June 27, 2026 (Originally posted on personal site)
To cap off not-E3 season once again, here’s Steam’s demo thing returning at a usual time. Now more than ever there’s the mass of shovelware that’s been boosted by generative garbage, just so someone can crank out the most shallow of games that nobody will be able to actually play once the data centers act like that slime tutorial anime and absorb all existing technology as well. Despite all that mess, I was able to filter through the list over time, plus having a head start with some suggestions from others as well as the past weeks of game reveals and such. This time I played 17 (+2) demos, almost as much as last time, but (just over) the same number as desktop ones I played previously. No VR this time though. I did aim to avoid obvious generated junk though, and it’s easier to avoid if the thumbnail for the game’s some generic trash. I’d rather pick MS Paint crust over that. And honestly that can be pretty charming.
over the hill
This all lowercase Unity game is about driving in the mountains without having to follow a set path, coming from the developers who made art of rally which I think I have but haven’t played. It pretty much works as expected, being a chill enough driving simulator that also involves needing to shift gears, either the full range or just high and low, and using a number of tools to get up or across tricky areas including a tow winch that can hook onto trees. Things get unlocked by finding them in crates or completing things to get points to buy them, including trail waypoint paths and wildlife photography. It’s also hard to completely total the vehicle, and the player can just respawn at any found cabin anyway. I managed to find the “end” of the demo by finding the boat to what would be the next area. Overall it’s a neat thing for those really into mountain driving, not sure it’s quite my thing though but a chill experience.
S.A.N.D.Y. - Beach Cleaner
This is the first Unreal game of the bunch, which as from last time I learned that if a demo gets my resolution settings wrong it’s probably running Unreal because it just keeps doing that. Even so this one has a retro PS1-esque presentation, using what’s only possible with THE POWER OF THE UNREAL ENGINE. Like Voices of the Void does I guess. Long story short, about two decades back now there was this movie called WALL-E about a robot cleaning up trash on a destroyed Earth until a thing happens. This demo mainly featured a bit of that first part, but instead of making trash cubes, this robot is more of a beach-combing scoop grate thing with a camera, arm, and radio or tape player of sorts stuck on. This even includes the love of old music through the attached player which plays some kinda old-timey tunes and can be toggled freely.
However it’s also a bit more forward with the darkness of an abandoned world, with one part of the beach having half-buried corpses sticking out of it, but also some weirdness including some trash that was more alive than it should have been, mutated by something. And yet the core game is all wholesome including the robot trying to put on sunglasses, which unlocks a whole range of headwear for the camera, and even finding a greasy duckling to clean up and also wear as a hat, still living of course.
When cleaning the beach, there’s this collector thing to return to, but I’m not sure if returning to that is even needed since I didn’t see any indication that the trash collection was filling up and needed to be emptied. I’m also not sure if it rewards anything. When dumping the trash either way, it has to be sorted by picking an option from the menu, but only advances to the next if the correct one is picked, so no apparent penalty there. It also has a second attachment with a heart icon, which is where the duckling is cleaned. And at the end of the demo, I eventually figured out to go back into the starting box once I noticed the “home” light flashing on the robot. I feel like this game will probably be a short one, unless there’s something hiding that hasn’t quite been alluded to, but could potentially be interesting in some form. In fact, this game’s already out, and going by what I’m seeing it does seem to be a short one but people also appear to enjoy it, plus it’s cheap, so I might just be getting to this one soon myself. That’d be the quickest turnaround from one of these demo sessions yet.
Worming from Home
This is one of those funny physics Unity simulator game things. Not sure why this stood out to me, maybe not many feature worms, or the pun was cute. Either way this is also an office work simulator, where the worm has to drag around a computer mouse and hit keys on the keyboard to fill out spreadsheets and sometimes other things. The controls actually worked pretty well for this concept and made it easy to enter numbers of a few digits in specific spreadsheet cells within a minute or two once I got the hang of it, spreadsheets being a primary source of income, though there’s other things like gambling with the company’s stock and doing whatever random things have been assigned. There’s a number of tasks to do over time, attached to a calendar on the wall to keep track of while also being notified of new ones in a corner of the screen, but I was knocking them out pretty quickly without having to rush despite the accelerated timescale.
