EGO Demo Impressions

It saddens me to think about how many players will be drawn in to EGO's fantastic visual style only to be pushed away by its insufficient tutorialization and noisy combat. 

EGO's flashy visuals are an absolute treat when the game is behaving how you expect it to. The screen-filling particles, fish-eye camera, and punchy silhouettes combine into a real feast for the eyes. Furthermore, the interstitial cutscenes and menu UI are dripping with character while displaying a cohesive visual style wholly unique to this game. I really like how this game looks.

Unfortunately, the charm of the visuals dissipates when you're tasked with actually playing the levels. The controls are taught with wall-of-text infosheets and you're quickly thrown into combat without having the scaffolding to understand what anything does.

Each of the player's abilities seemingly contain a lot of mechanical depth doubling as both traversal and combat moves. However, the depth of the combat does not simultaneously have affordances for a beginner player who is still learning. Much of my experience with the demo consisted of me trying attacks which either nuked a whole crowd or fizzled out while I was left to piece together what had occurred to create that result.

Similarly, the flashy visuals, while pretty, would frequently block my vision, making it harder to see incoming attacks or understand what the state of my character was.   

I genuinely hope the developers succeed. The game's visual style alone is enough to draw me in. But to do so, they must iterate on the onboarding process and thoroughly playtest their combat with fresh players before the final game releases. It would make me so sad to see this beautiful visual style hindered by the current frustrations the gameplay creates.

Impressions

The following are my impressions after playing the demo. Presented as a rough bulleted list:

Positives

• incredible stylistic vision
• intriguing repeated world
• unique smoke ignition combat mechanic
• it feels like the combat/movement has a lot of interesting depth to it even though I wasnt able to figure it out

Critiques

• Steam community posts appear unprofessional
• wall-of-text tutorials were insufficient for understanding combat mechanics
• incoming damage was hard to spot through (beautiful) screen-filling particle effects
• One-on-one fights felt more difficult than group fights
• Holding buttons to attack made prolonged fights awkward
• repeating worlds can be easy to get lost in
• the lack of dedicated loading screens made long load times feel like crashes
• I often found myself pressing buttons and killing enemies but now knowing what happened/how I did it

Gameplay VOD

Additional Information

Device: Steam Deck LCD 512GB
Steam OS: 3.6.24
Date Played: May 21, 2025
Demo Build ID: 18489619
Proton: 9.0-4

This demo was played in Game Mode on an external display. It was played with a DualShock 4 controller.

Get the Demo

Get the Game