Next fest is back again, huh? Feels like the last one ended just yesterday. Let's get back into the reviews. I've gone through quite a few more demos than usual this time, so if you want to skip to ones that I feel like I can recommend mostly without qualification, click on the ones with the star (★) next to them in the table of contents. ⊕Table of Contents:
- Homura Hime
- Constance ★
- Decks of Dexterity
- Death in Abyss
- Key Fairy
- BOMCAT
- The Shadow Cosmos
- DuoBellum de Marionnette
- Lumines Arise ★
- A Fox Tale ★
- Rubinite
- Super Blowfish Castle
- Soul Dier
- Air Hares
- Jamp
- HAMSTERMIND
- It Consumes ★
- Soulfused
- The people of Sea, Sun & Salt ★
- Polyroll Pocket

Homura Hime 🔗

Starting us off we have Homura Hime, a character action game. Action games like this are in a bit of a sad state for me as an enjoyer of games like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta because it seems like the only ones still being made are irredeemable gacha trash like Zenless Zone Zero, which I have no interest in. Homura Hime certainly reminded me a lot more of the latter than the former, with anime stylings and constant interruptions from your shrine maiden companion character who I'm certain you're meant to find adorable, but whose dialogue I mostly found completely worthless and skipped.

Also mostly worthless is basically everything you do in the demo between fights, including platforming segments glued together with a context-sensitive grappling hookAre there people who still find these to represent interesting gameplay or some kind of cool feature? At least the platforming segments in Hi-Fi Rush had some timing elements to them, the ones here you could basically sleepwalk through. and boxes you can smash to pick endless amounts of useless shit up. Still, beyond all the crust, at the core of it Homura Hime actually did have enjoyable enough combat for me. It's nothing outstanding, there's the standard fare of color-coded attacks you'll need to either parry or dodge (as in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance), but there was one aspect that actually did strike me as original: occasionally an enemy will pull you into a sort of 3D bullet hell segment sort of reminiscent of Furi or the bosses in Nex Machina where you need to tightly weave back and forth between bullet patterns or occasionally jump over lasers and such. I thought this had something of a nice rhythm to it, with you wailing on a boss up close while dodging and parrying, and then having a section of more forced dodging, and I could see it being more interesting in the full game with some more complicated boss encounters.

I won't be picking up Homura Hime, but if you're more into these anime-styled action games than I am, maybe check this one out. It took me about a half hour to beat the demo, skipping basically all dialogue.

Constance 🔗 ★

A 2D metroidvania with a lot of similarities to Hollow Knight, I have nothing but positive things to say about Constance.A lot more than I would have to say about Hollow Knight itself, actually. Everything here is well put together, from the art to the movement to a large amount of meaningful quality of life features. As an example, clicking in the right stick immediately pops up the map in miniature, with the right stick itself letting you scroll around, all while still moving about in the overworld.

This might sound small, but it's just seamless, and it represents the kind of polish visible throughout the entire game. Another example would be getting a camera early on, which lets you take a screenshot, pinning that screenshot to where it was taken on the map, with the ability to keep more pictures pinned at a time being something you can find upgrades for throughout the world. Any metroidvania fan knows the pain of a game having a poorly implemented in-game map where items or important features aren't marked. Arguably keeping track of things like this in your head without any sort of map assistance is a skill the game could test you on, but in practice taking screenshots is something already natively available on basically any system people play games on.If you're going to include a map in the first place, it's already a concession against the notion of testing players on memorization. Personally, I have maybe hundreds of screenshots of La Mulana 2 in addition to pages and pages of handwritten notes, and I genuinely can't imagine someone beating the game without doing the same. My point is, if players already can and do take screenshots to make note of something, it might as well be built into the game, and the system here for doing so is brilliant.

The combat and movement feel great. You have your basic Hollow Knight slash (horizontal-only, though) and later unlock a longer-range poke which can also go up and down. That poke makes use of your stamina-like paint meter, which you also pull from to dash, either on the air or on the ground. The enemies are built nicely around your mechanics, with some enemies needing to be doused in paint from your poke before they can be hurt, and some needing to be dashed through and hit from behind. Certain environmental hazards also require you to hit them with a paint attack to dodge them, to get past them, or as part of a timed platforming challenge. I think the design space is pretty wide open, and I was impressed with what I saw in the demo, so there are sure to be even more tricks in store in the full game.

