Unfinished Business or From Cathouse To Penthouse

This time, something different: two demos I didn't finish. That's unusual for me. I almost always get to the end before I post about one of these things, even if it means following a walkthrough. 

There weren't any walkthroughs.

One demo I played for over an hour, the other about half that, which is longer than than I spent with either of the last two demos I reviewed. I had a think about it. If reviewing demos as if they're complete games makes no sense, neither does acting as though I have to finish a demo before I can post about it. After all, Krikket doesn't and her reviews are excellent. 

Also she gets through way more demos than I do. Play the efficiency card!

I'm still planning on finishing the demos because I want to know what happens in both of them but since I already have more than enough done to fill a post, I might as well get on with it.

Chronique des Silencieux

My somewhat rusty French translates the title as Chronicle of the Silent. Google Translate prefers Chronicle of the Silent Ones, which means much the same but with a disturbingly Lovecraftian spin. For many games, that would be a solid choice. Not for this one.

Chronique des Silencieux takes place in a brothel. Technically, that's a spoiler. I don't feel particularly guilty because it became obvious to me about five minutes in. Five minutes after that Eugene, the protagonist, caught on, too, after it was spelled out to him by the Madame. He's fifteen year-old boy who's obviously led a very sheltered life. Cut him some slack.

Eugene's mother has just died. He's been sent to stay with his uncle, who lives in a small town somewhere in the South of France. Eugene barely knows the man. All he has is the name of the antiques shop where his uncle works and also, apparently, lives. 

The game opens just with Eugene standing helplessly on a station platform as the train pulls away. There's nothign to do but ask the stationmaster for directions. The response, I later realised, offers an ironic foreshadowing of what's to come. Unfortunately, although the English translation isn't bad, neither is it good enough to carry that nuance. I had the unsettling feeling that I must be missing something but I had no clue what it was.

It didn't help that it was raining and apparently that mattered. There's some business about running to avoid getting wet that added an unecessary level of stress, right at the point when I was still grappling with the slightly odd controls. Whether it's possible to keep dry or not I'm not sure. I didn't. 

Maybe I'd have had a friendler reception if I'd arrived dry instead of dripping all over the furnishings. It certainly came up in conversation. I'm not about to replay the scene to find out.

The graphical style the developer, Pierre Feuille Studios, has gone with feels a little off. It has that classic bande dessinée feel, only in full-screen, three-quarter cutaway perspective. I wouldn't say it works flawlessly. It takes a bit of getting used to but it felt comfortable enough after a while. 

The demo seems to be the opening of the game, starting with a short tutorial that feeds seamlessly into the narrative. The plot, at least at this early stage, revolves around Eugene and his fish-out-of-water attempts to make sense of the increasingly awkward situation he finds himself in; cast adrift from everything he knows, reliant on the kindness of strangers to survive, all while dealing with the trauma of losing a parent.

Or that's what it would revolve around if twenty minutes in there weren't several massive plot twists piled one on top of the other right at the start. As if finding out his uncle lives and works in a brothel wan't disturbing enough, Eugene quickly learns the uncle is in jail and before he's had time to process that bombshell, Eugene gets press-ganged by the local gendarmerie into acting as some kind of unpaid detective. 

In what may well be the least likely plot development I've ever seen in a video game (A really high bar.) a police inspector, characterized as one of the more effective, less corrupt officers on the force, coerces Eugene into interrogating his own uncle, currently cooling his heels in the local lock-up following a street brawl with one of the local drug baron's sidekicks.

From here on things only get crazier. We're asked to believe a fifteen year-old schoolboy from another part of the country, fresh off the train and not even knowing how to find his way around town, is somehow going to be better than an experienced, adult policeman at questioning suspects, spotting inconsistencies in the answers they give and making meaningful correlations between them. The inspector even hands over the charge sheet on the uncle and the file on the thug he beat up so Eugene can have a look at them. Anyone would think we were playing a video game!

Suspension of disbelief needs to be cranked up with a windlass to get past all this. Fortunately, the plotline is moderately intriguing and the setting moderately original so it's probably worth making the effort. I haven't played a lot of games set in small French towns where organized prostitution is looked on with nostalgia as a fondly-regarded national pastime, now sadly in decline, or where what someone did or didn't do in a war that ended thirty years ago remains the defining feature of their life by which everyone will judge them forevermore.

There's a lot of conversation to be had with many NPCs, by no means all of whom seem immediately to have anything to do with the plot. I imagine in the original French that's all very entertaining but the translation is just shaky enough to make it feel like a bit of an effort. 

As for the mechanics of conducting the investigations and pulling the threads of evidence together, I confess I was as much at sea as Eugene himself. The tutorial explains the mechanics well enough but I wasn't able to translate that into making much sense of any of it. I could see how to connect all the myriad possibilities but not why I'd want to or what I'd be trying to reveal. All the options seem far to dramatic for the stakes. Maybe I just didn't get far enough or speak to the right people although it certainly felt like I'd done more than my share of talking.

In the end I stopped playing because I had no idea what I was supposed to do next. I'd opened about half a dozen lines of inquiry but not one of them seemed to be going anywhere. That's not ideal for a demo. It hasn't put me off entirely but I'm going to need a walkthrough or at least someone's Let's Play to watch before I carry on.

Cat's Request

I got stuck in this one too and it only took me half as long to get there. I knew what I was supposed to be doing this time. I just didn't know how to do it. I was having a lot of fun until then, though, so I'm keen to keep going. I will, just as soon as I can figure something out. 

I was sorry to have to call time on my first session. I'd really been looking forward to playing Cat's Request and even though I somehow managed to back myself into a corner I couldn't seem to get out of, the game didn't disappoint. I was expecting a grungy, dislocated, trippy ride and that's pretty much what I got.

