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19th's Steam Next Fest Impressions Feb 2025 Edition - Day 5

Day 0/Day 1/Day 2/Day 3/Day 4

Maze Mice

Pac Man Vampire Survivors from the creator of Luck Be A Landlord.

It's specifically pac man championship edition. Run around in a maze, gathering XP crystals with sleeping cats next to them. Once you run past the cat, it becomes a chaser. As you kill cats you start getting chased by ghost cats that can ignore the rules of the maze.

This is a combination I'm surprised no one had thought of earlier. Both are about kiting enemies and both are about collecting small doodads on a looping map. It works smoothly and efficiently.

My first complaint is one that's probably only for the demo: For a survivor like-the upgrade selection feels really limited, especially the minimalist loadout before you start unlocking things. I was starting to see the oppurtunity for "builds" near the end, but then I was cut off from any more tools. This will probably not be the case for the final release.

Second is probably a more contraversial complaint, core to the game's design: Its implementation of the Superhot rule. Time only moves when you do. I get it. This rule slots really well into a survivor-like, both in terms of "gives the player a breather" and "adds tension to the incredibly tight squeezes that the late game provides." But it looses the kinetic feel that made Pac Man Champion Edition exciting. I kinda hope the final release will have a hard mode that removes this handicap.

Also music is good.

Whisper of the House

An Unpacking-like. You're a new resident in Whisper City, and open a housekeeping business. Help your neighbors move in and organize their spaces.

As expected from the robot assistant, this game takes place in a less grounded and open setting than Unpacking. While I do like being able to actually explore the town instead of just straight jumping from house to house, there is something lost from a less focused framing. Not a single owner through several houses, but several owners in the same town.

That isn't to say the game doesn't go for any narrative. After the first job, helping a dog lover decorate her new apartment, you're contacted by a super-scientist type to try his new time machine. His grandfather had gotten ill after overexerting himself moving house, and he wants you to avert that. While the premise is silly, there's a gentle melancholy to the whole proceeding.

The game also lets you use it to revisit previous houses, and there's a newspaper system where you see stories about the characters you've helped, so I'm guessing variable outcomes to your jobs will be the norm.

I do hope they up the "houses have hidden secrets" aspect the trailer plays up. Either I was missing a lot, or the demo doesn't really push that too hard. The first one had one hidden room as a gag, and I couldn't find one for the 2nd.

Centum

Centum is… kind of hard to describe. The simplest answer would be "a point and click adventure about escaping a simulation" but I feel like that answer is incomplete, if not entirely false.

The game starts with a computer loading up, and you're faced with several text files. Complaints about how a simulation needs to be kept running, how someone is sabotaging the project, and instructions to run a .bat file if something goes wrong. You do so and wake up in a medieval looking prison cell, being interrogated by a multi-headed judge. Both the questions and answers available are vague.

Which leads to my first complaint. The prose is… edging into purple. Everyone is speaking in flowery metaphor and it feels like lines could be shaved down a bit. I'm still getting the general gist, but I can see its voice being a turnoff for a lot of people.

From there it's 3 days of imprisonment. Three days of questioning, three days of incredibly simple puzzles, until judgement is passed on you. Once done so, you're returned to the desktop, with new files on the screen. repeat.

I will sing the praises that the game is incredibly reactive. I said the puzzles were simple, but that's because each one had several solutions at hand. Even though it always ended the same, they felt like branch points. I played through it multiple times and got a lot of different text and imagery each go through. I can see this game being good for people who like to secret hunt.

The art direction and pixel art is beautiful and grotesque. While the prose might be flawed, the visuals more than make up for it.

It's up in the air if it'll stick the landing, but it's got a few good flips in so far.

Everhood 2

I really liked the first everhood, even if I think it didn't quite stick the landing with it's thematic stuff in its closing act. I was genuinely interested in seeing where they went from there. "Everhood 2" was a genuine surprise.

It is kinda funny. Everhood was, in a lot of ways, a direct response to Undertale. Everhood 2… opens with a questionnaire about your personal tastes and fears. You know, like Deltarune.

