Big old Steam Next event
Jun. 29th, 2023 10:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
got_quietThe demos in the most recent Steam Next event were largely superior to the last one in terms of base polish and playability. Only a couple of the games I tried were just complete ass. The rest ranged from ok to something I'd pay for if I bought more than one game a year. Below is a quick review of what I managed to try before the event ended.
Harvest Moon in space. In the demo all you do is break rocks and refine them. There's a little bit of cultivating food too, but you're all alone on the planet so at least in the demo there's no NPC intereaction. The post demo trailer shows NPCs and there's UI that clearly shows population and relationships but you don't get any of that in the demo. Maybe it's a fun game, but I didn't feel like I saw much of it. It definitely fulfills the idle pleasure of just breaking a shit ton of rocks though.
Crime o'clock.
This is one of those searching games where you just try to find stuff that's deliberately hard to find. This one has a little gimmick where you need to find the relevant bits of a crime and you do that by clicking on details on different parts of like a 9-point time line. There's prompts like "where's the victim? Wheres the weapon? Where did the criminal go?" Stuff like that. The conceit is kind of neat but in the end this is still a finding game where you spend 20 minutes per round (if you're as bad as me at it) just trying to find a obscure piece of a big image. There are I guess something you could describe as a mini game where you mach up images but that's as complex as just scrolling around until you find the right one. Like the hidden image game I played in the previous round of demos, after playing this a little I just felt bad about myself so I didn't go through the full demo.
Hammerwatch II
I've never played Hammerwatch so I can't say what's changed. This is a top down pixelated action RPG which I was either playing wrong or has some brutal stats. Gameplay is straight forward. You run around a little map hacking and slashing with your given class. I picked a ranger, and as a ranger, basically if I got hit 2 or 3 times that meant I was dead, and my damage was not high, so combat looked like my training large packs of mobs in circles as I picked them off one by one. It wasn't unfun. Even though it was a little tedious the stakes for failure kept me from getting bored. There were a lot of quests too but I didn't manage to finish any because I kept dying in the relatively large dungeons. The pixel art looked good but did not do a super good job of conveying interactable objects vs atmosphere sometimes.
Since nitpicking VN mechanics is a weird obsession of mine, I have to add that in the demo at least you're prompted to chose one of three personalities (nice (iirc?), aggressive, and witty) at the very beginning and then you get locked out of any trait based option besides your chosen one from then on. So, the opposite of how I like traits to be developed in VNs. It's Bioware-esque, and not every choice involves those traits, but I still think Arcade Spirit's angle where you develop yourself over the course of the game is much more interesting. And, there there are time limited choices, which make sense because you are basically selecting the next verse in the middle of the song, but you chose the option before the previous verse is over. What this says to me is you don't actually need to know what someone is saying to know what choice to pick.
The voice acting was... ok. The mixing felt a little weird but they got professionals in at least. A couple times that annoying thing happens were the delivery is wrong likely because the VA didn't know what their line was a response to. I can't imagine that there is significant branching considering the production costs here, but who knows, maybe?
I'll be interested to read the reviews for this game but will stick to stuff I can just read at my own pace personally.
Spirit Swap.
I love me some match three and this one wasn't too bad. It's swap based and you can only swap horizontally. Getting a better than three mark swap puts a bar on your opponent's screen and each character has a "spell" that does a unique map clear if you match a square. The story mode was super easy but the vs mode has some difficulty levels and I got wrecked by the NPC when I tried it.
New Cycle
One of a million city builder games. The demo said some of the functionality was limited but I don't know if what was missing would make a huge difference. The game largely felt generic with one exception. It had "AI" quest givers. The text generated on those quests were not particularly interesting but they seemed to be platforms for discovery (mention of other areas etc) so possibly they are useful in the full game?
Other than that the city building didn't stand out at all.
Siheyuan
A puzzle game where you need to rotate little blocks to fit them in the right color. But you can multi play it where you have to help each other by moving the blocks to each other's zones but also can fuck each other with the wrong blocks. I thought it was fun actually but my brother couldn't tolerated it because he hates "action puzzles." Had a very tetrisy feel.
