Resurrection Gate, by Grim Baccaris (THON)
For a couple years in the mid-90s, one of the best things in life was the monthly PC Gamer CD. You see, in those long-vanished days, most video games had demos, but it had historically been hard to get them. Reliable internet bandwidth was nowhere close to a thing, so occasionally a publisher would throw a promo for one of their other games in when you bought one, but other than that your main option was shelling out a couple of bucks for one of the questionably-legal floppies loaded with shareware or demos software stores would put in a rack by the checkout counter.
But then CDs made storage cheap, and the magazines all figured out they could collect demos from all the publishers and distributors they had connections to, pack them onto a CD, and get the hoi polloi to pay a couple extra bucks for their subscriptions. In retrospect it was all crass commerce, but at the time it was a revelation: for a game-starved teenager, getting a couple dozen demos every single month for functionally-zero marginal cost was amazing. Sure, most of them were usually stinkers, but there were typically at least a handful that even in their incomplete state were lots of fun – and in an age where there were many fewer games, and fewer still that I could afford on my allowance, that feeling of excess, of more free games than you knew what to do with, was a rare treat.
The magazine CD of course didn’t survive the rise of the internet, as the publications all shifted online and broadband meant anyone could pick and choose the demos they wanted to try rather than getting a collection pushed to them each month. And beyond that, demos fell out of favor through the aughts and teens, as I understand it because the big publishers realized making a special miniature version of the game and giving it away for free cost them money, which they’d rather be spending on licensing butt-rock songs for poorly-edited trailers and tie-in energy drink promos. But then the worm turned, as indie developers realized they couldn’t compete with the advertising budgets of the big companies, but they could give prospective players a taste of their game, no strings attached.
The return of the demo is objectively great, but speaking personally, the context of my gaming has changed so much since then that I often find I like them more in theory than in practice: there are now 12 billion games released every femtosecond, my leisure time is way more of a limiting factor than money (especially since most IF is free), and I’m already sitting on a backlog that conservatively would last me to the heat death of the universe. Instead of a cornucopia to fill my game-starved hours, demos now can feel like an imposition, like a free perfume sample aggressively spritzed on you when you’re just trying to sneak into the department-store bathroom. The question isn’t just “is this demo good enough to sell me on the full experience?” but “does this demo, standing on its own, justify the time I spent on it instead of just waiting for the actual thing?” Which I’ll acknowledge is a high, probably even unfair, bar to set.
So yeah, Resurrection Gate is a demo, and I have some feelings.
(For those of you who haven’t read my reviews before, since it’s been a year-ish since I’ve been on the grind: hi! I’m Mike! And yeah, that was 500 words whose relevance to the game I’m ostensibly talking about is tangential at best, that’s just how we roll in these parts).
What we’ve got here is a fifteen-minute slice of what looks like it’ll be a lavishly-produced high fantasy IF/RPG hybrid. There are multiple playable characters, who boast a handful of stats, a couple bespoke and flavorful traits, and limited customization (you can make Yasha, a battle-scarred veteran, an introvert or a horse person, for example. I decided to lean into role-playing and picked the latter). Richly-colored pixel graphics illustrate the key characters and backdrops, and there’s a lot of incident packed in: the demo starts in media res, on the run from an army that just beat your own and killed your liege, hoping to make it to an allied city offering shelter; then an action-horror sequence as undead attack and drag off a camp-follower, and you enter the belly of the beast to save them. There’s a last-minute rescue, sexily mysterious characters entering stage left and dropping lore and plot hooks, and then a perspective-shift to a more politically-connected character that sets up some higher-order conflict before the inevitable cliffhanger.
It’s all kinetic enough, while the fantasy setting has some steampunk and body-horror grace notes that keep it from feeling too generic – and the aesthetics really are great, too. I’ll confess that this style of epic, all portent and proper nouns, isn’t my favorite these days, but it’s very hard to complain about execution this lush. As a teaser, I think it works – I have questions, and unused skills on my character sheet, so yeah I’d keep playing to see what comes next.
As a complete experience, though, I’m not quite so convinced. Partially that’s because the demo feels so desperate to get the game’s key elements on screen that it sometimes runs out of breath. Like, the opening sequence had me focused on the danger of being caught by scouts from the pursuing army – but the attack came from previously-unmentioned undead, and I’d hardly wrapped my head around that shift before the aforementioned bishy GMPC suggested that actually there were other powers at play far beyond my comprehension. Everything is a pretty standard fantasy trope so it’s not like things were moving too fast for me to keep up – but the velocity meant I didn’t have enough time to get too invested in any given conflict. Similarly, the RPG elements weren’t given enough space to get their hooks in; the one time I could choose to use a stat (one I was allegedly very good at!) it just injured Yasha without having any visible impact on the plot.
The intentionally-obfuscated prose style also doesn’t work as well in a shortform piece, I think. An orotund style can be a good fit for fantasy, but there’s some clunky verbiage, and descriptions of often tilt ambiguous (especially in a few cases where a character’s singular they/them pronouns aren’t clearly delineated from standard plural they/thems referring to different folks). There are some strong images peeking through the cruft, don’t get me wrong:
The ostentatious design and the hardy sleekness of the mount would suggest a rider of some distinction, a high-ranking cavalry. But there had been no sign of the rider, save for perhaps the dried blood in the mount’s mane, the blackened stain frozen in the same pattern it sluiced down the horse’s withers.
But while in a longer piece, I would have eventually figured out who was who and gotten more on the author’s wavelength over time, in the demo context the spikiness felt more, well, spiky.
I’m having a hard time resolving Resurrection Gate’s contradictions because ultimately that hinges on evaluating its success as a marketing strategy – like, I don’t think this demo is a great piece of IF, but it could be that it’s a teaser for one. Based on what I’ve experienced so far, I’d play the full game, sure, so I guess that means it worked! But I also suspect I’d enjoy the complete piece more if I hadn’t played this teaser – which is a sad comment on how far I’ve come from the excited 14-year old shoving the new PC Gamer disc into the CD drive, intent on devouring its contents no matter their quality or my pre-existing interest. I’m sure Yasha would agree: you just can’t go home again.
