February 2026 Next Fest, Day 3
Skill: None. Actual Quest: Grind.
I was up a bit late last night and have been groggy all morning. I must be developing demo fatigue. Hopefully I get my second wind today.
POLY IMPULSE
What do you call this genre? Precision platformer? Movement shooter? Precision mover… shooter? Anyway, this is one of those games that’s all about extreme mastery over moving and shooting and doing a stage over and over again until you get a double S rank and then realizing there were 300 people in the world who still did better than you.
Poly Impulse has a bunch of different sorts of wireframe shape to shoot, and they all do something interesting and different, like yank you along, invert gravity, give you a sniper scope and something about copying effects… I kind of lost steam with that one and got frustrated.
I’m not very good at these, and I get frustrated pretty quickly. If you’re into this sort of Neon White/Lovely Planet thing, I’m sure this will feel great, but it was a little too hard for me to make much progress in.
I think I’ll stick to Grid Leaper. Or Furry Femboy Aim Trainer.
Steezelpunk
Combination kart racer and… dwarf mining sim? The store page says RPG exploration, but the course is still pretty linear and you just collect gems that you spend back at base to unlock… something, I never got enough to do much and the menus are actually kind of overwhelming and confusing.
I wasn’t allowed to pick up artifacts, there’s a part later in the first track where I always fell to my death, I didn’t understand what my goals were or how to progress, and the controls, while not offensive, didn’t make the ship particularly enthralling to handle. I’m mildly curious what all is going on here, or what the developers are attempting, but not curious enough to stick around much longer.
Neon Rain
The requisite ‘intentionally insanely ugly shooter’ of this event. Neon Rain’s actual big feature is that it has a form of original Quake air-strafe momentum boosting, letting you bunnyhop until you’re going fast enough to merge onto the freeway if you do it right. Unfortunately, doing so means you’re probably hopping over all the ammo and health pickups.
It’s a bit too ugly to enjoy looking at, the air strafing doesn’t make the braindead combat any better, the guns aren’t very fun to use, and there just doesn’t seem to be any big idea tying it together. I punched out when I got to a section with a bunch of slowly cycling platforms you have to hop across. Yawn~ At least give me some tiny platforms I could theoretically bunnyhop across to skip it.
Kingdom’s Return: Time-Eating Fruit and the Ancient Monster
The requisite INTI CREATES pile for this event. This game is about rebuilding a kingdom, or more precisely, rebuilding a castle and the two or three blocks around it, by going out and doing sidescrolling stages to grind materials and money. You have four different classes, each of which plays pretty differently [once you start unlocking their skills, at least] and the combat is just slightly a notch above passable. I tried out the knight, who mostly parries enemies and does big uppercuts, and the mage who spams spells and can stand in place for several seconds to temporarily buff her ranged shots to do a tiny bit more damage.
After smashing enough boxes and killing enough birds, you can return to your capital and spend resources putting roads and buildings around your castle, each of which gives you a small stat boost and the promise of more resource sinks to upgrade them over time. It reminded me of an even less engaging version of the base building in BALL x PIT, without even the Breakout gimmick of you shooting your villagers out to bounce around building things.
It also reminded me a bit of Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin, with the split between some kind of management and side-scrolling combat stages to grind up materials. But Sakuna, of course, had the whole rice farming and cultivating thing going on, plus a lot of personality to the characters you were stuck living with, and this really just has the one smug fairy. Really, the thing that kills this for me the most is that your character’s XP isn’t shared at all, so if you ever want to try out a class besides your main they’re just going to be underpowered and require a ton of grinding to even get to the point where you can use their defining skills.
Shifting Sands
Is ARC Raiders still hot? Well, an isometric extraction shooter with a Tetris grid inventory system would sound kind of cool to me either way. The conceit of Shifting Sands is simple: every day, sandstorms bury everything you can see and unearth more bits of alien wreckage, and you have to go out and rip off the choicest bits you can and get back to the hub before you get scrapped yourself and drug back to be repaired. Every loot point makes you do a little minigame, you have to shuffle the crap in your bag around to make room for big, jagged hunks of steel, and there’s the occasional ambush by sand creatures or armed scavengers to contend with.
Once I realized you didn’t need to bring all your weapons with you every run, I started really seeing some potential here. The single-screen zones you can visit are arrayed radially out from the hub, and shuffle every day, and the game does some interesting things with the inventory. One of the items you can choose for free each day from the dispenser gives you a couple extra rows, your backpack grid can only hold things that can fit into it, and upgrading your gun [and presumably other things] can make it physically bigger, giving you a tradeoff to consider beyond just a green arrow pointing up.
MOTHERSHIP
Very, very cheaply made solo project about exploring space alone. You are flying from system to system, looting fuel cores and using them to get yourself to the next wreckage, in the search for the rest of humanity.
