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Harlock posted:Is there a list of what demos are worth checking out during Next Fest / additionally Steam Deck friendly? I haven't really gotten to play a lot of demos for Next Fest, though there's a lot that looks interesting. I guess I'll review the one that I did play. I can list the others that looked interesting to me if people want though.  The Ouroboros King is a new addition to the storied "what if we took chess and made a different game out of it" subgenre. It's more of a puzzler with chess rules that lets you build up a selection of customizable pieces along with a collection of items over the course of a run, with the ability to modify how much the odds are stacked against you. It's probably not winning any game of the year awards, but if you wanted a less RNG version of Pawnbarian or less drawn out version of Chess Evolved Online, it's worth looking into.
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Feb 8, 2023 01:08
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More SteamFest stuff! Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore sure is an MMO. It promises all the things that anything calling itself an MMO promises these days (a "hardcore, old-school" experience, to name the most obvious), but I didn't see anything particularly unique in my time with it. Maybe someone will tell me that I'm wrong and if you get up to Tier 2 classes in the demo it expands into compelling gameplay, but I sure wouldn't hold my breath waiting.  By contrast, Dark Envoy is... well it's not particularly my thing, but there's definitely something interesting going on here. A real time with pause/slow motion RPG, during which half of the characters scribble area denial status effects on the ground and another quarter dart behind tactical cover. Most of the description in Steam describing the combat is really trying to push the battlefield control angle, even mentioning stuff like casting walls of stone to separate enemy supports from DPS. The game seems to be intentionally built around co-op from the ground up such that you could do the whole campaign in online co-op mode, which is interesting, though unless you have a committed buddy you're likely going to end up finishing the game by yourself or with randoms when your schedules desync. It's fairly customizable for varied playstyles - even at the start you get two characters that, except insofar as they need to be a brother/sister pair you can customize from appearance sliders to class choice (four classes, each eventually unlocking four subclasses) to stat bars that vaguely remind me of the Dawn of War 2 setup but are probably from something else. I'm not holding out too much hope that the actual plot/characters are spectacular, even in the demo the brother and sister's dynamic got really old, really quickly. But somebody's going to latch onto this game, I can tell. Jossar fucked around with this message at 05:27 on Feb 8, 2023 |
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Feb 8, 2023 05:23
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A quick one before work. Atomic Picnic is a co-op shooter where you run around the map shooting/avoiding enemies in an attempt to survive for 10 minutes while upgrading your gun via a level up system. I really like the art style on this one, the gunplay and movement mechanics are super fun and fairly intuitive to pick up for anyone who's played one of these kinds of games before, but the lack of any kind of music is really off-putting, it doesn't seem like there's much variety, enemies start to get a little damage sponge-y, and it was really easy to get overwhelmed by the mini-boss that pops up about 1/3 of the way through a run without dodge-spamming. But seeing as the pros are inherent to the game itself and the cons are things that could be easily solved with some more time in the oven and a balance rework, I'm going to give this one a tentative thumbs up for people looking for something in this genre that's short and sweet. Jossar fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Feb 8, 2023 |
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Feb 8, 2023 14:05
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I'm on a boat! (Steam NextFest Edition) Dreadful River is a game where you're tasked with repowering the king's crown, but in order to do so you have to bring both down the river on a boat ride while under attack from enemies. You've got a crew who does auto-attacking which you can upgrade with loot that you find along the river/buy from blacksmiths and you can fire off a decently powerful magic cannon blast yourself. I really like the idea of this one, but it feels like somebody's student design project, half-baked in explanation to players of how things works, and untapped potential in systems that could be added and implementation.  Uncharted Waters Origin is what you would get if you made an Age of Sails game as anime as humanly possible. Split between combat, exploration, and trading all around the world in the early 1500s, Origin feels more like they're trying to reboot the last MMO than a true return to the original games that started the series. If you want to be optimistic, it's because you think that Uncharted Waters Online was a decent game that just happened to be super janky in execution and a redesign of the more annoying systems and a fresh coat of paint is all that's really needed to make it into the game that it really wanted to be. If you're pessimistic, then you think Uncharted Waters Online was/devolved into an incomprehensible cash grab and that this is going to be even more of one based on the fact the game architecture's been reworked to allow mobile users in and there's a bunch of mobile game elements (energy system, cash shop, spamming you with a billion rewards for that sweet dopamine rush) that are creeping in at the edges. Also they still haven't given up on including anti-cheat rootkits which force you to run the game in admin mode just to work. I'm still probably gonna try the full thing once it's out on Steam for real just because it's so very good at its specific weird niche to pass up. (There are more boat games, but I haven't gotten to them yet and honestly they look pretty mediocre. May edit this post with them later.) Jossar fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Feb 9, 2023 |
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Feb 9, 2023 02:58
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Ah dang. I had heard about Origin coming out soonish in global before this all started, so was excited to see it in the demo list, but didn't know that it was already a failure in its home markets. With that on top of the other stuff that'll probably sink it for good. Thanks for the tip on Sailing Era though! Got a look at another boat game or two:  Pirates of Pangea - Land & Sea Survival is a survival game where you build pocket-sized ships in a bottle and deploy them for exploration and treasure hunting while also managing a base home to your standard survival stuff (farming, crafting, etc.). This is the first one of these where I feel like I'm being unfair because I know that there is a lot more of a game than I actually got to see, but the opening segment did a really bad job of making me want to progress much further. The placeholder-ish graphics and failure to clearly explain how the game works within the game itself (a link is included to an hour long youtube video explaining how a playthrough is supposed to start, which is the epitome of "tell, don't show") make it feel like Generic Survival Game #237, despite the decently cool gameplay shown in the in-engine clips on Steam. So I guess this is sort of like the reverse of my experience of Atomic Picnic - that demo felt really polished in its fundamentals but needed the rest of the game built around it to reflect that. Pangea really needs to go back and work on its basics to reach what looks like an already in-place game.  Corsairs Legacy - Pirate Action RPG & Sea Battles - Kind of hard to judge this one because it's really just a mechanics test. I feel like somebody releases a barebones but technically competent ship combat game hoping it'll become the next big pirate game every couple of years or so though, so not really going to pay attention unless two years from now it pops up to rave reviews. Jossar fucked around with this message at 04:18 on Feb 9, 2023 |
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Feb 9, 2023 03:52
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I am compelled to post every demo I play regardless of its utility. Karagon asks the question, "What if the dinosaurs in ARK were elemental themed Zoids/the machines from Horizon Zero Dawn instead?" It's certainly not the jankiest survival game that I've tried this NextFest, which is good because it plans to release next week, but it also doesn't seem like it's really adding anything new to the genre. The dev also has a tendency to release prototypes/games that seem interesting but end up being "just good enough" and abandoning them after a few months of support to work on their next project, so what you see is pretty close to what you get. I'm going to give a tentative no on this, unless it turns out to be a much fuller game at release than I'm expecting or you're the sort of person for whom spending a few hours screwing around shooting robot dinosaurs while riding your own robot dinosaur is worth the sticker price even if the rest of the game turns out to be a mess.
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Feb 10, 2023 03:55
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I might get one more game in tonight, but it's not a sure thing. Otherwise might as well give my opinion as of being halfway through the festival. I've been trying to look at/spend more time with the stuff that seems interesting to me personally, rather than the stuff that seems like it's going to be a hit in general, and it hasn't really paid off. It turns out that while hidden gems do exist, most of the stuff that sinks to the bottom of the pile does so for a reason. This seems to be true for even for the stuff which isn't bad-per-se, but merely mediocre, unless it is a very niche game and your tastes are atypical, and mine are not nearly enough so. So I think while I will still continue to try out this wonky stuff just for the sake of experimentation, most of the things that are actually going to make it onto my wishlist for the long term are what goon/general consensus deems to be actually good.