A lot of it's in the graphics, rich in purples, ultramarine and teal. Clean neon, dirty surfaces under an unclean sheen, suffusing everything. The future looks like the present looks like the past. This isn't our future anyway, maybe. Maybe it is.

Some things never change. The louche lurch of the underclass underpins the high-tech, high-rise grandeur of the city. Ash may live in a penthouse apartment with a billionaire's view but he's cash poor and fresh out of luck. 

The government's calling time on the best friend Ash built for himself; Root, a disembodied AI, who drifts like a ghost out of the machine. You can be Root, too. 

The demo opens with Ash, unemployed, broke, stuck at home, watching the news on TV. There's an announcement: all AIs without bodies are to be withdrawn from use, a euphemism that goes uncodified. Storage or extinction? Does it even matter? It happens, Root's gone.

There's the plot. Save Root. Get them a body. Only, bodies cost and Ash can't pay.

You can figure it's going to take a lot of doing jobs for strangers to rake up the creds but first you have to get out of the apartment. I don't think that's supposed to be a puzzle but I made it one anyway. I couldn't find the door.

Turns out there's an elevator on the balcony because that's where the front door is. That's how skyscraper apartment buildings always work. On this planet. 

Yes, it's all happening somewhere in space. Somewhere cats live like people alongside every other damn thing; robots, aliens, maybe even some humans, although now I think of it, did I see any?

I get the impression there's subtext to be discovered. There's the happy, waving cat, familiar from Chinese restaurants the world over. That can't be a co-incidence. 

Cats are everywhere. Other than the news, all Ash's TV shows have cats. Actual cats, naked, on four legs, not upright cats wearing clothes, like Ash.

I watched the shows. There were two of them. You can change the channels with the remote on Ash's coffee table. In one scene a cat strolls peacably through a tropical forest to stop beside a pool, where water fills a bamboo chute that tips and spills, then does it again, forever. In the other another cat, or it could be the same cat, struggles through a blizzard towards a wooden hut. The cat doesn't make it. 

Ash doesn't react but he knows something or feels it. He knows the happy cat is part of a heritage he shares. He hates water even though scientists tell him cats came from the sea. He doubts it. Ash thinks cats came from another planet.

Maybe he'll find out for sure. Maybe we will. Maybe he'll go home. Planetary travel is a possibility in the game. I know it because I found a robot core, repaired it and put it in the robot in the junkyard. The robot woke up and opened a teleport station with three planets up and set to visit. 

Except my Ash couldn't go visit any of them. They're "not available in the demo". 

Don't you hate that? So annoying!

I guess I can't complain. It's not like I ran out of things to do. I needed five hundred credits to put down a deposit on a "cheap" 40k body for Root but by the time I got the money I'd already racked up a slate with the taxi company thirty credits deep and I couldn't get ahead. 

At the dump I found some wiggly camera eyes and fitted them on a street-sweeping robot who yearned to see the sky but he never paid me a dime. I cleaned floors in a restaurant for the five hundred. If there's another job on offer I haven't found it. 

I thought for a moment I'd made a wrong move, going to the dump first, but even if I'd gone straight to the restaurant, I'd have had to have taken a taxi to get there. Whatever you do, you're always going to come up at least fifteen credits short. 

Unless I'm missing something. I must be missing something. I'd read a walkthrough only again no-one's written one. I'd watch a playthrough only again no-one's posted one. Maybe I'll do it, be a team player - if I ever get to the end of the demo.

I really like this game. I'd definitely play it. I've wishlisted it. I might even buy it. But only when I know for sure someone else has finished it and shared. Otherwise it's going to be like all those text adventures I bought on cassette back in the eighties and never finished. 

I don't want to go through that again.

Gods And Robots

Everything's going very well on the Steam Next Fest front, thanks for asking. Four days in, four demos down. Three days left, three to go.

Yesterday I covered Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore, a game about which I can unironically say I feel mildly excited. You can have that for the poster, Blankhans. I haven't played it again for all the obvious reasons but I've been feeling twitchy about not playing it. Always a good sign.

Instead, I gave some time to three other demos, all of which I'm going to cover in the one post today. It's not that I couldn't fill a whole post about each of them. Obviously, I could. It's not they aren't deserving of that level of interrogation, either. They certainly are. 

It's that there's not really all that much point in reviewing demos as though they were finished games. Most come with very clear warnings: they'll change. The final version may not resemble the demo too closely, if at all.

With that caveat, here's what I thought about what I saw. 

Stray Gods 

This is by far the highest profile and most hyped of the titles I chose to look at this time. It comes with not only a Wikipedia entry but also one at IMDB, which makes a lot of sense when you check out the development history, personnel and aspirations of this unusual project.

It was crowdfunded back in 2019, not through Kickstarter for a change but via Fig.co, since subsumed into the video-game-specific funding platform Republic. That's an interesting topic in itself but let me not derail my own post for once. 

The company behind the project, Summerfall Studios, is based in Australia and Stray Gods is their first game, which makes the intended reach somewhat surprising. The title's being developed simultaneously for PC, XBox, Playstation and Switch. It also has some stellar names behind the voices including, as I've seen it characterized, half the cast of Critical Role. 

If that all seems a lot for an indie studio in Melbourne making its first-ever game, the explanation, as usual, is a Big Name. The whole shebang, including the company itself, is the passion project of David Gaider, former lead writer at BioWare, where he worked on all the biggies- Baldur's Gate II, Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age...

