I’ve been trying out some interesting game demos during Steam Next Fest! I haven’t get to recap them on my blog as much, but I want to try to document and share some of the games I’ve enjoyed and look forward to see its full version of!
Games I’ll talk about in this post:
Call of Boba
I’m a boba tea enthusiast and of course this game calls on to me I had the opportunity to get the early access of the demo, thank you for that I gotta say the game is adorable and fun, I’m curious to see what it will be like in the full version!
At first I simply expected a drink simulator type of game with drink menu mixing, inventory management, and customer serving, which we do get that mode as expected – but it turns out there are variety of things to do beyond that!
An unexpected thing to do is that when our character goes to sleep, we enter a dungeon shooting exploring mode – we shoot out boba ingredients and fight office-related enemies of our nightmare! This is a way to farm ingredients which will magically appear in our hands when we wake up. I feel by its own this is a fun game mode on its own.
We get to explore the town, interact with other characters, do farm and fishing (it seems we can actually get quite rich from here more than the actual boba shop lol). The art and character look adorable, with fun dialogs and easy to follow story so far.
Rooster
Another game I’ve seen the preview of and excited to try out the demo! The game has strong Chinese culture shown through its art style and game concepts, which looked unique and caught my interest.
We play the rooster, who got in punished for ruining a party with the other Chinese zodiacs and got sent back in time to finish tasks from the others to grow and learn from its behavior. From what I understand each Chinese Zodiac animal will present different gameplay to solve.
In the game demo we get a preview of story from Rat and Snake – for Rat we get to do a ‘find the object’ game, while for Snake we get to help it save a child by adjusting its shape – it can be quite unexpected to predict which shape will help out the most. Made me curious what will the other animals’ gameplay will be like?
The art looks interesting with plenty of things to look around, with some trivia to read about Chinese culture here and there, and a story to follow through about the people we meet as well as the other zodiac animals that will help Rooster to learn about its interactions with others.
Townframe
This game offers an interesting puzzle gameplay that got me interested – we need to arrange the landscape in the given frame to match the given description of our ‘clients’. For example, they might ask that specific houses are next to some trees and we can arrange the objects shown to follow it.
We get to play several stages and it’s interesting to see the different ways to solve and interact with the scenery, and new mechanics introduced – we can change the wind direction, discover hidden objects, move the clouds, and more. There are even some puzzles that are connected to each other.
The theme of specific scenery that gives a sense of nostalgia and memory is something I can feel I relate with and got me interested in the theme of the game. I feel this is a promising puzzle game that can bring a sense of satisfying challenge to enjoy when solving the stages, I’m curious to see what the other stages and possible puzzle interactions can be like.
Wilmot Works it Out
The game is pretty straightforward – solve puzzles by pushing and pulling the block tiles around to form a picture. New puzzle blocks are mailed to our doorstep, which may be a mix up of different puzzles or incomplete. The controls felt quite satisfying to do and the art is nice to look at – not knowing what puzzle art comes next makes it a pleasant surprise.
A fun touch to the game is that we can hang up the finished puzzles on the wall, making it a nice way to display our progress and achievements in the game with some personalization to arrange the framed pictures to be arranged as we like. I feel this can be a chill game to play, though I can imagine it can get tricky as the puzzles get more mixed up and bigger, haha.
I usually stream my gameplays on my Twitch channel – but I also update my other stuff on this blog and on my X/Twitter account. I’m interested in cute and chill games and will be updating games I discovered over time here! I also draw and post art content here as well.