Guess I'll mention some more random demos I tried, some of which have been sitting in my downloads for months, because that's a thing I did before too.
Dice Gambit: It randomly generated an absolute gremlin of a character for me, and I got my second party member by gay marrying her to someone with polar opposite personality traits whose opinion of her was that she was a disappointment. They fight monsters together. I'm kind of picky about SRPGs and don't click with most of them, but I was having a good time with what I saw of this one. The art style is also a lot of fun, and the character designs and how expressive they are are the good kind of ridiculous.
Terracards: I dunno, seems like it's maybe ok, but the tutorial failed to explain almost anything other than the absolute barest minimum. I had no idea why I lost my first run a few turns later because it never even bothered telling me what the win/lose conditions were. Uninstalled after that, so it's not my problem anymore.
Tom the postgirl: Another potentially fun thing coming from ARTE France, who I've had pretty good luck with in the past. Not entirely clear what's going on or what to do about it, but it's intriguingly weird and darkly silly.
Sister Ray: Also not sure about how this one will play out in the long run, but just the presentation is very compelling right away. Cautiously optimistic to see how it turns out.
SpellRogue: It's ok. Kinda neutral on the art style and overall presentation, like it's done well enough but not really in a way that appeals too much to me personally. I enjoyed playing up through the first boss enough I guess, but it's a low priority. A lot of stuff could stand to be presented more clearly than it is. It mostly makes sense after getting used to its weird quirks, but some of it has a lot of room for improvement for more immediate understandability.
GUG: Like two minutes in I was like wait, this feels like AI garbage and deleted it. I went to the store page and found that I'd missed the big warning that it's AI garbage. In my defense, you know how people have been complaining for years about how the Switch eShop is painfully slow and has zero useful features? The Steam Deck version of the Steam store UI is equally bad, just in different ways. Like it's full of features just like the desktop/web version, but the layout is a disaster in a lot of places, and the way it handles input (or totally fails to) is both baffling and inconsistent. I would be embarrassed to release something in that state as a public beta, but at this point they've had like three years to fix it and should be ashamed of themselves.
Dobbel Dungeon: On the plus side I get to bookend this with another SRPG that felt genuinely good to play to me and also has a delightful art style. The whole thing is unrelentingly charming and cute. They extremely successfully captured a lot of the elements of claymation while still keeping it a bit more fluid than the real thing. Very looking forward to seeing how the full game turns out.
