Demo Dive #3 - May

It must be something in the weather, this unnatural gloom and cold, because last week I was feeling terrible and almost sick - time to take a bit of time off to look after this meat machine. But, of course, taking care of oneself also includes gaming; Blessed be the Steam Deck for letting me enjoy games even while comfortably rotting in bed. And so, even being under the weather will not stop me from sharing my thoughts on a few excellent demos I tried over the past few days! DEMO DIVE is a go!

RUNEBORN

This was such an interesting take on a roguelike, mostly due to my profession. See, I don't tend to talk about it much since meddling with personal stuff with hobbies is rarely a good form, but it just so happens that I do work in the video slot industry. And so, seeing a proper PC roguelike game based on a slot machine design like that piqued my interest. It's clever, too! While, as is ordained by the laws of the slot, the random factor is huge, the designs around it of the usual roguelike trappings make for a fun experience! The core of the course is the slot with five lines in which you drop your runes. The longer the line of the same runes, the bigger the damage you do to your target.

Combat operated on that BALATRO mode - the enemies do not actively try to hurt you, but each comes with its own HP to blast through on a very limited amount of spins. You can hold some runes down and burn a respin, but those are also fairly limited, and you need to balance those nicely to have them for tougher fights. Especially since enemies come with various nasty modifiers to test your luck... and your build. Because, as a proper roguelike, you have plenty of neat tools to tilt the RNG in your favour. Trinkets offer various boosts to damage, multipliers, and other conditions. Gems can be inserted into them for further bonuses. And even the runes themselves can be altered with various triggerable specials. Bah, you can even, to a degree, customize the reels to favour a rune of your choice more.

It's all pretty well made, too - great visuals and solid audio. It's a fun time to play with. Sure, some might sniff a little at using a gambling game as a core for a proper adventure romp in the fantasy realm, but hey - it was translated superbly well. And with no MTX, no other shillin' to pay than the asking price, I hope, it's the healthiest one to enjoy!

SHROOM AND GLOOM

That was just brilliant. I have no idea that the roguelike deckbuilder space has places that can still be innovated on, but I am happy to be proven that it can be done. Still. We all know this genre is done to death; there are hundreds, if not thousands, deckbuilders out there in the wild yonder. But SHROOM AND GLOOM does something I never encountered before - it makes you play with your cards at every stage of the game. Normally, your deck is reserved for combat scenarios, and every other system is auxiliary to that purpose.

Here, however, you have your combat deck... and exploration deck. When you move between stages, you have roughly the same mechanics as in combat - your HP is up, your energy to play cards as well... And you must make smart choices with your in-between combat time with your cards too. Do you invest in finding new weapons? Do you spend on dummies to train on, shrines to level stuff up? Finding food to boost your health or combos? Even healing in between combat is via cards outside of said combat. It's a brilliant system, fresh and unique - at least as far as I can say.

Add to that superb immersion that comes from this mechanical solution, very interesting dark and gnarly art style (that never dwells into horror - it's more... dark whimsy!), and you have a banger in the making. Right now, it is a tad too easy to break the game in half, creating cards and combos so powerful that you cannot be stopped. But the potential here is huge, especially since crafting your own cards is pretty darn in-depth and intuitive. In short, can't wait to sink my teeth into this tasty morsel on release.

LOOTPLOT

I am sure some of you might be tired of everything being compared to BALATRO as soon as it has even a whiff of some similarity to it, but... I hope you can forgive me for doing it again. Mostly because the game in question doesn't even try to hide its, ah, inspiration, with the blocks having the iconography for points and multiplier taken straight out of BALATRO card upgrades! But, to the point - LOOTPLOT is an idea to bring that addictive chase after a point threshold to its absolute maximum. To a breaking point of creative freedom.

I like it. A lot. See, instead of cards, dice, or any other bits imitating a known tabletop game, LOOTPLOT opts to abandon the veneer of a classic game to go more abstract. And limitless. You have items, a grand variety of them, with a hefty list of conditions, triggers, modifiers - you name it. And you have your plot, that is, an assembly of square spaces you can place those items in. Simple so far, right? But the fun bit is that the plot size, shape, and dimension are entirely in your hands too. You're crafting not just your item selections and combos, but the very ground for them to work with. And yeah, you guessed it - these squares also come in variants... and can be upgraded with modifiers. In totality, this gives you a potential engine to make some ludicrous points, making machines defy rhyme or reason!

It is an ambitious title, something that clearly goes for the title of the Biggest Numbers Going Up game possible. There are some quality of life things that I would love to see implemented, or just missed them in the demo, like the ability to speed up the counting process. But the general loop here is highly addictive and already well refined. I can see this as one of the biggest time sinks imaginable to mankind, once it is released. Time will tell.