Next Fest is once again upon us. Or, rather it will be. The official start date isn’t until Monday the 15th, but I’ve received advanced notice about several demos ahead of the event.
As such, I’ve decided to start my Next Fest coverage a little bit early. I’ll have a full listicle of neat demos to check out a couple days into the event, but for now I’d like to do an in-depth look at a few of the demos since I have extra time ahead of Monday. As such, I’m aiming to write what are basically Demo Dive articles, but the focus will be on games participating in the Next Fest.
Sounds good? I’m going to assume that’s a yes.
Anyway, we’ll kick things off with a Detective game called Green Mist over Portland. As far as I can tell, it is, I believe, a solo developed project by Will Picard, aka Bushmonkey, a developer who has made a career out of creating Detective games over on their Itchio page. Green Mist is their latest, and most ambitious project, and, as previously noted, it’ll be participating in the upcoming Next Fest.
Now, if you’ve played a Detective game then you probably have an idea of what you’re in for with Green Mist. However, unlike many of the Detective games that I’ve played of late, Green Mist doesn’t explicitly follow Golden Idol as a singular source of inspiration. There’s also some Roottrees, and Type Help mixed in there for good measure. The resulting cocktail is a blend that juggles a lot of different ideas to varying degrees of success.
That’s a whole lotta name-dropping, but it doesn’t exactly tell you anything meaningful about Green Mist. As such, let’s dive into exactly how it plays, so I can properly qualify all of those name-drops.
In Green Mist you’ll take the role of Delphine, a psychic who has the ability to recall events that have happened in the past. She’s able to do this when she pinpoints a location, time, and the participants for a particular event or discussion. Ergo, your investigation will see you trying to deduce the where, the when, and the who of a given event so that you’re able to listen in, gain some insight, and progress the ongoing investigation. In a lot of ways, the structure resembles last year’s Type Help where you do much the same.
This naturally lends itself to a non-linear story that sees players jumping around the mystery’s timeline, which does get a little confusing at times. Admittedly, I found myself wishing that the included note-taking feature was a little more robust so that I could’ve included a written timeline of events within the game. Instead, I was forced to use my real-world notebook for that purpose.
Regardless, narrowing down the specifics of an event so that you’re able to clairvoyant your way into finding additional information makes up the bulk of what you’ll be doing across the demo. However, things are rarely that simple, so there are numerous conundrums that you’ll need to solve along the way. For example, you’ll be asked to find headshots of all the participants, and properly assign their names. This can be as simple as being handed a photo, or as complicated as searching through periodicals for an old newspaper article where the person’s photo was taken.
And yes, you will be sifting through periodicals in the same way you would in Roottress. However, the search engine lacks any red herring, or flavour text articles to help lead the player slightly astray. Evidently, the focus here isn’t on expanding the search engine gameplay of Roottrees, and instead is on figuring out the relevant details for triggering another psychic episode.
That said, you do need to pay attention to the finer details within various articles, and conversations to pull out the necessary pieces of information, so the puzzles feel satisfying enough to muddle your way through. Admittedly, I’d have liked for one or two of the available puzzles to be a smidge tougher, but I recognize that this was just a demo. There’s plenty of room for Green Mist to expand on, and present more confounding conundrums in the full release, which I trust will happen given what I saw in the demo.
Though, if you found the puzzles here don’t quite scratch your Detective game itch, there’s also a free prologue that’s available called The Red Pearls of Borneo. It takes place a few years prior to the events of Green Mist, and features a handful of the same characters. I haven’t personally played it – I have other demos to tackle – but I might give it a go at some point later to get a better feel for what I can expect beyond the limited viewport that’s provided by the Green Mist over Portland demo.
Also, before I close out I wanted to mention how much I enjoyed the art-style of the game. I’m not terribly well versed in nomenclature for different art styles, but the water colour portraits looked phenomenal. Especially the use of various blues, greens, and purples.
With that, I think I’m out of things to say.
If you’d like to check out Green Mist over Portland for yourself, the demo is already live so you can go give it a looksie. It took me about 2.5 hours to get through, though your mileage may vary if you’re able to reason out the solutions quicker than I could.
Also, again, the prologue, The Red Pearls of Boreno, is free and playable if you decide that you want more after finishing Green Mist’s demo. Both are available via Steam, or Bushmonkey’s Itchio page.
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Frostilyte Writes 