Tag Archives: The Steam Game Festival

Demos of the Steam Game Festival 2021

It’s times like these that I’m really grateful that my internet provider hasn’t saddled me with data caps, because I’ve downloaded a ton of demos from the ongoing Steam Game Festival that would certainly have resulted in some sort of additional charge on my bill. But the point is that as of February 3rd, 2021, you can open up Steam and download a bunch of demos for upcoming games. While I could never play all of them, nor would I ever want to be in a position where I had to, I did play some of the titles and have a few thoughts about what you should try and what you should avoid.

LUNARK

Lunark was the first demo I jumped into once all of my downloads from the festival completed, and while that might sound like some appraisal of its value, it was just the first one I clicked on. Looking back on it, I’m kind of glad I got it out of the way first because I really didn’t enjoy my time with this particular demo.

Lunark is a 2D side scrolling action and puzzle game that boasts a chunky-pixel aesthetic and plays kind of like the original Prince of Persia or Out of this World. If those references go over your head, it’s a very deliberate game that prioritizes the animation of what you’re doing over responsive controls and easy to use controls. Everything from running to climbing feels like there’s a giant lag between your button press and what happens on screen. It’s clear that Lunark is trying to illicit the same feelings of those other games, but it ends up feeling more convoluted and tedious than anything else.

Aside from mechanical issues, the game looks pretty cool with those big and beefy pixels even if it isn’t necessarily my aesthetic. The soundtrack also seemed pretty decent as well, but neither of those things seemed good enough to make me want to play the full version of this game. I don’t know about Lunark, but maybe it just isn’t for me.

CHICORY

Now here’s a game that I could really see myself spending a lot of time with. Chicory is a delightful little game about being a cute little dog person who has the ability to paint in the world around them. There’s context as to why they’re able to perform these artistic feats of magic that tie into the central plot of the game that (obviously) wasn’t fully explored in the demo, but it left me eager to see where the story goes.

Your quest to find out what happened to all the color in the world isn’t just a fun story hook, but it has mechanical repercussions as well. Your magic painting powers will allow you to navigate the environment, solve puzzles, help random citizens and oddly enough, fight enemies. I’m really curious to see how the mechanics evolve over time as you progress through the story.

For as delightful and joyous as Chicory appears on the surface, the end of the demo really takes a turn that I didn’t expect and basically transforms it into something of a bullet-hell. The controls work without issue for most of the demo, requiring you to use the right stick to move your brush around and the right trigger to actually paint, but it gets a bit dicier when you have to manage your paintbrush and move around at the same time. I’m sure it’s one of those things you get better at as time goes on, but even with that slight hesitance, I really think Chicory could be something special.

RETRO MACHINA

It feels mean to say that Retro Machina is squarely in the camp of “style over substance,” but I really felt that it was a game I’d rather look at than play myself. In Retro Machina, you play as a robot who was working at a nondescript factory alongside of their other identical robot buddies, who suddenly decides to not follow their orders because they saw a butterfly. I’m sure there’s more of a story there, but that’s all I gathered from the demo.

You escape the robot police and somehow get launched into the wilderness where you begin your search for a robot mechanic or upgrade station or something? Whatever the motivation, you end up in this different factory/office building where you have to solve puzzles and fight other robots to continue on. From a perspective that’s purely based on presentation, Retro Machina is great, but when you find yourself engaging in combat is where the experience kind of fell apart for me.

It isn’t that the combat is aggressively bad or anything, it just lacks any feeling of momentum or impact. The biggest thing that bugged me about the combat was the way that enemies can destroy you incredibly quickly, but not because they’re super powerful or anything, but because the game isn’t great about letting you know you’re taking damage. That led to a lot of moments where I’d exit a combat encounter with a fraction of the starting HP despite only having to fight like one robot. What I’m saying is that there isn’t great feedback for when you’re taking damage.

Aside from the combat issues however, the puzzle-solving aspect of Retro Machina seems promising. Despite needing or wanting an upgrade, your robot is extremely capable, boasting the ability to possess other robots to make them flip switches or navigate through otherwise inaccessible areas for you. There wasn’t a ton of innovative stuff I saw in the demo in regards to the puzzle mechanics, but it seems like that’s all primed to get insanely complex later in the full game. Overall the game seems neat, but I don’t think it’s something that I’d end up putting much of any time into.

