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.

Anyone Available To Get Some Kid's Cat Out Of A Tree?

At the risk of initiating a vortex of anticlimactic disappointment, I'm going to begin with the best and work back. Seems like a bad idea until you consider the very real possibility that events, circumstances or just good old ennui could see leaving the best 'til last turn into leaving the best 'til never. 

Dispatch was, by a number of country miles, the best of the six demos I downloaded and played for this June's Next Fest but it would have been one of the best in any batch. As a demo it could hardly have done a better job of giving a glimpse the game good enough to make me think it was something I needed to see in full. 

Structurally, the demo seems to be an early, although possibly not the opening, sequence taken from the finished game, the kind of slice a lot of developers lift out to put in the shop window, with varying degrees of success. It works exceptionally well here for the simple reason that it's a very solid and entertaining introduction that slips its tutorial functions in almost unnoticed. Demos that are basically just the tutorial rarely convince.

The whole thing only takes about twenty minutes but it packs an enormous amount in without ever feeling overwhelming. The first half is a visual novel with the looks of a quality animated movie or TV show and the script and voice acting to match. The characters are immediately relatable and recognizable, the dialog is witty, the jokes land and the whole thing just rips along.

There's a fair amount of player-interaction in the form of dialog choices, all of which come with a timer. You have to pick one of three responses and, depending on your reading speed, you only have just about enough time to read them all and consider the implications for a moment before you need to pick one. This sounds as if it might be stressful but I didn't find it so in the least. I generally dislike timers but in this case it added a sense of welcome urgency to what can sometimes feel like a fairly rote and purposeless process.

It did raise two issues, however, both of which occurred to me almost as soon as the mechanic appeared: do the choices affect later gameplay and what happens if you don't pick one in time? 

As to the first, according to the description on the Steam Store page "In Dispatch, every decision you make influences the unfolding narrative. From banter in the breakroom to life-or-death situations in the field, your choices affect your relationships with the heroes, their allegiances, and the path your own story takes." That's quite fluffy, I'd say. You could easily have all of that inside a purely linear narrative. There's certainly no way to know for sure from the demo how much, if at all, any of your "choices matter", to use the infuriating jargon of the genre.

The second, though, what happens if you dither so long you time out on the response, I really should have tested it while I was playing. It's a big mark in the demo's favor that it never even occurred to me to do it until after I'd finished. I was much too invested in the story to start messing around with the controls for science.

Luckily, the demo still works even though Next Fest has ended, so I just re-ran the first few minutes to try it out. All that happens is the choice defaults to whatever's first in the list. You could just sit back and watch it all play out in front of you like a movie if you wanted.

At least, you could until you got to the second half, which is when the game comes in. Unlike a lot of visual novels or walking simulators, there really is a game here, one that requires you pay attention and click buttons at the right time.

The set-up for Dispatch is that you play an ex-superhero, one who used to have a mechanized suit that gave him powers but doesn't any more, although how he came to lose it is not disclosed in the demo. You're now reduced to taking a job at what is effectively a superhero call center. Your new job (The demo shows you arriving on your first day.) is to sit in an open-plan office in front of a screen and field calls from the public asking for super-heroic assistance. 

The jobs vary wildly, from PAs for businesses to pet rescue to armed robbery. You assign available heroes from your roster and send them to do the job. All your team have different powers, skill sets, aptitudes and red flags so fitting the right hero to the right job is crucial. So is managing them as they do it. 

Sometimes you can leave them to get on with things on their own but on some jobs you need to be available to take their calls and provide specific advice in real time on tactics such as whether they should go for a full frontal assault or sneak round the back. When they've succeeded (Or in my experience made a complete hash of things.) its down to you to review their performance.

And that's it, in the demo anyway. It's a lot harder than it sounds because the calls just keep on coming and pretty quickly it all starts to fall apart. Every job has criteria that ought to be met but good luck with that! It goes from a thoughtful selection process to a juggling act to a series of compromises and finally just comes down to sending whoever the hell is available.

Or it did for me. I imagine the idea of the full game is that you get better at doing your job as you gain experience but by the end I was just glad to be able to send anyone to stop the bar fights or get the little girl's cat down from a tree.  

It was almost always obvious which hero would be best-suited to a job but I'd usually find I'd already sent them out on the previous call and they were still on it. Or they'd messed up and were recovering, because they may be superheroes but they still need time to decompress after every mission. And then sometimes they'd just go off somewhere without telling me where or why...

It's the kind of gameplay I generally dislike but I thoroughly enjoyed it here, for a couple of reasons. Firstly it was funny. The heroes are, frankly, not the cream. They all have issues. Some of them have more than others but there's not one that you'd really trust to go where they're told and do what they're asked without close supervision. They all chatter on comms all the time and none of them is at all impressed with you, your history or your performance.

