Demo Impressions: Drege and Demon Purge

Dredge

It’s hard to resist the allure of a setting where things aren’t as they seem.

Such is the case of Dredge, were you play a down-on-your-luck fisherman whose search for work brings him to a small island chain that is beset by thick fog every night. At first, the weirdest thing that can happen is a townsfolk indulges in a bit of camp. But it’s not long before the game prods you to go out into the fog at night, where it becomes quite obvious you’re dealing with MUCH more than you bargained for. Quiet quitting isn’t an option, though, so the question is just how far will you go?

The fishing is pretty barebones, but it’s enough to keep things moving. You sail around looking for semi-random fishing spots and deplete them to earn a buck. You’ll acquire different equipment over time to catch fish in different areas of the sea. You’ll also eventually get traps and nets to expand your seafood-generating arsenal.

Catching the fish involved a brief minigame in which you can speed up the process (in both real time and in-game time) with some timed button presses. But the reel fun is the Resident Evil-like management of your storage. If you want to maximize your hall (and hull) to market, keep your Tetris skills sharp.

But your boat is also good at — wait for it — dredging. You’ll need to harvest goods from shipwrecks and other sunken treasures in order to advance the plot and find materials to upgrade your ship (other paths of improvement can provide better equipment, but not better ships).You’ll probably end up doing noticeably less dredging than fishing, but the dredging has a bit more of an impact.

Without upgrades to your ship, you won’t get too far, too fast. It’s a well paced game that doesn’t let you do all the exploring right from the jump. The exploration served as the carrot for me, even more than the blatant Lovecraftian overtones that will keep you from successfully straying too far from safe harbors until you’re damned good and ready. And possibly insane.

All in all, it keeps my interest and is just fun enough. It’s probably not game of the year material, but I can see why the buzz is overwhelmingly positive on Steam.

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Gal Guardians: Demon Purge

Despite Inti Creates developing the the Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon games, I never expected their next Castlevania-inspired work to be a spinoff of Gal*Gun.

(As such, the characters and story are completely banal. At least the gameplay is fast and fluid and the artwork well-suited to a Castlevania-like setting)

But here we are nonetheless. And here we also have a game that infuriates me by flirting with Metroidvania design but not committing to it. As you defeat bosses, you unlock new subweapons that sometimes enhance your movement. The game lets you go back to the start of any previous level everytime you clear a level, but otherwise has no interconnections. And you go back to the old levels looking for powerups and alternate paths, only to discover your new means to travel are useless because gates block platforming challenges until you have the right weapon. And sometimes when you do have the right weapon and pull off a platforming challenge, a SECOND gate blocks the way back to the main path and you’re forced to take a death if your subweapon energy is too low to backtrack. I think they tried to help with this design choice, but blew it.

There are a few interesting innovations at work here, at least. You control two characters with different capabilities reminiscent of Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. And while you can swap between them at any time, dying will split them up and cause something of a body retrieval mechanic. The other character is sent back to the last checkpoint and can revive the other character with half their health if you can get back to where the death occurred. If both die, though, you will lose a life for realz. Earning additional lives has something interesting going on, too. How many points it takes to earn a free life scales to the number remaining. For example, it takes five times as many points to go from 5 lives to 6 as it does from 1 to 2. You’ll never have an undepletable large stockpile, but they’re always easy to get when you really need one.

In sum, there’s quite a few elements at work here that make the game stand out, in good ways and bad. Switch owners can download a demo to see if the game’s idiosyncrasies scratch their itches or push their buttons.