The game is an immediate step up from its predecessor on a mechanical level. The beatmaps feel better to dodge, especially if starting on hard, and you get a fully fledged retaliation system right away, something Everhood only played with at the very end.

dodge on the beat map, absorb notes of consecutive color, launch them back at the opponent. At least one color will do super effective damage. The longer your absorb chain, the more damaging the move, but attacks can also clear bullets in front of you, and getting hit causes you to drop your "ammo," so to speak. There's a push-your-luck aspect going on that works really well. There's apparently going to be a weapon system but the demo doesn't touch on it.

My main complaint is that, in Everhood, every fight you enter is for the most part unique and plot important. There's now a leveling system and, for lack of a better term, filler fights, repeated enemies who have the same beatmap pattern.

Other complaint is that, compared to Everhood 1's opening, this one has much less of a plot hook. Despite all the psychadelics and cosmic intrigue in the first one, it opened with a simple conflict. Your arm was stolen by some shit guys, get it back.

Here you basically jump into a hole, are attacked by a monster, saved by a character named raven who is a raven who gives you the tutorial and tells us we need to prove we're strong enough to help him. And we do that by retrieving a crystal he specifically hid. There isn't a sense of a driving conflict yet.

Of course you can also read this as confidence. "We proved ourselves with our first game, we're willing to have slower setup." Still looking forward to it either way.

Strand

Time loop puzzle game. You wake up in a seemingly empty space station, your memory implant having failed, and all machinery at low power. Find out wha happun.

A lot of the puzzles are variations on "what's the password?" The kind of info that can carry across loops.

There is some item combining but they tend to be the inbetween step of a puzzle. not something you need to redo every time.

There is a very "english as second language" feel here but that mainly only comes through the VA accents and a bit of odd wording here and there. No translation trainwrecks this time.

It's alright. Not sure the scale they're going for, though. Could be a game that's only a couple hours long, could be one that goes for well over a dozen.

Sliding Hero

Pseudo-metroidvania exploration puzzle game where the entire world is an elaborate sliding puzzle.

Depending on who you are this sounds like an interesting conceit or it sounds fucking intolerable.

Our Jester-Ass hero is stuck in an expansive Venitian villa filled with the undead, and for reasons not thoroughly explained he can't walk like a normal person, sliding until he hits a wall.

I will admit, I am a fan. I like that this game turns the most basic of traversal into something of a brain teaser. Since you'll be backtracking with upgrades metroidvania style, though, a lot of those exploration puzzles will have to be done twice, front to back and back to front.

The combat is just a more advanced version of this dynamic. Enemy rooms have weapon/tools lying around. Find a way to land on the weapon tile to pick it up, and then ram the enemy. You only have a set number of times until it breaks, and you'll also sometimes have to rely on an enemy being there to stop you early and make an impossible turn possible. Thankfully enemies don't respawn, so these only need to be tackled once.

I like it's macabre/Italian Blasphemous aesthetic, although it clashes with the peppy Zelda-ish chimes when you get correct answers.

I didn't finish it, but not becuase I wasn't having fun, just out of a combination of time pressure, getting the gist, and being a bit mentally worn out for puzzles.

#19th's steam next fest impressions #Maze Mice #Whisper of the House #Centum #Everhood 2 #Strand #Sliding Hero #Youtube

To Dr. Wily- You once mentioned that you think Centum has been trying to steal your second in command, are you sure that's what's happening? You also seemed pretty angry about the idea, which you really shouldn't, it's not like if you're right and it happened you'd be able to do anything about it, Centum is more powerful than you

Dr. Wily: YOU ARE MISTAKEN TO THINK THAT OVERRATED BASTARD IS MORE POWERFUL THAN ME. I COULD HAVE BROKEN EARTH INTO SPACE GRAVEL USING THE GRAVITATION FORCE OF ITS MOON, THE IDEA THAT CENTUM COULD STEAL MY SECOND-IN-COMMAND IS LAUGHABLE. HE ONLY WISHES HE COULD HAVE A SECOND-IN-COMMAND AS GOOD AS PROTO MAN WHEN ALL HE BUILDS IS PRETTY-LOOKING GLASS CANNONS. BESIDES, IT IS I WHO HAVE STOLEN HIS ROBOTS AND COME OUT AHEAD, NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.

PROTO MAN WORKS FOR ME BECAUSE I’M A SUPERIOR CRIMINAL MASTERMIND, CENTUM CAN EAT HIS HEART OUT.

#Dr. Wily #Centum #Proto Man