Demo Disc #7: The Next Fest Thing - Day 3
Greetings, digital nomads!
I’m a little pressed for time today, so if you don’t mind I’m going to skip the usual surreal introduction and dive straight to the demos. I hope you’re enjoying the selections from Next Fest thus far. There are a lot of demos this year, thousands of ‘em, in fact, so wading through all the Vampire Survivors knockoffs and hentai dating sims to find the good stuff is proving an interesting challenge. Which is not to say those genres can’t offer quality, uh, entertainment; it’s possible some of those porn games are great! But I’d have some serious explaining to do if my partner walked in and caught me playing an autoshooter.
VOIN
Developer: Nikita Sozidar Release: TBA
There are three ways to approach fall damage in action games. There is the wrong way, which is that falling injures or kills you. There is the acceptable way, which is that falling does no damage at all. And there is the way God intended, which is that landing from a height unleashes an Old Testament-style natural disaster that wipes your enemies off the face of the Earth. Voin rightly adopts the latter approach, imbuing your descents with the power of whichever storm god you prefer to pray to, unleashing a crackle of lightning from your steel boots that fries any foes in the vicinity.
And this is just one of the delights of this rough-but-ready first-person hack ‘n’ slash. Voin’s grisly fantasy adventure draws from a bunch of influences, inevitably including a tiered loot system and a Souls-ish timed dodge. But the most significant of its inspirations is Arkane’s similarly unpolished gem Dark Messiah: Might and Magic. Weapon strikes have that same sense of physicality and momentum as Arkane’s swashbuckling adventure. I particularly like how sheathing weapon enhances your movement capabilities, encouraging you to put weapons away so you can draw them again when combat starts (which is always the best bit of a swordfight). Moreover, if you attack with your weapon sheathed, your character seamlessly strikes with their blade as they draw it. As a way of introducing yourself into a fight, this is second only to dropping in like a lightning bolt.
The demo includes a comprehensive tutorial level that culminates in a boss fight, and a single, but large open-ended map that you can choose to explore how you like. While I reckon some visual tidying up wouldn’t hurt Voin (its texturing is rather murky and unappealing) I’ve no qualms about recommending its fighting system.
Ion Shift
Developer: Electro Soul Games Release: November 2024
I suspect the developer of Ion Shift saw the famous ‘Knife alien’ tweet and thought “Wouldn’t that make a great video game?” And you know what? They were absolutely right. This side-scrolling pounce ‘em up sees you play as a Xenomorph-ish organism that finds its way aboard a spaceship stuffed with juicy humans to eviscerate.
The results are not dissimilar to 2020’s reverse-horror game Carrion, although I reckon Ion Shift is slightly more fun. It has a wonderfully snappy jump system where you point the mouse and click where you want to move, whereupon your alien will nimbly leap and stick to whatever surface you’ve aimed at. This lets you creep along ceilings and walls to evade the eyes of patrolling guards, but more importantly, you use the same system to attack enemies. The wet crunch with which you land on a victim is almost certainly something I shouldn’t enjoy, but that ship sailed when I first clapped eyes on Doom at six years old.
Basically, it’s a game where you play as the alien from alien, ducking through vents, pouncing on guards, and dodging stationary gun turrets in fast-paced stealth platforming. But then came the moment when the game instructed me to pick up a knife with my tail, which I could then throw at a turret to make it misfire and shoot a guard. Lemme tell you, I sat up straight when that happened.
You can also climb inside the bodies of more rotund crewmembers to take control of them, wandering up to other guards before pulling a John Hurt. While I’m not sure this is the most body-positive of mechanics (thin people can be infested by hostile alien lifeforms too!) I do like the general idea of your alien strutting around the gaff in a human suit. Don’t be put off by the terrible key art and dodgy English localisation, this is a surprisingly accomplished stealth-actioner.
Download the Ion Shift demo here.
DEMO OF THE DAY: Sektori
Developer: Kimmo Lahtinen Release: Coming soon
Sektori is one of those psychedelic twin-stick shooters that developers with a strong programming background seem to adore making, conjuring colour and shape out of raw numbers and then being insufferably smug about it. Then again, if you make something like Sektori, maybe you’re allowed to be a little insufferable. This game rules like Louis XIV, unassailably stylish and terrifying in its power.
You play a triangle that shoots smaller triangles on a large hexagonal playing field that is also, secretly, made out of triangles. Into this Pythagorean arena spawn geometric shapes of varying hue and hostility, and you need to blast them into smithereens while avoiding their fatal touch. It’s familiar stuff, but Sektori adds one other mechanical flourish that elevates these fundamentals. As well as shooting enemies, you can also charge into them, triggering a thunderous AOE attack that clears a large area of the board.
Timing this to do maximum damage without immediately scuppering your run is half of what makes Sektori so compelling. Waiting until you’re backed into a corner and then blasting through your foes’ ranks to freedom is unbelievably satisfying. There are other clever twists too. The board changes shape as you play, with chunks of the hexagon vanishing and reappearing elsewhere. You’ll also collect powerups as you play, transforming your basic pew-pew weapon into a ferocious rainbow gatling gun.
What mainly makes Sektori such a joy, however, is how aggressively sensorial it is. Within a minute of play, the action escalates from a simple top-down shooter into a whirling kaleidoscope of death, all while its tachycardia techno soundtrack thumps in your ears. Out of every demo I’ve featured in the newsletter so far, this is the one I’ve returned to the most. Pat yourself on the back if you survive longer than two minutes.