Fellow Traveller will be hosting the fifth annual LudoNarraCon, a digital festival dedicated to narrative games, from May 4 until May 8
Much like Steam’s Next Fest, several developers have put forth playable demos for their games. There are 36 demos on display, with 18 of them being brand new. Despite it only being a twenty-minute time commitment for each demo, it can be overwhelming to sift through a whole list of games to pick out what you want to try.
Luckily, you don’t have to. We played every new demo to find the most exciting titles on display.
Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical
Stray Gods is an ambitious project by Summerfall Studios, a relatively new studio out of Melbourne and headed by David Gaider, formerly the lead writer on the Dragon Age series.
Stray Gods is a narrative told through the medium of musical theatre. The game’s characters break out into song during dramatic moments, and you’ll be able to influence the next part of the song, and subsequently the narrative, through dialogue options. The demo involves the main character Grace choosing between her long-time best friend Freddie and the Greek fertility deity Pan through song. The premise of Stray Gods is best described as urban fantasy.
The game’s art is very sleek and crucially, the voice acting is top-notch. You need talent to pull off a musical game and Stray Gods cast an all-star lineup to make it happen. Laura Bailey, Troy Baker, Rahul Kohli, Felicia Day, Ashley Johnson, Erika Ishii and Khary Payton are just some of the voice actors featured in Stray Gods.
Wrestling With Emotions: New Kid On The Block
Wrestling With Emotions, note the acronym, is a caricature of professional wrestling combined with a dating simulator. You play as a rookie wrestler, headhunted specifically by Manny McMann Jr Jr, whose dream it is to rise up through the ranks. If some romance brews between you and one of the eight superstars in the process, that’s just a bonus.
It’s easy to tell that developer Team Lazerbeam has a passion for the source material, as the demo is filled with pro wrestling references. From the rookies being referred to as “Little Kittens” (a play on New Japan Pro Wrestling’s young lions) to the commentators being Gorilla Baboon and Blobby the Brain, pro wrestling fans will love this one.
Cryptmaster
One of the more unique games we’ve seen, Crypmaster is a word-based dungeon crawler. You’ll need to type or say words to do anything in this game. If there’s a toad-like creature approaching you, you’ll need to type ‘Hit’ to fight back, for example. You have three lackeys with various abilities, but you’ll need to first discover what these abilities are. This is done by correctly guessing what the titular Cryptmaster is describing when you open a chest. You can give various commands to him, for example, if you type ‘Smell’ in then he will take a good sniff of the object and tell you what it smells like.
After commanding me to type an appropriate word to desecrate a holy altar, I typed something a bit risque and the Cryptmaster knew exactly what I had in mind. The game has a unique premise, and I’m very curious how deep the word recognition goes.
Death Trick: Double Blind
On the surface, Death Trick: Double Blind seems like a classic whodunnit. Set in mid-twentieth-century America, the game takes place within a travelling circus and the nearby town. You play as two characters, a replacement magician and a detective as they attempt to figure out who murdered the circus’ star magician.
The art is attractive as with all visual novel-type games, but what really sets Death Trick: Double Blind apart is its conversation system. You’ll have to manually point out contradictions and ask the right people about the right subjects all while racing against the clock. While most detective games allow the player to keep bashing their head against the case until it solves itself, we get the feeling Death Trick requires a more skilled investigator.
Harmony: Fall of Reverie
Our last entry comes from Don’t Nod, the French outfit behind Life is Strange. It’s more of a visual novel than the former - the game is played out entirely through dialogue. In Fall of Reverie, your character does double duty as a regular woman returning home to find her missing mother and as the aspect of Harmony in a parallel world.
The game contains a menu-based system that allows you to choose what tact you’ll take throughout conversations, relating to the other aspects you meet along the way. For example, after meeting the aspect of Bliss, you’ll be able to approach conversations in a manner that pleases the other person in the conversation, steering the narrative in a non-confrontational manner. The demo clocks in at about 40 minutes and is well worth the try.
Some honourable mentions go to Invincible, a first-person sci-fi narrative inspired by the works of Stanisław Lem and Tamarindos Freaking Dinner for being incomprehensible and truly bizarre.
LudoNarraCon kicks off on May 4 with the above demos and many more, as well as several exhibitions from narrative game developers including Gareth Damian Martin, who we interviewed early this year.