Yeah, that title is a little wonky, but I feel that it will match up well with Friday's article. Today we look at four demos from the last Steam Next Fest that I moderately enjoyed but not quite enough for one reason or another to warrant their own article. Since we're not going to play favorites here, we'll just list the four games in alphabetical order.
Release Date: TBA
Systems: Windows, Linux
Time Spent: 76 minutes
This was a strange point-and-click game done in an almost entirely black-and-white hand-drawn style that I actually really enjoyed. In general, I liked the overall vibe of this game and maybe it's the fault of it being a demo, but there were a couple of mechanics that felt like they were never adequately explained. There's something to do with this squiggly dark presence that you could collect, and that seemed pretty rare, that would give you a clue when up against a puzzle, but I never fully understood what these were. There was also a puzzle that I had to look up the solution because, in typical point-and-click fashion, the solution required you to take [redacted] and use it on [redacted], then take your [redacted] and use that on the [redacted] which gives you the hint that [redacted] is [redacted], and then you take that information over to the [redacted] and input the numbers [redacted] which will then open up and give you a [redacted] to open the door. This was all in one room, on a single screen, and I don't think I had all of the items in my inventory to complete the puzzle as intended; so instead I just inserted a series of numbers into a thing and solved the puzzle.
Only at the end of the demo did I feel that the game took on a bit of a Lovecraftian tint, but by that point I wasn't entirely sure what it was that I had been trying to accomplish.
Release Date: 2024
Systems: Windows, Linux
Publisher: roccay
Time Spent: 83 minutes
This was another point-and-click game with an interesting look, but while Candlelight: Lament hand-drawn aesthetic, The Dream of a Cockspur had an almost dithered low-fi decoupage look to it, combining digital and physical art.
The demo itself was more self-contained than Candlelight: Lament in that after the initial room, you only have access to a handful of screens you can navigate to and do not have an on-screen avatar to move around. In some ways, Cockspur felt closer to old-school point-and-click games like Shadowgate and The Uninvited where all of the action happens on a single screen at a time, although you are often still able to move between rooms with a puzzle or two to solve to proceed to the next room. The issue I had with one puzzle in particular, which is why it took me 83 minutes was that I needed to interact with an item in a way that was not intuitive, and just like Candlelight: Lament there was something that I could interact with that I thought was just regular art. I had a bit more of a chills running up the spine reaction to the end of this demo and I enjoyed this a bit more. I also appreciated that the game tells you upfront that the story is broken up into seven days and that the demo only consists of the first day. I'll probably keep my eye on this. Maybe.
Release Date: May 8, 2024
Systems: Windows, Linux, 64-bit Operating
Time Spent: 36 minutes
I have mixed feelings about INDIKA. On one hand, I loved that this was a third-person survival horror game with a nun as the main protagonist. However, since I couldn't invert the y-axis, I ended up walking around either looking up in the air or down at my digital feet for longer than my inner ear would have liked. I wish that I could say that this wasn't what led me to stop playing the demo, but it was a significant factor just because of how uncomfortable the controls felt and that I was starting to feel a little nauseous. I had hoped that I could power through, but that only seemed to make it worse.
One other thing that was a bit of a turn-off was that it felt like I was dropped into the game after the first or second stage. While not usually a problem as far as being able to complete a demo is concerned, it did make me less interested and invested in the characters and why and how this nun was attached to this guy out in the middle of a frozen Russian mountainside. I was intrigued with a lot of what the game was promising though with the late 19th-century Russian setting, the affliction of the nun's captor, and the disconnect between the gorgeousness of the graphics and the pixeliness of the menu and on-screen point/XP system. I was sad that I wasn't even able to get to the trippy puzzle section or anything to do with psychological horror, but that might be something I'll experience at a later date pending any UI updates to a certain axis.
Release Date: TBA
Systems: Windows, Linux
Publisher: Lowpix Games
Time Spent: 33 minutes
Lady Hunt was a demo that I felt I got the gist of the game pretty quickly and only made it so far before I decided that I didn't want to invest more time in the game solely because it was a demo.
The game played similarly to Castlevania or Slain: Back from Hell but with a friendlier and less complicated art style with gameplay closer to Blasphemous or a 2D platformer Dark Souls. Most enemies took more than one hit to kill which meant that you couldn't just power your way through but had to jump or dodge away from their attacks. Bosses had huge HP meters that covered the length of the screen with your attacks dealing minimal damage. There's a formula here that I have noticed quite a few times in this and some other demos I've played since February. With that in mind, a game has to be really special then if it is going the 2D platformer Blasphemous/Dark Souls route and Lady Hunt just didn't feel special enough to see my way through the second boss battle I came across.
So those are four more of the demos I played during Steam's Next Fext last February. None of them were bad, but at the same time, none of them wowed me enough to warrant their own article earlier in the cycle. I may come back to some of them after the full game is released, and even then it will likely be a few years until I actually buy them because of Steam queue reasons.
There're always reasons.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
P.S. INDIKA was probably the only game out of this bunch of four that was taxing on the Steam Deck. I didn't run any of the performance overlays to see how many fps the game was running and how many gigawatts the system was powering at, I just noticed there were dips in frame rate while running on a combination of medium/low settings.
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