June 2026 Next Fest, Day 4

The future is female. And kind of hung.

Jun 19, 2026

Yesterday, we honored the dreams of Mankind, and the voyage into the unknown. What is the theme this time? Well, ladies and chudlymen, as a raging feminist, I pride myself on maintaining a respectful appreciation for the female form. So today, I’ve chosen to highlight a selection of games that are all about celebrating women!

The Unleaving

Okay, this first one doesn’t necessarily star women specifically but you get a couple character options and the one I picked was the cute Psychic who covers half her face with a giant scarf at all times so it counts.

This is a Chinese horror game that takes a lot of direct inspiration from Disco Elysium, which is genuinely a much better mix than I expected going in. You play as a paranormal investigator visiting a backwater town where children are reportedly starting to lose their souls somehow. It’s got a lot of the conventions of cheap horror games of the RPGMaker style – you walk around interacting with objects, occasionally confronted with a zoomed in view of something creepy happening, and have to handle a little bit of adventure game item collection and combining to progress.

The Disco inspiration is where it really starts to get interesting, and not in the ways you might expect. Your stats aren’t inner voices, for one, and it doesn’t have the same context popups and other hallmarks of DE clones, but it does go all in on every interaction having loads of descriptive text, your skills running passive checks to give you even more flavor [and sometimes genuinely helpful information] and plenty of manual checks you can attempt with a dice roll. When I restarted to try a different class, for example, I found out that passing an early listening check gives you a whole quest early, which is surprising.

I was genuinely impressed with how much there was just to examine and interact with on the very first screen, then even more impressed by the encounters in town right afterwards, with one of my first items being a piece of equipment that replaces all dice rolls with a different RNG system, some really detailed environments, and a surprising amount of NPC interaction. There’s a lot more going on here than just a standard horror adventure game, and I’m really curious just how much more there is to it.

Maybe the most surprising part of it to me was how well translated all the text was, given what a highly specific topic most of it involves, and the sheer volume of text. Now, I assume that the localization was, at least in part, done with AI, and to be honest, that’s one of the least offensive use cases for it in indie development in my opinion. The Unleaving, however, has an even more interesting AI trick up its sleeve – an optional ‘free’ mode that you can toggle on, which, with certain interactions, gives you a text box instead of static options, and you can, apparently, type anything you want in there and see if the AI can play DM and adapt to your lateral thinking.

That’s… honestly kind of a neat idea. I remember back when the only thing AIs really did remotely well was text, and a few of them could be set up like Choose Your Own Adventure generators, and I’m sure everyone at some point has wondered if games would ever get to the point where you’d be able to break out of the finite discrete options the dev thought up and inject your own ideas. Sure, some of the shine has worn off that sort of thing now that everyone with a title higher than Assistant Manager is farming their job off to a chatbot, but hey. I didn’t get a chance to really do much with this mode, but it looks like you can get the game to, like, hallucinate whole new items for you to find if you’re convincing enough, which is funny.

Enigma Heart

In Enigma Heart you play as a black lesbian leading the resistance against a tyrannical and paranoid presiden-I mean king, and that’s not even the part that’ll raise the most eyebrows. Here it is: it’s a Zelda II clone. Yeah. That one.

And while ‘clone’ might sound a bit harsh, because it looks like there’s going to be a lot more going on in the full game than you ever got to play with in Adventure of Link, there’s simply too much in this that is simply a 1:1 copy of Z2 – your sprite and basic animations, the overworld with wandering random encounter spawners, the slightly frustrating level-up system, and most importantly, every single enemy is immediately recognizable by its general design and movement.

Not to say that it’s a bad thing that this rips off so much from Zelda II. In fact, it’s a pretty cool game to shamelessly copy from. And even in the demo, you get a taste of what the developer is layering onto the format – ledge grapples, slide moves, more dynamic side quests, and a lot of dialogue and cutscenes. It reminded me a lot of Heritage – A Dragon’s Tale, which was another game that drew a lot of inspiration from Z2 while expanding on it, almost to an exhausting level, to be honest.

