Some Steam Next Fest 2024 demos!

This seemed cute so I grabbed the demo! It even let me make my own dragon from preset customisation options. I think it’d be neat if “colour” let you pick it separately from markings. It has the problem WoW used to with furry races the face deciding the the entire colour scheme before the new customisation system

For some reason entering the game it lost my resolution settings and ended up in a weird windowed full screen (as I set it to windowed on the main menu). The controls are alright though it does feel a little clunky for the fact it wants to be a precision platformer, which is a pity. I feel off early on enough times to be completely turned off by continuing, but still, there’s a decent concept here and I hope the devs refine it.

Yeah I ain’t going up there

Also when I quit to main menu it reset to full screen again :V

Amusingly, this isn’t a Next Fest game, it just got the demo released recently and I thought it was. STILL PLAYED IT THOUGH!

So this game is clearly inspired by Spyro, there’s absolutely no doubt about that.

Though it certainly has a lot more serious story to the intro than the original Spyro trilogy ever did. That said the demo clearly takes place on an area after the first major boss because you get this lovely animated intro setting the plot… and then an opening gameplay cutscene that’s completely unrelated to it other than Glyde currently can’t fly, that’s fine though it is a demo and I understand they probably wanted to leave as much of the open plot off it so players can just try it out. It was a little jarring though haha

The game runs pretty smooth but it did weirdly hitch every time I did a new animation… I’ll chalk that up to in development demo issues, because otherwise it honestly played how it expected, you run around as a dragon and instead of a dragonfly you have a little wisp called “wing” who will collect items etc… with an hack-and-slash style system for fighting??? I wasn’t expecting to get in game ratings like I was playing Devil May Cry! You also have health instead of Spyro’s (or Crash Bandicoot’s tbh) hit system

Though audio balancing still needs tweaking, poor Voltraz was being drowned out by the waterfall behind him, Gylde wasn’t so absolutely just Voltraz’s lines being too quiet. It’s in development so I imagine they’re still tweaking that! But overall the sound design is pretty good, music flowing in to each area without sounding out of place. The demo area looked good and relied on stylisation over fidelity, which is always a good point in my book.

There’s also a decent variety on the dragons, which absolutely feel partially inspired by various dragons in media, though the names gave me a WoW vibe, but I’m not complaining. It’s nice to have these as dragons in the world though and not just Spyro’s “oop you rescued me! *disappears*”

Here’s to hoping they hit their goal ‘cus I barely touched the demo apparently (2%… despite playing for over an hour) and they’re still going on Kickstarter (almost there!)

I had played the game enough to at least unlock an elemental form for Glyde and suddenly that UI in the bottom left made a lot more sense. There’s absolutely a lot of potential here and I’m excited to see more of it once it hits funding (because I think it might!)

The size of the demo means I’ll absolutely be coming back to this

This was a short and sweet demo but it absolutely sold the game to me and I was already interested! resnijars have a visual style that honestly reminds me of Cave Story and Pixel’s work!

The music was also good to vibe to too! That all said maybe don’t have white enemies on white backgrounds?

I’m opening this simply: If you like Hollow Knight (or maybe Ori too?), wish-list this NOW. What I played of it reminded me of the meachanics seen in it including some emphasis on pogo-ing with your weapon and ricocheting projectiles, basically things I cannot get in the way I was taking screenshots BUT KNOW THEY WERE THERE.

The game is also gorgeous, the art team had done fantastic work and I had to not get too distracted looking at all the details in the scenery.

Also there’s this creature

This was a really short demo, it absolutely will be a fun little puzzle platformer! It takes VVVVVV’s simple mechanic based puzzling except instead of flips it’s rotating your direction of gravity 90 degrees from your current position

It is cute though!

When I watched Socket and Pocket of Hangry Hydra play through this on stream, I did compare it to Fantasy Life and Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale. The zones and resource gathering specifically is what reminded me of Fantasy Life, with Recettear’s comparison just being well, Amber Isle also being a shop simulator. It does open up with a simultaneously limited but complicated character creator, but it’s okay ‘cus you’re gonna be cute!

You can barely see it here, but you can have heterochromia! So I made this dino pal based off my hedgehog but I was being dumb about the options and got the colours backwards OOPS

The demo of what I played (it sadly can’t save) was pretty cute but also fairly tutorial heavy. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just a point that unlike some other games with similar mechanics, Amber Isle doesn’t just want to make sure you get the mechanics but also slowly feeds them to you so that you’re just swamped with mechanics immediately. But it does early on pose the hardest question… what to name your shop

So many people would take literal hours to decide this question. But overall it’s cute! I love the dino designs and I also enjoy the resource gathering, it’s absolutely got on my wishlist!

There’s not much I can say about this! It’s a cute puzzler about being a hedgehog who collects their hoglets either directly or more! Music was cute, and so are the visuals. Not much more to it! You can turn on colours in an accessibility menu which is nice!

Other than that it does add in mechanics on an in-game season basis. The demo covers all levels in summer and the first set in autumn that added a new mechanic. Neat!