Playing some demos
I played some demos! I think it's Next Fest or whatever but I swear I downloaded half of these before that started.
Q-Up
Mentioned this in my post about Unfair Flips, it's weirdly the mirror image of that game.
By which I mean that Unfair Flips looks like it's got clicker meta-mechanics, and it kind of does, but they soon abandon you to pure chance and desire for a particular flip.
And Q-Up – well, it's kind of the opposite. It seems very briefly like you should care about what flips you get, but soon you realise that the flips are the tiny bit of grit at the center of a palace made of pearl. It's all about the meta-progression - the skills, the items, the various currencies, the narrative structure built up in in-game messages. The various prompts "in-game" advance themselves, allowing you to, for example, start and game and then tuck your Steam Deck behind your laptop while you write some blog post about it.
Oh let me amend that last paragraph. I just unlocked challenges as well.
So, I mean, it's both seriously doing these things and it's also a piss take. A piss take of a genre I don't really play, but it's serious about taking the piss. The amount of intricate design that's went in here to balance this stuff while also keeping it funny... it's pretty impressive. Both the visual design and also the complexity of the thing.
Ah, I was just thinking I was feeling a little too satisfied with the experience I was having and then the demo ended. Good demo timing!
Dogpile
It's by the people who made Real Bird Fake Bird, so I like them already.
It's a... wait, I don't know what this genre is called. A game where there's a pile of physics-y things and they merge together when two of the same thing touch and you gotta make the big ones? There was a Disney one of these... oh yes, Tsum Tsum. Right. One of those.
Anyway, it's one of those, with, yes, also lots of meta mechanics. It's a deckbuilder, you are manipulating and buffing the dog-cards you use to spawn dogs to stack, and when the dogs merge you get money and bones which let you do that better. And there are also global buffs. And the whole thing is done in a lovely clean art style.
Also very impressive in terms of the amount of stuff there & the mixture of careful game design to give some good strategies and synergies to find, and also some stuff that's just fun & funny and probably not the best way to go. i look at this kind of design and I admire it aesthetically while also not having any real itch to dive deep within it and understand it. I don't even understand what things would synergise, I can just see that things have clearly been designed so they would. Some buffs interact with these buffs, and this thing rewards you for not having any of this, and I can see that there are likely to be multiple viable strategies and if I wrinkled my forehead a bit then I would probably understand what they are, but also I want to remain beautiful and smooth forehead-ed so I will not.
This might also explain why I like the kinds of boardgames I like.
Lumines Arise
I haven't played much Lumines, and I'm not very good at it, but I liked how the game still made me feel good even while I was flailing around at it. Nice rave visuals & music, yeah. Doop, doop, doop, I can imagine getting into the whole flow state and enjoying the hell out of it in a audio-visual-ludic-interactive way if I was any good at the game.
Guess maybe I should play Tetris Effect? Not that I'm an especial fan of Tetris either.
Legend of Khiimori
I really wanted to play this but it still has not finished downloading and it is now past midnight. Ah well.
It's a game about riding a horse across the steppe. But, like, it's really into the horse part - breeding horses, looking after the horse, the horse looks good and moves good. I'm not really a horse girl, but I can appreciate some people who care about a thing putting a lot of effort into doing the very specific thing well. Tourism for special interests. anyway, the pitch for this is: kind of like Death Stranding, but historical and about horses instead of piss. And cheaper.
Oh, it downloaded. But my blog locked me out on my laptop and now I've wasted a bunch of time grappling with the mobile editor to get this up so it's definitely too late to start it now. Next time! And also probably more Baby Steps, too.
Update, after having actually played some Legend of Khiimori. It's got a lot of systems in there, more than they could reasonably deliver on. And that means that there's a lot of stuff on screen. In a way that feels a little unconsidered - a bit "if I had time, I would have written a shorter letter". Not that it was overwhelming - the only thing I really had trouble with was the thing where you have to double tap the left bumper to tell the horse to stop, which is admittedly nice in a kinetic-skeumorphic kind of way. Wait, does "kinetic-skeumorphic" make sense? What I mean is that the bumper taps feel like kicking in your heels to tell the horse to change to a faster gait, or giving a little yank on the reins – or a double yank in this case. Did they have reins on the steppes? Probably.
Anyway, a lot of ambition here. I mean, not least that it's open world! I felt in safe hands in terms of the horse handling, and it felt good to be out somewhere and have my main worry "my horse is getting thirsty, I need to find a stream sometime soon". I guess the thing I didn't quite feel was a sense of the air rushing through my hair, alive & free and galloping across the plain to an unknown destination? I don't know that that was a promise this game made to me, but that's a feeling I would like to experience and this game didn't give it to me. It's partly that the game encourages plotting out waypoints on the map, doing some strategic planning as to which way to go. It's partly that going at a gallop is tiring for a horse, and I was never in such a rush that I wanted to tire it out, so I always stayed at a canter. And I guess it's also a little because I was playing on the Steamdeck – this is the first time the screen has felt small to me. I need to have a huge TV, soak in the world and see the grass blowing in the wind.
So, a reason that is about the game being about planning carefully to manage your trip. A reason that is about caring for the horse as a fellow being, not just a vehicle. And a reason that is about me not having bought a dock.
A few random niggles:
- funny that the horse would only eat grass if I was on it's back. I'm like... I'm just here having a chat, you're fine, eat up! No? Okay, I'll get on so you can eat.
- as someone who has almost always ridden a horse in situations where the horse knows the way much much better than I do... I miss the BoTW thing of the horse doing pathing along trails automatically. Or, to be honest, just being a bit wilful at times. Definitely helps in terms of feeling like the horse is in control of where it's going, rather than you.
Hard to balance making the horse feel alive & giving you a bunch of horse management simulation gameplay to do! Especially if you're also implementing a whole open world on top of that.
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