February 2026 Next Fest, Day 5
Community Celebration day!
Yesterday I mused about how I had gotten enough hot tips from other pages on Substack to fill an entire day’s worth of demoing - then I decided I might as well make that gimmick real, so I reached out and asked these writers if I could publicly accuse them of tricking me into playing these. Brace yourselves for the Next Fest picks of Substack’s top gaming tastemakers!
Roger Renfro, Load Last Save
These next four games come courtesy of Roger’s Next Fest roundups, Part 1 and Part 2. So now you know who to blame. And if you want to tell him what you think about his taste, you can find him over at his page, Load Last Save.
Croak
Well, would you look at that, a strong start. Croak looks great, sounds great, and plays great. It’s not as extravagant as Goldman, it’s not as stylized as some others, but it’s clean, readable, and expressive art and animation that has enough personality without getting in the way. It reminded me a lot of the modern Rayman games, and that’s pretty high praise in my book.
The main platforming gimmick is your tongue, which you can fire out horizontally to latch onto a surface and slam yourself into it, rebounding off in the opposite direction with a little vertical boost. The controls for the rebound take a little getting used to – you have to tap AWAY to get the full horizontal distance, and while the timing didn’t seem very strict, it could trip you up some.
The demo already makes clever use of the tongue and features like sliding blocks that you can push by slamming into to set up engaging, if not particularly challenging platforming gauntlets. It also has tons of secrets – there are ten coins hidden in every level, and almost all of them are tucked into little hidden passages that are only revealed when you get into them. Some of them are pretty obvious, especially once you start getting a sense for where they can be, but I bet it’ll be a decent game time extension in the full release.
Speaking of game time extension, the demo has one level locked behind getting enough gold medals – there are three medals obtainable for each stage, one for number of deaths, one for total time, and one for collecting coins. I didn’t get any gold medals in my initial runs of the available levels, so I haven’t tried the extra stage… yet. I will definitely be revisiting this and unlocking that when I get a chance.
Divinum
An action platformer where you play as a pixel woman with a sword. There have been dozens of these, and visually, Divinum doesn’t stand out that much.
Thankfully, Divinum does stand out in how well it plays. Combat feels great, with good impact, satisfying combos, and fluid movement. Enemies eventually get staggered with repeated hits, and can be knocked airborne for a little bit of juggling, but it feels like a natural part of the rest of the movement and attacks, rather than a transition from ground combos to aerials.
The demo is really short, but beating it lets you restart in a ‘hard’ mode, which actually adds a lot more of the mechanics and features of the full game for you to play with, like extra combos, equipment and extra skills, and challenging gauntlets to trigger. I haven’t gone back through the full hard mode, but I probably will.
Upload Aliens
You know, I’m not sure what Roger saw in this one.
It’s kind of a bullet hell where the gimmick is your character is simultaneously fighting common enemies that drop onto the ground, and the only way to damage the boss is to catch the enemies before they land, automatically kicking them back and destroying any other enemies they hit along the way. You get coins to spend between levels or deaths to increase your stats [although I never actually got enough to buy a single point] and there are Survivors-like level-up choices after each boss kill.
The game is surprisingly hard and frustrating, mostly because the controls and movement are really bad for what is, at its core, a bullet hell. Catching an enemy in mid-air slams you back down to the ground level awkwardly, you don’t actually have any attack inputs, so you just kind of wiggle on top of already landed enemies to damage them, you have a dash but I don’t think it actually gives you i-frames, and the entire background is so gaudy and visually noisy that it makes it hard to even tell what’s coming your way.
Which is all too bad, because, honestly, I think it’s a kind of cool idea for an arcade game. Just needs better everything, and, like, a lot better, before it’d be worth playing.
SoulQuest
I think I solved the game. GGEZ.
Another pixel girl swinging a sword-scroller. This one is the dark reflection of Divinum – it’s visually a lot more distinctive, but not as tight. There’s a more clear inspiration from the character action genre, but the air juggling is a little too big a focus, and doesn’t feel great anyway.