There's probably more I could talk about here (like some of the the surprisingly difficult optional platforming challenges), but I think I've said enough. I was strongly impressed by Constance having not really had any expectations, and I'm now looking forward to the full game. The demo took me about 25 minutes to beat.

Decks of Dexterity 🔗

A cross between a bullet hell and a roguelite deckbuilder, Decks of Dexterity ends up with the worst parts of both and the charm of neither. You play as a square moving around a square arena dodging other squares and picking up the correctly colored squares so that you can take your turn in the deckbuilding part of the game. I didn't find much interest from the angle of a good bullet hell—some patterns are undodgable and require you to make use of teleports (which you can get access to using your cards, when it's your turn), and none of the patterns were all that interesting. As for the cards, they basically all involve you shooting bullets back at the boss, without much variation and without the choice of which card you play seeming to really matter much: for an average pull from the starting deck, for instance, you can choose to shoot 9 bullets, or shoot 6 bullets and get an instant teleport to somewhere else. Obviously like any roguelite deckbuilder there'll be tons to unlock in the full game, but as was presented in the demo, the decisions I made didn't really seem to matter much. Worth noting is that when it comes time for you to take your turn playing cards the entire game pauses for you to make a decision, so if you're a shmup fan looking to get into the zone of dodging, that won't really be a thing here.

If you're at all halfway competent at dodging squares being shot at you, I don't think there's much of interest on offer here. The attempt at genre fusion is praiseworthy, but in this case I don't think it landed.

Death in Abyss 🔗

A bit like Devil Daggers in a fully 3D environment with the aesthetic of Star Fox, in Death in Abyss you pilot a ship and try to survive while destroying vaguely virus-like creatures as you're assailed from all directions.

This is a curious one for me. Unlike Devil Daggers where your only goal was survival, Death in Abyss is a campaign divided into various missions, which feels like it takes away from some of the elegance of just trying to survive as long as possible. The game is also astoundingly hard, and I died many many times and barely made it through the first mission in my time playing the demo. Part of that difficulty might be an unfamiliarity with dodging in a fully 3D environment, which you'll need to be competent with to proceed. Death in Abyss even includes a button for switching the camera to a rear-view, from which you can shoot backwards while still piloting your ship forwards. Even as a veteran of shooters you may find it a bit of a trip to get used to looking back to shoot and then changing direction while looking forward. More than few times I dodged directly into enemies after switching views, having slightly confused myself on what direction moving my mouse would actually take me.

It's obvious the game takes a lot of skill, and I found the challenge on offer extremely tough but pretty much fair. My only trepidation would be with regard to the campaign structure, but I don't think it warrants all that much concern.

Key Fairy 🔗

Key Fairy describes itself as "A hand-drawn, pacifist, folkloric, bullet-hell", all of which is true except for maybe the bullet hell part. As a forest spirit nymph thing you'll be merrily slip sliding and grappling hooking your way around some lush but ominous 2D environments where occasionally you'll be trapped in a room with some enemies which you'll need to dodge as you collect the stars they occasionally give off in order to damage them and complete the encounter. Definitely not "bullet hell" in any of the 22 minutes that I played, although the movement did have a very great sense of momentum to it with the grappling hook, which made exploring around fairly enjoyable in and of itself. It really seems to be to be more about the exploration than the combat, as well as the interactions with the curious creatures you come across. You'll be collecting keys and lanterns and bits and bobs all while forward and backtracking your way through the forest on your journey.

The writing is a little twee for my tastes, which is not to speak ill of it, just to recognize that it's not really my thing. I could easily see how this could be completely captivating for a lot of people, it has the feeling of being something that people point to as a hidden gem.

