Holden's Mega Game Demo-Thon

YES.

So a couple nights ago, being that I am in the use of that wonderful game delivery service known as Steam, I decided to take advantage of a lot of the free demos floating around it. A lot of them. So many that, about halfway through checking them out, I thought, "hey! I could make a blog post out of this!" Why not, right? Here go. To make this entry even lengthier, I'll include check-outs of a few free demos I took a look at long before and a couple of totally free, complete games I've handled in the past few months. Let's go in alphabetical order, shall we?

First up, the demo for a game called And Yet It Moves, no doubt named for the famous words of Galileo Galilei when he was forced to recant for claiming the Earth orbited the Sun. And Yet It Moves is a sort of puzzle/platformer hybrid. The usual platformer tropes of running and jumping are there, but with one solitary twist--you can rotate the world around you. This becomes necessary to access many areas, navigate obstacles, and solve some puzzles. There comes a bit of a challenge with it though--while you're rotating, your momentum is preserved, so if you mess up and rotate more times than is necessary or efficient, the speed at which you are now traveling will kill you upon impact. Stylistically, AYIM is very unique--everything appears to be torn and cut from paper or photos, like you're inhabiting a very layered collage. The unnamed protagonist is a pen sketch on notebook paper. Many of the sound effects seem to also be homemade, including an odd, spoken "SOSH" whenever your character dies. It was challenging, mainly because I kept forgetting which arrow keys rotated the world which direction, but I had fun. Don't think I liked it enough to warrant a purchase, though, I couldn't see the variety continuing for very much further into the game.

In one word: "SOSH"


Next is Beneath A Steel Sky, a free full game I actually got not from Steam, but a similar service called GOG. It was a (very) old-school point-and-click adventure. I was mostly intrigued by the cutscenes, which were drawn in a very comic book style by Dave Gibbons, the guy who illustrated Watchmen. Unfortunately, that was the only thing I ended up liking about it. I was, I admit, a little impatient with it, but it failed to sell to me on three levels: Number one, it had the most convoluted menu navigating I've ever seen in a game; number two, while I appreciate the old school, my eyes have been so spoiled by new-age graphics that the pixelated visions here were sort of hard to make out; and three, while I expect adventure games to be difficult, (it is their very nature) there's a difference between being difficult and having no difficulty curve at all. Your very first puzzle is one of challenging stealth. Since I paid nothing for it, I felt no need to stick around. Would have liked to see how the story panned out though, the characters seemed interesting.

In One Word: "Pixels"


Then came the demo for Braid, another platformer/puzzle combo, and one that's recieved a lot of media attention. A lot has been made of the fact that it's all painted, and I must say--it IS beautiful to look at. The puzzles come in with the player's ability to manipulate time--fast forward it, rewind it, freeze it--to solve puzzles which are also often progress obstacles. Braid is a thinking game. You go forward, stop, think about it, try things out, sit back and think some more. It's meant to be taken slowly. My only complaint is that some puzzles are exact copies of earlier ones, just swapped for a different time-manipulation mechanic, which feels a tad lazy even though it forces you to solve it differently. I had good impressions from this demo, but I don't feel ready to buy it just yet. I want to have the time (no pun intended).

In One Word: "Pretty"


The demo for a game called Cogs was next up. Cogs is a very simple puzzle game--so much so, in fact, that I was surprised to find it for sale rather than just be a very good browser game--then again, people shell out bucks for Bejeweled. Cogs is essentially a series of slider puzzles--you have blocks, you shift them around, the end goal being to create some sort of path, with gears or steam or some combination thereof, to power a machine. I've seen this concept in plenty of other games (mostly browser-based), but Cogs definitely stood out among them--it's done in very crisp, pleasant 3D and there's actually a lot of variety in the level design even though they're all, when you strip them down, variations on "move tiles around." The prettily animated menus and steampunk aesthetic were icing on this surprisingly fun cake. I'd buy it if the price dropped a couple bucks and I had the money to burn.