Pedigree aside, by far the most interesting thing about Stray Gods is the concept behind the game, which the Wikipedia article neatly sums up as "a video game that combines hallmarks of musical theater with interactive storytelling". Perhaps most intriguing of all is the specific, proximate inspiration, Buffy the Vampire Slayer's magnificent, ground-breaking musical episode "Once More, With Feeling".

That episode, first broadcast in 2001, went on to become the inspiration for every musical episode of every YA/Fantasy/SciFi TV show of the twenty-first century. Like Jimi Hendrix, it was an inspired original that spawned a lot of much less impressive imitations but on the evidence of the demo, Stray Gods isn't one of them.

I was a little concerned at the start that it might be. The opening scene with the band lounging around on the stage of a deserted theater at the end of an audition felt awkward and stilted. Even the voice acting didn't convince. I was worried the hype might once again have run far ahead of anything the game would be able to deliver.

By the time I reached the end of the half-hour demo I was mostly convinced everything was going to be fine. I still have a couple of minor quibbles but for the most part I found it an immersive, enjoyable and genuinely original experience. 

Any problems I have derive mostly from the plot, making it particularly inappropriate to criticize.  Plot is not always something a demo should be expected to explain in full and narrative flaws or plot-holes can't reasonably be assumed just because something doesn't seem to follow.  

This demo, constructed much more thoughtfully and commercially than most, makes no attempt to present a neat, complete narrative segment. Unlike almost any I've played, it doesn't simply give you access to the tutorial or the first chapter or allow you a time-limited run at the full game. Instead, it jumps from one stage of the storyline to another, showcasing some of the musical numbers, while demonstrating how the gameplay elements work.

By the time the demo ended, I had no sense, as I so often do, that I'd played and finished a short game. I didn't feel like I'd read a short story or watched a standalone episode of a TV show, either. Instead I felt, as ought to be the intention of every game demo, that I'd had a taste of something much bigger, something that left me wanting more.

It's a good demo, then, but will it be a good game? I think so, although I also think it's a hell of a risk. Graphically it's gorgeous to look at. The presentation is pictorial with limited animation, every scene being mostly a static illustration with movement provided by a shifting camera or a change of posture. 

The visual style is part comic-book, part animated movie cel, part book illustration. It feels extremely familiar to me; I've seen more stories told this way than I can count but mostly on a flat, paper page, less often a screen. The quality of the art is excellent, all the characters expressive and immediately identifiable, the backgrounds effective but unobtrusive. 

The visuals by necessity must take second place to the soundscape, this being a musical. It doesn't matter how pretty the pictures are if the songs don't land. They did for me, although I had a few moments with the lyrics, which at first I felt weren't always as mellifluous or as smart as they needed to be. 

That feeling thankfully faded as I found myself drawn by the music into the story and the characters, which is, ironically, where I feel the game may lose some players. It really is a musical, not just a game with songs and that could be a turn-off for some. 

I'm not an aficionado of musical theater but I like it well enough to be passingly familiar with the form. I enjoy the interplay between words and music it relies upon to create emotional heft. I have to make a little effort to push past the meniscus that screens the reality of the musical from our own but once that surface tension breaks, I'm inside the bubble and swimming happily, not drowning.

Many people never make that leap. A lot never get past the logical disconnect of characters moving from speech to song and back as if it's perfectly normal conversation, let alone some of them singing and some of them talking as if there's no difference between the two. 

In setting up Summerfall Studios, Liam Gesler, one of the three co-founders (The third being Elie Young.) said he wanted to create "a fun, emotionally-rewarding interactive experience that is accessible even to those who don’t consider themselves gamers." In Stray Gods, I wonder if he and his partners haven't made something more accessible to non-gamers than to anyone likely to self-identify that way.

"Gamer" these days is such an unhelpful descriptor, anyway. Most everyone games now. Without a doubt, musical theater as a form is far more niche than gaming. Musicals always fill theaters and the screen version has enjoyed something of a revival in recent years, after a long spell in the doldrums, but it's still something of a Marmite moment for many; you either really love musicals or you can't stan' 'em, to lift a line from one of the greatest of them all, Singing in the Rain.

For true gamers, I'd guess acceptance or otherwise will come down to how good a game Stray Gods is. Pretty pictures and catchy songs are all well and good but what about the gameplay? 

Pretty good, I thought. Surprisingly so, even. There are the expected dialog choices, where you get to give positive, negative or nuanced responses at key points in the conversation. Those are as well done as they are in most professionally-made games of the kind. There's also one moment in the demo when you 're asked to choose a character trait and the game is described, among other things, as an rpg, so I'm guessing there's an element of character development in there, somewhere. 

The best part of the gameplay for me, though, came during the songs themselves. At various moments a set of options pop up along with a timer that ticks down pretty quickly. You have to pick a response that will clearly affect the direction of the narrative but it also changes the lyrics of the song. 

It's very clever and I found it highly engaging. I'm not normally a fan of quick-time events, which this kind of is, and I don't generally approve of timers, but instead of finding it stressful or annoying, I found these in-the-moment decisions immersive and compelling. 

There was just - but only just - enough time for me to read the options, assimilate the meaning, assess the implications and make a decision. I found it exciting in a way dialog options in narrative games rarely are for me. 

I'm fairly sure that's all down to the musical structure, which makes the whole process feel more like having an emotional reaction than making an intellectual choice. For that reason, I suspect it may alienate and infuriate others in the way it engaged and entertained me.

And that, I think, is the takeaway from this excellent demo. If the job of a demo is to allow someone to decide if a game is or isn't for them, this hits all its marks. It's half an hour long and I guarantee that well before the end you'll know for sure whether this is a game you'll want to add to your wishlist or cross off your list of possibles for good.

You can probably guess which way I jumped.