Part of that might be because I didn’t go back to buy new moves, including the double jump, which would probably have made the aerial uppercut moves less annoying, but as it was, I kind of felt like a cat playing with a balloon. Enemies were kind of annoying, stuff would spawn on top of you and immediately do a big sweeping move, and a lot of your unlocks were the sort of complicated combos that you intentionally do once, realize they lock you in a canned animation, and then forget the input for and occasionally perform accidentally when you don’t want to. I did like that falling rocks could still kill enemies.
Voice acting was pretty funny though. Divinum’s got nothing on that.
Henry Nightingale, Courage Wisdom Power
These next four are from the official home of the Christian gaming podcast, Courage Wisdom Power, which is probably not where you’d expect a tipoff for the game where you eat people’s hearts and brains to come from, but that’s the beauty of both Substack and Next Fest. Henry, like me, has been taking this event one day at a time, with all six parts so far, [Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6] including a pre-game day of early demo previews, available on his page.
Awaysis
This feels like the sort of weird experimental game that would crop up on XBLA years ago and have a handful of fans rabidly defending it from people claiming they ‘don’t get it’ and ‘found it tough to control.’ You play as a little thing with a slightly too-big sword, and, at least from what I can tell, the game is trying to make physics and momentum a big part of the platforming and combat. You have a slide button that lets you become more slippery on slopes, which is used for one or two ramps and then otherwise just kind of makes you slide around the combat arenas awkwardly. You also have separate inputs for swinging your sword from the left or the right, which didn’t seem to matter much.
Honestly, I couldn’t figure out most of the combat in general – everything and everyone, my own character included, seemed to just slosh around arbitrarily, taking big swings that sometimes hit, sometimes whiffed, not much feedback either way, and then everything’s dead and you have a bunch of stuff lying around, some of which you can eat. Eating fruit heals you, I still have no idea what eating anything else does, and the game doesn’t seem very interested in clarifying anything. Well, I’m not that interested either, to be frank. And no, I’m not playing it in co-op with you either, Henry.
Chainstaff
Now this is what I’m talkin about. A bold, stylish run’n’gun with a strong central gimmick and a lot of energy spent on it. You play as… I guess a guy who’s been… surgically fused, or maybe hybridized, with an alien centipede, and also an alien gun, and also… the CHAINSTAFF. Which I think is another alien creature. The chainstaff has a bunch of functionality – it’s your grappling hook, which you can use to swing across ceilings and pull yourself up walls. It’s a deployable shield, blocking enemies and shots while you clear your flank or reposition. It’s a makeshift elevator and bridge, and most importantly, it’s your strongest weapon – you can charge the staff to hurl it like a penetrating spear, splattering anything it hits along the way.
Scattered around the first real map, you can run across downed soldiers, and your options are to rescue them, suck their brains out with your gun, or rip their heart out and eat it. You get a different reward depending on which you do, though obviously doing anything but rescuing them makes other soldiers in the map hostile to you.
As far as being a competent run’n’gun… it’s alright. The enemies are kind of big and erratic and annoying to fight, a lot of them take too much damage to really bother killing with anything but a charged chainstaff throw, and the grappling and swinging, while really fast and surprisingly versatile, are not exactly precise enough to reliably avoid damage. This is another one I’ll have to come back to later to try to beat.
Protagonist Complex one
Sekiro this ain’t. Metal Gear Rising in its dreams. A very weird and stiff action game that feels like someone’s earnest attempt to piece together a competent brawler but with only a big box of asset swap parts and a bunch of UE5 tutorials.
The combat is pretty clunky and also really funny – your character has a bit of Arkham-style autotargetting, and will step forward and snap rotate to hit the nearest enemy, and your combos are all pretty elaborate canned animations, which have then gotten their keyframes sped up to make it ‘more responsive.’ Parries don’t look like much, but stagger the enemy and let you do a pretty strong counterattack. More importantly, don’t actually give you i-frames… they just nullify the blocked attack. That means that, for example, you can parrylock the first boss pretty trivially, but parrying normal enemies in a common group means you often take damage during your counterattack.
