For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the Nintendo Switch version of Judero, from developer Talha and Jack.
one of the most striking things about Judero when you first see it is the art style. everything in game was originally hand made and animated using stop motion. this was then put into the game and used as assets. so it certainly has a unique feel about it, when compared to the vast majority of games released. the thing that didn't quite work for me were how the characters looked. the enemies being as they are was fine, but for most of the characters we saw it just didn't work for me.
Whilst i'm talking about things that didn't work, i found that a lot of the conversations we had were people felt needlessly wordy. i genuinely questioned in this demo whether we were getting story stuff, philosophy stuff, or just crazy stuff. Even though i'm from England, some of the English used wasn't too familiar so i would've appreciated somewhere there being a quest list to help me better keep track of what's what. in the town i visited in the demo i was chatting with one guy and i'm not sure if they gave me a quest to do or if it's banter. again, even if it's an optional thing, i would've liked something telling me if it's a quest or not just to help me keep better track of things.
One thing Judero did well was the tutorial. when we start the demo we have a companion and because of how it's written it feels like we've been together for a while. our companion helps out as our tutorial guide and for the most part they're good. but when the tutorial is over, the game uses the in-game world and a bit of story telling to make this change feel natural in a way i greatly appreciated.
Combat was mostly fine and it felt quite fluid. but every now and then i'd get caught up in trees and it became less clear what was happening, or it was difficult to spot the spawning bugs in dark areas. the boss fights were a little challenging at first but i managed to defeat all of them in the demo in a satisfying way.
For me, the demo could be better as i don't have an idea what the overall story is, if there is one. for a game being based on folk tales, i didn't learn if this is a game where i deal with individual stories with no overarching story or if this has one overarching story and the folk tales are used to tell it. so whilst the combat was fun and the enemies were cool, because i don't know how long it is or what the story is i come away from this demo with it being on a wishlist rather than an immediate buy for me.