Well, that ran long! Apparently, if I don't review a demo as if it was a full game, I review it as a demo at just the same length. I wonder if I ought to break the other two out into a separate post after all? I guess we'll see how it goes... 

Robotherapy

This one should be a lot quicker. The demo only took me eighteen minutes and the main thing I have to say about it is I can't see how they're going to make it into a full game.

This is a classic example of something I said the Stray Gods demo wasn't, namely an experience that feels satisfying and complete in itself. There's no introduction or tutorial or anything. It's straight into the game, straight into the narrative, then straight out the end. 

The premise is very simple: robots have killed all humans and replaced human civilization with their own. Unfortunately for them, it hasn't made them any happier. You, a robot, of course, play a therapist who treats other robots for their psychological issues. In the demo your clients include a robot poet who suffers from imposter syndrome and a robot who's coming off a bad romantic break-up. 

Also you try to treat your dog one time. Doesn't go well.

If it wasn't for that that last line that I threw in deliberately to change things up, you'd probably get the impression this was a fairly serious, if humorous, conversation game, where the goal is to solve problems and progress by doing so successfully. 

Nah. That's not how it works at all.

Robotherapy is a nihilistic, satirical, sarcastic, self-indulgent, surreal sprint through an irrational, illogical, unrealistic world. At no point did I get the remotest impression I was meant to take any of it seriously.

The game breaks the fourth wall all the time. It has a narrator, but only when it remembers it does. At one point the narrator asks the player if they'd like to do the narrating instead. Couldn't do a worse job of it.

The titular Robotherapist, whose name is Smokes because he smokes cigarettes all the time, not because, as you might have imagined, what with his being a robot and all, because smoke comes out of him somewhere, isn't qualified to practice as a therapist. He also isn't suited to the work and has no idea how to do it. It is possible to be a qualified Robotherapist in his world, something we find out when Smokes meets Back, who is one, but on the evidence it wouldn't make much difference either way.

You may have noticed the odd names: Smoke, Back. By the time Smokes meets his second patient, W/E, pronounced Whatever, you'll be well aware that names here have been chosen mainly so Smokes can riff off them like Abott and Costello doing Who's On First, something he does well enough that I did, once, laugh out loud.

Gameplay consists of two things: clicking dialog choices or clicking to jump or fire missiles in action sequences. It may make a difference which dialog choice you pick. It does not make a difference when or if you jump or shoot. 

The action sequences, which occur either in Smokes' dreams or in the Mindseum, an advanced form of therapy taught to Smokes by Back after the empathy trick he showed Smokes doesn't work any more, exist purely as narrative devices and parodies of similar sequences in games where they'd actually matter. You can jump or not jump, shoot or not shoot. It makes no difference.

My run-through consisted of eighteen minutes of really fast clicking. The dialog spools at a very comfortable reading pace for me, something so rare as to be a recommendation in itself. I generally read well over twice as fast as any game wants to feed me the words so it was relaxing to be able to go at natural pace for once.

The writing is funny although definitely not as funny as the writer thinks it is, which is why I put "self-indulgent" in that list of adjectives back there. That's fine. More than enough gags land to make the experience an entertaining one. The robot characters are all sufficiently well-defined to make spending time with them amusing, although Smokes is not anyone you'd want to spend time with, let alone pay for the privilege as his clients must.

I don't need to describe the visuals. The screenshots do it all. The game looks like that, all the time. I liked looking at it.

The problem I have with Robotherapist, if it even is a problem, is I can't see how it's going to be a whole game. If the demo reveals any narrative through-line I didn't really catch it. There's Smokes personal and professional development, I guess, with the hint of a potential romantic relationship, but I can't see caring whether he learns to be a good therapist or gets a girlfriend or sorts out his own existential ennui as motivators to make it to a Game Over screen. Caring about whether his patients get cured, even less.

It'll probably depend on how funny you find robots being no better at being alive than the humans they replaced, I guess. I found it funny but probably not funny enough to pay money for. I wishlisted it but I doubt I'll buy it. 

I'll play it if it turns up on Prime for free one day, though, which it very likely might. It's the sort of thing they like, over there.

Phew. That was longer than I intended, too. Can we fit the last one in? Hmm. Dubious. I feel I have quite a bit to say. Don't really want to rush it.

I know. I'll play another demo today, then I can cover that one and the one I didn't do today in a double-header next time. Yep, that's a plan!

My work here is done. Time for a coffee!

Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore Demo: First Impressions

I'll begin with what I told the developers of Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore in the extensive feedback questionnaire I completed after logging out of the demo a couple of days ago: I found the game much more impressive than I expected. I'll also repeat what I told them in the final, "Any other comments" section: they really need to get working on a better trailer because the ones they have now do the game a disservice.

If I'd made my decision purely on what I saw in those videos, I'd never have downloaded the demo. Luckily, this is still an MMORPG blog as much as it's anything and I'm still an MMORPG fan, interested in and occasionally excited by the possibilities inherent in the form. Consequently, I feel a sense of obligation to check out as many new titles in the genre as I can manage and since there never seem to be many MMORPGs in the Steam Next Fest, I can hardly afford to miss one just because the trailer makes it look bad.

Even so, I only downloaded the demo out of a sense of duty. When I first wrote about the game a month ago I was less than enthusiastic, describing it as "worth a punt", which is about as lukewarm a recommendation as you can get. I even declined to link one of the trailers because I thought it was so bad it would actually put people off trying the game.

That trailer, unbelievably, turns out to be the opening of the game itself, the first thing you see when you log in. It absolutely does not make any better impression in context. Indeed, I found it such a teeth-grindingly, jaw-clenchingly awful introduction that I made a quick note to remind myself not to forget how bad it had been when I came to write the review. Verbatim, I wrote

"Terrible voiceover - sound quality appalling - can't understand one word in five."

