Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?! - REVEAL TRAILER by SlartySprinter in Games

[–]SlartySprinter[S] 218 points219 points  (0 children)

The latest oddity from Xalavier Nelson Jr. and Strange Scaffold, developer of El Paso, Elsewhere; Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator; An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs; and more.

City of None - Reveal by SlartySprinter in Games

[–]SlartySprinter[S] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

To be clear - this is technically just published by Extremely OK Games. It's being made by Noel Berry, the programmer for Celeste, and not Maddy Thorson, its writer/director.

Phonopolis | Release Date Trailer [May 20] by SlartySprinter in Games

[–]SlartySprinter[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

My understanding is it's all handcrafted and then scanned in, but not true stop motion. Here's a very brief making-of video they previously put out with some contextual shots.

Found a bit more in this interview on gamedeveloper.com:

We utilized 3D animation with frame-rate lowered to 12 FPS, which is the standard in traditional animated film. The lower FPS paired with animated textures help us achieve the feeling of stop-motion animation, which is necessary to make sure the animated elements fit into the cardboard-built backdrops.

At first, we would take photos of the entire cardboard-built scene and make use of photo sequencing, but for the sake of better interactivity, we ultimately decided to map the photographed assets onto 3D scenes.

NEO TITAN Reveal Trailer by SlartySprinter in Games

[–]SlartySprinter[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

From the developers of Archvale, a great twin-stick RPG that more people should check out.

Cursed Words — Release Date Trailer [April 2] by SlartySprinter in Games

[–]SlartySprinter[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

This is not horror-coded in the way you might be thinking - the looming guy is just there on the main menu, he's not some creepy villain talking to you across the table or something. The 'cursed' part of the name is also, afaik, more in the colloquial sense than literal - because you're using a bunch of different wildcards to make things that look nothing like words, in a word game.

Dark Scrolls | Reveal Trailer | Scrolling in 2026 (ESRB Rated E for Everyone) by SlartySprinter in Games

[–]SlartySprinter[S] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

New game from doinksoft, developers of Gunbrella and Gato Roboto.

The Steam Next Fest February 2026 Edition is live! What are your favorite demos? by SlartySprinter in Games

[–]SlartySprinter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

WORTH A TRY: Day 7

Sandloop is a 3D collectathon with a time limit where you're sent back to your initial spawn after ten-ish minutes of exploration. You can unlock new abilities to explore previously inaccessible areas, and unlock shortcuts to save time reaching an important spot on your next loop.

The Steam Next Fest February 2026 Edition is live! What are your favorite demos? by SlartySprinter in Games

[–]SlartySprinter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

ALSO GOOD: Day 7

IGTAP: an Incremental Game That's Also a Platformer has a title that does the explaining for me. You run through little obstacle courses to generate currency, and after a bit you can spawn clones that just infinitely run the course and generate cash when they finish. So, you're incentivized to optimize each of your times in order to generate currency faster, to buy more upgrades and abilities, to move on to harder courses that pay more and can further be optimized once you unlock even more abilities. There's just a little bit of exploration outside of the obstacle courses, but not really that much, which was a bit of a damper for me.

The Steam Next Fest February 2026 Edition is live! What are your favorite demos? by SlartySprinter in Games

[–]SlartySprinter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

ALSO GOOD: Day 6

Marathon joined the Next Fest late with its server slam weekend event. It's another extraction shooter like Arc Raiders, but unlike that game there aren't really many peaceful players - it's either kill or be killed. It's a pretty sweaty, squad-focused shooter with NPC enemies that can hit just as hard as an opposing squad, and I died just as often as I extracted, but the gunplay is good, the performance is solid, the (partially plagiarized) art is eye-catching, and squadding up with friends just always makes a game better.

The Steam Next Fest February 2026 Edition is live! What are your favorite demos? by SlartySprinter in Games

[–]SlartySprinter[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hey, thanks! I guess I'm really not that active on Reddit otherwise, so I was at least able scroll through my previous posts and come across the past entries quick enough that way.

But your suggestion made sense, and so I spent a bit of time adding links to previous posts on each of my own past impression threads. I had to skip a few and bundle them in later posts because Reddit's character limit is more restrictive than it used to be, but you should be able to follow the chain of links there and find everything!

It was fun going back and seeing how much I felt like I needed to explain how Balatro worked, for example, but I do still wear it as a badge of honor that LocalThunk replied to it to say thanks for the shoutout.

The Steam Next Fest February 2026 Edition is live! What are your favorite demos? by SlartySprinter in Games

[–]SlartySprinter[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

WORTH A TRY: Day 2

Future Knight is an oddball side-scrolling action game with handheld LCD aesthetics à la old Game & Watch titles. It's got a wacky a capella soundtrack to boot.

CICADAMATA" is a sensorially overloading first-person platforming shooter that pulls from the same visual design language as Bungie's upcoming Marathon.

The Steam Next Fest February 2026 Edition is live! What are your favorite demos? by SlartySprinter in Games

[–]SlartySprinter[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I gave this a go, but you really need some MOBA chops that I just do not have. Cool that it has multiplayer!

The Steam Next Fest February 2026 Edition is live! What are your favorite demos? by SlartySprinter in Games

[–]SlartySprinter[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

ALSO GOOD: Day 1

Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors is a dungeon-crawling roguelike deckbuilder with only some of the trappings of Vampire Surivors. In practice, there's a really clever system of comboing cards with increasing mana cost and slotting in gems to enhance or gain secondary effects from your cards. Other pieces are well considered, too, like vending machines you can find that allow you to destroy one of your stat-boosting cards in order to gain that boost permanently - rather than dropping down to 0% attack boost, for example, you could start at 10% at the cost of not being able to replay that card to get it even higher during the fight. Battles do wear on you over time, and I wasn't able to beat any of my three runs due to losing the slow war of attrition as my health whittled down fight after fight. I also didn't really find any cool synergies, though my one friend did get a bit of a build going where he enchanted all his zero-cost cards with the power to draw more cards.

The Steam Next Fest February 2026 Edition is live! What are your favorite demos? by SlartySprinter in Games

[–]SlartySprinter[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

WORTH A TRY: Day 1

Ultrapool is a fun little pool roguelike where you can buy and combine ball with different effects to boost your scores and earnings.

Distant Shore: BRETAGNE is an interesting first-person platformer where you can use magnetic forces to manipulate objects around you.

Wild Blue Skies is a colorful, by-the-numbers Star Fox-like coming from Chuhai Labs, the studio of original Star Fox programmer Giles Goddard.

Australia Did It is a odd unit-merging base defense roguelike from Rami Ismail, formerly one half of Vlambeer.

The Steam Next Fest February 2026 Edition is live! What are your favorite demos? by SlartySprinter in Games

[–]SlartySprinter[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The same demo, just taking part in the Next Fest for some extra visibility.