The humor made it feel like fun but the main reason I didn't find it stressful in the way I would have expected was I couldn't see how my performance mattered. There didn't seem to be any penalty for screwing up that I could see so after a while I just leaned into it and stopped worrying that I was sending the ex-thief who can turn herself invisible to go deal with the robbery at the jewellery store. I can only assume that how well you perform in your role as a dispatcher does matter in the full game but it doesn't seem to mean much in the demo.

The doing-your-job segment lasts most of the second half. Then there's a brief return to the visual novel before a final montage sequence kicks in as a kind of coda. It's full of what I assume must be scenes from the full game and it makes it plain there's some sort of over-arching plot and narrative and that the visual novel aspect isn't merely a framing device for a superhero-skinned office sim. 

And the clips in the montage are really good. They're like scenes from a movie and it's a movie I'd like to see. I went straight to Steam after the demo ended and wishlisted Dispatch immediately.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that the demo is professional and the game looks to be the same. The people behind it include writers and directors of Tales from the Borderlands and The Wolf Among Us among others. They know how to do this sort of thing. 

If the writing is good, the graphics are easily its equal. The character design is excellent and the aesthetic is exactly right, all clean lines and flat surfaces like a good superhero show ought to have. The UI is uncluttered and intuitive and there's a wealth of lore and background material, all presented in a very approachable and attractive style.

Altogether a first-class demo for what looks like it could be a first-class game. Especially if you're a superhero fan. 

Or a fan of low-status, poorly-paid office work, I guess. I bet someone is. 

Nuts To This!

A couple of days ago, I mentioned I was downloading the demo for an open-world survival game called Squirreled Away. I said I might write a post about it, after I'd played it. Well, now I have and now I am.

Not that I have an awful lot to say about the demo or the game. It's pretty much what I expected from a light-hearted survival title, where you play as a squirrel. All the usual survival mechanics are in place and they feel there or thereabouts as compulsive as they always do. 

The reverse is also true. I very much doubt, if you've found it easy to resist the attractions of the genre until now, this is going to be the game that changes your mind. I wouldn't say the demo feels by the numbers but equally it's not out to shake up anyone's expectations. It's a good introduction to a game that looks like it was primarily designed to give the punters what they want.

I certainly enjoyed my seventy-six minutes, split across two sessions. If I was looking for a new survival game I might well have followed through and bought it, not least because it looks to be good value. The full game is only $14.99 (£12.99 for me.), which sounds like a very fair price. As it is, I'm not in the market for a new survival game just now and if I was I'd be more likely go for Dragonwilds even at twice the price but as a demo, this one does the job.

And the demo, which obviously is free, makes for a fun little diversion in its own right. If you wanted to get into the building elements, you might squeeze a few hours out of it. 

Mostly, though, it's the tutorial island, where you learn the basics by way of half a dozen quests, given to you by your fellow squirrels, all of whom have weirdly human names. They also all have problems only you, a complete stranger, can solve. Isn't that always the way?

The best thing about the game from my perspective was the movement, which felt fluid, intuitive and entertaining in and of itself. Your squirrel (Now I come to think about it, I'm not sure he/she/they even has a name...) bounds around in convincingly squirrely fashion, running up trees as though gravity doesn't exist. 

Actually, gravity barely does exist. There's no falling damage and you can't fall off a tree unless you press Ctrl first.

You can also swim, although it requires endurance that runs out very quickly, preventing you from swimming across the lake from the all-animal island to the enticing shoreline opposite, where the humans live. You can't even swim to the next island but fortunately there's a friendly turtle with nothing better to do than ferry curious squirrels from one island to the other and back again.

At least, he's willing once you've proved your community credentials by helping all those aforementioned squirrels with their fallen-down houses and such. "No freeloaders", that's Terry the Turtle's motto. (It's not, by the way.I just made it up. He's much friendlier than that.)

One of the squirrels, Maya, teaches you how to meditate. It would have to be Maya, wouldn't it? Not Claire, Mike or Sam. Meditation is how you learn crafting recipes, which might seem odd but you can't really argue with it. How do you imagine a squirrel would learn to make an axe out of a stick, a pebble and some resin they found up a tree? Meditation seems like as good an explanation as any.

My first session, I played for fifty minutes, doing exactly what you'd expect. I scampered around, picking up sticks and pebbles. I climbed trees to get resin. I collected strawberries and nuts to snack on because Squirreled Away is a survival game and you do have to eat. Although not, as far as I can see, drink or sleep, at least not in the demo.

