There’s a Demo-centric Steam festival or something like that going on right now. My inbox has been blowing up with messages about this game’s demo and that game’s demo, and since Fallen Angel fell through for idiotic reasons and I should probably cover something new/upcoming rather than slinking back into my old-game happy place, I decided to spend some time playing through a bunch of different demos and looking for something to blow me away. I own Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII because I liked its demo (even after hating Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy XIII-2), so my bar for demos isn’t monumentally high. Somehow, the eight games I chose barely cleared or failed to clear that low bar.

Skellboy Refractured can at least offer better performance

I decided to start with something familiar: Skellboy, which I reviewed on the Nintendo Switch back in February. That version of the game received one patch to improve the game’s performance, after which the still-stuttering technical mess was left unfixed. One major benefit of the game landing on the PC is the greater likelihood that it’ll run at a locked 60 FPS. That doesn’t change the floaty combat, less-than-great dialog, and other issues that don’t revolve around Skellboy‘s performance. But hey—apparently there’s multiplayer now. Priorities! Honestly, I started with Skellboy (which I gave a 5/10 to) to give the other demos a chance to shine by way of comparison. As you’ll soon see, it didn’t work out that way.

Of Bird and Cage is profoundly awkward and uncomfortable

Of Bird and Cage is an interactive symphonic metal game I was really curious to try. Let’s get this out of the way early: everything about this game is rape-y. The protagonist is a young, damaged girl with a drug addiction, no ability to stand up for herself, and a penchant for talking to creepy guys who end up punching or chloroforming her. Of Bird and Cage‘s store page implies that it explores the darker side of something like Beauty and the Beast, which means that this overwhelming grossness will continue to spiral. There are some topics that require nuance. If this game is anything like its demo, it murdered nuance with a hammer and set it on fire in the street. The visuals are ugly, there’s enough head bob (which can’t be turned off) to suggest that you’re playing as a bobblehead, there are QTEs and timed sequences, and it’s never obvious what can and should be interacted with. This is Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy done worse.

9 Monkeys of Shaolin is unremarkable compared to its peers

The whole time I was playing 9 Monkeys of Shaolin, I was thinking to myself, “This is kind of like a more boring version of Sacred Citadel,” which isn’t great considering that Sacred Citadel was a more boring and streamlined version of other games. A good beat-em-up has a certain rhythm to it, but 9 Monkeys of Shaolin spams groups of armored enemies and ranged attackers who require constant, weirdly timed parrying to beat, and this parrying spoils the fluidity of the combat in a big way. At times, I could only manage to get one or two hits in between parries. Also, the dodge button being mapped to an Xbox controller’s A button instead of the B button feels deeply wrong for some reason. I expected more.

The Protagonist: EX-1 has a great idea and terrible balance

It was around this point that I started to panic at how many bad demos I was playing and downloaded a bunch of sRPGs. The Protagonist: EX-1 easily has the most immediately appealing mix of elements, combining Mass Effect‘s vibe with gameplay that marries the standard XCOM formula with the punching and kicking combos of Legend of Legaia. Imagine my frustration, then, when I quickly died to the first enemy. Restarting the game revealed that I had no idea how to skip cutscenes (one was skippable by holding the space bar, but the skip prompt didn’t show up when mashing keys during the first two long ones). It quickly dawned on me that I should be using non-melee abilities rather than punching robots at close range, but then I walked into a room and got ambushed by a robot that acted first. It stunned me and called two allies, killing me in just one turn before I had received a single chance to act. Hard pass.

Black Legend seeks to overcomplicate your damage-dealing

Black Legend‘s look and engine-feel are strongly reminiscent of the rough RPG gems that came out around 2013-2014, but it’s actually a turn-based strategy game. What I didn’t expect was for it to be inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics. Throwing stones? Check. Each character ending a turn by choosing a direction to face, with attack bonuses being given to side and back attacks? Check. Classes that memorize moves so that they can use them when moving to other classes? Pretty sure that’s a check. The bleakness of everything is very Bloodborne, though, which doesn’t mesh with a genre that’s already prone to repetition.

