Demo Disk Vol.1

Dead As Disco + Denshattack

While it feels a little wrong to combine two of my favourites from this event, I honestly want to limit how much I say here as I fully intend to write at length about both upon their full releases.

You can’t blame me. Both of these titles are absolutely dripping with over-the-top style. It’s as if every time the artistic teams put down their pens and said “job well done” an inner voice instead screamed “WE CAN GO BEYOND“.

Dead As Disco is a vinyl record covered in highlighter fluid, spinning at a velocity which sends its colours flying as your heartrate quickens while trying to match its tempo. Kick-flipping down a parallel track is Denshattack’s tricked-out train whose insane movements and velocity juxtapose the peaceful palettes of dreamcast-era environments.

These games don’t just wear their influence on their sleeves, they’ve decked out whole punk jackets with patches of their heroes. I was already a fan of the Batman Arkham-style flowy combat, a delicate dance of hits and counters. But of COURSE it’s better when set to a sick soundtrack including, not one, but TWO banger versions of Maniac from Flashdance. People always say “oh those games make you feel like Batman”. Yeah? Well the slickness of Dead As Disco’s dance-fight animations landing on the beat makes me feel like busting out dance moves that I can’t even do.

Want another thing I couldn’t do to save my life? Skateboarding! Which may seem an odd segue to talk about a train game, except that Denshattack is quite literally what you get if you apply Tony Hawk’s scoring system to Ratchet & Clank’s rail-grinding sections. The jet-set radio art style is gorgeous and the soundtrack slaps so hard that I feel compelled to try and conquer its strange control scheme just to stay in this world a little longer. Couple that with incredible exploration and replayability in each of its stages, and I’m hooked.

IGTAP (Incremental Game That’s Also A Platformer)

With the nature of inspiration, inevitably a lot of games I saw during Next Fest could be summed up as “It’s X game plus Y game”. This can’t quite be said for IGTAP however, despite it literally being named along that tradition. It combined two genres which, honestly, make no sense together.

And yet. This is pretty good.

The loop is simple, but clean. You have a small platforming course to complete, each time you do you get a reward. You can spend the reward on upgrades for the next reward, new abilities, or a clone of yourself which repeats your actions on your fastest lap. The clone only gets a fraction of what you make, but then you just get another clone and there you go, that’s an idle game.

If it was that simple, I likely would’ve lost interest. The incremental games which catch me are the ones which start creating efficiency issues. Sure, you’ve got plenty of clones, they’re getting plenty of rewards, but it doesn’t really seem worth it to purchase any of the available upgrades. Thus, you realise it’s your turn to step back on the course. How many seconds can you shave off that best time?

Couple that with new moves unlocking shortcuts which drastically cut down a lap’s time, and the world itself being a platforming challenge with its own hidden rewards, and suddenly this idea has legs. Not unlike the strange egg you play as.

Everything Is Crab

Know what else comes out of strange eggs? Probably this creature? I’m not quite sure as, thankfully, unlike Mewgenics this genetic mutation simulator doesn’t feature reproduction. Instead this adorable slime simply tears through the world like most carnivores, and after filling its belly evolves to better facilitate its murderous inclinations.

At least that’s all I thought the game was, which was honestly fine. Sure some of the evolutions didn’t quite make sense to me, why would I lean into charming enemies or getting more nutrients from scraps when I was clearly a murder machine?

But an unlockable hinted at a pacifist run which I had not even thought was a possibility. I embarked on my attempt, and found this scavenger lifestyle thrilling. The way it forced me to rethink how I could avoid combat, how I had to pay far more attention to my enemies, and even to focus on outliving rather than outkilling. 

It’s a strange small world they’ve made, but I do enjoy seeing where my little freaks fit into their ecosystem.

Voidling Bound

To cap off this strange egg triplet we have Voidling Bound. Here, you hatch creatures with such cute and expressive eyes that you’re ecstatic to find you can pat them all. That is, before you proceed to Avatar your way into their bodies and force them to cleanse corrupted worlds which were effectively ruined by human influence.

Pokemon has had its fair share of criticism over the dog-fighting implications of its battles, but man I don’t even know how to interpret this game loop. One distinct improvement it has, and actually shares with the previous game, is an emphasis on slow evolutions. Step-by-step, every change a Darwinian nudge towards greatness.

My first creature was a gross looking albino bird whose beak opened in four directions. Yet, despite its initial disgustingly-pale skin, as I took it on skirmishes and used elemental materials to dictate its evolutionary path, I grew more attached. Especially as these choices not only changed how my Voidling attacked, but subtly altered its shape and colouring too.

A standard, basic, pale, clammy creature offers a blank canvas, which the more you paint upon, the more dear it becomes to you. The added control over its destiny deepened my investment in this little weirdo. I now love my lumpy crispy chicken. You will too.

Vampire Crawlers

There were plenty of trends to be seen within the next-fest top demo pages. When a new indie succeeds in creating an almost entirely new genre, it’s inevitable that ‘reinterpretations’ will soon follow. Vampire Survivors was no stranger to this treatment. Even the aforementioned Everything Is Crab is effectively a survivor-like.

Fascinatingly, while many other developers are trying to recreate their success, it’s the Vampire Survivor’s team themselves who I feel succeeded at reinventing their own wheel. This game almost feels like an unrelated card-playing dungeon-crawler simply wearing Survivor’s skin. My first run didn’t change that opinion.

I feel they simply started with the wrong character here. The second character, the one who sold me on the concept, starts with a slightly different set of starting cards. The difference being a card which revolved around drawing new cards to your hand, within a turn. Quite necessary when the starting hand size is only three cards. This highlighted what Crawler’s unique flair actually was, its combo system.

