19th's Steam Next Fest Impressions June 2026 Edition - Day 3
Day 0/Day 1/Day 2
Before I start, for anyone who keeps up with these, tomorrow is going to be packed schedule wise. Might just bundle days 4 and 5 together.
Come to My Party!
Korean Elementary School Drama VN
The year is 1999, and things are tough for 10 year old Jimin Lee. Between her perfect older sister, her baby brother, and her her family's poverty, her life has been defined by hand-me-downs and being overlooked. All she wants is one simple thing: a birthday party at WcDonalds. Her siblings got one, why not her? So her mom gives her an ultimatum: she can have her birthday party if she becomes class president. Thus begins her mad dash for friendship, popularity, and most important of all, votes!
This is me technically cheating again. Not in Next Fest, but was in the Summer Showcases, so I'm running with it.
The game is a tokimeki-lite relationship management VN. Each day you go through class and have different events with various classmates, with your choices increasing relationship meters. I do like the election premise, if only for how it encourages you to spread your focus around instead of focusing on specific characters.
The pixel art and music in the trailer is what drew me to the game, and I happy to say that the full game lives up to that impression. The sprite work is expressive, the backgrounds feel lived in, the animations are charming, and the BGM is catchy. Even if the writing were bland then I think there would still be some value here.
Thankfully the writing is also landing. Jimin comes off as a charming little shit. She's precociously blunt in a way that makes her simultaneously earnest, honest, oblivious, and at times genuinely cruel.
There's a good balance of tones going on. A lot of the scenes are genuinely funny childish antics, like the soccer kid who thinks that his life is a sports manga and everyone else trying to match his seriousness. It's balanced against scenes of drama that feel realistic for these kids. Jimin's friend Eunjin is a frequent target for bullying, clinging to Jimin like a life raft, and feels terrified of being abandoned as Jimin works to become more popular.
...and there's signs that it can go darker. It becomes clear that Jimin's neglect isn't just middle child syndrome, but something serious, and has something to do with her resembling her father. And the 1999 time period is being used to stoke world end anxieties, with one of Jimin's classmates' family's already being in an apocalypse cult. At the bottom of the steam page there's a content warning:
"Depictions of domestic violence, teacher-perpetrated violence, bullying, and suicide."
And I'm both intrigued and worried! I like what it's setting up so far, but I don't want it to dip fully into the macabre.
Other small complaints: there are minigames throughout the story that feel kind of... fisher price level interactivity. Like doing a hidden object game to help Jimin get ready for school or clean the classroom. It works for a gag once so far but otherwise feels like spinning wheels.
The translation needs another pass. There are some jarring grammatical errors here, especially near the very start. There are also a couple things that feel like a direct translation of Korean wordplay, like Eunjin's nickname "Joy Eunjin Hatejin."
Still, it's on the list as one of this fest's gems.
Bunderkin: The Ocular Eclipse
Puzzle Stealth Majora's Mask.
You play as Beedee, a Bunderdragon. Whether it's because of your rule-breaking antics, or because the townsfolk believe you are inherently cursed, you're forbidden from entering the city of Bunder Hollow. But tonight is the night of the Eclipse Festival, a night of games and festivities that happens only once every 50 years! You're not missing out on this. You're dead set on masking up and sneaking your way in, unknowingly stumbling into a plot involving cults, body stealing parasites, and a three day time loop.
Majora's Mask is my favorite Zelda, so when I saw this game citing is as a primary inspiration, I immediately gave it a try. The main difference is that this is a Zelda without combat, instead focusing entirely on stealth and puzzles. The thing is… Zelda was never good at stealth? Especially the era of Zelda it's pulling from, OoT to WW. There's apparently some Sly cooper in there apparently, but I never played those. It still had that stiffness that Zelda stealth has.
The other issue is that the stealth feels restrictive. Despite having a slingshot, you can only distract guards with it if there's a bell to shoot. Shooting the guards themselves does nothing. You can "swim" through tall grass, but only when its provided by the level. I'm not asking for Hitman levels of interactivity, but this aspect of the game feels a bit Simon Says.
There's also a tightrope walking mechanic that seriously needs to be sped up. Trying to sneak while still on the tightrope was a genuine pain.
Of course stealth's not the main draw. The main draw is the shenanigans with mask interactions and the time loop. The stuff that made Majoras Mask the most unique Zelda! The problem is... the demo doesn't have that yet. You only get two masks through most of the demo, and neither of them have any special effect. The demo ends right as the time loop begins.
I'm giving the game a lot of slack because it is a pre-alpha and exists to help push a kickstarter. They probably don't have the resources to realize their more ambitious ideas yet. But...that's what I wanted, game. Its what I came for.
On a writing level, I dislike the smurfy worldbuilding, with placing bunder before nouns as a naming convention. The world feels like it's trying more to be a mid-00s cartoon than it is a lived in world. And to be fair, the playtester trailer states that the game's intended audience is kids, so it might land better for them. (apparently the project also started life as an animated series before pivoting to this.)
Lastly, the game has a framerate stutter problem. Nothing unplayable, but enough that the game probably needs more work under the hood.
You have my attention but you still need to prove yourself.
