Prelude

Once again, a billion tons of demos have landed all at once. And once again, I played entirely too many of them on my Twitch stream. The Demo Fest Fest descended once again, telling me what's going to knock me on my ass and surprise me out of nowhere, and what's going to leave me utterly flummoxed as to how someone could be proud enough of it to show it to others. Of course, this time things were a little different, in that I had a much more powerful PC (albeit one dealing with a few health issues at the time...) and therefore a lot more elbow room to play things and stream them at the same time. I only had one OBS crash this time! Albeit, it was such a big one that it even took the Stream Deck client with it, so at least it had novelty on its side...

Once again, I maintained a scorecard, categorizing the games I played under three all-encompassing categories, then jotted down some brief thoughts about them later. And once again, this merely describes my initial impressions of the games' state in Mid-June 2025. They may have become better or worse over time, or I might just be wrong and stupid about them. What side of the fence are you on...?

The Good Stuff

Blaze of Storm: TERARIN GAMES have been churning out excellent pixel-art shmups with simple-but-effective gimmicks like they're going out of fashion, and this signposts the continuation of this much appreciated trend. Demo is a five minute time-attack mode (or a "caravan mode" if you're hip and with it) giving a good look at the mechanics. Well worth a spin - you have at least five minutes of spare time, right?

Maximus Mouse's Manic Mayhem: I was a big fan of Pug Fugly's previous game Alien Death Mob, and was very happy to see them continue pursuing their talent for classic arcade gameplay on stimulants. A tile-based blend of Pac-Man and Q-bert with tons of personality, cute pixel art and a local multiplayer mode (with bots!) that crashed on me. I'll be watching this intensely.

Mina the Hollower: What if GBC-era Zelda, but also a Soulsborne? Has all the polish and charm you'd expect from the studio that's wrung about ten years out of Shovel Knight, and feels great to actually play, with frequent "oh, that's cool" moments. Can they keep it up for a full game, though? I mean, probably. They do have a track record. Definitely one to watch.

Replicat: I was streaming my playing-of-demos and the developer of this one swung by and politely asked me to play it. So I did, and it turns out it's pretty fun! Basically a Balatro clone but instead of poker it's a match-two memory game where all the cards have meme-y cat drawings on them. Not sure about depth or longevity, but pleasantly entertaining.

Rhythm Storm: Radiangames has been walking the indie beat for a decade and a half now, and this might just be his magnum opus. Basically a blend of Geometry Wars and Vampire Survivors where the enemies, wave layout etc. are all synced to the level's background music. Excellent electronic music, beautifully glowy vector art from a future that never happened. Play this immediately, this is an order.

THYSIASTERY: Dungeon crawler/blobber roguelike with a uniquely dithered pixel-art artstyle. Hard as nails, but oozes charisma. I've been keeping an eye on this one for a while since I know someone involved with it, and I'm very excited to see more of it. It's been interesting seeing certain long-dead types of CRPG, like blobbers and Ultima-alikes, gradually return from the grave over the past couple of years, and I'll be curious to see if an audience still waits for them...

Brutal John 2: Aggressively stupid Duke Nukem/Serious Sam fangame where the story is so dated that stopping aliens from crypto-mining is a key plot element and the Duke Nukem-impersonation voiceovers so heavily accented that you need the subtitles. Somehow, despite the odds being incredibly against it on account of being an indie meme "comedy" FPS, it's actually pretty fun. Better than Phantom Fury, at any rate. Not that that's a high bar...

Absolum: An excellent fantasy brawler by several of the guilty parties behind the incredible Streets of Rage 4, with awesome artwork by a French animation studio and assorted Hades-style roguelite elements. Combat feels great, it's massively fun juggling enemies miles past the end of their lifebars, and the voiceover work is pretty decent. If this doesn't rock the world when it comes out, I'll be incredibly surprised.