For each card you play, if its cost is one higher than the previously played card, you start a combo. An ever-increasing multiplier begins, doubling, tripling, so forth, the effects of your next card. When my first run was limited to zero and one cost cards, it oversimplified the idea. “If I have one of each I’ll make sure to play that one second for the double damage”. That was the extent of my decision making.

That second character whose deck revolves around drawing additional cards within a turn? The card which facilitated this effect is also multiplied by this combo system. I immediately began scavenging as many of these and the zero-cost cards as I could. Who cares if you only draw three cards at the start of each turn? With how I was playing, I didn’t need a second turn.

Soon after I acquired a three-cost which essentially became my beloved railgun for how much it would demolish a horde, as well as wild-cards which could fill in your combo and take it even higher than thought possible. Playing the right character, with the right cards, and the right luck, and you feel a euphoria not unlike when the cards cascade down after a victorious solitaire.

Those sick bastards have done it again.

Hozy + Outbound

Another double-smush, though for a funnier reason this time: these are both simply so visually-stunning that they almost feel like screenshot-bait to me. In gameplay terms they couldn’t be much less in common, one is functionally a diorama-cleaning simulator, and the other a trial for van-lifing.

The similarity between them is the human warmth found in each. Hozy provides the catharsis of restoring a small space, and unpacking a family’s life and history into a once cold and forgotten place. Less-confining, Outbound places you in the midst of boundless nature, and allows you to unpack your own experience with the world. Hozy might make you consider the wealth of history which lay behind a person, while Outbound might make you wonder what lies ahead for yourself.

There’s a slow, methodical nature to each. Not meticulous, but contemplative. Removing floorboards and rubbish is smooth and calming. If a task cannot be completed quickly, then surely it must be done leisurely. My van in Outbound’s full throttle felt only slightly faster than running, but this pace simply allowed more time to watch the sunrise.

Sometimes it’s nice to just move slower, and clean up our environment. Or try and draw a ninja turtle with imprecise tools.

Romestead

Very possibly my favourite of the bunch, and easily the title I most look forward to playing, Romestead is a survival crafting game which you won’t want to stop exploring. Not just its gorgeously rendered world, in its stunning pixel glory, but all of its systems too. I am sure I shall write more on this in the future, so I will keep it briefer today.

A common issue I have with this genre has actually been largely solved just by the setting of this particular title. After the fall of ancient Rome, with all their knowledge but lacking their resources, what would you do to begin rebuilding? Punch a tree, gain a wood log? It doesn’t really make sense at the end of the day. But throwing a small chunk of flint at a boulder in hope that the flint will break into more workable pieces? That tracks for me.

A lot of the early crafting systems follow this mindset. Yes you can form a primitive axe and chop a tree down and into logs, but then you need to place those logs on a chopping block to continue processing them down. It nails a difficult balance between friction and fun, between realism and enjoyment. You can manually spin a mill’s crank to crush down olives or wheat, but buildings simply require an amount of large resources near the building site and a short minigame to construct.

Many systems lay hidden in plain sight, such as your inability to produce armour by yourself, while the game emphasises building a town of tradesmen to assist you (wink wink). Or a pantheon of gods whose identities are shadowed, but their reactions to your offerings may in turn reveal their true nature. This light obfuscation of what is possible, of what even exists in this world, leads to so much more interest in exploring and mastering it.

There’s so much more I could say about its design, both visual and mechanical, but I ‘m going to save my full opinions on this gem for its full release. In the meantime, consider it having my large bee-shaped stamp of approval.

Esoteric Ebb

Despite recently reigniting my passion for reading, I still get quite frustrated when games lob one dense paragraph after another at you. It might just be my reading speed, but it often feels like an absolute momentum killer. Yet I did not feel that irritation from Esoteric Ebb, despite it basically being an exercise in political philosophy and reading comprehension.

Titles in this style live or die based on the quality of their writing, often causing them to have casts of characters who monologue like they have a bachelor’s degree in classical literature. Esoteric Ebb avoids this common over-seriousness yet deftly steers clear of falling into cheap parody either. A good example of this is the game’s protagonist, The Cleric.

Waking from death with a muddled mind, you begin with an almost blank slate, if not for your interior monologues trying to influence you towards their domains. Your overarching goal may be to solve a mystery involving a recently-combusted tea-shop, prominent in the background is the city’s upcoming election. Five short days away, and your character is racked with indecision on his political stance. He isn’t even definite on what class he wants to be, despite being ostensibly referred to as The Cleric. What follows is simply a comedy of errors as you try to give definition to your character’s life.

To this end, in the midst of flirting with demonic bartenders, negotiating with a sphinx, or telepathically communicating with a psychic ant, you’ll find yourself asking which political parties they hold interest in. An attempt to find one’s self by brute force. This medieval fantasy setting also facilitates discussions on controversial topics such as class and gender politics, whilst providing a buffer from the complex nuances and context of our reality.

You are not left alone to decipher this world. Your mind is filled with your traditional RPG stats’ voices. To inform you of long-forgotten lore. Or to critique you. Or berate you. Honestly a few of them are assholes. But there isn’t much funnier than upsetting your own interior monologue.

Your Strength for instance vouches in favour of a testosterone-fueled masculine ideal, but shatters upon any proof of your ineptitude or girlish tendencies. Your Intelligence provides you with valuable world-building from the recesses of your mind, but shudders at your constant idiocy. My Cleric’s Constitution nearly killed him in the opening moments of the game, as I declared that I wasn’t worried about the five day time limit, and my nervous system vehemently disagreed.

Who cares about winning when its this funny to fail?