Prelude

I love demo festivals like Steam Next Fest so much. They're a great way to just buckle in and examine a ton of different flavors of game at once, and it feels like every single time I get completely side-swiped by something amazing that goes on to dominate the next six months of my life. Like Streets of Rogue. Like Fights in Tight Spaces. Like Balatro. So whenever Next Fest swings around, I usually run a few streams that week called Demo Fest Fest, covering a ton of stuff from it and whatever other recent demo events have kicked off around the same time. It's an absolute blast every time, albeit not always a smooth ride - some demos and OBS seem to not particularly enjoy occupying the same space, at least on my rapidly-decaying shitbox of a PC, so there were a non-zero number of crashes and other issues that sane people would not face.

This time around, I decided to maintain a scorecard, categorizing the games I played under three all-encompassing categories, then jotted down some brief thoughts about them later. Guess what this blog post is? As a reminder, this merely describes my initial impressions of the games' state in Late February 2025. They may have become better or worse over time, or I might just be wrong and stupid about them. It's your call as to whether you agree with me or not!

The Good Stuff

Blobun: A cute, puzzler that you probably now already have through that one Itch charity bundle. A simple premise - cover every square on the board without doubling back on yourself - that quickly expands itself just beyond my intellect/patience. Quite fun, charming art and sound, well recommended.

Descenders Next: I fell in love with Descenders and its unique brand of hurtling-downhill cycling roguelite action when it landed on Xbox Game Pass, and this sequel is, well, basically it's more of that except a bit fiddlier. The core is still there, though, and the licensed soundtrack continues to utterly rip. I'm optimistic about this one.

Haneda Girl: I've had Narita Boy in my library for a long enough time that I don't remember how it got there, but this demo is convincing me that I should probably pop back and check it out. A cool little platformer taking cues from Celeste and Hotline Miami, with some lovely mechanics that have you swapping back and forth between on-foot stealth assassinations and mech-riding demolition jobs with a surprising rapidity. If this doesn't have a level editor in the full game, they're missing a step.

Mindwave: What if WarioWare, but Wario was a depressed teenage girl and there was a story about competitive brainsports held by a megacorp? ... no, wait, come back, it's actually pretty damn good! It's actually fairly interesting how many indie games lately have been "What if Wario, but ________?", and even more interesting how many of them have pulled it off successfully.

Shotgun Cop Man: An extremely Flash-Game-core action platformer from the My Friend Pedro dev, hailing from a similar lineage to N or Super Meat Boy. Very polished and with forgiving enough hitboxes that you'll feel like a danger-evading badass with startling regularity. The full game is promising a level editor, which should produce some really fun stuff along with the usual spray of borderline-impossible gibberish from the internet's finest paint sommeliers.

Swingularity: Speaking of Flash Games, here's something else that would have been extremely at home on Newgrounds or something back in the day: Golf... in... spaaaace! A fun gimmick that feels great when you weave through multiple celestrial bodies to nail a hole in one, but the difficulty ramps up quickly and it can get a bit frustrating when you're trying to weave through multiple gravity wells.

ChainStaff: Mommy's Best Games have been nailing it since the Xbox 360 Indie Games era with a frankly-startling consistency, and if this is any indication, they haven't fallen off yet. An excellent action platformer with wonderful hand-painted body-horror artwork that, combined with the soaring guitar soundtrack, makes everything look like the side of a panel van. In a good way, I mean.

Dead Pixels 2: Straight to Video: A survival-y brawler-y thing where programmer-grade pixel art jostles for Vibe Dominance with VHS filters and video-nasty theming. Very slow to start, to the point where I was just about to drop it before I got some much needed skills and gear. Once you have good weapons with an upgrade or two the game starts to feel pretty good. Maybe I'm just in a good mood, but this is in with a chance.

Kero Quest 64: Litigitiously close to Super Mario 64 in gameplay mechanics, which makes sense since it was made by Super Mario 64 ROM hackers. Hell, the "butt-slam-into-super-jump" move a lot of those ROM hacks implement is here and accounted for. Look, let's be real: This is basically a ROM hack with the serial numbers filed off. Thankfully, it's a pretty decent one with a reasonable amount of charm.

