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I talked about this a few pages back but New Heights: Realistic Climbing and Bouldering has a demo now, and I'm slightly obsessed with it. If you're into weird simulations give it a try.
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Jun 20, 2023 12:10
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Has anyone tried the Cyber Knights demo? My gaming time is a bit constrained to test it out, but given how much I enjoyed Star Traders: Frontiers, I am looking forward to people's impressions.
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Jun 20, 2023 12:13
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Anyone check out the demo for Back to the Dawn? It's a prison break RPG featuring anthropomorphic animals. Sounds weird but the trailer is super slick and I like the "2D-3D" pixel art style. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8wCS8yJSrM&ab_channel=SpiralUpGames
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Jun 20, 2023 13:43
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GhostDog posted:I talked about this a few pages back but New Heights: Realistic Climbing and Bouldering has a demo now, and I'm slightly obsessed with it. If you're into weird simulations give it a try. what is up with the three different climbing games coming out so close to one another
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Jun 20, 2023 15:36
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Three? New Heights, Jusant, what's the third? And climbing as a sport/hobby has exploded in popularity the last ~10 years, maybe in some part due to it getting added to the last Olympic games.
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Jun 20, 2023 15:47
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Valve loving up the back button right before Next Fest is a real pisser, huh
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Jun 20, 2023 15:52
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Pigbuster posted:Valve loving up the back button right before Next Fest is a real pisser, huh
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Jun 20, 2023 16:03
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Volte posted:It's not the Back Fest 
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Jun 20, 2023 16:04
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Pigbuster posted:what is up with the three different climbing games coming out so close to one another Both are apparently by Polish developers, so maybe some cross-pollination going on.
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Jun 20, 2023 17:01
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More like cross-poleination. That being said, the first one is actually looking pretty good?
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Jun 20, 2023 17:02
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Wow, night time maps in Battlebit suck rear end.
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Jun 20, 2023 18:09
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Sab669 posted:Wow, night time maps in Battlebit suck rear end. One of my first levels was the Metro level and the lighting there certainly didn't do it any justice Fullbright Roblox battlefield sure is... an aesthetic Still a good game though
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Jun 20, 2023 18:18
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GhostDog posted:I talked about this a few pages back but New Heights: Realistic Climbing and Bouldering has a demo now, and I'm slightly obsessed with it. If you're into weird simulations give it a try. I just tried the demo and gotta agree, this is weirdly captivating. It's a fun mix between chill, deliberate preparation and sudden panicked adjustments.
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Jun 20, 2023 18:40
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Just like climbing irl
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Jun 20, 2023 18:49
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Sab669 posted:Three? New Heights, Jusant, what's the third?
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Jun 20, 2023 19:07
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In other news, if you have, like, 300 hours to fill and about 35 bucks you can head on over to GOG.com and get the whole saga of our boy Kiryu.
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Jun 20, 2023 19:24
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My dumb, boring thoughts on some random demos bought on by streaming them to some friends while drinking. Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition: If you didn't like the original ROTT from 1994, this will not, under any circumstances, change your mind. If you did, this is the best version. The source port included is the best one ever made with all the technical issues with the incredibly scuffed source code fixed, there's some additional audiovisual variety in the form of alternate enemy skins exhumed from the cutting room floor, and the one new level in the demo has a pretty intuitive, enjoyable flow. Well worth it if you're that kind of freak. El Paso, Elsewhere: I really want to like this - the story seems cool, the voice acting feels reasonably good and sincere for something literally being done by the designer, and the concept of "literally just indie Max Payne but with werewolves and poo poo" rules and is something I want more of, but... I dunno if it was because I was streaming in OBS or whatever, but it ran like absolute poo poo despite having N64-level graphics. Granted, my PC's like five years old, but also granted: it can run Doom Eternal (and several other Unity-based demos in this fest like Fortune's Run) on high settings flawlessly. I'll have to give it another spin offline and see how it turns out. Echo Point Nova: I loved Shattered Steel, and this is pretty clearly based on the core engine for that with the voxel destruction poo poo, but as an open-world-ish game on Zelda-esque sky-islands. Moving around is a blast once you get your abilities unlocked, but there's still a lot of rough edges, especially with the bullet time mechanic (which I once activated while dead, and needed to wait to recharge once I respawned). Very interested, but might have some serious rough edges. Vampire Hunters: Incredibly boring. Tries to be Vampire Survivors But As An FPS, but a lot of the fun of Vampire Survivors was exploring the maps to find powerups and weird unlocks. Every map in this is basically just a endless corridor with all the level design finesse of Starfox on the SNES, and the gunplay isn't nearly fun enough to cover for it. ARKOS 2: Very simple design wise, but I dug the voxel gimmick. Simple, but effective, and the gimmick they introduced at the very end of the last demo level was fun to mess around with. Might be cool? Worth poking at for about ten minutes of fun, at any rate. Pizza Possum: Simple, kinda fun, but also kind of lame. Art is charming with the wobbly physics arms, but the gameplay feels kinda meh and the audio feels very stock-asset-store. I really dig retro-arcade-style games on Steam like Annalynn and Donut Dodo, so the simple nature of the gameplay wasn't the issue for me. It was just kinda meh. Odinfall: Very very similar to a free prototype game the developers have previously put out, Gaunt Valkyr. Character sprites are more complex and there's more characters, but hey, there's a free base to play with for now. Compare and contrast?
