October Next Fest, Day 4
I'm a Gaming-type maid. A maid who helps with gaming.
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.
Night of the Duat
Vaguely Egyptian-themed horror adventure. Some of the assets look pretty good, but the performance is terrible. When you’re outside just looking in certain directions tanks the framerate by the dozens, and I imagine it’s because a lot of the assets are just completely full-sized models that got drag-n-dropped into place with no adjustment. The one puzzle I did was pretty terrible, and I genuinely don’t even know how you’re supposed to guess the combination.
There’s like two jumpscares I encountered, but the second one broke my mouse and I couldn’t get back into control enough to progress the dialogue and didn’t care much anyway so I moved on.
America Against Ants
This is basically a tower defense game merged with an old Westwood RTS, obviously with some inspiration from the Red Alert secret campaign where you fight against giant ants.
Honestly, calling it TD is selling it a bit short. Each unit you purchase has to actually enter the field from the direction of your reinforcements and then move into place, you can move units around, and even determine their facing, which shows you the exact field of fire they’ll be covering in that position. Units have different weapon types that determine if they can fire over obstacles, how much damage they do to differently armored enemies, and how far away they start acquiring targets. There seems to be a good balance between picking bottlenecks to fortify up and moving light units around to reinforce positions under pressure.
For as simple as the game looks, it has a lot of neat features and details. The level on the Las Vegas Strip, for example, is full of buildings you can order demolished with artillery to clear your sight lines, at the cost of giving the ants more lanes of attack. Later missions even give you a limited number of active abilities, different types of air strikes and drops, like pheromone baits and strafing runs to help thin out sudden dense swarms. You can pause at any time to give orders, or manually summon incoming waves early. I had a good time in the last available mission calling in about 10 waves all at once and then dropping a tactical nuke on them.
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of optional objectives or progress beyond clearing each stage, but there’s something kind of authentically retro about that too. It really does feel like something that either could have come out in the mid ‘90s, or on a Flash site sometime around the turn of the century. If the missions not in the demo, or the one I skipped, have slightly more interesting objectives than ‘hold out against 30 waves’ this might be worth picking up at some point. If you can stomach the AI generated and highly generic character portraits, that is.
Exo Rally Championship
I understand that I don’t really give off the vibe of someone who is really into certain genres, and whenever I bring up a racing game, for example, it seems a bit out of character. To be clear, I’m not obsessed with the racing genre, and I’m not even that into cars in general, but there are a few standouts that have really sucked me in, and a lot of those recently have mainly revolved around the particular motorsport of rally racing.
Exo Rally Championship is possibly the game most weirdly hyper-specifically tuned to my tastes in a long time. It’s a rally game, which takes place on varying planets, and your vehicle is a six-wheeled rover covered in micro-thrusters. Each wheel, spring, and chassis part is a distinct object which can take damage and be destroyed by hard impacts or environmental dangers, you have a surprisingly granular amount of control over your thrusters, letting you do stuff like apply extra downforce on cornering, soften impact, twist and orient yourself while airborne like a skateboarder, and even lift and flip yourself if you end up on your back like a tortoise. It’s a little bit of the old Robot Wars game based on the BBC show, a little bit of ΔV: Rings of Saturn, and a little bit… I don’t know, Lego Racers. It seems like it could be really fun, and pretty interesting – the planet I played on had showers of micrometeors, fine dust that would eventually gunk up mechanical bits and cause overheating and failures, and relatively low gravity to contend with, and if they actually significantly alter the dynamics for each planet it could be really cool.
Unfortunately, it did not run particularly well on the Deck, and I struggled to keep the framerate consistent or above the mid 20s, which makes it a little too frustrating to try any maneuvers or speeds that might require quick and precise adjustment. This is definitely one I’m hoping to try out on a full rig if I get the opportunity, and will be keeping a close eye on its development until release.
Eyes of the ElderWood
Another retro style horror game, this time purportedly based on Kashubian [northern Poland] myths and creatures. It gets points for style, I’ll say that – the first character intro made me laugh out loud, and it generally looks and plays the part of a King’s Field inspired horror game.
Your primary weapon is a revolver that frankly sucks and barely tickles the one enemy type actually affected by it, and can’t even permanently kill it. You also learn at least two spells, which are cast by using your off-hand mouse cursor to draw a glyph on the screen. The annoying part is that having a spell ready to cast drains your mana constantly even if you don’t use it, so you’re forced to dismiss spells and then try to draw a glyph, probably multiple times trying to get it to detect properly, while shuffling away from enemies. I wasn’t a fan in Arx Fatalis, and I’m not a fan here.