A GrimDark FPS. The controls were deep ass so I quit relatively early on. Couldn't easily select, or command, which are all the things I would expect RTS to prioritize. After spending a minute trying to figure out how to get the camera to rotate without issuing a command (the button is the same one for both things) in order to properly select the right enemy which was hidden from selection in certain angles, I decided I don't care enough for this genre to struggle with it.
Naheulbeuk's Dungeon Master
The old Dungeon Keeper was one of my favorite games, and nothing quite like it has come out in a long time, so when I saw this I was hoping it might be a good spiritual successor. Unfortunately it's one of the Janky Demos. The first thing it has you do is place a bath room, but I couldn't figure out how to do so. If I dragged a square I was told constantly that there were no walls, but the plan was kept and I had no way of removing it, until I had inadvertently produced a bathroom the size of the whole level. Then, trying to place a latrine in side also proved to be difficult, because I could select one, move it around, rotate, it, but no combination of button clicking or keyboard banging could get it to actually go down. The tip key said something like "use these two keys to build your room" without otherwise suggesting what those keys might be. So after failing to move forward or back in the "place a bathroom" task (the very first one in the game) I had to alt-f4 (I was so trapped in the task there was no way to quit otherwise) and that was that for that demo.
Moving Out 2
This is supposedly better as a co-op but I can't imagine how. It's sort of like overcooked where you run around a map trying to get objects into a truck to pack. But the mechanics are just designed to frustrate you at every turn. The first demo level they give you you have to put animals in pens, but the animals jump out of the pens. There's probably a trick to it, but I was so pissed at constantly having my progress reversed I just said fuck it and left.
Luna Abyss
This advertised itself as an FPS bullet hell. It's kind of horror themed and the only two colors it uses is black and red. Either it's pitch black, or everything is glowing red. Gave me a bit of a headache. The demo was largely traversing very dark areas and then entering the occasional room with some of the promised bullet hell. It was largely "strafe a bunch while killing everything," but was ok up until it crashed on me.
The worldbuilding in this one was grim dark horror but still a little intriguing. In the 10 minutes I played it was all just promises of something interesting though.
Urbano
A visual novelish rhythm game. I wasn't super pleased with this. The rhythm game aspect was a little lacking, where you need to attack and dodge but those take different timings and the visual indication of timing did not feel clear. On top of that, I managed to miss something at the very beginning of the game and just stud there putting in the three inputs that I was given to jump duck and slash waiting for the damn song to end and feeling like it was on a loop or something, when I finally thought maybe I needed to just quit it was taking so long (almost 10 minutes) and then out of frustration I tried moving forward and the fucking guy advanced lol. I guess I was supposed to approach the enemy as I was ducking and dodging but had somehow missed that instruction. Possibly because all of the dialog is introduced with this annoying as hell shake of the speech bubble. I read fast, so making text unreadable for almost as long as it would take me to read it drove me nuts, and I ended up skipping through all the plot stuff to get to the game play because I just couldn't deal with the text shake.
The art style is cool though. If the play were a little more polished I would have liked this more.
Inworld Origins
I picked this one up because it was touting its use of AI, and I like to keep my eye on what "AI" actually means at the concrete level. The idea of this game is that you're in a closed area with a bunch of NPCS and are trying to figure out why a factory exploded. So it's a detective game. The twist is that all of the interacting is done via microphone, you have to actually speak out your dialog, and then the NPCs respond via "AI" algorithm.
Generally the AI was good at catching whatever key phrase/word would trigger a realistic and natural sounding response, but only for the setup of the game. After that things got a little bit rough, and it was hard to determine what was kept "in memory" and what wasn't. For example, trying to get my partner to search for CC Footage of a missing android led to it asking me a bunch of questions that I couldn't answer at the time but going back I wasn't sure if I needed to start the dialog all over again or if it could recall the previous conversation.
But really the biggest problem with this sort of approach to playing a game is still that even if it looks like you have suddenly the freedom to do anything you want, the story is still actually scripted and there is still a narrow pathway that can lead to a valid outcome.
