I'd have liked to had this done mid-late week instead of, uh, after the event but life intervenes. Also I went somewhat insane and played in the region of ~50 demos when I usually play around 20.
Steam Next Fest continues to be a delightful and useful event; coming hot on the heels of a mostly vapid and disappointing "E3" season, where most of the Summer Game Fest-associated stream showcases overlapped heavily in their lineups and only some of those lineups were worthwhile, it's a hearty reminder that while the AAA industry (and almost entirely the Western side of it, at that) is melting down hard and fast and their slate is empty, there's miles of excellent small-to-mid studios pumping out fantastic work from here til well into next year. There is still plenty to be getting on with all the time; I've seen some people talk as if they need big $250mil+ budget games to exist, even as they otherwise dislike the bulk of them, and I don't think I'll understand that view.
The demos I ended up playing and retaining are as follows:
- The top recommendations, the "gold medals"
- Games I enjoyed and recommend with light reservation (the "silver medals")
- A quickfire list of all the other recommendations ("bronzes", if you will)
- Some waffling about trends I noticed
Because for some games I don't have terribly much to say without having the full thing to go over; a perfectly perfunctory platformer, for example, that just works and does its job is worth bringing up but there's only so much I can emphasise about it. If a game from the images above doesn't get mentioned at all, that probably means it was alright but not gripping or interesting, but also not bad or broken.
Off we go, then.
Top Recommendations
The Big Catch (Tacklebox Demo)
Developer: Filet Group
Publisher: Filet Group, XSEED, Marvelous USA
Release: TBC
I like to know where developers come from, to highlight that games come from all corners, especially these days. In this case, Filet Group are Canadian.
It has been fascinating watching the gradual progress of indie games that seek to emulate games of the past move through the console hardware generations in sequence. In the beginning, the NES and "8-bit" graphics were prized, with the king of that particular roost being Shovel Knight, I'd argue. We've progressed to the point where PS1-style 3D is now coming into vogue, with recent examples like Nightmare Kart, Lunacid, Alisa and ABYSS X ZERO being particularly good examples. The Big Catch is one of these, a 3D platformer with the aesthetics of a later and pretty high end PS1 game, with a lot of Spyro and Rayman 2 in particular (in that sense, it stands at the boundary between PS1 and Dreamcast).
But of course, the twist is that with the foundations laid and modern controllers and capabilties, The Big Catch has the room to be a game for sickos. And for sickos it is: the level of nuance and complexity in the platforming moveset on hand is remarkable, from basic platforming things like bouncing on ropes, swinging from bars and climbing walls to more advanced things like multiple kinds of special jumps (jumping right after ground-pounding, spin jump, the sliding kick jump) and the need to build and conserve momentum while approaching at a correct angle to run along walls. And I haven't even mentioned the fishing rod, which serves as that, a grabber, grappling hook and weapon. All of this fits comfortably onto a controller with inputs to spare an it also all feels really fucking good; getting the flow going, chasing a fleeing fish (as it runs on its little legs, naturally) across see-saw platforms by smoothly going into a crouching slide and doing the kick-jump to close the distance and get off each before gravity kicks in, moving the seesaw down away from the next ledge, performing jumps to cut corners and close the gap and keep momentum to chase it along a wall, it's a parkour/free-running game in the skin of a classic 3D platformer.
Be forewarned that it doesn't think much of checkpoints, and some of the platform challenges require doing a 1-2 minute tricky stretch of weaving moves together perfectly, where failure makes you fall back down to the start. The Big Catch asks of you, but if you're the sort of person this type of control appeals to, that likely isn't an issue. My only actual issues with it are the open-world is too big for its own good (there's big empty stretches of fuck-all between the platforming zones) and that it could do with explaining some of its moves in the tutorial zone instead of just describing them. For example, do I hold A while wall-running to do it better and stick to the wall, or is that placebo? It certainly felt like the case and all my successful wall-runs were done by holding A and my failures by not, but I don't actually know if that's the case and the game doesn't say.
It's more of a full 'vertical slice' than a simple demo (and, observing the crowdfunding campaign, it actually stars the actual game's rival character, not its protag, which makes the dialogue retroactively very funny), and it's extremely promising. There's a ton of collectibles to get and a special 100%-progress locked door at the end, so if the demo's sticking around after SNF, by all means grab it.
BLADE CHIMERA
Developer: Team Ladybug, WSS Playground
Team Ladybug have made a hell of a name for themselves these past few years, but I haven't gotten around to Touhou: Luna Nights and Record of Lodoss War - Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth- yet. Based off this I need to blast them to the top of my backlog because goddamn. BLADE CHIMERA is a Metroidvania and it's specifically as Symphony of the Night as I've seen a game get since Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night - debatably more, being actually 2D and having such beautiful sprite art and animation. It controls slickly, weaving together a gun-and-sword weapon pair very nicely, movement and combat feel fucking great (enemies die in reasonable amounts of time, so often the sticking point for independent Metroidvanias!), its UI is slick and refined and makes great use of screen-space, the soundtrack is fucking killer and it has a good ol' RPG stat groundwork and an interesting skill-unlock system in place.
BLADE CHIMERA nails the feel of the top-tier Igavanias, it's firing on all cylinders and I need it carnally. There's seemingly a bit of an increase in 'modern day' fantasy/sci-fi hybrids specifically mixing exorcising spirits/slaying demons with cybertech lately (I have another one in this post, even!), but it's a good aesthetic and BLADE CHIMERA's setting is real interesting. No gimmicks, no muss, no fuss, it's a pure Metroidvania of a particular style that doesn't get enough play, and I'm dying for it to come out.
I Am Your Beast
Developer: Strange Scaffold
Publisher: Strange Scaffold, Frosty Pop
Release: August 15th, 2024
Strange Scaffold are an American studio.
