June 24, 2024 (Originally posted on Neocities)
As is tradition, the games industry in all of its instability still congregates around June to announce new stuff. Stuff that may or may not come out, and the studios that made them may or may not still be around by the time they come out, and of course success does not ensure survival. While I didn’t really go watch the live/pre-recorded shows of things and just looked over announcements later, the thing I most wanted to get involved with as far as this big marketing event was the demos on Steam so I can more confidently find the next neat game I might be into, or several. This time I made an effort to play a lot more demos, all in search of that particular next thing I really want to play in full, and thankfully I had a fair bit of time over the week to do so.
Apparently from the last set of demos, my pick of the round turned out to be Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip, since that came out recently and I picked it up to play on the Steam Deck alongside other random indie things. Another game from last round, Harold Halibut, was also on Game Pass at launch so I’ll see about getting around to that there before it leaves or my subscription expires, whichever’s sooner. And another game I’ve played the demo and beta of previously, Times & Galaxy, came out hot on the heels of the release of DLC for goddamn Elden Ring because soulslikes are one of several genres that won’t stop happening, another of those genres being roguelikes which are all over the indie scene. That’s probably how I got a good chunk of demos being hidden from my list due to how Steam works when someone ignores tags, even including some in the “recommended” section which did have a few of interest otherwise.
I’ve also realized my general pattern when it comes to finding demos. Largely I don’t play a lot of the stuff that’s most popular, and out of the top 50 played demos list published after this thing finished, I played only a select few of those that I could spot in that list. This is also given that, again, so many roguelikes exist, and while a lot of people still seem to be into that, I have certain avoidances to that genre outside of a few outliers, like if I want to check out the actual classics. Also no VR demos on my list again, there were some but I didn’t feel like playing any this time and nothing jumped out at me to go get immersed like that. Sure would be nice to have VR take off more while figuring out the cost issues and not just be a console like how Facebook wants to be with it.
Goblin Cleanup
While Viscera Cleanup Detail is in the middle of an engine upgrade remaster or remake or sequel or whatever it is, and I hope the developers survive whatever the hell the industry is doing to come out with that eventually, there’s this game, which takes place in a generic sort of medieval fantasy setting and involves goblin maids being hired to put dungeons back together for adventurers to plunder again. Unlike some other games on Steam, the goblin maids aren’t said treasure in this case, rather it’s literal treasures of gold and stuff, but the decision to have the default character design be a feminine goblin maid in particular was certainly driven by something.
Like VCD, the goblins must pick up chunks of meat and such to throw into the garbage, but this time it’s a mimic chest which serves as a portable disposal without having to deal with the jittery physics of waste bins being carefully moved to an incinerator. There is also a mop to be dirtied and cleaned out, but this game has a “slimop” which is more of a fork used to stab slimes that are used to absorb blood until saturated, after which it is then fed to the mimic. Also in a similar vein to VCD’s tasks involving barrel and crate placement areas and restocking supplies, there is also putting back furniture and other objects in the right places, but instead of dealing with physics, stuff gets stuck in place if held in the right spot for a second, helpfully outlined. Plus there’s a checklist to track how complete the job is, instead of just looking it over and hoping someone didn’t miss a stray tiny object or spill.
There’s some back and forth about what’s an improvement versus what takes away from the experience in these differences, as dealing with more potential messes from screwing up, or maybe the physics just breaking, could be seen as part of the fun. The main source of this in Goblin Cleanup would be dying to traps, something mentioned in the expository theme song to the game, but I’m not sure what else could go wrong to add more of a chaos factor. Also some areas are hard to see in due to how the lighting works, which was also a feature in VCD, but the players had more options to deal with it that could also become a source of problems, such as fires, mostly, again adding to the fun/chaos.
I didn’t play this demo for too long since I wasn’t quite in the mood to clean a whole dungeon. Plus it seems like there’s a whole progression system involved to unlock levels, which I preferred VCD’s approach of just having all the levels available for the sake of variety and jumping in and not needing to worry about XP or “prestige” or whatever the modern gaming patterns are. Didn’t seem like this would have microtransactions though, I’d hope.
