19th's Steam Next Fest Impressions Jun 2025 Edition - Day 7
Day 1/Day 2/Day 3/Day 4/Day 5/Day 6
Last day. Exausted. Notes will be a bit less edited I guess.
Rue Valley
Time Loop Disco Elysium.
At 8:00 PM, Eugene Harrow finishes his first session of court appointed therapy, held at the Rue Valley hotel, a run down hotel in the middle of nowhere. At 8:47 PM, a nuke goes off. At 8:00 PM, Eugene Harrow finishes his first session of court appointed therapy.
I feel sorry for the state of the disco-like. It's not often that the first title in a sub-genre knocks it out of the park like that. It's a tough act to follow.
Rue Valley isn't reaching thay height yet. Its prose isn't as cutting, and Eugene, for all the possible permutations of mental problems you can give him, is no DuBois. Both lean toward the somewhat more generic. But I think the game knows it can't reach that height, and is aiming for something else.
The scope of the title seems a lot smaller. It seems the game will take place in a single location, with a smaller cast. Ideally the 47 minute loop will mean that the cast will be more reactive, have more permutations on where you go with them. Hard to tell with the demo alone, though.
I kinda dislike how this game handles the skill checks. Instead of Disco's dice roll, it's static. If you have x amount of personality trait, you pass. The variability comes with status effects that change your stats. Then again, if we're going to loop, failing something from a dice roll might get in the way.
Anyways I'm a sucker for time loop games so I'm in.
Ball x Pit
Twinstick Breakout Survivors
After an asteroid collision, ballbylon has fallen. Adventurers dive into the pit of what was a great city to search for riches
The game plays like a combination twinstick shooter and breakout. You shoot balls, they bounce against the enemies and walls, and if you catch them, you can reshoot them faster. Special balls have effects like causing status effects, spawning more balls, or doing AOE damage. Combine this with static effect upgrades to create synergies.
Behind all these systems, this is basically a vampire survivors like. You kill enemies to get gems, to upgrade your stuff, to keep the horde at bay. A gigantic DPS check.
I only fought one boss and it did add a wrinkle. It was a giant skeleton head and arms, and it could only be damaged by hitting its crown, meaning you needed to bank shot your way to the back.
In between runs you do base building. place structures to spawn resources, give effects, or unlock things. Harvest them by having little guys bounce around.
This is shaping up to be a perfectly cromulent survivorlike but seeing all these progression systems, alongside each character getting their own level up tracks, just made me feel tired.
Heatwave
Freeform Indie Fighter.
On a design level, this is an ambitious fighter, and there's a lot to like here. Multiple grooves with different base mechanics, assists, shorthops, super jumps, dashes and air dashes, parries, roman cancels, bursts, EX moves, guard cancels. There's a lot of ingredients in this soup. This is aiming to be a fighting game player's fighter. The AI in the arcade mode showed off some really interesting tech.
The problem is the art style. Not just on an aesthetic level. The incredibly low resolution sprites make the animation hard to read, at least for my eyes.
And the music… needs work. It's a bit flat right now.
There's a good fighting game somewhere in here but it's not exactly inviting me in.
Holstin
The most Polish survival horror possible.
The year is 1992. You play as Tomasz, whose friend Bartek went undercover in Jeziorne-Kolonia to investigate in the slaughterhouses. After he goes silent, Tomasz goes to retrieve him, only to find the town overrun with a creeping flesh substance, turning people into monsters.
Game has a very unique look. Seems to be mostly, if not entirely, sprites, arranged to make a 3d environment with dynamic lighting. Most traversal is an over the head isometric look, but aiming down the sights turns the game into an over the shoulder view.
The tone is very prototypical slavic dour. Your currency is cigarettes. Your healing item is herbal booze. Everyone is acting… incorrectly to this apocalypse. Either seemingly unaware it's going on, despite it happening in front of them, or treating it as "great, another fuckin thing on my plate."
At the very start you meet a scientist who claims to be partially responsible for what's happening trying to kill herself. When you take away her gun she seems less distraught and more annoyed.
Didn't feel "Scary" perse but had the usual survival horror tenseness. Limited inventory, scarce resources, limited save items. The classics.
Didn't finish it but that's more because I got the gist and wanted to get to another game.
