Steam next fest is coming to a close, so here's a roundup of every demo I've played but haven't reviewed previously. ⊕Table of Contents:
- Disaster Arms - Impact Project B.A.H.N.
- Blast Rush LS
- One Turn Kill
- Chrono Gear: Warden of Time
- POSSESSOR(S)
- Kaizen: A Factory Story
- Super 10 Pin
- Occlude
- Touhou ~ Dreams of a Sunflower
- Adventure of Samsara
- Gurei

Disaster Arms - Impact Project B.A.H.N. 🔗

This is Alien Soldier,Are you annoyed by my tendency to describe games in terms of other games? I'm of the belief that genres are for the most part a relatively bad way to give someone meaningful information about what it's actually like to play a game—calling something an "RPG" could mean dozens of completely different methods of interaction. Given that most games trace a lot of their mechanics pretty directly to another, I think a sort of genealogical approach is more helpful, although it requires familiarity with what's being referred to.

In this case specifically though, Disaster Arms really is hard copying Alien Soldier. I was going to link to the steam page of Alien Soldier here which was part of the SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics collection, but it appears to have been de-listed. I encourage you to find alternative ways to play this classic game. full stop. What that means is that it's a 2D run-and-gun action game which is basically a boss rush start to finish, with very brief levels between bosses. You switch between different shot types depending on the situation, switch gravity to cling to ceilings, and dodge and sort-of-parry enemy bullets to proceed. I expect that most people have not played Alien Soldier, but I hope you can trust me when I say that it's an excellent (if brutally hard) 2D action game, and to the extent that Disaster Arms blatantly copies it, it is better for it.

If you're the kind of person that's allergic to playing "old games" then Disaster Arms might be a chance for you to experience a great 2D action game. If you've already played Alien Soldier or it also looks interesting to you then hey, two cakes.

Blast Rush LS 🔗

What if you took a shmup and removed any focus on shooting or dodging bullet patterns, and just had bombs? Also remove levels, you only play for two minutes at a time?In fairness, this might not be true in the full game. The Steam page mentions multiple different levels, but this was unavailable in the demo. Well, turns out it would be really uninteresting. Skip this one.

One Turn Kill 🔗

The astoundingly rare non-roguelike deckbuilder card game. In One Turn Kill you're playing attack cards to deplete your opponent's health bar in—you guessed it—only one turn, or you lose. Rather than relying on some resource like action points, in One Turn Kill your resource is the number of cards in your deck: each time you play a card it draws you more, and you instantly lose when you've decked yourself out.You also lose if you've left yourself without the ability to draw any new cards, i.e. you only have 0 cost cards in your hand. Elements of strategy are introduced in cards that shuffle other cards back into your deck, various synergies with discarding and cost-discounting other cards, and special abilities that you'll pick up between battles. Lest you think this is purely a game of solitaire against an increasing health bar, some enemies introduce little twists like requiring you to deal a certain amount of damage within a real time limit or instantly lose, necessitating you to think fast.

One Turn Kill I found actually fairly challening: I didn't even fully beat every encounter contained within the demo. Failing a run sends you back to the start, where you have the opportunity to tune your deck with any new cards you may have gained, which will surely be necessary: given the inherent limit of the number of cards you can play before losing, I'm not actually sure that the deck I built was theoretically capable of winning some later encounters. I downloaded this demo blind, but it strongly impressed me—I recommend you give it a try if it sounds at all interesting.

Chrono Gear: Warden of Time 🔗

This is a vtuber fangame, which it took me a little bit to realize. I'm always impressed by the amount of effort put into vtuber fangames: Idol Showdown—another Hololive fangame—released a few years back and seemed actually incredibly polished and well-made, which is no easy feat for a fighting game. I'd say that Chrono Gear has a similar level of polish.

It's a 2D action platformer where you hack, slash and dash your way through levels that seemed vaguely reminiscent of Sonic zones, with lots of verticality, multiple paths, and occasional stage elements like giant wheels that you can take a ride on. Along the way you'll be fighting random enemies that I'm pretty sure are vtuber memes or in-jokes, and encountering all of the lovely Hololive ladies themselves in the form of boss fights or allies. There are some time control elements in that you can slow down an area around you or speed yourself up, something which occasionally interacts with level objects, similar to but not on the same level as Touhou Luna Nights. Vtubers aren't really my thing so I don't think I'll be picking this up, but Chrono Gear is another impressively well crafted fan-game.There's even a fully 2D animated opening to the game—I'm not sure whether or not it was made specifically for Chrono Gear, but I suspect that it was. Vtuber fans truly are built different.

Possessor(s) 🔗

When your city gets invaded by demons and your legs cut off, you'll have to partner with a demon to escape the ruined city and make it back to your family in this well-animated 2D metroidvania.

If you check the steam reviews for the demo, you'll see a lot of negative reviews talking about the clunky movement. They're not wrong—the movement is decently clunky, but personally that's something that I'm able to look past. Although you will be doing a lot of platforming in POSSESSOR(S), it's not a game about the platforming. There's a lot going on here: great art direction, music, and character design. The story didn't grip me, but neither did it waste my time, which I have a lot of respect for. This is from the developers of Hyper Light Drifter and Solar Ash, both of which were pretty well received.I didn't really care for Solar Ash, personally.

I didn't love the demo, but it was undeniably pretty well made, so I guess my point here is that if the only thing you're put off by here is the negative reviews, I don't think you should let them stop you from checking it out.

