Despite everything I managed to get some demos in this week! Wow!

RUIN: Beast City

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4380930/RUIN_Beast_City_Demo/

This game really wants to evoke the same feelings as Killer7 and No More Heroes, and I'm willing to put up with a certain amount of naked imitation to get there myself. It does a great job in some ways and tragically just does not have the resources in others. I can see the polished version of this in my mind's eye.

CiniCross

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3933120/CiniCross/

Roguelite picross. You know already if you would be into it or not. I tend to prefer picross more as a cool down leisure activity rather than as a "do it as fast as possible" thing and I'm kind of over roguelites, but I also played this for 90 minutes straight.

The Guiding Spirit

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4060670/The_Guiding_Spirit_Demo/

This game's deal seems to be using the in-depth character creator to craft a party of adventurers and then turning them loose into the adventure module to see how they bounce against each other in an almost Sims-like manner. Intriguing, and the character sheet gets quite granular, but I don't know if I really have the right mindset for mostly emergent storytelling like this.

ZERO PARADES: For Dead Spies

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2863680/ZERO_PARADES_For_Dead_Spies/

This feels like someone trying to recreate a recipe with all the same tools and a decent idea of the ingredients. It's nakedly imitative of Disco Elysium, and summarily seems to lack a nebulous feeling of heart. I could list a bunch of specifics, but it really just comes down to that. Everything in ZERO PARADES is trying to evoke the same feelings as Disco, but the source of those feelings doesn't seem genuine to me.

Here's the thing: this seems perfectly fine! Good, even! But given the context, I can't help but be ambivalent. Short version: ZA/UM the corporate entity ousted the core figures of ZA/UM the artist collective. But I want to play a game from the main creatives behind Disco Elysium; not a game from ZA/UM, the studio that brought you Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, now releasing a suspiciously similar game with suspiciously similar subject matter. Does that mean I'm not giving ZERO PARADES a fair shake? Maybe. Sorry.

Parasite Mutant

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4234670/Parasite_Mutant_Demo/

Cool vibes, obviously going for a Parasite Eve mood. Don't know how the main game'll go, but the demo just dumps you into a street with no real tutorialization or context. I don't know if the ATC-style combat is enough by itself to carry this game for me.

Wanderburg

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4268810/Wanderburg_Demo/

A three-cards Vampire Survivors type game where you're driving a big castle around with tank controls. The weapons mostly rely on movement so you're doing a lot of rapid turns and trying to line up broadsides and whatnot. Cute enough but really just not my kind of game.

The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker 2

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2939680/The_Infectious_Madness_of_Doctor_Dekker_2/

Didn't know what to expect here, just grabbed the demo because the title caught my eye. It's an FMV game where you're playing as some kind of therapist interviewing murder suspects. It certainly has the inherent goofiness of FMV games down, and the idea of tying together topics is potentially interesting, but at some point I was just testing every single combination of topics.

Mechaforce

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4036130/Mecha_Force/

Apparently this was a VR game that is now being made "normal"? I managed to glitch myself into the ground and become completely untargetable by enemies, allowing me to slash them in the shins with impunity until the game crashed. Goofy.

Fuzz & Dizzy: Part-Time Heroes

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4219710/Fuzz__Dizzy_PartTime_Heroes_Demo/

More power to anybody who wants to make a Mario & Luigi clone, but for the love of god tone down your fake camera-waver effect. That dizziness issue I had a couple years ago has made me hyper-sensitive to such things. Otherwise, cute enough, but clearly a proof of concept more than anything else; sometimes buttons just do not respond and that's rough in a game that heavily relies on timing.

Tides of Blazefall

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3677100/Tides_of_Blazefall_Demo/

There's some intriguing worldbuilding here but the combat is not terribly enthusing (card battler!!!!!) and I wasn't a fan of the map movement either. What I'm actually fascinated by is how influential Disco Elysium has become on indie RPGs; the "skills talk to you" concept was such a slam dunk that everyone's stealing it.

Dverghold

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4216280/Dverghold/

Old-school first-person grid-based dungeon crawling. It's a demos, so I can't judge too much yet, but the party options feel pretty constrained to me. It seems like you can only recruit generated characters rather than build your own squad, and the active team is limited to a scant three, meaning at least one of the traditional fighter-mage-thief-priest lineup is going to fall by the wayside. I may keep an eye on this.

Dosa Divas

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4316300/Dosa_Divas_Demo/

Impressively polished for a demo, with fun animations and understandable gameplay systems for the cooking minigames and whatnot. The combat is pretty blatantly Paper Mario + Octopath Traveler, but it's doing a better job making the timed hits feel good compared to some other indies I've played that're cribbing Paper Mario. The writing's fairly twee and unsubtle (fast food bad! home cooking good!) but doesn't seem like it cares to be anything more than that, so I suppose mission accomplished.

Kingdom's Return: Time-Eating Fruit and the Ancient Monster

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4360750/Kingdoms_Return_TimeEating_Fruit_and_the_Ancient_Monster_Demo/

The most GBA-coded game I've played in a hot minute; this would probably be great in 20 minute bursts during lunch break.. You run sidescrolling stages to gather materials for the base-building layer, and it's all rather simple and charming. I couldn't say if it has any actual legs - I'd have to see how it escalates - but it seems charming enough.

Psychic Kung Fu Master

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3313720/Psychic_Kung_Fu_Master/

A classic wuxia "you are some nobody who stumbled into the greatest legacy of all time and will upend the martial world" setup... when its English localization and jank UI manage to get above the waterline, at least. I'd like to formally apologize to Wandering Sword for calling it ramshackle because it feels insanely polished compared to this. Granted that this seems to be a fairly early demo, there could be something here once it pulls together into a functional form.