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Jun 20, 2023 20:37
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Balatro: Poker + Roguelike +  I mean I dig it but I legit felt dizzy in ways that only some VR games have made me felt.
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Jun 20, 2023 23:00
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I like how with the new UI, if you have Steam itself open and your Friends list, if you happen to mouse over the STORE / LIBRARY / COMMUNITY / [USER NAME] menus across the top of Steam, it'll minimize your Friends list and focus the main Steam window 
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Jun 20, 2023 23:03
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Playing Alien: Dark Descent, which is a very confusing sequel in the Dark Descent series, it's pretty good but also very feast or famine in combat. It's primarily a stealth game but for forced combat sections it gets tricky because if you have been playing correctly up until then you haven't been practicing the combat so you can get smashed.
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Jun 20, 2023 23:20
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Sab669 posted:I like how with the new UI, if you have Steam itself open and your Friends list, if you happen to mouse over the STORE / LIBRARY / COMMUNITY / [USER NAME] menus across the top of Steam, it'll minimize your Friends list and focus the main Steam window Well do you want a fancy mouse over menu, or do you want your friends list on top? Can't have both, bucko
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Jun 20, 2023 23:33
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New Steam UI seems weird and unresponsive. Like, the buttons are all in the same places but they don't react like I'm used to them reacting.
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Jun 20, 2023 23:39
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It's like two steps forward, one and a half steps back (we'll get the rest of the back button later)
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Jun 20, 2023 23:40
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Is the new UI weirdly blurry for anyone else? It's almost like it's decided to run at the wrong resolution or something.
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Jun 20, 2023 23:52
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The back button often suddenly stops working for me as well edit: just as balataro or whatever stars making waves Tactical Nexus has a poker hand update https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1141290/view/6055700197115652621?l=english fez_machine fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Jun 20, 2023 |
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Jun 20, 2023 23:55
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Space Butler posted:Is the new UI weirdly blurry for anyone else? It's almost like it's decided to run at the wrong resolution or something. That can happen if you change your desktop resolution or connect a new monitor. Restarting Steam should fix it, if it’s something like that.
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Jun 21, 2023 00:06
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Someone was asking about the Cyber Knights: Flashpoint demo earlier. I finally got around to downloading it (thanks for the heads-up that it exists!) and it starts you on a job with some pre-made characters. Customizing your Knight is locked in the demo apart from name and background. One of the options for the background is ex-Fenian Brotherhood, so they haven't forgotten the most important part of the Cyber Knights world. The combat is turn-based with individual initiative and action points - seems to be 6 per character, some actions cost 1, attacking costs 2 with your crew's weapons. Trese Brothers went from "unknown" to "I'm very interested in whatever game they make next" after I played Templar: Battleforce and Star Traders: Frontiers. Those bros make interesting games and continue supporting and patching them for a long time. Templar: Battleforce got an update a year or two ago (I think, time's been weird the last few years), and that game is probably a decade old now. And ST:F still gets updates every couple of weeks, it seems like, adding new stuff and fixing issues that have come up since the last patch where they added new stuff.
