Yesterday I checked out the demos of SteamWorld Build, Soul Stalker, and Houseflipper 2 thanks to Steam Next Fest; today I have a few more for you!
After this there are four more demos that I've downloaded and they'll be featured in my next post. Today I'll be looking at Choo Choo Survivor, Sea of Stars, Thronefall, and Moonstone Island.
First on the list for today is...
The blurb for Choo Choo Survivor is as follows:
Drive your train and get to safety while shooting down endless hordes of zombies that are blocking your way. Upgrade your weapons and abilities and become absurdly powerful!
Does that not sound fantastic? I think it does.
The game is very simple. It's a bullet hell just like everything these days that has "Survivor" at the end of the title, but this time we're on a train!
Driving along the track, we need to pick up fuel and health and inventory boxes. The inventory boxes allow you to select upgrades for your weapons and later into the round are required for buying health and fuel if necessary. That aspect seems a little OP to me. It would be a lot more challenging if you couldn't merely buy your necessities. Upgrades yes! Necessities no.
As we drive along we can find other survivors of this apocalypse and hope they make it safely onto the train. If they do we get bonus damage. And at the end of the round, we can spend all that gold we've found on permanent upgrades for future playthroughs.
Standard "Survivor" game. I didn't feel as though it was really groundbreaking but it was a fun little time waster. I'd recommend it for a very casual experience when you just want to phase out of reality for a bit.
Sea of Stars is inspired by your classic turn-based RPG ala Final Fantasy.
Straight away, in the 'Settings' before I even begin the game, I am annoyed. There is only keyboard control — no mouse — and no arrow keys either. It feels highly unintuitive navigating the menu with WASD and left/right 'Shift'.
Honestly, I only played this for about 15 minutes. While it seems like a cute little RPG worthy of playing, I just can't stand the controls. Keybind changes are limited, too. Very frustrating. I got into a battle, and it wasn't obvious which enemy I was attacking and I couldn't go 'back' in the combat menu to look at other options.
The graphics are cute, music is nice, there are materials to gather, and the story seems decent enough... but I just can't get past the controls. Maybe you can. 🤷♀ Maybe the controls will improve before launch. Other people in the Discussions page for the game are complaining about the controls so at least I'm not alone.
I wish I could say more about this game. The people who obviously didn't mind the controls are raving happily about it so there's something decent hiding behind these unintuitive buttons. Probably a game more recommended for controller players. 🙄
Thronefall describes itself as a minimalist game about building and defending your kingdom and that's exactly what it is.
You control your little King on horseback and slowly build up your village during the day and then fight enemy forces at night. It's very simple. Each farm and house that's built gives you a coin or two at the start of each day, and sometimes enemies drop a coin as well. You use that money to build more things or upgrade existing buildings.
Soon you will have enough coins to build an archery range and barracks and get some forces active, and you control where they go in hopes to protect your village.
You get points after completing the battles each night and finally, at the end, there is One Last Wave that is super large, comes from all sides, and you have to do your damndest to protect everything. After your eventual Victory or Defeat, all the points you have accumulated go towards levelling up aspects of your game so that when you start your next match you can have a different weapon for your King, or a different modifier on the enemies, or a different modifier on the village itself.
It's such an easy-to-get-into game and very addictive. It's a good little time waster and if this ends up being cheap I'll probably buy it.
Moonstone Island describes itself as follows:
Moonstone Island is a creature-collecting life-sim set in an open world with 100+ islands to explore. Make friends, brew potions, collect Spirits, and test your strength in card-based encounters to complete your Alchemy training!
I like life-sims and I like creature-collecting! Time to see if they can merge the two genres together nicely.
I paused this game halfway through my experience to alt-tab, zoom to this post-in-progress and exclaim something very important:
I am so chuffed with this game. The demo only allows you to experience 14 days and I'm up to day 4 but I am very impressed. My one complaint is: as is common with the life-sim genre though, time moves at a ludicrously fast speed. Sometimes these games allow you to adjust time speed to your own preference, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
Anyway. You leave your family to go off on an adventure to become an Alchemist on another floating sky island. You crash-land on an island and begin your new life. You can chop down trees, remove rocks, find the perfect place to set up your home and plant your crops, and your little creature follows you the whole time.
As is common with creature collector games, at the start you get to choose a creature from a selection of three and for this I chose a cute little buzzy bee. When you fight other creatures the battle-screen is a card battle similar to Slay the Spire, except you can actually heal your friend.
On the island that is now your home, there is a vibrant village with many people living there. You can talk to them, tell jokes and flirt, give them gifts, etc, just like in most other life-sims. So far the people actually seem to have personalities, are different to one another, and are interesting folk.
As you explore the island and make it your own, you can find ladders that go down into the bowels of the island where there is plenty of ore to dig, dungeons to explore, and creatures to battle.
I freaking love this. It's just lovely! Truly a gem. Apparently it gets released in Q3 of this year and I'm hoping very badly that it's a full release and not early access. FINGERS CROSSED!!! I'll be buying this as soon as I can.
Choo Choo Survivor: A casual bullet-hell. Would be a good time waster. I liked it.
Sea of Stars: Not keyboard/mouse friendly. Controls are irksome. Could be a great RPG otherwise but I couldn't get over my disdain of the controls.
Thronefall: A minimalistic village defence game. Very simple and very addictive. I really enjoyed it!
Moonstone Island: The gem of this post. I love it so freaking much. Life-sim + deckbuilder + creature collector. HELL YESSSSSSSS.
All screenshots in this post area courtesy of me, 
