Hoo boy, looks like a good round of demos this year. We got games about cars, we got adventure games, a poker roguelike, let's see what's good, shall we?
Pacific Drive - This game rules. If you've ever played Jalopy, a wonderful little game about a road trip across Eastern Europe, this is like that but if the road trip was set in a fucked-up Zone (Hi STALKER!) in the Pacific Northwest. There's lots of creepy, scary goings-on and you're stuck in your rickety shitbox scrounging for scrap to turn it into a proper Armageddon machine that'll ferry you through the dangers within the Zone, perhaps solving the mystery of why it's there?? I dunno! But I spent 4 hours with it in the intro and first level and had a blast. Structure-wise, Pacific Drive is set up in distinct 'levels', which I assume are procedurally generated like a roguelike. You select a route and you arrive in a long section of road with points of interest to explore, aiming to pick up as much as you can. There are dangers and risks; radiation fields, electrical towers arcing, circular, maybe-sentient sections of ground that BASH your car from the underside. You evade the dangers and bring all that scrap back to your safehouse garage to turn it into juicy new car parts and workstation upgrades. It's a great gameloop and I can't wait til it comes out.
Star Trucker - Hey, another vehicle game! I like games that focus on your relationship with a vehicle. Subnautica has its Cyclops, there's Jalopy, Both FAR games (Lone Sails and Changing Tides), Pacific Drive up above. Done right, it can get you attached to a mechanical device, learning its quirks and eventually treating it as an extension of yourself, maybe even feeling like home. I think I wanted to like Star Trucker more than I did by the end of the demo. It's got a strong premise (Eurotruck in space), and a cool spaceship shaped like a GIANT truck (seriously, you EVA outside it and it's just hilarious looking at its gargantuan size), gameplay touches that feel like they're pulling from Tin Can and Rogue System, but right now it feels unpolished, and there's just enough stressors to distract from the chll vibes I think this kind of game normally targets. Power cells for your systems run dry remarkably fast, and hitching to a trailer can be surprisingly confusing. I once accidentally bumped one and ended up trying to hitch to the opposite side I initially went for. The truck's steering was squirrelly afterwards until I unhitched and switch back. Dunno if it was just that I hitched at a funny angle or what, but it wasn't explained at all. Star Trucker has a few problems tutorializing, as well. I hope this gets polished up by release, because there's a solid gold nugget in there somewhere.
Balatro - A poker deckbuilding roguelike. Not exactly like real poker, this game has you drawing seven cards and building poker hands from them. Each hand has a different score and multiplier associated with it, and in each round you're trying to beat a goal score in as few hands as possible - go over your limit and it's game over. What makes it really fun is the other cards you can buy between rounds. Sure, you can buy new playing cards. Get another ace, why not? But wouldn't you rather make a full house more valuable than a straight flush? Or have all your played spades multiply your hand's value by 4? There's a heady satisfaction putting together a synergistic combo that gets you a win in a single hand by stacking modifer cards like this, and this seems like it has a solid core. It may be a bit sparse in terms of framing though. No story, but if you enjoy the gameplay, it's very good.
Lightyear Frontier - This seems to be another sort of 'environment restoration' game, like Terra Nil, Distant Bloom or Loddlenaut. Lightyear Frontier is oriented like a light farm sim, but the hook is that you have a big mech to do all your work with. The mech itself has a nice heft to it (if a bit slow) and the tools feel good to use, nice and chunky. Beyond the farming and resource gathering, there's the element of restoring the local environment, but I don't know that it's got enough juice. You start out in a nice enough biome, your only problem areas are sufficiently distant from you and low-stakes enough that it feels more like a flight of fancy than something you NEED to deal with. Maybe the game has a slow start, but it's not exactly a great demo if it hasn't got its hook in by the end. Still, the mech DOES feel good, and your effect on the malnourished environments IS clear and visible. If you like the whole mech concept and you don't mind a light and easy game, give it a try.
The Mermaid's Tongue - Lookin' like another banger from SFB Games! I'm a gigantic fan of their previous game, Tangle Tower, and this is the sequel to that, as well as the third game in their Detective Grimoire series. Both of Mermaid's Tongue's predecessors were wonderfually charming, witty point n' click mystery games, and this one promises to do it again. Gorgeous art, fantastically moody music, and a snappy rapport between our two protagonists, Grimoire and Sally, are all elements that persist in this snippet, and it's a joy to have it be so overtly nautical. Gets me right in my braincase. I hope dearly that it comes out soon. Go play Tangle Tower! (And the first game, Detective Grmoire 😉)
Battlecore Robots - I didn't get much time with this one, but I'm not really feeling it anyway. I love Custom Robo, so I was glad to see an imitator make an attempt at it, but it just doesn't feel quite right. Jumping and moving is fine, but weapons are stilted, with an uncomfortably long cooldown that isn't communicated well. By that I mean there's no indicator at all. Custom Robo at least either locked your robo in place between gunshots or played a little buzzer for other weapons on cooldown. In Battlecore it just feels like guesswork. I should also mention that the story segments are just functional, with decent character art and some dialogue to justify having a series of robot fights. Custom Robo Arena, this is not.
Duck Detective: The Secret Salami - Very cute game. Effortful voice acting. Keyword-gathering, like Golden Idol. I was surprised in at least one way by this game. The eponymous Duck Detective has a pretty solid voice actor behind him! A wonderfully gravelly voice delivering silly lines is a good gag, and this game's got 'em. It's a cute game with a look that reminds me of Later Alligator (a game I have not played). Investigation is set up like The Case of the Golden Idol, with collectible keywords that you'll arrange into a declarative conclusion summarizing the case. Demos can sometimes leave a lacking impression of a game's depth, so I won't hold it against Duck Detective that its first couple puzzles are pretty simple. There are at least some hints of deduction here, connecting dots that aren't spelled out to you as much as, say, an Ace Attorney game. I'll watch out for this one.
Botany Manor - Well, this is neat! A kind of Strange Horticulture-type plant identification game blended with a Myst-esque structure as filtered through The Witness' art style. Botany Manor has you playing the part of a 19th-century botanist who's just come back home from a long trip, and has to solve plant-related puzzles to progress further throughout her expansive estate. For example, to clean out the smoggy greenhouse at the start of the game, you'll have to research the growing conditions of a plant with the unique ability to filter smog out of the air. Any game that has you referring to a big book all the time clearly has its head on straight, and while this isn't a real fancy implentation, it's nice to have information in an easy-to-reference place - though it keeps citations more than it does the actual information, telling you where a given note is in the house rather than collecting it within the book. I don't mind this too much since it at least reduces the working memory load, but you, the reader, may find the walk annoying if you need to go back and forth referencing things. Looking ahead in the book seems to foreshadow a smaller number of plants than I would prefer, but I think the core gameplay is good enough that that kind of might-have-been isn't such a big deal. You should definitely try out Strange Horticulture, though, if you want to identify dozens of plants.