BOMCAT 🔗

BOMCAT is a single screen arcade-game where you run around and throw bombs, clearly inspired by Donkey Kong—the original, where Jumpman goes over the barrels and rescues Pauline. As someone who probably respects the original Donkey Kong (and classic arcade games in general) more than most, I didn't feel like this one had a ton of sauce. The bomb trajectory when throwing was a little hard to predict which gave the entire thing a feeling like I was constantly scrambling rather than doing anything really well considered. The goal in every stage of BOMCAT is to blow up all of the computer terminals, which is a little weird and doesn't feel quite as natural or as elegant as Donkey Kong's "reach the top" or "get rid of all of the supports so the dude falls". I guess the computers are like shield generators for the giant octopus kidnapping your girlfriend? It feels a little random.

Still, like any great arcade game it's easy to just pick it up and start playing, so if this one looks at all interesting to you, maybe check it out.

The Shadow Cosmos 🔗

I'm committed to reviewing every demo that I play here for various reasonsIn part just as personal record, in part out of a probably misguided notion that a negative review might help someone avoid wasting their time, in part because if I were a game developer for something which might be highly obscure, I'd prefer to see someone give some thoughts on it somewhere—even if highly negative—rather than have the writer decide that it's not even worth talking about., which occasionally means reviewing a game like this. This is... not good or worth spending a lot of time or words on. I'm not trying to come across as insulting, but it has the feeling of a game made by a young child who might forget to make things make sense to someone else, because everything makes sense to them (feel free to guess how I would know what that feels like). If you can get more than 10 minutes into it, you're far more patient than me.

I download some demos based completely on a whim or just based on the tags (this one had the tag "spectacle fighter", which is not true), so occasionally I see stuff like this. It's fine, occasionally coming across some jank is in the spirit of Next Fest I'd say, not like it cost me anything.

DuoBellum de Marionnette 🔗

Continuing on with the theme of jank, here's another one I downloaded because of the "spectacle fighter" tag. It's meant to be a sort of PvP character action game—I spent a while going through the tutorial and checking out the various characters, all of which do actually have some pretty cool designs to them. Unfortunately the game ran at about 19 FPS for me, and despite waiting for a while to try the PvP with another real person, I never ended up getting matched with anyone. There was an option to play against a CPU, but I decided to just move on to the next game.

Maybe one day I'll come back to this one if the technical issues get worked out / I can actually fight someone else? It honestly seems promising.

Lumines Arise 🔗 ★

I am a gigantic fan of Enhance, the developer of this. Tetris Effect is one of my favorite games of all time, and now Lumines has been given the Tetris Effect treatment.

Let me take a step back.

Lumines is sort of an arcade survival puzzler similar to Tetris. Rather than dropping tetronimoes to clear lines, you'll be dropping 2x2 blocks onto a wide playfield. Each individual square of those 2x2 blocks will be one of two colors. Your goal is to drop your blocks such that the individually colored squares themselves form into 2x2 squares (or larger). Then, a scanline constantly moving from left to right across the screen will clear the colored squares away—you know what, it might be easier to just show you (to be clear, this is footage from the previous Lumines game).

If you couldn't tell from the video, Lumines is a very musical experience, and in a lot of ways it's basically the precursor to Tetris Effect. The music is synced up to your actions, with every rotation or movement of a piece playing some click or tap or drum hit that's unique to the song being played, and after you've cleared enough blocks the stage will seamlessly transition to the next visual theme and corresponding song. I personally never could get good at Lumines in the same way that I'm good at Tetris, but with absolute bangers in the game like SHAKE YA BODY, I hear the music in my soul, or even Lights, it almost doesn't even really matter—it's fun just playing and seeing how long I can survive.

Lumines Arise is Lumines back with a slick new coat of paint, a brand new original soundtrack from Hydelic, and one or two new game mechanics.There's now a "burst" meter you can build up to clear a bunch of blocks in an emergency, sort of similar to the ZONE mechanic in Tetris Effect. I'm here for all of it. If any of this sounds at all interesting to you, I encourage you to check this out: playing Tetris Effect has gotten me into a pure flow state of connectedness with a game in a way that nothing else ever has, and I could feel the same thing in the stages of the demo available here for Lumines Arise.