Unfortunately, as with Heritage, Enigma Heart is just a little too self-indulgent in a lot of ways, and I found myself skipping a lot of very long, boring, and unimportant cutscenes, which also skips any dialogue in them. There’s a whole sequence at the start where you just slowly drag yourself along the ground, there’s one of you just walking back to and through town with a cow, and my favorite is this one of me speedrunning a funeral.

Then after the funeral you can go talk to the bereaved widow and she has an emotional meltdown at you which eventually rewards you with the attack power buff spell. Insane. I wound up getting through a cave and wandering into a giant, seemingly empty chunk of the overworld and realizing I’d have to backtrack a ton and quit, but hey, who knows, if this has as much going on as Heritage did, it might be worth trying… just don’t expect me to actually watch all these cutscenes.

Whispering Ledger

This game opens with a hilariously direct and very long disclaimer, and so I feel compelled to begin my discussion of it with my own direct disclaimer: Whispering Ledger is a [potentially] highly pornographic game, and while I will obviously not be showcasing anything pornographic in my clips or screenshots, or even any shots of hefty bulges, I will be mentioning them, in what may be explicit detail. So, uh, don’t be reading this next one at church. Unless you go to, like, a really cool church.

After the developer’s self-insert forces you to sign a bunch of release forms declaring that you do, in fact, legally acknowledge that approximately half the women in this hentai VN are futanari, [look it up, I’m not here to educate you. she is] you finally get to start the game. You are a human merchant who has moved from a small island to the big city, looking to fulfill your dream of running an adventurer’s supply shop in the land of beast babes. Your primary gameplay loop consists of commissioning expeditions to nearby locales, refining the raw materials thus retrieved into more profitable items, and then choosing your sale price for each thing before opening the shop for the day.

It’s a little bit like indie classic Recettear, minus, of course, the action segments where you actually get to go battle in dungeons. Instead, the management is handled via menus, and the shop phase resolves almost instantaneously. You do get to set whether to price items above or below market value, but only in very broad and rigid increments, and sometimes you’ll have to decide whether to allow customers to haggle the high prices down. Unfortunately, charging high prices, which is supposed to be balanced by lower trading volume, also seems to immediately and devastatingly impact your store’s reputation – I wound up with a very negative rep just by leaving too much stuff expensive for too long without paying attention.

Not that it seems to matter all that much – in the first chapter, at least, there’s no real time or money pressure on you, and you’re free to grind up resources to trigger shop events or for crafting, and in fact, you need to do a lot of grinding to unlock character events with each NPC. This is probably the weakest part of the game, to be honest – every NPC requires a certain amount of interactions before you can unlock their side story, and most of them have either a strict cap on interactions per day or resource requirements. If you just don’t have any parts to trade with the mouse girl, for example, you have to then send out expeditions for components, hope they’re successful, then visit her to change them into mechanisms. And you do need to unlock and play through each character’s side story to advance to the next chapter, which can take a while because the stories, both main and side, are extremely long.

Just because they’re long doesn’t mean they’re totally tedious, thankfully. In fact, the quality of writing and pace of the plot was easily one of the strongest parts of this VN. I’m used to these things spinning their wheels, getting really repetitive, and dragging on forever, so I was surprised that a game with a naturally repetitive shop management structure actually had a pretty lively and frequently amusing story. You’ll survive assassination attempts, engage in grey market arms deals, battle void knights, and potentially blow like half a dozen loads before the game even starts forcing you to pay taxes and wages. Most of the fail states seem to just reset you back to the last meaningful decision branch, but at least the game has fail states.

So let’s get to the meat [heh heh] of the game, and talk about the sex scenes. As promised by the introduction, the sex itself does seem to be entirely optional, each scene being prompted by a pretty obvious yes/no dialogue split, and if you say no, fair enough, buddy, it skips ahead smoothly. But there’s no getting around the, ahem, charged nature of many of the scenes and even a lot of unavoidable instances of getting flashed, all of which are technically still clothed but leave little to the imagination.

