Recently there was an event, the Steam Next Fest, where many developers put up free demos of their games for everyone to try. Naturally I took advantage of this and found many games that now have my interest. And I’m going to talk about five of these, unified by the theme of them involving distinct days as part of how they play.
Blue Prince
Blue Prince was either the first demo I played or the first one that stuck with me, memory is fuzzy like that. You take the role of a man who will inherit the 45 room manor of his great uncle if he’s able to find the 46th room. Because this isn’t an ordinary manor, the layout changes everyday.
How the game works is that you walk around in a first person perspective, and each time you open a door, you have a set of three potential rooms it can open to. Each room you enter detracts from a count of steps, if it runs out you’re done for the day. The demo gives you a four day time limit and removes items to limit your progress, it’s unclear to me if the full game will have a (much longer) time limit.
Some special rooms cost gems to make, and as you get further in the manor doors will start requiring keys. If you get to a locked door without a key or a dead end you’ll have to backtrack to find another path, which will drain your steps. Though for me I never ran out of steps, because it’s fully possible to end up with all dead ends and locked doors barring your progress for the day, in fact it happened to me every day.
Despite there being no apparent danger, for me at least there was an odd sense of fear that was hard to shake. The manor is devoid of people because you’re supposed to be doing the challenge alone, and some important rooms are darkly lit. I wouldn’t call it horror, but it was unnerving.
I’m not sure if I got as far as I could in the demo’s four days, even with a second playthrough, but I got a feel for the story and how it progresses. Documents found in certain rooms give context for the state of the family that left me wanting to find more, and I encountered a safe I couldn’t figure out the combination to. This is a game about acquiring knowledge, so you’re not truly back to square one each day. You have to experiment with placing new rooms to get anywhere instead of the same reliable set.
For more direct and mechanical progress you can also unlock areas in the manor grounds that give you bonuses, which need to be walked to each day to take effect, draining your step resource. Encountering this made me feel a lot less frustrated with the game and its inescapable dead ends.
This game was quite the paradox in that I feel like it’s not for me in several ways, yet I’m still drawn to it. All the other games listed here are ones I was pointed to, but Blue Prince was my own discovery and it was quite the find.
The Crush House
The Crush House is another game that got me to play it multiple times, mainly due to it crashing on me (for reference I played on a Steam Deck). Described as a ‘thirst person shooter’ you are the producer and sole cameraman of the titular reality TV show. You pick four people to star on the show, and then follow them around, filming their drama and making sure to please the demands of audience, displayed as a feed of comments on the side of the screen.
A season of the show starts on Monday and ends on Friday, but if you fail to meet the network expectations for a day of filming you will be canceled immediately. This adds a lot of tension to the game as you only decide what to film, not what happens. If people want something heartwarming but the characters you’re filming start fighting all you can do is film something else. With four people and a decent sized house it can be hard to keep track of all of their locations to know who is most exploitable at the moment.
Whether it’s fighting or romance, the cast will get into something dramatic quickly, and go from one to the other fast. And they’ll vary between playthroughs, though you will notice some recurring themes and conversations. Also as a quick note, there do not appear to be any restrictions on who can romance who, which is good for the gameplay in letting the randomness do its work, but doesn’t feel fully in sync with the game being explicitly set in 1999.
In addition to the reality tv stars, the generic demographics you have to please can feel like characters in their own right at times. Plumbers are obsessed with water features and want them in every shot, while Butt Fans really want you to zoom in on butts. Compared to them the Voyeurs feel normal.
Between days of filming you can walk around the house at night. This is when you can use money earned from ads that play while on commercial break to buy more props, which I never got enough money for. Cast members may sometimes stand around at night, if you break the rules and talk to them they’ll have a favor to ask of you, a sidequest to film something specific. I wasn’t able to get far enough to see the consequences of completing a favor.
Promotional material also advertises that there are dark secrets to uncover, presumably on the nights between filming. Hopefully the full release is more stable, I’d like to make it through a full season and see how my early theories about the dark secrets turn out.
Bloomtale
Bloomtale: A Different Story is a turn based RPG that feels a lot like Persona 5, just in a small American town in the 60s. You play as a girl who was sent with her little brother to stay with her grandfather over the summer after her parent’s divorce, and ends up having to fight demons alongside her friends, with her soul on the line if she can’t beat them before summer’s end.
