What to say about Steel Seed, Storm in a Teacup’s upcoming dark sci-fi adventure? Not much, and it’s not because the demo is just 30 minutes long.
As harsh as it sounds, it’s true—for me at least, who sat staring at the “Thank You For Playing” screen, having no strong thoughts about it. The demo didn’t give me much to go off of, to connect with anything I saw on screen, or even interest me enough to discover the mystery of the story, based on hints dropped throughout. Which weren’t many, in the first place.
Steel Seed is a single-player stealth-action game set to release sometime in 2024. Throughout the demo, you take the role of Zoe, accompanied by her flying drone companion KOBY, as they explore an underground facility filled with robotic entities.
The game is at the forefront of promotions thanks to the recent Steam Next Fest, and the demo is currently available to try out on Steam.
A Mystery Mission With No Real Conclusion
You’re directly thrust into the action at the start of the Steel Seed demo. You might think you accidentally skipped a cutscene or two when you’re greeted with this dialogue:
OK, S4VI told us that the first shard of my dad is somewhere in here.
But no, that’s immediately how the demo starts, with no introduction. While it was a bit jarring, it is indeed a demo, and props to the studio for letting me get a taste of the gameplay straight away.
In the same room is the save point, or the S4VI point, which is how you might pronounce ‘save’ in a room by yourself if you’re feeling a little bit silly. There’s the fast travel, skills, heal, and ammo shop menus. Healing resets all the enemies on the map.
The mechanics are simple enough—on the exploration side, you’ve got your platforming, wall-running, and some special actions that you can do with your flying drone companion, KOBY, who speaks in beeps and buzzes. Using KOBY, you can fly around and find ways to open paths either through interactions or by shooting glowing machinery.
Grabbing Life By The Ledge, Or At Least Trying To
For a demo with quite a bit of platforming, the mechanics didn’t feel as polished as they should be; the awkward, forced camera angles made it a bit of a pain to traverse some areas.
Sometimes Zoe refused to grab ledges, choosing instead to fall to her doom (fair enough) before respawning on the previous platform at low health. Had it spawned me at the previous S4VI point, this issue would have been more of an annoyance than it was.
We soon encounter our first enemy, a robot; It looks exactly like the first thing you’d probably think of if someone told you to imagine evil robots. I’ll leave it at that.
This is where Steel Seed introduces stealth, a major mechanic. You can use stealth to gain an advantage over enemies. This means hiding behind corners, tiptoeing your way toward the enemy when it’s turned away, and downing them in one swoop.
Not the depth I expected in a game described as a stealth-action adventure, but this may be just a basic introduction to a much more expansive system.
If your stealth fails, you’ll be seen and enter combat. You have your light attacks and your heavy attacks, which feel like separate entities with no real connection to each other, making combos feel clunky.
While the Steel Seed wasn’t FromSoftware-levels of difficulty, it’s not a button-mashing fest either. The robotic enemies felt a bit tanky and hit a lot harder than I thought they would. Being surrounded guarantees your death, so dodging will be your best friend.
Steel Seed: A Seed That Needs a Lot More Watering
Is Steel Seed good? Well, it’s not bad. While it feels like I’ve just spent the entire article saying basically nothing, that’s what I feel the demo has given me. It just feels average at best, but not painfully. It’s short, but not sweet. Need I go on?
There are plenty of games that show and do not tell, through the gameplay. Within Steel Sword‘s demo area, I’m not sure what story the environment, the enemies, or the gameplay was telling me.
We’re in a large, generic run-down factory environment with lava on the ground to show us where not to go and copy-pasted enemies lurking around corners, jumping across moving machinery to find shards of Zoe’s dad.
I’m sure that last bit has some deep, intricate meaning to it with context, but the demo simply wasn’t convincing enough for me to want to find that out. Maybe, within the full context of the plot, Steel Seed will feel much more thrilling to explore.