When I had enough, I made my axe and my pickax and ran around chopping up bigger twigs for more sticks and breaking up bigger rocks for more pebbles. I learned how to find and fill a cache, which is where the squirrels keep their nuts, among other things. 

I helped all my new squirrel pals and ticked off all my quests so Terry the Turtle would ferry me to the next island and then when he was ready to take me, I wasn't quite ready to go. I still had a Golden Acorn to find. As well as leading the guided meditations, Maya also minds the mystic circle of pillars where, if you can find and place all five Golden Acorns, a ghostly blue squirrel appears and gives you a permanent buff that gives you more stamina.

I didn't want to miss out on that so I carried on looking. I had four but the fifth eluded me, even though the pillars themselves give some hefty hints. In the end I found the missing acorn at the bottom of a hollow log. Then I hopped onto Terry's shell and off we went.

I had some minor issues with the UI, particularly when it came to building, which felt fiddlier than it does in many games, but there's one very useful function I really liked. If you hold down RMB, the screen fades and the names of every creature in a very wide area appears, along with a headshot that lets you know what species they are and a distance, measured in Paws, that tells you how near or far they are.

I found it very handy but when I jumped off Terry's back onto the sand and turned it on to see what was waiting for me, I was a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of options. The second island was clearly going to be a lot busier than the first.

It was getting late, so I decided to leave exploring the new place for another day. It looked like the demo was going to be one of those really lengthy ones you can play for several hours without repeating yourself.

It wasn't, not really. Most of the second island turned out to be cordoned off by an impenetrable grid. I could see all the new squirrels waving at me, no doubt desperate for me to come and help them with stuff they ought to have been able to do for themselves, but I couldn't get to any of them.

As far as I can tell, there's only one reason the demo lets you go to the second island at all and that's so you can try out the housing. Okay, I guess it also whets your appetite for what you could be doing if you bought the full game - all those juicy exclamation marks with their as-yet unknown quests - but you're obviously really there to give housing a go.

And the housing offer looks pretty solid. An embarrassingly-named seagull called Lotta Land fills you in on the details although it's all very straightforward. I was able to knock up a nice little shack with a roof and a balcony and somewhere to place my bed in about a quarter of an hour this morning. Construction required nothing but sticks, which made it pleasantly simple to get started. I assume there's more complexity later.

I admit I'm a little curious to see for myself. As I've said before, these days I find the early stages of survival games at least as addictive as I once found classic MMORPG starting areas. Both are pleasures in themselves, regardless of whether you  go on to play the games seriously, which means the fun never seems to wear thin. I spent the best part of two decades very contentedly replaying what was effectively the same content in scores of different MMORPGs, not to mention multiple runs in the same ones, and now it seems likely I'll do the same in dozens of open-world survival games.

Whether I'll want to do it as squirrel is another question. Even though I generally enjoy playing anthropomorphic animals even more than I like playing humanoids, this particular quadruped didn't immediately catch my fancy. It felt a bit characterless, hardly surprising given there's no character creation. You're just a squirrel and that's that.

If you've ever fantasized about becoming a tool-using squirrel, though, this is your game.

Noiramore Academy Demo - What Are You Waiting For? Go Play It, Already!

Noiramore Academy is a 3D mystery adventure game or at least it will be if the Kickstarter funds. It's also by some margin the best of the Next Fest demos I've played so far. I still have a couple left to try but I would be amazed if either tops this one.

I was so impressed, in fact, that as soon as I finished it I went straight to the Kickstarter page and backed it, making it the first project I've pledged on the funding platform for several years. At $15 it's hardly a major commitment and anyway, at the moment, the chances of the game funding don't look all that great. It's currently at just over $16k on a $40k ask.

There are still twenty days left and as we all know the peak funding opportunities for Kickstarters come at the beginning and the end, with take-up following a U-shaped curve. Except that's not really true. It applies to some projects but by no means is it guaranteed. Many plateau after the first spike and just lie there, others never even get that first bump of enthusiasm.

Noiramore Academy has vaulted that first hurdle, I'm pleased to say. It made about a third of its target in the opening days, considered by some analysts to be pretty much a minimum requirement for eventual success. Still, it's asking a lot to double that over the remaining three weeks.

I really hope it can because I want to play this game. I loved just about everything about it. The creative force behind the project is Anastasia Snyder, founder of Ink Rose Inc. She's a "Digital Illustrator, Voice Actress, and Online Video Producer" and all these skills are very much in evidence throughout the demo.

Graphically, it's wonderful. It looks like a comic-book come to life. The entire demo, which took me over an hour and a half to play through, takes place in a single location and yet it felt like a whole world. 

