I am impressed with my impressions.
So I wanted to do more of a comprehensive roundup of demos on display at this year’s Fall Game Festival and I realized that if I spent time figuring out making videos that it would never get done and fewer people would see them. So without further ado I want to run down the demos that I played.
I wholeheartedly recommend checking out the Steam Fall Festival page because there’s like a hundred plus demos and there’s no way I’m going to get through half of them in the next couple of days. See what games grab your attention and download the demos if they have them.
I wasn’t impressed by Glitchphobia’s demo and that’s coming from someone who was a big fan of Superliminal and its mind-bending puzzles. Glitchphobia is a puzzle game that uses perspective and control tricks to bamboozle the player. What annoyed me most about the game is that the rules are not consistent nor are they clear and it leads to frustration.
To compare to Superliminal, that game has a pretty strict set of rules and you gradually learn how the world works as it expands what is available to you. In Glitchphobia the game will throw you into a room and suddenly you can walk on walls, but you don’t know that unless you specifically walk into the wall and keep walking. But then you can’t walk on walls anymore. There’s another room that messes with your controls depending on where you are, and another where you have to navigate pitfalls in darkness without stopping or it zooms you back to the start.
I’ll keep an eye out on Glitchphobia but I’m not impressed by the demo.
I expected this game to be dollar store Papers Please and it was that to an extent, but even with the demo and its limited content I can see that this is going to be more than just a simple clone game. Contraband Police is yet another game from the content mill that is Playway SA and its two hundred billion subsidiaries. You play as the border guard for an eastern European authoritarian country and it’s your job to make sure that the people who should not be coming into the country are not coming into the country.
The core gameplay loop is very similar. You call forward people one by one and get their credentials. Match up their name, make sure their paperwork isn’t expired, the numbers match, etc. Contraband Police has the extra element of the vehicle inspection. Check weight, license plate, look for defects, and more. The game tells you that broken windows or missing headlights are not a reason for refusal of entry, but correctly inspecting a vehicle does give you bonus cash.
It’s not clear what elements Contraband Police will introduce outside of inspection and apparently upgrading your office and buying equipment. It’ll be interesting when it comes out.
Gloomwood is wonderful. You know a game has fantastic atmosphere when you’re on the edge of your seat playing it in broad daylight. Gloomwood is one of those games that serves as a handy reminder that you don’t need photorealistic graphics in order to produce a gripping video game.
With an old Quake aesthetic, Gloomwood is a first person survival game set in a Victorian world with plague doctors, cane swords, mutants, and more. It’s a dismally gloomy world that you can almost smell through the screen and you’re going to be spending a lot of time creeping through the shadows and trying to avoid direct confrontation. Overhead on all of this is one of the most chilling soundtracks I have heard in recent games.
Which isn’t to say that your character is defenseless. In addition to your cane sword which can attack and parry you get access to an array of weapons. It’s definitely one of those games where you’ll want to save up your ammo for the big bads because you won’t find much of it.
This one I can very much recommend because I have already played and beaten it. Superliminal is currently available on the Epic Game Store and was on sale not too long ago for $10. It is a puzzle game that plays with forced perspective to metaphorically put your mind into one of those taffy pullers and just play with it.
The big draw to Superliminal is that you can pick up objects and they grow/shrink with your perspective. It’s a really cool trick that never gets old. There is a plot to the game about dreams but I’ll let you figure out how it ends up.
Garden Story is a game that I have already played the demo to, once from a prior game festival and once for the Game Devs of Color Expo. It’s a Zelda-esque game where you play as a grape named Concord who has to travel to fight the rot that is threatening his village made up of sentient produce and animals. It’s freaking adorable.
There are a bunch of fantastical characters in this game and it’s going to be a long wait before this comes out in 2021.
MMO Fallout 