October Next Fest, Day 7
You play sixteen games, what’d’ya get? Another week older and deeper in debt.
A NOTICE: I am traveling, and therefore limited to playing [and recording] on my Steam Deck, which is an impressive little machine, but, uh, not flawless. Any issues I mention with performance or graphics should be considered in that context, which isn’t to say they aren’t problems, but that they are problems that might not exist on a full rig. Also I mostly fixed the resolution problems from Day 0, but not entirely. You’re just gonna have to deal with it, I’m tired.
Hired Stars
I think this game can be summed up pretty well by this comment made by the developer in a Steam Forums post regarding feedback:
These rockets aren’t homing missiles. You can see what they do in the engineering menu, which isn’t included in the demo.
Hired Stars is a real-time strategy game where you order a single spaceship around 2D space and engage in combat with other similarly bulky, awkward ships. Every ship is split into multiple zones, which take damage and affect performance if destroyed, and several weapons systems that can all track and fire independently. If all you do is follow the instructions belted out by your stiff AI voiced commanders, you’re pretty much stuck ordering your ships to go to a waypoint, where they are then ambushed and fired on from multiple angles, and maybe landing a few hits of their own before exploding.
Digging into the controls an experimenting a bit reveals a bit more depth to the tactics. The game has a lot in common with ΔV: Rings of Saturn [the second time I’ve gotten to reference it this event!] and you can command your ship to change its orientation independent of its heading, or mostly so, anyway, and target individual locations on an enemy ship, letting you launch yourself behind them and fire into their engines for critical damage. Theoretically. In practice, it’s still extremely cumbersome, brutally difficult to get your ship to do what you want it to, and incredibly unfair – enemy ships literally blink into existence and immediately start unloading into yours from what is almost point-blank range, they seem to have the same stats as you but better control over course and orientation, and outnumber you. The developer appears to be extremely defensive in the forums threads regarding people’s confusion with the game’s systems and difficulty, insisting they just need to have better strategic planning or tactical execution. The game needs a tutorial, and probably a complete control overhaul, and even then I’m not sold on it.
Kriophobia
Would not load.
Akuma’s Bloodrain
Very basic wave-based shooter with a nuDoom style glory kill mechanic. When enemies are brought to low enough health, primarily via your infinite ammo shotgun, you can then get into range and use your otherwise very low-damage off-hand slash to instantly kill them, earning a score bonus. That’s… pretty much it. There were 3 enemy types I saw, and while they are not particularly interesting or threatening on their own, the second wave’s difficulty is ramped up so insanely by sheer numbers that I couldn’t make it to the third on multiple attempts.
Nullstar: Solus
Another spike dodger platformer, but this time by way of Lunar Lander. Except… one of the hallmarks of Lunar Lander style games, like Sub-Terrania, for example, is that your ship rotates, shifting the orientation of your single thruster and forcing you to make constant adjustments to maintain control. Nullstar instead keeps your ship locked into its natural facing, and you have independent control of four cardinal direction thrusters, letting you rocket up, push yourself side to side, and even accelerate downwards. Since there is gravity, this ends up feeling more like a slightly cumbersome way to implement walking and jump controls than a true Lunar Lander game, and the fact that you have the option to temporarily lock out one thruster to boost the output of the others doesn’t add enough to make up for this simplification. Maybe later it does – I only made it a few stages in before getting stuck on a level with a bunch of timed laser gates, and decided to move on.
Xenomycology
A sidescrolling tower defense game where you plant mushrooms to expand into new areas and destroy the drones of the human invaders. The game works a bit like Plants vs Zombies in that you’re slowly accruing the Moisture required to plant new spores, selecting from the mushroom types you’ve unlocked. The basic shroom collects extra water from water sources, increasing your income, and very cheaply allows you to expand your influence – shrooms can only be planted within a certain radius of another. Defensive shrooms act like towers, firing their projectiles at incoming threats and holding ground against their attacks. Later, you unlock expansion shrooms that have a larger spore radius, letting you reach distant ledges, and a power plant shroom that is delicate but improves your income beyond what environmental sources will provide.