The frustration of trying to find the next step in the plot when there are no markers whatsoever reminds me a little bit of a bad tabletop session, when the players want to do something but the GM has made it clear through railroading that their only real option is to do something else, but they won't give you any good clues as to what that else might be, so you waste an hour of play time trying stuff that's obviously "wrong" until you get thrown a bone or whatever (yes this is oddly specific). That's why games like these still inevitably fail for me. I don't feel like I have more freedom when I have to use that freedom to find the same little thread that would be there even if it were not obscured so much. Give me something more tightly written any day.
The good
Mythforce
This was probably the best of the batch in terms of fun and polish. It's a class based FPS roguelike with a fantasy flavor. You can play one of four characters that all play pretty differently, and are running around dungeon spelunking. The classic rougelike elements are here, with some persistent upgrades but mostly the run depending on one big upgrade option per level, with each level getting subsequently harder and a few levels with bosses. You get 3 skills and an ult and two weapons and are off. I played the tank warrior and the melee is a lot closer range than I want it to be, but there was some good utility in the charge and taunt, and my brother who played with me was very pleased with the range mechanic in terms of hitboxes and feedback. For example if I knocked down a mob the game knew where the head's crit hitbox was when it was prone. Considering so many of these games fail because they don't have the fundamentals down, that's a big accomplishment.
Wild Mender
It's sort of a survival open world game? The survival elements did not seem to be that punishing when I was playing. You're a little lonely guy who is trying to bring life back to a nearly dead desert planet by tending a little spring and planting some plants. By the end of the demo I had picked up a bunch of upgrades mostly related to making traversing the map easier and some big terraforming upgrades that moved the scope from a tiny ass patch of land to maybe something more significant. There's a night day cycle that's turned on its head where the danger is in the heat of the day (you run out of water real quick if you stray far) and the night is when you do your running around and questing. The big problem I had with that was that I couldn't see all that much cause it was night, but it wasn't pitch black at least. I ended up spending like 4 hours straight on this game without meaning to so the play cycle seems to be working. I'm mostly interested in how much terraforming is involved. The combat was kind of bad, but like, Valheim bad, so perfectly workable, just clearly not the priority.
This was probably the best of the batch in terms of fun and polish. It's a class based FPS roguelike with a fantasy flavor. You can play one of four characters that all play pretty differently, and are running around dungeon spelunking. The classic rougelike elements are here, with some persistent upgrades but mostly the run depending on one big upgrade option per level, with each level getting subsequently harder and a few levels with bosses. You get 3 skills and an ult and two weapons and are off. I played the tank warrior and the melee is a lot closer range than I want it to be, but there was some good utility in the charge and taunt, and my brother who played with me was very pleased with the range mechanic in terms of hitboxes and feedback. For example if I knocked down a mob the game knew where the head's crit hitbox was when it was prone. Considering so many of these games fail because they don't have the fundamentals down, that's a big accomplishment.
Wild Mender
It's sort of a survival open world game? The survival elements did not seem to be that punishing when I was playing. You're a little lonely guy who is trying to bring life back to a nearly dead desert planet by tending a little spring and planting some plants. By the end of the demo I had picked up a bunch of upgrades mostly related to making traversing the map easier and some big terraforming upgrades that moved the scope from a tiny ass patch of land to maybe something more significant. There's a night day cycle that's turned on its head where the danger is in the heat of the day (you run out of water real quick if you stray far) and the night is when you do your running around and questing. The big problem I had with that was that I couldn't see all that much cause it was night, but it wasn't pitch black at least. I ended up spending like 4 hours straight on this game without meaning to so the play cycle seems to be working. I'm mostly interested in how much terraforming is involved. The combat was kind of bad, but like, Valheim bad, so perfectly workable, just clearly not the priority.
Videoverse
There are a lot of VN demos in the event but most of them look like ecchi bishojo and I'm not particularly dedicated enough to subject myself to that. But I am weak for a good nostalgia software trip. Videoverse is another game that is played through the interface of a retro machine, this time a fantasy handheld called the Videoverse Shark or something like that. There are PMs, there are message boards, there's likes and reports and hints of classic forum drama. The demo sets up a little mystery as a new member of the community shows up, posts art, gets flamed, and you defend them. Who is this new person? Well I guess that's the first mystery of the game.
