One thing about Summer Game Fest is that it has a ton of different smaller fests in which I can see so many new games. And, if they’re indie games, they will almost always be guaranteed to have demos. I love that about indie games, though I worry that it’s a burden to the indie devs. The bonus to me is that I get to try a whole bunch of games that I might not have paid attention to otherwise.
Do I need more games? Of course not. I have such a big Steam pile of shame, but as is the way with PC gaming, I keep adding more to the pile than I take away (by playing them). It’s too easy when there are so many steep sales. A content creator I once watched pretty regularly said, “If you hesitate to pay 99 cents for a game, you probably don’t want it at all.” I thought about it, and he was right.
Side note: I was talking about my wishlist in the Discord I’m in. I use it as a way just to remember games that catch my eye as I’m watching one of the umpteen fests going on. Look, they rattle of twenty to thirty games in a row and my memory is now shit. I’m not going to remember them past thirty seconds. Plus, wishlisting them helps the devs.
I tend to have a dozen or two demos installed at any one time. Then, they haunt me until I play them. By the way, I’m playing Dark Souls III (FromSoft) once again, and my god, I’m falling in love with it all over again. It was my favorite game before Elden Ring was released, which means it was my favorite for six years. Then, it slipped to being tied with Elden Ring for first. The more I played Elden Ring, though, the more it pulled slightly ahead.
I did a ranking of the From games. I gave Elden Ring a 9.75 (I think?) and Dark Souls III a 9.5. Now, though, I’m enjoying myself tremendously back in Dark Souls III. I found a new way to cheese a boss (from the Reddits), and while it took some time, it was loads of fun. It’s a boss who doesn’t aggro until you walk up to it. I’d known that you could use Pestilent Mist, a top-tier sorcery that eats away at humanity. It takes 30 intelligence to use, though, so I don’t usually use it until the DLC at the earliest–or on NG+ and beyond.
What I discovered was that this boss was able to be poisoned. (He’s a giant skeleton, so why he’s able to be poisoned, who knows?) There’s a pyromancy called Poison Mist (which in this game is purple. In Elden Ring, it’s green). I walked up to the boss and stopped short of the spot where I would prock him. Then, I just blew the mist on him (it’s a breath pyro) twice. I had to do it twice to prock the poison. Then, I would watch as his health was slowly ticked away. Each application took off almost a thousand health points. It took nine applications, which is strange because this boss is supposed to have 15,000 HP.
Anyway! Each application took about a minute to completely wear out (I have a ring that extends the length of spells). So in total, it took roughly ten minutes to kill the boss. Which, come to think of it, is how long a normal fight against him would take for reasons I won’t get into.
Was it boring to sit there and watch his health slowly tick away? Yes. Was it hilarious as well? Also yes. I have played each From game enough times to find the most fun in cheesing the bosses in new and innovative ways.
Back to demos.
The video I have included above is the trailer for a game called Rita (Spork Tank). For some reason, I had it confused with another word game (which this is) and had thought I had already played the demo. When I realized i hadn’t, I fired it up. You play as the titular Rita, a chick who is…well, it’s not really clear. Letters are found around town, and my job as Rita is to make words to activate certain things. Such as, I have to find the letters ‘J-U-M-P’ and put them in a crossword puzzle in the proper place (there are clues in the crossword puzzle), then I can jump.
I really like that premise, and for the most part, it really works. The game is charming and has a whimsical aesthetic that works. The characters and objects are blocky like they’re made of Legos, and I’m down with that. Once I was done with the demo, I was disappointed that I could not buy it and continue to immediately play it. It’s coming soon, so I wishlisted it, of course.
The one big downside was because of me. I could not make some of the jumps because of my awful death perception. Ha. I meant depth, but I wrote death. Also apt. And if I fell off, say a palm tree, then I had to go back to the first palt tree and try again. The controls are fidgety, and again, I think it’s me, but it does make me hesitate to buy the game.
The other negative is that it’s sometimes confusing because the tutorial is very minimal. It’s asking you to intuit things that I can usually get, but not always. I’m being chill about it because it seems like a very small team, but I felt like a little more explanation would go a long way.
Also, there is a mini-game of having to race another chick from one point to another. It wends through doorways and across the beach. I had no idea where the chick was going, and they were so fast. There was no way I was going to beat them. Normally, I would have tried over and over and over again, but the controls were so clunky, I gave up after three or four times.
In tandem, I met a cute pig who was a vendor. He was selling speedy shoes. You can probably see where this is going. You need the shoes in order to beat the other chick in the race. What did I get for beating the chick? Nothing. Oh, there was an article about it in the paper. Yay. I ran into the chick at the end point, and they wanted to race me again back to the first spot because they were faster that way for some reason. I tried it two or three times, but I realized that I probably needed something else to beat the chick. I gave up pretty quickly.
This game has so much heart. It was fun to tootle around in the world, finding letters and doing crossword puzzles. I’m eager to play it, and it put a big smile on my face. This is why I love indie games.