henke on 20/6/2023 at 09:05
NEXT FEST MEGA THREAD HERE WE GO
This time around I have played a number of COOL DEMOS, lemme tell you about em.
(https://store.steampowered.com/app/1546310/El_Paso_Elsewhere/) El Paso, Elsewhere[video=youtube;8SHoTK_Wgao]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SHoTK_Wgao[/video]
The new indie Max Payne has a demo and it's a fun one. It really does play almost identically to Max Payne 1. At first I though it wasn't quite as tight, but after a while it started feeling better. Lovely presentation and narration. It's a good one!
(https://store.steampowered.com/app/2179440/New_Heights_Realistic_Climbing_and_Bouldering/) New Heights[video=youtube;dkx_dYLArRs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkx_dYLArRs[/video]
Ever since playing the demo for the cancelled climbing-game Vertigo by Wildebeest Games in ~2010, I've been wanting something like this, even considering trying to make it myself. I had a Rock Climbing Expert (Jeshibu) play this demo and he said "closest I've seen a game come to bouldering". It's surprisingly intuitive and easy to pick up and play as well. Hold either mouse button to move your arms and search for a good grip. Hold Shift + mouse button to move your feet. Control your body with WASD. It's all about finding good grips and carefully navigating up difficult cliff walls. The demo is huge. Probably 3-4 hours of content if you wanna climb it all.
what else
what else lets see
hmm
oh yeah, our boy YAKOOB has a NEW DEMO OUT! :D
(https://store.steampowered.com/app/2212110/Leaf_Blower_Man_This_Game_Blows/) Leaf Blower Man[video=youtube;ueCSd9Y7haY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueCSd9Y7haY[/video]
Really just the introductory sequence of the game, I'm guessing, but it certainly does a nice job of introducing you to the magical world of BLOWING LEAVES. WOW!
edit: did my dumb ass just go and put this in Comm Chat? MODS! SOME HELP HERE!
Sulphur on 20/6/2023 at 09:59
So hyped you put it in Comm Chat, eh.
Also of note: Little Kitty, Big City, Shadow Gambit, Sea of Stars, and Hammerwatch II all have demos. I'll have thoughts on these, if I get around to them.
Pyrian on 20/6/2023 at 16:22
Quote Posted by henke
Really just the introductory sequence of the game, I'm guessing...
It's actually a whole different level that's not in the game.
Al_B on 21/6/2023 at 18:11
Quote Posted by Sulphur
So hyped you put it in Comm Chat, eh.
Now moved to a more logical home per request by henke.
Sulphur on 22/6/2023 at 09:07
Quote Posted by Al_B
Now moved to a more logical home per request by henke.
:thumb:
I played a few more things. Some thoughts:
Venba - fuck me, this might be the first video game that features people actually from my home state, and one of the first words in it is 'aiyo'. Very cute. It's about a South Indian housewife and her husband as immigrants trying to make a life in Canada in the 80s. It seems a fairly straightforward mini-game and conversation-'em up, sort of in the vein of Night in the Woods or prior indie games whose names escape me. The art is nice-ish, immediately dousing every scene with pleasant warmth and life. I was tickled by the Tamil songs on the radio, but even more tickled by doing something in the game I've done as a matter of course in my life - making motherfucking
idlis. Had to chuckle at that.
However, the demo is
very slight, and I'm concerned about whether there's enough depth in the structure to carry an entire slice-of-life game in it; the story will have to do some very heavy lifting here. I hope they lean more on how difficult it is to adapt one's culture, language, and mannerisms to a new place, too - especially for as deeply traditional a community as Tamilians can be.
Eternights - the most anime thing I've played in a minute. It's a dating sim/action game, and if you think that's a weird combination, you probably haven't played Boyfriend Dungeon. Okay, so it's an unwieldy combination, but this game just makes it embarrassingly terrible. There's this calendar animation that plays every time you move to the next day or the current scene shifts to nighttime, and it's like a fade to a 3-second long screen and fade out every time. The structure of the game makes it cut between conversations and gameplay, and every time it switches, there's loading and saving, each of which takes a couple of seconds. When an interaction takes about 5 seconds to show someone's reaction face, and then you move back to loading/saving, it gets annoying
fast. Also, most of the budget seems to have gone to the (admittedly nice enough) anime sequences, because the demo's environments are mostly poorly lit corridors with barely any detail to them. And the action is so nondescript, it resists my attempts at describing it.
