#nextfest

Pompeii: The Legacy

Here's a fact about me that I feel like doesn't come up that often: I'm a sucker for city builders. Thankfully for me, it seems like we've been in a bit of a renaissance for these styles of games for the past few years, with both big developers and indies taking stabs at the genre from all sorts of aesthetic directions. I admit to having a bit of a bias towards historical ones, though, so I had to give Pompeii a shot. Given the very limited scope of the demo, it's a little hard for me to tell whether this one has the sauce or not (the true nature of a city builder doesn't tend to reveal itself until you've at least reached the specific complexities of the mid-game), but I did enjoy what I saw. The opening portions have a similar vibe to an Anno without being quite as logistically or mathematically demanding. It's also got story events that pop up from time to time to give you very light roleplaying (or min-maxing) opportunities, which seems to be something a lot of 4X and city/colony builders are doing these days. I know some enthusiasts don't particularly like them (looking at you, every popular Civ 7 Youtuber); but I'm a filthy casual, so I find them a nice change of pace even if the implementation is pretty basic.

It seems like disaster management will be a pretty important consideration in the full game, but none of that reared its head in the demo. Definitely one to keep an eye on to see how it shakes out once it's actually released.

Town To City

Might as well get the other city builder out of the way. This one actually gives you a pretty solid chunk of time; and even once you reach the "end," you can still keep playing and building. You just can't progress further up the development tiers. I adored this game. Unlike most city builders I've encountered, TTC puts a much larger emphasis on spatial puzzle solving rather than strict management of production chains. Fulfilling citizen desires with specific building types to increase happiness does still exist here, but in a much more simplified form. To satisfy food needs, just plop down a fruit stall and fish stall. No need to also put down a farm and harbor and then optimize the output of each one. Instead, you need to manage your use of space: distribute your shops and warehouses so that your entire populace has easy access to things they want, build housing dense enough to provide sufficient labor for those shops and services, but don't build so dense that you don't leave yourself any space for other needs.

Aesthetic considerations are very important in this game. It has no grid, and you're encouraged to plop buildings down in more organic, freeform arrangements. The road building tool is literally a paintbrush, which I think communicates this game's priorities perfectly. My favorite part, though, is how decorations work. Much like in real life, your populace is happier when their workplace, housing, and commute have features that are pretty to look at. It's vital to fill in the spaces between your houses, shops, and walkways with all sorts of little decorations: streetlights, flower pots, wells, arches, bushes, trees, etc. There are a lot of options, and many of them have different colors and varieties you can either manually select or have the game randomize for you on placement. You can even place some of these decorations directly on your existing structures: streetlights turn into wall-mounted lamps or lanterns floating in a fountain, and flower pots and bushes turn into windowsill planters. This gridless, modular system makes it so much easier and more fun to customize and beautify your little town. The game even comes with a photo mode to let you capture your town from any angle you want (I used one of my own photos for the screenshot before this writeup). It really is a delightful, relaxing, and only moderately-puzzly game. The most no-brainer wishlist addition for me.

Date Everything

Oof.

So despite this game appearing like your typical farcical dating sim, I wanted to give it a fair shot. On my first playthrough, I left with mixed feelings but still felt tentatively optimistic. Sure, some of the humor did not land all that well and was trying way too hard, but there were at least a couple characters I enjoyed (Betty the Bed and Mac the Computer) and one I thought was fine but had promise (the piano whose name I can't recall off the top of my head).

It turns out I just got very lucky with my choices.

When I replayed the game on a date with Fabby and let her make nearly all of the decisions, we both left feeling largely negative and wary. Fabby being Fabby, she spent most of the second day (the first day where you can choose to talk with anything in the house) in the bathroom. The writing for these characters was pretty dire. The toilet character's gimmick (a white rapper with an extremely overdone French accent) was so surprising and weird that it kinda wrapped back around to being a little charming, but the shower, mirror and towel just did not have anything interesting going on. You'd think these characters would provide at least some fun interplay and/or kink given how closely they're linked to intimate, seemingly private activities, but their introductory scenes did not have any interest at all in exploring any of that. The shower was especially egregious, as he spent most of his scene complaining about being stuck in the bathroom and finding his job extremely dull (while shifting inexplicably between an Elvis and Johnny Cash impersonation). Betty the Bed does engage in intimacy and kink, so this seemed to just be a result of specific writing choices made for those characters rather than any game-wide content restrictions. Fabby's comments summed up my disappointment with the writing quite well: "This shower should be happy to see me naked every day." The whole situation wasn't improved by a noticeable lack of gender variety in the bathroom characters (everybody we found used he/him pronouns) and misgendering language used by at least two of them (to the point where I would have wondered if I had accidentally chosen the wrong pronouns at the start if it weren't for the opening sequence clearly referring to our avatar with she/her pronouns). We also noticed a trend of non-white characters sometimes being put in stereotyped roles and outfits. It happened just frequently enough to give both of us some weird vibes.