Kaizen: A Factory Story 🔗

As a lover of the Zachtronics games, this was a big letdown. Despite clearly copying the Zachtronics formula, mechanics from Opus Magnum and the vague setting of SHENZHEN I/O, Kaizen seems to have learned all of the wrong lessons. ⊕

Every single one of the puzzles in the demo is far, far too easy, with no room for the kind of problem solving or variation in solutions that people actually play Zachtronics games for. Pictured to the right are two different solutions for the very first puzzle in Opus Magnum:

Even if you've never played Opus Magnum and barely understand what you're even looking at, surely you see the entirely different approaches. Notice how both are optimized for different metrics? Again, this is the depth of variation in problem solving within the very first puzzle: there is no excuse for Kaizen to not have a puzzle even approaching this level of depth within its entire demo. Every puzzle in Kaizen has its solution histograms as a single bar, as there is one and only one clearly correct and optimal way to create the final product. The beauty of Zachtronics games is not that they are puzzles with one single solution to be found, but problems with multiple different (and varyingly effective) ways to approach a solution.

Another lesson not learned from Zachtronics is regarding the story. In SHENZHEN I/O (which Kaizen most resembles in terms of story), you get little snippets of plot from quick little emails before and after solving a puzzle, from the technical documents necessary to solve some of the puzzles, and in some cases you get light worldbuilding elements from what you're actually constructing: designing a microcontroller for a window that automatically opens and closes depending on the level of dangerous smog outside tells you a lot about the world you're in without any clunky or hamfisted dialogue. In contrast, Kaizen spends far too much time on story sequences and dialogue that is unsubtle and does not establish any kind of interesting atmosphere or mood.

It takes effort for me to not be interested in a Zachtronics-style game, but Kaizen seems to have actually managed it. If there is anything close to an interesting game here, none of it was represented within the demo.

Super 10 Pin 🔗

This was a real personal letdown for me. As a huge fan of developer Modus Interactive's previous game Knight's Try, I was looking forward to this. Unfortunately I have nothing but negative things to say about it. It's a retro-styled bowling game where you can slightly influence the motion of your ball after its initial impulse, with spinsNo pun intended. on the format like special bowling ball power-ups you can collect like a bomb ball or a boost ball, and played on stages with various hazards and atypical lanes.

I found the abilities mostly pointless and the ball difficult to control in motion—my most successful strategy was getting a good initial angle and not trying to influence the bowling ball afterwards at all, which is really not an interesting way to play a game. Frankly, everything felt clunky. I don't think at any point I was really enjoying myself. I'm not the kind of person who would tend to get a bowling game in the first place, but I saw a lot of great design in the developer's previous game Knight's Try, and I was hoping that I would see some of that same vision here.

Occlude 🔗

Occlude is a variant solitaire gameSimilar to the games within the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection. containing various hidden rules you can only determine through experimentation, and with occult theming.

Not a lot to say here—the solitaire itself is fun enough, the theming creates a great atmosphere. I didn't play enough to really dig into any of the hidden rules, but this was already a game I expected to at least look into when it came out anyways. I think you already know if this kind of game is the thing for you or not. If "variant solitaire", "hidden information" or "rule discovery" sound like the kind of things that appeal to you, consider this an invitation to check it out.

Touhou ~ Dreams of a Sunflower 🔗

Touhou ~ Dreams of a Sunflower describes itself as "Touhou meets Dark Souls", which is more or less pretty accurate. It's charmingly very jank, and throws a lot of system mechanics at you pretty fast.

The shoot-em-up or bullet hell genre is almost universally restricted to two dimensions, for good reason. It's just not easy to dodge bullet patterns in an interesting way in a fully 3D environment in the same way you can in 2D. Among other reasons for why that is, it's just not easy to even visually understand 3D bullet patterns, much less dodge them. The 2D playing field of a traditional shmup provides a complete overview of the experience, whereas 3D games have to rely on often finnicky camera systems, not something you want to be devoting mental energy to when you're trying to dodge something like this. Dreams of a Sunflower here gets around most of that problem by leaning on the side of being a little too easy, and including a fairly generous parry option which cancels out a bullets in a small sphere.

Really, I admire the ambition on display here. This is something of a wild combinations of genres and while it is incredibly jank, I would still describe it as surprisingly playable given what I would expect, although I don't know that I would recommend that you check it out.

Adventure of Samsara 🔗

A 2D pixel art "souls-like" metroidvania with boring combat, sluggish movement, and not one single interesting or unique facet for me to expound upon here. I guess reading the Steam store page it's supposed to be connected to Adventure, for the the Atari 2600?As features prominently in Ready Player One. The game is published by Atari, but I'm not actually sure what that "connection" practically means.

Skip this one unless you really really love uninspired 2D "souls-likes".

Gurei 🔗

I was talking to someone who said that he skipped this one because it looked like a Hollow Knight clone with bad movement, which I thought was a shame. I think that there's some serious artistry on display in Gurei, and that it is much much more than anything like a Hollow Knight clone.

In the first place, Gurei is a pure boss rush game. Wander around the hub area and you can pick any one of a number of bosses to fight by entering its arena. After defeating it, you'll receive a totally unique power based on it like a shield, a dodge attack, or a bow, and from then on every other boss will be powered up. You have a limited number of lives and receive more after each boss you kill, but fall to zero and all your progress will be over.

I think the mechanics here are incredibly well designed. The continual powering up of each boss is no joke—rather than just increased health or damage dealt, the bosses receive entirely new moves and phases, meaning there's real strategy as to what order you want to tackle each of them in.

The art direction is great, the minimal dialogue presentation is great, the mechanics seem thoughtful, the boss fights seem tightly designed. I'm not sure I would have heard about Gurei had I not dug through the Next Fest demos, but I think it's a certain buy for me when the full game does end up releasing.