As for the story... well. You're this dude whose friend's trying to set you up on a dating app. He's got dreams of a pop idol one day swiping right on him. You meanwhile are seemingly a hopeless smartass no matter what dialogue option you choose. Meanwhile, there's this new drug coming out called Eternight that stops aging (great name, A+ marketing), and after some banter you go to sleep, whereupon you have a weird dream in which your arm's cut off and you fight some monsters (yes, that's right, and no, I'm not explaining that). Then you wake up and go outside, at which point the world's Eternight facilities explode, a gigantic wall shows up across the country, and people turn into *gasp* monsters. So you run to a shelter and
coincidentally run into the pop idol (literally), and then your dream comes true. It's... uh, something. Whatever that something is, it's ungood.
(Props to stealing the sudden wall thing from Darker than Black, I thought I was the only person in the world who'd seen that anime.)
Broken Roads - the demo was available before the Next Fest, so maybe it'll be around after it's over. So: an isometric RPG set in the strayan outback post-apocalypsism, which, uh, doesn't look all that different from it does now (sozzles, Ozzles). Seems Disco Elysium-influenced, but really it's more in the vein of Obsidian RPGs.
Anyway, nice art, acknowledges indigenous peoples in the splash screens, etc. The big marquee gimmick is that it features a very literal moral compass, with four quadrants: Nihilism (nothing matters, so be a selfish bastard), Machiavellian (my group uber alles, so all everyone else is a means to an end), Utilitarian (treat overall happiness for everyone as an optimisation problem), and Humanitarian (everyone's dignity is important). Immediately, you can see that those descriptions don't necessarily match up to the labels as we'd traditionally define them, and there's the thorny question of 'what if I'm in between any of those?). Well, the game's answer is magnitude - making decisions that are wildly different from your current alignment have a larger impact on your current moral disposition, and also open up more options in dialogue. Decisions that are within your current quadrant make you more 'narrow-minded', conversely, and make some choices unavailable, but offer you higher-level options in conversations.
So how's that work for the game? Well, it's a fun idea, but the execution is as dry as sun-bleached bones. The writing is fine to pretty nice, but the reactions to your moral choices aren't particularly interesting. There's also the issue that neatly delineating conversation options and labelling their moral stance gives you a sense of being constrained by the system - though I see why they went with it, because not labelling the options means players might get upset at choosing a response and their compass shifting to something they didn't expect. The demo does the expected thing of judging your actions at the end through a fairly didactic conversation with an NPC I barely knew, where I felt like I was being lectured about choosing my own path by the game first, then the character. About as subtle as a sledgehammer, and I couldn't see the point of it - it failed to encourage me to question my decisions, like Kreia did in KoTOR 2. In summary, a lot of telling, and not enough showing... but in a game that's literally telling you who you are every step of the way, I suppose it would be silly to expect anything else.
I got into some combat at one point, and the mechanics need some work. It's not easy to see how many AP/MP you have, the NPCs had pathing issues with one dude just moving back and forth because he couldn't melee attack my party, and I couldn't intuitively tell what parts of a battlefield gave me cover without hovering my mouse around the area first. There's also QoL issues in that you can't highlight interactables, NPCs are named but you can't
see their names if you hover the mouse over them, there's no run/walk toggle, buying stuff at shops doesn't let you split a stack by entering the number of X item you want (you have to right click and drop one of whatever repeatedly until you're happy with the number you're buying), and a lot of other things.
In short, needs work, and the core conceit seems to project the appearance of depth, but the execution does not. The voice acting is fine, and while the characters are all very mildly written, the prose is decent, and we need more games where you can hear Australianisms peppered throughout a conversation.