Building Relationships
This one wasn’t on the Next Fest list, but I read about this game on an announcement summary page and it caught my interest. This game features the player as a house who rolls around with physics, sort of oblong Katamari style without the whole everything sticking to them thing, on a quest for romance probably, though who knows what direction the relationships will actually go. The buildings involved are all sorts of structures with different personalities, including those who aren’t looking for love or are already taken, and it’s a very modern weird indie kinda thing, without going headfirst into the psychadelic kind of weird.
There’s also fishing because of course, but the fish are cars because it “makes sense” or something as mentioned on the Steam page. Also initially moving around is difficult until managing to build some momentum, but after just a few upgrades found by talking to treasure chests, often involving answering one of their survey questions, the house can hop and skip all around the playable area fairly easily. This demo was pretty short, even after finding some hidden spots to fish or talk to chests, but I enjoyed it. I’ll have to look for the full version when that’s out for a strange diversion. Ideally the full version would also have options for different resolutions and maybe the pixel filter that’s stuck on by default, as well as a way to exit without force quitting, but I feel like that’s more just for the demo and I wouldn’t really take off points for arbitrary score if the full version lacked those.
The August Before
This is a bit like Unpacking, but the opposite of doing such and in 3D and first-person. Mainly the player has to clean up the room while also finding items to pack into a suitcase. There are also some puzzles to solve around the room, though I did one kind of backwards by taking down the posters first which revealed a note of sorts, but then looking at the calendar and for whatever reason needing to arrange the stickers from the calendar onto the wall surrounding it, I was given a hint about the posters. Also the player character seems to not be packing much in their suitcase, though I’m pretty used to packing them pretty full, and this is also with choices about what to bring or leave behind, which probably has some emotional meaning, but I’m pretty sure there’s plenty of space for either of the items that only one could be brought along, as well as all the socks that went in a bin, because there wasn’t really much for clothing in that suitcase either.
When the room is done and the items are packed, the player closes the suitcase to exit the level. In my case the stuff in the top part of the suitcase didn’t move with the lid so it was just floating there during the fade out, so that was amusing. As interesting as going through someone’s stuff to figure out how they live can be, not sure I’d go with this one since I didn’t really get interested in what was going on in general.
Global Farmer
This game claims to be able to place a farm anywhere in the world, I guess derived from some kind of procedurally generated map stuff, unless it actually pulls map data, but I couldn’t tell. I wanted to place one in Antarctica, but naturally the demo was limited to just a few less extremely frozen areas and I’m not sure if the full version will even allow Antarctica. Other than that it’s a pretty basic farm management kind of thing, not even driving the vehicles like those farming simulators including Farming Simulator by name. I downloaded this really just to see about the Antarctica thing because otherwise this is a pass.
Star Trucker
I’ve played American Truck Simulator a bit before and it can be somehow relaxing, a weird aspect of job simulators when jobs tend to have stressful issues even for those who love the job. In this one set in space, the virtual issues are much more of a concern because just scraping against a random debris object or otherwise causes hull breaches that leak air. And go figure the first thing done in this demo is to go fix random hull breaches, instead of driving the space truck, which I’d think would be the main thing to focus on. There’s also the issue about losing power to the artificial gravity system at some point for whatever reason, and having to figure out that the battery slot is somehow under the stairs after fumbling with everything randomly bouncing around the ship. It seems like in this combination of Truck Simulator and probably Elite Dangerous is the game I might be thinking of as far as shipping cargo around in space, they leaned a little much into the micromanagement of ship systems for this to keep me interested, plus the whole “barely scraping anything causing massive oxygen leaks” being persistent throughout.
Mech Builder
If someone wants to build Gunpla models but doesn’t have the cash to dive into a potentially very expensive hobby, because I’ve seen how much some of those kits go for, simulators might help. This one is a 2D recreation of model building that simplifies acts like sprue cutting and label application and pieces just snap together once they’re almost exactly in the right spot. It’s okay I guess but not quite what I was looking for in a model simulator. Mainly I’d be more interested in a 3D form, and I swear I’ve heard of something like that in 3D somewhere, but yeah, I didn’t quite get into this one. Also I do prefer to build the actual models as one of my ways to unplug from things for a bit, and I also don’t go for the ultra expensive ones for the sake of my budget, plus there are some really cool looking kits I’ve seen within the lower price ranges overall. Odd and cute designs and not just the usual “spiky hero Gundam” look grab my interest, but there is still some variety in this simulator, though not so much in the soundtrack which is kinda just there and felt mainly like one song.