To put it bluntly, no, you cannot play Whispering Ledger as a straight-edge antigooner. You can’t play it at the airport, you shouldn’t be opening that store page with the curtains open, and it’s not one you can explain away to your boss even if you are technically on break. This dev loves two things very openly – fantasy worldbuilding, and girls with huge boobs and equally impressive hogs. If you sign off on that at the beginning, well, you know what you’re getting into. Just mark the game as Private when you purchase it and nobody but Gabe will know.

And really, these days, what’s going to turn more people off than descriptions of testicles straining against striped panties is, again, the AI art issue. There’s a lot to say about this, but I think it’s worth pointing out that, at least from what I played, it’s not terribly apparent with the character art, which is all extremely on-model and honestly, really good. The more noticeable stuff is anything that’s supposed to be vague or generic, which does have some of that over-detail sheen to it, and it really jumped out to me in one or two spots where a scene transitioned to the same location and perspective but with so many changes to the lighting, small details, and so on that it was obvious that I was seeing two different generations of the same prompt. However you feel about AI art in general, this developer at least took their time curating and cleaning it up, which is more than I can say about a lot of VNs with non-AI gen art.

PLATONICA SPACE

From the developer of GIRLS MADE PUDDING comes a remarkably off-putting game about being trapped in the most soft pastel nightmare limbo ever conceived. You wander around, finding objects, then finding the place to set them that triggers a mostly-text flashback, full of melancholy about the lost Earth and the sadness of a young girl who still has to go to school after the Earth has died. Hang on, is this an OPUS fangame? Who gets that joke? Anyone?

What’s really upsetting about this is that the whole setup involves you only having access to a couple rooms, each with multiple exits, which then loop back around to copies of an earlier room, and I guess it’s just a huge, non-Euclidean maze of the same two rooms over and over with random shit in them, which you become more and more exhausted as you walk from one to the next, until your character passes out and starts over on another day.

Presumably this unlocks another room? Or maybe not. I wasn’t having any fun or finding any interest in the memories being revealed, certainly not enough to keep me going for much longer in this purgatory. Could it have a good story? Maybe eventually, though ‘the more you do, the sleepier you get’ being a fucking bulletpoint pitch in the store page summary feels a little on the nose for how I felt trying the demo.

ToMyX

This is a visual novel conceptualized as a game show being run by a succubus, who is forcing the developer to confront each of his ex-girlfriends and sort out his feelings and why they broke up. It’s also one of the most offensive and annoying things I’ve played this event.

The text is tiny, the dialogue is drivel, there’s a bunch of what I assume are weird in-jokes about the developer’s real life and prior games, and none of it is at all interesting. Even the conceit is aggressively irritating – why do I care about this one bad date this guy says he had? Do you really think I believe he actually dated this many women, and these aren’t just all digital representations of girls he stalked? Most of all, what the fuck is with these minigames?

They control like shit, they’re bizarrely strict for being on the default difficulty, and sure, you can apparently opt to go into this in Story mode to remove them entirely, but then I’m just reading an epic poem length blog post about a guy talking smack about his ‘exes’ in the most abrasive format imaginable. Oh, and the audio balance is all fucked up and too loud. I thought this would at least be funny enough in an embarrassing way to really rip on it, but it was not worth the time.

Maid Cafe Simulator

So, I know this is a popular format for games lately, I think epitomized with TCG Card Shop Simulator, but not because I’ve ever played one. It’s just the sort of thing every streamer active in the past year has played at some point, and so you’ll unavoidably catch glimpses of it if you’re alive in the world, and Maid Cafe Simulator does all the standard shit – customers wander in, you have to interact with them, you need to order stock and then pick up the box and physically go place things on shelves, you have to pick out exact change at the register, and you get a melee button to bop people who get too rowdy or whatever.