A Fox Tale 🔗 ★

Playing a lot of demos, you lose patience pretty quickly for games wasting your time. It's surprising how often developers don't put their best foot forward, starting off with some long dialogue or unimpressive cutscene which doesn't represent the gameplay or stand as being very interesting on its own. That's why A Fox Tale is so refreshing to me, despite being a pretty standard platformer. It's just a platformer, you move from level to level quickly if you can make the jumps, there are some optional collectibles which involve harder jumps, and it's all a little Celeste inspired with a wall cling, climb, and airdash you get later. I don't mean to give the impression that I don't care for story or dialogue—there is dialogue and a story being told here and I liked it well enough, but I liked it in part because it breaks up the levels rather than preceding them, doesn't overstay its welcome, and isn't any more complicated than it needs to be.

A Fox Tale is simple, but well done. Sometimes you just wanna jump.

Rubinite 🔗

A 2D isometric boss rush game with interesting mechanics, Rubinite had a few too many interruptions for my tastes in its demo. You slash and dodgeroll around bosses, but the only way to do appreciable damage to them is to make use of a mechanic where you build up marks on the boss before performing a single slash which deals much more damage the more marks you have built up. Building up those marks involves being forced to stand completely still, with you building them up quicker the closer you are to a boss. I thought it all felt pretty good, and had an obvious sense of risk versus reward: if you want to kill the boss faster, you need to stand closer and give yourself less time and space to dodge.

It's clear the full game has some big ambitions, with an entire Hollow Knight-style charm system, world map, and an attempt at a narrative far deeper than you might expect for a boss rush game visible in the demo. This mostly didn't captivate me, but that's not to say that any of it was bad, just that in the context of a demo being a small vertical slice of an entire game that aspect was far less important to me than focusing on the gameplay.

Super Blowfish Castle 🔗

I have a bit of an interest in purely one-button games, which Super Blowfish Castle is. I think it's an interesting design exercise to see the range of possibilities where the only interaction is a single button: Bauhaus Bonk, for instance, is quite a different game than Good Knight. Super Blowfish Castle is all about rolling a tiny fish through a toylike Rube Goldberg machine where the one button you press swings hammers, lifts flippers and pulls open gates in order to get the fish to the end of the course. The challenge here mostly comes from timing things right so that the fish doesn't fall off the track or crash into a gate you didn't open in time. It's not very challenging: I'd say the appeal lies mostly in the toylike nature of it, just watching the cute fish go through the obstacle course which gets more and more complex every level.

Soul Dier 🔗

Soul Dier is a tactics game in the vein of something like Fire Emblem, except with guns. It's well made, but beyond having guns rather than the traditional melee combat of a standard TRPG, didn't seem to have any kind of unique twist or selling point to me. I played two of the combat missions on offer and they pretty much involved shooting the enemy, maybe moving into a position behind them to get extra damage, maybe moving into cover for my own damage mitigation. There were "spells", but they were also basically just variants on shooting guns. If you're a fiend for TRPGs or if the notion of a TRPG with guns sounds great to you then maybe check it out, apart from that I don't think there's much else to recommend.

Air Hares 🔗

Air Hares dares to ask: what if in a shmup instead of shooting enemies, you watered crops on the ground to grow carrots? Well, I can answer, it would be a lot less interesting. If the game actually involved independently targeting the ground while needing to dodge complex patterns it might have been a lot more engaging, but as it stands the only way to control where you fire is to fiddle around with your position so the game will automatically softlock onto tiles on the ground, rather than directly targeting them yourself. It's difficult to convey fully through words, but trust me in that it had terrible gamefeel. There also aren't really bullet patterns as in a traditional shmup, there are much fewer and larger enemies that try to charge into you, with dodging them involving just timing a button press. Skip this one.

Jamp 🔗

Another one-button game, Jamp is a mobile game port. You control a little orb guy who automatically moves back and forth bouncing into walls and turning directions, with your button press controlling when it jumps. I guess you could call it an autorunner, if autorunners were more about ascending tricky platforming towers rather than moving to the side. Jamp was an incredibly short demo—I beat the three levels available in it and my playtime is listed as one single minute. I've now spent more time writing this review than I did playing it.

