Vampire On Titus
Member
Prologue demo for Dark Auction is now available on the game's Steam page.
Finished playing this earlier today and I loved what they've put together so far. There were already, I don't know if I'd call them "twists," but certain unexpected aspects which upped the intrigue. Presentation wise, the demo did a good job of selling the dire circumstance and the settings oppressive atmosphere. Reading Noah go through everything I felt the stakes on a gut level, and was quickly invested in the plot. The basics of the scenario are familiar, but the details feeling believably human and "real" has always been a strength of Rika Suzuki's writing. The expressive art helps a lot too. I can already tell, even from the few interactions we got with the extended cast, that everyone has a ton of personality.
The overall vibe of the game feels like CiNG came back from the dead to give us a brand new game. There's already themes of past memories and strained family relations (Another Code), an ensemble cast rife with secrets to uncover in a closed environment with 1st person exploration (Hotel Dusk), a continued refinement of the keyword system (Glass Rose). There's a lot of DNA from CiNG and Rika's past works in general going back to the Riverhillsoft days in this game and it's awesome to see.
The only issues I had with the demo were stiff 3D character movement (largely offset by the varied styles of presentation making it so the game doesn't rely on 3D animation too much), Shoddy KB&M controls (I don't mind playing with a gamepad but there's still no excuse for this), and the pre-rendered motion graphics the game will use is heavily compressed with chunky artifacts, especially in darkly lit areas. The last issue, I'm guessing, is to keep the file size low for the Switch version of the game. But surely on PC we can get better looking video.
Can't wait to play more of this, anyone who likes mystery games, adventure games, or is a fan of CiNG's past work should do themselves a favor and check out the demo.
The overall vibe of the game feels like CiNG came back from the dead to give us a brand new game. There's already themes of past memories and strained family relations (Another Code), an ensemble cast rife with secrets to uncover in a closed environment with 1st person exploration (Hotel Dusk), a continued refinement of the keyword system (Glass Rose). There's a lot of DNA from CiNG and Rika's past works in general going back to the Riverhillsoft days in this game and it's awesome to see.
The only issues I had with the demo were stiff 3D character movement (largely offset by the varied styles of presentation making it so the game doesn't rely on 3D animation too much), Shoddy KB&M controls (I don't mind playing with a gamepad but there's still no excuse for this), and the pre-rendered motion graphics the game will use is heavily compressed with chunky artifacts, especially in darkly lit areas. The last issue, I'm guessing, is to keep the file size low for the Switch version of the game. But surely on PC we can get better looking video.
Can't wait to play more of this, anyone who likes mystery games, adventure games, or is a fan of CiNG's past work should do themselves a favor and check out the demo.
