Sometimes I forget that game demos are a thing. That some games offer little tasters of the full product to try before you buy. It honestly feels like a bygone era, like the demo discs you could peel off game magazines. I must’ve played tons of the Fury3 demo back in the day. You have to wonder why all games don’t offer it in today’s world of digital marketplaces. Well after a recent harvest of demos from the Switch eShop, I can see why many don’t.
Ciel Fledge
A daughter raising simulator? With a post-post-apocalypic science fiction setting? Welcome to Ciel Fledge, a game where you plan the weekly schedule of a ten year old girl (Ciel), thrust into your care, for the next ten years. The game gives you a lot of menus and outlines the personal growth milestones of Ciel, whom you’ll raise from mysterious orphan to (presumably) sexy-warrior-princess-school captain. This would honestly be interesting enough for me but unfortunately Ciel’s weeks are interrupted by “battles” like taking a quiz at school. And these “battles” take the form of an utterly incomprehensible match 3 card game. Which is just… what? Who the fuck thought this was a good idea? Actually offering nothing, like Friends of Ringo Starr, would’ve been better.
It’s a hard pass from me but good luck to the boys from Studio Namaapa. Their other game is an open world JRPG where you date fish-girls or something so I’m sure their next idea will be just as special.
Metropolis Lux Obscura
Woah, look at this gritty shit. You’re this tough mother fucker who just got out of prison for a crime he didn’t do. Better head straight to your old dive bar and get in a fight.
What the fuck is this? It’s another fucking match 3 game! Who is in charge of these things? Except this time we have more of a Bejeweled style match 3 than whatever the hell Ciel was. At least this one makes sense, just use the touchscreen to shift matching icons around. Don’t match up three police badges though! That’ll cause you to take damage. All cops are bastards, and these class traitors exist only to protect the property of the rich from us working slobs.
I have to wonder why this game exists. Civilisation has produced more match 3 games than we’ll ever need. Marrying one with a noir comic, another over saturated niche, isn’t the crossover the world was screaming out for. If developer Ktulhu Solutions wanted to tell this story, there’s better ways of delivering it than via a match three game. But looking at their pipeline of new games on Steam, it seems they’re just concentrating on corning the lucrative horny male gamer market.
It’s an astonishingly short demo, just three rounds of match 3 and a cliffhanger ending. You do get to see some tits though, but not worth the trouble. In fact I’ll save you the effort and post them here.
Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet
Sword Art Online is – and I had to look this up – one of those endless Japanese entertainment empires that spans multiple novels, anime series, merchandise, endless mangas, sex toys, and fifteen video games just churned out of the Japanese content farms. Who the fuck is buying all these? How is all this churned out in just 11 short years?
Maybe there was something compelling there once, I don’t know, but Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet (SAOFB) sees you create a character in what turns out to be a in a virtual reality MMO. SAOFB isn’t a MMO though, it’s a third person shooter and single player RPG. I played through the opening level which acted as a tutorial to the action and met the cast of characters after an overwrought cutscenes and…
Nah, I’m done. Life is too short to deal with a bunch of dolls discussing the meaning of life in their game within a game. If you’re already invested in the Sword Art Online saga, fucken go for it, I wont stop you nor will I judge you. Just… what is the point of it all? Why isn’t Sword Art Online ACTUALLY FUCKEN ONLINE? Why isn’t it an MMO?
Anyway I can’t go on. I feel I need to recover from these three disappointments before starting the other demos. I had just been feeling so good about gaming having knocked over a bunch of the longstanding backlog recently.
Pietriots 