Bloomtown: A Different Story caught my eye immediately when I first saw it at last year's PC Gaming Show. Beautiful, smooth sprite animations and a clear Persona influence interested me enough to finally pick up the demo yesterday when I was browsing Steam's Next Fest.
It has a somewhat slow start, but I'm sure Earthbound fans will dig the the game's Americana setting with a dash of whimsy and humor as you poke around town. Of course, things take a turn and you end up fighting demons.
There's more than a little Persona 5 in the game's battle system, with familiar music, UI, gameplay elements, and concepts like companion demons. Some of it is parody, such as slapfights to determine who gains the initial advantage in battle. Some might feel outright borrowed, such as the battle music (which is nonetheless excellent).
Like many early demos, there are bugs and rough elements I'd expect to get smoothed out. However, the overall experience was far better than I was expecting. I'm excited to get my hands on the full game.
The demo is available on the game's Steam page if you'd like to try it yourself.
Much of this isn't unique to PC gaming. And if there ever was a dark age for PC hardware, we've recently crawled out of it, thankfully.
What bugs me the most right now (and doesn't quite get addressed in this article) is low performance standards. Everyone's pushing 4K and ray tracing, which makes it hard out here for us framerate nerds. It's starting to feel like every major release that comes out is Crysis, something for my hardware to grow into. Only with blurry anti-aliasing/supersampling techniques now.
One new, big positive I'm not seeing talked about much is a growing variety of Japanese publishers are taking PC seriously now, and that hasn't happened in over thirty years. I'm including Sony in this, even with their recent missteps in the space, and Square Enix's recently announced restructuring suggests simultaneous PC releases in the future for their games. That will inject some competition in PC gaming, although be aware that Japan has its own share of publishers that release broken ports.