SHERWOOD EXTREME

While it isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Sherwood Extreme sure seems like it’s trying to do the whole Bulletstorm thing in a low-polygon art style, replacing space marines with a Robin Hood-looking character who’s killing orcs. Sherwood Extreme is a level-based arcade-styled action game, where you’re trying to rack up the highest score you can by chaining together kills and acrobatics throughout a level in order to keep your combo meter up.

You run around with a crossbow and shield and shoot orcs while flipping in the air in slow motion like you’re in some medieval version of The Matrix. The shooting and score chasing aspect of Sherwood Extreme seem pretty solid, I just hope you unlock some more abilities or something because after only two or three levels, I was looking for some more variation. However, the game moves a lot slower than I initially thought it would because there isn’t a good feeling of momentum to running around or flipping, and it all just feels a bit janky. But hey, it’s a demo of an unreleased project.

Obviously I can’t speak to how Sherwood Extreme is as you get further into it, but there’s something there that’s worth paying attention to, I just wish it controlled and flowed a little bit better than it currently does. Hopefully that gets ironed out as the game develops, but even if it does, it’s one of those weird circumstances where I don’t dislike the game, but something just isn’t clicking with me. I wanted to enjoy Sherwood Extreme more than I actually did, but I don’t know if that’ll happen.

NARITA BOY

Speaking of games I wanted to like more than I actually did, let’s talk about Narita Boy. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but Narita Boy is a 2D pixelated action-platformer with Metroidvania elements. Right off the bat I will say that Narita Boy presents itself very well, both in terms of the art style and the soundtrack. And when you eventually do get to fight things, that feels pretty dang good too. You get this very cool sword that feels great to swing around and slash up monsters with, but you can also turn it around and use it as a shotgun which is objectively rad as hell.

While I think Narita Boy looks cool and has some neat combat mechanics, I don’t think this demo does the full product any justice. Like a lot of these demos, it starts with a world-setting cut-scene, but then it dumps you into a portion of the game that would probably be way more tolerable if it wasn’t the first and longest thing you do in the demo. You have to suffer through endless dialogues about the world and your place in it before you actually get to do anything cool. Even when your task is to go find the cool sword you have to trudge through more dialogue and an obscene amount of screens where you literally walk in a direction until you can press a button to open a door, just to do that again in a different room.

I’m sure the story is interesting, but they front load so much of it in the form of people just talking at you in dialogue boxes that I began to lose interest almost immediately. And it isn’t like a few sentences, these are full on paragraphs that talk about how cool it’s gonna be when you get that sword but first they have to describe the sword’s power in excruciating detail. Needless to say, I buttoned through a lot of dialogue because I just wanted to play the damn game. I think Narita Boy is really cool, but if that demo is indicative of what playing the full product is like, I don’t know that I can handle the pace of it.

STEEL ASSAULT

Yes, okay, Steel Assault is a pixelated 2D action game. I feel like I’ve written that so much today, but that’s not the point. Steel Assault reminds me of Bionic Commando, Contra and even the Metal Slug games a bit. It’s very much a “shoot everything” kind of game, but it has this interesting tether mechanic that I unfortunately was never able to wrap my head around, but was still very cool when I did manage to use it correctly.

The basic rundown is that you have a cool laser whip that you can kill bad guys with as well as the ability to fire a tether in two directions at once to make a zip-line or tight rope that you can use to traverse distant platforms. For instance, if I’m on a platform and fire the tether up, one end connects to my current platform and the other tethers to the one above me. From there I can climb up the rope and also whip guys while hanging from the rope which looks very cool.

Yet despite how cool it looks, I found Steel Assault to be difficult in kind of bullshit ways. First and foremost, the enemies constantly spawn, leaving you no respite whatsoever. Now I’m sure that’s not an issue a lot of folks out there, but when I was trying to get a handle on what was going on it became incredibly frustrating. But that alone wouldn’t sour me on a nostalgia-driven action game, however what did get me was the readability of everything that was going on. I rarely have this issue in games, but I had a really hard time clocking enemy projectiles. The first sequence of the demo is you fighting a flying robot while you’re on a boat that’s speeding through the canals of a city. That robot fires bullets at you that basically vanish into the colors of the boat as well as the background, which might be more of an issue with the heavy retro-styled filter they put over the screen. I died a lot because of that.

Steel Assault was the only demo that I wasn’t able to get through just because of how difficult of a time I had with it. I don’t think it’s a bad game, I just couldn’t get into a groove with it. You’re mileage may vary, but if you think you’re a bad enough dude to play Steel Assault, you should go for it.

