The Demo Thread

• Last Moon - (link) - 2d zelda like. Combat feels pretty good, movement includes a run and a roll/dodge. World seems interesting. You are a crystal person/part of a shattered moon? And you make a sound like glass breaking when you are hit. I liked my time with the demo. I liked it a LOT. It was on my wishlist already, and it is staying on there. Dev's are still cooking away, not expected until next year. Looking forward to it!

• Crab God - (link) - A side-view strategy/sim game where you are migrating a crab god to-be across a roguelite map (pick node, survive, move on). It's cute, and it's surprisingly engaging. Wasn't expecting to like this as much as I did! I'm the five minutes and done guy - 22 minutes later, I stopped myself from playing more. Wishlisted. Demo is exclusive to Next Fest - try it while you can if it appeals to you.

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• Only Way Is Down - (link) - Reverse Only Up, with a cat. The movement is a bit awkward - I'm certain that's on purpose. I find that I can handle a person plummeting to their death constantly over and over again, but watching this cat do it is just too much. Not for me.

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Quarthinos said:

Thanks for the list! I might try and see if there's still a demo for Rungore tonight.

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• Airborne Empire - (link) - Sequel to Airborne Kingdom, a flying city builder - now with more stuff, and some combat (the first had none)! Pretty much exactly what I thought it was going to be. I like the first game quite a bit, so this one is sure to be played eventually. Stays on the wishlist!
• The Rise of the Golden Idol - (link) - Sequel to one of the best adventure/detective games of the past several years, and exactly what I was hoping for. Stays on the wishlist!
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Reckoning of New York - (link) - Third game in the series of visual novels. This one has a second character to unlock! Oooooooh. I quite enjoyed the first two, which were two very different Vampire The Masquerade stories. A few minutes confirmed the basic structure is still there, and the writing seems to be just as good as the others. Looking forward to this on release! Stays on the wishlist!
• Caravan Sandwitch - (link) - @Nauls took at look at this earlier on the previous page, and I would like to second their opinion - this is a delightful exploration game, it really is. I want to call the main character "Sausage" (their name is "Sauge"). But it really does have a neat setting, it's pretty, it feels good to control. I like that there is no fall damage of any sort. Environmental puzzles and fetch quests abound, but hey, you should know that going in. I liked it a lot.

• I Am Your Beast - (link) - The next title from Strange Scaffold. The last game they made that really drew my interest was a third person shooter, going through that crazy hotel in El Paso with a lot of bullet time dodges and shooting. This is a first person / action game in little set pieces. You have objectives to accomplish, you are timed, you are graded, and there are secondary objectives to complete. It's got a pretty poignant, John Wick / Jason Bourne story going through it. And being able to kill enemies by throwing empty pistols at thme is silly. A little too frantic for my taste (hence why it's an "eh" for me), but it is absolutely worth a look!
• Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure - (link) - It's an adventure game where movement is done by shifting the tiles under the character's feet. So is combat. And puzzle solving. It turns every single movement of the game into a puzzle, from bringing objects along with you to place something on a button, to navigating around objects that won't move at all, from moving swords into enemies to kill them. It's pretty darn interesting, but it's a little too.. something? I'm just not feeling it? Another game that people should very much give a look to, because it might just tickle the puzzle part of your brain. I've never been a huge fan of the 'shuffle the blocks around' puzzles, so this didn't really hit it for me - fell off my wishlist.

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• The Alters - (link) - Was on the wishlist, is staying on the wishlist, and is ALMOST a "Oh HELLS yes!" title. This is that game where you're on a circular ship on a strange planet, and you make alternate reality copies of yourself to work the ship. There are time limits, and stress, and your alternate copies all have their own quirks. You only control 'prime' you, and go from there. Exploration, resource gathering, and that 'copy' mechanic (and dealing with the 'alters' and their interactions with each other make for a truly fascinating take on the base building genre. I really enjoyed my time with the demo, and it's pretty long - I certainly spent way more time with it than I expected, and didn't feel like I had done more than scratch the surface of some potentially really deep mechanics. My only real irritation? No jump button. And why isn't sprint toggle-able? But that's more of a general gaming gripe . Don't sleep on this one - it's well worth a look.

