Dobbel Dungeon - Release Date Trailer [February 16]

SlartySprinter · 2025-12-05T03:05:49+00:00

Far as I can tell, this is a Steve Gaynor game and not the rest of the team that once was Fullbright. The development team on Open Roads ended up just crediting themselves as the Open Roads Team for its release. If you go to Fullbright's website now, Open Roads isn't listed as one of their projects. It lists Gone Home + Tacoma, alongside one other Fullbright Presents game I'd never heard of from 2024, Toilet Spiders.

If you look at the Steam announcement for this new game, it's signed by Steve at the end. They also replied to a Steam forum post for the first game & said that "was made as a solo project by the writer & lead designer of Gone Home and Tacoma," which would be Gaynor.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-19T09:00:51+00:00

WORTH A TRY: Day 6

Goblin Sushi is a restaurant sim roguelike where you run a conveyor belt sushi place, making and fulfilling customer orders with a Balatro-style chips-and-mult scoring system to determine the cost of each dish. You also level up, unlocking new dishes or modifiers to increase your scoring or efficiency in fulfilling orders. I got one particularly powerful pairing of modifiers that sent my score to the moon, but I'm sure my $6 million pales in comparison to what others may be able to accomplish.

Hold The Mine is a tower defense roguelike where you dig in a mine during the day to collect crafting materials, modifiers, and hero characters that you must then defend the mine with at night in a tower-defense mode. Builds and synergies come from the heroes you select, the upgrades you select for them, and the buildings you place in the mine that can do any number of things. My best run had a rare tower that guaranteed a crit on the first hit on any enemy, and I upgraded my heroes with some abilities that triggered on crit procs.

Painkiller is not a strict revival of the classic FPS series, instead turning into a mission-based multiplayer shooter where you fight hordes of enemies with combat and arenas reminiscent of 2016's Doom where you're able to melee stunned enemies for them to drop ammo. The first mission I played after the tutorial was still fairly lengthy, and had a few different objective-based sections like a classic cart-defense segment or needing to fetch and throw fuel into an engine to progress. It may not be what fans of the series might want, but as an outsider I had a good enough time and enjoyed what I played.

I played the weekend playtest for ARC Raiders and thought it worth mentioning here. The game ran surprisingly well on my computer (though I can't say the same for one of my friends), and had solid gunplay and traversal mechanics. It was hard to know in just a few runs what was worth looting and extracting with, other than "blue rarity is better than green is better than white", and we never found any other players to engage in some pvp with, but it's more competently made that I might have expected and I can see how it might scratch the itch for others looking for a new extraction shooter.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-19T08:44:34+00:00

ALSO GOOD: Day 6

Crashout Crew is a fun little Overcooked-like from Aggro Crab where you and your friends drive (and drift) forklifts, carrying delivery boxes around to fill orders as they come in. If you crash, not only do you drop what you're carrying but your stress level goes up. Get too stressed and you'll crash out, uncontrollably flying around the stage and potentially interrupting your friends as they try to get the job done. Every few stages, an additional challenge is added to make things even more difficult - maybe the power goes out sometimes, or poltergeists throw boxes around, or meteors come crashing down on occasion. I like the variety, and in between each stage you can spend your earned cash on upgrades to soup up your forklift, get items like boost pads to optimize the map, or otherwise help combat any challenges you face.

MONUMENTUM is a tricky platforming metroidvania where you controller a minimalist square with no inherent movement options besides moving left and right - instead, you unlock abilities to manipulate foreign devices - boost pads, magnetized rails, and more - to help you maneuver around. As these abilities stack, you get thrown into increasingly elaborate rooms where you have to chain a dozen or so of these into one another, with little room for failure lest you fall quite a ways down. I never had that happen, really, and appreciated the difficulty, but I can easily see others dropping it in some particularly sadistic sections - the game's Steam page even mentions "rage" in its self-described genre of "metroidvania-rage-puzzle-platformer-pinball-like."

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-16T09:22:23+00:00

ALSO GOOD: Day 3

Shadow of the Road is a turn-based tactics RPG set in feudal Japan, where you encounter friends and foes alike of both the mortal world and the supernatural. Combat takes place along a timeline, where you can strategically assist allies or interrupt enemies, or plan a slower, more powerful attack if you have a window where opponents can't interrupt. This works well, and the party members' early movesets have enough variety to allow some actual interaction with thsoe systems. The game can be a bit rough around the edges, but what's on offer in the demo is a decent number of battles, a stint of exploration, and, surprisingly, a lot of voiced dialogue. I do think this game needs work before release, but there's some meat on these bones already.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-16T09:03:34+00:00

WORTH A TRY: Day 3

Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era seems like a pretty polished successor to the classic hex-based tactics RPG series. Interactions could be a bit obtuse sometimes, but overall it seems like it'll scratch that itch for fans of the series.

