Hands-On With Skate Story, Neva, and More!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3LQFuzGStPzDEStVyCi0xO

So this weekend was the Game Showcase at the Tribeca Festival where a number of smaller releases coming soon were offered for free playtesting. I went and tried out a few of them so here are some thoughts on the games I tried:

Skate Story

This is the game I was most excited to try and was one of the two games that solidified the decision to cover this event. Skate Story is the new game from Devolver Digital where you play as a skater in Hell that is trying to escape. The key is that you're made of glass so if you mess up an fall off the skateboard, you shatter into a million pieces. This gives the game a souls-like quality, especially when you take into consideration how the mechanics to do tricks in order to build momentum have some level of difficulty to them. The aesthetic is where the game really shines as the hell from this world has a surrealist quality to it that makes the world fun to explore.

Skate Story does not yet have a release date.

Neva

In 2018 Nomada Studios' game Gris won Game of the Year so expectations for the follow-up are reasonably high. As mentioned above, Skate Story was one of the games that motivated me to attend this event, Neva was the other. This game feels like a step up in basically every way from Gris and the addition of combat mechanics feels organically like the next step in what this studio will produce. The art style is distinctly theirs but leveled up with more detail in a way that creates for an engaging experience.

Neva does not have a release date as of yet.

Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure

This was probably the biggest shock for me at this event considering I had seen it listed on the festival website but had not really heard of it up until playing it here. As the title suggests, this is a blend of the puzzle genre and the fantasy RPG genre where the player has to move their character along the grid to move objects like keys or swords into other objects like doors or monsters. It sounds weird, which is part of why I wasn't super interested in the game before playing, but the puzzles have an engaging level of difficulty and a fantastic art style that made this my favorite experience of the event.

Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure arrives on July 25th, 2024

darkwebSTREAMER

I'm not a huge horror fan but darkwebSTREAMER really caught my attention. In this game you play as a streamer on the dark web (as the title implies) who's goal is to explore the twisted aspects of the internet, buy weird occult things, gather as many viewers as possible, and not die in the process. The game has a great analog horror vibe to it that, at times, feels like a playable creepypasta with some great scary moments so this should make the top of any horror fan's wishlist.

darkwebSTREAMER does not have a release date as of yet.

Thank Goodness You're Here!

Wrapping things up, Thank Goodness You're Here! was another surprise for me since I had very little knowledge of the game before going into it. Upon playing I discovered that the game is similar to Untitled Goose Game, which fits because it is from the same developer. You play a traveling salesman who arrives at a town in England to meet with the mayor and are asked to complete a series of increasingly odd jobs while you wait for the meeting to begin. It has a great mix of slapstick and surrealist comedy and the art style makes it feel like you are watching a cartoon. It is definitely worth a play.

Thank Goodness You're Here! arrives on August 1st, 2024, and a demo is currently available on Steam.