Just gonna dump the hot takes into this post as I go.
At some point it was bound to happen, really bad The Stanley Parable imitators showing up. The reverse psychology won't work on me for this one.
Incredibly, the second demo I played is another Stanley-style comedy walking simulator, and it's also bad. Though not quite as bad as Do Not Buy This Game.
Point-and-click Americana set in 1968 ... written and made in Poland. Looks good, sounds better (nice music and good voice acting) and feels good to play (mouse & keyboard only at this time). Not too sure if the story is something to be excited about, there just isn't quite enough of it in the demo. Still, followed / wishlisted.
A visual novel / point-and-click? About a giraffe detective and his hippopotamus assistant?? Fully voice acted???
I'M THERE!!!!1
Seriously, having played
and loved Aviary Attorney just a couple months ago, this is more than welcome and can't release soon enough. The demo looks perfectly solid already.
A third person action-adventure (interestingly without melee combat, apparently) adaptation of Sámi folklore. The title is a Sámi word and roughly translates to midwinter, i.e. the darkest part of the year. Somewhat unfortunately, to the ear accustomed to English, it also sounds a bit like some unpleasant disease.
This is one of those demos that clearly never were meant to be released to the public and is just an early build - there is controller support (the game outright tells you that controller input is the preferred way to play it), but not in the settings screen that the game launches into, and the controller support fights with the standard Steam controller scheme that is applied to the demo by default, and it doesn't have an option to invert the Y-axis, and you have to force V-Sync through third-party tools or your graphics card control panel ...
But: The game already looks and sounds really great, the package is clearly there. Very confident the finished product is gonna be great. Followed / wishlisted.
Pretty basic third-person exploration game with a bit of platforming that seems to be somebody's first stab at making a published game.
Noble Muffins / PlayWay are back with the latest iteration of their eurojanktastic open-world-ish immersive-sim Thief Simulator, where the gap between ambition and execution makes players' eyes water since 2018 - and yet ... give them another five to eight years and these devs might actually iterate this game into something that you could play unironically.
Tries to be a mysterious side-scrolling puzzle platformer similar to the Playdead classics Limbo and and Inside with more of a mystery/sci-fi angle rather than outright horror. But it's bad. Very. Unsalvagable. Don't even download this.
Crappy FPS. Looks bad, performs bad, plays worse. Avoid.
A 2.5D side-scrolling survival adventure game where you control the mother of four little fox cubs and have to manage your own as well as their survival. While doing that, you discover the larger world and scenario through environmental storytelling. Interesting, although the core gameplay seems a little thin. Still followed / wishlisted.
Similarly to Tacoma and The Return of the Obra Dinn, this game seems to be all about watching the interactions of a number of people in a confined space (a two-story house in this case) to first find out what happened, get access to the whole environment, and then (and this is this game's unique selling point) change certain events after the fact to prevent any of the people dying in a house-fire.
This game seems to be determined to push the envelope of this concept, featuring nearly 200 of these cutscenes for the player to watch and nearly 60 events to change. That's quite a matrix to juggle. I kind of doubt that that's actually fun to do. And since the scenario isn't a space station either, I can't for the life of me imagine the story of the people in this house will be that interesting. But, well. Still interesting enough to watch and wait for reviews once the finished thing is out.
A promotional tie-in game for the Canadian YouTube music promotion channel MrSuicideSheep and the associated record label Seeking Blue. It's a pixel-art 2D-platformer with the MrSuicideSheep channel mascot as the main player character. The demo gets barely past the tutorial and stops immediately after picking up a double-jump ability, but the tutorial is very nicely done, elegantly teaching mechanics without having to display any written-out hints, and the controls are nice and tight as well. And, as you might expect for a promo game put out by a music channel / label, music and sound is really nice, too. Apparently the finished product is going to be released for free, so, slam dunk!