But you don't have to take my word for it. Here. Watch the blasted thing for yourself, if you can stand it.

I feel comfortable sharing it here because everything else I'm going to say about the game is very positive. I played for over two hours and would happily have gone on playing a good deal longer. As I also said in the feedback I sent to the devs, they have a very solid base already for what looks like a game with considerable potential. It's a great start.

To put a little detail into the picture, the world looks rich, vibrant and attractive; movement is fluid; the UI is clean and efficient; controls are intuitive and comfortable and gameplay is both familiar and immersive. The music is pretty good too but my greatest surprise was finding that, once you get past that abysmal opening, so is the soundscape. 

I removed the UI from most of the shots for aesthetic reasons but it's pretty unobtrusive.

I'll start with that, just because it's such a bizarre contrast. As I said, I literally couldn't understand anything any of the characters said in the opening cut scene, not only because the voice acting was so insanely over the top as to make Andy Serkis doing Gollum sound like Olivier doing Hamlet but because the entire mix is muddy and muffled.

Clearly, if incomprehensibly, that must be a design choice because all the sound in the game itself is crisp, clean and clear. Not only that, but there's a fair amount of voice acting and most of it isn't just competent - it's good! 

The way the Help function is introduced as lore-inflected grafitti is inspired.

The game proper begins with a fairly lengthy sequence in which a goblinesque creature leads you through the streets of what turns out to be the hub city, chatting away in expository fashion to let you know where you are and what you're going to be doing. The creature's dialog was well-written and well-acted, as were most of the several other, lengthy monologues I listened to later, when I explored the area.

Those conversations, if you can call one person speaking and one staying silent a conversation, happen spontaneously when you get close enough to an NPC with something to say. It's quite a sophisticated take on handing out quests, except that at this stage there don't seem to be any. Quests, that is.

If you want me to get you something, just ask! You don't have to tell me your life-story.

It seemed perfectly plain that all of the NPCs that spoke to me had things they wanted me to do. They all led up to a request that I help them out with a problem they were having. But then they just stopped. Presumably at some future stage the mechanics of questing will be patched in and attached to the dialog, which will be fine and dandy, although I quite liked the spurious spontaneity of being buttonholed by people so wrapped up in their own problems they just felt they had to share, even though they didn't, for once, expect me to do anything about it.

There may not be any quests yet but there's plenty to do in the demo. Coreborn describes itself as a open world social survival game and all of that familiar gameplay is present and functioning well. You can gather fungi and fruit to feed yourself, pull bundles of twigs and plant fiber out of bushes to make yourself tools and weapons, kill animals for leather to make armor, chop down trees and break rocks so you can build yourself somewhere to live: all of the usual time-consuming busywork that's proved so popular and compelling to millions of gamers for decades.

Item #1 on the agena: Make myself some clothes!

And you know why there are so many of these games and so many more keep getting made? Because it's fun, that's why. It's gameplay that links into pre-existing receptors in the human psyche that pump out endorphins to reward you for doing what's necessary to ensure your survival. Or something like that. It feels good. It's like a drug.

Coreborn doesn't do anything much to differentiate itself from all the other games it's competing with. It's not trying to be edgy or original. The exit interview is happy to ask you to compare it to other games you've played. It even gives you suggestions. Did you think it was like Valheim? Or Minecraft? I'm pretty sure the devs are hoping you'll say "Why, yes, now you come to mention it, that's just what I was thinking!"

Yes, I tried to cross the bridge. Yes, I fell in the river.

And I'm more than good with that as an ambition. Don't try to reinvent the wheel. Just put a nice, firm, tire on it so the ride feels smooth and comfortable and make sure all the nuts are tightened properly so the damn thing doesn't come flying off when we get rolling. 

On the basis of what I saw in this demo, the basic groundwork has been laid for what ought to become an entertaining and satisfying experience. There's a very great deal more to be added and some of the parts that are in place aren't much more than placeholders but the potential is considerable.

Fear my bunch of slapped-together twigs!

One of the obvious placeholders is Combat, which is extremely basic and not much fun. There's only a single, craftable weapon - the Greatsword - with a couple of attacks and a special. There's a dodge mechanic that doesn't work all that well (Or I'm useless at dodging, which is another possibility). 

There's a note in the extensive help section about some animals being aggressive and others not but f there's any way to assess the aggressiveness and difficulty level of an enemy, I couldn't find it. Some creatures kicked my butt in seconds, others didn't seem to fight back much at all, but since the cute design aesthetic leaves all of them looking like candidates for a petting zoo it was hard to tell which to approach and which to avoid.

The game currently has a death mechanic that's more of an annoyance than a penalty. You respawn at the nearest designated location with full health and no loss of experience or skills but you drop all of your inventory except for what you're holding and wearing. You have two hours to collect your stuff from the gravestone that appears where you died, after which it all vanishes forever. 

It sounds harsh but since no-one else can loot your stuff and you respawn at most a few minutes from where you died, where a gigantic glowing purple beam of light descending from the heavens highlights the location of your grave, dying is merely an annoying interruption to your gameplay rather than an actual penalty. 

On your left, a purple beam for your grave. On your right, a blue beam for the hub city.

Since you also revive with full health but whatever killed you doesn't immediately heal up, I found myself farming leather from hard-to-kill creatures by pulling them near my respawn and running back to have a second (Or third.) go. That's something that'll need to be tightened and tidied as development progresses but even as it stands I can't say I wasn't having fun. I don't mind  a few deaths if it gets me what I want in the end.