Everything worked without any glitches. The writing was not bad. The main characters were not English speakers so I'm pretty sure some of the language errors were intentional because they didn't show up elsewhere. If I exhaust my free VN pile I may look into this one.
Wizard with a Gun
This was being published by Devolver Digital so I assumed that it was going to at least be polished and that's the case. It's a little action roguelike thing where you're running around an isometric map, trying to gather resources to build up your base before you run out of time and have to retreat back to it through a portal. The world ends, you turn back time, and do it all over again. The two stick gunplay is a little odd and the guns I wasn't sure about. Certain times of guns have certain rates of fire, and then you craft magic bullets that have certain effects. There's a water bullet that makes enemies wet but doesn't do damage. Not sure what that's supposed to be for but I didn't figure it out by the time the demo was ended. There's a little bit of building but mostly the demo was running around shooting rocks and trees and trying to figure out the tech tree. But the combat was kind of fun so I liked the game.
Ratopia
This is a sort of base building + mining game where you are the queen rat and you need to build up your kingdom after running away from enemies. It reminded me a lot of the sort of flash games that used to waste hours on and I wasted hours on this one too building up my little rat empire. Some of the later mechanics like setting up consumption tax rates and stuff was a bit too spreadsheet for me but digging around and making the tech tree was fun enough. The demo ends after a certain number of days and I felt like I got my fill in that time.
There are a lot of VN demos in the event but most of them look like ecchi bishojo and I'm not particularly dedicated enough to subject myself to that. But I am weak for a good nostalgia software trip. Videoverse is another game that is played through the interface of a retro machine, this time a fantasy handheld called the Videoverse Shark or something like that. There are PMs, there are message boards, there's likes and reports and hints of classic forum drama. The demo sets up a little mystery as a new member of the community shows up, posts art, gets flamed, and you defend them. Who is this new person? Well I guess that's the first mystery of the game.
Everything worked without any glitches. The writing was not bad. The main characters were not English speakers so I'm pretty sure some of the language errors were intentional because they didn't show up elsewhere. If I exhaust my free VN pile I may look into this one.
Wizard with a Gun
This was being published by Devolver Digital so I assumed that it was going to at least be polished and that's the case. It's a little action roguelike thing where you're running around an isometric map, trying to gather resources to build up your base before you run out of time and have to retreat back to it through a portal. The world ends, you turn back time, and do it all over again. The two stick gunplay is a little odd and the guns I wasn't sure about. Certain times of guns have certain rates of fire, and then you craft magic bullets that have certain effects. There's a water bullet that makes enemies wet but doesn't do damage. Not sure what that's supposed to be for but I didn't figure it out by the time the demo was ended. There's a little bit of building but mostly the demo was running around shooting rocks and trees and trying to figure out the tech tree. But the combat was kind of fun so I liked the game.
Ratopia
This is a sort of base building + mining game where you are the queen rat and you need to build up your kingdom after running away from enemies. It reminded me a lot of the sort of flash games that used to waste hours on and I wasted hours on this one too building up my little rat empire. Some of the later mechanics like setting up consumption tax rates and stuff was a bit too spreadsheet for me but digging around and making the tech tree was fun enough. The demo ends after a certain number of days and I felt like I got my fill in that time.
The OK
One Lonely OutpostHarvest Moon in space. In the demo all you do is break rocks and refine them. There's a little bit of cultivating food too, but you're all alone on the planet so at least in the demo there's no NPC intereaction. The post demo trailer shows NPCs and there's UI that clearly shows population and relationships but you don't get any of that in the demo. Maybe it's a fun game, but I didn't feel like I saw much of it. It definitely fulfills the idle pleasure of just breaking a shit ton of rocks though.
Crime o'clock.
