April 5, 2024
Hello! Welcome back to our regular section where we write a little about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week, we're mixing it up a bit with a special GDC-based standalone trailer, highlighting several game demos we tried out at the end of March (and that's also just me, Chris, hi!).
If you fancy catching up on some of the previous editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.
Horses – PC, others to be confirmed, 2024
Boutique developer and publisher Santa Ragione won the IGF award for best narrative during GDC with its previous game, the wonderful Mediterranea Inferno, and Horses, developed by Andrea Lucco Borlera, looks like another gem.
This one is decidedly quieter, with minimal dialogue and disturbingly rudimentary construction. Borlera cited the Czech surrealists and Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek director of Poor Things and The Favorite, as inspirations for me at GDC's Developer Day, with Horses in the style of a deeply disturbing silent film. Expect speech cards for dialogue, slow, manual mechanics, and violent close-ups of people chewing, as you take on the role of a young new farmhand on a ranch that houses a herd of naked, horse-headed slaves.
In practice, it's somewhat simpler than some of the previous Santa Ragione games: effectively, you wake up and slowly carry out simple, if increasingly strange, tasks each day, such as watering plants, feeding the dog or, erm, bury bodies, like a story. It takes shape around you, but the magic here is in the atmosphere and tone. Horses are magnetically sinister. It's also a rare attempt to use real, suspended meaning in a game. You'll have to bring something of your own to the farm table here and get halfway there.
-Chris Tapsell
Thank goodness you're here: PC, PS5, Switch, 2024
Few games can take what is effectively a joke and build a game around it, but Thank Goodness You're Here could do it. The joke in this case is a self-deprecating jab at old-school northerners and almost incomprehensible Englishisms, as you, a small-time peddler, wander around the small fictional town of Barnsworth.
For some reason, your only means of interaction here is to slap things (developer Coal Supper describes it as a “slapper”), things ranging from blocked hoses to giant fish to the inside of a large cake-baking oven. The charm of this one is the way it highlights their moodiness, with the characters' small faces comically squished in the middle of their giant heads, the snappy animation and hand-drawn art a cross between old-fashioned newspaper cartoons and modern kids. TELEVISION. The proof of this, however, will be whether Thank God You're Here can go beyond the basic humor of slapping people to make them bark variations of “Hey up!”, and also stay on the right side of laughing. with, vs. . laughing at.
-Chris Tapsell
Militia – PC, date to be confirmed
Another creepy and oppressively atmospheric European adventure, Militsioner puts a giant spin on the theme of authoritarianism, but it's also kind of fun. Your task here is to navigate a ruined Russian city while avoiding the gaze of a giant policeman in the sky.
Ostensibly a sort of stealth survival scavenger, Militsioner has you scavenging kitchens and climbing rooftops and windows in search of resources (which are traded with a strange in-game merchant), but the twist is that this big copper is also a little a baby. You'll have to chat with him intermittently, manipulating his mood with flattery, obedience, or reassurance while he sulks or acts demure, or presenting him with the occasional gift.
The test will be whether this can overcome the fantastically surreal concept to create a game that remains truly interesting and engaging over time. (And as an aside, it also made me feel really sorry for the poor soul who chose this one to play after me and who, in the absence of anyone there to help explain the demo, didn't realize they'd skipped a tutorial complete. and he needed to restart the demo from scratch, so he just ran around and looked lost, while a giant yelled at him intermittently. If you're reading this, I hope you figured out how to reset it.)
-Chris Tapsell
Hyper Light Breaker – PC, date to be confirmed
Unfortunately, this is a bit disappointing, although don't rule it out just yet, as it could have simply been the difficult nature of the demo. Hyper Light Breaker is the long-awaited successor to Hyper Light Drifter from developer Heart Machine, who created the fun Solar Ash in the middle. However, the big change here is actually several major changes: Breaker, unlike Drifter, is no longer a Zelda-like pixel art adventure game, but a third-person roguelite extraction looter where you quickly switch between swords and guns.
Surely that's where some of the difficulty in getting a proper demo comes from: without a lot of running around to build the right equipment, and therefore to build a cohesive structure around it, Hyper Light Breaker's combat in the actual moment feels a bit of a stretch. little flat. You'll be parrying things and shooting flying enemies (everyone's favorite!), while dodging snipers, zeroing in on brutes, and slinging grunts, which leads to a lot of things at once, as opposed to the refined minimalism of your sword-and-play gear. bomb. in the original. The world itself also feels structurally bland: a procedurally generated loop of go somewhere, get loot, mine, where the original hid so many shiny, manually placed secrets.
All that said, this could work brilliantly when played in its proper context, as there are flashes of interesting, intertwined items and modifiers. But in a snapshot of the initial game, it's hard to detect much of the magic of the original, beyond its still-vibrant sounds and neon color palette. I hope the final ends up much better.
-Chris Tapsell
Hinterberg Dungeons – PC, Xbox Series X/S, Q3 2024
Let's finish with the best: Dungeons of Hinterberg stole my heart with a hands-off demo at Summer Games Fest last year, and having played it, I can confirm that it plays exactly as it looks. As in: deliciously.
Hinterberg is a dreamy, light-hearted holiday game where you arrive as a keen adventure tourist to the Austrian mountain resort town in search of some rest and relaxation. However, the mountain range is full of mystery, so you'll delve into several dungeons (the term is used loosely in the video game definition here, to effectively mean “large, self-contained, combat-puzzle-themed area”), before Return to the city to relax.
The combat is great: responsive but strong, if a little easy, though that reflects the laid-back nature of things here. The environmental puzzles are interesting and a little more challenging, as they fall into that nice “nice puzzles” territory. And magical snowboarding is, unsurprisingly, great. But the real stars are Hinterberg's cast of affable, rosy-cheeked locals, who chat away either to politely redirect you from a currently closed gondola to an endgame location or to talk in-depth about the strange phenomena they're studying. , or ways to chat with people more effectively at the bar after out on the town. This game is like a dream vacation: it is a delight.
-Chris Tapsell
