October Next Fest, Day 2
Goin off the rails on a shitty train
A NOTICE: I am traveling, and therefore limited to playing [and recording] on my Steam Deck, which is an impressive little machine, but, uh, not flawless. Any issues I mention with performance or graphics should be considered in that context, which isn’t to say they aren’t problems, but that they are problems that might not exist on a full rig. Also I mostly fixed the resolution problems from Day 0, but not entirely. You’re just gonna have to deal with it, I’m tired.
Brno Transit
From the makers of supremely brown love letter to Soviet era Czechoslovakia HROT comes a “horror” game with more than one tongue in its cheek. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from Brno Transit, but whatever it’s doing, it delivers. The demo takes place entirely in a handful of stations on the Brno subway, a dingy and creaky set of trains making endless loops around the worst pit this side of the Pitt.
After some lightly Kafkaesque bureaucracy, and a scatalogical emergency, you finally gain command of your own train, and can pilot it along the track, as your job, or perhaps purgatory, demands. A jump scare later, and the demo’s over.
I don’t see how exactly this can be expanded upon, or what challenge can really be induced in what seems to be a very light-hearted but filthy minded parody of the horror genre, but I have enough faith in the developer’s keen sense of satire and abiding love for true shitholes that I’m still looking forward to finding out.
Shadow of the Road
Crashed before I could reach gameplay. Shame.
The Last Caretaker
Wanted to play this but could not get the framerate to acceptable levels.
Bubsy 4D
The glorious return of… Bubsy! The mascot character everyone forgot about until Ulillillia tried to find the highest parts of accessible geometry in Bubsy 3D. I mean, I guess Bubsy technically returned for a 2D platformer too but who remembers that? Anyway, this 3D collectathon comes from the twisted minds of the developers of Demon Turf [and soon, it’s sequel, Demon Tides] and boy is it obvious. The controls are the same sort of… I guess I would say ‘excessively generous but still imprecise’ that made their previous game a bit of a wash for me, and about twice as much vocalized snark to boot.
And the worst part is Bubsy cannot stop making noise. Nearly every input causes him to emit some kind of gurgle, whinny, or overwrought performative exertion. It’s seriously exhausting to listen to. Well, at least it ran pretty well, and tonight, hell, that’s cause for a sticker. Come get your sticker, Bubsy. No, no, shut up about the sticker, Bubsy.
Diggergun
Am I… can I say this? Is this alright? Well, Diggergun is a bit of a Boulderdash game buried at the bottom of a… sprawling commentary on abusive capitalism and labor rights. You play as a little guy who’s ended up working the mines on an island where the corporation leverages exorbitant fees on everything you do, constantly jacks up your giant gem quota, and on top of everything else you and everyone else immediately start developing black lung. But that’s okay because it’s fun to dig for gems!
The game has so much going on in every other facet of its world – a town full of NPCs, who you can meet and improve your relationship status with, the ability to use your shower and toilet to give yourself a little extra stamina at the cost of your constantly ticking time each day, and apparently some kind of actual schedule system determining when and where you can find characters – that how much less thought seems to have gone into the actual mining part is a little grating. The levels seem to be semi-randomly generated, and are barely even anything that could constitute a ‘puzzle’ much less a head-scratcher. You really just blast your way to the gems, careful not to shoot one too many times and destroy them, and then once you’re at your capacity, you can use the entrance door instead of the exit to return to the surface and deposit your gems to earn your pay.
I mostly noticed the random nature of the levels because I kept accidentally hitting the interact button as the stages loaded, because the game didn’t detect my controller and I had to use keyboard, which is a very bizarre scheme that uses the left arrow key to interact, the right arrow key to shoot your Diggergun, and the down arrow key for jump. It doesn’t work great, so I guess it’s kind of a relief that the game’s actual stages are basically devoid of challenge, at least as far as I got.
Not a lot of winners, not a lot to say. I was holding off on a few more promising demos because I didn’t think I had enough time to give them yesterday - I’ll probably be trying a few that I actually already have on my wishlist from here on out, and I hope those are better.