June 22, 2025 (Originally posted on Neocities)
Oh look, another one of these right after the last one, at least as far as post frequency. I’ve been a bit busy over the last few months, but did manage to find time to play some demos and try to figure out what the new hotness is. According to the list of top demos from the event posted on Steam, I’m clearly way off the mark because I played none of those top 50 demos. Then again, aside from my usual avoidance of certain genres or play modes, I was also kinda looking for more niche stuff anyway. As well, perhaps this focus on less popular and more niche stuff makes me closer to the apparent target audience for Death Stranding 2, due to Kojima’s apparent desire to not appeal to the mainstream as much as possible. Or maybe I’m just some weird game hipster that also betrays that idea by sometimes playing popular stuff anyway.
Also, this is the return of VR demos, for now at least. But only a couple this time, since that’s all I had time for. And I did figure out how to hook up PSVR2 to the PC in case I can’t use the Reverb G2 as a backup going forward. It mostly works, with the exception of one trigger not always working in the software. However, for the applicable demos this time, I used the Index as usual.
Gecko Gods
This is apparently a long-awaited thing, and being a game about being a tiny lizard crawling around everywhere, I already get the appeal. The gecko in this is pretty cute and makes some kinda squeaking noises when mashing one of the buttons, the same that’s used to grab levers for puzzles. There is also a dash button that is also a primary attack, because it turns out there’s a few random enemies in this, but not many. When enemies or regular pots are smashed, they drop these glowing things that I didn’t find a use for in the demo but might involve something later. There are also bugs to collect by eating them, but there was no screen I could find to show which ones have been eaten so far.
I spent most of my time in the demo just wandering the island it takes place on, after getting past the initial tutorial tunnel, before going for the actual intended puzzles. One section was labeled as a “gauntlet” with platforms and things to navigate, but given the gecko can just climb all the walls, it was more just following the general path while sticking to those walls instead. Climbing usually works fine and maintains the intended direction over curved walls, but gets a bit confused on anything more complex than a gentle slope. There are apparently more islands to explore in the full game for the quest to find the titular Gecko Gods, as is mentioned at the start of the demo. I might give this a further look after it’s out. However, if you can’t wait to play more gecko-based games right now, there’s Gex Trilogy, which I already have those games anyway.
Funi Raccoon Game
As far as weird-ass “Sunday stream” types of games go, this is a game all right. The presentation is an abstract early 3D throwback style with blocky textures and low polygon environments combining photographic textures with large pixel art sprites throughout, and the game itself focuses on a tiny pixel raccoon of some color and odd name, selectable by the player at the start, buying a dumpster house and stealing as much as possible from the levels in order to furnish it. My first go at the demo ended up getting stuck because I got into the dumpster before throwing the items in, which the controls of such aren’t explained until reaching the dumpster at the end of the initial level, and I couldn’t open the door to exit without having those items. After figuring that out, there was another level right after that quickly ended up being unplayable because stealing a gun from a cop made infinite heat-seeking cop cars spawn.
After resetting that mess, I actually went through the level a bit more carefully to pick up whatever items I could before dealing with the police, including entering a gym that contained photos of gym equipment and medicine as well as edible weights that increased lifting power to carry heavier items. I also got a quest from a giant statue to steal the cop’s gun, so I did that again and ran right for the door to turn that in, and ended up at an unfinished part of a level. Not long after that the demo was apparently complete, but still had additional unfinished levels to attempt to wander around, which I did, but I had pretty much seen what this weird game had to offer in general.
GlitchSPANKR
Out of all the demos I played, I found this one the most entertaining in terms of depth and weird humor. It starts off with a kid stealing a forbidden game involving spanking from their mother, which contains a virus that requires installing an antivirus that also involves spanking in order to combat it. The game starts off as a prop hunt, where this toilet-shaped virus attempts to hide among a room full of objects that have to be searched through and smashed using the floppy slap hand, but it quickly derails into all sorts of other ideas depending on the routes taken in the story.
The demo has four branching routes, primarily sticking to two main paths but with a short extra fork at the end, but apparently the full game is planned to have many more paths and levels. It’s a pretty in-depth demo with a lot of dialogue from the talking toilet, with the major decision being to befriend or destroy the virus and whatever that entails, with the friendly route going to all sorts of genres in the mix while the destruction route is closer to sticking to prop hunt but still mixes things up here and there. There’s even weird secrets to find in the levels, including various unlockable things and some strange horror minigame following the demo’s end level. I ended up going through all the main routes and poked around a few places as well. I’m just wondering what sort of absurd nonsense the full thing will get up to and how far a toilet virus friendship can go.