Grail
Redwall Deckbuilder Autobattler
A game in the style of The Bazaar in a woodland fantasy world. Build a deck through shops and events. When in combat, the cards will shuffle and play in order. At the end of every day, face off against another player's deck. Win against 6 other players, your run is successful. Lose 4 times, and it's done.
Note that most of my knowledge for the genre comes from watching others. It's my first time playing one myself. So might be speaking incorrectly here or there.
I do like the granularity that the deckbuilding genre adds here. At least from what I've seen, the builds in things like The Bazaar and Super Auto Pets are done in a way where it's fewer moving parts, and adding or removing one can be a huge game changer. A deck of cards allows for more tiny variations and decisions.
That isn't to say that you can't sink your own deck with a bad choice. Each card has an energy cost, and if you can't afford it, you'll just bank whatever energy you have into that card for when it comes up again. There are cards that refill energy, so you need to build a deck that can consistently maintain its own engine no matter the draw order or win condition.
The deckbuilder side does add a major drawback, though. Because combat involves cards being played back and forth in quick succession, it's harder to actually follow what's going on. I found myself just zoning out until I saw the victory or defeat text. Also, I'm not sure if this is inherent to the deckbuilder side of the equation or just its balancing, but fights felt like they always lasted long. It's inherent to the genre, but each run will eat at least an hour.
I am kinda worried. The team behind it is Sokpop, who is known for smaller scale titles. They seem to want this game to last a while, with the suggestion of "seasons" of cosmetics later. That being said... from my understanding, bigger players in this genre are struggling to stay profitable. I hope they aren't writing a check they can't cash.
Songs of Glimmerwick
Witch School Cozy Life Sim.
In this world, music is magic and magic is music. The world itself is singing for those who can hear it, and is willing to harmonize with those that can play along. Those who knew how to play are known as witches, and have always been there to guide the people in song.
Yet there was a time where this was not the case. For decades, people lived under The Silence, a complete ban on any forms of music and magic. It was dangerous. It was limited. It must be cordoned to the most select of select few.
But the reign of the silencers fell 40 years go, and their ideology exists only in the fringes. You are from one of those fringes, a small isle dedicated enough that most refused to speak. Yet when you started hearing the music of the world, you found you could nor bring yourself to stay there. So you left, boarding the first ferry you could find to Glimmerwick, to attend the foremost magical university: The Etchery.
I admit I come at this one with some conflicting baggage. On one hand, this is the newest game from Eastshade Studios, and I loved Eastshade to bits. On the other hand, while I get the desire for ethical Harry Potter, I've reached the (perhaps unreasonable) point of thinking we should throw the witch school baby out with the bathwater.
The game is as expected of a Stardew/Harvest Moon like. Each student needs to have a job on the island while maintaining their studies, and you were picked as gardener. When you aren't attending classes, you're either socializing with the islands denizens and completing sidequests, or are planting and tending to the fields.
The music gimmick comes in how you cast spells. You have a flute, and cast magic by playing songs. I have fond memories of Zelda's ocarina, so I'm game for this, but there's a problem. A lot of the spells are tied to actions that you'll be doing over and over, like tilling the land or cutting trees. So if you master the full version of each song, playing an extended rhythm minigame, you will have "mastered" it enough to do it instantaneously. In which case… why not let me cast instantanously from the start, if the only thing blocking me is a piss easy rhythm game. But I guess it fits the theming.
The game has a day night cycle, but it's forgiving. The day doesn't end until you go to sleep, and if there's a necessary time specific event during the day then the clock won't progress until you've gone there. And of the two minds of 1) thank god. I feel like this would leave me anxious 2) This completely negates any tension between the farm life and the social life aspects of the game. Less interesting decisions to be made on a moment to moment basis.
Eastshade Studios is still fantastic at setting up a vibe with limited scope. The world is made up of simple vector sprites and models, but the way they're layered and the way the light shifts through the day elevates it. On an audial level, if you're theming your game around music, the soundtrack needs to match up, and they thankfully nailed this as well. I don't have the vocabulary to go into specifics, just that their choice of instruments and mood add to a specific sense of place and tone.
There is intrigue so far. As mentioned before, it's a world that's recovering from the rule of a censorious regime, and there's a central mystery about how it fell, with an unexplained plague and a former resistance leader that tried to burn down one of the world's major sources of magic, glimmerwick's own enchanted forest. But it's intrigue without stakes so far, just a thing that happened back then. The trailer makes it seem like there will be some return of these factors, but I'm not sure how far they'll push that envelope yet, or if they'll pull punches to maintain the cozy atmosphere.
It's hitting a lot of the same notes Eastshade did, but It's not clicking as well. While I can blame my personal context with its premise or make some statement about the post-Stardew cozy game oversaturation, I think it all just boils down to finding the photography/painting aspect of Eastshade more engaging than the farm and life stuff of Glimmerwick. If someone clicks more with this style of gameplay, I can see it being a hit.
Last complaint is that it shows multiple fantasy races here, tree people, moth people, wolf people, tieflings, mer-people with coral hair, and your character is locked to bog standard human. Let me be a mothman, you fucking cowards.
