Gaming

New batch of demo reviews for stuff I tried today:

Memori Basically a Celeste clone, everything from the art style to a lot of the mechanics seem to be just trying to copy that. Not necessarily a bad thing, because Celeste is a great game and I'm always down for more pure 2D platformers, but this one definitely needs some work. The basic controls aren't bad, but they're nothing amazing either, and interacting with any of the special mechanics in the levels it starts to feel really bad. A lot of the mechanics in the demo are basically copies of level mechanics from Celeste but not executed as well, and the few more unique ones felt really awkward to use as well. Hopefully it has a while until release and can get polished up.

SteamWorld Build I've liked most of the other SteamWorld games I've played, and while this one didn't look too interesting to me on the surface I figured I'd give it a try. The first half of the demo is a pretty basic city builder, didn't really feel like it had much of an interesting twist on the formula and was pretty easy. When you get access to the mine it gets a lot more interesting. The mine basically plays like a second city, with resources shared between the two areas and many only available from one or the other. Rather than building houses, you have tile by tile zoning control for different types of mining camps. You can choose which walls to dig out and have to build support structures to stop cave ins, and bridges to cross chasms. Planning paths with your limited resources to most efficiently dig minerals out of the walls feels like a great adaptation of SteamWorld Dig to another genre. This part of the game was way more engaging, and while I like the idea of having to balance the two areas, it was only really an annoyance when I had to go back above ground and plop down some more buildings to keep things going in the mines. It's not as innovative for the genre as something like Against the Storm, but it does have a pretty unique hook that is worth checking out if you're into this sort of game.

SokoSolitaire This is a Sokoban (block pushing puzzle) game, with the main twist being that the blocks are now cards. Cards have to go in specific locations, and sometimes form solitaire-like sequences. The main mechanic other than that in the demo are these special tiles where you can stack multiple cards, but only if they're in numerical order, and you can push them out in a last-in-first-out approach. The puzzles pretty quickly got quite difficult for me, I'm familiar with this genre but usually bounce off of these games after a while, and while this seems like a decent one of those I don't think it's really for me. You probably already know if you'd be interested in this or not. Also, you play as a cat wearing a suit.

Vampire Hunters A first person shooter take on Vampire Survivors, this got my attention from seeing the screenshots of your character holding a dozen guns with them covering half the screen. Unfortunately, it's not really as fun as that sounds. The guns don't feel particularly good, and the gameplay entirely consists of walking down a narrow corridor and shooting incredibly basic enemies that just move towards you in a straight line, which doesn't really translate well from top down games to this. There's also a pretty bad lack of variety here in all aspects, and the meta progression seems very grindy for some very uninspired upgrades. Hopefully this gets a lot more time in development, because it could turn into something pretty fun.

Peaks of Yore A monochrome first person mountain climbing game, with some intentionally awkward Bennett Foddy inspired controls. You have a book of mountains of varying difficulties to pick from, and the starting few at least are quite short but quickly get more challenging. You get a stamp to put in your book for each climb you complete, and go back to your cabin between missions, where you get unlocks and decorations delivered to you in packages. I think this is really well executed, and while it's more fun to play than most games of this type, I'll probably enjoy watching someone play it more than playing more of it myself.