Steam Next 2021: Games that feel like other games

 Well this looks familiar

Yes, I pretty much did no research on any of the demos that I downloaded, all on the off chance that I might get something good, which did lead to a bit of fumbling with the sorts of games that I would never usually play if given the option. Games far outside my typical pick of genres. (So basically just any game which isn't an RPG.) I'm picked up a simply stupid amount of RPGs over the past few weeks further hammering home the point that I can get a bit monogamous when left to my own devices without something to challenge me, so I think it was good to saddle up to different types of games here and there. As for the two games I played through and am covering in this blog, not only are they both genres that I wouldn't have expected to play on my own, they are both games that I'm going to consider under the category of 'like this other game' for clarities sake.

The first of which is Riftbound, a game which features so much nature themed character designs and imagery that you just might get sick of the colour green if you spend too long starring at it's endless moss strewn stages. Honestly I think the game looks somewhat pretty and has a charm to it's presentation, but once again I have a feeling that the 3D models aren't to a standard of quality that suits the robust mechanics of the game. As in, when I first saw these models, they had me worried about if I was going to play something that was readily realised. Now I'm speculating here, but I think the reason for that may be because the designs of the various sprites and elemental spirits that populate this world where drawn up first on a 2D space, for the game's art, and then translated into 3D, which meant a lot of characters who are too round or plastic-y to work in a 3D world. But enough talking about models, what about the game?

Well the game is a sort of tower defence model with a small chunk of backstory to obscure this basic premise; the 'spirit of the woods', or something, is under attack by cursed undead skeletons and the like, meaning that elemental wisps have to defend it. That means waves of slow moving enemies taking lanes of approach towards the goal point whilst the player sets up units in each lane to do damage and hopefully kill the waves before they get to you. Units are based on different elements, which I think informs their damage type, some units exist to feed you more resources so that you can summon ever more units, some are there to buff surrounding units, others are buffers between shooting units and the enemies, and so on. Oh, and when a lane's defences have failed and the enemy reaches the end, they destroy a 'ward' which annihilates that lane and makes it unusable by the player or the enemy. (Which I find odd because, logically, that lane has no ward or defenders on it anymore, so the enemy could just send all of it's forces through there and get past the defence. But it's a video game, stop bringing logic into this, me.)

So if I've done a decent enough job explaining all of this you might have a certain game in your head, and you may be thinking about how much that game sounds like Plants versus Zombies. Because that's essential what this is, high fantasy PvZ, from concept to execution. (Only with 3D models which I don't like) Now if you're wondering what exactly this genre has done to evolve since the days of PvZ... well, so am I, because this game didn't make that readily apparent. I mean, there were multiple upgrade paths available for some units which I think wasn't the case with PvZ (but then, I only ever played the first one) but apart from that the basic gameplay is the same, only it feels much slower. Now my suggestions for this would be for the game to take on some of the lessons of similar sorts of tactical games other genres. Maybe borrowing a pause and/or speed-up button, so you can take matches at your own pace. Maybe throwing in more tooltips on units and enemies, so you can get familiar with what works best against who, maybe working on those 3D models a bit more so they aren't gross. Riftbound has a ways top go, but they have a basic game model which works and had proven popular in the past so I think they may be able to grab an audience even if they do listen to no advice and put things out right now.

And then we have 'After Shadows'. Another title in the 'I like the logo so I'm just going to download this' area of demo exploration. (Let that be a lesson to those who don't know it yet; cool logos do wonders for discoverability) What I discovered this time was a 2d platformer set to a somewhat pretty dark fantasy world space, and my initial thoughts were 'finally, a cool adventure platformer, this is the sort of stuff I expected more of.' Only I was dead wrong, on the adventuring part, not the platforming. Because this is a game that suffers quite a bit from it's lack of tutorial, in that even after a mostly complete session I've only come away with a somewhat decent idea of what the creator was going for on this title. (But I think I've got it.)

So for story reasons that I don't care to go into, the game requires the 'syncing' of several crystals or something, it's not important. What is important, is that the syncing of these nodes takes time and activates a minigame with the odd random quicktime event in order for the progress bar to keeping going to completion. Getting in the way of finding and syncing these crystals is a black goo monster who occasionally spawns out of the ground, jumps up and attacks you. There's no way to fight back, only hiding spots to cower within, and if he does hit, you'll be treated to another quick-time event in order to escape. Do you see where I'm going with this? What sort of game this one is like? It took me way too long to figure it out myself but here it is: this is essentially a 2D single player platforming version of Dead by Daylight. 

Points for ingenuity because I would never have thought of adapting that concept in this way, even though I can't say I think the union has been perfect by any stretch of the imagination. The level design does, unless I'm missing some fundamental mechanics, seem to offer some genuine pits wherein you can fall in but can't get out, which is a supremely major faux pas of 2d platforming design. (Maybe the game employs random generation or something, but even then that's just evidence that the creation algorithms aren't fine-tuned enough) The monster is so large it's impossible to really run around him (again, 2d spaces are limited) and so everytime he shows up during a node sync it really just means you escape in the exact same way you did last time. The Rougelite elements (When you die you get 'cursed' with a debuff for the next run) seemed weak or maybe just not even implemented yet. (I saw the debuffs I was receiving, but didn't notice their effect at all) And the overall gameplay loop is just kind of boring when you aren't trying to outwit another human, (like in DBD) but instead just hoping to get lucky with a mostly random AI spawn. Interesting idea, conceptualisation needs some fundamental work.

The very idea of 'What about this but with that' is integral to a lot of coolest ideas in art, and so I'm happy when we see these sorts of games that can reimagine the familiar, but it's never an easy task to create something new, and even more so from established elements. Neither of the two games I played felt like they had 'lightning in a bottle' so to speak, but both had the promise of creators who wanted to think a little bit of the box, and that goes a long way when you know how to use it. So these are the sorts of games I would classify as promising, whilst wanting. Not the highlights of the fest perhaps, but maybe the beginnings of future success stories, or just development careers that may be going places. These are games that I'm glad I'm played.