Demo Disc #14: The backpacker's guide to quantum mechanics
Greetings, digital nomads!
Just a brief intro this week, as I already wrote far too much about this week’s demos and have little in the way of news to share. One quick note though: I’m aware the disc archive is in dire need of updating, and hope to sort that out over the weekend. It became neglected in my frantic scramble to keep up with Steam Next Fest, and I haven’t found a chance to tend to it since.
Also, I should point out that a couple of this week’s demos are rougher around the edges than I would normally like. But hopefully they'll compensate for this through their intriguing concepts or just being a bit odd. I’d rather feature weird, wonky games in this newsletter than one of the billion Lethal Company clones currently clogging up Steam. Seriously, when I close my eyes the phrase "1-4 player cooperative horror" dances on the inside of my eyelids.
Proton and Electron
Developer: ElectronLab Release: Coming Soon
Those of you who read issue #1 of Demo Disc may recall the splendid (and tragically overlooked) science-based puzzle-platformer Exographer, which remains one of my favourite demos to feature in the newsletter (I also reviewed the full game a while back, if you want a more comprehensive take on it). Proton and Electron likewise weaves a scientific theme around its blend of jumping and chin-scratching, and is similarly successful in its efforts.
You play as pellet-shaped boffin Dr Proton, who shrinks himself down to subatomic size to fix an experimental device corroded by antimatter. As he explores the quantum realm, which, in a remarkable discovery for science, turns out to precisely resemble a 2D platforming video game, he encounters a friendly electron who assists him in his quest.
This leads neatly to Proton and Electron’s key gimmick, which is that you control two characters at once. While Dr Proton moves around levels in classic Mario fashion, your electron pal shoots around the screen like an arrow, their speed or trajectory altering based on what they hit along the way. Gelatinous globs of antimatter will catch the electron, readying them for their next move, while positively charged electromagnetic fields will rebound the electron off them, often pinballing the electron around the level in sequence.
These abilities combine to form light navigational brainteasers, with you typically using the electron to activate switch sensors that open doors, allowing Dr Proton to progress. But they also help each other more directly too. The electron cannot freely move outside of gelatinous antimatter, requiring Dr Proton to pick them up in free space. But if Dr Proton tries to walk on those electromagnetic surfaces without holding the electron, he comes to a pretty spectacular end.
It all amounts to a smart, characterful puzzler that delivers ideas on tap and is filled with neat little touches, like how Dr Proton warps the space around him as he moves across the level, and the delightful bounciness of red antimatter. The demo contains 30 puzzles to play through, while the full game will offer 150 whenever it launches.
Download the Proton and Electron demo here.
Homeland
Developer: SPACINGCLOVER Release: Tba
Homeland is notionally a 2.5D shooter, although it doesn’t feature much shooting at present. It does have a neat concept though, with you navigating through shifting maze of rooms by manipulating the experience on four individual screens.
The main viewport is situated in the top left of the screen, where you move your character around rooms and through doors from a third person perspective. In the top right of your screen is an isometric bird’s eye view of the rooms you’re trying to move through. Yet these rooms are often not connected to one another, so you also use this screen to rearrange them, shifting them around so that the doors connect up, enabling you to move closer to the level’s exit.
In this manner, Homeland creates a fun foundation for puzzling, with you connecting a room to walk into it, then moving that room to connect to another room so you can transition into that one. That’s more or less all there is to Homeland right now, however. The third screen will apparently involve circuits, but it isn’t functional in the demo. The fourth screen simply tracks your progression through the demo, which only has three levels and so won’t last you too long.
Still, it’s interesting system to play around with, and there’s potential for a great game here, provided developer Spacingclover can make judicious use of those two additional screens.
Download the Homeland demo here.
Backpack Boy
Developer: Chuck, Niles Games Release: Coming soon
Backpack Boy would make an ideal sidekick for last week’s Ninja Ming, complementing the teleportation abilities of Demo Disc’s favourite shinobi with his power to make platforms appear out of thin air. Granted this isn’t a wholly accurate description of how Backpack Boy’s power works, but I’ll twist any number of facts if it means I can write the words ‘Ninja Ming’ one more time.
