Driftwood demo playthrough (Next Fest Feb 2023)
3This game is quite the change of pace from the typical types of things I play on stream, but it caught my attention as a potentially enjoyable and somewhat chill experience.
The premise: you are a sloth. You have a longboard. You cruise down winding highways, with the occasional off-road detour, and try to avoid embedding yourself in the odd vehicle or guardrail.
The game does what it sets out to do fairly well, and I spent an inordinate amount of time repeating the single track in the demo, which certainly says something for the gameplay, at least. It wasn't entirely clear to me exactly the extent to which longboard and wheel choice affect your control though. Given that there's only one track in the demo, I have to wonder how varied they'll be / how many there will be in the full release.
The biggest issue I had (seen for a bit at the start of this video - I cut most of the affected section) is that the game is surprisingly GPU-intensive at medium and high detail settings, enough to severely impact NVENC. Given the style of the graphics in this game, it's hard for me to fathom why it would perform that badly, so I hope the developer is able to spend some time on optimizations, or at least on more granular graphics options (e.g. shadows). The scenery is super cool, and it's sad to have to turn it down to low which drastically limits draw distance to a jarring extent. Potato mode is kind of hilarious and looks halfway like Star Fox (or perhaps more appropriately, Stunt Race FX?).
Also worth noting for anyone thinking of streaming this game: a portion of my original VOD for this on Twitch got muted when I had the game paused during a break. The music is by Ghostrifter and has a creative commons license that requires attribution; not sure how to effectively clear that with streaming/video sites. Might want to take that into consideration and substitute your own downtempo playlist that you know is stream-safe. (The music is simply used as a playlist anyway, at least currently; the game doesn't bind specific songs to specific tracks.)
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