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Feb 10, 2023 05:32
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Jossar posted:So I think while I will still continue to try out this wonky stuff just for the sake of experimentation, most of the things that are actually going to make it onto my wishlist for the long term are what goon/general consensus deems to be actually good. Okay, having said that...   Take a cocktail mixer, throw in one part Terra Invicta, one part Disco Elysium, and a dash of other science fiction and visual novels. Shake well and pour yourself a glass of Lightracer Spark. Over the vast course of the universe, civilizations flourish and decay as part of the standard flow of time, until a malevolent unnamed civilization discovers how to alter the fundamental constants of the universe. Having done that, they've taken a hammer to the laws of physics in order to ensure that the expansion of the universe is halted and instead a Big Crunch will occur, with themselves reigning as omnipotent beings over/just before the resulting singularity. Recognizing the danger but recognizing that the malevolent civilization is currently too powerful to confront directly, the remaining universal polities have combined into the United Cosmos Front and are instead biding their time, hoping to strengthen themselves to have the best possible shot of stopping this looming threat. As part of their efforts, they are sending out 500,000 artificial intelligence probes into the vast reaches of space in the hopes of artificially accelerating or "amending" the development of nascent civilizations so that they can either directly contribute to the fight or at least produce something worth harvesting before they are annihilated in their own local conflicts. You play as one of these Amenders, in what is basically a Terra Invicta style mapgame that hops from planet to planet, with occasional dumps into visual novel/CRPG sections for the advancement of a planet's local plot. The specifically Disco Elysium-esque element promised, as opposed to just any other CRPG style system, is that you have a bunch of subroutines that are supposed to butt in whenever they feel like it, although I felt that they were pretty subdued in the demo. I'm a little nervous that the devs might not be able to stick the landing on this one just because they're juggling so many things at once - for instance some of the visual novel sections felt a little too neatly tied up in a good/evil binary that seems like it might form the basis for a fairly bland morality system. But it's still the most exciting of any of the games I've tried so far, and definitely think it deserves a bit more press. Jossar fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Feb 11, 2023 |
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Feb 11, 2023 02:20
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Well, I had my fun. Time to get back to the junk. Godfist has a very simple premise: you were betrayed by God and are therefore going to climb his tower, punching all of his servants in the face, until you get to the end, whereupon you will punch God in the face. You and the enemies can't actually die from HP loss, instead it works on Smash Brothers rules where the more damage you take the further you fly away from an enemy's attack and permanent death occurs when you fly off the tower. The only thing that keeps this from being a straight 3D beat 'em up is that there's a bunch of special abilities keyed to a roulette which you can activate with gold (which is also used to buy new abilities from merchants) and a level up system to increase the damage of certain abilities. Honestly, the frills don't really feel like they add much, and I kind of wish it was just a pure beat 'em up, but the game's too barebones either way to be really enjoyable for long.  Dark Tree is a top down style ARPG that, sadly for FutureCop, is an absolute trash fire. It promises that you get to combine multiple weapons against enemies to devastating effect, but really what you're doing is just sort of running around while the game auto-attacks on whatever weapon you're holding down the key for at the time or just defaults to the weapon bound to the B key. Maybe you can do it for multiple weapons nearly simultaneously if you want, but the whole thing just feels super awkward, and it's not like the placeholder plot is worth the trouble. I've had games intentionally built as idle/incrementals whose undisguised button pressing to make numbers go up felt more fun and engaging than this, avoid. Jossar fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Feb 11, 2023 |
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Feb 11, 2023 04:04
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Thanks, it's definitely helpful to have a community here since it ensures that people get to take their chosen approach towards the festival and nevertheless get an aggregate as to how everything works out. Love everybody else's reviews! (Process isn't entirely random though - I also check for vibes, though based on a much lower bar of entry consisting of concept idea and screenshots.)
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Feb 11, 2023 04:34
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One last review before bed: The hacking game genre has a surprisingly wide spectrum of offerings these days, but at its extremes there are two lines of thought - the ones that go all in on trying to teach you Unix commands and the ones that abstract out the computer touching entirely. DROP is the latter. Sure you're on a computer and get to run autonomous programs to take out some of the scutwork for you, but this is a fast-paced game where you're too busy running around smashing things and slamming buttons to actually learn how to code. You don't even do the thing where you break into a server via 50 different IP bounces, all the action is local to the individual level. And maybe it's a little too fast, the pace got pretty harrowing by the end of the demo, although the real game is supposed to give you more of an opportunity to grind for upgrades to make things easier on yourself. But for what it is, a cyberpunk themed action packed puzzle-y hacking simulator, it hits all the right notes and is worth checking out. Jossar fucked around with this message at 05:54 on Feb 11, 2023 |
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Feb 11, 2023 05:46
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 Okay, a big asterisk here in that, as a Goon, I have no friends and could not actually play this and had to settle for watching a stream. Presumably you could jump into the discord and find an active session if you really wanted. King of the Castle is pretty much summed up as "the board game King's Dilemma, but if instead of the king's decisions being made by clockwork, mechanical systems, they were controlled by a streamer/the friend in your group who actually owns the game, while the rest of you plot to backstab them." There are a lot of... questionable stylistic decisions going on at the edges here which confuse me as to its target audience (the game is obsessively fanatical about asking you for your pronouns, but one of the consistent decisions that you can select to have as an option for the King with respect to his barons/counts voting is an obvious Trump joke, even if it's designed to annoy everyone when you use it), but the underlying game itself seems fairly well designed. It's only going to be $5, and really that's only for the one person who owns the game, since everybody else can connect in via the game's private website or Twitch. Realistically this thing looks like streamer bait of the highest caliber. But it's also decent enough that I can't just dismiss it out of hand? I dunno. Jossar fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Feb 11, 2023 |
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Feb 11, 2023 16:19
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Gonna slowly trickle these in all day, I think. The Magical Mixture Mill is pretty much fantasy Factorio/Satisfactory/Dyson Sphere Program/etc. combined with Recettear and similar shop games. Yeah, there's a lot of other games I could compare it to instead, but it's got too much automation game DNA involved for most of those to be an accurate comparison. The only reason i'm not calling it a pure automation game is because you are still selling the potions to people who gain relationship meter. Mechanically it works and is a satisfying experience, and I can even forgive that a lot of stuff isn't in yet because it's the demo, but... The game splits the tutorial between the kindly, if slightly insensitive, old witch who teaches you about the basics of potion brewing and a horrible little bag goblin that you acquired by beating up an evil sorcerer who teaches you about all the automation elements. Both parts are critical to the game, but the goblin spends a lot of his time dunking on the witch behind her back and saying how her whole setup is inefficient, and I feel like that sort of extends to TMMM in general. The whole thing feels like it has an undercurrent of mean-spirited metacommentary on the witchy life-sim potion brewing genre that's been in vogue recently. I could just be reading way too much into the game's style of humor though. Jossar fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Feb 11, 2023 |
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Feb 11, 2023 18:01
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 Is The Ranch of Rivershine any good? Well, I suppose the answer to that question depends on the answer to another question: "who's playing?" For the gamer specifically interested in simulating riding horses, ours is a terrible landscape to navigate - unless you're really into Star Stable, an MMO which is really more designed around kids with its cutesy artstyle and fantasy plot, most of the games that are universally agreed upon as being good are action-adventure games that just incidentally happen to have really satisfying horse riding mechanics. For instance, Red Dead Redemption 2, which is the one that seems to show up consistently on all of the ranking lists. Once you start getting into horse-riding specific games, there seems to be a neverending series of arguments as to whether certain aspects are accurately represented or fun. There is also the problem that if you are not very specifically into horses, all of these games come across as really, really boring. The Ranch of Rivershine is an attempt to square the circle by making a horse game that doesn't involve you shooting people in the face but still expands beyond the racing/riding elements by including life sim elements. I can sort of see how it might work, if the developer puts a lot more effort into tightening up the controls and adding more things to do, but to be honest it still comes across as fairly empty beyond the core horse-racing mechanics. At least this is a better fate than that of Jane Austen fans, whose MMO closed down back in 2021 and now they have to content themselves with the upcoming Regency Solitaire II.