Just Crow Things
This game comes from the makers of Rain On Your Parade, a game I didn’t enjoy when I played it on Game Pass because it seemed more like a random minigame collection after a point. I’m just mentioning that because they advertise it on the page. However I found more fun in this one, which is more of a sandbox level approach involving a cute crow raising hell and getting tasks done, as requested from various animal friends. Naturally, this bird simulator also involves defecating on everything as flying birds sometimes do. And of course this game has special powers for that involving various food, like some might cause ice and others cause fire because why not. It’s that kind of game.
I had fun with this demo, and the crow is very cute as well, being rounded and having a sort of quail head feather thing going on. I’ll have to see how this does in full and ideally it doesn’t become a weird practically mandatory shoot-em-up minigame collection or whatever it was that annoyed me about the cloud game before. It does have races in the levels, and there are specific difficulty settings for the races, which is appreciated though I didn’t find the one in the demo level difficult. Also for whatever reason the game seemed really loud and I had to turn down the sound volume in the pause menu, but the SFX slider couldn’t be selected either by mouse or controller. Though I did manage to turn down the music slider, which was the main loudest thing.
Caravan Sandwitch
This is one of those narrative adventure games like Sable where it involves driving a vehicle around and then doing things on foot to get resources and advance the plot, though while that one seemed like more of an open-ended go wherever sort of thing, this one has a more specific plot about finding what happened to someone. The demo featured driving to a starting town of sorts and a goal to build a part for the van, and that can be accomplished in part by getting spare parts from the people there by holding a party. Also there’s frog people, which is neat. They might be aliens and the setting might be some future scrap punk kinda Earth thing after people left to do space stuff. Plus there’s a mysterious red umbrella sort of figure who appears in the distance sometimes like the G-Man. This one might be a chill emotional kind of experience and I might have to see how this one turns out.
Amber Isle
There was a game announced during one of the not-E3 goings-on called Discounty, which was a darker take on the typical “cozy” shop-running game where capitalism spirals out of control and pollution wrecks the small town the successful shop started in. I have to say that game summed up my feelings about the typical “cozy” shop-running game, though it’s not just that aspect that puts me off. In this demo, it turns out that this supposed village-tending game is more just a shop-running game in its entirety, with the exceptions being gathering random things and sometimes talking to other dinosaurs. And then the dinosaurs yell at the player for not only stocking every item in the known universe, but also not remembering the exact custom orders placed because there’s nowhere I could find in the game that keeps track of that, so I guess the player is expected to keep Notepad open. Not that needing to take notes during a game is a bad thing, but that’s more fitting for complex puzzles at this point, not just a few random items in a list.
Also, the menus are a bit buggy and don’t really work with the controller which this game seems designed to be played with, and the tutorial isn’t entirely clear at times how to advance like unlocking crafted items, so it appeared to be softlocked once until I poked around the recipe unlock screen enough. I wonder if this game is meant to release in early access or if they’ll give time to clear up the major issues before release. Though if it’s still a grindy shop simulator at its core I’m not interested.
Mr. Elevator
This was a weird one. It’s all only in Japanese, so I could just sort of fumble around figuring out the controls since I’m not quite fluent yet in that language, but that’s not the weird part. The controls themselves are weird because it involves manually controlling arms around to interact, but not quite at the level of Trespasser. It’s a little more intuitive than that once figured out, but still weird. It involves the mouse buttons to extend or ready arms combined with the keyboard to do hand actions with things in the world. Trying to describe this sounds weird and the game itself is weird and looks sort of like an angular MS Paint sketch, but I didn’t get further than getting through a couple doors by trying to work out the puzzles involved, which aren’t entirely in Japanese but still some kind of strange logic. Or maybe the demo was broken when I played, I couldn’t tell exactly since I thought I figured out the second part but it wasn’t opening any doors.
Pawn Planet
This seems like a very low budget sort of thing with not much polish and a lot of basic gameplay typical of a store simulator, and of course it also includes storage locker auctions like other pawn shop simulators. And for some reason there’s also a part where it becomes a bad FPS as a minigame. This feels very incomplete but for all I know it’s actually fairly close to what they’d consider complete. I just wonder how much of this game was pre-packaged templates because it feels a lot like mostly that.