And that’s really it for now. I have a couple of other demos I want to try out before the Steam Game Festival wraps up on the 9th, so maybe I’ll gin up a “part 2” before that happens. I haven’t even scratched the surface of what demos are currently available, so I recommend you check out the offerings for yourself because there’s definitely stuff that’s exceptional that I didn’t or probably won’t end up covering here.

A Look Back at The Steam Game Festival

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As we watch the corpse of E3 gently float down the stream with golden coins placed over its eyes for The Riverman to grant it safe passage, we find ourselves in the midst of constant press events that look to fill vacuum E3 left in its wake. One of these events came in the form of the now concluded Steam Game Festival, where developers could directly market their upcoming games via Steam and allow us to download demos of upcoming games. I played a couple of these demos and wanted to provide a little bit of insight into each of the games I got my hands on.

I want to preface with the fact that most of, if not all of the demos I tried, were of games that were not done and clearly needed more work. I am not judging these demos as full products, nor would I want to imply that was the case. These games are in development and are subject to change, so consider this article as a time capsule that describes what these demos were like.

GRIEFHELM

Griefhelm is a side-scrolling action game that sees you, a knight, sword fighting their way through waves of increasingly deadlier enemies. While it sounds fun on paper, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. The controls feel floaty and unresponsive at times, often resulting in the mistiming of blocks and strikes. Griefhelm uses a similar combat system to Nidhogg in terms of having to correctly angle your sword stance between low, medium and high, in an attempt to parry and hit your opponents. While technically that system works in Griefhelm, it doesn’t feel anywhere as responsive or satisfying as Nidhogg.

There’s also another layer to the game that lives in-between skirmishes, where you select which mission you want to go on. Each mission offers a different kind of objective, although they all boil down to just killing dudes and not dying with the promise of some sort of reward that you can use in other levels being bestowed upon you, as well as new pieces of armor for your knight.

While I don’t think Griefhelm is there just yet, I think with some refinement to the controls and mission variety that it could be a really fun game.

UNTO THE END

Remember everything I said about Griefhelm? Then get ready for Unto the End, a game that is cut from the same cloth as Griefhelm, but does just about everything better. Well, except for showing me anything outside of the combat mechanics of the game, because the demo is literally just the combat tutorial and nothing else as far as I could tell.

Unto the End is a much more visually appealing version of Griefhelm, that’s easier to control and more satisfying to play. It uses a similar combat system that seems to be a little more fine-tuned and responsive than Greifhelm. Outside of those examples however, there isn’t really much else to glean from this demo. I look forward to seeing more of Unto the End despite knowing next to nothing about it though.

WINDJAMMERS 2

Windjammers 2 is a game that I forgot existed at all despite it being the sequel to one of my favorite Neo-Geo games, Windjammers. If you have no idea what Windjammers or its sequel actually is, you could call it a mix between pong, air hockey, and that aggressively 80’s attitude that we all love so much.

Windjammers 2 boasts a new hand drawn art style that I’m actually really into, along with a couple of new offensive and defensive capabilities that allow people who know what they’re doing to completely devastate others. Completely unrelated, the demo only allows for online play at the moment, and I definitely didn’t get obliterated by every opponent I faced.

I will always champion Windjammers as a game everyone should try at least once in their lives, although I don’t know that I am foaming at the mouth in anticipation of a sequel. I’ll see how I feel about it when the full game is released, but for now I’m okay with the first installment that currently lives on my Switch.

RUSTLER

Long before the days of Shark Cards and orbital strikes, the Grand Theft Auto series started as a top-down action game where driving a car in a straight line was borderline impossible. The early GTA games also showed off some of that trademark humor that Rockstar is infamous for, but nowhere near as loudly as they do it now.

With that history lesson out of the way, Rustlers is the fantasy version of those old GTA games, emulating everything from the top-down camera angle to the inability to ride a horse in a straight line along with some really hit and miss attempts at humor.

The combat is sluggish and unresponsive, often times defaulting to you just mashing the attack button in the hopes you land a hit on an enemy that’s also flailing wildly, but somehow better at it than you are. Riding a horse is a laborious process that will almost always end in you crashing into something and falling of said horse, which ultimately became the way I dismounted my horse every single time.

The only somewhat redeeming factor is the sense of humor Rustlers has. There were some moments where I might have softly chuckled to myself, like when I saw a cow on a roof that had the word, “horse” spray painted across its body, or when the medieval cops were after me and had one of those rotating red and blue police lights on their helmets. There were also a lot of not so great jokes that I endured, most of which involved being drunk, excessively cursing or soiling yourself.