• Surmount - (link) - 2(ish)D climbing game with a cutesy art style. You control your grip with the triggers, and the big mechanic thing they lean into here is the swing. You swirl the control stick to build momentum, let go, and zoom. This is used for both speed and mandatory traversal. And I could get used to it, but I can also see this shredding my thumbs. Down in here in "if it's free" you go, and REMOVED from wishlists.
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• Sworn - (link) - It's a dark Arthurian multiplayer action roguelite directly and obviously inspired by Hades. Upgrades are based on choosing from three options bound to a particular deity / mythological figure. And I'd just rather play Hades. If ou're a multiplayer person, might be a neat thing, though.

• Blade Chimera - (link) - And REMOVED from the wishlists. A pretty, but ultimately unsatisfying metroidvania to me. The movement and the combat both feel pretty lackluster to me, even if the pixel art is pretty. But so many good games in the genre, and new ones coming all the time? Meh. Just wasn't fun to me.
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• Tails of Iron 2: Whiskers of Winter - (link) - Bills itself as a 2d souls like. I don't really like the feel of the combat, simple as that. Pass. And removed the first from my wishlists.
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• Ceplion - (link) - 2d pixel art, side scrolling action platformer. The movement is merely okay, the combat feels really 'eh', and there is a certain sloppiness to the sound design and to the animation/art asset placement in the layering. Once again, in a super crowded genre of games I tend to enjoy, this one falls short for me. The screen shots look like the world gets really, REALLY expansive, but I dislike the fundamentals.
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• Lone Planet - (link) - Odd platformer where you jump from a round "planet" to another and another and another. After a four minute unskippable cutscene and story beats. So, there is that. I didn't really like the way it controls, and the graphical choice here just doesn't work for me. Pass.

• DEATHGRIP - (link) - And REMOVED from wishlists. The podracer game. I think. Either you auto-opt in to analytics gathering, or you have to jump through hoops in an external site to opt out. Killed any bit of interest I had for the game, what-so-ever. No idea how it plays or feels. Not going to check up on it. Reclaim Interactive can go pound sand.
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• Nimbusfall - (link) - This was heading to 'Eh' territory. Really rudimentary looking boss rush game. I'm not sure about the weapon choices, and attacks are limited. Movement takes a moment to get used to. Like any boss rush, it's all about learning the moves. Luckily, they give you <x> number of lives (you pick when you start an attempt at the rush) that will automatically load in if you die, so the action is seamless. It's both much more shallow and deeper than you'd expect, and not really my thing, I think. Hence "Eh." HOWEVER! IT soft locked on me twice during the 'upgrade' scenes between bosses - I could make noises like I was moving/dashing/attacking, but no visual cues on the screen, and unable to select the upgrade or move on to the next boss. Had to ctrl-alt-del to close the game. Not my thing, and it's a bit broken besides.

Mortus said:

I was going to try the Once Human demo, but apparently I can't. It's being said that I'd have to disable my pi-hole or use a VPN. Thanks but no thanks NetEase.