I do appreciate some of the things this game is trying to do – there are multiple difficulty levels, and they affect how ‘realistic’ the zero-G movement is, with the lower two giving you automatic deceleration any time you’re not applying directional input, and the highest letting you cruise at top speed at the cost of needing to manually reverse thrust to slow down. I also liked that the game has… some kind of comprehension of interstellar travel, with your progress to Alpha Centauri including relativistic time dilation, and your character at least numerically aging at a different rate than the relatively stationary universe around her. Even the sense of scale is pretty impressive considering the limitations, and that’s one of the big draws for a space adventure.
But it is still very crude, and an extremely big swing for what is clearly not just a first-time developer but probably a first-time tinkerer with game making tools. They’re biting off a hell of a lot – your suit even comes with a bunch of tools like a grappling hook and sniper rifle, which are totally useless but technically functional in the demo [except for on hard difficulty, where giant robot eye drones do spawn and you can shoot them] and obviously intended for some of the planet-side stuff shown in the trailer that runs after your second EVA.
And I get it, man. This is the sort of game I’ve thought about making myself, but it’s too big a project to really do… anything with without any resources to speak of. But maybe I’m just too much of a cynic. Maybe I’m underestimating this guy’s passion and drive, and in a few years [or decades] I’ll be crowing about how ‘I was there the whole time!’ Kind of doubt it, but crazier things have happened.
Tammuz: Blood & Sand
So resumes in earnest my VR adventures. Tammuz is a VR puzzle-box simulator, very similar to The Room games, and, naturally, The Room VR. I always thought this was an under-exploited strong suit of VR, physically manipulating dials and sliding things around with motion controls with satisfying clicks and clacks, and this does an acceptable job at that.
Not too much worth saying about the puzzles, unfortunately – they’re standard fare, a tile-slider [albeit with a nice little ‘storage’ slot at the bottom to make it easier] being your first ‘real’ challenge, and a 2x2 Rubik’s Cube being the thing that made me punch out, mostly because it was really fiddly to actually turn. Seems totally fine for what it is, but, like I always say about The Room, I wish there was a little more thought put into, you know, the actual puzzles.
BirdseedVR
Another thing that feels like it’s a perfect match for VR – Pokemon Snap but for bird watchers. You have a set number of Polaroids to take each day, you mostly sit there waiting to hear some chirping and then wait for a good opportunity, frame your shot, and, yeah, that’s it. Still, the demo has hints about more game-ification in the full release, with daily challenges, new camera lenses to unlock, new bird types, and possibly even live co-op, which in my opinion would be the real selling point.
I’m serious – even thought I think this game is inherently more boring than Pokemon Snap in every way possible, even though I think it needs some kind of movement or ability to do something other than wait around, I would absolutely buy at least two copies of this just as a social activity with my mother. If they make it actually fun in some way on top of that, that’s just bonus.
PROTON VR
This game looks so much like VR shooter COMPOUND that I just assumed it was a sequel from that developer – turns out it’s a different solo dev who’s just exuberantly and openly inspired by COMPOUND. It’s got a few key differences [including a decent sitting mode toggle] but it’s extremely similar, and not in a way that I hate.
In fact, I really like almost all of the ways PROTON changes things up – the more standard ‘holster’ system is an improvement over COMPOUND’s weird instant hand swapping, there’s a lot more verticality in the levels, bigger rooms too, and at least one of the enemies had a cool destructible weak point cover. The full game looks like it’ll have some skill progression, weapon unlocks, and attachments to modify guns, all of which could be cool or potentially just bloat.
But I was really sold by the minigun, with its silly little engine and overheating barrels. Ridiculous in all the best ways. Can’t wait for this to come out.
Ironforged
Where PROTON was clearly aping COMPOUND, Ironforged seems to be emulating District Steel pretty closely, though that might be a little unfair – the similarities are looser, and District Steel isn’t even finished, and might never be. [though the devs keep promising otherwise]
But this is also a lot less fun than PROTON – the guns are well modeled, sound fine, and handle well but aren’t super interesting, the enemies are just dudes who yell and start popping off at you when you enter line of sight, and the only thing I really enjoyed was how the ragdolls instantly lose all weight on death and get flung around by the last shot.
It’s also got a progression system, where you spend your earned cash to upgrade your frame, eventually unlocking the sprint and bullet time abilities, which, to be honest, should just be enabled by default. You got so little going on here, at least let people play with slo-mo. Or turn the fucking lights on. I did think it was funny as hell how fast you die in the harder of the two available stages.
A lot of stuff today that I just… wish I was more jazzed by. I feel like there’s some good ideas here that aren’t quite seeing their full potential. But I probably will give a few of them another go later on.
This is also the first time since starting on Substack that I’ve noticed other people talking about their own Next Fest adventures, so maybe today I’ll try to catch up on some of those in between my own quota of demos.
Thank you for your service! I need to check out POLY IMPULSE as I love Neon White.