Hotel Barcelona
Not sure what to make of this. Not much plot here right now. You play as Justine, a federal marshal heading to Hotel Barcelona searching for "the witch," alongside the spirit of serial killer Dr. Carnival. That's kind of all I got there.
The demo kind of throws you into the deep end with no intro or tutorial. just get to playing. And I feel that's a mistake here? It seems there are some weird systems in play, and I didn't understand all of them.
It's a 2d beat-em-up, where every stage is based on a classic horror movie genre. The levels branch into several routes before you hit the boss, and each door gives a different buff. There are random effects from the weather each attempt, and every time you retry, an echo of your last replay follows. Their attacks will also attack enemies.
You lose the ghost if you change route from last time, though, which really limits your options.
It has the problem of too much of your kit being hidden behind upgrade trees. It feels like the game expects several failed runs to build upgrades before allowing you your first win.
I'm not sure if I can call this grindy though. There is a dynamic I like. Each run is timed, so you can't sit back and grind enemies. If you don't spend your resources between runs, however, they are lost. So you need to try and optimize your resource farm.
I dunno. The base systems right now feel kinda stiff. Maybe it'll be less so once I have a proper moveset, tutorial, and more of a framing story.
Hirogami
Papercraft platformer.
You play the foldable hero Hiro on a quest to reactivate the shrines and stop the unspecified Blight. The gimmick here is that you can fold into separate forms with separate abilities on a moment's notice.
The demo has 3: the standard humanoid form for basic combat and exploration, an armadillo form for speedily rolling through breakable obstacles, and an inbetween "flat" form that can be used to glide through the air. The latter two makes me think there will be interesting movement tech for speedrunners, depending on how lenient the level design is.
The combat felt… prefunctory. Standard 3d platformer 3 hit string, with a charge attack I never used. Felt more useful for breaking stage hazards than fighting enemies.
The demo only had the first level, so it didn't exactly push me challenge-wise, but I enjoyed what I saw. It rewarded backtracking and detail hunting, and overall had a really good vibe.
Leap Galaxy
Alien Bunny Precision Platformer.
Super Meat Boy style platformer: short levels meant to be blitzed through as fast as possible, then replayed to shave down milliseconds. The physics feel good, the level design seems fair, and its 2 bit art style is really readable.
The main problem is probably less the game's fault and more my own:
The gimmick momentum mechanic is called the star. Which is essentially a high momentum dash in any of the four cardinal directions. The problem is it's shown as throwing a star behind you, launching yourself forward with the momentum. If you press dash-right, your player character shoots to the left to do it.
My brain immediately read the action as primarily shooting the projectile, not dashing. When I want to dash up, I hold down, because that's the direction I'm aiming the star. This is entirely as self-induced muscle memory problem, but it's something that I'll have to put effort in to unlearn in the full game.
Memory's Reach
First Person Puzzle Metroidvania.
You play as a human explorer searching the planet Virishal, and the ruins of the once great Mairi empire. Dig through abandoned facilities slowly being overtaken by nature, as you look for the history of this planet and its civilization's downfall.
The game takes a lot of its design language from Metroid prime, from its visor HUD to its scanner system to it's 3d map.
One thing it doesn't have are some pretty crucial Metroid verbs: shoot and jump.
A good portion of the game's puzzles are traversal puzzles: how do I get from point A to point B using my limited tools and no jump. A fun one was a series of purple platforms that rotate 90 degrees when you press a purple switch. As in, all of them, on the entire map. There was a lot of accidentally closing paths behind you and having to make roundabout paths.
The other type of puzzle were these abstract tile puzzles that felt disconnected from the world at large. I did not like them.
I am a bit confused by some aspects of the worldbuilding? The opening cutscene made it sound like we knew next to nothing about this civilization, but the AI partner and scanner is able to translate their documents and give commentary about them.
The demo did reward rubbing my face up against the walls for details, so it's hitting my buttons. I like it.
Closing
And that's it. 40 demos. That's as many as 4 tens. An average of 5.7 demos a day. And that's terrible.
There's one last bit of housekeeping I want to do: Earlier this week, I recommended the demo for Tamashika.
I would like to rescind my recommendation. Play the game it's iterating on, Post Void, instead.