So yeah! I left that second playthrough feeling pretty disappointed with the game. It leans way too heavily on comedy for how unfunny most of the writing is, and it seems weirdly averse to being kinky and horny. I think I would have liked it if it was either more sincere or more perverse. Ideally both.

Dispatch

I was genuinely floored by this demo. It's a superhero workplace comedy made by former Telltale folks that blends a simple management simulator with the now-ubiquitous timed dialogue choices. The animated sequences look gorgeous, the writing is snappy and clever, and the actual dispatching portion of the game is surprisingly engaging. I love how you're given a brief description of what traits might be important for a mission and have to spend a brief moment agonizing over which of your Z-listers might pull it off. And how sometimes the one you know would knock it out of the park is already busy doing some other mission. When you succeed you feel like a genius, and when you fail you can't help but laugh. It rules! One of the few games I'm absolutely going to buy the moment it releases.

Azaran: Islands of the Jinn

Hey, you know how Nintendo hasn't made a "traditional" 3D Zelda game in 14 years? Benji decided to just make their own, and God bless them for it. I don't have much to say about it, since the demo is just a small slice of what I assume is the very first dungeon, but it does a great job of nailing the aesthetic and dungeon design. As someone who tends to replay Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess at least once a year, I'm very happy this exists.

Crescent County

You are a delivery witch who rides a broom (that's basically a motorcycle with glide capabilities) through a pastoral, pastel island. The primary mood the demo seemed to be trying to hit was "chill." Even the races were chill. The delivery portions didn't have time limits; and while "optimal" routes exist, you can pretty much drive wherever. It was fun enough, but I'm not sure how well what seems to be the core loop will hold up in the full game.

Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream

I feel like it's been ages since I've seen an isometric stealth game, and I'm so goddamn happy I found this one. I do love me some first-person stealth (Thief, Dishonored) and third-person stealth (Splinter Cell, Hitman), but there's something really special about the birds-eye, isometric implementation. I love how blatantly puzzle-y it is. You're given essentially perfect knowledge of enemy placement and routes. Then the game stares out you and demands you take it all in and figure it out. It's not trying to trick you. That would be gauche. It just wants to see those gears turn in your brain.

Eriksholm's demo gives you longer to play than I figured it would, and I loved every second of it. Just barely threading the needle between two guards feels so fucking good.

Undusted: Letters from the Past

A woman restores mementos from her childhood as she remembers her complicated relationship with her parents. It's the kind of game I'm a sucker for, and it itches the same part of my brain that Powerwash Simulator did. Just in smaller, bite-size portions. Of course the story is clearly going to be much more important for this game than it was for Powerwash, and the writing seems pretty solid so far, though it's not something that can truly be evaluated from just the short snippet the demo offers. I'm intrigued, though!

AEROMACHINA

I really wanted to like this game more than I did. It's got a killer art design and a compelling premise (you're a cyborg furry who's part fighter jet and you do 3D platforming), but the implementation was just a bit too frustrating and awkward for me. The nadir of the demo was very early on where it tries to teach you how to do a long-jump into a glide and does and absolutely piss-poor job of it. If it weren't for a Steam discussion thread where multiple people expressed their own frustrations and one kind soul perfectly communicated the specific button-press timing the game is looking for, I truly don't think I would have made it past that room. Even when I finally knew what to do and could do the long-jump glides consistently, it still felt kinda bad and awkward. Psuedoregalia this is not.

I feel the real test of how much you care about a game will reveal itself in how willing you are to redo lost progress as a result of an unfortunate save situation (whether it be the game's fault or your own). In my case, I got into a boss fight without realizing just how difficult it was going to be, died, and then went back to the last time I passed a save point. Because this game doesn't have checkpoints or auto-saves. I realized I'd have to redo, like, 15 minutes of progress and decided I just didn't care that much about seeing the end of the demo.