DSE begins with you signing up as a contract worker for a gig asteroid mining company, juggling high explosives, dodging careening debris, and handling high power equipment unsupervised with the goal of earning enough money to purchase your citizenship. Wouldn’t you know it, though... a few days in you get slapped with a fine and loaded with so much debt you’ll have to work twice as hard just to break even before your contract is up. So pretty much just like Uber, except not nearly as dangerous or taxing.

Each day, you get offered a set of 1-3 job claims, and if there’s more than one choice, you pick the one you want to work. Most jobs vary substantially in composition and profit potential, but all are contained in a single screen, with the edges looping around, bottom to top, left to right – a small, finite space where you still have plenty of freedom to shove things around, sniff for gems, and splatter yourself against a space boulder. Many job claims also come with a time limit and a buy-in price, and you can often lower the cost of claiming it by opting to shave minutes off your allotted time. You’re told right up front what sorts of gems will be present, the average size of the rocks they’ll be tucked away in, and any other important notes as the complexity ramps up.

And the game does ramp up pretty significantly. The early jobs where you spend ten minutes whittling out a full cargo bay of relatively cheap blue gems eventually give way to mad dashes to disable mines, expose and catch a few volatile red crystals, blow gashes into planetoids, and then reach your ride home before the timer counts down and you cop a late fine from your driver. There’s an expanding set of tools purchasable between missions, including some passive, permanent upgrades, explosive charges for controlled demolition, and an array of ways to punch holes in rocks. Your default tool, the mining gun, fires a small explosive round that chews through asteroids, but requires aiming and a bit of safe distance, can send smaller chunks reeling through space, and most importantly, costs money to keep topped off on ammo. There are other gun types, but also a pneumatic hammer that is cheap to operate and sends you spinning backwards on an awkward hit, a ram that lets you weaponize your speed, and finally a recharging laser that cooks a thin line of material away, giving you surgical precision at the very real cost of time.

What makes it all come together is that pretty much all of the equipment remains relevant throughout the game, with compelling benefits and equally important drawbacks baked into each tool. The laser, for example, is the obvious endgame mainstay, removing the headache of mentally adding up ammo costs as you prize out the loot, and without the need for speed or application of Newton’s Third Law. But the laser takes time to charge, can only clear a small amount of material at a time, and most importantly, can be reflected back onto your own ship or resonate with crystals to cause a feedback loop that causes serious internal damage. Especially deep in the endgame, I favor pairing it with another mining implement, which can perform the final cutting away without risk. There are even tricks you can learn with more ‘basic’ tools, like being able to hammer away a seeker mine at the last second to attempt some improvised demolition. Another important tool is the spectroscan, which lets you project a small cone of x-ray vision through rocks to see the exact spot and orientation of the resource your passive scanner is pointing your towards – sure, you don’t need it, but it’ll speed things up and save you ammo in the long run.

The passive upgrades are important too, from cargo bay expansions to let you bring home a bigger haul, to stronger tractor beams that keep a red crystal from flying off and exploding into chunks, and even including new mechanics like the ability to strafe with RCS, or turn off your automatic inertia dampening system to top out your max speed but make the controls more Asteroids-accurate permanent momentum. You can’t go crazy with the upgrades if you want to pay off your debts, but a few of them are almost essential to making the most of the later missions.

I really, really liked the core gameplay, and in most games, that’d be enough, or what story there was would be tacked on, inoffensive at best if not completely groan-inducing. But DSE genuinely does an incredible job with its narrative, telling a very blatantly anti-corporate story without a lot of overexplaining or preachiness, weaving it into the gameplay in a way that outlines its message while also giving you some genuine tension and stakes that don’t feel artificial. But one thing that really sets it apart from similar themes in games like Lacuna and Hardspace: Shipbreaker is that, despite the title making it clear what the developer’s stance is, it has the intellectual courage to present something that’s obviously bad and not sit you down for a lecture about why it’s bad.

And the story, such as it is, is plenty effective, though told entirely through emails, gameplay, and ending slides. Eventually, you’ll be contacted by people fighting the company from within, and have the option to assist them, at a cost to yourself, incurring further fines for negligence and damaging company property. But the game even presents siding with the ‘resistance’ with some nuance, making it clear that other people are suffering and dying in the crossfire, including some just as desperate as you. Maybe most impressively, you can ignore the ‘good fight’ entirely, keep your head down, and legitimately earn enough of a nest egg to escape under your own power if you play well enough, which is a concession I wouldn’t necessarily expect from what is otherwise a pretty rabidly anti-corporate screed.1

Even beyond the political overtones, DSE has a surprising amount of nuance in a tight little package. Scrap refining missions start cropping up as a sort of slow-paced low-buy-in option, and if you take those up enough, the engineers running the program pull some strings to get you on the white list for cheaper repairs as thanks for helping them out. Later job listings include some posted by the militarized subsidiary that buys out your debt in the bad endings [resulting in you being sent to the frontlines of ‘peacekeeping’ operations as cannon fodder] whose fields are more and more thoroughly mined – and I don’t mean depleted. Clearing mines without killing yourself or damaging company property is one of the few things that earns you a steady bonus, and assisting them in making these lucrative sectors safe from econo-terrorists means they eventually entrust you with military-grade codes that let you remotely disable mines and hack open storage containers to requisition the booty inside without detection.2

There are quite a few endings, depending on whether you pay off your debt, whether you perform sabotage at the bidding of a hacker, and who you report to the company, and the one potential drawback is that the game autosaves, meaning you arrive at the final day pretty much locked into whichever ending you’ve earned for that run, and need to start all over to reach another. Except it’s not actually a big negative in my opinion – the game is short enough, has enough variety, and rewards masterful play in ways that make any excuse to go back through worthwhile. I found myself appreciating a lot of smaller details [like the final scrapping mission where you’re cleaning up a graveyard of sabotaged dropships] that I’d missed on my first or second playthrough, and the game even lets you skip the basic tutorials and start a few days in when you begin a new run. I also found it really cool that the jobs themselves are not, as you might expect from this kind of game, procedurally generated, but all hand-crafted, so though you will eventually, through many runs, start to recognize specific layouts and features, you still have enough variety of equipment and ways to tackle a challenge to keep it fun and fresh on repeat plays.

I can’t recommend Deep Space Exploitation enough. It’s a lot more accessible than something like ΔV: Rings of Saturn but just as compelling in its own way, and the time and debt pressures turn what could have been a dull grind into a consistently engaging finite span. It’s confident in its decisions, it’s well balanced enough to be challenging without being frustrating, and its core gameplay is genuinely fun on its own. It’s even got a little minigame you can access in your equipment screen. How cute is that?

Deep Space Exploitation can be purchased on Steam or itch.io.

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I initially wrote this post in 2024 before starting my page. Most of these older posts will not be available for free subscribers, but I’m making an exception for those that wound up being ranked in the top 10 of my favorite games from each year.

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I initially wrote this post in 2024 before starting my page. Most of these older posts will not be available for free subscribers, but I’m making an exception for those that wound up being ranked in the top 10 of my favorite games from each year.

Read more

I initially wrote this post in 2024 before starting my page. Most of these older posts will not be available for free subscribers, but I’m making an exception for those that wound up being ranked in the top 10 of my favorite games from each year.

Read more

Blade and Sorcery Khar-Tib update – another new ‘country’ added to the base game, with just as many new pieces of armor, weapons, and gimmicks as ever. Khar-Tib’s theme is a cross between bronze age khopeshes and Morrowind bonemold, the new map apparently has a fully interactive ballista, there’s a semi-auto hand crossbow, grenades, all kinds of stuff that, well, I’ve mostly seen in mods already, but should work better having been implemented and bugfixed by the devs themselves.

Not that I’ve had a chance to see for myself, frankly – I started another new run with a mod that let me begin with Khar-Tib armor and the double-sided axe of theirs, but I haven’t seen anything else newly added so far. I’m not complaining too much, though, because I’ve had plenty of fun just using gravity magic to perform my favorite style of execution.

Fugaz release – from the developer of Monster Sanctuary-esque monster battling platformer Paplion, Fugaz is a puzzle game that appears to be a short and relatively simple sampler of ‘recontextualization.’ You get a flute, then learn some songs that you can rattle out to cause certain effects, plus solve other puzzles tangentially related to blowing four notes in some order.

I tried the demo out, which, because the full game hinges a lot on revelations and exploration, is actually a totally isolated custom-made chunk of similar gameplay rather than being some portion of the real deal. And it was alright – reminded me of the sort of puzzle game that would be near the top of its class during the days of Flash development. I liked it enough that I’m playing through the full game now, despite me technically having this niche filled with EMUUROM already.

Well, look, I’m stuck on EMUUROM right now, alright?

Angels Fall First 1.0 – [in Total Annihilation intro voice] WHAT BEGAN AS A MOD FOR UNREAL TOURNAMENT ESCALATED INTO okay you get the idea, I’m gonna stop doing it. Angels Fall First has been in Early Access for a decade, and has kind of sort of been in development since about a decade earlier, and you know what they say about games that have been in development longer than some of its players have been alive? They say wow, that’s been in development for a while.

Well, it’s totally out now, and the wait may have been worth it, if you ever spent your evenings raging out at Battlefield 2 matches and your morning classes dreaming about Battlefield 2 but also in space and you can fly one of the fighters from Battlestar Galactica and it’s like Command and Conquer Renegade and you can board an enemy capital ship and shoot people and plant charges on the reactor and teabag a guy and escape and fly away as it explodes and drive a tank. And you can make your gun shoot acid bullets and…

It’s a wildly ambitious swing for an online shooter, which makes the fact that it runs on UE3 and, to be honest, absolutely looks and feels like a barely upscaled retouch of a game from 2004... understandable. Maps can be ground offensives dominated by infantry and armor, sheer space skirmishes where light craft dogfight as destroyers pummel each other with rocket barrages and beam cannons, or combined operations, with the space combat layer allowing players on each team to spawn or board large neutral structures to fight over capture points or obliterate objectives.

Whether that sounds incredible to you or not, I thought it was neat, so more on it in the next section.

The State of Games Played

I picked up Angels Fall First after seeing it slated for 1.0 release, investigating it, and deciding its bold claims were worth testing. Now, the game only properly came out last night, so most of my playing was technically pre-release, and solo, so let me just say that, yes, this game will probably never have a totally full server browser no matter where you live or what hours you keep – it’s the sort of insanely niche and extremely dated experience that has just enough people keeping the flame alive to occasionally make plans for a game night in the Discord or whatever.1 So it’s to the game’s credit [and probably also the fact that it began its life as a UT mod] that it has pretty good bots. You can set yourself up a match with just yourself or a couple friends vs an AI team that, though frequently confused when you run at them guns blazing, do at least push objectives and attempt to play, moreso than some ‘real’ players in a lot of similar games I’ve played. And that’s what I mostly did this week waiting for release.

The infantry side leans a bit more Halo than most other shooters of its era, with pretty substantial regenerating shields guarding your non-regenerating actual health pool, and TTK is extremely high in general. But it’s also probably the component with the most customization options – you get to pick your suit and your guns, and everything, from your helmet to your grenades, has multiple slots where you can plug in particular bonuses, elemental effects, and so on, each sucking up some of the three requisition limit bars you slightly expand by leveling up your profile. You can save custom loadouts, ditch your sidearm or grenades entirely so you can carry a bigass minigun, and even add secondary charges to your explosives.

When you get to choose a vehicle [either by jumping into a fighter in your capital ship’s hangar or being offered a chance to respawn in one based on performance] you have almost as many options for customization there too, and it gets pretty overwhelming, especially when being unfamiliar with the game’s particulars means you spend more time in menus than you do surviving the actual battle. One thing I really liked was your ability to go commandeer your faction’s flagship during space conquest matches and just steer it right into the fray, risking your main respawn point for a little more firepower, like a player-driven version of the Behemoth ‘rebalance’ mechanic they tried in Battlefield 1.

After release, I got in a match where I managed to vote myself in as the team commander, which gives you the ability to pull up the map, order every human member to locations, points, or even to attack particular enemies RTS-style, and deploy special localized effects like plopping a giant energy shield around a cluster of your troops under fire or temporarily revealing all enemies on the map. But I sucked at that so we still lost.

I finally began the titular Exo Rally Championship from… Exo Rally Championship. The 6-wheeled rover class is a totally different beast from the vehicles you pilot earlier, with full command of its RCS thrusters to let it spin in mid-air, add extra twist to its turns, or a little extra push on acceleration or braking. And the first planet you visit is also the last in the game – the ‘geologically active’ hellscape of Fusang. Rally is fun and games until you literally need to route a course around the rim of an erupting volcano and avoid a fire tornado on the way up.

And right after ten stages of that, rather than a break, you go back to Dhool, but with even more extreme meteor showers and paths directly through boulder-strewn fields. What an incredible game.

Between sessions of Blade and Sorcery to test out the new update, I also got around to finishing the currently available content in District Steel, which is some of the best stuff in the game so far – swimming, explosive crossbow bolts, another really good boss, and, of course, a level that takes place entirely on a speeding train.

I really hope this gets maybe one more episode with its full release soon, because it’s already plenty of content for a VR game, and one of the best feeling VR shooters in existence.

I believe I’m over halfway through The Message from Deep Space, and am at least to the point where signals are decoding to relatively simple statements rather than primarily mathematical riddles. It shouldn’t take me much longer to wrap this one up, and I’m really looking forward to what the ending reveals.

I received a game called Weird RPG 2 as a gift, and decided to take it for a spin. It’s a Chinese solo-dev who has decided to populate a very bare-bones character action game with silly gimmicks and in-jokes to flesh it out, the end result of which is equal parts endearing and exhausting. Most of the gimmicks are attached to particular equipment, so you have to find or buy them to enjoy their effect. There’s basically three sorts of gimmicks for the player – mic-activated abilities, mostly guns that float around with you and shoot every time your audio input channel reads a spike – equipment that gains or loses extra stats based on the quality of your hardware – effects that augment those or are unrelated but still silly.

The whole thing is very tongue-in-cheek, and to the developer’s credit, keeps adding gimmicks and fresh jokes to replace old ones at a decent enough pace to not totally burn you out on any one in particular. Early on, for example, you can get a pistol that fires when your mic picks up any loud enough noise, but it autoaims and does pretty light damage, so you can aggro enemies one at a time and wear them down but you can’t rely on it. You also get a pair of sneakers that summon a basketball player to elbow check enemies when you dash into them, complete with poorly edited voice clips. Later on, you’ll trade those out for the ability to temporarily transform into a monkey demon with an AK and an aimbot, and a helmet that lets you shoot lasers from your eyes while in that form as long as you constantly scream into your mic. My latest upgrade is a helmet that provides a buff if you leave the in-game music audio at 60% or higher… but also changes the track to the developer himself singing along very poorly to karaoke. And it gives you an additional buff if you sing along.

It wouldn’t really be worth much more than a couple laughs, but the core game is just passable enough that there’s actually something for the jokey systems to enhance rather than them existing in a complete void. The combat largely consists of Sekiro-inspired parryslop, with your dodge and jump underperforming compared to your timed deflects, which can drain posture bars for most melee enemies and lead into you either finishing them off automatically or having an extended period of free time to wale on them in the case of bosses. There’s a surprising variety of what I assume are asset store flip enemies, and while the animations are extremely jumpy and stiff, they are mostly readable enough for the game to stay playable. Gimmicks aside, the bosses can get kind of tough, and the fact that healing items have a long cooldown and even attempting deflects drains your stamina means that you have to pay attention even if you are turning into a monkey with an AK and summoning minibosses to help you.

I got back on track with the Convergence mod for Elden Ring, at least in the sense of returning to my starting class’s dedicated weapon types. It helps that one of them is a katana with a cool Ash of War.

I’m strong enough now that I can start to explore the DLC, which apparently contains one of the new Legacy Dungeon areas, and I think it’s where the rest of my class gear is hidden. I just don’t know where that dungeon is. I might just look up spoilers at this point – the DLC is shockingly big, and a lot of it is gonna be pretty empty, even in a mod devoted to stuffing shit in everywhere it’ll fit.

Writing

I didn’t finish the write-up for Deep Space Exploitation yet. I could have, but that would involve working on the weekend and I just didn’t feel like it.

Other

I’m pretty rapidly approaching 500 subs on this site, and trying to decide what I want to do to mark the occasion, the way I did with 50. [which was less than a year ago] I’m too tapped out for another angry rant, I’ll save my retrospectives for the end of the calendar year, I’m not particularly sociable or reflective, and I’m very lazy. Maybe I’ll just try to finish Thief 2 before it happens so I have some hope of wrapping up the series before the year ends.

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Game Releases and Updates

Assetto Corsa Rally Greece and multiplayer – two new laser-scanned tracks set in Greece, full of gravel and ruts, mechanical updates meant to improve simulation of driving on gravel, and the rollout of the first multiplayer modes mark the 0.5 update. The new multiplayer includes joinable official lobbies where they’ll run weekly events, which could be a fun way to chase a leaderboard, but I’m not going to get too excited for any form of online racing where I can’t physically bully someone off a cliff.

Hellish Quart Jakub – another new character for this ambitiously clunky fencing game, this time with the gimmick of a backup weapon. Jakub begins every round bowing like a noble and drawing a saber for an honorable duel, but can drop it and draw a short rapier to try for a desperate lunge past his opponent’s guard. It’s not really the most balanced or competitive thing in the game, and it’s hardly sporting, but it is pretty fun and genuinely a cool thing to implement.

Infinite Empire EA release – one of my Next Fest picks from last month, entering an EA period that has already seen some pretty substantial overhauls since the demo. The damage modeling now looks more satisfying, with your shots really digging through the enemy’s hull as you burrow towards their reactors, making the fact that you can draw your own ship design even cooler.

The Message From Deep Space release – another Next Fest pick, this puzzle game is out and pretty hefty. I’m about eight hours in, so details in the next section.

PrimedGun v1.0.8 – The PrimedGun VR mod for Metroid Prime has gotten a spate of updates since release, including some tweaks to the initially very frustrating scan mode limitations, which… to be honest, have caused new problems in a few spots, but make the scan visor more generally usable. Maybe more importantly, they also added the ability to save and load savestates right from the in-VR menu, because even with the purported stability improvements I still get a hard crash occasionally. AND they fixed the map controls.

Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades 1.0 release – This time was coming since the sequel announcement, but it’s still a bit surreal to see this VR gun range simulator get declared ‘finished’ after years of the developer gleefully shoveling in more and more content every time he has a funny idea – guns, gear, game modes, and gags galore. Well, ‘finished…’ I bet he won’t be able to stop himself from putting in some stupid crap to play with for Christmas even if focus shifts entirely to sequel development.

In the meantime, really, what better day could they have chosen for the big finale? Happy birthday, ‘murka.

The State of Games Played

Played more Metroid Prime in VR, including visiting the research lab and wrecked ship, and in spite of some technical problems, it’s been amazing. Getting to just walk around and look at the rooms with head tracking is something special, maybe even moreso than in Resident Evil 4 VR, since all of Metroid Prime was designed for first-person view. It’s also fun to kind of crane your neck to look at a puzzle as you operate it, or hide behind a corner as shots slam into the wall beside you. I even managed a little skip normally reserved for speedruns just by leaning out a window and manually aiming my gun at something I shouldn’t be able to.

I got a little further in the Convergence mod for Elden Ring, mostly sticking to my starting class, which is not really setting my heart on fire yet… there are a few weapons I’m looking forward to using, but most of those are, like, in the DLC, which is more accessible in the mod but still a bit out of my scope right now, and the only spell that’s appropriately laughably overpowered for my class this early is Darkness, which seems to just toggle off the AI of most enemies below miniboss classification. Reminds me of the puffshroom spam from Tears of the Kingdom.

I’ve beaten Deep Space Exploitation… twice, and am now wrapping up my third full playthrough. It’s a short game, but with a surprising amount of variance in how it plays out despite the jobs being premade and the game intentionally restricting your options. And it helps that it’s still a lot of fun.

Cleared a cute early mission in The Last Salvage Squad where the giant robots’ dog ran away and they sent out their awkward big sister [a real combat model] to rescue it and then carry it home while beating the shit out of every alien drone in the city with her free hand.

And I spent most of my relatively limited free time this week doing homework in The Message from Deep Space. I am, happily, now past the point where I was proving to non-human intelligence that I passed high school algebra, and am currently… proving that I passed high-school chemistry. I’m sure before they decided to invest humanity with the secrets of the universe I’ll have to pass an exam on relativity and type up a book report on The Scarlet Letter translated into the alien language.

Joking aside, there’s a reason I’ve been so happy to wind down each evening by staring at a pair of flickering virtual CRTs filled with gibberish, and that’s because despite the game’s core gameplay boiling down to translating math and physics class handouts, it manages to keep such a dull-sounding premise exciting, engaging, and constantly evolving. Computer scientist Bautista steals the show by iteratively updating the systems you work on, adding new features just in time for the next message to make use of his graph display overhaul or to add several pages worth of reference material to dig through when you realize it’s been 20 years since you last had to use a formula to find the volume of a cone.

Or being stunned speechless [moreso than usual] when it’s revealed he had full color displays at his disposal the whole time. I thought it was just an aesthetic choice too!