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Feb 11, 2023 19:00
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So many games, so little time. Every time I see a city builder based in Ancient Greece, I have to stop myself and ask - is this going to be better than Zeus: Master of Olympus? And over twenty years later the answer is still a resounding no. That is mostly because Zeus is a very good game. With Builders of Greece, however, it's because it sucks. I didn't find anything different or exciting here compared to other city builders, and even when looking at the devs playing the game to see if things got better, it just looked like more of the same. Also these guys have at least three other games in development with delays that are literally just this but "what if in Egypt/China/Persia" so the odds of hard work turning this around and making it into a stellar game are slim to none.  Galaxy Highways is an action-space shooter with a wide variety of mission and sub-mission objectives that is almost bullet-hell esque in the amount of stuff that gets thrown at you, but is surprisingly forgiving in that enemies regularly drop HP so if you can survive an engagement and kill some inter-objective enemies you can usually give yourself a fighting chance. It's not really a game for me, but I was able to play pretty far through the demo and I liked it a lot and would definitely recommend it to fans of space shooters.  I am not good at fighting games and I am not good at rhythm games. Usually I can manage one or the other at least enough to gauge a title on, but God of Rock, a combination Rhythm and Fighting game, made my brain explode such that I could barely finish the tutorial. Everything about this seems phenomenally on point, so I am begging someone who can actually play God of Rock to tell the thread if it is even remotely as fun as it looks.
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Feb 11, 2023 20:52
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 DinoBlits is a cute little town/civilization build em up that tries to be simple, but in the end felt like it was sort of obscuring some of its own mechanics. There's nothing wrong with it as a game if you want to try it out for yourself though.  A lot of people have said that after diving deep into the festival, they eventually run out of demos which interest them in any way, shape or form. I have a different problem - the more time I spend here, the more I find games that even if I like them conceptually, aren't in genres I am familiar with or would ever really play. Candle Knight appears to me to be a charming little 2.5D action platformer in an abandoned castle whose unique mechanic is balancing an Ignition gauge where if you run hot you deal more damage but also take more damage as well. It feels smooth and I'm going to recommend it if you like 2.5D action platformers, but this comes with a big caveat emptor compared to something like DROP where I at least sort of knew what I was talking about before I recommended it.  City of Beats is an ARPG which seems like it should be more heavily rhythm based than it is, but honestly the dynamic soundtrack stuff doesn't seem to make that much of a difference apart from making you feel really cool as you shoot out light bullets at robots. Between the beautiful misty cyber-city, awesome music, colorful side characters (even if not fully fleshed out just yet), snarky internal monologue of the main character, and action packed gameplay I wanted to love this game. However, the dash is too short, which is very noticeable and infuriating in an ARPG like this (with no way to improve it even via metaprogression), the enemies are pretty much all boring variants on red and black robots, and the bosses aren't that much more interesting than the normal enemies apart from being major damage sponges. But even then I would still love and recommend City of Beats... if we weren't almost guaranteed to be getting Hades II's Early Access this year. This last one is possibly the most crucial reason why I can't recommend this game and also the cruelest. I realized about 2 minutes after I closed the demo that even though were a lot of individual differences, City of Beats was giving me a lot of Hades vibes and that it is never ever going to escape those comparisons. These guys slaved for nearly two years on this thing, and Supergiant announcing "oh by the way, we're making Hades II" at the end of last year has basically tanked any chance that it is ever going to get to stand on its own two feet. Maybe that's unfair, or maybe you've got room in your hearts for two games with the same feel, but I don't.
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Feb 11, 2023 23:49
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 Plan B: Terraform is a logistics based game about terraforming a Mars-like planet into habitability, enough of which have been produced over the last few years that if NASA had received the funding instead... Congress would probably have taken away an equivalent amount from their budget and poured it into a miniscule fraction of making a single F-22. Let's not get our hopes up here. Uh, Plan B: Terraform? Yeah sure, it's fine, whatever. Didn't personally spark joy but it seems solid enough if you really like setting up road infrastructure. I heard some people say that it's what you get if you specifically wanted a mixture of one of the other Mars terraforming games with Transport Tycoon for that reason, though you are still doing plenty of regular terraforming. It'll be out in Early Access in 4 days, if you miss it now just wait on reviews from that.  Worldless is a 2D action platformer in the most technical of senses, in that there is action which is done via a timebar as turn based combat system and there is platforming. It reminds me of a lot of flash games I saw back on all of those sites in the 2000s and 2010s, right down to being annoying to deal with your menus because the developer decided it was more "artistic" to hide them until they were unlocked as part of the in-game tutorial. Those were enjoyable, if not life-changing, and this will be too for those of you who want to try it out.  Hmm. Wantless is a Tactical RPG set in the dystopian future where you are a Transposer - a doctor who literally goes and beats up people's traumas until they're cured. Or voluntarily comatose, whatever the patient's asking for. Every action you take on a turn increases the corresponding number of actions that the enemies can take, but you get action points for eliminating enemies and the battlefield can become unstable if things escalate for too long, so you're encouraged to be tactical but decisive. Following that philosophy there's a reward ladder for pushing to try harder rooms than you normally would, but go beyond your limits and it's not worth it. There's a modular skill crafting system where you can assemble a bunch of different components together to make up the skills that you bring into runs affecting not just things like the ability itself but also the area of effect and cooldowns. I even caught a sight of some kind of PoE style skill modifier tree... I'm going to say you should probably try this out, even if I have only slightly more confidence in that statement than I did for Candle Knight. Hmm.  Zellige: The Tilemaker of Granada is really more of an art project that just sort of happens to have extra interactive elements behind it. You're a skilled tilemaker commissioned to decorate the palace of a wealthy merchant in Al-Andalus with mosaic patterns. Additionally you get to walk around the house and talk to the family/observe their collection of art pieces from around the Islamic world and maybe get a little bit of a look at Granada itself. The game is a perfectly suitable vehicle for what it promises, it's up to you how interesting you find being an interior home decorator who exclusively works in repeating pattern mosaics.  Fall of Bali looks like it's going to be some incredibly grognardy historical strategy game, but as of right now it's just a buggy piece of junk with a history textbook stapled onto all the nation descriptions. But if you want to learn about the multiple kingdoms contesting for power and dominance in 17-18th century Bali, do I have the demo for you! I'm going to try and download as many demos as I can tomorrow to keep reviewing what's available until I run out. Unfortunately there is at least one game I just have to entirely judge blind just to bring it to people's notice because it is currently a 2 player game (although with plans to expand to 1-4), but didn't have a stream going the way King of the Castle did, unless someone's interested in trying out the Battle Turtles game with me: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1812800/Umigame/ Jossar fucked around with this message at 03:57 on Feb 12, 2023 |
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Feb 12, 2023 02:45
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I only have hearsay to go on, but this one is supposedly pretty good, allowing for some VR jank associated with being a solo project: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1178780/BattleGroupVR/
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Feb 12, 2023 04:33
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Jerusalem posted:The MW mod is Morrowind? I love that game but looking up a video it looks like the movement will give me the same reaction as I got trying the Half Life 2 VR mod, where I immediately felt nauseous. I might take a look at Elite if it goes on sale though. I just got the bug to try out more VR stuff but I suspect I may have "wrecked" it for myself by playing what was obviously the best game first. It's my understanding that MW5 usually refers to MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries rather than Morrowind, but having looked at a video for it, bouncing around in a mech's tin can cockpit might still make you pretty nauseous.
