yesterday i played a bunch of Steam demos on my stream for Next fest. you can find video of the stream here. my impressions:
Axyz
not to be confused with Axyn Adventure mentioned above. it’s basically exactly what you’d expect from the screenshot - it’s a Kula World-style action puzzle game with vaporwavey visuals and lots of breakbeats on the soundtrack. i know of Kula World but have never played it outside of a minute or two but i always have a soft spot for ball rolling games. it seems like it basically just is another version of Kula World from what i can tell. you roll the ball around an abstract 3d space and try to pick up all the items as quick as you can. maybe the levels get more interesting later on like Kula World seems to but i only played around the first world, which was just standard navigating and collecting. as far as recent y2k era throwback action puzzle games go i preferred Vividlope, but this basically does its job fine and i could see people who like Kula World getting into it.
Skin Deep
it’s the long awaited new game from Blendo! from what i played it feels like… a Blendo game. a friend was mixed on this one because they didn’t like the voice acting and felt like it was kind of busy/overtutorializing design wise. i think to me it just felt like a Blendo attempt to be more maximalist and mainstream-accessible. basically like a sort of cartoonish mini immersive sim. you’re a woman who works with a cat resistance group to take down some space pirates. you have to save the cats that have been captured on each level. the cats are done in Blendo style tho the space pirates and other characters aren’t.
the main mechanic involves stunning people using various makeshift items and beating them up and then taking their heads and flushing them out to space which is a pretty wacky premise. like a typical immersive sim, there are a bunch of different pathways and approaches you can take. the levels were small and fairly linear so i didn’t really see the impact of that in the demo, but i can imagine they get more complex later on. the writing can either be cute or grating depending on what mood you’re in. it is a little soy bantery and obnoxious at times but i also just don’t like a lot of game voice acting in general. and there are other bits in the writing that i found amusing. some of the emails were kinda funny and i like that “bojo” is the default insult that gets thrown around - sort of like “taffer” in Thief.
overall, it’s a bit wackier and more maximalist than other Blendo games but i still enjoyed the demo i played and i’d def come back to it whenever it comes out.
Navicula Meatus
i wanted to play something horror-adjacent and this is one that i found via i think just through the eek3 stream that had a demo and looked interesting enough. you’re this horrible crustacean monster and you wander around a world talking to other horrible monsters in some indecipherable language and they ask for things. if you keep the HUD open there’s some language there, but i don’t think it’s decipherable. really it’s basically just one big fetch quest where figure out how to attain and deliver different items to different characters.
i complain about some of these haunted ps1-style games being a bit too much in attempting to do full on gamey things that are kinda half-baked and don’t work, and that a lot of these games would work better as vibey walking sims. this is a case where the game is more minimal and depends heavily on the cool visuals and sound design but the game part is just kind of uninteresting and tedious. i at least picked up more as it went on because i was interested in staying in the world for awhile, but i just don’t think fetch quests are really a great thing to anchor the design of a game around unless there are substantial other things to keep people interested. i guess it’s another one of these retro lo-poly 3d horror-adjacent games where i liked the vibe but it wasn’t enough to hold my interest in the rest of the game. cool character and environment design though.
Mythic Mire
another game from the prolific developers of Salad Fields and Mibbibli’s Quest. this is an Earthbound-style RPG that promises to be weird and feature a lot of furry characters like their other games. the demo was short and it really wasn’t anything too out of the ordinary other than one or two slightly weird combat mechanics (the pool playing and some occasional cool 3D rendered scenes). a lot of their games are quite long and have a lot of different things going on in them so i imagine this one could get more interesting over time. i definitely need to go back and check on some of their other recent stuff - but in the meantime, this was a pretty standard JRPG work in progress demo and i really didn’t have much to go off of.
Airframe Ultra
can’t even find shots that accurately reflect the demo that is available right now.
this is a really cool looking PS1-style motorcycle combat racer made by the Rain World dev. that may sound like a totally left-field thing to come from this developer until you play the demo. the biker characters have a similar sort of style of movement/control to the Rain World slugcat character, and also the world design seems to sort of loop in and out into a bunch of different pathways sort of like Rain World.
unfortunately the demo is not very far along at all and seems like it might have been designed more for multiplayer? my assumption was that’d be more focused and singleplayer so i was a little confused about that. i really couldn’t get a sense of the totality of the experience other than it just giving me stuff to mess around with in a sandbox. there were a huge variety of cool weapons there too (almost every type of gun and melee weapon you can imagine + some more), and i love the look of the world. so i could definitely imagine this being very fun in the future! but what was here was really not enough, and i’m probably going to have to wipe my memory of it and start afresh whenever the full game actually comes out.
