I have a lot more demos to review here and a lot less to say about each of them, so it's time for the Lightning Round. Despite thinking that I was already scraping the bottom of the barrel of demos I still managed to find quite a few games which strongly impressed me and that I ended up wishlisting—highlighting those games and hopefully getting them even slightly more exposure is what I'm here for. Part one and part two are here and here. As always, games with a star (★) next to them in the table of contents are ones I strongly recommend checking out. ⊕Table of Contents:
- Big Hops ★
- CiniCross
- Evil Egg ★
- MONUMENTUM
- Bubsy 4D
- Mosaic of the Strange
- Revolgear Zero
- The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time
- MIK
- Hell Maiden ★
- Poke ALL Toads ★
- Myths are 100% True ★
- Towerbolt
- Yuki
- Maid of Salvation ★
- Majogami
- Anima Gate of Memories: I&II Remastered
- Tia: Weird Hunter ★
- FUNKYHEART
- Super Beast World

Big Hops 🔗 ★

A very bright 3D platformer, I think Big Hops does pretty much everything right. Jumps have a sense of weight to them while still not feeling overly restrictive or committal, and there are some unique mechanics of throwing mushrooms to create bounce pads or acorns to create giant stalks that you can climb up, in addition to some Super Mario Galaxy-style gravity bending and planetoid-hopping that shows up later. I've played a decent amount of indie neo-3D platformers (including ones that also happen to include some kind of contextual grappling hook mechanic, like The Big Catch: Tacklebox), and I think this one is probably the most professional feeling out of all of them. On the whole it's a little too easy for me to really be strongly interested in it, but there's no doubt it's well made.

CiniCross 🔗

Picross with a Slay the Spire architecture to it. You move along a Slay the Spire-type map where you solve the Picross puzzles as fast as you can before your time runs out, with any mistakes taking away from your health, all the while picking up items and artifacts which occasionally reveal a square or series of squares while you're puzzle-solving, or give you extra gold or give you back time or so on and so forth.

As a certified Picrosshead I beat the demo without any difficulty and liked it well enough,The lack of music was pretty bad, though. but I have to wonder who this game is really for: if you're a Picross fan, wouldn't you rather just solve the puzzles without all of the roguelite cruft around it? None of it struck me as all that interesting, and it's certainly not original or novel. If you're not a Picross fan, is there really anything here for you? Except for choosing which route along the map you take, which items you buy and when you use them, there's literally no other gameplay besides solving the puzzles, and if you're really relying on the items to carry you through the puzzles because you're not used to solving them, I doubt you'll get far. This feels like a game without a real audience.

Evil Egg 🔗 ★

A real game for real gamers. A twin-stick score attack shooter with seizure-inducing presentation clearly inspired by classic arcade game Robotron: 2084, you'll be shooting enemies and rescuing noids as you move from room to room and try to survive. I can tell that there's a ton of depth here that's basically entirely left to the player to figure out, and I'm here for it. I had heard nothing of this game before seeing it randomly and only after playing did I realize that it's made by Ivy Sly, developer of Y.O.M.I. Hustle, one of the most innovative and unique games in recent history. Apparently the full game will be free (and also apparently the demo version is literally just the full game itself), so I think this is one to look forward to.

MONUMENTUM 🔗

A completely wordless 2D sort-of-metroidvania where you play as a square rolling around left to right, moving from screen to screen, slowly unlocking buttons on your controller that correspond to machines dotted about that you can use to traverse the world: one type of machine launches you straight up, another puts you into a sort of anti-gravity field as you follow along its tracks, another two launch you at an angle. It's maybe difficult to fully convey through words, but immediately intuitive just seeing it.

Some of the platforming challenges here where you have to launch yourself into an anti-grav field were actually really difficult and took me a lot of tries repeating the same route over and over. Your momentum is strongly related to the direction you hold the control stick, so as far as I could tell you needed to be pretty fast in smashing your stick from holding forward to get horizontal distance to holding up so that the anti-grav field catches you. To be clear, there are are no checkpoints or enemies or anything, the game is entirely just you traversing the world, and if you fail a section and fall down then it's up to you to make your way back up to where you were. For the most part the level design was fairly kind about this, with the hardest jumps being ones where falling just puts you right back at the start and lets you try again.

The presentation in MONUMENTUM makes me feel like it's the kind of game like Environmental Station Alpha or ANIMAL WELL where there are some super deep secrets and such to find, but that's pure conjecture on my part, I didn't encounter anything actually like that in my time in the demo. I respect the vision of what I think MONUMENTUM is going for and I don't think it's bad at all, but I think I'd like just a little something extra like that for me to be super interested.