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Feb 12, 2023 05:18
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Sab669 posted:
Let my experience tell you that 80% of these games are junk and that this is the correct attitude to take. However...  I was a little worried when I saw the mature content disclaimer for Archmage Rises, which included a long list of unsavory things, but the bit I actually got to see was a fun romp through a Dwarf Fortress type randomly generated world with a good portion of Mount & Blade mixed with D&D style skill checks in its noncombat systems, though the actual combat and dungeon exploration gameplay is more of one of those old school dungeon crawlers. The main content storyline appears to be guaranteed no matter what world you generate and I'm not sure if that's something that's always going to be the case or if it's just a matter of the developer trying to keep things on rails for the demo before letting you descend into full procedurally generated insanity in the main version. It was fun being a classic adventurer trying to prevent a mind control plot by delving into a skeleton tomb though, with the added implication that the rebels might have just been trying to stop your patrons from getting access to the magic to reinforce their own hegemony, while still admitting they were 100% going to use it themselves just the one time. There are definitely bugs - I once got locked on a skill check in a random event that refused to trigger until I took the other option and fell into negative gold. But it's definitely worth keeping an eye on. Just note that if you want to try it for yourself that the demo button is hidden off to the side of its page rather than placed prominently in green in the main body of the page like a lot of other Steam demos are. Jossar fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Feb 12, 2023 |
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Feb 12, 2023 15:18
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I've been having a lot of fun with this game the last week as well.
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I've played a bunch of games about cyberpunk. I've played a bunch of games about dinosaurs. Screw it, let's just mash 'em all together. In Dynopunk, you play as Chris, the last T-Rex in the world, who has ambitions too large for his small town and thus moved to Synth-City in order to open up an electronics repair shop. What follows is a game that mixes visual novel elements with a bunch of minigames, the most prominent being the repair process which is basically One-Liner from WarioWare with increasing levels of complexity and complication, and trying to manipulate the emotional states of your clients in order to achieve a desired result - which could mean getting paid or influencing the larger events of the city in some way. Also you can just screw with people and if your AI assistant finds it funny enough they'll pay you from an offshore bank account they set up somewhere, somehow. The music and art style are all perfectly on point, very Neon 80's and Synth. I didn't quite gel with the game's writing/sense of humor, but if you're willing to sit through a bunch of "oh, the T-Rex has stubby arms" jokes and some relatively subdued pop culture references, there's a lot to love here. EDIT: Somebody who's played The Red Strings Club should probably chime in, that's where it's popping up in the mindspace map, if taking itself less seriously. Jossar fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Feb 12, 2023 |
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Feb 12, 2023 16:51
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 I said before that 2 minutes after I closed down City of Beats, I realized that the game was trying to make me feel like I was playing Hades. Spiritfall doesn't even try to hide it. This is literally "Hades, the 2D platformer." It's very well polished, but you know exactly what you're getting when you play this, apart from stuff like the hidden room that turns it into Smash Brothers for an encounter.  SokoChess White is Chess, but the goals are like Sokoban, until you start getting to later levels with an increased number of obstacles, in which it sort of flips itself and becomes Sokoban that just happens to involve Chess piece movement. Maybe the full game will flip-flop on that a little more. Again, you know what you're getting with this, there's some additional mechanics that pop up, but it's not that complicated. It's not Chess: The JRPG.  1/2 White or Black may or may not be Chess: The JRPG. This... really shouldn't be here. It snuck onto my list because it has very good English advertising despite the demo being entirely in Chinese, but I kind of want to see if it gets an English translation because it's very pretty and looks like it's going to be bonkers.  Well, if I'm already reviewing bonkers looking games that I can't actually play, I might as well give the write up for Umigame, in which you and another player (to later be 1-4 players) take the role of Battle Turtles and smash your way through aquatic themed dungeons. It looks a little floaty and chaotic from the clips, but in a good way. Game's code looks like it might self-destruct at the slightest touch based on a note in the demo though, so definitely has the highlights of an idea that the dev thinks is funny that might not make it to a full release state. Jossar fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Feb 12, 2023 |
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Feb 12, 2023 18:46
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 Quantum Coherence is a game that tries to bill itself as a big philosophical space shooter, but can't even get through the opening chapter without throwing typographical errors in your face. The controls are terrible: even when they work, the gameplay is generic apart from the BLINC function, which has been done better in other games. And on top of all of that, the game crashed into a chapter title screen mid-mission. Avoid. The only philosophically compelling thing to come out of this piece of junk is that the art in the introductory advertisement for the faceless megacorporation was at least partially generated via artificial intelligence program, and is making a strong argument that it should've been allowed to have full creative directorship over the game's graphics instead of the developer.  Spirited Thief is a turn based stealth game divided into two phases: you have a spirit who goes in and cases the joint so that you can get an idea of the layout, and a sorcerer-thief who actually breaks in and steals stuff. The concept feels a little bit contrived over just having the map fully visible at the start and a single player character, but maybe I missed something clever that the spirit is absolutely vital for that wouldn't be possible otherwise even if it wasn't strictly necessary, or this is one of those cases where function follows form instead to make things feel more like a heist and give you a wise-cracking buddy. The actual gameplay is solid, with the turn based nature of it allowing you to hide out of sight of guards or sneak up to them and stun them/steal their keys without relying on you having quick reflexes. Making this a bit more of a planning game than the madcap zaniness that can sometimes happen in something like Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine. Incidentally, did you know that there's a Monaco 2 in development? Not at this NextFest, sadly.  HeistGeist feels like someone tried to staple several games together. The main character is playing a deckbuilder with the cards being categorized into A/B/C types that can chain effects depending if you play an A after a B or so on. Simultaneously you have a hacker that's playing a much easier puzzle game (still card-based) where the biggest threat is accidentally destroying the nodes she's on instead of getting useful stuff out of them. Out-of-combat segments for each character allow acquisition of assets to make traversing the mission grid easier and combined with interplay between the two characters, this works to create a movie-like heist feeling, which felt incredibly tense and cool while playing the demo mission. But I can't help but feel like this falls off the rails or gets old really quickly, especially if the Hacker-side isn't given more revision in development. I recommend HeistGeist, but I could very easily understand if you find it to be generic or unbalanced. Jossar fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Feb 12, 2023 |
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Feb 12, 2023 21:38
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 Soul Tolerance is a sci-fi mystery RPG set in the distant future of 2214. Humanity wiped itself out 130 years ago, then AI fought over all the remaining server space, and then a single AI won out and controls everything. For its own amusement it keeps robots running the routines of humanity, and suppresses anything that reaches a certain level of developmental complexity. Such an existence is said to have surpassed "Soul Tolerance." You play as Unit 12, a detective robot manufactured to investigate a case where deviation from Soul Tolerance has emerged. I liked the graphics and worldbuilding on this one, but not enough to overcome my boredom at slowly and half-aimlessly wandering the streets of robo-Sapporo. Download the demo to look at the beautiful voxel art in the intro sequence and just buy Primordia instead, which is this concept but executed better.  Gods of Savvarah is a visual novel in which you play as Hasvah (the gray lizardman in the front) as he is forced into a journey around the lands of Savvarah, an evergreen paradise surrounded by an endless wall of clouds. Game is trying to bifurcate routes so you don't get the full story of side-character motivations on any one playthrough, so while you only need to play through once to get a satisfactory ending, playing through multiple times is necessary to understand why everyone is doing what they're doing. Has battles which appear to be sort of QTE based, in that the screen will start darkening rapidly until you pick an option. Will be releasing the first chapter in late March or April, but plans to spread it out over 9 chapters, which is good in that it gives the developer more time to write the story, but bad in that they could drop off the face of the earth and leave it unfinished or you get a miniscule amount of content for each chapter. Gods of Savvarah seems interesting, but very traditional for its genre. Bonus: I don't really want to play Amarantus, which has a lot of the same deal but is hyping up the marketing on the stupid intraparty antics of your band of ragtag revolutionaries and their love lives. But you are now aware, in case that is your sort of thing.  Immortal Tales of Rebirth is another one for the dishonorable mention pile of "Chinese Games that Pretended to Have an English Option". This one might actually be worse in that it pretended to have the option in-game too, which barely helped anything. Some kind of roguelike strategy cultivation game where you build up strength and fight big monsters? Controls felt clunky even when I was trying to just focus on the gameplay and move the main character around. Maybe there's a group of people who have been eagerly following this game and have a fully working English patch and more expansive tutorials than what the game provides. But if you're relying on that then there's other games even in this NextFest that I'd rather have that kind of dedicated support for. And with that, I think I'm done reviewing games that I 1) conceptually liked, 2) could even sort of play or felt were worth bringing up despite not being able to play, 3) haven't been better reviewed elsewhere either in the Steam Thread directly or one of the genre threads if it's one that people are really taking notice of. Gonna either go and review the games that people did give their opinions on already or make a closeout post summing up the experience and ranking the stuff from my reviews. On the one hand, would be nice to play some of the more conventionally popular games, but I'm also tired of playing demos. Jossar fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Feb 12, 2023 |