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Jun 21, 2023 00:29
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More demo impressions! El Paso Elsewhere: Indie Max Payne with N64 graphics. Overall pretty cool and fun enough that I'm going to keep my eye on it, but it did have a lot of small issues that kind of bothered me: I didn't like how bullets and bullet trails weren't rendered which kills the allure of slow-mo, I didn't like how all of the enemies were boring melee units with attack animations so janky fast they may as well be doing contact damage like a NES goomba, I didn't like the difficulty of kill confirmation since the game gives you mixed signals with yellow and red over your crosshair for things besides enemy death (I think?), and so on. The Devil Within Satgat: A 2D souls-like with a focus on fancy DMC-esque sword play and parries and dodges and all that resource management stuff. Bit of a mixed bag: it looks incredibly polished in a lot of respects and I think the combat could be great, but the actual gameplay felt really stiff and awkward. Reminded me a lot of Jedi Fallen Order: looks great and shows promise, but feels jank. Also had a script which felt badly translated to english. I might keep my eye on it, but I'm not that hopeful that the issues like I experienced can be ironed out as much as I want them to be. Bad Boro: A top-down souls-like beat-em-up in a contemporary urban setting. While it looks very stylish, the combat felt terrible to me with awkward/non-existent hit-stun, confusing hitboxes and dodges, boring enemies, lifeless world, etc. Avoid. Echoes of the Living: An indie Resident Evil clone that's a combination of REmake1 visuals with old-school RE2 double campaign and urban setting. It's an odd mixed bag: the rendered backgrounds were very impressive and the basic gameplay is there so it shows promise, but the UI/UX, characters/animations, controls and back-and-forth key hunt gameplay were ugly and awkward. Maybe they're leaving some of the UI/UX for last and can get it fixed up for full release, but I'm not holding my breath. Battle Shapers: FPS action roguelike akin to games like RoboQuest or Gunfire Reborn. Actually impressed with this one and had a good bit more fun with the combat than I thought I would which was a cross between Overwatch and Doom Eternal: dashing about, peppering robos with bullets and my overwatch-esque abilities and then finishing them off with a satisfying takedown Doomfist-punch was cool. Levels seemed a little interesting in that they might be themed around a Megaman-esque boss? I still don't think it quite reaches the highs of other roguelike FPSs like Deadlink and the like, but it was nice enough that I'm keeping my eye on it. Vampire Hunters: Vampire Survivors but as an FPS. Shows promise with an interesting twist and design, but feels very bad and boring to play. Feels like the game was just created for the sole purpose of a joke: one of those game jam experiments based of making fun of the way how if you were to realistically depict a Survivors character, they'd be some sort of crazy tentacled monster with a million arms for a million different weapons all glued together that they're somehow shooting all at once. Maybe play it once for a chuckle, and then move on. Or, just look at this picture, and you get the gist of the entire premise:   ROBOBEAT: A BPM/Hellsinger clone. Didn't quite grab me as strongly as BPM or Hellsinger did, so I'm a bit meh on it. It's not bad, and it has an interesting aesthetic to it, but I didn't feel like the combat viscerally satisfied me as much. One of the weird things about the game is that the music isn't level based: your character has a cassette player they load with music that you can choose at any time. I guess it's nice to have the freedom of choice, but I dunno if I like it (and I don't know if it extends to custom tracks). Maybe I'll keep an eye on it, but I dunno. The Kins posted:El Paso, Elsewhere: I really want to like this - the story seems cool, the voice acting feels reasonably good and sincere for something literally being done by the designer, and the concept of "literally just indie Max Payne but with werewolves and poo poo" rules and is something I want more of, but... I dunno if it was because I was streaming in OBS or whatever, but it ran like absolute poo poo despite having N64-level graphics. Granted, my PC's like five years old, but also granted: it can run Doom Eternal (and several other Unity-based demos in this fest like Fortune's Run) on high settings flawlessly. I'll have to give it another spin offline and see how it turns out. I didn't have any performance issues when I played it, so yeah, dunno what was causing you issues, unfortunately. Thanks for the reviews for the other demos! FutureCop fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Jun 21, 2023 |
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Jun 21, 2023 00:59
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finished Nightmare Reaper, which took less time than I was expecting given how many stages it has (around eighty). twenty hours or so for the first run it was enjoyable making things go splat but I suspect your fun with it is highly dependent on whether you have a really busted gun to fall back on. around 3/4’s in I got an infinite-ammo staff with +2 “bullets” per shot and an explosive modifier and that was pretty much it for the difficulty
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Jun 21, 2023 01:07
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I played some demos but most needed some more time to bake, but these two were pretty neat: En Garde!  https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/256952039/movie480_vp9.webm?t=1686416495 https://store.steampowered.com/app/1654660/En_Garde/ Already been mentioned, but this swashbuckler is very neat, the gameplay of fighting, moving around, parrying, etc, works well, and more importantly it's fun, I am definitely keeping this on the wishlist for later. Gaucho and the Grassland  https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/256945012/movie480_vp9.webm?t=1683139134 https://store.steampowered.com/app/1670830/Gaucho_and_the_Grassland/ Super super cute life sim, a gathering and crafting game, you lasso bulls and herd cows, and build yourself a cattle ranch, and you have a dog buddy that digs stuff up for you. I think this one has great potential. There's been lots of life sims lately that are too close to the farming Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons/Stardew Valley mold without differentiating themselves enough imo, but this game shares that kinda cozy feel and charm and I hope it turns out well. PlushCow fucked around with this message at 05:03 on Jun 21, 2023 |
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Jun 21, 2023 04:58
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I bought Company of Heroes 3 and it was a not very good game, which is a shame, because I played the hell out of CoH2. Can someone recommend me a good WW2 RTS that isn't staring at a map or have 10 hours of tutorials?