Bubsy 4D 🔗

Annoying presentation. Bubsy 4D also leans in the direction of being far too forgiving: you have a mid-air flutter jump, a mid-air dive which can instantly give you a huge burst of horizontal movement in any direction, you can go into a skydiving pose which also gives you more horizontal movement and significantly slows your fall speed, and all of these can be chained into each other. That's on top of having an insane amount of air control, meaning that you can turn around on a dime even in mid-air. You really have to be asleep at the wheel to mess up any jump in Bubsy 4D, because at any given time there are at least three different options for completely changing your direction and getting a ton of distance, and that's before buying any of the many upgrades available which give you even more options to rescue yourself.

I think 3D platformer developers nowadays really want to have stylish movement in their games and are strongly inspired by some of the flashy tricks you see in speedruns, but part of the reason why movement in a 3D platformer can be flashy at all is because it's challenging. When you can basically quadruple mid-air jump your way over any obstacle, you're practically not even doing any platforming at all, you're just flying over the stage. I expect that the fastest route for any given stage in Bubsy 4D will almost always involve building up a ton of momentum very quickly and catapulting directly to the end.

Mosaic of the Strange 🔗

An interesting pseudo-minesweeper sort of game. Numbers start completely revealed on a grid, with each number telling how many highlighted squares are contained within the 9 surrounding squares. This game is basically 100% puzzle, so if you love minesweeper or logic puzzles then I think it's worth checking out. If you do end up enjoying it, there's a full game which seems to be the exact same thing with a different theming already released, 2024: Mosaic Retrospective. As for me I solved the first large grid and decided I had had enough minesweeping action for a while.

Revolgear Zero 🔗

The lightning round continues with Revolgear Zero, a shoot-em-up which does the R-Type thing of your ship having an orb on the front of it which blocks bullets, but which can be transformed to turn into a more powerful weapon at the cost of no longer shielding you. Uniquely for Revolgear Zero compared to other shmups, your burst meter is incredibly easy to charge up, so you really want to be bursting early and bursting often,Unlike some other areas in life. as you're completely invulnerable while doing so and let out a very damaging laser. I thought this had a decent loop to it—you might think that a bullet blocking shield and frequent invulnerability would trivialize the game, but I still found some of the patterns slightly tricky and enjoyed taking on the bosses on offer in the demo.

Revolgear Zero is, I think, a pretty good shmup if you're a shmup fan, but if you're not really familiar with the genre I think there might be better places to start: I'd probably recommend ZeroRanger primarily, but even if you just want a different demo to play, I still think about Rainchaser, a demo that I first played in last year's October next fest.

The Remake of the End of the Greatest RPG of All Time 🔗

This is doing a meta thing which I found aggressively uninteresting and time-wasting. I can tolerate meta easily, and in other situations I'm quite a fan of it: I liked The Stanley Parable well enough, for instance, but I think the first impression that this game made was much worse. There's not much more to say, I got annoyed and quit very quickly. It's the lightning round, what more do you want?

MIK 🔗

More megastructure climbing! This time we're doing so in first person but without any hands to grab onto things as in White Knuckle, so you're basically just walking and jumping. Your movement options are actually pretty much the same as in Half Life 2Less, actually, because you lack even the option to sprint., which is fitting because this is a Source game complete with Source jank. As soon as I encountered a crate and realized that I could pick them up, I immediately started propclimbing my way into the sky.

It would be derisive and probably reductive, but in a way this game could be called a walking simulator. Unlike the previously mentioned White Knuckle or the previously reviewed Primal Echo and MOTORSLICE there aren't any grabbing or climbing mechanics besides jumping along conveniently placed wooden platforms. What this means is that despite a maybe more visually impressive (and computer performance-demanding) megastructure than any of those games it nevertheless feels the most artificial out of any of them, like an obstacle course that you're just following the path on.

MIK could also be called a walking simulator for the random documents and personal logs you'll find on the computer terminals scattered about. There the gameplay involves finding a four digit code somewhere in the immediate vicinty that needs to be entered in order to disable a fan or a force field generator so that you can proceed. There are a ton of logs spanning date ranges of hundreds of years which no doubt tell a very interesting story, but I didn't read any of them. Something about MIK completely and utterly prevented me from getting immersed. I think maybe the Source game feeling of it, the lack of tension and the world feeling very artificial just made me want to start bunnyhopping along and not really pay much attention to anything else.

Hell Maiden 🔗 ★

I think it speaks a lot to the quality of Hell Maiden that despite it crashing my computer multiple times I still kept booting it back up to see if I couldn't get through a full run.Unfortunately, I couldn't. A Vampire Survivors clone, Hell Maiden has pristine presentation, with great character artwork and user interface. I realize that "It's the Dark Souls of X"-style comparions can get a little annoying, but I do think this game could probably be called the Hades of Vampire Survivors clones. It's all themed around the Divine Comedy, although I don't recall Dante and Vergil being anime girls. Guess it depends on which translation you read.

