'm quite surprised I found enough time to choose six in the first place. It didn't take as long as I expected. I'm getting more used to the Next Fest aesthetic, which appears to draw its spiritual inspiration from a mash-up of mid-90s GeoCities home pages and the kind of fliers people used to hand out at acid house gigs a few years before then. I had less trouble navigating the manifold options this time, at least. It's still something of a crap shoot, all the same. 

Given the time-frame, I decided to stick very much with what I know, as will become obvious when we get to the list. Point and click adventures? Check! Detectives? Check! Cyberpunk? Check! Anthropomorphic animals? Check!

In the time-honored tradition of awards contests everywhere, let's start with the runners-up. The also-rans. The ones that didn't quite make the cut. These are the demos I thought about downloading then thought again. If I can remember why, I'll mention it. If not, just assume the worst.

Frozen Flame - Didn't I already play a demo of this? Yes, twice. I said I'd give it another look if they ever made a demo that lasted more than ten minutes and maybe I will. Just not this time.

Renown - Looks interesting but also looks quite, um, serious? Intense? Not sure a demo is the best way to introduce something like this. Maybe an open beta would be better.

Dragon Forge - "Become a powerful dragon and automate massive factories!" Of course! First thing I always think of when someone mentions dragons - assembly-line production methods!

Grand Theft Gato: Vice Kitty - Someone really likes puns. I'm always up for a game where you play as a cat but unfortunately the trailer is not encouraging.

Roadwarden - tl:dr. Jk.

Gnome Online - Can't say I wasn't tempted. PvP and those graphics, though?

And now the winners, in no particular order...

 Brok the Investigator - "The very first PUNCH & CLICK! Brok is an innovative adventure mixed with beat 'em up and RPG elements. In a grim world where animals have replaced mankind, what kind of detective will you be?"

An alligator one, apparently. I don't think there's a choice. This one has a demo and a Free Prologue. Not sure if those are two different things or the same thing with two different names. I don't believe I've ever played a beat 'em up in my life so that part is going to be interesting. Other than that, it looks like the standard anthropomorphic animal noir detective point and click game I've played a hundred times before but the trailer suggests it at least ought to be a good one.

 Cats and the Other Lives - "Part interactive fiction, part Felis domesticus adventure, “Cats and the Other Lives” explores the reunion of a broken family from the perspective of their house cat, Aspen."

I did say I liked playing a cat. I'd lay odds this is translated from an Eastern European language. The writing has that off-kilter feel to it. Let me just check... oh, close! Cultic Games is "an indie development studio from Istanbul". Looks downbeat, which appeals to me, and there seems to be at least an attempt at interpreting a feline psychological perspective, something that fascinates me as a conceit. Probably the demo of the six I'm most enthusiastic to try.

Sanya - "2D narrative adventure game about the warmth of fleeting childhood memories: about a little boy named Sanya, his dog, his friends and many exciting adventures that await them in a small post-soviet Russian town set in the achingly strange and nostalgic period of the 90s."

This whole "cozy 90s" thing is beginning to weird me out. I'm seeing it start to crop up all over the place, now. Were the '90s really a simpler, easier time? I lived through them and it's not exactly how I remember it. Supposedly "a game about your childhood", only if you were twenty or thirty years younger than I am and grew up in Russia, guess. 

Post-Soviet Russia is certainly an unusual choice for a setting. The game's produced by a two-developer team called Helpnode, about whom I can find very little. I was curious whether the developers were themselves Russian, something that might have been a concern given the current political situation, so I did a little digging. 

The game is being funded by Bright Gambit, "a small private investment initiative...focusing on investing only in games". According to a news item at Gamesindustry.biz, Bright Gambit "intends to support games from marginalized communities and overlooked regions." Does that sound like Russia to anyone?

Sanya is one of the first tranche of five games to receive funding. None of the news sources or reviews I could find chose to make it clear but eventually I tracked down the location of Helpnode via an archived job advertisement. According to Ingamejob,  "Helpnode is a small indie studio founded in Moscow, Russia in 2020". So now we know.

Hill Agency:PURITYdecay (Or possibly PURITY&Decay. The Steam page uses both.) "Murdered sisters, mind altering drugs and flying cities, to a case that goes way further than the banks of this one detective's little neighbourhood in this Indigenous cybernoir detective narrative adventure set in a post-post-apocalyptical future."