Other aspects were obviously barebones but fully functional. Crafting at the lowest level doesn't require anything other than the right materials and a button press in the UI but there's provision for crafting stations and trees once you progress. Building has few options but what there is has been implemented with style and works fluidly. The social side of the game, involving banding together to build towns, which then need to be defended against attack (By mobs rather than other players, I think?) looks to be implemented although I didn't have time to try it.

"Hedonist"? Hmm. Interesting choice.

Character creation in the demo is minimalistic. There's only one option, a humanoid with very few cosmetic or physical variations. There are several non-human NPCs in the hub city that look far more interesting, including robots and the ever-popular rat-people but also a much more unusual choice: star-nosed moles. I'd be happy to play any of those.

There seems to be a good deal of quite intriguing lore at the back of the setting in which the player-characters finds themselves. The MMORPG, which is being produced and developed by a German outfit called Blankhans,  is supposedly based on a tabletop game of the same name, although detailed information about that seems oddly hard to come by. 

There's a video about the Pen & Paper version on YouTube that has 1.4m views so someone must have played it. Unfortunately my O-Level German isn't up to a two-and-a-half hour long video so I'm none the wiser.

All in all I was much more impressed by the demo than I ever imagined I would be. If I hadn't developed a certain amount of self-restraint in these matters over the years, I'd be in there now, exploring and gathering and crafting and building, just for the fun of it. I'm a little wiser about these things than once I was, though, so I'm just going to keep it in mind for a later, more fully-functional release, particularly one where progress won't be wiped.

Very definitely one to watch, which is more than I can say for the trailer!

Seven Steaming Slices

It's Steam Next Fest time again, I'm very happy to say. I've been looking forward to it the way other people used to look forward to the big Steam sales but don't seem to any more. I never really paid much attention to those because I rarely itch to spend money on games unless I know for certain sure I want to play them right away, in which case I'm usually happy to pay the asking price. I mean, you either want it or you don't, right?

Having a huge smorgasbord of free demos to pick away at suits me much better than any sale, not only because I'm cheap but also because demos are bite-sized amuse-bouches that tickle my tastebuds deliciously. Most of them run no longer than an hour, very occasionally two, meaning I can start and finish in a single session then move on to something new. I prefer that hugely to committing to a week or two, playing the same game.

I was thinking about it today and it occurred to me that I'd actually prefer it if a lot of games lasted no longer than a couple of hours in their full and final release. I might well buy a lot more of them that way. I'd happily pay a dollar for a game that lasted a couple of hours where I'd balk at paying $15.99 for one that might take me a couple of weeks. 

It's a change of attitude that's slowly overtaken me in recent years and it doesn't just apply to games. I find it very hard nowadays to commit to watching a full-length movie, something I used to do literally four or five times every week. Sitting down to watch anything that runs longer than an hour makes me twitch and the bar is getting lower all the time. These days, I'm finding it a bit of a challenge even to watch TV shows that last around an hour. 

 

Whether it's part of the aging process or something to do with the infamous cultural drift towards a shorter attention span (A theory hardly supported by the ever-increasing average length of hit movies.) I couldn't say but it's been creeping up on me for years now and it's getting worse. Even MMORPGs, infamously disrespectful of the players' time as they always have been, no longer exert the hold they once did. I play them in shorter and shorter sessions, often dropping in for half an hour or less to do some dailies or a single instance, then logging out to do something else instead.

Demos are perfect for me: short, free and entirely lacking in commitment. I also find them oddly satisfying, the good ones anyway, in the same way a short story often has a stronger impact than a long novel. I believe there's much to be said for brevity, although you'd never know it from this blog.

As usual, I've tried to limit myself to as many demos as I think I could reasonably hope to complete and post about before the event ends on June 26. Seven demos in seven days doesn't seem like too big an ask.

I didn't get all the way to the end of the list this time, partly because I'd already hit my target but mostly because there seemed to be a mildly depressing sameness to the games I was seeing. So many iterations of the same old ideas. Not that I can cast any stones, given the lack of originality in my own choices, the same old Point & Click adventures, MMOs and walking simulators as always.

Here they are, in the order I picked them. They may not be Best In Fest but they're the best I could find before I lost interest. 

Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore

Second time that trailer's appeared on the blog. Doesn't get any better, does it? 

This came first because it's on my Wishlist so Steam prompted me to pick it. I wrote about it a short time back, when I said "The gameplay looks rough but the world looks kind of pretty." I guess we'll find out just how rough and how pretty. I'm not optimistic, if I'm honest, but it's the closest thing to an MMORPG on the list so I feel kind of obligated at least to try.

Chronique des Silencieux 

It's set in France! In the 1970s! It's in French! It's a Kickstarter! The trailer looks really shaky!

There is an English translation, fortunately, although I quite fancy practicing my very rusty language skills. It looks like a standard detective adventure game but the setting is original, at least. I travelled through southern France a bunch of times in the seventies so it might even be nostalgic. Well, it would be if I could remember anything about it. Mostly, all I can recall is a vague impression of the inside of the car and a few municipal campsites. It wasn't exactly St Tropez. 

Cat's Request

First of the inevitable cat games. Second of the inevitable detective games. The only one to combine both. I think I was pretty restrained this time. This one is a bit different in that the cat is an alien who repairs old robots when they get replaced by androids. The cat has a virtual assistant and the plot revolves around a search for a body to put the assistant into because of a government edict that all disembodied virtual assistants have been reclassified as malware. 

Did I say "a bit different"? Make that batshit insane. The trailer looks like an AI's fever dream. Looking forward to this one. 

