Welcome to the inaugural blog post here at the Indie Space Café! While no other post will have this introduction, I want to extend a huge thank you to those who are here to learn about Desvelado. I hope you have a splendid time exploring the Indie Space Café and discovering all the wonderful indie games that this industry has to offer!
Desvelado — an indie game where you control Vampy, an insomnia-ridden cutesy vampire with a knack for overcoming challenging puzzles and enemies before subsequently heading to bed in your cozy coffin for the night. This 2D Bed-Time-Vania game is being developed by Valentín Zacarías, Pablo Cuello, and Joaquín Calvo. This game was officially shown off at the Latin America Games Showcase on June 8, 2024.
Upon the showing of the first trailer of Desvelado they also subsequently released a short demo for everyone to try for themselves. At the time of writing this blog, Desvelado has a set release date of 2024 and is currently only being released on Steam.
So, the famous question... Why not? Why not try the demo for Desvelado?
Desvelado's art style is as unique and calming as it gets for 2D platformers. Artistically, the game is hand-drawn frame by frame... Yes, you heard that correctly, every single animation within Desvelado is hand-drawn. Pablo Cuello and his small team have created a visually stunning masterpiece that you will not want to miss if you are a fan of the old-school fast-paced 2D platformers.
As far as game mechanics go, Desvelado is no stranger to the classic 2D platformer mechanics you've come to know if you are familiar with this genre. When controlling little Vampy, you have the ability to jump, and dash in any direction (upon extinguishing a red light), and when you eventually come to meet your fate on the spikes below, you find out Vampy is indeed immortal. The overall objective of the game is very well done as it is clear that your progression through the game is contributing to the ultimate backstory of Vampy needing to extinguish all the lights in his castle before going to sleep.
So let's talk about the gameplay loop for a moment because Desvelado, at its heart, is simply intriguingly addictive, in a vampire-esque way. When roaming the castle corridors, Vampy experiences two types of ghosts which include your normal white ghosty ghost and a particularly hurtful purple spikey ghost (no touchy). While you traverse the levels in the demo, you must extinguish all the lights in the level in order to move on. This is where it gets tricky since both ghost types can also reignite the lights even after you extinguish them, making it ever so more difficult for you to move on to the next level.
Where Desvelado thrives the most is with its fluid gameplay of being able to chain dashes together when extinguishing red light after red light because once you use a dash it's gone forever, so you must keep extinguishing red lights to get your dash back.
Also! A quick shoutout for the audio design for Desvelado. From the sounds when Vampy is traversing around to the very fitting music that truly fits the roaming of a vampire castle that you would come to expect, it is all unbelievably well done.
I enjoyed my multiple playthroughs of the Desvelado demo and cannot wait for the full release coming in 2024. If you haven't already tried the demo yourself, go ahead, ask yourself, why not?