Gestalt: Steam & Cinder demo playthrough (Next Fest Feb 2023)
2I had already wishlisted this game after seeing it mentioned before. Now that it has a demo, I was interested to find out how it holds up.
The answer is, it holds up extremely well; probably better than I could have expected. There are clearly multiple systems in play: you have sword- and gunplay to balance (though at least when starting out, your gun is a relatively limited resource best used strategically), there's leveling and equipment and an ability/stat tree that rather reminds me of Final Fantasy X. And of course there's sidequests, and currency that might not have much use in the demo, unless I completely spaced out on something.
The movement and combat mechanics feel pretty good, and you have both a backdash and a roll (though both have a shared cooldown). All of the graphics, including character animations, seem really well done, and there's full-sized torso portraits of major characters. The music is no slouch, and sound effects seem pretty on-point; the one thing I found somewhat jarring is how blatantly stereo-separated sound effects are; enemy sounds seem to be panned 100% left or right even if they're right next to you.
The only real complaint I have about the demo is that the boss encounter dragged on for far longer than it felt it should have. Its patterns were easily learnable and the game gives you plenty of restoration items, so that wasn't particularly an issue; it just felt boring having to continuously whack the boss just because its life bar was probably twice as long as it needed to be. This game didn't strike me as particularly souls-like otherwise (I'd be much less interested in it if it did), so I'm not really sure what prompted that particular decision.
The demo ends on a real cliffhanger, so I'm certainly interested to learn more when the full game releases.
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