October 16, 2025 (Originally posted on Neocities)
Despite this once again happening during an exceptionally busy October week as seems usual for this round, I managed to play 15 demos at least some of the way through if not fully, including a VR one, which is more than the usual number of VR demos I tend to have in these lately. So after another relatively busy week, here’s my overview of what I played.
PowerWash Simulator 2
I played through the first game of this on Game Pass a while back, when I had that before letting it expire because I didn’t feel like paying $15 USD a month for it, and I especially don’t want to pay double that either. Long story short, it’s a lot like the first, which was a weirdly enticing game, where I’d just put on whatever background music of my choosing and spray around inefficiently to unwind a bit. What’s different here is a home base that’s populated with cats you can’t spray with the thing, except initially I could but they had no reaction to it and then the game figured out I wasn’t supposed to be doing that in the first place. The home base can also be populated with furniture that is purchased but then also has to be cleaned in the usual way.
As for the jobs themselves, there’s been some adjustments to how things work, like how soap is no longer a consumable specific to surfaces and is instead a thing that recharges over time and also has to be washed off instead of just enhancing the spray itself. There’s also on-screen indicators pointing toward the last few objects with filth on them on top of the existing push button to highlight feature. If I feel like cleaning with weird lore once again, maybe I’ll look into this one.
Tingus Goose
I was first made aware of this on a stream highlighting the best but mostly worst of mobile game ads, and it’s an idle incremental kinda thing based on weird internet cartoons drawn by someone who keeps depicting geese in increasingly strange manners with common themes of symbiosis and birth and rebirth, but mostly just weird. Now it’s coming to PC without ads and I’m not sure if this is going to be a cheap paid thing and whether it’ll have additional costs attached.
Either way, the way this works is whatever thing at the bottom of the screen becomes pregnant with a constantly elongating goose neck grown by spending cash which is accumulated by bouncing and merging the babies that spawn from it. Also the arrangement of these extra limbs that come from the goose neck can change the efficiency of cash flow by moving them toward things that will duplicate or help merge and so on. There’s other elements involved, like earning calcium per goose tree to get more persistent upgrades, but that’s the main thing. Also before each chapter which involves a new goose being grown, it shows some of those cartoons which lead into the vague theme of the next growth.
I’m not really into the idle thing myself at this point, despite still having an ongoing Cookie Clicker save I occasionally poke at, but this certainly is a weird one, as if what I wrote above was just glossing over the general process using terms that normally do not go together wasn’t enough to indicate that.
Bubsy 4D
Bubsy is back once again, now in hot dad form (not the musician). Also I’m not sure if there’s time travel involved given the whole fourth dimension thing. Either way, the game controls normally, unless you don’t want it to, and Bubsy will yell at you if you choose to enable tank controls, as well as if you try to turn down his commentary frequency which starts maxed at “Bubsy”. I didn’t find the dialogue annoying, and the only frequently repeated stuff was all the jump noises and his mention about what happened to CRT gaming whenever sitting down to enter the sandbox mode. Long story short, Bubsy is the reluctant hero put on the spot by the returning cast seen in that one cartoon pilot which also pulled characters from Bubsy 2, to where he didn’t bother with the recurring Woolies stealing the sheep on the outset, but once the roboticized sheep returned and took the Golden Fleece, it became serious enough to get dragged into space.
As far as my experience playing, it played generally fine. The game features a lot of ways to extend a jump including the trademark glide as well as a homing pounce, plus there’s the ability to become an orb, similar to the Homer Ball in The Simpsons Game, possibly due to radiation. I only had some issues with that last one to not fly off the third and final level in the demo so much, which that level had a whole timed segment about crossing a bridge while utilizing that power to make it over in time, plus that particular level also seemed to have the buggiest collision as he kept getting stuck in between level objects at times on foot, but at least the game controls decently and I could generally escape being stuck whenever.
The game also has upgradeable move stuff like an absurd “OG Coyote Time” that lets him pretty much run off of a platform for a few seconds before starting to fall, in case jumps weren’t going far enough. There’s also a number of costumes, most of which were locked out in the demo, but were previewable. In the full game, he can become yarn incarnate or dress like Sonic, as in shoes and nothing else. Despite being always pantsless he’s apparently only truly nude when he’s also shirtless, which necessitates a crotch blur to maintain whatever rating, sure. Combining shoes and a crotch blur just makes him look more naked really. Of course you can go with the classic look of his old shirt that still fits him like a glove, if the glove were a shirt, or even more classic in full low-poly Bubsy 3D horror. I just wonder how boss battles will work here, as the only knowledge of those I have is about gliding on top of a chicken or something riding a flying calculator from 3D.