Oh, and it’s also a Souls-like, because of course it is. There are checkpoints, using them restores your Estus medpacks, and you collect souls from enemies and can use them to level up. One of the attributes you can put points in says it increases your attack speed, but, like, look at that. That’s with no points of agility. How much faster could this get?
The intro is bizarre, the radio messages from your commander had shades of MGS2, and the redacted newspapers you find laying around genuinely cracked me up. Oh, and I suppose the boss intro was kind of cool. He was a HUMAN before they set him on fire.
Blood Facsimile
This appears to be Mario 64 by way of Cruelty Squad. You are dumped into a grimy, dark, stock FPS world full of ghosts and very low-resolution NPCs and enemies, and tasked with collecting stars, which open up more levels back at your hub.
I honestly think this is a cute gimmick for a retro 2000s-style FPS – too often, all the focus of level design is just getting a player from point A to point B and presenting little combat gauntlets or middling ‘puzzles’ to interfere with that movement, which means any actual thought or structure generally gets trimmed or used as niches to stuff some extra ammo or whatever. Giving you an incentive to actually stick around, thoroughly explore, and enjoy a well-crafted level is a great idea.
Or it would be if the levels were great. Now, admittedly, I was getting pretty tired by the time I took this one on, and will probably go back to screw around in it a bit more, but I was pretty underwhelmed by the level design I saw, which consisted of a lot of crawling through vents and locked doors. I did like the guns, ammo, and aiming vaguely reminiscent of Goldeneye and the kind of extreme difficulty. I just wish it looked a little better. Or at least a little crazier. I also wish the stars had actual challenges attached to them, SM64 style, instead of all [or apparently all] being simply hidden collectables.
Raphael Carbinatto Dias, Jogos a se Julgar
These last games were ones I spotted on Raphael’s page - Raphael is over here trying to get through 100 demos this week, and buddy, if only I had the time and energy for that. I made a big deal about how I picked out a short list that was over 100 titles long but every day I go back to it and kind of grimace as I look at some of these store pages. Anyway, I haven’t been keeping score but he says he’s got 26 left today, and I’d better see all 26 demos thoroughly reviewed the next time I check up on Jogos a se Julgar! Until then, check out his first five Next Fest articles. [Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5]
Tiling Town
Do you like puzzle games where you stare at something until you start to feel like an idiot? Tiling Town, or rather, Tiling Forest, as this demo is more properly titled, is a puzzle game with a superficially basic premise that hides some surprisingly tough challenge. It’s very straightforward at the surface – lay your available tile types out until you fill up one of the chunks you’ve unlocked – do it right, and you’ll earn a new type of tile, one that presumably will allow you to fill up other sections, and so on.
However, to actually finish a zone, you need to fill every gap, plus connect every road, and all of the pieces need to properly match up – no roads going straight into grass, no dirt patches with a flat edge, and so on. These limitations mean you’re spending a lot of the early game simply connecting roads to new roads, unlocking more areas you can’t totally finish yet, until you either can’t figure out how to connect the next road, or find one that you can complete to get a new tile. Assuming you recognize it. And getting that tile then means you have to go back and reanalyze every open puzzle to see if they’re finishable now.
You get some annotation tools, the game is pretty up-front about what to do and what to look for, and as much as I wanted to really dig into it, I got super stuck after getting the basic 90 degree bends and couldn’t find anything else and started feeling myself go insane. If you liked A Monster’s Expedition or Can of Wormholes, the sort of game with very limited verbs and a kind of emptiness that gazes back at you as you stare at it waiting for a flash of insight, this might be your next favorite edition. Maybe. I dunno, I still haven’t seen many pieces.
Ardenfall
Having tried and mostly bounced off of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon [which I do want to finish… eventually] I’m not in much of a mood to be convinced by attempts to make an indie Elder Scrolls game. Ardenfall seems to be right in that vein, and is certainly putting the effort in.
Mechanically it feels a lot more like an homage to Oblivion than Morrowind, but stylistically and thematically the reference points are mostly reversed. The first area and town are very coastal, with locals making armor, weapons, and even throwing stars out of seashells, the ‘forest’ being made of huge coral trees, and everyone being a fisherman. There’s some neat features like a bubble generator you can free up in several different ways depending on your stats and inventory, which then lets you ride a big bubble up to a floating island and fight a miniboss for some loot.
