The demos keep on coming! There are simply too many games to play and too little time to play them in - I reckon I must win that lottery to just dedicate my time to indie games, wholesale. But for now, I'll continue chiseling in the endless marble block that is my backlog and keep trying those demos out in the hope of finding the next gems to play with and recommend to you all. And so, without further ado - let's roll!
BALLIONAIRE
At what point can we say there's a new genre, or at least a sub-genre, in the wild? Of course, all of them are, in broad strokes, roguelikes, and roguelites, but they have such distinctive flavor to them that it's hard to not differentiate them somehow. When I say 'survivor-like' I bet quite a few of you know exactly what I mean by that. Waves of enemies, unlocking abilities, and passives that evolve and gel together to become the Bullet Hell for the enemies rushing us down. However, when I say 'Balatro-like', it still feels a bit ephemeral. What comes to my mind is adding roguelike bits and bobs to a classical game we all know. Poker, but roguelike. Blackjack, but roguelike. And now we are getting our hands on Pachinko - but roguelike!
Not gonna lie - I did not believe it could work. But it does, way better than expect, too. The game is deviously simple. You drop the ball, watch it pick its random path down, and try to beat the score. In this case, the threshold of money you need to generate. The power lies in the triggers, deployable bits between the machine prongs that, when bonked, do something special. They can bounce your ball, earn some money, teleport, cut, consume the ball, or spawn special balls. Then there are more elaborate ones, with their own lifepool that must be chiseled down for a powerful trigger. Or collectors that hold your dropped balls to release them later with some big impact on your gains. And more still! Traps, modifiers, combo spots, you name it. The demo, I would believe, shows only a fraction of these, and with the variety already on display, this one is going to be a banger for any addict of the 'number go high' sensation.
INTO THE RESTLESS RUINS
Gosh, I love games like this. Games in which a single core mechanic gets flipped just enough to propose a unique gameplay feature. A twist in the genre, if I say so myself. In this little pixelated roguelike, you have two games for the price of one - a dungeon builder and then, a dungeon crawler. And you control both elements, as they intertwine to form a great and fun loop that quickly becomes addictive... and punishing! You build a deck of dungeon chambers, varying between empty corridors and turns that form your basic connective tissue of a dungeon and more functional rooms - foundries, fireplaces, and cleansing fountains. Your goal is to use sparse resources to construct a layout that is both easy to traverse and keeps you pushing upwards, empowering your run.
After each round of putting a few extra rooms in you enter the Harvest, in which you zoom in on your hero and actually GO around the dungeon you've made. You are fighting monsters, unlocking seals, and picking up buffs you planted beforehand. This was most illuminating to quickly display how lack of care in preparing a proper layout can bite you in the butt - I got lost in my own creation. Created unnecessarily long runs. Or stacked important rooms way too close to each other, like the torch-refilling chambers. Oh yeah, torch - each of your harvests is time-limited by your light source going out, and gosh, it is hard to find your way when you can barely see a few pixels in advance! Not to mention your dwindling life, as the darkness consumes you...
In short, I got hooked. It's fresh, it's unique, I don't ever recall playing anything similar and the loop of setting up your own gauntlet kept fresh for the entire duration of the demo. Very eager to get the full version and crunch it out.
DUNGEON CLAWLER
Now this was a bit of a rough play. Not because the game is bad - far from it! But the demo felt to be in a very raw state. There were no sounds for almost any action. The animations were rudimentary for most things. Everything felt very 'placeholdery' if that makes sense. Like a rough Flash game of the Miniclip or Newgrounds era. But I can definitely overlook this state of the demo, since it is a demo, hoping however that the final product will present a higher degree of polish on that audiovisual front.
The game itself, though, is quite brilliant. A roguelike to the core, it relies on a fun and highly unique take on combat - the Claw Machine. Each hero we'll guide through the dungeon starts with a selection of items that are dropped into the machine and in each combat round, we have a number of draws with our mechanical claw to pick those items up to activate them. Grabbing shields to boost defense, swords, and daggers to deal damage, and so on. Each win expands our collection of items, adding more esoteric components to our pool. Poison damage, reflection, healing, stuns - you name it. Add to that passive perks that modify the gameplay and you have a recipe for a pretty fun and peculiar gameplay loop!
Just really hope for more polish, because other than the previously mentioned lack of it on the game-feel department, there were moments I felt the enemies weren't balanced well. The bastards that dropped spikes into my pool at some point dropped so many of them I could not fetch a single item from my selection, and the simple fight lasted forever! Hope those situations are rare and there will be more ways to avoid getting stuck with'em without a solution.
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