I Am Your Beast is a very stylish first-person shooter about blitzing obstacle course levels, fulfilling some objective and escaping to an exit as fast as possible. It has wonderful American comic-book art which suits its tone perfectly, of an ex-CIA super-killer who retreated to the woods to try and live with himself only to find his peaceful reverie ruined by churlish US military goons seeking to press him into service to overthrow a Middle Eastern state to get at oil reserves. Even outside of gameplay, the main character's performance is so fucking good it easily sells that he has achieved an almost Zen-like state that he slides into when getting to work.
The game is all about killing soldiers and grabbing things as fast as possible, with generous auto-aim to make headshots reliable and help fill the gap between your speedy, precisely flowing parkour movement and the precise gunshot-and-thrown-knife kills required of you. You can slide into guys to knock them over, hit X to grab their weapon as it falls and stomp them before flowing into using the weapon on the next foes who come into view. Levels are nominally short, 20-40 second bursts but of course there's a strict grading system that easily inspires "just one more try" for higher grades, and the simple nature of the controls and combat combined with the speed, the fucking banging electronic soundtrack and satisfying feel of gameplay make it easy to slip into the flow state that's essential for time-attack/score-attack games. It's fun, it's frenetic, it's got wit and style, this one wasn't on my radar before this Next Fest or the E3 season stream showcases but it sure as hell is now.
Kriegsfront Tactics
Developer: Toge Productions
Publisher: Toge Productions
Release: TBC; "Prologue Chapter" July 17th 2024
Toge Productions hail from Indonesia.
There's been a "World War 1 with mechs" game and "World War 2 with mechs" has happened quite a few times, from Wolfenstein to one announced during the Summer Game Fest pile (it was a roguelike tower defence so it entirely left my mind, unfortunately); "Vietnam War with mechs" is quite a bit more interesting from story and scenario perspectives, I must say. Symbolising the immense power deployed to Vietnam and how it was ultimately unable to complete its objectives via massive destructive machines has quite a bit of potential, to say nothing of what the pilots are going to go through.
Kriegsfront Tactics is a turn-based tactics game where your units are big building-sized mechs; they have a set number of action points and spend them to move, shoot, do trick shots, reload, etc. Gameplay is fairly conventional but with some neat touches to set it apart from others; for example, there isn't an explicit cover system, such as in Firaxis' XCOM games, but terrain very much does matter. Placing your units behind large stone structures or natural barriers organically actually do protect them, so cover must be searched for and considered without a system to tuck you into it. Units all move on square grids but aiming isn't locked to grid-lines for sight, which shows through with some units' Aimed Shot moves that let you line up the shot yourself to try and get around cover. While there's still variance in bullet waver and so on, it lets you identify if things are in the way or not from your mech's perspective; you can go into the aim without committing to the shot and spending the AP.
All units have multiple targettable spots (body, the individual arms, legs as a singular block) which allows for things like disarming enemies by shooting out the arm holding the weapon, or opening up a tank mech by getting side shots and blowing off his shield arm. There are also different models of mechs (some light, some heavy, some four-legged) and multiple weapon classes (shotguns, snipers, handguns, machine guns, artillery, rocket and melee weapons), suggesting at significant unit customisation, and there's quite a bit of modelling and effects going on for bullet behaviours and physics. For example, my sniper finished an enemy standing in front of one of my units; it triggered an evade from my unit as the sniper round killed the enemy and punched straight through, so it was a riskier shot than I considered. On another instance, shotgunning an enemy up close saw a stray pellet pass the target and nick the edge of another unit behind it
There is a bit of Bastard XCOM RNG (shoutout to the tank who, disarmed of his gun, proceeded to block and dodge every shot on him for two and a half turns, stalling me long enough for his backup to start filtering in), but that comes with the territory. Kriegsfront Tactics is pretty conventional but very enjoyable, and its setting holds a lot of promise. There wasn't much actual dialogue or any story in this demo, but in July there's a free Prologue Chapter being released, serving as a more up-to-date, extended demo, handy if this one doesn't stay up. I heartily recommend giving it a look.
Lost And Found Co.
Developer: Bit Egg Inc
Publisher: Bit Egg Inc, Gamera Games
Release: TBC
Bit Egg Inc hail from Thailand.
I'm very fond of hidden object games, they're a good vehicle for looking at often cute, often very detailed art and they're so simple input-wise that they're fantastic for just vegging out to with some music or a podcast or something, while still demanding just enough of you to keep the brain going. Lost And Found Co. is a particularly charming little one, with absolutely precious art and a cute little story to weave in and around the levels. It also seems to have a fair bit of meat on its bones; in addition to multiple optional objectives (including things to find to gain hint tokens) per level that provide little mini-puzzles, it has whole optional "request" levels off to the side as well. Genuinely, if you ever want something to just relax with, this is the perfect sort of game and this eems like a particularly great choice.
Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo
Developer: Pocket Trap
Publisher: PM Studio
Release: TBC
Pocket Trap hail from Brazil.
This game is so Gameboy Advance that its start-up is a 3D model of a GBA cart going into a GBA. The devs know what they're aiming for and they've nailed it so hard it's incredible. Pipistrello is real fucking strong, this feels like it would be perfectly at home on the GBA proper, from the particular style of its sprites to gameplay having simple inputs with the rest of the game design providing the room for expansion and complexity with clever mechanics and cheeky puzzle setups. It even has the camera viewpoint and room style of handheld Zeldas (Minish Cap is the particular reference point), it really has the look flawlessly.
It controls great, it looks incredible, it's got clever ideas like finding ways to ricohet your yoyo to get around corners and hit things or nab things from safety, the characters are funny and slightly demented (you are a rich little shit and your aunt, CEO of an extortionist power company, literally made a soul-powered device, which gets stolen and used against her; two comically self-interested shitheads). I'm really looking forward to the full release, this is a serious contender for new indie darling.
