Demo Disc #18: Was there cake in this?!
Greetings, digital nomads!
We're tucking and rolling straight into housekeeping this week. You may have noticed the last couple of newsletters have been published on a Saturday, rather than a Friday. This is because my work schedule changed at the start of this year, and the latter half of the week is now much busier and more rigid than it was in 2024.
This is a temporary situation that I expect to last a few months—although I can't be more precise than that at present. I'm currently deliberating how to fit the newsletter into this new schedule. I still intend to publish on Fridays, but if this continues to prove unfeasible, I may formally switch the publication date to Saturdays until my schedule becomes more open again. Needless to say, I will let you know if and when this happens.
That's all on the announcement front. This week's demos are a weird and broadly wonderful bunch, capped off by a stonking Demo of the Week. Expect backroom blasting, collectible frogs, and psychedelic competitive mindjacking.
Oddcore
Developer: Scarecrow Arts Release: Coming soon
Oddcore is apparently based on memetic online story scaffolding The Backrooms. This makes it something I would normally avoid, for the same reason I tend not to feature demos for sequels. I prefer to spotlight games that are wholly original works, enjoyable with minimal additional context.
However, in Oddcore's case, that aspect of its personality is second to the fact it is a genuinely good shooter. It's a round-based, time-attack roguelite-y affair, where you jump between strange liminal dimensions blasting waves of shadowy foes. Survive long enough to harvest the souls of the fallen, and you get to spend them on upgrades and additional time.
The effect is not unlike a single-player STRAFTAT, with speed and rapid rotation of maps being a core part of its appeal. Although I'm not sold on the art, which renders its world through a bleary, chromatically aberrated lens that makes me feel a bit ill, the underlying gunplay is fastidiously engineered. Basic weapon modes buck and snarl in a gratifying manner, while each weapon possesses a creative alt-fire, such as a rapid burst-fire mode for the pistol, and a spinfusor-style exploding disc for the shotgun (if you don't know what a spinfusor is, I recommend you acquaint yourself with my history of Tribes) .
There's also a spinkling of buildcrafting going on, with you allowed to pick two special abilities like a dash and a rocket jump before throwing yourself into the fray. It all amounts to a shooter that's far better than I expected, although I'd advise you to tread carefully if you're prone to motion sickness.
Download the Oddcore demo here.
Bonnie Bear Saves Frogtime
Developer: Bonte Avond Release: Coming soon
I can't put my finger on Bonnie Bear Saves Frogtime, which is partly why I'm including it. Everything suggests it's an entirely sweet and innocent adventure about hanging out with your pals. Bonnie is a teddy-ish bear suffering from low self-esteem (though not low enough to stop her wearing an incredibly loud frog costume) who is drawn into a Pokemon-like game of collecting and then duelling frogs with her buddies.
Mechanically it's as a blend of point 'n' click adventure and light turn-based strategy. Through the demo you challenge various people to frog-game duels, where you must move your frogs across a grid to reach your rival's endzone before they can shuffle their frogs to yours. You can accelerate your amphibians' movements by leaping over other frogs, while there are special types of frog to collect that bend the game's rules, such as a "pusher" frog that shoves rival frogs backward with its tongue.
This minigame is perfectly playable, but the reason Bonnie Bear Saves Frogtime intrigues me is because it wields a slightly cursed energy that eludes me as to whether its deliberate or not. The game is laced with abrupt, humorous asides that sometimes land and sometimes don't, while the voice acting ranges from mildly undercooked to downright bizarre, particularly the shark character who seems to gargle all their lines. The character designs are also really weird. Your friends are a dude with a pineapple for a head, a homuncular wooden-puppet thing, and a living Punch doll with a face so large it would get Alex Honnold's stomach fluttering.
There are countless games around that aim to establish a creepy/cute aesthetic. But I suspect Bonnie Bear Saves Frogtime drifts into these waters entirely by accident. Which, ironically, makes it more effectively unsettling.
Download the Bonnie Bear saves Frogtime demo here.
Wild Cosmos
Developer: Heytibo Release: 2025
This pleasant little puzzle-platformer borrows the sphere-hopping concept from Mario Galaxy, casting you as a cute wee spaceman who crash lands in the midst of a strange, colourful asteroid belt. With bits of your ship scattered across the belt's heavenly bodies, you must navigate between their gravitational fields to retrieve the parts and repair your vessel.
This planet hopping is entirely what makes Wild Cosmos worth a dabble. Following a short introduction, you start on a vaguely earth-ish sphere, traversing it by jumping across floating logs and onto giant leaves. But you soon punch through this initial planetoid's atmosphere, bouncing across interconnecting moons to access weird tubular worlds, dodging water-squirting seahorses on a cylindrical ocean planet, and weaving between spiky tumbleweeds on a hotdog-shaped lava world.
Mechanically, Wild Cosmos is pretty rudimentary. Your two abilities are jumping and whacking things with a spanner to collect the ship parts you need. It's also not without its flaws. The fact that you insta-die when you fall in water particularly grates, since the shape of the worlds world often means hazards are obscured until you plunge into them. Still, pootling about Wild Cosmos' topsy-turvy planets provoked enough quiet wonder in me to give it a nod.
Download the Wild Cosmos demo here.
Powerplay
Developer: Frantic Release: Tba
It was only a matter of time before some cunning developer spliced together the RTS and the factory-building sim. Powerplay is exactly this. It takes a standard Command and Conquer scenarios, right down to the throwback isometric visuals, then infuses the systems with production chains and automation.
You start out a round of Powerplay by ferrying water to a central tube to grow clones of workers, who you then assign to mine basic resources like iron and stone. Soon enough, you'll gain a sufficient amount to begin constructing factories, which you connect to resource depots with conveyor belts. Eventually, you'll produce items like assault rifles, bullets, tanks and so forth, which you can then assign to workers and begin conquering the map.
It's all slickly presented and smoothly thought out. I particularly like how easy the game makes it to connect buildings with conveyor belts, seamlessly switching to a top-down perspective for a better view of your belt layout. The actual combat is very nineties' RTS, so your enjoyment of the game will hinge somewhat on your tolerance for the ol' build 'n' rush. That said, it's an intriguing synthesis with undeniable potential.
Download the Powerplay demo here.
Demo of the Week: Mindwave
Developer: Holohammer Release: Coming soon
Far and away the best demo I played this week, Mindwave is a cyberpunk Warioware acid trip erupting with personality and style. It puts you in the scuffed high-tops of antisocial teenager Pandora, who drags herself to a gaming competition at Mindwave towers in the hope of winning 10 million dollars.
The "game" you play is framed as a battle between Pandora's mind and that of her opponent, taking the form of a rapid-fire sequence of microgames themed around the personality of your foe. In the demo, you square off against another teenage girl called Starlight who is Pandora's polar opposite, bursting with energy and sweetness. Hence, the games are all things like feeding cute animals, popping bubble-wrap, and punching numbers into your flip-phone. You have mere seconds to complete each task, the frantic action accompanied by a sunny electropop soundtrack and gorgeous interstitial animations.
It's a 10,000-volt surge of joy cabled directly into your cerebellum. I don't want to say too much else about it because it's worth experiencing yourself. But there are a couple of more practical points to make. First, don't expect to beat Mindwave's demo on the first try. It's designed to be difficult and disorienting, so just enjoy the ride for your first run. Second, this is an unusual game that requires a keyboard and mouse. Each microgame has a unique control scheme that uses different bits of both, so there isn't much point plugging in a controller or downloading it onto your Steam Deck. But don't let that put your off. This is worth sitting down at your PC for.