There's an absolute wealth of fascinating background detail everywhere you look, not just in the many interactable objects, each of which tells its own story, but in every facet of the illustration and design. You could - and I did - spend a significant amount of time just wandering around the classroom, poking your nose into everything without feeling the need to get on with the plot at all.

There is a plot, though, and it's a good one in that I have no idea yet what it is. It's a mystery. That's how mysteries are meant to work.

The demo leans quite hard into the in media res approach to storytelling, trusting you'll be smart enough to pick things up as you go. As far as I could gather, you play a thirteen year-old girl who also happens to be a unicorn (A Unicornum, technically...) called Judith Hovern. 

Judith does not have the best disciplinary record and the game opens with her receiving a dressing-down from the Principal, along with a ban from Movie Club, something that seems to be important to her. As the demo proceeds, it transpires that Judith is also on the outs with a popular couple, Becky and Nicholas. (The school is co-ed and those two are described as girlfriend and boyfriend, although Judith herself makes it quite plain she's too young to be interested in boys. Ew!)

She's no loner, though. She does have some good friends, including the wonderful Gina, drama society stalwart and method actor, currently living as a fluffbat in preparation for her next starring role, and goth true crime and serial-killer buff Marisol, who may be every bit as creepy as she seems. 

Every character, and there are quite a few, is beautifully drawn, both literally an metaphorically and the voice acting is of equal quality. There wasn't a single character that didn't sound the way the excellent dialog suggested they should. I particularly enjoyed the performance of the actor playing Gina and not only because they sounded almost exactly like my friend does, when she puts on a "funny" voice, although I admit that's a level of metatextual pleasure not available to everyone.

Too often, when I play games, I find the strength lies in either the graphics or the world-building or the lore or the voice acting or the dialog but not in all of them at once. In Noiramore Academy every aspect compliments every other perfectly. And what better way to introduce players to the characters' world could there be than have them learn about it for themselves in history class, while you sit in? Genius!

It's a fascinating world, too. Fantastical and magical but with few of the obvious tropes. No elves or dragons or wizards - just bats who might be listening and resonance waves you control with your horn. Or with a wand, if you've been unfortunate enough to have your horn snapped off, but wands offer a really inferior experience, as we all know. There's a subtext in that, right? Or am I making up my own jokes, now?

Gameplay is good. Very good, in fact, if like me you find mystery games somewhat hit or miss. I always think I'm going to enjoy them more than I do because it turns out that a) I'm not as good at spotting clues as I think I am and b) working stuff out isn't always as much fun as I think it's going to be.

In Noiramore Academy, solving mysteries is quite hands-on. There's observation and deduction but mostly there are mini-games. 

Mini-games are often my favorite part of an investigation, at least they are when I can do them. I could mostly do these although as usual I tended to get hung up on the "I know what I'm suppposed to be doing but I can't figure out exactly how I'm supposed to do it" part. 

Fortunately for me there are several playthroughs of the demo on YouTube and I have no compunctions about using them. I generally prefer to refer to a walk-through or a guide rather than bang my head against a puzzle until I stop having fun, out of some dim sense of pride. Literally no-one cares whether you work everything out for yourself or copy someone else's homework in a single-player game so why pretend it matters?

All I needed was a tiny hint, anyway. Okay, a couple of tiny hints. Three at the most. And all of the puzzles were completely fair and logical when I knew what I was meant to be doing. And original, too. I think this might be the first time I've ever repaired an antique dress using a pattern and a needle and thread.

I don't think I'm going to go into any more detail. It's obvious how much I enjoyed this one. The demo is there to play (I hope it stays that way after Next Fest ends - it really needs to for the Kickstarter.) and I strongly advise anyone who likes this sort of thing, a demographic which I'm sure includes a few regular readers here, to go try it.

If the demo isn't avaialable or you don't play this sort of game much, maybe watch the trailer or even one of the playthroughs on YouTube. I've thoughtfully embedded one above so you don't even have to leave. It makes for an entertaining watch, if watching someone else playing a game can be defined as entertainment. I picked one where the person playing keeps their trap shut but there are several more on YT with commentaries, too, if that's your bag.

There's a lot in the demo, which is flagged as "pre-alpha" but which played flawlessly for me. I was flicking through one of the playthroughs just now to remind myself of a couple of things and I noticed stuff in there that I definitely didn't find when I was playing. I may have to play it all the way through again. Oh, what a hardship that would be!

I could go on (And on. And on...) but I'm going to end here and keep this short because I know short posts get read more than long ones and I would really like to maximize my chances of encouraging more interest in the game. Mostly because it's really good and you'd be doing yourself a favor by trying it but also in the admitedly hubristic and ridiculous hope of nudging that Kickstarter a little further towards its goal. 