The Rise of the Golden Idol
Developer: Color Gray Games
Publisher: Playstack
Release: 2024
Color Gray Games hail from Latvia.
I freely admit to cheating a bit here; this is a sequel to a 2022 detective puzzle game (which I discovered through a Steam Next Fest, even!) called Case of the Golden Idol. If you like detective puzzle games, Case is really worth your time, it's an exemplar of the style to my mind, excellent DLC and all. Rise is pretty much more of that, with more meat and some refinements: there's now an overarching Conclusion board to fill details into each chapter, drawing from all of the levels of that chapter, which requires a bit of parsing unspoken (but present and observable) details across levels to wrangle. The puzzles have a similar difficulty progression to the first game, based off this demo (which has the short tutorial level and all of Chapter 1), too.
Where the first game was a pastiche of Victorian England, and specifically the lives and behaviours of the upper classes - looting distant cultures of their heritage and relics, exploiting those resources to achieve and consolidate power in England and then using it to bend society to their whims, often in moralistic pursuits that the self-styled crusaders did not themselves uphold - Rise of the Golden Idol is a firm pastiche of 1970s America. Following a string of apparently drug-related deaths, Chapter 1 has elements such as a corrupt police chief warbling into a TV camera about a Demon-Worshipping Drug Cult, whilst coming to an agreement with the family of a wealthy victim to bury the fact that their dead relative is one of the affected in exchange for board membership in a trust fund/asset management/technology company, at a time when computers are on the rise and America is in cultural upheavel. It dives in with a lot of the late-60s/early-70s moral panics and paranoia prevalent in America, touching on its drug culture and the fear thereof and the sizzling pot of white suburban lunatics who would shortly give rise to the Satanic Panic. All very Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, is Chapter 1, which is very exciting indeed given the true nature of the titular Golden Idol (and, possibly, the new one depicted at the end of Chapter 1).
It's a lot easier to waffle when there's a released first game to go off of, and also actually a chunk of the story in the demo.
The refinements I mentioned are mostly about the UI; in the first game, you swapped between the investigation screen and the 'scroll' screen, where all of the questions you had to figure out by slotting names, words and phrases into specified slots in sentences lay. This meant lots of swapping screens and leaping back and forth, especially as the questions and puzzles became significantly more complex and elaborate later in the game and in the DLC, where you were jumping across multiple areas of a town and sometimes across different times of day in the one level. Now, each section of the 'scroll' screen, such as the one for the names of characters in the level, are their own little windows that pop up when their icon is clicked, and can be dragged and dropped around the screen so you can have it up next to the pop-up windows for examining people and items. That makes it much easier to plug in the simpler details like character names when you find the pieces to put it together as you go. Similarly, in the first game you had to click objects and underlined words in dialogue or text to get the words/phrases added to your phrase list; now, all the phrases and words revealed by an examination are lined up next to the window and added automatically. In exchange, more of an effort is made to obfuscate actions and events, with multiple words (e.g. "slipped? fell onto? approached?" for a man who died next to something) provided so as not to give away the game or lead your thoughts in any single direction. There was some of that in the first game, where the phrases provided could be used to infer things without having to interpret the illustrations and text.
As I said, I'm horribly biased; it's a sequel to a game I quite adore. I'm real excited for this one and I'm looking forward to its release eagerly. Everyone should have a little blorbo game series they found.
Tactical Breach Wizards
Developer: Suspicious Developments Inc
Publisher: Suspicious Developments Inc
Release: August 22nd, 2024
Suspicious Developments Inc hail from the UK. The distinctly British police uniforms gave it away before I looked it up, admittedly.
A turn-based tactical game about spec-ops wizards who do a lot of blasting terrorists and cops out of windows, which should be enough to sell it by itself, I'd argue. It's a fucking fantastic turn-based tactics game about breaching-and-clearing rooms of enemies swiftly and with minimal damage taken...such as by blasting them out of windows. Knockback effects and means of utilising it for bonus damage or immediate eliminations takes centre stage among the mechanics, which certainly gives Tactical Breach Wizards a particular kind of flavour. A lot of tactics games, especially on smaller scales or with less emphasis or even absence of RPG mechanics, often become akin to puzzle games where doing the puzzle in as few moves as possible is the ideal, and this is exactly that sort. It's brisk and clever, presenting its levels room-by-room instead of a rolling series of encounters across one sprawling map that can cascade terribly, like an XCOM (or a Kriegsfront Tactics, even, which makes for a good comparison for different styles of this genre).
It's by the devs of Gunpoint, a puzzle-like stealth game that was also very funny and charming. Tactical Breach Wizards has a similar sense of humour, with funny lines and an actually really well-done blending of traditional standard 'Western' fantasy with modern day and specifically spec-ops military aesthetic in a way that stays funny and odd. I'm also actually hooked by its story setup, of a kidnapped Navy ops time wizard seemingly turning bad and working for a dodgy powerful PMC. One to watch, for sure.
Other Highlights
Akimbot
Release: August 29th 2024
Evil Raptor hail from France.
This one I want to highlight because of what it is: we have now an independent take on Ratchet & Clank's style of gameplay, of all things! And a decent one with its own (slightly odd but fine) twists! And I don't think the devs would object to this comparison when they made sure to give their robot little ear flaps to make sure he had a little visual connection! Akimbot is a pretty decent run-and-gun 3D platformer, though instead of having a sprawling arsenal of weird, wacky and destructive guns, you have four special guns and eventually four normal ones; killing foes builds the meter for the special guns which do more damage, with the standard ones doing much less but also having infinite ammo. It works as a system, not least because the energy given by enemies is generous and you can get quite a lot out of the meter: about 60% of the first boss' HP bar, for example, which is quite something.
