Next Fest - Nighthawks At The Demo

I sorted my Steam Wishlist by "Date Added" this morning and Nighthawks came out as the oldest game on there. I added it almost six years ago, on January 15, 2021. If there were any games on the list before that, I must either have bought them or removed them but I guess it's entirely possible I started using the Wishlist just to keep tabs on Nighthawks, which is the game I've most wanted to play ever since I first heard about it.

In fact, I just checked and there's a post from November 2020, actually called "Wishlist", in which I talked about games on my wishlist that had recently gone on sale. None of which I ever bought and none of which are on there now, either. At some point, my wishlist became dominated by games whose demos I played and liked during Next Fest. I do sometimes add other things but not very often. 

Nighthawks, though, was one of those exceptions, not that it's done me much good up to now. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first opportunity anyone's had to give the game a try in the seven years since the Kickstarter campaign offered a "proof of concept" demo back in 2018.

I had actually forgotten the game was ever on Kickstarter. It's being developed by point and click adventure specialists Wadjet Eye Games in collaboration with Richard Corbett, one of the people behind Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies. With a pedigree like that, it hadn't occured to me crowdfunding, would be needed but lots of things that don't seem to make sense happen on Kickstarter.

The campaign did fund successfully but only barely, limping across the $125k threshold with a final total of just over $136k. I'm never really sure what low numbers like this mean for a game in development. Clearly that sort of money's not going to have kept the lights on for the last seven years and if it was to raise the game's profile, seven years with not a word about how things are going doesn't seem like the best way to build on the publicity of a successful Kickstarter.

Then again, it wasn't supposed to take seven years. The estimated delivery time was May 2020, less than six months after I added it to my wishlist. Five years later, this demo is pretty much the first I've heard of it. So, was it worth the wait?

Oh boy, yes! It's exactly what I was hoping for, a beautifully designed, elegant, classy package that's great to look at, listen to, read and play. I found the demo highly immersive and thoroughly engaging. If it wasn't already on my wishlist then it certainly would be now.

Stylistically, it's gorgeous. Beautifully designed without being over-elaborate. And every screen is a painting. I don't think it's a co-incidence that the name of the game immediately brings to mind that famous work by Edward Hopper, either. It's as though they've taken those "concept art" illustrations so many games use to get people excited and then used them in the finished game, instead of replacing them with much less interesting graphics as is the usual way of such things.

This also seems like a moment to say something about AI. I've always expressed a qualified interest in the use of AI in the creative process. I'm not out there with my pitchfork and flaming torch, yelling about how it's a sign of the end times. I make AI images for my own amusement and find quite a lot of them aesthetically pleasing.

It's just a tool, though, and one with considerable limitations still. No AI-generated image is going to stand up to competition like this. These pictures have a warmth (Ironic, given the setting and subject matter.) and a humanity (Ditto.) that AI, at least so far, can't match. I very much doubt we'll be seeing AI-generated images in games that rely on illustrations for ambience or impact any time soon although I've played plenty of games where the human-created pictures were nothing to write home about, so there may be some bleed-through around the edges..

The writing is similarly characterful, oozing with personality and leaving no-one who's played any of the Fallen London series of games in much doubt over the provenance of this one. It's a pretty fair bet that anyone who's interested in Nighthawks will be more than happy to read the equivalent of a novel's worth of prose in order to play it but just in case anyone's in any doubt, that's exactly what's expected of you. 

Several novels, in fact. 800,000 words. That's half as long again as War and Peace, always cited as the benchmark for a very long novel. Of course, this being an RPG with multiple starting points and branching plot-lines, you're never going to have to read all those words in a single play-through.

As I began the demo, it felt for a while that it was going to be all reading, all the time. I'd been playing for a fair while before the first voice actor piped up. Once the dialog began, though, the game turned out to be fully-voiced. The voice acting is good, too. Not flashy or overdone and enjoyable enough that I wanted to hear it all, even though I'd sometimes read to the end of the conversation before the actor had reached the end of the first sentence.

The game is set in the one city where it's acceptable to be a vampire.Vampires have recently been revealed to the human population as facts not fantasies but that doesn't mean they've been accepted, let alone welcomed. Tolerated is the word and not even that by everyone.

Since this is an RPG, the demo begins with a series of questions you need to answer and choices you have to make to decide who you're going to play. I've always liked these systems, where you express a variety of preferences and dislikes and select some slivers of back-story for the game to weave into a personality you can build on. It takes all the effort out of coming up with a characterization.

The demo itself is probably quite replayable because of this. The end card suggests you might like to go round again with a different "Sire" to see what happens. I haven't done that yet but I very well might at some point. It'll be something to do while I wait for the full release, which is still "TBA".

Only having played the one character so far, I'm not sure if everyone starts at the bottom of the heap but I certainly did. No masked balls or opulent bedrooms dripping with velvet, brocade and crystal chandeliers for me.  

 

The demo begins in the filthy backstreets of Cradlebridge as you search for some traitor your sire has tasked you with finding. Your home, such as it is, is a flophouse room in the ironically-named Halcyon Hotel and your evening meal is the bitter blood of an old woman.

Well, mine was, although I immediately regretted it. Very early on, you get the choice to let the woman go or sink your fangs into her and since I was somewhat nervous about the low levels in my blood-meter, I opted for the latter. Her blood turned out to be barely worth drinking but the act of taking it from an unwilling victim locked me out of any chance of becoming one of those benign vampires who only drinks from consenting donors.

I guess that makes this one of those "Choices Matter" games although I can't say for sure that it would have mattered that I made that specific choice. I might have preferred a warning at this very early stage, all the same. But then, I did know I was doing a Bad Thing. I just chose to do it anyway. I shouldn't complain when the obvious consequences followed.

The gameplay is harder to describe than it could be. Nighthawks is consistently labelled "an RPG" and it has a lot of the tropes and mechanics of one but it also shows its Wadjet Eye detection/adventure heritage quite strongly. There's a good deal of opening drawers and looking under beds for evidence or clues in the demo as well as an even greater reliance on long conversations in which you tease information out of the various people you meet.

Mechanically, the game uses a system similar to the one I mentioned in a couple of other demos this time around, where instead of moving around a room and clicking on things to see what they do or examining them to find out what they are, you select much the same kinds of actions from a list. This seems to be the way some developers are handling things these days and I like it - up to a point.

I'm guessing that's the influence of  the Visual Novel genre, where there has to be something for you to click or you might as well be reading a book but there's not much leeway for independent thought or action. Not that there's much more of those in traditional adventure gaming. You do have a lot more freedom there to wander around, poking things, picking them up and putting them in your pockets but in the end there's generally only one solution to the puzzles and only a set number of ways you can combine the objects.