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Feb 12, 2023 23:40
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Okay, I guess I can't sit still, so you're getting me reviewing whatever I have left/can download as long as the festival's still up. These are going to be a lot more about how I personally felt about the games than how they work, since there's already a description for them, which I will link to. If there's no link, then the description continues within the post referred to by the game above. If this postscript set is boring compared to my actual review of the games, let me know and I'll just move ahead to my final review. I agree with what Dr. Video Games 0069 said about Creeping Deck: Pharaoh's Curse. I liked the aesthetics on this a lot and was secretly hoping it would be good if I wasn't amazing at deckbuilders, but no, there's just nothing particularly interesting here.  Going to have to disagree on Takara Cards. Or I guess agree that it won't click for a lot of people, myself included, but if you're the sort of person who finds all the stuff surrounding the basic game that you have to read the menus for interesting (Karma, for instance), then you'll love the full version to death. Doesn't really do a good job presenting the intricacies front and center though.  MEATGRINDER is a very good game that I am terrible at. I keep getting dragged off the edges of cars by the rope of my shoe grappling hook and eating asphalt. I wish all of those of you who do not have this problem a pleasant time of high-octane Speed-style asskicking. I agree with The 7th Guest that MEATGRINDER is probably going to outstay its welcome if it's too long of a game, but I'm a bit more optimistic and think you could get 7-8 hours out of it, if paced well, and the final set of chapters involves you running down from space into the atmosphere on meteors or whatever.  Unlike MEATGRINDER, I was able to get through the demo of Shady Knight, but it didn't feel as smooth as the stuff that FutureCop was able to find a video of. Most of that's on me, but I did notice that the weapons seemed to be a lot more stubborn to pick up than advertised. Jossar fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Feb 13, 2023 |
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Feb 13, 2023 02:13
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NOT YET, SNAKE! IT'S NOT OVER YET! (I still have something like 15 more demos to review even after these, holy hell.)    Assorted Townbuilders (Roots of Yggdrasil, Pocket Planet, Cardboard Town) Whereas before I was basically in complete agreement with Dr. Video Games 0069, except that I think Takara Cards could have somebody who likes it just as it is, my opinions on this one are entirely the reverse. Still respect their work put into the reviews and everybody else's, just to be clear. As someone who wanted a less intense version of Against the Storm, I immediately fell in love with Roots of Yggdrasil. I appreciate how the more advanced buildings build off of your previously existing infrastructure, so you need multiple Equipment Posts to build a Watchtower, and how if you're clever with your placement you can get away with having multiple buildings of the same type "score" off the houses. I do kind of worry it's in a middle zone where those who are really into the genre will only find it a cute curiosity and those who aren't really into the genre will bounce off of it. Pocket Planet started off lovely, but even early on I got annoyed with how easily the RNG could ruin your plans, and how sometimes the last piece or two even in a good run could make the final result end up looking disharmonious. A cardinal sin in a game that's relying on the pretty vista factor. Game's still good if those things don't dissuade you. I did not like Cardboard Town at all. It felt very heavily constricted by the early game in a way that Roots of Yggdrasil explicitly tried to avoid, and it didn't feel like I was building towards anything in particular. My distaste for this one is the most subjective out of the town builder reviews, almost purely visceral rather than anything else.  Tape to Tape is kind of like MEATGRINDER, in that it's a very good game that a lot of people in this thread rightly love, but I personally wasn't good at and will not be playing. I don't have anything else to say (or that I can say) on the matter.  Okay so you know how I reviewed City of Beats and Spiritfall and said that those games were basically Hadeslikes? As soon as I made those posts, I said to myself: "Yeah Jossar, but you KNOW in your heart of hearts that there is someone lurking on the forums who is going to go 'Well yeah, Hades was great and all, but I really wanted it to be cyberpunk/a 2D platformer and then it would have been my perfect game.'" That is basically how I felt reading The 7th Guest's review for Wandering Sword. I don't want a Live A Live remake! I mean, I'm happy that we can live in the world where we get both that and Wandering Sword, but I very specifically want this game for the exact reasons that make it different, and have rocketed it up to near the top of my Steam Wishlist! I mean, I was always going to given the subject matter unless it was terrible, but it's very good: both in its presentation and mechanically as an RPG. Jossar fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Feb 14, 2023 |
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Feb 14, 2023 01:24
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 FutureCop pretty much had ArcRunner right on the money: it's flashy enough that you want to like it, but it's missing that certain je ne sais quoi. If you want to be a robot space ninja who flips out and murders people with guns, just play Warframe instead.  secretly best girl did a pretty good of describing what Dungeon Drafters is. So how does it play? Eh. Maybe it's because I was playing the Monk, but I felt like a lot of the time I was just sort of puttering around waiting to whack people on the head rather than using my cards properly. I can see how it would work though, especially if you get really good at customizing your deck. Lovely art direction. I feel like I've been saying that a lot, but with these sorts of indie projects you tend to get it, unless the overall work is a terrible mess anyway.  The 7th Guest described the "fun" part of Gripper, the boss fights, well. The fact that they are still mediocre is even more damning of the introductory sequence to levels, where you drive your motorcycle through a Super Hexagon style corridor trying not to get smushed, but there's basically no energy to any of it. I'm also personally infuriated at the story, which felt like it was trying to emotionally manipulate me into caring about it when there was basically nothing there. There's gotta be a better game for killing dudes on a motorcycle than this. Go find a Nintendo Wii and play 5DS Wheelie Breakers if you have to.  FutureCop had more fun with Vernal Edge than I did, having somehow managed to break the intro tutorial room and have the game awkwardly shuffle me further along with minimal explanation as to what I was supposed to be doing. The Pulse system is interesting, but felt slow as did Vernal's general kit. Not really a fan of Metroidvanias anyway, but even if I was, I think I'd pass.  Especially when Afterimage feels like a much smoother product. The 7th Guest covered this one pretty well, I only wish the intro story cutscene had been a little less vague/awkwardly phrased, but you'll quickly forget about that as you amble through the world's colorful environments.  My experiences with Dungeons of Aether mirrored Dr. Video Games 0069's, which makes sense as a good portion of the demo is on rails. I'm keeping a hopeful eye out for this one, but I'm not sure how you overcome the "staring at each other raising your power levels until one of you is strong enough to win" problem, which seems inherent to the design. EDIT: The more I look at it, the more I'm running out of original things to say, but with only 9 demos of moderate interest left (including some favorites like Gestalt: Steam & Cinder), might as well just finish. Also Karagon, which I reviewed earlier, released just as the festival ended and is predictably mediocre in its reviews. Jossar fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Feb 14, 2023 |
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Feb 14, 2023 04:43