Only other point I have to make is the boss fight has the boss flying around the arena, eating attacks while shooting AOEs, before he fucks off and spawns adds for a bit. You know, the standard Western videogame boss fight. It was just funny to see, is all.
Arranger
Developer: Furniture & Mattress LLC
Publisher: Furniture & Mattress LLC
Release: July 25th, 2024
Furniture & Mattress LLC are a fully remote studio, their team split across America and Argentina.
Arranger is a clever little puzzle game, by this demo: everything is on a grid, and when you're aligned with them and move in a direction (up/down or left/right), everything on your row/column moves with you in the direction you do. Things that hit an edge wrap over to the edge opposite them. From this simple notion comes a lot of really clever puzzles about moving very precisely and with specific intent, right from the outset; they really set these up to make sure you really grasp the mechanics and also have a good idea of how to move around without screwing yourself by wrecking a solved puzzle. It says "role-puzzling adventure" as its subtitle but I must admit I'm not entirely sure where the "role" part comes into it.
It's absolutely one to keep an eye on; there's quite a few of these world-warping grid-based puzzle games lately (such as Paper Trail, which released just one month ago!) and it's fun to see this little sub-genre of sorts spring up. One of those things where you wonder what gave them all the idea of the core concept, or if it was even any one thing to begin with.
DIGITAL EXORCIST
Developer: COOL BEANS PRODUCTIONS
Publisher: COOL BEANS PRODUCTIONS
Release: TBC
COOL BEANS PRODUCTIONS hail from somewhere in Latin America, couldn't find specifically where.
This 'demo' is a little different from the rest, as it's not technically a demo; it's like that Prologue Chapter that Kriegsfront Tactics is releasing next month, an "Episode 0" prologue chapter that serves as a demo, introduction and setup for the main game, DIGITAL EXORCIST CF1_DEFRAG (which got shown at one of the showcases this month). It's got achievements and all, although I've noticed some demos just do - The Big Catch's Tacklebox Demo does, for instance. As for how it caught my eye, well, look at it. Taking inspiration for its UI and gameplay style from Hideo Kojima's SNATCHER in particular (though the Steam page also cites Policenauts, and Suda51's The Silver Case), DIGITAL EXORCIST is an adventure game that's similarly very straightforward with what you can or can't do, and like SNATCHER in particular is so linear that it's almost a visual novel rather than an adventure game. Simplistic as it is, it is a very distinctive style and I think it works quite well.
DIGITAL EXORCIST has a very interesting setting - it's a jokey Japanamerica backdrop (akin to the Ace Attorney localisations, which insist they're in America even as you go to distinctly Japanese temples and are assisted by a distinctly Japanese shrine maiden) which serves as a stage for a firm halfway mix of Shin Megami Tensei and Digimon: demons exist, they appear and hunt and kill people and are reachable and fightable by special exorcists using body-mounted (visor-and-gloves) special magic computers, paired with some kind of assistant spirit/demon creature. Your character, a suspended agent of a government exorcism agency, is tagged along by the Digimon-looking assistant creature that serves as a partner robot in the vein of Metal from SNATCHER (only it's a slightly ominous monotone robot-like thing, and not a little nerd), it's all very compelling and interesting, and when the story isn't threading into demon horror it has a lot of fun jokes and interesting world details to dispense (from Sawyer, the agent, ranting about the sanctity of rice in the way a stereotypical American would rant about the sanctity of steak or burgers, to going into all the tools and methods of demon exorcism, drawn from basically every other religion and culture but particularly Chinese and Japanese ones).
On the flipside, it does stagger into some cornball and bad jokes, too. Meme references ("Despite your directions"), cornball 4chan/SA/KF type posts on a forum, and when Sawyer first freaks out at finding a body, an achievement inexplicably called "YIIKING OUT" with a sprite copy of a pose from that game pops. Not to my taste, I must say, meme references always date badly, YIIK shouldn't be considered in any form at this point and even while individual 'posts' on the forum may be accurate enough to /x/ posts or other styles of forum post, like most attempts at that it lacks the "je ne sais quos" that makes it seem actually natural. Still, most of the rest of it is good. I'm compelled enough by DIGITAL EXORCIST's world, its fucking bangin' soundtrack and its great art to come back for CF1_DEFRAG. I just hope the devs control themselves a bit more.
There's a particular way that SNATCHER's presentation (certainly on Mega CD/PS1, at least) actually really emphasised environmental changes with its otherwise minimalist UI: like here, half the screen is your view of the current room or sight and the other half is a black void where menus appear, and menus are just lists of text with no images or even decoration. This keeps your focus on the picture, and thus your environment, and SNATCHER used changes to that environment to really great effect. Coming back to find things moved, doors opened or things disturbed actually made it quite a thriller at points, backed up by its excellent sound cues and fucking 11/10 soundtrack. Coming into a room and seeing something prominent, like a SNATCHER corpse, just being gone and right as a little shock cue plays, and then The Pleasure of Tension kicks in immediately - that makes the hairs stand on end, it's fucking peak. In that way, SNATCHER is truly one of the older 'ADV'/visual novel games.
DIGITAL EXORCIST CASE_(0) has a moment like that, and it fucking nails it. It got me on end, waiting for the tension to break and The Thing to happen. If the devs can keep hitting that level, CF1_DEFRAG is going to be a fucking treat.
Genokids
Developer: Nukefist
Publisher: Nukefist
Release: TBC
Nukefist hail from Spain.