The downside of the "select an action from a menu" approach is that it feels more obviously linear. It's possible that, in the full game, selecting one option might close down others but in the demo I didn't notice that happening. I ended up clicking through everything in the end. On the positive side, though, it avoids all those super-annoying times where you just keep looking at the same things over and over, trying to figure out what the hell to do with them. Or, worse, where gameplay turns into a minute inspection of the screen, pixel by pixel, just in case you might have missed something.

On balance, I think I prefer to have all the options laid out in front of me, whether that's done, as in Nighthawks, with a menu or as in some games by having a key that makes all the interactable objects light up. In the end, I want to have fun and hear stories, not solve puzzles.

That said, it may well be that the finished game will offer a mix of mechanics. There is one screen in the demo that deviates from the pattern. When you walk into the bar at the nightclub, instead of a menu and dialog panel on the right, there's just a full screen picture with "Talk to Bartender" along the bottom. Maybe they haven't finalized everything just yet.

The eventual game is supposed to have some elements of management simulation, where you end up running the nightclub. There's no hint of that in the demo, where the club is very firmly in the hands of an undead mobster. How you would come to be the one in charge instead of him is not immediately obvious.

You do get to see something of the game's combat system, which is nominal at best. It's the purest of RPG combat, where the game decides everything on the basis of your stats and gives you the result without any active involvement required from you, the player. 

I made the mistake of taking on a couple of masked ant-vamp vigilantes even though the game warned me I was over-matched. There was a lot of grunting and thumping and blood-spatters all across the screen as they kicked my ass. Later, I sparred with a vampire enforcer in the boxing ring. That went a lot better although the visuals and sounds were identical.

I'm more than happy with that sort of combat in a game of this kind. It sure beats some irritating quick-time event involving a lot of meaningless button-mashing. You do have access to certain special abilities, called Gifts, too, so there may be some way to bring those into play during combat although I didn't come across anything like it in the demo. I did get to use my Beast Within gift once but that was during a conversation. (Well, if you call being shot at a conversation...)

The full game has upwards of eighty voiced characters, ten companions you can ask to join you and "Multiple adorable rats, some of which you can pet." In the demo I think I met maybe half a dozen NPCs, only one of whom I could have teamed up with, had I so chosen. (I did not.) Didn't see a single rat, adorable or otherwise. 

That took me about three-quarters of an hour. I would have carried on for longer but the demo has a timer in the form of a clock that ticks away in the background, warning you not to stay out too late in case the sun comes up and presumably turns you into a pile of ash. 

I'm speculating there - the exact mechanics of vampirism in the game aren't laid out in the demo. It may not be about extreme light-sensitivity at all. The game wanted me safely tucked in bed by midnight, which seems like an unnecessarily cautious margin for error.

I had a great time with the demo. The full game is clearly going to be epic. It's likely to be one of the few games on my wishlist I buy at full price as soon as it becomes available. Can't offer any better recommendation than that.

Next Fest: No Spoilers

Before I got started on my review of the Nighthawks demo this morning, I thought I'd better play the last remaining demo on my list, Æther&Iron. Next Fest ends today and sometimes demos become unavailable immediately after.

To that end, I fired up Steam, hit Play and the first thing that appeared was the screen you see above. I've played a lot of demos. I wouldn't swear I've never been confronted by an EULA in the opening moments but it's certainly not anything I'd expect. If you're hoping to persuade people to give your game a try, I'd have to say it's not a great way to open.

Over the last forty-five years or so I've been playing computer games (Does anyone call them that any more?), the last quarter of a century mostly online, I've signed hundreds of EULAs. I used to be in the habit of reading them all the way through, carefully, but as time went on I became more and more resigned to simply clicking the acknowledgement box and taking the contents as read.

I was encouraged to start doing that when I learned that, under UK law, at least, the Unfair Contract Terms Act of 1977 provided a fairly reliable safety-net against any unreasonable clauses in these kinds of agreements. I did a short course in law when I was studying for some insurance exams back in another lifetime and I had a passing familiarity with the way the law worked in that particular area from my studies. 

Then, in 2015, that act was largely replaced by the Consumer Rights Act, with which I am much less familiar. I'm a lot fuzzier on the whole thing now.

More importantly, perhaps, most EULAs these days make quite specific stipulations about the national, regional and local laws that apply and about which jurisdictions would be used in case of legal action, making it somewhat uncertain whether UK law would be the primary factor in any case. It would be comforting to be able to say no-one would ever be extradited over something they'd done in a video game but given some of the attempts that have been made in the past, I would hesitate to say it's never going to happen. 

Not being clinically paranoid, I don't really expect any such action to be taken because someone did something silly in a video game but there is a slightly more realistic possibility that some publisher or developer might take exception to something someone might say about their game in a post or to some image used to illustrate it. Games developers and designers have occasionally dropped by the comments section here to mention that they've read a review so it's always somewhere in the back of my mind that anything I write might be seen by the makers of the game I'm writing about.

More cogently, I'm also somewhat interested in what happens to what I post, after I've posted it. Having been so frequently critical of the entire copyright system as it's existed since the eighteenth century, I'm aware it's somewhat hypocritical of me to want to hang on to ownership of my own work but hypocrisy is a failing I'm wiling to acknowledge in certain circumstances. 

It's not so much that I care if people copy my work and re-distribute it, which has happened occasionally, albeit not to my knowledge recently. I'm not making any money from it and I very much doubt anyone else would be able to, either. My objection isn't to so much with re-use of my work, with or without credit, as it is to the dictatorial proposition sometimes found in EULAs that all my base are belong to them. 

I still rarely read EULAs all the way through these days but I do often scan them quickly to see if anything stands out as unusual. If I come across one of those clauses that effectively read "Everything you ever do, anywhere, that remotely involves our game in any way, isn't yours, never was yours and never will be yours, so don't come crying to us about it if we take it and use it, in or out of context, anywhere, ever, you whining little baby",  it's quite likely I'll decline to play that game at all, let alone write about it.

As I said at the top, though, it's hardly something I'd expect to have to think about when loading up a demo. Demos are commercials. Advertisements. Promos. They're supposed to lure you in, not put you off. They exist to generate publicity, don't they?

Consequently, I thought I'd better have a quick squint through this one, just in case. And what I found was very interesting. 

I haven't read every word but I have skim-read the whole thing and given the sections that particularly caught my attention a bit more attention than that. It's not draconian or over-bearing or objectionable in any way. It's quite a friendly, even jolly EULA, as they go. 

