Demo Impressions Part 20

Featuring: Big Boy Boxing, Dog Eat Dog, Fishbowl, FoMO, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo

Wow I have a lot of demo impressions that I’ve wrote so far and I’m definitely going to have more after this. Any games with (*) means the demo is still available at time of posting.

Fishbowl*

I’ve been wanting to play a demo for Fishbowl for a while now and I made sure to play it when I saw the demo up for Steam Next Fest. Fishbowl puts you in the shoes of Alo who just moved to be at the job she was just hired on. She actually got a pretty nice place, but she’s still away from home. The game starts with Alo on a call with her mom. Her mom seemed to want to check in with Alo and see how she’s doing, though her mom does interrupt her a couple times so maybe it’s also partly so she can talk to someone too. When Alo finally arrives home, she notices that a box was delivered and upon opening it, reveals items that her late grandmother bought or made for her. She also finds a toy fish, after you do a sliding block puzzle, which she sets on the table. You can even read about these items in Alo’s journal. Although, Alo doesn’t exactly have the time to ruminate on the items as she needs to get some work done. Alo is a video editor and after meeting a coworker named Menguzonuo, goes to finish the video that her client needs urgently. The video editing here is represented by a minigame where the various different clips or assets are sent down a track. To properly edit the video, you need to move the clip to the matching track and quick match it. The quick match is especially important as you won’t be able to move the next clip until the current clip reaches the end where it’s either matched or incorrectly matched. I found that if you don’t quick match, you won’t have enough time to put the clip in the right track. I’m not sure whether or not your score will matter, especially since there’s no (visible) score tracker, but the dialogue does change at the end if you made some mistakes or didn’t make any mistakes.

Alo also gets a call from her friend, a teacher named Zuari, who reveals it’s been a month since Alo’s grandmother died, Alo’s workplace is now working from home, and Zuari and her school are going online (hmmm I wonder when this was being developed…). However, no matter how well Alo seems to be dealing with the death of her grandmother it all reveals itself as she sleeps. Alo understandably is still dealing with the loss of her grandmother and her grief comes out in her dreams. We see the events that led to her knowing about her grandmother’s death, the way she dealt with it right after, where the toy fish came from, and old memories resurface when she was a kid hanging out with her grandmother.

Aside from the slow walking speed, which made me go to see if there was a sprint all the time, I liked Fishbowl. I like the writing, I like the story so far, and I like the minigames. And man, does this game not play with grief as it was getting me and digging up the time my grandma died. All in all, another game to look forward to.

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo*

Coming May 28, 2025

This game intrigued me when I saw the trailer during the PM Studios showcase and I had to try it out. You play as Pippet who is a total up and coming yoyo master who was visiting his Aunt Pipistrello. However, today isn’t going to go like he thought and in retrospect he should have suspected something when his Aunt didn’t greet him like usual. It turns out that Aunt Pipistrello actually has an electricity monopoly and her competitors decided enough was enough. Four of her competitors stole an old, discarded, electricity producing prototype and used it against her to charge up their mega batteries. Pippet, scared but wanting to help, jumped to block the ray that his Aunt was hit with…which caused his Aunt to completely disappeared. Even worse, all the batteries were charged and one of them threw Pippet so there would be no witnesses. Luckily, Pippet survived and you soon learn why this game says the yoyo is cursed. Well, the yoyo technically isn’t cursed, but holds 1/5 of Aunt Pipistrello’s soul which lets her be able to talk to you and transform the yoyo into a bat. It’s up to Pippet to fight all four of his Aunt’s competitors, recover the mega batteries, and piece together his Aunt’s soul.

Luckily, Pippet isn’t all talk. Aside from gaps that you need to jump over, you’ll come across a lot of enemies throughout your adventure. What do you use to deal damage? Your yoyo! Whenever you flick the yoyo in the direction you’re facing, the yoyo part will deal damage to enemies that it overlaps. Not only that, but the yoyo will also bounce off of slanted walls, letting you hit enemies placed in tricky places, hit an enemy from a distance, or hit multiple without getting in their line of sight. Throughout the game, you’ll also learn yoyo tricks, which will help you traverse, give you different attacks, or both. Like you get a charged attack and able to do an offstring throw (which lets you hit things too far away and if it’s an enemy it does more damage than normal). There’s also puzzles here as you can grab objects with your yoyo. The first level just has you figure out how to grab keys and put it where it needs to go, but later on it’ll include the environment like needing to find a way to get a key passed a force field that doesn’t let items go through it. Or putting your platforming to the test with thin walkways and having you platform on moving platforms and figuring out where you need to go to progress.

This demo included the first level (or scenario) as well as another area and a boss fight. The first level is, obviously, easy as it’s the first level and it’s meant to introduce you to everything. The other area level and the boss level are specifically subtitled as “Difficult!” and well the game wasn’t lying. I’m not sure where these will be placed in the full game, but these levels are pretty difficult. These levels do reveal some more aspects of the game. The levels are going to be bigger, more involved, and the enemies will change to fit with the area. Like in contrast to the Aunt’s house having slimes, the skyscraper area has flying enemies like bees. The bosses also are hard as the Don has two different attacks, jumps away if you get too close, and gets harder as you go through his stages after lowering his health a certain amount. Bosses seems like they’ll not only change up how they attack, how fast, and how often; but also the layout of the battle area. It’s crazy. You do have a safe house as well and when you first see it, it’s empty. However, when you go into the other levels, you’ll see others in there. In the Safe House you’ll not only heal up, but will be able to equip badges, buy upgrades, and have blueprints you find be made. The upgrades are handled in a different way. It seems weird to see the effect and then the effect if you’re indebted. Like, how do you even gain the indebted effect? Since these upgrades cost money, why can’t I see how much I have? Well, it turns out that when you grab an upgrade that’s when you become indebted, which gives you a debuff, and you need to pay it off with freshly dropped coins. It’s pretty interesting having you think if it’s worth having the debuff now for the buff later.