Technical action games are pretty hard to get right, I find, and despite how ominous that is to open with, Genokids is actually pretty on track, so don't worry there. I bring it up because it surprises me how much it does get right, though it isn't entirely there. For example, some enemies, particularly the flying bastards that drift away and shoot you from offscreen from across the room take just too many hits to feel good. On the flipside, Genokids mostly has a really good sense of speed, in movement, in its parkour platforming and in its blue character. That's its central mechanic, as it were; you have four characters (two in the demo) who each have an attack string and a launcher, some moves by moving the stick while attacking and then a set of specials, with each covering a different 'role' or type of play. I didn't catch anyone's names so we'll go with Blue and Red; Blue is the fast one who doesn't hit as hard (she's also Vergil, she shoots the blue projectile swords and everything when her Devil Trigger is on), Red is the super slow heavy hitter, and from the trailer Yellow has a hammer and seems to focus on hitting many enemies at once, and Green is the projectile user (would've been nice to have!).
In practice, Red felt like total shit, he's just too slow to do anything but basic attacks and got hit out of every one of his specials when I tried them. Blue ran rings around him for movement, attacks, range and effective, useful specials with utility, to the point that if you play this demo (if it's still around at the time of posting) I'd just say to stick with Blue for the whole thing. The party shares a health bar and despite there being a mechanic where you can swap characters while your current one is being knocked back/is in hitstun, there's not much purpose or utility to actually doing it. The game is fast, you aren't stunned for long enough for swapping to matter, and the demo boss is a really fast speedster that uses projectiles and sets up big damaging orbs, there's extremely little reason to ever bother with Red.
I have some issues with its controls, namely block and dodge are on the same button, determined by if you're still moving or not when you hit it, and that just sucks. What's everyone's problem with blocking, man? It's all perfect parries and evasion in all of these fucking things, no-one's ever as satisfying as Demon's Souls/Dark Souls 1 or Nioh where your block matters super hard, or Metal Gear Rising where your parry is a well-timed block and a mis-timed parry is just a block, no catches or drawbacks. "Well, it's harder to perfect parry/time dodges", sure, but also everyone's doing that please do something else, one of you, please. All my examples there are 10+ years old for fuck's sake! Sure, blocking is super hard in Devil May Cry, Royal Guard is very costly if you aren't perfect, but also your fucking jump has i-frames so it's fine! Just jump!
Genokids having a dedicated launcher button sounds fine but it's basically a two-use thing; you hit it to launch an enemy, jump and then hit the attack button til your string ends and then hit launcher again to spike them into the dirt. There's not really any more nuance to it, which makes me wonder the purpose of giving it a dedicated button instead of just making it a button+stick combo like DMC or something. Maybe it matters more on Yellow and Green?
I've been a bit harsh on Genokids but it is genuinely one of the better indie technical action attempts I've played. It controls great and it is very responsive, and performance is on point so it beats the shit out of many others on that alone. Red might suck but Blue feels perfectly fine, she could carry the game with a bigger moveset honestly. I'm looking forward to seeing it come along, it should be a fun laugh, my bitching aside.
Hookah Haze
Developer: ACQUIRE Corp
Publisher: Aniplex Inc
Release: July 11th 2024
ACQUIRE Corp hail from Japan.
Hookah Haze is a visual novel with a very obvious and specific core inspiration, with its sort-of PC-98 sprite art aesthetics and its neon cyber-future bar aesthetic going on. I'm aware I often make comparisons, perhaps too many, when going through demos but also a lot of the games I end up interested in tend to wear their inspiration on their sleeves, or just openly tell you their names on their Steam pages (it's pretty difficult not to bring up FromSoft's Souls games if I were to write about Enotria: The Last Song, for example, what with it calling itself a "Soulslike" on its page). In this case, Hookah Haze's obvious inspiration is the immaculate VA-11 HALL-A, the cyberpunk bartending PC-98 aesthetic-clad visual novel of yore, and one of my favourite games of all time.
Hookah Haze is being a bit daring to try and follow in those footsteps, but it's far from the first (as much as some may not want to admit it, all those barista coffee-serving games are just ripping VA-11's shit wholesale, but without the excellent music or amazing visuals or good writing or...). It acquits itself better than others, having an actually pretty good OST and doing a real good job with its sprites, animations and aesthetic - the UI having controllable neon lights, a view of the fish tank on one side and the rainy Tokyo streets on the other, that's real vibes right there. Partway through each interaction you have a meticulous process of adjusting the hookah for the customer, watching your character clear the pipe before you set the coals in it. If that end of it has any aesthetic interest to you, Hookah Haze serves decently, I think, the way VA-11 did for mixing drinks.
I don't want to be too mean to Hookah Haze, as I liked it well enough, it seems like a basic charming little visual novel, but it compares unfavourably to its inspiration in the worst area: writing. The writing of VA-11, its cast and its protagonist are its strongest parts, Jill is a fucking fantastic character unto herself and the staff and regulars of the titular bar are all delights in their own ways. Hookah Haze's demo only has two in-game days, and they're likely early ones too, but the scenes are not overly long and don't really get anywhere or set up too much meaningful. Sure, one character works a lot and another is getting a concert for her idol debut, those could go somewhere and I can see how they'd evolve, but they don't land a hook quite like VA-11 does. It's not that they're bad, just that they're quite basic from this end. This is also the trouble of doing a demo, admittedly, for a visual novel; it's basically some slices of a first chapter and trying to extrapolate from there, which is hard for anyone to do.
Hookah Haze's writing might not be up to the snuff it takes after, but it still seems cute and charming enough - I found some lines funny and I am quite taken with the character designs at least. I'm likely going to pick it up at some point. I do think it has incredible vibes and gets a good bit right, and I don't want to state declaratively that its characters and writing are lacking when there's simply not enough in the demo to truly judge by. It just doesn't stack to its inspiration, but that isn't a condemnation as very little does!