Henry Halfhead
While many streamers were playing that demo of the latest Foddy joint Baby Steps, I picked a demo where the main character doesn’t even have an entire head, yet has incredible powers somehow. He also has a charming theme song as the first thing on the title screen. After selecting a Henry, because even this game manages to have a brief customization section only involving a set of skin colors to pick from, his powers become quickly apparent on this interactive story thing that goes through his childhood I guess, at least the first part of which for the demo.
The presentation makes this feel like a kids’ story, but there’s still some other odd aspects like being able to turn into a knife, yet not really do much damage as such, becoming a self-eating piece of cake and just becoming Henry again after finishing, and wearing hats that are much bigger than the halfhead. He starts as a baby who can fit everything into the square hole and grows a little bit of hair later on, but I wonder how far this story goes and if he becomes a bald adult later on going by the cover. Also the whole game seems to take place in a mostly empty white room that fills with rooms worth of things as it goes.
Mars Attracts
I figured I’d see how this theme park simulator, based on another licensed property that’s adjacent to dinosaurs in its history as a gory trading card series, managed to fit the general theme. Turns out it’s a bit questionable in execution, but not the interesting kind. It really is just a theme part kinda simulator mixed with a touch of zoo habitat management, except the zoo subjects are humans abducted from several time periods and they’re also experimented on to unlock more things like rides. There’s also the chance of humans to escape habitats and break things around the park, which more often than not requires hiring the emergency police squad to blast them because the security guards aren’t really doing much, and that’s if the humans just don’t get stuck on things for a while. The concept in general is also a bit weird, given the appeal of this I’d think would be seeing the torture and destruction up close, but it’s abstracted into low-detail models like the usual crowds in these kinds of games. I think the idea of this sort of setting is better explored in other previous games involving wacky alien invasions like Destroy All Humans, as well as a number of B-movies and the Mars Attacks film proper.
Garbageland
Not to be confused with the song from Red Vox. In fact I don’t even remember really seeing any rats in this one, or at least creatures that are recognizably rats. This demo, which is apparently separate from the main game’s story, features some kind of tapir-looking fellow teaming up with a Furby clone and some other randoms in order to bounce around levels erratically to track down bunny-chicken hybrid livestock, because for some reason this is a game also about finding loot in dumps in a style like Breakout, or more rather some kind of mini golf, but aiming is restricted to just constantly rotating.
The levels also have random goals like survive however many turns or reach the goal before a number of turns, and it’s hard to figure out what to do with the bouncing since I didn’t see any even brief path guide to help with that, plus the aforementioned constant rotating instead of actual aiming, so just hit it and hope it works. I ended up getting stuck on a level with flying enemies that just went around the blocks and also above the half-size blocks for the most part, and the other issue is not being able to run into the enemies really because that just causes the player to take damage. Long story short I think being able to aim, including even in the town segments, would help a lot here, if not also giving the player more options to smash enemies. There was a menu about special powers that might have been useful, but I didn’t see anything in there that seemed like it would be. At the very least I can relate to the developer’s dislike of social media.
Aeromachina
Might as well check out one of the latest furry type PS1-looking fast action games. Unlike some of those specific genre of games, this one doesn’t have a character creator that’s down with the thiccness, let alone any character creation at all, but has some kind of jet shark character as the main character. It’s styled as a Metroidvania in 3D, more visually resembling Metal Gear Solid but more cartoony, and the combat and traversal are pretty decent, once I managed to figure out that I had to hold down the lock-on button in order to attack toward enemies, but there was one serious issue that kept me from going, and it apparently has to do with how they’re attempting to explain crossing a long gap in a glide. Something about whatever orders and timing I tried dashing, jumping, and gliding in some kind of combo did not work. I’m not sure if something in the game was broken right then or something vital wasn’t clearly explained. If the control for that made a bit more sense or was at least as intuitive as the rest of the controls, then I’d probably have liked this one more.
Project Turboblast
This wasn’t in the initial Next Fest list, but I heard they got a demo in last minute. If you’ve heard of this before, it’s likely related to the thicc booty ass bunny bot they have as a mascot. I mean, that’s how I heard of it. However, that’s about as much appeal as this game seems to have. While I didn’t poke around in the menus to see if I could drive anything but a normal-looking car, because a lot of the racers in the courses seemed to be bikes instead, it’s a fairly typical-seeming arcade boost kinda racer about trying to not hit all the walls while also maxing out the throttle and such. That’s about it.