Neon Inferno: A cool action platformer with a little bit of Wild Guns injected in by way of segments that require you to shoot into the background. Absolutely incredible pixel art brings the cyberpunk setting to life, but the default difficulty setting (one life, no continues, don't fuck up) is, uh, a bold creative choice, to be sure.

Nitro Express: Dual-stick action platformer with extremely Metal Slug-core visuals. Very charming and absolutely dripping with polish, but the demo is extremely short. It's around for a good time, not a long time. Definitely give it a whirl if you can (and if you're not Anime-allergic).

Wordatro!: The most derivative demo I played - it's literally just Balatro but it's Scrabble instead of poker. Quite fun, though, and I found myself coming back to it a few times off-stream, which is generally a pretty good sign.

Day of the Shell: Neat little single-button roguelite built around reboot-era XCOM's movement and cover system. Intuitive and easy to get your head around while still presenting a stiff challenge if you don't get lucky on the upgrades (by the end of my winning run I was basically one-shotting nearly everything!). Really looking forward to seeing more of this one.

Glum: First person cartoon kick-em-up that wears its Dark Messiah inspirations on its pants leg. Feels extremely German in ways I can't describe. The tutorial level is pretty dull and annoying at best, but the short town level is a lot of fun and gleefully chaotic in all the best ways. Flawed, but promising!

Deliver At All Costs: Very PS2-era top-down driving game about making increasingly weird deliveries in an increasingly-chaotic small island town in the 1950s. Pretty fun and charmingly strange, with some clear influence from things like Deadly Premonition. Very promising, although it does beg the question - how the hell did a small student team get a Konami publishing deal? Who do they have photos of?

Palpus X Annihilation: Hey, remember Alien Shooter? Yeah, this is that again. Very rough - there were a bunch of strange, brief missing-texture bugs in the menu that took a second to fix themselves - but it scratches that zero-rent horde-blaster itch with a surprising deftness.

Deadwire: What if Hotline Miami, but also Gunpoint? It's a combination that works surprisingly well, though the limited about of time you can be in connect-mode can make doing the cooler things a bit more fiddly than they reasonably should be, so you tend to do the same things over and over again since you can do them quickly and they work. Play it now before it becomes famous.

GearGrit: Lotta PS2-ass games this time around. Anyway, this is an extremely PS2-era 3D platformer (heavily inspired by Jak 2, apparently) with a little bit of character-action combat by someone who is very clearly fishing for a very specific kind of fanart. Some frustrating elements (the boss battle is stupid fiddly and relies on getting physics objects to co-operate while an enraged ape is chasing you and trying to punch you into paste) but the gameplay feel is on point. Stunning work for a solo dev, too!

The Bad Stuff

Blackjack Tavern: "What if Balatro... but blackjack?" Except you have little control, nothing is explained, and there's very little polish. It does, however, have a bizarrely realistic bubbly, foamy drink in the top left corner of the screen.

The House of the Dead 2 Remake: Imagine House of the Dead 2, except there's more triangles, the animations are somehow stiffer, there's awkward ragdolls, and the voice acting is bad in a boring way instead of a funny way. Proudly continuing Forever Entertainment's nightmare run of remakes that the original developers are well within their rights to not attach their names to.

Nitro Gen Omega: Incredibly stylish with magnificent Anime-OVA-ass animations accompanying every action, but that's about where the good points end. Very poorly optimised, very poorly explained, and some quests don't even seem to pop up their appropriate markers. Head-scratching at best.

Cybertaxi: Lunatic Nights: Okay, so: Imagine the MS-DOS game Quarantine, except poorly smushed together out of Asset Store bits and pieces in Unreal Engine 5 with zero optimisation, zero art direction, and voice acting that might have possibly had humans involved at some point in its creation.

