March 6, 2025 (Originally posted on Neocities)
The demos are back, and I’ve pushed through a bunch of asset flips and “AI slop” in addition to the kinds of games I’m really not into anyway, just to find a select handful of things that interested me in whatever way. We’ll see what winners we’ve got, provided they all come out in full at some point.
I was going to play a couple VR demos on top of these, but I ran out of time and also one of the VR demos I picked out only worked with Oculus stuff because they apparently used the wrong plugin that wouldn’t interface with everything. In terms of VR, I’m mainly an Index user, with a backup Reverb G2 that Windows 11 wants to brick, so I’m staying off of that OS as long as I can. So these are all once again usual screen game demos.
Goodlands
This game is much like the visual style of things like A Short Hike and Lil Gator Game, but this time with dinosaurs and a custom player character that can be a decent handful of dino species, which is mainly just the type of head. The gameplay is mainly about finding a fossil located somewhere, which then the team teleports to it and then it takes a day to finish, but first one of the team members has to have a task solved, like getting a sandwich or a fuel can, and after which the player has to sleep from the menu or from the tent at base camp to progress to the next day. Then the fossil’s boxed up in a crate and has to be driven from the site to the museum without losing the crate out of the back, or else for some reason the player has to advance to the next day again to respawn the crate because they can’t just load it back in, and that just sounds like a terrible mechanic, though I didn’t end up encountering it even though the truck controls like it’s on ice.
After bringing it to the museum, the fossil has to be cleaned in a task that involves either using the hammer or a drill on dirt covering it without damaging the fossil underneath. There’s also an X-ray feature to find the bone under the dirt in order to aim away from it yet still have the tool hitting the dirt circles off. After putting up one fossil, which was part of a larger dinosaur, I was given some tickets to the museum, but I couldn’t figure out which dinosaur to give them to. There’s also a number of other side missions and rumors on what general direction or location to go to find more fossils, including smaller ones that can just be picked up. There’s also a camera button that just immediately takes a picture of right over the player character’s right shoulder in a pixelated format regardless of how that setting is for the game itself, and I’m not sure where it saves if anywhere. This might end up being an okay game, but there’s also some implications of using the goop of their ancestors as fuel. Digging up their bones on the other hand, people do that all the time.
BatteryNote
This game is designed in the fashion of a Game Boy game, or maybe similar kinda handheld, but the music is a bit more advanced in style so it makes me think of it more like a Super Game Boy kinda thing. It’s apparently also designed to be a short experience according to the store page, where the player chooses one of three scrapped robots to boot up and talk with, which includes a temperamental waitress, a confused soldier type, and a perverted survey eyeball thing. This is done until they break down for good after 10 “hours” on the in-game clock, the first of which always has to be spent charging up the robot to a minimum functional level.
There’s also the option to overcharge the robot to blow them up early for whatever reason the player decides, like if they feel they’re in danger or the conversation gets uncomfortable, though given the intended short length of things I’m not sure where this would come up. I did also see a demo for another visual novel about an imprisoned dragon girl waiting for her execution where the player has a button that just immediately executes her ahead of time, so I’m wondering if this is some new trend mechanic of sorts and where it came from. This could be a neat little visual novel sorta thing, though not sure how much the short length would put people off.
Promise Mascot Agency
This game comes from Kaizen Game Works, the developers of Paradise Killer, my 2023 Game of the Year. This time the premise is set in a rural Japanese town in what seems to be modern day but styled a bit like the 70s or 80s, complete with optional fuzzy video filter. The protagonist is an ex-Yakuza member seeking to repay a debt and teams up with an effectively retired severed fingertip mascot named Pinky☆, complete with the star in the name, to convert a run-down hotel into a mascot agency as in the title. Also mascots are living beings in this universe despite all their unusual designs, also including a constantly crying tofu block who just is tearing up regardless of actual mood, a green “goth girl” who apparently resembles a burial mound and is found in a graveyard, and a cat covered in Sticky White Stuff which is actually yam, but not helping the implication otherwise given that they’re really into adult videos. Long story short it only gets weirder.
Across town, navigated by driving a truck to various points of interest that pretty much have to be discovered by the player, unless Pinky☆ is asked for advice on what to do, which uncovers mascots, potential jobs, side quests, and other things. First mascots have to be hired with a good enough job offer, sweetened with extra perks such as increased cuts and time off. Then sending mascots on jobs is done from a menu to pick any available from the lineup, and optionally given an item, usually some random food or drink found in a vending machine or elsewhere, to reduce the chance they’ll run into an issue on the job. If they do run into an issue, this opens up a card battle minigame where strategic use of cards against the obstacle’s type can save the job and its payout. The cards are found in a variety of places or from quests as well.