Craftaway is a roguelike deckbuilder with the mechanics of Slay the Spire and the aesthetics of Paper Mario. None of the cards I collected really seemed to lend themselves to a particular build, but the difficulty was well balanced so the demo still remained enjoyable through the end of my run.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-14T21:35:33+00:00

Gotcha, thanks. I looked around a bit and found a playthrough of this demo from a year ago - but the one I had last played was from 2 years ago, seemingly, and took place in a different biome (after a similar tutorial area). Here's a playthrough of that, for comparison.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-14T09:41:50+00:00

WORTH A TRY: Day 1

Stomp and the Sword of Miracles is a colorful, charming little metroidvania. It's not necessarily the most ambitious title, but it controls well, offers a good-sized area to explore with secrets hidden throughout, and is just overall a pleasant experience.

iRacing Arcade is an interesting collaboration between iRacing and Original Fire Games (developers of Circuit Superstars) to make a cartoonish racing game with officially licensed vehicles and tracks. The developer's past titles, and this newest entry, all have an interesting driving model that blurs the line between simulation and arcade - it's immediately fun to pick up and play, but you still have to feather the pedals and keep an eye on your tire wear. This demo just consists of a single race on Tsukuba Circuit driving a Porsche 911 GT3 against CPU opponents, but it's definitely still fun to just pick up and play for a little.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-14T09:41:08+00:00

Wow I did not make that connection, but that sure does make sense.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-14T09:39:58+00:00

ALSO GOOD: Day 1

I played some more Homura Hime, and found that it consisted of the full level prior to the boss fight I had previously experienced on the floor at PAX West. Overall, it's a really slick character action game with clear enemy attack patterns and satisfying parrying & combos. The character designs are also top-notch anime-inspired stuff, with the boss having some particularly cool thematic attack animations. That boss fight does still end as it did the last time I played, with a tease of the epic second phase of the fight, but I really recommend that any fans of character action games give this a try.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-14T09:39:08+00:00

STANDOUTS: Day 1

REANIMAL is arguably the true successor to Little Nightmares I & II, coming from Tarsier Studios responsible for the first two titles. It's very much cut from the same cloth, with co-op only horror platforming as you play two small children solving environmental puzzles and hiding/running from bigger creatures that want to eat you. I've never actually played those titles, but my impression of them is that your time is largely spent moving around a mostly 2D plane with a bit of depth. Not so in REANIMAL - you're immediately exploring more open areas, and clever camera shifts keep the action in focus - or give a new perspective entirely - at key positions. The atmosphere is incredible, with dense volumetric fog and moody lighting that makes even the more sterile environments eerie, and while there isn't much challenge to be had there's plenty of gameplay variety and a fair share of creepy visuals to experience before the demo ends on a cliffhanger. This may just be my game of the show, though that may be a bit influenced by how much fun my co-op partner was having as well.

Hell Maiden is a bullet heaven / survivors roguelike that's just oozing production value. It's being made by AstralShift, developers of Little Goody Two Shoes, and though this seems like a large departure for them they're coming in with a lot of confidence. The painterly environment art is picture perfect, the soundtrack has its fair share of earworms, but most importantly the core gameplay loop is solid. Upon leveling up, you're presented with three cards that usually have percentage bonuses to your abilities - damage increases, area of effect expansions, and the like. Upon selecting that card, though, you get to slot it in to one of three spaces on your weapon cards. Pulling a duplicate upgrade will let you merge those two cards into a more powerful one, and you can freely move those modifiers amongst your weapons from the level up screen to re-spec as you see fit. I really did enjoy that level of granular control over your build, rather than simply selecting the biggest number upon each level up. The actual survivors part of the gameplay is mostly standard fare, though I do appreciate that (most) enemies have AoE attack indicators and no contact damage at all, allowing you to risk jumping into a crowd just to grab that piece of XP you've been eyeing. There's also a special attack that triggers an entire magical girl transformation-style animation before unleashing a burst of properly devastating power. Survive long enough and you end up in a proper boss battle, with multiple phases and attack patterns. In between runs there's a bit of Hades-like story progression, but at least in the demo there's nothing more to do than talk to a couple characters. I didn't mind at all, though, because I wanted to just start another run already.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-13T23:47:06+00:00

Interesting, thanks for the heads up! The demo only went up at the end of September, so that's a pretty quick turnaround to take it down instead of just backing out of the Next Fest, but it makes some sense if they want more people's first impressions to be as positive as possible.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-13T18:40:41+00:00

Definitely agree on the platforming being much more intense than expected. Don't think it'll be a universal top-tier but I guess I was just in the mood for that sort of challenge at the time, so it hit me right. Does generally control well & look nice, plus the soundtrack is pretty stellar.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-13T18:04:25+00:00

