Q&A: July 6th, 2022

Hill Asks
The Wolf AMONG US???

Hill...

RupertLitterbin Asks
Raycevick sus???

You two are like these boys.

The Great Leveler Asks
favorite demos from this next fest and why?

I gave a description for each on Twitter, but I'm happy to talk about them again here!

Selaco was the obvious steal of the show I think for a lot of people. I was excited to try it for sometime while tempering my expectations as always, especially as previous indie games wearing inspirations on their sleeve often left me feeling rather cold.

Selaco has just as many overt influences, but through the lens of its own passionate creativity. It's a gorgeous looking game via it's art style, whose atmosphere is evoked so effectively through its sound-design.

There's also so many different ways to play it too, which makes it a game I hope to be replaying for sometime just like the game it's tech is based off of.

One of the big surprises of Nextfest for me was Terra Nil. Honestly, on paper, I've never had anything against Strategy games, especially slower paced ones like Civ, but they're just so often bogged down in bad UI's, long interludes, and genre conventions from the 90s that make so many of them feel the same.

Terra Nil addresses a lot of those, delivering a calming, peaceful, and addictive gameplay loop of turning your dusting wastelands into bustling forests.

It and Ozymandias are the two strategy games I'm looking forward to in the near future.

You Suck at Parking is one I already played a couple Steam Fests ago, but it's just looking better and better, one that's equal parts cute, challenging, and feature rich. I really hope to get to play this one in a big group of people, I can already hear the screaming matches over alcohol.

The biggest surprise was Lorn's Lure. I might've mentioned my dream Tomb Raider project, where it's Lara Croft exploring the depths of an Icelandic underground, where the whole gameplay loop is based around free form climbing and exploration rather than combat and scripted jumping challenges.

In context, Lorn's Lure is not that at all, in practice, it's the closest experience to this dream I've played and it's even more compelling than I imagined.

Being able to manually control your climbs, calculating the characters' energy while going over heights that can almost give Vertigo,  is a joy I wish more games were tackling, but I'm really glad to have one do it so well.

Finally, SIGNALIS is what that just kept gripping me more and more the longer I stuck with it, until the ending left me completely convinced. It's like a perfect blend of MGS, Resident Evil, and Silent Hill.

Really, really, loved the atmosphere of this one.

The demos for all but SIGANLIS are still available to play and I highly recommend checking them out!

Submit your questions in the comments below, for future Patreon Q&A's.