Anastasia has had two previous projects fail on the platform so far. I really hope the third time turns out to be the charm. This game deserves to get made.

Online, Offline, What's The Difference? A Quick Look At The Spire Horizon Online Demo

Today's Next Fest demo is an MMORPG called Spire Horizon Online. Note that "Online". It's important.

I just had to re-write my whole opening monologue because it was a riff on how, surely, we don't need to add "Online" to the names of games any more because pretty much all of them are, only to discover there are in fact two versions of this, one of which is not.

There's an open-world RPG called Spire Horizon that's already available on Steam and then there's this one, which is an MMORPG version of the same game, due to launch in December. I now realize I have been conflating the two since I first heard about the demo. I apologize for any confusion - not that anyone's picked me up on it yet.

The original is the game that one reviewer on Steam claimed was a now-abandoned student project from a single developer. The same reviewer also added, snidely, that the project must have received a failing grade. That seemed credible at the time. If true, it certainly wouldn't be the only student project on Steam. I've played a couple.

As soon as I logged into the game, though, it began to seem extremely unlikely. So I checked and the single developer part is true, which is both surprising and impressive when you see what they've achieved, but I find it very hard to imagine it was done for a student project.

The demo opens with an impressive four and a half minute long movie that would look entirely in place fronting an AA game. AA games don't exist any more, apparently, and I'm not sure I know exactly what they were they did but if they were anything like I imagine then this would have been just the sort of movie they'd have opened with.

Don't take my word for it. Here it is. It's well worth a watch even if you have no intention of playing the game.

It's lucky it's on YouTube because in the demo it glitched and jumped all over the place and I missed a lot. I could tell it was good from the bits I did see but it wasn't until I watched it on YouTube that I realised just how good. 

It wasn't the best of beginnings, technically speaking. I don't know if the juddering and skipping was down to the only available server being in "Asia" or some issue with my own internet connection, which hasn't been at it's best of late, but it made me expect the worst going into the game itself.

And things certainly weren't perfect. There were quite a few more problems. Some might have been bugs - there's a card at the start warning that the demo is "unfinished" and may contain "various bugs or issues". Most of the issues I encountered, though, like quest widows not closing properly or certain buttons not responding, could have been caused by connection issues or lag. 

Whatever the cause, there was nothing to make the demo unplayable or even to stop it being fun, which it was. I played for an hour and would happily play more if I'd had the time. There's a lot of promise here and no small amount of pleasure to be had in what's already there, although I think there's a deal of work to be done yet if the game is going to meet its proposed December 2024 launch date. 

I have wishlisted it anyway, not that that means I'll buy it. It definitely has potential. Plus it's really weird in the right kinds of ways and that's something I always like to encourage.

Here are some things that I found unsurprising about it

• It's a medieval fantasy world, all castles and keeps and greensward everywhere.
• It has lots of Kill quests and not just Kill Tens either. More like Kill 15 of three different mobs.
• It has levels and classes you gain XP by doing quests and killing stuff.
• The classes include Fighter, Priest, Sorceror and Assassin
• There are mounts including some that fly.
• There's gear and upgrades and loot.
• It plays like an MMORPG from maybe fifteen years ago, one of the lesser-known ones like Argo or even NeoSteam.

Here are some that I wouldn't necessarily have expected

• The player character is a skeleton. Hair optional.
  
• You never really get to wear any clothes. Or have a face.
• The plot revolves around your character's search for his lost friend.
• The friend is a capybara.
• Classes include MuayThai, Boxer and Musketeer.
• You get a mount and wings for free, almost at the start.

Graphically, it's lovely to look at it. The colors are rich and vibrant, the scenery is attractive and for once everything is bright and cheerful. The UI is well designed and pleasant both to look at and to use. I particularly like the font used and the borders are elgant and stylish. It's one of the more tasteful yet friendly-looking UIs I've seen in a while.

The whole game feels a bit like that -tasteful and friendly - or I should say the demo does. I imagine things get a little less cozy later on. It's explained in one of the quests that there's a protective barrier around the area keeping the really bad monsters out, so the local monsters are fairly tame. All told, it feels like a nice place. You wouldn't turn down a weekend break there, if you won one in a raffle.

Gameplay is exactly what you'd expect. Speak to an NPC, do something for them, get referred to the next, ad infinitum. Combat felt more like an ARPG than an MMORPG, with mobs coming in large numbers and respawning almost instantly. Button mashing worked for me. 

Most of the time, anyway. It is quite possible to get out of your depth, esspecially if you run out of healing potions. Of course, that's just in the starting zone. I imagine everything gets a lot tougher later on. 

