Steam NEXT FEST 2021 Fall

ANNO: Mutationem.

A very nice looking low-poly/pixelart action platformer. Unfortunately, there's nothing good to say about either platforming or combat: the platforming is incredibly janky and too snappy, and the combat is most basic it can be with no parries, no air combos and no special abilities, at least as far as the demo shows. UPDATE: In the Steam Discussions page Devs said that the demo is almost 1 year old, and looking through what did since then it seems that most of the issues that I listed here has been addressed.

Ardein.Arise / Ardein.Fall

Ardein.Arise, a.k.a. Ardein.Fall, is a fast-paced Tower Defence arcade space shooter in which you, a tiny spaceship, are trying to protect your mothership. You can shoot lasers, you can build turrets, and that's about it. The game is pretty basic, but the soundtrack is nice. Maybe take a look at Nova Drift instead.

Arran: The Book of Heroes

Arran: The Book of Heroes is an extremely simplistic top-down button masher slice 'em up. You go around the forest, you mash LBM, and that's it. The full version promises inventory and skills, but it probably still be no better than Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance.

B.I.O.T.A.

B.I.O.T.A. (for some reason seen by Nvidia Shadowplay as Russian Roulette 2) is an action platformer with the funkiest synths, crunchiest sound effects, and the nastiest 2-bit colour palettes (including the infamous CGA cyan/magenta one) on this side of the 199X. You control one of the multiple characters (some of which seems to be unlockable later) on a quest to rid the mining asteroid you stuck on from Metroid-like beasties. The map is non-linear, with a central hub where you can heal, change your character, and buy upgrades. This one immediately goes into my wishlist.

Astral Ascent

Astral Ascent is a gorgeous, nature-themed pixelart rogue-lite in the vein of Dead Cells and Skul. The combat revolves around gaining mana with basic attacks and then unleashing one of four powerful spells that cycle as you cast them. Between rooms, you can gain new spells, upgrade them with traits, gain utility and passive abilities. The movement in and out of combat feels very smooth, and the characters even feel almost weightless with the double jump resetting after any basic attack. Another one to look forward to.

Blade of Darkness

Do you hate strafing? Do you hate how nowadays all camera movements are smoothed enough that you don't get a headache even in the middle of the swordfight? Do you want to play a game that is older than 90% of Fortnite players?

Blade of Darkness is a game from the dark age. An age before WASD was a thing; an age before strafing could be done with a single button; an age when most things were done for the first time. I wouldn't advise you to play this if you don't have a solid resistance to the jank of yore.

Blind Fate: Edo no Yami.

Blind Fate: Edo no Yami. Great idea, but awful execution. You play as a blind cyborg with map data fed to you by an AI companion. The issue is that AI's data is outdated by 350 years. That means that you need to rely on your other sensors to update that data as you go. For example, you might fall through a hole in the building floor that was not there 350 years ago, but if you scan the area with your cyber-tanto, you will see that the building is long gone and there are only overgrown ruins around you.

The same mechanics apply to the enemies: you cannot see them until you slash them multiple times, detect them on the sound data layer, or see them on the heat data layer if they have some hot reactor running. After you have located an enemy, you can stun and execute them using your hand cannon, or you can look for their weak spot using one of the data layers.

Unfortunately, the combat is very stiff and unsatisfying. The roll doesn't go through the enemies; the block is slow and unreliable; enemy attack telegraphs are hard to read. Skip this one unless they will do a significant overhaul of the combat.

Chessformer

It is chess, it is platformer, it is Chessformer! That's kinda all you need to know about the game. It's a platformer puzzle when you move around chess pieces. The gravity is there too.

Cognition Method

Cognition Method is a terrific looking game about an astronaut investigating the mysterious space monolith. The interior of the monolith is a brutalist puzzle hellscape that is slowly being corrupted by some unknown force. While the premise sounds fantastic, the game falls short because the 'default unity blueprint' movement feels off, and gravity-based-puzzles centric gameplay only aggravates the issue. If you liked NaissanceE as I did, you will probably like this one too. I just hope that the developer will polish the movement a bit.

Diplomacy is Not an Option

Diplomacy is Not an Option is a neat large scale city builder / tower defence / RTS hybrid game that reminds me of Rise to Ruins. Very polished and very nice looking. You can build tens of thousands of units and lead massive wars defending and expanding your kingdom. Very intriguing, especially since the demo only features an endless mode on one map, but the full version promises a campaign with varied mission goals and even some decision making.

Critatel

Critatel is a pixelart, sci-fi themed rogue-lite platformer similar to Enter the Gungeon in terms of having bullet hell elements and tons of disposable guns, but also adding a layer of having different ammo and trinkets. It looks nice, sounds nice, controls very nicely and overall feels very polished. I will be checking this one out when it's out.

