Demo Driver 8: The Stanley Parable Demonstration
Please do not read the alt text for this image.
It’s hard to talk about The Stanley Parable without sounding like you’re a pretentious twit who uses the word “metatextual” far more often than is healthy. (The FDA recommends using it no more than twice per 1000 words.) And The Stanley Parable Demonstration is even a layer beyond that. It’s not so much a demo as it is a metatextual examination of game demos, layered on top of a game that is itself an examination of choice and the illusion of agency of games. So it’s at once trying to convince you to buy a game based on nothing from the actual game, and it’s also trying to point out the futility of trying to demonstrate a game in that fashion.
While it may come as something of a surprise based on all of that, it’s actually fairly effective at giving you an idea of what you’re going to be getting into. It presents its questions, gets you to ask some questions of your own, and the whole thing plays out with just the right mixture of not actually being a game adjacent with just enough player agency. Even if it’s mostly an illusion.
Demo Driver 8: Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages (#206)
It’d be really nice if some of these games provided better screenshots instead of looking like a hot mess in still frames.
Let’s hear it for the crazy ambitious indie game.
I’m not talking about indie games that come down to “examining a new idea,” that’s just a thing. No, I’m talking about indie titles that see a big idea and just go for it, ones that say things like “let’s mash together space exploration, sim flight elements, and RPG gameplay into a single space.” I’m talking about games that bite off way more than they can chew or even fit in their mouth at once.
Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages definitely falls under that header. It is, in many ways, a mess – but it’s a mess because it’s pulling in a bunch of disconnected genres and doing the best it can to try and make all of them work together. I shan’t scorn it for the parts where it falls down, because I love how enthusiastically it tries. There are a lot of games all going on at the same time here, and while I’ll be the first to say that it doesn’t seem to quite congeal, boy does it ever try hard. Which is pretty keen.
Demo Driver 8: Hammerfight (#308)
Spin round for what?
My cats have a pretty standard routine at this point that passes for the two of them fighting, and it’s kind of hilarious. They’ll both be perched on their hind legs glaring at one another, but neither one of them wants to actually hurt the other, just sort of whap the other around. The result is that for a couple moments they look as if they’re just going to glare or pounce, then one of them smacks the other without claws, and then the whole thing devolves into kitty paw-slaps and yowls. A confused mess of angry fur and smacking.
Hammerfight reminds me a lot of that. Not in the sense of adorable cats, but in the idea that it’s a confusing mess of a slap-fight. It’s got a fascinating and engaging premise, totally, but it’s an idea that never does a good job developing beyond that, and interesting aesthetics and concepts don’t make for a good game.
Demo Driver 8: Sugar Cube: Bittersweet Factory (#447)
It would be really nice if even the designers could get a single shot of this game that did not make it look unbelievably messy, because that certainly turned me off.
The vast majority of games are mediocre. We all know this even as we don’t really think about it. Your game collection is, I’m sure, filled with games that you consider actively good rather than lackluster, and it’s easy to sort of extrapolate outward from that. Most of the games you can find aren’t bad, though, nor are they really all that good. They’re just… there. They work. They’re not worth feeling a great deal of joy or sorrow over. They’re mediocre. Filler. Likely impossible to have any strong emotions about either way, even.
Sugar Cube: Bittersweet Factory is a game that is mediocre in every way, shape, and form. It is yet another puzzle platformer in which you move from screen to screen and try to figure out how to bypass the game’s obstacles to get to the end. It is also another game that falls victim to the “demo cannot sustain half an hour of play” curse that I get all uppity about, but even with that being said I feel I have a relatively solid grasp of the game from my limited play time. It’s neither bad nor good. It’s just there.
Demo Driver 8: Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (#98)
And you find yourself thinking “I could be playing a game that’s just as dude-centric but with Joe Mad designs,” so that’s not a ringing endorsement.
The Castlevania franchise has been in an odd place as years have gone by. It has produced a lot of classic games over the years, lots of stuff well worth playing, and it’s one of the few franchises to pull of a wholesale genre switch successfully. It’s been good, by and large. Sure, not every game has been a thunderous success, but there’s a sense of continuity just the same. And there’s a conscious effort by the people in charge not to just turn Castlevania into a franchise of the same thing every few years – see also the mention of a wholesale genre switch above.
At the same time, one wonders how many stories you’ve really got about shaggy dudes going off to fight Dracula in a big old castle over and over.
I commend Castlevania: Lords of Shadow for what it’s trying to do, totally. I commend it for being a reboot, I commend it for once again trying to reinvent the series in terms of gameplay, and I can’t say that it’s doing a bad job, exactly. But I can say that it’s a game which would have been better served had it come out three years earlier or so, and I can’t say it sports a particularly good demo. Even if it does feature Sir Patrick Stewart.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 