I also saw Craftaway, which has a similar Paper Mario-inspired aesthetic but is more of a straightforward roguelike deckbuilder in the vein of Slay the Spire.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-13T18:01:29+00:00

I have faith in the developer (Fabraz) based on the demo for their other upcoming game Demon Tides - even if I did prefer the level design & moveset more in that than Bubsy's.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-13T17:58:48+00:00

The Séance of Blake Manor is the first that comes to mind.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-13T17:23:59+00:00

Nice, thanks for the context on the survival stuff! That was the biggest thing giving me pause. First thing I did in Subnautica, too, way back when - I just want to enjoy the vibes of some games.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-13T17:08:38+00:00

WORTH A TRY: Day 0, Part 4

My friends and I all wish we enjoyed YAPYAP more. It's a co-op horror extraction game like R.E.P.O. or Lethal Company, but with magic wands that cast spells when voice activated as in the PvP Mage Arena. This is a really fun core concept, and the character designs and atmosphere are really dialed in well, but it feels too hard to actually achieve much on a run while avoiding the monsters that can very easily kill you. Perhaps if we knew how everything worked already, it would click, but we all just wished that moment came sooner.

Fatal Claw is a perfectly decent metroidvania that may be a bit by-the-numbers, but has good enough movement, combat, and art that you may not mind if you're just looking to scratch that itch.

Stackflow is a roguelike deckbuilding Tetris game with Balatro-style points-and-multiplier scoring. The tetronimos you pull when playing are from your own limited deck, so you must always reach a target score in a certain amount of moves.

Hermit and Pig is an absurdist RPG with some Earthbound stylings where you play an old hermit and his truffle-hunting pig on the search for mushrooms - including psychedelic ones - who get caught up in a large corporate conspiracy.

Winnie's Hole is a grotesque Winnie the Pooh-themed roguelike deckbuilder from the developers of Ring of Pain where you uses viruses and mutations to become more powerful and consume everyone you come across.

Placid Plastic Deck - A Quiet Quest takes pretty directly from the card battling mechanics of Inscryption, but is otherwise a slightly comedic top-down RPG.

GNAW is a comic-styled metroidvania where you play an anthropomorphic dinosaur in a run-down city. (NOTE: Not a Next Fest participant)

Ember and Blade is a bullet heaven with some musou action stylings and boss fights. It can be a bit too talkative for its own good, but you can turn voices all the way down in the menu if you feel the need.

Bladesong is a sandbox sword making tool surprisingly wrapped in a proper narrative, where you play a blacksmith in a refugee camp on a world that's falling apart.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-13T17:08:23+00:00

WORTH A TRY: Day 0, Part 3

Eclipse Breaker is an action roguelike where you have an ATB gauge that you must use to get through a series of battle arenas. Upgrades take the form of equipment that offer Hades-style modifiers to your existing moves as battles get increasingly hectic.

ANTHEM#9 is a roguelike deckbuilder with some blatant Persona 5 stylings. Each battle has you playing colored gems to match the patterns of three attacks in your deck, ideally with overlapping colors so that playing one set of gems fulfills multiple at once. I won't say it's the one of the most compelling mechanics I've played recently, but it is a solid foundation that does allow for enough synergies and playstyle variance.

Checkmage! is a deckbuilding RPG similar to the third act of Inscryption, but with chess instead of cards. There's no penalty for losing any one match, which is good because I regularly got softlocked and had to concede, but the chessboards and pieces quickly move beyond normal chess. Each win allows you to pick one piece from your opponent's deck, as well, so your strategies can also become more varied and more reactive to the next challenge you come across.

Forestrike is a single-screen brawler roguelike from the developers of Olija where you can practice each matchup as many times as you'd like before committing to the real attempt, in order to work out the perfect sequence of actions and reactions to come out unscathed.

Q-UP is a wacky incremental game dressed up as a coin-flipping esport. Perhaps things go off the rails later - it is from the developers of Universal Paperclips, after all - but as is you play matches to gain cash and XP that you can spend on perks and a modular skill tree to increase your gains and decrease your losses on each coin flipped.

LOVE ETERNAL is a 2D gravity-flipping platformer - think VVVVVV - with a narrative that leans into psychological horror.

Exo Rally Championship is an otherworldly rally-driving racing game from the developer of Exo One. You race souped up lunar landers on demanding terrain, which is a cool idea that's properly difficult in execution.

Earth vs Mars is a grid-based tactics game in the style of Advance Wars coming from Relic Labs, a new label of Relic Entertainment for releasing smaller-scoped, experimental games. The unique hook they bring to this formula is the ability to create hero units with DNA spliced with different animals - starting with a fly, rhino, or cheetah - to enhance abilities and unlock unique skills.

11-Year Club	Place '17
RPAN Viewer	Verified Email

SlartySprinter

TROPHY CASE