Blood West

Blood West is the low-poly non-linear exploration and resource management horror FPS with stealth and souls-lite death elements. The shooting is a bit janky, and the stealth may need some tweaking, but overall the game feels polished enough and have no glaring issues. The demo was intriguing enough to make me wanna check the full version.

Conscript

Conscript is a classic PS1-era survival horror set in the trenches of Verdun during WW1. Low-res visuals, clunky controls, limited supplies, lethal enemies, cryptic puzzles, and the constant feeling of dread and oppression. It seems to be pretty faithful to the stuff that was the origin of the Survival Horror genre, so it is worth checking it out if you're into that.

Die After Sunset

I knew there was something funky about this game after I got bombarded with its ads on Reddit, and there sure is. What do you get if you mix the gameplay of Risk of Rain 2, the art style of Fortnite and Radical Heights, with the success of Gigantic and Battleborn? You'll get this crap, also known as Die After Sunset (btw, can we please stop with the names like that? I feel like Dying Light, Dead By Daylight, and Until Dawn was enough). What seems to be born from an attempt to scavenge assets of 'Agents: Biohunters' is a barely competent wave-based third-person looter shooter with clunky controls, lacklustre weapons, boring items, and uninspired level and enemy design.

Dread Delusion

Dread Delusion is a tough one to recommend. On the one hand, we have a lovingly crafted PS1-style King's Field-like action adventure with a harsh but very deliberate and specific art style, some nice eerie music, and old school RPG mechanics (no quest markers, but detailed directions in the journal instead); and on the other hand, we have the PS1 era simplicity in mechanics and level design: vast empty fields of nothingness, kiting enemies and whiff-punishing instead of actual combat. And on top of that, the demo was a very unpolished experience: crouch and block buttons did nothing for me in the demo, spellcasting is hard-bound to RMB even after I rebound it in the settings; with little to no effort I managed to: clip out of bounds, get a dozen of the same quest item, get to one of the quest objectives the unintended way, deliver one quest item before ever picking up the quest. I will keep an eye on this one waiting for a thick layer of polish.

Endling

Endling grabs you immediately as you start the game. The world is ending, and you are just a pregnant fox mom escaping a burning forest and trying to find shelter. The game itself is a survival side-scroller in which you are trying to find enough food to feed your fox cubs in a post-apocalyptic world. Cubs are weak, food is scarce, and everything is dangerous. It reminds me of Limbo/Inside, Shelter, and a bit of Rain World. The game is super charming, and I can 100% recommend it to everyone.

Evertried

Evertried is a turn-based rogue-lite with a combat system similar to the Crypt of the Necrodancer. You move along the grid on a 7x7 platform and try to clear it of the enemies while keeping up your real-time combo gauge going. Every handful of floors you visit a shop where you can get more abilities. The combo gauge is used to power up your passive abilities, while active ones require you to move multiple times before using them. I didn't see any meta-progression in the demo, but I assume it is there.

Spies & Soldiers

Spies & Soldiers is a simultaneous turn-based strategy with a lot of hidden information. You command the titular Spies and Soldiers to take over a procedurally generated kingdom. Simply looking at first glance, the game is pretty deep after you learn the mechanics. First, soldiers take over castles to allow you to spend action points to muster more troops. But the more troops you gather, the more supplies you need, and to get those, your soldiers need to capture the crop fields and adjacent lands to make supply lines. And it all would've been pretty easy if the other player wasn't there to do the same. This is where Spies come into play; they can: stealthily give you info on enemy troop numbers and positions, take over towns to provide you with more action points, open up castle gates to negate defenders' advantage in sieges, and assassinate each other in case they get revealed. My issues with the game are: the UI/UX could be better and more smooth, and the procedural map can sometimes place one party at a sizeable disadvantage.

Exo One

Exo One is a minimalistic and meditative gravity/gliding-based exploration game, kind of like a mix between Lifeslide and Venineth. You control an alien aircraft capable of either having gravity affecting it tenfold or at one-tenth, thus allowing you to gain speed by sliding downhill and then glide in the air. The demo is pretty short, about 10 minutes long. The only story beats it gives you are that there you are, the sole survivor of some interplanetary mission, and you a vision that through alien tech and time manipulation, you can somehow bring everyone else back. Definitely my kind of game.

Fallen Aces

Fallen Aces is a first-person brawler with imsim elements made a noir comic style about one tough guy going against an entire city full of crooks and mooks. You go around sneaking around the corners and waiting for an opportunity to bash some heads in. Sometimes non-linear, sometimes self-aware. Very cheesy, very funny, very fun.

