A Pick of Next Fest Demos: Cosy Balls, Dungeon Cards, City Building, and Cthulhu

Cozy Marbles

First up is a charming marble run trackbuilder by solo dev Pixel Pea Games, and published by Mythwright (the forthcoming Kaiju Cleanup). Quite frankly, I picked this one because I wanted to see what kind of games were coming out that my kids could feasibly play; they’re aged five and six and both love Gravitrax so really, the challenge was, can a video game interest them as much as a physical marble run game?

The answer is “yes”, for my six year old at least. “I like the music,” he told me (it’s lo-fi hiphop) closely followed by “This is super easy.” And it is: track pieces are selected from a Toolbox at the bottom of the screen and placed with a click of the mouse (the mouse also controls the camera). Given that it’s a demo, pieces are limited but there are still more than enough to create some pretty elaborate tracks.

My eldest making an especially bumpy marble track.

There are also a few challenges you can complete in the demo, which gift you Tickets. These are then used in the in-game store to unlock new pieces (I bought a two-way drop segment). You can even customise marbles with cute faces and goofy accessories, with the full game promises stuff like dino heads and cowboy hats. It’s all very cute and relaxed.

Maybe a little too relaxed: even building a lengthy slope with speed boosts doesn’t make marbles move especially fast; it doesn’t come anywhere near the “you’ll have someone’s eye out” speed of real-world Gravitrax, unfortunately. This is really my only criticism, and the main thing that caused my son to get bored, as sending multiple marbles out at once always feels slower than it should. I’ll be interested to see if this changes when the game launches later this year.

Into the Crypt

Have you ever booted up a game, tried it for five minutes, but it failed to grab you? Into the Crypt, by Megaglope Studios, is a victim of this, even though it checked a lot of boxes for me. If you’re going to release a deckbuilder in this day-and-age, you’re going to have to come up with something that can not just compete with Slay the Spire 2, but that offers something new or different enough to warrant giving your game more time than that cultural juggernaut. I thought Into the Crypt might do this, given that it promises typical Spire gameplay spiced up with first-person dungeon crawling.

Unfortunately, this aspect of the game is purely aesthetic; you don’t control your chosen character (a Berserker in the demo, but the full game promises an Alchemist and a Druid). Instead, (you know how this goes) you pick a route from a map that shows what’s coming up, open a door with a key, then the camera automatically walks through the dungeon to that room. I hoped for something like Legend of Grimlock with turn-based card-based fights, or maybe Deep Sky Derelicts.

You have limited movement to look around a room, but the game doesn’t give you anything to do with this ability.

What’s here so far is otherwise solid, but between the overly-familiar gameplay and cluttered UI, it’s clear it needs more time in the oven (it’s set to launch later this year). Even the art style has a similar vibe to Slay the Spire; imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, maybe, but it doesn’t always equate to something worth playing. I’d like to think Into the Crypt can build on its ideas and suggested gameplay (dungeon crawling) to become something really decent, but for now it’s stuck trying to escape the dungeon of generic doom.

Empluna

Here’s another genre that really tickles my fancy: city-building! But with the weird hook that you also get to design all the buildings in the city. And, at least going by the demo, it’s a suitably dense sim with some heady ideas. You pick the type of world, society and economy you’d like to start with (although Sandbox is available so economic restraints are lifted), then a narrator lays out how, basically, it’s up to you to build somewhere that’s not going to turn into some kind of dystopian hellhole.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the game soon collapses under its own weight. All of the other stuff you’d expect from a city sim is here (laying down roads, connecting buildings with power, etc) but the tutorial is dense with text yet still too vague to make sure instructions are being followed properly – it doesn’t help that your onscreen helper keeps telling you to look at a tiny video to see which buttons to press.

I mean, don’t get me wrong: whereas Into the Crypt suffers from a lack of ambition, Empluna suffers from too much of it. This started as a student project but the devs (BigCodersPlanet) enjoyed what they were working on and believed they were onto something important, that it grew into a proper game. I admire that, and it’s the reason I’m willing to cut the game some slack for being unoptimised and unwieldy at the moment.

I had a really haphazard start to my city; I won’t show you the horrendous mess it became.

The low-poly graphics are charming, the breadth of mechanics (including the ability to rebuild existing buildings) and the promise of up to 25,000 NPCs per city are all alluring. Yet, Empluna feels like a clear case of a game in desperate need of testing – even something as simple as laying down a road doesn’t fit it to, or flatten, terrain but turn into a snaking monstrosity. Mark this as “one to keep an eye on”.

The Sinking City 2

I gave a bunch of indie games a try, but I was also attracted to Frogware’s The SInking City 2. This studio has had a whole load of set-backs and problems leading up to this game’s release (scheduled for August 18) but The Sinking City 2 kickstarter smashed through its goals last year and now here we are, with a playable slice of Lovecraftian horror.

It’s…not bad. It’s not especially good, either, but that’s primarily down to technical issues (occasional crashes, glitching textures, etc). Whereas the first Sinking City tried to do too much, the sequel streamlines the 1920s cosmic horror into something closer to Resident Evil; Frogwares hasn’t been shy about promoting this one as more of a straight-up survival horror. This also means that investigation stuff, which was a core part of the original, is now optional.

You might want to see a doctor about that, mate.

This is disappointing, and it might be for you if you’re coming to this from the first game or the later Sherlock Holmes titles created by Frogwares. The good news is that it doesn’t really affect the flow of the game, and it certainly doesn’t affect the atmosphere. This is an area that the studio has clearly put a lot of time and effort into, as the demo has you travel through multiple waterlogged areas, often lit only with a flashlight, as gross wet things lurk nearby.

The main creatures on show in the demo are the Slither (zombies controlled by worms) and smaller gangly monsters with vicious teeth. Everything felt tightly scripted, with a few instances of being funnelled into ‘arenas’ where you need to navigate submerged desks and filing cabinets as Slithers advance. The gameplay and weapon handling really reminded me of the latest Alone in the Dark more than anything, so put me down as being ‘cautiously optimistic’ about this one.

New Games, Review