June 2026 Next Fest, Day 6

Niisan~ stop playing demos~

Jun 21, 2026

I was thinking of doing another day like I did last Next Fest where I went around and saw what everyone else played and make a whole day of picks stolen from other people. But Henry Nightingale apparently had better things to do, and Roger Renfro just played a bunch of crap, so I wound up only really wanting to try a few games already covered by Raphael Carbinatto this time. But I’ll still link everybody’s stacks here because they all gave me something to complain about.

Let’s start with a few games I picked on my own, though.

Dust Front RTS

RTS as a genre has been on life support for longer than most readers have probably been alive, so much so that its descendants and all horrifically grafted chimera made from its components are vastly over-represented compared to the real deal. So any time an actually promising RTS game shows its face, it must be examined, if only out of scientific curiosity.

Dust Front is planned to incorporate some form of grand strategy layer, but the demo showcases only the actual RTS battle part, which is a very grimy, gray isometric meatgrinder, chunky tanks kicking up clouds of dust and shaking the screen with their cannon fire. It feels like a massively desaturated rebirth of Command and Conquer: Generals with the unit design adhering closely to the addled delusions of the concept artists and letting the color guys take the day off.

It’s got all the hallmarks of a turn-of-the-century Modern Military setting RTS – wacky vehicles that may have turrets bigger than their chassis but still need to grind along on treads, neutral buildings that infantry can occupy and turn into bunkers that require a war crime to neutralize, units lumbering into range and acquiring their targets with little urgency, so many UI elements and extra features hidden in the sidebar menus that the onboarding tutorial messages outnumber your troops, and a second sidebar dedicated to bonus abilities you can deploy on the field at any time. Or, well, at least designate at any time. One of the least satisfying parts of this otherwise very satisfying strategy games is that calling in an airstrike requires a level of premeditation that strains the definition of ‘real time strategy.’ No shit, it’s like 20 seconds. Even at the plodding pace of units in a game like this, that’s still enough for the front to move enough to put you on the receiving end of your own shock and awe if you’re not paying attention. I’m just lucky I happened to have three tanks bigger than apartment buildings holding the frontline stable.

Speaking of which, the one nod to the alleged grand strategy layer present in the demo is that you get to pick the combination of units you start the skirmish with, from a selection that includes some wild shit, like rocket bombardment artillery or just 20 some tanks to give you early momentum. Then you also get to assign slightly smaller squads as your reinforcement options, which become available on a timer as you play. One of those squads I made was just those three behemoth tanks, who plowed in through one of the map edges and met up with the remnants of my initial force to obliterate everything else. Pretty sick.

Scientific Project: Optic

This is presented as more of an edutainment title than a puzzle game, really, including a lot of rambling about scientific history and very cringeworthy jokes told in an annoying accent. But at its core it’s just another ‘beam orientation’ puzzle game, and not a very good one at that. Despite the narrator chuckling about how much you can learn from how light behaves without lasers, the only puzzles I encountered were coherent beams of light, which then reflect off the surfaces of polished cubes and shaped mirrors locked into discrete places around the map, and which you can rotate to change where the beam goes, but only in notched, pre-set angles.

That makes it easy for the puzzle designer to ensure there’s a guaranteed solution that doesn’t require shuffling things around or, God forbid, actually programming functional physics and locking mechanisms, but it also makes the whole thing pretty boring, even for edutainment. You know, when you have to do this crap in a Resident Evil or Zelda game you at least get to dome a zombie or something in between turning mirrors. I can’t fathom a single reason to play this over The Talos Principle, [or its sequel] even if this were less boring.

At some point, I got stuck because the last cube wouldn’t actually point the beam at the exit switch. Just to either side of it. Masterful.

Forgotten Blood

It’s an ugly as sin King’s Field knockoff, you think I’m just not going to play it??