In One Word: "Varied"


Coil is the second of the four items here that aren't demos, but full games that happen to be available for free, and unlike Beneath a Steel Sky, I bothered to play this one through the whole way (though it's only about twenty-five minutes long). Coil takes a fun, interesting approach to it that I'm seeing pop up in a few other games: it gives you no direction at all, letting you figure out how to play the game. It gives only the hint that there are no buttons to push or click--everything is handled entirely via mouse movements. It's up to the player to figure out what movements. Coil could, in that regard, be sort of loosely classified as a puzzle game. It's broken up into little sub-missions that appear to be different stages of development for some sort of alien fetus. The story is given in chunks between sub-missions and left intentionally vague. The art style heavily reminds me of Roman Dirge. It was definitely interesting to play, more of a little experience than what we usually call a "game." A couple parts were annoying though, lengthened beyond fun and intrigue by not knowing what to do, which sort of comes with the "figure it out yourself" perspective. It's also available to play on Newgrounds, but downloading from Steam lets you play it fullscreen.

In One Word: "Pulsating"


The demo for Crayon Physics. I had heard a little about this but didn't really know much about it. The premise is very similar to the dozens of browser-based "draw play" games where you draw ways to get a ball to a goal, but Crayon Physics also incorporates real-world physics into it--things like gravity and inertia. The demo is generous, providing the first two game "worlds," which is several levels. I had so much fun playing that I actually lost track of time during this one. The paper-and-crayons aspect of it is very well presented, there's hardly a surface you CAN'T scribble on like a giddy child, and it's very easy to just pick up and play. The generic New Agey music does get kind of annoying after a while, though. Still, if the price ever halves, I'll snap it up right quick.

In One Word: "Playful"


Eets was the next demo. It's a puzzle game that draws heavily on the old Lemmings games, though with a slightly more passive way of directing the safe passage of the characters. Different food items in Eets cause different reactions in the little creatures, also called Eets, that you're trying to protect from harm, thereby driving them to different actions that (hopefully) help them get to the goal unhurt. It's a neat idea, but for whatever reason, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't get into this one. Not sure what it was.

In One Word: "Squeaky"


Eternity's Child, I'm told, was developed and created by some talented, rich, bored kid in Europe. There was a lot of hype about it before it released, only to have a lukewarm reception, and I can see why--some effort obviously went into it, but there's just not enough different about it to separate it from a lot of other games. Eternity's Child is a platformer, and a pretty basic one too--run, jump, collect gems and coins. You're actually playing as two characters, really--one, the protagonist, Angel (really, Angel? come on, now. I can tell you're more creative than that), who does said running, jumping, and coin-collecting, and a second one, unnamed in the demo, who floats around you like the Tails to your Sonic and shoots at things via the mouse as your only means of defense. The art is crisp, though it smacks enough of the original early '90s Rayman to be considered a bit of a lift from it, and there's a distinctly...Hot Topic sort of overtone to it in the character design that only compounds the mouth-pursing that came with the character's name. One that I wouldn't mind if it fit with the rest of the game. Which it doesn't. The demo is also criminally short--one (small) level. You also get no plot, if there is any, which is a bit of a downer. So overall, a good effort, but it needs more originality. At least it's only five bucks.

In One Word: "Gothy"


Eversion is a small, short and sweet platformer with some light puzzle elements. It's very classic and old-school, very Mario-ish. Except I doubt Mario ever traveled to the dark corners of sanity. That's right, Eversion has Cthulu Mythos overtones. It begins as an almost overly cute game...saccharine, even. But as you use your power to "evert," or change the world around you to get past obstacles, things begin to change. It never gets truly scary, but there are some genuinely creepy moments, and it's neat to see some of the effects on the game itself when you start going into deeper levels of eversion...the score counter, for example, starts just flashing random numbers. There are also two different endings, something uncommon for a platformer.

In One Word: "Deceptive"


I'd been looking forward to the demo for Mevo and the Grooveriders for a while now (an error within Steam prevented it from being downloaded for me for a while). Essentially, Mevo is what you would get if you smushed together a platformer with Dance Dance Revolution. The titular Mevo automatically runs and maneuvers around some obstacles, you are charged with tapping the correct buttons in time with the background music to both greatly enhance said music and to further help Mevo in his progress, his end goal being to save funk. It's highly addictive, and fortunately the music's pretty good. A set of unlockable costumes grant Mevo special abilities within certain levels, which is also a nice touch. For some odd reason, though, they chose to end the demo on the advanced tutorial level, just after the first world, rather than let you play the level after it as well to put what you just learned into practice. It's also too short for the price tag. If they release some extra content, though, it's high on my list, because I can't deny it was a lot of fun. Even after unlocking all the demo had to offer I'd go back and play through the levels again.