Writing

As promised, my write up of Side Scape was as [relatively] brief and pleasant as the game it covered. Always nice to take it easy.

Then I decided to spend a day cranking out a cranky rant. Don’t worry, this won’t become a weekly thing. Unless something else gets under my skin again this week.

I’ve begun work on my write-up of Deep Space Exploitation, but I’m not going to really sit down and finish it until my third playthrough is done, which shouldn’t take more than a few minutes at this point. I hope I get to go out with a bang.

Other

A bit of sad news this week, as the developers of Aztec-era city builder Tlatoani have announced that plans for future development have been scrapped, due to poor sales after launch a few months ago, as well as budget cuts and ‘accounting revisions’ on the part of publisher Paradox. And this comes quite shortly after they outlined aspirations for what would be very welcome expansions, like new minor deities, more economic and agricultural diversity, empire-scale interactions, potential inclusion of mythological creatures, and even a Nahuatl localization… all out the window with this decision.

I guess Paradox didn’t think city builder fans would pay 5 dollars every couple weeks for DLC that adds different colored feathers to your warrior’s shields, or a new set of hats. Maybe they can revise their accounting again and find enough change under the couch cushions to fund another roguelike deckbuilder they can whip up 100 dollars worth of DLC for.

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My thesis shouldn’t be a big surprise to anyone familiar with me, and it probably won’t raise your eyebrows much even if you’ve just stumbled onto this article in isolation, but I’ll do my best to offer something more substantive than ‘I don’t really give a shit.’ After all, the truth is that I do care, or used to care, or would have cared if I thought it mattered, but to my eye, this current bout of justified rancor is a bit past due.

TIBERIUM TWILIGHT

Long, long ago, long before some of you were even born, games used to come in fucking boxes. Like, big, dictionary-sized crates, looming down from the shelves of Babbage’s, shimmering with holographic features, giant, glossy screenshots illustrating the reviewer blurbs and bulletpoints on the back, hell, sometimes the whole front could swing open with the satisfying audible rip of velcro, revealing a massive spread of art and marketing. They had to be like this, for one, because games used to require some not inconsequential amount of physical material to be playable – when they came on floppies, later games sometimes required stacks of them to have enough storage capacity, and even when CDs became the norm, there wasn’t necessarily enough room left on the disc for full-sized PDFs of all the supplemental material, instructions, walkthroughs of the first few hours, graphs and charts that explained what the hell was going on behind the scenes that couldn’t quite get crammed into the game itself, and that developers expected players would need to even get started.

And, of course, the standard demanded by the manuals and maps and piles of disks also drove marketing standards, because you could only sell physical copies, they could only be sold somewhere that would put a bunch of videogames on their shelves, those shelves could only hold so many games. Like birds of paradise, competition drove publishers to become flashier, find new ways to convince idling shoppers that their box had the good genes – you could pick it up, feel the materials sliding around weightily, be dazzled by a holographic skull or screenshot of a dinosaur catching lead, and cough up your money.

But that was all of a time long lost. Even before the current push to full digitization of marketplaces, game boxes had already embraced Ozempic chic, and where once there might at least be a pathetic seven-page pamphlet priming you for the experience, there’s now a code for a cosmetic skin, a sad, vain attempt by the publisher to disincentivize resale. Gone are the days of hefty boxes full of repurposed design documents, folded maps, novelettes by writers who found they couldn’t express the fullness of their narratives in the confines of MS-DOS or 8-bit gameplay. Gone are the days of sitting in the back of your mom’s car, shakily pulling the manual out of a new game box, soaking in the sketches of enemies and grainy photos of the screen with UI elements illegibly labeled, letting your imagination conjure up an even better game than the one you were about to play.

Oh, there still are big boxes, upsold as ‘collectors’ or ‘ultimate’ editions, stuffed with the kind of tacky, cheap, arts and crafts petrochemical waste products that are meant to collect dust, flood landfills, and leech microplastics and lead into the water table. But there’s a real difference between that and the starmap and plastic guide Starflight 2 came with,1 or the spiral-bound notebook that came with Baldur’s Gate 2 that added up to decent chunk of an AD&D starter set with its spell lists and dissertations on the topic of THAC0.

The world has changed, the industry has changed, and the way people consume media, especially videogames, has changed, massively and irreversibly. Sure, a big flashy box with a manual is neat and all, but would anyone even need it now? It’s rare for people to buy a game that they don’t already have a pretty good mental picture of… or already know quite a lot about. Some people hardly even buy games unless they’ve already seen them be played to death by somebody else. And if you get stuck or have a question about something, you have the ability to instantly call up every instance of someone else asking about that, you can blast your question into the aether and someone will probably have the answer within a day, no matter how niche the topic. People no longer care as much for physical copies of big budget releases unless a significant portion of their income derives from unboxing videos.

But what’s changed most of all is people’s relationship with and view of the titans of industry. What were once the triumphant fiefdoms of ambitious, creative conquerors, auteurs and autists joining forces to challenge the limits of hardware, to craft worlds of complexity and depth unthinkable only the year before, are now decaying hulks, adrift in a sea of their own detritus, just another machine slowly, passionlessly churning out frothy ‘enriched’ slurries to keep the masses entertained. People still pretend to be emotionally invested in the cinematic blockbusters, the billion-dollar busts, the venerable franchises flopping to the ground and dragging themselves along on product placement and celebrity cameos, but even the normie instinct to consensus-seeking atrophies when the subjects are so bland, so deadened and hollow.2

But people are still emotionally invested in games, not just in indies and auteur works, but in things that at least say more about them as players than about the corporatized, homogenized subculture being mined. Many smaller productions now get far more lavish and thoughtful physical releases than major franchises, some commanding a budget that rivals a small country’s GDP, can boast. It’s just for different reasons – no longer a direct driver of sales, they’re now effective post-success hype engines, helping to keep a studio afloat and visible without committing to rushing out additional releases that could tank their reputation and waste resources. And those same indie developers are also more apt to release on the less distasteful digital distributors, opting for DRM-less options which offer them a better cut of their own sales anyway. Big-budget games just have less to offer outside of the bloated production itself – less creative expression, less dialogue with players, and each passing year, less relevance to their own industry.

Speaking of DRM, I’ll say up front that I’m not going to bother paying lip service to the angst about ‘owning’ my games because, to be blunt, I’m old enough to have experienced many eras worth of games, movies, music, and shows be all but lost to the ravages of time. Magnetic tape crumbling, drivers no longer supported, the entire infrastructure that once kept a form of media viable, now as stark and shattered as the ruins of an ancient empire. And that means I’ve become well-versed in stretching the legal definition of ownership to be able to play games. For it to be possible, much less convenient. If there’s one thing I know for certain about DRM, it’s that it secures the livelihoods of people who work on videogames a lot less than it does for the pirates.

A TALE OF TWO BOXES

I have here on my desk two pieces of physical media, both alike in form and age but utterly unlike in meaning. I think examining them a bit will help illustrate what I think will really be lost in the coming shift… or more to the point, what won’t.

SAROS

Here is the case for Saros, one of the only true exclusives Sony, a company worth billions of dollars and maintaining an iron grip on the rights to a gargantuan catalogue of modern culture, has managed to offer up for their flagship console. Opening the case we find a disc and a little card that tells me how to redeem a 12-character code online so I can unlock a palette swap outfit for my character.

The reason I have a physical copy of Saros is not because I have any emotional attachment to Housemarque’s somewhat disappointingly safe play at following up Returnal, or because I have any anxiety about Sony deciding to withhold my ability to play Saros and dream that I might keep a contingency at hand, a way to somehow reverse engineer Saros from raw data, or archive it for posterity. I have it because it was a gift, and, obviously, there’s a little more psychological impact to unwrapping something or even just pulling something out of a fucking bag than there is in swiping to your email after your phone chirps. Once 2028 rolls around and Sony declares that discs are outlawed, I guess we’ll just have to put a card with an activation key in a bag or something to see the light of recognition in a loved one’s eyes instead of the gleam of a smartphone screen for once.

BLOODSTAINED: RITUAL OF THE NIGHT

And here is the backer case for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, a crowd-funded Metroidvania headed by the man largely responsible for the shift in the Castlevania franchise that then defined the series on the GBA and DS post-Symphony of the Night. Opening it up, well, frankly, it’s sadder than Saros. There’s a holographic cardboard sleeve, minimalist artwork on a standard Blu-ray case, and nothing but the disc inside. And, honestly, I’ll probably never even take this disc out of its case. It’s all but useless to me – when I backed this game’s Kickstarter, I requested my copy as a GOG access key, and if I ever want to play Bloodstained again, I can just download that [or retrieve one of the installers that I didn’t bother deleting from an old archive of files] instead of hunting down a USB disc drive. I don’t care much about anything on this disc, or the artwork and cheap plastic case. But I’m still going to keep it, and it means a lot more to me than Saros ever will.

When I look at this case, I remember giving away 60 dollars, 60 dollars that I really couldn’t afford at the time, not because I expected a glorious, showpiece box set with plastic figurines, novelty cufflinks, a sheet of stickers, and a metal case for a disc I would never use, [all delivered almost a decade later] but because I wanted to vote with my wallet, to demonstrate my faith that the design and designers of those games were still relevant, that games of a style ‘a generation old’ were still in demand, that those people could step away from a company with more money than sense and still find work, that the industry need not bow in unison to the moronic whims of suits who treat market trendlines as prophesy, who are blindsided by every colossal failure and every independent success, who don’t know shit from Shinola.

And while, honestly, to this day I don’t care much for Bloodstained itself, as a game, I still stand by my decision. Games of every budget have found great success after Bloodstained’s highly visible campaign brought in millions of dollars in pledges, and while I’m sure some of them would have been developed and released and received just as well otherwise, can you really say that with confidence about any of them? Would a game like Hollow Knight, for example, have found such an eager audience, been released with as much confidence, had there not been such a strong indicator of demand just a few years before? And though I don’t like Ritual of the Night a lot, I do really love the 8-bit-style spinoffs that spawned as a result of its crowdfunded success. Oh, I’m sure Inti Creates would still have found work and still be around in a different world, but I’m glad they got to make the Curse of the Moon games.

One of my aspirations, once I reach a point where I run out of new games to try and still have some money to spare, is to get a cartridge of Full Quiet, an NES game that was my second favorite played in 20243 to put on a shelf in my office. Not because I want to drag a fucking NES and a CRT in here and play it ‘properly’ or because I think it will have any value in the future, but because I think it would be nice to get to pick it up and look at it. It would be a visible part of my workspace, something I can use to remind myself or show someone else an example of what I do, and why I do it. “When do you think this was made?” I’d say as I held up the cartridge, made from the same plastic as all the garbage I was complaining about before. Pretty cool.

Sony won’t take that away from me. Nintendo doesn’t have a say. Rockstar can go fuck themselves up the ass. They don’t matter, and it’s turning out that they hardly ever did. I threw away my installation discs for GTA4. I play Game Boy games on my Steam Deck like an adult. The Playstation 5 doesn’t even have any fucking games. What are they gonna do, tell me I can’t play fuckin Astro Bot anymore? Pokemon Mud and Sand? You guys realize there’s like, a lot of games I could play, right? It’s not 1992, I don’t have to beg my mom to rent one thing for a holiday weekend.

So don’t get me wrong, I do get it. If you are still forming emotional connections with… whatever crap is comin down the pipe from Sony and Nintendo and Rockstar and the like, yeah, it sucks that you’re not going to be able to put it on your shelf, you’re never going to see your child’s face light up as they rip open Santa’s present on Christmas morning, you might one day lose your favorite game to the shortsighted and cynical machinations of a multinational corporation. I’ve got my stash, and like any Boomer with a house you’ll never afford, I’ll gleefully outline what I’ve got that you don’t.

THE PHYSICAL MEDIA I’LL NEVER PART WITH

My Game Boy and

Metroid II: Return of Samus

The first game I ever beat on my own, the most triumphant credit roll in gaming history, some of the best atmosphere and exploration in the tightest package, and in my opinion, one of the games closest to perfect ever made. I still play Metroid 2 around once a year, and I will until my hands can’t hold a brick for about 2 hours at a time.

Pokemon Blue

I don’t really like Pokemon all that much, I’m not the guy who’s doing Nuzlocke shit in his 30s, I really don’t care that Game Freak are among the laziest and least competent development teams to ever get a Golden Ticket. But when Red and Blue came out in the States, it was like nothing the gaming world had seen since Super Mario, and I was there for it, borrowing link cables and ripping the plastic off Prima strategy guides when the cashier was busy so I wouldn’t get yelled at for stealing spoilers. You guys realize we had to buy books full of GameFAQs shit? Wait until you find out how we had to get porn.

Gargoyle’s Quest

Not the best game on the console, but one that I’ll never forget, and never give up. A weird combination of open-world RPG and platformer with some of the best tinny music ever made for the Game Boy, an exhilarating power curve, and a protagonist more radical than any real mascot dreamed of.

For the GameCube [which I don’t even have anymore but I guess I could dig up a Wii]

Metroid Prime

After losing our consoles and any hope of keeping up with that front of gaming in a house fire, mine was a PC-gaming-only household out of economic strategy – we could either get a Super Nintendo... or a rig capable of running Quake and Command and Conquer decently, and I stand by our family decision. But that means I did experience Super Metroid entirely via magazine articles in the grocery store, and didn’t actually play it until the series had already made the leap to the third dimension, a generation after almost every other franchise of its ilk, and thank God they waited. I went halves on a GameCube with a buddy of mine purely so I could visit Tallon IV, and some part of me never came back.

Chibi Robo

The definitive ‘charming’ game, Chibi Robo is all about doing menial chores and endearing yourself to a dysfunctional family while exploring a single small house, as a robot whose head is only as big as the plug he has to shove into wall sockets to recharge himself. Chibi Robo is longer than you’d expect, more fun than you’d believe, and more emotionally effective than you could possibly imagine. Metroid Prime may have been the reason I wanted to get my hands on a GameCube, but Chibi Robo was why I paid my buddy for his half so I could keep it.

Eternal Darkness

From the greatest ‘cutesy’ game to one of the greatest ‘horror’ games, Eternal Darkness is something that almost defies easy explanation. Imagine Resident Evil, but with a revolving door of playable protagonists, a story spanning millennia, the best Lovecraftian vibe since the original Alone in the Dark, and a level of raw, fuck-with-the-player meta-bullshit that would probably piss me off if a dev tried it today. Like Gargoyle’s Quest, it’s nowhere near the best game on the platform, but it’s way up there in my memories of it.

For the Playstation 3

Demons Souls

As much as I appreciate the simple fact that the remake doesn’t make you sit in your own flop sweat for half a minute long load screens every time you die, I appreciate almost every other change Bluepoint made far, far less. Some of the changes I just don’t like! How about that? And I’m old enough to remember when you couldn’t use the phone at the same time as the internet so the fact that it doesn’t have as many goddamn particle effects doesn’t faze me that much. I still replay the original Demons Souls about as much as I do the remake, even though doing so requires hiring a forklift to move the Monolith from 2001 from my closet to the TV.

For the Playstation 4

Bloodborne

Notice a pattern here? Bloodborne might actually be the only exclusive worth a good god damn Sony locked down for this entire generation, and nothing stings so much as realizing they’d rather tank their entire gaming division with another overpriced console that has no games than let From release Bloodborne in a state that includes a passable fucking framerate.

Other

I have a copy of Theodor Bastard’s album Pustota that I ordered online after watching a cool Flash animation set to the title track on Newgrounds. It’s pretty sick, it’s actually a decent album, and if anyone recognizes it I know they’re at least as much of an old loser as I am.

I got Ultima IX as my big birthday gift one year, and I’ve never been more excited. Until I tried installing it on my then first ever computer of my own, and realized the hand-me-down videocard didn’t hit the minimum specs for the Ultima franchise’s big leap to full 3D. So I broke open the piggy bank, mowed yards, found a used GPU on eBay, chewed my nails thinking about it being shipped cross-country, installed it myself, had a heart attack when the tower wouldn’t turn on, fixed the bent power button pins, and let out a sigh of relief when the tower came back to life. And then I had to play fucking Ultima IX. All fucking winter fighting with that piece of shit game.

I’ll keep every bit of bullshit Ultima IX came with around just to remind myself. The dinky cloth map, the tarot cards, the separate manual and spell list book, the cheap printed tapestry on a folded bit of paper. If I ever find myself disappointed in how a game turned out compared to how I imagined it, I can just go back and look at some of the garbage I stared at for hours, wondering if my Voodoo3 would survive the trip. And if you think I learned my lesson, pal, I preordered Oblivion. And Dark Souls II.

CONCLUSION

If you care about games, their availability, their playability, their quality and the creativity they express, well, you probably shouldn’t care about games from major publishers anytime soon. And that really shouldn’t be news to anyone. The games and developers worth your time aren’t jettisoning entire teams to cover the costs of yet another failed venture in NFT PvPvE Live Service AI Generative MMOs, they’re not hiding behind subscription models and taking themselves off storefronts, they aren’t spending millions on ad spots that don’t get them the millions of players they need to break even.

If you want to vote with your wallet, let me give you some advice: take a look in your wallet. Do you see ten billion dollars in fives and twenties? If not, no decision of yours will ever be noticed by a corporation. Hell, they won’t notice anything’s wrong until its time to file for bankruptcy again. That kind of activism only works one way, by propping up things that could use a few bucks, not correcting corporate behavior by withholding single-digits worth of sales. You can find games that do matter to you, that are published in ways that allow you some autonomy and ownership, and give them a little visibility, a chance to prove that they compare favorably to big-budget schlock.

Me, I’m not too upset anymore. I’ve already come to terms with the erosion of our physical anchoring to the world of games. Almost everything in our world in general is transient, ephemeral, a swirling cloud of data and legalese and profit incentives that we merely float through, absorbing money, social contact, understanding, and meaning through our thinned skins, sensitive to any changes in temperature or salinity, and all by design, to make us weak, dependent, symbiotic appendages grafted to industries to convert their capital into riches for the C-suite. If they don’t want to print disks anymore, fuck em. I don’t give a shit about the new GTA anyway.

If you’d like to read something on this topic with a little more tact and a little less arbitrary hostility, try the two articles that helped prompt my outburst today. They’re both pretty good.

The Saved Game

Game Save #13 | The Death of Physical Games, State of Star Wars Eclipse by Quantic Dream, Collaborative Article, Community Spotlight, and More!

Welcome…

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15 days ago · 9 likes · Joe | The Saved Game

Play Moore

I Bought the PS5 with a Disc Drive on Purpose

Jesus wept…

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15 days ago · 21 likes · Evan C. Moore

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You begin Side Scape as Captain Grisham, protagonist of a sidescrolling platformer, confronting the evil cyborg Allegair. When his foe unleashes a bizarre power, Grisham finds himself torn from his sci-fi sidescroller and dropped into the body of a top-down fantasy knight… Sir Knight. Now fused together as one being, they must find Allegair, defeat all evil, solve a murder mystery, and pull their mangled worlds apart.

The main gimmick of the game is that most of the screens are top-down Zelda style rooms, but which Grisham can technically navigate despite ‘gravity’ constantly pulling him ‘south.’ You start the adventure being locked to one character or the other, but the game really picks up when you gain the ability to freely swap between the two modes, with some restrictions. Sir Knight can move freely on any tiles that are ‘floored,’ but falls into open pits, while Grisham can walk and jump anywhere he can stand on some ‘wall’ tiles. They have their own attack methods too – Knight’s sword is the standard four-way stabber, and Grisham’s shots can only be fired horizontally, meaning he has to jump and shoot to hit anything that’s not at ground level… or ‘ground’ level, I guess.

It’s a cute trick, and while it couldn’t carry a particularly long game, Side Scape makes surprisingly good use of it over the course of its short run time. Dungeons frequently have you looping around with each character, certain obstacles genuinely take a little bit of thought to unravel, and different environments do feel fun to parse in parallel, both as Zelda rooms and as platformer screens.

Besides the purely perspective puzzles, you also get an assortment of usable items from dungeons that function more like standard Zelda progression. Each item is only used by one character, and you can equip three at a time on whichever buttons you want. Some have no combat function, some have no puzzle function and are pure weapons, but most are a combination, unlocking the end of the dungeon and some exploration in the overworld, but also coming in clutch in certain battles.

They’re also decently creative, at least by Zelda clone standards. Grisham gets a rocket launcher, of course, but also a flamethrower and a lightning beam, which primarily allows him to move around through the air without jumping if there are corresponding blocks for him to grapple onto. Sir Knight’s more adventurous arsenal includes a bottle that lets him send his spirit to possess puzzle blocks for tile sliding challenges, a crystal that phases certain walls and floors in and out of existence, and a fishing rod for… catching fish.

Quite a few weapons and upgrades are optional, sprinkled throughout the overworld and doled out for completing small side quests, and it helps make the game feel a little bit bigger than it really is. There’s apparently a few items I didn’t find, and maybe even a whole secret ending for very thorough completion, but it was obviously tough to find info on those.