This is one of those searching games where you just try to find stuff that's deliberately hard to find. This one has a little gimmick where you need to find the relevant bits of a crime and you do that by clicking on details on different parts of like a 9-point time line. There's prompts like "where's the victim? Wheres the weapon? Where did the criminal go?" Stuff like that. The conceit is kind of neat but in the end this is still a finding game where you spend 20 minutes per round (if you're as bad as me at it) just trying to find a obscure piece of a big image. There are I guess something you could describe as a mini game where you mach up images but that's as complex as just scrolling around until you find the right one. Like the hidden image game I played in the previous round of demos, after playing this a little I just felt bad about myself so I didn't go through the full demo.
Hammerwatch II
I've never played Hammerwatch so I can't say what's changed. This is a top down pixelated action RPG which I was either playing wrong or has some brutal stats. Gameplay is straight forward. You run around a little map hacking and slashing with your given class. I picked a ranger, and as a ranger, basically if I got hit 2 or 3 times that meant I was dead, and my damage was not high, so combat looked like my training large packs of mobs in circles as I picked them off one by one. It wasn't unfun. Even though it was a little tedious the stakes for failure kept me from getting bored. There were a lot of quests too but I didn't manage to finish any because I kept dying in the relatively large dungeons. The pixel art looked good but did not do a super good job of conveying interactable objects vs atmosphere sometimes.
Norland
This is one of those "emergent narrative is created by lots of numbers" games a la crusader kings etc. You get yourself a little town, have to assign things at the top level, manage a bunch of needs and other stats, resource balance, and there's combat, and towns to trade in or sabotage etc etc etc and games like this just overwhelm me with stuff that doesn't have much to do with "narrative" really and isn't the sort of challenge I like.
Stray Gods
Since nitpicking VN mechanics is a weird obsession of mine, I have to add that in the demo at least you're prompted to chose one of three personalities (nice (iirc?), aggressive, and witty) at the very beginning and then you get locked out of any trait based option besides your chosen one from then on. So, the opposite of how I like traits to be developed in VNs. It's Bioware-esque, and not every choice involves those traits, but I still think Arcade Spirit's angle where you develop yourself over the course of the game is much more interesting. And, there there are time limited choices, which make sense because you are basically selecting the next verse in the middle of the song, but you chose the option before the previous verse is over. What this says to me is you don't actually need to know what someone is saying to know what choice to pick.
The voice acting was... ok. The mixing felt a little weird but they got professionals in at least. A couple times that annoying thing happens were the delivery is wrong likely because the VA didn't know what their line was a response to. I can't imagine that there is significant branching considering the production costs here, but who knows, maybe?
I'll be interested to read the reviews for this game but will stick to stuff I can just read at my own pace personally.
Spirit Swap.
I love me some match three and this one wasn't too bad. It's swap based and you can only swap horizontally. Getting a better than three mark swap puts a bar on your opponent's screen and each character has a "spell" that does a unique map clear if you match a square. The story mode was super easy but the vs mode has some difficulty levels and I got wrecked by the NPC when I tried it.
New Cycle
One of a million city builder games. The demo said some of the functionality was limited but I don't know if what was missing would make a huge difference. The game largely felt generic with one exception. It had "AI" quest givers. The text generated on those quests were not particularly interesting but they seemed to be platforms for discovery (mention of other areas etc) so possibly they are useful in the full game?
Other than that the city building didn't stand out at all.
Siheyuan
A puzzle game where you need to rotate little blocks to fit them in the right color. But you can multi play it where you have to help each other by moving the blocks to each other's zones but also can fuck each other with the wrong blocks. I thought it was fun actually but my brother couldn't tolerated it because he hates "action puzzles." Had a very tetrisy feel.
The Bad
A GrimDark FPS. The controls were deep ass so I quit relatively early on. Couldn't easily select, or command, which are all the things I would expect RTS to prioritize. After spending a minute trying to figure out how to get the camera to rotate without issuing a command (the button is the same one for both things) in order to properly select the right enemy which was hidden from selection in certain angles, I decided I don't care enough for this genre to struggle with it.