In One Word: "Funky"


Part of me's a little embarassed to put Mighty Jill Off on here, just because of the title and plot, but I'm gonna anyway, because it's a darn good game, the fourth and final of the four full games on this list. (Also, for those who don't understand my bashfulness regarding the title, it's an allusion to "Jilling Off," a slang term for female masturbation, as an (admittedly sort of clever) feminized version of the common "jacking off." ANYWAY.) It's supposed to be a tribute to an old game I'd never played or heard of called Mighty Bomb Jack. It's a platformer, but it's a very different platformer. The titular Jill can jump incredibly high, high enough to make Mario feel out of shape--which means that while she can clear tall pillars in a single bound, it also makes it really easy to smash into hazards such as spikes. The gameplay is focused around learning to control your jumps just right--you can cut a jump short if you hit it again in mid-air, and if you rapidly tap it you'll glide on a slow downward diagonal. There aren't any worlds, just one big (half an hour continuously, my first time through) level with lots of checkpoints. Though you'll be introduced to all the elements you'll encounter in that half-hour within the first couple minutes--blocks, crumbling blocks, spikes, fire, pillars, and spiders (the only enemy), the game never feels repetitous. You're always finding something new to do with all these elements, which to me is indicative of extremely good game design. Oh, yes, the name. Despite the implications granted by the name, the main game itself is entirely clean. It's the narrative framing it that's for the adults, though even that shows nothing explicit, it merely shows Jill's motivation. Jill is the sub in an S&M sub/dom relationship, and when she displeases her "Queen," she is tossed to the bottom of the dungeon they live atop. Jill climbs this tower not to rescue a princess, but to show her "Queen" how much she cares, and I like that sort of twist away from the well-beaten dead horse of platformer-character motivation. While discussing that, in turn, a wealth of S&M stereotypes probably floated through all the heads present, but believe me when I say that even the narrative, despite its sexual overtones, is absolutely adorable, even downright sweet.

In One Word: "Huggable"


Mr. Robot's demo so impressed me that it's the game on this list I'd most strongly consider buying, and in fact may before the year ends. It's been around for a while, but I didn't hear much about it, so I decided to just finally give it a try. It's a blend of puzzle game, adventure game, and RPG that actually fuses together very well. The writing is kind of cute, the graphics easy on the eyes. I just hope the puzzles do actually get harder, the ones in the demo were very easy, and despite the strong prevalence of RPG and Adventure elements, it is advertised most prominently as a puzzle game. Plotwise, you're an ambitious little robot aboard a spaceship sent to colonize a planet. The human crew is in cryo-sleep, but the crew of robots is hard at work until things start going wrong and you, under the tutelage of some other robots plus the ship's obvious nod to HAL 9000, have to get things back on track. The demo was short, but not overly so, and the game gave the impression at least of having a lot more length to it. Mr. Robot is worth looking into for sure, though I have to say as a final word that some of the menu navigation is kind of confusing.

In One Word: "Domo"


Plants vs. Zombies, which just came out about a week or so ago, has been getting a lot of buzz as the latest game after a very long silence from Popcap, a company often credited with being the big catalysts for the whole "casual games" phenomenon. Plants vs. Zombies is part of a niche genre of games called "tower defense" games, where one must strategically place a growing number of varied units to repel an invading horde. In this case, a classical zombie outbreak has occured in the suburbs where you live--but not to fear. Your front lawn is apparently entirely capable of defending your house, through the use of special plants. Most of the ones in the demo were offensive units--like the Pea Shooter, who well, shoots peas. There are also defensive units, such as the Wall-Nuts, whose thick shells take a long time for a zombie to munch through, and resource-generating units, such as the Sunflowers, who generate Sun (the currency used to buy more units to plant in your lawn). For those who fear zombies--fear not! The walking dead in this game are much more silly than scary. Their heads just sort of fall off when you have successfully destroyed one (with a little "pop") and I smirked a little when I saw later levels have them start to use traffic cones and buckets as helmets. There are other nice little touches with them too, like the classic low groaning of "braaaaains" and the leader of each level's "final zombie wave" bearing a little red flag with a brain on it. Adorable, in a zombie sort of way. Given the number of slots for available units to choose from, it looks like there's a lot of possibility for the full game's strategic potential.

