[Steam Demos] Shadow Gambit and Jumplight Odyssey impressions

Shadow Gambit very slick presentation immediately tosses you into a fantasy Caribbean and you have to pick up world building via context, very clearly inspired by Curse of the Black Pearl (to where you use black pearls to revive crew members) Afia (the lady with the sword in her chest) has enough personality to be intriguing

Actual RTS-stealth tactics, the models are actually quite small so you can't see the kind of slick kill animations in the opening cutscene

details overall are unfortunately quite small - not enough to cause confusion but that you can't really see any details (like that one character Afia meets is actually a skeleton) until their speaking model pops up

game lets you save and load anytime during the game and is explicitly part of the gameplay loop, you're intended to experiment with different ways to kill or sneak past the enemies, and like a proper stealth game, hiding bodies is important not to get spotted and trying to bumrush through a map is not viable

Hit box seems a little wonky on some abilities, and it can be a little awkward to actually see what is actually a viable route - I've gotten ganked due to my understanding of a path differs from what the game lets you go through

sometimes rotating the map isn't enough to clear things up

but the game's save-reload anything helps to reduce a lot of frustration

Jumplight Odyssey Very Retro Sci-Fi in appearance, crew uniforms very reminiscent of Space Battleship Yamato, Euphoria's own design is reminiscence of the many alien princesses in different combining mecha series - OG princess Allura in specific

and the Catalina is very Leiji-esque

the in-game models looks kind of wonky, like they need a little more polish.

It's very much modelled after FTL where you have to jump to stay ahead of the advancing enemy, but there's real-time pressure to keep moving and much more emphasis on crew management and ship building as there's much more customization options in the ship build.

definitely feels like there's much more gameplay loop planned then there was in the demo but that also the pressure to jump between points is high enough that you don't really get much of a chance to do various missions based on the planet you jumped to.