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• Blue Prince - (link) - Roguelike puzzle game where you go through a manner. This is a certified banger. If puzzle is your thing? Do this. Have a notepad handy. You'll want to have it. I read about this one last year, and yeah. This is pretty damn cool. And hey, such a luminary as Daniel Mullins (of Inscryption and Pony Island fame) is singing this one's praises. If you like puzzle games, you need to give this one a look. Depending on the price, this might be an instant purchase or it might wait for a bit. But it's definitely going to be bought and played.
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• Golden Lap - (link) - I love the IDEA of sports management sims more than the actual thing. This? This is freaking great. Especially as a "have 30 minutes to kill?" thing. It's a Faux-rmula 1 management sim with a minimalist aesthetic, and a fairly minimalist take to how many things you can adjust. For a given race weekend, you run Qauli session and a race. I did career mode and started from scratch, but ended up feeling alright. I got my boys up to 3 and 4 during Quali, but I had skimped on the second driver and put the money into the car. Ultimately that didn't pay off. My top driver couldn't retain 2nd (strategy fuck up on my part!), and my second driver plummeted down. It has a minimalist feel, a minimalist take on sports management (you can adjust three areas on the car, for example), there was next to no tutorialization (so I learned as I went - SPEND ALL YOUR UPGRADE POINTS EVERY PIT IN QUALI!), and I did worse in the race than in quali. And you know what? I freaking loved it. LOVED. IT. I'm buying this game the minute it's out. God damn, if it came to mobile? Great tap dancing fake $deity on a pogo stick, that would be freaking awesome! If F1 Manager (or sports management games in general) always seem to be too complex but your always thinking that maybe this time you'll like it? Try this.

• Steel Seed - (link) - What if the Jedi Fallen Order was more of an action/stealth game and less souls-ish - meaning sneak attacks and hacking are in, parrying and dodging is out, and there is no stamina meter - ? Now change the setting to some other scifi... thing, and away we go. You have a droid that you can directly control. The setting for the demo is an industrial area over a lava pit that is falling apart. Movement is very third-person action platformer - double jumps, slides, wall running on select surfaces, climbing things indicated my yellow bars, some really minor environmental puzzle things. Enemies are pretty easy, for the most part. I liked it rather a lot. Tutorialization needs some work - if you play the demo, try wacking things with your power sword thing. You can probably cut through it. Not quite a "HELLS yes", but very close! Oh, and the dev team (Storm in a Tea Cup) as an AWESOME logo, and last put out Close to the Sun - a game that had its ups and downs. If a third person action game sounds up your alley for the moment, give this one a glance.
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• NODE - (link) - Okay, this was almost an "Eh". ALMOST. But it kind of sunk it's hooks into me. It's a 2.5d puzzle platformer - you interact with things on a 2d plane, but the world is 3d. Think Inside/Limbo/American Arcadia/Plant of Lana. Right up my alley, right? So here's the kicker - your character is a robot exploring a nuclear power plant in Siberia, and after a short time? Direct control is not possible. You have to load commands in on a timeline. Go forward for 3 seconds, jump, go forward for 4 seconds, turn, go forward forever until next antenna pickup. It's a bit of a Zachtronics element to the genre that I find intriguing as hell. The path is broken up into segments where you reconnect automatically back to base, have dialogue pop ups, and your programming comes to a stop. Basically checkpoints. There are some issues with it, but it was intriguing enough that I really want to see how it gets reviewed upon release next year (allegedly).
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• Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn - (link) - Why is it up here instead of down there in "Eh" or "Meh", with 99% of the other souls-likes I try? You can turn the difficulty down and turn on infinite health. Simple as that. If it gets frustrating, I can turn invulnerability on and still progress. I found the premise and setting interesting enough while I was playing to keep it on the wishlist, and that accessibility feature? Huge. So, it stays on the wishlist. Which is more than I was expecting, honestly. I don't play these very much so I don't have a lot to compare it too, and I'm perfectly fine with that.

• Vampire Therapist - (link) - A visual novel where you interpret what fellow vampires say, and then pick the appropriate response category and see what happens. It has a certain charm, but not enough to make me keep it on a wishlist. Eh.
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• Dungeons of Hinterberg - (link) - A exploration/action/puzzle game. Third person. very distinct grpahical approach. And leaves me feeling.. nothing. Eh. The game is set in the alps, but there is no jump button. You want to get up to a ledge, you run up and mash your face against it and maybe you'll climb it. There is a lot to draw inspiration from here, and at the same time..... not.
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• First Dwarf - (link) - Dwarf in a mech RPG colony survival game. Third person, you build bases, you fight things. You can switch to your friendly lil' dragon and fly around. Entirely too much cuttin' down trees and smacking piles of stone for my liking, But if that's your jam, might be worth a look.

