For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the PlayStation 4 version of Fate/Samurai Remnant, tho the game itself did think it was the PS5 version at the end. This game, from Koei Tecmo, Omega Force, Kou Shibusawa, Aniplex, and Type-Moon came out last year but the demo only came out this week.
I didn't know about this game and the PlayStation Store webpage for it didn't give much information. there are no screenshots, no videos, and you have to scroll down to the bottom to find out that it's an action RPG. In the demo the action aspect of the game is very clear and mostly explained. The game uses blocks of text and a screenshot for the tutorial so it's not great, but most is done in easy fights where you can see it in action so i mostly understood what it wanted me to do.
What isn't explained at all in this demo is the RPG aspect. my character did gain levels, but it was never explained. It's most likely because this demo is less than an hour long and focuses on the beginning of the game. i would imagine that the RPG aspect is explored in the next section, that's not included in the demo.
What we do get in this demo are several videos, animated and in-game, exploring history, backstory, and what's happening. after the demo is finished there's a cool trailer for the game that makes a lot of sense as we know the rough outline of the game by this point.
This isn't a perfect demo. as well as the game not knowing what version it was, at the beginning the game got stuck for a couple of minutes in the settings menu. i cut out of this video when nothing was happening and skipped to when it had fixed itself. there were a couple of instances where the game had framerate issues or stuttering. thankfully whilst those were noticeable, they never got in the way of gameplay. One aspect of the gameplay i wasn't keen on was how the story jumped from the present to the past and back to the present and it just felt unnecessary and that it didn't add anything to the story compared to if the story had been told linearly.
I did come away from this demo enjoying my time with the game, so ultimately the demo did work as i know enough of the story to be interested, i understand the basic gameplay and know it's something i can do and enjoy, and that this PS4 version of the game looks great and it doesn't feel like a downgrade from what would be a better PS5 version. so i do recommend you try out the demo if you're interested.
