June 2026 Next Fest, Day 2
What do you know of the Mooses?
Man, it’s such a nice day out. Why do I have to be stuck inside playing demos? Huh? What’s that? An NES-punk metroidvania??
Spyder: Agent 8
A puzzle adventure game where you play as a little six-legged robot that can climb on most surfaces. The intro and a lot of the style of it reminds me of the VR series I Expect You to Die, but with a lot less involved puzzles. And the puzzles in IEYtD aren’t the greatest to begin with. Most of it, at least in the demo, resolves down to navigation challenges and putting together combinations. Oh, and a frequency matching minigame.
You can walk right up most walls and on the bottom of shelves and stuff, and the controls are fine for the most part, though I found myself really wishing I had a slightly faster movespeed option or the ability to ‘drop’ off of surfaces instead of having to walk all the way around, both of which were in Gecko Gods, as an example. I did like the way your robot automatically weighs down some switches with his body, and the trackball computer interface that has you running along the top of it to move the cursor.
I wound up accidentally falling out of bounds at one point and had to restart at the last checkpoint, which isn’t a good look for a game about being able to crawl around every surface. The demo ends abruptly at about halfway through the sub the mission takes place in… or maybe I just glitched it out by getting back on the orange.
Either way, it also unlocks a whole suite of ‘Micro Missions’ which are discrete, timed challenges. I played through a couple and thought it was a cute idea for fleshing things out a bit, but I wasn’t compelled enough by the core gameplay or puzzles to bother with this much more.
A Standard Deviation
The basis of this puzzle game is that most puzzle elements, and your own character, can be split into their component colors, which then only collide with obstacles that share that color.
It turns into a bit of a Four Swords situation, with you shuffling your selves around to put your squad into the right formation to accomplish something. Even in the demo, there’s quite a few sorts of puzzles – block sliding, minigolf, laser redirection, even a bossfight. Combat is kind of interesting, with your attacks knocking colored copies out of enemies, which can then only be harmed by the same color of you, and vice versa.
I’m not sure how much more can be stretched out of this setup – it feels like it could either be a very short, quirky puzzle gauntlet, or one of those games that has multiple layers and requires you to visit your mind palace to make progress in, and either way it could be really cool. I might revisit this later and see if I can clear it and get a better idea of what the total package is aiming for.
Rift Wizard 3
A few years ago, I bought and played some of the original Rift Wizard. It’s a roguelike with a couple really interesting twists, like the fact that you get to preview each option for your next floor, and pick your starting location on that floor. But its main feature is the fact that your only attacks are limited-cast spells, which you buy from a vast list, and every spell has potential for interactions and synergies with many other spells. It’s also quite hard, or at least, I was never patient enough to complete a real run of it. Whatever the reason, I was intrigued when Rift Wizard 2 came out of early access last year, but decided not to buy it… why would I get 2 when I still haven’t finished 1?
Well, now 3 is coming, and like 2, it seems to change things up a surprising amount. The main new feature is Crafting – every floor has, in addition to the blue orbs you still use to buy new spells, a few other items which give you temporary bonuses when collected. Maybe more importantly, they also get broken down into elemental components, and you can spend those at any time, like buying spells, to craft permanent equipment which augments your current spell selection. This shifts a lot of the passive upgrades off of spell purchases, though every spell [that I tried, at least] also has a couple major upgrades of its own.
Some of the new spells are pretty cool – I like the new movement upgrade ones, like the one that summons a flying drake for you to ride around on. The fully searchable menus for spells and equipment is one of those things every game like this needs. The new art is pretty nice, and I really like the scaled down levels – I think part of why I always burned out on the first game was that each floor was just a little too big for me to have the mental energy to parse, and having slightly smaller and more dense layouts might be an improvement. I can’t say much about the balance, because honestly, it was still way too hard for me to get anything going and I’m not going to spend half an hour looking at a massive list of spells trying to come up with a game plan.
I’m still probably not going to buy it, holding onto the dream that one day I’ll get into RW1 enough to finish a run and write it up, but it’s cool that the developer keeps working on this idea, forking off into a new title to experiment with a new set of mechanic ideas. It all reminds me of the course of the Siralim series, but if that’s the case, shouldn’t I just wait for Rift Wizard Ultimate?
LarsGadiel
A prequel to Xenon Valkyrie that is made to approximate the look and feel of an NES game. The sprites and environments are pretty nice, the controls are fine, and the music is outstanding, if a little derivative of actual famous NES tunes.
Gameplay-wise, it reminded me a lot of Faxanadu, with the towns full of NPCs just existing as part of the overall map, warps to ‘dungeon’ areas, enemies that you’re probably meant to grind a bit, and navigation that involves you climbing around and following ladders a lot. Your weapon gains XP on kills, and getting to the second level seemed to only give me a chance to do 2 instead of 1 damage with each attack, which is weird.
