I didn’t have a lot of time for the next fest but I did give three games a try that were on my radar before the next fest.

The first was Allumeria. It was recently in the news because it got DMCA’d for looking like Minecraft. Having played it I would say that while the artstyle is somewhat Minecraft inspired the game felt more like 3D Terraria than Minecraft. But I still consider it to be too raw to really get into it. The forest boss was kind of just running around to avoid getting hit by projectile spam while spamming projectiles back at the boss. I don’t know if I was supposed to have better gear for the boss but it was like 10 minutes of just running around taking potshots at the boss because the boss was too tanky. I followed up the boss fight with the forest dungeon and after literally spending an hour inside the dungeon I gave up because I had no idea where I was supposed to go what I was supposed to do. That said, I’ll still keep it on my radar because the concept was appealing.

The second game I played was Let’s build a dungeon. This was probably the best game I played and the whole concept of the game is so novel I’d definitely recommend keeping an eye on it. Basically the core gameplay of let’s build a dungeon is to build an MMO world. You throw in a spawn point, build roads, scenery, and then add quests and dungeons (which you also build manually) and then get NPC players come in to play your MMO world. Except that is not all that the game is. The game is also a game dev studio management game where you deal with hiring talent, managing the popularity of your MMO, budgeting etc. Except that’s not all that the game is. You also get to play the very MMO world you create. You can make a character and play through all the quests and dungeons you’ve made and if I remember correctly you can also play the MMO worlds other players have created. I would also recommend their previous game, let’s build a zoo, which is a game where you build a zoo (with a twist that I’m not going to spoil).

The last game I tried was Cargo hunters. It’s essentially a single-player extraction shooter where you play as humanoid robot. The novel idea in cargo shooters is that any other bot you destroy you can saw into pieces and then you can take those pieces back into your base and rebuilt your own bot using the pieces from the other bots. And that’s pretty much all I can say about the game because the demo was so barebones I couldn’t really tell anything more about the game beyond that it worked and didn’t play like ass. In fact I’d say the demo was an excellent example how not to do a demo. The game is supposed to have crafting, but most of the crafting stations are not available in the demo. It’s supposed to have trading, but trading station is not available in the demo. You can find gun parts to modify your guns, except the modification station is not available in the demo so you can’t do that. There’s a leveling system in the game but beyond being a requirement for some crafting stations I didn’t see any reason for there to be a leveling system. The demo felt like a mash of all sorts of things that an extraction shooter should have, except more than half of those things weren’t even in the game yet. So the game boils down to running the same level over and over again killing the same bots over and over again while you become weaker and weaker because you can’t really replace the gear your started the game with. I’m keeping it wishlisted because their trailer showed far more content than what the demo had so maybe there’s a quick jump into something with more substance when the early access launch happens, but overall this was the demo I was the most disappointed by.