Firegirl

In Firegirl, you play as a Firefighter Girl tasked with doing exactly what you'd expect firefighters to be doing, i.e. putting out fires and rescuing cats from burning buildings. Unfortunately, the controls are slightly janky (the player character has too much inertia; while spraying water, you cannot turn around, which can make it hard to spray things directly above you), the pixelart is pretty basic (or at least not to my liking), and the core loops seem to be rather shallow even taking into the account the existence of upgrade system. Overall, the game gives off amateur-ish vibes and probably won't be fun for more than a couple of hours at most.

F.I.S.T.: Forged In Shadow Torch

F.I.S.T.: Forged In Shadow Torch is a metroidvania set a diesel-fur-punk future. You play as a member of an underground resistance cell named Rayton smashing his way through the oppressive regime with a giant mechanical fist on his quest to save his friend. The game's movement and combat are surprisingly fluid and polished; jumps and walljumps work precisely as you would expect, punches are snappy and impactful, and the executions are brutal. In addition, there's a full-fledged combo system with additional moves and sub-weapons to be unlocked. The game's weakest point seems to be the colour palette, but the level design and the attention to detail compensate for that. A very nice surprise, I will definitely buy it someday.

Forgive Me Father

Forgive Me Father is a retro FPS that tries to be like Project Warlock but fails. The weapons have terrible accuracy, the arenas are too tight, the FoV is too low, and that horrible black border on the screen is just annoying. The game has an amazing hand-drawn comic book art style, nice lighting, and banging soundtrack, but retro FPS live and die by the gamefeel, and this one is doesn't feel good to play.

Dead Ink

Dead Ink is a very slow and clunky attempt at a top-down souls-like. You play as a 3D printed vessel on a faraway planet with a digitally imported consciousness of the first human to do so; you go around a giant tower and slay other 3D printed things. The game's central theme is the ink that everything is made of: you, your equipment, your enemies, ink splashes on the ground instead of blood. The issue here is that the ink is coloured like piss mixed with liquid shit. In addition to that, when you walk, you make splashy sounds of wet feet on a concrete floor; when you kill enemies and absorb their ink, a.k.a. souls, you hear a sound like someone's pissing into a teacup. The game is not pretty to look at, not pleasant to listen to, and not comfortable to move around and fight.

GB Rober

GB Rober is a Megaman clone, and not your regular one, but a CGA DOS version. The game has a great soundtrack, super punchy weapons, and great explosion effects. The controls are smooth, except for the dash that cannot be done from the neutral position and requires you to press the directional button. The biggest issue for me is how zoomed in the game feels: the characters are huge, making margins for evading/parrying the projectiles very small; the explosions, while looking and sounding great, take too much screen space; and the four-colour palette is a bit too harsh on the eyes because of how big the pixels are. Most of these issues would be fixed by zooming out a bit. A couple more issues I had were resolved by going into the Steam Discussion page and reading Dev's response to the demo feedback. First, the game is a bit too hard — it turns out there's a dash mechanic that is not explained in the Demo (there's also a great variety of ways you can customize the difficulty in the options, Celeste-style). Second, I thought that the game has a stuttering issue — it is actually a hitpause from the explosions that can be disabled in the options menu. I guess I can recommend this if you like Megaman and can stomach the CGA palette and chunky, zoomed in visuals.

Medic: Pacific War

Another great idea wrapped up in an absolutely awful execution. Medic: Pacific War tells a story of a private field medic trying to save as many people as possible, making choices who to save, and trying to stay alive himself under the constant gunfire and bombing. The game falls apart at the hands of amateur developers: — The performance is terrible (the game struggles to keep at least 30fps on medium settings on my 3080) even though the game looks at least five years old. — The controls and interactions are unresponsive. — Healing minigames are basically one-button QTEs. — The voice acting is incredibly amateurish (I usually wouldn't mind, but it really clashes with the game's tone), and audio mixing is terrible. I would love to see the same idea explored by someone more competent.

Gloomwood

If you still haven't heard about Gloomwood by now, then it's probably not for you. It is basically the original Thief. Skulk around in the shadows and hidden passages through an interconnected city, poke unsuspecting guards with your canesword or go loud with guns and traps. The stealth system is pretty in-depth, with visibility and walking surfaces being taken into account; the interactivity is pretty high, allowing you to eavesdrop through the closed doors, to peek through the half-open ones, and mantle on top of ledges. And even though the demo is pretty old by now (for example, lacking the new inventory system a-la Resident Evil 4), it feels incredibly polished: movement and combat feels proper and responsive, the menus and options are present and working as intended.

