Demo Disc #13: Gunfight at the O.K. Corral – enemy turn
Greetings, digital nomads!
After a short hiatus, we’re back on the demo-scene. I had a pleasant if fleeting time in the States, where if you want to know, I visited Obsidian Entertainment for a sneak-peek of Avowed. Pop over to Eurogamer if you want to read my thoughts on that (there's also a supplementary feature on Avowed’s links to Pillars of Eternity. This concludes the shameless plugging.) But to give a quickfire rundown, I reckon it’ll be a perfectly enjoyable fantasy romp when it launches, albeit one that may not dazzle through its raw originality.
Anyway, we’re not here to discuss full games. There are plenty of websites for that! This week’s newsletter is a bit of a platypus, a fairly sedate affair the middle, but things get a bit wild at either end. Expect caveman capers, liminal spaces, and the unlikeliest demo of the week yet.
Primal Planet
Developer: Seethingswarm Release: 2025
Primal Planet is a game that meddles with time in multiple ways. Not only does it flagrantly ignore the 64 million year gap between dinosaurs and humanity, but it also bypasses the two decades between 16-bit games and crafting systems.
This is a prehistoric metroidvania wherein you play a caveman searching for his family in a land prowled by terrible lizards. But among the familiar mix of 2D platforming and incremental pathway unveiling are a few neat twists. Travelling alongside you is a cute little dino pal who helps you out in fights and passively eats bugs and fish to replenish its health bar. Meanwhiles, the stone age tools and weapons you use often serve multiple purposes. Your spears serve to fend off dinosaurs as you’d expect, but can also embed into walls to create ad-hoc platforms. Igniting them at fires, meanwhile, will transform the into torches you can use to clear path-blocking thickets.
It's one of those games that’s just instantly, thoroughly competent. Pretty, evocative pixel art, sleek and responsive movement, and pleasing mixture of puzzles, combat, and resource management (you can distract dinosaurs by throwing food at them, but these you also use food to heal). The story also doesn’t necessarily proceed as you might expect. Well worth a half-hour of your time.
Download the Primal Planet demo here.
Green Heights
Developer: Samuel Dufour Release: Coming soon
Our debut demo of the week Lorn’s Lure left me with a craving for grungy first-person platforming, and while Green Heights is a less sophisticated experience overall, it nonetheless ticks many of the same boxes. Starting from the base of a towering cylinder of architectural anomalies, you’re given the straightforward yet formidable task of ascending as high as you possibly can.
The platforming here is even purer than that of Lorn’s Lure, with no climbing axes or momentum-based sliding to factor in. You just hop from one mossy plinth to the next, pausing occasionally to parse the path ahead. Yet from its simple 3D geometry, Green Heights ekes a surprising amount of platforming variety. The movement, meanwhile, expertly balances fluidity with precision, letting you string together pixel-perfect jumps with surprising ease.
The punishment for falling is severe – no matter how high you ascend, you’ll have to start again if you drop all the way to the bottom. But this exacting demand encourages unyielding focus, making it a surprisingly effective way of escaping from the wider world. In other words, Playing Green Heights is the closest I’ll ever get to understanding Alex Honnold.
Download the Green Heights demo here.
Limscape
Developer: SMOOTHEA Release: Coming soon
Limscape may sound like a budget brand of drain cleaner, but if anything this is only fitting, as you’d need a truly preposterous amount of chlorine to keep this game’s semiaquatic spaces smelling fresh. This glossy, first-person explore ‘em up is inspired by the liminal “pool-rooms” of 3D artist Jared Pike, with you wandering through nonsensical yet weirdly soothing bath-houses that would be rubbish for exercising in but have impeccable vibes.
Frankly, this is more of an interactive art-piece than it is a proper game, with your actions limited to plodding around and peeking at the bizarre environments. Yet while there are dozens of games inspired by backrooms or pool-rooms or changing rooms (although the latter of which may be a consequence of me not setting up my Steam filters properly), most of them are used as settings for Z-tier horror games designed to bait reactions on YouTube. Limscape more specifically targets the surreal serenity of being in a room that exists solely to connect to other rooms, the curious harmony of being in-between.
It's also, at a more basic level, a sumptuous Unreal Engine 5 tech demo. Much like adding ray-tracing to Minecraft, UE5’s lighting and shaders shine better when applied to games that are visually simplistic to begin with. I spent a long time ogling the water in Limscape, something I haven’t done since Morrowind came out.
Download the Limscape Demo here.
Ninja Ming
Developer: 1 Poss Studio Release: 2025
Ninja Ming,
Ninja Ming,
Translocation, is his thing.
Throw a knife, and where it flies,
You’ll teleport to the other side,
LOOKOUUUUUUUT! Here comes Ninja Ming.
I’m tempted to leave it there and see how many of you unsubscribe. But in case that comprehensive summary of Ninja Ming wasn’t detailed enough for you, let’s elaborate. This is a Celeste-adjacent platformer with a teleportation flourish. Playing as an adorable little shinobi, you must navigate single-screen puzzles filled with a standard array spikes and pitfalls. This you do partly by jumping, but also through tossing a knife across gaps. Pressing the throw button a second time will instantly transport you to where the knife is.
Ninja Ming quickly builds some natty jumping puzzles out of this combination. You can jump immediately after teleporting, even if you’re in midair, but you can’t throw another knife until after you land, meaning you must think carefully when performing either of those abilities.
The presentation still needs some work, and while the game supports keyboard, the octo-directional knife-throwing requires a pad if you want to remain sane. Nonetheless, it’s a neat little idea, and while the demo is fairly short, it’ll definitely test your reflexes.
Download the Ninja Ming demo here.
Demo of the Week: Day of the Shell
Developer: Duper Games Release: Tba
Day of the Shell is a turn-based tactics game where you play as a single character and every turn is resolved in one click. This is a terrible idea which by all rights and natural laws should not work. That Day of the Shell makes it work is why it’s demo of the week.
You play a pistol-wielding lady who is empowered by the spirit of a naiad-like creature as the last hope against a giant floating crystal which is destroying the world. As setups go, it’s not great, and the rather ponderous narration had me eyeing the quit button after about thirty seconds. Once I got past the intro, though, Day of the Shell got its claws in more or less instantly.
The game plays similarly to X-COM, click on the ground to move your character to that square, click on an enemy to shoot at them. Either of these choices will end your turn. If you choose the latter, your shot will hit or miss depending on variables includes distance, angle, and line of sight. Enemies are governed by the same rules, but in a mechanical wrinkle that the entire game hinges on, will typically only shoot at you once every few turns.
From these simple ingredients, Day of the Shell produces remarkably dramatic gunfights. It feels good from moment one, but it properly clicked for me when an enemy bullet PEEEOWN’ED into the pillar I was hiding behind, destroying it in the process and leaving me exposed to the laser-sights of two other enemies. Cue a frantic scramble to some treacherous half-cover that only provided partial protection, gritting my teeth as two screaming bullets pinged off the rocks in front of my character’s face, before rushing to some full cover that afforded a flanking shot at my targets. Through clever scenario setup and excellent sound design, Day of the Shell makes every fight feel like the O.K. Corral, only switch the drunk, consumptive cowboys with anthropomorphic crows.
It's an ingenious distillation of turn-based tactics. The demo quickly folds in extra layers too, like mortar firing enemies that will damage you across a wide area. I’m not wholly sold on the roguelike elements of Day of the Shell, mainly because the initial abilities you unlock are a bit pedestrian. Otherwise though, this is a bold concept slickly executed, and I look forward to trying the full game.