I did actually enjoy it and I think it's a fun concept, but I wish that it were more of a "real" game rather than being purely a mobile game port.

HAMSTERMIND 🔗

A puzzle game mostly about rotating square mazes divided into four sections in order to pass through them, although there are also some language translation puzzles which maybe hinted at something deeper than the mostly basic primary puzzles on offer. I always keep my eyes keenly peeled for any game like La Mulana,Or like Blue Prince, if you're more familiar. although I don't really think that this is a game like that. It seems much more straightforwardly like a progression of puzzle to puzzle, with you going up and down an elevator where each floor is another one of the main rotating square puzzles, with an optional sort of gravity-based sliding block puzzle also being on each floor. The formula of main puzzle + side optional puzzle on each floor was fine, but got a bit repetitive. The one language translation puzzle that I completed in the demo didn't really wow me, but the mechanics of it clearly left space open for something a lot more complicated.

I imagine that the full game will have some more depth, but personally I think I'll leave it for someone else to check out the full game and let me know how deep it really goes.

It Consumes 🔗 ★

This is a sad one for me. It Consumes is an amazing concept, a Devil Daggers-like arena survival FPS in a pitch black arena where you need to send out a sort of radar pulse to even see enemies. The aesthetic is great, oppressive but with fairly good visual clarity while still remaining distinct from Devil Daggers.

Why is it a sad one, then? Because every so often once you've collected enough XP from defeated enemies, the game will screech to a halt, pausing entirely so that you can pick one of three perks:

This is horrible. It's maybe the single worst design decision I've encountered in every demo I've played, and it sullies what would be an otherwise incredible game. All of the action pausing every minute or so completely prevents you from getting into a flow state, it removes all tension as you context switch from frantic survival against hordes of demons and skulls into considering whether or not 15% extra damage or 15% more stamina recovery would be better for your build. Imagine if when playing Tetris, every 30 lines you cleared the game paused to let you ponder some upgrades. If you've never really gotten into the zone or gotten into a serious flow state playing a game you might not get why this is such a big deal, but trust me when I say that it's a feeling like no other, and that a game can get you into a state like that is high praise.

I hate Vampire Survivors for a lot of different reasons, but one of them is the proliferation of developers copying these kinds of pick 3 mechanics into games they have no business being in, like this. It all just feels misguided: Devil Daggers didn't need roguelite elements in order to be replayable—if anything, it was more replayable for the lack of them. Getting better at the game to get a higher time spent alive and a higher place on the leaderboard is motivation enough for a large amount of replayability. Similarly, if It Consumes wanted to include build diversity and different upgrades or such, that didn't have to come from pausing the action every so often: KILL KNIGHT was another Devil Daggers inspired arena survival game with different builds, but you just decided your build before you started playing.Personally, I'm not even really much of a fan of the way that KILL KNIGHT has a bunch of different weapons, but there's no denying that the way they chose to implement them was better than if they had paused the gameplay in order to have you decide while you were playing. Alternatively, upgrades could've just dropped into the level or come from defeating enemies, and you walk into them to pick them up, like Quake.

Other minor quibbles: rather than taking place on a floating platform where you immediately die if you fall off (again, like Devil Daggers), It Consumes just has some markers denoting the edge of the play area, and if you spend more than 10 seconds outside of that, you die. This strikes me as a less elegant solution, and a change that I'm not sure adds much—maybe it might've been unfair to have a harsh edge in such a dark game, but the edge could've just been lit up. I want to be clear about something: there's no reason to copy everything that Devil Daggers did, because it already exists. I'm a firm believer that games should never be married to convention, and should always be willing to rethink or retool mechanics that might be popular, expected, or conventional. I bring up other games as comparison because identical mechanics might have completely different impacts in different games, like pausing to pick 3 in a build-centric game Vampire Survivors versus a more action-oriented one like It Consumes.
For instance, giving the player a timer to return to the play area is also something Death in Abyss did, but having a soft boundary like that makes more sense to me as a solution when you're navigating a fully 3D environment to prevent the player from just running away in one direction. I still played It Consumes for a pretty decent amount of time, longer than almost all other demos I played here, but I can't help but feel very sour on the missed potential.