The Good Life

In The Good Life, you play as Naomi Hayward, a photo reporter from New York sent deep into the middle of nowhere, England, to uncover the mystery of Rainy Woods, also known as the 'happiest town in the world', and repay her enormous debt to the company. The gameplay is generally similar to Deadly Premonition with the exception of combat: you run around the town talking to people, doing some fetch quests, growing crops, cooking food, and snapping photos. The Photography system is actually quite interesting — each object you can get in your frame has one or more tags, and twice a week, the photo app updates its 'Trending' tab with several hashtags. So, for example, you might wake up to #mushroomsoup trending, and you would have to go to the cafe to order a hot bowl of mushroom soup or go around the countryside to gather some mushrooms and cook them yourself. In addition to that, you will also be asked to get more story related photos by your news agency or just by random citizens. And hey, it's a SWERY game that doesn't looks and runs like shit; you can't not play it!

Return to Nangrim

Very hard to say much about the game so early in development, but Return to Nangrim might be shaping into something very interesting. The demo presents you with several systems in a very limited environment. The systems are: 'Inventory management', 'Questing & Reading', 'Mining', and 'Forging'.

'Inventory management' is pretty self-explanatory. The inventory menu is there, and it is working as expected, not much to say about it.
'Questing & Reading' is a little bit more interesting since it presents more of the notes and books in the game as a 3D object animated as you turn the pages. Look very neat, love it.
'Mining' is pretty simple too: find a deposit on the wall and whack it with a pickaxe until it's gone, or simply up walk to a gem and yank it out of the wall with your hand. Serviceable, but not too exciting.
'Forging' is the highlight of the demo. To forge a battle axe, you are asked to smelt four different types of ore into alloys (iron -> iron ingot, copper + tin -> bronze ingot, iron + platinum -> dur iron ingot) while feeding the forge with wood to keep the optimal temperature. Still not as involved and complex as in Vintage Story, but much better than most games.

Despite how early into development it is, this demo's look and feel are much more polished than many other demos I played throughout this fest, and that gives me hope. Give it a year or two, and we will see how it shapes.

Robin Hood - Sherwood Builders

I couldn't even finish the demo for Robin Hood - Sherwood Builders because of the amount of busywork they're asking you to do without giving you some actual action — gather wood, make a bow, hunt some deers, gather stone, make a furnace, gather more wood and stone, make a smithy, gather more wood and stone, make a sword. The game is just another one of unimaginative, underdeveloped, unpolished projects. They don't have a release date yet, so maybe it will be better in a couple of years, but I would place too much hope in this one.

Sentient Noir

Sentient Noir is some high-tier fever dream of a game, from both the technical and artistic standpoints. Give the demo a try just to see that things like this exist.

Starship Troopers - Terran Command

Starship Troopers - Terran Command is an RTS about fighting against the swarms of bugs, destroying their nests, and securing/fortifying/defending key positions using a small number of specialized squads. The game plays very much like WH40k Dawn of War 2 — each of your units has different weapons and special skills. Troopers hold the line with a constant stream of bullets and dispose of swarms with grenades; engineers build HMG turrets and clear out nests with their flamethrowers, and snipers use the high ground to take out high priority targets. The most significant difference between DoW2 and ST is that while DoW2 is more focused on the courage/suppression system and cover, Starship Troopers units won't fire if there's a friendly unit blocking their line of sight. That makes you micro your squads much more constantly moving them as you push the swarm back inch by inch.

Supplice

Supplice is a boomer shooter at its core. And by 'core' I mean that it literally runs on GZDoom. And while there's nothing wrong with the game itself: the music is banging, the guns are booming, the level design and art style are nice and readable, I cannot recommend this game just because of how unimpressive it is. There are hundreds of Doom mods, maps, and weapon packs like that available for free; there's technologically impressive Selaco that runs on GZDoom as well, there's Prodeus, there's Hedon, there's Ion Fury, there's Dusk, there's AMID EVIL, there's ULTRAKILL, there's Project Warlock. Each of them brings something unique to the genre, but not Supplice.

War Mongrels is an RTT (Real-time Tactics) game set in the eastern front of World War II. The gameplay is pretty standard for a genre: sneak around the vision cones, use characters' skills to dispose of the enemies, and hide bodies in the bushes. The game looks very impressive and is very polished. What sets it apart from other games like Desperados series, Shadow Tactics, and especially last year's Partisans 1941 are two things:

You play not a was heroes, and not even as a dastardly bunch of partisans dismantling enemies using guerilla tactics. Instead, you play as german deserters that abandoned Wehrmacht and now have nowhere to go and no one to call an ally.
The game's uniques gameplay feature is the combat mode in which the game gives you complete action-style control over the character allowing you to use WASD for movement and LBM to shoot the enemies.

I would say it's a pretty fresh and competent take on a not oversaturated genre, so it might be worth checking it out.