There’s also purchasable items for the desk, including a mouse that doesn’t spin around when trying to grab it, and furniture that improves some stats when used through a minigame. However all the minigames for that furniture just turn out to be one of those snake games, or rather a worm game in this case. Improving those stats unlocks perks to either increase moneymaking or physics powers. The worm also has to sleep in their plant pot at the end of the day to get a small bonus the next day, or otherwise suffer a penalty if staying up too late.
The end goal of the demo is to unlock extra desk space. I got that done, then looked under the desk to see what was down there. I didn’t see much aside from being able to turn the computer off and on again, and once down there the only way back up is all the way down to the floor, which respawns the worm back on the desk. I’ll say this is an interesting enough concept though not sure I’d stick with it much longer.
Barely Breathing
If you’re thinking of the hit 1990s song of the same name then you’re not alone. This is another one of those funny Unity physics animal simulator type things, but this one’s much more of a specific platformer with a defined path of sorts. This game also defaults to an unlimited framerate in a way that can actually break the computer by running it too hot, so that’s another thing to watch out for in these games, especially when it’s nearly impossible to replace melted parts at this point. I did find the framerate cap, but without V-sync so the screen ended up with a bunch of tearing.
The main mechanic is to hop between areas of water, including temporary ones made by splashing around in a primary source because the temporary sources can’t be extended. I found this game annoying due to its strict platformer line instead of being a sandbox approach. Mainly there’s seemingly broken checkpointing that either does or doesn’t reset random puzzle elements when returning to whatever bit of water counts as the last one the fish was in. I didn’t bother finishing this one.
Mingle
This Unity puzzle finding and merging game is the shortest demo I played all the way through, but of course its value is meant to end up being in replaying the levels constantly. Maybe they’re counting on people obsessing to get the highest score with the lowest time possible, or just finding a new creature to add to the collection since each time a level is done it brings a new one in until they’re all found. The art style is cute in black and white, and the brief personalities attached to each of these beings is also fun, and there’s apparently over 400 of these things. Might be a neat distraction if a bit repetitive in that way. At least each level has its own little gimmick, like how they move around or what happens when finding a match.
TOEM 2
I figured I’d want to play the sequel to last year’s pick for my game of the year by default, but I also figured I might as well see how it’s looking at the moment to confirm my desires. It’s a grayscale diorama-type photography adventure that runs in Unity, just like the last one, but with some added things. Mainly there’s platforming now, meaning the character can jump on some things or also jump up ladders, but this isn’t the main way to get around places, and largely it’s still pretty similar with the camera being the main tool for everything and also the means by which other tools are used. One such tool is a screwdriver used for several puzzles over the demo, mainly used in pipe puzzles while following a plumber across town who resembles someone from a Game and Watch or some kinda sign. Several other characters have varied art styles, where previously most of them were somewhat animated 2D drawings, now there’s various levels of 2D shading and 3D modeling, including some characters who are very cubical. I’m reminded of that Gumball show a bit, though so far what I’ve seen hasn’t gotten that level of wacky and varied in art style.
There’s also extensions on the existing mechanics, like how before when staring at something required focusing the camera on it for a few seconds, now needs a button to be held down, which is probably meant to add more flexibility to photography instead of having to be real quick to get a photo of something before it advanced a quest. There’s also posing for photos involved, just a fun little extra made more so with the higher detailed character this time around.
Of course most quests depend on having a photo taken of something and presented to the quest giver, but sometimes physical items themselves are involved, including some quest I couldn’t find that involved bringing some type of hot bean drink somewhere, but mainly I just found the random rooftop the seller was on, and the challenge involved was to not drop it, mainly by not falling too far down while platforming in some spots, including across the balloons for the path over. That’s probably where the platforming aspect is going to come up most, likely one of the harder sidequest chains in the final game. Also the partial city included in the demo felt pretty big, to where there’s even a minimap included of a sort.
Long story short, I’m still interested in this one, and I figure it’ll likely still run fine on the Steam Deck given its approach to the visuals, and subsequently the Steam Machine for the lucky 50 or so who get one of those. Maybe by the next long trip I take I might be playing around on this one, that or whatever from my backlog fits on the Deck.