There’s also things to do at the headquarters, like upgrade it and change the design on the nail on the back of Pinky☆, plus conversations to unlock once certain conditions are met and certain mascots have been recruited. There are a bunch more things to do overall, but the demo is time limited to an hour, so I only had a bit of time to run around to do these things and send mascots out on jobs, but there were things mentioned like cleansing shrines and tracking down spirits to retrieve items and so on, plus the available map in the demo is a small part of what’s in the full game. This one’s certainly on my radar, and it already was before the demo since I’d heard about it a bit earlier.
Wheel World
This game is a little like if Breath of the Wild was more about cycling, and not like the weird DLC motorbike thing. This involves actual pedaling, though with a help from a spirit skull to provide boost power. The premise is to upgrade the bike the spirit’s attached to back to legendary status in order to reconnect the spiritual sewers of sorts to the world or something odd like that. Mainly the game’s about bike races, and the controls are pretty decent and don’t seem to let the rider fly off the bike if there’s any impacts. There’s not even impacts with other racers in the races so it’s a good idea to just draft behind them and pass right through. The demo was pretty short featuring just the one race on the starting island, plus an optional harder rematch version, then ends while going across the connecting bridge. This might be a neat game, though more for bike enthusiasts I guess. Or at least the act of cycling since I don’t think there’s any particular licensed parts and it’s more abstract.
Wanderstop
I’d heard about this game a bit given the people it’s coming from, including The Stanley Parable creator and the composer of Minecraft. This is another one of those “cozy games” that keeps coming up, but with the angle of playing as a warrior girl who has pushed herself to the limit and seeks out a trainer in the forest to solve hitting a new wall, but ends up getting stuck at a tea shop, eager to leave and return to the warrior’s life but can’t for whatever reason. Instead she has to go through the slow and patient process of making tea from plant to pot while staying there, with the possibility of this being how to overcome those limits. The game seems to be all about the importance of taking a break. The demo covered the general process of making tea, including the geometric patterns of placing plants to create a bigger one that bears seeds or fruits, and the large brewing contraption that takes up most of the tea shop.
I can see how this game in general would be relaxing to people, given that there doesn’t really seem to be any aspect in any mechanics that would induce stress. The most annoying part I encountered was seeing if I could fix the resolution, which resulted in me toggling fullscreen mode on and off, then having to reopen the game because the borderless window was too small after but then it was fine. So not really a problem aside from ideally I could just set the resolution specifically, which ended up being a recurring theme through several demos here. I’m not too sure about this game for myself though but I’ll see later.
GeckoShop
There are so many of these shop manager games on Steam, probably due to there being some asset kit that handles most of the mechanics. At least this game has a distinctive style to it, some kinda cartoon look where the geckos have big flat cartoony eyes in all sorts of random colors. The geckos are bought in boxes that give three random styles of various rarity because everything’s gotta be a gacha these days. Those can be sold or collected in a personal tank or just left on the floor to swarm the place. Also the super rare one I found was just an axolotl. There’s also other generic items to sell like gecko food and that’s mainly what I saw.
There might be lizards to find outside, though I didn’t find any, and a cart can be brought along but things don’t seem to stay in the cart when it’s moved, so not sure what the point is. I don’t think I’m into these kinds of shop games, but at least this one’s a little charming. The geckos also make squish noises when thrown against things or stepped on, but they’re fine after that. I didn’t see them doing much wall crawling either, if any. All I’d want from this game is an easier way to flood the building with lizards until the game lags horribly.
My Chandroid Sweetheart
The demo started with this assembly of digging out the parts to a robot waifu from a box, and when I attached the torso bits I noticed there were certainly physics involved. Before it got to the actual title screen there was a message that said the game was “dedicated to the public domain” and there was another public domain notice on the title screen, so I’m not sure if this game’s being sold or will be free or what. The proper game itself starts with customizing the robot waifu, including changing the colors, picking either one hairstyle or bald and some limited clothing, then picking out a name including Cyrillic, Greek, and Japanese characters within the game’s keyboards, as well as making sure to move the “melon” and “peach” icons around to alter the bust and butt sizes to see what options were available. While it’s not quite as extensive as Atlyss and its body sliders tunable to a variety of preferences, there is certainly a fair bit of range for those two aspects between fairly flat to remarkably voluptuous, including an optional physics off toggle if soft robotics is too immersion-breaking or someone’s playing this in church.