In One Word: "Silly"


Following on with the zombie theme, Stubbs the Zombie is a fairly oldish game now, but I'd wanted to play it, as it's supposed to be hilarious. Stubbs is set in an idyllic 1950's America, complete with film grain, cheesy 50's sci-fi cliches, and classic 50's pop forming the background music, like "Lollipop" and "Mr. Sandman." As Stubbs, who takes a cue from Yogi Bear by being smarter than the average brain-muncher, you're...well, I'm not really sure what your goal is. You're a zombie, albeit a slightly intelligent zombie. You walk with a shuffle, you can scratch at things with your long nails, you can eat people's brains (which restores health and recharges your small number of special attacks). Standard zombie stuff. The demo has you stumbling into a water treatment facility and messing with the scientists there. Now, there's a lot to like about this game. The tongue-in-cheek 1950's atmosphere is perfectly realized, the game itself is rather pretty without suffering any slowing down or choppiness for it, and as I had heard, the dialogue writing is worth a chuckle. However...it's too darn hard. There's no difficulty curve at all. I tried and tried and never made it past the first couple minutes of where the demo put me. The only way you can go, you're immediately set upon by scientists with ray guns, and a large number of people with guns vs. a zombie who also walks like a zombie is not good odds. I did discover that if I just scratched someone to death, without the whole eating brains thing, they became a zombie too and could act as a computer-controlled minion of mine, but even then I was never able to last through much of the initial gunfire.

In One Word: "Imbalance"


What may very well be the oldest game on here, The Longest Journey has been cited to me again and again as an example of a very very well-done point-and-click adventure game, back when companies other than Telltale still made them. I'm stuck on a puzzle, but I'm okay with that--as I cited much earlier, it's in the nature of adventure games to be difficult and make you sit back and think, and I did slowly find my way to the solution of the first puzzle. While you aren't given much of the story, I think I got a good enough impression. The protagonist, April, was the only character in the demo I liked very much--the Captain (I was on a boat) was a bit of a jerk and the navigator had an annoying voice that sounded like she was trying really hard to read some meaningful poetry. But April was pretty awesome. I liked what little I've seen so far. The graphics are pretty dated now, but it still doesn't look bad. Just old.

In One Word: "Patience"


Come on, you can do this. Only three more to go. Have I really written this long of an entry about video game demos? I need to find something better to write about. Anyway. Very recently I've had my eyes opened by my friend Cineris that the Tomb Raider series is (gasp!) actually worth playing. So enlightened, I decided to check out the demo for the most recent entry in the series, Tomb Raider: Underworld. There were...a lot of ups and downs. Let's go positives first. First of all, it's a beautiful-looking game, so much so that the game even chugged a little on the lowest settings (but still looked pretty on them). I also experienced some weird hitches with the background music, though that may have just been my sound card. Lara's animations are smooth and believable, and it's evident some actual research went into the archeaology aspect of the game. The demo is a very good length, being slightly over an hour. I really, really wanted to like it, but there were some issues that kept me from truly enjoying it. Number one, it doesn't seem particularly friendly to people who are brand new to the series like myself--in both how to play and a few brief story allusions I felt like there was some stuff I wasn't in on. I am grateful that I'd played Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time well before this game, though, as it follows that same branch of more naturalistic, parkour-based platforming, where looking for the next place to jump to or climb up is just as important as the timing and direction of said jumps and climbs. Unfortunately, to preserve its sense of realism, there are several moments where the area you're supposed to go is barely evident, resulting in a lot of trial and error. There were a few moments where I even got to where I was evidently supposed to entirely on accident, through a leap of random chance, and once even an accidental button press. Second, I realize this is an issue born mainly from the series being native to consoles rather than computers, but the controls can be awkward or even frustrating at times. Lara's really picky at times when she's dangling from a ledge as to what arrow key will cause her to face which direction, which is tolerable when there are no stakes, but really annoying when a misstep will cause her to die and you watch her scream, fall, and break her back on rocks twenty times in a row because none of the arrows seemed to be interpreted as "face away from the wall you're clinging to." The fighting controls are a total mess not well-suited to a keyboard and mouse combination--I was grateful for the auto-aim. Perhaps earlier entries are better, I'll try them sometime. This demo had a lot going for it but ultimately didn't sell me (or wouldn't if my computer were capable of running it smoothly anyway).

