Hopefully not too niche being a Japanese service, but has anyone been able to register for Misskey? They aren't allowing registration from outside Japan (the VPN I tried didn't work). From what I can tell, they started restricting registration a year ago, has it been closed the whole time?

Citizen Sleeper, a light RPG with dice-based gameplay, feels like a classic sci-fi story with contemporary ideas and worries. It's tight gameplay; I felt on edge most of my time in this decaying space station, always a sense of urgency maintaining my body and getting enough scrip for my greater goals.

All this is underpinned by some great prose. It's not quite on the level of Disco Elysium or Planescape: Torment, but even after taking in positive initial impressions, Citizen Sleeper has a surprising amount to say. The developer said they wanted to tell a story about those on the fringes of capitalism, where many of us have had to learn to survive. I think they nailed it.

The player is a sleeper, a human-machine hybrid detached from the corporate network, having to start from zero. An interesting concept itself, the story is that sleepers came about as a loophole in AI prohibition: put a human to sleep and copy them into an artificial body for indentured servitude. The means of corporate control is a built-in body deficiency. You'll degrade without a very specific chemical. The sociological concerns presented by these concepts and putting these kinds of escapees in a "normal" society are also interesting. I never know who to trust as I try to survive, knowing that merely being off the corporate leash puts me at the mercy of someone looking for a cut of the bounty. Or, I might be taken advantage of by someone that knows I can't survive without stabilizer. That's just the start of it.

Very cool experience, and refreshingly compact (I was through the main story in under 10 hours). There's a sequel coming, and I'm eager to get more of a taste of the game world.

I'm a little late, but I finally got around to taking on the demos that caught my eye during Steam's Next Fest this past month. All positive experiences, with one big stand-out.

Uncle Chop's Rocket Shop is a repair sim with a wild story driven by roguelite progression. Think of it as Papers, Please or Hardspace: Shipbreaker but with the grimy, whimsical styling of Spongebob Squarepants or (dating myself here) Ren & Stimpy. At first, I felt like a fish out of water and couldn't tell my encoder from my pancake, surely by design. It wasn't long at all before everything clicked in a big way--gameplay, story, themes, visual design--and I was happily clearing alien waste out of toilets. Very much looking forward to this release.

Keep Driving is a nostalgic road trip sim. Hitchhikers make up your "party" as you take on harrowing encounters such as slow tractors on country roads and birds that won't move. Great soundtrack and UI design that's all evocative of a low-information time when roads meant possibilities and places to discover. I think I'd need to get my hands on the full game to be more sure about the gameplay loop and the meta-progression. I'm also not entirely sure about the drunk driving quest.

Keylocker describes itself as an "unforgiving Turn Based Rhythm JRPG." This is timed hits turned up to 11. The game's combat doesn't integrate music like I was expecting, at least not as far as I got in the game. Lack of music is a plot point for the game, and most spaces have some great ambient sound design to fill in the soundspace. The difficulty is certainly challenging, but the visual and audio cues for it are designed well. The sprite art is gorgeous stuff, with plenty of animation and distinct character design. It's still rough around the edges, and the writing is a bit much (even for me, as someone with built-up tolerance for this sort of thing), but I'm interested after it gets a little more polish.

Knights in Tight Spaces is a high-fantasy follow-up to the well-received Fights in Tight Spaces. I loved Nitro Kid, a similar melee card battler with 80's styling, and this is right up my alley. I'm much more into the detailed environments and characters here than Fights' minimalist silhouettes. If the animations/camera perspectives get polished up a bit, it'll be a treat. That said, I do want to know how much content I'll get out of this before I buy, so the price point is going to be important.

How about you? Any finds from Next Fest?

I enjoyed Respawn's first Star Wars game, Fallen Order, a pastiche of present-day gameplay concepts on top of a venerable, popular IP. Eager for something with the potential to improve upon some of Fallen Order's shortcomings, I was interested in Survivor from the moment it was announced. There were damning reports about Star Wars: Jedi Survivor's performance on PC, so I held off until the recent patch. Happily, I can report a patient gaming win here.

Survivor ran well on my aging, mid-tier PC (3060Ti, overclocked i5-10600k), with some framerate dips here and there. It's interesting to play a Star Wars game that gives a sense of scale to the planets, and I think adding in fast travel this time created room to stretch things out a bit. Between that and how Star Wars the game feels by blending in distinctive architecture, character design, and fashion, this was a visual treat for me.

Some of that was a big dose of the prequel films, surprisingly. These two games are set in between Episode III and IV, and this one leans even more into the prequels by introducing a local faction that rose to power by taking over a Lucrehulk and its droid contingent. There are B1 droids sprinkled throughout the game (you know the ones, wiry builds and rather chatty), and if you'd told me that ahead of time I would have groaned, not being a fan of the prequels myself. By the end of this one, however, I'm starting to think these games could rehabilitate the sequels in my mind, as I enjoyed this dose of flavor. I suspect they have a smart writing team being selective about what to pull from the established universe, seeing as how they also made the excellent choice late in the game to draw from the same well Andor has.

On the gameplay side, it's interesting that I have zero interest in any of the side content and Metroidvania-style exploration. Survivor does feel just as good in battle as any of the Jedi Knight games (massive praise coming from me, being my favorite melee combat in gaming until Souls came around). Maybe I'm okay with taking my lightsaber fencing fantasy in small doses. Cosmetics being exploration rewards is also a problem here--not interested--and running around wasn't always consistently fun for me. I had whiplash from how awful Jedha was at times and then suddenly being the best parts of the game. There's certainly a concerted effort to give the exploration-oriented players something to do, but I wonder if this would be a better overall experience if it were trimmed down.

Overall, I enjoyed Survivor more than Fallen Order. I'm excited to see where this trilogy goes with more iteration on this winning formula.