After exiting customization, the player finds their close-enough-to-ideal robot waifu broken in her charging dock, having her battery stolen, which also for some reason includes her memories, so the player has to direct the amnesiac robot around to solve puzzles, which are largely about standing on pressure plates, and some can only be used by her. This also involves shrinking down to go inside large batteries to make them operational through puzzle solving. The puzzle mechanics aren’t always explicitly told, aside from how to initially use some tools, so the player has to figure it out or work out a hint from the name of the puzzle room. The player also can’t swim or fall from a certain distance, and the robot doesn’t want to jump and is also afraid of small dogs, which the player can just pick up and move freely.
There are tools gradually unlocked in order to do things, like reprogram pressure plates as well, plus items to find which seem to mainly be for buying new customizations for the robot, which those are first found by scanning everything possible, which means the robot waifu can end up even closer to one’s ideal, such as a maid or bikini model or construction worker from what I found, or just cut out the in-between and have her run around nude in a PG no-visible-bits cartoon manner from the start. This is an interesting puzzle game at least, but I still wonder what the public domain thing is about. Whether it’s paid or not, it has some interest from me at least, and not just for the thicc robot waifu potential.
Squirreled Away
This game is about cute little squirrels surviving in a park, particularly the player’s who drops in from the sky. The demo ended up being pretty short when finding the tutorial squirrels to introduce mechanics like crafting tools and not much else. There’s also a button to enter some kinda squirrel vision that highlighted items and NPCs so I could find where they were. After that, I was able to go to the next area, unlike Wheel World’s demo, but there also wasn’t much to do there aside from getting introduced to the base building mechanics, as the rest was blocked off by a demo wall. Long story short, it seems to be a light survival craft base build thing, only having to worry about stamina, which only depletes from tool use and not climbing, and HP, which I didn’t encounter any threats to. Seems cute but not sure what else I’d really be doing in the game.
Tall Trails
This is a climbing game in similar style to Breath of the Wild, but focused on smaller islands and a fair bit of openness to completing goals, where the player only really needs to visit the base camp of an island in order to unlock the next. The player character is a little clay golem who thankfully doesn’t have to worry about fall damage, and is in search of a purpose with the help of other golems of various size. The player golem also has a boot stuck on their back which can launch them upward by ejecting items from it, and holds up to three at a time, and some items have special properties either while held in the boot or when launched out of it that can help with traversal. There are also badges that can be equipped to boost certain things like jump or stamina. There’s an option, pretty much the only one related to any sort of difficulty, to increase the default stamina level to not have to worry about managing that so much, but I didn’t find any difficulty with it myself. The art style is that type of cute simple drawing/sculpting look, and overall the game seems chill and could be a fun little experience. I pretty much completed the demo and looked at a few cosmetic options that are unlocked by finding coins.
Glum
This game calls itself a “first-person booter”, which means a first-person perspective game involving kicking instead of guns. The premise is a goblin going out and wrecking things, and that’s pretty much all that needs to be known. It sounds fun on paper but I didn’t have so much fun with the actual demo. While knocking around physics objects freely to damage enemies is fun, it seemed like the enemies took little damage compared to how much their ragdolls flew around the map, and it was more about having to line them up into a sort of “closet” that would instantly take them out. It also seemed like enemies would often end up attacking from behind without warning, which if this game was going to take something out of the Doom reboot’s book, there’s ways to have the enemies “remind” the player they’re behind without doing serious damage to keep the power trip going, among other methods to keep the player involved that aren’t entirely noticeable until examined closely.
The controls seemed a little complicated for what this was, like how throwing items seemed redundant when you can just kick them, and meant that dropkicking things took extra buttons because grab and throw are the same button, plus having to kick buttons to open some frequently-occurring gates felt like it broke the flow of things instead of just kicking down the gates, and I’m not really sure of the point of having additional boot powers to launch the boot like a rocket or drag things around briefly. Plus the level design didn’t seem to flow to the nest point as much as it should naturally have, as I felt like I was looping around a bit once it got out of the tutorial. There’s potential here, but I feel like it needs some work and balancing to lean more into the “satisfying destruction” angle that might fit this better. Mainly simpler and punchier, fully selling the “mighty foot” angle as seen in other FPS games more focused on guns as usual.
The Art of Reflection
This is another first person puzzle game involving portals, but a bit different, as it’s a bit more about perspective as well. It’s a bit hard to explain in writing, but mainly the player can teleport over to orbs by clicking and using the scroll wheel to zoom in, then they’ll end up at that point. This power also works through mirrors, where the player will enter a flipped version of the world at whatever angle, horizontal as well as vertical. There’s also the ability to pause the transition midway, which introduces the main potential annoyance I have about puzzle games like these, which is timing, but at the very least this also slows everything to a near-stop to give time to reposition and resume the travel or start anew, or just stop right there as is needed sometimes. And on top of that there’s keys to unlock doors, but they have a specific orientation that can be flipped in a mirror and then carried through. The demo felt pretty long to me, given these usual kinds of games, so I wonder how much longer the full game is, plus there are also bonus puzzles to try to find, I think at least. It’s a neat set of mechanics and I might want to look into this one later if it builds well on what I’ve seen here.
