• 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.