Demo Play Thursday - CASSETTE BOY On PS4

For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the PlayStation 4 version of CASSETTE BOY from Forever Entertainment.

I can't say i had heard of this game before i downloaded it from the PSN, but reading it's store page was really interesting. at first glance, the game looks to be a retro Game Boy style RPG but when you read it's store page it becomes clear that there's more to it than that.

This is a short demo and the game makes it clear that the final version that, i think, is out now could be a little different from this. But i feel we get a good look at CASSETTE BOY. the music was really nice, the graphics were mostly fine, apart from when our character who's mostly coloured white goes onto what appears to be white sand as it's hard to tell the two apart, and i thought the tutorial for the game mechanics was handled well.

This is a game where you need to go slow, talk to everyone, and then go forward using the information you just gained. in this demo, so it could have been changed in the released game, we're not provided with an obvious go here and do that. but by talking to people we know we're meant to get the sword, we know how much the shop deed costs so we should aim to get it, and we know that the locals are frustrated by the big rock so we should be looking at ways of clearing it out of the way.

But with this demo being as short as it is and the game's story being mostly unclear, apart from the moment to moment stuff i mentioned above, i really did feel that this demo needed a trailer to showcase the game. the demo shows off the early ideas so if you're interested in mechanics then this demo maybe enough, but i'm more interested in the story and i have no idea what it really is here and i don't think the game does enough to sell it to me. as for the mechanics, well moving the world to hide things is straight from Echochrome on PS3, which i did a playthrough of it's demo before https://youtube.com/live/KW2tikPtS8g, so for me it's nothing new and this demo showed nothing new to me in it's implementation. I kinda feel that players would learn more from watching a trailer than playing this demo, but playing the demo itself is a pleasant experience. 

Demo Play Thursday - Front Mission 3: Remake On PS4

For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the PlayStation 4 version of Front Mission 3: Remake from MegaPixel Studio and Forever Entertainment.

I haven't played any of the Front Mission games before so i was hoping that the demo would start with a good tutorial and not rely on prior knowledge of the previous two games in the series. There is a tutorial for the basics, but as soon as i got into actual proper battles, more things were popping up that i just had to guess. for the White Flag situation, i think i understand what's happening, but near the end when my character was doing 3 attacks when every time before it was only doing 1 i have no idea why that happened.

whilst i enjoyed the music in the game, i found the art to be surprisingly poor. i'd say all bar two of the character pictures looked odd, and not in a good way, and whilst most of the buildings looked like buildings the art was very simple. Apart from the mechs, most of the art and design of the game seemed old and low resolution. i did like the style of the old websites and navigating the internet, but that's more from a nostalgia point of view as it looks familiar. personally, i found the poor quality of art and design overall distracting. it felt like a phone game upscaled.

As for the story, it didn't really grab me. some of the character interactions felt odd, and how we instantly helped someone break the law at the end of the demo also seemed unbelievable. 

So whilst the demo was fine, i didn't enjoy playing the game and won't be seeking out the game now. the demo is best for those curious, but other than that it's hard to recommend. 

Demo Play Thursday - UNABLES On Switch

For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the Nintendo Switch game UNABLES, developed for consoles by Forever Entertainment.

From the eShop page, i mostly knew how this was going to work. It reminded me of puzzle games back in the PS3 era, in a good way. I wanted to play the demo as i was curious just how well it would actually control.

There are two ways to control the game, the default is via the analogue sticks and there's an optional gyroscope (motion controls) mode. i stuck with the default but there were no options to finely tune them. with motion controls, you can tune the sensitivity. but there's nothing for the default. i personally found them to be too sensitive and not offering fine controls. the first couple of stages can be a bit of a blur because of how fast the camera is moving and swinging around the stage.

I can imagine it'll get easier with time, but this demo only offered 3 stages. each one awards stars for completing tasks in each level. I'm not a fan of these sort of games, gatekeeping the game behind ability seems like a waste of game. especially when you get stuck like i did. i couldn't do the final stage of the demo. i did enjoy the other two, but if i'm getting stuck so early on i worry that i won't be able to complete the first set of levels as i wouldn't get enough stars. there doesn't seem to be a way to play the locked levels in easy mode either. so if i can't progress and i can't play them in easy mode, my guess would be i'd stop playing. Even the demo locked the second and third stages behind star requirements!

Each of the three stages looked very different from each other and what we had to do in them were very different. in the first stage, our goal was to interact with the environment in very simple ways. but in the second stage we  had to interact with our opponent and the referee. The third stage was the most difficult as we had to manipulate a victim across their crime scene. The problem i had more than once was that if the victim gets to their chalk outline, nothing else interacts with them. but i still had a tommy gun and no idea what to do with it. the level didn't finish until i told it to or until the time ran out.

But that incident highlighted that this is a tough puzzle game. there is no hint system and seemingly there is a correct order to solves the puzzles in. I enjoyed the idea behind it but i wanted to play this casually. the ramp up in puzzle difficulty was far too steep even for this demo. i appreciate the creativeness and ideas in each level, but it does feel like difficulty became even more difficult for them to manage. after playing the demo i feel like i wouldn't be able to progress and i would get frustrated that level design got in the way of the puzzle.

UNABLES is a great looking game and i did enjoy the music. i recommend people try out the demo, it does a good job of getting the puzzle ideas across and what is possible. But as for the getting the game, i could only recommend it for those who like a challenging puzzle game and play for that challenge and not for those who play puzzle games casually.