And I can see what they're doing, I think. Maybe all EULAs are like this now or will be soon. 

For a start, the document makes very clear indeed that you don't, won't and never will own the game you're about to play, regardless of whether you've paid money for it or on which platform you've chosen to access it. 

I do like that short, declarative opening sentence: "We own the game". No room for quibbling there. Later, there's another clause that says they may at any time stop supporting the game and that's an end to it. I imagine this is exactly the way the Stop Killing Games campaign was hoping developers would react. Nothing like a bit of clarity to calm things down.

There's a fair bit more about access and changes to the game and platforms and availability, all of which makes it very plain that you, the player, have some very limited rights only, to play whatever version of the game is made available to you, for as long as it's made available, where it's made available. And that's it.

Again, very reasonable. It just codifies in advance what has always been the reality of online gaming, that being that you have to have an up-to-date, patched version of the game to access the official servers on which the only legal version of the game will be running and that the service can be suspended or terminated at any time, with or without notice. Anyone playing any MMORPG will recognize that as their existing reality, I'm sure.

For a demo, though, it feels a tad over the top. A demo is generally a throwaway experience, isn't it? Is anyone really expecting to be able to keep playing a demo indefinitely?

I wouldn't have bothered much about any of that. Par for the course for games, if not for demos. I was more interested what I could or couldn't say about it. And there's a lot about that in the small print, some of it quite unexpected.

It tells you what you can and can't do if you stream the game (Demo, I should say.) on Twitch or upload videos of you playing it to YouTube. It tells you how you can monetize your content via Patreon and how you can't.

I found these sections surprisingly chatty for a legal document but the intention was obviously to be helpful and supportive. Developers want people to make content about their games (By which they mean videos and streams, mainly.) and these devs also understand that people make a living doing it so they're willing to meet content creators halfway over monetization.

There's also a lengthy section about making Mods that I won't address because I know bugger all about Mods, neither creating them or using them. I will say that I can't remember seeing that aspect of the ecosystem being addressed in such detail in an EULA before but that's likely to be because I would have skipped right past it as irrelevant.

So far, I hadn't seen anything that would prevent me from ticking the box and playing the demo. Or writing about it afterwards. And then I saw this:

"If your User Content contains "spoilers" of the story of our game, your content must contain an appropriate "spoiler warning" either at the beginning of your User Content (If your User Content contains spoilers throughout.) or at the beginning of a segment of your User Content (If the spoilers are contained within a segment of your User Content.)"

That, I'm afraid, is a condition up with which I am not prepared to put. Not for a demo, anyway. 

It's a demand for editorial control, isn't it? It's telling the reviewer on what terms they may review the product. The fact that the request is entirely reasonable, in the best interest of the reviewer's readers or viewers and no more than any well-mannered, properly socialized reviewer would do without any prompting from anyone, is entirely irrelevant, especially when the demand is allegedly enforceable by law.

Also, it's a demo FFS!

If I was reviewing the finished game, I would without question employ spoiler warnings before getting into any detailed discussion of the plot. Not to do so would be plain rude.

But for a demo? The whole point of a demo is to showcase the game, drum up interest in it, get people excited and in the case of Steam encourage them to add it to their Wishlist. The demo should be specifically designed so that spoilers aren't relevant. You want everyone to know what's in it or else what the hell is the point? If you can't manage that, then it's your problem, not the reviewer's.

There aren't any spoilers in this post because once I read that clause I decided I wouldn't bother playing the demo at all. It's a shame because it looks like something I'd enjoy but, hey, there are lots of games out there. It's not like I'm going to miss one. 

I might even still try it when it releases, supposedly next year. I won't get any reminders about it because I'm not going to wishlist it either but if it's a big hit no doubt I'll get to hear about it anyway. I'd have a lot fewer qualms about signing that EULA for a full game than for a demo although I still think the spoiler clause is unwarranted and presumptuous. 

The last thing I have to say about all of this is something that actually annoyed me more than anything I've mentioned so far. When you get to the end of the document there's a line thanking you for reading all the way through, which I couldn't help but read as ironic, although maybe it was meant to be taken straight, but there's no way to exit the EULA without agreeing to it.

Seriously? You're thanking me for reading it all but I'm not allowed to say "No" to what I've read? WTF!

There's no Decline option. Escape doesn't work, either. I had to close the demo from the taskbar to get back to Steam. That really pissed me off. I'm still cross about it now.

I did at least get a blog post out of the experience so there's that. The Nighthawks post will have to wait until Wednesday now. Or maybe Thursday. It's going to be another busy week and this hasn't put me in any better a mood for it.

Next Fest - What's A Little "C" Among Friends?

• Excuses for not writing the post I was planning to write #347: 

Six vans from the National Grid turned up outside our house this morning and a dozen workmen got out and started digging up the street so they could fix two faults in the electricity supply. Consequently, we had no power from eleven in the morning until four in the afternoon. And the dog ate my homework.

Before that happened, I had time to play the Next Fest demo I was most lookiing forward to, the one for Nighthawks, which I've had wish-listed for years. I was going to talk about that and also the other demo I've finished, A Tale of Dirty Whiskers, but Nighthawks, even the demo, deserves a lot more time than I have left to give it today, so this is just going to be a quick run through the cat game.

Attentive readers (There must be one or two.) will remember I said part of the reason I chose this demo was that it was voiced in Spanish and I thought it might give me a free language lesson. 

Guess what? It's not in Spanish. 

It's in Portuguese. I do know the difference, having been to both countries many times. I've always thought spoken Portuguese sounds very little like Spanish, unlike written Portuguese, which looks very much like Spanish indeed. I'm kinda surprised I mistook one for the other, even in the short clip I watched. I must be losing my ear after all this time not traveling.

It's a moot point anyway, because the game is voiced in neither. Well, it might be if you selected the "Portuguese" option at the start but since there's an "English" option and I have no interest in practicing my non-existent Portuguese, that's what I picked.

While I'm on the subject, I might as well deal with the translation up front. It's not great. It's not terrible but it's a long way from idiomatic and has some fairly unmistakeable errors. I was particularly confused by the way the player-character is consistently shown as "Detetive" in dialog scenes although when any of the other characters refer to him they use the word "Detective". 

I wondered for a while if Detetive was actually his name and it was some kind of post-modernist joke but I checked and "detetive" is indeed Portuguese for "detective", so I'm guessing it's just an error. Translation is clearly still a work in progress anyway. Whole passages of dialog are still in Portuguese in the supposedly English version.

