Happy Monday, folks. It's time for the highest-stakes stream I have ever done.
I'm kidding, of course, this looks goofy as hell. :P Mostly I'm curious what it entails, as it's fairly well-reviewed on Steam. Come join in on the silliness and let's see what is involved in "Strategic Typing". XD
As summer gets into its stride and the heat begins to rise, it’s nice to know that Steam at least is looking out for us. It started a Steam Game Festival this month, full of demos to try. I had a flick through the pages and picked up six, mostly at random, to try. It’s quite a mixed bag so I thought I’d give my thoughts. First up is…
Ghostrunner
Not sure what the ghost part of Ghostrunner is going to turn out to be (presumably the protagonist or the big scary face at the end of it) but I’ll be damned if it didn’t feel like the ghost of Mirror’s Edge. Five seconds in and I was wallrunning all over the place. It felt pretty good, particularly as you can naturally chain together wallruns. It was pretty satisfying to jump, wallrun and then slash.
Speaking of slashing, the combat is pretty nifty too. Despite being first person and full of parkour, the thing it reminds me of most is Hotline Miami. You die in one hit but so do your foes, so it’s a case of getting your sword to flesh before your robotic bodice is riddled with bullets. Parkour plays a big part in that, as enemies are firing flashy futuristic bullets that move a little slow, plus you can slow things down even more while in the air. You can even dodge left and right, which is a bit funky.
It presents a pretty nice image of a man firing desperately at a blur only to be sliced into ribbons. Rather perplexingly though, you can only use this power while in the air. That leads to a lot of bunny hopping in combat, particularly when more than one opponent is in the mix. What doesn’t help is the rather drab level design. It’s cyberpunk but in the Hard Reset way of being set in rather dull surroundings. Hopefully that’s just confined to the demo and things get a bit more interesting in the main game.
Ghostrunner
Developer: One More Level, 3D Realms, Slipgate Ironworks
Release Date: 2020
For The People
Bit of an odd one this one. For The People puts you into the shoes of a politician who’s just been installed as the mayor of an eastern bloc city called Iron-1. As you might expect, it’s an old industrial town that’s fallen on hard times, mostly due to the previous mayor's actions. It’s your role to bring it back up to code, especially now that the party is going through some restructuring. While I doubt our new mayor’s role is entirely voluntary, he seems to take it in good spirits.
His day is a busy one. He starts off sitting down with lobbyists from various sectors of the city: police, firemen, health, etc. Of course, budgets are not going to stretch to shoring up all of them so your first being decision is who gets the bucks. I went with the police - figuring that they’d be good to have on my side - and the fire service. Because a burned down city is not worth being a mayor of. After that, you make a number of smaller decisions each day about where to divert funding, whether to allow this or that and general decisions that keep things ticking over.
It’s a promising start but For The People is very rough around the edges. The translation from Russian isn’t foolproof, for example, leading to many awkward sentences and others that straight up don’t make sense. It’s a little worrying to see in a demo, which is after all supposed to sell your game. Hopefully they get a bit of cash to spend on the localisation aspect. It also has a few design issues, for one thing it’s hard to tell who’s speaking at times. The art style - being the requisite grey - also doesn’t excite much. The cutscenes are done in an odd, drawn-by-hand style that doesn’t quite fit. Interesting premise, wonky execution it looks like.
For the People
Developer: Brezg Studio
Publisher: 101XP
Release Date: 2020
INMOST
If you’ve followed me for any length of time then you’ll have noticed that I’m a pretty pretentious guy and so tend to navigate towards pretentious games. Truth is, I very rarely have any idea what they’re on about. I feel like that’s going to be the case with INMOST, a game ostensibly about loss but is mainly full of scary black goo monsters. In its defense though, it is doing a lot more with itself than throwing around goo.
It opens with a girl escaping a room. She falls out of a grate and hobbles her way to the front door, while light bursts through the room behind her. Then, before we know it, we’re in the shoes of a bloke exploring a goo-filled nightmare world. At one point we see him as an old man, hobbling down steps and petting cats. What’s going on? Who knows. But I do know it’s genuinely unnerving. Both in setting and because of the weird things that happen. Like the spindly bloke with a mask for a face. Didn’t enjoy my time with him.
The INMOST demo doesn’t give too much away but it seems to juggling quite a few balls. We end the demo playing as a bloke with a sword and grappling hook, which was rather unexpected. Presumably it all ties together and, I must admit, it does have me rather hooked. The platforming, however, is a bit awkward. You jump in a fairly rigid arc, which led to a lot of trial and error when trying to navigate the heavily goo filled levels. Still, I imagine in a title like this, we’re in more for the atmosphere than for the sick jumps.