I don’t think I like Rustlers at all, but maybe you’ll enjoy it. If that’s the case, more power to you.

THE BLOODLINE

A while ago I wrote about the newest Mount & Blade game, specifically mentioning how I thought it was way too much for me to contend with. I know that it’s a very beloved series, but it just wasn’t for me. I only bring that up because I share a lot of the same feelings with the Mount & Blade series as I do The Bloodline.

The Bloodline does itself a massive disservice by starting you out in a mostly abandoned castle with barely anyone around. You create your low-poly character and head out on an adventure that is mechanically similar to something like Mount & Blade. Just like those games, you’ll split your time between first or third person combat, traveling and exploring the over-world, and recruiting allies to join you in what I’ve heard are fairly massive battles.

One of the first things I encountered on my travels was a massive tower that was devoid of any enemies, but had a big bell hanging at the top of it. The game and I agreed that I was to make it to the top of the tower and ring that bell. Luckily The Bloodline gives you a grappling hook that works about 70% of the time which is all I needed to make it to the tippy-top. That and I don’t think there’s any fall damage, so that helped too. I got to the apex, rang the bell, and got 1500XP for my trouble, and was teleported back to the world map. Then I traveled to a town, looked around for people to recruit, and the game crashed.

I haven’t loaded it up again since, but the demo is so rough and janky that I think I’ll wait for a more polished release to continue on my The Bloodline adventure.

NIGATE TALE

Do you like rogue-like games? Do you also like unnecessarily horny representations of anime characters? Well friend, you might just love Nigate Tale, a game that apparently is both of those things and I had no idea. Not like there’s anything wrong with liking these things, it was just a lot to absorb all at once.

See, I don’t enjoy rogue-likes at all. It all just feels a little too grindy for my tastes, but I get the appeal of them, and for what it’s worth Nigate Tale seems like a pretty competent one of those kinds of games. The controls are responsive, the enemies provide a real challenge, and the game has a pretty good look to it as well. From the perspective of someone who doesn’t know what makes a good rogue-like, this seems like it’s all right.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m trying to “yuck anybodies yum” or anything, I just was not prepared for the 3 scantily clad anime ladies I would encounter within the first 5 minutes of playing. All of that confusion immediately faded away when I met a large hamster-like creature who gave me some special powers, cause their presence alone was easily the high point of Nigate Tale.

I played a little bit of Nigate Tale, and I genuinely have no idea if it’s good or not. It felt good to play, but I was constantly at a loss because the in-game translation isn’t fully there yet which made it genuinely hard to understand what powers I was picking up or even what the story was. I hope this thing gets properly localized and people can get their hands on it, cause it seems all right for what it is.

SKELLBOY

Skellboy is the kind of game that I can get behind. It’s this action game where you play as a skeleton that acquires new body parts and weapons from their fallen foes, and wears it on themselves. A new head might give you more health or the ability to spit projectiles, while new feet could make you run faster. It seems ripe for a puzzle solving game where you’re swapping parts of yourself out to progress through certain obstacles, but you don’t have an inventory so you just pick up and discard things as you go.

The game also boasts this almost Paper Mario-esque art style, except instead of everything being made of paper they’re just chunky pixels. But the way the perspective shifts as you move through a level gave me some really strong Paper Mario vibes that I very much appreciated.

The only criticisms I really have with Skellboy is that the combat not only feels slow, but there isn’t much impact to anything you’re doing. I found myself losing a lot of health because I just didn’t realize I was getting hit, and the same thing can be said about attacking. Outside of that however, I really dug what I played.

There it is, my not-so-comprehensive coverage of The Steam Game Festival. Overall, I like how Steam has run this event and gave people access to a lot of neat upcoming games that I would have otherwise not known about. Considering E3 would be over by now, it’s been nice to get a constant trickle of announcements and events like this one, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other publishers tried similar things. Everyone has their own launcher these days, so it wouldn’t be outrageous to see someone like Ubisoft announcing a game one day and simultaneously allow people to try a demo or beta of said game on their own platform. We’ll see what happens over the course of this summer I suppose.

The Steam Game Festival

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If you haven’t heard of The Steam Game Festival before, don’t worry, cause you’re not alone. This is apparently the second time that Valve has orchestrated the event, but the first time that I’ve been aware of it.