Mech Builder
Developer: Don Pachi
Publisher: Don Pachi
Release: TBC
I couldn't find where the dev hails from, for this one.
This is a really cool idea I'm actually surprised I haven't heard of anyone doing before: model kits as a jigsaw game, because they're really not far off. It's an inspired idea and Mech Builder delivers on it very well. The interface is nice and neat, you get to do all the engaging little work like snipping all the plastic prongs off, you have to apply decals to the right spots and snap and click everything together per the instruction sheets, it's really damn cool. It's a great idea for a puzzle game, and all the mech and figure designs are pretty great, too. All originals drawing from toys and model kits that exist, to my knowledge of AmiAmi's daily releases, and they all look quite good. The variety in models is also a great idea, both from the puzzle perspective but also the aesthetic one. Good shit, it's the only way I'll really engage with model kits because I am too cack-handed to do the real thing with any sort of worthwhile result.
Mushroom Musume
Developer: Mortally Moonstruck Games
Publisher: Mortally Moonstruck Games
Release: Q4 2024
Mortally Moonstruck Games hail from the Pacific Northwest, which is mostly America but also part of Canada, so one of the two.
Mushroom Musume is a visual novel/adventure game about raising a mushroom daughter, and then playing her life for a bit to see what antics she gets up to. The demo is rather trunccated, with the end of it including words from the dev about planned minigames, mechanics for between playthroughs for unlocking new possible forms and appearances, more events and an overarching plot to follow. As a taster this is neat enough; you make a series of decisions that change what species of mushroom your daughter becomes (changing the colour of the UI to match her, even, which is cute) and what her traits are (I may have fucked up). After that, you swap to her perspective and go through a few events, from fun and innocent things to danger moments that might end with her dying, as is the case for these sorts of things - there's 30+ endings and a run took like 20 minutes, so even this demo could be a laugh for a while by itself.
It's very charming and I'm fond of its art and writing, but there is one decision I question: dice rolls. When you make choices, some of them also include a surprise dice roll that decides if your mushroom daughter succeeds or fails. It's a way to give variety to playthroughs and branch them more, sure, but also it's basically a coinflip if your choice matters or not as a result. It's just annoying that what seems like a fun or sound decision will randomly not be - your daughter has a host of stats and I'm not sure if any of them actually matter for anything in this demo, as it's not clear if they even matter for the dice rolls. More info about which stats control them, if any, would be good, as would be an option after a run goes down a branch to be able to pick your success/fail instead of fishing for it.
A very charming little game, I look forward to it. Also, curiously, it's a game that claims Xbox controller support on its page but doesn't seem to actually have it; it did, however, work perfectly fine with the Dualsense. I sense the beginnings of a sea change in PC controllers.
Touhou Gensou Mahjong
Developer: D.N.A. Softwares
Publisher: Mediascape Co. Ltd
Release: 2024
D.N.A. Softwares hail from Japan.
A game so adorably originally for the Switch that its icon for the online mode in the menu is still a Switch. Touhou Gensou Mahjong is a Japanese/riichi mahjong simulator but your selectable characters have special abilities that multiply scores, lock enemy hands, prevent tile theft and so on. It works a lot better than it may seem, and most importantly the game moves at a very brisk pace with cleanly modelled tiles, a nice clear UI and pleasant Touhou music remixes. The character art is done by a range of illustrators, some I recognise the styles and names of, which is a treat to see. The way your discarded tiles slide into your discard lineup and slightly mis-align as if just placed there naturally is a real nice touch; aesthetic matters a lot for these things, and if you don't think so, I invite you to play the mahjong in Final Fantasy XIV and then repent. Speed also matters, and if you disagree I repeat my invitation and demand.
Touhou Gensou Mahjong does have the perennial issue of mahjong simulators where it isn't as clear about some things that it easily could be, and basically requires knowing how to play mahjong before coming in. There's some things that it would be nice for it to do, such as indicating which wind tile is which if you haven't memorised which symbol is which (and can't just read the character), or having a number indicator for the suit tiles - mainly, for the character suit, as the others easily depict their number with their images to non-Japanese/Chinese readers. In this sense, Mahjong Soul remains the best mahjong simulator and also the best game to learn riichi mahjong with, but if you know how to play, this is absolutely worth playing. It certainly kicks seven shades of shit out of FFXIV's mahjong, which I will not stop beating on!
Yars Rising
Developer: WayForward
Publisher: Atari
Release: September 10th 2024
WayForward hail from America.
Yars Rising is one of those fucking weird surprises you get every now and then: a neon cyberpunk Metroidvania that heavily bases itself around Yars' Revenge, a fucking Atari 2600 shooter game (the publisher is Atari, who aren't the actual original Atari but a new company wearing their skin and making...actually okay use of their IPs, admittedly, on the whole, unless I've missed something). It's also actually pretty good, and marks a noted step-up for WayForward in one key way: their 3D modelling and texture work has skyrocketed in quality since Advance Wars: Reboot Camp, which looked kind of plain and bad. The models in Yars Rising are really nice and smooth and detailed looking, it's wild! Their 3D is catching up to their incredible 2D work; also notably, the game just fucking runs without issue, which has been a problem for WayForward's last few releases due to their issues with Unity as an engine.
Yars takes a fair bit of its styling from the River City Girls games, such as the motion comic cutscenes (done in the same art style by the same artist/artists) and the general style and tone of the writing (mostly silly jokes and comedy), though I feel like the latter is a few grades down from RCG's. The River City Girls pair occasionally had lines that didn't work didn't hit, but Yars not only frequently is extremely cringey and bad, but there's also way, way fucking more of them as there's so much needless fucking talking and mid-gameplay commentary by the main character and the cutscenes. The RCG ones were also helped by presentation, with the characters popping out of their UI icons at the top of the screen to talk as you played with funny sprites, but in Yars it's a plain text box. The voice acting and performances were also better there (for the leads, at least; a lot of the other NPCs and incidental characters were shitty reads by Youtubers, thank fucking god for the Japanese dubs being available), they're not good in Yars. The main character and her first friend are okay but the lines are garbage, and the two guys and the others are just bad. Not great when there's so fucking much of it.
