June 2026 Next Fest, Day 1
If you ask me to get a job, the fight is on.
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
blows into kazoo Two different mayors named! blows into kazooWhat 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…
Damnit, I added Bloody Countess to my queue mostly as a "this looks like something that Jim would enjoy" pick. A shame it didn't ultimately live up to that standard.
I also played Shadow Rush and I bounced off it completely. It just felt weird and without much avenue to actually enjoy what's presented.