Skate Story
The long-awaited weird skate game published by Devolver is apparently not much of a wait longer. I remember seeing a demo of this at a previous MAGFest across from one for Olliefrog Toad Skater. What happened to that game? Either way, I’ve now played demos for both during these demo festival things. The premise involves a demon wanting to eat the moon, so they become made of glass and skateboard around to get there. Normal stuff for Devolver-published games.
Tricks are mainly just pressing the jump button while holding another one, and tricks can be chained into combos, which in boss scenarios are what do damage, especially if done at higher speeds. However a lot of the levels are following paths and jumping through eye gates to open the next door, while avoiding bailing because of the whole made of glass thing. However breaking doesn’t set the player back much, just at the start of the section with any gates still cleared. This one seems to be a decent skating experience from what I played, with button inputs driving tricks instead of the unusual joystick-based setup of Skate but seemed a little more grounded in its physics. Seems like it’ll be neat in its full form.
Yooka-Replaylee
Playtonic appears to be repenting for their past sins in mediocrity from what I hear about this new version of the game that’s recently come out, as well as the 2D sequel they made for its previous form. I did briefly play the old version through Games With Gold on the Xbone, but didn’t really find it interesting enough to play for long. I don’t remember if there were any particular standout issues I encountered either. In any case, I don’t remember a lot of what happened aside from there was a lot of shiny gold decor and it ran worse and maybe there were different cutscenes, but given that was on the Xbone and not my fairly maxed out machine. I’m also not sure if there was that tutorial cave run through twice in the old one. All I know is this demo is short and doesn’t even get into the first world, ending right before that, but then going into one of the reworked minigames which at least controls decently and is some kind of puzzle thing. If I feel like checking this apparent series out, this would be the place to go.
Cairn
What if QWOP was climbing? Then you’d have GIRP. But what if that was taken seriously? Then I guess you’d get this. It features this woman who is covered in bandages doing free climbing with an assistant climbing robot that makes chalk out of garbage, and I wasn’t sure if this took place on an alien planet or some obscure part of Earth. The game will apparently have three difficulty modes, but this demo only had the “normal” mode available, so Filthy Casual and BALL CRUSHER were off-limits, or whatever they were actually called.
The demo started in a training area with walls, and that’s where I found out I had no idea what the controls were doing by default. It turns out if you want to know what limb you’re moving, or even to pick what limb you’re moving instead of it randomly picking one, that’s all in the accessibility settings. So unlike a Bennett Foddy game, you can actually make the game control more sanely, even if that’s not “intended”. Since this game isn’t Baby Steps, I was fine making that decision, just to get through some of this demo.
Once I was able to actually know what I was doing, I could get the woman up the exit wall and into the real climbing, where apparently saving is manual at specific wall holes which is also where camp can be set up. I soon figured out doing this climbing thing while managing several meters isn’t quite my thing, but it’s neat at least as far as the working version of the climbing mechanics. As far as climbing games I’ve enjoyed recently, I played through Tall Trails, a game I’d previously played a demo of as well, and that ends up being less about climbing and more about launching across distances. And if you’re going to ask me about Peak, forget about it. I’d rather play Bubsy 3D, because at least Bubsy is in that.
Digimon Story Time Stranger
Another demo for a game already out at the time I played its demo. I’ve played a bit of Cyber Sleuth before this, and this is fairly similar in execution but kinda different in plot. The demo was also pretty long and went through pretty much the whole first chapter I’d say pacing-wise. Like Cyber Sleuth, it involves a team of up to 3 versus 3 in turn-based combat using dynamic turn order, and mons can be generated once encountered enough in battles.
The plot involves a bunch of things going on, but mainly having to investigate behind a giant wall near Shinjuku where stuff is weird, and getting to pick one of three partner Digimon. I ended up going with Gomamon for this one, which certainly helped with encountering a lot of Virus types given that one’s a Vaccine, with that whole rock-paper-scissors dynamic with Data in there too. And that’s on top of elemental resistances and such. I accumulated a bunch of mons over the demo, and the neat thing is all of them get experience points, even all the boxed ones, plus there’s just auto heal when holding still in the field for a moment. There’s a lot of quality of life in this one.
After going through the demo and fighting a climactic boss and then some explosion, the demo kept going a bit longer and ended kinda randomly after a cutscene in a sewer talking to people, where I could continue it in the full game if I wanted. Then it unlocked a bonus demo involving a pre-set scenario taking place later in the story within the Digital World in all its mon-populated shanty town goodness, where I had a bunch of mons to merge and evolve and such to build whatever team to take into their sewers and fight more stuff. It’s a neat bonus that allows some experimentation at least. I’ll see when I’d get to this one.