The actual game is pretty good; it controls well, it looks great and it actually integrates the original Yars game as the hacking minigames used to open doors, which is really fucking cool. WayForward usually do pretty good with their platformers and Metroidvanias, and I'm pleased to say they stick the landing on that front here as well. That may feel like a pithy amount to say after complaining so long about writing and voice acting, but hey, it's good standard stuff. With the leaps in presentation and performance, it may be that with their next game, WayForward will finally get good voice acting! Here's hoping; either way, I'm impressed.
Other Recommendations
Alright, everything else I liked but didn't have much to waffle about:
- Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus. You ever see Hollow Knight? Then you've seen this, but it's a Japanese mythology piece about spirits and yokai. Plays really well and looks nice.
- Cato. A very funny idea that's a simple and sweet little puzzle platformer. A pleasant afternoon when it comes out, likely.
- Constance. You ever see Hollow Knight? Then you've seen this, but you're a paint/ink themed witch doing...something. Plays well and looks nice.
- FUMES. Car combat is a genre/sub-genre that got functionally absorbed into sandbox games after the PS2, and FUMES is a lovely take on them. Nails the batshit madman Mad Max apocalypse vibes, especially with the giant monstrous cars hacked together out of shit like a shipping freighter.
- Kemono Heroes. It speaks to my soul; it looks like a game I'd stumble into as a kid, plugging floppy disks holding ROMs into the SFC Wildcard our cousins sent us. Gorgeous SNES-era aesthetics on a good action platformer.
- KILL KNIGHT. Entirely my shit aesthetically, it's an isometric score attack shooter with some interesting mechanics and is mercifully not a roguelike, thank christ.
- Kitsune Tails. A simple and cute platformer with 8-bit/NES style visuals, homaging Super Mario Bros 3 in specific. Has lesbian romance too, according to its trailer. Plays well.
- MACHI KORO With Everyone. A digital version of an existing board game, comes with the rulesets for it and its sequel MACHI KORO 2. Spend coins to get buildings to generate coins better by combining building traits, be the first to get 4 special buildings. Board game enthusiast friend recommends it too.
- Maid Café On Electric Street. Ostensibly a maid café management game but definitely more a dating sim/visual novel than it is that. Cute and charming characters and lovely spritework, a fun time.
- Payloaders Strike! A very fast FPS with interesting ideas about ammo and combos. Fun but may get repetitive without other mechanics or options.
- Scarmonde. Someone got real horny for NES-era turn-based RPG combat and godspeed to them. Plays like a pure version of the NES/FC Final Fantasies, interesting class spreads but I wonder how complex or interesting they can make boss fights without the limits of their systems.
- The Star Named Eos. Point 'n' click puzzle game reminiscient of the Room series or the Machinika Museum, only with a different framing device. Some remarkably good and devious puzzles from the outset.
- Yuri Sword Saga. Fun shmup with nice art, almost set off the roguelike alarms with the upgrades you get at intervals throughout levels but ones not selected rollover to the next interval instead of going away and it doesn't seem rnadomised. Fun time.
- Zombie Police: Christmas Dancing With Police Zombies. Hell of a fucking title; extremely budget visual novel about solving murders, sort of Ace Attorney style. Interestingly, you can make an accusation at any point once the option unlocks, long before you see all the evidence or may even have met the culprit. Potentially interesting ramifications from that. Localisation equally has no money and is either machine-translated (that is, fed through Google Translate or DeepL) or done by someone at the company themselves who is not fluent in English, but it has a charm all the same.
Trends And Other Things
Just some notes and topics I wish to go over before closing.
All of the games on my slate that supported controllers (or at least nominally did, in V.A. Proxy's case) supported Dualshock/Dualsense (PS4/PS5) controllers, and at least some only supported that, no Xbox support (Kitsune Tails, Mushroom Musume, Somnabuster). Can always be a coincidence, of course, but it speaks to me of a potential sea change in PC controller usage ever since Sony made their own PC drivers and embraced PC support. In a way it makes sense; Xbox sales are dead on the floor and have been for years, the PS4 was immensely successful and the PS5 is farting along as the default non-PC option for AAA game players, so there's just more Dualshocks and Dualsenses floating around. Some (me) would also argue that they're just better controllers, which may be a part of it, but mainly I'm surprised at how bad Microsoft has fucked things up.
A stunning amount of the games I played, at least a good dozen or more, were made on Unity. You can't easily just jump engines and learning a new one isn't easy, but it's somewhat disheartening; how many of them may be screwed when Unity's executives and shareholders go rabid again and attempt to extort everyone in a blind rage? Remember, if you're considering making a game yourself: anything but Unity! They can't be trusted after that shit.
The wave of farming sims from the last few years of Wholesome Directs and Nintendo Directs has passed as they've all released now. The new trend in its place seems to be lots of small business owner sims, and quite a few of them give off "iffy" vibes, but maybe I'm just a cynic. I dunno, something about trying to gussy up running a bookshop by making it a Cosy And Wholesome Book Wagon, or the multiple games by non-Japanese studios about running specifically Japanese businesses, it carries a whiff of gentrification, almost, of making things "trendy" and encouraging gits to hop on. Perhaps I'm a curmudgeon.
