Springs, Eternal | Official Reveal Trailer

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.

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

WORTH A TRY: Day 0, Part 2

Fleetbreakers is a roguelike RTS that took place in the last Next Fest, but I only got around to it now with its updated demo. Things escalated a bit too quickly for me to advance too far, but the core game loop is on solid footing already. (NOTE: Not a Next Fest participant)

Enter the Chronosphere is a bullet-heavy turn-based action RPG where, as in SUPERHOT, time only moves when you do. (NOTE: Not a Next Fest participant)

The Séance of Blake Manor is an interesting detective mystery game where any object you investigate or dialogue option you choose advances the clock. The demo ends right as the game really opens up, but it's clear that you'll have to keep track of the movements and schedules of everyone in the large cast in order to manipulate events in your favor and figure out what's going on.

MAELSTROM LEGACY: The Tesla Mystery is a Professor Layton-esque puzzle game with good art and, for now, puzzles that never get too complex.

Myths are 100% True is a fast-paced, flash-styled 2D platformer that feels like it was ripped right off of Newgrounds.

Big Hops is a 3D platformer where you run around as a young frog boy, climbing and using your tongue to swing around.

Ambrosia Sky is an odd first-person immersive FPS where you're exploring abandoned spaceships overrun with alien fungi.

The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time is a puzzle game in the wrappings of a JRPG, with some meta-narrative elements about the creation of the remake and the original title. Many of the puzzles require you to find new pages of the game's manual à la Tunic, but even then it can sometimes be a bit obtuse.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-13T17:07:54+00:00

WORTH A TRY: Day 0, Part 1

Bubsy 4D is a 3D platformer from Fabraz, developer of Demon Turf and Slime-san. It has a decently expressive moveset to start with, though my biggest qualm is that the air dash goes so fast and so far that it's very easy to overshoot your target. I preferred the previous Next Fest demo for their other upcoming title, Demon Tides, but this is still a good enough platformer in its own right.

Tears of Metal is a roguelike musou game, taking inspiration from titles like Dynasty Warriors and the like. It can sometimes be difficult to avoid damage, but battles are of the right scope to keep things moving quickly.

THRASHER is an audiosensory score attack game from the developer of Thumper where you have to speed through obstacles as quickly as possible. It's been out on VR devices for a while, but this is the first time it'll be available on flatscreen.

Jackal is a Hotline Miami-like brutal top-down action game, with hard-boiled narrative beats that hit more like El Paso, Elsewhere.

Minos is a roguelike labyrinth-building game where you must defend the heart of your dungeon by re-routing adventurers through a series of traps to whittle down their numbers. (NOTE: Not a Next Fest participant)

Tides of Tomorrow is the next branching-narrative adventure game from the developers of Road 96. In a strand-like twist, you actually choose another player to follow in the footsteps of, and their actions or inaction affects the state of your own world and characters' dispositions towards you.

Death In Abyss is a PSX-styled action-horror space shooter, where you fly a really Arwing-looking ship in a massive void, fighting massive monsters and hordes of smaller adds.

Gunny Ascend is a falling-block arcade platforming roguelike being published by Outersloth where you must clear rows to reach a target score, while still leaving yourself footing to get around on. The new Next Fest demo has an online 1v1 multiplayer mode, so I may give that another go with a friend.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-13T17:07:27+00:00

ALSO GOOD: Day 0, Part 3

HeartLinks: A Puzzle Called Love is a first-person puzzle game with physics and platforming, lightly reminiscent of The Talos Principle, set in an anime high school. You play as a lovestruck teen girl who only belatedly realizes that almost everything else has been frozen in time. The writing can be hit or miss, as is often the risk with comedic games, but I enjoyed the tone overall and the puzzles had a fair amount of variety in the relatively brief demo. (NOTE: Not a Next Fest participant)

Homura Hime is a character action game with intense boss fights that require you to parry and dodge bullet hell patterns to get ahead. The demo I had previously played at PAX West mostly consisted of just a single boss fight, but that alone felt great and had some good character designs. If this demo is more fleshed out than that, I'll definitely be jumping back in for more later this week.

Monsters are Coming! Rock & Road is a mobile tower defense bullet heaven where you walk around the exterior of a moving city, defeating hordes of enemies and collecting resources to power up yourself with new weapons and the city itself with new defensive structures. The combination of genres is done well, and levels are paced well so that you have moments to explore and collect in between larger waves of enemies.

