Small Saga: It's cutesy with a sense of humor, there's some hidden Secrets, it can be played with a Controller (X Menu, B Run). Areas are "cut off" rectangular Screens you traverse between like in Little Big Adventure. Dialogue is in bubbles between protagonist and his companion and other creatures he meets. JRPG-inspired Menus and "Epic" combat with pseudo-3D Cutscenes. Enemies can "Goad" you in combat, and if you attack they retaliate. HP restores after each combat. You Save the game at different Statues littered across the game world. Nice music. Circular Skills Menu with branches to different sides, early ones seem mostly +Attack/HP/Action Points with a few Utility or special ones littered throughout. There's status effects like Bleeding or Stunned in combat. You seem to be able to Reskill at will. Interesting lore around humans, rodents and other fierce creatures. Gets very tense and "real" for a bit there, but I wouldn't want to spoil anything. After that you make your way to the city of the mole people, Cranbaile, where they have item vendors, a library and everything. There's a over-world map with an... interesting Quick travel system. This was the Highlight so far and it oozes that it was made with passion and care, people should definitely play the Demo as long as it's available and check it out for themselves.
Dragon's Wandering Tavern: Thought it might be interesting and comfy because of the art style, but it's an unfinished proof of concept with Engrish writing and unfunny ESL dialogue. Also seems clearly targeted at young children beyond that. UI is a mess. Gameplay is a mess. Art style is a mess with pixelated and hand-drawn figures mixed with MS Paint background. I rarely abort these things, but this was such a case. Not sure why this was in the "RPG" section to begin with.
Two games I've had Wishlisted before DemoFest, trying to help me purge or confirm my Wishlist were:
The Wandering Village: Seemed like an intriguing concept, but it looks a bit like a Mobile/Tablet game. Otherwise interesting enough Strategy/Building game. You build a city on the back of a giant beast. You have a local view of the city, a view of your behemoth and a global view showing where you're heading on the world map with limited sight range. You forage shit from the plot of land on its back, build homes for your villagers, farm for food and build things like storage buildings, doctors or research things like the Scavenger Hut to send expedition parties to interesting points of interest on the map and the likes. You can switch the production on some buildings for instance on the Farm between Beet and Wheat or in the Kitchen between Beet Soup or Berry Muesli to improve your food diversity and make villagers happier.
Your behemoth sleeps around and walks the world looking for food, getting you into trouble or into favorable situations depending on where it decides to go and you have to Research shit to help control it better. For instance there's a "Hornblower" to perhaps influence its decision which path to take at crossroads or tell it to walk or sleep. You have to manage his Sleep, Hunger and Poison levels effectively to stay alive and can build trust through various action, in which case it will listen and more often do what you ask it to instead of ignore your commands and do what it wants. If it walks through the desert for instance there's no water, plants grow slower and your people might starve to death. You need to prepare for eventualities by stockpiling things like food or water. I have to admit I fucked up bad the first time around. I got into a long ass desert and half of my villagers starved to death, the big lug ran into a big poisonous cloud storm that infected everything on his back, which spread unstoppably and then he too starved to death, but I managed to finish the Demo using what I learned on the second try. It ends when you walk towards two unavoidable Big Poisonous clouds. I'm undecided about it. It didn't blow me away with its amazing qualities, but what's there is solid enough. It needs some more work and I need to see more, but definitely worth trying if you're looking into these kinds of "base building" games. Btw. if you want to be able to build some of the "Endgame" buildings, gather some Iron Ore and Sand via your Scavenger Hut before you get too far in.
IXION: Hoped it would be the solution for Startopia itch, it wasn't. Impressive Intro Cinematic. Mission Briefings happen in a window at the bottom right with voice-over. Your mission is to take a round space station called the Tiqqun to Proxima Centauri and begin colonization. You can build science, cargo and mining vessels to explore the immediate Solar system you are in before jumping to a next system. There are multiple choice Events for Science ships. The story is a bit pretentious and the UI needs some work and is a bit overcomplicated. Demo is basically the Tutorial and not much happens, it didn't leave me with a very good impression and they seem to have put their production budget into making Cutscenes rather than interesting Gameplay. If not a bad game, this at the very least is a bad Demo that doesn't tell you all that much about how the final game will play. Also heavy environmentalist Subtext.