This is one I wrote about on my tumblr earlier in the month; it's becoming a concerning trend, filtering down from publishers no doubt, for indie games to lean heavily on trailers animated by an animation studio or crew (or lone animator) in place of actually showing their game. Often they make the animated trailer the first thing the player sees, which sets them up for annoying, upsetting or frustrating a potentially interested audience if the contrast between the animation and the game is too great. The example I leant on was Tenjutsu, a roguelike shown during Devolver Digital's show, but it was far from the only offender, though debatably the most extreme. It feels like an extension of the horrid tendency, alive and well at Microsoft's showcase this year, to show trailers that are purely CGI phantoms, no trace of the actual game at all, effectively showing nothing of worth beyond a name and whatever concept the animation delivers. The worst example there was the Gears of War prequel, whose trailer was not only entirely CGI, but wasn't even done in-house. It's a bad habit, and while I can't deny that the idea of having a well-animated video of something I made is deeply enticing as an idea, the game comes first and before all else. Release that separately if you want it so bad, and certainly don't show it at a big showcase, as it may distort your game's reputation in the audience's mind. Tenjutsu may well make it out okay, but I wouldn't be surprised to later learn it didn't recover from the discord of that trailer.
Speaking of Tenjutsu, there's been a fresh bit of kerfuffle in the discourse about roguelikes, and also Metroidvanias and horror games, and how they seem omnipresent among indie games, making up the bulk of releases. Roguelikes in particular get ire because their sheer numbers have never really dropped, they've been extremely common and I'd argue dominant among independent developers for years and years. There are reasons why (it's a popular genre, generates replayability and also it's much cheaper and easier than making fully designed, handcrafted content). Tenjutsu's trailer debacle particularly sparked a lot of frustration.
This has prompted pushback from people who like roguelikes, of course, but also people who want to defend indie games broadly or champion the ones that prove the stereotype wrong, like this thread on Twitter. Now, it's a good thread, there are some good picks in there...but also halfway down is Mad Mullet Jack, which is a roguelike. It just doesn't use the tag or the word in its Steam description, but if you read what it says, watch footage or play it, you'll see its randomised level progression and powerup dispensation immediately and realise the truth. But, also, I'm sorry, but I must politely insist that if you concur that roguelikes aren't over-represented and entirely too common, shove it up your hole.
I wrote down the name of every single roguelike I came across while compiling the demo list for this Steam Next Fest. I kept going until I felt sure I had a good survey of games I would be interested in, and while I was there, I decided also to track roguelikes specifically, with that thread and surrounding debate in mind. Mark the number: for the 50 or so demos I came out with, Steam showed me 137 roguelikes. Roguelikes here meaning games that used the word in their description, or used a roguelike or roguelite tag in their tags - you might suggest including roguelites is unfair, but I tell you that if I don't like chocolate (and I don't!), handing something to me and going "it's only half chocolate" still means it's got chocolate in it.
A few games in I note where one of Steam's recommendation boxes started, specifically this one:
Note that 19 games in this box were roguelikes. This box had 21 games (the last section had just one game, as sometimes happens). Might I be so bold as to suggest that if I, someone who doesn't like roguelikes and does like shmups and bullet hell games, gets handed a platter of those and 19 of 21 are roguelikes, it wouldn't be unfair for me to think there are too many fucking roguelikes releasing all the time, and that they are akin to a fucking plague? That perhaps this demonstrably populous genre is overrepresented, if not in actual volume (though it demonstrably is!), then certainly in its media presence and by algorithms?
It's a confluence of issues, sure; for example, one not often mentioned is that the people who run the E3 season stream showcases often have really pablum or actively terrible taste or at least 'taste-making' skills, going back to the same few wells and limiting what gets shown and thus what is perceived to exist. But to be frank I don't really want to hear it from anyone that there aren't too goddamn many of these things, that they aren't akin to a fucking plague and that no-one should be exhausted with them, and that it's unfair to dismiss games for being them when so many fucking games are these things these days. Until you can quantifiably prove otherwise (and also fix the issue of bad lineup picks at these showcases), you can't give anyone shit for being sick of them.
And that is, finally, a wrap. At the time of writing it is now the Thursday after the Steam Next Fest. Life interferes often so writing this took longer than I hoped, even with the concession to not waffling even token words about every last thing I tried and sticking just to the ones I felt deserved the most attention.
The Steam Next Fest remains an excellent initiative and I think it's safe to say from its continued run for years now that it must be quite successful. For all I whinge about roguelikes, indie games are an important thing these days with the grand dying of the established Western (that is, North American and Western European) AAA games industry. Fantastic, incredible art is being made all the time, you just have to hunt it out for yourself, one way or another.
The industry is in for turbulent but interesting times. In addition to Japanese studios becoming resurgent anew these past few years, Chinese and Korean studios are on the rise, the fruits of the Playstation China Hero Project and changing legislation, as well the great influx of gacha wealth, building sprawling studios out of independent outfits swiftly. The Latin American showcase at Summer Games Fest this year was one of the stronger showings, with many incredibly sick looking games coming from all over the place there such as ABYSS X ZERO and Mariachi Legends. Here in Europe, Finland has become something of the new centre of top-tier games, bringing us the wonders of ULTRAKILL, Fear & Hunger and Alan Wake 2 in recent times, as central and Eastern Europe get their turn in the spotlight, as it were. Elsewhere, Sony has started a Playstation India Hero Project initiative, a repeat of its Chinese efforts, which effectively helped kickstart and build the foundations for a local game development industry out of the existing scenes. We are going to see such varied and diverse wonders in the coming years, which is something to hold onto as every day brings news of yet more job cuts by Western studios as their executives slash and burn to keep their own wallets fat.
Keep those who lost their jobs in your hearts, but take heart in the fact that videogames as art stride on despite corporations' best efforts to ruin it.