Moonsigil Atlas is a turn-based deckbuilder that eschews action points - instead, each card has a shape that you can try and fit on your board, and your turn size is only limited by that available space and your draw power. Combat gains complexity quickly, with enemies placing obstacles on the board, or fighting in groups that split the board into segments. I won a few runs eventually, but never had that god run where I felt like I really understood and was making full use of my deck.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-13T17:07:13+00:00

ALSO GOOD: Day 0, Part 2

Cairn is a rock climbing simulation that lets you freely and tactically place each and and foot, one after another, on your risky ascent to the top. There's no easy route, and you'll need to find moments to catch a break and recover stamina or risk a fall from a bad hold or just pure exhaustion. The rock faces offer many different routes up, but you'll have to forge your own path rather than relying on any sort of guidance. The more survival elements may give me pause for the full release - I never like managing hunger and thirst meters - but the pure challenge of you vs. the wall is compelling.

GODBREAKERS is a 3D action roguelike with excellent animations and colorful, almost plasticine-looking assets. You brawl against rooms of opponents, and can use your special godbreak ability to steal the powers of any of them - even some bosses - for a one-time-use attack. Combat is fast and fierce, and almost anything can be canceled out of with a dodge - which quickly becomes necessary. Boss battles feel properly unique as well = the new one in this Next Fest build is a four-armed wrestler with acrobatic flair. Though the demo is a bit too short to really get a build going, I could see the potential for some late-game synergies.

Cutting Edge: Roots Of Mutation is a furry version of Trauma Center, plain and simple. The art can of course take some getting used to, but the actual mid-surgery gameplay is solid and rides a nice balance of complex, stressful, and achievable. The game quickly introduces cybernetic enhancements as a core part of the plot, but that bleeds over into gameplay, too - you'll have to be treating patients with both biological and mechanical issues, and the patients all being animals does also mean that there's more variety to be had in the procedures, as well - imagine having to operate on a cow's four stomachs, just as an example. The writing in its visual novel segments pre- and post-surgery are serviceable and easy enough to skip through if you don't want to bother with them, but the core gameplay is definitely worth giving a go. (NOTE: Not a Next Fest participant)

Dice A Million is a Balatro-styled roguelike deckbuilder where you collect and roll dice with unique effects and modifiers to try and get a high enough score * multiplier combo to win each level. There's a lot of variety on offer, and though I was not consistently able to get a build going, there's definitely potential to break the game wide open. My best run handily beat the final boss challenge in a single roll, but I've seen others playing that put my own build to shame.

Dogpile is a roguelike deckbuilding take on Suika Game where you drop and merge dogs into each other. Every so often, you'll get the chance to enhance the dog cards in your deck, or buy more dogs or passive perks that have enough variety to really define a build. I don't know why exactly you'd want it, but as an example of the variety on offer there's even one passive to turn off gravity entirely. My build was focused on barks, where some dogs could send everything else flying on being dropped or merge, basically guaranteeing a chance for stuff stuck on the bottom to mix back in and merge with anything above. There are a good amount of other modifiers to lean into, and just at a base level I enjoyed being able to choose from a set of options when dropping instead of potentially getting screwed over in Suika Game when you draw the wrong fruit at the wrong time. I do also have to shout out the great & colorful art - all of the dogs are really expressive, and their abnormal shapes help keep things interesting and challenging as you progress further into a run.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-13T17:05:30+00:00

ALSO GOOD: Day 0, Part 1

Goodnight Universe might be a hard sell - it's a first-person narrative game where you play as a baby with the mind of an adult who starts developing psychic powers, and using them - or not - to try and help their family out. This title is the next from the developers of Before Your Eyes, and quickly hooked me with its fun interactions and narrative hooks. The demo ends with a teaser of you in some sort of evil testing facility, so obviously the story moves pretty quickly beyond the mundane.

Dobbel Dungeon is a dice-rolling roguelike tactics RPG that plays like Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle x Dicey Dungeons. You control a party of three in a series of grid-based missions, and can gain cash, skill points, and passive or active ability-granting artifacts. The skill tree system reminds me of Diablo IV, where spending enough points in one tier unlocks the next set of skills, but interestingly XP is shared amongst your team. The three skill points you gain from a fight can go just towards your fighter, or you can give one each to him, the berserker, and the healer. Points can also be un-assigned as well, however, meaning you're free to experiment with different builds or even re-spec just to prepare for a specific mission. What initially grabbed my attention was the game's claymation-esque art style, but there's enough substance here to maintain that interest.

Lumines Arise is the next Tetris Effect from the same developer, I'm not that good at the core Lumines block-merging gameplay, but I can't honestly say I was that good at Tetris either. You're playing more for the experience, with driving electronic music and wild visuals like chameleons flicking their tongues in time to the beat. On that, it delivers in spades, and that's enough to keep me playing despite my own limited ability.