BALL X PIT: Wonderfully deranged Arkanoid-y shmupp-y thing that hammers all the "be happy" buttons in my brain. Lots of interesting build options, great game feel, and I love how the monsters start chanting when they have you in a bad spot. Also, there's a weird Farmville-y thing attached to persistant progression that also has Arkanoid elements for some reason. If you haven't played this yet, why not?

VOID/BREAKER: Startlingly impressive roguelike FPS with lots of environmental destruction stuff, set within a glitchy VR world ruled by a omnipotent AI. Seems well prepared to allow you to make some really fucked up builds - I (briefly) had a rapid-fire, ultra-inaccurate rocket-launching pistol before I blew up under mysterious circumstances. Game feel is decent, with some awkwardness. One to watch, even as the "roguelite FPS" sub-sub-genre approaches critical mass.

Monument Valley 3: More charming little perspective puzzles, now with boat bits to give the puzzles a slightly wider scope. I'll be honest - much like the rest of the series, this'll be way more fun on your phone with touch controls and pacing dictated by your bus schedule than it is sitting at a desk. Unfortunately, all the mobile versions are exclusive to Netflix, so this is literally the only option for Just Buying The Fucking Thing. So, there we go.

Critter Crossfire: A simple turn-based strategy game with the twist that all your aiming and shooting is done in a limited-time FPS-view mode. Quite fun, if a bit frustrating with certain weapons - grenades are simultaneously way too heavy and way too prone to physics-ing away from their target. Gives me some nostalgia for the weird (and kind of bad) 3D Worms games in their first couple of iterations. Curious to see this develop further.

Ninja Gaiden Ragebound: Incredibly polished action platformer by the team behind Blasphemous. Insanely good pixel art, extremely fun game and level design with its slightly puzzly approach to combat (get the guy who gives you the super attack, then use it on the big guy, who might give you a super attack for another big guy, and so on...) and game feel is a million bucks - you absolutely feel like a badass, and any screwups are absolutely your fault and not the game's. Looks like it'll be an essential release.

Bloodthief: First person walldashy speedrunner that inexplicably riffs on the janky lowpoly-even-for-the-era artstyle of the original Thief games for its visual aesthetic. Feels great to chain moves together, parrying and airdashing through swarms of guards to continue fuelling the rush. While secrets and unlockable weapons that open new paths may add depth, I'll be curious to see whether the idea holds for a full game or whether it's played all its cards early.

Blast Rush LS: An arcade shmup by the developers of Grapple Dog that casts aside the normal guns to give you an infinite supply of bombs. Slightly weaker bombs than your average shmup, but bombs regardless, adding an interesting and unique dynamic to combat - your attacks are very slow, so you have to time them to knock out as many enemies in one go. Charming 16-bit audio-visuals. Demo is limited to a 2-minute caravan mode.

Acts of Blood: Low-budget brawler from Indonesia. Janky as all get-out (the ragdolls pay loving homage to early-Dragon Engine wallbounces, and the boss found it exceptionally difficult to actually hit me if I dodged within a calendar day of his attack animation starting) but the fighting feels satisfying enough. There are a lot of really cool indie games coming out of Indonesia nowadays! Every time I go to PAX Aus they all share a booth or two and they're almost all deadset bangers. Someone needs to investigate this phenomenon!

Cleared Hot: Desert/Jungle Strike-alike bearing the Microprose name(!) with a very goofy and comical tone to it and a big emphasis on physics goofballery - you are fully encouraged to winch up shipping crates and smash enemy vehicles with them, to say nothing of flying low to apply rotor blades to infantry! Some jank apparent (the hitboxes on the jet strafe-runs in the final stage of the demo were oddly not quite the same as the warning lines displayed on screen) but very promising. Gonna keep an eye on this one.

He Who Watches: Excellent grid-based first-person puzzle game about walking on walls and manipulating switches and blocks with a magical bow and a single arrow. A little awkward in parts - you can look freely but can only shoot in the four cardinal directions, which can take a bit of getting used to - but otherwise a winner in the making. Watch this one.