It's all perfectly understandable (Well, the translated bits. The untranslated Portuguese maybe not so much...) so it didn't get in the way of the game for me. Not that there is much of a game in the demo. The Steam Store page doesn't really claim a genre for A Tale of Dirty Whiskers but I was expecting some kind of adventure-murder-mystery-detection-point-and-click affair. Instead, I think it might be more accurate to call it a Visual Novel because there's very little for the player to do except turn the virtual pages.

It opens with a seven minute sequence that requires no input from the player at all and the entire demo only took me tem more minutes to complete, during which I did very little more. Mostly what I did was watch a bunch of odd-looking but nicely-drawn cat-people insult me and make snarky remarks about each other. It was quite entertaining.

The plot involves a family of cats whose mother has just died in what may or may not be suspicious circumstances. One of the family has hired a detective to investigate. That's you. 

The cat that hired you didn't bother to tell their siblings you were coming, on the very valid grounds that if they had, most of them wouldn't have turned up for the big family get-together. Consequently, none of them is very favorably disposed to talk to you, although they certainly are happy enough to talk in front of you.

Listening to them doing that is most of the demo. The rest is a bit of prowling around after they've gone to bed, looking for clues in traditional adventure game style. Except you don't actually move around the house as such. You just stand there and click some menu options. By co-incidence, this also turns out to be how Nighthawks handles the same process, although that's a bit like saying a butcher's bike is the same as a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide.  

The cats themselves are all very distinctive individuals, fun to look at and listen to. They look nothing like each other, which is explained by the possibility that their mother may have had many lovers. I did think that went a little further toward the "cat" end of the spectrum than anthropomorphised cat-people games usually tavel.

One of the siblings is a loud-mouthed drunk, albeit good-natured with it. One is some sort of goth-punk-emo teenager or twentysomething. Another is a dandy and there's a tough-but-maternal-looking one. The worried-looking, apparently well-balanced cat is the one that hired you. Oh, amd there's a cute kitten, too. Well, the game tells you he's cute. I wasn't convinced.  

In the seventeen minutes the demo gave me to do it, I didn't form much more of an impression about any of them than that but according to the description on the store page all eight of them are "deep and flawed". (Not the kitten.) Also, I don't believe I met all eight, although I could be wrong.

The whole thing feels a little ramshackle but not in a bad way. I wouldn't buy it but if I got it as part of a Prime Gaming offer I'd claim it and I'd probably end up playing it and enjoying it. The illustrations are charming and, if you allow for the shaky translation, the writing isn't bad, either.

I haven't wish-listed it but that's not really a mark against it. If you like quirky cat games, it'd definitely be worth taking a look at the demo. It won't take up much of your time.

Next Fest: Dark Rites, Neon Lights

This one's going to be really easy. There are no surprises here. Dark Rites of Arkham is exactly what it says it's going to be.

The store page on Steam, somewhat surprisingly, doesn't offer a neat one-line description I can cut-and-paste here, opting instead for a full feature list, but I can tell you it's a retro-noir, pixel graphic point and click adventure set in 1930s Arkham, New York against a backdrop of Lovecraftian horror. The protagonist is a hard-boiled detective and the crime he's investigating is a ritual murder. With that, everyone knows where they are and what to expect and the demo carries through on every one of those expectations.

Honestly, I could pretty much stop there. If you've ever played one of these games, all you'll need to know is that this is another of them. I'll say up front that it's a good one, too. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you like. And if it isn't, it's not going to change your mind.

I suppose I should go into it all in a bit more detail, all the same. Wouldn't be much of a review otherwise. Or much of a blog post.

Let me begin with the graphics, then. They're excellent, as I think you'll be able to see from the screenshots. Over the last few years I have completely changed my opinion on retro pixel graphics. I used to dislike it but now I'm quite fond of it. I'm sure if you dig hard enough through my posts here, you'd be able to find more than one negative comment regarding the style but I think you'd have to go back quite a long way.  

Like a lot of things, I think it's an acquired taste. Most people who appreciate it now acquired their taste for it in their childhood. I didn't. There were no pixels when I was a child. 

By the time I saw graphics like these, I was already middle-aged. I didn't like them then and I don't much like those old, original versions now. That's why, for a while, I thought I didn't like the modern take on the style, either.

Retro pixel graphics, though, don't really look that much like the ones I remember from thirty years ago. They're much more nuanced and subtle and there always seems to be a wealth of detail I can't remember noticing when the originals were around. I suspect that has far more to do with the graphic capabilities of the machines I play them on now, and especially the monitors, than anything about the art itself. I would have been playing the old pixel adventure games on a 14" CRT display at 640x480. It's no wonder I could hardly tell what I was looking at, half the time.

So, DRoA looks good. That's a start. How does it read? After all, reading the words is every bit as important as looking at the pictures in a point and click adventure. 

It is all reading, too. There's no voice acting, just a rather pleasant period jazz soundtrack. The text, which displays quickly and legibly across the screen, reads very well. The writing is solid, which is just as well because the game opens with a fairly long dialog sequence, during which the detective (Jack Foster.) spars with the landlord of a tenement apartment house over access to a room a crime suspect is renting. 

This requires no input from the player whatsoever beyond pressing a key to keep the conversation moving. It could very easily have felt frustrating as an opening, were it not for the quality of that dialog, which zips along in a lively, pulp-noir style.

The writing may be retro but it's certainly not old-fashioned. No genuine thirties pulp would have dared to be as sweary as this. In that sense - and probably that sense alone - it feels extremely modern. I mean, it really is very sweary indeed. Not quite Roy Kent in Ted Lasso sweary but getting there.

The setting is unrelentingly grim, as you'd expect, but the tone is deftly humorous. Black humor, that is. There's no attempt at Chandleresque pastiche, thankfully. I've seen enough of that to last me more than a lifetime. Instead, the prose style remains grounded without ever feeling leaden. It keeps a nice balance between the unpleasantness of what's happening and the matter-of-fact reaction of the seasoned professionals who have to deal with it. Except for the rookie who throws up when he sees his first decapitated corpse, of course. That's a given.

What about the plot? Too early to say. The demo, which took me a shade under half an hour to finish, doesn't really get far enough into the story to give much away. In fact, I know little more, having played through it, than I could have figured out from the title. We're in Arkham and there's been a ritual murder. That's it. Still, enough for a demo.

Okay, then. The demo looks good, reads well, hits the right tone and introduces its theme and plot effectively. That just leaves the gameplay. How's that?

Again, solid. Maybe better than that makes it sound. It's not innovative, original or exceptional but it doesn't need to be.  It just needs to be effective and familiar for what the game is aiming to be. Who wants innovation or originality in a retro-noir point and click adventure, anyway? Not me and, I'd guess, very few of the players who are going to be interested enough in the game to download the demo, either.