A pretty fresh take on the metroidvania genre, adding a time-loop mechanic to the usual platforming, collecting and map-exploration - the player only gets 15 minutes per loop to explore, but retains items and information found and the map from the previous runs. On top of that there's a pretty unique art style and really fast and fluid platforming with some new takes on basic platform mechanics - takes a bit to get used to if you play a lot of platformers and are used to the current control conventions of the genre, but once it clicks it really flows. Definitely getting the full release of this one!
It's A Short Hike, but styled like a classic mascot / cartoon 3D platformer. It's cute. It's tight. It flows. It's REALLY cute. It's comfy. It's a follow. It's a wishlist. It's a must-have. And it's SO CUTE!!!1
This is a mix of a rogue-lite action-adventure and a more heavyweight RPG. You not only get procedurally generated maps and permadeath, but the world-state also doesn't exactly carry over between runs, instead the actions from the previous run are fed into an algorithm that changes the world based on actions taken and decisions made in the run, and the next character then experiences that world. You can also explictly leave stashes of equipment behind for your next run and they will still be there - if stashed in a safe place. Success at the overarching goal isn't guaranteed - if the final mission is taken on and failed, the world-state is no longer maintained and you have to start over completely.
The game also de-automates a lot of the RPG mechanics and instead makes you go through dice-roll systems (with modifiers) often, even for trivial tasks such as opening doors.
In short, it's everything I'm not looking for in a game in one perfect hostile package. But: It looks, sounds and plays quite well. So if this mix of genres and mechanics is your thing, definitely give this a watch.
, but
.
Isometric pixelart action RPG with a "mind-bending science fiction story" - a lot of verbose mumbo-jumbo that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me and certainly failed to motivate me to fully explore even this demo. Notably the dialog system seems to be VERY inspired by Disco Elysium. No voice-acting at all though. Not necessarily bad, but not for me I think.
A side-scrolling puzzle platformer where you apparently play some sort of alien parasitic seed, which can possess little twigs and make them move (?!?). All the textures in the game are made from photograps, so the look is very unique - not necessarily realistic (the levels are quite typical 2D platformer designs), but certainly something I haven't seen before in a game. The platforming is a little slow for my taste, but still: Followed / wishlisted.
Are you like me and have been slightly disappointed with all the first-person-parkour games there are? Including Mirror's Edge? Have you also wished that the gameplay in those could be smoother, faster, and not encumbered by the levels trying to mimic real-life spaces and places? Then this game is for both you and me. Best first-person parkour-platforming I have ever played by a long shot. It's a bit more Sonic-the-Hedgehog rather than Faith Connors - no wall-running, instead you get a dash and a glide. Must-have.
First-person horror game. Very obviously made in Brazil, the English translation at least in the demo is incomplete and quite poor - possibly the Portuguese text is better, but I can't judge. From what I played, the focus seems to be less on the scares, but more on the classic point-and-click puzzles - find thing to open thing to combine thing with a thing to get to another thing, etc, etc. Didn't really grab me. Looks and sounds quite good though.
Looks like a cute 3/DS-era Zelda-like action adventure with a foxy Link, but is actually much more of a souls-like, with a really faithful transposition of Dark Souls combat mechanics to the isometric top-down perspective. The save/heal/respawn-all-enemies mechanic is also there. So is the very sparse (explicit) story-telling and tutorializing. Gets difficult pretty quickly, too.
However, the map is custom-made for the demo to quickly show off all elements of the game, so the difficulty curve may be somewhat flatter / smoother in the actual game - probably not though, this seems like the creation of a Dark Souls superfan, and we know the type. Likes to suffer and make others suffer.
I'll keep an eye on it, but since I'm not a big fan of getting stuck in games and throwing controllers in frustration, this is a 50/50 for me. Souls-like fans who also happen to like the aesthetic of this game should definitely put this on their wishlist.
Took me a bit to figure it out since the demo contains zero tutorial or explanation about what's going on - this is basically a bad remix of Manifold Garden. In Manifold Garden, every room is a four-dimensional torus, which is why everything seems to endlessly stretch in
every direction, but actually just wraps around on itself. On top of that, there is the gravity shifting mechanic, where you press a button and whatever direction you are looking at while you do becomes the new "down". You then go ahead and solve puzzles based on switching things around in this environment, which allow you to move on to other rooms.