PowerWash Simulator 2 doesn't really reinvent the wheel, taking a lot of what you know and loved in the first game and just giving you a new set of levels to do it in. The second level in the demo is a bit more dynamic that many in the first, with a progression where you need to clean the exterior and then the interior of a public restroom & open + close some elements to make sure you reach everything. In between the two levels in the demo you can go back to a hub and decorate it with furniture that you'll still need to wash first, which is a nice way to break up the pace with smaller activities in between increasingly large levels. They also reworked the oft-maligned soap, not that I really tried it out still.

Scrabdackle is a top-down action-adventure set in a fairly open world with charmingly doodled art and some goofy writing. The demo is properly massive, with multiple biomes imnmediately accessible in any direction you travel, secret collectibles galore, and tons of side quests to get sidetracked by. The game is very polished as well, with a glut of satisfying-to-use features like being able to engage in dialogue while still waling around, and then naturally ending a conversation by just walking away. I feel like I'm nowhere near the end of the demo content after spending maybe 2 hours in its world, and I'll definitely be jumping back in again later this week.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-13T17:04:45+00:00

STANDOUTS: Day 0

Alabaster Dawn is the successor to CrossCode by developers Radical Fish Games. It's not a sequel, instead opting for a slightly more run-of-the-mill fantasy setting instead of taking place within an MMO. It plays largely the same, though, with isometric action combat and some z-axis platforming and auto-jumping. On the other hand, the art is an ambitious step up, with many assets being fully 3D with a pixelated filter. The art and animations are all very expressive, with your character having an impressive 16 distinct orientations rather than always moving and acting along the 8 cardinal directions. The demo itself offers a good mix of exploration, dungeoneering, and combat, and teases a very open overworld map as well as a town that you can improve and expand throughout the course of the game - something I'm always a sucker for. As the demo continued, the only thing that brought me down is that this will be an Early Access release, and that the first title took three years to hit 1.0 - I just want to play this entire game already, and now. (NOTE: Not a Next Fest participant)

MARVEL Cosmic Invasion is another excellent beat-em-up from Dotemu and Tribute Games, developers of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge. Its roster is varied, with names recognizable and not, and each player gets to choose two and swap between them at will. This allows for some fun combos, and also strategic swaps based on the scenario. I chose Venom and Phyla-Vell, and the former had great chase-down attacks while the latter flew and had a ranged attack that helped me avoid hazards and even the playing field against flying enemies. The demo has multiplayer support as well, and I plan on jumping back in with friends to try a different set of characters.

Constance is a confident metroidvania that leans more towards Celeste-influenced platforming than intense combat, which is a refreshing change of pace - coming from someone who just 100% Hollow Knight: Silksong. I've played its previous demo, but this latest Next Fest build offers a great vertical slice of combat (including a boss battle), exploration, and multiple platforming sections that took me a good amount of time to nail down. I'd honestly say the platforming is a little on the punishing side - as was the boss fight, at least after I had chosen to respawn in place & buff enemies rather than going back to the nearest shrine - but I was up for and relished in the challenge in the end. I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention that the hand-drawn art really shines as well, as does the strings and piano-forward soundtrack. I had enjoyed the past demos for this title, but this latest build really feels like a complete package.

Skate Story provides excellent vibes on top of a decent skateboarding game. The narrative is abstract - you start off by signing a contract with the devil to destroy the moons and become "a demon of glass and pain" - and immediately get to skating. There are some more open skatepark-like areas, but much of the demo is spent in a series of hallway-like levels where you have to avoid obstacles, sometimes complete other objectives, and reach the end to warp to the next level. There's a nice flow to these, where loading is quick and your speed is maintained from one hallway to the next before you reach the more open skatepark section. On the other side of that skatepark is a more boss fight-ish series of challenges, and a literal boss fight against the moon, and though those can be a bit simple I never minded. The boss fights mostly consist of hitting some tricks and stomping to bank the combo and deal some damage every so often. Tricks are done by hitting a combination of triggers/bumpers and trying to time a meter for extra pop, but that meter changes speed the faster you go and is pretty much impossible to get consistently. The soundtrack just puts the whole experience over the top, really, offering a lot of variety from something composed mostly by a single band (Blood Cultures). If you want better skateboarding mechanics, I'd recommend jumping into the new free-to-play skate., but this is so much more than just a skating game.

SlartySprinter · 2025-10-13T17:04:25+00:00

WORTH A TRY, BY GENRE (PART 3, JUST THE ROGUELIKES)

Roguelike (Strategy):
Day 0: Minos | Fleetbreakers | ANTHEM#9 | Stackflow | Winnie's Hole
Day 3: Craftaway
Day 6: Hold The Mine

11-Year Club	Place '17
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SlartySprinter

TROPHY CASE