 Robotherapy

More robots, fewer cats. Actually, no cats, as far as I know. Set in a "dystopian robot society" after the robots have killed all the humans, you play a robot psychiatrist trying to help unhappy robots come to terms with the knowledge that even killing all the humans hasn't made them happy. Bleak enough for you? I think it's supposed to be funny but it's hard to tell. 

Stray Gods

This one's definitely a comedy.* A musical comedy, no less. Points for originality there, for sure. The trailer looks amazing and the music sounds great. Not so sure about the gameplay, about which there doesn't seem to be a lot of detail. Lucky there's a demo, then, isn't it?

Little Kitty, Big City

A Switch port, possibly. There are some really good names this time around. Not Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore, obviously, although that does have a certain Saturday Morning Cartoon grandeur to it. Stray Gods is a very solid pun but Little Kitty, Big City is pure genius. I would have picked it just for the name but luckily it turns out to be some kind of open-world adventure game so I ought to be able to play it, too. 

Did I mention the cat can wear hats? And there are lots of them? I should have led with the cat hats. Hats for cats are awesome.

Underground Blossom

Lastly, there's this, a graphically stylish point & click from the creators of Rusty Lake, a series I feel I'm supposed to have heard of but can't say I have. The plot is a bravura hybrid of high concept and arcane weirdness, in which you travel through the memories of one Laura Vanderboom by way of the metro stations of her mind, a set-up which immediately reminded me of Crazy Jane from Doom Patrol. Pretentious? I hope so!

And that's the seven. All I have to do now is play them. I see XyzzySqrl already streamed two of my picks so I'd better get a move on or everyone's going to have played them before I can write them up.

Wish me luck.

* (No, it's not.)

Garfield And Morrissey Don't Know What They're Talking About

I quite like Mondays. Not a popular opinion, I know. 

It's mainly because Monday hasn't been a regular working day for me for well over a decade, not since I went to see my manager and said I wanted to drop my hours from full time to four days a week and she got out the calendar for the rest of the year and put a line through every Monday. From then on, whatever my working pattern has been - and it's changed more times than I can remember - I've never worked Mondays.

Monday isn't my favorite day, though. I don't have one any more. It used to be Sunday (Suck on it, Morrissey!), a preference dating all the way back to adolescence, when I had classes six days a week (and chapel on Sunday mornings), making Sunday the only day of the week I didn't have school all day. 

Now Sunday is my main work day, so in a weird way Sunday is my Monday, although when you don't have to go to work the day after, it hardly has the same dread impact. Sunday's also my Friday, I guess, seeing it's both the first and last day of my working week. Or it is on the weeks I don't also work Saturday...

Anyone know why I started this? If you do, please let me know in the comments because I certainly don't.

Oh, wait a moment, yes I do. It's coming back to me now. I was going to say here we go with another Friday Grab-Bag on Monday. That was it.

 

Mark This Comment As NOT SPAM. 

Since we've mentioned the comments (We? Are we the Queen now? Or, I guess, the King. Still getting used to that...) this might be a moment to mention that I'm very, very bad at checking Awaiting Moderation. And when I say bad I mean I pretty much never do it at all.

This morning, I just happend to look in there (For reasons.) in what must be the first time for at least a year. I was very suprised to find about half a dozen genuine comments among the endless stream of sexual harrassment and unwarranted praise that prefaces links to websites of extremely dubious provenance. I authorised all of those valid comments, most of which were of fairly recent origin, so if anyone's commented lately and not seen their comment appear, now might be the time to check.

I haven't replied to any of them, for which I apologise. I wasn't smart enough to do it as I was signing them off and now I can't remember which posts they were for. I may go back and try to find them but I probably won't, so feel free to drop another comment and remind me if anything needed an answer.

 

Address Unknown

Whenever Wilhelm does one of those posts about all the peculiar offers and invitations he gets via email thanks to having a blog, I wonder why no-one ever gets in touch with me to promote their product or give them free content for their their platform. I mean, I'm glad they don't but no-one wants to feel like they're invisible. 

Okay, everyone wants to be invisible, at least sometimes but that's an entirely different fantasy.

It so happens that this morning, in the course of fact-checking for the item above, I discovered that contrary to my belief, this blog has never in all the dozen years of its existence had an email address. Well, not one that both worked and that anyone could find. Believe it or not  - and if you're a regular reader I'm sure you will have no difficulty believing it whatsoever - I did not know this until  about a quarter of an hour ago.

When I set up the blog I was, like many people, somewhat anxious about the potential for self-exposure. I anticipated many bad things happening, as new bloggers often do, not realizing that by far the more likely outcome wouldn't be torrents of abuse but complete and utter silence. 

In the interest of anonymity, I put the least-possible information in my public profile but I did include an email address. That email address was invfull@gmail.com. It's been the contact address for the blog ever since but even though my Blogger profile has been accessed over eleven thousand times no-one has ever used it. 

There are two good reasons for that. Firstly, it appears I neglected to tick the box that makes the email address visible when you look at my profile and secondly I don't appear ever to have gotten around to creating an email account of that name at Gmail. I imagine I made it up back in 2010 with the intention of registering it at some future time, if and when I felt comfortable about it, but then I forgot all about it, just like I forget most everything else.

In my head, though, I've been thinking all along that there was an email address on the blog, somewhere. I've occasionally wondered why I never get any mail from it but I figured it must be one I never look at. I have plenty of those. I never bothered to check until now.

Sorry about that.

I can now confirm that this blog does have a valid email address attached to it and it's visible from my profile. Confusingly, it's my Twitter email because I'm signed in to the maximum permitted number of Gmail accounts and I'd have to sign out of all of them to add another (Why? I don't know! Ask Google. It's annoying.) 

