#demos

Grim Trials: It's very "we have Hades at home", but it feels like it might have potential. Not so much in the characters and story department (although I will award it unintentional humor points for having a wide variety of unusual names, and then John and Timmy), but it looks and sounds nice enough, and the combat and progression might turn out interesting with a few tweaks.

Disgaea Mayhem: Terrible demo. There's zero tutorial or explanation of what you're doing or even anything that tells you what the buttons do (unless you go into the settings menu for changing them). There are three very basic and not very interesting levels, and it hard resets to the main menu after finishing one of them. It shows you absolutely nothing of the progression/upgrade systems, which is an absolutely wild decision for a spinoff of a series so focused on that stuff. It doesn't look anywhere good enough to justify having to drop from quality to performance just to have it run smoothly. The highest camera speed is still way too slow. And on top of that the minimal gameplay they do let you experience is a low tier at best musou game. I hope there's something in the full game to justify its existence, because otherwise I feel sorry for anyone spending money on it just to end up with this.

Denshattack!: I was a little worried about this one because I had a really hard time telling what was going on in the trailers because of my wonky vision, but it's much less of an issue when playing it myself. Unfortunately I don't really enjoy playing it that much (and could not get the hang of what it was trying to get me to do with the trick system, like it felt like it just wasn't registering 80% of the time), which is too bad because I dig the vibes and the music is fun. I can see other people having a good time with it though.

Pragmata: Seems alright but not really my thing, which is exactly what I expected. I could see them doing some fun things with controlling both characters simultaneously though. It's kind of impressive it even runs on a handheld, but it's pretty noticeable how low the shadow resolution is. That was an issue when I played Romancing SaGa 2 recently too, which otherwise tends to look pretty good. Somehow in a bunch of games shadows have gotten significantly worse than they were ten years ago if you're not running on high settings. Also I still think HDR was a mistake. Doing the calibration for minimum brightness for it the entire screen was still solid black even with the slider all the way to the right. How does this help me?

Star Fox: Star Fox is Star Fox. They have successfully made the same game again, and it feels pretty faithful. I don't remember where any of the enemy spawns are anymore because it's been probably 20+ years since the last time I played it, but it only too like 30 seconds for the feel of it to come right back. I don't have enough of a desire to replay it to buy the full game though, and I could just pull out my N64 if I really wanted to. Maybe it'll lead to them making a new one for the first time in forever though. Which is now making me picture Frozen but with furries, so that's a thing.

Kingdom's Return: Time-Eating Fruit and the Ancient Monster: I had to grab this along with the others just because of the ridiculous title. There's almost something there but not quite. Lots of dungeon crawling that feels just ok at best. I could see it maybe being acceptable as one of those things for when I need a distraction but am too out of it for something more substantial if it's heavily discounted, but I don't think this is going to be the next big thing. I did stick with it longer than most of the others though, so that's something.

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book: I wasn't sold on it at first, but the final level of the demo convinced me. As someone who could never get into most of the older Yoshi games, I'm actually glad this one is so different. The focus on experimentation and discovery feels good after getting past the tutorial-ish parts. I was a little concerned when it opened on Bowser Jr. because I've never liked Bowser Jr., and I will always be disappointed every time Yoshi makes any noises in a game made less than like 35 years ago because it's not the same as in Super Mario World, but otherwise I see what they're going for and appreciate it. Now to wait like three years until I can find a cheap copy somewhere somehow...

Rhythm Heaven Groove: The demo is delightful, but I expected that because I played Megamix before. It's still a bunch of quirky rhythm minigames with extremely catchy music. Also bonus points for giving an accessibility feature a personality. It has a built-in screen reader (which can just read the text or also describe what's on screen), except it's an actual character who looks so sad if you move your cursor to the option to disable it. So I didn't. *beep!*