The game involves the standard fare of running around as enemies swarm you, but with some interesting decision making going on where rather than just picking one of three perks which get applied to you, you pick modifier cards which get applied to one of your weapons—these cards can be swapped between any weapons you have, upgraded by stacking the same card on top of itself, and swapped out if you feel like a specific card is no longer working for your build. Each weapon you have only has three spaces for modifier cards (and occasionally positioning of those modifier cards matters), so you will actually need to be pretty tactical in swapping bad ones out and upgrading the cards you do have to make efficient use of your space.

Like I said, for technical reasons I couldn't ever get that far into a run, but as someone with a strongly negative view on the entire genre Hell Maiden still managed to impress me.

Poke ALL Toads 🔗 ★

A very cute puzzle game where you play as a fairy and poke all the toads. You'll switch between fairies, press buttons, flip levers, and sacrifice your friends in your quest for complete toad poking. The art is great, the puzzle design was good and introduced new twists at a steady pace. Not much more to say, check this one out.

Myths are 100% True 🔗 ★

An action platformer with an incredible sense of momentum, this one has the sauce for sure. Myths are 100% True as it turns out, so your task is to get out there and photograph all of them. You run jump and dash around each level with your camera taking photos in a rectangle right in front of you and your dash launching you off of any sloped surface, so there's a great sense of satisfaction to flying across the stage and getting your movement just right to frame the perfect photo which catches all the enemies on-screen in one group photo. I like the Newgrounds-style cartoony artstyle, the level design in the demo was great, and it even managed to have a great feeling boss fight to cap off the demo.

I have nothing but praise for this one, give it a try for sure, it might be the best even among the bunch of great demos in this last batch here.

Towerbolt 🔗

A pure platformer where your jump height gets taller the longer you stay off the ground and your double jump gets refreshed every time you walljump, I thought Towerbolt had a kind of flash game feeling to it (tone: positive). It's pretty straightforward, with the whole game seeing you ascending a tower and each level having you reach the top from the bottom as fast as you can, with one optional collectible to pick up if you can make some harder jumps. Good gamefeel, maybe not enough to carry a full game without some other twists but enough for a good demo.

It's jumping, nothing more, nothing less.

Yuki 🔗

A survivor horror game that was a little poorly put together, with strange transitions and some camera angles that weren't very well selected. Yuki still does manage to do something interesting by having you go into an UNDERTALE-like encounter whenever you run into an enemy: you'll need to choose the correct dialogue options to banish the phantom attacking you, complete with a mini-dodging section in a tiny box basically exactly like fights in UNDERTALE. That's one feature I think more games ought to copy, so despite being obviously derivative in this case I think it's a good choice theoretically. In practice though I found that the space to move around in was a little too cramped, and the demo lacked any sort of interesting patterns to dodge. The dialogue choices necessary to banish the phantoms and actually win the fight I also felt were a little shallow and uninteresting. During these enemy encounters some absolutely jamming drum-n-bass music will start playing, which was very catchy but clashed incredibly hard with any kind of survival horror atmosphere.

Theoretically I think Yuki could be a great game, it just needs to get some more of the finer details correct.

Maid of Salvation 🔗 ★

Please trust me, despite the utterly atrocious poster there and painfully generic anime theming, this game actually has a lot of interesting stuff going for it. It's a 2D isometric action RPG / metroidvania hybrid, which is something I'm certain must already exist, but I'm not sure I can think of an example of this exact combination of elements. Not to praise it too much, but it feels a little bit like an isometric Symphony of the Night, basically what the 3D Castlevania games should have been.

Just go check out the videos of the combat on the store page. No, don't look at the character designs, don't worry that they're all maids, no don't worry about the AI art, just look at the gameplay!

Majogami 🔗

From what I can tell Majogami's developer Inti Creates has a lot of experience with some pretty popular 2D action games, like Gunvolt and Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon. Whatever sauce they normally have, though, is definitely lacking here. The artwork is gorgeous and reminded me a lot of Muramasa: The Demon Blade, but the gameplay is pretty much a button-mashing mess, with basically no skill to it whatsoever. You have an auto-targetting attack which will launch you across the screen at the nearest enemy and kill them in one hit and there's basically no limit on how often you can use this, so you just chain attack through every level. This same mindless button mashing also got me through the boss fight that ended off the demo.

If you want your games to just look pretty then check this one out, personally I was pretty bored by the end of the demo.