Spectacle
This game features the player character as a newborn lizard creature who grows up quickly to “adulthood” in order to solve puzzles with the powers of winking and blinking, soon enhanced with special goggles. These goggles can show different things like hidden messages and remote views, at least as far as the demo ones went. This has some good potential to it and I like the general art design and feel of it, including the part about being a lizard fellow, and working out the puzzles was interesting even if the pieces of the puzzle weren’t the newest things I’d seen. I’d like to check this one out in full to see the weird adventures of this player character lizard wizard fellow. Also all the eye inputs are controlled by the keyboard or controller, not a webcam like that one game Before Your Eyes, but I wonder how possible that might be to rig up in the game itself rather than external tools.
Creatures of Ava
I wasn’t quite sure what this game was but it turns out it’s some kind of action game without much of actual direct attacks, instead having the player character use beams from a stick to purify plants and creatures from some vague “evil” infection or whatever. And also there’s a flute to control animals to remove obstacles and things. There was also a weird sad anime intro that showed the protagonist as a kid leave an exploding space station in an escape pod, but it seemed to imply this character lived only in the escape pod for several years until landing on the planet. And then there’s some coordination between the native beings on the planet who of course are in some kind of tribal society of sorts and the human visitors who are largely just stealing all the animals in order to save them from the infection I guess. Not sure what this game’s meaning to do with that setup or if there’ll be some twist later that whatever the intervening humans are doing is actually making stuff worse somehow.
Schim
At the surface this is a puzzle kinda platformer-esque thing of sorts involving a shadow frog being hopping between shadows on the ground to head to random objectives within a level. However there’s also this weird drawn-out intro part involving the shadow frog being in the shadow of this kid who grows up and is controllable for this segment, I guess wanting to be a firefighter but settling for an office job, and then their life falls apart completely over several screens by losing their job, bus, and probably also all their money and pants at some point for all I know, and the shadow frog falls out of their shadow when they trip over their sorry self, and I guess eventually the goal is to find this broken mess of a person and put the frog back in. I’m not sure about that story angle as it seems a bit overly clichéd. But the style itself is neat and the shadow frogs are cute.
Sometimes the navigation takes a bit of random trial and error to see where certain objects are moving to ride in their shadows, and sometimes the frog gets left behind in a stationary one if the moving shadow passes through it, though this can also be done intentionally, and it was also sometimes hard to tell which objects served as “checkpoints”, but I think it was ones with dotted colored lines around their shadows. Also after finishing the demo it unlocked random options to make the game harder for whatever reason. I don’t know that it really needs to be harder because I think there’s plenty of trying to figure stuff out here, but some people are just like that. Those kinds of people are also likely complaining about how the Elden Ring DLC is hard or something. Or maybe not hard enough.
Critter Cove
This is more of what I thought Amber Isle might be, a game about running around a beaten-up sort of village and fixing it up with crafting and whatnot. Also it has a pretty extensive character creator that allows mixing and matching many heads with many other bodies, starting with human ones but allowing extension to all sorts of upright animals and even robots of sorts. I put a character together who I named TV LIZARD, a TV-headed chunky lizard of blue and yellow and red and a bunch of other random colors throughout, and also the monitor face was wearing a 3D mustache because that was an option, and finally the tail was a power plug cord. This is the power of character creation being able to reach closer to my personal aesthetic, or at least how I’m feeling with messing with characters at the moment. Though robots and lizards are common themes in general with me, but sometimes like in Chimeraland I just want to make a really fat bee with a beetle shell, who knows.
This game seems like it could be fun in the right mood, with plenty of random quests to do, and if someone might want to decorate the place well after finding some ways to do that with furniture and such. I didn’t play for too long, just enough to get a decent feel for things and talk to the characters around, who include a shark captain, some kinda rat running the place, and a couple animal villagers, as well as a robot who runs a workshop after being oiled because robot stuff.
Also there was an option to turn off the “critter noises” or something that was checked by default, so I decided to uncheck it to see what would happen. Turns out that if “critter noises” are on, it plays this generic chipmunk squeaking helium gibberish clip that’s about 5 seconds long every time a dialogue line shows up, and it will overlap itself if speeding through dialogue. I can see why they have it off by default but I wonder if they’ll make that option work a little better, or maybe have an option to make it even more annoying.