In this game, gravity is fixed, and pushing the magic button turns on or off an endless repetition of the map in
just the direction you are looking at. The rest is the same, find switches, solve puzzles, get to the exit. The game does not tell you about any of this, you're left to figure it all out on your own (although I found out after the fact that it's all spelled out on the game's website ...). Unlike Manifold Garden, which has these beautiful levels full of M.C.-Escher-inspired impossible architecture and is actually really fast and smooth to navigate, this game features intentionally obtuse level design and clumsy movement with a slow walking speed and an almost useless jump. This game could be still fun with better designed levels, but if the demo level is any indication, oof. I'll keep watching, but purely based on the demo:
A Celeste-style skill/speedrunning platformer with Ori-styling. Sounds like a winning combo, but the imitation of the Ori aesthetic is too blunt for me (even the music is a soundalike, how shameless are these devs?) and the actual platforming is a little too slow, the difficulty curve is somewhat too steep, and there's little chance of any of this getting improved upon, because the game releases in a week.
The player controls an anthropomorphic robot traversing Portal-esque chambers with buttons, switches, lasers, etc, and two doors, but only one of them can be walked through. Walking through the door will spawn a clone of the player character at the other door and all the steps the player took to get to that point will then be replayed, exactly as the player has taken them until that point - but backwards. The goal is for the clone to get to and walk through the chamber exit.
This enables collaborative puzzle solving - with yourself. Essentially this game is a mechanic taken out of The Talos Principle, with the additional twist of the reverse playback of the recorded actions. I loved those puzzles in The Talos Principle and this game replicates the experience pretty darn well, even if the graphics are a little basic. Looking forward to the finished product.
Point-and-click adventure game, but very light on classic puzzling, more of an exploration / interactive story-telling affair, with branch points that affect the story that switches perspective between two characters and takes place over seven days. The style is quite interesting, seems to be a homage to Richard Linklater's rotoscope-animation movies - not sure if the animation actually was rotoscoped, but if not, the imitation of the effect is very well done. Story is interesting, too. One more for me!
Point and click-adventure very much in the style of
Joe Richardson's work - scenes and characters cut-up and animated from snippets and crops of Renaissance art and scored with classical music - mostly 18th century, as far as I can tell. Other than the offbeat styling, it's a very classic point-and-click. Lots of reading, inventory, get the thing to do the thing, etc. It goes on the list, I'm a sucker for quirky stuff like this.
Couldn't get the controller support in this demo to work at all. Even the demo's menu was hilariously broken. Wishlisted purely so I can recheck the demo at the next Steam Fest.
Pretty funny moment, the game starts with a dream-like cutscene showing one of the protagonists towing a huge sailship through huge ice floes and I immediately thought "Wow, is this about the Franklin expedition" and mere minutes later it turns out: It is! This is another story exploration game with vaguely point-and-click mechanics - the most prominent one unfortunately seems to be pixel hunting objects, which will enable triggers to move the story along. A highlighting feature would be very welcome here. The rest isn't very point-n-clicky, there's a feature to read the inner monologue of characters on a subject, the story takes place in multiple points in time and you can switch between them on the fly - all very interesting stuff. Style is somewhat minimal, but pleasant, and the user interface is very smooth, everything just zips along. On the list it goes!
First person spooky house exploration game. I didn't encounter any jump scares or really anything that could be classified as horror, other than the music. The exploration is fine, but basic. Go here, find a key to that door, find another thing to put on a thing, find a safe combination, etc. Didn't grab me. Runs pretty well, doesn't look like much though.
All the aesthetics of a 3D platformer, but it's actually a rather slow-paced exploration and puzzle-solving game in expansive open plain and cave levels. You enlist the help of some AI NPCs and make them push objects around and raise and lower platforms to get to your goals. Looks and runs pretty great, and is cute. Goes on the list.
for Lil Gator.