Well, the one notable thing about this one is that in order to pick up items, you need to stand in front of the glowing indicator, then open your inventory, then move the cursor to the bottom of the screen, then grab the item and move it up to an open slot in your inventory, and let go. Every single time. For everything. Enemy drops, stuff out of chests, crap that comes out of broken pots… actually, one of the things I got out of smashing a random pot was a key, so don’t assume you can just skip anything either. And don’t think you can just stack an item with like items because sometimes that just refuses to work. It’s not any better with a mouse either.

I made like three loops of the first room and couldn’t find any way to proceed without walking through the poison swamp and hit Alt-F4.

Ten Years of Rain

A bit of a Zelda clone set in Central Asia. You start with a sword and a hawk, who acts both as your default ranged attack and can air dash you across small gaps. The hawk can also flip switches remotely and even grab items and carry them back to you like a boomerang. Eventually you also collect a bow and an axe, which can be used to open up new paths through the environment.

Of all the straight-up Zelda knockoffs I’ve played lately, this one definitely has the most promise. The style and setting are interesting and the developer seems committed to making the most of them, and the combat, controls, and general quality of the game does not otherwise significantly detract from its good points. I did run out of money from not realizing the bow consumes cash like in Zelda 1, and I failed to find any really substantial dungeon to explore, but I liked the game enough to play it some more later.

Besides, it’s got a really sick title screen.

The next couple games were things I hadn’t considered downloading before seeing them on Raphael Carbinatto’s page. If you want more Steam Next Fest picks beyond mine, he’s been on the same exhausting quest to chronicle multiple games a day this week. [Preview, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5] [I’m linking the English language versions because I’m assuming that’s what most of my readers would pick]

Mym’s Sword

Another kind of Zelda inspired game, Mym’s Sword has you playing as a blobby blue dog-thing who falls into a ruin and claims a magic sword. The main gimmick of the game is that you attack by using the right stick to point the sword in one of eight directions, and then sticking it in an enemy’s face and letting it swing itself. This is facilitated by having your jump bound to a trigger, making it a platformer with a bit of a learning curve if your muscle memory has not been exercised with anything similar. [like Zexion]

You quickly leave the ruin and find yourself in an overworld, full of caves, mountains, waterfalls, and graveyards, some of which require a little bit more effort or puzzle solving to access. You’ll also run into a few different rings, which give you passive effects that scale off a meter – lowered when you get hit, filled back up as you collect orbs from defeated enemies.

It’s really hard to say just how extensive the full version of this game will be – it looks like it’s going to lean pretty hard into tucking secrets around the map, making you do some lateral thinking and pattern recognition to reach optional [or maybe even required] areas, and the somewhat wasted screen real estate occasionally gets used for something surprising, like a minigame where you have to kill enemies in such a way as they fall into a moving basket at the bottom of the screen. I don’t know if I actually will try to discover more in this demo, though, as I was pretty frustrated to boot it back up after a break and find that it doesn’t save progress whatsoever. Gee, I hope the full game does!

Sting & Swing

A platformer about chipping a golf ball around and trying to land it in holes scattered throughout the screens. Each time you successfully sink one, it fills up and turns into a normal block, and you keep the flag, which is kind of like your total score, a minimum of which is needed to open certain doors.

It seems relatively simple at the onset but the demo actually teases some potential challenge and cute little mechanics as you play. One of the big gimmicks is that not all holes are just open for you to putt your ball into casually – some of them only open once you’ve put your ball on a nearby tee, after which you have either a limited amount of time or swings to make it into every connected hole to win them all.

The other main thing is kind of quietly indicated to you by a background mural in an early screen, so I don’t feel bad spoiling it – you gain the ability to add spin to your shot, letting your ball roll along the ground depending on if you whip around it clockwise or counter before taking the swing. With the way that’s revealed to you, in front of a hole you can’t land otherwise, I’m hopeful that the full game has even more little secret moves to perform, or maybe just more hidden interactions and layers of puzzle to take this beyond awkwardly playing Jump King with a golf ball.

Kodama: Slumber of the Gods

A mostly pretty standard modern Metroidvania, potentially livened up a bit by having your attack be barehanded pummeling. It’s got a few good features, like the ability to pin screenshots to your map, a sprint option that’s genuinely really fast, and a cute bestiary in your pause menu.

