Games

I didn’t play much outside of my stream this week, since a lot of my focus was spent on either processing videos as explained above, or else looking for new Steam Next Fest demos to prepare or play. I did the occasional CivIdle run, and I’ve now unlocked the “100 hours (or played the demo)” achievement for that game too, that I complained about not getting a couple of weeks ago despite playing the demo. I also played a bit of Esports Godfather and was bowled over by all the changes to the game since I played it last. Arena venue management? Player scouts? Retirement ages? I can now choose the direction my jungler always starts in so red side isn’t always playing from a disadvantage? Hmm! And then there was My Little Universe, a resource farming and upgrading game and not much more than that, but satisfying to muddle around with late at night nonetheless.

But most of the week was spent on Steam Next Fest, and I promised to dump a list of game demos that I played and the scores I gave each one in this week’s blog, so here we go. These scores and brief review snippets are also both on the stream spreadsheet (not listed here yet as the entire thing is publicly editable right now) and the Shiarapedia stream wiki page too, and in case I rewrite my reviews or change my scores slightly, those ones take precedence.

Anyway, this week, I played and recorded my playthrough of these demos (not all of them are strictly from this month’s Steam Next Fest) and sorted them by score:

• Wanderstop – 9/10 – Amazing demo. Beautiful graphics, stylish teahouse, great concept and intro, fun characters, perfect length for a demo. Main nitpick would be that controls can be a bit touchy, both in terms of picking things up, holding them, and item interaction. But it’s a nitpick.
• Deliver At All Costs – 8/10 – This was a lot more fun than it had any right to be. Destructible physics, fun and voiced narrator and over-the-top characters, great music, chaotic quests, and intriguing vehicle upgrades. Kind of felt like playing GTA: VC again. Main drawback would be the tank controls, but I suspect this is deliberate in order to cause more chaos.
• FUMEHEAD – 7.5/10 – I liked this one a lot. Stylish colours and characters, a unique battle phase implementation for the deck that determines what colour cards are eligible to appear that round, consumables that have expiration dates so you cannot horde them too long, a stylish inventory/upgrade menu, a descent into insanity storyline, and a funny post-end-of-demo scene.
• Moves Of The Diamond Hand – 7/10 – Fun dice-levelling mechanics and stylish art, though there are some weird decisions like not being able to just use items in inventory to heal yourself directly. Might be possible to get softlocked.
• MagicCar of Delicious / Gourmet Food Wizard – 7/10 – I enjoyed this one. Upgrade a little train with towers that you drag around clearing little zones. There’s a night market segment to sell food at too. <3 Though that part is weird, since you can just leave and reenter with no penalty to reset the stall.
• Promise Mascot Agency – 7/10 – Smooth, solid demo, with a Yakuza-like weirdness that I like, was voiced in Japanese and even has a vocal song, all great things. Vehicle controls (on keyboard) were a bit too slidey, but might be adjustable. My main worry is that it felt like a weird but ultimately bland minigame collectathon. It will live or die by how good its story is, but that didn’t impress me in the demo. I really like the timed demo concept though.
• Sylia – 7/10 – Despite the forced 640×480 fullscreen resolution, some weird text things like characters at the start of some lines not being capitalized, and the perhaps slightly too long introduction gameplay segment, this game was great! I played far more than I meant to. The pet characters were fun and memorable, being able to recruit random monsters was awesome, and the first Sequoia dungeon was cool, while also dropping hints that there were other pets we were missing. I managed to sell my map, that is probably a bug.
• Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping – 7/10 – Fun, solid, well voice-acted game. Not super simplistic, but not too tough either, it’s more of like a comfort food game, put on your detective hat and follow along with the story. I did dislike occasionally knowing exactly who a deduction was talking about but not having the keyword for it because you have to find and talk to one specific person to get it though, but then again the map does show you what clues you have uncollected.
• Cubic Odyssey – 7/10 – Pretty smooth, stylish galaxy-wide Minecraft/NMS inspired game with things like vehicles and spaceships, including what seems to be mobile spaceship bases and such eventually. And portals to go back to any planet bases. I liked the demo quite a bit, minus a few issues like hotbar quirks and the inability to split items. The stars, the colours, the meteor showers, they were great. Can’t tell how repetitive it is later on though.
• Sultan’s Game – 6.5/10 – This is a Cultist Simulator variant with similar QoL features from those games, but with a narrative story wrapped around it. Lots of typoes in the demo. Some unclear bits on what cards can be used where sometimes. But very intriguing otherwise.
• Wordatro! – 6.5/10 – Balatro with words, and it is exactly what it advertises to be, needs more QoL and powers and stuff but the demo promises that in the full game anyway. Main Menu button really shouldn’t end the current game without warning, demo or no.
• Yasha: Legends of the Demon Blade – 6.5/10 – Fairly smooth and very pretty Japanese-themed, Hades-like, action roguelite, though there’s a bit of an animation lag at the end of the attacks that I don’t really like in my action games. No major complaints though.
• Tales of Seikyu – 6.5/10 – Yokai and cozy Stardew mechanics in a 3D game seems to be a nice match, but there are signs of lack of polish that I hope get addressed. Inventory and the shortcut bars were a chore, at least on kb/m. Some characters clipped through things or stared at walls. It was a 3-day demo so there was nothing like a festival or event to see, those are often the highlights of these sorts of games.
• Nice Day for Fishing – 6.5/10 – I like the game and its fishing mechanic, and the NPC banter was quite funny even without knowing about Epic NPC Man, but the game runs the risk of being repetitive and how good it will be will depend on that.
• Doloc Town – 6.5/10 – Cozy farming/life sim with a post-apoc theme and a side-scrolling view. There are quite a few almost-familiar-but-slightly-different implementations of systems like the faint/sleep penalty, the need for planters, the sleeping tent that you can build platforms in, portable 15-use boxes, tech trees that require XP levels in multiple tasks, etc. Some I like, some I’m intrigued by, some I’m not sure about. The ambience during the rain is especially wonderful. There’s combat and bosses too, though not in what I played.
• Cauldron – 6.5/10 – Wish the UI was a bit better in places, but this one has lots of dopamine — you play minigames to collect items to upgrade your party or upgrade the minigame itself. Pleasant game, funny writing, definitely a great companion game to putter on while doing other things. Multiple game modes for different moods that affect each other, like some powerful upgrades require you to complete X number of game modes. Could use more tooltips and such for the combat part of the game though.
• As I Began to Dream – 6/10 – The store description mentions trauma, but the demo never got to the trauma part, and it was fairly easy and straightforward. But it was a cozy puzzle platformer, and if the puzzles eventually get harder then it will be a good game. The rules around the collectibles felt a little confusing.
  
