Rogue Waters
Pirate-themed XCOM
It’s an XCOM, complete with tactical turn-based combat. This is thoroughly pirate-themed, with ship-to ship combat occurring before each fight. You can cleverly disable your opponents passive bonuses, attack their crew, or just beat up on their cannons before they can do the same to yours.
The tutorialization is good! Everything is explained exactly when I need it to be, and the numbers are all quite low. Units have 1-3 health, and the base attack deals one damage. Great! There’s a big emphasis on movement and positioning here, which makes it a bit different than most XCOMs. Most troops advance one square after an attack, so obstacles and other people matter a lot.
The voice acting is good enough, but not great. The music and sound design are also great, and very piratey! The coolest mechanic by far is the Rope Swing, where you can travel a great distance, and then the rope is consumed. It makes the battlefield feel a lot more dynamic than it otherwise would be, with how limited movement is.
Maybe it’s just the demo, but the story seems a little rushed, just an absolutely frantic clip. There’s betrayal and kraken summoning, resurrecting and revenge, and that’s all in the first 30 minutes!
The writing, both at a dialogue and a story level isn’t stellar, but it’s trying. The text is also displayed too quickly, in a jarring way where the next line seems to shove the previous out of the way, right as you’re reading it.
The game is stunning, and the fact that you can turn off blood gets it extra points in my book. There is a bug in the demo where the option to invert camera rotation does not work; it is permanently inverted from every other game. Annoying, but not breaking.
The game has a little bit of Slay The Spire in it, with raids being a map of different enemies and rewards you can plunder, before approaching a boss at the end. You and your crew are immortal, so it seems like there are some roguelike elements here as well?
Ship upgrades feel meaningful and diverse, and the theming fits it very well. In fact, everything just oozes pirate, but it perhaps feels a little unearned? You can summon a Kraken from level 1, the very first mission. Where do you go from there?
Verdict: Somehow, this feels like less than the sum of its parts. The combat is innovative, everything is polished, the production value is high… but it just seems to be lacking something compelling that I can’t quite put my finger on.
Arco
Bullet hell adventure game??
Arco is the surprise hit for me here! At first, I was a little turned off by the art style and the implication that I’d have to search for hidden treasure. I’m no fan of exploration, and the pastoral beginnings made me a little wary.
The game picked up a little bit, but I still found myself asking, “Why am I fighting fireflies and the like?”
Even with these concerns, I recognized that the writing and music were both excellent. And by the time they’d immersed me, the art style had also grown on me. I could tell that this was going to be a deeply personal and well-told story.
And then it kept going! I have my nits: it’s far too easy to accidentally run instead of shoot, and I already said the bit about the fireflies…. but while I wasn’t grabbed at first, there came a point where I was absolutely hooked. I liked what I was seeing even before the turn, but what an intro!
Verdict: I’ll be picking this one up at some point, I’m sure.
Aethermancer
Roguelike pokemon
Aethermancer greets you with stunning art followed by some evocative, if confusingly written prose. The writing in the game is solid, though this introductory text is filled with Fantasy Names, and is the least clear text I encountered in my time playing this demo.
I am Siriux. This was…extremely not clear to me based on the ending of this.
The pokmeon designs are great! The first guy I chose was an Ice Minotaur, who is extremely rad. An excellent design, and the pixel art is really solid!
There are a lot of improvements on the pokemon formula. Your monsters gather energy from each of the 4 elements passively, or when they use a basic attack. There’s a lot going on, but the tooltips are very clean and generally helpful.
I say “generally” because they weren’t perfect: I lost one monster because I didn’t realize that redirecting attacks would only apply to the first attack of the round, meaning I “protected” my guy at full health instead of the one I cared about. I also got a lance early on that was supposed to generate wild energy, and as far as I could tell didn’t do that.
Corruption is a neat mechanic where your ‘mon’s max HP is reduced. I encountered this MANY times before it was explained to me, which would have changed some of my decisions. So it goes.
Speaking of mechanics, there’s a lot of cool innovations to ensure that each run isn’t completely random or starting from scratch. Soulbonding ensures you can find your favorite pokes each time, and worthiness (XP) lets the monsters retain some of their perks and abilities. It’s a good system!
The controls are strictly keyboard here, no mouse, which I quickly adjusted to, despite my initial instincts to mouse over or click on things for more information. It feels like a handheld game, and that’s part of the charm. There’s also a lot of QOL additions, like fast travel and marking important places on the map, or the fact that space and enter are both mapped to “accept”.
The final boss fight is significantly harder than any that come before it, but the game does warn you of this. I’d have been able to win if I had remembered that the trainer could heal the monsters. Really, the previous battles (which seem pretty trivial) seem to only exist to pile on corruption and let you level up for the challenge. It’s a quick loop, and I think it will work well. Each of the zones felt very similar to each other on a first run, but I’m sure a more discerning player will be able to have opinions between them.
Verdict: This is an excellent evolution on the pokemon formula, with great designs and a roguelike exterior. If pokemon games were my jam, I’d be all over this. Unfortunately they aren’t, but I will be recommending this to a couple friends.