TANUKI: Pon’s Summer
This Unity game is about a tanuki who delivers packages on a BMX, including a trick system with it. If I hadn’t heard about the trick system I probably would have passed on this one, but having played it, the trick system is decent enough, though not quite as in-depth as something like the Mat Hoffman games, the BMX counterpart to the Tony Hawk games, or whatever other games there were, like the whole Dave Mirra thing that somehow eventually turned into BMX XXX. Anyway, this game is not that, especially not that last one.
What there is, though, once getting past the initial part that seemed a bit long involving a week of doing nearly nothing after briefly attempting to get a job where nothing panned out, is biking around town, sometimes grinding on rails and collecting random floating money that’s only worth a few coins, and delivering packages to people. Some of these packages start quests including minigames or various tasks, like figuring out how to pour drinks at a bar to balance the amount of head, or sumo wrestling that’s presented a bit like Punch-Out, and for ones that integrate more into the main gameplay, having to bike a cart around carefully meaning avoiding tricks and huge jumps, and also finding targets to take photos of. This does mean a number of quests don’t really involve the core BMX mechanic for getting around places, which is a bit weird.
The default configuration for the tricks mostly makes sense in a usual button plus direction format, except for some reason by default the grind button is also the boost button, plus when falling off the bike the tanuki has to run back over to where it went, and then also try to not hit any direction while pushing the button to get back on, because the game recognizes that as a trick input that immediately bails. On top of that, once the challenge markers show up, pressing that same button, even if it’s in the middle of a trick input, starts that challenge without any confirmation, which means having to hold another button to cancel out of it to return to whatever was going on before. In that regard, I suppose try to avoid bailing on top of one of those markers.
At least for falling off the bike, there’s an option to just disable that pretty much entirely, though that “immediate bail when trying to get back on thing” should also be fixed, but there should really be an extra confirmation for starting a challenge, even if it’s just holding that button down for a bit longer than would be needed for a trick, especially if they’re going to be placed in the middle of areas meant for doing all sorts of tricks. What’s weird about this is that some quests on the bike do disable the ability to start a challenge, mainly the cart quests, which I figure is understandable for a mission type where tricks are discouraged.
This was a fairly long demo, to where I took a short break before finishing what turned out to be the last day, and a short one too. Essentially when not delivering to make money, since the post office is closed on certain days, that cash is spent on rebuilding the shrine, which there’s a time limit of days to work toward a festival within a month. However the time limit advances more as a plot than actual time management, where delivering the last package of the day will end that day, so if there’s a desire to track down more floating money or other activities, then just delay the last package for a while.
This does seem to lean much more toward the “cozy” aspect than the “hardcore stunts” one in general, which might be nice for unwinding at least. I just wonder how getting extra cash through side activities and such will play into the ending depending on how well the shrine is put back together, if there’s any chance of multiple endings or variants on it, thinking something like how Stardew Valley handles performance.. At least when purchasing an object, it only buys it once and allows placing as many down as desired that will fit in the grids, so I figure even if there is a variable ending, getting the “best” one might probably be easy. In short, this one seems fine but I don’t know that I’d follow back up on it.
Shape Sender Deluxe
Here’s another Unity puzzle game, this time involving moving shapes to pipes with physics. The demo was a short but decent length with over a dozen puzzles, plus whatever custom ones could be shared by short codes to look them up on a server, but I stuck to the built-in ones. It’s a pretty well-put-together system for object placement and adjustment, with some slight overlap concerns when clicking an item if its rotation handles overlapped something else I was trying to adjust, but nothing that was too in the way.
Speaking of “in the way”, each puzzle is graced by the presence of the character Sendy, whose physical existence in the levels mean you can hit them with things, which I discovered on accident and exploited to solve a couple puzzles as well. It might also be a way to get back at the character who may or may not be messing with the player at times. The interaction with this in-puzzle character seems pretty thought-out, including tracking how some puzzles end up being solved, how many of a certain fragile shape gets broken, and once when I was pummeling them with some shapes, they kept pausing their level end dialogue each time they got hit, which dragged it out a bit.
The physics of the puzzles themselves seem pretty deterministic, an important factor for anything even slightly resembling the Incredible Machine games, and on top of that all the bounces and movement all follow the background music quite nicely, on beat or even partial counts or whatever the terminology is. Overall it’s a pretty clean-looking and charming game that’s gotten my attention.
