June Review Roundup
Daemon Masquerade
Daemon Masquerade is a neat little detective game, albeit one that's probably a little too easy for what it offers. The store page cites influence from Fate/Stay Night and Death Note, but the FSN lineage is especially blatant once the game properly starts - you play as Detective Lambda, the seventh and final entrant in the titular masquerade, and as the "Hunter," you win by discovering both the real name and the demon partner of each of the other six masquers. Assisting you in this endeavor is the demon Biblios, who can copy any document in existence. Each morning, you get a fresh set of documents related to each masquer, and your task to comb through them and make connections to figure who they are and what their demon does, conspiracy-corkboard style. It's a really compelling idea! The concept is fantastic, and it's really neat to whittle down the 40-ish options down to one or two as you get more information about what each entrant has been up to each day.
Unfortunately, as mentioned, the game is very easy. The logic is actually pretty sound, and the game never requires any guessing (which is good), but this almost backfires in a weird way when it becomes TOO straightforward. Some of the masquers are let down by their naming convention - given the list of demons available, it's not very hard to figure out which of them probably goes with "The Revenant." Others are just given to you on a silver platter, like when one of the masquers is murdered and you get a death certificate, which makes getting their name a little anti-climactic. That said, most of them are handled well enough that either the demon or the masquer's identity is not immediately obvious, and the best ones require a bit of reading between the lines to figure out what's going on.
If you think you have a masquer dead to rights, you can tell Biblios and he'll ask you who they are and what evidence points to it. This is, I think, the sketchiest part of the whole thing, because Biblios' standards are...not particularly high. More often than not, you really only need one or two crucial pieces of evidence for him to go "Hmm, well you've convinced me!" and rarely does he push back against your theories. Occasionally he'll make you do a little legwork ("We've got five passports here, if you think this one is real then you have to prove the others are all fake"), but provided that you have an even remotely reasonable argument, he'll mostly go along with it. Once you reach the endgame sequence, the other masquers can directly refute your claims (requiring you to submit additional evidence to buoy your accusation), something the game needed more of earlier on.
In the grand scheme of things though, this is small stuff. The actual core gameplay is good! We had fun with it, and for $10 you could do a lot worse. However, at time of writing, we're also in the middle of the big Summer Steam Sale, and you can get *a lot* of game for $10. This isn't an anti-recommendation as much as a...like, it's fine? It's not great, but it's fine. The value proposition just isn't there when everything else is on sale too.
Kindachi Mysteries: The Honjin Murders
This is apparently an adaptation of a Japanese novel, but it's been given a Visual Novel facelift and plays more or less exactly like No Case Should Remain Unsolved. Like that game, the goal is to follow testimony, figure out which statements were said by which people, and arrange them in the chronological order, and this plays out pretty much exactly how you'd expect it to. Having proper character portraits makes it significantly easier to keep track of who is whom - NCSRU sort of has these, but Honjin clearly has a little more budget behind it and it helps considerably. The game also occasionally cuts away to a more traditional VN presentation for some scenes, which should work out but ends up feeling really stilted because the audio isn't properly synced to the animations.
It took me about 20 minutes to finish the content in the demo. It's absolutely something that I would play the rest of, but again, $10 buys you a whole lot of game right now and it's hard to justify that on a 3-4 hour experience. This'll be one for later down the line.
Nextfest Demos
I'd be more specific but honestly there's only so many times one can write "it's a Metroidvania with Soulslike elements" before I fall asleep halfway through the sentence. MIO, Shattered Divinities, Blighted, they're all good games! But they're all the same game, and at best I'd want to play like, one of them before moving on to some other kind of experience. The only other thing of note that I remember playing is a low-budget attempt at a Prince of Persia-style platformer called Legend of Hiraq and it just...didn't work at all. Completely unresponsive to all but one or two buttons on my controller, and I wasn't about to play a platformer like that with the keyboard.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
This is less a review (which is coming when I finish it, I'm about 20 hours in and about to fight the Axons in Act 2), and more an excuse to briefly get on my soapbox. The talk around this game is insane, and I don't even dislike the game! It's good! The artwork is gorgeous, I love the character writing, and look - if you TRULY think that this is a masterpiece that redefined the way you look at RPGs or whatever, then more power to you. I'm glad you got to play something that spoke to you on that kind of level, because games like that don't come around very often.
For everyone else, it's really hard to take the level of praise that this game gets seriously, like it "saved JRPGs" or whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. This is usually (not always) paired with unsubtly (or outright openly) bashing the other greats of the genre in a way that makes it clear that the person saying it either A) Doesn't play many RPGs in the first place, especially turn-based RPGs or B) Only plays a very specific subset of the genre, primarily the big budget ones like Final Fantasy. Again, if that's you, I'm glad you got a game like this; the "realistic fantasy" market (for lack of a better term) is underserved, and hasn't really gotten a big hit since what, Lost Odyssey? Maybe Yakuza 7? But intentionally or not, this praise is buried behind a sentiment that comes off like "Finally, a game that isn't for fucking weebs" as though the anime aesthetic and themes that a lot of the genre adopts is the problem. This is usually (but not always) paired with trashing Square-Enix specifically for taking Final Fantasy in an action-focused direction, never acknowledging that Square probably makes more turn-based games than uh, literally any other publisher (Dragon Quest, Bravely Default, Octopath Traveler, SaGa, etc).
E33 does a lot of very interesting things! But almost all of them are pulled from the games that this demographic didn't (or refused to) play. The game's director apparently directly cites Final Fantasies 8 and 10 (as well as Sekiro), but like, QTEs built into offensive attacks and the ability to dodge enemy attacks (or counter with good timing)? My brothers in Christ, Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga came out in 2003. If you want to generalize it to just "timed hits," we can take it all the way back to Super Mario RPG in 1996, a game that will be thirty years old next year. The pictos system is taken straight from Final Fantasy 9 (or Tales of Vesperia, if you prefer), games from 2000 and 2008 respectively, and the story has more than a little bit of Nier (2010) in it. If E33 was your gateway to the genre, there is a wealth of experiences out there, and most of them are still incredibly accessible! Expand your horizons, and I think you'll like what you find.