Ophelia Payne

After playing Looking Up last week (you can read my review of the demo HERE), and thinking a lot about my dad, I thought about other demos I played during Steam Next Fest that hit me in the feelings and thought I’d share a few with you.

These cover a lot of ground – friendships, family, love, loss, grief, even a bit of mystery but all left me caught up in my feelings and memories, and I can’t wait for the full games to release to finish the journeys.

The following demos all deserve some love and are listed in no particular order. Go play the demos (if available) and add them to your Steam wishlists.

GENRE: Simulation

DEVELOPER: Glowfrog Games

PUBLISHER: Glowfrog Games

Pieced Together is a cozy scrapbooking game. It took me on an emotional journey about friendship, getting older and letting go.

From the opening scene, I knew this would hit hard. I had moved recently, and while packing/unpacking, I ran across some items that brought back memories of my time in school and memories of people I had lost touch with.

You will sort through items, solve puzzles and uncover the story. Reliving memories and creating a scrapbook using pieces from your past felt really familiar to me.

I recently received a code for the full game, so watch this page for a full review soon. Can’t wait to dive into the full game to see where this story goes.

GENRE: Adventure, RPG

DEVELOPER: imissmyfriends.studio

PUBLISHER: imissmyfriends.studio, Wholesome Games Presents

Fishbowl’s demo lets you experience the first few days of Alo’s life in a new city.  Talk to your family and friends over video calls, go about general tasks like eating and showering and sleeping. Work from home as a video editor (where you will play mini games/puzzles to complete).

After the death of your grandmother, your mother sends you boxes of items, and you rediscover childhood memories and get to know yourself better. The title, Fishbowl, references a fishbowl toy that is in one of these boxes you unpack.

Fishbowl impacted me in a very direct way. When my grandmother passed, my mother sent me a box of things my grandmother wanted me to have. Each one sits proudly in my home, full of memories. Fishbowl is a slice-of-life visual novel about grief and self-discovery. I am looking forward to seeing how the whole story plays out once the game launches.

GENRE: Casual, Indie

DEVELOPER: Lab42

PUBLISHER: Secret Mode

Wow, this demo impacted me in a way I was not expecting at all. During the A Storied Life: Tabitha demo, you will play through 3 non-sequential chapters of this narrative puzzle game. You are tasked with cleaning out the home of a loved one who has passed away. You choose what items to recycle, auction off, or keep. Ultimately, you use the items you keep, completing the damaged memoirs you have found. You are given certain words under 3 colour-coded options, and you choose which words to fill in each blank. The story changes depending on your choices, and I played through multiple times to test this theory. You will also get different narrative options depending on whether you auctioned or recycled certain items as well. For example, I recycled a painting that I didn’t have room to save, and someone found it in the bin, and it was worth £300,000, but on another playthrough, I auctioned it, and the police confiscated it. There is clearly more to Tabitha’s life that I can’t wait to uncover when the full game releases.

Final thoughts: These three demos all stood out to me for various reasons and are all worth your time and attention if you love a game with emotional storylines.

Until next time…be good to yourself and be good to each other.