Each screen, you either have an obstacle to solve, by means of planting shrooms until you can reach a new exit or new shroom sample, or several waves of combat against enemies to prepare for. Most of the enemies are flying drones that shoot down at your shrooms as they encounter them, going down in a few hits from your own basic towers, or tanks which are substantially, uh, tankier, and all but require you build the shrooms that lob explosive spores in an arc to deal with.
I didn’t get much further than that – as soon as the tanks appeared, I started finding it difficult to build up enough moisture to fortify my positions in time for the onslaught, and that’s in spite of each wave taking an excruciating amount of time to actually show up, seen via on-screen timer that’s sometimes 60 seconds long. It’s just that your own water income ticks up even slower, and there’s additional fiddliness with the shroom positioning [you must place mushrooms far enough apart or outright replace them to have room] and with the lack of clarity in incoming enemy waves and paths. If you lose your water shrooms, you’re pretty much instantly screwed – I don’t know if it was bugged or what, but at some point when my income dropped down to the baseline, it actually stopped providing any water whatsoever until I planted a few basic shrooms back down.
Idosra: The Electric Renaissance
This is my jam. Idosra is a sidescrolling platformer RPG set in a post-apocalyptic world that is now rediscovering the wonders of electricity, and their first order of business is to start putting automated turrets everywhere. You play as Marika, a young woman from North Carolina who stumbles across the Vallas Empire’s machinations and becomes their target. The game plays out a bit like a mix of cinematic platformer and Apogee Software game – you run, jump, climb ledges, and do front kicks on guards who try to apprehend you while collecting floating gems and other bonuses. Then every stage ends with a score tally that includes dozens of bonuses just like the old Rise of the Triad.
What really makes it stand out are all the additional mechanics. Collecting gems and defeating enemies grants you XP, which you can then spend reading the books scattered around the world to unlock permanent perks. Most of these, at least in the early demo areas I played, are significant upgrades, unlocking whole new mechanics like the ability to drop yourself off ledges carefully or scroll the camera around to investigate pitfalls for secrets or to spot enemies outside of their range. Each book you read also increases your intelligence, letting you read more advanced books. Meanwhile, your other stats increase based on your actions, like your wisdom improving the more you learn about the world and characters. One conversation with a shopkeeper, for example, revealed information about local politics, while your first encounter with a gun turret can be resolved by you knocking out the camera with a projectile, earning the knowledge that they use the little glass lens to ‘see.’
I had a few problems with the demo that probably mostly come down to me playing it in desktop mode on a Steam Deck – I could never get the controller to divide the left and right trigger inputs, so I wasn’t actually able to try out the ‘peer ahead’ move, and the launcher didn’t fit on screen properly. Also while the dialogue is pretty good, all the character portraits are weirdly ugly. That said, the game is so interesting, was so much fun, and has so much potential that I am going to be finishing this demo in my own time and probably picking up the game at release.
东方异域见闻 ~ Touhou Dystopian
This 3D character action game has been out for a while and technically is not part of this Next Fest but someone asked so I played the demo anyway. It’s a 3D character action roguelite where you fight waves of enemies as one of the Touhou Project characters until you get to a boss fight with another Touhou Project character. This is as far as I got because it ran pretty badly on my Deck and in fact would not accept any input at all properly until I played it completely undocked.
Once the game deigned to let me play it, it was pretty fun – you get a good mix of basic attacks, the ability to evade backwards while firing projectiles, and two levels of special attack you build up meters for. It reminded me a lot of the Nier games, with the basic enemies being pretty trivial and the bosses spraying out patterns of bullets, half of which you can dispel with your own shots, and the rest that have to be dodged through. But it was late and my battery wasn’t holding up so I moved on after a few attempts at the first boss.
LingTian2: Your Destined Prince
Alright, let me explain. Last year, I played the demo for LingTian1, a bizarre looking visual novel that I thought would be good for a laugh. After getting stuck on a puzzle, and getting prompt and gracious help from the developer herself, I wishlisted it and have been enjoying every news update since.
