February 2026 Next Fest, Day 2
Bitten by a Vampire Survivor
We’re deep in the trenches now, our feet rotting away, the stench of our fallen comrades soaked into every inch, our memories of the time before growing faint and agonizingly misty. Fight through, that we may meet the games we actually want to play once more.
The Magus Circle
Vampire-Survivors-like is one of those genres I mentally filter out now when going through lists like the one for this event. They’re easy to make, everyone’s making one, everyone thinks they’re going to have the next Vampire Survivors on their hands, and they’re not that interesting to talk about, even if they’re technically competently made. The exception is if there’s some kind of obvious gimmick that jumps out as unique in the second or two I deign to glance at their store preview, and that is why I bothered to download The Magus Circle.
It’s a Survivors-like, alright. You walk around a big open field, monsters spawn on your periphery and walk towards you slowly, and you kite them around picking away at them and hoovering up the gems they drop, and your level-ups consist of picking one option from three cards. Magus’s main gimmick is that your attacks don’t auto-cast, or rather, they aren’t permanently enabled once unlocked in a run – each spell is cast by you drawing a glyph onto the screen [in my case, with a mouse] and has both a mana cost and a duration. The basic magic missile, for example, is pretty easy to draw, cheap to cast, and lasts for a few seconds, firing off at the nearest enemy. Another spell, the tidal wave, cuts across the screen and then stays there, washing away any enemies trying to cross that stream while doing constant damage.
This gimmick works surprisingly well in practice, and has been thoughtfully integrated in all the game’s systems. You really do have to think about what spells to cast, and can’t just cast one over and over, because they don’t stack – recasting an active spell just resets its timer. Some skills push you into a particular playstyle – bonus damage scaling off how many active skills are currently running, or increasing damage on a single spell for as long as it stays active, encouraging you to manually extend it and not let it run out.
Another thing I really like is that the gems enemies drop aren’t your XP – they’re the mana, the ammo you use to cast more spells, so not being able to grab any isn’t just a matter of existential angst, knowing you’re leveling up slightly slower than you could be. It’s a balance of survival, leaving mana you can’t use around, changing into bunny form to dart between mobs to grab a wad, and so on. The XP comes directly from kills, and this is the first game of its type I’ve seen where you don’t level up automatically – you get to choose when to apply the levels you’ve accumulated, and holding off doesn’t just mean you’re not interrupted every minute or so, it also grants you a scaling bonus to incoming XP, meaning you’re encouraged to try to play slim for some of the time.
I really liked Magus Circle – the gameplay is active and engaging, especially for the genre, the art and sound and music were all great, and I genuinely want to see what else the developer can come up with in this format.
Akatori
I’m fairly certain I played a demo for “Akatori” some time ago, and liked it enough that I wishlisted it and so have been vaguely aware that it’s still in development. I figured now was as good a time as any to check it out again and remind myself why I was interested in the first place.
Well, this game, or rather this iteration of it, feels like crap in a lot of little ways. Some animations seem to be outright missing frames – enemy projectiles will damage you before they hit you, and they kind of teleport the last distance to a surface in a really obvious way. Movement is sloppy, combat is weightless, it’s all just a little off. I went on a little dig to find out what happened, and from what I can tell, the developer of Akatori: Chapter One [or rather, Shapter One, which is what the store page’s url is, suspiciously] is someone totally different from the current Akatori developer, the game is no longer being published by Hypetrain, as it was in the Chapter One days, and seems to have been completely rebuilt from the ground up or massively overhauled for some reason. I don’t know what actually happened here or why, but having refreshed my memory on Chapter One, I don’t see any legitimate reason for it to have been totally overhauled. You can’t download Shapter One anymore, so it’d be hard for me to do a real side-by-side, but you can see the little gifs and trailer showing off things like the old ‘staff thrown into wall as platform’ mechanic that’s been completely discarded in the new version.
Maybe I’m just being crazy and paranoid, but I don’t think I’m that interested in this game anymore anyway after playing this demo.
Drift Survivors
Alright, yes, another Survivors-like, and the gimmick that pulled me in this time is that your character is a car doing donuts in a parking lot. It’s kind of cute, and there are some decent ideas meshing with it – there are ‘wait in this circle’ supply drops, and I think rather than coming to a complete stop you can just do a donut around it while the timer counts down, there’s little optional circuit race challenges that pop up occasionally, one of your skills lays down a Tron-style light wall behind your car that does damage, which is pretty satisfying, and instead of a combo meter you have a Drift gauge that runs down anytime you’re not burning rubber.
That’s kind of all there is to it, though. Controls were… fine, same with all the other parts, and I wasn’t really persuaded that there’d be any terribly surprising developments later in the game – just more cars, more tracks, more types of gun firing at mobs. The pressure plates arranged in lines did irritate me, though – they’re set up as though you’re supposed to drive across them in sequence for some kind of bonus or trigger, but I could only ever get ones in the middle to ‘activate’ and then immediately fail – the ones on the ends never did anything when I drove over them. Maybe I was missing something and it would’ve been so cool that I’d change my whole opinion on this but I somehow doubt it.
Grime II
I played the first Grime game a few years ago, and it was fine. It was okay. Not my favorite Metroidvania, not the worst one I’ve played, but not really one I would ever enthusiastically recommend or use as a barometer for others. Grime II, frankly speaking, seems like it’ll be much the same. Totally competent. Mildly engaging. Ironically lacking in passion, given the themes of creative urge and self-manifestation.