LOK Digital
This is apparently based on a printed puzzle book of sorts, but made to play on electronic devices. To try to put it simply, it’s a word puzzle that involves finding made-up words specific to this game in order to completely fill the available grid, following rules defined by finding those words to fill spaces. I found this to be an interesting logic sort of thing, having to plan out moves to ensure the grid can be filled, plus it starts saying to “trust the learning process” instead of explaining exactly how everything works, and this “learning process” does work. Also the creatures whose society apparently depends on solving these letter grids look like cute sock puppet worms.
Deathgrip
First, this game does not feature music from Death Grips, but it would benefit from that as the music was kinda just generic-sounding sci-fi menu music the whole time instead of having more intense tracks during the races, even partially. Generally this game is in the vein of the podracing video games, including aspects from several games including optional combat and not being limited to one life before being kicked out of the race, so there’s quick respawns as well, and I think they’re even infinite just like the classic one. However it seems to lack the “impact” of the podracing games, like I feel that the audio should be a bit louder or at least more dramatic for things like explosions or weapons, and the visual effects also seem a bit muted. I’m not sure if they were depending on motion blur and that obnoxious chromatic aberration that keeps popping up and causing eye strain to pull the work, but seeing as those can be turned off in the settings (thankfully), I’d hope there’d also be a bit more visual impact to things in general. Plus there’s the music thing mentioned earlier, so switching that up could make the races feel more intense instead of a casual drive. However I guess someone could just play their own music over it and maybe just overcrank the game volume for everything else.
Weyrdlets
Nothing like a demo you can’t play because it has a mandatory third-party login. For a demo. This is peak modern gaming without the gacha mechanics, though for all I know it has those too. Apparently this login requirement is due to having to work with COPPA protocols because it goes online, and like YouTube they thought their thing could be mistaken as for babies at random, but for some reason the idea of an offline demo or guest mode didn’t occur to them. Also not sure why this needs to be online anyway, it seems to just be an idle thing for virtual pets or something. So yeah, didn’t actually play this one.
Blood Typers
Think Typing of the Dead but instead of a rail shooter it’s more like Resident Evil, where typing things corresponds to everything from moving around the area to picking up items to attacking the usual zombies. Cool concept, though it also seems to be weirdly focused on co-op play looking at the menus. Also for all I can tell the levels are probably procedural and stuff so this is probably meant to be a run-based sort of thing. Not sure how long the novelty will hold up in that scenario.
Techno Banter
This is a bouncer simulator of sorts in a sprite-filled pixelated 3D world. The player character, some kind of buff dog-like creature with void black skin, has a job guarding the door of a nightclub and only letting in people who fit the current party requirements. The initial tutorial takes the form of reading a book on the toilet and then the actual demo is more a regular guided tutorial. After observing the next in line and in the case of rejection, there’s a sort of conversation battle that involves finding the right comeback to insults before time runs out. The text in these bubbles can be a bit tiny but the key is to match the theme to cause emotional damage. Then there’s sometimes a dodging minigame to avoid a barrage of insults, but in this case the tutorial got stuck if not every single bullet was dodged and the player character does not have much HP to deal with that. There are also more skills to unlock over time it seems as there was a special attack dealt to the last in line for the demo. It reminds me a bit of Danganronpa in terms of conversational battles and without the whole murder game anime scenario.
Cordbot
This is a very Portal-inspired box and button puzzle game, but from an isometric angle and dealing with a robot with a limited cord length. If anything the cord is more of an annoyance than an interesting mechanic, even if there’s extension cords that can be used in a few ways probably. I didn’t play this for very long because the weird cord physics and the act of plugging things in but it somehow not detecting being near an outlet were both a pain, especially when dealing with a very short timer before having to reset a puzzle because this robot apparently has practically no batteries.
Thank Goodness You’re Here!
One of those cheeky British humour games involving a tiny man going around jumping and slapping things. This somehow solves people’s problems. Of course it has a weird style to it and I went through a few scenarios but couldn’t figure out how to get past a part in a freezer because either the puzzle softlocked or it was just that unclear what to jump or slap or whatnot.
