The Good
- In Stars and Time: cute RPG maker type game, writing is very good, art is gorgeous, very intrigued
- Cuisineer: adorable art, cute dungeon crawler slash town sim gameplay which could do with a little clearer tutorialing that you don't just have special moves. đ The load times are also a little rough, but I'm hoping that's just an alpha/no shader cache yet issue. Seems promising!
- Battle Shapers: Neat futuristic take on a Gunfire Reborn-style first-person shooter roguelike. I think this has some real potential but the performance and stability isn't there at this stage.
- DriveCrazy: Absurd juxtaposition of modern Unreal Engine rendering with low-poly graphics, Road Trip Adventure type humour, and a take on a mission driving game. You fight a giant alien-mind-controlled(?) bear by ramming it with your kei truck. This could be very, very good.
- The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood: Okay this one came out of nowhere for me. Very intrigued. Interesting premise, well executed demo.
- Sludge Life 2: I mean, it's more sludge life. If that appeals to you it appeals to you.
The Less Good
- Goodbye Volcano High: Has potential, the demo didn't really do a lot to make clear what was going on, and ended super abruptly. Still curious what it's going to be like in the end!
- Vampire Hunters: Cool idea, but I don't think even the first person bombast of "strap a bunch of guns together" gameplay can overcome the fact that I have too many survivors-likes on my plate at the moment. The gunplay also doesn't feel very good.
- Galacticare: "Full controller support" my ass
- Heretic's Fork: I think I misread this as being a deck builder but it's actually a tower defence game, a genre for which I have zero affection. Cool art but not my thing.
- Fortune's Run: Theoretically has controller support but it doesn't include most of the things you need to actually play. Cool throwback art style though.
- SteamWorld Build: disappointed that this has no controller support whatsoever, I was under the impression the SteamWorld games saw most of their success on Switch, so this seems an odd choice
- Elder Ring: Chinese game with a slightly audacious title which claims to have English support but I couldn't get the language switcher (or resolution switcher, for that matter) to work
- Spirit Swap: Lofi Beats to Match-3 To: Cute and stylish panel de pon. Sadly a lot of technical issues (with playback of the titular music in particular!) get in the way of it being much fun to play at this stage. Hopefully they'll get there!