Howdy howdy, squiders. Still pondering what to work on, and to be honest I haven’t had a lot of time to think about it as I’m staffing a leadership training at the end of the month that’s taking a lot of my time, and I’ve got to drop stuff at a consignment sale the day after. I’m hoping to more proactively look at my project options tomorrow or Thursday.
At the end of February/beginning of March, Steam had a special demo event for games coming out this year. I downloaded six and played five of them (the sixth got taken down before I got to it, so sucks to be that game, I guess) and thought I’d talk about them.
Whisper of the House
This is one of those games where you unpack and organize houses. It was surprisingly relaxing, plus there were some time travel elements and the hints of something more going on. The demo was about an hour long. I did get stuck once (and the hints were no help) but figured it out. (The books had to go on the bookcase.) I put this one on my wishlist to look at more when the full game comes out.
A Week in the Life of Asocial Giraffe
A cute little puzzler. Demo took about 20 minutes. Artwork is cute too. You play as Asocial Giraffe, and you have to figure out how to do things without interacting with anyone else. The animation if someone does talk to you is pretty funny, and the puzzles reset pretty easily. By the third puzzle I had the whole idea down. I’m not a huge puzzler fan, so while I enjoyed the demo, I won’t be playing the full game.
Wanderstop
I really wanted to like this game. You play as Aria, a fighter trying to become the best trying to recover from a series of setbacks by training more, except you get sidelined by a random tea shop in the woods. The game itself seems to be about tea–planting plants, drying tea, making the tea, etc.–and I would assume there’s a storyline about learning to take care of yourself and so forth.
But the gameplay was horrible. My computer isn’t too shabby with graphic-heavy games, but this was so jerky it became impossible to play. I gave up about 45 minutes in when it became obvious that it was lagging too much to continue. There’s no reason for this game to be as graphic-intensive and laggy as it is based on its subject matter.
Is This Seat Taken?
Another puzzler, but more of a traditional logic puzzle than Asocial Giraffe. You have a variety of little shape people, all who have wants, and you have to place them all in places where they will be happy. Demo took about 25 minutes and went though…four stages, I want to say. There’s a bit of a storyline going on as well. Cute game, fun puzzles. I’d play it. I put it on my wishlist.
Einstein’s Cats
Demo took about 30 minutes. Very similar to Is This Seat Taken? except you have a variety of cats and boxes/baskets on shelves to place them in. The most logic-y puzzle of the bunch. I was perfectly happy to put cats in boxes, but my daughter got a little bored. I will say that sometimes you were not given enough information to solve the puzzle, which was a little annoying but easily overcome.
But Kit, you might say, why are you looking at silly puzzlers? Well, I think Steam put the games it thought I would like best on top (there were a lot of available demos, and I did not go through all of them. Six seemed like a reasonable amount of demos to go through and I stopped after that) and I do tend to play a lot of shorter games. Mostly that’s because I don’t tend to have the attention span to get through longer games easily–it’s not that I don’t love a story-rich open world RPG, but I’m not going to get very far, and I’ll probably play a bunch for a few weeks and then not touch it again for months, if ever.
(Not to say I won’t get through an open world RPG, but it’s going to take me a hot minute. I have a lot going on, and gaming is often pretty low on the priority list.)
Did you guys play any demos in Steam’s promotion? (I don’t actually know what it was called, I kind of stumbled into it) Did you find anything interesting?
