Demo Disc #2: David Lynch presents Ground Force, and other weird tales
Greetings, digital nomads!
First off, a huge thank you to all you wonderful new subscribers. I’m right chuffed so many people have climbed aboard this freshly Christened vessel, without once questioning the integrity of the hull, sails, or indeed Captain. All kidding aside, it’s great to have Demo Disc off to such a strong start, and I hope you find the newsletter to be a useful resource going forward.
On the subject of resources, a quick bit of housekeeping before we get to the good stuff. I’ve added an extra page to the Demo Disc site, which provides a straightforward list of the demos contained in each newsletter, linked to the appropriate Steam page. I’ve added this for reference purposes. If you see a demo you like, but then go to sleep or eat a large pizza and forget what it was or which newsletter it featured in, you can pop over to the "Disc Archive" page and look it up without all my pesky words getting in the way. It’s a bit sparse over there right now, but it should fill up quickly. Yes, that is a statement of intent.
That’s enough preamble. Like a courtroom for cows, this week’s Demo Disc is filled with beefy trials. Expect dungeon crawling, boxing puppets, and a very normal game about gardening.
Monomyth
Developer: Rat Tower Release: 3 October 2024
Monomyth was nearly my pick for Demo of the Week, and only partly because it’s an immersive sim and my passion for gaming’s least commercially viable genre knows no bounds. This is basically an indie modernisation of Ultima Underworld, trapping you in a dank and gloomy dungeon and asking you to fight, sneak, or spell your way out.
The demo lets you experiment with most of the basic mechanics, which tick every imaginable box of systems-driven dungeon crawling. In my playthrough, I beat a skeleton to death with a rolling pin, slipped past a necromancer by dousing torches with water arrows, and discovered three different ways to bypass a locked door. There’s even a system for cooking food by placing it next to heat sources, including real-time bread baking with dough that swells and browns as it cooks. Forget escaping Monomyth’s dungeon, I want to open a bakery in it. I hope there's a wider menagerie in the dungeon's lower depths, though, as I don't think skeletons eat many carbs.
The only reason Monomyth isn’t Demo of the Week is because it’s very trad, and I feel that slot should be saved for games that strive toward newer territory. Nonetheless, for anyone with a vague interest in dungeon crawlers and how they evolved into games like Deus Ex and Dishonored, Monomyth’s demo is an essential example of that experiential overlap.
Download the Monomyth demo here.
Rebots
Developer: FlatPonies Release: 7 October 2024
Rebots hooked me in with a joke that had me honking like an untitled goose, then held my attention for the best part of an hour with its blend of planetary exploration and Pikmin-style logistics. You play a new employee of the interplanetary Rebots corporation, tasked with building homes for its customers in a pastel-shaded asteroid belt.
In play, Rebots sees you travelling through the belt via an overhead map, paying to access new “constellations” of asteroids. Not only do these floating rocks have far more trees and elephants than I typically associate with asteroids, each also includes a housing plot that needs filling, which you do by completing contracts. These jobs could be as simple (and eccentric) as delivering a bunch of mushrooms to the housing plot’s mailbox. Rather than collect those mushrooms yourself, you can conjure a force of robots to do these tasks for you, programming them to mine and collect specific resources, and then drop them off at a location of your choosing.
The demo takes you through the entire introduction of the game, then lets you free to explore a bunch of systems and planets. Setting up robot patrols is a little on the finicky side, and the early missions are simple enough that they don’t fully showcase the systems at play. But it makes up for this with its generally pleasant vibe, and the big fireworks display that triggers when you welcome an alien to their new home.
Download the Rebots demo here.
Decline’s Drops
Developer: Moulin aux Bulles Studio Release: 10 October 2024
I haven’t the slightest idea what the title refers to, but I was nonetheless intrigued be Decline Drop’s blend of Tintin-ish animation with moderately challenging platforming and a playable character who beats up enemies with a big blue pair of boxing gloves. It’s like a less punishing mix of Super Meat Boy and Cuphead, and I’d argue has a more enjoyable combat system than the latter, compressing a surprising number of moves into a few simple controls.
The demo offers two playable levels. The first is a platforming-focussed level where you skate along rails avoiding sawblades, and pilot a boxing-glove submarine through several underwater areas. The second is a boss fight where you go twelve rounds with an obese dinosaur. It isn’t as precise as Meat Boy, and the level design is visually simplistic compared to the richly animated characters. But its pace, style and weighty pugilism kept me on board throughout. Do yourself a favour and plug a controller in before playing, however. The keyboard bindings seem purposefully arranged to dislocate fingers.
Download the Decline's Drops demo here.
Combat Complex
Developer: Spherical Horse Studios Release: 4 October 2024
Combat Complex doesn’t have the most alluring exterior, from its insipid title to its generic sci-fi world. But I quickly forgave all that once the lead started flying. The action in this 3D isometric shooter crackles like a crisp packet cabled to a car battery. Within seconds of spawning in one of its randomly generated mazes, you’re assaulted from all sides by giant green centipedes and fire-spitting drones that drop out of the sky. Armed with an assault rifle, a shotgun, and a railgun, you mulch these foes by the dozen as you frantically try to hold back the tide.
It's incredibly simple, but surprisingly moreish. And as with all the other games featured this week, the demo lets you experience a fair ol’ chunk of it. I completed three levels and saw a bunch of different enemy-types without the demo closing its security shutters on me. I’d call it a neat little palette cleanser, but it’s more of a palette stainer; gooey, messy, unpretentious fun.
Download the Combat Complex demo here.
DEMO OF THE WEEK: Grunn
Developer: Sockpop Collective, Tom van den Boogart Release: 4 October 2024
Grunn presents like taking a tour of Stratford-upon-Avon with an aura migraine, and plays like an episode of nineties gardening show Ground Force if it were directed by David Lynch. You play as a nameless greenthumb hired to tend the overgrown gardens of an unaffordably large house, with the aim of completing the job before the building’s absent owner returns after the weekend.
If the bleary art-style and my 11pm-on-a-Thursday Lynch comparison didn’t give it away, there’s more to Grunn than tidying up lawns and watering flowers. But it’s worth stressing that Grunn’s gardening fundamentals are entertaining in and of themselves. From the pleasing snip-snip of your shears, to the catharsis of flattening molehills with a trowel, Grunn has the same sort of tangibility that powered Powerwash Simulator to stardom.
Yet Grunn is not merely a satisfying simulation of mundane tasks, however much its marketing might protest otherwise. Things are off from the start, with the environment scattered in unsettling polaroid pictures that double as game hints, while the gardening instructions left by your employer suggest you use two tools that aren’t where they’re supposed to be. I don’t want to delve too much deeper into how Grunn evolves from there, but let’s just say that even if you think you know where it’s going by the end of the first day, it’ll probably find a couple of ways to surprise you.
Grunn follows in this week’s brief but nonetheless proud tradition of providing a substantial demo, letting you explore the garden and its surroundings for two in-game days. And if one run through it isn’t enough for you, it has multiple endings to find. I’m yet to find an ending where North Korea censors your character’s trousers, but given the other oddities Grunn includes, I still hold out hope.