Rogue Point: Rainbow Six Terrorist Hunt: The Roguelite by the Black Mesa devs. Pretty fun - the gunplay feels great, and the audiovisual element is a million bucks - but it suffered a bit from me playing in single player - this is a game that really demands co-op. Was kinda surprised by the slightly irreverant tone of your characters, given how this genre tends to cast your protagonists as extremely by-the-book police or military. Hoping this does better than other recent co-op centric FPS games...

Samurai Blitz EX: Simple and incredibly fun arcade-style game in the endless-runner vein except seemingly not endless. Charming pixel art, great game-feel, inoffensive audio. You could have played three runs in the time it took you to scroll down to this part of the page, so get on it. Unless the price is wrong, I'll likely be diving on this like a hand grenade threatening my squad.

Moros Protocol: Lowpoly pixel-art roguelite set on a space station being infested with gnarly bug creatures that may or may not be harbingers of the devil or something. Still some rough patches - the dialogue in particular could probably use a proofread - but I quite dug this one even with its slightly STRAFE-y visuals (nobody wants their FPS roguelite to remind people of STRAFE!) and I'm curious to see where it goes from here.

MIO: Memories in Orbit: A fascinating and very European Metroidvania with a non-zero amount of Soulslike to it, set in a smashed up, dying world of confused and insane robots. All very cheery stuff. Feels great to play, if a bit confusing (you don't start with a map!) and the setup is very intriguing. I'll keep an eye on this one.

TEXNOPLAZM: Lowpoly boomer-shooter-adjacent brawler by one of the developers of Ghostware, sending you wall-jumping, punching, shooting and slamming your way around the crumbling shadow of a cyberpunk metropolis. Game-feel is great with lots of accounting for the player trying stupid shit (You can parry a speeding train, and are fully encouraged to do so!) Keeping an eye on this one.

Morsels: Nuclear Throne-alike with a swapping-between-characters gimmick. Wonderfully wild pixel-art and some cool ideas, but goddamn, the "clips" on your weapons are TINY. You can only shoot for like half a second before you have to lay off the stick for a second or two, which doesn't feel good at all. The weird comix-y cat-and-mouse setting is intriguing enough, though, for me to keep an eye on this one.

The Bad Stuff

Formula Legends: There's a cool concept here - Formula 1 racing in several different decades with their own capabilities - and the visuals look a treat, but it tries to have it's arcade racing cake and eat it while including a bunch of simulation mechanics that just don't work. Combine that with the racing just not feeling good, and it's death by a thousand cuts.

Wild Horse Racing: The idea of a 2D side-scrolling horse racing game was intriguing to me, and the pixel art is pretty nice, so imagine by dissapointment when I found out that the control is handled by rapidly repeating an endless loop of eight or so track-specific QTEs. I tend not to "hate" games, especially not demos, but goddamn, this one bought me to the verge.

Lia: Hacking Destiny: Cartoony cyberpunk roguelite platformer with some aggressively mediocre pixel art. No D-Pad controls, and analog stick handling is so incredibly scuffed that pointing the stick up or down (as is needed for dropping through a platform for example) will absolutely send you scuttling off in a random other direction, typically towards your demise. Squandered potential from a developer trying to punch miles above their weight.

Arcade Galaxy: An extremely blatant mobile port where the menus have no gamepad support while the game does. Music is irritating, graphics are mediocre, and game-feel is utterly wretched, trying to make characters feel like they're walking and driving at the same time and mostly just combining the worst of both worlds. Avoid this like the plague!

Beef Arena: Incredibly amateurish platform arcade shooter with a little Super Crate Box inspiration. Presumably the developer's first game ever, and kinda charming from that perspective, but this is the kind of thing you shunt onto Newgrounds or Gamejolt or whatever to polite, if mediocre scores. Not something to attach a price tag to.