Skin Deep
This is another unusual game in the typical manner for Blendo Games, complete with sticking with a Doom 3 source port as the engine. I found this out when I was trying to get the game to render at my monitor’s native resolution but it kept ending up looking wrong, so after a bit of looking around I just ended up playing this one windowed as big as it would fit on my screen. The game claims to be an incredibly immersive simulator, mainly for paying attention to certain aspects that a number of stealth games would normally gloss over, like sneezing in dusty vents and slipping on things, as well as stepping on broken glass because the player character goes around barefoot, and further footage previously released shows that it will also account for aspects such as smell. I didn’t really encounter much of this additional stuff outside of the tutorial, which goes over the process of taking down enemies by removing and flushing their heads as well as freeing cats, which are boxy models in Blendo tradition, though the other characters had more polygons. Also the player can go into space with no ill effects that I noticed, so I can only guess because a space suit just instantly happens while in space.
The level after the tutorial was a small ship where I pretty much stuck with the strategy of throwing a box of pepper at an enemy before pouncing on their back and ramming them into room objects until I could remove their heads. I didn’t have much reason to mix it up then, and the only small obstacle I encountered was randomly slipping on a patch of soap while trying to grab a head because this was inside a laundromat. So this is a pretty weird game in presentation at least, but I would have liked to see a bit more of the odd “immersive” mechanics in action myself. Maybe a little more encouragement to not get stuck repeating the easiest methods of dispatching enemies out of a safe habit.
Mashina
This is a claymation 2D and sometimes 3D digging simulator thing featuring a cute spherical robot with a tiny drawn-on face. The main part of the game seems to be the underground, the 2D part, which involves drilling around to find minerals, which are various shaped lumps of blue shiny stuff that have to be fit into the backpack in a usual inventory puzzle like what Resident Evil 4 brings to mind as an example. These are dropped off in a machine at the base to collect them and free up space, but there are also mining machines that can be attached to larger clusters to provide a more steady income. The backpack can also be expanded with collected minerals.
There were a couple quests in the demo from the 3D above ground, which features the claymation character models in a Doom-like sprite angle rotation thing with their photographic frames, with the rest of the area in low-poly style. Talking to anyone there but the one designated quest giver for the demo resulted in multiple takes of a “not available in demo” voice line, and every other character who can be talked to, aside from the player character, is fully voiced. The first quest involved collecting a bunch of minerals with some extra bomb powerups, which also have to fit in the backpack. The second was about finding someone stuck underground to give them a potato, and that quest came with disco ball powerups that increased digging speed briefly. It was a short but fairly charming demo, but I just wonder what all the other characters do above ground and how deep the underground goes.
SpreadCheat
This is an unusual demo set in a vertical screen format, which makes me wonder if this is also being released on phones as all the interaction is by clicking. The presentation involves these super swole low poly businessmen running a company that’s clearly corrupt and the player is hired on to fudge the numbers as usual. The core gameplay is clicking numbers as well as some basic formulas into certain spreadsheet cells to get the target number to the right value, so mainly just a bit of figuring out how to math that out. In between there are random minigames involving things like closing virus pop-ups and cleaning up after an office party and even making a short PowerPoint. It seems like a short game with a fairly short demo, but also has some kind of daily challenge mode for those who are into that. Not entirely sure about this job though.
Isopod
This is a 3D physics-y platformer from the developers of a fairly well-received 2D platformer about a spider. This one involves the titular isopod, which in this case is like those pillbugs or whatever they’re called locally from being able to roll into a ball and use physics to get around that way. They can also physics around by the magnet they’re wearing to attach vaguely to metal objects. While playing the demo, I found those methods of movement pretty unreliable and often causing falling off into death areas, not to mention that the bug is taken out from one hit by anything, unless they’ve collected an arbitrary number of leaf bits to get a bonus hit. Of course this means that if the isopod then falls into a death pit and gets stuck, they have to go through all of their extra hits before they can respawn. Long story short I found the most reliable methods to get around was to walk along slowly and use the unrolled attack, as using the rolled up attack was somehow more vulnerable to getting hit in the middle of it. I don’t think I’m getting this one, and this seems like one of those rougher transitions from 2D to 3D platforming, but not the worst.
So that’s demos for now. I’ve at least found some interest in things here, though if I had more time and there were more available that actually worked, I’d like to look into more VR demos. Provided we make it to June and I have some time set aside from whatever I’ll inevitably be busy with then, I’ll see about checking out more demos overall at that time. Or maybe October otherwise.