The biggest dealbreaker is the alchemy system: some actions like throwing a rock inflict humours onto your opponent, and combining specific humours and then launching an attack that cements them results in extra damage. This is supposedly a big part of Black Legend‘s strategy. I’m calling it right now, though: forcing you to waste your turns setting up damage just slows down the gameplay, and when your starting point is Final Fantasy Tactics—already one of the slowest turn-based strategy systems in gaming—everything is set up for maximum time-wasting. This will probably be an easy game to tire of. Thirty minutes in, I hit F11 by accident while taking screenshots and chose to quit out because I was tired of it.

I’m concerned about Lucifer Within Us‘ mechanics’ rigidity

Full disclosure—by the point I loaded up Lucifer Within Us, I was so exhausted by the series of disappointments I had just tried that I could barely see straight. Was that why I struggled so hard to get into the flow of its detective process? Or is it really as obtuse as it seemed? Either way, spamming the player with lore and tutorials isn’t a great way to ease them into things. Paradise Killer (which is similar to Lucifer Within Us in many ways) benefited from its open-world and great clue-tracking systems, allowing you to uncover its weirdness at your own pace. Here, it felt like I was constantly hitting roadblocks. I had a working theory of how the crime had unfolded, but I couldn’t dig into the necessary topics or use the accusing system to test the hypothesis that I wanted to prove or disprove. Still, it’s possible that I was simply missing some obvious detail that brought everything together. I haven’t written this game off yet.

Oniria Crimes appears to be outright broken in many ways

Oniria Crimes is a voxel-based investigation game that I stumbled across while looking around, and it looked really promising. After playing the demo, I trashed the key request that I had put in for it. The demo is a mess. Stylistically, I can’t hold anything against Oniria Crimes; the voxel art looks unique and colorful, and I can’t imagine confusing this with another game (even another one that uses voxel art). I hate the 3D minesweeper hacking game with a fiery passion, though, and entire lines of dialogue would fail to appear when I tried to speed up the many, many, many lines of dialog. This is another game that could stand to ease players in a bit more before drowning them with information. Eventually, I managed to softlock the demo entirely. Games don’t typically become better-programmed the further you play.

Stirring Abyss is probably the demo that I enjoyed the most

Stirring Abyss is another game that buries you in information early on, but there’s a certain je ne sais quoi that I appreciate about it. It doesn’t hurt that it gets a lot of things right that the other games I looked at got wrong. It’s visually interesting, unlike Black Legend. The early gameplay feels reasonably challenging but well balanced anyway, unlike The Protagonist: EX-1. The story revolves around undersea Cthulhu monsters being fought by soldiers in old-timey diving suits, which is interesting unlike Skellboy and doesn’t make me want to scrub my brain like Of Bird and Cage. Stirring Abyss could become repetitive if it continues to make its missions longer without shifting the scenery and giving you more tactical options, but I do like what I’ve played of it, and the demo does a good job of making me want to play more.

That having been said, all of my divers had suit oxygen readings that read 20/20 despite depleting naturally as they moved, so they started to go insane from hypoxia and I have no idea how I was supposed to know that. Right now I’m assuming it’s a bug. Or maybe I read one of the game’s tutorial prompts wrong and don’t grasp how the mechanic works (though the 20/20 display is weird either way).

Anyway, I made a bunch of screenshot galleries while playing through these demos. Non-paywalled:

Skellboy Refractured demo screenshots
Of Bird and Cage demo screenshots
9 Monkeys of Shaolin demo screenshots
The Protagonist: EX-1 demo screenshots
Black Legend demo screenshots
Lucifer Within Us demo screenshots
Oniria Crimes demo screenshots
Stirring Abyss demo screenshots

Trying out 8 demos to find something good first appeared on Killa Penguin