Effulgence
The art style interested me, with how it’s a bit voxel-y in execution with text characters. However that’s pretty much the main appeal, the rest is mostly standard RPG stuff, turn-based with dynamic order, but also on top of that aiming is affected in real time because stuff’s always drifting around, which affects the calculations for distance. A neat idea at least but not sure what else it adds aside from having to wait for stuff to line up. There’s also a world map between combat areas which has different things to do like find healing or level up skills at a specific building, as well as shops that were mostly closed off.
As far as the combat areas, it’s a sequence of enemies that seem to mention their gimmicks before having to battle, and there’s the ability to bail on a zone and return to the start of the last encounter after going back to heal. It’d be better if that didn’t feel like a necessity rather than a nice feature, as the balance seems to insist on there being a lot of grinding. Plus weapons have durability and break after a number of uses, but more are constantly being printed with materials gotten from fights. I’m not sure how to control what’s printed though, so it was just making guns and grenades on its own on occasion.
In fact I’m not sure about how a lot of things work in this demo either. Like this card game I somehow got stuck in, until I figured out I had to use the mouse to specifically click the added button to exit the card game instead of using the controller, so I guess that bit was broken. There’s also the manner of navigating the world map, which on the controller, confirmation on that specific screen is the X button on Xbox controllers, and A instead goes along the paths. Until I figured that out by messing around enough I thought the game was broken from the start. Long story short, this game has a lot of potential but I don’t see it quite realized here. It’s not quite fun but it has interesting ideas.
Sleep Awake
I heard this had FMV so I wondered to what extent. It’s mostly just stuff that shows up between playable bits and is mainly abstract weirdness like people dancing as monsters or running in deserts and a lot of close-up eye shots. This is mostly one of those horror-type walking simulator things that occasionally has stealth in it, so I guess think like SOMA. In this though the main concept is that some unknown force called the Hush is abducting people in their sleep and leaving holes in reality where they once were, so people do what they can to not sleep and are therefore all insane in some way.
The player character is just trying to keep someone alive through use of some eyedrops but they keep falling asleep to the point of either almost getting abducted or wandering across the ruins of the town, meanwhile there’s pain cultists and gas mask police on the lookout for I guess pretty much anyone still in the city. There’s also collectible microfiche holding articles to look at later but can only really look at one per sheet. I wasn’t getting too into this one and the demo just kinda suddenly ends after a point. Also it was really dark, as in literally so. I should have probably cranked up the brightness more to see where I was going instead of being turned around a number of times.
Mr. Sleepy Man
This is some kind of weird platformer about controlling a guy who’s always asleep through a weird town and also getting into random bits of trouble just so there’s something to do. Things can be stolen, people can be hit with things which doesn’t seem to even do damage, and cars can be driven into rivers. Also getting caught by the police ends the demo because they didn’t add the ability to leave jail in this version but it would apparently continue from there in the full version. There’s also a music video level that in the readme says gets claimed on YouTube, so I guess don’t play that on there if you care about making half a cent of ad revenue probably, and that’s if you’re popular. I don’t know about this one but at least it caught my attention.
Mech Builder 3D
Here’s a follow-up to a demo I played last year, and both times on the previous 2D version, I’ve mentioned that I said something about how I’d prefer to see a 3D version, ideally without cranked out designs from an “AI” thing, and here we are with this one. I get the feeling this is the version that was intended to be made from the start, but they started out with the 2D version and its weird counterpart Waifu Builder until they could manage this one.
As far as virtual model-building goes, this one seems to feel more authentic in the methods used. Of course the first tutorial models are overly simplified to the point where it was just assembling two halves initially, but then building the later models was much more complex to where I feel like that many steps all at once is usually broken down into a few steps for readability’s sake. Then again I don’t buy the super expensive ultra kits myself so I’m not sure how those tend to go, but this seemed to emulate the mid-range kits by design.
There’s a bit of physicality to cutting things out of the sprues to where the parts sometimes get stuck on there and need to be shaken loose, though parts don’t collide with each other while they’re still on the sprue. Once one’s empty, it falls down onto the table like the rest of the parts do, so that means dragging them off of the pile of freshly trimmed and assembled parts. There’s also more do with the completed models like posing them without really any joint limits so they can become a crumpled up mess, then painting them with a few shader effects, including being able to crank up the bloom to a level which turns the model into a blinding light blob. I don’t know if there’s label application in this though, since I’d had enough playing through about halfway through the one page, but this seems fine from what I played and a notable improvement. There’s also a kitbash mode once again but I also didn’t get to that.
As far as the use of “AI” stuff, which was present in the 2D ones for those designs, they claim that what’s here is all modeled out by paid people this time. I wonder if the starting concepts are worked out through generating designs or if they have people figuring that out, or if these models were just bought from an asset store and were put there by other artists. To my knowledge these generative things still haven’t properly figured out 3D modeling yet, and the models seem pretty clean and intricate. As long as folks are being properly paid and jobs aren’t being lost in the name of profit then that’s at least a plus.
