Last Update On: Mon, 2nd March (2026)
Been playing a whole bunch of demos. So here’s a couple of notes.
These are games that I completely fell in love with, and cannot wait for the full version of. I’d say the last-year equivalent would be CloverPit, which I got a bit obsessed with.
A fun little game that feels very impressive. It only goes up to Prestige 5, but the road there is perfectly engineered to get you hooked on waiting for the full thing to come out.
It is a classic incremental game, with multiple currencies. The loop, however, is extremely fun. You’re a slow, chained torch to a spirit, and told to go get some souls. You get them by
shining some light on them while performing an exorcism. Starts out short, can be lengthened.
Previously wrote that, and now that I’m looking back it downright looks like some shit an AI wrote. Let’s try again.
It’s an incremental game. Not exactly classic. There’s a spirit at the center that wants some souls. How’d you get them? Well, you move this slow torch that is chained to the spirit, and flash it onto spirits to harm them and get souls. Feels satisfying. What helps is the fact that damn near the entire game reacts to the rhythm.
On every beat. The spirit in the center pulses. Your torch flashes. The entire game feels the music. This is just, straight up inherently satisfying.
The design of the game is spectacular too by the way. Everything looks immaculately designed, with a whole lot of style dripping off of every component of the UI. The upgrades also feel satisfying to go through, there’s rarely a case where an upgrade feels basically inconsequential. They all cause some pretty measurable/noticeable improvement in your exorcisms.
Oh yeah, you decide when to start an exorcism. Then you have a time limit to flash the ghosts. One of those games with the gathering and the spending phases split explicitly. Everything comes together to build a beautiful game that, by the time that Chapter 5 stopped, I not only forgot that I was playing a demo, but felt really bad about the fact that I can’t play the rest. Can’t wait for this thing to come out.
Play it. You have no reason not to. Except time, I guess.
Okay so, this is a DICE A MILLION situation. That game is out now, but I played its demo and was a bit amazed at just how much stuff was in it. It was already basically a game. Same situation here.
This demo has so much stuff, I played it for around 4 hours. It’s also, I feel, one of the best executions of a merge between the roguelite and connecting-letters-to-make-words genres (I don’t know the name of the latter). There’s 4 characters available, but each one radically changes the game in some way. So let me give you an idea by describing the game.
Basically, you have a 5x5 GRID of letters. You can start at a letter, and go to its neighbours, and keep doing that to spell out a letter. Pretty simple.
Roguelite elements make themselves clear at the start - your first character gets one red letter and one blue letter. They don’t have effects… yet - but you can give them some. So you do that, play a game — it’s fun, you get to the 3rd boss and beat them… Then you get a whole lotta unlocks.
Next character pops up --- and instead of red and blue, they start off with void letters. If a letter is void, then instead of giving you points, it takes them away. So y’know, not good. At least she has a 10% chance of every void tile becoming shiny — which give you 50 points. Which makes it a bit better, especially since you can easily avoid the void letters. There’s other ways to synergize with void, but I’ll let you figure that one out.
Anyways, you beat the 3rd boss and the game… keeps on going? Okay, so, you beat the 4th boss, and the score requirement is starting to get a bit much. You also unlock… numbers? The next character shows up and… instead of red, blue, void, or shiny tiles, you now get numbers. You start a run, expecting a tutorial, but the character just gives you their best guess and tells you to figure it out.
I won’t tell you how they work. Instead I’ll tell you a small, tiny bit about the 4th character. They use chess pieces. You unlock chess pieces. And once you do, in every run, you’ll get your pick of ways to get any of these.
Please, do yourselves a favour and play the demo. It’s really good. And it’s free. Also the main guy is a muppet. I don’t know what’s up with that but, I like ‘em.
Ah yes. The sinister brother of the joker.
Anyways. I was going to put this game under The Greats section, but then I started feeling a hunger to go back to it. Only reason I haven’t is that the demo - while allowing for quite a bit of gameplay, doesn’t have as much depth as the other games in this section. However, it more than makes up for it in a gameplay loop that has me hooked.
The game is a Roguelike where you have a car racing on a track. You don’t race the car, you just manipulate both it and the environment to change how well it performs. The main goal is, like Cursed Words, going above the points threshold. How do you do this? Well, every time the car loops the track, you get 100 points. Simple. There is even a loop counter keeping track of the total loops in a run (we’ll get back to that).
So how do you get more points? Well, you have cards which have the place of perks, and they can do many things - usually settling in the classes of point gathering, fuel efficiency, speed management, and other. An example of other would be, for example, spawning a ghost car on the start of the lap. You also got items, some of which can stack, which provide a minor boost. Usually these are either one-time special items, or items that require a bit of investment to provide enough of an effect. Finally, you have gates, which can be placed at predefined points on the racetrack - and they trigger whenever your car passes them, similarly to perks.
Alright, and what stops me from getting points? Well, your car has fuel, and when it runs out - like most cars - it can’t go on anymore. What happens next is that your car then loses 10% durability, and gets another full tank. This keeps going until you have 0% durability. If you didn’t get enough points by the time your durability runs out, tough luck. Note as well that durability persists across levels. So one bad performance can cripple your chances at achieving future goals.
First things first. Can I just say how fun it is to see a car race around a track? Especially when, with specific combos, you can get the car to speed up so much, that it starts doing tens of loops per second. Every time you gain something, a little icon pops up - so enjoy seeing a mass of things emanating from the finish line if you’re fast enough. Not to mention how the gates will look. Somehow, it’s not even overwhelming too - you’re not going to fill the entire screen. So you just sit back, and see your car drive at MACH SPEED, praying that it’ll manage to get the goal without losing too much durability. It can be quite thrilling. And when you know you’ll win? It’s just really satisfying.
By the way, when you complete a run, either by winning or losing, you manage to get some progress towards “infinity” (whatever it is), and experience points. Whenever you level up, you get the chance to spend some post-run currency (might be based on loops? unsure) and unlock certain items (or rarely, permanent boosts) for all your future runs. I love this system - when I finished my first run, I immediately went back in with another run and a couple of unlocks, to not only see if I can get a better result, but level up to unlock more stuff.
Finally, I’ll mention the loops (told you we’d come back to this). Each track has a scoreboard that, rather than count up score, counts up loops. You might say oh, that makes sense, why did you wait so long to mention it? Well, when you achieve the point goal, your car stops no matter what, even if it has fuel left. In other words, in order to maximize your loops, you have to not only focus on winning the levels in order to progress and get more chances, but also keep your “points per loop” as small as possible to get as many loops as possible. Brilliant. I love it.
As a small conclusion - the game also seemingly will allow you to mod your car, though the demo locks this feature up completely so I have no idea how it’s going to work. But considering I already love the demo’s game loop (lol), chances are the added depth will only benefit the game.
Not exactly a next fest demo. But this is my article.
You are a horse.
Something doesn’t feel right.
These demos are still pretty good, they just don’t make it to the favourites. And all the demos are free so, makes sense to get and play these ones as well.