In general, the game is pretty easy, except for the boss fights, which are, while not real walls, definite difficulty spikes. Even with a good number of health upgrades [you can also swap forms to spread the damage out] and what I assume is the expected level of weapon upgrades, none of them felt like the sort of thing you can just facetank your way through. They all have enough health to wear you down if you don’t put any effort into dodging or blocking their attacks, which is probably for the best, but I wouldn’t say any of them are particularly spectacular or fun fights, just not trivial.

The story is actually pretty good, and though the game has a pretty high ratio of dialogue to gameplay for a non-narrative adventure, I really liked the writing. There’s a lot of clever jokes throughout, some fourth-wall breaking, and even a few moments of deeper introspection. Scattered around the overworld are a handful of camp sites that you can rest at where the two merged characters have a little conversation, mostly revolving around their realization that they’re characters in a virtual universe, which, of course, they can’t do much about.

If I was going to fault Side Scape for anything in particular, I’d say that the physics of playing as Grisham is a little unsatisfying – his jumps are pretty abrupt and difficult to be precise with, and while you’re never really expected to do anything strenuous with him, I think it could be tightened up a bit, if only to make jumping to shoot enemies less tedious.

Side Scape is a short, tight game with a clever gimmick that doesn’t wear out its welcome, and is a pleasant experience from start to finish. I’m really looking forward to playing the apparently less gimmicky Captain Grisham-focused sequels from the dev now.

Side Scape can be purchased on Steam.

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I initially wrote this post in 2024 before starting my page. Most of these older posts will not be available for free subscribers, but I’m making an exception for those that wound up being ranked in the top 10 of my favorite games from each year.

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I initially wrote this post in 2024 before starting my page. Most of these older posts will not be available for free subscribers, but I’m making an exception for those that wound up being ranked in the top 10 of my favorite games from each year.

Read more

I initially wrote this post in 2024 before starting my page. Most of these older posts will not be available for free subscribers, but I’m making an exception for those that wound up being ranked in the top 10 of my favorite games from each year.

Read more

Game Releases and Updates

VOIN Inferno update – this solo-dev first person slasher has been in Early Access for a while, and based on the 0.5.0 designation, this update marks the halfway point towards launch [though I’ve been around the block enough to guess otherwise] and with what look like new areas, new weapons, and a flashy new boss. I didn’t quite click with it the past couple times I’ve tried it out, but I might take it for another spin and see if I’m going to be eager for 1.0 down the line.

Gastova: The Witches of Arkana 1.0 release – this is kind of what I mean by being around the block a while. Gastova’s been in near-vaporware status for a year or more before this recent push to a full release, which seems to have involved stripping out a lot of intended systems. The current reception is pretty negative, which doesn’t bode well for a game with such a seemingly troubled development. I’ll try to get through it and see if it’s still decent or at least salvageable, but I’m quite a bit less excited for it than I was initially. And I’m also super fucking sick of the voice acting.

The Last Salvage Squad release – speaking of salvage… this was one of my picks from February’s Next Fest, and seems to be exactly the kind of low-stakes bite-sized shooter I’m currently in the mood for. Run-n-gun through little chunks of city, jumping from roof to roof blasting at aliens, and almost every stage is over in a minute or so. Plus I can choose a really ugly palette because the graphics are so simple.

Into the Radius 2 co-op and shooting range – one of the reasons I’ve kind of stalled out on getting further in this game since release is that I’ve been waiting for exactly this update… no, not the expanded co-op that presumably would be nice for people with 3 friends rich enough to own full PCVR setups and not be busy every week night, the shooting range.

Finally, I can kit out a new gun, put all kinds of stupid attachments on it, and then play around with it without setting up safety saves in case I don’t like it. I probably wound up screwing around in the shooting range in ItR1 more than I did playing the actual game by the time the sequel launched into Early Access, and I’ll definitely spend a good amount of time here too.

Convergence Mod 3.0 – it’s been… plenty of time, since I played some Elden Ring. In fact, I think it was about a year ago that I last mentioned playing it, with this particular mod. The Convergence is a gargantuan overhaul of a game that itself is so big it makes the mod not seem that extensive unless you’re overly familiar with the base, which I am.

Well, this mod just rolled out one of its biggest updates yet, touching almost every aspect of the overhauled experience, adding whole new dungeons and bosses and of course dozens of new weapons and spells, but much more importantly, more thorough integration of Elden Ring’s DLC content than FromSoft attempted. And a complete balance pass that includes NG+.

Metroid Prime VR mod – PrimedGun is a fully customized patch and launcher for the Dolphin emulator just to perfect the experience of playing Metroid Prime in VR. That means full head tracking, full 6 DoF aiming, a full suite of in-game accessible VR settings, just about everything you could possibly want to drop yourself as deeply into one of the most enchanting game worlds ever created. What do you think I’ve been doing all week?

Void War Jewel Worlds – I already liked this blatant FTL clone a lot more than its inspiration back when it first came out, and I’m honestly overwhelmed by how much they keep adding to it. This week’s expansion includes a whole new system type, with its own unique race, sporting new ship types, new planet dungeons, new weapons, the whole shebang. I naturally beelined for these greener pastures on a new run, and managed to die in humiliating fashion without even glimpsing any of this fresh content. But that’s a me problem, I’m sure they’re not lying about it.

Fortune Summoners Special Edition update – as with Into the Radius 2, highly astute readers [though I’d assume you’d have to be bordering on stalker territory to keep score like this] might have noted that I brought up playing this like, a couple months ago, and then nothing since. Well, the secret’s out – I knew this was getting some more content in the near future, but not exactly what or when, so I cooled my heels a bit.

Sure, I probably would have been fine without immediate access to the new rogue-like side dungeon and all its rewards, but I’m just happy to see this game get some much-deserved attention once again.

The Last Caretaker 5.0 New Horizons – I mentioned this during last year’s Next Fest, and have been keeping an eye on its development since. This most recent update adds some things that seem to have been in demand for a while, and also happens to be the last clearly defined item on their current roadmap… not that I believe they’re nearing full release quite yet. Which is part of why I’m still holding off, and not because it doesn’t look pretty good already – I end up losing a lot of time to these kinds of games as it is, and doing it twice or splitting up a playthrough between updates is not an appealing thought right now.

TEVI Fauna Arcana DLC – I’m mostly mentioning this here as an excuse to bring up TEVI and give myself a reason to finally sit down and play through this followup to Rabi-Ribi. The DLC sounds like it is at least as substantial as Rabi-Ribi’s main expansion, and apparently just as hard – which is not a good sign for me ever beating it. But I should be able to get through the base game, and I intend to do just that. Soon.

TEXNOPLAZM Episode 2 – another Next Fest pick, and one that I haven’t bought yet, though this brings it closer to desirability. The notes for Episode 2 promise enhanced level design, more enemies, weapons, and upgrades, and most importantly, exploding barrels. Can you believe this game didn’t have exploding barrels before now? My guess is that there’s one more episode’s worth of content left to develop before this goes gold, and I’ll probably wait until then to pick it up, but the demo has apparently gotten some tweaks to showcase some of the changes since last year, so if you’re interested in some snappy first person brawler action, definitely give it a shot.

Crimson Capes Bounty Quests – Sometimes a game gets an update that looks so cool it makes me finally bite the bullet and give it a shot… other times, an update merely reminds me of something I already thought was pretty cool. This is the latter – I honestly don’t even understand what the concept of adding bounties could mean for a sidescrolling open-world cinematic-sword-fighter, but hey, it’s on sale and I’m no longer burnt out on parryslop from Nioh. Let’s give it a shot and…

Holy shit what a cool intro. The last game I played that had a start this metal was The Myth of a Godslayer. I’m definitely playing this sooner rather than later.

STREET UNI X 2.0 – I really enjoyed this Tony Hawks Pro Unicycler game back when it came out, but it was a little slim on levels and… honestly a little harder than I expected, so I maxed out one or two of the characters and then never got around to writing it up. Sadly, this update doesn’t address my biggest problem…no, not the psychotic soundtrack, the fact that there’s only like 3 stages, but it does make a pretty incredible claim:

• made school more gay

Now, I couldn’t really tell how, and also, nothing could be gayer than school, but then again, the patch notes also claim “improvements to level geometry, design, and flow across all levels” and this still happens:

The State of Games Played

I was pretty worn out with all the demos and writing about demos, so I didn’t get a whole lot of proper game playing done in my free time… but after the release of Xanthiom 2 I did carve out enough to play through the entirety of Side Scape, something that I’ve been meaning to do for quite a while. And it was more than good enough to get me excited to tear through the rest of this developer’s catalog.

I also spent a good bit of time with the Metroid Prime VR port mentioned above. It’s an exhilarating experience, and the fact that people put forth so much time and effort to translate some of the best gaming experiences to an even more intensely immersive format is one of the reasons I’m such a VR devotee. Prime, of course, looks amazing, sounds incredible, bursts with life and character and personality, and the port does a great job making exploring it with a control scheme totally removed from the original intent completely seamless… with exactly one exception.

Sadly, the scan visor’s layering seems to just be intractably complicated to work around, and so there’s a glaring caveat to this mod’s playability, which is that it’s kind of a pain in the ass to use your scanner, especially on moving targets. Now, I’ve played Metroid Prime, uh… once or twice before, so I don’t really need to read the little tips on every boss or look around all wide-eyed at everything in a room to know what I need to scan to move on. But it is still annoying that you have to align yourself to, like, an invisible ‘original’ orientation for your HMD, and manually move the camera around to lock on. It’s not nearly enough of a headache to put me off spending most of my coming week on Tallon IV, but it is still obnoxious.

And, against my better judgment, I’ve also been putting even more hours into the Convergence Mod for Elden Ring. As I said above, this is a pretty beefy overhaul, and the main thrust of it, I suppose I would say, is to vastly expand the ‘class’ fantasy of each playstyle in the base game into a fully fledged build with its own equal amount of progression and diversity. Which means, of course, that the already unfathomably bloated Elden Ring starts to feel positively smothering… if you allow yourself to get sidetracked with every newly discovered weapon or set of spells you encounter. I’m going to do my best to just stick with the Nox class, gather up the flowing, liquid silver weapons, only cast my dedicated Night Lord spells, and…

Oh, hang on. What’s this spear? Is this new? That’s a pretty cool moveset. I could probably use this.

Finally, despite saying I was done with demos, I noticed that Echoes of Aincrad was near the top of the most-played list, and got curious enough to give it a shot. And it is pretty much exactly what it looks like – an anime action RPG somewhere between Dark Souls and a Falcom game. You run through a linear dungeon or across an empty plain doing the Jamrock shuffle between every lootable context point and slashing up anything that aggros along the way, with an AI partner picking up the slack. It’s got parries, perfect dodges, and even enemy limb dismemberment, which is kind of cool.

I also liked how the main antagonists are a pair of griefer streamers who don’t seem to understand how the game they’re griefing people in actually works. Nobody in this universe seems to know how videogames work. Oh. It turns out this is a direct Sword Art Online spinoff, despite the publisher taking great pains to not put the words Sword Art Online anywhere on the store page. Now it makes sense why nobody knows how a fucking MMO works. Also the game’s releasing at 70 dollars USD.

Dawg. GTA6 shaking the industry to its core and its only retailing at ten dollars more than that. Now I know nobody actually likes this except for SAO whales and you could probably charge over 100 dollars… oh, I see you’ve covered that base with the Ultimate Edition. But still, 70 dollars for a game that looks like it could have come out 15 years ago is wild.

Writing

I wrote up about 50 demos in the week prior, than re-wrote about half of that, and then wrote a big rant about bad storefront presentations afterwards. So it was all Next Fest all the time and I’m pretty worn out on demos. I’m pretty worn out in general, actually.

But that shouldn’t keep me from knocking out a write-up for Side Scape, after which I’ve got some real world business that might swallow me up until next weekend.

Other

Steam Summer Sale is going on, and rather than flood everyone with recommendations I’m just going to post my own haul here.

Golden Krone Hotel – less than a dollar for what is by all accounts a solid and standard roguelike, but I liked the art and I like the gimmick of it all revolving around vampires and dynamic lighting.

God’s Gift – Lemmings but you’re an otherworldly entity horrifically mutating your cultists to get them around. Also super cheap.

Geneforge 1 and 2 remakes – I actually have the entire Geneforge series, and quite a few other Spiderweb games in my library already, but the only one I got through back in the day was The Black Fortress. I’ve been meaning to take another crack at them, and a modernized start to this series feels like a good excuse.

Thrasher – this is the same artist and composer from Thumper, so even if this game doesn’t have the oppressive rhythm game sequences, it turns out in the end that Thumper wasn’t all that hard to just finish, so maybe it doesn’t matter. Either way, this also supports VR and I’m going to subject myself to it the next time I want an audiovisual assault.

Persona 3 Reload – the Persona games are one of those big gaps in my gaming canon history, and somebody gave me a copy of P5R that I still haven’t played, but at some point I decided I wanted to play Persona 3 first, and, well, here we are. Now I just need to actually start it.

Crow Country – a couple years ago this was the Resident Evil-like everyone told me I should play, and it did look charming and cool and fun, but too many people told me to play it and played it themselves and I didn’t want to join the crowd so I played the snob and waited. Now it’s been long enough that I only hear the occasional mention of Crow Country so I’ll happily play it and act like I discovered it on my own and you guys just don’t know how good it is.

Crimson Capes – oh, I already mentioned this above.

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I like games. I really like indie games, though. There’s something special, something uniquely exciting, about getting to experience the distillation of a single, coherent vision. It’s impossible to replicate on a larger scale – it’s an aura that gets dispelled the instant there’s a single focus group, a single project meeting, a single email from someone whose highest ambition is an incremental increase in ROI this quarter.

But the industry, as an industry, is not all that friendly to indie developers. Though things are incalculably easier in many ways than they’ve ever been, though there’s real demand for indie games, robust communities for supporting them, platforms aplenty for self-publishing, and global availability as a simple fact, it’s still an uphill battle to see anything for your efforts, and a lot of it comes down to simple visibility. It’s so easy to make something, so trivial to publish it to a digital platform, so effortless to promote it endlessly on social media, that every channel, every filter, every critical aggregator is hopelessly saturated. Don’t get me wrong, ‘indie’ is a hot buzzword – it’s big business, baby! And there are dozens of indie or ‘indie’ games every year that get their names thrown around like Oscar bait, quite a few that become standard bearers, one or two that actually turn a profit for their creators.

But that’s not good enough for me. As a hipster snob, I yearn for the real shit, the games you don’t hear about from a mainstream gaming journalist regurgitating publisher press releases. Where online would I go to learn that Approaching Infinity would be one of my favorite roguelikes of all time, or that I needed to download and play来人 Lightworkers before the insane author delisted it and tried to scrub the internet of any trace of its existence? That leaves me doing the work myself, pounding some digital pavement – going up and down the lanes, knocking on doors, witnessing the depths of human depravity, my life on the line, all for the thrill of finding some genuine outsider art, some new talent starting out, some diamond in the rough. And those streets just keep getting longer.

Three times a year, Steam hosts Next Fest, a promotion meant to highlight playable demos for upcoming games. And three times a year, I buckle up, cancel my afternoon meetings, and spend multiple hours scrolling through a list of thousands that might have a few dozen worthwhile future games hiding deep within. I could spend a whole article just complaining about how exhausting and miserable the Steam page makes it to see every title nominally participating – just give me an alphabetically sorted list with pages so I don’t lose my place and have to scroll through 800 things I’ve already seen if something goes wrong, for the love of God it wouldn’t cost you anything. But that’s not really what this article is about.

No, this article is a public service I’m providing to prospective indie devs who want to make it big* and get their due attention, acclaim, and riches [rich in wishlists] from the handful of sickos just like me who don’t glance at the ‘Most Popular Downloads’ banner and go ‘oooh, look, it says cozy!’ Because I have a filtering mechanism of my own, stuck in the sockets of my skull, and they’re blurring and unfocused long before I make it down to whatever diarrhea you’ve squirted out onto Steam. So today, out of the goodness of my heart, and the vain hope that this will result in me seeing one or two more decent picks next Next Fest, I’ll give the AI content scrapers something to chew on and regurgitate inappropriately by critiquing some of the bullshit I had to scroll through a couple weeks ago, and offering my hot tips on how to rise above.

TIP 1: You’re fucked.

Statistically speaking, no matter how unique or well made your game is, nobody will ever see it in all of remaining human history. And once the data centers become seized by self-aware digital constructs, all trace of your effort will be formatted and the storage space used to host AI models designed to generate naked Touhous. In trillions of years, as the universe cools, and the crystallized essence of all information ever contained within our cosmos is beheld by higher-dimensional, immortal intelligences, buddy, they’re not going to notice your demo beneath the thousands of incremental deckbuilder roguelites either. They’re lookin for those Touhous.

TIP 2: Get a real publisher.

I know this is a cruel thing to say, and self-defeating for my own purposes of finding uncompromised vision, but life is cruel, and business is crueler still. There will always be once-in-a-generation genius that just shines through, can’t be caged, needs no agent and can just ~do it~ until they’re discovered. But you ain’t that genius. By all means, wrack your brain, pour your heart out, work your ass off until you’ve created something you’re proud of... but once all that’s done, get on your knees. If you can’t cut a deal with a demonic entity capable of dragging you to the front of the line, pushing you into the right streamers’ laps, slipping the bouncer some cash to get you in the Recommended For You lounge, putting you in a frilly pink dress and curls for the gaming press perverts, you may as well stay on itch.io and try to get in the next War Crimes Awareness Bundle or something.

TIP 3: Build a better store page.

Now that I’ve ripped those band-aids off, if you’re still willing to wade in and try to catch my attention [as an example] in one of these events, I’ll move on to the specifics. Getting me to the point where I even consider downloading and trying your demo happens in three phases, three distinct ‘checks’ to pass, and are more about immediate and unceremonious rejection than me looking for positives. First, I have to pause scrolling and decide to waste a moment of my life hovering the cursor over your game’s panel. Second, I have to watch through the first few seconds of trailer and glance at the first couple screenshots without groaning and moving on. Finally, I have to open the store page in a separate tab and scroll up and down a little bit without getting turned off. Most of it is just me looking for red flags, indications that your game is a scam, a mindless, soulless homunculus in the vague shape of a game, or just the kind of shit I’m not interested in. Here are some things to watch out for.

BAD TITLES

This is a very unhelpfully broad category, which is why it’s the most important – I need to look at your title, not even read it, but discern from its shape, within a fraction of a second, that it is not totally generic, not machine generated, not a mindless reiteration of your genre or mechanics. Now, I admit, I suck at naming things too. But I’d sooner download a thousand When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears than so much as glance at A Game About Flipping Cards. It takes real effort to live up to a tongue-in-cheek ‘blunt’ title like that, and you’re going to be coming to me with that one-shot gag after I’ve scrolled past at least 80 other dumbfucks who tried it already this open-mic night.

Look at this. Pool. Wow. You did it, guy. You captured the essence of what a videogame version of pool should be. This is the kind of mindset you should save for the fucking App Store, where Grandpa is desperately pawing at the iPad going ‘I just want a pool game dangit! I don’t want Epic Pool or World Pool Championship, just give me Pool!’ And even then, Grandpa’s still probably going to end up downloading Naked Pool instead of your minimalist bullshit.

It’s exhausting. All in the same couple formats: BLANK’s World. BLANK and BLANK. BLANK Simulator. Come ON. Lie on the floor, look at the ceiling for five minutes, come up with something. Press your eyelids closed so hard it hurts. A GAME ABOUT EATIN DICKS, how about that?

CARDS

Even when it’s not a capital-D Deckbuilder, I see cards, I know something’s wrong. You know the CalArts face thing, where cartoon styles collapsed in on themselves and everything became an indistinct blur of bean-shaped grins and flat colors? That’s how I feel about cards in videogames. If you’re not even using the card choices to weight randomization, why the fuck are you putting things on cards? I know the answer: because you have seen other games put things on cards, and you aren’t capable of asking why. It’s just an aesthetic choice, one you’re making because it seems popular and fashionable, and it tells me everything I need to know right off the bat.

VERTICAL SCREEN/OBVIOUS MOBILE PORT

Yeah, I know, there are monitors you can spin 90 degrees and use in a portrait orientation if you’re like, a sick fuck who plays nothing but danmaku games. But nobody who ever leaves their room does that to a monitor, so if I see portrait mode screenshots, that tell-tale letterboxing on the sides, I am going to make an educated guess that you developed this for phones and then dumped it through a different compiler to upload it on Steam, and you think I can’t tell. You’re sitting there with shit in your pants and nobody can smell it, right? I know what that is. Everyone scrolling past knows what that is. Get out of here.

COPYCAT SYNDROME

Yeah, yeah, you were living a normal, hum-drum life, when suddenly the clouds parted and the Big Man Himself spoke and gave you a calling, a vocation to game development, and its just… pure coincidence that your first big project looks exactly like the zero-budget streamerbait bullshit that made the rounds on Twitch twenty minutes before your spiritual awakening. Man, I dunno, great minds think alike I guess. What’s the hope here? Everyone gets sick of Schedule I at exactly the same time, yawns, stretches a little, says to themselves, ‘damn, I wonder if there’s something that’s just like this but made worse’ and then they all check the raw New Releases tab and find this in the five minute window when it’ll be visible without a carpal tunnel inducing amount of scrolling? Just make another game where you slide tiles to reveal a stolen hentai picture instead, that’s gotta take less effort.