Edit: yes, I should have mentioned, it's essentially trying to be Australian Fallout. Which is cute, given Fallout was itself inspired by Mad Max.
henke on 22/6/2023 at 13:54
Thanks, Al!
Played a bunch of stuff that I don't have much to say about but I'll say it anyway.
Little Kitty, Big City - not as slick as Stray. I kinda wanna play Stray again btw.
Bike Out - bicycle physics are tricky to get right. This game doesn't even TRY. Boo!
Surmount - a more arcadey physics climbing game. Has a lot of fun stuff in it, but the main swinging-mechanic is wonky. :erg:
Necrogolf - 3D golf game set during a zombie apocalypse, which just means you'll have to pause your golfing to swing golfballs into the heads of attacking zombies from time to time. Fun concept, but the golfing is kinda underbaked. Eh...
Kamlorn on 10/10/2023 at 17:03
That goblinAmerica is just... Reminds me of that kind of dreams, where it's you they want to catch, but here you are taking sweet revenge. Similar feelings David Szymansky's games evokes in me. Or American McGee's ones. This project is something in the middle between them, IMHO.
qolelis on 10/10/2023 at 21:16
Quote Posted by henke
Ever since playing the demo for the cancelled climbing-game Vertigo by Wildebeest Games in ~2010, I've been wanting something like this, even considering trying to make it myself. I had a Rock Climbing Expert (Jeshibu) play this demo and he said "closest I've seen a game come to bouldering". It's surprisingly intuitive and easy to pick up and play as well. Hold either mouse button to move your arms and search for a good grip. Hold Shift + mouse button to move your feet. Control your body with WASD. It's all about finding good grips and carefully navigating up difficult cliff walls. The demo is huge. Probably 3-4 hours of content if you wanna climb it all.
Might be worth trying the demo for (
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1977170/Jusant/)
Jusant if you haven't already. I'm not a climber myself, but when I got into it, I felt like there was a certain rhythm to it. It's not purely about climbing, though.
Sulphur on 11/10/2023 at 05:21
So I played a few things.
Flashback 2: from Microids, though apparently this is being done in collaboration with Paul Cuisset. The demo's clearly unfinished, with things like the mouse cursor not being hidden during cutscenes, and the controls acting weird for me at times. Those are fixable, but the core game... iunno. Remember Flashback? In that game, did you want the protagonist to keep piping up all the time with obvious observations, obnoxious VOs, and lore to find with computer terminals that have bootup animations longer than a second so you immediately lose interest and close the terminal before you even read anything? No? Well, too bad; also, these are the minor niggles. The big one is this takes '2.5D' literally - so it presents like a traditional 2.5D platformer initially, but instead of being locked to a 2D movement plane, you can also move in the Z plane forward and backwards a few feet. This is perfectly calibrated to be fucking annoying, because if Conrad isn't perfectly lined up in the depth plane with a ledge, it won't let you ledge grab. Oh, also, forget both moving and grabbing an overhead ledge. Just like Flashback, you have to amble up to it so you're exactly in line with the lip, and then jump to hoist yourself up. This was fine during the SNES days, but today it isn't. The combat also moves the game to a sort of twin-stick shooter mode, but with a kind of isometric viewpoint, so aiming is pretty terrible, and the entire experience is just... ungood. And it only lasts about 15-20 minutes!
Also, it runs like a one-legged dog in a pool of molasses. There is a lot of work to be done, but I don't think this is going to be fundamentally fixable.
Unawake: Very pretty. Runs on UE5, so you'd expect it to be. Fantastic production values for the first cutscene. Unfortunately, it also plays like a prototype. First person sword action RPG is a fine idea, but the mechanics need to be solid, and this one just feels grotty. Hits have little impact or feedback, the enemies seem braindead, and everything just feels unsatisfying. There's no oomph, it's like swatting things made out of cardboard, and when you die, it's usually a surprise (which is a sign that there needs to be more feedback, again). It's an alpha, so things will improve, but I'm not seeing a mechanical framework with much depth or enjoyment here as is.