I played the Trigon: Space Story demo.
It felt a lot like someone played FTL and thought “What if we remade FTL, but on a spaceship… In space.”
There may be more to crew management and ship construction it in the full game, but the demo felt very derivative.
It’s amazing how FTL spawned its own little subgenre.
Too bad about the name, though. I hear Trigon, my mind goes…
Have you seen Fermi Paradox? It’s like playing Reigns, except instead of a king you are effectively god, making decisions that impact how the universe develops. It’s…odd.
Sounds like I need to try Terra Nil
Funny, because this is all I get
I’ve not but it looks great, thank you!
I gave The Sequence 2 demo a spin. It labels itself as a zach-like - that made me pull the trigger. It’s probably most similar to Opus Magnum, out of the Zachtronics game I’ve played - you push a thing towards one or more goals. There is a decent puzzle game here I feel, but damn it’s sooo slow in giving me more tools/challenges. It’s level 25 before it introduces a new mechanic, and a ton of levels are basically identical. Also, everything is strictly sequential, so I didn’t get that sweet “clockwork” feeling I got when playing Opus Magnus or Spacechem.
Edit: doh, it’s called sequential and I didn’t like that it’s sequential. That dawned om me just now.
It bored me enough to get me to remove it from my wish list.
Yeah, I think that’s where I am as well.
Holy crap, installing this right now :O
I played a bunch more of the indie demos up for a short time on Xbox as well. Started with Faraday Protocol, which seems fairly Portal-like, in that you’re moving through a series of rooms designed to test your ability to navigate and escape them. Kind of fun, but didn’t really move me.
Then tried Lake, which I oddly enjoyed quite a bit. I say oddly because, for the demo at least, it’s basically a mailman simulator. It’s set in a small Oregon town and I was constantly expecting some sort of Lynchian twist, but it never came. I’m sure there’s more to the full game, but I did kind of enjoy just delivering mail and meeting the townsfolk. If that’s all there is, I wouldn’t really object.
Then I tried Riftbreaker, which I believe will be coming to Game Pass later in the year. I like the idea, building a base and keeping it protected while you’re mining or exploring and what not. But I couldn’t seem to keep the whole darn thing powered, so I gave up a short way in. I’m sure I missed some critical bit of exposition.
Then I tried Sail Forth, which I wanted to enjoy more than I did. I respect it for making you actually care about the direction and speed of the wind, and how you should manage your sails to keep moving (unlike some sailing games I won’t mention cough Black Flag cough) but I didn’t really get much out of it, just sailing around, shooting enemies with a cannon while they shoot you. Looks like much larger and tougher ships like brigantines are eventually available, but I never had the resources to buy one. I’ll put this one in the “we’ll see” pile.
Last, I tried Sable, which I again wanted to like more than I did. It looks like an interesting world, but I kept getting stuck trying to climb some temple thingie. You have a stamina meter for strength and can only climb so far, and if you run out of stamina you just drop. You don’t die, there doesn’t seem to be fall damage, but you have to start all over and I just wasn’t in the mood. We’ll see how this one shapes up too.
While it didn’t grab me the way I’d hoped, the concept is great and I’m not at all surprised that you really liked it.
You guys covered it but I tried Terra Nil and decided it’s more of a puzzle game than an actual city builder; that took it down a few notches in my book.
I tried it as well and really liked it. The demo is short and pretty easy, and it’s fun figuring out what all the stuff does. And the transformation of the landscape from wasteland to wilderness is pretty awesome–great animations and charming graphics. I’m curious where it goes from there, but I wishlisted it.
I fiddled around with this demo a bit and quite enjoyed it:
Every building has four (or more) attributes that affect what it looks like and how effective it is. Some buildings lower or raise the attributes in area around them. Decorations can be placed to improve the attributes. Sort of a feng shui your way to victory.
I wanted to see what the “monster attack” thing looks like but haven’t triggered one.
Many tooltips and dialogs have not been translated, but you can still mostly figure everything out.
Ooooh, a demo for Lake! Thanks for mentioning it.
Indie first person action roguelike dungeon crawler.
Spy Hunter style 3D runner mobile port.
SNKRX, great simplistic indie game that combines lots of mechanics from different sources in a novel way without any bloat.
Arena action roguelike with auto chess synergies.
I made a thread for it:
Part of Apple Arcade, fyi
Yes! Great to see SNKRX getting mentioned here.
My friend wrote about it a month ago and for a couple of quid it’s a really interesting little action game, very tough and runs are short enough for quick sessions. It’s changed a lot even in the last week or two since I started playing it. Lots of quality of life improvements and other tweaks. Definitely worth checking out.