Northwind
A Slay the Spire
Now we’re talking! This is a Slay the Spire clone, and a pretty dang good one! It makes some tweaks and innovations to the formula, most of which I really jive with.
First, instead of potions, you have perks which can be used every single fight. This is a massive improvement (that I’ve written about before) which dramatically reduces the worry of waiting for a better time.
Second, instead of energy per turn, you mainly get energy by drawing specific cards. This is a little annoying, and really gets into the Magic the Gathering feeling of it being possible to just get mana screwed. Pair this with the fact that equipment (another brilliant innovation) can clog your deck before you’re able to use it, and it’s easy to fall into a bad spot due to deck composition.
After each battle you’re offered the choice between 5 coins or another energy card. The energy cards aren’t very good, but they’re also essential to draw. It feels bad picking them, since generally a slim deck is better, but it also becomes necessary just so you can actually play better cards.
It’s nice that mana carries over turn to turn, though it’s often scarce enough that I rarely had enough to spare. The level up mechanic is also inspired, where you can spend some mana (a hefty 5 by default, which I was able to lower to 4) to improve every card in your deck, as well as allow for the equipping of better gear. Gear isn’t persistent, but goes in your deck and needs to be equipped each battle. Usually these give permanent, passive effects, often with specific triggers.
The combat itself is a little tug of war, with each enemy stating its intent, and you assigning cards to damage them. Whoever’s intended damage is higher deals the difference to their opponent. Tricky at times, devastating when 2 enemies are on screen, or when one is really winding up for a sucker punch.
The bones of this game are great! The artwork is stylized and dandy. My only complaint is that it all feels a little slow, especially on the fight animations. There is a speed option, though changing it to Fast didn’t seem to change anything. Moving to Very Fast sped things up, but also made things feel frantic, and didn’t help with the most obvious source of slowness, the magic meter. It fills up as cards are added to your hand, but it feels somewhat delayed from everything else. It’s a touch jarring, but this is a nitpick! We’re talking about a demo, and minor UX things like that can easily be fixed.
I like this game. The numbers are bigger than Spire’s, but not impossibly big that I can’t get my head around it. There are some clever innovations here, even though I couldn’t play with all of them. I didn’t get the chance to merge my cards, as I needed the health at every campsite too much.
Verdict: I’ll be keeping my eye on this one as it continues to develop. It’s extremely inspired by Slay the Spire, a fact it does not try to hide. But StS is incredible, and if this can fill the shoes it’s aiming for, we’ll all be richer for it.
Metaphor: ReFantazio
This is one of the longest demos I have ever played. I kept expecting it to be over, and it just kept going. I played 2 hours of this, and am not sure how much longer the prologue goes on for, but I’ve got a pretty good idea of what it’s offering.
I’m not usually a fan of anime art styles, like what’s used in the many cut scenes. That said, the rest of the game art is very pretty, and I like the striking UI, even if it’s a tad busy at times. The most distracting part is during combats when a big wheel appears after every turn, and a mini cut scene plays when entering “squad mode”.
I actually really like the mix of overworld combat and squad mode. It means you can easily clear through tiny encounters without having to go into the slower-paced mode. The Faerie vision isn’t always clear to read, and I often mis-click “V” when timing the transition, but it’s a good mechanic that will get easier with time.
For a while, I wasn’t sure what the gameplay would even be like. The first hour of the demo is mostly clicking through dialogue trees, with a couple bits of sprinting (a frenetic, almost uncontrollable experience) and dodging mixed in.
But it’s a pretty game, outside of the cut scenes, and I do like the art style of the game. A lot of the worldbuilding reminds me of 3 Musketeers, or Brust’s Phoenix Guard, but chock full of fantasy racism. So much racism! Just oodles of it. It’s exhausting!
I do like the story, and the characters, even if the conversations feel a bit repetitive. Yes, Grius, you don’t trust Stroh. I get it. You don’t need to mention it every 3 seconds.
The best QOL feature is on that Atlus also had in 13 Sentinels, the audio log. You can pull up the last few dozen lines and read them again, or even hear them delivered. It’s nice when people start monologuing, or when an accent obscures a word.
I have some complaints: the camera controls are frustrating, and I keep hitting esc instead of tab. Who maps the main menu to tab?? While I’m never a fan of inventory management in RPGs (ugh!), this one does seem to do it well enough, with a tooltip telling me what items I should “consider selling”, and an option to sell them all. Thank you, Dragon Age: Origins for this innovation.
Finally, the game’s core conceit of choosing classes seems interesting, and I want to explore it more. There’s an almost Stormlight Archive scene of speaking ideals and discovering great power. Why it’s delivered in a skin-tight gundam suit is never explained.
The squad mode of combat has a lot going on, including real-time blocking and rank positioning, and I really don’t understand time units, but overall it’s a fairly standard pokemon-style experience, just a lot faster paced.
I’ll come back to this one for sure!