It’s also pretty hard, or rather, kind of unforgiving, with only three health and one Estus flask at the start. There’s even a Dark Souls-esque splash message and conspicuous death counter increment when you die. I might have to go back into this later to see if I can’t get further, because after the first boss I couldn’t tell where to go.
AGX GP
This demo starts with a weird amount of glazing for a fictionalized version of Elon Musk who spends his fortune on making pod racing real instead of buying Twitter. Then there’s a sizzle reel of a qualification track in Dubai or something and finally the big reveal of the main course on The Moon. Hell yeah. Love me some Moon racing.
There’s a lot of forced tutorial frontloading this, but it’s somewhat excused with how thoroughly they try to cover the essentials. You have the usual manual boost on a slow recharge, boost pads on parts of the track to route through, and hazard ground that slows you down drastically if you’re not boosting over it. But there’s also a side dash ability which you can use to swap lanes, tighten up turns, or collect/smash multiple gates arrayed too close together to get otherwise. There are ‘jump’ zones where you can launch yourself into the air, and can either slam yourself down to the ground or use the side dash to swap to a different track entirely, both of which give you a free boost.
The game proper consists of a lot of discrete events, each one on a customized track, and in a bunch of different modes or objectives, which really do manage to change things up in surprising and engaging ways. There are obviously races, which include smashing into other racers and trying to find a good spot for a takeover, but other events include a challenge to pass through every gate on the track in one lap, simple lap time trials, and so on. The game is very good about showing you exactly how close you were to qualifying for the next medal, and each one you win for a course unlocks a new toggleable feature, like race ghosts for yourself or the highest-scoring dev. One of my favorite features is that, if the event is one that can be trivially reset and allows you to do a flying start, you can just loop over and over and manually commit once you’ve gotten a top score you’re happy with instead of having to go through menus to restart it.
I really enjoyed this, despite usually not being very good at this style of racer. I think part of it is that this is a rare one to not feature ‘drift’ boosting, which has always been a tough thing for me to get used to. I am a little disappointed that the tracks on the Moon don’t seem to be affected at all by low gravity – I know these are specifically anti-gravity vehicles, but it just makes the setting kind of pointless in comparison to, obviously, Exo Rally Championship.
Flux Empyrean
The requisite bizarre, ugly pile of this event. Flux Empyrean is one of those games that’s all about being superficially obscure and weird. Even the tutorial takes place on a rotating platform in space that you use to align yourself with the constellations and experiment with your tools.
The game proper has you start on a large, mostly empty ship, with a wheel to control the rudder, manual sail controls to catch the wind, and a bunch of devices designed to point you towards signals emanating from the various structures poking out of the endless sea. Both the boat and most locations are littered with little CDs that add entries to your journal, and I suppose it’s a combination of backstory and puzzle hints, though I only really solved one or two puzzles in my time with it.
Most of my time was spent trying to figure out what the ball you can ‘cast’ out does, or struggling to make my sail actually go down, and there’s a bit too much reading involved for a quick demo experience. But there is some potential with the systems and the overall vibe of the game. I liked that you get a hoverboard that lets you just hop off your ship and zip across the waves to nearby islands without having to pilot it properly, and I liked the graphics and audio and celestial navigation. There’s no way to tell if this will actually be genuinely interesting or just a weird framing for a collectathon but I might be willing to try it out on release.
Washington Prime
Right off the bat I want to say I’m sorry for the lack of audio on some of these clips – I played through this four separate times after it failed to record footage properly and on the last attempt the audio part just didn’t save and I was too tired to try again. Not the game’s fault, just a quirk with how I had to record it.
This is basically Die Hard as a GZDoom game. You start the demo with the option of three different pistols, a bunch of kind of arbitrary ‘difficulty’ toggles, and then an air duct you crawl through before falling into a sprawling office complex full of security guards in white dress shirts.
This being GZDoom, it does have quite a few features that are a bit more reminiscent of the Build engine than Doom – security camera consoles, aim-down-sights, usable health kits, and some verticality to the level design, though not much on display in this demo.
Really, the most important feature of this game, or at least the demo, is the difficulty – I had an awful time my first couple attempts at it, and am honestly kind of glad I had recording problems because I took later runs more seriously and wound up clicking with it more, but it is still obscenely difficult in a lot of ways. The main thing is that, while you put the enemies down in just one or two shots, you’re not much tankier yourself. You die in just a couple rounds, enemies are not exactly terrible shots, they have decent reaction time once aware, and I think you can even get headshot for bonus damage. The biggest problem, though, is that any loud noise aggros enemies from a pretty good distance away, and it’s really easy to get flanked and instantly killed by some guy who just took the other way around a cubicle.
