As the hours melted away, one of the last titles we had the pleasure of experiencing was the upcoming Sad Cat Studios game, REPLACED. Replaced is a side scrolling action game, like the giants of the NES game era, only coupled with absolutely gorgeous pixilated visuals and a very adult neo cyber punk atmosphere. The time available with the title was a little short of what might be needed to get the full experience, but we made the most of it. Attendants present indicated there were three sections available, one for story elements, one for city exploration and one with an escalating series of enemy combatants to take down. The person helping us advised going in reverse order so as to skip the long story introduction and focus on the gameplay elements.
We followed their lead and started with the escalating brawl. The combat here was super balanced and required jumping back and forth, parrying and concentrating on precise timing. Each step of the fight grew ever more challenging, and entertainingly, the boss of this set piece could be seen lurking in the background looking massively ominous (a la classic Double Dragon arcades). We got close but never quite could take down the boss of this portion of the demo, as it was pleasantly challenging. This was like a 2D take on the bounce around beat-‘em-up mechanics made famous in the Batman: Arkham Asylum games.
From there, we moved to the city exploration part of the demo. Here, a River City Ransom-esque (though fully downtrodden) city was our for the exploration featuring the expected number of miscreants, the poor and the desperate. We ventured into a market and learned of a young person at a local video arcade that might be able to help our character. We were told that our character is actually an artificial intelligence called R.E.A.C.H. that has been Johnny Mnemonic style injected into a human brain. As such, his interactions with everyone are stilted and awkward the way you would expect AI to be if piloting a human being. We found the young person and they insisted they could only help us if we could repair one of their broken arcade games and beat their high score. A very Fire Truck-esque minigame was unlocked following this storyline point.
Exploring this world, even the small bits that we were able to, was absolutely lush and exciting. If everything in REPLACED is as well constructed as the demo portions we got to experience, this is going to be a big throwback hit. s