In contrast to several of the demos I've reviewed so far, no-one at the deliciously-named studio behind the game, Postmodern Adventures, is attempting any wheel re-invention. The controls are just what you expect them to be and the UI is minimalistic in a very unflashy fashion. At no point did I have to delve into any settings to find out what something did or how to do anything I wanted to do. It all just worked as should.

With the controls safely under control and out of mind, I was able to address the puzzles with full concentration. There weren't many but I'm pleased to be able to say I figured all of them out on my own, without recourse to external guides or hints. One or two took me a moment but that was only because I hadn't passed the mouse pointer over the appropriate part of the screen yet.   

Better still, the solutions were all logical. Not reasonable - that would be asking too much of any adventure game - but at least they made sense.If you're a policeman with a gun, why wouldn't you shoot the lock off a door? In fact, the solutions were so logical, I think all of them were the first ideas I came up with, which really is unusual. 

Working through the various obstacles standing in the way of investigating the case was good fun and also satisfying. I figured out what to do each time well before frustration or boredom began to leech the fun out of it and you can't really ask for more from a point and click adventure.

The demo ends when you've discovered the body and used your notebook to recorded what little evidence there is. Then comes a slide show of images from later in the game, just to give you some idea what comes next. That was a  nice touch.

It's a good demo. It's an odds-on bet that if you enjoy it you'll enjoy the full game, so you might as well wish-list it. I have. 

Next Fest: Choices That Matter

I'm very glad I decided not to review Dissimilar along with those other three demos in the last post. At that point, I'd played for just under an hour. My played time on Steam now stands at 96 minutes but that extra half an hour or so has made a big difference to what I would have said about it. I already liked it but having seen more, I really like it!

Often I find demos that have been specifically created as demos give a better indication of what the full game will be like than than those that just give you the the opening chapter or two but this does appear to be the largely unedited opening of the game. If so, it works extremely well. 

The demo opens with a disturbing black and white sequence in which the main character, Amelia, is being interrogated by a bunch of shadowy figures, whose faces can't be seen. She's clearly under investigation for something she's done and they're looking for her to give a frank and full account of whatever it is that just happened.

From there, the game moves into flashback, narrated by Amelia, as she attempts to explain everything to their satisfaction. Her flashbacks are where the bulk of the game takes place. Intermittently as you play, the scene shifts back to the interrogation and Amelia has to justify her actions or elaborate on them to the satisfaction of her interrogators. That makes for an atmospheric and somewhat unsettling start but things are only going to get worse. 

Amelia recalls leaving her evening classes around eight in the evening on Friday 8 December, 2079, intending to go home to her very exclusive and expensive Paris apartment, which we later learn her mother bought seven years ago, when Amelia started secondary school. I'm not wholly up to speed with the French education system, even assuming it won't be very different half a century from now, but I would guess that puts her in her very late teens or even her early twenties.

Amelia calls a self-driving car, one of her mother's. Amelia's family, we will learn, is very rich. And very old. And very important. In the car, Amelia calls her boyfriend and they have a long conversation about role-playing games.

This seemed quite unlikely and it gave me some mild forebodings about how arch and fan-servicey the writing might get, all of which turned out to be completely unfounded. The game is excellently written, nuanced and layered, subtle and surprising. The translation is excellent, too. 

The whole Dungeons and Dragons motif turns out to be entirely relevant and not at all a fantasy about how you can have a hot, rich girlfriend who invites you to come to her place and spend the night because her parents are away, even though your main interest in life is sitting in front of a screen, designing dungeon levels. I mean, that's totally a thing that happens, right?

While she's speaking to her boyfriend, Amelia gets a call from her mother, who I thought seemed oddly insistent on apologizing for decisions she made years ago. It's very subtle but I think there's some kind of foreshadowing there. They have something of a rapprochement and Amelia gets so caught up in the conversation, she doesn't even notice the car has left Paris and is heading out into the night. 

When she does realize she's been kidnapped by a self-driving car, she panics a bit but before she can get too distraught she gets yet another call, this time from her good friend Iris, who tells her she's behind the unscheduled change of destination. She won't tell Amelia much else except that she doesn't need to freak out and that Iris needs her for some "special project". 

That's totally re-assuring, right? I mean, you'd be fine with being abducted on that premise, wouldn't you? Especially by someone who, as we learn is the case with Iris and Amelia, you've never actually met in in person, only online.

The car ends up at a castle deep in the countryside, which is where the game finally lets the player into the action. It didn't feel like too long to wait at all. I found the whole introduction compelling. 

Amelia is less worried about being dropped in a deserted castle in the middle of nowhere by a driver-less car that promptly leaves than you might expect and for good reason. It's her castle. 

Well, her family's. They own it and it's where she spent many a happy family holiday in her childhood. At this point she's suspecting her mother may have something to do with what's going on (You think?) but she's understandably still not at all happy about it.

From then on the player has full control over Amelia's movements and actions, at least when she's not in the interrogation room. The game uses a nice three-quarter angle I found very easy to get on with and although there's a warning that it was designed with a controller in mind, I found it very comfortable to play with the keyboard. The mouse isn't used at all.

Once in the castle, gameplay comes in two parts: exploration and turn-based combat. Only part of the building is available to explore in the demo but even that seems like a lot. There are a number of rooms you can go in right away and more that open after certain criteria are met. There's also a large outdoor area with formal gardens and a courtyard and a small observatory. And there's a dungeon, although in the demo it only seems to exist to give the androids a place to hang out and... drink?

To save a lot of exposition and explanation, what happens is that Amelia finds she's been brought to the castle to play a game. A kind of LARP with androids. She acquires a tablet device that allows her to print copies of soldiers to fight for her. The tablet also protects her from attacks. When it fails, the fight ends but Amelia cannot be harmed. Or so people kept telling her. I'm not sure she or I believed it.

All fights have to be initiated by Amelia. She's never attacked. They're all set-piece battles, clearly framed as some kind of test within the framework of the game. Both the game Amelia is playing and the actual video game. It's clever.

Initially, fights are mostly trial and error. There's little information about the opponents or their abilities  but as soon as you defeat one you learn its strategies, which you can apply to other, similar enemies. Or you could work it out from observation. In these early stages, at least, it's usually something simple like "Always attacks the person farthest away". I imagine things get more complicated later on.

The game isn't a roguelike per se but you can re-fight each battle as often as you want and you learn from each loss, so in a way it's similar. I found the fights very much scratched my itch for thoughtful, tactical, turn-based combat. They were fun. I didn't mind repeating them.

