Every Friday, AV club employees kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, immersing ourselves in the ideas behind the hobby we love with a little Game theory. We’ll sound off in the space above and invite you to respond below in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend and what theories make you think.
Once the video game promotional season starts — known to the less insane as “summer” — it just doesn’t stop: once it’s weathered Summer Game Festival and the various trailer-focused tributaries that feed off of it, we now find ourselves in the rut of the more interactive (which is to say, more entertainment) version of the industry’s relentless desire to let you know there are games in their hills: Steam’s next demo-focused festival, which runs from this week until next.
Unfortunately there is no way to play everyone demo currently available on the Valve-owned marketplace, which is advertising a completely unreasonable number of free, small-sized video game pieces right now for anyone who has the time and energy to hit the Install Demo button and give it 40 minutes of their time . Instead, we’ll have to take the scattershot approach, simply chronicling our own views on six demos we’ve tried this week, with no more scientific rigor to the whole thing than a shrug and “eh, looks good. ” (Which is as good a time as any to ask you in the comments to let us know what gems we missed. There so many demos.)
Our favorite demo we played at Next Fest is one of those “one good idea executed beautifully” things that the indie scene is so good at pumping out. Created by Stray Fawn Studio, ClawlerThe trick is right there in the name: It basically is Kill the Spire, except instead of playing cards to defeat enemies (who politely tell you what they’re going to do on their next turn), you use a claw machine to grab daggers, swords, healing potions, and shields from a large pile . It sounds simplistic, but adding a physical component to this “choose which of your limited resources to deploy” kind of RPG opens up all sorts of fascinating possibilities. Sure, this new sword they’re offering me does a lot of damage, but it also seems like a motherfucker to pick up all the time. (And that’s before you get into really stupid things like magnets or enemy forces that add damaging items to your stack – there tone room for permutation here.) This was an easy and automatic wishlist extraction.
And now for one of “a good idea executed… less beautiful” stack: As fans of strangely soothing simulation games like it PowerWash simulator, we were excited to sample Crisalu Games’ efforts to implement those vibes in a blood-soaked dungeon full of traps that can turn your goblin minions into a mess as they go about repairing and polishing them. (In a clever touch, you don’t want to die, not because you have a limited life, but because your messy corpse is just another mess to clean up.) In practice, however, we found Clearing goblins pretty annoying, not in the “outside, watch the dirt fly off the walls” area PowerWash somehow. We suppose it could sing more in multiplayer, but the core gameplay of walking around with maces and other death traps, swapping furniture and persistently cleaning up blood just wasn’t as fun as we’d hoped – and the fact that we could never quite to let our guard down lest death come for us only added an irritating layer of attention to the whole thing.
It’s a massively multiplayer minesweeper, an idea both fascinating and wacky as it sounds: players are thrown into a huge minesweeper board with 1,000,000 mines on it, and each works to clear their own little pieces of it by placing tiny flags with different cosmetics on them to show where the dangerous squares are. It’s a very clever, very simple concept, and it’s lasted us as long as our attention span for Minesweeper. (Ie about 15 minutes). Ironically, we feel that one of the game’s touted features is one of its biggest flaws: There’s no penalty for hitting a mine or marking a square incorrectly, just a very quick respawn timer. Minesweeper, for us, is all about the thrill of avoiding mistakes; we’d love to see developer 神匠游戏 get nastier or more punitive with this idea. Battle royale Minesweeper anyone?
We were fascinated by the concept of Wheapy Wholesome’s Golden Age studio simulator Hollywood animal as it is the first time we have heard its main pitch. No one has seriously tried to make a movie studio simulator as far as we know, as Lionhead is ambitiously weird The movies in the mid-2000s, and we were interested to see how the game would handle this diverse, complex process.
Unfortunately, it turns out that making movies in the 1930s involved a tone of micromanagement, to the point that our 30-minute stay with Hollywood animal didn’t actually make it through the entire tutorial of the game. Both the aesthetic and the concept are solid: commission a script, build scenes, hire staff, discreetly deal with your employees’ personal problems, and then hopefully make more money than you spent on the whole damn thing. But the sheer number of decisions required at each stage overwhelmed us pretty quickly, which might make for a great approximation of what it’s like to run a studio, but it didn’t translate into enjoyable gameplay.
(Also – we know the bad people on the internet will mock us for “digital cancellation culture” or whatever – but we wish there was a button to automatically filter out any employees with “racist” or “misogynist” labels ; I don’t hire them, so you don’t have to introduce them, game.)
The gameplay of this sequel to the well-loved indie title from 2018 was quite enjoyable, even if a) Hades-it’s a similar genre beautiful crowded these days, and b) the lack of multiplayer in the demo cut out one of the main appeals of the original. (Will be back for the full game.) We especially liked the variety of spells you can use to build up a character before a run, giving you a lot of variety in how your mage fights. But we must, we must must ask the developers to hear the following sentence: Your video game is no better when it tries to be fun. Comedy is hard, and in an interactive medium like video games, it is murderous hard. Your characters shouldn’t be making weird little jokes every four seconds. For the love of Christ, no more “witty” digressions please!
Pounce Light’s A small meadow is, by its own admission, less of a game and more of a tool or toy: You’re given a small plot of land—absolutely tiny, in the Next Fest demo—and a series of tools that let you terraform, build, and otherwise modify it. No goals, no objectives, no meters to fill: just a mellow soundtrack, beautiful visuals, and the quiet wonder of watching this pretty amazing technology do its thing. (Painting walls was our favorite part; it’s easy to imagine the mazes you can construct, but it’s also just fascinating to watch the ways they come to life and grow.) The demo is also clever because the space you is given is enough to make you visualize what you could build with just a few more legs, moving your finger closer to the wishlist button with each pretty little tower or flower garden.