Update: the developer of this game implemented a difficulty mode which completely eliminates any mid-game perk picking, allowing you to just play the whole way through without any interruptions and with only the upgrades you select before the game applied. I went back to test the game like this and I think it plays a lot better, so I feel like I can recommend this one mostly without any reservations anymore, whether you love the Vampire Survivors-clones or you just love intense arena shooters.

Soulfused 🔗

A text adventure where you play as a sort of Robocop-esque cyborg in a dystopian world. There's not really any twist or mechanical novelty here, Soulfused is basically just a text adventure with some nice UI to keep track of the map, your inventory, and some art for the people you talk to. Are there text adventure purists for whom all this stuff is casualization? I couldn't tell you, I'm not much into them. Soulfused was well done though, about the only bad thing I have to say about it is an ear-shattering machine static sound effect near the end of the demo that was far far too loud. If you're into text adventures or you just love the dystopian cyperpunk-ish aesthetic, maybe check this one out.

The people of Sea, Sun & Salt 🔗 ★

I'm not normally much of a fan of city builders, but something about The people of Sea, Sun & Salt really captivated me, and it ended up being the demo I put by far the most amount of time into. There's a very calming but almost melancholic atmosphere to it, with the warm Mediterranean theming and the guitar music backing. In the game you'll be placing down houses, farms and stone quarries at first just to build up your resources before moving on to building temples and fountains to build up your people's faith. There's a large focus on proximity, so you'll end up bulldozing some houses you placed down earlier to make way for bigger houses that hold more people, which you want to cluster around central buildings like the temple, or various government offices.

There's an easygoing feeling to it—I think that if I were to play a game like Cities: Skylines I might get decision paralysis keeping the game paused to really try to master plan everything out, but Sea, Sun & Salt really lends itself to just placing things down and rebuilding later, which for me ultimately gave the island I was building on a very organically made feeling. More parts of the island will come up from the sea giving you more land to build on over time, and you'll also unlock new (and often bigger) buildings as you go on. Again, given the proximity-based nature of how people's houses need to be close to the buildings they go to, you end up naturally developing what feel like different neighborhoods, all clustered around central buildings like temples.

As you develop more you're faced with various choices of which kinds of policies you want to choose and what buildings you want to have available, like choosing between those giant centralized temples or tinier (and smaller capacity) shrines. At the very end of the demo I was even faced with choosing between Democracy—whether I wanted the people of the island to choose their policies themselves, without any control from me—or Autocracy, where I could choose them myself. I don't think it's quite as deep as something like Civilization's policy tree choices, but I thought that it still added some nice flavor. The demo ended at that last choice, but based on the visual shown I had barely scratched the surface of the full development of the island and the eventual amount of choices and new buildings and such unlocked.

It's neat, and I had fun with it. The screenshots on the store page are a lot more beautiful than the shantytown-looking island that I developed, but there's no doubt it's a very beautiful and calming game, helped along immensely by the somber guitar/lute backing music. At various points I stopped micromanaging building placement and just observed the days pass as the people moved about: from their houses to the fields or mines, to a park, past the fountains, to the well, back to their houses. I recommend The people of Sea, Sun & Salt even if you don't consider yourself a fan of city builders.

Polyroll Pocket 🔗

It's sort of like Sonic the Hedgehog, with even the ability to roll up into a ball and spin dash. I thought it was fine, well done for a retro-styled platformer. It does the New Super Mario Bros thing of having each level contain three optional collectibles that require you to go out of your way to find them, and for the most part they were fairly well hidden (I didn't even end up finding all of them in the demo). There are also some fun twists I don't think I've seen anywhere else, like an autoscrolling stage where you can control how fast the stage scrolls, speeding it up or slowing it down if you pass by certain markers:

This was actually a lot tricker than you might expect, it ended up being by far the hardest stage in the demo. It seems like this is a sort of companion game or sequel to a game that already exists just called Polyroll, so if you're into retro platformers, this one seems worth checking out to me.

Is your insatiable lust for demo reviews still not fulfilled? Read part two of the October next fest reviews.