The developer is a writer of romance ebooks, who, during Covid lockdowns, decided to teach herself programming, 3D modeling, AI generative tools, and so on in order to translate her books to otome visual novels. The end result is LingTian, alongside 1000 Princes, or maybe LingTian is one of the 1000 Princes. You play as a self-named girl attending culinary school who lives in the Fang Kingdom. One day, while being bullied at work, you find and rescue a mysterious, handsome, and somewhat bizarrely proportioned man who has been laid low by an assassin’s needle and left to die on the ski slopes. After a series of farcical misunderstandings, it turns out the man is none other than the youngest Prince of Fang Kingdom, LingTian, fourth in line for the throne, the least favorite of his [step?]mother, the Queen, and rumored by the public to actually be a dwarf.
The Queen hounds LingTian to give up his studly military duties and enter the public eye through a Bachelor style national competition for his hand in marriage, something he resists until he encounters your character again at the restaurant she works at and decides he must woo her using the competition as cover for legitimizing his pursuit of a lower class woman. Thus begins the epic romance that will put Twilight to shame… in more ways than one.
LingTian2 picks up immediately after the events of 1, or what I gather the rest of the game to have included from what I did play. The competition is in full swing, contestants are being eliminated, and your humble character is convinced she’s been cut in spite of LingTian spending nearly every waking moment of his life openly declaring that she is his one true love and he will do anything to spend the rest of his time on Earth [or whatever planet this takes place on] with her. At the end of the demo, he essentially does that on live national television, with literally everyone breathing in the country watching, so, uh, at least that tedious plot line is put to bed.
Something LT2 introduces that I actually really liked are a handful of new, or rather, newly important characters. LingTian’s greatest rival for the protagonist’s affections is her childhood friend and all around Good Guy ChengXun, who was mentioned frequently in the first game but has now been handpicked to join LingTian’s personal guard, promising juicy love triangle tension. But my favorite character is ZhiYan, a brilliant IT engineer [don’t call her a hacker, that’s kind of a sore spot for the Chinese] and avowed, REALLY VOCAL ABOUT IT misandrist, who has her own sort of rivalry with LingTian despite them both clearly knowing each other pretty well. She’s pretty amusing, ranting to LingTian about misogyny and computer security and dropping the F bomb while trying to get un-fired from her government position, and begrudgingly allowing him to put her name on the list of Potential Princesses as a freebie in exchange for being reinstated.
The demo is still structured in a weird way, with a standard visual novel split into chapters, and certain events that occur merit you some hilariously strange currencies, all aspects of LingTian’s feelings for the protagonist – his breath, his sweat, the stars in his eyes, his… magnetic field? You can use these to unlock certain rooms in the main menu, giving you access to scene replays, side event stories, romantic ballads the developer wrote performed by a vocaloid, and so on. In the first game, I got stuck because I ignored these areas, one of which secretly held the solution to the puzzle I couldn’t solve… I think they’ve been relegated more strictly to optional content now, but you never know.
The game has the same tacky, two-or-three-gen-outdated AI generated backgrounds, the male characters still look hilariously built and goofy, and the story is still pretty corny, repetitive, and rife with grammatical errors and weird syntax and spacing due to the developer’s homebrew machine translation setup. But, man, I just love it. It showcases a level of earnest, almost insane ambition that’s rare in the realm of romance VNs, it looks and plays like nothing else of that genre, is rife with goofy minigames and bizarre, characterful asides, and comes across as 100% genuine.
Well, it’s actually been quite a bit more than 16 games, but I wanted to make the joke fit the song. It’s been a hell of a week, and it doesn’t look like my life will be returning to normal anytime soon, so if nothing else, I’m glad I found a lot to look forward to in the coming months. Idosra is easily my pick of the day, but I’m also glad I had an excuse to post about LingTian for this site - I’ve been dragging my feet on actually getting and finishing the first game, and now that I’m sure the developer is continuing the series in earnest, I think I’m ready to give it an honest look. Thanks for sticking with me as I play and mostly complain about a lot of stuff of virtually zero interest to the wider world. The Next Fest event is now officially over, and I’m going to be picking away at some of the stragglers I didn’t get to on my own time, and probably not posting about them in an official capacity like this, but I’m also planning on doing another round-up post tomorrow or the next day to highlight the games that really made an impression on me and gauge or guess how long it’ll be before we get to play them for real.