The writing is... I want to say decent. It's better than functional, anyway. The NPCs have some flavor and the prose style doesn't jar. The translation is solid, assuming it has been translated. I'm basing that assumption on the location of the server. I have no knowledge of where the developer, Mendoka, is from.

I did very much like the central conceit of what I guess we're calling the Main Story Quest these days. Playing a character whose one and only motivation is to search the world for his lost friend seems like something that hasn't been done to death in the genre and it makes a refreshing change from Only You Can Save The World or I Just Woke Up And I Don't Know Who I Am. That said friend is the world's largest rodent just adds to the fun.

I don't have an awful lot more to say about this one except that I'm not entirely sure why it needs to be an MMO. I didn't see much in the short time I played to indicate what potential for grouping or raiding or even trading there might be although I did see quite a lot of other players running around. Then again, you wouldn't really expect to see much in the way of co-operative activity in the starting zones of any MMO these days so maybe that all comes later.

I suspect I might prefer to play the RPG, anyway. It's very cheap, it has good reviews and it's right there, right now if you want it.

 I'll be keeping an eye on the MMORPG all the same. As I said, I feel it has potential. It certainly felt at least as well-constructed as some I've played, games that have had far more attention, naming no names. (Okay, Palia springs immediately to mind. Crowfall, even. I'm not entirely sure either of those felt orders of magnitude more polished, let alone finished but they certainly received orders of magnitude more column inches.)

File under very much worth a look if you like this kind of thing.

Sentou Gakuen: Revival - or - Kitten's Got Claws

Yesterday's post , listing the seven demos I'd picked for this Autumn's Next Fest, ended with an exhortation to myself to "go and get on with it" and for once I took my own advice. By the end of the evening I'd made an attempt at four of the demos, some more successfully than others.

The first I tried was Spire Horizon. That didn't get far. The servers were down. I tried again a few hours later and they were still down. Not the best look for a game trying to pick up some traction from a limited-time event. 

Later in the evening, while I was attempting to update the New World client to New World Aeternum, which I knew would need a full download but which in my case also required me to uninstall and reinstall the game on top of that because the new client wouldn't verify, I saw that Spire Horizon needed an 8GB update too. I did that but by then it was too late to see if the servers were up.  I'll try again later today.

Which brings us to the three demos I was able to play. Usually, I try to play demos right to the end before writing about them (Unless they're the open-ended, kind, of course.) but I haven't finished any of these. I clocked up about an hour in two and forty-five minutes in the third. I may well go back to any or all of them for a second look but what I've seen so far has given me more than enough to talk about. 

Sentou Gakuen: Revival 

After my failure with Spire Horizon, I moved on to this one next because I was very curious about it. As I said in a comment at MassivelyOP yesterday, SG:R is "a visual novel “with MMORPG elements”", whatever the heck that means. 

I couldn't quite figure out what to expect from the description and having played the thing for an hour, I'm still not exactly clear on what it is or wants to be. After a very brief visit to Character Creation, the demo begins with a lengthy introduction in which your character arrives at a very busy train station and walks through some even busier city streets on the way to their new High School, where they're about to start as a transfer student.

This part is quite literally a "visual novel" or at least a visual short story. Scene after scene appears, with lines of text at the bottom giving an internal monologue, describing what you're seeing and feeling. Except you aren't seeing any of it.  

I tried to start a new game to get a screenshot of the text but it seems you can't restart, only continue, so just imagine a caption telling you how incredibly, overwhelmingly busy the street scene above is, people everywhere, lots of noise, cars roaring by...

 

The descriptions continually focus on the chaos and clutter of the environment, attempting to conjure an impression of a bustling city, overfull to the point of chaos. Meanwhile, the pictures show serene scenes of completely empty streets with no-one anywhere to be seen. 

The writing is pretty good. It does a fine job of eliciting the sensations of struggling to find your way in a crowded city you don't know. The artists don't seem to have read any of it.

After quite a bit of that you find your way to some suburban avenues that are actually supposed to be quiet. Except they aren't because that's where the action is. Action so bizarre I could hardly believe I was seeing it. I'll summarize: 

As you walk along the street, you step in something squishy. Looking down, you see it's a half-eaten fish. It belongs to a scraggly black cat. The cat takes this interruption to its meal badly and hisses at you. You try to talk your way out of the confrontation but the cat is not to be persuaded. It attacks. You fight the cat and lose. You end up in the school infirmary, hooked up to an IV drip. 

You and me both, sister!

 

Let me make this clear. It's a cat. Not a giant cat or a magic cat or a cat-like monster. Just a cat. 

You, the player character, are a full-sized, human girl (Or boy, you can choose at character creation.). Your age isn't specified but is most likely mid-to-late teens. 

