Every Friday, AV Club staff members kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming and diving into 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 in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend and what theories it inspires you.
Once the video game promotion season – which less bothered people call “summer” – starts, it simply doesn’t stop: after having already resisted Summer Game Festival and the different tributaries focused on the trailers that feed on it, we now find ourselves right in the dab of the most interactive (that is to say, the most amusing) version of the industry’s relentless desire to let you know there are games in these hills: Steam’s demo-focused Next Fest, which runs from this week to the next.
Unfortunately there is no way to play each demo currently available on the Valve-owned Marketplace, which is currently touting a completely unreasonable number of little bits of free video games for anyone with the time and energy to hit an “Install Demo” button and give it 40 minutes of their time. Instead, we’re going to have to take the scattershot approach, simply chronicling our own versions of six demos we tried this week, with no more scientific rigor overall than a shrug and a “hey, that looks nice”. » (This is a great time to beg you in the comments to let us know what gems we missed. There are so many demos.)
Our favorite demo we played during Next Fest was one of those “good idea, beautifully executed” demos that the indie scene is so good at presenting. Created by Stray Fawn Studio, ClawThe gimmick is right there in the name: it’s basically Kill the arrow, 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 collect daggers, swords, healing potions and shields in a big pile. . It sounds simplistic, but adding a physical component to this “choose which of your limited resources to deploy” type of role-playing game opens up all sorts of fascinating possibilities. Sure, this new sword I’m being offered does a ton of damage, but it also looks like a mother to pick up regularly. (And that’s before you get into really stupid stuff like magnets or enemy powers that add harmful items to your stack: there’s a tonne room for swapping here.) This was easy, automatic wishlist entry.
And now, one of “a good idea, executed… less beautifully”: like fans of strangely soothing task simulator games like PowerWash simulator, we were excited to test Crisalu Games’ efforts to import those vibes into a blood-soaked dungeon, complete with traps that can turn your goblin handmaidens into pulp as they repair and polish them. (In a smart way, you don’t want to die, not because your lives are limited, but because your messy corpse is just another mess you’ll have to clean up.) In practice, however, we have observed Goblin Cleanup quite tedious, and not in an “exclusion zone, watch the grime fly off the walls” High pressure washing sort of way. We imagine it might sing more in multiplayer, but the core gameplay of wandering around maces and other death traps, replacing furniture, and laboriously mopping up blood just wasn’t as fun as we hoped it would be – and the fact that we could never do it. letting our guard down completely, lest death come for us in a messy way, only added a layer of irritating attention to it all.
It’s a massively multiplayer minesweeper, an idea that’s both as fascinating and as crazy as it sounds: players are dropped onto a vast minesweeper board containing 1,000,000 mines, and each tries to clean up its own little pieces of it, planting little 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 for us as long as our attention span for Minesweeper usually does. (That’s about 15 minutes). Ironically, we feel like one of the game’s touted features is one of its biggest drawbacks: there’s no penalty for hitting a mine or marking a square incorrectly, just a respawn timer very fast. Minesweeper, for us, is above all the tension of avoiding mistakes; we’d love to see developer 神匠游戏 get nastier or more punitive with this idea. Minesweeper Battle Royale, anyone?
We were fascinated by the concept of Wheapy Wholesome’s Golden Age studio simulator. Hollywood animals since we first heard his basic pitch. No one has seriously tried to make a movie studio simulation, as far as we know, since the ambitious and bizarre Lionhead. Movies in the mid-2000s, and we were interested to see how the game would approach this diverse and complex process.
Unfortunately, it turns out that making movies in the 1930s involved a tonne of micromanagement, to the point that our 30-minute stay with Hollywood animals didn’t actually go through the entire game tutorial. The aesthetic and concept are both solid: order a storyline, build scenes, hire staff, discreetly deal with your hirees’ personal issues, then hopefully earn more money than you spent on all of this. But the sheer number of decisions required at each stage overwhelmed us quite quickly, which might give a good approximation of what running a studio was like, but didn’t translate into enjoyable gameplay.
(Also, and we know bad people on the internet are going to make fun of us for “digital cancel culture” or whatever, but we wish there was a button to automatically screen all employees with the mention “Racist” or “Misogynist” tags; I don’t hire them, so you don’t have to present them, game.)
The gameplay in this sequel to the much-loved 2018 indie title was quite enjoyable, although a) the Hades-as the genre is pretty crowded these days, and b) the lack of multiplayer in the demo took away one of the main appeals of the original. (He’ll be back for the full game.) We particularly liked the variety of spells you can use to create a character in pre-run, giving you a ton of variety in how your wizard fights. But we must, must, must implore developers to hear the following sentence: Your video game isn’t better when it’s trying to be funny. Comedy is difficult, and in an interactive medium like video games, it’s murderer hard. Your characters don’t need to make quirky little jokes every four seconds. For Christ’s sake, please, no more “spiritual” asides!
Leap the light Small clearing is, by its own admission, less of a game than a tool or toy: you receive a small plot of land – absolutely tiny, in the Next Fest demo – and a series of tools to allow you to terraform, build lit, then edit it. There’s no goal, no objective, no meter to fill: just a gentle soundtrack, great visuals, and the quiet wonder of watching this pretty amazing technology do its thing. (Drawing the walls was our favorite part; easy to imagine the mazes you could build, but also just fascinating to observe the way they animate and expand.) The demo is also nifty, because the space given to you is just enough to make you visualize what you could build with just a few more feet, moving your finger closer to the “wish list” button with each beautiful little tower or flower garden.