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Jun 21, 2023 05:02
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PlushCow posted:I played some demos but most needed some more time to bake, but these two were pretty neat: Downloading that now. There are not enough swashbuckling games.
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Jun 21, 2023 05:07
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The Atomic Man-Boy posted:I bought Company of Heroes 3 and it was a not very good game, which is a shame, because I played the hell out of CoH2. Can someone recommend me a good WW2 RTS that isn't staring at a map or have 10 hours of tutorials? If you're open to older games, Men of War: Assault Squad II is really good. https://store.steampowered.com/app/244450/Men_of_War_Assault_Squad_2/
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Jun 21, 2023 05:07
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I only played the tutorials and part of the first level of El Paso and my problem was that everything seemed way too constrained to get some good shootdodges in? Not helped by the incredibly low ceilings, it just felt claustrophobic. Idk, I'll play more and see then.
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Jun 21, 2023 06:32
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Bloody Hedgehog posted:If you're open to older games, Men of War: Assault Squad II is really good. Alternatively, Gates of Hell https://store.steampowered.com/app/400750/Call_to_Arms__Gates_of_Hell_Ostfront/ Which is a standalone game by a different mod team, but due to weird publishing agreement ended up having to sell the game under Call to Arms' license. It has a newer engine and QoL features and somewhat more varied scenario designs, and a sort of conquest campaign mode.
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Jun 21, 2023 06:53
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Was busy with trying out Boneraiser Minions tonight, so I only got one demo in, though I have a ton saved up to play... Boomerang Jack's aesthetic design screams "stupid, forgettable, budget-designed game you played online in the early 2000s" and the game's dialogue and low effort intro sequence certainly don't help matters. But it's surprisingly fun? I certainly wasn't expecting the game to turn out to be a spectacle fighter halfway through, but there it was - right down to the triple S rankings in big fights, the ability to Matrix slowmo-kick grog bottles back into pirates' faces if you time it right, a healing knockback shockwave, and button prompts for finishers on mid-sized enemies and the demo boss. Joker Rating: Holographic - Man, I'm conflicted about Boomerang Jack. I expected it to suck, but it turned out to be good enough that I can't just dismiss it out of hand. There's still a lot of things that are obviously bad or rough around the edges though. I'm wishlisting it just to see where it goes. Jossar fucked around with this message at 07:13 on Jun 21, 2023 |
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Jun 21, 2023 07:09
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Have Valve/Steam commented at all on all of the "Prologue" games showing up on the front page lately under New & Trending? They are only ever short demos for games, and it's quite irritating seeing them flood the front page. It seems to me like developers are exploiting the fact that they are able to release demos as individual games in order to get seen on the front page, even though there is a system already in place specifically for demos. Because they've been listed by the devs as free games, they also clutter up the "Free to play" system. I like the idea of demos and would like to see more of them, but they should really have their own section because it's getting a little out of hand. I would have thought Valve would have stepped in by now or at least would have commented on it. It would be easy enough to create a new tab for "Popular Demos" to interact with the existing system for demos, that way everyone would get what they want. Edit: Typos \/\/\/\/\/ If true, that's way worse. Very much exploitative behavior. Mr Scumbag fucked around with this message at 10:16 on Jun 21, 2023 |
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Jun 21, 2023 09:41
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Mr Scumbag posted:Have Valve/Steam commented at all on all of the "Prologue" games showing up on the front page lately under New & Trending? Many of them are for games that were already released, and flopped. Adding a "Prologue" demo is a desperate last ditch attempt to get the game name back on the front page and garner a few more sales for the full version.
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Jun 21, 2023 10:05
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Bloody Hedgehog posted:Many of them are for games that were already released, and flopped. Adding a "Prologue" demo is a desperate last ditch attempt to get the game name back on the front page and garner a few more sales for the full version. Name five. Most of the prologues I've seen have genuinely been released way before the actual release of the main game.
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Jun 21, 2023 10:09
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It's definitely a case with a lot of Vampire Survivors clones that they release a free Prologue or Prelude before they go into early access. A really early demo in the hopes of getting enough people invested in your product, because you're not going to stand out in this space without word of mouth.
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