(Above preview image taken from Steam)
With The Game Awards over for another year, I thought it'd be cool to take a look at its sister festival on Steam that allows you to try out a whole bunch of upcoming games, from the much anticipated System Shock remake all the way down to little indie titles. So considering the fact that these are demos of full games that aren't out yet, I can't really consider this article one of my typical review posts. Instead, I think it'd be more accurate to say that this is more of a 'first impressions' kind of deal.
I started playing these demos in the evening of the 13th of December and finished in the evening on the 14th. In total, I spent a little over five hours playing these demos.
SkateBIRD
(Above image taken from GlassBottomGames.com)
Developer / Publisher: Glass Bottom Games
Release: 2020
First cab off the rank is SkateBIRD, a game that's been on my radar for quite some time. Unfortunately (and though the game admits it), I found it to be pretty buggy with weird respawning issues in addition to an bizarre crash when opening the menu and selecting an option. It also didn't help that I had to use the Xbox controller prompts instead of the DualShock ones, which is the only PC-compatible gamepad that I've got right now. But in spite of this small setback, I was able to pick up the controls reasonably quickly. Sadly, this sandbox demo has very little to offer beyond a small table area. If you try and explore outside of it, the game will freeze and automatically reset you back on top of this table. The gameplay itself I thought was rather janky as well: sometimes I would land a trick when it looks like I'm going to crash, other times I'd land perfectly fine visually but inexplicably ragdoll anyways. I'll give SkateBIRD the benefit of the doubt and write most of this off as being an early somewhat functioning demo for a (hopefully) far more refined full release. Still, it's nonetheless a disappointing start to these demos.
The Drifter
(Above image taken from Powerhoof's YouTube page)
Developer / Publisher: Powerhoof
Release: When It's Done
If I were to sum up The Drifter in a sentence, I would say that it was as if a point-and-click adventure game from the nineties was grittier, grimier and much more Australian where the gameplay is minimal and the embellished art and fascinating narrative being where the real magic is. The demo is decently long, taking about thirty minutes for me to get through the whole thing with most of the prompts and puzzles being pretty simple to figure out and I think this is a lot better than having the moon logic that many older point-and-click games subsist off of. Besides, as I mentioned earlier, it's the plot that's going to be of interest more than anything else in these kind of games (as the gameplay in point-and-clicks are usually quite similar to one another). To that end, I found The Drifter's story of a down-on-his-luck everyman and his voiced inner monologue caught up in the mysterious disappearances of homeless people to be pretty intriguing, with the quality of the writing, dialogue and performances keeping me invested the entire way through.
That's rather impressive considering how close to its chest the game keeps its cards. You're often left in the dark about certain details, but rather than hindering my enjoyment of the game, it helped to hold my interest and further drive both the plot and the gameplay. And though The Drifter has pixelated graphics in a market saturated by similarly styled indie games (with other titles like Backbone: Prologue, Unavowed and Technobabylon coming to mind), it distinguishes itself with the nostalgia of those self-same adventure games of old, but also more importantly through its pure pulp style and entertainingly authentic Australian speech patterns and colloquialisms. In short, I was very much impressed by this demo. Plus I felt it was a lot more polished than the SkateBIRD one, even if they are two rather disparate genres. If it manages to uphold its level of intrigue, I'll certainly be looking forward to the full release...whenever that happens to be.
Chicory: A Colorful Tale
(Above image taken from Chicory: A Colorful Tale's Kickstarter page)
Developer / Publisher: Greg Lobanov
Developer / Publisher: Greg Lobanov
Release: Coming In 202X!
A wholesome Undertale-esque painting simulator where your character, a cleaner for the titular character Chicory, is tasked with repainting the now black-and-white world after Chicory goes missing. Cleverly, the act of painting is tied in nicely with the gameplay where the eccentric characters you meet will ask you to perform a task for them - usually involving repainting things that have now lost their colour. The game also has a cute hint mechanic where you call your parents for advice. The mother says something more vague to remind you of your current objective. If you're still stuck, you can ask to "put Dad on the phone" who is much more 'direct' in his speech, outright telling you what you need to do. This fits appropriately with how character-driven the game is, to the point where part of the game design oozes personality through a mere hint system.
Other than neat in-universe hints, the best part of the demo was definitely the end boss fight which effectively tested my ability to move the brush quickly and precisely. However, I felt that there was a lack of detail in the overall presentation. Arguably, it's part of the game's aesthetic where it resembles a colouring-in book which the player must fill in themselves. In any case, the game is adorable even though I fear it will retread ideas that have already been explored extensively by other indie games as the characters and their dialogue will seem suspiciously familiar to those who have played games like the aforementioned Undertale (which at the point is probably everyone who ever lived).