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 Dust & Neon, described by FutureCop here felt instinctively satisfying, but unlike FutureCop I never quite got to the "I would like to play more of this" stage. I'm not sure how much the game adds by requiring you to manually click the button when reloading each individual bullet, but I can't deny that it's thematically appropriate.  Gestalt: Steam & Cinder (also reviewed by FutureCop) personally hates you if you try to play it with a keyboard, or at the very least seems to really want you to be playing it with a controller instead. But it's good. It's so drat good, that it is the closest of the Metroidvanias that I've reviewed to making me want to give it a real playthrough rather than just reviewing it for NextFest. I liked Afterimage, but if you had to pick only a single Metroidvania to get from the bunch, this is it.  The 7th Guest summed up Valfaris: Mecha Therion pretty well, don't really have that much to add. Everything feels really smooth and intuitive, if a bit chaotic because of the need to go and find the right spot to slice enemies apart to recharge your energy blaster meter. "Valfaris: Mecha Therion" is also an inherently very satisfying set of words to say.  Dr. Video Games 0069 described Lakeburg Legacies as not having that much game yet. Sort of? Lakeburg Legacies feels like the tutorial tried to set you and the game up on a romantic date, and left before giving you any advice on how dates are supposed to work, so you're both just sort of awkwardly standing there trying to figure out how to start a conversation. There's clearly magic here waiting to happen, but it only rewards the truly committed, leaving the rest of us to wonder if it's worth a call back for a second try. :max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/affogato-4776668-hero-08-40d7a68d12ba46f48eaea3c43aba715c.jpg) Affogato is a coffee based dessert of Italian origins, consisting of a scoop of milk or vanilla flavored gelato drowned in a shot of espresso. Alternative variants involving liqueurs are commonwaitaminute.  Affogato is pretty fun, with The 7th Guest having the full details. The game that I most predominantly felt I'd be interested in seeing a Let's Play of it when it comes out, but also that more than playing it. I get the weird feeling that the coffee shop elements more exist to give justification to the rest of the game, especially the character elements, but mechanically the game really wants to be about the reverse-tower defense section instead? Something doesn't quite harmonize.  Okay, I feel like everybody knows what Voidtrain is, but I didn't see a formal review for it, so here goes: Open world survival game where you're floating in the middle of nowhere, but also there is a set of train tracks, so it's your goal to build a lone trolley car into a train so you can visit islands, also floating in the middle of nowhere. At these islands you will fight things/harvest resources, so you can improve the train, queue loop for eternity and also sometimes enemy trains will show up and you have to fight them off on the void tracks. Kind of like the upscale version of Pirates of Pangea for me, right down to the problems - cool concept that is incredibly slow to get off the ground, so I had no interest in making it to the supposedly fun bits. Maybe I just needed to have a little more patience, but the opening sequence felt slow as molasses and like I wasn't playing the game half the time, and that spent a lot of goodwill that I would have otherwise been willing to give to the start of the trolley section. Maybe get back to this when it's finished baking and I have more energy.  12 years ago, a little known studio called Hazardous Software Inc. released a game called Achron. It was a thoroughly mediocre RTS with the exception that you had the bonkers ability to send stuff back through time, and the devs took it 100% seriously so you ended up also playing in the past as a simultaneous version of the map you were on in the present with changes to the past propagating to the present and also you could send stuff forward in time, but that's much less complicated unless you were doing stupid shenanigans that let units somehow survive their own destruction in the past because they rode out a time-wave by not being in the present when the changes finished propagating. Most of that description is wrong, but I'm not going to look for my old key from outside of Steam to boot it up and you're not going to play the game to correct me on how it works. This is the sort of nonsense that I expected to see a lot more of going forward, and I suppose we did if you count 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel. I wish that Phantom Brigade was the true successor to Achron, instead it settles for being much more conservative, trading that off for you know, actually being good. Instead you just see the potential future in the present and plan your turns around that in a sort of hybrid turn-based/tactical mech RPG. This will still make many people's brains hurt and is a fun time, and justly deserves the positive reviews it has received. And that's it! There were three more games I wanted to get to, but their demos either ate themselves (The Great War: Western Front, Oblivion Overide) or I otherwise never got around to downloading (Meet Your Maker), and unlike the ones that I could not get to work as a single, monolingual English player, it seems unfair to do a review on those when they either got a review here from someone else or were popular enough in their niche to see one elsewhere. Will get to work on ranking them tomorrow and then I'll call this a wrap. Jossar fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Feb 15, 2023 |
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Feb 15, 2023 01:15
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Waves of Steel, I'm guessing.
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Feb 15, 2023 04:28
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NextFest Post Script and Write Up Boy am I tired! That was a lot of games to review and it felt like it really did take an entire festival to justify pausing the rest of what I was doing with my life to go over and play them all. Was a lot of fun though. Want to thank everyone for going along with the ride, even when I dragged it out a few days beyond the festival itself. The Final Review Ranking is going to be based on my personal tastes. No matter how good I thought a game was generally, it's not going in my highest tier or two if I don't personally plan on immediately buying it either at launch or as soon as the first sale comes up. I'll also try to give out a closer describing my thoughts in retrospect. BRAVE TIER - "The games in the arena" So, a funny thing happened when I was reviewing my list where I found a lot of games that are probably not going to be as good as the demos suggest, but also happened to be some of my favorite games at NextFest. So this is a sort of honorary S+ Tier for those games that I personally loved above all else, but you've been warned. Lightracer Spark - Despite everything else, still my favorite game of the lot. Did I scare people away from this one by calling it high concept Terra Invicta meets Disco Elysium? It's a lot less complicated than that! We only got the tutorial and part of the first planet, so this still has a lot of ways it could go wrong before the final release. Atomic Picnic - The more I played throughout NextFest, the more I questioned whether this game deserves the review I gave it or I just latched onto the first thing that I enjoyed. I want to believe that its problems are easily fixable, but Atomic Picnic could just as easily never graduate to being a full, finished product or one that makes co-op basically mandatory. HeistGeist - Yeah, I'm just as surprised at this one as you are, really. There's nothing original about it, but I just felt so cool pulling off the demo heist that I want to play more. Roots of Yggdrasil - I absolutely adored this, but others seem to have found it middling at best. Kind of worried it might just atrophy away as the developers try to get out anything at all, but maybe it'll get some time to shine/publicity at the follow up Indie Cup? wait are we seriously getting another one of these things literally right after the last festival ended S TIER - "Sending its glad voice across a hundred demos" Games that I loved and are also recommended without caveat. Wandering Sword - I think this one got enough buzz to save it from being crushed under the heels of its more famous peer competitors and is a refreshing breath of air for a wuxia game. Archmage Rises - Expected a procgen mess, got a fun Mount and Blade/dungeon-crawling experience. Releases in April. DROP - I liked DROP, but was kind of surprised to see that it became something of a breakout game for a bunch of people in the thread. Well, you never know your audience. A TIER - "I am often seized by the fatal Goon need to have a pretty good time" Games that are very good but I have no personal desire to play, or games I liked but not as much as the BRAVEs and can't recommend as wholeheartedly as the S-Tiers. Galaxy Highways - Very fun, but a little too much to keep track of on-screen at once for my tastes, although not really a bullet hell as such. Valfaris: Mecha Therion - The shmup to Galaxy Highways' more arcade-y approach. More innovative relative to its particular genre. MEATGRINDER - The most fun I had with a game I was downright terrible at. Releases sometime in Q2. Tape to Tape - As a Blaseball fan, I'm obliged to put this game here, even if I personally didn't like it. Also, it's very well made and a lot of other people seemed to have be having fun. SokoChess White - I found the demo very pleasant, but even for a puzzler it's a bit too flash in the pan to really be an S-Tier game. As it turns out, the version with pieces from both sides (SokoChess) already exists and is $4.99 on Steam if you want to try that out. Releases on March 3rd. Wantless - This is the game I expected to pop off more than DROP as a hidden favorite, but maybe it just didn't deliver on its promise for turn based tactics fans? A little less enthusiastic on it myself now that I've had some time to sit and think. Still seems good though. Zellige: The Tilemaker of Granada - This game was always going to be very near the bottom or very near the top of my list. Personal preference says top, but if you're not interested in its core concept, there is nothing on this good green earth that is going to convince you otherwise. Releases on February 17th. Spiritfall - Hades: The 2D Platformer is still, nevertheless, a very fun game. Also it's pretty close to its release date so you can just grab it now if you're jonesing for something that fills the same niche. Releases on March 7th. Gods of Savvarah - Not really sure how to rank a visual novel. The story seemed interesting? Probably overhyping this but you'd need to have the full game to judge and we're going to be waiting a while on that one. First part releases in April. Dungeons of Aether - I don't think there's going to be time to fix the whole thing where you and your opponent clink against each other, but it's still a cool game. Releases on February 28th. Phantom Brigade - Another one for the "concept's cool, didn't grip me personally" pile. Might give it another shot if it's on sale. Releases on February 28th. Affogato - Demo's still up, so if you're interested you should play it, also because there's a demo-exclusive background for the shop in the main game. Gestalt: Steam & Cinder - Queen of the Metroidvanias on offer from the Fest. Afterimage - Jack of Metroidvanias, in that it's still good but slightly eclipsed