Then again, there weren't enough of them for it to become tedious. I only saw three but there was at least one more I saw the set-up for but didn't do. Although the thrust of the "game" Amelia is playing involves those fights, the game I was playing had far more to do with Amelia' trying to work out what the hell was going on. And it's a fascinating scenario.

The "soldiers" are AI-controlled robots. Or they might be. Amelia is familiar with AI and works with it in her studies. Also, her mother is deeply involved it commercially and professionally. But these are far more sophisticated units than she's used to seeing. They're so convincing, she wonders if they might be being remotely controlled by humans but the AIs say not and eventually she believes them. 

They are also humanoid, which apparently is absolutely illegal in 2079. Amelia suspects they may be some outlaw work of her mother's. It  certainly explains why she's being interrogated.

Dissimilar is one of those games that doesn't give you much in the way of exposition, relying instead on supposition and internal narrative. Everything you learn comes from Amelia's interior monologue and the increasingly probing questions she asks the AIs, none of which is able to answer her directly on anything but the game she's supposed to be playing but some of whom reveal more than they mean to anyway.

I loved all of that. It's exactly my kind of story-telling. Abstruse, veiled and elliptical. I found the world-building fascinating and the plot intriguing, too. Couple all of that to some gorgeous graphics and entertaining gameplay and you have a game that's going straight onto my wish-list.

The best part wasn't any of that, though. It was the way it ended.

There is a "normal" end to the demo, where you meet some hidden criterion and the game gives you a score, tells you you're done and invites you to carry on anyway to see anything you might have missed. I got that one. Then I carried on.

Much better was learning I could can win the game by not playing at all. Well, not "win" so much as "finish". But it felt like a win all the same.

When I play pre-defined characters in narrative-driven games, I often find myself wishing the character I'm playing would just say no sometimes. So many of the situations they allow themselves to be put in seem like nothing I would ever want to do and I wish they'd just not allow it, either.. 

It's very rare for a game to let the player enact such a refusal, for the obvious reason that to do so would completely negate the point of playing the game in the first place. It isn't unheard of, all the same. I have seen it done a couple of times. I always take the option if it's offered but it inevitably just leads to a snide "Game Over" card and either a re-start or me giving up on the game altogether (Which I have also done because, like Amelia, I can be stubborn.)

In the Dissimilar demo, and presumably in the full game, Amelia gets into a full-blown discussion with one of the AIs about what the hell is going on and why she has to put up with any of it. I was cheering her on all the way when she pushed the AI into admitting that, if she wanted to, she could just leave the castle and that would count as having completed her "quest". 

I didn't think it would come up as an option for me to take on her behalf but it did. I was exploring the grounds of the castle when I came to the main gates and saw they were clickable. I clicked them and got the option either to stay or leave. 

Obviously, I chose to leave. I was very curious to find out what would happen. 

It wasn't what the AI Barkeep had promised. He told Amelia that if she left, not only would her quest be complete but he'd answer all her questions, always assuming he knew the answers. I was hoping she'd be able to go back in and hold him to it.  

She couldn't. Instead, Amelia found herself back in the interrogation room, where a somewhat disgruntled interrogator questioned her on what happened after she went through the gates. She described how she'd been manhandled by the waiting police and bundled away, which neatly explains why she wasn't able to go back inside for the answers to her many questions. 

She went on to wonder whether she had indeed left too soon and if she wouldn't have been better off carrying on with the game. The interrogators harumphed a bit, clearly wishing she had done exactly that, then told her they were done with her. 

What happened to her after that was not revealed. Instead, the game ended with one of those Game Over cards I mentioned, only this time it felt completely satisfying, not least because it came with a note saying the game had thoughtfully saved itself when I made my decision to leave the castle, so if I wanted, I could go back and see how things would have turned out if I hadn't.

I thought that was the perfect way for Amelia to have her cake and for me to eat it. I felt she'd absolutely exerted her right to self-determination and behaved in a fully rational and intelligent manner as befitting a highly intelligent, independent young woman, while I'd made a clean and clear choice to express my own independence of thought, refusing to allow the game to control me rather than the other way around. 

That I hadn't saved the game before doing it meant it was a final, irrevocable move, untainted by indecision or wavering, and yet I felt the developers had slipped a safety-net under me without my even noticing, so I wouldn't later be able to regret my stubbornness and curse them for allowing me to indulge it.

All things considered, an exemplary piece of game design. And, of course, one that can only work occasionally. If every game did it then we'd know it was coming and it would be the same as saving before any potentially awkward choice, something I do my best to avoid. Not that my best is very good...

Dissimilar is due to release on 9 December. I very much doubt I'll buy it then because I hardly ever buy anything on my wish-list the moment it becomes available. 

I'm pretty sure I'll buy it one day, though. I was really impressed by this demo, just in case you couldn't tell. 

Next Fest - Halfway Up The Stairs

To my considerable surprise, I've already played four of the eight demos I downloaded for Next Fest. Things went much faster than I was expecting, although not for the reason I might have wished. I didn't really get into it and spend a lot longer playing than I thought I would. Just the opposite, in fact, as we're about to find out.

Here are the four demos I've played so far, in descending order by how long Steam tells me I spent playing each of them:

Dissimilar - 59 minutes 

Nova Antarctica - 31 minutes

Atomic Age - 23 minutes

Magic World - 5 minutes

Let me break those timings down a little. 

I haven't finished playing the Dissimilar demo. I stopped at a convenient point because it was getting late. I was having a pretty good time with it and the only reason I haven't gone back to finish it is because I thought I ought to get some of the others out of the way first. 

Conversely, I've played the whole of the Nova Antarctica demo twice. It has a fifteen-minute lockout.

The Atomic Age demo might last any amount of time. I wouldn't know. I got stuck in the very first location and decided enough was enough.

And the Magic World demo turned out not to be a demo of the game at all.

Now the reviews. I'll take them in reverse order, saving the best for last. 

Magic World   

This is a demo for a game that supposed to be an open world MMORPG. Maybe it will be, one day. I wouldn't put my money on it. Certainly no-one, not even the developers, are claiming its an MMORPG yet.

The first thing you see when you hit Play is this warning:

At best, it's a tech demo, although even that's pushing it. It's a very basic draft of the proposed magic system as it relates to combat. There's a short tutorial, using placeholder graphics, in which you move through a series of featureless corridors and open spaces, following instructions on how to move your mouse and press keys to fire spells at an opponent or protect yourself from attacks. There are also options to duel other players and fight NPC opponents, neither of which I felt the slightest inclination to do.