Does that run-on sentence sound odd to anyone? It seems like there might be a preposition missing. The Steam page leans heavily into the post-colonial, indigenous (Néhinaw) setting, which does sound intriguing, but the glitching video was what sold me. Mind you, at that point I hadn't read the Mature Content Description: "violence, sexual assault, human-trafficking, drug and alcohol abuse, self-harm and suicide, body disorders and body hatred, racism." I might have passed if I had.

Genfanad: A Generic Fantasy Adventure - "Heroes, we need you! Our world has too many jobs that need doing and not enough willing suckers to do them. Chop wood! Craft slightly better weapons! Go fishing! (When we remember to add fish.) Oh and if you REALLY must fight scary demons, we've got some dungeons that need clearing out… "

When I picked this one I didn't realise it was a Runescape parody. I just watched two alpha gameplay videos on YouTube and I'm already regretting it. I suspect this may be less ironic than I imagined. And less fun.

Yoko Redux: Dreams of a Blue Planet - "I've been h4ving these dreams la7ely. They can't be real...8ut what if they are? I close my eyes and I see her fac3. Follow Locke as he tries to discover the secrets of Yoko in this point and click, cyberpunk noir adventure"

Another cyber-noir setting, another glitching video, another sale. I'm such an easy mark, although if I'm honest it was the "Yoko" that hooked me. This is another Kickstarter game (So was Genfanad.), which might raise some flags but I think Kickstarter point&clicks have a much better success rate than Kickstarter mmos. Not that I've done the reearch to prove it. Just a hunch. 

And that's the lot. Oh, except I added a seventh while I was pulling the links for this post.

Monorail Stories -  "Monorail Stories is an adventure game focusing on extraordinary things happening to ordinary people. Board the monorail and experience a special story about humanity, friendships, and intertwined destinies manifesting during the everyday commute."

And guess what? It's yet another Kicjstarter project! I swear I'm not picking them on purpose.

Reminds me a lot of The Longest Road on Earth, which I bought, played and loved as a result of playing the demo during an earlier Steam festival. Only this time its in color. And there aren't any mice. Presumably.

And that really is it. Now I suppose I'd better go play some of them.

Old Skies, New Demo

I was excited to learn earlier today, by way of a post at Later Levels, that a playable demo had been released for a game on my Steam wishlist: Old Skies. It''s the latest project from Wadjet Eye Games, makers of Unavowed and the Blackwell Chronicles, all of which I very much enjoyed.

I downloaded the demo immediately. It only took a few seconds. Then I played it. Steam tells me that took a couple of hours. Actually I think it was more like one but I can't be sure. I left the game paused while I had a cup of tea and played with the puppy in the garden. I really ought to pay more attention to these things when I know I'm going to be writing about them later.

The demo is part of the latest Steam Next Fest, an event I am learning to love. This time around it runs for a week, starting today and finishing on June 20th. I'm looking forward to going through the demos on offer, picking a reasonable number, playing through them and posting my impressions here.

This is the first. A harbinger, if you will.

Coming from Wadjet Eye as it does, it won't surprise anyone to learn that this is a hand-drawn, 2D adventure game, although as the Later Levels piece explains, it was nearly a full 3D title. Maybe that would have been fine but based on other adventure series that took that route I'm not so sure.

Stay right there, pigeons! I have a surprise for you!

The flat, saturated style that makes each location resemble a cel from a 20th Century animated movie has always been one of Wadjet Eye's greatest strengths, so you'd have to wonder why they'd even consider moving in another direction. I'm pleased to say the images here are up to the usual standard, with the character models looking particularly appealing. I did find some of the detail a little thin but let's put that down to this being an early demo, not the finished article.

While it's always a pleasure just to gaze at a Wadjet Eye game, the core appeal lis in the storytelling. The characters tend to be nuanced, the world-building convincing and the narrative compelling. All of that is evident in the demo for Old Skies.

There are five characters in the demo: Fia, the protagonist; Nozzo, her handler, present only as a hologramatic head; Professor Joseph "Andy" Anderson, the client; Lisa, his erstwhile girlfriend and a waitress, whose name I can't quite bring to mind.  All of them, even the apparently forgettable waitress, make a solid impression in the short screen time given them but Fia, as befits the main character, is a standout.

