Next Fest

Steam Next Fest is here! I always look forward to the experience of downloading 20 demos and wishlisting about 2 games (a wishlist of ~180 games btw). But it is a fun experience, you never know where you find your next favorite game.

This time it was a bit different than usual. For the first 3 days all the demo feeds were randomized, instead of just showing the most popular stuff. A double edged sword. On the one hand it helps to give visibility with people with no time, money or skills for marketing, and you never know what hidden gem you might find. On the other hand, you have to drudge trough 20 AI slop games, or babby’s first Unity game, or worse, an asset flipped template with minimal changes.

A short summary of which Demos I did find interesting and worthy of a wishlist, in no particular order, plus a longer section about one particular Demo:

Welcome to Elderfield

Welcome to Elderfield was a pleasant surprise. The gist of it it’s that it’s Stardew Valley meets Look Outside, or Stardew Valley with Lovecraftian horror.

Iron Nest

Iron Nest is probably not a hidden gem. I was aware of it for some time after I saw it on twitter. It’s great, ticks all the right boxes for me. The UI is fully diegetic and you can feel the weight behind each lever that you pull. It’s hard to compare it with anything, I guess it’s like some existing submarine games.

No Such Place

No Such Place is a single player extraction shooter. It was pretty fun, works as a good second screen game. It’s like a more polished and more developer Zero Sievert.

Brigador Killers

Brigador Killers was sitting on my wishlist for a while now. It’s an isometric top down shooter with fully destructible environments where you can build and customize vehicles to wreak havoc. I did not get much of the story but it probably doesn’t matter that much, might become understandable later. It was a ton of fun and the demo seems to contain hours of content.

Silver Pines

Silver Pines was also in my wishlist for a while. It’s great that I had a chance to play it. It’s great, fully recommend it! Can be summed up as Alan Wake meets Silent Hill meets Twin Peaks.

Trash Day

I tend to steer away from friendslop co-op games, but my fiancee really wanted to try Trash Day so I gave it a go. It was fun. Your goal is to gather garbage in your cart while playing as a Racoon, there are some nice challenges and it’s cute.

Blue Ridge Hunting

In for a penny, in for a pound, after Trash Day it was my turn to propose a co-op game and Blue Ridge Hunting seemed promising. It has a great artstyle and I love stories about hunting cryptids and unkown anomalies even though I know they are all bull. I can suspend my disbelief for the atmosphere. The art style was pretty great. The game itself is very rough around the edges with random disconnects and UX issues but the one hunt we managed to complete was really great. Nothing beats scrambling to switch from your flashlight to the shotgun while the other person is screaming that something big is coming their way. I will keep an eye on its development.

Demos played after the time of writing and updated later

Boltgun 2

Playing the demo reminded me that I actually hated the first Boltgun, reviewed it negatively then finished it out of sheer spite. They took the most hated aspects of Bolgun and made them worse.

They Are Here

Great atmosphere and setpieces but I just don’t find grays that spooky.

Static Dread: The Submarine

I discovered the original Static Dread: The Lighthouse during a previous edition of Steam Next Fest. I loved the demo and couldn’t wait to play the full release. It was a nice experience, great atmosphere and always kept you guessing. So of course when I say the Submarine I downloaded the demo asap, just didn’t get around to playing it.

The Submarine covers the story of what happened on board the submarine (I assume the one that becomes relevant near the end of the game) during the same events of the first game. You can tell it has a way higher production value, 2D static drawn people have been replaced with animated 3D models that actually move and do stuff. Navigating the submarine reminds me a lot of Mouthwashing. The gameplay is nothing like in the lighthouse, you now have to manage crew energy as a resource and manage the crew in order to complete various tasks to ensure the survival of the submarine. Some tasks you will have to assign to yourself. Really looking forward to the full game.

Phase Zero

Was intrigued by a classic Resident Evil clone. Phase Zero even has tank controls. Unfortunately the zombies feel a bit too fast for the clunky tank controls. I don’t think it’s for me.

Foghorns Drown

Great art style, the demo intrigued me, however it crashed to desktop while talking to a random NPC.

Dishonorable Mention: Order of the Sinking Star

As a game developer, I’ve been keeping an eye on Jonathan Blow’s latest endeavour. He has been steadily working on a new programming language called Jai, because he has convinced himself that all other languages are not good enough for him and only yet another new programming language can allow him to make optimized games that don’t suck. Or something. Order of the Sinking Star is a product of that effort, and I was curious what it had to offer. His chud politics aside, I tend to separate the artist from the art, and judge a product on it’s own merits.