All and all, I liked this demo. I’m not sure how good I’ll be at the game, but I’ll certainly try my hand at it when it fully releases.

Big Boy Boxing*

While I never played Punch-Out, and thus don’t have the nostalgia that would gravitate me towards this game, the animation of the fighters alone made me want to play this. I made sure to play the demo for this one and it was pretty fun even though I was pretty bad at the game. The demo allowed us to fight against a handful of fighters on your base power, as it looks like we’ll get special abilities in the full game. Anyway, this game is an example of simple to learn, but difficult in the field. As you can guess, you’re able to dodge left and right, duck, and do a left and right jab on your opponent’s body and head. There’s also moments that part of your opponent will flash yellow and, if you hit it, you’ll land a critical hit and gain thunder. If you get three thunders, you’ll be able to do a devastating punch. Easy right?

Wrong! After watching a fighter’s introduction cutscene, which I love, you’ll soon see that it’s not so easy as it sounds. After all, your opponent can fight back now and you’ll need to learn their patterns. It can be pretty hard and they all have their own way of fighting and parts of them can even be shielded. It can also be hard to tell where their punch will go and their yellow flash is often during their attack. Not to mention that they change up their attacks after you damage them a set amount of health. Fighters will also increase in difficulty. The demo let you play them in any order, but man was it a bad idea to fight Trigger Happy first. She’s cute, but she’s fast and ruthless. There’s also challenges you can do for each fighter as well, like not getting blocked or finding a way to avoid punching out kids during the Mr. Adyltmen’s fight.

Aside from me being bad at Big Boy Boxing, I had fun. I loved the introduction cutscenes for all the fighters and I love how they’re animated. All the fighters look and feel like they fight differently and it’ll be interesting to see how it’ll be when you have abilities on your side.

Dog Eat Dog*

This game was one that you had to check out the Steam Page for, as the trailer doesn’t make much sense without context. While I usually just continue on, something made me look further into the game. Maybe it was the name of the game. Dog Eat Dog has you play as a nameless man who is currently living with his parent-in-law, his wife, and his baby. However, it turns out that he’s behind on his rent and after a tense talk with his landlord, he needs to get $600 by Friday or they’re all out of here. However, you do need to get enough money for food, your parent-in-law’s medication (even though he’s unpleasant), and your baby might be sick. Oh don’t worry, it gets worse. When you go to work at the construction site, it turns out that it was shut down and all the workers are now out of a job.

Luckily, he does run into his friend at the bar who says that he’ll get you a job where he works. Where he does “easy work for easy money” by scamming people. After taking a night to think about it, he takes the job and it turns out to be a scam call center. This demo does include two work days, by the way, and your first day is your training where you learn how to scam. After choosing your target, you’ll call them. Basically, you need to convince them on the phone and build their trust so they’d give you access to their computer by choosing the right dialogue choice. Once you’re in, you’ll need to ask them who they bank with and you’ll even be able to look at some other things on their computer or ask them other things. Once you know their bank and they tell you their password, you’ll need to quickly cut off their display on their end, transfer a lot more money than you said, bring back their display saying you got the payment, and hang up. The second day does hint at these calls getting harder, or perhaps it’s harder depending on the person, as you’ll have a temper meter that you can raise or lower based on what you open on their computer. Anyway, it seems you only have time to do one call a day and you get 10% of what you scammed out of your victim and then a dumb fee for taking too long or whatever. After work, you’ll be able to go to the different stores or the library before heading home and progressing to the next day as well.

So far, I like Dog Eat Dog. It was better than I thought it would be and I’m really glad that I decided to play this one. I like the art, the writing, and that this reflects phone scams. The game reminded me of when I watched Kitboga and it does also make me wonder if there will be a scam baiting character that has a chance of popping up if you fail a scam.

FoMO*

This one was a pretty weird one. FoMO starts right as you got off of work and you’re meeting your colleagues at a local pub. The only thing you can do is sit with them and ask how they’re doing. However, everything changes when you get a notification and (gasp) you don’t check it. The pub’s music stops, everyone looks at you in what I can assume is disbelieve thinking “We don’t take too kindly to those who don’t check their messages”, and everything is backwards. Literally, you go out, notice things aren’t on the same side as they were when you entered, and when you look up you can see the pub sign is backwards. Anyway, you just go home and go to sleep. The next thing you know, the game is telling you to escape with guttural sounds happening around you. As you look around, it reveals that you’re in a office, perhaps the office you work at, and those guttural sounds are coming from figures roaming between the cubicles ready to grab you if you run into them. Is this a nightmare? Hopefully, but it seems you can’t wake up until you escape.

The only thing is that is unclear what you have to do. I even almost quit as I couldn’t get out of the run/escape the bloody office sequence, but I did figure it out (not letting the dots out of your sight). Nonetheless, FoMO is pretty decent and it even scared me when one of the enemies passed me right as I was turning around and when I got caught.