Demo Disc #15: The Bollywood Motorbroom Club
Seasons greetings, digital nomads!
Apologies for the interruption in service last week. My hopes for a gentle run to the end of 2024 proved embarrassingly naïve, and December is comfortably the busiest month I’ve had all year. Hence, the time I’d normally spend testing demos was instead spent bullwhipping Nazis into ancient pits in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. A just and necessary cause, I’m sure you’ll all agree.
You can read my thoughts on Indy’s latest adventure here, if you’re interested. Returning to the matter at hand, leaving Steam to fill with demos for an extra week means today’s newsletter has some proper treats in store. We’ve got open world witch-racing, Bollywood roleplaying, hyperviolent ninja puzzling, and the smartest use of tetrominoes since Tetsuya Mizuguchi stuffed them into a VR headset.
Next week’s Demo Disc will be the last newsletter of the year, as I’m visiting family over the holidays and, quite frankly, could do with some proper time off. Hopefully, this will be a regular recommendation of five great games to try out. But in the event the demo stream runs dry as Christmas approaches, I may try something a little different, possibly a roundup of the best demos featured this year, if enough of them are still around to play.
Crescent County
Developer: Electric Saint Release: Tba
Crescent County is a witch-themed courier sim wherein you deliver packages around a pastel-coloured landscape and forge friendships with a group of sorcerous pals. This is, I’ll admit, not typically my bag. I am ambivalent on witches, sceptical on delivery sims, and barely have time to maintain my real friendships, let alone some fake ones.
However, Crescent County is also a game about pulling sick drifts on a combustion-powered broom while shoegaze-y rock pulses in your ears. This, combined this with the other elements I mentioned, makes the resulting experience rather fun indeed.
The demo guides you through Crescent County’s introduction, with its broom-riding tutorial culminating in a cross-county race with your pals. It then lets you vroom freely across a pretty big chunk of the pastoral world. The broom handling is excellent, with you drifting around corners to build up a Burnout-ish boost that propels you out of the bend. My favourite sequence involves you navigating a twisting road that leads up to a mountain observatory, before swooping off the cliff-face to glide back down the mountainside, threading your broom through bubble blower-shaped wind turbines as you descend.
The demo has a few rough edges, including the lingering presence of a debug menu that I couldn’t figure out how to close, and while the keyboard controls aren’t quite as bad as developer Electric Saint makes out, you are probably best following their advice and plugging in a controller. Nonetheless, this was a swish of a wand away from demo of the week, and well worth hopping on for a ride.
Download the Crescent County demo here
Aikyam
Developer: Thousand Stars Studios Release: Coming Soon
I was drawn to Aikyam by its distinctive lozenge-shaped characters, which reminded me of the animate Russian dolls in Double-Fine’s adventure game Stacking. Yet rather than interacting with your friends and acquaintances by inserting yourself into them, Aikyam instead has you perform dance-offs with them via colourful turn-based RPG “combat”.
You play as a young lady called Vishva, who wants to master her dance skills in preparation for the festival of Holi. This means wandering around your village challenging groups of people to strut their stuff. When battle commences, each side takes turns to perform a different dance move, which can be increased in effectiveness through matching simple button prompts as the move plays out.
It’s a familiar RPG affair, but beyond the general concept of battling via dance, there are a couple of fun tweaks to the formula. Characters you particularly impress will become your “fans”, attending your recital, giving you buffs during battle and even temporarily joining your party. You can also summon the entire crowd to contribute to extra-powerful attacks, exhausting your rivals through the collective might of your routine.
It's silly, light-hearted fun, breezily written and vibrantly presented. The full game will apparently include a twist that introduces a second combat system, but the demo never shows this, which is a bit of a shame.
Download the Aikyam demo here.