From wholesome to not wholesome at all, Carrion is brutal and gross in all the right ways. It touts itself as a 'reverse horror' game where you control a big, amorphous blob of a monster which consumes human flesh in order to maintain its biomass while growing bigger and stronger. As you'd expect from a game of this sort, the sound design and the art style helps a lot in conveying the terror. Your monster has no discernible shape, has several unblinking glowing eyes and you also make weird slurping noises as you move just to top it all off. Plus, the industrial ambience and the screams of those you devour adds a lot to the atmosphere as well. It's 'ew', but it's a cool gore-y horror kind of 'ew'. But what definitely isn't 'ew' (in a bad way) are the controls. Using the left mouse button to move and the right mouse button to attack allows for some serious fluidity and frantic combat around the grimy industrial facility in which you find yourself in.
When it comes to the humans you use like health packs, I felt that their AI fluctuated between surprisingly intelligent and surprisingly stupid. For example, when you fling open a vent with a human nearby, they'll often turn around and watch it for some time with their weapon at the ready if they have one. This, in turn, allows the cunning player to perform surprise attacks from behind. Sometimes however, an NPC would just stand completely still while you chow down on his buddies. Then again, I'm not sure how you're supposed to react to a hulking mass of writhing flesh and gnashing teeth so I'll give the AI the benefit of the doubt here and say, in universe, that guy was just really really scared.
Other than that, the pace of the demo was very clearly geared towards being a Metroidvania with you accessing new areas as you unlock new abilities, feeling your way around in the darkened rooms and corridors. I liked this a lot as it really helped me to sink into my bizarre role as the monster skulking in the vents. But, with that being said and considering it is a Metroidvania kind of game, I would have appreciated some sort of map system to go along with it as it would have helped me to get my bearings a bit better. Fortunately, each area is distinctive enough in both design and visuals to not be too confusing to navigate. Even so, hopefully a map of some sort comes in the full release. In all, Carrion is another great and short twenty minute demo which shows promise for a new kind of game.
Thanks for reading!
Other than neat in-universe hints, the best part of the demo was definitely the end boss fight which effectively tested my ability to move the brush quickly and precisely. However, I felt that there was a lack of detail in the overall presentation. Arguably, it's part of the game's aesthetic where it resembles a colouring-in book which the player must fill in themselves. In any case, the game is adorable even though I fear it will retread ideas that have already been explored extensively by other indie games as the characters and their dialogue will seem suspiciously familiar to those who have played games like the aforementioned Undertale (which at the point is probably everyone who ever lived).
Carrion
(Above image taken from Phobia Game Studio's Facebook page)
Developer / Publisher: Phobia Game Studio / Devolver Digital
Release: 2020
When it comes to the humans you use like health packs, I felt that their AI fluctuated between surprisingly intelligent and surprisingly stupid. For example, when you fling open a vent with a human nearby, they'll often turn around and watch it for some time with their weapon at the ready if they have one. This, in turn, allows the cunning player to perform surprise attacks from behind. Sometimes however, an NPC would just stand completely still while you chow down on his buddies. Then again, I'm not sure how you're supposed to react to a hulking mass of writhing flesh and gnashing teeth so I'll give the AI the benefit of the doubt here and say, in universe, that guy was just really really scared.
Other than that, the pace of the demo was very clearly geared towards being a Metroidvania with you accessing new areas as you unlock new abilities, feeling your way around in the darkened rooms and corridors. I liked this a lot as it really helped me to sink into my bizarre role as the monster skulking in the vents. But, with that being said and considering it is a Metroidvania kind of game, I would have appreciated some sort of map system to go along with it as it would have helped me to get my bearings a bit better. Fortunately, each area is distinctive enough in both design and visuals to not be too confusing to navigate. Even so, hopefully a map of some sort comes in the full release. In all, Carrion is another great and short twenty minute demo which shows promise for a new kind of game.
Wooden Nickel
(Above image taken from Wooden Nickel's Steam Store page)
Developer / Publisher: Brain&Brain
Release: 1895
Wooden Nickel is quite the odd little demo. It provides a decent chunk of what to expect when the game is completed, and what is there is kind of fascinating. While I didn't find the art style particularly appealing nor the music memorable, the dialogue, the grounded sense of simple choices that matter and the effects from said choices are what beats at the heart of this game. At the beginning of every morning in this small burgeoning town, you receive a fresh copy of the newspaper through your door. To travel around and fill the hours of each in-game day, you select an interesting looking article out of your paper and then the game will take you to that thing. As an example, the story about a mythical bird being shot out of the sky might take your fancy. Choosing that article would then take you to the man in town who allegedly shot it down. You can then make conversation with them and you may be presented choices on how to interact with them.
