Game Theory: Oh god, there’s too many demos!

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

Once Video Game Promotion Season—known to less deranged people as “summer”—kicks off, it simply doesn’t stop: After already weathering Summer Game Fest and the various trailer-focused tributaries that feed off of it, we now find ourselves smack in the dab of the more interactive (which is to say, more fun) version of the industry’s unrelenting desire to let you know there are games out in them thar’ hills: Steam’s demo-focused Next Fest, which extends from this week to the next.

There is, tragically, no way to play every demo currently available on the Valve-owned marketplace, which is touting a completely unreasonable number of free, bite-sized chunks of video games right now for anyone with the time and energy to hit an “Install Demo” button and give it 40 minutes of their time. Instead, we’re going to have to go with the scattershot approach, simply chronicling our own takes on six demos we’ve tried this week, with no more scientific rigor to the whole thing than a shrug and an “eh, looks neat.” (Which is as good a time as any to beg y’all in the comments to let us know what gems we’ve missed. There’s so many demos.)

Our favorite demo we played during Next Fest is one of those “one good idea, executed beautifully” things that the indie scene is so good at pumping out. Created by Stray Fawn Studio, Clawler’s gimmick is right there in the name: It’s basically Slay The Spire, except instead of playing cards to defeat enemies (who politely tell you what they’re going to do on their next turn), you’re using a claw machine to grab daggers, swords, healing potions, and shields out of a big pile. It sounds simplistic, but the addition of a physics component to this kind of “choose which of your limited resources to deploy” role-playing game opens up all sorts of fascinating possibilities. Sure, that new sword I’m being offered does a ton of damage—but it also looks like a mother to pick up consistently. (And that’s before you get into really silly stuff like magnets, or enemy powers that add harmful items to your pile—there’s a ton of room for permutation here.) This was an easy, and automatic, wishlist grab.

And now for one from the “one good idea, executed… less beautifully” pile: As fans of weirdly soothing chore simulator games like PowerWash Simulator, we were excited to try Crisalu Games’ efforts to import those vibes into a blood-soaked dungeon, complete with traps that can turn your goblin maids into pulp as they go about repairing and polishing them. (In a clever touch, you don’t want to die, not because you have limited lives, but because your messily gibbed corpse is just another mess you’ll have to clean.) In practice, though, we found Goblin Cleanup pretty tedious, and not in a “zone out, watch the grime fly off the walls” PowerWash kind of way. We imagine it might sing more in multiplayer, but the basic gameplay of walking around swinging maces and other deathtraps, replacing furniture, and laboriously mopping up blood just wasn’t as fun as we were hoping—and the fact that we couldn’t ever completely drop our guard, lest death messily come for us, only added an irritating layer of attention to the whole thing.

This is massively multiplayer Minesweeper, an idea both as fascinating, and as goofy, as that sounds: Players are dropped into a vast Minesweeper board with 1,000,000 mines on it, and everybody works to clear their own little chunks of it, planting little flags with different cosmetics on them to show where the dangerous squares are. It’s a very clever, very simple concept, and it lasted for us for as long as our attention span for Minesweeper usually does. (I.e., about 15 minutes). Ironically, we feel like one of the game’s touted features is one of its biggest detriments: There’s no penalty for hitting a mine, or mis-marking a square, just a very quick respawn timer. Minesweeper, for us, is all about the tension of avoiding mistakes; we’d love to see developer 神匠游戏 get nastier or more punishing with this idea. Battle royale Minesweeper, anyone?

We’ve been fascinated by the concept of Wheapy Wholesome’s Golden Age studio simulator Hollywood Animal since we first heard its basic pitch. Nobody’s seriously tried to make a movie studio sim, to the best of our knowledge, since Lionhead’s ambitiously weird The Movies back in the mid-2000s, and we were interested to see how the game would tackle that diverse, complicated process.

Unfortunately, it turns out that making films in the 1930s involves a ton of micromanagement, to the point that our 30 minute sojourn with Hollywood Animal didn’t actually make it all the way through the game’s tutorial. The aesthetics, and the concept, are both solid: Commission a script, build stages, hire staff, discretely deal with your hires’ personal problems, and then hopefully make more money than you spent on the whole damn thing. But the sheer number of decisions being asked for at each stage overwhelmed us pretty quickly, which might make for a great approximation of what running a studio was like, but didn’t translate to enjoyable gameplay. 

(Also—and we know bad people on the internet are going to make fun of us for like “digital cancel culture” or whatever—but we wish there was a button to automatically filter out any employees with the “Racist” or “Misogynist” tags; I’m not hiring them, so you don’t gotta present them, game.)

The gameplay on this sequel to the well-liked 2018 indie title was pretty enjoyable, even if a) the Hades-like genre is pretty crowded these days, and b) the absence of multiplayer in the demo cut out one of the core appeals of the original. (It’ll be back for the full game.) We especially liked the variety of spells you could use to build a character pre-run, giving you a ton of variety in how your wizard fights. But we must, must, must implore developers to hear the following sentence: Your video game is not better when it tries to be funny. Comedy is hard, and in an interactive medium like video games, it is murderously hard. Your characters do not need to be making quirky little jokes every four seconds. For the love of Christ, please, no more “witty” asides!

Pounce Light’s Tiny Glade is, by its own admission, less of a game and more of a tool or toy: You’re given a small plot of land—absolutely teensy, in the Next Fest demo—and a series of tools to allow you to terraform, build on, and otherwise alter it. There are no goals, no objectives, no meters to fill: Just a soft soundtrack, beautiful visuals, and the quiet wonder of watching this fairly amazing piece of tech do its thing. (Drawing out walls was our favorite part; easy to imagine the labyrinths you could construct, but also just fascinating to watch the ways they animate and grow.) The demo is canny, too, because the space you’re given is just enough to make you visualize what you could build with just a few more feet, inching your finger closer to the “wishlist” button with each beautiful little tower or flower garden.