I always kind of knew this game existed and I finally got around to playing it because it was leaving gamepass, but I decided to drop it around 4.5 hours in, which from what I can tell is about halfway through the game. I think there could have been something good here, but in the end nothing really comes together that well.

To start with the thing I think was the best, the combat isn't terribly unique, but it is good, when it works. 90% of the time it feels way too jank, the lock on doesn't go from dead enemy to new alive enemy, the parry and then attack after parry feels weird, the dodge feels weird, and just the 1 2 3 4 of the attack combo doens't feel right. There's also the whole mechanic where the fox god like death attacks enemies and it like takes off their armor or something but it feels like an extra thrown in gimmick. There were certain times though where it came together and felt decent, but usually it just felt clunky.

Movement almost feels good, but once again jank comes into play. I like the double jump and the powder dash, but the way the flips work and the way ledges are very wonky and sometimes the character grabs on to them and sometimes they don't and sometimes it is very weird animations was frustrating. The world is also so large and open but the actual traversal is so painfully slow, even with the triangle things that pop up sometimes, but the triangle portals are usually for backtracking not forward trecking, and the sprint speed is just soooo slow compared to how open and empty the environments are.

When it comes to the story, idk, it like exists. Nothing about it at all was interesting and the enemies that show up, besides the one big boss I fought, were painfully generic.

I think at best this game could be like an 8/10, if things were cleaned up and just made to feel better, but they way it stands from the amount I played, there was just nothing special or good that makes this game really worth playing in my eyes, at best something is just ok, and at worst they aren't necessarily bad but they are frustrating. Solid 5/10.

This is a very small problem, but I wish this wasn't dropping in five weeks. Partially because I'm really into it and want to jump right into the full game immediately, and partially because I suspect my demo save won't transfer over to the launch version. The reason the latter bothers me is because the demo is quite big, and there are a lot of areas to explore that don't seem to be gated, and there doesn't seem to be a limit to what I can unlock skill and gear wise. If the game was dropping months, or a year from now, I could forget about it and start all over. But starting over in only a few weeks isn't quite as appealing, and it kind of makes me want to drop the demo instead of trying to explore further and/or beat the next boss.

I know, I know, I could easily solve this by not buying it at launch. But I so want to. That's why it's a very small problem.

On another note, I've seen a couple outlets covering Summer Game Fest classify this as Eurojank largely because it's published by Kepler Interactive. I think that's interesting for a few reasons. One is the obvious, that A44 is from New Zealand, and not Europe. But let's put that aside and say Eurojank transcends geopolitical boundaries. Well in that case, the demo isn't particularly janky. Actually it's quite polished. It looks gorgeous, runs smooth as butter, feels great to play and I haven't run into a single bug.

So if Flintlock isn't functionally janky, is it just Eurojank by association because Kepler typically publishes Eurojank? Well, of all the Kepler published games I've played so far, which include this demo, Tchia, Ultros, Scorn and bits of Pacific Drive, I haven't found any of them janky. In fact, my experience of all of them was that of polished works, even if I didn't love all of them (Scorn wasn't as enjoyable as I hoped and Pacific Drive is a cool concept but I didn't like the survival elements enough to jump from the demo to the full game). Now, I know at least one person who played Pacific Drive and ran into bugs, but I'd say that my personal experience of Kepler published games has been that of polished works that are doing interesting things. So why call things Eurojank if they aren't really full of jank? And if Kepler largely publishes pretty polished games (in my experience), can they really be called a Eurojank publisher just because they are based in Europe?

And then there's the fact that publishers are not the ones developing the games. They publish which means marketing, distribution, etc. Even if Kepler had a few janky titles under it's belt, are we really going to slap that label on everything they publish given publishers are not developers? It seems like a fairly useless and even potentially misleading form of categorization that gives publishers more credit for that which devs create than they deserve.

Long story short, this ain't no janky game! I hope that's true for the launch version, but so far I'm impressed.