I played through The Queen's Game demo yesterday.
It starts with an intro sequence where the gameplay is just running around and completing menial tasks. The first one is the game telling you to mash the action button for two minutes. And I mean literally for two minutes, there's a timer on the screen and all. The game tracks your number of button presses but doesn't tell you how anything matters, if there's a target to hit or whatever that target might be. I got what I thought was a good score, the NPC told me it was a failure, and then the story moved on and I'm guessing nothing there actually mattered?
After that there's a tedious minigame where you are told to mix and serve drinks, you need to check the instructions for each, pick the three ingredients needed, mix them, and deliver each of them to the right NPC based on vague descriptions. Then after that the last part is just running around touching hotspots.
Once you get to the meat of the game, you choose one sorceress whose powers to borrow, which gives you the skill set to use in the Tower of Trample clone part of the game which should be what most of the game is about. In the demo there are two to choose from and one boss to fight. The levelling progression is increasing affinity with them to gain levels with the specific sorceress to unlock more powers. The demo is supposed to have up to 3 with both, but I just beat the boss at level 1 on the second try, the biggest threat being that the moves are limited in how many times you can use them per battle (think Pokemon PP). I only barely finished the battle before running out of any damaging moves, and it was incredibly tedious all the way.
If you check the preview images on the game's f95zone page, the first one with the weird mask is the MC, the black-haired woman in the second one is the sorceress I went with, the blonde in the third one is the alternative option. I think at some point the game told me I was supposed to unlock scenes with them as I gain levels, but you can see my current recollection room in the attached screencap and I have no idea what the logic there is as I'm still at affinity 1 with Zhao and I'm pretty sure I only saw two of these scenes in actual gameplay? I found the scenes really weak, basically some panning over still images with pretentious one-sided dialogue.
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edit - Actually something that hadn't clicked with me when I was initially writing this, my biggest issue with those scenes is less about their quality and more that they are entirely disconnected from the gameplay? Like the first Zhao scene is some findom thing that at one point involves a hand extending from the player's POV to hand over a stack of bills. It makes no sense for that come from the player character, so apparently this is supposed to just kinda give you this sorceress's general vibe? The scene plays when you talk to her and select it and other than that it's in no way acknowledged inside the game. All their scenes are like this.
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After beating the first boss you'll step into a magic circle which takes you to a short dungeon corridor and plays a scene with the queen of hell who now has noticed you. If afterwards you walk the wrong way, it partially replays the scene and then gets stuck. If you proceed correctly you get a notice about the end of the demo.
It's all a weird experience because parts of this are decently polished and give off a good impression, but the main content is amateur hour all the way through. If we get updates here on this site I'll still check them out because I'm a sucker for a Tower of Trample clone and based on what the game is going for I really want to like it, but I don't have my hopes up.