The puzzles aren’t very good, the combat is annoying, and the enemy types have good visual styles but are just a pain in the dick to deal with. One moth monster just instakills you if it ever sees you, even if you crawl under a rock and force it to noclip into solid stone to grab you. Another thing that stalks the dark maze that made up the majority of my playtime causes you to sustain a jump scare and loud noise if you look directly at it too long, with two effects: first, the noise is so goddamn loud it clips, and sounds like shit, and if it happens too many times your character ‘dies’ with an animation of her falling to the fetal position while rocking in a scene that cracked me up almost as hard as the intro.
Not sure that I’m curious enough to see where this goes to play any more, to be honest. It has some charm but not enough to outweigh the tedium of walking through dark mazes constantly dismissing and recasting my light spell, and stealth segments with instant death on failure.
Tarvos Devestation
Didn’t load up. Well, it kind of did but then it locked up.
Maid of Salvation
Top-down ARPG where you play as a Combat-type Maid, an anime trope that was all the rage like two, three years ago, hunting demons in a forest with swords bigger than your body in a French maid outfit. The combat has some modern touches, like a parry that temporarily drops an enemy’s defense, a lengthy evasion, and an off-hand pistol attack that you can spam while moving backwards or laterally to keep up the damage pressure. I actually really enjoyed it, once you got through the tutorials and rooms with single trivial enemies. The first boss is slow enough and telegraphs his attacks so much that I was basically able to stand my ground and reliably parry and counterattack him with my giant Guts sword, which felt pretty good, and the demo teases enough upcoming abilities and choices in equipment and skills that it might end up pretty interesting.
Structurally, the game reminded me a lot of Xanadu Next. You start out in a forest zone, which is laid out with a metroidvania style map, and some of the areas are inaccessible at the start, obviously requiring you to gain new abilities to return for more content later. Before the boss, you can open up a shortcut from the save point shrine to that point, and after the boss you unlock the warp to your base of operations, from which you can warp to the other zones of the game, and I’m assuming they all have their own full metroidvania maps too.
Unfortunately, the demo really wants you to comb through the entire hub area, talk to every single NPC, and get all of their quests before allowing you to warp to any of the other zones, and the hub area is GIGANTIC and mostly empty. Then I accidentally ran into a big golem guarding one area that nearly killed me with a punch, and fell into some water which finished me off, and I decided I could play more of this later if I really wanted to. And I might! Just not right now.
Klostyn
An FPS carefully crafted to emulate the look and feel of mid ‘90s bargain bin shooters, and hitting its marks perfectly. The intro cinematic has corny dialogue, very authentic crude CGI, and the public domain masterpiece of Mars from Holst’s Planets suite turned up to 11. Hilariously, the demo then just plays Mars at random times as combat music, which fits pretty well and cracked me up frequently.
The gameplay feels like a blend of Unreal and Turok, with your enemies consisting mainly of Space Pirates who look a little like juvenile 40K Space Marines, and natives using bows and swords. The speed and solid balance of the weapons and enemies is what made it stick for me – your first three guns all feel pretty good to use, enemies are dangerous but not health sinks, and you can headshot guys with your pistol or blast them backwards and into chunks with the shotgun without spending a whole lot of time or health.
The level design is a bit weaker – the areas are pretty big for an FPS of this sort, which though not out of character with the kind of Raven Software style they’re going for, could definitely stand to be tightened up. There’s no map or objective overlay, so going in circles trying to find the button or new exit you’ve opened up is inevitable, there’s quite a bit of slightly tricky platforming and hops up awkward stairways of slight cliffside extrusions, and they’ve made the baffling decision to toggle fall damage on, and it’s sensitive enough that even hops from one floor to the next down can damage you a bit.
I didn’t beat this demo, but I definitely will. It’s really hard to say whether there will be enough stage and enemy variety in a full version to flesh things out enough, but I got a pretty positive impression from it so far, and if the developer can pull this off, it might be one of the best retro FPSs since HROT.
This round of demos was kind of a banger in my opinion, and I’m pretty pumped to watch for these to come out in the next few months or next year. I’ve still got a massive list of things to check out, most of which I will inevitably have to pass on, but the number of winners, at least to my taste, that I’ve hit so far is surprising, and I’m sure there’s a couple more potential gems left.
Lego Racers mentioned!!!