So the biggest thing that helped me actually get through the first level, besides psyching myself up and swapping to the silenced pistol, was to go into the audio settings and turn the music WAY down so the separate ‘footsteps’ channel was actually relatively audible, and play with headphones. You do get a visual [and musical] indicator that enemies are aware of your presence, a bit of a Metal Gear alert phase style, so you don’t have to necessarily be a true Rainbow Six room-clear-autist to survive, though it wouldn’t hurt. Thank God, too, because there are a lot of bullshit rooms to clear. This is a pretty… authentically mind-numbing office, with a bunch of empty conference rooms, tons of bathrooms and storage closets, and so on. Thankfully, the game drops pins on the map for any health and ammo pickups you’ve gotten close enough to, otherwise you’d have to root through dozens of completely indistinct offices.
The second stage is honestly a little better – it takes place in construction site, and while the enemies have automatic weapons and more health, it’s balanced out by you finally getting access to some higher caliber guns of your own, including an automatic shotgun that just liquefies people in a really satisfying way and doesn’t have ridiculous damage dropoff. There’s a lot of other neat touches, like the fact that to use a medkit, you need to equip it and then channel a pretty long animation of your guy pulling out a bandage and wrapping it around his arm, and throwing knives you can use for silent takedowns.
Once you beat the demo, you unlock the ability to start with a second weapon [including the shotgun] or play with a special ‘arcade’ mode that removes all normal drops from the map and enemies, and has them drop cash instead. You can then use the cash at upgrade terminals to buy ammo, new guns, med kits, or even upgrades to your skills, which I think basically just affects accuracy or recoil on weapon types. Or you can just use the default GZDoom console commands to give yourself all the guns and god mode so you can play around with them.
All in all it was pretty impressive, and I wound up enjoying it a lot once I got over the hump of actually treating it like a somewhat serious shooter. I’m actually kind of glad I had so many issues with the recordings, without which I might have just said ‘its too hard’ and given up. I do still think it’s erring a little too hard even on ‘easy’ settings, but if they just boost the footstep audio a bit by default I think that would go a long way toward helping new players appreciate its strengths.
Cohen 1939
If Duke Nukem: Die Hard Edition isn’t your thing, how about Peaky Blinders as a Hotline Miami clone? No? Fair enough. That’s not just me being unfair, either, that’s how the store page describes the game. It’s set in a roiling gang-war-torn Birmingham, where fascism is on the rise, maybe, and more importantly everybody’s ditched their accents.
There is, of course, some use of AI generation that’s pretty obvious in the loading screens and pretty much anything that’s not an in-engine cutscene, but the voice acting is so obscenely bad, and mispronounces things so wildly, that I honestly don’t know how an AI would fuck them up that much. Wouldn’t you be able to tell the AI to do things in a British accent? Is this just random people doing these in one take?
As hilariously bad as all the cutscenes are, and they are REALLY bad and funny, the gameplay is surprisingly solid for a scalp-cam brawler. You have the usual ability to grab and throw various melee weapons, you can zoom around shivving guys as they stand up from their poker game, and you even get the occasional genuinely useful gun to mow down mobsters with. After the prologue, you move on to the mansion, where you’re given one of what looks like four playable characters to do one-shot missions with, and based on the skill unlock store, each one seems to have their own ability. The blonde you start as has the ability to magically summon Ravens to scout and harass enemies, another character has what I assume is bullet time, and so on.
The stages have some cute touches like non-hostile guys who just try to run out the door as soon as you start your killing spree, you get scored based on your combo and it looks like you can eventually unlock different guns to start stages with, and it all controls fine. But the real star of the show is how silly and awful the cutscenes are, and though the developer claims the voices are just placeholders for ‘professional voiceacting with real Birmingham accents’ I suspect that, even if I’m right and that means them adding extra prompts to the AI, it won’t actually be any less funny. I love that the main bad guy in the tutorial sounds like a 12 year old boy.
I’m pretty happy with the score so far - nothing yet has really jumped out at me as ‘potential GOTY material’ but there’s been plenty that I’m already looking forward to taking a second look at. I’ve got what should be a pretty strong lineup scheduled for tonight, so hopefully I won’t hit demo exhaustion as early in the week as I normally do. Until then…
Washington Prime looks cool but visually unappealing and I hate ADS in most shooters. One to keep my eye on.
Never got around to playing Rift Wizard... Then 2 came out, now 3 shows up as a demo. The Siralim comment struck a chord with me, since Ultimate came out just a couple of months after I got 3 and before I ever really got around to it.
I recommend you check out that new "personalized recommendations" setting this Next Fest introduced, it actually showed me some interesting games I had missed.