Fit, healthy teenagers do not lose fights to cats. They might, at the very worst, get badly scratched or bitten, which would be unpleasant and potentially dangerous if not treated, but since no-one gets attacked by a cat in the street, something like that could only happen if the teenager tried to pick the cat up or otherwise interfere with it. 

The cat would not, under any imaginable circumstances, pick a fight with the teenager and even if it did the teenager would not fight back.  And even even if all of that actually, through some indescribably unlikely chain of circumstances, was to happen, the teenager would not lose the fight, let alone "get their ass kicked".

I thought for a while that the game might turn out to have some kind of fantasy element that would make sense of the cat fight but no. It's supposed to be a naturalistic setting or close enough. I'm wondering now if cats in Indonesia behave radically differently from cats in Europe or the UK. Or maybe its cats in Japan, since that's where the game is set. Or maybe people in Indonesia believe Japanese cats are peculiarly aggressive and/or Japanese teenagers exceptionally fragile...

What she said...

Whatever. It happens. And what happens next isn't much less disturbing. 

You wake up with the nurse standing over you only she turns out to be both the school nurse and the biology teacher because that's a thing that happens. Maybe in Indonesia. Or Japan. 

She's very sinister and scary, her bedside manner clearly modeled on Nurse Ratched. Not only is she deeply unsympathetic, she also makes her own medicines. Unlicensed ones that she tells you, almost gleefully, are not sanctioned by any authority but her own. She makes you take one of her concoctions...

And it makes you feel much better. Anticlimax! 

That's it for the Infirmary. At least it for now. But don't worry. You'll be seeing plenty more of that hospital bed. It's basically your respawn point. Every time you get knocked out, which is going to be often unless you learn to fight a lot better than I did, that's where you'll wake up.  

May as well get used to it. You'll be back.

And you'll stay there, too, because every time you lose a fight or get caught doing something you shouldn't be doing (Which sends to the Detention Room instead of the Infirmary but same difference.) you get a timer that prevents you doing much of anything until it runs down. 

I think it may also get longer the more times you "die", too. I wasn't keeping track but I think my timer started out at about a minute and ended up closer to two and half by the time I logged out. I know it felt like a long time to just stare at the screen and not be able to do anything.

After you get out of the Infirmary, the first thing that happens is you walk into a riot. In the corridor outside, kids are fighting over lockers. There are factions, some dressed all in white, some all in black, some in cosplay or regular clothes. One guy is in full plate armor with a sword but its all plastic. 

They fight with weapons including baseball bats. It's anarchy.

All of this, once again, is in the text and only in the text. On the screen all you see is a pristine, entirely empty corridor. Once in a while a single character will appear and stand while what they have to say scrolls along the bottom of the screen. Then they disappear again. Mostly, though, you just stare down that empty hallway into the vanishing point. 

I'm not seeing it. Are you?

And it kinda works? The writing is good enough that I got the full impact of the chaotic, violent scene without needing to see it. Which means I might as well have been reading an actual novel, I suppose.

So how about that gameplay, then? Is there any? 

Quite a lot as it turns out but you really have to go look for it. I'd call this a sandbox, near as makes no difference. Or possibly a sim. There's plenty to do but don't expect anyone to tell you what it is.

I only began to get the idea once the math teacher turned up, threw some chalk around (Which, now that I come to think about it, did sparkle and leave glowing marks on the walls, so maybe there is a fantasy element in play after all...) and told everyone to get to class. 

The next station stop is: Math Class.

I thought it was going to lead to some more structured content but it didn't. Instead I slowly figured out that from this point on you're largely free to roam around the school looking at stuff, fighting other students, picking up anything that's lying around, slipping on banana skins and starting "Investigations".   

Movement took me a while to figure out. It's like an old Text Adventure game. You can go into any of the adjacent rooms. There's a little grid at the bottom right that shows you which is available. 

I found out later you can also go by train to any location. Yes, you can go to a third floor school room by train... It's the game's version of Fast Travel.  Like a lot of things in the game, it's probably best not to think about how it works.

It'd be strange enough if it was an instruction manual but it's a coloring book.

Absolutely none of this is explained, except for the combat, instructions for which come by way of a coloring book featuring Kungfu Komodo given to you by Nurse Eiko. My character was unconvinced by these idiosyncratic teaching methods and I regret to say I didn't pay much attention to them either, which is why I kept ending up in the Infirmary. 

Combat consists of some kind of symbol-matching game but I never figured it out and for once button-mashing wasn't enough. After being decked by a couple of students in the hallways and an angry Salaryman in the street when I went outside for a breath of fresh air, I gave up trying to fight people.