The art and animations aren’t really anything to write home about, but are… sufficient, and I feel the same way about the audio design. The combat is almost interesting – you can punch in any direction, the hits come pretty fast back to back, and you very quickly unlock the ability to slide past enemies, but only when they have a blue border, usually indicating they’re about to attack. The restriction on sliding past enemies is weird, but it could work if it were part of a more fleshed out and impactful combat system – I brought up Smashing Spirits: Brazil’s First Boxer in just this context in my Christmas essay, and I urge the Kodama devs to take a look at that game for some pointers. If this game had a combo meter that boosted your attack power and speed as you gracefully slid through attacking enemies and continued to pile on the pressure, damn, that would be cool. As it is, I’m not really impressed.

Also the game makes you pay for maps. I don’t even like when Team Cherry does this shit. Give me something good to buy, don’t make me pay for maps.

Magical Blush

Really cute and enjoyable top-down adventure game, where the gimmick is all of your attacks are elemental spells, which you can bind and use as you like. Most enemies have specific elemental resistances and weaknesses, so you’re encouraged to keep a broad set on your swappable hotbar [though, at least as much as I played the demo, you only really get a few more than the four you can access at any one time] but each one also functions a little differently, and also has interactions with environmental and puzzle elements too.

Even more importantly, your character occasionally shouts out the name of her spell as she casts it, in English, with an accent, which is maximally anime.

The game’s pretty fast, and surprisingly hard later on – you have to juggle a lot of different enemy types, each with their own attacks, and remember which button you have each element of your own on. My one disappointment is that a lot of spells, including some of the ‘basic’ no-mana-cost ones you’re supposed to be spamming a lot, have kind of long cool-downs, meaning that if that’s the only thing that really hurts an enemy type, you have no choice but to hit and stall, hit and stall, until you finally whittle them down.

The demo already has plenty of secrets, and some interesting mechanics – there’s a whole area infested with ghosts, and torches that ward them off, with enemies that alternatively try to snuff the torches out, swarming you with extra enemies, or light them again if you trick them into shooting them with fire, though you can re-light them yourself too. I died at a spot pretty far from my last checkpoint and took a break, but I’ll definitely be back for more.

Knuckle Jet

Okay, fine, I did download one thing Roger Renfro recommended. Knuckle Jet is one of those platformers where you rocket through things and bounce off walls like a knight… a rocket knight of sorts. Your rocket gauge fills back up any time you touch the ground, you get some extra juice for destroying enemies in mid-air, and you can rocket along certain background elements for free, ricocheting off 45 degree angles and smashing through crates.

I sometimes like games like this, especially if they have a good flow to the platforming, but I’ve got to be honest, Knuckle Jet just doesn’t have ‘it.’ There’s something kind of limp about the feedback, the audio mix feels weak, the upgrades are either kind of pathetic or frustrating that you to grind for them, I don’t like the attempt at claymation style animation in cutscenes that just makes it look like their dog ate half the frames, and I don’t like how sloppy the controls felt. The momentum from your boost takes you a good ways further than you often want to go, trying to pick an angle that you get locked into with a thumbstick is frustrating when there’s no visual feedback, even when you only have eight options, and the game just doesn’t seem that hard when its not launching you into spikes because you tapped the stick wrong.

All the stages I played were incredibly short, the first boss fight was tepid, and the optional routes mostly seemed to only have extra currency for buying upgrades to your equipment options. Hilariously, one of the pieces has literally zero benefit for buying the first upgrade tier. You just have to buy it to then buy the next one that itself offers little. Why not just increase the price of the first tier? Exhausting.

Well, folks, I think that’s going to be where I leave it off for this Fest. I’ll be tinkering around with a couple things I enjoyed [or wanted to enjoy more than I did] before putting together my hotly anticipated Best Of post, so unless you make an incredible pitch, I don’t think I’ll play any new demos for a while. Thanks for reading, and enjoy the rest of your Father’s Day/summer solstice.

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