• Really well-executed limited palette art. It swaps palettes between different areas for mood. Maybe that’s why the playable character is a black cat.
• This demo is really short. I saw a bit of lore and played some hide and seek, then went through the scary door. The cat has a drill but I don’t even get to use it!
• Didn’t get a chance to see any interesting action except for the very last few seconds of the demo
• The camera feels unpolished. It always freely drifts behind you, so quickly changing directions often will make the camera jiggle unpleasantly. It would be nice if the camera would stay still or lock to an axis sometimes. That would especially help with aiming jumps, since the camera always jerks upward a bit every time you jump.
• The controls feel great. Super responsive movement with no sliding and little momentum buildup. Jump height is also quick to respond to letting go of the jump key.

Soft wishlist. This demo just wasn’t long enough to be totally sell me on the full game.

• I found this demo to be good but not great. I’m struggling to identify why it didn’t appeal to me more.
• Maybe the selection of levels wasn’t impressive enough. There were a handful of puzzle ones, but some just felt like repeats with not much new each time. There seemed to be a lot of autoscrollers.
• Platforming movement mechanics were simple and straightforward, which is appropriate for a puzzle platformer, but then there are levels with precision platforming and not much puzzle
• Cool series of boss levels at the end
• Maybe the demo didn’t do enough to hint at the possibilities for the whole bow and arrow mechanic for puzzles, so I’m just not getting hyped enough
• Maybe I just don’t get the presentation of the game? Electronic music and high-tech UI but playing as a cat with a bow in the forest

Pass

• Celeste but with 360° dash
• Cool mechanic: dash into spikes to bounce off of them
• Slow motion while aiming, but the aim indicator isn’t very accurate. Also, unlimited slow motion
• Hard to tell when I have dash or not
• Something feels off about the air control. I often overshoot or undershoot when trying to land on a small platform
• What a long demo! This is a substantial amount of game to give out.

Pass. I had fun, but I’m currently not in the mood for Celeste-style precision platforming.

• Crusty brown gothic look, like Quake
• Gameplay really grabbed me. Sometimes, I was leaning forward and holding my breath!
• More and deeper movement mechanics, compared to other first-person parkour games, like SEUM or Neon White. Building up and preserving speed is a big deal
• Challenging levels, with actual enemies to fight and a quickly-rising difficulty level. Levels are usually 1-5 minutes long — lengthy compared to Neon White’s 10-30 seconds
• I managed to wall jump off of a deadly spike wall, and I’m still not sure if that was intended

Soft wishlist. I definitely enjoyed this demo, but I currently don’t have an appetite for this type of game.

• First thing after the intro cutscene: a detailed character creation screen. That’s pretty overwhelming.
• I like the art style except for the subdued 3D character models
• Throwing the dice and watching them settle is satisfying, as it is in Armello
• Gameplay is clearly focused on battle grid combat, since the “dungeon crawling” is just clicking on a map, like Slay the Spire
• Do team management and watch the plot in the downtime between jobs
• There is an appreciable amount of role-playing in this RPG

Wishlisted

• Just walk to work
• Slowly walk through streets full of deadly things, like exploding garbage bins, loose signpoles, and falling signs
• No checkpoints! No dodging! This is a rage game.
• There’s online co-op, apparently. Have Fun with friends!
• This demo is silly fun, but I don’t need to play more of this

Pass

• This guy also made Elec Head, another charming puzzle platformer
• Puzzle platforming with exploration
• Cute pixel art
• Wordless teaching. Actually, the only words in the game are the credits!
• Puzzles all revolve around clever use of bombs: launch yourself like a rocket jump, blow up one bomb to push another

Wishlisted

• Has that Flash game feel, but in a good way. Quirky idea, simple design. It’s built to quickly get you in and playing.
• The puzzles are like connecting circuits. The figures can only move if they’re connected to a crown-wearing figure.
• An interesting take on grid-based puzzles. Like a fusion of Sokoban, chess puzzles, and “Chinese” checkers.
• PANIK’s cute demo trick: just have a quick line of super-simple levels to show off mechanics in the rest of the game!
• I’d actually love to play this on my phone instead

Wishlisted

• Deus Ex-like cutscenes for a story set after the Combine invasion! You join a company that raids the multiverse
• Doom screen melt transition, holy crap
• The familiarity and comfort of Source engine physics, movement, and weapons
• Game crashed a bunch for me, so I’ll have to stop early

Soft wishlist (I’ll keep an eye on this)

• BTW, “mrak” is Russian for “darkness”
• Super rough, gritty introduction to a setting drowning in crusty old tech
• Unfortunately crashes early in the game

Soft wishlist

Thoughts before playing: Pretty, abstract 3D puzzle game. But what’s the killer feature? Like the portal gun from Portal or the camera from Viewfinder?

This is what it would be like to play the PlayStation 2 boot sequence as a puzzle game, with floating cubes and coloured sparks whizzing around in an abstract void. You get to control some balls, rolling them around the level to press buttons and zoom through pipes.

This demo shows some early levels, featuring some fairly stimulating puzzles, but it failed to really grab me. The slow pacing and pure abstractness of the game’s setting aren’t getting me excited to play more. I just never got to that “aha” point where I realized what made the game special. In comparison, another puzzle game demo I played in a past Next Fest, The Art of Reflection, didn’t waste any time showing off its key feature of jumping through mirrors.

I’m going to pass on this game, but I know someone is going to like it.

The game produced an error when launching it, which I fixed by forcing Steam to run it with Proton Experimental.

2D animated cutscenes? Hell yeah, I love that kind of effort. The in-game 3D art also does a good job capturing that illustrative feel of the cutscenes. Atmospheric top-down adventure with cool art and light RPG elements? I liked Bastion and Tunic, so maybe this could be up my alley, too. The game’s premise and worldbuilding interest me. You play as a young guardian of time and use your time powers to fight the monsters ravaging the world.

But gameplay-wise, this demo is rough. I found the melee combat to be unsatisfyingly sluggish. There’s a bug where falling off the world makes you permanently faster when you respawn, and I was definitely running way too fast by the end of the demo. The game is tagged as a roguelike (aka “choose some randomly drawn upgrades”) on its store page, but there wasn’t much time in the demo to really appreciate any of those upgrades in action.

I’ll pass. It’s really unfortunate that this demo disappointed me, since this game still might grab me if it gets in better shape.

The key selling points for Wander Stars are its loud inspiration by anime and its word-slinging combat mechanic, the latter of which got me to try this demo. I thought it was an interesting take on turn-based combat to line up words that customize an attack, and that old anime style presentation is indeed charming.

Wander Stars is also very heavy on the visual novel-style dialogue and cinematics, which is probably necessary to evoke that anime feel. It felt more like a visual novel in disguise than the more mechanically involved turn-based RPG that I was hoping for. I’m just lacking the patience to read so much between active gameplay, though the gameplay near the end of the demo does show potential for depth in the turn-based combat.

I’ll pass.