Demonstrable
I love demo season. Steam Next Fest feels like the closest we get to popping in a fresh demo disc in the modern era, only we get to pick them ala carte! How nice. The only potential downside is just how many of these come out and are quickly taken down, leaving folks unable to try games they may have been interested in. Fear not! Here are the 10 games* I tried from the most recent Fest, some feedback on them, and whether or not I personally wishlisted them afterwards.
Some demos try to lure you in with the promise of a strong story, unique presentation, or an innovative mechanical hook. JDM doesn’t do any of that. It just drives, and it drives very well.
The two cars available in the demo are heavy, even the light one. If you’re like me and accustomed to lighter, less realistic racing, this game is going to kick your ass for a bit. Figuring out how not to throw your tail out sideways when you’re trying to take a corner eventually gives way to some truly killer drifting and an excellent sense of speed, which is elevated by the sheer amount of -stuff- you zip past in the Japanese countryside.
The customization potential here is bonkers. Every damn part of your car, aesthetically and mechanically, can be tweaked with noticeable effect on performance. If the final product delivers on giving players enough levers to pull to truly make their car their own, I suspect this could be a sleeper hit for racing fans on a level few indies can match. Lots of potential, I hope it crosses the finish line intact.
Wishlist? Sure, why not! It’s not my usual racing preference but it’s so well made.
Holy shit. Ok, deep breaths.
I’m a bit too young for RoboCop nostalgia. I’ve seen the movie because I love me some Verhoeven, but none of the sequels or spinoffs. This game’s target audience likely does not include me. So why was this one of the best first impressions I’ve gotten from a game in recent memory?
After playing so many modern movement shooters, RoboCop almost feels like you’re playing a arcade rail shooter. You plod forward, spot your targets, take them out in order of threat, and accept that you’re just going to eat bullets because you’re made of titanium and justice. You don’t take cover or dodge, you just shoot better than the other guy. The action in this game is absolutely nuts despite the lack of agility: breach a wall to kill at least one guy, loudly waddle up to a punk, grab him by the collar, throw him through a window at 80MPH, turn 90 degrees and shoot a red canister to obliterate his friends in a shower of sparks, stomp out while chewing one of their batteries to heal your bullet wounds. Every combat arena gives you the tools and environment to create an action movie scene people would immediately upload to YouTube.
The combat alone impressed me, but what truly won me over was everything else. Surprisingly strong writing with sympathetic characters just trying to get by in Detroit. A police department that is full of losers who with rare exception don’t care about Murphy’s blatantly deteriorating mental state. Sidequests that emerge organically, interrupting your case as people who genuinely need help struggle just across the street. For a game where you play as a guy who’s more cy than borg, it’s a more convincingly human element than most games achieve. That compels me to the point where I opted to not even fully complete the multiple levels in the surprisingly generous demo so as not to spoil myself. I cannot wait to see what else this game has in store.
Wishlist? You had best believe I’ll be playing this. 100 times yes.
I’ve been keeping an eye on Aggro Crab since the excellent Going Under. When I heard that they were working on a hermit crab soulslike I was tremendously excited, not just for the premise, but particularly to see how they’d take another genre on. Now I’ve tried it, and…eh?
In a nutshell: great platformer-esque movement, good presentation, awful combat. Soulslikes are entirely built around challenging combat, arguably even moreso than exploration, and the combat here just feels janky. Your moveset is extremely limited, with short swipes and a stab on an un-modifiable weapon. It is helped by the shell you currently have equipped giving you another move but those moves are, at least in the demo, largely bad and your shell will often be swapped or broken. Combine that with enemies that give you very little for tells with some particularly poor audio feedback, and what’s here feels far more unfinished than the visuals would have you believe. I want to believe, but my excitement is significantly dampened after having actually played the thing.
Wishlist? I wouldn’t judge you for doing so but I will likely wait and see.
Horror game demos are challenging to get right. They need to show you how they build terror and tension, what their action sections if any look like, and present a compelling world to get hunted in without ever giving too much away. Pine Harbor only succeeds at the second one of those and even that kind of sucks. I killed the same humanoid monster over and over, wandered through some halls, and found everything else so uninteresting that I quit after about 10 minutes. Survival horror is more than just having to count ammo and arrange items in a grid.
Wishlist? Nah. You could do so much better.
On the other side of the horror coin here’s the obligatory “you can only hide” entry. Except you will never hide in this demo, because Hollow Cocoon forgot to actually show off that part of the game.
I’m more optimistic here than I am for Pine Harbor. HC is gorgeous, full stop. This empty rural Japanese village looks lovely, with lots of excellent use of light and shadow. There’s a compelling conceit here involving a deceased manipulative grandmother with an affinity for silkworms, a family hurt by her previous actions, and the fallout of her death as her remaining family picks up the pieces. You explore what’s left of the town she refused to leave, her home, items that tie to your family’s past, and the foundation is set for what could be excellent.
The thing is, the game cuts before we get any actual gameplay beyond walking and clicking. Some of the furniture even has you automatically duck into it to hide despite the complete lack of any threat. The introduction of a humanoid monster is the conclusion of the demo. Not only is showing the monster with zero ambiguity a bit of a bold choice for a game of this tone, but to do so and then cut to “please wishlist”? It erodes my confidence in this thing because I get the impression the devs would prefer I give them money before seeing how their game actually works. Will this be good? I don’t know, they wouldn’t let me find out.
Wishlist? I mean you can, but it’s a gamble.