However, you can only visit so many 'articles' in a day and some, depending on your decisions, will take up more of your time than others. This limitation is an effective way of enforcing the idea that your choices actually have importance and that you should be particular about what you decide to do. How this idea is going to be expanded into a full game remains to be seen, but I'll be interested in seeing how the developers handle it going forward as well as how to 'shake up' the gameplay occasionally to stop it getting stale. Perhaps to counter this, the developers will emphasise shortness and branching storylines to give it a bit more replay value, but we'll just have to wait and see.
Moving Out
(Above image taken from SMGStudio.com)
Developer / Publisher: SMG Studio & Devm Games / Team17 Digital
Release: Coming 2020
A silly physics-based affair is what awaits you when you boot up the demo of Moving Out. Designed with multiple players in mind, you and a couple of friends are tasked with moving objects out of a building into your truck while trying to do so in record time. I played it with a keyboard and, even though it controlled fine for the most part (apart from the aiming controls which would jolt about wildly), the game makes it obvious from the beginning that it's one of those games where a controller is pretty much required for you to have any fun at all. It's also one of those games that seems to have adapted its party game concepts from similar titles like Overcooked! and Human: Fall Flat where you and your fellow players have to work together against both the game's hectic nature and each other. It's an old idea retrofitted into somewhat new gameplay and while the demo doesn't offer much in the way of content, there may be potential here. But beyond its rudimentary and by now conventional gameplay style (thanks to the work of its contemporary peers), it intrigues me as to how the developers will help make Moving Out...stand out. The graphics didn't help much with that either - it just looked like a cartoony cutesy art style I've seen many many times before in dozens of other games including the ones I've already mentioned.
Eastward
(Above image taken from EastwardGame.com)
Developer / Publisher: Pixpil / Chucklefish
Release: Coming Soon!
I think one of the things I love most about the Eastward demo is how committed it is to replicating the JRPG games of yore in how they were developed artistically. It seems to particularly take notes from the top-down Final Fantasy games on the SNES and the Mother series. So much of it screams vintage, from the pixel art to the bizarre characters to the bit-crushed music to even the slightly blurred colours and chromatic aberration subtly replicating the effects of an old CRT monitor. But at the same time, there's so much modernity in it as well: the twin-stick combat being a notable one plus the little graphical details like the gorgeous rippling of water and other little particle effects near impossible to replicate on older hardware. Unfortunately, the game also has the whole post-apocalypse backdrop to the story, one of the more common and over-saturated kind of stories today. But based on what I've seen in the demo, Eastward's post-apocalyptic world is nothing short of unique and charming, like a beautiful end-of-the-world cross between Mother and Gravity Falls.
Shame then that the final boss of the demo has you see the same cutscene before it, over and over again if you die to them. I'm sure a more competent player would have no trouble defeating it on the first go and though it only took me a few attempts, it was still frustrating as hell to have to sit through it all over again every time I failed. In every game where something similar like this has existed, it's never been fun or a clever punishment for poor gameplay - it's always been annoying. That gripe aside (which I hope gets fixed, please), Eastward has got something special to it, even if it's only because of how superb its execution of preexisting tried-and-tested concepts may turn out to be.
Oh yeah, I also thought the transitions between screens was a bit awkward and 'jumpy' - something else to fix in the final release, I suppose.
Haven
(Above image taken from TheGameBakers.com)
Developer / Publisher: The Game Bakers
Release: 2020
Haven is similar to Eastward in as much as it is a two character game. Unlike in Eastward however, the characters are controlled by two people instead of one. Indeed, this connection is what lies at the core of Haven and it is what's pulled directly into the game's turn-based combat where you have to hold and release buttons at the same time in order to attack effectively. It's not exactly rocket science nor the most profound concept of love and connection translated into a game mechanic, but it works well enough even if it is a bit boring and samey. Well at least I would say that it worked well if it weren't for the fact that the demo is single-player only...which seems a bit odd considering the core theme and gameplay Haven is planning to present. But hey, at the very least, there
will be more variety added to the game - at least in the environments - if the gameplay trailer the developers published on their YouTube channel is anything to go by.