Naheulbeuk's Dungeon Master
The old Dungeon Keeper was one of my favorite games, and nothing quite like it has come out in a long time, so when I saw this I was hoping it might be a good spiritual successor. Unfortunately it's one of the Janky Demos. The first thing it has you do is place a bath room, but I couldn't figure out how to do so. If I dragged a square I was told constantly that there were no walls, but the plan was kept and I had no way of removing it, until I had inadvertently produced a bathroom the size of the whole level. Then, trying to place a latrine in side also proved to be difficult, because I could select one, move it around, rotate, it, but no combination of button clicking or keyboard banging could get it to actually go down. The tip key said something like "use these two keys to build your room" without otherwise suggesting what those keys might be. So after failing to move forward or back in the "place a bathroom" task (the very first one in the game) I had to alt-f4 (I was so trapped in the task there was no way to quit otherwise) and that was that for that demo.
Moving Out 2
This is supposedly better as a co-op but I can't imagine how. It's sort of like overcooked where you run around a map trying to get objects into a truck to pack. But the mechanics are just designed to frustrate you at every turn. The first demo level they give you you have to put animals in pens, but the animals jump out of the pens. There's probably a trick to it, but I was so pissed at constantly having my progress reversed I just said fuck it and left.
Luna Abyss
This advertised itself as an FPS bullet hell. It's kind of horror themed and the only two colors it uses is black and red. Either it's pitch black, or everything is glowing red. Gave me a bit of a headache. The demo was largely traversing very dark areas and then entering the occasional room with some of the promised bullet hell. It was largely "strafe a bunch while killing everything," but was ok up until it crashed on me.
The worldbuilding in this one was grim dark horror but still a little intriguing. In the 10 minutes I played it was all just promises of something interesting though.
Urbano
A visual novelish rhythm game. I wasn't super pleased with this. The rhythm game aspect was a little lacking, where you need to attack and dodge but those take different timings and the visual indication of timing did not feel clear. On top of that, I managed to miss something at the very beginning of the game and just stud there putting in the three inputs that I was given to jump duck and slash waiting for the damn song to end and feeling like it was on a loop or something, when I finally thought maybe I needed to just quit it was taking so long (almost 10 minutes) and then out of frustration I tried moving forward and the fucking guy advanced lol. I guess I was supposed to approach the enemy as I was ducking and dodging but had somehow missed that instruction. Possibly because all of the dialog is introduced with this annoying as hell shake of the speech bubble. I read fast, so making text unreadable for almost as long as it would take me to read it drove me nuts, and I ended up skipping through all the plot stuff to get to the game play because I just couldn't deal with the text shake.
The art style is cool though. If the play were a little more polished I would have liked this more.
Inworld Origins
I picked this one up because it was touting its use of AI, and I like to keep my eye on what "AI" actually means at the concrete level. The idea of this game is that you're in a closed area with a bunch of NPCS and are trying to figure out why a factory exploded. So it's a detective game. The twist is that all of the interacting is done via microphone, you have to actually speak out your dialog, and then the NPCs respond via "AI" algorithm.
Generally the AI was good at catching whatever key phrase/word would trigger a realistic and natural sounding response, but only for the setup of the game. After that things got a little bit rough, and it was hard to determine what was kept "in memory" and what wasn't. For example, trying to get my partner to search for CC Footage of a missing android led to it asking me a bunch of questions that I couldn't answer at the time but going back I wasn't sure if I needed to start the dialog all over again or if it could recall the previous conversation.
But really the biggest problem with this sort of approach to playing a game is still that even if it looks like you have suddenly the freedom to do anything you want, the story is still actually scripted and there is still a narrow pathway that can lead to a valid outcome.
The frustration of trying to find the next step in the plot when there are no markers whatsoever reminds me a little bit of a bad tabletop session, when the players want to do something but the GM has made it clear through railroading that their only real option is to do something else, but they won't give you any good clues as to what that else might be, so you waste an hour of play time trying stuff that's obviously "wrong" until you get thrown a bone or whatever (yes this is oddly specific). That's why games like these still inevitably fail for me. I don't feel like I have more freedom when I have to use that freedom to find the same little thread that would be there even if it were not obscured so much. Give me something more tightly written any day.
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Date: 2023-06-30 06:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-01 03:32 pm (UTC)