Welcome to the first birthday of our monthly Dem-OH! Round-up, started April 2021!!!
How does it feel simultaneously so long ago yet only a moment away?!
Well we’re all here now, so before the sweaty Summer months kick-in be sure to take a moment for yourself to reflect on the past year. Oh how things have changed.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure how long I’d be doing these little demo compilations, but you can be sure I’m still having a blast playing at the forefront of new and innovative games from all around the world.
Thanks to everyone who has joined a livestream, or even just watched a video. It’s been a lot of fun entertaining and it means the world to us to share our love of gaming and the wonderful experiences it can provide!
First off – if you don’t know who RedCandleGames are, you should do some research, or maybe watch this video from one of my favourite YouTubers. Shrouded by the controversy stirred up by their previous title, Devotion, this winning Taiwanese team seems to have tucked their two fantastic horror games (that you can only buy from their offical site, because of said controversy and every company’s blind-eye policy towards the behaviour of the oppresive Chinese government) under their belt and turned to something new this time around.
Nine Sols is a gorgeous and smooth hand-drawn 2D action platformer with challenging parry/dodging-based combat and a fantastically engrossing story with which the demo masterfully hooked me. And oh man, you should see the test boss they throw in – a delectable trial of the sharpened taoist fighting style that took me about thirty minutes to study and finally overcome. Currently being crowdfunded on their site, it seems to be as clear to the already 7000+ backers as it is to me that this is one you’re not going to want to miss. It may be a bit of a crowded genre for sure, but I have no doubt that RedCandleGames will deliver only the most thought-provoking and deeply engaging game they can, just as they do every time.
You might think playing chess with a shotgun would be an unfair advantage, but Kings SUCK! With their meager movement and a target on their back, it’s going to take the perfect amount of wits, guts, and good luck to make it through the tactical armies of those that betrayed you and earn your revenge. 1st place winner of the 50th Ludum Dare game jam in both ‘Overall’ and ‘Fun’ categories is already a massive pull, but mixing that with 2nd place in ‘Innovation’ says it all. You’ve never played anythying like this challenging chess-style action puzzler and the now-released complete version taunts players with it’s blistering difficulty, where every victory yields upgrades but also stronger and more numerous opponents. How far can you make it before blundering?
If you’ve ever caught one of my Dem-OH! streams, you’ve no doubt seen me play (and complain about) a block pushing, or ‘sokoban’, puzzle. There are a bajillion available, so I find myself playing demos of them rather frequently, and almost every one is an unoriginal lifeless title that I can’t imagine was created for any reason besides the dev practising game programming.
Patrick’s Parabox, then, must have seen my plight, that I had lost all faith that the sub-genre, and came to deliver a message – ‘this is how you do it’. Hot DAMN is this game solid, innovative, and totally bloody genius. By transforming the very soul of a sokoban game, the blocks that need to be pushed around, into magnificent 4D, paradoxical, self-contained meta-representations, this one elevates each and every puzzle to mind-blowing heights. Pushing cubes into cubes for storage is one thing, but very quickly the cubes become little areas of ther own, and then begin to look suspiciously like the level containing them. That’s when the penny drops and you realise you can manipulate the level by moving the cube, and the cube by moving around the level. It really has to be seen and played to be believed, or even understood, but it’s fair to say this has become an instant favourite of mine. Puzzle fans, you don’t want to miss out.
I admit that I prematurely judged this one, seeing it as just another Enter the Gungeon wannabe roguelike top-down shooter, but that’s only half-right. Bullet Runner does clearly take a lot of inspiration from there but by focusing on individual levels and mixing up the gameplay with Doom Eternal elements such as finishers to replenish health and ammo, a swing hook for platforming and ripping the shields of off bothersome enemies, and non-stop action, it makes its own space in the genre. I mean, it absolutely is just a mix of those two games like you wouldn’t believe, but it works well and is a blast to play, so what more could you possibly want?!
“I’m optimistic that the combat will be interesting […] that the different trainings will open up new and exciting paths to victory […] that the missions are fun and challenging”
Life got in the way a couple of times this month, leading to several cancelled Dem-OH! streams, but we still managed to play through almost 50 games! Still on track for beating last years big number – 622!
NOTE: Ratings are basically representative of how much I enjoyed the demo and the likelihood that I’ll come back to the title in the future (or even would liked to have continued playing it right then), with regards to gameplay, quality, and (of course) personal preference to genre, etc. A zero represents that the game is too non-functional to really get a feel for it. It is essentially a non-rating.