When I watched the promotional video a while back, I was less than impressed with either Fia's dialog or the voice actor's reading. The delivery didn't seem so much underplayed as thrown away. It almost sounded like an early table read. Also the English Public Schoolgirl diction sounded like it would grate after a while. A very short while.

In the demo, given the full context of the plot and characters, that same delivery flares into life; subtle, smart, engaging and often very funny. It's the voice of a character you want to spend time with, get to know, to understand. So much seems to be happening beneath the surface, hinted at here and there by the echo of a sigh, the ghost of a smile.

All the characters are well-voiced, which is just as well since Old Skies is fully voiced by Wadjet Games' "largest cast yet". The music, once again by Thomas Regin, the composer responsible for the previous games, is good too, albeit considerably too loud in the default setting. I had to turn it down by half to hear what the characters were saying. 

Twenty-somethings still say "Jeeze Louise"? In 2024?

The setting for the demo is extremely near-future New York. 2024 to be exact. The basic premise of the game involves time travel so that's just one of the periods we'll get to explore in the full game. There will be seven in all, the announced eras being Prohibition, the "Gilded Age", which I had to look up (1870-1900, according to Wikipedia.) and, somewhat worryingly, the morning of 9/11. 

Time travel is a notoriously difficult concept to wrangle into anything even close to coherence. I learned long ago not to question any of the premises in a given interpretation too closely. All of them fall apart if looked at straight-on.

All that matters is that whatever position the piece takes it remains internally consistent and that the writer does something interesting with the conceit. There's not enough of the story present in the demo to be certain of the former but as for the latter I'm already sold. 

Very little, really almost nothing, is explained. Fia works for some organization that seems to be commercially-oriented although it could be governmental. Her job appears to be somewhere between a tour guide, a bodyguard and one of those KGB agents who used to make sure Soviet athletes and ballet dancers never got the chance to defect when they visited Western democracies. 

Jeeze, Fia! Spoilers, much?

So many unexplained references and casual remarks pass between Fia and Nozzo as they discuss the client, the job and the problems that arise. I absolutely loved it. Nothing makes me happier about a work of speculative fiction but that it assumes everyone already knows as much about its world as the characters who live in it. I realize others may find the approach less welcome but I'm sure it will all come clear over the course of the full game. I just hope they don't explain everything.

Gameplay is very much what you'd expect. There are some surface nods to the futuristic background of the characters but fundementally the processes are directly analagous to those used by the previous games. Expect to ask a lot of questions, read a lot of documents and research everything on a computer.

The Steam page mentions "Lots of puzzles that require temporal thinking to solve" but we'll have to take those on trust because the demo doesn't have too many puzzles and those it does have don't require any "temporal thinking" at all. At least I don't think they do. I'm a little vague on what "temporal thinking" might be, if I'm honest.

I was able to solve all the puzzles the demo put in my way without needing to look anything up out of game, which means they must have been pretty straightforward. I found the difficulty level just about right for my tastes, spot on for a demo, which needs to draw people in, not put obstacles in their way. I imagine the game itself will require considerably more mental effort if it's on a par with its predecessors. 

I'd tell you but then I'd have to kill you. Oh, wait... you think I'm kidding?

The only part of the demo and by implication the design that I found weak was the lack of realistic dialog responses and behavior when returning to characters I'd already spoken to but that's an all-too common generic fault of point & click adventure games. Characters in most of them seem happy to stand around in one location for hours or even days on end, always willing to chat even when the protagonist is being blatantly rude or repetitive. 

I've failed any number of puzzles over the years because I simply can't bring myself to be as boorish and pigheaded as a game requires, badgering people relentlessly on the offchance they might say something different on the sixth approach than they did last five times I asked them the same question. Old Skies is no worse in this respect than any other game but if I had one piece of feedback to offer (They invite it.) then that would be it. 

All in all, though, it's an excellent demo, a great advert for the game and a lot of fun in its own right. It tells a complete story so it feels like a short game as much as a chapter in a much longer one. I strongly recommend playing it although if you prefer you could watch someone else doing just that. 

I'm very much looking forward to the full game, whenever it comes. 

As yet there's no release date.