In One Word: "Falling"


I'm a fan of Nick Parks and his animation, so when I heard Telltale was doing a series of Wallace & Gromit adventure games, I was all on board. There's a demo up on Steam for the first episode, Fright of the Bumblebees, which involves Wallace accidentally breeding a swarm of giant bees. The atmosphere is well-captured, for sure...there's a Wallace-and-Gromitness to the humor, and the theme song is intact for the opening screen. Telltale even took pains with the look and animation to try and make it look like claymation. (Which reminds me, whatever happened to The Neverhood? That game needs a comeback.) It feels like something that could plausibly be a Wallace & Gromit short film. The only presentational complaint is that for some reason all the voices except Wallace's sound distractingly crackly and low-quality, like they were recorded at a drive-in. The demo consists of two different puzzles, taken from very different parts of the game but tied together for the demo's purposes. Neither were particularly challenging, but the unskippable, over-friendly tutorial gave me a feeling that these games might be intended towards the younger set. As much as I love Wallace and Gromit, I think I'll wait to see what people say about the other episodes before I shell out any cash for these. Especially currently: the first episode has a frankly ridiculous thirty-five dollar price tag.

In One Word: "British"


And lastly, finally, Watchmen: The End Is Nigh. I'll come right out and say it: I went into this demo biased. I wanted to download it just so I could make fun of it. Unfortunately for my fun-making, it ended up being thoroughly mediocre rather than outright terrible. That's kind of sad anyway, because I can see that it had potential to be something pretty cool in spades. It's a brawler (the modern equivalent of the side-scrolling beat-em-up) featuring Rorschach and Nite Owl in the old days, when they worked together, before the passing of the Keene Act that would outlaw costumed vigilantes. A decent premise, I think. The demo had you deal with the first half of the first mission, where the dynamic duo are acting as riot control for a large prison experiencing an orchestrated jailbreak. You pick which character to play, the other will be your AI partner, and off you go. The writing is actually pretty good, and the game looks The cutscenes are done in very awesome.Watchmen-esque comic panels with limited animation, the game itself is done with a lot of realism (again, I had to turn the settings down to keep it from chugging on my machine), and if they didn't get the actors from the film adaption to do the voice acting, they sure got people who sound very similar. There are even a few nice little touches, such as Rorschach assuming his classic head-down, hands-in-coat-pockets stance when there's no immediate danger. The sound is good--the punches sound solid, the bone cracks sound wince-worthy. The game has a lot going for it...until you actually play it. First, the combat itself needs a lot more variety. There's the standard light attacks, heavy attacks, and dodges, and combinations thereof. That's it. And even half the touted "combos" are things that seem like they should be regular moves, such as a stun move or a disarm move. Half the time the game won't even recognize you're inputting a combo anyway. Rorschach (I didn't play as Nite Owl) also has a generic "rage" bar that, when full, will allow you to do a headbutt that's usually an instant KO. This limited move assortment gets old fast, and you'll fall into a pattern of light, light, light, heavy, move on to next enemy. Occasionally, and completely arbitrarily, you'll also be able to do a finishing move on someone. Rorshach's, true to his character, are brutal, and some of them are actually kind of cool ideas, but I want to feel more like I earned pulling off a move like that, not that it was some freak chance. Besides the lack of gameplay variety (which also extends to the enemies--you only fight two types--as well as the environment, which has, FOR SHAME, a few copypasted areas), the camera is also a big problem. It's ridiculously over-sensitive. It captures a lot of cool angles on its own, but when you move it, it bucks like a horse. Nudging it slightly several times is the only way to assure any camera control, and you can't do that in the heat of battle. Pushing it anything more than slightly will swing the camera rapidly around to the other side of you. Annoying. This game could have been so much more.

In Two Words: "Whores, Daniel"


As a final word, I've been giving some thought to daily writing excercises.


~Holden Out. (Of space and breath)