MINDWAVE
very high effort fusion of Warioware-like microgames in a kind of offbeat visual novel with a premise sort of similar to Psychonauts where you enter into other people’s mindscapes. it has sort of webcomicy sensibilities and feels very Gen Z in the general aesthetic and way the characters talk (in a positive way tho). someone in my chat described it as a bit Invader Zim-core except more teenage.
your main character is a goth teenager who has reluctantly entered this Mindwave contest and is not really good at it. after an initial tutorial, the first part you can wander around and talk to different people who you may or may not be fighting later, and then you enter one full on Mindwave battle(?) with what appears to be a very twee pre-teen. from what i’ve heard the microgames sort of reflect something in particular going on in the story with each of these characters, and there’s a pretty catchy pop song that plays throughout.
the really high effort that’s gone into the entire thing, esp the really unique visual design is kinda the reason to play this game. i hate the word “polish” but it really is very polished and has a really unique sensibility. i really enjoyed what i played and i can imagine it catching on whenever it comes out. i guess that’s probably why it’s already received a lot of attention. def one of my favorites of the bunch.
ChainStaff
this is another game from Mommy’s Best Games, creator of the bizarre and compelling Pig Eat Ball and a very fun arcade game i’ve played a lot of at Wonderville in NYC recently: Bumpy Grumpy. he apparently had a lot of games on XBLA back in the day that looked a bit similar to this one.
the XLBA-core appearance and the 2000’s flash game edgelord level of blood might make you think this game is super jank but it’s actually quite well put together! the game is Metal Slug/Contra style but revolves around you using the titual Chain Staff for a quite versatile series of tasks. it seems like it would be a bit unwieldy but i actually got the hang of it as things went on, enough to the point where i wish more games had a weapon like that.
the giant enemy designs are very fun and varied too - particularly the boss pictured above with the giant skull. the demo could get quite difficult in spots - particularly the final boss battle - but in a way that felt rewarding to get through. the sci-fi story of your main character grunt who has a bug stuck on his head that’s keeping him alive was appropriately pulpy and the perfect sort of tone for this kind of game. you even have the choice to save other soldiers or kill them for resources throughout, which might have narrative effects down the line (it does make other soldiers shoot at you instead of help you in the levels).
all in all, a good time! it’s probably worth checking out some of the other games by this guy because this was a really creative platformer i think some people on here would like. i also really like Bumpy Grumpy a lot so maybe worth checking that one out on Steam if you want something that feels like an early 80’s arcade game.
Moves of the Diamond Hand
it’s another new Cosmo D game! i actually saw a playest of this happening after one of my classes at NYU a few months back but had no real sense of how the game actually felt to play from that. continuing on in the lineage of Betrayal at Club Low, this one has a lot of dice rolling and RPG mechanics. it is also thankfully back in first person, which i honestly appreciate a lot as someone who def vibed the most with his early couple games.
i wasn’t sure how i’d feel about this as a continued direction of leaning on dice rolling as someone who likes the vibey wandering of Off-Peak and Norwood Suite in particular. but i really got into it! it kind of makes me think that just wandering around a train station or another public space but with D&D style checks on basically everything is a surprisingly nice format i’m surprised more stuff doesn’t do. it makes something that would otherwise seem mundane a lot more compelling, and the design sensibility of the dice fits with the off-beat feeling of the world and dialogue, so it fits in really well.
anyway, this was also one of my favorites and i’m definitely looking forward to the whole thing when it comes out!
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overall, the ones i liked were MINDWAVE, Moves of the Diamond Hand, ChainStaff and Skin Deep. ChainStaff is the one i’d be least likely to return to because it’s not really a style a game i get into as easily as the others, but i still thought what i played was very well done. both Mythic Mire and Airframe Ultra def seem like they have potential to be interesting down the road but i didn’t have enough to go off of yet so i’ll just have to wait and see on those. Axyz was very solid but maybe slightly unremarkable and Navicula Meatus had cool visuals but i didn’t really like the fetch questy nature of it.