One new thing I liked was the way you can ‘capture’ some enemies and use them as one-shot summons, and can eventually unlock the summons as equipable abilities. I don’t really like that the unlock is based on grinding kills, though – I like the Ender Lilies style of there being unique miniboss variants that give you unlocks more.
Astral Wizard Orb
A ball-rolling platformer a la Super Monkey Ball. But it also has fake retro graphics. Alright.
I feel like you really need to have obsessively played a lot of marble-roller games to have any subjective opinion on this, and I have not. It seems fine, but a little staid given its aesthetic and name – I’d expect you to have, like, magic spells to bounce you around or turn off gravity temporarily or freeze platforms, to give this game something more than just ‘roll a ball.’ And hey, maybe they do introduce that kind of thing past the third level I gave up on, but I kind of doubt it.
Armatus
AUUUUGH! NOT THE SHADERS! NOT THE SHADERS!
A third-person shooter roguelite with competent design and mechanics. Very similar in structure to Returnal, but with a smaller budget and less interesting guns. I did like how tight the progression was – you kill everything in a room, sprint through a door with a one-way forcefield, and immediately start the next round or get your reward to move on, no backtracking, no clambering over ledges to get to a different door, no flashing obstruction indicating a path that you need a new item for, just mowing down mobs and moving on.
But come on. Is there really any reason to play this instead of Returnal? The gun is very generic, and though, sure, maybe in the full game they’ll go more experimental, I doubt it and also think you should include the most interesting stuff in your demo anyway. I did like the skill that causes ‘weak point’ targets to appear on enemies so you can skill shot them for MASSIVE DAMAGE. That felt good. Everything else is, as the kids would say [maybe last year or the year before] ‘mid.’
Oh, and it crashed at some point before I reached a boss. That’s either cringe or rizz. Maybe I got memory-mogged and should’ve been hardware-maxing but my rig is pretty ‘lit’ if I do say so myself.
Sandloop
Another retro 3D platformer. You play as a little rabbit with a headscarf who runs around a mostly-abandoned city collecting giant sand crystals. That’s about it – I didn’t run into any combat, or serious platforming challenge, and the upgrades I unlocked were all pretty standard stuff – double jump, wall jump, you get the idea.
It’s not much of a collectathon, but I did actually like the level design – the game’s got a pretty good sense of scale, and some of the vistas are actually pretty impressive for the genre. You loop back around and unlock shortcuts pretty frequently, and if there was… much of anything going on, it’d feel a little Souls-ian in that way.
The one very weird thing is that the game, as the title hints at, also has a time loop mechanic. Sort of. If you play too long, the music starts speeding up, and eventually you get a fade out and respawn back at the ‘start’ in front of your glorious leader. Same thing happens if you die. Bizarrely, it doesn’t seem to actually mean anything. Shortcuts stay open, quests stay done, even your currency stays in your pocket. I don’t get what the point is.
Super Alloy Crush
A very Mega Man Zero action platformer, at least with the character I played with. It’s also pretty good – you have a variety of moves, even your special attacks have directional input alternatives, so you can do like a drill move or a big blast, and it all felt solid. I really liked the art, music, and character designs, and environmental reactivity, with parked cars and other stuff getting smashed up and blowing apart as you fight on and around them.
That said, this demo doesn’t show off much in the way of level design or overall game structure – there are some secrets off in branches, but the only thing in them are boxes full of currency, which is also spilling out of every enemy and destructible object, and after a few screens of running around collecting all the coins I could, I realized I just didn’t care that much and shortly after realized I might as well just run past and jump over 90% of the enemies if I didn’t care to get their coins.
After a miniboss, the demo throws you in an arena, where waves of enemies spawn, and after each wave you get a choice of minor upgrades to buy with your collected funds… hang on, did this suddenly turn into a Vampire Survivors-like? I don’t know where this was going because I had to take a break anyway, so I left it at like, wave 3 of ???. Maybe later I’ll give the demo a shot with the ranged character and see if I can find out what the deal is.
Just kidding, I’m just going to be looking at this menu screen for a couple minutes instead.
Artemis VR
There are a few VR demos that caught my eye this week, and I still haven’t had my actual headset sent to me, so I borrowed one and set it up and tried out this… cockpit simulator, which purports to be of the Orion command module used for NASA’s Artemis program. Well, it’s not. The store page also claims that, and I quote:
NASA resources and consultation - The game is under development i.e. thanks to NASA resources and consultation in terms of Artemis MIssions
I think most of this store page was written by AI, because the voice acting is all [or almost all] AI, and yet somehow I think the jokes were written a human with a bad sense of humor. Probably the most interesting thing about this is that every line is a joke. Everything said is some kind of quip, or sarcastic remark. It’s really kind of impressive how bad it is.
Gameplay-wise, this reminds me a lot of the NES game Space Shuttle Project, a game I was disappointed by but simultaneously obsessed with as a kid. The NES game is basically a sequence of QTEs and minigames, some quite difficult, that you do while undergoing missions to, like, build a bunch of scaffolding in orbit. It’s bad, and this isn’t much better, though if you’ve seen me mentioning early access mech simulator OVRLRD, you know I love pushing buttons and flipping switches in VR, and this has a lot of that. I don’t know, I get the feeling this is a rinse of some sort, but it also has too much effort put into it to be a total scam.
A few potential winners in here today, though none of them are ‘drop everything and play it right now’ quality. Now that I have a headset set up, I’ll probably knock out a few more of the VR ‘experiences’ tonight.
Yeah, I pretty much had the same thoughts regarding Akatori. It immediately caught my eye when browsing demos, but the game itself didn't feel as good as I was hoping. A shame, really. Magus Circle looks interesting, though! I'll check it out.