The Steam Next Fest is back. I always like to play through the demos available to show some support for indie developers and keep on the lookout for any new great games, so this time I thought I'd write some quick reviews of the demos I play through.Last Next Fest I came away having found two pretty incredible demos for games I'm now strongly looking forward to: Rainchaser, a shoot-em-up in a similar vein to ZeroRanger with great music, and HYPERBEAT, an analog-stick based rhythm game with an incredibly striking aesthetic. I strongly recommend checking out both, although Rainchaser may be a little difficult if you lack experience with shmups.

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- 🔗

I technically played the demo for this before Next Fest began, but I think it's still worth talking about. From the creators of Danganronpa, it's basically if Danganronpa were a tactical RPG instead of having class trials.It's really similar in styling to Danganronpa: teenagers kidnapped to a high school, a mascot basically shaped like Monokuma, character designs by Shimadoriru basically exactly like Danganronpa characters, time management exactly like Danganronpa, so on. Despite a pretty crawling start and some at times horrendous english voice acting, I was brought back around by the combat, which I enjoyed quite a lot. The gameplay is a lot closer to something like Into the Breach than Final Fantasy Tactics: on your turn you can move any of your characters in any order, limited by a small number of action points. Killing certain higher-health enemies refreshes an action point, making each turn a mini-puzzle in the optimal way to make as many moves and clear as many enemies as possible, typically while also trying to accomplish a secondary objective like protecting a generator or downed character.

In terms of the story, whisked away from your life in the Tokyo Residential Complex—an absolutely gigantic indoor structure with lights and ceiling panels that mimic the sky—you find yourself tasked by some mascot creature with defending the high-school-like building that you're residing in, one where for the first time you can see the real sky, and one surrounded by a gigantic wall of everburning purple flames. Beyond that wall of fire is nothing but ruins and strange alien creatuers called "invaders" who will occasionally mount attacks on the school, apparently trying to recover some precious artifact the exact details of which are kept a mystery. Not all of your fellow kidnapees are immediately on board with this, however, so you have to make do with just a few people for defense while trying to convince the others to get on board.

The demo is about 5 hours and managed to set up some big mysteries and endear me to most of the characters, so I'm almost certainly going to get the main game when it releases. Despite some heavy talent working there I've heard that the rest of what Too Kyo Games has put out so far has been bad, so here's hoping that this one manages to make the landing.

Genokids 🔗

A character action game in the vein as Bayonetta, Devil May Cry or, perhaps most relatedly, Hi-Fi Rush, the main gimmick here is the ability to quick swap between characters to extend your combos or quickly recover from damage. As a moderate fan of these kinds of games I thought it had pretty decent gamefeel.Gamer cred check: I've played through most of Bayonetta, have beaten The Wonderful 101, and, in contrast to popular consensus, I bounced off Hi-Fi Rush after a few hours. The game obviously still has a long way to go, but I think there's a decent foundation there: the enemies were fairly basic and unchallenging and the sound design could use some serious work, but the underlying mechanics seem solid, with the boss fight at the end of the demo actually forcing you to make use of blocking, dodging, and all of your special moves. The visual aesthetic is sort of a western anime style and it's all themed around the main characters being in a band, but unlike Hi-Fi Rush there are no rhythm elements. Also unlike Hi-Fi Rush, the inter-fight traversal segments don't make me want to shoot myself. The demo took me about 20 minutes to play through.

Lilac 0 🔗

This one is for the shmup fans. Another clearly ZeroRanger-inspired game, the gimmickI don't use "gimmick" in a derogatory way, just as a useful shorthand for and slightly less pretentious way to say "unique central mechanic". here is that you play as some kind of space samurai instead of the shmup-typical spaceship, and using your sword and invincible dash is integral to both scoring points and dodging attacks. The demo here was short, but it served as a good demonstration of the mechanics and difficulty on offer here. I think it's probably a little on the harder side, especially if you're a newcomer to the genre.

Phantom Zone Labyrintos 🔗

I see a weird, poorly translated visual novel slash point and click adventure and I guess that activates some kind of neurons in my brain that make me think that I have to try it. Turns out, it's... basically exactly what it seems like, a weird poorly translated VN. You're a robot whose AI is originally based on a person's brain waves or neural scan or something and you're exploring around a giant facility in the wake of some kind of violent disaster, so basically nothing we haven't already seen before a hundred times.As in SIGNALIS, for instance. I spent about 15 minutes hoping to see something that would really spark my interest and didn't end up seeing it, so that's when I stopped.

qualia 🔗

Another AI-themed demo, the concept here is that you're participating in a research experiment where you have to examine the responses of two participants to a series of prompts and determine which response—if either—was actually AI-generated. While I liked the premise and theming, this felt like way too small of a slice: there are 10 questions with pretty short responses, and as far as I can tell no matter how you categorize the participants' answers or what you do, you get the exact same ending. It's possible I'm missing something? The store page has screenshots much more interesting than anything contained within the demo, which took me 10 minutes total, having played multiple times to try to see if the ending would be any different.

