Article June 2nd 2023 Ian Howarth

May was a good month – we got a little travel in, sunnny days running in the park with Vincent, and I managed to (mostly) stick to the Dem-OH! streaming schedule for the first time in a while. I also hit infinite rank in Marvel Snap, which I had pushed really hard for! Just lots of fun stuff going on.

But that’s all garbage compared to June. Perhaps the best month of the year for our hobby, where we start the E3 (RIP) news cycle for upcoming games and big announcements, it’s also the season for the biggest demo event of the year – the summer Steam #NextFest! The perfect time to go all out and lose ourselves in as many weird and interesting indie titles as possible. I can’t wait to see what sweet treats we find. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Youtube, or even join the Discord, because there’ll be more random live streams than you can shake a sturdy wooden stick at!

Stand-Out Demos

(in recording order)

Afterdream – Demo on Steam

A good horror game is hard to do. It requires insight into what makes us tick, patience to build the tension/release cycle without damaging the pace, and excellent audio-visual syncronicity. Good horror in a 2D world is almost impossible. Because you’re able to see outside of the boundaries of a character’s reasonable area of vision, and due to the limited movement available, it can be challenging to create suspenseful situations that don’t feel repetitive. Limbo and other similar titles fall into the trap of essentially being a puzzle game with moments of terror always in the form of a chase sequence, which works well but we’ve seen it a few too many times by now. Afterdream really steps it up. Firstly by going all in on a design style that feels… wrong, making everything look dirty, damaged, and out of place. But mostly with its gameplay that forces you to backtrack through dangerous territory, feel around blindly in the heavy darkness using only a camera flash to see, and playing mini-games against the clock suddenly whilst God-knows-what draws ever closer. Constantly mixing up what you’re doing and how you’re interacting with the game keeps the whole thing fresh and moving along, letting the player freefall down a rabbit hole of madness.

Previews

Circle of Kerzoven – Live on Kickstarter with Demo on Steam

Check out the Preview here!

Like building settlements, controlling resources, and seeing your little town explode into a bustling city? Better yet, how about sending your villagers off to explore new locations where they’ll go on to create their very own communities with which you can contract trade agreements? Meta-management!

Dem-OH! Dashes

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.