Big Hops
This is a platformer with the ability of tonguing things to either swing or grab distant items, and it stars a frog who is fully voice acted along with the rest of the characters and makes relatively expressionless teeth faces when talking. Like the frog just has a lot of teeth I guess. It starts out wandering the forest with a sister who makes similar faces, then the frog falls into a cave and meets a temple that turns out to be the makings of a demon, then the level gets kinda interesting because it just does the Mario Galaxy gravity mechanic thing, then there’s a desert which is where I stopped because I could not figure out what I was supposed to do to cross a platform gap that was totally out of reach of any jump or move combinations I tried. There’s also items that can be thrown, and some are planted in the ground or sometimes walls to be jumped off or climbed. Possible potential but I think it was going too far too fast to nail in the mechanics, plus there’s some jank involved like not quite being able to aim long jumps properly or almost falling off ledges when pulling switches and so on.
DrainSim
This seems like an Unreal tech demo and looks like someone made an Unreal game without bothering changing a number of the fonts or default camera behaviors or ability to correctly detect screen resolution. At least it generally works, and the water physics are there, even if the ground physics briefly weren’t at one point where I fell through the floor, but I managed to climb back out after a minute of exploring underwater without actually being underwater. Also about physics, moving the character around is weirdly physical as in turning and walking are really momentum-y so it feels halfway to one of those wacky ragdoll physics simulators. However, it’s a job simulator starring some guy who can unclog toilets with a plunger, then decides he’s going to unclog the flooded world starting with the town he’s in. That’s pretty much it. Unless someone’s a water clearing enthusiast with the pumps and barriers and whatnot that can be used then I’m not sure who’s getting a kick out of this.
The Oversight Bureau
I was trying to figure out what this voice-controlled thing meant by having generated voices, if it was going to make up responses on the fly, or be canned responses that are either filters put over VO or just not even bothering with that and having the computer do all the work, and it’s in the latter camps, probably the latter-est of them. Long story short, another box and button puzzle game that I think is trying to either get you to care about the characters or the situation or whatnot while also acting as a prison for people who don’t obey the government corporation or whatever usual thing. I didn’t get attached to this one, really just seeing what it was but not much doing with it aside from actively being antagonistic to the prompts, and the only response was that it was just not even going to dignify it with a response.
Wanderer: The Fragments of Fate
Apparently this was listed as a remake, but looking into it, it’s a remake of a game that came out three whole years ago. Still longer than the gap between Last of Us on PS3 and its remaster on PS4, but still pretty short. This is also the only VR demo on the list I played. It seems decent enough, having the ability to move around smoothly in a 3D environment instead of being locked to snap and teleport stuff, though those are also available. There’s also a fair bit of physics interactions to screw with, but then also get your arms stuck in things while climbing and having to yank them out of their buggy collision. Climbing reminds me of the exact same thing I was doing in the Horizon game on PSVR2, but with harder to grab things.
The scenario is time travel with alternate timelines, including starting in one where the Soviets reached the moon first and now it’s future flooded Boston ruins ruled by environmentalist raiders, but then finding Grandpa’s time machine thing to change the past for the future and that usual story. When I got to the time machine apartment, for one thing it was late at night so I wasn’t quite thinking straight, but also there’s just a ton of random crap to mess with there like things that don’t lead anywhere and also fishing with cockroaches for frogs that I didn’t figure out, so actually solving the real puzzle took a while to get to. At least the general interaction stuff made sense to control and was relatively intuitive, except for these pull-and-turn handle things which I kept not pushing all the way back in and I was wondering why it wasn’t working. Also there’s some combat which amounts to the usual shoot the other guy enough first but melee is also an option, though the latter’s not quite as good as I’ve seen in Blade and Sorcery and also there’s no blood or being able to slice off limbs and such.
In addition to the arm-getting-stuck thing I kept encountering, there was a brief part where I had to hold a door open so a boat could leave, but I didn’t realize I had to keep the door open, so the boat never left, and once I realized what to do the boat was stuck, so I just ended up shooting the driver which automatically reloaded a checkpoint to redo that one part. So at least there’s some workarounds to weird bugs. I get the feeling it might be on the shorter end of games though so not sure about this one, even if I would play it again while tired and not knowing exactly what interaction advances the actual plot for an overly long time.
Once again, that was the demo thing. And following up on the top 50 played list after the event, I actually played three on there. Again, more than usual. Probably because it wasn’t just a billion roguelikes this time, because some people will just play every single one of those regardless of how good it is or isn’t, and demos would be a good way to figure that out without blowing the budget. There was a lot of multiplayer though, but I was soloing this, so those were generally off-limits if they didn’t have a proper singleplayer mode.