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Yeeep. I downloaded a boatload of demos ahead of time to try out , knowing that I wouldn't be able to get to them all during the actual event since last week was a busy week for me personally. Turns out the demo is disabled from launching even then, almost like DRM. Trying to launch it now, even though I have the files downloaded, just brings me to the steam store's front page. Kind of disappointing. Hoping I don't run into this too much more with the other demos I was hoping to try out.
Anyway, I played the demo for a little, but I didn't manage to finish it, but just started scanning fingerprints, before I needed to switch to try another demo, so I can't give much of the feedback. I intended to return to Shadows of Doubt and try another approach in getting into the case's apartment and finish the demo, after I saw it was still available after the end of Next Fest, but now there's only blue "Buy" button in the Steam client.
I don’t intend to beat a dead horse by talking about the frame rate. That’ll come with time and optimization. The game you’ve created is beautiful and the world feels lived in. Lighting in particular looks great!
However, due to the voxel style, I find it hard to focus on individual items to see what’s important and what’s not. I feel the game should better draw attention to important objects. I would also feel more immersed in the world if I could interact with more, smaller objects.
On that note, though, I noticed a lot of repetition in my 90 minutes of play. Mainly in the game’s text. While I was working on the first case, I would mess around, beat up people on the street, and take their keys. There’s only so many times I can read the same few emails on their computers, or the same few documents in their homes. I even got bored of the dialogue from NPCs I passed. I understand the appeal of procedural generation, but I’m not exactly sold on it. These things can get stale fast. I hope this isn’t an issue in the final product.
The technical performance is fine, overall, all things considered. The UI is incredibly clunky. I almost closed the demo immediately because of it, and I still wasn’t used to it by the time I finished the demo. I fell through the map four times, but I’m sure you’re aware of that issue. Please add a weapon wheel.
I understand that combat isn’t the main focus, but right now it feels like pulling teeth. Melee feels very clunky right now and It seems that most weapons don’t have collision yet. (On that note, can we have fireable guns?)
Physics also feel a little inconsistent. I can throw a ceramic bowl through a window to break it, but a hammer doesn’t work?
I’m the kind of person who doesn’t play games the way they’re meant to be played, and I really appreciate devs who go the extra mile to make sure people like me can enjoy their games, as you have.
To be fair, the shadows of doubt demo was pretty much just the full game. Especially since with a bit of save game editing you could extend the timer indefinitely. Kind of a no brainer that they would not want to leave up the full game for freesies indefinitely. I kinda hope they bring out a demo with stronger restrictions that they could leave up permanently, but obviously that would take away from development ressources that could just advance the game, so I am not holding my breath on that one.
But other than that, yeah it is a shame that these days we only get demos for like a week or two, I still remember a time back in the day when demos were abundant.
Quite a few dev/pubs know demo's are good for getting their games know and keep demos up for months, and update them to be mroe up to date with the game.
Other devs/pubs barely can keep a demo up over weekend, and then get *really* defensive when people ask about the demo *cough*Frogware*cough*.
For me that means i most likely want buy their game, or most definitely not before lots of reviews are out.
1) I don't like survival elements for the most part, and it was annoying to me how many features I had to configure in settings to have something that I liked to play more. I didn't want to see waypoints in the world for items I had never encountered and stuff like that. I wanted to explore and discover those for myself without being distracted by (to me) useless features like being cold or hungry or whatever. I think that it's important & helpful to have tension in fiction, but "survival" is more like busywork to me and it only takes away from your game, at least to me, though I'm sure people will be into that still.
2) I feel like navigation was very difficult without the waypoints being on. I only found the apartment I needed to go to to continue my detective-ing by pure chance which was frustrating. I tried to ask for directions, but every NPC I talked with was a waste of time to talk with. They didn't add anything to the lore of the world or help with me progressing through that tutorial case. They are just there to maybe convince you that the area is livelier than it is. Besides moving up and down stairs or whatever they barely did anything. I think you're procedurally generating the world in some fashion, but there has to be some way to lead the player along with game mechanics as opposed to Peter Molyneux's beloved breadcrumb trail fixing the tough problems.
3) Related to #2, but, seriously, the dialog was terrible. Not sure if you're saving the "good stuff" for the "real cases" or whatever past the tutorial crap, but that alone made me very not into attempting to talk with anyone. Not sure if I missed the decent dialog that was sent out with everything else, but I talk to just about every NPC I can when I'm playing a game that offers that, until I realize that the dialog is a joke at my expense. If that was placeholder bad dialog it should have been signposted as such. I assume unless told otherwise that your demo is representative of what you want the final game to be like. Hopefully the dialog quality improves dramatically and conversations are actually worth having in the final game.
4) The default controller layout is very confusing and - as far as I could tell - inaccurate. I might be missing something, but as had never played the game before I blame the developers for delivering under-cooked stuff instead of pretending that I am somehow at fault for not 100% understanding what wasn't explained or what was poorly designed. In the controller layout menu on Steam, it lists the Y button on my controller as corresponding to the F key on the keyboard which controls the Flashlight. Whenever I pressed the Y button, however, I did not use a Flashlight, or anything in particular. The B button was supposed to be a Use button but also was of dubious, unclear meaning. Not sure what I should've been using that for.
5) The tutorial case prompted me to get like 5 fingerprint samples from specific areas after I had gotten like 20 other fingerprint samples from the same individual. Not sure if that was supposed to be "funny," but I wasn't impressed either way.
6) The UI and UX for going through case files is almost unusable on Steam big picture mode on a TV. Maybe it'd be ok if I was inches from a computer monitor, but it did not work for me as a Steam Deck gamer who primarily plays docked as this point. The font you're using isn't easy to make out at distances of over one foot and the stacks of files are difficult to navigate through with a control stick. It seems like this could easily work.
However, like a lot of what I experienced when playing the Shadows of Doubt demo it was another feature that is apparently going to be broken just because.
7) I'm impressed that you put out these demos at all, because if none of these things change I will not check out any future demos and I will not buy the game, especially at full price - despite loving detective stories and especially games where I can use my detective skills.
Thank you- despite all its potential, the game flounders.
(I also desire more punishment for being caught. Or have the extreme mode make it so one shot is lethal. (Maybe doesn't kill, but you are seriously damaged. Maybe like a adrenaline system? So as your adrenaline wears off, you get slower and slower and weaker and weaker until you die. Sort of like bleeding. But a lil more in depth)
This demo is really good. I am super excited to play the game!
(The blood trail does a good job of this too tho)
I just want to say thank you for the Non-Binary option. I know a lot of people will feel really validated just to have this.
Of course, you have to fix some critical bugs first (weird physics, broken vent-crawling, sometimes broken AI)
Then I suggest you make some decent punishment for player, to make him think what he is doing. For example, you can make some career advancement (when player solves cases he gets money and social points. Some amount of social points gives him new rank with new posibilities and gadgets. For example, you start as some unoffical detective like vidgilante or something. You can't break into people's houses and they don't have to answer your questions if they don't want to, but when you solve some cases, you get promoted to "official" detective and you'll have your badge which you can show to some tenant and he'll have to let you in. But if you get caught on something illegal, you'll lose all your previlegies and your career and have to start all over again)
Also it would be cool to see cars in this game. And some illegal ways of getting information (for example, you can kidnap someone who must know something you need to know, but he doesn't talk, so you tie him, put him in the trunk and move him to your house where you interrogate him). And I think it would be better to make arrests more immersive (you cuff the suspect, put him in the car and deliver to prison or somewhere idk)
I think this is gonna be my favorite game, demo was awesome