For the uninitiated, The Steam Game Festival is a weekend long event spanning from March 18th to the 23rd in which you are able to download and play around 40 demos for upcoming indie games. From puzzlers to adventure games, rouge-likes and RPGs, there’s genuinely something for everyone on display. I went ahead and downloaded a few titles and wanted to highlight them here.

EMBR

Embr puts you in the shoes of a firefighter who has to do the typical firefighter things. Spray water, save people, loot their houses, it’s all represented in the game. You start off by picking a mission from your cellphone. Each mission in the demo had a threshold of civilians you needed to save, with optional objectives that boiled down to just saving all the people in the level, and stealing wads of cash in the burning house.

It’s all represented in this cartoony style in an attempt to detract from the actual horror that is being in a burning building. In my short time with the game, I found myself having to deal with not only fire, but live electric wires that don’t play well with water, and the harsh lesson that is what a back-draft is.

To my surprise, I actually had a very good time with Embr and would definitely play it again if I had the opportunity. It’s got some multiplayer functionality which seems like it’ll be almost necessary at some point considering the levels I played were big and dense enough to become slightly overwhelming as a solo firefighter.

HEAVENLY BODIES

Heavenly Bodies is one of those, “it’s hilarious to watch, frustrating to play,” kind of games that people love to stream. You are an astronaut floating through this derelict space station or space craft, it wasn’t super clear, and you have to complete objectives in this zero gravity environment. It sounds simple enough, but the controls and perspective work against you just enough to make it incredibly frustrating.

Each arm is controlled by an analog stick, with each trigger enabling you to grab onto things. You have to use these in tandem to propel yourself around the vacuum of space in order to get things done. It’s hectic and unwieldy, but I bet it would be a blast with other people involved.

I didn’t manage to get far in the demo considering there’s a ten minute time limit in place. Ten minutes in which I managed to open a door and definitely give my character a concussion or three from how many things I slammed them into. Heavenly Bodies seems like it would be fun, but only if you have a high tolerance for failure, and you have some friends with you who aren’t too precious about winning.

RAJI: AN ANCIENT EPIC

Raji: An Ancient Epic is an isometric action game akin to Lara Croft and The Guardian of Light in that you’ll be doing a lot of platforming, puzzle solving, and enemy killing. Leaning heavily into Hindu mythology, Raji: An Ancient Epic has you running around as a young girl named Raji who is on a quest to find her brother. Throughout her journey, she discovers an ancient power in her that makes her really good at killing demons.

In the short demo I played, I found combat to be fun albeit a little muddy in places, with hits not landing with enough impact along with not having much in the way of variety with your moves. To be fair though, Raji has a ton of contextual combat moves ranging from holding her spear out while she spins around a column to running up a wall, flipping off of it and stabbing into the ground for a nice area of attack effect. The problem was that the opportunities for these moves were limited in the few combat arenas I saw, as well as don’t reliably work. There were times when I’d manage to run up the wall, but getting the attack to happen after that was a little hit or miss.

But like all of the games on this list, it’s a demo and I can’t judge it too harshly. I really enjoyed Raji: An Ancient Epic as a whole, with the glaring exception being that somehow it reset my resolution mid game, and wouldn’t allow me to reset it because I physically could not click the “apply” button in the settings menu. Aside from that though, I’m kind of sold on Raji: An Ancient Epic.

GOING UNDER

Going Under is a beautifully crafted, fast and frantic rouge-like action game that tasks you with going through room after room of goblins dressed like tech bros. Using your fists and literally anything that isn’t nailed down, you punch, stab and smash your way to victory… I assume. I didn’t get very far in it because it’s surprisingly difficult despite its pleasing cartoon aesthetic.

In Going Under I maintained this feeling of being severely under powered in comparison to the many tech goblins I faced. Even one-on-one, these enemies are dangerous and can easily overwhelm you if you aren’t careful. At times I felt like the game might have been cheating a bit, specifically when 4 goblins would run up to me and simultaneously beat the shit out of me, but I bet that feeling dissipates with time.

I like just about everything going on in Going Under with the sole exception that I do not enjoy rogue-like games. If you’re into these kinds of experiences than you should absolutely keep an eye on Going Under, but the very structure of the game doesn’t appeal to me personally.

There’s plenty more to try during The Steam Game Festival, but these were some of the ones that I managed to play that stood out to me. I think events like these should ultimately replace the need for ordinary people to go to conventions. At least this way they can actually play games without having to wait 3 hours on a line.