Akimbot
Turns out this is pretty much Ratchet and Clank if they were both robots and so was everyone else. A nice game to find in this massive demo pile that feels just like one of those console generation-spanning platformers that came out early on PS3 before games became a lot of brown hyper realistic shoots for a while. The player character is a robot sounding like trying hard to be edgy and cool and the sidekick of course is the comedy relief.
The demo level seemed to fit all the usual set pieces like the level being a long chain of islands with occasional boats unlocked with random hacking minigames, as in the minigame is random every attempt. Then there was effectively a turret sequence by riding the boat while being shot at by turrets. There was also a part where the player must hide behind objects while a timed sniper turret keeps shooting at the last seen position. And there were too many electric shield towers to avoid, and they were also usually easy to avoid because they could just be jumped completely around.
There is a weapon unlock partway through the demo to get a gun that has limited energy reserves replenished by fighting enemies, but then there’s just an assault rifle that gets picked up and has infinite ammo regardless and I just stuck with that for the rest of the demo since I didn’t feel the need to switch out. Otherwise there’s usual melee attacks, which getting in melee range usually means taking damage because there doesn’t seem to be a way to avoid this when up close, or shooting enemies can take a fair number of hits to take them out. So it’s a tiny bit rough but this was a neat demo to check out.
The Big Catch
Another demo that was pointed out to me that wasn’t on the main list. This is apparently some kind of fishing-based platformer starring some kind of bunny dog or whatever. This seems to be one of those precision physics kinds of things specifically, something I was not in the mood to figure out completely when I played. If I end up in a better mood then maybe I’ll look into it again but it just throws a bunch of info all at once in this tutorial zone. It felt a little like the first part in Driver where you have to master all the moves to play the actual game, or in this case the rest of the demo, but much more doable at the very least for not having a timer or a strict limit of mistakes to deal with. Also there wasn’t an option to change the resolution, but there were several screen filters to apply. Generally it felt like a “fake retro” game because of this, which for some reason felt weird to me on this demo specifically. Maybe something about the art styles mixed with the presentation.
Looped
This was a short demo of a sort of narrative puzzle game without dialogue, like others I’ve seen before including Samorost and Plug & Play. It features a fox or some kind of canid getting sucked through a space wormhole into another fox/canid’s living room, the latter of which also seems to be obsessed with building a rocket. It’s a sketchy art style and apparently based on a short film of some sort. Mostly the gameplay here involves moving the mouse around and clicking and/or dragging stuff, usual for this genre. I also got stuck in a Pong minigame at one point which was easy enough but just insisted I complete a few rounds before going back to the main thing.
Waltz & Jam
This is a sorta Zelda-like kinda thing, or maybe there’s a more recent game that’s a better example of a top-down-ish isometric-esque action game with a sword. This one stars a ghost with a ghost dog looking for the afterlife I guess. It’s pretty much as expected, but I was also not in the mood for dealing with one of those “moving death wall” levels that came up not too long into the demo so I left this one at that.
A Last Song
To put it one way, this is a bit like combining Creatures of Ava with the Waltz & Jam thing above but also the player character is a robot this time. Plus there’s this whole thing about playing songs to plants specifically, and apparently the intended way of playing this is to memorize which note is on which button and copy by ear instead of matching the button prompts, but of course the option is there to show buttons which I’d recommend for most folks. Players can also just mash all the buttons while running around, but there’s a couple powers to use by holding down two buttons at once in order to heal or attack things. It’s a bit of a weird thing in general and it didn’t entirely click.
Pillory
The art of this RPG is pretty cool, but I’m not sure about the rest. It uses a “mood-based” battle system of sorts involving attacking enemies until they no longer want to fight and there’s also type advantages involved somehow. There’s also having to cycle through randomly chosen actions to pick the intended one, but this degrades mood. Likewise the player here can take certain actions to boost mood, but going too far in either direction causes status effects. Long story short, another weird RPG in both setting and mechanics. My main issues with this one were that it does that thing at the start where it throws the player into a battle they’re not meant to win and then I couldn’t really figure out where I was supposed to go. I’m not sure if I could stick with this for long.
So that’s games. Again. At least I found some good demos in here of things I’d like to check out in full provided the developers survive the industry to that point. Or maybe some are already out, or will be out shortly.