Originally posted this elsewhere as a comment but I figured I'd make it its own post. Here are my impressions of five demos I've played:
Little Kitty, Big City
You're a little kitty, lost in a big city. If you think "But Stray released just last year!", this game is quite different in two core aspects: The tone is much more comedic and light hearted, as will be immediately apparent when you start the game and the intro cutscene and its cartoon physics set the stage for how you got lost in the first place. Secondly, where Stray's gameplay pretty much exclusively consists of walking up to a thing and pressing whatever contextual button prompt pops up, Little Kitty is controlled much more "manually" and you have to aim your jumps, bat things off of high ledges and sneak up on pesky birds yourself. The demo is pretty short, but still gives a good idea of how it'll be like to navigate the eponymous Big City through the eyes of a cat.
This has all the makings of a chill and casual game, but it remains to be seen how the gameplay evolves in later stages of the game and how long it'll be.
Laika: Aged Through Blood
Remember those flash games where you ride a motorcycle and have to manually balance the bike by tilting it forward and backwards? What if you also had a gun and it was a metroidvania? You play as an anthropomorphic dog named Laika who's tribe is under attack by a hostile faction of birds, and you fight them off with your trusty motorcycle in fast one-hit kill combat. One thing I found pretty weird is that you only have two bullets before you need to reload, and to reload you need to perform a backflip. I guess this is supposed you keep you moving instead of sitting still and sniping enemies at the edge of your screen, but many times I've found myself frustrated that I needed to go out of my way to find some kind of ramp to jump off of, just to turn back around so I could progress through the next set of enemies with my now loaded gun. Maybe I'm just bad at the game though lol. The presentation is pretty bloody and gory, but I dig the Mad Max + occult tribe aesthetic overall. I also liked what I saw of the writing, with Laika trying to balance with what's necessary for her tribe and trying to care for her daughter, who herself has witnessed some traumatic stuff.
I liked some parts of this game, but others didn't quite click with me. This game could be good, but I can also just as easily see it becoming more frustrating than fun.
Jusant
Dontnod have decided that instead of creating another walking simulator, they wanted to create a climbing simulator! Fortunately, this is not the Uncharted climbing we've probably all experienced at some point, and there's a surprising amount of depth to the mechanics. You control both your hands individually, you can use your rope to hang and swing, and you have to manage your stamina during the longer stretches. While the slice that is playable in the demo is still relatively easy, I can definitely see these mechanics being used in interesting ways to create more difficult stretches later down the line. Unlike any other game from Dontnod, there is not a single line of spoken dialogue in this game (at least in the demo), however there are some readable notes scattered around. The presentation is still strong though thanks to fantastic animations for your character and highly detailed sounds for every step on every surface, and how they reverberate through the environment. Said environments also look great thanks to excellent use of global illumination (I believe the game runs of UE5 but I'm not 100% on that)
It's a pretty unique game and I'm totally down for more.
En Garde!
This game heavily leans into the fight scenes of 90s comedy action movies with an acrobatic main character overcoming big groups of enemies,
and the aesthetics of swashbuckling adventures like the three musketeers or zorro. You engage in sword duels with parrying and dodging, you move around the environment to kick boxes into enemies, or kick enemies off ledges, and throw buckets on their heads. The playable portion in the demo is unfortunately rather short and basically just an extended tutorial, and while the mechanics are fun they also feel rather one-dimensional. The game needs more variety in interactable objects instead of just the same excact wooden crate repeated over and over again. There are also parkour section in between combat arenas, but absolutely no ways to incorporate parkour into your combat, which is another huge missed opportunity imo.
This still has the potential to be great, but for that the combat system needs to evolve beyond what's available in the demo.
Lies of P
I'll keep this one short since this is easily the most popular demo of the whole event and there are already plenty of opinions out there. This game is an unashamed souls clone, but a damn good souls clone. It does still have some original ideas, like the way the blocking and parrying works or how your weapons consist of two parts, a blade and a hilt, which can be modified individually. It's also a surprisingly long demo, after over three hours I still haven't seen the end of it. Overall, this demo left a very strong impression and changed my opinion of the game from "ehh" to "I'll probably buy this on release day"
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