So then why did I download Maid Cafe Simulator? Well, I already played the shop management VN about swordfighting with futa animal girls a bit further up, so I don’t know why you’re so surprised. Joking aside, it’s because I think this is a genuinely interesting twist on the format, and one I’m a little surprised I haven’t seen before – maid cafes are a big deal, not just in the real world of downtown Tokyo, but in the popular imagination of nerds everywhere. There are shows about them, games about them, and most of all, it combines the new hotness of ‘physical shop management sim’ with the evergreen ‘idol manager’ genre in a way that probably makes a bunch of indie devs who cranked out their own ____ Simulator title after the success of TCG Card Shop smack their heads and go ‘why didn’t I think of that?’

And I have to say, having not really played these sorts of games before, I’m impressed with how well the two worlds are smashed together here. Obviously, the presentation is a little bit rough – there’s a lot of limbs clipping and awkward animations, and some of the little minigames feel like there could be a bit more flair to them, given that theme cafes are all about showmanship, and there’s not much kenonomimi maid flair to you stoicly carrying a can of coke over to the table and plopping it down. You really need the ability to assign greetings and dances to your servers and have, like, a minigame for drawing a heart on omurice with ketchup or something.

But there’s plenty to engage with, even in the demo. Surprisingly for a game with this normally open-ended format, there is a pretty tangible end goal and set of minor goals, with each of your maids having little requests that you can tackle like side quests, which unlock new recipes and improve your relationship, which then means you can improve some of their stats, letting them work a little faster or for longer hours.

The character designs and scenes were all really good too, and the one where you meet the stray dog kenonomimi rummaging through your fridge legitimately cracked me up. The voice acting is all in Chinese, but the quality is fine, and the characters are distinct despite being obvious archetypes. I liked some of the little quirks, like how your first maid bombards you with text messages, and the fact that you sleep on the couch in the breakroom which you’ve converted into a sad little bed.

But first you have to get the damn maid off of it! Go home! I need to get to sleep!!

Femme Fatality

This is another… genre of sorts that I think is currently on the upbound path, and that’s… I don’t know what to call it. Stuff like Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator. If you’ve seen it, you know what I mean.

The Spieler

The Quivering Innards of Alien Capitalism

A POUND OF FLESH…

7 months ago · 7 likes · 4 comments · Trip Harrison

It’s a real-time management plate-spinner where you play as an extremely misandrist paid killer/shock jock streamer. You go through your email, pick out tips on guys who ‘deserve to die,’ then do little minigames to research your target, pick your method of getting close to them, and then choose how to kill them off to best amuse your sick fandom.

Since the game is running in real time, you’re on the clock with all of this, because your Mood is constantly ticking down, which you can restore briefly with some retail therapy, but only to an extent – each purchase is one-time only, and there’s only so many things to buy to perk you up. Every action also gets augmented by your other stats, or affects them in turn, and you’ve got to keep things entertaining and… in line with your twisted principles to get the most ‘value’ out of each kill. I’m not sure why, for example, strangling a particular guy is more ‘fitting’ than faking an overdose or beating him to death, but they have different levels of ‘messiness’ and I guess are more or less likely to led the cops to your door eventually, though the game is awfully vague about how openly you’re doing these things.

There’s a lot of really funny stuff going on, but unfortunately, due to the nature of the format, you’re by necessity blowing through it all a little too quickly to really enjoy it properly. For example, one of the factors in your Mood degrading is how full your email inbox gets, so you have to execute a little electronic hygiene and go through deleting junk mail and obvious phishing bait, trying to avoid accidentally clicking ‘yes’ on any Nigerian prince requests while not ignoring too many job offers. Some of the bluntness of the text and ticker tape feeds really cracked me up, and if you’re a fan of this sort of game, whatever sort of game it is, you might really enjoy this.