INMOST
Developer: Hidden Layer Games
Publisher: Chucklefish
Release Date: 2020
Hello Guest
You know it didn’t click for a long time that this is meant to be a companion game of sorts to Hello Neighbour, a game about breaking into our neighbours house to find out what’s in the basement. I’ve not played that game but it did explain why Hello Guest has some impressive visuals to it for an alpha. It’s even got an intro cutscene where our doofus protagonist clocks into his job as night watchman at an abandoned amusement park. It may not seem like a necessary job but apparently everyone hates this park.
Your job is to patrol around scaring away the masked vandals who will drop down into the park with the express mission of kicking it to pieces. They must’ve made the stands out of the ends of matches because they burst into flames real quick. You basically have to jog around with your torch and flashlight, scaring them away and using your paycheck to buy more supplies. All the while avoiding the creepy beak man who runs around the park. He’s your biggest threat and where the horror comes from.
It’s a self-learning AI, supposedly, so the more you chase him away the smarter he gets. Certainly, he got better at hiding from me, culminating in a moment where I placed a camera, checked the screen and just got the chance to see him tearing up behind me. Sounds nice but the truth is that I really don’t find Hello Guest scary. It could be the screechy, static-like sound that bird boy emits - ensuring you know his location at all times - or it could be that the core gameplay loop is just kinda dull. It’s a midnight stroll full of booting vandals and staring at birdboy. I ended up rather bored, I’m afraid.
Hello Guest
Developer: tinyBuild
Release date: Unknown
Touch Type Tale
I went into Touch Type Tale with a huge amount of skepticism. It billed itself as a typing-based RTS and that was a strange marriage to me. RTS games require you to think of about three things at once and the mouse is the perfect conduit for that. Quick click and you’re done. Typing is a more laborious process and requires you to think about the word. I’ll be damned if it doesn’t work though. So well that it’s the only one of these games that I added straight to my wishlist.
Touch Type Tale’s missions are split between resource gathering and battling. To gather resources you have to head to the mine, start your cart and then type out the words on the veins. Then you gotta type more words to hire workers or sew the farms to make money during the night. All while the enemy is bearing down on you. So you better type up some barracks. There’s a lot to do but Touch Type Tale simplifies things. The only resource is money and troops build automatically once you have enough cash. That simplification allows you to keep on top of things.
Warfare is similarly streamlined. Once you have your guys, you type the word on the road you want them to go to. Pitched warfare really racks up your words-per-minute as you coordinate your front line while trying to get reinforcements on the move too. Units such as cavalry also bring in flanking bonuses, so you can split troops up for the pincer movement. For such an original premise, Pumpernickel Studio seemed to have pulled it off rather well. It’s even got an interesting plot, though things like writing polish and voice acting are still waiting for completion. They’ve got time. I’ll be waiting!
Oh and this is quite possibly the pettiest gripe I’ve ever indulged but the title to me is so dry. It’s a bit too on the nose. Better to have an exciting title as the bait and the intriguing core mechanic as the hook.
Touch Type Tale
Developer: Pumpernickel Studios
Release Date: 2020
Trepang2
Now I know every person who played the Trepang2 demo said the same thing but I’ll add my voice to the crowd: it really does feel like F.E.A.R. Whether or not you found F.E.A.R scary, you have to admit it had pretty sexy gunplay. Bullets felt like they propper impact both on the enemies and on you. Not many games really captured that after F.E.A.R - at least ones where you weren’t fighting demons. The Trepang2 demo does it pretty well, with a reasonable selection of guns to do it with. I love the shotgun, I love it a lot.
It also has the slow-mo gimmick from F.E.A.R which is just as fun here, especially combined with the fact that you can grab people to use as human shields. Add in the cloaking mechanic and boy you have some good gunplay. Go invisible, sneak behind a guy and grab him as your human shield then slow mo. Shoot all of his friends at your leisure, with the measly few bullets they can get out thudding into your human shield. Then, when you’re done, snap your meatshield’s neck and go about your day. Nice.
Unfortunately, the gunplay really is all the demo has going for it. It’s set in boring, white painted rooms for the most part, with very little divergence unless you count a few offices. It feels like it’s been constructed entirely out of stock assets, which doesn’t give me much hope for the full game. Nor does the enemy AI at the moment, which often has bad guys staring into walls, snappable necks exposed, or bundled up on a door. It also, at one point, pulls a hallucination section out of its arse which also worries me. I hope it doesn’t fly too close to F.E.A.R.
Trepang2
Developer: Trepang Studios
Release Date: TBD
Well that’s the demo round-ups and honestly, it was (mostly) all good. I’m more excited for some than others but it’s good to know that, despite everything going on, there is still a lot of talent doing good work out there.