Steam tells me it took five minutes to get to the end of the tutorial but it felt a lot longer than that. I never expected to enjoy the gimmick of moving my mouse while pressing a key in order to cast a spell but this was even less fun than I thought it would be. No fun at all, in fact.

I can easily imagine a VR game, where you have to wave a wand around to cast spells, being both exciting and immersive but this is neither. The idea of simulating somatic gestures by moving your mouse left and right or up and down seems doomed to failure form the start. Who would find that more enjoyable than any of many variations on action combat we have already?

 

Not me, that's for sure. As for the demo not including anything that makes the game an MMORPG, I think it's perfectly reasonable for the devs to put up a tech demo and ask for feedback. I just don't want to be the one playing it. Looking at the game's store page, it does explain that's what it is (Kind of...). I didn't see that when I chose it and if I had I would never have downloaded it. I don't think it was made clear in the Next Fest entry but I might just have missed it.

Also, to answer a question that came up in the comments last time, the store page clarifies that the images they're currently using to promote it are indeed generated by AI but they promise no AI content will be used in the game itself. Judging by what's available so far, I would imagine by the time the actual game arrives, AI will be so embedded in game development generally, no-one will care any more.

Atomic Age

This one looked every bit as good as I hoped it would. Well, it did in the one location I ever got to see... 

It begins with the main character addressing the player directly, telling you who he is and what he does as he sets up the premise for the game. The dialog is solid enough and the voice actor does a good job putting it across. I was feeling like this might go well.

Then there came a couple of opportunities for me, the player, to ask questions in the traditional "Pick one response from three" mode and those started to give me some concerns. All three options felt a little off, somehow. They didn't feel like they'd been written by the same person who'd done the dialog. They had a different tone altogether, one I didn't much take to.

That discomfiting dissonance continued once the introduction ended and the game itself began. There was some conversation between the character I was playing and the mustachioed gentleman I'd come to see for an interview. None of it felt quite right. Then the gent and his female companion left, locking the door behind them and leaving me trapped in the room

Side-stepping the issue of how wildly unrealistic this is (Have you ever been for an interview that ended with the interviewer, accidentally-or-otherwise, locking you in the interview room?) the real problem was that I couldn't get out. I'm used to adventure game logic, where I end up trying every interactable object with every other interactable object until some entirely ridiculous combination does the trick although usually I don't have the patience for trial and error and just look it up.

This time, there were few enough objects that it seemed quite feasible to try every combination. The problem was none of them worked.

I opened the cupboard and took the rope. I found the Personal Assistant robot in the bin full of spare parts. I found the Operating Manual on the shelf. I attached the rope to the fruit machine that dispenses batteries as prizes. (Best not ask too many questions about that.) I got a battery, which I put into the PA to get it working.

 

And then I was stumped. Those were all the usable items I could find apart from a gramophone and the door. Using the gramophone caused a drawer at the bottom to open and close and that was all. No item would interact with it, open or closed. Nothing would interact with the door. None of the items worked on or with each other.

I googled for a walkthrough but it seems no-one has bothered to write one. Or even complain about being stuck. At which point, I decided I had better things to do with my time and called it a day.

Apart from the unplayabilty of it all, I found the controls annoying. In most point&click adventures, you Examine with RMB and Use with LMB. This one does the opposite. Either I or B usually opens your inventory. Here, neither does. I could only open it by clicking on the icon at the bottom left of the screen and once the inventory was open it obscured most of the middle of the picture, making it very awkward to hand anything to anyone or use an object in the backpack on anything in the room.

None of these idiosyncrasies presented an insurmountable problem but all put together they added up to a constant background of mild irritation. Compounded with the major frustration of being stuck in the first room, it was more than enough to make me want to quit, which I did.

I wouldn't write the game off for that, though. A walkthrough or even an in-game hint would have gotten me over the hump and the odd UI choices are something I'd have become used to as I went along. The visuals are very appealing and the voice acting was more than decent. I'll give it another go if I find out how to get past the opening screen. 

Nova Antarctica

This demo felt much more polished, finished and complete than the other two. It ran flawlessly and everything was clearly explained. The game plays well and looks great. 

I didn't enjoy it all that much, for two main reasons:

1. It's a true survival game
2. It's on a timer.

Yes, I knew it was a survival game, going in. Yes, I have played quite a few survival games and enjoyed them. Even so, I wasn't ready for such a harsh, unforgiving experience.

At the start of the demo you arrive in the Antarctic by boat. According to the game's description, you're a child although, since the character is dressed in an all-over environment suit, complete with helmet, that looks exactly like a space-suit, you could be a gnome or a dwarf or anything less than four foot tall, it's impossible to tell.

The suit has a backpack life-support system powered by batteries. If the temperature drops below zero it uses power. (It's the Antarctic. It's always below zero.) If there's a blizzard, power use increases enormously (It's the Antarctic. There are always blizzards.) 

 

You follow some glowing footprints. You pick up everything you find - wood, rocks, meal packs, plant life - as you pass by the remnants of previous expeditions, including the corpses. You can even activate holograms that give you some idea what happened to them.

At various points the game instructs you on how to craft useful items from the detritus you've found. A crate, so you can clamber over obstacles. A new battery to replace the one that's just about to run out. A pick to mine ore. You find a penguin you can pick up and carry to give you additional body heat.

All of which is quite good fun. Until you die. Which you will.

On my first run, I failed to replace my battery fast enough. I froze to death in a blizzard. I had learned quite a bit, though, and I was sure I could do better.

I was right. I did much better. I got a lot further, saw a lot more, managed to replace the battery several times. I was just at the point when the game was telling me I ought to be making some kind of shelter when I died. My battery hadn't run out this time (Although it was damn close.) The timer had.

 

You get fifteen minutes. Andy Warhol would love it. (Actually, he'd hate it but anyone over about fifty is culturally obliged to name-check the great man whenever the words "fifteen minutes" are mentioned, regardless of context.)

Fifteen minutes is not long enough for a demo in my opinion. I'd say you need twice that long to get the feel of most games and probably longer for anything in the survival genre. I'm sure, having played survival games before, that gameplay gets easier the longer you last, or at least the survival aspects will fade into the background. All this does is highlight the extreme difficulty of getting started in a game like this, which is the part most people would probably prefer to forget.

Also, similarly to Atomic Age, the controls were non-standard. Again, not a major problem. I was already adapting to them even in the short time I played. I do often wish there was an industry standard for these things that developers would adhere to, though.  

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Nova Antarctica turns out to be a good game. I just don't think you can tell all that much about it from the demo. I wouldn't say it was a particularly good demo although it's not bad in any obvious way. Just not good.