• IRONHIVE - (link) - A deckbuilder colony/city builder on a 2d plain. With some outrageously piss poor tutorialization. Seems like an interesting premise, and the way it plays could be interesting. If it bothered to tell you anything in a timely manner, if it mentions it all.
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• The Echo Paradox - (link) - First person alien (UFO and alternate dimension) investigation game. There are MUCH better options out there.
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• Forgotlings - (link) - a 2d action platformer. It looks pretty - the animation and art is reminiscent of some form of cartooning that escapes me. Interesting premise - you and everyone else is a forgotten/discard object that arrived here and was given life. Bonus to the devs for giving a really short story primer and then getting you right into the action. The movement and the combat are... stilted? Delayed? Something. Neither felt good to me. Might watch someone play this though. Otherwise, no, REMOVING from wishlists.

• Once Human - (link) - Nope. Nope Nope Nope. See Mortus's post just a few up thataway for why. NOPE NOPE NOPE.

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• The Operator - (link) - You work for a federal agency, taking trouble calls from agents. Your interface is a PC desktop. They send you files, you use tools to find what they need. It's an investigative game, and it sucked me in pretty good. I liked that quite a bit.

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• Bloodless - (link) - Action adventure game where your combat revolves around dash-counters. Very stylized art style, pixels with a minimal color palette. It's effectively a parry system, and I suck at parries! . I like the idea, I'm just bad. And there are enough games that I don't feel compelled to 'git gud' at something that doesn't quite site right with me. Ya'll might enjoy this one, though. The demo is less than a gigabyte, and might be worth a look. Ah, and steam says controller isn't supported - this is a lie.
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• The Elderseed - (link) - 2d action adventure platformer. I didn't play it for very long - I dislike the controls. A d-pad button to crouch, you can wall jump some walls but others that look identical, you just can't. The overall movement feels both darty and imprecise, and this is billing itself as a 'platformer'. The story premise and the art style weren't enough to keep me interested. Pass from me.
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• Sword of the Necromancer: Prologue - (link) - {NOT PART OF STEAM FEST!} - This is a free PROLOGUE, so it lives in your library forever. A top down 2d pixel art hack and slash dungeon crawler with roguelike stuff. Combat feels not so great, movement is limited directly to eight-axis with no nuance, and, well, that pretty much kills it.
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• Sword of the Necromancer: Resurrection - (link) - The 3d, third person action game remake of the above. And it's more serviceable, but I'm BOOOOOOOOORED instantaneously. And it really is a straight 3d remake. Meh.
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• The Sacred Acorn - (link) - "Cozy souls-like" means the aesthetic is "cozy". Otherwise, it's a top down action adventure game with art I find to be uninspired, movement and combat that doesn't feel good, and a waste of my time.
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• CASSETTE BOY - (link) - Top down zelda like that really feels like they took a modern game and try to stick into the OG Game Boy aesthetic and capabilities. To it's detriment. I spent a little time with it, not once felt like I was having fun. No idea what gimmicks or whatnot might be there - the basic experience felt slow and very much like a drag.
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• Heaven Crawler - (link) - I wanted so much to like this game. But for an isometric action title, regardless of anything else? I don't like how it feels to play, either the movement or the combat. Bummer. Meh.

• Into the Emberlands - (link) - Top down exploration game. Click to move. You have a lantern with a certain amount of 'ember' charges, and you use one for each tile/step you take away from the little village you start in. Sound cut out a half dozen times, crashed twice. It wasn't going higher than "Eh" at best anyway, but now it lives down here.

Frosty Grin said:

It seems related to Forgotton Anne somehow - a spin-off?

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• Bloomtown: A Different Story - (link) - I stated it was a Pokemon-like. I was dead wrong. Do you want Persona, but in a small town and with pixel art reminiscent of the mid-90s top down SNES RPGs (Chrono Trigger, FF6, etc)? That's pretty much what this is. Small town. Side jobs. Demon infested alternate upside-down version of the town. Nefariousness. Four person parties in turn based combat with "Heroic Beast" magic powers.And I got sucked in. This was great. I played it for nearly an hour, and I forced myself to stop. A bit of a slow opening, and there are some minor things I'd like to see improved on (fast travel, for instance, and sometimes objectives aren't highlighted on the map), but for the most part? I loved this.