Tomboy Adventure 2

The sequel to the ‘critically acclaimed’ Tomboy Adventure, TA2 is a VR dating sim with a focus on physical interaction with various props, one of which is the titular tomboy, a childhood friend you are seemingly trapped on a desert island with until summer is over.

You can order her to follow you, trigger little vignettes, and even find a Polaroid camera that lets you take snapshots which you can keep in your backpack. Eventually, as you build up XP both in your Relationship meter and your Summer Feelings meter, you can confess your feelings to the tomboy… who misreads the cue and merely accepts you as her best friend, which unlocks a whole set of ways you can physically manipulate her, such as rubbing her head, pulling her cheeks, or picking her up and hurling her out to sea.

You can also go into a character editor and change up her skin color, hair style, and clothes, in case you’re unhappy with how much of a creep the game already makes you feel like. Sadly, though the game has a bunch of sliders for like, cheek depth and jaw sharpness, you can’t make any sort of Dark Souls facegen grotesquery. You can barely even tell the difference between everything maxed and everything at zero. Except her eyes, which I did get to clip through the sides of her head somewhat disconcertingly.

The game is pretty buggy and dull – all the spots where I was supposed to sit down next to her had me sitting down in the middle of nowhere or literally clipped inside of her, which is really disorienting in VR, and I couldn’t figure out how to trigger some of the stuff, she started handing me marshmallows at the fire but I couldn’t figure out any way to actually light the fire to roast them so we just sat there eating marshmallows. Worst of all, the fishing poles didn’t seem to work right, and trying to cast the line just resulted in it limply flopping in front of me no matter what I tried. You don’t fuck with a man’s expectations of a fishing minigame, no matter how small and tan you are.

Away with you!

Memory of Memorie: A Chill Story

I left this for this morning so I could ‘play’ it while doing all the editing for this post. It’s a low-fi study and chill ‘app,’ intended to be put on in the background while you do something else, soothing you with the sight and sound of a little anime witch practicing magic very quietly.

The setup is that this little apprentice witch needs to focus on her studies so she can get better at magic, and so she’s cast a spell that lets her FaceTime with a random person from another world [you. Or rather, me] and then they just leave their phones or magic mirrors on while they study together, which is apparently a real thing that girls do.

You can program a schedule with a certain period of focus, during which Memorie will work on summoning light with her wand, scribble down notes with a quill pen, or just read as the music and ambient sounds play, and you can even set up multiple sessions, with a programmed break. She’ll announce break time aloud, prompting you to tab back over and watch her… relax, sip her tea, flip through a smaller book that I assume is unrelated to her studies, or just close her eyes and rest. During the break you can click on her to get little dialogue snippets, then when the break is over, she announces that too and gets back to work.

And despite this not really holding any appeal for me personally, I found it to be incredibly well done. When you’re done, the amount of time spent in Focus mode gets tallied up and granted to you as XP, and each level lets you unlock a slightly longer and more involved little conversation with Memorie, after which you earn a new way to customize the experience – changing some props, unlocking different hats for her to wear, new times of day, including the ability to let it cycle through them, and my favorite, new viewing angles, contextualized as her accidentally casting the magic mirror spell on a random different reflective surface nearby and not having the spoons to fix it.

You can pause, end, or skip through focus and break periods however you want, and it doesn’t seem like you get penalized for betraying your own schedule, which is nice. I think my only real problem with it is that there’s only two music tracks available in the demo, and they’re so similar I can’t even tell the difference between them. Something like this really needs a pretty long playlist, and almost definitely needs the ability to import your own music, otherwise as soon as you have the thought of ‘I’ve heard this song X times this hour’ you’ll never be able to think about anything else with full brain power.

So ends my Girl Power edition of Steam Next Fest demo previews. Of the things I played today, I’m honestly really interested in a few of them, especially The Unleaving. I’ll probably have to get further in the Enigma Hearts demo to decide if I think it’ll deliver on its promises or just be too drawn out to stick with, and while I did like some of Maid Cafe Simulator had to offer, I honestly don’t know that I have the patience for that format.