Moldwasher
This one game PowerWash Simulator took off oddly well, and I found myself oddly engaged with it and its sequel. So naturally there’s going to be more of those. Here’s one that runs in Unity just like it, but this time it’s a pixelated 2D thing from an isometric sorta angle. I’d feel like the third person perspective makes the cleaning less personal, but they mostly had it working here, just it’s a little unclear sometimes if something’s totally cleaned through the pixelated look. It has some usual progression going on with using cash earned to get a stronger washer and also unlock alternate tools such as a leafblower of sorts for use in side levels, plus finding random things under cleaned surfaces to also clean off including decorations and CDs.
However this has some significant issues, mainly involving the decision to have some objects constantly regrow the dirt or mold on some surfaces if they’re not being actively sprayed off, which if the current tool isn’t good enough means that it’ll just be an infinite struggle to hit where it’s just reappeared after getting the last bit, and there’s no option to put a level on hold or even exit entirely and come back later with better tools as needed like in other cleaning type simulators, such as the aforementioned PowerWash Simulator as well as House Flipper. This alone takes a potentially chill concept and turns it into an annoyance where I might as well rather clean off actual mold from actual surfaces instead of attempting to unwind with something so annoying. Job simulators shouldn’t feel as stressful as an actual job even if they aim to be accurate, and this one involves a piece of sushi as a main character, so no idea what’s up here in terms of “accuracy”. I later read somewhere there might be an option to slow down the mold growth rate, but I didn’t see it when I played and it shouldn’t be necessary either.
Hack ‘95
I’m not sure why I was going to try this one as it turned out to be a deckbuilder kinda game, minus the roguelike aspect that’s normally attached, but honestly it might as well have that as well instead of half-assing it. In this Unity game, there’s hacking jobs that involve playing a deck of collected cards against opponent machines, and then having to counter cards while also doing more damage and so on. Really, and as I should have expected, it comes down to RNG and having good cards in general like most other card games, so there’s not a lot of depth to this one aside from also having to upgrade general stats. The retro computing aspect more or less seems tacked onto that core mechanic, or maybe the other way around. Maybe for someone wanting an actual hacking type game there’s things like Uplink and Hacknet which I’m pretty sure I have both of. This is a definite skip for me. I feel at least if they went with the roguelike aspect it would have more depth than having to reload saves and hoping the RNG works out this time.
Object Impermanence
Here’s another puzzle game and another Unity game. This one has an interesting concept based on line of sight, which has been explored in a number of other puzzle games like Echochrome and Antichamber at times. On an alien world, there’s color-coded things that behave differently depending on whether or not they’re visible. In the demo, there’s one that pauses when not looked at, and another that resets to where it started. Interaction is mainly done with these orbs containing creatures being placed on switches and in sockets. The tricky part here is remembering to look or not look and having to frame the camera so that exactly what is wanted visible stays that way, or else the solution starts to fall apart. This game has some very interesting but also very frustrating potential, mainly due to how hard it can be to break usual habits of looking around in a game. I still find it neat at least, despite or perhaps because of the design’s intent to break how I’m looking around at a level in addition to where I’m going to not fall off.
KOTAMON: My Sis Found a Rare Card in a Long-Ass Game Title I’m Not Repeating
Once again, a Unity game, and this one is remarkably similar to another slightly less lengthy titled game called My Wife Threw Out My Card Collection (etc.), including digging through piles of trash to search for cards of value while also just selling the actual trash in compacted cubes. It’s a very mindless game suitable for getting tired before bed, kinda like when I played this demo for the hell of it. The player character also chugs lots of beer to restore energy for packing up trash somehow, including the empty cans from all that. There’s the cleaning of cards and also reassembling them after finding a few pieces in the pile. Mainly the game is very anime-adjacent, including the character designs with hair ears, the cards themselves having some anime-type illustrations of mostly anime girls of various clothing, and the “unstuck” button being that “help me stepbro” meme with an ass sticking out of a washing machine. Not really my thing as I suspected, but maybe great for someone who has trouble sleeping and is fine with anime-adjacent whatever.
