October Next Fest, Day 6
Bibi, boo boo, it is a bad game.
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.
Cosmic Destroyer
A fairly basic little side-scrolling shmup with a handful of gimmicks. Stage rotation is one – I’ve seen it done better, but it’s still cool to see, and has the potential to be used well. The other is the grappling hook – you can launch it out in whatever direction you’re moving in [or straight ahead if you’re not moving] and it will deflect projectiles and grab certain enemies and objects to stow on your ship’s belly.
In addition to the occasional temporary bonus weapon, you mostly just throw the grappled items, which is an awkward operation, and doesn’t seem to be particularly worthwhile versus just normal shmup focus fire. I guess you might get a score bonus for throw kills, but who’s keeping score? This seemed totally fine, or at least not completely terrible, but I didn’t feel myself becoming invested whatsoever in finding out where it goes.
Asantria
Oh, wow. 6000 HP. Fuck this.
Bobo’s Big Tower
I guess I don’t get to play this one.
Just kidding, I played it a little bit. The game is basically Necrodancer minus the music – you hop around a grid in a turn based fashion, and have to position yourself with respect to enemies hopping in to have them land next to you with an empty space behind them so you can repeatedly knock them back the way I get knocked back in that clip. There’s switches and push blocks or rather push balls and again, I just couldn’t work up any interest in pursuing this any further.
Below the Crown
A roguelike deckbuilder, but all your summons are chess pieces. You get bonus coins for getting the king of each stage into checkmate, you get less money for eliminating all the other pieces and forcing a forfeit. Seems like this could have a little something going for it if you’re really into chess, or more specifically, really into chess puzzles. Can’t really say much more because it crashed every other minute I tried to play it.
The Myth of a Godslayer
Now here we go. This is an action RPG with giant, actually pretty good looking sprites, some fighting-game style inputs for special moves, and the entire demo [that I got through at least] is just a giant branching dungeon. The dungeon and platforming reminded me of the middle Ys games like Oath in Felghana, or CrossCode.
You start the demo with the special ability to punch with an electrified spike that activates dungeon elements and also temporarily stuns enemies, and that appears to be your main dungeon item. At what I assume is the midway point, you unlock an electrified slash, and you also have the ability to do spin attacks, dash attacks, and backflip uppercuts that launch your enemies. You can also just jump on top of them and ride them, amusingly.
I really expected this to be a lot jankier than it is just from initial appearances, and ended up really enjoying it up to the point where I had to take a break. This game has got very big shoes to fill, and I don’t have any particular confidence that it will completely match up to the sorts of games it puts me in mind of, or break the mold in a noteworthy way, but it’s exactly the kind of impressive amateur effort I really enjoy digging up in events like this, and will absolutely be looking to play it at release.
Cyan Heart
Another one of these games that emerges from a person having a bad idea they can’t get enough people to convince them is not great until it’s too late. Cyan Heart is a survival horror game seen entirely through a selfie-mode perspective, where you’re piloting a woman who is FaceTiming you or whatever. That means your controls are backwards and you can’t actually look where you’re going and have to watch the minimap out of the corner of your eye to angle her through doorways or in the general direction of a console she needs to touch.
Actually, scratch that, you can go into first person mode but you just can’t move in it. Well, no, uh… hang on, some rooms, you can move in first person, but if you sprint she turns the camera back around so you can’t see where you’re going, and then in most rooms you can’t at all. I don’t really know, and frankly, I don’t really care, and it was with a sigh of mild relief that I gave up on this after five minutes of trying to figure out how I was supposed to open literally the second door in the demo.
Alchemist’s Alcove
This is basically Rift Wizard crossed with one of those mobile games where you drag a little icon of air onto an icon of a rock and they turn into an icon of sand which you can drag onto an icon of fire to get an icon for glass. You are a little wizard guy who has a dagger and a dream, and that dream is to rub every two items he ever sees together and hopes whatever they turn into is good shit.
Actually, most items don’t really rub together at all, but there are a lot of combinations, and many of them form pretty lengthy chains, with the end result… sometimes… being a way to attack enemies besides your dagger. Find sulfur and ash, and you can make a powder that your flint [one of the items you always have on you] can ignite to create a bit of pure elemental fire to stick in your pouch, and then you can use that fire on slime to make three casts of a cone of flame spell, on a magic scroll to make pixie dust, or on meat to make cooked meat. And then that bit of fire is gone, and you need to find more ash and sulfur to make more. Killing enemies in certain ways influences their drops, and burning enemies to death takes care of the ash.
One of the things I never really liked about Rift Wizard was the ‘ammo’ limitations on all your spells, and having to constantly take inventory of which spells I could ‘afford’ to cast to simplify a situation, and Alchemist’s Alcove is that on steroids. Combine the extremely low ‘ammo’ value of any given spell you make with the very small inventory space to carry bits of goo and good rocks from one screen to the next, and you just don’t have a whole lot to work with. God help you if you see a new combination and it winds up making something that sucks. Like soap bubbles.
You also don’t get a new screen preview the way you do in Rift Wizard, which is a small bit of mental preparation that helps make that game a more engaging experience and feel less like a constant dice roll. I did like the fact that some enemy types infight before targeting you unless you rush over to aggro them, which lets you be a little more strategic but still not as much as a preview would. Finally, and this is the big one, it’s just too goddamn fidgety to constantly do a bunch of inventory management and end up with like, three casts of poison cloud, two lightning rocks you have to manually recharge, and some bits of copper scrap you don’t actually need but who knows, maybe it’s good for something later? There’s bits and bobs of half-decent ideas here, and I can think of one or two people who might get really into this, but I’m not yet sold on the package.
I may sound a bit grumpy today, but I’m actually pretty jazzed. Myth of a Godslayer is exactly the sort of thing I do *gestures vaguely* all of this for. It may be decent, it may really suck, but I’m just glad I found it and got to show it off like a kid who brought a weird frog in to show-and-tell.