• Shadowveil: Legend of The Five Rings – 6/10 – Roguelite autobattler. I like the idea in general and love the flow, but gameplay was a bit slow, some clicks weren’t intuitive, and I felt like I was fighting the UI here and there while trying to get used to it. I LOVE L5R though. And we didn’t get to see much of the roguelite upgrades, but it apparently is quite good.
• The Northern Path – 6/10 – Sledge. Dredge in the tundra with a dog sled and a more peaceful overall vibe. There does not seem to be a food/supplies mechanic, which is fairly different from many other coldlands survival games. Which means you can basically farm tons of money at the start of the game with no penalty. That part’s weird.
• Save the Villainess: An Otome Isekai Roleplaying Game – 5.5/10 – Funny/interesting narration style, pretty art, and even a great voiced opening song, but lots of unnecessary and slow animations (skippable though). It’s not “snappy”. I accidentally mixed up save and load twice, annoying menu UI.
• Skin Deep – 5.5/10 – Stylish spaceships and weird cat captains! Am worried using props to murder enemies and get rid of heads might feel sameish after a couple of levels, especially with the “easier” ways of killing. The teleporting in the demo was weird too, but assumedly not in full game.
• Hanako’s Flower Shop – 5.5/10 – I very much like the concept, but I found the English voice acting and the amount of unnecessary early banter during the “tutorial” offputting, though maybe I was a bit harsh. There’s proper JP voices planned though. The flower collecting segment was buggy too. Things like trait stacking were not explained, at least within the first couple bouquets. I love their volume sliders for each character.
• Do No Harm – 5.5/10 – They pile on quite a lot of mechanics and some things like dosages, allergies (and how to get around them), and the meter thing that came in with the wheel were not explained well or seemed inconsistent. Don’t know if that was intentional. Dislike the sanity mechanic where you have to quaff laudanum, because that’s like RNG saying “Hey, here’s a random gold or sanity loss for this customer.”
• SEDAP! A Culinary Adventure – 5/10 – It’s a serviceable “restaurant” simulator with stages, using Singapore/SEA-inspired recipes, with the main twist being that there’s a different “outdoor” area connected to the restaurant with each stage. It’s meant for two players and I felt disadvantaged playing alone. The early story is weak. Who am I selling my food to? The island is deserted!
• STRAND – 5/10 – What I played of the demo didn’t really show that much, though I really liked being able to pick up and spin/examine so many weird items. I might have gotten softlocked at the end though, not sure. Also the game has FPS issues on higher graphics and looking around can cause motion sickness.
• Veloria: The Knot of Candles – 5/10 – I enjoyed this one enough to play it all the way to the end of the demo, but it needs several passes to deal with all the translation issues, punctuation, missing line breaks that made sentences cut off, etc. Classic Asian jank. Some of the puzzles were moderately difficult, with red herrings thrown in, and translation issues hindered a couple of them. Plushie and dog abuse trigger warnings.
• That’s not my Neighbor – 4.5/10 – Demo on https://nachogames.itch.io/thats-not-my-neighbor and not part of Steam Next Fest. It was fine, fairly straightforward, demo only contained one level with 7 neighbours to interview. The rotary phone UI was a bit weird.
• Mayhem Maidens – 4/10 – Basically Vampire Survivors as a tower defencey roguelite where you control/recruit up to 5 girls (characters from some Light Novel) and protect/upgrade an orb in the middle. Character movement is slow though, and it’s very difficult to switch to/control the characters in the chaos. The melee characters feel a lot weaker too.
• CraftCraft: Fantasy Merchant Simulator – 3.5/10 – The crafting is both simplistic and finicky (some unexplained parts) at the same time, but with a bit of polish it could be a lot of fun. Right now, not really. Game is voiced, somehow. There are two buttons at the top that return you to main menu, for some reason. Lost my first character because there’s no confirmation on one of them, and the game crashed soon after.
• Valkyrie Star: A Cacophony Choir – 3.5/10 – Combat is missing lots of descriptions like tooltips on buffs/debuffs, some skills and mechanics (like mana/mystique) were partly renamed and had two names, and the story writing was incoherent at times. Nice to see several sort-of henshins though, and the concept in general is intriguing. With polish and an interesting story, could be very fun.
  