This is another example of a 2D platformer with a gimmick, said gimmick being that the world has a second layer. Shining Backpack Boy’s torch in any direction will penetrate the veil of reality, revealing the hidden world underneath.
As such, platforms and puzzle objects may appear or disappear depending on which layer they’re on, forming the crux of the game’s conundrums. A simple example might require you to lower a box to the floor from the top of a ladder of platforms, by switching torch on and off to drop the box rung-by-rung.
It’s hardly the first example of such a system, but the fact you can freely shine the torch around lends Backpack Boy’s take on it a sleek novelty. The demo offers just shy of an hour’s play, introducing an array of new ideas as it goes like a deployable lantern that you can place around levels.
Download the Backpack Boy demo here.
Nonsolar
Developer: Cheap Laptop Games Release: Coming soon
Nonsolar is the game I was most hesitant about adding to this week’s newsletter, but every time I verged on binning it off, it would do something that convinced me to play just a little bit more. It’s a third-person sci-fi shooter with a passing resemblance to Dead Space, with you playing an astronaut freshly arrived at an exoplanet that receives just one percent of its star’s light.
It doesn’t start like this, however, instead kicking off in a 2D, side-scrolling 8-bit mode, which is revealed to be a dream-state modulated by your ship’s AI. From there, you wake up and float to your ship’s control room to initiate the landing sequence onto the shadowy world that forms Nonsolar’s setting, then commence resource runs in an extraplanetary transit van.
What makes Nonsolar interesting is all the weird stuff it feeds into this structure, from enemies that can only be seen by using certain equipment, to the frequent switches between the 3D and 2D planes. There’s a dreamlike quality to it that I found fascinating, although I should warn you that this comes paired with an amateurishness to the underlying production. Between the interesting bits is a lot of tedious trudging through overlong corridors, and when you finally unlock a weapon, the shooting mechanics are not great.
To me, Nonsolar has the air of a student project. It’s a little wonky and self-indulgent, with aspirations beyond its means. But there’s also something here worth nurturing, and with the right direction might become genuinely great.
Download the Nonsolar demo here.
DEMO OF THE WEEK: Exo Rally Championship
Developer: Exbleative Release: Tba
Exo Rally Championship is created by the developer of playable screensaver/interplanetary marble run Exo One (which is currently a fiver in the Steam sale and well worth that price if you fancy a few hours of sombre spaceship soaring). Because of this lineage, I foolishly went into Exo Rally Championship expecting something similarly light and experiential. Boy was I wrong. This is DiRT Rally in space, a fastidious, exacting racer that replaces the forests of Finland with arid exoplanets pelted by meteor showers.
The rovers you race are not trundling science cubes like Curiosity and Perseverance, but sleek, six-wheeled alien automobiles whose propulsion is matched only by their fragility. Rolling one of these rovers on a planet’s rugged terrain will smash it up as if it had been struck by a comet, resulting in a laundry list of errors being flagged by your rover’s onboard computer.
Hence victory in Exo Rally Championship demands far more than speed. It requires precision, control, and an acute understanding of the game’s more distinctive wrinkles. First, alongside the more familiar driving controls, your rover also has propulsion jets that enable pitching and rolling manoeuvres in midair. These are vital for minimising damage, ensuring your rover always lands on its feet when jumping over lumps and bumps.
Second, rally checkpoints often demand you pass around them in a specific direction, rather than through the middle. This means you have a certain freedom in approaching any stage, taking a longer route around a checkpoint to avoid rough terrain, for example. There are exceptions to this rule, however, and some checkpoints even require you to doughnut around them. This is tricky to execute smoothly, but hugely satisfying when you do.
In short, don’t expect to immediately excel at Exo One Rally. That said, there are some immediate pleasures to be had here. The bleakly beautiful alien landscapes of Exo One are effectively replicated here, and the more terrestrial vehicle provides a more tangible connection to them, with you careening through dust plains, sliding across scree slopes, juddering over rocks formations. It’s taut, physical stuff.
This is a beefy demo too, letting you play through 10 very different stages on a single planet. A comprehensive tutorial is also included, which I highly recommend you spend some time with. Finally, like most racing games, Exo Rally One is best played on a pad. Well, I suppose they’re best played with a wheel and pedals and a VR headset, but in the absence of all that expensive kit, a pad will suffice.