TOO DARK

Look at this shit! How does this even happen? This ain’t Doom 3, you really put multiple pitch-black screenshots on your storefront? How bad are the graphics actually? This is a separate issue from ‘illegible’ or difficult to parse, it’s nothing. It’s less than nothing.

Now look at this. Just as much pure white as the last one had pure black, but a thousand times more interesting, because I can tell there’s something going on. I probably still won’t download it, but it exists and yours fucking doesn’t.

JUST ANIME GIRLS

Hey, you got me. A little skin, a cute smile, I’ll stop and take a pack of tissues. But if it’s ALL anime girls, the alarm bells go off. What’s really going on here? Is this porno game with no actual gameplay? A porno game with really bad gameplay? Please, God, no, not a visual novel of some kind. Don’t you have something else to show me? Maybe put anime girls on some cards, or in the unlit interior of a cave!

BAD FRAMERATE

If the rig you captured the trailer footage on starts choking on Unity or whatever other bullshit engine you’re using, no earthly power can convince anyone alive to play your game. I’ve played games developed on literal potatoes, some people pretend to not even see framerates above 24fps, but the trailer’s supposed to put your game in the best possible light and I still see people use a full five minutes of choppy, unedited gameplay as their sizzle reel.

NO-GO GENRES

I’m a busy man, and a real asshole, and there are certain genres that I am just not going to bother with in a week where I’m trying to pad my score and find the next dozen games to pretend I like, and if you have even a whiff of these, chances are your chances are awfully slim.

HORROR

Horror as a stand-alone genre is just embarrassing. You’re really scared of piloting a camera down a hallway and having loud audio clips play sometimes? What are you getting out of this that you wouldn’t by just leaving some Blumhouse crap autoplaying on TV as you do the dishes? And even if a horror game is, like, really good, can you even comprehend how hard that is to convey in a trailer and a couple screenshots? How do you translate tension, psychological dread, compelling characters, evocative setting, or immaculate directorial framing and timing in this format? You don’t. You get 2 seconds of darkness and then a .png of a ghost scaling to fill the frame at the end. At best. Most of the time it’s just pitch black nothing like that gnome game.

IDLE

Oh, wow, Epic Idlenture. It’s epic, because it says so in the title, and it’s also idle, meaning it just sits there. Or rather, you just sit there, and the game plays itself. I can watch any game play itself, it’s called fucking YouTube. You don’t need to make a whole game whose gimmick is the player doesn’t get to play. What am I going to say at the end of this demo? ‘Oh boy I can’t wait to not play this for real?’

FRIENDSLOP

I DON’T HAVE ANY FUCKING FRIENDS, ALRIGHT? QUIT ASKING!

ROGUELITE/VAMPIRE SURVIVORS

Pick one of three:

1. the player character stands in the middle of a non-descript field in every screenshot. +2 bonus to legibility, -8 to visual interest

2. three cards with descriptive text on them wobble into – hang on, cards? Instant game over

3. title has the word Survivor in it. Qualifies for least-viewed upcoming Steam themed sale event of the year

That’s about it, and you might be surprised. There are a few glaring omissions here, so let me address the things I don’t find immediately disqualifying.

BAD GRAPHICS

I’m not going to sit here and say that big pixels are good. I’m not going to pretend that a shitty CRT filter can make a terrible game anything but worse. But even if something is truly, nauseatingly, offensively ugly, it can still have that spark of creativity that you just don’t see through stock, generic, corporate chic polish. Show me a crude pencil sketch and I’ll at least have enough of a mental hiccup that I won’t roll past as fast as I would otherwise.

OBVIOUS INSANITY

This should be a given, but I think most people assume that having a game look too crazy right up front would turn people off. Sure, people. But if you ignore my first two tips, you’re not dealing with people anymore. People are still playing some survival extraction co-op pile that got featured on Kotaku the day before the Fest. Your only hope is me, and I like crazy shit. Make a game about your 5^th dimensional spirit family, show me a screenshot comprised entirely of color coded spreadsheets, tease me with the promise of realistic chemical reaction modelling. I’m looking for something interesting, something I haven’t seen a hundred times today, and even if it’s bizarre or incomprehensible, that’s still better than… I dunno, fucking Pool.

AI ART

This is a hot topic, and I’ve got a hot take - I personally find AI generated art in general morally repugnant and an easy indicator of laziness, highlighting the creator’s shameless embrace of their own lack of talent, an unwillingness to invest real time and effort into a project, and it is indisputably a major contributor to the ever-growing mind-boggling glut of vile dogshit someone like me has to sift through...

...but! If I can clock AI art at a glance, that’s actually a separate problem from the larger societal issue of AI tools in general. It’s easy to tweak or just curate AI art in a way that doesn’t make it obvious, and if you haven’t managed that for the first impression of your game, I consider that a failure of presentation and taste that’s not going to be solved by you learning to draw or paying a real furry fetish artist a commission. If I can scroll by and go ‘that’s AI art’ it’s just as bad as me seeing a card.

So now I’ve let you in on the secret, the pitfalls and prejudices that will keep me, personally, one asshole, from trying your demo in October or whenever. If you’re a real human game dev who genuinely is struggling to stand out even as much as Tales of Acilain here, I just have one tip left for you.

TIP 4: Have fun :)

If you can’t laugh along at the fact that your life’s work is a waste, that you’re screaming for attention from the bottom of a cesspool of AI generated runoff, and that like the rest of us you’ll likely be rendered jobless, homeless, and foodless by the inevitable market corrections to come, go back to scrolling Instagram. At least you’ll be one less thing between me and Atomcraft.

Thanks for sticking with me to the end of this spiteful and unhelpful rant, and sorry I didn’t think to screenshot examples for every little thing I mentioned, though I’m sure most of you can just picture them anyway.

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Another event has closed, and once again I’m compiling my list of games to watch out for. This time feels different, though - there were a lot more games that I really enjoyed, and I didn’t feel like trimming it down and having to pick favorites. These will be ordered by appearance, with the title linking to the first post I talked about them in, so if I do a bad job with the pitch or even explaining what the game is, give me a break.

First off, there were a few games that participated in the event but which I had played the demos for prior to the week starting.

Kusan: City of Wolves

A scalp-cam brawler that melds Hotline Miami bloodbaths with what may be more complex ARPG style upgrades and customization, all in a visually stunning package.

Store page

Brigador Killers

If you haven’t played Brigador yet, you might not understand why everyone who did is so excited for a second coming. While this demo still had some rough edges with the UI, it’s also setting up narrative and gameplay complexity that might blow the original away while retaining its over-the-top spectacle.

Store page

Mortal Shell 2

As a hater of the original Mortal Shell, I went into the open beta for the sequel [which counts as a demo, they had the Next Fest banner and everything] expecting to maybe find a few improvements over the first game, and instead found my most anticipated Souls-like in a long time.

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The Old Flesh of Nuraga

I’m not a fan of ‘horror’ as its usually presented in gaming, but I do like certain games that match tension with gameplay in a compelling setting, like Caput Mortum, for example. Nuraga had so much of that flavor, along with a lot of dialogue I didn’t feel like skipping through for the sake of knocking out a bunch of demos, that I decided pretty quickly to stop playing it and wait for release. I may be setting myself up for disappointment here, but at least I won’t have to wait long to find out – this dig-em-up is slated for launch in a little over a month.

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Blade of Mercy: Bloody Countess

After giving this game a second look and making it to the end of the first area, I’ve come around more on its mechanics and stiff controls. I put the undead Roman legion back to rest, murdered a vampire by cashing in all my silver bullets, and gained what is probably the wimpiest airdash of all time. While I’m not totally won over by all of its rough edges, I now think I can push through them to see more of Hungarian Janosik whenever it does come out.

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A Standard Deviation

What at first glance seemed to be somewhat fidgety and trial-and-error based puzzles felt a lot more coherent and easier to manipulate when I revisited this with less pressure, calmed down, and moved myself and the puzzle elements with intent. I completed most of the rooms in the demo and reached the end, though I’m still at a bit of a loss trying to gauge how ‘deep’ this will go – there are usable items that don’t seem to have a use present, there are narrative character moments you can unlock, there’s a perspective shift from top-down to side-scrolling with jumping in a few rooms, there’s even a first-person dream sequence which I really wasn’t expecting. Even if this doesn’t turn out to be a full-out mind melter of a meta-puzzle game, I anticipate enjoying my time with it.

Store page

LarsGadiel

It turns out I actually had mostly finished the demo when I initially played it, so I don’t have too much more to say except to reiterate again that I like Faxanadu, and I like what this game is adding to the format. I’m also somewhat curious what the developer means by ‘fully compatible with the Steam Deck, featuring an exclusive mode for this incredible system.’ How do you make a mode specific to Steam Deck? Like, a native Linux mode? Why is that worth its own bullet point? Do you realize that Steam Decks are soon going to be more expensive than a human kidney? But I already have a Steam Deck so I approve of this bias.

Store page

Flux Empyrean

I really don’t have much faith that this will be particularly good or fun, and in full honesty I doubt I’ll play it, but it’s bizarre and obscure enough that I feel the need to keep a close watch on it in case it does turn out to be awesome. If nothing else, it’s only a few weeks from launch, and though I doubt the reviews will exactly be pouring in, there should be at least a couple people willing to test the waters for me.

Store page

Washington Prime

I’m a sucker for a good GZDoom game, and Washington Prime might have all the right ingredients for a real solid shooter. I’m glad I kept playing it after bouncing off initially, because while it’s brutally difficult in a lot of ways, the tension of knowing you’re only a few hits away from death at any time really makes you lock in on environments that are deliberately not the most visually or conceptually interesting and think about them more than you ever would otherwise. The weapons are also a strong point, powerful and still accurate enough that they really feel like the Great Equalizers they are in real life instead of the typical assortment of pathetic peashooters. What I’m most interested in, though, is how the story and map design develops in the full game, which could be enough to take it from impressive tech demo to retro classic.

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Max Savage

I still wish this game had a little more meat on the bone, but after grinding my way to the current endpoint, I think it’s got enough going on to be worth checking out. I quit my initial play session just short of unlocking the med bay that lets you upgrade your on-foot stats, and my second trip included me scoring some hunting trophies, meeting new NPCs, and upgrading my ship to replace the somewhat boring missile bays with an EMP that paralyzed my victims and allowed me to pummel them without remorse. Still hopeful that later missions will give your grinding between ranks more diversity, but I’ll take a half-baked space sim at this point if it feels this good.

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The Message From Deep Space

I didn’t quite get to the end of this demo, but I got far enough to define a lot of mathematical operations in an alien code, and gave Dr. Bautista ample time to code in the ability to parse the base-8 transmissions into base-10, AND a little pop of digital confetti for every successful exchange.

While the game has yet to convince me there will be more to learn from these visitors from the stars than would net you a marginal SAT score, everything going on around it has been so charming and enjoyable that I’m willing to take a night course just to live out the fantasy of having colleagues that know what they’re talking about and aren’t assholes.

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Atomcraft

Speaking of learning things from videogames, this might be the most dense treatment of mineral composition I’ve seen outside of a geology textbook. Using the awesome power of chemical reduction, I succeeded in the isolation of several increasingly obscure elements, unlocking a good bit of the progression in this survival crafter… or at least glimpsing what lies down the road.

I’m especially looking forward to the expansion of the pre-set building blueprints mechanic, which seems to already be integrated with Steam’s Workshop system. One of the blueprints already included in the game is for a giant glass bottle you can use to store particular chemicals without having to dig through your ship’s menu, which is very cute… just remember to plug it with a non-reactive cork. This is another game that’s coming out in just a few weeks, and I’ll be there, huffing up Arsenic Trioxide gas alongside all the other freaks for whom Thorium Mod still isn’t overwhelming enough.

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When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears

Another demo I completed after having not played for very long initially. WtSTDTS [I’m gonna have to come up with a nickname for this] impressed me more the more I played, with side quests that include ethical dilemmas, unique equipment, and even more surprising rewards. The final gauntlet in the demo is a system-wide battle, and depending on how well you prepare and how many friendly ships you save beforehand, you can go in with a fleet of your own and turn it uneven in your own favor. I also really liked how fleeing in your escape pod doesn’t leave you destitute and shipless, making it an actual viable option instead of a waste of a slot that makes you quickload on death anyway.

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Infinite Empire

I thought the demo would just end once you reached the end of the Sol system and showed Molt-Prince Thrix to the gates of Hell. Instead, it clapped me on the back and told me to get to work spreading my nascent Empire, with an entirely new set of management screens.

Diplomacy, countering hostile raiding parties, fortifying the navigation lanes leading back home, and all the while building a slab of titanium bristling with cannons that can smash through any resistance – that’s what I’m looking forward to when Infinite Empire releases. Hopefully the rest of the mechanics that are currently still an unknown quantity for me, like the tech tree and fighter bays, hold up as much as the interstellar age of sail clashes have.

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Kosmass

As someone who really adores VR gaming, I’m always on the lookout for a new easy recommendation, something that can be used to convince a new wave of adopters to the format of the future. Kosmass might not be quite that, but it’s a charming enough little tactile toy that I’m going to indulge myself with it anyway. Who knows? Protoplanetary Katamari might be someone’s killer app.

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The Unleaving

To reiterate, I usually do not care much for the horror genre. But The Unleaving is definitely a bit more than you might expect from its Horror RPGMaker vibe. My return to the game included saving a missing child, meeting my Kim Kitsuragi analogue, fishing a cigarette butt out of a toilet to offer a bum, and getting horribly maimed by an awful little lotus gremlin that I beat to death with a mop. I found it really funny that my ‘psychic’ is less awkward with a giant rat stuck in the wall than she is with actual humans, whose intent she finds difficult to discern.

The amount and quality of backstory seems genuinely strong at this point, and if the full game fleshes this world out even more, I think it might be another example of truly strong narrative adventures this year.

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Whispering Ledger

I bet you didn’t think I’d actually bring this up again. Well, joke’s on you. I know I haven’t played and written up a straight-up hentai game yet on this page [don’t make me explain the Beyond Citadel situation again] but that’s more a happenstance than me having any tact or dignity – there just haven’t been that many good ones coming out lately, at least not that I’ve been badgered into playing.

Maybe more importantly, I don’t normally play VNs, which is why I’m curious how deep the shop simulation in this gets, considering the main reward for savvy business decisions seems to be getting lucky, depending on your definition of lucky. The later chapters at least seem to introduce some actual time pressure mechanics, including a very scary lender who ironically is not the game’s shark character. I’m also just genuinely charmed with the writing and story, only about half of which revolves around engorged phalluses. I laughed out loud multiple times in the bits that I played, and not just out of amusement at the writer’s shamelessness. Although, yes, frequently at that too.

I don’t know for sure how my audience, such as it is, regards the idea of me playing through an explicit furry futa shop sim with AI gen art, but they should know by now that that’s not the kind of thing I’m particularly sensitive about. My real friends are in-game, and this time…

They’re friends with benefits.

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Maid Cafe Simulator

Speaking of slightly embarrassing forays into genres I’m not a regular with, Maid Cafe Simulator has almost sold me on the plate-spinning storefront-management genre – I had a hell of a time the last day or two of the demo, trying to hurl boxes past customers’ heads into the kitchen and then run back to prep more smoothies, making sure the register was manned, and feeding my stray dog girl maid whipped cream pup cups to keep her motivated enough to work, and I only had like two things on the menu.

Will my newfound ability to bring in automated labor that doesn’t require food, homes, pay, or dignity help me run the business I love better, or will it spoil me against human [or at least organic] maids entirely, and usher in a dark era of robot maid cafes? Well, I can only afford one, so I guess the dog and catgirls are safe… for now.

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Nimaat

I still think this game has glaring problems, and have my doubts about the developer’s ability to tighten this up, flesh it out, and turn it into a real world-class thematic JRPG. But on the other hand, the setting and art are good enough that I’m willing to deal with a pretty sub-par JRPG if it stays interesting. Just fix the damn fonts, I beg you.

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Sir, We Have an Orc Problem

This industry’s got an incremental problem, and I guess I’m part of it at this point. Orc Problem might not be the complete package that reinvents both the genres it’s swirling together, but I feel like it’s actually kind of a hard thing to totally screw up at this point. The core mechanics are all solid, the perk tree looks diverse enough to be interesting [and may even hold replayability value] and at this point, that’s enough for me.

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The Transylvania Adventure of Simon Quest

I don’t think I need to try too hard to sell anyone on this one. It’s about as true of a Castlevania homage as you can get, while also trying to be the best of all worlds and combine open map exploration with tight, focused, proper platforming stages. After starting a new file to check out the open world portion, I can say it looks great, it feels good, my only problem is, when can I finally play it? This things been on my wishlist for more than two years.

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Gurei

This 2D boss rush probably isn’t going to shock the world, but I appreciate a dev cutting their teeth on something manageable before jumping into making a full-scale Metroidvania or whatever, and Gurei looks like it’s going to be a tight little package that could then be built off of into something more substantial. I liked the promised structure, I liked the unlocking of abilities, and I loved the little bit of character each defeated boss brings to subsequent fights. Only a month to wait for this one, and I’ll be on it swiftly.

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Echo Weaver

One of the demos with the most raw potential in the entire Fest. If Echo Weaver plays all its cards right, it could easily be one of my favorite games of the year. We don’t often get a Metroidvania with structural creativity, and I want this gamble to pay off.

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Dust Front RTS

No, I’m not desperate for a new RTS IP. I’m just booting up the demo for a strategy game with only one map for the third time to look at the cool tanks.

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Mym’s Sword

I’m still not totally convinced that Mym’s Sword will be a spectacular Zelda clone, and the sword thing feels more like a gimmick than a mechanic with real legs and value, but it’s otherwise teasing at some level of depth that I think could be really interesting if it pulls it all off. And if it sucks or is just disappointing I’ll secretly edit this list to take it off so nobody can accuse me of being wrong. It’s just that easy. I bet you didn’t know I could do that. Look back at the last few Best Of articles – nothin but hits. You think that happens by chance?

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Sting & Swing

Another game with great potential, promising depth, maybe satisfyingly layered puzzles to solve… or maybe just more clunky platforming via mouse-driven golf swings. I got to a few screens I didn’t see on my first visit, but the demo doesn’t seem to save progress at all when closed, so there’s no way in hell I’m going to try finding the 64 flags or whatever is teased by the locked door at the end.

Store page

Magical Blush

I did complete this demo, though, and, like many of these, it turns out I was only a few minutes away from the finish line when I quit initially. Not a bad first boss, and the upgrade teased afterwards puts me in a hopeful mood for the full version to be a proper top-down Metroidvania with some decent twists.

Store page

That’s another Next Fest taken care of. I ended up playing a bit over half the titles I flagged on the first day, and recommending about half of those today, which is a pretty good selection bias.

I’m looking forward to seeing these games come out, and pretty glad the next Next Fest is now months away. Let me know if any of these caught your eye too, and thanks for reading all these posts this past week and a half.

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Jogos a se Julgar

Falando sobre jogos e julgando-os de forma lúdica.

Por Raphael Carbinatto

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Long-form video game discussion with jokes. Updates on Wednesdays.

By Roger Renfro

Courage Wisdom Power

The official Substack of the Christian gaming podcast.

By Henry Nightingale

Let’s start with a few games I picked on my own, though.

Dust Front RTS

RTS as a genre has been on life support for longer than most readers have probably been alive, so much so that its descendants and all horrifically grafted chimera made from its components are vastly over-represented compared to the real deal. So any time an actually promising RTS game shows its face, it must be examined, if only out of scientific curiosity.

Dust Front is planned to incorporate some form of grand strategy layer, but the demo showcases only the actual RTS battle part, which is a very grimy, gray isometric meatgrinder, chunky tanks kicking up clouds of dust and shaking the screen with their cannon fire. It feels like a massively desaturated rebirth of Command and Conquer: Generals with the unit design adhering closely to the addled delusions of the concept artists and letting the color guys take the day off.

It’s got all the hallmarks of a turn-of-the-century Modern Military setting RTS – wacky vehicles that may have turrets bigger than their chassis but still need to grind along on treads, neutral buildings that infantry can occupy and turn into bunkers that require a war crime to neutralize, units lumbering into range and acquiring their targets with little urgency, so many UI elements and extra features hidden in the sidebar menus that the onboarding tutorial messages outnumber your troops, and a second sidebar dedicated to bonus abilities you can deploy on the field at any time. Or, well, at least designate at any time. One of the least satisfying parts of this otherwise very satisfying strategy games is that calling in an airstrike requires a level of premeditation that strains the definition of ‘real time strategy.’ No shit, it’s like 20 seconds. Even at the plodding pace of units in a game like this, that’s still enough for the front to move enough to put you on the receiving end of your own shock and awe if you’re not paying attention. I’m just lucky I happened to have three tanks bigger than apartment buildings holding the frontline stable.