by Gestalt. Releases on April 25th. B TIER - "We sit together, the games and me, until only the games remain." Games that are good, but flawed. I might buy them if on sale, but they're not going to be long time favorites. Dark Envoy - The battlefield control mechanics on this one are fun, not sure if they can survive the surrounding elements. The Magical Mixture Mill - About the same, as Dark Envoy. Maybe I just got really hung up on it seeming mean to other games, but even within TMMM certain elements like customers seemed shallow and half done. Do love me some automation loops though. Candle Knight - Maybe I just didn't get far enough in the demo to see if it was really good or really bad though? City of Beats - I'd love to be proven wrong on this one, but it just isn't polished enough. Releases sometime in Q2. Dynopunk - After having played Affogato, I've revised my estimates on this one down a little, but I still think Dynopunk's more of an A fallen from grace than a C trying to escape the pile. Takara Cards - In perfect balance is Takara Cards, which is a game that is mostly mediocre saved from being completely so by some theoretically interesting underlying systems. Releases in March. Lakeburg Legacies - Lakeburg Legacies would be so good, if it was good. Releases sometime in Q2. Shady Knight - Didn't feel as smooth as a game of this type should be to me. Might be different for you. Spirited Thief - Even if I don't quite understand the spirit part of the game, it's still a very fun stealth game. Releases sometime in Q3. C TIER - "Shouldn't it be repaired if it's done for? It should, but it's something we've no time for." Mediocrities, saved by underlying decent design from being outright bad. May still be salvageable/worth playing, especially if your tastes wildly vary from mine. The Ouroboros King - I just can't help but feel like most of the core elements have been done better elsewhere, even if not all in a single game. But if you very specifically want Chess: The Roguelike, it does that serviceably. Releases on February 27th. DinoBlits - A nonentity of a game whose demo I picked up because I kept looking for a good game with dinosaurs in it. ArcRunner - I think there's better sci-fi shooters, but it's fine. Dungeon Drafters - Definitely one of the ones where you can't just rely on my review and need to make sure whether or not it's your own thing. Found it bland and repetitive myself. Releasing sometime in Q2. Creeping Deck: Pharaoh's Curse - Perfectly generic deckbuilder, set in Ancient Egypt. Pocket Planet - Alternated between being very enjoyable and very infuriating, landing it in the exact middle. Dust & Neon - Okay, so when I reviewed Dust & Neon, I didn't know it was releasing tomorrow, as in a full release. If the Demo's all that there is, this really should be a D-Tier. But the robot cowboy dueling's okay enough and there's enough extra advertised that it's saved from the junk pile. Worldless - I forgot that this game existed, which pretty much sums up where I think it belongs on the list. Plan B: Terraform - Released today! Into Early Access, rather than a full release. I didn't really see what this brought to the table that other terraforming games didn't, but people seem to like it, so maybe I'm wrong. Also it's $9.99 ($8.99 on sale), so it's not like it'll break your wallet. Voidtrain - Probably the only one of these and below I expect to take a serious look at again at some point in the future. There's huge potential here, but it's just so slow to get started. D TIER - "And all should cry, 'Beware!, Beware!' His buggy mess, his vaporware" Bad games. Expect your net utility value with these to be slightly negative at best, and quickly veering off towards rock bottom. Ethyrial: Echoes of Yore - Like we really needed another low budget, generic MMO in an already crowded sea. Releases in April. Dreadful River - Poorly explained and poorly designed, I still think it looks like somebody's student project that just got let loose onto Steam. Releases on February 28th. Pirates of Pangea - Land & Sea Survival - This one is more like a C- that fell in here because I didn't want it and Voidtrain to share the same spot on the ladder. Could redeem itself with a lot of dev polish. Corsairs Legacy - Pirate Action RPG & Sea Battles - Wasn't great, but the devs have also put out other sections with additional gameplay. Still not expecting this to be good. Godfist - For a game about punching things, the punching doesn't feel that satisfying given how hard it is to put enemies down for good. Releases in March. Vernal Edge - Not even worth describing with a face card (of Metroidvanias). This might be a little harsh, but I also had a pretty bad time with the demo. Releases sometime in Q1. The Ranch of Rivershine - Bottom of D Tier, saved from going any lower because the demo was at least playable without incident and I didn't expect much from it. Soul Tolerance - The concept and aesthetics deserved to be attached to a much better game than this. Cardboard Town - It's not objectively a bad enough game to deserve F-Tier, but I disliked it so, so much compared to Roots of Yggdrasil. Karagon - Game released on the 13th, to mixed reviews. The fact that a couple of people seem to really like it makes me hesitant to dumpster it altogether, but I wonder how much of that is based on people assuming the dev is going to go full throttle on making this game the best that it can be, when they already have three other projects lined up to work on? $19.99 ($17.99 on sale). Uncharted Waters Origin - The game already failed in Asian markets and will probably fail even harder here, especially given all the weird cash shop and mobile-esque elements I saw on the sidelines of the demo. If we didn't have anything to compare it to, as someone who has regularly dealt with janky KMMOs, I'd probably still play it because the underlying game is still good (if overly riddled with annoying systems), but in a world where we have other options UWO stays down here where it belongs. F-TIER - "For all their consoles are filled with filth and vomit" Games that are literally unplayable, absolutely miserable, or in some way commit a cardinal sin against gaming. May they sink into the murky depths of Steam after this review, never to again see the light of day. Dark Tree - Poorly written, gameplay consists of you running around while maybe holding a single button, trying to circle strafe enemies. Still somehow the best of this sorry lot. Releases sometime in Q2. Builders of Greece - Not only is it a boring city builder, but the developer is just slamming out multiple games which are all the same thing in different settings. Releases sometime in Q3. Fall of Bali - C'mon, don't post the demo to Steam if it doesn't even work. This was a technical test with a history book attached. Immortal: Tales of Rebirth - Game "technically" was an English demo in the least useful of ways, was generally confusing, and the movement controls felt terrible. Releases in April. Gripper - Soulless, lifeless, took a cool concept and utterly ruined it in the execution. Quantum Coherence - Simultaneously satisfies the trifecta of all three things that should place it in F-Tier at once, and has the gall to be trying for another run in the Indie Cup. The worst of the lot. UNRANKED - "..." I still have opinions on these games since I did at least part of a review for them, but I only sort of indirectly engaged, so not going to rank them. King of the Castle - The sort of game you probably won't play because it's tailored to annoy you one way or another (again, streamer bait), unless everyone collectively agrees to just focus on the game itself, which seems alright. Releases on March 2nd. Black & White, formerly called 1/2 White or Black - I think the devs realized they made an error on the demo, as the game is now properly marked as not being supported in English. I still want to know what's going on with this one though. Releases sometime in Q1. Amarantus - I think this one's trying too hard to be edgy, but he who does not play it does not get to rank it. Releases sometime in Q2. Umigame - Realistically this game's going to crash and burn, but I want it to be at least playable solo to try it out. Releases sometime in Q3. God of Rock - Well, I suppose the world will never know if this is any good or not. Or I guess we'll just wait on the full version. Releases on April 18th. Final Thoughts A lot more good stuff than I was expecting going into the halfway point, but I think I was frontloading a lot of the bad demos near the beginning of the festival. In the end, everything averaged out to about what I was hoping to get out of the experience. Would come back and do it again next year, have to think about if I have the energy for this other festival or just want to move on to other games or replay the Wandering Sword/Roots of Yggdrasil/Archmage Rises demos. Jossar fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Feb 16, 2023 |
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Feb 16, 2023 02:47
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ymgve posted:I notice that you have a queen and jack of Metroidvanias, but no king or ace? Fair cop, the original statement for Gestalt was supposed to be highlighting/making fun of the fact that I only found the Metroidvanias with female protagonists interesting enough to play, but I couldn't find a way to make it land without being weird, so it sort of just got converted into a playing card joke halfway through. Also the Indie Cup isn't really super-demo oriented the way NextFest was, so I think I'm going to pass on that. Escape The Mad Empire, Erra: Exordium, Beneath Oresa, Chaos Crown, and The Brew Barons all seemed interesting at first glance if somebody else wants to take an in-depth look. Jossar fucked around with this message at 14:20 on Feb 16, 2023 |
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Feb 16, 2023 14:15
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ultrafilter posted:itch.io is running a bundle of magic-themed games from LGBTQ+ creators. $60 for 69 games. Or $10 for 66: https://itch.io/b/1713/trans-witches-are-witches-apprentice-edition
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Feb 17, 2023 02:08
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FutureCop posted:I'm really looking forward to the next one they've got coming out, being Rabbit and Steel, closest thing to a MMO raid simulator without all the, well, horrible MMO bits. Got to play it at MAGfest and had a good time. This looks really fun, but seems like it will work best with a dedicated group, since solo mode basically defaults to the game that's already out by being more bullet-hell focused. (I might also be of mixed minds as someone who usually likes all the MMO-bits, but that's a separate story.)