Robert on Earth
He is a Robert, but not a cop, he is a Robert farmer. This is a sidescrolling game starring a bunch of cute robots drawn in a rough digital style and mostly focused on farming, to where that’s pretty much what made up all of this demo, except for the fishing parts. Mainly I wasn’t sure if something was broken and the other parts weren’t unlocking, or if I was missing something, or if it was just not included in the demos, which I feel like was the main thing but it wasn’t just that clear, because there was a quest to unlock the town which didn’t unlock. I also couldn’t figure out how to craft things like batteries to solve other sidequests. However there are random tumbleweeds that spawn and smack right into the robot’s face and drop items. It seems like it could be a fine game but I’ve hardly seen much of it through this demo.
Hirogami
This is one of those indie-looking games that’s actually published by a major company, this time Bandai Namco. I think I saw this one in a recent Sony Direct or whatever they’re called and figured I’d have a look. This demo is a short one with just one level to establish the origami warrior main character’s powers, which mostly involve hitting things with fans, and introducing the armadillo form which naturally rolls around to break things. I wasn’t paying too much attention to the story in its tiny font text boxes but it’s something about purifying the land from something. Might be an all right game when it’s done.
Don’t Move
While a lot of VR things are based around moving your whole self around, this one’s the exact opposite. It’s so much about not moving that it recommends seated mode, but given my length of experience in VR I opted for standing. I also tried doing the normal mode, but it turns out that the “normal” mode is so hyper-sensitive to even breathing that it pretty much instantly breaks. And in order to restart in a different mode the demo had to be completely exited and restarted, which is a bit more of a pain in VR, in addition to the menus after the initial one just not seeming to work correctly.
Eventually I got it working in “easy” mode, which has a reasonable margin of error to just exist and breathe but not be jumpy. It pretty much just throws stock fears at the player like spiders and snakes and sharks and such, aside from parts involving throwing stuff at the player, including grenades. Naturally I don’t see much to fear here, as I’m hardly affected by horror elements in video games as it is. The main issue with this experience is cramping up from holding almost perfectly still for a long time. Also there was a point where stuff just stopped happening and I wasn’t sure if that was part of the demo or if it just ran out of content, but by that time I didn’t want to totally cramp up in order to get to the last demo.
Virtual Skate
As the last VR demo as well as the last one overall I played in this round, I think I picked a good one to end on. This one has a weird but fairly intuitive control scheme involving manipulating the feet on the board using hand controllers. After a few minutes of messing around with it beyond the tutorial, I pretty much got it figured out, but it also helped to enable “rotate on board” in the settings so I wouldn’t get completely turned around in my cable. There’s also the ability to jump off the board and run around on foot, but sometimes I couldn’t quite stay off the board when it auto-grabs to do that so I more ended up throwing it across the demo warehouse to stay off until I got where I needed to be. The music they have in the demo is generally fine and fits the game, though I can see turning that down at some point to throw on some classic Tony Hawk soundtracks.
It also turns out the demo just has automatic multiplayer, or maybe I accidentally enabled it somewhere while adjusting stuff in menus, because after a while a couple random people joined and mainly just kept to their own thing skating around. I ended up playing this demo for quite a bit just getting more familiar with how to do tricks with holding buttons and doing hand motions which could be hit or miss depending on how quickly those are done, and I feel like I’d want that to be a little snappier. Overall though I’d like to see this kind of VR skateboarding get more developed and polished and maybe have a bunch of custom content as well, like if they went as far as making it the Blade and Sorcery of skateboarding or something. At the very least skating around ported Tony Hawk levels would be cool.
And that’s demos once again. I think my top picks out of what I played would be GlitchSPANKR and Virtual Skate, just for how much I got into those. If I had more time, maybe I’d have looked at some of the more popular things like Dead as Disco, Dispatch, or maybe even Date Everything, despite that last one not really appealing to me for reasons largely related to the dateable objects being made a bit too human, as in mostly human. I’m not signing up for dating a bunch of gijinkas. Also, why do all of those kinda sorta-randomly picked examples start with D?
Either way, with so many games being either Souls-likes or roguelikes or even those survival craft things in between random MMOs, and those genres still managing to keep around the top spot on the charts after all this time, it’s no wonder I’m digging for the bottom of the barrel to find the diamonds in the rough. For now, I’ll just look to make it through to October while doing so many things along the way, at least what I plan to do. Maybe I’ll even play through some games all the way for once. And hopefully all the fun games not yet out that I’d like to play don’t end up in the trash along with the rest of the industry.