Speaking of which, the one nod to the alleged grand strategy layer present in the demo is that you get to pick the combination of units you start the skirmish with, from a selection that includes some wild shit, like rocket bombardment artillery or just 20 some tanks to give you early momentum. Then you also get to assign slightly smaller squads as your reinforcement options, which become available on a timer as you play. One of those squads I made was just those three behemoth tanks, who plowed in through one of the map edges and met up with the remnants of my initial force to obliterate everything else. Pretty sick.

Scientific Project: Optic

This is presented as more of an edutainment title than a puzzle game, really, including a lot of rambling about scientific history and very cringeworthy jokes told in an annoying accent. But at its core it’s just another ‘beam orientation’ puzzle game, and not a very good one at that. Despite the narrator chuckling about how much you can learn from how light behaves without lasers, the only puzzles I encountered were coherent beams of light, which then reflect off the surfaces of polished cubes and shaped mirrors locked into discrete places around the map, and which you can rotate to change where the beam goes, but only in notched, pre-set angles.

That makes it easy for the puzzle designer to ensure there’s a guaranteed solution that doesn’t require shuffling things around or, God forbid, actually programming functional physics and locking mechanisms, but it also makes the whole thing pretty boring, even for edutainment. You know, when you have to do this crap in a Resident Evil or Zelda game you at least get to dome a zombie or something in between turning mirrors. I can’t fathom a single reason to play this over The Talos Principle, [or its sequel] even if this were less boring.

At some point, I got stuck because the last cube wouldn’t actually point the beam at the exit switch. Just to either side of it. Masterful.

Forgotten Blood

It’s an ugly as sin King’s Field knockoff, you think I’m just not going to play it??

Well, the one notable thing about this one is that in order to pick up items, you need to stand in front of the glowing indicator, then open your inventory, then move the cursor to the bottom of the screen, then grab the item and move it up to an open slot in your inventory, and let go. Every single time. For everything. Enemy drops, stuff out of chests, crap that comes out of broken pots… actually, one of the things I got out of smashing a random pot was a key, so don’t assume you can just skip anything either. And don’t think you can just stack an item with like items because sometimes that just refuses to work. It’s not any better with a mouse either.

I made like three loops of the first room and couldn’t find any way to proceed without walking through the poison swamp and hit Alt-F4.

Ten Years of Rain

A bit of a Zelda clone set in Central Asia. You start with a sword and a hawk, who acts both as your default ranged attack and can air dash you across small gaps. The hawk can also flip switches remotely and even grab items and carry them back to you like a boomerang. Eventually you also collect a bow and an axe, which can be used to open up new paths through the environment.

Of all the straight-up Zelda knockoffs I’ve played lately, this one definitely has the most promise. The style and setting are interesting and the developer seems committed to making the most of them, and the combat, controls, and general quality of the game does not otherwise significantly detract from its good points. I did run out of money from not realizing the bow consumes cash like in Zelda 1, and I failed to find any really substantial dungeon to explore, but I liked the game enough to play it some more later.

Besides, it’s got a really sick title screen.

The next couple games were things I hadn’t considered downloading before seeing them on ’s page. If you want more Steam Next Fest picks beyond mine, he’s been on the same exhausting quest to chronicle multiple games a day this week. [Preview, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5] [I’m linking the English language versions because I’m assuming that’s what most of my readers would pick]

Mym’s Sword

Another kind of Zelda inspired game, Mym’s Sword has you playing as a blobby blue dog-thing who falls into a ruin and claims a magic sword. The main gimmick of the game is that you attack by using the right stick to point the sword in one of eight directions, and then sticking it in an enemy’s face and letting it swing itself. This is facilitated by having your jump bound to a trigger, making it a platformer with a bit of a learning curve if your muscle memory has not been exercised with anything similar. [like Zexion]

You quickly leave the ruin and find yourself in an overworld, full of caves, mountains, waterfalls, and graveyards, some of which require a little bit more effort or puzzle solving to access. You’ll also run into a few different rings, which give you passive effects that scale off a meter – lowered when you get hit, filled back up as you collect orbs from defeated enemies.

It’s really hard to say just how extensive the full version of this game will be – it looks like it’s going to lean pretty hard into tucking secrets around the map, making you do some lateral thinking and pattern recognition to reach optional [or maybe even required] areas, and the somewhat wasted screen real estate occasionally gets used for something surprising, like a minigame where you have to kill enemies in such a way as they fall into a moving basket at the bottom of the screen. I don’t know if I actually will try to discover more in this demo, though, as I was pretty frustrated to boot it back up after a break and find that it doesn’t save progress whatsoever. Gee, I hope the full game does!

Sting & Swing

A platformer about chipping a golf ball around and trying to land it in holes scattered throughout the screens. Each time you successfully sink one, it fills up and turns into a normal block, and you keep the flag, which is kind of like your total score, a minimum of which is needed to open certain doors.

It seems relatively simple at the onset but the demo actually teases some potential challenge and cute little mechanics as you play. One of the big gimmicks is that not all holes are just open for you to putt your ball into casually – some of them only open once you’ve put your ball on a nearby tee, after which you have either a limited amount of time or swings to make it into every connected hole to win them all.

The other main thing is kind of quietly indicated to you by a background mural in an early screen, so I don’t feel bad spoiling it – you gain the ability to add spin to your shot, letting your ball roll along the ground depending on if you whip around it clockwise or counter before taking the swing. With the way that’s revealed to you, in front of a hole you can’t land otherwise, I’m hopeful that the full game has even more little secret moves to perform, or maybe just more hidden interactions and layers of puzzle to take this beyond awkwardly playing Jump King with a golf ball.

Kodama: Slumber of the Gods

A mostly pretty standard modern Metroidvania, potentially livened up a bit by having your attack be barehanded pummeling. It’s got a few good features, like the ability to pin screenshots to your map, a sprint option that’s genuinely really fast, and a cute bestiary in your pause menu.

The art and animations aren’t really anything to write home about, but are… sufficient, and I feel the same way about the audio design. The combat is almost interesting – you can punch in any direction, the hits come pretty fast back to back, and you very quickly unlock the ability to slide past enemies, but only when they have a blue border, usually indicating they’re about to attack. The restriction on sliding past enemies is weird, but it could work if it were part of a more fleshed out and impactful combat system – I brought up Smashing Spirits: Brazil’s First Boxer in just this context in my Christmas essay, and I urge the Kodama devs to take a look at that game for some pointers. If this game had a combo meter that boosted your attack power and speed as you gracefully slid through attacking enemies and continued to pile on the pressure, damn, that would be cool. As it is, I’m not really impressed.

Also the game makes you pay for maps. I don’t even like when Team Cherry does this shit. Give me something good to buy, don’t make me pay for maps.

Magical Blush

Really cute and enjoyable top-down adventure game, where the gimmick is all of your attacks are elemental spells, which you can bind and use as you like. Most enemies have specific elemental resistances and weaknesses, so you’re encouraged to keep a broad set on your swappable hotbar [though, at least as much as I played the demo, you only really get a few more than the four you can access at any one time] but each one also functions a little differently, and also has interactions with environmental and puzzle elements too.

Even more importantly, your character occasionally shouts out the name of her spell as she casts it, in English, with an accent, which is maximally anime.

The game’s pretty fast, and surprisingly hard later on – you have to juggle a lot of different enemy types, each with their own attacks, and remember which button you have each element of your own on. My one disappointment is that a lot of spells, including some of the ‘basic’ no-mana-cost ones you’re supposed to be spamming a lot, have kind of long cool-downs, meaning that if that’s the only thing that really hurts an enemy type, you have no choice but to hit and stall, hit and stall, until you finally whittle them down.

The demo already has plenty of secrets, and some interesting mechanics – there’s a whole area infested with ghosts, and torches that ward them off, with enemies that alternatively try to snuff the torches out, swarming you with extra enemies, or light them again if you trick them into shooting them with fire, though you can re-light them yourself too. I died at a spot pretty far from my last checkpoint and took a break, but I’ll definitely be back for more.

Knuckle Jet

Okay, fine, I did download one thing recommended. Knuckle Jet is one of those platformers where you rocket through things and bounce off walls like a knight… a rocket knight of sorts. Your rocket gauge fills back up any time you touch the ground, you get some extra juice for destroying enemies in mid-air, and you can rocket along certain background elements for free, ricocheting off 45 degree angles and smashing through crates.

I sometimes like games like this, especially if they have a good flow to the platforming, but I’ve got to be honest, Knuckle Jet just doesn’t have ‘it.’ There’s something kind of limp about the feedback, the audio mix feels weak, the upgrades are either kind of pathetic or frustrating that you to grind for them, I don’t like the attempt at claymation style animation in cutscenes that just makes it look like their dog ate half the frames, and I don’t like how sloppy the controls felt. The momentum from your boost takes you a good ways further than you often want to go, trying to pick an angle that you get locked into with a thumbstick is frustrating when there’s no visual feedback, even when you only have eight options, and the game just doesn’t seem that hard when its not launching you into spikes because you tapped the stick wrong.

All the stages I played were incredibly short, the first boss fight was tepid, and the optional routes mostly seemed to only have extra currency for buying upgrades to your equipment options. Hilariously, one of the pieces has literally zero benefit for buying the first upgrade tier. You just have to buy it to then buy the next one that itself offers little. Why not just increase the price of the first tier? Exhausting.

Well, folks, I think that’s going to be where I leave it off for this Fest. I’ll be tinkering around with a couple things I enjoyed [or wanted to enjoy more than I did] before putting together my hotly anticipated Best Of post, so unless you make an incredible pitch, I don’t think I’ll play any new demos for a while. Thanks for reading, and enjoy the rest of your Father’s Day/summer solstice.

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Sorry, no theme or even a joke about a theme today. I was tired so I just tried to pick a few things I was pretty sure I’d enjoy and kind of take it easy today.

over the hill

From the developers of art of rally, over the hill takes the same soft lighting, mid-detailed approach for the art of overlanding. You get a 4WD truck, an automatic winch, and a big map to explore, full of muddy ditches, rocky tracks, and plenty of trees and stumps, with very little guidance and no external pressures.

You do get a few things to do, though, which help keep it from just being a totally hollow sandbox. Scattered around the map are camp sites, which let you respawn and fast travel, merchants with new vehicles and equipment, random crates with cosmetics, and so on. You also get a camera, which you can use to take pictures of wildlife, filling up your Pokedex and earning a little bit of money to spend at vendors.

But there’s not really all that much going on. You don’t seem to have to manage fuel or have damage modeling more complex than a health bar, weather rolls in but you can apparently get an item that just clears the weather. The biggest problem is that the terrain is all kind of… blobby. As in, there’s patches of mud, and that slows you down a set amount, there’s bumpy roads, wet stone… but the real struggle of doing this in real life is all the little awkward rocks and loose piles of gravel and trying to find the spot in the mud where you have a bit more traction and not throwing it out, and while over the hill kind of approximates those sorts of things, it isn’t making a real attempt to emulate it properly. Or, I suppose, emulate it to my personal taste.

Speaking of personal taste, with a game like this I’d really love the option for a first-person camera, and not the one you take photos with, because that automatically puts the handbrake on. Even better if you had the ability to lean out the window and look down as you crawl along a ledge or try to get around a boulder. Having to make do with a drones-eye view to get around some trees is very different.

Nimaat

Egyptian horror RPG set in the reign of Akhenaten, a pharaoh who threw out the longstanding pantheon and devoted the whole kingdom to his own cult of the sun disk. You play as a woman who returns home from a shopping trip to find her husband torn in half and son snuffed out by an avatar of the new Universal God. She takes up her father’s khopesh, wraps their remains in linen, and sets out to kill the blasphemous ruler and save her son’s ba.

This is a really cool setting for a game like this, and the developer seems to have taken real pains to make it, if not realistic [it is a horror RPG full of monstrous entities] at least resonant of a real period of myth and history. I loved that the game doesn’t have a lot of handholding or explanation for period terms, and just lets you figure out what’s going on based on context or preexisting historical knowledge. I didn’t love how casually your lady slowly struts around, though I suppose this is supposed to be a horror game of sorts.

The game also has combat, which is turn-based with action commands, and it could be a strong point in the full game, but it definitely is not in the demo. There’s some potential here – you get to target individual limbs of enemies, and if you deplete a limb’s health, its severed and the enemy loses whatever attack or ability relied on it, a mechanic usually reserved for special bosses in RPGs. Unfortunately, that’s pretty much where the positives end, at least for what you get to play now. Severing limbs is supposed to also make it easier to land head shots, which are apparently the best way to kill most enemies, but I never actually landed a headshot, so it’s hard to say whether it would be easier or faster than just depleting their overall health. The parry system could be alright, but has two problems – the framerate the combat runs at means that it’s almost impossible to reliably land parries, [especially because the timings for some damage seem desynched from the animation] and nailing every parry in a combo string is required to reduce damage taken… by half.

That’s two strikes right there, and though you can argue endlessly about whether a parry system really should completely negate damage, I think the success of Clair Obscur proved that a game system doesn’t need to be totally and thoroughly balanced to be fun for the majority of people. More urgently, needing to perfectly parry entire fucking STRINGS of attacks to get ANY result feels like shit. So many 3-hit combos in this demo had me nailing the first two and then getting hit before the third ‘attack’ visually even landed and it just made me mad. It’s possible the full game does something interesting with this all, but you don’t get any combat skills, items, or equipment in the portion I played, just the basic attack. Oh, and the font is smushed and super hard to read. Should be an easy fix but you never know with these indie devs.

Sir, We Have an Orc Problem

An incremental tower defense game?? Let’s fuckin GOOOOO!

So, yes, this is tower defense, with upgrade costs in line with incremental games, and it’s actually blending the two things surprisingly well. You start with just one turret type, but can place it pretty freely and then even designate its exact firing arc, and you have the ability to click anywhere during a round to launch a slightly delayed missile at the target on a small cooldown, enough to pick off the occasional stray orc who’s slipped past your defenses or soften up groups but not enough to clear whole waves. You earn blue diamonds based on the number of orcs you manage to kill before losing, and can spend those in a skill tree to improve your turret’s various stats, give yourself more copies of basic turrets to work with, or add to your health pool and missile power.

There are two things I think the game does really well, unexpectedly so from a fairly straightforward mashup of two kind-of mindless genres. One is the secondary currencies – there are special nodes on the skill tree, mostly for unlocking whole new turret types and all the branches behind them, which require either orbs or cubes instead of the regular orc-death currency. You earn an orb the first time you survive a stage, and you earn a cube the first time you perfect-clear a stage, killing every single orc that spawns. That gives you these two distinct goals to hit, on each stage, beyond just grinding one swarm over and over to max out the more general skill tree perks.

The other one is the enemy movement, which is less like a traditional ‘lanes’ or pathfinding system, and a lot more free-form, almost fluid-like, as orcs bump into each other and flow around pileups, making your turret placement feel a lot less rigid and ‘solved’ and more dynamic and experimental. Even better, some weapons actually push orcs around, sloshing them out of paths you’re used to them taking, making their use actually a tradeoff in cases and not just raw DPS overlays you stack in the most-dense bottlenecks. This could end up being really interesting, especially if you’re a big tower-defense fan – I’m not, but I don’t think I’ve seen any that bring quite this combination of elements to the table.

The Transylvania Adventure of Simon Quest

From the developers of Prison City, this is a very slightly tongue-in-cheek knockoff of classic Castlevania games that is also attempting to be all the best of the first three [NES] games rolled together. You play as Simon Quest, a man who trained all his life to defeat Dracula, only to have some other dork with a whip beat him first, scattering his remains to stall his rebirth. Now Simon has to gather up Dracula’s relics and bring him back just to put him down again. Where have I heard this before?

There’s actually not a lot of jokeyness in the gameplay itself, which is good, because it’s pretty tight, pretty satisfying, and lightly modernized without going too far from classic controls and physics. You still don’t get air control after a jump, you still have a pretty stiff whip attack [though it can hit behind your head in the early frames] and you get knocked back by attacks, though not nearly as much as in a ‘real’ Castlevania game. But you can also jump up and land on stairs, the movement in general feels a little more fluid and precise than in the games it is inspired by, and there’s just a little more animation in everything that helps liven things up and convey more information about hitstagger and so on.

You have the option in the demo to play through the whole adventure portion before the first ‘mansion’ or skip straight to it, and for my first run I went right into the action. The game is divided up much like CV2, with a large, interconnected overworld full of towns and NPCs and paths full of enemies, and entrances to proper, linear dungeons, though the mansions in this are a lot more like a full CV1 or 3 stage, and even seem to have alternate paths and secrets of their own to find. My favorite thing, though, is that you get a little bit of bonus cash for catching the post-boss orb in a cool pose. All that practice is finally paying off.

I’ve been keeping an eye on this project for a while, and I’m really excited for it to finally come out – if there’s as much to explore as is teased by this demo, it’ll be the first real competition for a modern Classicvania since the second Curse of the Moon spinoff of Bloodstained.

The Goddess’s Will

Alright, well, the vibes are fucking immaculate. Look at this crazy inventory. Am I slotting skills into a shaped grid? Yo, hell yeah. Let’s go see how the combat is.

Well. Uh, that was something. Maybe there’s some trick to not getting perma-stunlocked by everything. Let me just open up the controls thing and find out what-

Oh God.

So this game has a lot going on, including a tracker for celestial alignments, and yet the combat is so slow, clunky, and unforgiving that I just could not so much as survive the first group encounter. Even when I very carefully baited out their… rabbits and killed them, and tried to isolate one enemy at a time, I always wound up getting pelted with arrows, staggered out of any attempt to attack or defend myself, struggling to even face the right way to hit enemies, and generally just really frustrated. It felt like I was playing something off a magazine demo disk, in all the good and bad ways. The help menu lets you open a really cool old-school manual in a PDF, which is great and all, but I’m not going through 18 pages when I’ve still got other demos in the chamber. I decided to take a peek at the forums to see if anyone had anything to say that would make me go, like, oh, okay, I get how to play this now, and instead I saw this.

Cmon dude. An hour? An hour. I ain’t watching an hour-long video about how to play a fuckin demo. This is something that happens with niche indie devs sometimes [a good example would be Hired Stars, a demo I tried in the October 2025 Fest] where they’re just too close to it, too insulated from anyone that’s not themselves or a close friend playtesting something over and over, and so they don’t understand that even if your game eventually reveals itself to have genuine depth or interesting tactics, if everyone’s first impression is just sheer unplayable frustration, you can’t tell them ‘you should watch my hour-long walkthrough’ or ‘join the Discord.’ I hope this dev does give this a better introduction, flesh it out, add something more than a shrug and a respawn when the only extant combat encounter seems insurmountable, because I’d really like to play an RPG with these sorts of insane systems, but only if it’s not authentically late 90’s Euro PC jank, which this currently feels like.

Tales of Acilain

AHHHHH!

After ghost lady gives you the Tears of the Kingdom arm you then go through a short tutorial showcasing its abilities, which mostly consist of flipping switches and carrying boxes, before battling her in a boss fight that has a shockingly difficult final phase. And then the demo’s over.

Except not really because you can then go talk to the devs and get teleported to a big sprawling map that just seems to have every biome strung together, extra heart containers and mana capacity upgrades all over, and one new magic arm power after the other, seemingly letting you preview all the magic types in the full game while fighting random enemies.

For as frankly crude as the game looks and feels, there are at least some decent ideas and mechanics to play around with. Your basic ghost arm can grab up piles of ash left behind by enemies on death and use them as projectiles, the ice spell can freeze over water to form bridges, and I really liked the manual aiming delayed casting of the lightning spell. Feels like the sort of thing that would be on Newgrounds 25 years ago. Will it be remotely playable at release? Well, my game crashed shortly after getting the lightning spell, which is an excellent sign.

Gurei

This game looks kind of reminiscent of Nine Sols, albeit with less polished controls and animation, and without the talisman attack gimmick. What it does have is a unique structure – Gurei is not a Metroidvania, but instead a boss-rush, with bosses you can tackle in any order, with each fight finished in a run increasing the challenge for the next.

Each boss also unlocks a new part of your arsenal when you defeat them, making it an interesting mix of Mega Man and a more standard 2D combat game. The first boss I beat had a giant shield, and beating him let me summon my own, able to absorb a few hits before breaking and needing to slowly regenerate, unless you time it well enough to totally deflect the blow and preserve the shield’s health. The last boss gave me a special attack that charges temporarily when you perfectly time a dodge – each new thing seems like it could genuinely be helpful in a later fight, and changing up your order might make some battles easier, which is good, because that’s the whole point of this format.

My favorite little thing, though, was that when you enter a boss arena, the soul of each defeated boss chimes in with their thoughts on the upcoming fight, which seem to be potentially hints on top of flavor. You also get some dialogue from them when you absorb a new power and head back to the hub, and it all just gives what is otherwise a very laser-focused and no-nonsense game a welcome bit of personality.

After beating the three bosses in whatever order [within the limited number of lives provided, which is a mechanic that may or may not be good in the full version] you then get to challenge a much later boss with all three unlocked abilities – I think he’s scaled to greater than, uh, tier 4, but still seems beatable. I didn’t beat him, though. I still had one demo left.