Ghost Hand 🔗

Ultra super kusoge. A "Soviet inspired fantasy Metroidvania", this is the single jankiest demo I've maybe ever played. I found a way to gain infinite jump height literally within seconds of being able to control my character by timing attacks that give you a little bounce, almost like Super Metroid bomb jumping. The comparisons to Super Metroid end there, though, as while there's clearly a lot of love put into Ghost Hand, it has an asounding lack of polish. My sound cut out multiple times in the first five minutes, the camera is wonky and will randomly decide to stop following you or focus somewhere else, performing a walljump imparts you with an insane amount of momentum such that you'll be moonwalking for seconds after hitting the ground. I did end up spending about 50 minutes in the demo, only quitting after a boss that was definitely supposed to appear in an arena didn't appear leaving me trapped, even after I quit and reloaded. There's a lot of soul here, but I'll probably be giving this one a pass.

Run TavernQuest 🔗

A text adventure where you're not the one playing the text adventure, you're basically a sort of AI dungeon master for some idiot actually playing the game, making this really more of a CYOA as you decide how you want to respond to the player's antics. The main joke is that the guy actually playing is the worst stereotype of "gamer player character", instantly trying to murder shopkeepers, never reading any instructions and not even really being good at the game and so on, and you're supposed to keep the story going despite all of the player's idiocy. It was novel, although I don't recall it being particularly funny or coming across as very original. The entire game is voiced, with pretty good voice acting. My main takeaway was that I found the concept that I had to keep the game going instead of ruthlessly killing the idiot player a little annoying; after killing him once in a fight he underprepares for and doesn't pay attention to any of the mechanics of, you control the enemy he's fighting and have to pick the least optimal attacks so that the player survives. I'm coming across more negative than I felt after playing it, but looking back the gimmick wore a little thin in the 30 minutes it took me to finish the demo.

Covert Critter 🔗

I dropped this one pretty fast. An "homage" toBlatant rip-off of, even down to the opening company logos and main menu. Come on, I like MGS too, but get at least some originality. the original Metal Gear Solid, the many flaws here show up very quickly. While the textures and stylings are done well and the game looks pretty good, it feels utterly terrible to play. The AI is stupid and ineffectual, the controls are lacking, the camera manages to be much worse than any Metal Gear Solid title without even the option to go into first-person to see someone who might be off-screen. It's clear that this one needs a lot more time in the oven.

Is This Seat Taken? 🔗

One of if not the most polished demos so far, Is This Seat Taken? is a logic puzzle game about arranging people's seating while trying to accomodate everyone's various preferences, like wanting to sit in a window seat on a bus, or sit next to a friend, or so on. The presentation is minimalist but still cutesy, and they go farther with the concept than I expected at first. Starting with people just wanting a window seat or wanting to sit next to a friend, you're soon introduced to people with multiple preferences and people with behavior that affects the space around them, like playing loud music or not having showered. Then, faced with others with preferences like wanting to sleep or really hating bad smells, you shuffle them around until everyone is happy. Eventually you move on from cars and busses to seating people in a multiple rows of a theater, then a wedding with various tables and foods laid out.

None of the puzzles were really that difficult: it's the sort of puzzle where you don't really need to think a ton before making a move, you can just start putting people in place and then go back to re-sort and swap people around if necessary. Still, it was enjoyable enough, and there's an obviously large amount of design space that I imagine the full game will go deeper into. There's I guess supposed to be an overarching story told through inter-puzzle conversations where we follow one of the little shape person's journey to being an actor, or something, but it was pretty saccharine and uninteresting to me.I'm definitely not a "cozy game" guy by any means, although thankfully there really isn't much time wasted if you're only interested in the puzzles. Like I said, it came across as incredibly polished and well-made for what seems to be developer Poti Poti Studio's first game, so I might pick it up when it comes out. It took me about 20 minutes to beat the demo, including the bonus stage if you solve every other puzzle without mistakes.

Am I Nima 🔗

This was a pretty unique one, a sort-of visual novel-style game where you wake up tied up in your basement and face some questioning from someone claiming to be your mom. Like one of those games where you drag elements together to make new onesAt the moment I can only recall this one, although I'm certain that there are more., you connect concepts together in your mind in order to gain new responses to your mom, as well as implicitly reveal more of the story by seeing what happens when two concepts combine. If combining "Nima" and "Dad" makes "Sorrow" or "Mom" and "Basement" makes "Experiment", you can start to piece things together on your own. There are actually a seriously large amount of concepts to reach: I might have spent upwards of 20 minutes not advancing any dialogue, just combining concepts together and puzzling out what was going on that way. In the demo there's only one route, with a predefined ending no matter what responses you give, but I can easily see how the story might differ depending on what you say. After you already have enough concepts and have a rough idea of what's going on I imagine that the real interest will lie in what responses you pick and what kind of character you choose to portray, but there was also a short point-and-click section, so who knows what kind of depths the full game might hold. In total I spent about 50 minutes on the demo, and not having heard of it beforehand and not even really being interested in horror, it made me pretty interested for the full game.