Order of the Sinking Star gets my beefy gaming PC to spin all it’s fans at 100%, while for other steam reviewers it barely runs, while looking like a mobile game from last generation. I thought Jonathan Blow was all about optimization. Aside from that, the game is Sokoban with a twist, plus, some very cringe-y voice acting and writing. I removed it from my wishlist after about an hour of play. Not worth it, IMO, YMMV.

Sinking City 2 Demo

I’ve recently played the remastered version of The Sinking City. It was sitting in my library since before it got remastered. While not exactly a hidden gem, it certainly had less visibility than it’s counterpart Call of Cthulhu. It was a great game, rough around the edges but the atmosphere was there, the story was great, the characters were interesting and it was a captivating experience all in all. I considered writing a post about it but I never got around to that.

When I saw the demo for the second game was available I couldn’t wait to play it. I was following it’s development and saw that it was going for a more modern approach, with gameplay more similar to the latest resident evil games than the original, but I was interested in exploring more of the world Frogwares had created.

A grim reminder

The demo starts with a grim reminder of the reality that exists right across the border from where I live:

I commend the efforts of the brave people who manage to develop a game trough all that hell, which makes the word I’m about to write that much more painful.

To get one thing straight: The game does not seem to have suffered in quality in spite of this. It looks great, it plays well, there were no bugs or crashes, or horrible performance issues, soo all the negative points I’m about to make, I think, are completely unrelated to the situation in Ukraine but more of a simple consequence of some deliberate choices that have been made.

Press F to pay respects

The first issue I have with the demo is that the gameplay starts with a long tedious section in the style of Call of Duty’s press F to pay respects kind of gameplay, only it’s press E to take care of your comatose wife.

The Protagonist

The other thing I heavily dislike about this second installment is the protagonist’s design.

A generic handsome man, Indiana Jones wannabe, a dashing hero earning for adventure. Does this look like a guy who’s had to take care of his comatose wife for a long time? Just compare that chiseled smug face with the first game’s protagonist

Charles Reed was a haunted great war veteran, with PTSD, haunted by his past, being the sole survivor of the incident that sunk the USS Cyclops. One look at his mug and you can tell he’s tired of it all. And his lopsided eyes gave him character. He was a memorable character, with gravely voice in which you could hear the years of cigarettes and alcohol abuse, as a noir private eye should be.

Calvin Rafferty on the other hand sounds like a very happy, well adjusted individual. No shade to the voice actor, I think it’s a direction issue. He just sounds too normal, boring, not memorable.

The other issue with the characters is the way they react to stuff happening around them. Charles Reed was accustomed to the weirdness, he was plagued by nightmares and visions for years. He was stoic and not much could phase him, rarely having a reaction beyond “Hmm, that’s odd” regarding what he saw.

Calvin on the other hand, has this very annoying habit, that I also noticed and it annoyed the shit out of me in Resident Evil 9, of stammering and shouting “What”, “W-w-what was that”, “What’s going on???”, etc, like almost breaking the fourth wall, looking at the camera and telling the player “see, weird shit is happening, are you scared? This is weird and scary get it? Please put down your phone and pay attention to our game”.

Charles Reed spoke rarely to himself and when he did he delivered cool Bond one liners. Calvin on the other hand quips like a MCU character. Always stating the obvious and re-stating shit that the player has just seen like “Never seen the slither puppet the dead before, not good”. Maybe it’s trying to establish that this is a new phenomena, but it feels very clunky and unorganic.

The Sinking City itself

The game looks gorgeous, it makes great use of Unreal Engine and raytracing, the atmosphere is there, but I already see a problem:

The first Sinking City, Oakmont was a city of people that accepted their fate. The city got flooded but life moved on, they were cut off from the rest of the world and there was not much they could do. As such, it was bustling with NPCs, and a lot of populated houses. And the NPCs weren’t just standing around, they would walk around the city, enter into scuffles with one another, fighter over food and resources, it made the world feel alive.

In the Sinking City 2, Arkham is being evacuated, so it seems like it will be mostly devoid of other human NPCs, besides some story relevant ones. And it was like that, very post apocalyptic, all the visited places were devoid of humans.

Another potential issue I saw from the Demo is that it was a very linear experience. You could only navigate trough the channels to get were you were suposed to go. We went from open world to a linear experience with fixed safe rooms in your path. Maybe this is just the Demo, but this is what they show to potential players.

