The demo starts showing a femme fatale all dressed in red running from the main characters, making me go "oh, are we doing Carmen Sandiego? I loved, adored those games as a child".

But then the game is a very abstract, context-less collection of puzzles, with a very made-for-phones interface, and sometimes I do like to play these games where I can turn my brain off and idly spend time with something where narrative has no weight, almost as an arcade-y vibe, but when I sit down to play on my PC I do expect a little more. So I don't know, maybe I end up playing this on my phone instead of this port.

I've always wanted to play this game and others in the Jake Hunter series. This demo was very short, covering a mock-up mystery to teach the game's mechanics, and while I couldn't learn much about the quality of the narrative I enjoyed the intricate way in which you collect clues and organize your thoughts to form arguments that can be used on suspects. Hopefully the story will live up to the gameplay.

I don't think this demo was part of the event, but FMVs and VNs are distant cousins, and an FMV game by Square is a very strange and curious proposition.
Usually FMVs aren't much beyond point'n'click games mechanically, clicking here or there, saying this or that, but here you collect clues as the video plays and at the end of a chapter you can spend some good 15 minutes doing nothing but putting them together to reach a number of hypotheses for why certain things happened or who's responsible.

And nearly all of them contradict each other, letting the player interpret events in different ways so by the end of it you find yourself with dozens of solutions to the same mystery. Only one of them is the correct one, but the game never favors one or the other and trusts the player with figuring out the truth on their own, which was rewarding.

This looked very similar to VA-11 HALL-A, down to the near future setting where transhumanism has been achieved.
There's something enticing about talking with strangers that come to you with their issues, life stories, or whatever is in their mind, and being able to tailor a recommendation that works for them and makes them happy based on what you learned; like a librarian, for example.

There was a brief moment like that in the demo, where you suggested a drink to a customer that wasn't expecting it but left pleased by what you made for them, and I was almost envious as that's the kind of job I'd like to have. Would love if the full game was like that too.

This demo was surprisingly an opportunity to think about how I see myself and revalue some things in my life. I do wish I was as good as the game wanted me to be to design my own tarot cards, though.

I always appreciate the opportunity to learn about folklore and culture from other regions and was keeping an eye on this game for a while.

Unfortunately a friend that played it warned me about the poor writing and gratuitous use of violent and self-harm scenes which already made me wary, and I played this demo not to see what was good in it as usual, but fearing seeing what I heard was bad.

And... yeah, the demo very quickly dives into those topics and using them as pure shock value, without some amount of care, which frustrated me enough to not want to play the rest of it.

In a previous demo event this one was available, but not in my region so a friend played and streamed it for me. My thoughts on it haven't changed (you can see them here: https://backloggd.com/u/sonicyewth/list/steam-next-fest-february-2023/) but I'm glad this time it wasn't region-locked so I could properly play it myself.

There was a lot of talk about this game in my circle when it came out, but knowing that it was the "Volume One" didn't excite and I decided to wait until the other releases to play them.

But with this event there was no reason to not try it out, and the gloom from its saddest, quietest moments in the writing accompanied by the use of stock images from desolate, silent places in grayscale and filtered left such a sinister and gripping impression that I purchased the first volume right after finishing it.

I adore this whole line of "Pixel Pulp" bite-sized games, reminding me of computer games I played as a kid with that stunning 8-bit art, I could genuinely play them the entire day.

On a previous demo event before this game's release I wanted to but couldn't play it because it had no keyboard support. Now the game has been out for a while, and it says it supports keyboard controls but those are baffling, with no description of keybindings anywhere so you can know what key does what, and no key prompts on the UI.

It sounds like a game I'd enjoy playing, but they made less than the minimum for this PC port which was a bummer.

I adore this whole line of "Pixel Pulp" bite-sized games, reminding me of computer games I played as a kid with that stunning 8-bit art, I could genuinely play them the entire day.