Demo Disc #1: Nice to Meat you, can I Lure you in?
Greetings, digital nomads! Welcome to Demo Disc, a weekly selection of game demos inspired by the video game magazines of the nineties, frisbeeing across the Internet straight to your inbox every Friday. I’m Rick Lane, and I've been a professional video game journalist for the past *counts on fingers* eleven years. You may have seen my words appear across publications such as PC Gamer, EDGE, The Guardian, Eurogamer, Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and others.
I don’t want to spend too long on introductions, because there are demos to recommend! But to give a brief flyover of the premise, every week I'll highlight five game demos that I think are worth your attention. I intend for each newsletter to include a manageable collection of demos, all of which are worth experiencing in their own right. But I will also select from the five a Demo of the Week, in case you've only got time to play one of them (and because rating art over other art is fun).
There's no remit on the types of games I'll select; if anything I want each week to be as varied as possible. But I plan to prioritise games you may have overlooked, rather than well known, hotly anticipated titles you're likely to seek the demos out for yourself. For this particular newsletter, I've also focussed on demos for games that are releasing imminently, rather than months or years down the line. I may continue to do this, I may not! It's my ship, dagnabit, and I'll sail it into rocks if I want.
If you'd like to know more about the whys and wherefores of this newsletter, check out the "About" page here. For now though, let's peel the jewel case off our imaginary first issue, pop out the disk, and discover what treasures lurk within.
Iron Meat
Developer: Ivan Valeryvich Surovov Release: 26 September 2024
This delectably titled action game asks the question, "what if a 16-bit shooter got infected by John Carpenter’s The Thing?" It puts you in the role of a space marine type fellow in a world where both humans and machines have been infested by an extraterrestrial organism known simply as "The Meat".
Now, I don't have much affection for the 16-bit era, but Iron Meat won me over with its properly gnarly body horror and how rapidly its 2D action escalates. Indeed, the demo is incredibly generous in terms of how much it throws at you, delivering new weapons and enemies every thirty seconds. By the end, you’ve gone from blasting rather basic mutated humans with an assault rifle, to fighting a flesh-ridden tank with a rapid-firing plasma gun. It left me wondering what the full game could possibly have left to offer. It also makes the demo a heck of a ride while it lasts.
Download the Iron Meat demo here.
Zero Protocol
Developer: R_Games Release: 26 Sept 2024
A retro-styled survival horror with shades of System Shock, Zero Protocol traps you in a secret Antarctic Research station where all that secret Antarctic research has, shockingly, gone wrong. You awake in intensive care to discover the facility has been evacuated, and you’ve been left alone to figure your way out.
What follows is a classic survival horror blend of slowly unpicking the environment while battling the occasional shambling horror. Behind the crisp pixel art is a world that's impressively tactile and coherent, and there’s a neat little sanity mechanic where your character starts to hallucinate if they go without a specific medicine for too long.
My favourite mechanical flourish, however, is the "snapshot" system. This lets you take an in-game screenshot of the environment, such as a door code scrawled on a wall, which then shows up for reference when you activate one of the many keypads. The shooting could be a little stronger, but Zero Protocol's moody atmosphere and environmental puzzling more than make up for that.
Download the Zero Protocol demo here.
Echo Point Nova
Developer: Greylock Games Studio Release: 24 Sept 2024
When I saw Echo Point Nova is developed by the creators of Severed Steel, I expected it to be a similarly slippery-slidey shooter much like that game. It definitely delivers on that. But I didn’t expect the hoverboard, or the grappling hook, or the sledgehammer that lets you smash through walls a-la Red Faction: Guerrilla.
All this amounts to a highly liberating FPS in which you hop across a sweeping archipelago of floating islands, popping superpowered mercenaries with pistols and submachineguns (usually while arcing several dozen feet through the air above them). It’s a shooter with old-school sensibilities, but built from more modern component parts. Well worth a look if you’re after something that stands out a bit from the boomer shooter brigade.
Download the Echo Point Nova demo here.
Exographer
Developer: SciFunGames Release: 26 Sept 2024
Exographer is a pretty pixel platformer about exploring an alien planet, which strives to make you feel like a propah Science-tist through a more procedural approach to puzzling. Alongside the more basic jumping and switch-flipping is a sophisticated snapshot system (even more so than Zero Protocol) where taking photographs of the environment is central to its conundrums. Not only does taking screenshots reveal hidden elements in the game world, you can also teleport back to any position that you previously photographed. On top of that, some screenshots can be "analysed" through an icon matching system to provide further clues about a particular puzzle.
Although the tablet interface takes a bit of getting used to, it succeeds in engendering a sense peeling back the layers of this world, which, I should note, is beautifully rendered through gorgeous pixel art. It’s hard to judge how deep those layers go from the demo, but the wide range of character abilities that are locked off in the demo version suggest there’s plenty left to be uncovered in the full game.
Download the Exographer demo here.
DEMO OF THE WEEK: Lorn’s Lure
Developer: Rubeki Games Release: 20 September 2024
You know that bit in Portal 2 where you descend from the squeaky-clean test chambers of Aperture Science into the facility’s vast, decaying underbelly, and its forgotten architecture stretches impossibly to the horizon? Well, Lorn’s Lure is a game entirely about that sensation. You play as an android trapped inside some forsaken megastructure that’s all rusting pipes and precipitous drops, trying to find your way out with nothing but a pair of climbing axes and a peppering of parkour.
It’s a simple yet satisfying first-person platformer, where you use a combination of jumping, sliding, and climbing to navigate its knotty subterranean spaces. Your android is lithe and speedy, but also fragile – even a moderate fall in Lorn’s Lure leads to into instant death. Moreover, you can only climb on a wall for so long before you lose your grip, meaning you need to be precise about your movements vertically as well as horizontally.
What really grabbed me in this demo, however, is its sense of place. The complex you’re trapped in feels genuinely huge and unknowable, its proto-3D spaces reminiscent of those moments in Thief: The Dark Project where the level designers went “Euclid? Fuck that guy”. The environment is lent a powerful atmosphere by excellent sound design, rushing winds, your own echoing footsteps, and a superbly grungy, synthy soundtrack.
Lorn’s Lure is far more than I thought it would be from looking at the screenshots. It also happens to be launching today, so if you jive with the demo as I did, you can grab the full game here.