The email address for the blog also redirects to one I look at every day so I will see whatever anyone sends there. For a while, anyway. If it turns out to be a nuisance, I reserve the right to sever that link, after which it'll be down to how often I remember to check. Either way, it will now at least be technically possible to get in touch with me without resorting to hijacking the comment thread on the latest post (Which I'm also totally fine with, by the way).

 

From The Comments

Wow! It's almost as though there's a theme developing here. It wasn't planned but I guess I'll go with it.

Angry Onions was kind enough to drop by with a link to a very informative video explaining exactly how ChatGPT works. It's a shade under half an hour long. Less if you skip the commercials. I watched it right after breakfast this morning and I'm embedding it here because it's well worth the time it takes to watch.

In general terms, there wasn't much in the video I didn't already know. The specific mathematics involved, even dumbed down to the nth degree as they are, still go way over my head. For instance, I remember matrices from school and not being able to understand them then. I don't understand them any better now, so referencing a matrix as a way to simplify a much more complex process really doesn't do much for me.

That in itself highlights one of the most significant aspects of the whole AI phenomenon, namely that, for the end user, an understanding of how LLMs and Generative Pre-Trained Transformers work isn't really necessary or possibly even advisable. As has been observed countless times, no-one needs a degree in electronics to switch on a TV set. 

What's important is what shows up on the screen, not how it got there. The underlying technology is interesting, of course, if you have an enquring mind, but what's essential for the end-user to understand are the controls, not the mechanics. 

The current suite of applications we're choosing, highly inaccurately, to call "Artificial Intelligences" are either tools or toys, depending how we use them. When we use them as toys, it doesn't much matter how we play with them, so long as it amuses us but if we're going to use them as tools, we do need to know what they're good for, what their limitations are and how to handle them safely. It's not clear everyone's reading the manual.

There were two statistics in the video I found surprising, even shocking, and neither of them had anything to do with how ChatGPT functions. The first was the sheer number of people currently using the app. Kyle states that as of 2023 "ChatGPT has one hundred million monthly users". I knew the whole AI phenomenon was getting a lot of media attention. I did not know so many people were actually using it.

The second, which relates directly to the first, is that running ChatGPT to service the demands of those hundred million users "might cost $500m a day." Seriously? For an application that's free to use? How the hell are they funding that? And how long is it going to be before the pay walls come up and the AI gravy train runs off the rails?

I asked Bard because I thought it would be rude to ask ChatGPT itself.

 

I have two things to say about that. 

First, I haven't fact-checked any of it against original sources and as we all know - or should - all these AIs are very happy to make something up if they don't know the answer. (Also, AIs don't "know" anything. I know that. No need to remind me. It's a figure of speech.) I'm just quoting what Bard said as a starting point for further investigation, should anyone care to look into it further. 

That's what I find Bard useful for. I'd no more accept anything it told me at face value than I'd take a child at their word if they told me they'd been playing with fairies at the bottom of the garden. No-one would, would they?

Second, saying the same thing twice does not provide "additional details". I suspect there may have been a lot of high school essays in that original data corpus.

Caveats aside, I think it's not unreasonable to assume that billionaires and megacorps are going to be driving the AI revolution forward but that we, the general public, will end up paying for it in the longer run, one way or another. I can absolutely see why that might be a concern. There's not much of a history of forces like that working in anything other than their own financial interest, after all.

In the video Kyle alludes to the frequently expressed concern that unrestricted public use of these models risks creating a feedback effect that will eventually render all data on the internet at best suspect and at worst corrupt. He also (And not, in my reading, entirely facetiously.) nods towards the longstanding paranoid scenario in which machines attain sentience and decide to dispense with humanity.

I'd put the danger of the latter somewhere just above a zombie apocalypse. The former, though, does seem to have some traction. ChatGPT itself is currently insulated from any such corruption due to its siloing within a data set that cuts off sometime around September 2021 but that protective restriction also means the engine becomes less useful for practical purposes day by day. If the AIs are going to have a future they're going to have to live in the present, not the past.

If a hundred million people are pumping AI output into the data-sea every single day now, how many are going to be doing it next year and the year after? It's a fair bet most of those users won't be fact-checking and cross-referencing before they dump their results into the pool. Gigo still applies only now it's going gigagigo.

Which sounds like a suitably gibberish moment to end this segment. Of course we'll be coming back to it soon enough. Probably for the rest of our natural lives.

 

I Nearly Bought A Game But In The End I Didn't.

Story of my life, really. I keep getting emails from Steam telling me something on my Wishlist's up for sale. The list itself has ballooned to more than two dozen titles so something's almost always on some kind of offer. I always check the deal but it's rarely tempting enough to get me to bite.

Not everything on my wishlist is there because I really want to play it, of course. Some things are just bookmarked in case I want to write about them some day. There are a few Point & Click Adventures on there that I would like to get, most of which I played in demo form at one time or another. 

One of them is Crowns and Pawns, about which I was very lukewarm back in February of last year but towards which I have since warmed a little. I did eventually add it to my wishlist and when it came up recently at 45% off I almost pressed "Buy". I'm really in the mood for a good point & click about now.

Luckily, before I spent the money it occurred to me I must have quite a few games in my Amazon Prime Gaming library by now. I checked. I have one hundred and thirty four. I've finished fewer than a dozen. There are more than a hundred I've never even looked at. 

Among them are at least fifteen Point & Click adventures, although most of them are versions of bloody Monkey Island. Still, I ought to be able to find something. Then I remembered one of the games I got free from Amazon, Lake is also on my Steam Wishlist. If I take that one off my list, I thought, and start playing it through Amazon, it'll be just like I bought it!

So I did and it is! That ought to keep me busy for a while.

And finally...

Close With A Song!

Anyone like Suicide?

  Moon Duo obviously do!