On a positive note, the main gliding/hovering movement felt pretty fluid with a nice flow to it, even if there was a bit of jank when you'd reach the edge of a cliff and stop abruptly or jolt down it awkwardly. Luckily, it didn't occur too often for it to be a serious problem. Repeatedly tapping the button to sharply turn around while gliding also yielded noticeable camera clipping issues but again, nothing major. The performances and chemistry between the two main characters, Yu and Kay, seemed genuine enough though they occasionally came across as stilted. However, coming back to the more severe negatives, I wasn't a big fan of the demo's presentation. I thought the music didn't really fit well and the graphics, which were clearly going for a cel-shaded aesthetic, looked a bit rough around the edges and was lacking in detail. On top of this, there was a noticeable amount of pop-in on the grass and other objects and, as far as I'm aware, I couldn't change this as there were very limited graphics settings into the video options. On that note, I hope the game looks and plays a lot better when it finally releases and has a bit more depth and nuance to its story of star-crossed lovers.
Röki
(Above image taken from Nintendo.co.uk)
Developer / Publisher: Polygon Treehouse / United Label
Release: 2020
Röki's baseline premise of a girl trying to find her brother seems congruous to so many other stories that I struggle to find anything particularly interesting to say about it. Maybe, when the full game is released, I will be gladly proven wrong and it's going to make me reconsider my early assessment of it entirely...but I'm not going to hold my breath. What it does have going for it though is a Scandinavian wintry bleakness and a snippet of a soundtrack that, while not awfully memorable in its own right, did remind me of The Talos Principle, a puzzle game which I quite like. And while its art style may not appear to be particularly original, it has a painting-like quality that fits the cold colours and muted tones of this snow-covered fantasy land. Even so, it has to be said, it's far from perfect as I found the main character's facial animations to be...off-putting to put it bluntly, with her eyes bulging out of her head in a way I unfortunately found quite displeasing. Gameplay-wise, it's rather rote: pick up objects in the scene that you can use to solve puzzles - far from groundbreaking. However, to not be too cruel to Röki, there is that certain satisfaction you get from good adventure-puzzlers, a kind of satisfaction you can find in the demo. I pray that the game does something more extravagant than the similar indies that have come and gone, but I worry my hope is misplaced...
...Eh, maybe I'm being too dramatic. Let's just wait until it comes out.
Heavenly Bodies
(Above image taken from IndieDB.com)
Developer / Publisher: 2pt Interactive
Release: Some Time After 2020
The first game in the demos so far where I fully understand the necessitation of a controller, with a neat concept briefly explored by games like Surgeon Simulator or I Am Bread, where the precision of analog sticks matters along with having complete nuanced control in an environment where you actually have very little actual control at all - struggling to navigate a weightless environment. The presentation was effective enough with a indie-fashionable retro-futuristic outer space aesthetic paired with an expectedly sci-fi synth soundtrack. Having the camera rotate with the player as they moved about was also a nice touch if a bit dizzying - helping add to the weightlessness of the character as well as heightening the tension in the brief ten minutes you're given to complete the demo. The game's developers claim on their Steam page that the full version will add an "increasingly precarious range of physically-simulated stellar scenarios", something which I hope they deliver on as the core concept they have here could be fashioned into gold...or a lump of useless space coal if executed poorly especially if the controls aren't polished enough.
Tactical Galactical
(Above image taken from DANGEN Entertainment's YouTube page)
Developer / Publisher: Capsulated Software / DANGEN Entertainment
Release: 2020
Ah, another retro-futuristic game so soon after the last demo. But this time, with a different kind of take on the concept. Instead of replicating the art style of what the seventies thought the future would be like, it's instead what the nineties thought the future was going to be like as represented by a fictional Saturday morning cartoon show. It's a kind of nostalgia bait that I find oddly endearing. Admittedly, the opening cutscene animation depicting a made-up television episode with authentically jerky animation warmed my heart and put a smile on my face. And what do you know, the gameplay wasn't too bad either! If you've played an RTS before, there's not much there to surprise you with: you're on a hexagonal battlefield, there's a fog of war, there are a variety of units with different ranges and abilities, there's environmental effects like meteor strikes which you have to avoid...it's been done before, but you might get something out of it if you're looking for a tongue-in-cheek space opera RTS to scratch that itch for something safe and familiar. That is, of course, if the demo matches the overarching gameplay of the complete product.