The game seems like it might potentially have some good story beats and meaningful choices too – the first village had a problem with some kind of whale monster stuck in the pass out of town, and rather than go around trudging through dialogue and solving quests to resolve it ‘properly,’ I just went and gave the thing a smack. It pulled itself free, flew away in a cutscene, and then murdered every single person in the first village, their blood splattered corpses littering the streets. Well, that’s a job well done.
Didn’t give myself nearly enough time with this, and I almost don’t want to spoil too much of it if it really is coming out soonish. But I probably will at least try to get to at least one of the endings before the demo potentially goes away.
Esoteric Ebb
Making a game to intentionally crib from Disco Elysium is one of those things that absolutely warrants a smirk and a raised eyebrow. It’s a format that rides almost entirely on the quality of the writing, and, I’ll be real real, Disco Elysium itself barely had good enough writing to pull it off. So believe me when I say I don’t fault anyone for seeing a bit of this and assuming any glowing about it will be overblown. This is one of those games I probably would have skipped myself if I hadn’t seen Raph’s post praising it.
The game begins, with another flash of very obvious inspiration, with you waking up on a mortuary slab with fragmented memories of your current status and mission. The setting and mechanics determining your success at interactions are very Dungeons and Dragons, with spells memorized at rest points, every character having a class and level, and plenty of fantasy multiculturalism to sink your teeth into. It’s dense with lore and backstory, even in the very first minutes as you engage in the inner battle to collect your senses, and shockingly, all of it seems very well-thought-out and written.
In fact, the game rides the lines beautifully all the way through – light, clear art with charming details, conversations and inner thoughts with real jokes, and yet not saccharine, cloying, tasteless, or annoying about any of it. It makes use of tabletop conventions to give you plenty of checks and rolls, including your inspections of NPCs, which basically act as a gut check to see how thoroughly you read them on first impression. And, most importantly, it got a few genuine laughs out of me.
Now, whether this can hold up over the course of a full game, how ‘full’ that game will be, and, most crucially, if it can do what Disco doesn’t and make your choices feel meaningful is all up in the air, but from what little I’ve seen, I’m genuinely excited for this one.
Haunted Lands
A DOS-style platformer that seems like a spiritual successor to Dangerous Dave. Your gun fires hitscan rounds, unless you charge it, causing it to emit a large explosive blast, or consume an… adrenaline charge or something, which lets you launch a grenade. You can aim up at an angle, but only one very specific angle, which is kind of awkward. Enemies aren’t terribly threatening, at least in the first screen, but some of them are armored which means they don’t take damage from normal shots, and your gun needs to be manually reloaded, which can be interrupted with jumps and other moves.
I didn’t get super far before deciding to go to bed, but I did unlock a second character, who I’ll probably use if I get around to playing more of this and trying to get further. And I might – this seems to have a good mix of nostalgia and modernization without going too far in either direction.
The End…
Well, that’s it for me today, and might be it for the event - I’m going to be pretty busy the rest of the weekend and next week, so aside from my eventual Best Of post, I probably won’t be around too much. If I do play more demos, I’ll try to get another post together, but if I don’t have time, I’ll probably just mention them in Notes if they’re any good.
Thanks again to Roger, Henry, and Raphael for letting me drop their names here, and for playing and writing about so many demos. If any of these caught your eye, or were ones you enjoyed too, don’t tell me - go tell those guys directly, see what else they’ve looked at, and give them a sub while you’re there.
Thanks for the shout out, and even more for disagreeing with me about several points I made. I really live for conversation like that.
Hello! Rene, developer of Blood Facsimile here. Thank you for giving the demo a shot! Your criticisms about the level areas feeling lackluster are for sure warranted. My vision for the final game definitely includes many more interactive elements as well as stars that are kept behind Mario 64 style minigame/challenges, but unfortunately these were not things I could get prepared for the demo. Thanks again for playing, I appreciate ya