Individually the things that make Bloomtale feel like Persona 5 just sound generic traits nobody can monopolize, but together they add up. To start with the most blatant, relationships with other characters are tracked with a gameplay mechanic called ‘confidants.’ If you knock down every enemy in a fight, text appears saying ‘hold up’ and you can either unleash a powerful attack to hit all enemies or recruit one as a spirit to use in battle.
Then there’s the fact you use summoned spirits reflecting a character’s personality for their magic, the magical otherworld showing insight into a character’s state of mind, the calendar system, the animal companion who takes a more humanoid form in the magical otherworld and explains how it works, vocal random encounter themes, the protagonist speaking with a seated figure in a special dream space that they form a contract with, so many beats are taken from Persona, 5 specifically, that it can start to feel like a remix. This isn’t even a complete list.
Despite all of that the game does also have things to set itself apart. Gameplay wise things are distinguished by each character having a set guardian they always have access to, and a second free slot for demons recruited from random encounters. This adds some flexibility to party building while still letting each character have their own identity. However, it felt like attacks would miss more often than they’d hit, which got frustrating.
The protagonist also isn’t a mute vessel, she talks outside of player choices and there’s more room for her to act in different ways. I didn’t do it, but you can have her spend the money for an errand on candy for her little brother instead, or lie about the price in order to keep the change. This left me curious to find out how the game could change in different playthroughs.
It’s not the most original game, and the script could do with polishing, but the demo felt promising regardless.
Demonschool
Demonschool is a game with DS style graphics about attending school while being a demon slayer. The protagonist and her friends are assigned a different cursed item to investigate each week, which leads up to a big boss battle.
The progression of days is mostly linear, only plot important events will progress the time of day, so you don’t need to manage your time. Maybe that will change later on, but for now it mainly means that you need to do sidequests when they become available and shouldn’t just save them for later. There’s no danger of hitting your deadline and getting a game over for it.
Combat is where the game truly shines. Battle takes place on a sizable grid where your win condition is to eliminate a set number of enemies and have a character reach the other side of the board. Attacking an enemy will knock them back, you can hit them into other enemies to spread damage around, or into an ally to execute a combo attack.
Each action a character takes requires an increasing amount of energy, of which you have a set amount each turn. So having each party member do something lets you do more, three characters taking one action takes the same resources as a character acting for the third time that turn.
You’re not locked into any action until you press the button to end your turn, and you’ll see the results of your turn as you set them up, so you’re encouraged to take your time to fiddle with different approaches. And there’s a scoring system to reward winning in the minimum amount of turns. It’s a system that lets you coast if you want, but rewards mastery.
While the game has a literal ‘monster of the week’ format, it’s also up front about the overarching conspiracies and such that the overall narrative will focus on. I felt that a few party members were a bit one note even in the special scenes for increasing your relationship with them, but this was only a small slice of the story.
Something is clearly up with the island the game is set on, and the demo concludes with things escalating even further. I want to see what happens next and how combat will open up with the teased addition of even more party members.
Dungeons of Hinterberg
Dungeons of Hinterberg is an action RPG that places you as a monster slayer on vacation, specifically vacation for going into dungeons and slaying. In the demo I got to explore a snow covered area where I got the ability to conjure a hoverboard to move around and grind rails on, which made basic movement fun.
The dungeon in the demo was a Super Mario Galaxy like environment, with small planetoids in a strange magical space you could walk all around. Combat felt fairly simple but I did get taken out once, some tougher enemies had attacks that were difficult to dodge.
After completing the dungeon it was back to town, where I had a long list of potential characters I could spend time with. Each offered different potential benefits, and the game drops a clear hint that you shouldn’t expect to be able to get all of them on one playthrough.
The demo closed with a hint of the overarching plot, with the protagonist receiving a vague warning of dark secrets around town. I enjoyed the game and will look into the full release, but the demo was so short and sweet, covering just one day, that I don’t have much to say here.
And that’s all that I’ll talk about here. There were other games that caught my eye, but I wanted to keep this to a set group. While the big budget games have been going through some headline making roughness, the upcoming indie games have a lot of clear promise.