Deep Rock Galactic fucking rules. Its explosive success and long term support has been wonderful to see and participate in, with increasingly more spinoffs releasing and in various stages of development. This one is being worked on by another studio with Ghost Ship’s blessing, but after having played it I’m not sure I understand how they got that.
Vampire Survivors-likes are in their awkward teenage phase. Some have already notably improved the genre (Brotato in particular warants mention) but heaps have just been derivative or worse, boring. DRG:S is both. The weapons are painfully dull, the upgrades are almost nothing but numeric increases, the enemies don’t do anything remotely as interesting as they do in DRG, and most painfully the spectacle offered in other similar games is completely absent here. You just trudge around, chip through rock, and hope your shitty bullet patterns get the job done. This game threatened to put me to sleep and it was only like 5 PM on a Sunday. This is the least interesting way they could have adapted DRG.
Wishlist? I actually removed it from mine post-demo. What a shame.
When I saw Headbangers announced a while back I wrote it off immediately. Rhythm minigame pigeon battle royale? Sure. Whatever. I gave its demo/beta a shot more as a bit than anything else and didn’t expect to like it. The common theme for all the games I’m featuring here is that I’m very bad at predictions.
Headbangers is basically a cross between Rhythm Heaven and WarioWare that plays like crack cocaine. If you’re remotely a fan of rhythm games there will be some in here that hit home for you, and the minigames themselves are more creative than anything Fall Guys ever managed. Battle Box, That 70’s Race, and Garden Party are particular standouts. This thing is as creative as it is funny; I even found myself coming around on the incredibly phallic pigeons!
My concern with recommending this is that I suspect it will struggle to hold an audience. This thing is niche within niche. I mean it’s for me, I like it, but a $20 sticker price combined with the gameplay and presentation being so bizarre has me doubting enough folks will take the plunge to keep it going. A major part of my motivation to play this on release is my fear that it won’t be running for long. I hope my poor prediction track record holds strong.
Wishlist? Brother I preordered the pigeon game. (EDIT: Right before this went up Headbangers was announced for Game Pass! Thanks Steam Refunds, that money is going to my code for RoboCop now.)
This game has intense Dreamcast energy. Frantic both visually and mechanically, color that borders on overwhelming, a pounding soundtrack, and a preemptive parry/denial concept that keeps the fights tense as you Sonic 3D Blast your way around the combat arena and spew bullets. The demo is tiny and there’s not a lot else to talk about here that you can’t see for yourself, but what’s there plays great and shows serious promise. See, not every short entry is negative!
Wishlist? Yes. Simple as.
It’s generally not a bad sign when your protag is a suited anime fellow with a goofy pose and funny-shaped nose. Lupin, Akagi, what have you. This particular game gives you one of those guys with some Spike Spiegel-ass moves and tailoring. How could you go wrong?
AA is a surprisingly solid action platformer that would feel at home on the Genesis, but it’s not all rosy. While the visuals are good and the movement is fluid, it desperately needs punchier combat sound/visual effects and an edit pass on the script. Right now the dialogue is riddled with typos and awkward phrasing to the point where its distracting, because this is surprisingly chatty for an action platformer. You could argue that makes it all the more Genesis-authentic but still I’d prefer it not be quite so jank. All that said, its strong mechanical foundations make for something I’m happy to keep an eye on.
Wishlist? Yes, but I’ll be giving it a close look before considering an actual purchase.
Brainwash Gang knows style. They also know violence, with Friends VS Friends being a particular multiplayer standout this year despite some unfortunate non-gameplay decisions. How do they handle a far more seriously-toned single player adventure? Based on the demo for Laika, poorly. Almost incredibly so.
On the surface it seems fine. You have Excitebike-esque controls here, wheelie-ing and doing flips with a dedicated gas pedal instead of the stick, leaving that to control your rotation. This, in theory, would make a good control scheme driving game. But Laika quickly reveals that it has much grander ambitions than simply doing sweet jumps, and it all begins to unravel about as fast.
This game also has gunplay aimed with the right stick. Backflips reload your whole two bullets, and frontflips restore your single use of your parry. This is awkward and initially overwhelming, but you eventually get your head around it well enough. Fights are easy, even, thanks to copious auto-aim and on demand slow-mo. The issues crop up when Laika decides to get fancy, because every stylistic choice the game makes serves to make actually playing the thing miserable.
Why are stylish motion blurs and blood trails placed on top of zoomed out tiny sprites, obscuring them when their orientation matters immensely in a combat system where you have 1 hit point? Why do materials need to be picked up individually when shot open from a distance in a game where you are constantly rolling and sliding? Why does the camera often struggle to keep up with your speed, reducing your ability to see in front of you? Why does the spin seem to have momentum in a game that requires you to consistently position your bike between you and bullets to block?
The king of the bad choices here is how it refuses to adjust gameplay when you’re in the exploration sections that don’t have combat. There is no reason I should have to drive off to do a backflip just to reload my gun when I’m trying to gather resources that I can only acquire by shooting them loose. Without enemies to present a challenge it only serves to wastes your time. I cannot adequately express how frustrating it is to do a simple puzzle, realize it requires three shots, and have to leave a clearly obvious solution for a bit because I need to go find a bump in the road to do a flip on in order to finish it. When doing stunts serves the function of a menial task, that only turns doing stunts into menial tasks. Huge disappointment here, I can only hope it’s improved before release.
Wishlist? No, and you have no idea how sad I am to say that.
* I technically also played Lethal Company during the Fest, but it was borderline incomprehensible and the multiplayer elements were so wonky that I found it impossible to gauge. Maybe it’ll be good???
Reviews as Fair as a Die Roll 