Potions: A Curious Tale (Xbox)
Potions: A Curious Tale is an adventure game with a focus on crafting, and a “wits over weapons” approach to combat. This is conveyed clearly from the first interaction with an enemy, which lets you stumble into the right thing to do in a way that feels surprisingly natural. Similarly, the plot is explained through dialogue rather than explicit instruction or popups, but in a non-annoying and quite natural-feeling way.
As protagonist Luna, your aim is to develop your witching skills and potion reportoire by learning from your Granny, the towns potion master. During my play time, the majority of missions could be boiled down to problem-solving via fetch quests and exploring new areas to find ingredients for crafting a large variety of potions. The crafting system is based on blending different amounts of earth, air, water, and fire ingredients, which gives enough structure that you can start experimenting with combinations straight away. Some missions also include combat encounters, which are intended to be managed by using the environment (and even other enemies) to your advantage, rather than by just throwing potions everywhere.
One of my favourite parts of the game was its art style, which is aesthetically pleasant and calming but not boring. Each area has a distinct colour palette, collectibles, and cast of enemies. There are also some graphical quality-of-life features, such as ingredients being highlighted in purple during conversations and some interactable objects being highlighted in yellow. While there are no maps for individual areas, the visual clues provided are fairly easy to understand: for example, paths that lead back to the main map have a different appearance to the regular paths in that area. Also, once you have navigated to a deeper area of a zone, you can then choose to go back to that area. E.g. on reaching the Deep Dark Forest, you can choose to enter at the 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th sub-area. This cuts down the backtracking needed for longer quests without removing the locations entirely.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with this demo; I meant to play for 1 hour and ended up playing for 3! The demo is full-featured and long enough that players can definitely work out if they will enjoy the full game: the game seems to have 8 chapters, and the demo reaches to at least the start of chapter 3.
Pixel Skater (Xbox)
This demo caught my attention purely because I saw skateboards, but Pixel Skater can better be described as a skateboarding-platformer hybrid with hints of creepy not-quite-horror.
Unfortunately, despite being interested in the idea the game was going for, I quickly realised the game wasn’t for me. While most of the on-skateboard controls worked decently, the wall-jumping mechanic was so hard to correctly activate (not helped by the disorienting scrolling background) that I nearly quit the tutorial after spending 10 minutes futilely testing different timings of pressing the A button.
Once I actually finished this section, by luck rather than understanding, this opened a second tutorial section that was markedly better than the first: the environment was more open, detailed and visually appealing, and the characters I interacted with showed the game’s style and personality off far more effectively. The game should have opened with this part!
After finishing the second tutorial, I tried the easiest of the available Missions… and did terribly. Navigating around the more open tutorial area had been enjoyable, but navigating around the Mission area was much trickier for me. I realised that I was not having fun, and would be unlikely to have fun with the other missions, and so quit right there. For me, the confusing controls and navigation outweighed the interesting vibes.
P.S. The first review on the xbox store is an angry 1*. The reviewer said that they expected a game with more realistic graphics based on the splash screen in the store page, and that the game was being dishonestly marketed. However, the screenshots and trailer on the store page do fairly represent the game, and the reviewer is the one in the wrong here. Also, it’s named Pixel Skater...
Mythic Ocean (Prologue) (Xbox)
Mythic Ocean is an interesting blend of visual-novel-style choices with relatively free-roaming exploration, which takes place almost entirely underwater in a charming ocean full of creatures to befriend. Oh, and its also set after the end of the universe.
While the opening environment was very pretty, there was a lot of uncomfortable juddering. It felt like the developers were trying to run before they could walk, graphically speaking. However, once you get underwater everything becomes (and stays) prefectly smooth, so I think the first few minutes just needs some extra polish. The overall art direction of the ocean is great – it feels like a welcoming and calming place to be even when odd things are happening.
Speaking of odd things – you’re now an undersea creature with no memory of your previous life. Your guide Elil tells you that this ocean is a holding pen between the end of this universe and the start of the next. In this ocean are at least 6 gods, and one of them will become the Creator of the next universe. Your job is to choose which one it is, and your interactions with the gods will affect if, and how, they rule. (If no-one has already used the phrase “meta-god-game” for a different type of story, I’m claiming it for this one). This is an excellent idea for a story, and so I was excited to dive in.
Mythic Ocean is all about its story, dialogue, and exploration of character personalities, with few other mechanics except for some collectibles. There is no combat, no death, and no levelling-up or other RPG elements. For me, reducing the amount of gameplay systems to center the interactions makes perfect sense, as they are the unique part of the game. The mechanics which are present work well: the swimming controls feel good, I didn’t experience any bugs, and while the default unboosted speed feels slow, the boosted speed feels just right. I will nitpick and say that I definitely felt like a floating camera rather than a defined character though.
The main gameplay consists of swimming from area to area to find each god, then travelling between areas to complete quests for each god, resolve misunderstandings, and get the gods to interact with each other. In the demo, I met the first 3 gods (technically 4, but one god is a pair of twins), and started to understand their different, and differently flawed, personalities. For example, Amar is a chilled out, friendly, pleasure-loving creature, which has its obvious pluses. But you quickly learn that he is out for the simplest life possible and won’t put in the effort or time to help out anyone else or hear anyone else’s troubles.
By interacting with each god (and by them interacting with each other) their flaws may be tempered, or entrenched. They may overcome their weaknesses, or double-down on them, and it’s this aspect that makes the game so interesting to me.
The demo ended after about an hour of play, and I was genuinely disappointed. I have now bought the full game, and I really hope it is as deep (pun not intended) as the description implies, because this idea has so much potential.
The Pedestrian (Windows, GOG)
The Pedestrian is a puzzle platformer with an interesting framing, where you need to arrange and link the sections of each puzzle, like moving pinned notes on a corkboard, in order to figure out the path between them. This means that step 1 of each puzzle is figuring out how the different signs and spaces of that puzzle could interact with each other.
The navigation mechanics, and the puzzle mechanics, are carefully built upon in the demo, with new elements such as switches, hazards, and item pickups being introduced at a sensible pace without overloading players. Tutorials are embedded within the world in a way that feels naturally left rather than strategically placed – as post-it-notes on walls and CRT monitors showing specific buttons being pressed.
The developers have used these core mechanics well, and have also done a good job with the “2-D play space in 3-D worlds” aesthetic. The way that the camera flows between each puzzle-space, so that even though your stick-figure character isn’t visible, you still feel like you know where you are, is impressive. The world itself is also intriguing, as the city has traces of activity but no actual people, which means it feels like you are always arriving just a few seconds after everyone has suddenly left.
For me, the demo took about 45 minutes. I was already starting to lose my enjoyment of the game by the end of the demo, but that’s because I am particularly bad at intuiting what I need to do in situations that are not explained with words. For most people, the game is regarded as not particularly difficult, and also as very short, with an estimated time on HowLongToBeat of 4-5 hours.
While I don’t think I would enjoy the full game, especially as there will almost certainly be more mechanics and more complexity involved in the later puzzles, I can see its appeal. If you are a fan of puzzle-platformers, The Pedestrian is likely to be a good addition to your collection.