The "Ehhhhh..." Stuff

Gun Crate Raccoon: Imagine Super Crate Box but smushed into a slightly roguelitier form and with way worse game feel. Which, given one of the developers of Super Crate Box put together a full on tutorial on how they made their game feel good, feels like a mistake.

Megabonk: A very rough 3D Vampire Survivors clone very clearly made by one person using pre-made art and sound assets. It feels like they're having an absolute blast putting everything together, but I'll be honest: This does nothing for me.

The Phantom: Okay, look motherfucker. I've been collecting the weird Australian collections of the newspaper strip since I was but a wee youth, and I'm an open cheerleader for Aussie devs striking out and going for it in our weird, indies-and-mobile-only fragment of the industry. I'm basically the target audience for this game. So! Why is it in this pile instead of the "Good" one? Well, the art is extremely on-par and looks basically just like the comic (with some pleasantly cheesy 90s-computer-coloured-comic-cover colouring thrown on). The gameplay however? The gameplay's pretty rough, there's weird bugs every now and then, the audio is uninspiring, the voice work is cheesy in wrong kind of way, and some of the design decisions contradict things that have been core to the character since before World War II (The Phantom doesn't shoot people! Like, ever! He shoots the weapons out of their hands! It's been like this for like, ninety years!) All I can hope is that the game defies my expectations and turns out Kind Of Alright, because I think it's safe to say that it's not exactly going to trouble, say, Streets of Rage 4.

Ruffy and the Riverside: A very charming puzzle-platformer collectathon with an excellent artstyle and a very cool concept - sampling textures and placing them on other surfaces to utilize their properties to navigate the level - but it's not particularly well-implemented and I found the level design more frustrating than anything else. Oh well.

Sanae's Silphid Breeze: A very rough Kirby fangame with Touhou art stapled onto it. Even if you're hugely into both of those things, it's not enormously inspiring. The pixel art is nice enough, I guess.

Rogue Light Deck Builder: Works better as a funny video on the social media service of your choice than as a playable product. Also: Reacts incredibly poorly to being asked to co-exist with OBS on my PC, with laggy mouse control caused by low framerates rendering the game unplayable.

Claire a la Mode: Cute little food-themed platformer with Game Boy Color-inspired 8-bit art. Seemingly every room has its own little gimmick, but not all of them are particularly fun to actually play. With a little refining, this could be onto a winner.

Monaco 2: Enhhhhhh. Maybe I wasn't in the right mood for it, or maybe it's because I was playing in single player, but Enhhhhhh.

Pico Drift: Clearly just one guy messing around trying to make his own Midtown Madness-alike. There's very little there at the moment, and what's there needs a lot of polish, but this is clearly just one guy's hobby project, so good for him. Don't let me yuck that particular yum.

Cubic Odyssey: Minecraft Man's Sky. This is probably cool, especially in co-op or whatever, but it simply didn't do much for me. Alas, I fear my tree-punching days may have come to an end. Do not weep for me, for my cards-playing days have only just begun.

Ultra Mega Cats: Another co-op-centric roguelite shooter, except it's third person and trying to take a lot of cues from Overwatch. Including, unfortunately, the utterly intolerable voiceover work. Again, maybe it comes into its own with more than one character (and let's face it, more than one class), but it felt decidedly mediocre to try and slog through. The art is nice, to be sure, but it's going to take a lot more than that in a genre dominated by laser-focused titans like Gunfire Reborn and Roboquest.

Godstone: 2D pixel-art fantasy RPG platformer thingymabob. Seemingly expects you to be intimately familiar with a fantasy universe you know nothing about since this is the first form of media it's ever appeared in. Lovely pixel art, albeit suffering from the easily-fixable dread horror of mixels. Utterly wretched sound design that does everything I hate. Honestly, kind of forgettable.

Unyielder Prologue: Roguelite take on the ULTRAKILL formula. Kinda cool, and dripping with style, but the balance is a complete dog's breakfast. Most of my runs started by immediately throwing me at a boss without nearly enough ammo to so much as dent it. Can likely be refined into something great, but it ain't there yet.

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