The "Ehhhhh..." Stuff

Super 10 Pin: Wacky arcade bowling game paying some surprisingly intense homage to the N64 games you got out for the weekend from Blockbuster. I love this to bits, but I am exorbitantly terrible at it and I'm not sure how much of that is me and how much of that is the intentionally-kinda-awkward controls. Seems to have a decent amount of content planned - even the demo was showering me with level unlocks - so one to look out for.

Identifile: A cute casual roguelite where you play as a mouse cursor on a fake computer, using click-and-drag controls to attack viruses by drawing circles around them. Love the style and concept, but in my experience the battles tend to go on way too long due to small attack windows.

Finnigan Fox: A tweaked and updated reskin of a pre-existing game (Fox N Forests) replacing the mediocre 16-bit style pixel art with mediocre Flash animation as part of an effort to appeal to a younger audience as part of a port to the Intellivision Amico, the very real console that exists. Nothing spectacular, but I like the change-the-seasons mechanic.

Truxton Extreme: A good old fashioned shmup by whoever's wearing Toaplan's skin this week. Wonderful graphics and music, but the story mode graphic novel scenes are cartoonishly bad, and honestly, it feels very oldschool and vanilla, but in a dull way rather than a back-to-basics way. Maybe I've just been ruined by the bullet hell crowd...

Hordelord: The horde mode for Gravelord, an early-access "boomer shooter" FPS by the same developer. Splitting this off into a seperate paid game feels a bit cheeky to me (albeit they're giving it to early-access buyers for free), and it just doesn't have the substance to stand on its own two feet. Doesn't do anything crazy enough to justify not just being a post-campaign unlockable mode.

Speed Demons 2: A second demo dropped by Radiangames, a simple top down highway-centric arcade driving game with a lot of different game modes, ranging from races to car chases to just weaving through peak-hour traffic. Fun, but feels like something's missing. Would probably be an absolute blast on mobile, which it very explicitly is not being released on. Oh well!

Obliterator-X: A top-down pixel art horde shooter that also wants to be a base builder, extraction shooter and tower defense game, while not really succeeding at any of them. Graphics are okaaay, game-feel just isn't up to par. Somehow makes scrounging for resources while fighting mutants in the Australian outback uninteresting.

Look Mum No Computer: Top-down pixel-art RPG, ala Zelda, with a MMO-esque quest structure and an actually pretty cool setting of being set inside of analogue synthesizers. Unfortunately, this cool concept is kind of squandered by ugly pixel art, incredibly repetitive music loops, and mediocre game feel. Oh well.

Rogue Snake: That one Nokia phone game, but with Vampire Survivors bits bolted on. Pretty clearly amateurish and lacking reams of much-needed polish, but there's something here that could be pretty cool if it develops further and gets a bit of time, love and refinement. I'll keep an eye on this one.

Adventure of Samsara: Soulsian pixel-art Metroidvania with vague connections to the Atari 2600 game Adventure that only start to appear at the very end of the demo as a weird, awkward tease. Some nice art (if a bit Superbrothers-y), but the whole thing just feels very rough.

ODDCORE: FPS roguelite mashing as many trendy buttons (lowpoly! pixel art! boomer shooters! liminal spaces! haunted theme parks! please, for the love of god, someone bite the hook!) and looking to the audience for approval. Some cool ideas like the time limit and the variety in per-level objectives, but I just didn't vibe with it. I'm sure it'll be somebody's catnip, given how wide its cast its net, but I can't say it's mine.

Ra Ra BOOM: Mediocre side-scrolling brawler that somehow does barely anything with the concept of ninja cheerleaders fighting robots. The cheerleader bit barely even comes up! Nice artwork and the voicework is okay in an anime-dub kinda way, but the gameplay is thoroughly uninspiring in a post-Streets 4 era.

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