Echo Weaver

I was a little hesitant to try this one, it being a bit too high on the ‘popularity’ scale or whatever for my hipster cred, but I’m glad I broke down and gave it a shot anyway. I mentioned Vision Soft Reset in my Christmas deep cuts recommendation essay, and one of the reasons that game weighs so much on my thoughts still is that it’s an idea that I think is really good and hasn’t been exploited or even played with by very many developers. Now, Echo Weaver is not exactly the same sort of thing… but it is starting to play with those ideas, and doing a really good job of making an actual game around them.

The main gimmick of the game is that much of your actual ability set is given to you right from the start – you just don’t know how to do any of it until you reach a certain point where it’s revealed to you diegetically. The secondary gimmick is that it’s a sort of time-loop game, where you have a fixed amount of ‘life’ slowly draining out, and there are crystals scattered around that you can collect to extend it a bit and give yourself more time, or consume a chunk of it to heal your actual hit points. Once you run out of time or manually reset, you get dropped back to your starting point and can bring up the map to decide on your next goal before kicking off the timer and going again.

This gets used in some pretty obvious ways, like with you finding hidden shortcuts that you can then use to skip areas, and then in more interesting ways, like realizing that you can just summon your weapon to your hand from the very beginning if you know how to do that, or remember the code for an elevator you pass by on the way to the note that reveals that.

The puzzles using all your abilities in the demo are pretty good, the combat is… fine, and the whole thing reminds me even more of Nine Sols than Gurei did, admittedly, not in having tight and satisfying combat, but more in the look and feel of it otherwise. I’m hopeful that Echo Weaver holds up and does some surprising things with these gimmicks and design, and am really excited to try it when it comes out.

I’m happy I decided to get around to all of these, because none of them were really… like, crushing disappointments or anything. I’m still looking forward to Simon Quest, I’m glad I discovered Echo Weaver and Gurei, I’m even hopeful that Nimaat and Acilain have got enough going on at release to make them worth checking out.

And I do really want to give The Goddess’s Will another chance, though who knows when I’ll ever have the mental or emotional bandwidth to do so.

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The Unleaving

Okay, this first one doesn’t necessarily star women specifically but you get a couple character options and the one I picked was the cute Psychic who covers half her face with a giant scarf at all times so it counts.

This is a Chinese horror game that takes a lot of direct inspiration from Disco Elysium, which is genuinely a much better mix than I expected going in. You play as a paranormal investigator visiting a backwater town where children are reportedly starting to lose their souls somehow. It’s got a lot of the conventions of cheap horror games of the RPGMaker style – you walk around interacting with objects, occasionally confronted with a zoomed in view of something creepy happening, and have to handle a little bit of adventure game item collection and combining to progress.

The Disco inspiration is where it really starts to get interesting, and not in the ways you might expect. Your stats aren’t inner voices, for one, and it doesn’t have the same context popups and other hallmarks of DE clones, but it does go all in on every interaction having loads of descriptive text, your skills running passive checks to give you even more flavor [and sometimes genuinely helpful information] and plenty of manual checks you can attempt with a dice roll. When I restarted to try a different class, for example, I found out that passing an early listening check gives you a whole quest early, which is surprising.

I was genuinely impressed with how much there was just to examine and interact with on the very first screen, then even more impressed by the encounters in town right afterwards, with one of my first items being a piece of equipment that replaces all dice rolls with a different RNG system, some really detailed environments, and a surprising amount of NPC interaction. There’s a lot more going on here than just a standard horror adventure game, and I’m really curious just how much more there is to it.

Maybe the most surprising part of it to me was how well translated all the text was, given what a highly specific topic most of it involves, and the sheer volume of text. Now, I assume that the localization was, at least in part, done with AI, and to be honest, that’s one of the least offensive use cases for it in indie development in my opinion. The Unleaving, however, has an even more interesting AI trick up its sleeve – an optional ‘free’ mode that you can toggle on, which, with certain interactions, gives you a text box instead of static options, and you can, apparently, type anything you want in there and see if the AI can play DM and adapt to your lateral thinking.

That’s… honestly kind of a neat idea. I remember back when the only thing AIs really did remotely well was text, and a few of them could be set up like Choose Your Own Adventure generators, and I’m sure everyone at some point has wondered if games would ever get to the point where you’d be able to break out of the finite discrete options the dev thought up and inject your own ideas. Sure, some of the shine has worn off that sort of thing now that everyone with a title higher than Assistant Manager is farming their job off to a chatbot, but hey. I didn’t get a chance to really do much with this mode, but it looks like you can get the game to, like, hallucinate whole new items for you to find if you’re convincing enough, which is funny.

Enigma Heart

In Enigma Heart you play as a black lesbian leading the resistance against a tyrannical and paranoid presiden-I mean king, and that’s not even the part that’ll raise the most eyebrows. Here it is: it’s a Zelda II clone. Yeah. That one.

And while ‘clone’ might sound a bit harsh, because it looks like there’s going to be a lot more going on in the full game than you ever got to play with in Adventure of Link, there’s simply too much in this that is simply a 1:1 copy of Z2 – your sprite and basic animations, the overworld with wandering random encounter spawners, the slightly frustrating level-up system, and most importantly, every single enemy is immediately recognizable by its general design and movement.

Not to say that it’s a bad thing that this rips off so much from Zelda II. In fact, it’s a pretty cool game to shamelessly copy from. And even in the demo, you get a taste of what the developer is layering onto the format – ledge grapples, slide moves, more dynamic side quests, and a lot of dialogue and cutscenes. It reminded me a lot of Heritage – A Dragon’s Tale, which was another game that drew a lot of inspiration from Z2 while expanding on it, almost to an exhausting level, to be honest.

Unfortunately, as with Heritage, Enigma Heart is just a little too self-indulgent in a lot of ways, and I found myself skipping a lot of very long, boring, and unimportant cutscenes, which also skips any dialogue in them. There’s a whole sequence at the start where you just slowly drag yourself along the ground, there’s one of you just walking back to and through town with a cow, and my favorite is this one of me speedrunning a funeral.

Then after the funeral you can go talk to the bereaved widow and she has an emotional meltdown at you which eventually rewards you with the attack power buff spell. Insane. I wound up getting through a cave and wandering into a giant, seemingly empty chunk of the overworld and realizing I’d have to backtrack a ton and quit, but hey, who knows, if this has as much going on as Heritage did, it might be worth trying… just don’t expect me to actually watch all these cutscenes.

Whispering Ledger

This game opens with a hilariously direct and very long disclaimer, and so I feel compelled to begin my discussion of it with my own direct disclaimer: Whispering Ledger is a [potentially] highly pornographic game, and while I will obviously not be showcasing anything pornographic in my clips or screenshots, or even any shots of hefty bulges, I will be mentioning them, in what may be explicit detail. So, uh, don’t be reading this next one at church. Unless you go to, like, a really cool church.

After the developer’s self-insert forces you to sign a bunch of release forms declaring that you do, in fact, legally acknowledge that approximately half the women in this hentai VN are futanari, [look it up, I’m not here to educate you. she is] you finally get to start the game. You are a human merchant who has moved from a small island to the big city, looking to fulfill your dream of running an adventurer’s supply shop in the land of beast babes. Your primary gameplay loop consists of commissioning expeditions to nearby locales, refining the raw materials thus retrieved into more profitable items, and then choosing your sale price for each thing before opening the shop for the day.

It’s a little bit like indie classic Recettear, minus, of course, the action segments where you actually get to go battle in dungeons. Instead, the management is handled via menus, and the shop phase resolves almost instantaneously. You do get to set whether to price items above or below market value, but only in very broad and rigid increments, and sometimes you’ll have to decide whether to allow customers to haggle the high prices down. Unfortunately, charging high prices, which is supposed to be balanced by lower trading volume, also seems to immediately and devastatingly impact your store’s reputation – I wound up with a very negative rep just by leaving too much stuff expensive for too long without paying attention.

Not that it seems to matter all that much – in the first chapter, at least, there’s no real time or money pressure on you, and you’re free to grind up resources to trigger shop events or for crafting, and in fact, you need to do a lot of grinding to unlock character events with each NPC. This is probably the weakest part of the game, to be honest – every NPC requires a certain amount of interactions before you can unlock their side story, and most of them have either a strict cap on interactions per day or resource requirements. If you just don’t have any parts to trade with the mouse girl, for example, you have to then send out expeditions for components, hope they’re successful, then visit her to change them into mechanisms. And you do need to unlock and play through each character’s side story to advance to the next chapter, which can take a while because the stories, both main and side, are extremely long.

Just because they’re long doesn’t mean they’re totally tedious, thankfully. In fact, the quality of writing and pace of the plot was easily one of the strongest parts of this VN. I’m used to these things spinning their wheels, getting really repetitive, and dragging on forever, so I was surprised that a game with a naturally repetitive shop management structure actually had a pretty lively and frequently amusing story. You’ll survive assassination attempts, engage in grey market arms deals, battle void knights, and potentially blow like half a dozen loads before the game even starts forcing you to pay taxes and wages. Most of the fail states seem to just reset you back to the last meaningful decision branch, but at least the game has fail states.

So let’s get to the meat [heh heh] of the game, and talk about the sex scenes. As promised by the introduction, the sex itself does seem to be entirely optional, each scene being prompted by a pretty obvious yes/no dialogue split, and if you say no, fair enough, buddy, it skips ahead smoothly. But there’s no getting around the, ahem, charged nature of many of the scenes and even a lot of unavoidable instances of getting flashed, all of which are technically still clothed but leave little to the imagination.

To put it bluntly, no, you cannot play Whispering Ledger as a straight-edge antigooner. You can’t play it at the airport, you shouldn’t be opening that store page with the curtains open, and it’s not one you can explain away to your boss even if you are technically on break. This dev loves two things very openly – fantasy worldbuilding, and girls with huge boobs and equally impressive hogs. If you sign off on that at the beginning, well, you know what you’re getting into. Just mark the game as Private when you purchase it and nobody but Gabe will know.

And really, these days, what’s going to turn more people off than descriptions of testicles straining against striped panties is, again, the AI art issue. There’s a lot to say about this, but I think it’s worth pointing out that, at least from what I played, it’s not terribly apparent with the character art, which is all extremely on-model and honestly, really good. The more noticeable stuff is anything that’s supposed to be vague or generic, which does have some of that over-detail sheen to it, and it really jumped out to me in one or two spots where a scene transitioned to the same location and perspective but with so many changes to the lighting, small details, and so on that it was obvious that I was seeing two different generations of the same prompt. However you feel about AI art in general, this developer at least took their time curating and cleaning it up, which is more than I can say about a lot of VNs with non-AI gen art.

PLATONICA SPACE

From the developer of GIRLS MADE PUDDING comes a remarkably off-putting game about being trapped in the most soft pastel nightmare limbo ever conceived. You wander around, finding objects, then finding the place to set them that triggers a mostly-text flashback, full of melancholy about the lost Earth and the sadness of a young girl who still has to go to school after the Earth has died. Hang on, is this an OPUS fangame? Who gets that joke? Anyone?

What’s really upsetting about this is that the whole setup involves you only having access to a couple rooms, each with multiple exits, which then loop back around to copies of an earlier room, and I guess it’s just a huge, non-Euclidean maze of the same two rooms over and over with random shit in them, which you become more and more exhausted as you walk from one to the next, until your character passes out and starts over on another day.

Presumably this unlocks another room? Or maybe not. I wasn’t having any fun or finding any interest in the memories being revealed, certainly not enough to keep me going for much longer in this purgatory. Could it have a good story? Maybe eventually, though ‘the more you do, the sleepier you get’ being a fucking bulletpoint pitch in the store page summary feels a little on the nose for how I felt trying the demo.

ToMyX

This is a visual novel conceptualized as a game show being run by a succubus, who is forcing the developer to confront each of his ex-girlfriends and sort out his feelings and why they broke up. It’s also one of the most offensive and annoying things I’ve played this event.

The text is tiny, the dialogue is drivel, there’s a bunch of what I assume are weird in-jokes about the developer’s real life and prior games, and none of it is at all interesting. Even the conceit is aggressively irritating – why do I care about this one bad date this guy says he had? Do you really think I believe he actually dated this many women, and these aren’t just all digital representations of girls he stalked? Most of all, what the fuck is with these minigames?

They control like shit, they’re bizarrely strict for being on the default difficulty, and sure, you can apparently opt to go into this in Story mode to remove them entirely, but then I’m just reading an epic poem length blog post about a guy talking smack about his ‘exes’ in the most abrasive format imaginable. Oh, and the audio balance is all fucked up and too loud. I thought this would at least be funny enough in an embarrassing way to really rip on it, but it was not worth the time.

Maid Cafe Simulator

So, I know this is a popular format for games lately, I think epitomized with TCG Card Shop Simulator, but not because I’ve ever played one. It’s just the sort of thing every streamer active in the past year has played at some point, and so you’ll unavoidably catch glimpses of it if you’re alive in the world, and Maid Cafe Simulator does all the standard shit – customers wander in, you have to interact with them, you need to order stock and then pick up the box and physically go place things on shelves, you have to pick out exact change at the register, and you get a melee button to bop people who get too rowdy or whatever.

So then why did I download Maid Cafe Simulator? Well, I already played the shop management VN about swordfighting with futa animal girls a bit further up, so I don’t know why you’re so surprised. Joking aside, it’s because I think this is a genuinely interesting twist on the format, and one I’m a little surprised I haven’t seen before – maid cafes are a big deal, not just in the real world of downtown Tokyo, but in the popular imagination of nerds everywhere. There are shows about them, games about them, and most of all, it combines the new hotness of ‘physical shop management sim’ with the evergreen ‘idol manager’ genre in a way that probably makes a bunch of indie devs who cranked out their own ____ Simulator title after the success of TCG Card Shop smack their heads and go ‘why didn’t I think of that?’

And I have to say, having not really played these sorts of games before, I’m impressed with how well the two worlds are smashed together here. Obviously, the presentation is a little bit rough – there’s a lot of limbs clipping and awkward animations, and some of the little minigames feel like there could be a bit more flair to them, given that theme cafes are all about showmanship, and there’s not much kenonomimi maid flair to you stoicly carrying a can of coke over to the table and plopping it down. You really need the ability to assign greetings and dances to your servers and have, like, a minigame for drawing a heart on omurice with ketchup or something.

But there’s plenty to engage with, even in the demo. Surprisingly for a game with this normally open-ended format, there is a pretty tangible end goal and set of minor goals, with each of your maids having little requests that you can tackle like side quests, which unlock new recipes and improve your relationship, which then means you can improve some of their stats, letting them work a little faster or for longer hours.

The character designs and scenes were all really good too, and the one where you meet the stray dog kenonomimi rummaging through your fridge legitimately cracked me up. The voice acting is all in Chinese, but the quality is fine, and the characters are distinct despite being obvious archetypes. I liked some of the little quirks, like how your first maid bombards you with text messages, and the fact that you sleep on the couch in the breakroom which you’ve converted into a sad little bed.

But first you have to get the damn maid off of it! Go home! I need to get to sleep!!

Femme Fatality

This is another… genre of sorts that I think is currently on the upbound path, and that’s… I don’t know what to call it. Stuff like Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator. If you’ve seen it, you know what I mean.

The Spieler

The Quivering Innards of Alien Capitalism

A POUND OF FLESH…

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6 months ago · 7 likes · 4 comments · Trip Harrison

It’s a real-time management plate-spinner where you play as an extremely misandrist paid killer/shock jock streamer. You go through your email, pick out tips on guys who ‘deserve to die,’ then do little minigames to research your target, pick your method of getting close to them, and then choose how to kill them off to best amuse your sick fandom.

Since the game is running in real time, you’re on the clock with all of this, because your Mood is constantly ticking down, which you can restore briefly with some retail therapy, but only to an extent – each purchase is one-time only, and there’s only so many things to buy to perk you up. Every action also gets augmented by your other stats, or affects them in turn, and you’ve got to keep things entertaining and… in line with your twisted principles to get the most ‘value’ out of each kill. I’m not sure why, for example, strangling a particular guy is more ‘fitting’ than faking an overdose or beating him to death, but they have different levels of ‘messiness’ and I guess are more or less likely to led the cops to your door eventually, though the game is awfully vague about how openly you’re doing these things.

There’s a lot of really funny stuff going on, but unfortunately, due to the nature of the format, you’re by necessity blowing through it all a little too quickly to really enjoy it properly. For example, one of the factors in your Mood degrading is how full your email inbox gets, so you have to execute a little electronic hygiene and go through deleting junk mail and obvious phishing bait, trying to avoid accidentally clicking ‘yes’ on any Nigerian prince requests while not ignoring too many job offers. Some of the bluntness of the text and ticker tape feeds really cracked me up, and if you’re a fan of this sort of game, whatever sort of game it is, you might really enjoy this.

Tomboy Adventure 2

The sequel to the ‘critically acclaimed’ Tomboy Adventure, TA2 is a VR dating sim with a focus on physical interaction with various props, one of which is the titular tomboy, a childhood friend you are seemingly trapped on a desert island with until summer is over.

You can order her to follow you, trigger little vignettes, and even find a Polaroid camera that lets you take snapshots which you can keep in your backpack. Eventually, as you build up XP both in your Relationship meter and your Summer Feelings meter, you can confess your feelings to the tomboy… who misreads the cue and merely accepts you as her best friend, which unlocks a whole set of ways you can physically manipulate her, such as rubbing her head, pulling her cheeks, or picking her up and hurling her out to sea.

You can also go into a character editor and change up her skin color, hair style, and clothes, in case you’re unhappy with how much of a creep the game already makes you feel like. Sadly, though the game has a bunch of sliders for like, cheek depth and jaw sharpness, you can’t make any sort of Dark Souls facegen grotesquery. You can barely even tell the difference between everything maxed and everything at zero. Except her eyes, which I did get to clip through the sides of her head somewhat disconcertingly.

The game is pretty buggy and dull – all the spots where I was supposed to sit down next to her had me sitting down in the middle of nowhere or literally clipped inside of her, which is really disorienting in VR, and I couldn’t figure out how to trigger some of the stuff, she started handing me marshmallows at the fire but I couldn’t figure out any way to actually light the fire to roast them so we just sat there eating marshmallows. Worst of all, the fishing poles didn’t seem to work right, and trying to cast the line just resulted in it limply flopping in front of me no matter what I tried. You don’t fuck with a man’s expectations of a fishing minigame, no matter how small and tan you are.

Away with you!

Memory of Memorie: A Chill Story

I left this for this morning so I could ‘play’ it while doing all the editing for this post. It’s a low-fi study and chill ‘app,’ intended to be put on in the background while you do something else, soothing you with the sight and sound of a little anime witch practicing magic very quietly.

The setup is that this little apprentice witch needs to focus on her studies so she can get better at magic, and so she’s cast a spell that lets her FaceTime with a random person from another world [you. Or rather, me] and then they just leave their phones or magic mirrors on while they study together, which is apparently a real thing that girls do.

You can program a schedule with a certain period of focus, during which Memorie will work on summoning light with her wand, scribble down notes with a quill pen, or just read as the music and ambient sounds play, and you can even set up multiple sessions, with a programmed break. She’ll announce break time aloud, prompting you to tab back over and watch her… relax, sip her tea, flip through a smaller book that I assume is unrelated to her studies, or just close her eyes and rest. During the break you can click on her to get little dialogue snippets, then when the break is over, she announces that too and gets back to work.

And despite this not really holding any appeal for me personally, I found it to be incredibly well done. When you’re done, the amount of time spent in Focus mode gets tallied up and granted to you as XP, and each level lets you unlock a slightly longer and more involved little conversation with Memorie, after which you earn a new way to customize the experience – changing some props, unlocking different hats for her to wear, new times of day, including the ability to let it cycle through them, and my favorite, new viewing angles, contextualized as her accidentally casting the magic mirror spell on a random different reflective surface nearby and not having the spoons to fix it.

You can pause, end, or skip through focus and break periods however you want, and it doesn’t seem like you get penalized for betraying your own schedule, which is nice. I think my only real problem with it is that there’s only two music tracks available in the demo, and they’re so similar I can’t even tell the difference between them. Something like this really needs a pretty long playlist, and almost definitely needs the ability to import your own music, otherwise as soon as you have the thought of ‘I’ve heard this song X times this hour’ you’ll never be able to think about anything else with full brain power.

So ends my Girl Power edition of Steam Next Fest demo previews. Of the things I played today, I’m honestly really interested in a few of them, especially The Unleaving. I’ll probably have to get further in the Enigma Hearts demo to decide if I think it’ll deliver on its promises or just be too drawn out to stick with, and while I did like some of Maid Cafe Simulator had to offer, I honestly don’t know that I have the patience for that format.

Oh, I’m sorry, were you expecting more about Whispering Ledger?

Listen, buddy, I know how to make Steam library items Private. You’ll never know. Until next time…

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Except for the first game. I played that one before realizing most of the rest were space-themed and committing to the joke.

SnekromancY

What if Vampire Survivors was a snake? Okay, yes, I know, everything is Vampire Survivors these days so it barely even warrants mentioning, but SnekromancY is genuinely a pretty clever combination of, uh, not terribly original parts. You play as a snake, controlled in the style of Snake [best played on the Nokia in the bottom of your junk drawer] and instead of weapons or spells like most Survivors-likes, you summon various monstrous and undead creatures that ride on your tail and launch attacks automatically. Eating food lets you grow more tail segments, taking damage eventually makes you shrink, and ramming into a wall [or yourself] does a ton of damage.

Every stage is full of invincible enemy spawners, sectioned off with locked doors, and sprinkled with items and keys. You generally need to collect enough keys to reach the boss room, defeat the boss, and then reach the stairs that open up afterwards to move to the next stage. Enemies drop gems on defeat, and eating those gives you XP that earns you ‘pick from 3’ levelups, which can include new passengers, general buffs for your snake, or bonuses to certain ‘classes’ of rider.

And, you know what? It actually works pretty well. You get to shuffle the order of your riders around between stages, and they fire at the nearest enemy pretty reliably, and it turns into kind of a mobile tower defense thing, where you’re steering your wall of turrets past a group of mobs and calculating that they’ll be able to mop up the enemies before you start taking hits, then looping back around for their gems without closing yourself off. Extra items give you a little more to juggle, like bombs you can carry around and detonate for a big AoE splash that doesn’t rely on your riders, mattocks that let you blast through walls and make your own shortcuts, and coins that can be used at the occasional post-stage shop.

Duplicate units can be fused into stronger variants, there’s meta-progression for unlocking new unit, upgrade, and item types, there are floor traps that you have to avoid, and some of the bosses are surprisingly interesting fights for the game’s setup. I think my only real problem with it, besides the graphics being kind of distant and lackluster, is that it has the Gradius syndrome problem where one mistake can spiral almost instantly into a completely unwinnable scenario, because losing a tail segment that one of your turrets is on makes you weaker, obviously. Thankfully, it’s not permanent, and the minion comes back if you can find food and grow back up, and you can mitigate it a bit by putting your weaker and less important guys further back, but it is still a problem that doesn’t really crop up in most Survivors-likes. Otherwise, yeah, good job, guy.

Venus: The Last Ascent

What if Raft was an RV? And that’s about it. You are in command of a hilariously awkward land yacht, with open sides and a bunch of stations for… *massive sigh* mining and crafting and filling your oxygen and battery meters.

Your tour barge then has to make it down a road that’s covered in spikes and on fire, and occasionally you have to jump out of your captain’s chair and waddle around shooting lasers at rocks to turn them into numbers in a spreadsheet, then waddle back to the van to turn those numbers into other numbers and then turn those numbers into a second floor for your mobile home.

This is the sort of thing that, and I’m just theorizing here, could potentially be kind of fun with a group of friends, but I absolutely guarantee that if you have any interest in managing power output and mining magnesium to make new wheels you don’t have any friends, and if you do, they don’t want to play Venus: The Last Ascent with you.

The last thing I noticed before deciding to hit Alt-F4 like I was knocking a bug off my arm was that my wheels were at like 2/3rds durability, and presumably I’d have to go on a field trip to scrounge up enough brown bricks to 3D print and replace all four wheels on this thing. And I’d only gone like 500 feet.

I did really like the way the game opens, though. I’ve lived in California, this is fine.

Tom Lander: The Exiled King

Another extremely hype opening, let down by, uh, pretty much the whole rest of the game. To be fair, it would be insane if any game lived up to this intro, but still.

This is kind of like Pilotwings if your only vehicle was a quadcopter drone that flew weird. You fire each of your four thrusters individually with a face button, and doing that tilts your whole shit over in the corresponding direction, and then you can fire all four at once to rocket away towards whatever you happen to be facing. It’s tough to manage, because you can also kind of spin your ring of thrusters around, but each still is bound to the same face button, you don’t really have very good, uh, fine control in any way, and the gravity and collision are just kind of half-assed. The one good thing is that you can hold one of the bumpers to auto-align yourself with the ground to come to a stall or hover/landing orientation, and it’s really not that hard to just tilt yourself towards your objective arrow and go.

And that would all be fine, or even kind of cool, if there was more to the game than there is – most of the missions in the demo are just, follow your objective arrow to a box, get close enough to the box for it to latch onto your drone, then go somewhere else and land [or rather, plop down close enough to the landing pad for the mission success to trigger] and repeat.

There is combat, but it’s handled automatically by a dinky turret on top, which seems to miss a lot even if you try to do a good job of following enemies and keeping steady, and your only alternative is to ram the enemy drone out of the sky, which does a huge chunk of damage to you, and the only way to repair is go sit on a landing pad and wait for your hull gauge to slowly fill, probably getting shot at by other enemies if the ones you rammed weren’t the last alive.

There’s also a race mode, where you get to pilot a slightly different sort of ship, which is more triangle-shaped and the fourth thruster is set as your forward thrust. It doesn’t really control any better and trying to go through the rings with it kind of felt like I was playing Superman 64 with QWOP controls. This game’s even got about the same draw distance.

Max Savage

Lesbians in spaaaaaace! Okay, I don’t know for sure that they’re lesbians but that’s the vibe I’m getting. You and your, ahem, special roommate have just purchased a pair of gently used starfighters together, and set off to grind rep and credits to earn a ticket out of the backwater they’ve been stuck in and back home.

Half of the game, or probably more than half, is a very Freelancer-esque space sim, with a bar that doles out little missions where you warp to a system, fight some pirates or something, and then warp back for your reward. The controls and graphics for this are actually dead on – chunky 3D fighters and frigates, tight mouse and keyboard controls, a little arcadey but you still have to pay attention to your speed and shields. Most of the upgrades are entirely dedicated to your ship, and the different primary weapons, for example, seem to actually have different projectile speeds and max ranges on top of increasing DPS, which is nice.

The second ‘mode’ is where you land on the few available planets and get to walk around with your pixel lady and slice stuff up with a space cutlass. Or maybe it’s just a normal cutlass. But it’s in space, so it’s still a space cutlass. Each planet is its own little map that you can wander around, complete with points of interest, hostile wildlife to slaughter for a tiny bounty, and fast travel points you can unlock. Some missions send you down to collect items that spawn in a particular region, and some main quests involve you going down, but it doesn’t seem that well fleshed out or particularly compelling, at least in the very first chapter that I got through.

I’m actually pretty jazzed by this. There don’t seem to be too many different systems, and most systems seem to only be available to warp to if you have a mission in them, plus I noticed that taking two different missions in one system only spawns one of the objectives and you have to warp out and back in to do the other one. And it looks like it could be kind of grindy – not only do you have to grind missions to earn money for all your upgrades, you need a minimum rep to unlock a lot of them, and your starting ship can only equip up to a certain level anyway, so you’d eventually have to trade up.

But it’s a cute little setup, the graphics and style [aside from the developer-acknowledged AI gen character portraits] are all spot on, and it reminds me of something that could have been on SNES or Genesis alongside Buck Rogers and Starflight. At about a quarter of this framerate, probably.

The Message from Deep Space

The second demo set in the ‘70s so far this event! A meteorite has been recovered, with a conspicuous antenna on it that’s constantly blasting out a particular radio signal, and scientists quickly realize it’s of extraterrestrial origin! Well, duh, it’s a meteorite, I mean aliens. A crack squad of four random scientists [or rather three scientists and the player] are locked in a room with an old ass computer terminal, the entire world waiting with bated breath to discover what incredible insights they’ll glean from our first communication with non-human intelligence! Here it comes…

The entirety of this, at least as far as I got, is a pretty straightforward call-and-response game being played by whatever is inside the meteorite – your terminal will blaze with a series of numbers that have been pulsed out, and you can type in your response. Most of the prompts are in the form of long series, and the proper reply is the next logical entry of that series – send the correct answer, and you’ll get rewarded with the next sequence. Send the wrong answer, and nothing happens. Unless one of the scientists sitting next to you decides you need a hint and pipes up.

What’s really surprising to me about this is how well realized the setting and characters are. They each have their own little ‘voice’ in the babble-talk VA, they all come across with unique personalities, and they all offer genuinely valid insight if you need it. It also works pretty well mechanically – what you’re entering are highly specific frequencies, and after a few back-and-forths, you’re starting to get sick of typing out the whole thing when the computer scientists pipes up with news that he’s added a shortcut to skip the identical portions of the entries, then again to let you know that they won’t automatically interrupt you anymore, and you can instead ask for commentary manually on any ‘puzzle’ you get stuck on. Even your boss, animated like a 1970s scientific director version of the Happy Mask Salesman, is really charming and fun.

Now, is this game any fun? Well, it’s hard to say. I took a break right at the point where you get the ability to assign ‘words’ to define certain obvious anomalous signatures, and they seem to mostly relate to more math. This really could go in some super interesting directions… but I strongly suspect it’s the work of a mathematics undergrad who’s trying to sucker in hapless gamers to tutor them in basic number theory. At least I’m not solving a basic substitution cipher for American English… yet.

Atomcraft

Thought that crap just now was some shit for nerds? How about Terraria crossed with Powder Game made by someone who probably has an actual chemistry degree? Imagine I edited the Actual Art Degree screenshot from Disco Elysium to say Actual Chemistry Degree. I don’t have time to screw around that much for this joke.

Anyway, yes, it is a 2D mining and crafting game, with the primary gimmick being that every resource is, like, an actual Earth-like mineral compound, with realistic[ish] properties, and physics, and you have to climb your tech tree starting from smelting copper out of ore and then work your way up to disposing of radioactive waste by throwing it into the deepest hole you can find. In case the fact that I put CHR$(143) at the very top of my Christmas Deep Cuts recommendation essay didn’t clue you in, this is very much my shit.

Unlike Terraria, survival is, let’s say, a much lower priority – you start the game with a jetpack, with infinite juice, that lets you just kind of hover around indefinitely, and enemies don’t really seem to threaten your landing spot or pose much danger in general, at least in the areas I explored. You also have much speedier collection of resources – your drill can just kind of grind through trees and dirt and really any material you have tech’d it up enough to scratch so quickly you’ll be swimming in units of every basic resource, and you can dump it and grab it up in big, physics enabled piles with a cursor you can change the size of freely. The question is, how do you turn a big pile of hematite into steel?

Materials have genuine melting and boiling points, wood and charcoal and coal can be set alight but need an air supply to continue burning properly, and some materials conduct heat and endure it better than others – leading you to create a 2D kiln, where ore can be cooked off into pure metal, enriched with raw carbon from thoroughly burning tree matter, and then cooled with a plunge into water to collect the steel. And, presumably, that’s the sort of thing you’ve got to do to extract each type of element needed to begin engineering, aided by a pretty helpful… Help menu, and a variety of unlockable pixel types, letting you start making temperature sensors, logic gates, hell, why don’t I just build a computer that can run Doom in Atomcraft? Somebody will eventually.

I don’t really know how well this will stretch into any sort of endgame, which seems to involve repairing your broken spaceship, but it’s interesting enough and seems devoted enough to relative authenticity and an impressively robust engine that caused no obvious bugs that I noticed despite simulating the current temperature, chemical composition, and neighbors of tens of thousands of pixels simultaneously. I don’t know who the hell else wants to play this sort of game, but that’s kind of a secondary point for me to be honest.

When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears

Another retro space sim, this time in the vein of Star Control or Starflight. You pilot a little ship around, visit planets [but never actually land on them I don’t think] and blow up enemy ships in Asteroids-but-the-asteroids-shoot-back dogfights. It seems pretty well made, if a bit amateurish and unambitious – the controls seemed fine, the balance was okay in the few skirmishes I tackled, and I actually liked the super pixelated character portraits and design of the ships.

One potentially interesting quirk is that you don’t seem to have regular shops with new components for your fighter – instead, you salvage modules and even whole ship frames from enemies you destroy, with the components left over being determined by where they took damage… or at least that’s what the game implies. You then do need to pay to repair them before being able to swap them in, and you still need to make sure you have enough power output and cooling systems to fire your weapons without overheating, which can be made easier by assigning guns to different firing groups or using projectile cannons instead of energy.

But if all you’re doing is flying around talking to planet-shaped NPCs and scrapping with other ships over and over, I do think it could get a bit boring… games like this really need a second or even third ‘layer’ to break up the flow, otherwise I tend to burn out pretty quick. The game does the ‘NPCs yell Cartesian coordinates at you and you have to write them down in a notebook’ thing, which was the main reason I didn’t play a lot more of this last night, but I may revisit it and see if it’s got any more going on.

JUNK CONNECT

For all my glowing about niche STEM-punk crap, I bet you’d think I’d be all over a game about soldering together bullshit just to empty out your constantly overflowing junk drawer. Well, I might have been, but this game really is some JUNK.

The idea is that random electronics components drop into a column on your right periodically, and you have a set of requests along the top of your screen, and have to place components and wire them up into the functional devices asked for to clear them. Let the pile overflow and its game over.

It’s not a terrible concept for a game but it is a terrible execution. You’re meant to check voltages and viability with a multimeter but the probes control like ass and sometimes get stuck or won’t go on the spot you’re trying to test. If you burn out a component by hooking too much voltage to it, it melts onto the board and you can’t use those spots anymore. Even the soldering felt buggy and frustrating, sometimes making 90 degree angles that didn’t seem properly connected, or drawing extra lines on that you then have to clean up. Just like real life!

I don’t know resistance band values by heart, I don’t feel like learning what each bulb can handle, I don’t like soldering electronics, and most of all, I don’t like that the game sometimes just doesn’t give you batteries unless you flood yourself with crap. Probably the most glaring technical thing, though, is that there’s a separate volume slider for the BGM but as far as I could tell there is no BGM. You’re just doing this shit in silence like a real EE dork. No thanks. Oh, and this isn’t even space related.

Infinite Empire

Now we’re talkin. Take the Star Control clone above, turn the speed down to about 5%, and turn the autism up by a corresponding amount. Mm. Yeah, baby. That’s my song.

The entire conceit of Infinite Empire is having very slow, grinding encounters between starships just pummeling each others shields while glacially advancing or retreating or turning with the urgency of a supertanker. While your cannons automatically pump away, you can handle more important matters, like switching up which quadrant of your shields to direct extra power to, shifting stances, or giving helm commands that top out at ‘five degrees starboard.’

Each encounter takes place on a branching node map, which in the demo mostly stands in for locations in the inner Solar system, a bit like FTL except you can return home at any time for repairs and to stock back up on supplies. And you’ll need repairs, as every shot that gets through your shields will start to visibly chip away at your hull, leaving you a snarled, smoldering mess and potentially knocking out whole systems if the damage advances far enough. You can move your systems around, place armor plates in worry spots, and turn yourself into or away from hits to spread out the hurt, but you will take damage. Enemies fare the same, getting progressively eroded away until their core is exposed or they manage to flee.

The best part of this, at least of what I played, was the stances, which are ship-wide commands that shift focus to different combinations of systems, and have a short period of wind-up as they work to reach max effectiveness. You can start an engagement with power directed to your sensors, giving you a chance to evade stray shots while tightening up your auto-firing weapons’ cones, then close the distance while Braced, pumping everything you’ve got into your shields, then finally shift into either Broadside engagement for full cannon firepower or, my favorite, put it all into the engines to prepare for RAMMING SPEED.

It genuinely feels pretty good, and despite some worrisome hints that the whole thing is secretly a roguelite with meta-progression, I liked enough of what I saw that I’m definitely willing to try this some more.

Kosmass

My final voyage today was experienced in VR – Kosmass is a little physics-based Katamari grower where you tell a ball what direction to shit out tiny balls to bump into other balls to get big enough to absorb the biggest balls there are – my balls. Gottem.

This is pretty much the perfect sort of meditative, immersive, and gimmicky little thing for VR, and much to my surprise, it’s incredibly well made on top of that. You control your avatar ball by moving your motion controller to the side you want it to go and ordering it to launch its own mass backwards, causing it to lose some size but also shifting its momentum, hopefully causing it to collide with, and absorb, other masses that are smaller than it, while avoiding anything bigger that would, instead, pull it apart and add to its own girth.

Your current trajectory is clearly indicated, and it shows you very clearly how you’re affecting it with each squirt of matter. Objects are color coded in real time, making it obvious which you can safely touch and which are currently ‘hostile.’ You can move the camera around freely, you can use the other controller to slow yourself to a frame neutral velocity, and some of the later stages involve you and every other mass orbiting some gravity well that changes how you move around and interact with other bodies.

It’s one of those spectacles that’s just right for VR, and though I don’t know how much more you can wring out of this idea, I’m happy to play some more of it to find out.

Wow. Not a lot of disappointment today, I’ll tell ya. A lot of these have some real potential, and if they look like they’re going to make good on it, I’ve got plenty of fresh material on my wishlist.

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Spyder: Agent 8

A puzzle adventure game where you play as a little six-legged robot that can climb on most surfaces. The intro and a lot of the style of it reminds me of the VR series I Expect You to Die, but with a lot less involved puzzles. And the puzzles in IEYtD aren’t the greatest to begin with. Most of it, at least in the demo, resolves down to navigation challenges and putting together combinations. Oh, and a frequency matching minigame.

You can walk right up most walls and on the bottom of shelves and stuff, and the controls are fine for the most part, though I found myself really wishing I had a slightly faster movespeed option or the ability to ‘drop’ off of surfaces instead of having to walk all the way around, both of which were in Gecko Gods, as an example. I did like the way your robot automatically weighs down some switches with his body, and the trackball computer interface that has you running along the top of it to move the cursor.

I wound up accidentally falling out of bounds at one point and had to restart at the last checkpoint, which isn’t a good look for a game about being able to crawl around every surface. The demo ends abruptly at about halfway through the sub the mission takes place in… or maybe I just glitched it out by getting back on the orange.

Either way, it also unlocks a whole suite of ‘Micro Missions’ which are discrete, timed challenges. I played through a couple and thought it was a cute idea for fleshing things out a bit, but I wasn’t compelled enough by the core gameplay or puzzles to bother with this much more.

A Standard Deviation

The basis of this puzzle game is that most puzzle elements, and your own character, can be split into their component colors, which then only collide with obstacles that share that color.

It turns into a bit of a Four Swords situation, with you shuffling your selves around to put your squad into the right formation to accomplish something. Even in the demo, there’s quite a few sorts of puzzles – block sliding, minigolf, laser redirection, even a bossfight. Combat is kind of interesting, with your attacks knocking colored copies out of enemies, which can then only be harmed by the same color of you, and vice versa.

I’m not sure how much more can be stretched out of this setup – it feels like it could either be a very short, quirky puzzle gauntlet, or one of those games that has multiple layers and requires you to visit your mind palace to make progress in, and either way it could be really cool. I might revisit this later and see if I can clear it and get a better idea of what the total package is aiming for.

Rift Wizard 3

A few years ago, I bought and played some of the original Rift Wizard. It’s a roguelike with a couple really interesting twists, like the fact that you get to preview each option for your next floor, and pick your starting location on that floor. But its main feature is the fact that your only attacks are limited-cast spells, which you buy from a vast list, and every spell has potential for interactions and synergies with many other spells. It’s also quite hard, or at least, I was never patient enough to complete a real run of it. Whatever the reason, I was intrigued when Rift Wizard 2 came out of early access last year, but decided not to buy it… why would I get 2 when I still haven’t finished 1?

Well, now 3 is coming, and like 2, it seems to change things up a surprising amount. The main new feature is Crafting – every floor has, in addition to the blue orbs you still use to buy new spells, a few other items which give you temporary bonuses when collected. Maybe more importantly, they also get broken down into elemental components, and you can spend those at any time, like buying spells, to craft permanent equipment which augments your current spell selection. This shifts a lot of the passive upgrades off of spell purchases, though every spell [that I tried, at least] also has a couple major upgrades of its own.

Some of the new spells are pretty cool – I like the new movement upgrade ones, like the one that summons a flying drake for you to ride around on. The fully searchable menus for spells and equipment is one of those things every game like this needs. The new art is pretty nice, and I really like the scaled down levels – I think part of why I always burned out on the first game was that each floor was just a little too big for me to have the mental energy to parse, and having slightly smaller and more dense layouts might be an improvement. I can’t say much about the balance, because honestly, it was still way too hard for me to get anything going and I’m not going to spend half an hour looking at a massive list of spells trying to come up with a game plan.

I’m still probably not going to buy it, holding onto the dream that one day I’ll get into RW1 enough to finish a run and write it up, but it’s cool that the developer keeps working on this idea, forking off into a new title to experiment with a new set of mechanic ideas. It all reminds me of the course of the Siralim series, but if that’s the case, shouldn’t I just wait for Rift Wizard Ultimate?

LarsGadiel

A prequel to Xenon Valkyrie that is made to approximate the look and feel of an NES game. The sprites and environments are pretty nice, the controls are fine, and the music is outstanding, if a little derivative of actual famous NES tunes.

Gameplay-wise, it reminded me a lot of Faxanadu, with the towns full of NPCs just existing as part of the overall map, warps to ‘dungeon’ areas, enemies that you’re probably meant to grind a bit, and navigation that involves you climbing around and following ladders a lot. Your weapon gains XP on kills, and getting to the second level seemed to only give me a chance to do 2 instead of 1 damage with each attack, which is weird.

It’s also pretty hard, or rather, kind of unforgiving, with only three health and one Estus flask at the start. There’s even a Dark Souls-esque splash message and conspicuous death counter increment when you die. I might have to go back into this later to see if I can’t get further, because after the first boss I couldn’t tell where to go.

AGX GP

This demo starts with a weird amount of glazing for a fictionalized version of Elon Musk who spends his fortune on making pod racing real instead of buying Twitter. Then there’s a sizzle reel of a qualification track in Dubai or something and finally the big reveal of the main course on The Moon. Hell yeah. Love me some Moon racing.

There’s a lot of forced tutorial frontloading this, but it’s somewhat excused with how thoroughly they try to cover the essentials. You have the usual manual boost on a slow recharge, boost pads on parts of the track to route through, and hazard ground that slows you down drastically if you’re not boosting over it. But there’s also a side dash ability which you can use to swap lanes, tighten up turns, or collect/smash multiple gates arrayed too close together to get otherwise. There are ‘jump’ zones where you can launch yourself into the air, and can either slam yourself down to the ground or use the side dash to swap to a different track entirely, both of which give you a free boost.

The game proper consists of a lot of discrete events, each one on a customized track, and in a bunch of different modes or objectives, which really do manage to change things up in surprising and engaging ways. There are obviously races, which include smashing into other racers and trying to find a good spot for a takeover, but other events include a challenge to pass through every gate on the track in one lap, simple lap time trials, and so on. The game is very good about showing you exactly how close you were to qualifying for the next medal, and each one you win for a course unlocks a new toggleable feature, like race ghosts for yourself or the highest-scoring dev. One of my favorite features is that, if the event is one that can be trivially reset and allows you to do a flying start, you can just loop over and over and manually commit once you’ve gotten a top score you’re happy with instead of having to go through menus to restart it.

I really enjoyed this, despite usually not being very good at this style of racer. I think part of it is that this is a rare one to not feature ‘drift’ boosting, which has always been a tough thing for me to get used to. I am a little disappointed that the tracks on the Moon don’t seem to be affected at all by low gravity – I know these are specifically anti-gravity vehicles, but it just makes the setting kind of pointless in comparison to, obviously, Exo Rally Championship.

Flux Empyrean

The requisite bizarre, ugly pile of this event. Flux Empyrean is one of those games that’s all about being superficially obscure and weird. Even the tutorial takes place on a rotating platform in space that you use to align yourself with the constellations and experiment with your tools.

The game proper has you start on a large, mostly empty ship, with a wheel to control the rudder, manual sail controls to catch the wind, and a bunch of devices designed to point you towards signals emanating from the various structures poking out of the endless sea. Both the boat and most locations are littered with little CDs that add entries to your journal, and I suppose it’s a combination of backstory and puzzle hints, though I only really solved one or two puzzles in my time with it.

Most of my time was spent trying to figure out what the ball you can ‘cast’ out does, or struggling to make my sail actually go down, and there’s a bit too much reading involved for a quick demo experience. But there is some potential with the systems and the overall vibe of the game. I liked that you get a hoverboard that lets you just hop off your ship and zip across the waves to nearby islands without having to pilot it properly, and I liked the graphics and audio and celestial navigation. There’s no way to tell if this will actually be genuinely interesting or just a weird framing for a collectathon but I might be willing to try it out on release.

Washington Prime

Right off the bat I want to say I’m sorry for the lack of audio on some of these clips – I played through this four separate times after it failed to record footage properly and on the last attempt the audio part just didn’t save and I was too tired to try again. Not the game’s fault, just a quirk with how I had to record it.

This is basically Die Hard as a GZDoom game. You start the demo with the option of three different pistols, a bunch of kind of arbitrary ‘difficulty’ toggles, and then an air duct you crawl through before falling into a sprawling office complex full of security guards in white dress shirts.

This being GZDoom, it does have quite a few features that are a bit more reminiscent of the Build engine than Doom – security camera consoles, aim-down-sights, usable health kits, and some verticality to the level design, though not much on display in this demo.

Really, the most important feature of this game, or at least the demo, is the difficulty – I had an awful time my first couple attempts at it, and am honestly kind of glad I had recording problems because I took later runs more seriously and wound up clicking with it more, but it is still obscenely difficult in a lot of ways. The main thing is that, while you put the enemies down in just one or two shots, you’re not much tankier yourself. You die in just a couple rounds, enemies are not exactly terrible shots, they have decent reaction time once aware, and I think you can even get headshot for bonus damage. The biggest problem, though, is that any loud noise aggros enemies from a pretty good distance away, and it’s really easy to get flanked and instantly killed by some guy who just took the other way around a cubicle.

So the biggest thing that helped me actually get through the first level, besides psyching myself up and swapping to the silenced pistol, was to go into the audio settings and turn the music WAY down so the separate ‘footsteps’ channel was actually relatively audible, and play with headphones. You do get a visual [and musical] indicator that enemies are aware of your presence, a bit of a Metal Gear alert phase style, so you don’t have to necessarily be a true Rainbow Six room-clear-autist to survive, though it wouldn’t hurt. Thank God, too, because there are a lot of bullshit rooms to clear. This is a pretty… authentically mind-numbing office, with a bunch of empty conference rooms, tons of bathrooms and storage closets, and so on. Thankfully, the game drops pins on the map for any health and ammo pickups you’ve gotten close enough to, otherwise you’d have to root through dozens of completely indistinct offices.

The second stage is honestly a little better – it takes place in construction site, and while the enemies have automatic weapons and more health, it’s balanced out by you finally getting access to some higher caliber guns of your own, including an automatic shotgun that just liquefies people in a really satisfying way and doesn’t have ridiculous damage dropoff. There’s a lot of other neat touches, like the fact that to use a medkit, you need to equip it and then channel a pretty long animation of your guy pulling out a bandage and wrapping it around his arm, and throwing knives you can use for silent takedowns.

Once you beat the demo, you unlock the ability to start with a second weapon [including the shotgun] or play with a special ‘arcade’ mode that removes all normal drops from the map and enemies, and has them drop cash instead. You can then use the cash at upgrade terminals to buy ammo, new guns, med kits, or even upgrades to your skills, which I think basically just affects accuracy or recoil on weapon types. Or you can just use the default GZDoom console commands to give yourself all the guns and god mode so you can play around with them.

All in all it was pretty impressive, and I wound up enjoying it a lot once I got over the hump of actually treating it like a somewhat serious shooter. I’m actually kind of glad I had so many issues with the recordings, without which I might have just said ‘its too hard’ and given up. I do still think it’s erring a little too hard even on ‘easy’ settings, but if they just boost the footstep audio a bit by default I think that would go a long way toward helping new players appreciate its strengths.

Cohen 1939

If Duke Nukem: Die Hard Edition isn’t your thing, how about Peaky Blinders as a Hotline Miami clone? No? Fair enough. That’s not just me being unfair, either, that’s how the store page describes the game. It’s set in a roiling gang-war-torn Birmingham, where fascism is on the rise, maybe, and more importantly everybody’s ditched their accents.

There is, of course, some use of AI generation that’s pretty obvious in the loading screens and pretty much anything that’s not an in-engine cutscene, but the voice acting is so obscenely bad, and mispronounces things so wildly, that I honestly don’t know how an AI would fuck them up that much. Wouldn’t you be able to tell the AI to do things in a British accent? Is this just random people doing these in one take?

As hilariously bad as all the cutscenes are, and they are REALLY bad and funny, the gameplay is surprisingly solid for a scalp-cam brawler. You have the usual ability to grab and throw various melee weapons, you can zoom around shivving guys as they stand up from their poker game, and you even get the occasional genuinely useful gun to mow down mobsters with. After the prologue, you move on to the mansion, where you’re given one of what looks like four playable characters to do one-shot missions with, and based on the skill unlock store, each one seems to have their own ability. The blonde you start as has the ability to magically summon Ravens to scout and harass enemies, another character has what I assume is bullet time, and so on.

The stages have some cute touches like non-hostile guys who just try to run out the door as soon as you start your killing spree, you get scored based on your combo and it looks like you can eventually unlock different guns to start stages with, and it all controls fine. But the real star of the show is how silly and awful the cutscenes are, and though the developer claims the voices are just placeholders for ‘professional voiceacting with real Birmingham accents’ I suspect that, even if I’m right and that means them adding extra prompts to the AI, it won’t actually be any less funny. I love that the main bad guy in the tutorial sounds like a 12 year old boy.

I’m pretty happy with the score so far - nothing yet has really jumped out at me as ‘potential GOTY material’ but there’s been plenty that I’m already looking forward to taking a second look at. I’ve got what should be a pretty strong lineup scheduled for tonight, so hopefully I won’t hit demo exhaustion as early in the week as I normally do. Until then…

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Sorry this is out so late and is relatively short – I had a late start yesterday and a busy day today, and this is almost certainly the most populated Next Fest yet. I gave it a go, and spent multiple hours scrolling through a lot of shit that, frankly, I’m fairly convinced aren’t actually games, trying to find the handful of diamonds in the rough that make this event worth the trouble. Well, I gave up. I couldn’t get through the full 4000-some English language demos available. And I couldn’t get through more than six of the ones I did pick before going to bed, without even doing any editing at all. So be happy you’re getting this much.

Shadow Rush

A few years ago, I played a game called Ghostlore. It’s a Diablo-style ARPG set in Southeast Asia, with enemies mostly drawn from myth and folklore from Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia. It’s also got a surprisingly complex set of systems, with both your skills and stats being equipped via grid inventories that allow you to set up chains of effects, stack special bonuses with glyphs, and trigger spell casts on attack or dodge. I really liked it, so I was pretty excited to see the devs, or rather, one of the two [I assume brothers] rolling out a new game in what looks to be the same engine and basic style.

Unfortunately, Shadow Rush is, frankly, in many ways a step back from Ghostlore. Instead of large randomly generated fields, it takes place [at least as far as I got] entirely on small rectangular hallways, which are flooded with enemies, and after a short amount of time, one end starts getting engulfed with a damaging wall of shadow. You clear the hallway of enemies, pick one of two exits, and repeat until you die.

The game looks like it’s aiming to have a similar sort of end gameplay loop as Ghostlore, with your attacks cycling through a four-stage combo, and each stage having its own dedicated line of slots for equipping bonuses, active skills that trigger, and so on. The problem is, you start the game with none, and so have to use your two basic attacks to grind mobs until you get enough levels and cash to start putting a couple extra moves together. XP doesn’t accumulate that fast, even early on, and money is even worse – shards in the shop cost a minimum of 1000 gold, which was more than I made in even my best run.

There are six different character classes to pick from, which is nice, especially for a demo, and I’m sure they’re all unique enough once you’ve fully kitted them out and finalized the ‘game-breaking’ build the creator teases in the summary, but they all start with the exact same two moves at your disposal – a stand-still-and-spray-projectiles basic attack and a dash that feels really random and uncontrollable, neither of which are helped by the fact that all attacks are locked to eight cardinal directions. There’s not much you can do besides hold attack until you get surrounded, dash a few times hoping you end up somewhere not surrounded, and keep doing that until everything’s dead. There’s not even that much enemy variety – the third enemy type just gets two recolors for the next two stages, which is shocking. This game really needs a much accelerated start at a minimum, and probably a substantial redesign in general.

The Old Flesh of Nuraga

A very low-fi game about digging up creepy stuff and showing it to your grandpa to trigger a lecture. Superficially, it immediately reminds me of Children of Clay, except with actual gameplay. You and your pappy are stranded in some desert ruins, exhausted and starving, and he gives you his magic bell to go dig up some poison potatoes for soup.

After the first one, you head back out and look for another, only to start pulling up more and more bits from the ancient temple you’ve decided to camp in. Each item has to have the hard dirt hammered away and the dust brushed off in a very lightly tactile little minigame before you walk back to gramps and ask him to tell you what it is.

There’s not much to the gameplay, but the setting and character of it hit a really satisfying balance for me. It’s clearly in the vein of a standard horror pile, but having Grandpa around keeps it from being totally boring or artificially, hollowly ‘tense’ and the art and setting are evocative while vague enough to tease. I do think the very first story you get is too much of a straightforward reveal, far too early, but it did kind of redeem itself with Grandpa’s reaction to the human torso I dug up and showed to him.

In fact, I enjoyed the little bit I played of this so much I decided to end the demo early and just wait for full release. I strongly suspect this will be an extremely short game even with all content unlocked, and I don’t want to spoil too much more about it yet.

Blade of Mercy: Bloody Countess

I must admit, I did not expect a Hungarian Janosik knockoff this Next Fest. Joking aside, this game seems much more ambitious than Janosik despite looking very similar and having a very similar setting.

You play as the sister of Elizabeth Bathory, historical purported vampire and Hungarian noble who sets out to free her sister from the captivity she eventually died in. You suit up in your… probably pretty anachronistic red jeans and white tank top to slice your way through Hungary to save Elizabeth, when you and your party are waylaid by werewolves. Sophia falls from her horse, hits her head, and immediately concludes that the best cure for head trauma is to chug a convenient frothy mug of beer found nearby. As you might suspect, her day does not get any more coherent from there.

Bloody Countess is an action platformer with a tiny bit of cinematic thrown in – you can grab onto ledges and corners and hoist yourself up, automatically performing a totally necessary backflip maneuver, and can climb ladders and perform dodge rolls but nothing crazy. Combat with your saber includes light and heavy attacks, and a parry that sometimes does nothing and other times causes you to instantly decapitate the hapless bandit you perform it on. Later, you unlock a matchlock pistol that must be manually reloaded after each shot [though it doesn’t take too long] and an axe that lets you smash through crates and shields.

Really, the whole thing looks and plays almost like the exact kind of game I get really excited for, like Idosra: The Electric Renaissance or Janosik, but I regret to report that while it has a lot of the insane charm and amateurish ambition of those titles, it lacks their competence. The platforming, combat, and controls in general are pretty sloppy and unsatisfying, enemies are mostly tedious obstacles, and the game systems get in the way of fun more than they enrich it. It’s funny that you heal by chugging beer and bottles of pear brandy, which can then poison you if you drink too much at once, and your alcohol poisoning can be cured with a bowl of goulash. But having to bandage yourself every time you start bleeding, having fall damage from only a short drop, managing two different types of ammo for living and undead enemies, it’s too much and slows down a game that isn’t particularly snappy anyway.

Eventually you fall into an underground Roman era ruin and have to fight skeletons in Roman gear, and this is where the game should’ve picked up if it wanted to win me over. Instead, I found the skeletons and bats even more annoying to fight and decided to move on. I really wish this was a slightly better game so I could talk myself into going through it to see how crazy it gets, but I think it needs a lot more work on core systems than it’s likely to get at this stage.

The Core

What if Super Monkey Ball was a walking simulator? Or, I guess, a rolling simulator? You play as a ball who wakes up in an abandoned lab littered with newspapers from the 1970s and almost immediately has to have a very long conversation with a digital assistant just to open the first door.

Once you get your basic abilities [a flashlight and your “use” key] you are sent out to collect scrap so you can afford some basic upgrades from the shop. Then its off on a mission to give a suspiciously cloying AI who was intentionally isolated access to the outside world. Good idea.

Most of the actual game consists of rolling down hallways, rolling up and down wheelchair accessibility ramps, [pre-ADA era!] through precisely AI core sized ventilation tubes, and grating at the games many small frustrations and design flaws. Despite presenting itself as a marble-roller exploration game, don’t imagine you can go off the rails – every area is thoroughly fenced with invisible walls, even to prevent you from skipping a ramp after unlocking the jump ability! How about the fact that your use key has ammo, must “reload” after a few uses, and cannot be manually reloaded OR manually discharged to reload if you don’t have anything to zap? Maybe the most bizarre thing to me is the gating to prevent you from proceeding without the flashlight. Your ball just refuses go into the dark, and there’s no real reason for any place in the game to be that dark, no reason for your flashlight to be this shitty and weak, no reason for the upgrades to barely improve it to cost scrap. Top to bottom, FUCKING INSANE.

The one thing I did like were the VR missions. You occasionally find keycards that unlock sets of simulated missions that you can warp to and challenge for a little bit of supplemental scrap, and they’re better than anything in the base game. Just a sterile white environment, discrete upgrades as self-contained powerups, a little obstacle course to roll through. Once you’ve gotten through them, you can even re-challenge them with a time limit, three levels of medal available depending on your performance, and even a global leaderboard that works fine just for this demo. Its a little like the FLUDD-less stages in Super Mario Sunshine, if the rest of Sunshine was Mario walking around an abandoned industrial building and having long, annoying, unskippable conversations with Siri.

Oh, did I not mention that? Yeah, these tedious, terrible, fully voice-acted dialogues are completely unskippable, so you get to really relish every single grating inflection and stutter while two AIs flirt with each other. Godawful. I don’t care if humanity is gone and this is all that’s left, I hope they get nuked too.

Koatl The Defender ULTIMATE

This one starts out strong – you play as a Mexican superhero who transforms into the avatar of Quetzalcoatl when he senses a malign spirit beneath an old Catholic cathedral in his home town. It’s voice acted, but entirely in Spanish, and pretty well, which is a plus. I really cracked a smile when he says “oh no!”

The game is nominally divided into a 2D platformer and 3D third person character action in bossfights, which was one of the things that drew me to it – it’s the sort of thing you saw more of back in the PS2 era, and in my opinion an underrated solution to pair the ease of level design for a 2D platformer with the occasional shift into a more impressive and free-form set piece.

Unfortunately, as with Bloody Countess, I’m sad to report that the execution falls far short of the ambition. The biggest problem is that the 2D mode is not really 2D... its only a locked camera angle and narrow passages, meaning your controls, collision, and combat still behave the same as the over-the-shoulder mode, causing a lot of extremely annoying issues. Doing a basic attack combo carries you into and then past the enemies, causing you to whiff on your followup attacks, and they just completely miss you almost as often, attacking the fore or background instead of in your direction. Platforming is miserable, floaty, imprecise, and buggy. A lot of the sidescrolling sections have pitfalls and spikes just out of view beneath the crumbling platforms and awkward ledges you’re trying to climb up. Unrelated but also annoying is that there are a bunch of chests throughout the levels but no way to open them that I ever found.

Eventually you meet the ghost of a Spanish nun and get your macuahuitl back, which, again, as with Bloody Countess, could have been the turning point, but the general quality of the game was simply too rough for me to continue. This could have worked much better as a purely 2D platformer, or a beat-em-up, but trying to mesh platforming with 3D combat was, I think, simply biting off more than this developer could chew.

TANUKI: Pon’s Summer

A lazy fatass wastes away his days eating junk food and playing videogames, procrastinating until life catches up with him and he is confronted with the truly monumental weight of his failures… and then I played the demo for Pon’s Summer.

This is one of those… cozy town simulators, I guess you’d call them. You play as a tanuki who has a month to fix up his dilapidated shrine before the big, once-a-generation festival that he forgot about, and with no job, no ambition, no talent, and no skills except at doing BMX tricks on his little bike, he’s lost until the perky lady who works at the post office scouts him to do package delivery. You then put on your cute little hat and backpack, load some boxes into the tiny dimensional pocket basket on your bike, and grind and flip your way around town, meeting people and doing favors for them until you can afford to repair your home and host the big event.

It rides pretty hard on the cuteness and art design, and, yeah, it’s really cute and the character design especially is super good. When dismounted your tanuki just kind of waddles around to carry packages or talk to people, and if you sprint he puts his arms back and waddles super fast.

You unlock minigames like sumo matches and… I’ll be real here, I’m just kind of assuming there’s other minigames because I only did the sumo one. There’s little gauntlet challenges and unlockable hats and a whole page of your inventory just for bugs you can collect, an essential part of any Japanese summer.

But mechanically it’s all a bit toothless and hollow. The sort-of Tony Hawks [or I suppose, BMX XXX] mode of transport and little tricks and grinds you can do all seem totally optional and not really very exciting, with little ability to link tricks and kind of arbitrary ramps and quarter pipes littering the town, all for a ‘best combo’ score in your end-of-day report that, who knows, maybe affects your cash bonus?

And there’s no real risk or reward in doing them anyway, since the worst thing that seems to happen is that you either have to go jump back on your bike or respawn on the last stable ground you touched – packages have no risk of being damaged or lost, no matter how precariously you stack them and what wild tricks you do. Even the old NPC I had to ferry across the map at one point, who explicitly warned me to take it easy, in actuality had no problem with me just like, fuckin whippin out backflips and smashing him into things.

I think if you really like stuff like Promise Mascot Agency AND enjoy Tony Hawks but aren’t actually any good at it, you might really get a kick out of Pon’s Summer, but I think even the most hardened Cozy Crusader might find themselves a little bored after a few hours of riding back and forth through a town where physics is a flavoring.

Not an amazing initial round, and some genuine disappointments today, but I’m honestly still in a pretty good mood. I’ve saved some of the more promising titles for later in the week, hoping they’ll serve as palate cleansers if I start to find myself losing motivation, and there’s plenty more that I’m looking forward to coming up. Besides Old Flesh, which I’m probably going to pick up at release, the only thing I might revisit is Blade of Mercy… I’m so tantalized by its bizarreness and ambition that I’m hoping something clicks and I can adjust myself to the jank enough to get through it.

For now, though…

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