Steam Demos

[got_quiet]

My friends and I tried out a bunch of the steam demos during the event. For the most part the games we played were cheap knockoffs of other games. Soulstone Survivors was just Vampire Survivors reskinned. From Space was a more boring and easy version of Alien Swarm. Undecember is a PoE/Lost Ark clone with a lot of mechanics named the exact same thing as in those game. There are a handful of ripoff Factorios. Cosmoteer is Faster Than Light, there was an Unpacking ripoff. I could go on forever. It's almost impressive how quick lazy devs can push that crap out.

There's also a small handful of VNs. I took note of them and may look them up on itchi.io later, but I don't want to interact with them on steam because there's no way of hiding that shit from your friends list as far as I know. My friends know I play VNs but I don't think I want to announce to the world that I am willing to try out furry bara games.

There were a few games that seemed to be more than cheap ripoffs that I gave a try.

Haven Dock. My brother played this one and seemed to like it. It's a building and resource game where you're stranded in the "ocean" with lots of little islands and you build up a big dock with resources and tech trees and stuff . Seemed cute and relatively polished.

9 Years of Shadows. A Castlevania where you're a princess running around in a cursed castle where all the color has gone from the world. The art and sound is super clean. The gameplay felt simple but had some interesting elements. You get a teddy bear companion that provides a resource that is both a shield and ammunition so you need to decide how best to use it. I enjoyed this one.

The game that sucked me in the most was Against the Storm. It's a cross between a city builder/management sim and a rougelike. The narrative conceit is that all of the settlements outside the city are temporary, because of a perennial storm that destroys everything after a period of time, so your job is to stake out new areas after the storm has passed and re-cultivate them. The queen or whatever expects a certain level of performance, so if you fail to do things like create a stable population, or achieve the randomized goals for each level, she'll punish you and relieve you of duty. The gameplay involves cutting through a thick forest and breaking into little clearings that have events in them and resources. Everything is randomized, including the buildings that you can build, meaning sometimes certain methods of winning will be closed off, but to balance for that the tech tree is more open that usual, allowing for many alternative ways to build certain things. I played a bunch at the easy level and it was so easy that I was never in any danger of failing a round, but it was still pretty fun.

The last game I played was sort of a ripoff but also very much not. It was called Overhaul and was basically a sudoku roguelike. You would enter a chamber and have to solve simple sudoku (up to 5 rows is what I got to) while also dodging enemies or interacting with other elements of the map. In a sense there isn't any combat because you're trying to just solve a simple puzzle. There are power ups and stuff for health and speed and I guess power, I don't even remember now. There was also a dynamic voice system that was a lot like Hades, where the protagonist kept making comments on things, but it wasn't quite as good because the comments were very generic "ok"s and "let's go"s etc. I wanted to like this game more than I did because it was novel, but the puzzles are not difficult and the pitfalls are more annoying than anything. Still, kudos for the idea.

Comments

[got_quiet]

I'm not surprised that Vampire Survivors wasn't the first. I know I've played flash games that were extremely similar to it years ago. The demos pretty much ALL were some version of X "Survivors" so it was clear that regardless of where the gameplay was coming from the piggybacking was for the fame and the name recognition.

[autumndaze]

Yeah I think part of the appeal is that it's so cheap, has no microtransactions, has a lot of content, and is funny to watch with all the effects happening. Also it's had better marketing from what I see. One of the earliest ones I've found I think never made it past the demo stage.