Anima Gate of Memories: I&II Remastered 🔗

Utterly sauceless character action combat, I shut this one off after about 10 minutes. I wasn't having any fun and it didn't seem like there would be anything interesting or new popping up by the end of the demo. The voice acting is horrendous, so bad I paused the game and checked the options to see if I could change it to a different language without also changing the text language (I couldn't).

This feels like an early PS2 game remastered so I was a little surprised to see that the original is from 2016—it has a lot of problems emblematic of the early stages of figuring out fun 3D combat, like you being left to completely babysit the camera if you want any chance at getting a decent overview of the action. Devil May Cry 4 came out in 2008, so as far as I'm concerned this game has no excuses. Skip it.

Tia: Weird Hunter 🔗 ★

A Chinese game with an atrociously bad English translation but surprisingly great 2D sidescrolling action-RPG combat, Tia: Weird Hunter reminded me a lot of Astlibra. There's a focus on pretty crunchy combat and an extensive amount of systems for upgrading your magic, your skills, and equipping various items. When it comes to RPGs I mostly tend to consider all of that stuff chaff that needs to be cut through to get to the actual gameplay, but here, just as in Astlibra, I think there's a decent amount of depth to it. I'm also a little more willing to stomach it here because I feel like a lot of RPGs tend to use level ups and items and skill trees as keys jangling in your face to distract you from the lack of real underlying gameplay, but the insanely difficult boss fights on offer here in Tia eliminate any kind of doubts along those lines.You actually can't even pause to do any kind of upgrading or skill tree-ing while you're in a boss fight, which I thought was a great touch.

Beyond the gameplay I also appreciated the great UI and art, with some story sections being told in a sort of manga format. Like I said, the translation was pretty bad so I mostly didn't pay attention to much of the story, but it was easy enough to get the gist of a lot of it, with the manga sections helping a lot with that. I hope that this one gets some more attention from an English-speaking audience so that they can improve the translation, because I'm looking forward to the full game.

FUNKYHEART 🔗

FUNKYHEART and the terrible, horrible, no-good gamefeel. A first person platforming game where you're meant to be bunnyhopping around, I failed to make the third jump in the game for about five minutes in a row and stopped playing. Before you rush to cry out "skill issue", dear reader, let me explain. Looking it up on the Steam discussion forums multiple other people had the exact same issue as me, and it turns out that you actually have a double jump while you're in auto-bunnyhop mode, and that's how you're supposed to get across the gap.

Charitably, FUNKYHEART was trying to do the Mega Man X sequelitis "non-tutorial tutorial" thing, where you're trapped somewhere and the game wants to teach you about some new mechanic by forcing you to discover it yourself, because there's no other way to proceed. The problem with the way that this was done here is that if you want to have a non-tutorial tutorial that forces a player to learn something, it needs to be absolutely clear that you can't proceed without making use of that new mechanic. Not only did it look like I could've made it across the gap I kept falling down if I got the positioning just perfect, but I'm pretty sure that I actually could have made it across. If you want the player to realize that they need to make use of some new mechanic, they need to not feel like they can get over whatever obstacle you're presenting them with using the tools already available to them.

Also, I ask you: what is this, The Witness? Is it too much to ask to just fucking put some text on screen that says "JUMP IN MID AIR (but only while in auto-bunnyhopping mode) TO DOUBLE JUMP"? I guess so, because it was also too much to put some text on screen telling me which key on my keyboard advances dialogue. That one I had to pause to check for myself in the menu in order to get past the very first dialogue box.

Look, maybe this one is a skill issue on my part, but I think it's emblematic of bad design anyways.

Super Beast World 🔗

Yeah, yeah, more like Super Breast World. Anyways, this is a fast-paced frenetic feeling platformer with lots of different paths through every level, sort of like a Sonic fangame with maybe a slight twinge of Pizza Tower? There's a combo meter for each enemy you jump on and smack out of the way—the timing on it was fairly forgiving, but combined with the level design I felt a constant drive to just hurtle forward without any slowing down, waiting or backtracking, which I think is a big point in the game's favor. The gamefeel is maybe not fully there, as I thought the airdash had slightly too little distance to it to really smoothly traverse some of the paths the game seemed to want me to take, but it's possible there was just something I was missing or that it was a skill issue.

The character design and giant snake girl and such I could probably have done without, but as a platformer Super Beast World definitely wasn't bad.

And that's all from me for this Next Fest. I've ended up checking out and reviewing a lot more demos than I expected myself to, and I'm glad that I did. Even all the way to the end I was still finding games completely off my radar that strongly impressed me, and hopefully I've managed to put you on to at least one that you also think looks interesting.