Also, is Salaryman an acceptable term? I seem to remember reading it had gone out of fashion but it's the one the game uses. And whether or not it's acceptable to call a middle-aged man by that term, whatever you call him is it okay for him to punch a teenage girl in the face hard enough to knock her out and leave her needing hospital treatment? 

Just because he's having a bad day? 

Seems harsh. 

Just say yes and don't think about it too hard.

It's the kind of thing that happens all the time in Sentou Gakuen, though. I know that because of those aforementioned "MMORPG elements". 

There's a box you can tick to give permission for your character to be used by the game as an NPC. It defaults to "Yes" so it's an opt-out, really. As far as I can tell, what it means is that everything your character does, like be hit in the face by a Salaryman or falling over after stepping on a banana skin, is going to be reported to every other player, using your character name, either in a window called "Info" or as a small pop-up on screen. 

I'm fairly sure your character can also appear as one of the NPCs other players fight, although I'm not so sure you'd know about it until you read the result in the Info report. I don't think it interrupts your own gameplay. Certainly, if anyone called me out I never noticed. I insulted several of my fellow students to provoke a fight so I apologize if does actually yoink you out of class for an ass-kicking. Not that it's likely to be your ass that gets kicked if it's me that's calling you out.

Besides starting fights with random schoolmates and passers-by, gameplay options come in a pop-up window for each room and include Info, Upgrade, Encounter, Nearby Students and Investigation. Not every room has all of them. Although the tabs are always available, often some of them are empty when checked. You need to check all of them in every room if you want to be sure of not missing any.

See? I told you he punched me in the face!

As well as the four tabs there are also icons that appear at the top of the screen. They do change as you move from room to room. If you mouse over them you get an explanatory tool-tip like "Do something stupid to provoke someone to fight with you." or "Buy ticket". There are quite a lot of locations outside the school grounds - shops, cafes, parks - all with their own potential activities.

You can start an Investigation in any room. Investigations can last an hour or several hours or a whole day. And that's real time. I had two complete overnight but then I couldn't figure out how to see if my investigation had uncovered anything. Maybe you have to go back to the same room to check. I just thought of that!

There are two factions you can join and actions you take affect your standing with both of them. I joined Yami, whose motto is Freedom, Diversity, Laissez-Faire. The other faction is the authoritarian one that goes about the hallways telling everyone else what to do. We hate them.

You can form a Club, which I think is like a guild in other games and you get an apartment, where as far as I can tell you can do absolutely nothing. I think your Club may get a room of its own too. If so, I bet you can't do anything there either.

I logged back in after I'd finished the post to take a screenshot and in five minutes I discovered enough new information to write a whole other post. Like there's a train for fast travel and a shop and a cafe and a whole woodland area with a "dungeon" you have to be Level 15 and get a permission slip from the Principal to enter...

 

All of which, I realize, doesn't really make it clear whether or not I liked the demo. Or whether I had fun playing it. That's because I don't know, either.

I know I was intrigued by it. Fascinated, even. I was certainly never bored. So much of it made little or no sense. It so often went places I wasn't expecting. It made me think. 

And it was well-writen, in perfect English, and the pictures were pretty to look at. So there's all of that, which is a lot. 

I just never had the least feeling I knew what I was doing or even what I was meant to be doing.

It's very likely that had more to do with my lack of familiarity with the kind of game Sentou Gakuen: Revival is than it has to do with the game itself. I'm guessing it's part of a sub-genre that has, until now, completely passed me by, meaning I have no idea what it's intending to achieve or what it expects of me.Meanwhile the developers clearly expect their audience to be extremely familiar with the whole thing and to be happy to get on with it on their own.

Either that or it's just nuts, which is always a possibility. 

I'm beginning to see how this is an MMORPG now. Just a really weird one.

Whichever it is, I'd say the demo is definitely worth a look, especially if you haven't come across this kind of thing before. It kept me fully engaged and entertained for an hour and I only stopped because it felt like I'd taken the whole thing about as far as I could without going and doing some secondary research. I'd pressed all the buttons and found out what they did. (I hadn't. There were more and it turned out I didn't really know what some of the ones I'd found did, either.) but I didn't know why I was pressing them or what I was hoping to achieve by doing it.

I may go back and play some more when I've looked into things a bit. I think I most probably will do that. Or I might just call it quits, add it to the experience pile and move on. There's a lot going on in gaming just now. I'm not sure I have the time for experimenting with unfamiliar genres just now.

More to the point, I've gone on about it for so long here that I don't have time to talk about the other two demos I was going to write about today so that's going to have to wait until next time. Or maybe the time after that.

I'm off to see if Spire Horizon is up yet. Then I ought to check out New World Aeternum. And tomorrow is the start of the Big New Season in Once Human.

It's going to be a busy week.