I really like demos. I'm pretty hesitant to part with my meager cash, and games are expensive, so I like to try before I buy. Good thing Steam's been doing these events every now and then! And why not jot down my impressions as well? Some of these games might end up obscure later and it'd be nice to have a reminder about what they're like. So here we go:
Station to Station - This is an interesting little puzzle game! Your object is to connect a variety of buildings via train track so that raw materials like wheat can be supplied to production facilities like mills and bakeries, or end users like cities. In practical terms, you're building train stations and connecting them while trying to keeps costs down and profits up, aided by cards that are drawn once you reach earning thresholds. A simple concept, but there are two extra wriggles that make it challenging. One: To cross over a previously-laid track requires a bridge, and those get expensive unless you have a card to mitigate it. Two: You won't have all the buildings on the map available at once. After you connect, say, three, three or four more might pop up. This means that what you thought was sensible track placement might now force you to build some expensive bridges to hook up these new buildings. It's a strategic game that could get very complicated very fast, but I had a good bit of fun with the demo. If you like games like Islanders, this might be for you.
House Flipper 2 - I haven't played the first House Flipper, but the couple hours I played of House Flipper 2 remind me of Powerwash Simulator and Viscera Cleanup Detail, chill games where you just meditate on a task for a while and relax. It has the same satisfying feeling of progress as you go through a level and see the visible change you've made. Given enough variety, that feeling won't get stale. Hopefully House Flipper 2 can provide that.
Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles - This is an interesting one. Coming from the same developer as The Falconeer, this game is sort of like Townscaper with some 4X set dressing. I don't mean that dismissively either, it's a cool direction to take it. As in Townscaper, you place little building blocks that automagically form greebles and connections that end up coalescing into a little village, but this time there's some light resource management to make you think about efficient placement, and faction mechanics to give the world some flavor. I can't say what the factions amount to mechanically, but it does provide another lever to manipulate while building your little models. I've always enjoyed the building part of city builders more than the management of them, and this seems to align with that. Interested to see where it goes.
Chronique des Silencieux - I haven't finished this demo, but I think I've played enough to have some thoughts on it. This is a detective game, which is right up my alley, but there's just enough jank that I don't know if I feel like putting up with it for the full game. The systems seem really cool, testimonies are kept in a log that you can compare to documents on your person, there's a list of leads you've uncovered, you can ask NPCs about anyone else you've talked to, or about topics that you've discovered through dialogue - there's a lot of good old-fasioned detecting going on here. But Chronique has problems communicating with the player. The tutorial is both not sufficiently explanatory, and easy to break. At one point I did something the game didn't expect and got softlocked. Rebooting the game simply skipped the tutorial, leaving me lost about how the taught mechanic worked. There's also a lack of clear examples of what the developer expects of you - what you're supposed to recognize is possible so you're not floundering around. Am I supposed to be able to make a conclusion about who did what to whome at this time, or are you just tutorializing how the buttons work? This is not helped by the game's unexemplary translation from French, which has enough strange wording choices to be confusing. Not ideal in a detective game where details can be the lynchpin in a deduction. I really want to like this game, detective games are my shit and this one really shows promise. There's just a lack of polish that makes it offputting to play.
Ebenezer and the Invisible World - This is literally a Christmas Carol sequel in metroidvania form. Here's a screenshot:
You wanna see a game explain how to make Ebenezer Scrooge backstep? How about Fezziwig explaining what a save room is? Or the tutorial about Attack Ghosts? Or how the plot is about helping a union overthrow their boss (or something, I got tired before I got to play very much). This game's so weird, I hope it ends up good.