Acid Knife
(Above image taken from Acid Knife's Steam page)
Developer / Publisher: Powerhoof
Release: When It's Done
Considering the warning the developer gave at the start of the demo, I expected Acid Knife to be really unpolished...but that couldn't be further from the truth. Sure, in terms of actual content, it's a bit bone dry (Ha, get it 'cause the player character is...is a skeleton? Heh...heh...okay, I'll stop). But mechanically speaking, there's something real special here. Movement has a nice weight to it without being too heavy, there's excellent feedback when landing an attack on one of the skull-inised centipede enemies, which remind me of the foes you'd face in Devil Daggers, and only having five slots to hold things makes you seriously consider what is more valuable to take with you into the next room. And even though the audio and sound design are all apparently just placeholder pieces, they still fit quite nicely with the demo's bleakly psychedelic atmosphere. Acid Knife is also true to its name: you often use a knife and the graphics do indeed feel you've taken acid...or someone's dumped hydrochloric acid all over the computer's motherboard causing beautiful glitch art. Either way, it's definitely acid, definitely a prototype, but definitely awesome.
Spiritfarer
(Above image taken from ThunderLotusGames.com)
Developer / Publisher: Thunder Lotus Games
Release: 2020
Wow. I really want this game. Right now. Yeah, if it wasn't obvious from my bluntness, this is perhaps my favourite demo so far...which is staggering when I consider the fact that I've enjoyed the vast majority of them. The concept behind Spiritfarer is rather original, at least for a video game in my experience: your job is to essentially take dead spirits to the afterlife and "learn to say goodbye to them" before they pass on. Even more impressive is how wholesome and cozy the game is with a premise like that. In fact, it matches something like Animal Crossing in both wholesomeness and gameplay. You talk with and get to know various spirits, assist them with their needs and help them to come to terms with their passing. You also perform various housekeeping activities like fishing, cooking, planting crops, and building new parts of the ship for your passengers...all in service of giving them a perfect send-off into the 'great unknown'. It's bittersweet in a most beautiful "all good things must come to an end" kind of way. Speaking of beautiful, this game looks Gorgeous with a capital G. The animation is wonderfully hand-drawn with a suitable weight and feel to each character, there are little details like the water splashing around the edges of your boat or the sparks coming off lightning strikes and the overall art style is somewhere between Studio Ghibli and something wholly original. If this is an in-development version of the game, I can't wait to see what an expanded final Spiritfarer will be like.
System Shock
(Above image taken from System Shock's Steam page)
Developer / Publisher: Nightdive Studios
Release: 2020
Well, that was a disappointment. Probably the buggiest demo of the entire festival while simultaneously being one of its most anticipated. Not a good combination by any stretch of the imagination. To start off with, barely any of the options in the settings menu worked beyond turning off motion blur. Subtitles? Nope. Higher graphics settings? Nuh-uh. In fact, I thought the lack of change in the textures was due to a deliberate choice Nightdive made to keep the low quality pixelated aesthetic of the original. In short, basically nothing I did in these menus did anything at all. I didn't even have the option to save or load in any capacity. As a result, when I inevitably died (for reasons I will go into briefly later), I was put right back at the start of the level which chugged a lot as it seemed to load everything in again from scratch.
There were also inexplicable framerate drops when solving board puzzles to open doors, stuttering when entering some new areas...so not a very impressive showing at all. Plus the demo does little to explain how it works gameplay-wise. I'm sure System Shock veterans won't have a problem, but when you're trying to introduce a classic game revitalised for a new audience, it's far from a good first impression. On top of all that, melee attacks felt rather indefinite against enemies. Sometimes you'd connect on one swing, and miss for no reason on the next. There's barely any feedback when you get damaged as well, leading you to situations where you don't realise you're on low health, then you suddenly die. The animations and models don't look particularly good either, but I'll chalk that up to both the issues with the option menus as well as it being a very early pre-alpha version.
This isn't exactly how I thought I was going to end this demo marathon but here we are...at the end, that is. I hope you enjoyed this post enough to read through my ramblings and first impressions of these first versions of upcoming games or at least skimmed through it to look at the games you liked. No matter what you did, I hope it was worth it for you.
If I were to rank the demos by my overall enjoyment of them and partly by how much promise I think the full games have, I would rank them roughly like this (as of 15th of December 2019):
1. Spiritfarer
2. Carrion
3. The Drifter
4. Acid Knife
5. Eastward
6. Chicory: A Colorful Tale
7. Heavenly Bodies
8. Moving Out
9. Wooden Nickel
10. Haven
11. Tactical Galactical
12. Röki
13. SkateBIRD
14. System Shock
The list isn't set in stone and is extremely approximate. I might change my opinion on it daily, but that's basically how it goes.
Thanks for reading!
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