• Edge of Sanity - (link) - 2d side scrolling survival horror. Like most games from Daedelic, there are some design choices and mechanical hickups that almost drop this down into "Eh?". But I like the aesthetic and the setting (eldritch horror, secret facility, "Alaska" wilderness). You do excursions out to areas and then return to camp, learning things along the way. You also start to acquire 'traumas', perks that mess with you. There is some rudimentary combat, but most enemies are hide-or-flight. I liked it just enough to put it on the wishlist.

• Dawnmaker - (link) - Combo deckbuilder / city builder that was surprisingly engaging. You have to generate resources to advance and also counteract deadly smog. Fairly simple, but deeper than the tutorial makes it seem. Played it for an hour, failed the first area, the passed it. Quit out, because, you know, an hour. Lots of interactions between both cards and buildings on the hexagon grid. I was very engaged, and trying to plan for eventualities. The only reason it's down here instead of up in "Yeah" is I feel I got what I wanted out of the experience. Very slick interface, a good time.
• Tower of Mask - (link) - First person dungeon crawler. Like, you can only move in cardinal directions dungeon crawler. BUT you can free look. Controls were a bit odd, but I got used to them. No idea how far this goes, I stopped after a few minutes. I will say that this is NOT my genre of choice., but this one is tempting. I might come back and look at reviews for this one, because I was pretty intrigued.

• Aloft - (link) - Sandbox survival-ish in floating islands. It apparently can get pretty expansive. Multiplayer. Why survival-ish? Because there was no 'survival' sliders - no food/water/etc. And there appears to be no fall damage. So it's a crafting/building game in a mildly pretty environment where you can eventually, maybe, build airships. Again, a little too choppy-tree, smacky-stone for me. And the crafting is just.. eh. Not my type of game normally, and that continues to be so with this one.
• Republic of Pirates - (link) - I'm going to agree with @LuNatic_ ; this feels like a slightly more narrative focused less deep version of Port Royale. I like the interface a bit better in this one, but for everything I feel it gets right, it lets down in other areas. There's nothing wrong with it, per se, but it's not for me.

• Honeycomb: The World Beyond - (link) - Holy unoptimized mess and bad UI, Batman! It wants to be Subnautica-but-on-land-and-different. But the menus and the UI? Yeah, no. And on my rig (which is no slouch) it decided that it was going to be blurry, bloomy, badly textured mess. I noped out almost immediately.

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• Beyond Galaxyland - (link) - Sci fi 2.5d side scrolling, turn based RPG (you can move between layers at select points). I like the art. The combat can get pretty varied. I'm confused about the story, but I'm intrigued. Stays on the wishlist.
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• Akimbot - (link) - 3rd person action platformer. I've seen articles referencing it as a throwback to the PS2 era gameplay wise. And.. I'd agree with that. It feels nice to play, it's got bright and colorful environments, it's not particularly challenging (at least at first). And it looks pretty good for what it is. I enjoyed my time with it, and wouldn't mind playing it more. Wishlisted.
• Sumerian Six - (link) - A Real Time Stealth Tactics game set at the outset of alternate history world war 2. Plays very similarly to Mimimi Games' Shadow Tactics, Shadow Gambit, Desperados 3. There are some interesting things here - footsteps don't make noise, you have crazy gadgets that let you do things like "hitchhike" on enemies while they are patrolling, allowing you to get by otherwise alert baddies. I liked it a lot.

• Creatures of Ava - (link) - A perfectly acceptable 3rd person action adventure game where you cleanse infected creatures, do research, collect them to do things, and explore and do simple puzzles. I removed it from the wishlist simply because it's a little too... too... ? I don't know. Anyway, it's fine. It really is. And if I got it for free, I might play it eventually. But maybe not.

• Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire - (link) - This is a game that is supposed to occur up in the sky. I never got there. After 15 minutes of fetch quests on the ground with a wonky camera, unskippable dialogue - you can't advance it if you are done reading, you just have to wait - and... yeah. There might be a neat game here. It's supposed to be turn based combat. But this game has committed one of the big sins in demos. It wastes the players' time. Hard pass.
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• The Light of the Darkness: ORIGINS - (link) - I didn't like this at all. Side scrolling souls-like, maybe some metroidvania elements I'll never discover. I don't like the movement. I don't like the combat. Not for me.
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• Brokenlore: UNFOLLOW - (link) - Turns out I'd played the demo before. Didn't like it then. Don't like it now. Meh. Frosty has a decent take on it up that away.
• Dustborn - (link) - Damn. Damn damn damn damn! I really wanted to be able to enjoy this. This game is a cell shaded third person rhythm-and-beat-em-up-adventure game as a punk bad crossing alternate history America. Lots of conversation, an interesting setting, pretty good looking for the aesthetic they are going with. This also had that crazy trailer during the presentations where the conversation choices could change the outcome pretty dramatically. Just... it lost me. The demo is broken up into different sections to give you an idea of what to expect. There is a lot of very interesting stuff here. Just... ugh! I'll end up frustrated with the rhythm game elements and hating it. May watch a lets play instead.
• Heart of the Machine - (link) - Holy terrible user interface! In a 4x, that's not uncommon, but here? I couldn't even intuit what to do in the first 3 minutes, clicking on all of the things. I may be stupid. Regardless, nope nope nope!
• Fantastic Haven - (link) - It's a fantasy city builder thing, where the goal is to 'rehabilitate' creatures. I was bored to tears, and tutorialization is fucking awful. Pass.
• Ark of Charon - (link) - Colony sim (that ends up moving around) and a tower defense game on a 2d plane. I did not like the controls, the lack of meaningful tutorialization, or the actual look of the game once I had it loaded up. Meh.
• Spirits of the Silicium Forest - (link) - An odd "build" based game that goes out of it's way to say "not a deckbuilder!", highly dependent on positioning. It's strangely limited, and honestly I didn't find it any fun.

• Misgiven - (link) - A side scrolling (ish) adventure game in a very stylized sci-fi setting. The game is based around conversation mechanics that are actually pretty interesting. To pick an option, you must click and drag a response... blob... into a container. If it fits, you say exactly what you mean. If it doesn't, you can't say it. And if the blob has to squeeze a bunch to get in that container? What you'll say comes out... not exactly as planned. The more you converse with someone, the wider the entrance to the container, so more difficult conversation options become available. It's actually pretty neat. But the game provides next to no tutorialization for basic movement (click to move), the prompts you need to look for, etc. There could be a neat game here, but the state of the demo makes it a bit hard to recommend.
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• LiFE CODE - (link) - What a janky mess. Over the shoulder third person shooter. I got just a couple of minutes in and decided that no, I don't need to play this.
• Realm of the Everbound - (link) - Third person action adventure. I think. Ditto janky mess. Ugh.

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• Fading Skies - (link) - Okay, here is a modern third person action platfomer that could qualify as "cute" that I like. Combat isn't difficult, it's very big in exploration and narrative, puzzles are both environmental and LOTS of jumping, there is an eventual flight mechanic, and.. I just like it.
• Before I Go - (link) - 2d metroidvania of the shooty variety with a really distinct art style, a story where I have no idea what's going on, a big damn map, and elements of precision platformers. I kinda dig it.
• Soul Drifter - (link) - What Frosty said . It's first person parkour with a stamina based glide. And for what it is, it looks and feels just fine. I like it.

• Aero GPX - (link) - A modern, cell shaded take on F-Zero. It might be a touch too easy, but it looks pretty. Feels fast, but not as fast as F-Zero.

• Disco Samurai - (link) - Isometric rhythm action game with a pixel art style. Looks cool, but I don't why I even try .

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GMBigKev said:

Instantly brought out of the immersion when everything was listed in metric for a supposedly American agency

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