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Feb 17, 2023 05:10
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 Pharaoh: A New Era Tried the new Pharaoh remake. I wasn't a particular fan, but that's more because I forgot how out of the old Impressions city builders the only one I really liked in more than a tentative capacity was Zeus. Steam seems to be hotly abuzz with arguments on changes to the military system (which are fair, it's been simplified quite a bit, but it also was the weakest part of the game anyway) and quality of life (a bit more mixed - does adding a global worker pool outweigh the loss of the minimap?), but the overall game is a pretty faithful adaptation. More than anything else, that might be the biggest strike against it - if you can run the old game and don't mind 25 year old graphics (which are still pretty good) it's probably just about as worth your while to buy the old game on GoG or Steam, especially since it seems to be on sale (including the expansion) on GoG for $4.99 (or $9.99 normally, which it also is on Steam) compared to the remake's $19.54 ($22.99 normally). Jossar fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Feb 18, 2023 |
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Feb 18, 2023 01:17
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Also, I think NextFest broke something in me, where now instead of wanting to play games, I just want to play something for 20 minutes to an hour and then write up a review for the thread.
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Feb 18, 2023 02:02
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 My last, plaintive cry for Yi Xian: The Cultivation Card Game as a separate thread died about a month ago, but most people have still probably never heard of it and I still occasionally pop in and play a round so might as well plug it while I'm in a reviewing mood. Deckbuilding autobattler whose most common PvP mode is an 8 player round-robin brawl and whose PvE mode is just tough enough to be satisfying, even if the focus remains ranked PvP. The one big weakness is that while there is some flexibility in a card or two of your build, especially if you're in upper tiers of play and trying to counter an opponent's strategy, for the most part after a certain point in a match you reach the apex of your chosen archetype and settle for whatever spot you're going to get based on how the rest of the lobby built itself up. People claim the unlock system for sidejobs/characters is a big negative, but it really isn't. You get several for free, all of the characters are free in PvE, and the game's pretty generous with the non-cosmetic currency to unlock everything permanently just by playing. Ludicrously fun for $7.99, I still got a couple dozen hours out of it while I was in my "intense, sustained play" period. Jossar fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Feb 18, 2023 |
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Feb 18, 2023 02:28
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Ulio posted:Any good PvE type games like Warframe, Path of Exile but less complicated? PoE and Warframe are pretty different games, can you narrow down exactly what it is you're looking for a bit? EDIT: Will try and figure out some recommendations based on the general gist in absence of anything else, gimme a couple of minutes.
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Feb 18, 2023 02:52
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Hmm, usually I am the sort of person who really likes all the janky systems in these things, but... I think Titan's Quest had a form of co-op, and it's sort of more directly in the Path of Exile ARPG lineage? But you sort of need somebody who's already committed to playing rather than just picking it up and finding people. Maybe try Deep Rock Galactic? Jossar fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Feb 18, 2023 |
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Feb 18, 2023 03:01
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 Well, since the Pharaoh remake wasn't anything particularly special, refunded it and tried out Gunfire Reborn instead. This is the FPS Roguelike that I wish Ziggurat had been. I feel like there's a little too drastic a difference between the easy parts and the hard parts (effortlessly cleared everything up until the 2nd to last room of the first biome, had slight difficulty with the last real room but nothing major, then got turbostomped by the first boss), but I can accept that for my level of skill and newness to the game I might just need to focus on dealing with metaprogression first. It took me 43 tries to get a complete Hades run after all, and now I can pretty much clear a non-Heat run of that effortlessly. Definitely going to keep poking at this, dunno how much more today though. Jossar fucked around with this message at 15:26 on Feb 18, 2023 |
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Feb 18, 2023 15:18
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John Murdoch posted:I had the exact same experience with my early Gunfire runs and I can confirm that it'll clear up before long. Metaprogression grants you a LOT of power with the expectation that you'll graduate up the difficulty track over time. Duly noted! Thanks for confirming on that, would've been a shame to hear the opposite.  At the same time as I initially grabbed Pharaoh/Gunfire, I also picked up Vampire Survivors. Well, re-picked up. I originally grabbed it when it was in early access, bounced off it, and then after the Fest said "eh, I probably COULD use a game that takes 10-30 minutes while bouncing between other stuff." ...that's it. It's Vampire Survivors, it's very good, has a thread, what else do you want? Jossar posted:Dark Tree is a top down style ARPG that, sadly for FutureCop, is an absolute trash fire. It promises that you get to combine multiple weapons against enemies to devastating effect, but really what you're doing is just sort of running around while the game auto-attacks on whatever weapon you're holding down the key for at the time or just defaults to the weapon bound to the B key. Maybe you can do it for multiple weapons nearly simultaneously if you want, but the whole thing just feels super awkward, and it's not like the placeholder plot is worth the trouble. I've had games intentionally built as idle/incrementals whose undisguised button pressing to make numbers go up felt more fun and engaging than this, avoid. *sigh* _________________________________________ A Dark Tree Retrospective Okay, so I feel like I have to go back and explain why exactly Dark Tree sucks so much given that I've been playing Vampire Survivors on and off over the last day for 5 hours and from the outside looking in, it's basically the same premise. The easy way out is just to say that everything in Dark Tree is the same, but done much, much worse. But if pressed on it, I'd say there's something else at work. Vampire Survivors is simple. It knows that it wants to be an arcade-style survival game. Even when it adds new mechanics and stuff like a boss rush mode, it's still doing its best to try to stick to that core design. Dark Tree wants to be complex, something which does not work at all well because its core is built around simple gameplay. So instead DT is trying to go back and staple things onto the controls in an attempt to have its cake and eat it too, but it just sort of ruins both forms of play at once. (The bit about everything being done worse is also true though. And these days there's really no reason to settle for mediocrity if the concept isn't even interesting enough to justify it.) _________________________________________ Unrelated: In The Festivals Will Never Stop news, Made in Brazil is now showing off/having a sale on Brazilian made games until next Thursday: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/42974040/sale/MadeinBrazilSale EDIT: Somebody with a controller tell me if GOD-MACHINE - SHOGUN CYBERMETAL ARENA is any good or not. With a name like that, I have to know. Jossar fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Apr 27, 2023 |
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Feb 18, 2023 22:53
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