5046

This game, which I really really really want to like, will get getting its own thread shortly.

-Tom

5047

I was gonna say “Somebody whose opinion matters to me didn’t like it”. I didn’t know I was coming from the future!

5048

I just bought it but only fooled around with it a bit before skimming the manual. I’ll be interested in hearing your take on it.

5049

Last day of the Next Fest, getting some last-minute demos in. Really all this has done is expand my wishlist beyond all reasonable capacity!

Omno - Despite sounding like a particularly effective fabric softener, this is a promising demo. It’s a third person Zelda-like, although no combat in the demo, it’s more of a platformer / puzzler, but it’s so beautiful. It reminds me of the puzzle / platforming aspects of Hob. After the demo is done and you see a glimpse of amazing creatures, you’re free to surf around this vast expanse of desert with a few bonus things to do, hinting at some of the freedom in the full game presumably. Very cool.

Kingdom Gun - Some kind of 2D platform / combat game like the original Risk of Rain. Yeah, not doing it for me. Awkward controls and feel, graphic style that doesn’t appeal to me, general sense of meh.

Faerie Afterlight - A 2d Ori-like platformer with a weirdly off-cute aesthetic, where you control some… thing with your left stick… and a sprite with your right stick, and the schtick is obviously that you have to control certain enemies with the sprite so that your “thing” can use their abilities to your advantage. I can tell though, it’s going to be one of those frustratingly difficult platformers that demands precision timing and three brains. I managed to die multiple times in the opening few minutes. Pass.

Spiritle - An interesting looking board game kinda thing… but it crashes to desktop after the tutorial, so I guess not! Dev still hasn’t fixed that aspect of the demo in 5 days so…

Unsighted - Yay, a good demo again. Cool pixel art aesthetic, nice chunky sound effects, me like. Well, apart from the fact it can be hard to tell where walls are! It’s the art style coupled with the slightly odd (thikn Hyper Light Drifter) angle and I keep running into walls, or walking straight past what should be obvious exits. But combat is good, you die quite easily if you don’t take care, but once you do it’s all quite manageable.

Synthetik 2 - I love the first game, and the devs have poured their souls into improving it even further over the years. Synthetik 2 is a shoe-in day one purchase, but I was curious to check out the demo. Well, the tutorial in there is really terrible! But once you get into the main game we’re back in familiar territory. Sure, it needs work, the movement doesn’t quite feel there yet, I haven’t learned to read the layouts for cover yet (which is essential in the first game) but the soul is intact. So it stays on my wishlist!

Out of all the demos I played, I think the ones I’ll most likely buy without question are:
Synthetik 2
Grime
FRANZ FURY
Sable
Carrier Command 2
Death Trash
The Fermi Paradox
Omno

That’s quite a lot!

5050

Ok, late addition to the “fucking awesome OMG” list…

Moons of Darsalon - Holy heck, this is like Lemmings crossed with a platformer set in a funky retro pixelly chiptune physics-based thing of things. It’s got a great style to it, great music, and a real sense of humour. It is also Grade A awesome.

5051

Damn it krok. I’m going to be having a demo night aren’t I? Haven’t played one yet!

5052

Krok plays the demos so we don’t have to! We just add them to our wishlist and later wonder why we wishlisted it.

5053

Best hurry up, this is the last day to play the demos. I think some of them are independent of Next Fest and may stay up, but hard to know which.

I can see Moons of Darsalon being mighty frustrating but also completely awesome at the same time. You have to give commands to these little guys and lead them home to the moonbase. Naturally they don’t always do precisely what you tell them when you tell them to do it, leading to much frustr… er, hilarity. Fortunately it is mostly hilarity! Especially with the little speech bubbles that pop up after doing some dumb thing. Once you get a laser gun it gets even sillier. I love it. The best part though? I won’t spoil it, you have to complete a level to see that.

5054

I didn’t even know there was a Synthetik 2 one v:0

5055

God, I miss Lemmings. Sitting in a computer lab in 1991, messing around with each level until I got it right. I did try it again around the year 2005 and discovered I didn’t have the patience for it anymore as the difficulty escalated quite quickly. Hopefully Moons of Darsalon isn’t quite as hard.

5056

I played Lemmings last year for the first time since I was a kid and was kind of in awe at how well it has aged, lack of fast forward aside.

@krayzkrok oh, I have played one demo and that was ConnecTank. Heavily based on Rocket Slime but from what little there is in the demo it misses the mark. Hex grid for no good reason. Having to assemble your belts each level didn’t add a great deal (yet) but also made no real sense (why would it break between fights?). Once you start firing ammo, you just… keep firing, occasionally switching heights and firing counter ammo, until the enemy is dead. There’s potential for sure but it doesn’t hang together very well right now.

5057

With Lemmings you’re the hand of god directing these creatures and assigning them roles. Moons of Darsalon you’re in direct control of a character who has to find the guys and lead them home. You can give them some basic commands but nothing like Lemmings, you’re the one who deals with hazards in the environment. There’s obviously a puzzle aspect to it as well, but the whole tone of the game is slapstick comedy. Your guys are smart enough to follow your instructions but will make dumb mistakes that usually results in them faceplanting in various amusing ways. This doesn’t necessarily kill them, so it’s more hilarious than frustrating. You really have to try it to see how it works.

5058

Sounds like you played that one so I didn’t have to this time!

Yes, and it feels very similar to the first except a more isometric perspective this time. But it looks, feels and sounds largely the same. Definitely will be great when it’s finished. I played a couple more games, it’s Synthetik all right, that feeling of struggling to survive with a particular weapon, then picking up something really awesome and blowing everything away.

5059

Looks awesome, ugh this thread over the last week has caused me to add over 50 games to my wishlist.

5060

Oh my god, Terra Nil is just a lovely thing. When you get to the clean-up stage and you have to scrap and recycle all the stuff you’ve built to wipe all traces of us from the new environment/habitat, it feels sooo good and wholesome. I could get used to ‘reverse builders’. The presentation is really lovely as well.

5061

Franz Fury’s driving model feels great but ‘adrenaline mode’ totally screwed the game up and I had to kill it via Task Manager, booo! It also says ‘racing game’ in the description but what I played (and saw in the trailer) didn’t look much like racing.

5062

You are… er… “racing” around killing things? Who knows, but there are cars introduced later, and there are roads, and maybe there are even races. Who knows!

5063

I enjoyed it very much as well, probably should have put it on my “instabuy on release” list but I… ahem… forgot about it. ANYWAY, the only thing I didn’t like was during this cleanup stage, I couldn’t get my recycling silos or my barge close enough to some structures I’d built away from water. I even tried rebuilding bits and pieces so I could create new canals, but that wasn’t working through the wetlands I’d created. So I could only get to about 80% cleanup and it felt… unsatisfying to have bits I couldn’t get to. Maybe I wasn’t familiar enough with the mechanics to figure out a way to get to them, but it feels like something you’d need to plan for ahead of time (which you can’t do the first time you play obviously).

5064

Yeah, I noticed that the silos are for scrapping structures that your loading docks can’t reach along the waterways, and crucially the scrap is stored in them. The loading docks give you scrap and resources immediately so the resources from that I used to create new waterways to access the silos for the final stretch of clean-up. I’m not sure then what the silos are really for if you still have to reach them with the drone–I’m sure that will become clear with the full game! But yeah, I feel like the puzzling to zen ratio is spot on here for me.

5065

Late to this party but I loved this show. It’s a show that could only be made in the UK. No one does humanity like the Brits.