• Bura: The Way the Wind Blows – 3.5/10 – Most of the art was decently nice but some (faces, walls) were low-poly, weird and offputting. Lack of decoration and life in village, the “church” was a small empty room. Story was nonexistent and characters twice referred to things that hadn’t happened yet. Interestingly it looks like the full game involves a time skip to an older protagonist. Game gave me vertigo too, partly because FOV slider was hidden, but the controls were not very good overall and hiding acorns in random places is not “rewarding exploration”.
• Food Wagon – 3/10 – The adventure part was weak, the graphics and UI were super basic, some Korean signs were not translated, the “roguelike” component felt out of place like they didn’t figure out how to save games, and the only NPCs I found were bugged. But pulling the food wagon around and across bridges and setting up camp and cooking kebabs was evocative of something much greater. I want a better game like this.
• What Comes Next – 3/10 – It’s really simplistic, has weird “story” arcs (like when you break into a house to get a shirt for a beggar), you can’t retrieve the mouse after he completes his tasks and returns to the girl, and it overall feels very much like a free game or tech demo.
• Absurd Story: Back Home – 3/10 – This demo is held back by a very poor translation effort, but there’s a chance the actual game could be fairly interesting. It looks like the main character is en route to pick up a quirky party and the puzzles are easy in the demo part of the game, except for a part that I wasn’t noticing the ingame feedback for.
• VIOLENT RUSH – 2/10 – Stylish, but short demo that abruptly ends, no meaningful choices, very questionable content and art.
• Dragon Heartburn – 2/10 – A finicky “precision puzzle” game where you are breathing fire and need to navigate through rooms of idiotic workers without killing any of them. There’s a cursor bug in fullscreen, and the fire mechanics and the weirdness around what happens at angles in the game are not what I’d consider fun.
• My Lil Afterlife – 2/10 – Felt like a very early tech demo. Graphics were cute, but music was repetitive, inventory/placement was annoying and needs QoL, there’s no reason to craft anything, the dungeon was too short even for a demo, and combat is poorly implemented with line of sight issues, attacks landing before induction bar ends, etc. Also a bug where you can go into decoration mode as the dungeon was loading and you’d end up invisible in the dungeon.
• qualia – 2/10 – More an art project than a game. The main menu did warn that the demo was only 5-10 minutes long though. But even as an art project, it’s lacking a certain je ne sais quoi. It needs more interaction than just pressing Human or AI buttons, and it basically doesn’t make full use of the video game medium. The engine was also very weird, with visible menu items up top.

Phew, that was a lot of demos this week. And these are scores for the versions of the demos that I played, and are not necessarily indicative of the final game, some were obviously not final pre-release demos for example, but early vertical slices of gameplay. There’ll be more in next week’s blog, too. Check them out here.

A few of those were played “Afterhours”, or off-stream, partially because I have a larger list of demos I want to play than I feel that I can get through in time for the end of the festival, and I am not sure if many of these demos will be up after the festival, and partially because some genres probably just don’t lend themselves to me streaming them very well, or I’m fairly sure the game will flop but I wanted to try them out nonetheless, so I played them without my usual audience of 2-3 and recorded them anyway, and tossed them into the Demos playlist.

I played (and like/tend to play) a lot of smaller demos “off the beaten path”, not just because they’re the popular demo du jour of the community, and that’s generally something that I’m proud of. Not that I’ll play every weird game I see, or that I won’t play a demo because it’s too popular, but I don’t consider popularity to be a reason that I play a game. In fact, because I uploaded all my playthroughs to my YouTube channel in a Demos playlist as well, some of those videos might well be the only video, or one of a very few videos, made of some less popular games. The Steam Demo Fest, like many other things, is a popularity contest and it can be very, very hard to get noticed. But I’d rather go hunting for gems than play the same 4-5 demos that every other streamer plays because they saw their friends play it, or because they get sponsored to play it. And maybe by making videos on more “unique” games, I might in turn get more views in the online streamer popularity contest and stand out a bit more myself too.

That being said, if a friend of the stream suggests it, I’ll generally try a demo out too, even if offstream, because that means they wanted to see it or they think I’d like it. And so there will still be another week of demos to go at least before I transition back to regular games!

I didn’t end up taking many screenshots because, well, I recorded everything on video anyway, but I will close out this section with a couple that I did take, this one from the end of Moves of the Diamond Hand:

And this one of a double 9-letter word to cap off the end of the Wordatro! demo: