February 2026 Next Fest, Day 1
Pissed out while running
It’s that time of year again - time for me to push through dozens of crap demos like a treasure hunter flailing through huge tangles of spiderweb to find the next indie trash I’ll pretend is good. Buckle up, pardner. It’s going to get bumpy.
Obey the Insect God
A sidescrolling platformer with sprites made of digitized photographs a la Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game, although it maybe has more in common with Mortal Kombat: Mythologies. Notice I’m talking about the bad parts of each franchise, here. Maybe the worst parts. Honestly, playing this just makes me want to finally start on the Jrago games I’ve got.
I did like this cutscene, and the fact that it is apparently based on Finnish myths of some sort, but it is just irredeemably ugly and the gameplay is pretty bland and the whole thing is irritating.
Crown of Silence
One more sidescrolling ‘Souls-lite’ in the vein of Unworthy but lacking the polish. And Unworthy wasn’t even particularly polished. The most interesting things about this game are all the ways it fucks up.
There’s massive recovery time on a lot of actions, meaning you can get stuck ‘catching’ your ranged weapon or finishing a swing and be unable to do your dodge, which is your only form of damage mitigation since there’s no block, and enemy attacks and projectiles move so fast and have short enough telegraphing that you’re essentially forced to just hit and wait, not even hit and run, one attack at a time because you need to make sure your input window is completely open to dodge the attack that’s absolutely programmed to come, because there’s no [or no noticeable amount of] hitstun on enemies.
The funnier thing is the game has two ‘sub’ weapons that you start the game with, and the giant shuriken thing is pretty much the only reliable way to actually attack enemies in spite of it having the aforementioned recovery frames every time it comes back to you, but it’s not what you have equipped by default. Instead, the demo starts with you having a book equipped in your off-hand, which does… nothing, because it’s used to cast spells and you don’t start with spells or find any in the amount of time it took me to give up on this demo.
Oh, and when I tried to kill myself to respawn with all my flasks I found out that for some reason the death pit damage is set up to do half your total health, which resulted in my HP bar getting shaved down to a literally imperceptible sliver before it would actually kill me, which I thought was pretty funny and bizarre.
Under Par Golf Architect
Well, this is one of those park management games people love, but for golf. I don’t even play golf, but for some reason this jumped out to me – designing and managing a golf course seems like exactly the type of thing that would really work in this format, and this game appears to be giving it the old college try. You do the usual, setting up paths, facilities, and ‘attractions’ to draw visitors, trying to bring in enough turnaround to keep your ledgers in the black, and most of your creative outlet is in designing the main attractions, in this case, the holes.
And Under Par does let you do some halfway decent design on the holes, albeit on a strict grid, with various grass types, hazards, elevation, and slope to account for, and every golfer who shows up actually plays it out, their shots determined by their own personal stats and skill, which then feeds into their enjoyment of the hole. It’s kind of neat to watch two AIs play a round, and you can even jump in and strut about and play yourself, though the controls are standard for golf sims but the simulation is obviously pretty barebones.
I guess my real problem is that there’s just not much personality to it – you can’t make, like, a hilarious deathtrap or purgatory golf hole, you can’t even make ridiculous themed mini-golf style courses, it’s all pretty straight up, stone cold basic bitch golf, and that’s a shame. If you had some more options, and could make courses like the stuff in Golf Story with silly cartoon hazards for the AIs to contend with and lose their minds over, I think this could really take off. As it is, only the most devoted of golf nerds will ever really care about it, and probably not even enough to make a whole 18 holes.
Blades of Fire
The entire time I was playing this I was like ‘man, this reminds me of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow for some reason.’ Then, at the end, I saw the MercuryStream logo again and went ‘ah, yeah, alright.’ Even if it weren’t literally the same developer, this game just has that 2010 air about it, that PS3/X360 chunky, clunky, bros and brewskis feel, and I mean all that in the most positive way possible.
The two main gimmicks of BoF are the directional combat and the weapon crafting. The combat is pretty cool – each of the four face buttons make you swing your weapon in a different direction, which accommodates you hitting different parts of enemies. This matters because some of them have different armor values on each part, and because of this, some weapons even have different ‘stances’ you can take, with swords, for example, being able to do swings or piercing thrusts.
It’s pretty sick, and combined with the parries, dodges, and charged strikes, feels solid, weighty, and satisfying, though I spent most of my time just sprinting up to dudes and splattering their domes like Gallagher.
The other half is the crafting – your weapons all have a limited durability [and sharpness, handled by quick mid-combat whetstone application like in Monster Hunter] which means eventually you will need to scrap them and make a new one, besides trying out different movesets and damage types. You do this by sketching out a new weapon from an unlocked blueprint, tweaking the length, form factor, attachment types, and so on, with a surprising amount of granularity and choice in the resulting stats.
For example, you can leave the pommel off your sword, but the lower weight is less important than the loss of its counterbalance, making the sword’s center of gravity too far forward and causing it to use more stamina per swing. Or you could change your steel type in the blade, making it sharper, but less durable and useful in blocking. Then you have to hammer it into shape, with a minigame that’s somewhere between the smithing in Kingdom Come 2 and the Fun-sized Forge in Dragon Quest XI.
I genuinely was having a pretty good time with this, despite dying a lot to the first troll and laughing at the INSANE Final Fantasy twink getup your companion is rocking.
I also laughed a bit too hard at this death scene. C’mon, it’s pretty funny.
The Eternal Life of Goldman
Is humanity ready for a dark and gritty Ducktales reboot? No? Too bad. Goldman is a game about an old guy pogoing on native savages with his cane and scooping up every shiny coin that gleams in his vicinity, and… I think I’ll stop describing the character right there to avoid claims of antisemitism.
The gameplay itself is fine, but the real draw is the art, which is insanely detailed, fluidly animated, hand drawn, and utterly gorgeous. Even the tutorial stage had so much going on that I occasionally stopped and just watched shit going on in the background. It’s a good mix of bubbly and horrific, and rides the fine line between overstimulating and satisfying.
Your main conveyance is, of course, your pogo cane, and the tutorial gives you a few ‘upgrades’ to it, with the reveal that you can ‘downgrade’ at any time, for example to reduce your bounciness to clear a low ceiling. Not much of the rest of the demo, at least what I played, does much with this gimmick, and, in fact, the first couple levels are a bit too easy for my taste. I found quite a few secrets, and many of them had chests with healing items, but I was at the carrying capacity for them so frequently that I wound up just tossing out like half a dozen, which made finding the chests a lot less satisfying than they should have been.
But my real problem is with the story, or rather, the way it kind of intrudes on the game itself. It’s a little too wordy, too focused on characters that don’t have any connection [yet] to the art and action or even the story playing out between the visible characters, and they pipe up with this weird drama while I’m trying to enjoy some platforming. Shut up about your problems while I’m playing, people. If you want me to give a shit you have to earn it.
Espectro The Fighters Focus
Very barebones beat-em-up in the SMS or Genesis style, lacking [as far as I could tell] some pretty essential components like back-hits, directional throws, and so on. There’s not really much to say about this… except that the title screen includes a credit for Del Player, developer of, well, a few bad and rough games I’ve played, but most notably an entire Streets of Rage-inspired series titled Revenge on the Streets, which had a progression from very basic to… still pretty basic, and would track smoothly to this game… except I can’t find any indication that this is the same Del Player.
For one, the Del Player that I’m familiar with has no mention of this game anywhere in connection with any of their other games or their social media pages I could find. For another, the listed developer on Steam’s store page has only this game to their credit, the in-game Credits option is inactive, and the title screen credit says 2024-2025, which makes me think this is a totally different Brazilian who has decided to take the name Del Player… unless this is a secret Del Player prototype that has been stolen by a rival developer and inexpertly repurposed! But honestly I suspect no grand conspiracy. It’s just more fun to think about all this than the game itself.
Knitewings
A rail shooter in the style of Space Harrier but with baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaabes! Insane choice to make the ass so front and center you’re constantly instinctively craning your neck to see past a barely covered ass and box, but that’s the reality of these sorts of games. They just never totally work, because the whole idea means you’re obscuring some of the shit you’re trying to shoot and dodge with the character model. At least it does include the cute feature where you can go down to the ground and she runs really hilariously fast along the surface.
This game is a mess in a lot of ways, but two really stood out to me. For one, it’s got the Vampire Survivors rogue-lite thing where you get interrupted every level to pick your bonus from three cards, which doesn’t actually pause the game so all the enemies and pickups and shots just kind of sail past you as you fuck around in the menu. But the one that made me not want to play it anymore was the sound leveling, or rather the complete lack of balance in the audio.
Anything that this lady does aside from shooting, from melee attacks to getting hit to leveling up or using special moves, plays a sound or voice clip that I swear to God is at least at 300% normal volume and clips. In these videos I’ve reduced the effect but I’m still probably going to give someone hearing loss. I’d have added a warning but if you’ve gotten this far you probably deserve a little pain.
Well, that’s all I got for today. MercuryStream isn’t really an indie studio in the same way more authentically artisanal development is, but I still found myself enjoying their return to the 2010s a lot more than, for example, their attempts at modern Metroid. I also am curious how well Goldman holds up over a full game. I might play a bit more of those two over the coming week, but it’ll be a low priority, as I have to get through so many other games.
But if there’s anything you’ve tried that you think I would enjoy or at least be interested in, let me know in the comments - chances are I already have anything on my ‘short’ list [because it isn’t that short] but any input will probably make me bump it up a notch or two. See you tomorrow.
I tried Espectro The Fighter's Focus, too. It was bad.
Seeing it on your list is like finding out someone else who was in a freak accident. Like seeing that your neighbor also suffered a life-altering injury after trying to photocopy his ass on the office printer.