Demo Dive #1 - September '25

September 2025 is a month of least games released in recent history. We all know why that is. SILKSONG landed like an atomic bomb, and the blast threw everyone away. Understandable, to be honest. No matter how great your game is, you just don't want the heat of competing for players' attention against one of the most anticipated games of all time. Nonetheless, when we are waiting for the enthusiasm to cool off and new games to hit the market in the coming weeks, there are a lot of great titles to try out through the power of glorious Demos! This week is a little heavy on the Roguelike front, but what can I say - the ones I checked out below are just fantastic, so let me be the one to present them for you.

IDENTIFILE

It is always a pleasure to find a roguelike that feels fresh. The roguelike genre is currently suffering from oversaturation. It sometimes feels like every week we get about 10 of them, and few and far between are anything else but hammering out the classics. But as an addict, always chasing that dragon of stellar progressive runs, I try to play a lot of them anyway to find my next injection of dopamine. And so, on a perfectly innocent crawl through BlueSky feeds, one caught my attention. Without hesitation, I downloaded the demo, and dang, was that a good call! IDENTIFILE has the potential to be quite a banger, and let me tell you why.

Even if the ancient Windows OS aesthetic wasn't a solid selling point for you, the game relies more on its rather unique combat. As a cursor, your goal is to draw rapid circles around enemies, and forming those circles is your main way of dealing damage. Simple in concept, elegant in execution! Mostly because, as expected, the variety of enemies will not make that easy and will happily litter the tight window box arena with various bits to dodge. Zooming projectiles, beams of enemies, rapidly launching themselves, kareening your way... It is a feverish dance testing the keenness of your reactions.

So, the combat feels great, but when I am speaking about potential, I mean how deep the game can go. With multiple cursors acting as our characters, we can start with different powers and characteristics. With proper enemy variety, the game can keep the combat loop fresh for a very long time. And various upgrades, relics, and equippable aids - again, if their variety is on point! - can spice up the combat and provide what every good rogue depends on: a plethora of possible builds to smash the game open. If the quantity of content can match my expectations, I can easily see myself utterly lost in IDENTIFILE, burning hours like cheap wax at a Halloween party. Absolutely looking forward to this!

BEARLY BRAVE

Didn't I just mention that stumbling on a roguelike with some new ideas was a delight? Well, it happened twice last week. BEARLY BRAVE blew me away with its concept, and I really must convey to you that if you're a fan - to any degree! - of roguelike deck-builders, this one should be a no-brainer. Already on your wishlist. Demo played. You need to witness it to feel the magic.

Okay, okay, so what's the shtick here? It's kinda... all of it. This game feels like someone feverishly passionate about the genre spent a few months studying the best games of its kin and decided to, masterfully, I will add, blend so many different mechanics borrowed from other games to make something truly unique and impossibly well crafted. I know, I am glazing, but hear me out. Your goal is to fight boss after boss, basically, and each enemy grows exponentially in power; their HP pools burgeoning massively every level. Why? Because if you're good, clever, and RNG is by your side, you can end any combat in 1 round. Maybe two, at worst. All thanks to a BALATRO flavoured combat system of score times multiplier. You will use cards as your primary source of damage and then your patches, candies, and other mods to ramp up that damage with said multiplier. It's brilliant.

But the complexity doesn't end there. The enemies are relatively passive, acting more like puzzle pieces to solve, conundrums to overcome. Each comes with its own unique mechanic, punishing you, and limiting you for some actions. Want to do a big multicard combo? Prepare to soak up a mighty hit in return. Playing an odd number of cards? Well, time to heal the boss's HP. Decided to discard in search of the key card? Bummer, discarding will hurt you. It's a great system that plays around your potential. Add to that an immersively clever relic system with the patches, consumable candies to empower you in critical moments, and fantastically unique brand mechanic to make even the card arrangement a tactical thing, and wham - a brilliant game is made.

Oh, also, you're a cute teddy bear wrapped up in an obvious teddy bear mafia scheme for brutal tournament of toy on toy combat in a fight for a coveted shelf space to be sold to a kid. Isn't that nice?

STRANGE ANTIQUITIES

I was quite a fan of STRANGE HORTICULTURE. It is a pretty well-done blend of cosy, no-rush management mixed with a bit of detective work and story-driven adventure. A very peculiar blend of genres that just works. What I did, however, dislike in that title was how easy the identification of plants was, in the end. Felt less like working out the clues and more like a simple game of memory, matching pictures to text. Even the more demanding 'puzzles' were a trifle, and the only real challenge lay more in the questlines, requiring a bit of cerebral approach here and there.

I am happy to report that STRANGE ANTIQUITIES starts strong with the Demo, already showing that the whole 'figure out what's what' core loop of the game is going to be a tad more demanding. Not extraordinarily so, at least in the short gameplay span the Demo allowed me, but still... felt more polished. Thought out. Organic, in a way. This immersion of being a scholar flipping through pages of grimoires to match the information provided was definitely there. As the game progresses and you amass even more bits of data to fiddle with, I can see the challenge of identifying rarer artifacts to be quite a delicious morsel of brain-teasing fun!

Add to that improved smoothness of visuals, a bit more somber atmosphere, and surely a good bunch of character-driven questlines, and I do believe this will be one of those worthy sequels. A title that builds and expands on the core idea, polishing the core loop and adding extra zest to the whole experience. Can't wait!