Pigeon: A Love Story
This is a pigeon flight simulator of sorts that runs on some kinda Chromium/Electron/WebGL kinda deal. I don’t know of a whole lot of games that do that. This is more of an art kinda thing, but there is an eventual goal, which is searching through the hundreds of thousands of pigeons flying over a real-world city to some kinda scale to find the special one, while all the others will reject your bird and turn red. Mainly just scream at birds until one follows you. I was just more curious as to how this one worked, and I feel like I got the gist of things from the demo alone. They also had a submission form to accept rejection lines that the pigeons will randomly give, mixed in with the occasional hint like to go north or such, or more vague directions. I did manage to find the target bird in my attempt over part of London at least. It feels more like something to watch than play, which apparently there’s also a screensaver-like mode in there.
Casualties: Unknown
Back to the Unity games. Here’s a survival game, by which I mean the developer went hard on the survival aspect and modeled fairly detailed stats for limb parts and other things, though slightly simplified compared to a full model, it’s one of the most detailed I’ve seen that makes me think more of old DOS games like Robinson’s Requiem, and I have to commend the game for that alone. In addition to “usual” survival aspects like food and water and sleep and stamina, there’s aspects like having to bandage bleeding and treat infections, which can apparently lead to amputation in the worst cases. That other game I mentioned has that sort of thing too.
As far as the gameplay itself, it comes down to a fairly standard set of sidescrolling platforming and mining and crafting, just in the caves of a death world full of dangerous environments and creatures and traps and anything that can bring a painful death to the dog-like furry-type thing the player controls. There’s also only one way to save, and that’s surviving all the way down to the bottom of the current layer. Also there’s a time limit attached because why not make things more stressful. To counteract that, however, the settings for a particular run are already highly customizable to where this brutal game can be made even more so, or the totally opposite direction where it’s more of a casual spelunking tour, which is honestly how I was able to figure out some things.
Essentially I tried a few runs quickly. The first one I barely had any idea after playing the tutorial and wasn’t sure what was a wall or empty space, and things went badly quickly. I blame the default lighting level, which is also customizable. The second time, I screwed with a bunch of settings by maxing out the chances of certain things showing up, and it became a chaotic mess where the character was often being flung around by something causing all sorts of internal injuries until they were pretty much a pulp, which ended up being pretty darkly hilarious in a way. The last one, I went full easy mode and still managed to keep giving the creature food poisoning by drinking chocolate milk constantly, because as it turns out the creatures are based enough on dogs that it turns out that’s not a good idea. I probably should have figured that out sooner by how on the easiest loadout setting they come with a full sack of dog food on their back.
I’ve also noticed that this game in particular has gotten a fair bit of traction recently with bits of fan art and other mentions here and there. While the game itself can apparently get to some really dark places including the creature having a total mental breakdown and wishing for death as the suicide mission draws more to being literal, the fans seem to take it a lot more lighthearted and turn the whole thing into a dark comedy of sorts.
I just find this game particularly interesting, and multiplayer might add another level to the survival aspect, or maybe the screwing around aspect. I looked into it a bit and it turns out there’s a mod somewhere for that, but I feel like it should come built-in (though I understand not wanting to take on the potential nightmare of coding that can become), just hopefully not forced to be like a default Minecraft hardcore server that bans whoever ends up dead, or enforcing the worst part of “friendslop” where anyone who dies has to wait around for an hour before the next respawn point. At least have that as an option at most, because if the singleplayer runs are so customizable, so should the multiplayer. If the mad scientists running the show are so immoral and haphazardly sending engineered creatures down to a death world, I feel like they could just quickly send another down for a player to take control of instead of sitting on their thumbs up their ass for an hour. This also applies to the mod. And yes, a singleplayer game enthusiast of sorts is suggesting a game gets an official multiplayer mode, how about that.
Kaido Genkai
The second, and also last, demo that runs on Unreal, with its telltale “not getting my resolution right at first”. It’s like having a 16:10 (or 8:5?) monitor just breaks the hell out of some things for whatever reason. And yet the Steam Deck does quite fine with one of those with what I’ve got working on there. This is a racing game styled as an anime, taking place across a small town in Japan but later other places. I actually didn’t play this one for long because I was mostly just messing around with the driving, which seems to generally work, without doing much actual racing. I also observed some of the NPC cars driving around had some difficulties, like randomly running into light poles or getting stuck halfway off a ledge on an overpass bridge thing. There’s also how I couldn’t manage to find much else to do because some directions are given after the tutorial race (which I skipped the tutorial part of because I already figured out it was just the usual modern driving controls), but there’s not really a map to direct anywhere, so paying attention to directions is a must, that or just wander and get lucky, which I didn’t really. I found a mission that would only take place at night but didn’t wait that long. This might be a fine game but probably not for me.