And at this point I ought to move on to Dissimilar, only I think I'll save that for a separate post. This one's long enough and it would be unfair to hide the demo of the four I most enjoyed all the way down here. I might write it up later today or if not then tomorrow.

As for wish-listing, none of the three I've talked about made it onto the list. Atomic Age might, one day, if I ever get to see the rest of the demo. Nova Antarctica just isn't for me. As for Magic World, I'll be surprised if it troubles any of us again.

My Next Fest Hot Picks

 

Those are my picks from this Autumn's Next Fest. All eight of them, which is probably at least two too many for me to get through before the event ends. Possibly more.

A week really isn't long enough for this, is it? I guess the idea is that you approach it the way Krikket does and only play each demo for long enough to decide if you want to wishlist it or not. That is the purpose of the whole affair, after all.

I can't help treating them all as small, self-contained games. Unless I actively dislike them, I'm going to do my best to play each demo through to the end. The lengths vary a lot but I'd guess most take 45-60 minutes to complete, with a few outliers being either much shorter or completely open-ended, with no obvious end-point.

That makes it unrealistic for me to try and fit more than a half-dozen or so into my weekly gaming schedule, unless I'm prepared to drop something in their favor. Some quarters, it's not much of a problem. There have been Next Fests where I've struggled to come up with six demos I'm interested in playing.

Mostly, though, I have to turn down a few that look quite interesting and it has to be remembered that the total number of available demos in every event is well into four figures. Even allowing for the fact that most of them are in genres I have absolutely no interest in playing, the handful I pick can barely be representative of anything.

Except it kind of is, anyway, because I always gravitate towards a couple of categories that never seem to have a huge number of demos available: MMORPGs and traditional point&click adventures. Sometimes I can hardly find any of either. Eight would often be a quorum.

Not this time! There were more of both than I could cope with and several look really promising. Games that looked like I'd enjoy them were positively jumping out at me. I made my selections in a matter of minutes. It helped that the whole thing seemed to be laid out and presented more coherently than usual, although that might just have been because several of the demos that caught my eye were in the "Recommended For You" section. That hardly ever happens. Maybe the algorithm has improved.

The eight I went for are:

Nighthawks

First in this list, first in every way. I've had this on my wishlist since January 2021 (!) and I'd honestly given up hope of ever seeing it. And now here it is. Or a demo, anyway. It's a Wadjet Eye title and almost certainly their most ambitious to date. The pitch is "...a deliciously twisted new take on vampire role-playing games as you take over a failing nightclub on the wrong side of the tracks, and turn it into your personal empire through seduction, intimidation, and careful use of secret supernatural Gifts" Might be a little too much on the management-sim side of things for me but I have very high hopes.

Nova Antarctica

A survival game set in Antarctica in the year 2900, where you play a child who's been sent alone to the South Pole to investigate a mysterious signal. Why a child? I have no idea. Maybe because despite the bleak setting, the game looks extremely cute and gameplay involves "the mysterious animals of Antarctica." One of the screenshots shows the child-protagonist wearing a space-suit and riding a wolf. Sold!

Atomic Age

 

One of several extremely good-looking demos in my pick. The visuals did contribute a lot to my choices as they always do but there's no point trying to play a great-looking game in a genre for which you have no affinity, so even the greatest pictures have to take second place to the gameplay. This one's "A futuristic, humorous, slapstick based point & click adventure in the shape of the 50th and 60th years." All of that sounds right up my street except maybe the slapstick. I do really like the phrasing on "50th and 60th years", which I think means the 1950s and '60s. It does describe itself as "retro and nostalgic" (For the characters, that is, not the player, which is a clever conceit, if hard to parse.) I have a feeling this one could be quite odd. I hope so.

Dark Rites of Arkham

Pretty much says it all in the title, doesn't it? And yes, it's exactly what you'd expect: a pixel art point&click (They cutely call it a "pulp&click".) in which "A macabre ritual murder puts Arkham PD detectives Jack Foster and Harvey Whitman to the test. As the investigation progresses, they will unveil a disturbing connection between the Salem witch trials of the 17th century and the end of humankind." I'm not a huge fan of Lovecraftiana but it's a safe and trusted setting for this sort of thing and I'm happy to give it a whirl.

Magic World

An MMORPG. Confusingly, not the first to call itself "Magic World", either. There were several MMOs in this Next Fest but this is the only one I went for and I'm not confident about it at all but the rest looked even less likely to be fun and I felt I really ought to try at least one of them. This one has a fairly traditional setting: "Expansive Open World – Explore mysterious lands, ancient ruins, hidden treasures, and battle dangerous creatures." Unfortunately, the devs also appear to want to re-invent the wheel by replacing all the tried and tested methods of combat with one that has you "drawing magical symbols with your mouse and combining them with key presses to unleash devastating abilities." I have seen this tried before and it was not a success. Also, I don't have room on my desk for drawing symbols with the mouse...

Dissimilar

I have a lot more faith in this one. It's "A unique blend of mystery, turn-based combat, and exploration" with gorgeous, hand-drawn art. I'm always looking for games with the kind of turn-based combat I so much enjoyed in the Dungeon of Naheulbeuk but they're very hard to find. This isn't exactly the same but it looks like it might have a similar feel. And even if it doesn't, the detection and exploration looks like it'll be fun.

A Tale Of Dirty Whiskers

 

There are always loads of demos featuring cats in every Next Fest, aren't there? Anyone would think there was some connection between owning a cat and playing video games. Hard to imagine. It was the feline factor that drew this to my attention but the main reason I picked it was that the demo seems to be in Spanish. Not the text, which is definitely English, but the voice acting. I don't speak Spanish but I know enough to pick out a few words and I was wondering if playing a whole game where the translation of what I'm hearing is right there in front of me might work like some half-assed kind of language course. And it's another point&click murder mystery, so there's that...

Aether and Iron

Not exactly leaving the best to last but quite possibly the best-looking. Gameplay-wise, it's a "decopunk Narrative RPG set in an alternate 1930s" with turn-based combat between flying cars, which sounds amazing and looking at the raves from the likes of PCGamer (“This tactics RPG set on a floating New York City could be the next great noir videogame.”) I guess it might turn out to be the best after all. Here are a couple more tantalizing comparisons:

“Aether and Iron Is Like Disco Elysium, Citizen Sleeper, and BioShock All at Once” - GameRant

“Aether and Iron has lashings of Bioshock and Baldur’s Gate 3...” - PCGamesN 

That's some heavy praise. It better be good after all that! 

I'd better stop typing and get on with playing or I'll never get through them all before the event ends. I'll be back with my judgments later - always assuming I can find time to write them up.