I also hated the navigation experience. This time they want for the cinematic approach of doing things. Reed was able to climb ledges and drop down holes freely and easily. Now it’s a special, slow, cinematic experience when you press E to vault trough windows and press E to drop down holes in the floor. Same goes for getting on and off the boat, I honestly preferred it when Reed just teleported on and off the boat. But I get it, they want and need a wider audience and maybe this is how they get it. But that doesn’t mean I can’t complain about it.

Two slow ass animation locks in 10 seconds

Then to top it all off, near the end of the demo they have a heavily scripted cinematic setpiece with explosions, because that’s what you need to have to sell games these days I guess. The Sinking City 1, due to it’s likely budgetary constraints was much more restrained in this. It didn’t have much for cinematic setpieces and huge explosions, it was much more grounded in a way, the horror was cosmic in scale, apocalyptic in consequences, but, somehow, it was mostly kept to the quiet streets of Oakmont.

Combat

The combat was never the greatest part of the first game. It was serviceable. So of course, when I saw the first clips of the new weapon selection UI it was clear it was going in a more Resident Evil direction, but I saw it as a good thing. The same Sinking City game with an improved combat loop sounded good on paper. Unfortunately it is a bit too much like Resident Evil. Almost beat for beat, the first combat encounter in the game has the same pacing and almost the same setup as the first combat encounter at the gas station in the remade Resident Evil 2 game.

We want the Resident Evil 4 audience

The first game had a very unique and original enemy design. The Wylebeasts were amalgamations and mutated versions of human bodies. The first enemy you encounter is the Stygian, an amalgamation of tentacles and human hands, a spider like creature that is hard to aim for.

The first enemy you encounter in The Sinking City 2 is a… generic human zombie. Only this one is not reanimated by a virus but by some water worms. You do eventually towards the end of the demo encounter a Wylebeast like that in the first game, the Stygian, but why not open with that? Why open your new and improved combat with damn zombies?

These zombies also have obvious glowing weakspot “shoot here!” growths on them. The first game also had weakspots on their enemies but they did feel a bit more subtle and harder to hit.

Overall the combat does feel more deliberate, with resource management being much more important, and it feels more impactful, but I really hate that you have to fight zombies. I wanted The Sinking City with Resident Evil 4’s combat, not Resident Evil 4 wearing The Sinking City’s skin.

Other stuff

The game takes a very long time to compile shaders, and instead of doing it just once at the start of the game, it does it between “levels” as well.

Why demos can be detrimental

Will the demo and all these complaints make me not want to play The Sinking City 2? No, I will still keep it on my wishlist, I’m sure The Sinking City 2 will be a good game. I just feel like it won’t be a great The Sinking City sequel.

I’ve been discussing Steam Next Fest with a colleague a few days ago, and how poor the feed seemed for this edition. We were not the only ones to notice. And while talking about it I sort of remembered how for like whole decade before Steam Next Fest became a thing, demos were really going out of fashion. CDs filled with demos were all the rage in the early 2000s, but demos got rarer and rarer, and I don’t think it’s something that just happened. I think it was deliberate.

As the industry matured, more and more games have started coming out unfinished, in a broken state, full of bugs, likely due to the overinflated budgets while trying to adhere to unrealistic time schedules. Then steam Early Access opened to flood gates and made it the norm.

As a AAA company, putting out a Demo was more detrimental than not. A demo could absolutely ruin the effects of multi million dollar marketing campaigns. We have moved past demos, now it is all about creating hype and selling lies and promises, whatever gathers the most attention. I don’t imagine No Man’s Sky would have sold as much as it did if they released a demo beforehand. Sure, they have done a lot of work to fix those mistakes, but that’s besides the point. Or imagine if Bethesda games put out demos before releasing Fallout 4 or Starfield . Major game publishers now do whatever they can to prevent a single look at the game before release time, they want to accumulate as many pre-orders are possible and don’t want anything interfering with that, now they even do review embargoes that expire 2 days after the release date, not before.

Steam Next Fest is trying to fix that in a way. But if you check it out, you’ll see you will seldom find any demo put out by any major developer or publisher. It is however a double edged sword for indies and smaller studios. A well done demo will make your wishlist numbers soar into the sky, and wishlist don’t mean just potential sales, they also mean visibility, and visibility also translate in more overall sells. On the other hand, if your demo is a buggy, low effort mess, it will just make your game be dead on arrival. Even if your game is not like that, the demo might still turn off potential buyers when they figure out the actual game is not at all what they imagined.

In the end, I think it’s great that people take the risk to put their work and art out there, because while the calculus for major studios write off putting out a demo as a net negative, for smaller studios it can be a huge boon and it’s probably worth the risk.