Charisma Dungeon: Skeleton Key to My Heart
This game, whose actual name I’m refusing to print entirely, is the one Godot demo of the bunch this time around. Unfortunately I didn’t attach to this one as much as I did with the previous festival’s sole Godot demo I played, which I later picked up the full version of with another Godot game I played the demo of during an even further back festival. This one’s a dungeon crawler at its core, but with the twist that the player character can’t really fight well, so the need to recruit others by essentially dating them comes up quickly. The game is full of monster girls, which compared to the usual implementation of those, are thankfully more leaning on the monster side, and they can either be defeated in combat or added to the party. There’s also dynamics to how interactions work in combat as well as the order of party members, where some insist on being up front and others in the back, and some can even get jealous when hitting on opponents, all affecting stat boosts and penalties and whatnot. There’s also encounters where the opponent is enraged and undateable, so must be defeated in combat.
Where this game ends up falling apart, however, is the actual dating mechanics. It’s really just trial and error, but the trials spaced out just enough to be annoying when having to redo a choice either for a recruitment or boss fight, and somehow after a point I kept picking the wrong answer 2 out of 3 attempts, and there’s usually only 3 choices. That’s either just terrible luck or a bad implementation of “assumed dialogue options” as seen in many RPGs and interactive movies and similar. This also means potentially having to reload and skip a bunch of dialogue if things have gone horribly wrong in the latest attempt to where the party is pretty much all dead, which is why I didn’t bother finishing this one. I feel like they tried a bit too much to be like Undertale or Deltarune with opponent and party interactions and missed how those games make it work.
There’s also visiting an inn through the occasional healing pool in a dungeon, where a “sleepover” can occur, and that boils down to more trial and error with random choices where picking a topic has it awkwardly shoved into a generic sentence, as if someone was playing a poor facsimile of the latest Tomodachi Life, to try to level up the party members by making the “right” choices. From what I can tell that’s the only way to level them up, whatever that actually affects, which is concerning given each attempt still takes a consumable item that’s only sometimes found in the dungeons. I’m also not sure you can heal anyone else but the player character outside of the healing pools, because there’s some potions I found on occasion but they seemed specific to the player character. After all this, the one thing I can praise the game for is its character designs. Maybe that’d fare better in something leaning more toward a dating simulator first instead of a basic prototype of one added to a dungeon crawler, or just some kinda visual novel deal. Or if certain talented artists get an interest in this game’s designs even.
Hirobot: Clean & Restore
This last demo here (of the initial bunch) of course runs on Unity like most of the others, and like a previous one goes back to pressure washing. It also is in third person, but this one’s in 3D and over the shoulder like a usual third-person shooter. I still feel like PowerWash Simulator nailed the feel best being in first-person, as this one more just felt a bit dull, with no real connecting story or hook, and that “dull” feeling could also apply to the “thing cleaned” sound comparatively. The controls are also slightly off, while aiming and rotating the spray angle work fine, aside from not being able to aim very far upward, there’s also a jetpack activated by double-tapping the jump button, though the default keyboard configuration for descending threw me off, being mapped to Alt instead of Ctrl like I’d expect for the usual “crouch” action. There’s also a lack of a “free aim” mode which is how I’d handle a number of tasks in the aforementioned simulator game. Mainly this one’s not quite there in a number of ways. I guess one particular game about pressure washing is a tough act to follow from anyone other than who made the first.
Finally, here’s two bonus demos that I found after this whole demo festival thing while I was browsing the now-ongoing Steam sale. They’re also both Unity, and I played both of these on my daily driver Linux machine since I didn’t feel like booting up the big Windows gaming PC for a quick check through things I was considering. This Proton thing is pretty neat, though I figure made a bit easier to run since they both run on a common enough engine.