Rustwing
Developer: Sleepy Crystal Release: Tba
“FTL with a dash of twin-stick shooting” is the basic summary of Rustwing. You play a mercenary in a rickety rocket ship tasked with crossing a star system to take down a disabled federal cruiser (I’ll you can fill in the lore gaps without aid here. Dark Souls Rustwing ain’t.) Along the way, you’ll need to earn money and parts by battling smaller vessels and conquering outposts, using your ill-gotten gains to kit out your craft with superior weapons, armour, and so forth.
Rustwing has powerful “made in Adobe Flash” energy, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. The top-down combat is simply yet evocatively presented in cartoonish 2D, and while your starting weapons rattle like a shopping trolley crossing a cobbled street, you soon pick up lasers and missile launchers that make shorter work of the swarms of foes that populate most locations. I particularly like the gouts of flame that trail from ships as they sustain damage. Hardly radical design, but effective nonetheless.
While I enjoy the combat’s grunginess, some mechanics, like the rather limp dash manoeuvre, could do with tightening up. Encounters would benefit from more variety too— I captured a whole lotta space stations in the time I spent with Rustwing. That said, Rustwing’s fundamentals are robust enough to make it worth taking for a spin.
Download the Rustwing demo here.
Arashi Gaiden
Developer: Statera Studio, Wired Dreams Studio Release: Tba
Arashi Gaiden (which I initially misread as ‘Arashi Garden’—a very different game about clearing stinging nettles from your backyard) has some of the slickest turn-based action I’ve encountered in a hot minute. Playing as the ninja Arashi, equipped with Wolverine-style claws, you’re tasked with eliminating every on-screen enemy in 2D, tile-based scenarios.
Instructing Arashi to move will send them careening all the way across the screen until they’re stopped by an obstacle. If you stop adjacent to an enemy, they’ll get a chance to hit you. Get hit enough, and you’ll die and the stage restarts.
The rules couldn’t be simpler. But two further ideas elevate this basic setup. The first is what happens when Arashi swooshes through an enemy, namely that they fall apart while making a noise like someone divebombing into a swimming pool filled with mince. Like Hotline Miami, Arashi Gaiden hides a truly vicious streak behind its throwback pixel graphics, and the unfortunate ends some of your enemies come to will make you wince.
The second is that, while Arashi Gaiden is turn-based, it has a combo meter that counts down in real time. So while simply clearing a stage is fun at a base level, the real satisfaction comes from perfecting your run. Slicing through your foes in a flawless sequence of moves will earn three shiny golden shurikens, while a growly American voice yells “SLASHERRRRRR!”, which I must say feels utterly grand.
Download the Arashi Gaiden demo here.
Demo of the Week: River Towns
Developer: Frogsong Studios Release: Q2 2025
This is a splendid little puzzler which blends Tetris-style shape-arranging and colourful city construction. Presenting players with desiccated diamonds of soil, River Towns challenges you with converting them into thriving settlements by carefully placing buildings within the diamond’s boundaries.
River Towns feels great from the moment you plop your central structure beside the river nexus, whereupon the dry riverbeds fill with glittering blue water. From here, you build your town outward using the varyingly shaped structures the game hands you, striving to align them as tidily as possible. The more of the grid you can fill, the more points you accrue. Bonus points can be earned in numerous ways, such as aligning buildings along riverbanks to generate bridges between the.
As a puzzler, River Towns is more laid back than actual Tetris, devoid of the latter’s time pressure. But the tile matching affords it the mechanical grit that I’ve missed from other light-hearted urban-planning games, such as Townscaper. There are other pleasing details too. I love the way buildings pop up like a tent when you place them, and there’s an enjoyable ecological theme to the city-building, with the landscape greenifying as your town spreads. This is arguably counterintuitive, but no less enjoyable for it.
The demo provides a custom-built stage of multiple levels to play through, evolving the puzzling with towns that have culturally divergent districts, and trees that can be restored to blossom by surrounding them with structures. It’s a comprehensive showcase of what’s shaping up to be an excellent game.