Erenshor
Here’s a game I’ve heard about which is an MMO simulator, as in it looks and acts just like a typical and classic low-poly MMO of the fantasy variety, with the twist that it’s all singleplayer and all the other “players” are just NPCs with certain personalities and scripts attached. They emphasize that no “AI” chatbots are involved, it’s just classic state machine logic and whatnot, all local. It’s a pretty neat idea, being able to make an MMO that gets rid of the second M and the O so it’s just massive. However I haven’t really been a fan of how a usual MMO handles in combat and general questing and inventory management and so on, so as cool as this concept is, it doesn’t really seem like it’s for me. But it does have a decently-sized-looking demo.
Paradise Marsh
This is some kind of creature collecting thing tied in with poetry and constellations. It mainly involves wandering around a procedurally generated map of sorts and finding creatures hanging around depending on the time of day and the type of environment. Mainly there were frogs during the day and bugs at night that I saw. To put the stars back in the sky, there’s going around to catch the creatures, then going to a pillar at night to turn them back into stars. Also there’s random bottles with poems in them, and I also found an owl who recited something. Plus I was finding random cans on the ground, apparently those just boost movement which makes it a bit harder to catch things. I was picking them up thinking they were empty trash.
This was a short demo that lasted just one day cycle, not quite enough time to finish any constellations because it was around 5-10 minutes while figuring out how stuff worked, but neat enough I suppose. I also appreciate when any game going for this not-quite-low-poly flat-shaded kinda style has an optional screen pixel filter so I can turn it off and see the underlying cute style more clearly, like my time with Lil Gator Game and A Short Hike.
So that’s all I got to this time around, despite this mainly happening during a very busy week for me once again. Actually kind of a lot, but some demos were shorter and others I didn’t spend long on as it was. Following up after the demo festival, there’s the usual top 50 list. Out of that, I only played two of the demos on that list: art of rally and Casualties: Unknown, both in the top 11 as well. I mention top 11 instead of top 10 because the 10th one is the billionth or so Nexon MMO, which also is the first on that top 50 list to have one of those “AI disclosure” sections attached.
I did also search through that list and found 6 demos, including that Nexon MMO, with one of those disclosure sections mentioned for various things, ranging from translations to “assistance” to “placeholder” assets to much more intentional than just “placeholder”. Also there was another demo on that list which had recently gotten some mention a while ago for apparently also using “placeholders” but didn’t list the disclosure thing, so I guess we’ll count that as 7-ish, whether they may or may not have changed that later. Long story short, I’ve generally been keeping away from games that have been using this tech in ways I’m not really a fan of, largely in the asset departments, including making their whole game look “lazy” just by generating the cover and thumbnail and such, even if none of that is in the game itself. Upscalers are a different thing I guess, as long as they don’t go too far and start “yassifying” Resident Evil characters. Though I still like to see how well I can run things without first.
Anyway, there’s now a Steam sale going on as I mentioned, and I figure it’s easier to spend the alleged equivalent of $80 USD on many cheaper games, rather than one big quadruple or even quintuple A game that might not even be complete at that price point and also completely half-ass a boxed release with just a code in a box, supposedly due to “potential leaks” according to some folks, despite allowing a preload a week in advance. If they’re not putting a disc in the box, I’d think a “dick in the box” would somehow be more preferable. Even a “game key disc” if nothing else, as I’m going to call them now, thanks to Nintendo’s name for a similar concept but not on a disc, but I’d still prefer something that would work offline for the worst case scenarios. Mainly they just needed to appease big chain retailers with physical shelf space with the lowest effort.
The point is I only planned to screw around with GTA VI if I could borrow it from a library essentially, and this lack of physical media, which I’m sure they’ll just “forget” to make even a slightly more physical release later in counter to the theories that it really is just to prevent any more leaks, also raises concern for the eventual PS5 version of Forza Horizon 6 that I also plan to borrow from somewhere. I’m convinced that will be at most a “game key disc” as is normal at Microsoft, but could be worse. Everything’s going wrong over at Microsoft so I don’t exactly have a lot of hope here. More reason to bet on Linux I guess. Even if the extended support for Windows 10 just got more extended. Mainly just means I can hopefully put things off with the big gaming PC until I can figure out a plan and source whatever parts within reasonable prices once I know what I’m after. Namely considering a mid-to-high-ish end AMD graphics card since those seem to play better with Linux than Nvidia, even though I’ve got this old GTX 750 Ti in my daily driver and I can run some relatively basic or old enough games graphics-wise on that quite well with its Linux install.