19th's Steam Next Fest Impressions Feb 2026 Edition - Day 4
Day 0/Day 1/Day 2/Day 3
Tired today so these notes will be a bit less edited.
Prime Monster
British Politics Simulator Roguelite
The age of Humanity is over. The age of Monsters is now. But after ridding the world of humanity, Monsters realized they needed some form of government. So they made the worst of all choices and copied British parliament. Now it's your job to defend your party's interests and win the position of Prime Monster.
If I had a nickel for every political campaign simulator roguelite I played this Next Fest you already know how the sentence ends.
Drawn to this game for two reasons: 1) A friend recommended it. 2) This is from The Sexy Brutale devs. And if nothing else they still know how to give a game a strong sense of style.
This is a game with a lot of moving parts. The meat of the game is during policy debates. You have to pass or block legislation by corralling your MPs to vote in your favor and browbeating the opponents MPs to drop their support. You do so with the unity gague. When you completely fill it, an MP of yours will flip from abstaining to voting your way. Similarly, you can attack the opponent to lower their unity gauge, and if it goes under zero then one of their MPs will abstain.
These values are moved by either using cards with varying effects, or by sacrificing cards to gain political capital points, which allow you to use your chosen character's abilities. The demo has an orc who is mostly straightforward, focusing on directly attacking the enemy and buffing your own men.
If you use a dirty trick card, you get a stronger effect, but then have to survive a roll so the judge/overseer/whatever doesn't penalize you.
In between matches you can buy items like blackmail and hire staff, as well as dealing with controversial news stories that will give you buffs and debuffs.
Now, the demo is really short, so I don't think I got the full picture of how the system feels. But it felt less like I was building synergies and more like I was constantly on the back foot, fighting for every point I could muster. You only have three cards to choose from each hand, and you'll probably be sacrificing at least one for political capital, so there's not much "freedom" on a turn to turn basis.
That's very thematically fitting! And it creates a cool dynamic you don't often see in deckbuilders. But I can see it turning off players who go for the genre specifically for big combos.
There is a sense of randomness, with the dirty tricks and certain cards requiring you to beat dice rolls. But it's balanced by an aspect I really like: Unlike most rougelite deckbuilders, you do not need to win every round. You can get bad luck and have to soldier on, maybe even purposefully taking a dive to save resources for later. Once again, very thematically fitting.
Aside from the design though… I know this is supposed to be bitter satire, but there is a part of me who, despite enjoying the systems, goes "I…don't want to play the idiot right wing tribalist politician right now."
Island of Ruin
Horror Mystery Block Puzzle VN
You awaken on the decayed island of Utakata with no memories, just a fading memory of sinking into the ocean. You come across a strange tree claiming to be the spirit of the island, telling you that you can restore your memories and the memories of others. Find the truth of who you are and what happened.
The game is split into two parts. The first is the novel part, which is pretty self explanatory. The second is the puzzle part: a block puzzle similar to the Magical Drop games. You shoot a colored block upwards. If it hits a group of the same color, it explodes. The end goal is to collect the energy cores in each level by exploding blocks next to them, which you spend to unlock new scenes in novel mode.
I was drawn to the game because the contrast between the abstract puzzles and narrative parts reminded me of Sephonie, and wanted to see if it existed in a similar space. Not quite.
I'll rip the band-aid off: I didn't notice the AI notice until after I started playing. Right now it's just for translation help and for "background textures." The former, I've seen games release with an MTL and then patch in a proper translation later, so it's not a total write off yet. The latter, I have no idea what they mean.
You can feel the AI translation though. Characters don't have much of a voice, and the narration is equally bland. But I can't place all the issues on translation. There's structural problems going on.
The mysteries its presenting are theoreticlally interesting. There's been a rash of mysterious masive bloodstains on the island, but no one has been reported injured. People with no history of sleepwalking are wandering off in the night. The heroine's sister seemingly snaps for no reason and attacks her. These disparate threads will apparently all to a massive calamity.
The problem is that the story's rushing through it.
No one is getting the proper characterization, and we barely know anything about the island as a place. We meet someone, are told quick exposition, and shown something spooky.
I am pretty sure this is so that the novel sections don't dominate the puzzles. But the puzzles are…fine. First section was piss easy and the second got more involved, but it never stopped being something I was forcing myself through. And unlike the previously mentioned Sephonie, it seemed completely disconnected to the actual narrative and world, just a way to pad out runtime.
Maybe I'm wrong and there's a big reveal later that contextualizes it, but I couldn't finish the demo to find out.
Racheteer DX
Undergound Gameboy Color Classic Zelda
After a meteor stuck earth, humanity was forced deep underground, in geothermal powered sanctuaries, to wait out the Impact Winter in cryosleep. You are one of the maintenance crew, people who pop in and out of cryosleep to keep the power plants and machines running.
You awaken to a standard temporary power out, one of the standard hiccups of the process. But as you collect your supplies, monsters start appearing and your mentor is kidnapped. Now it's your job to hunt him down and save the future.
First thing: I really like how the game handles lighting while keeping to the game boy color aesthetic, using pips of color to represent partial vision.
Gameplay is pretty standard 2d Zelda. Once again the main gimmick comes from lighting and your lantern. Certain enemies and environmental objects react to your lantern. The mole enemy freezes while bat enemies rush you, for some examples.
The demo is only one dungeon, and you don't get any upgrades, so it's only a surface skim, but they seem to have the level design down. There was some fun back and forth with rotating passages that felt very puzzleboxy. Boss wasn't too exciting but it's the first boss in a zelda-like.
Also enjoy how grim the setting is, for all its cheery veneer. And not in a "cute looking thing is secretly fucked up" sort of way just… seeing people try their best in a tough situation.
Main complaint is one I have with a lot of faux retro: everything looks like it's on a grid but your character actually stick to it. Can make accidentally clipping enemies or hazards too easy.
It also has a cipher language!
Hitogata
Dark Comedy Apocalypse Adventure
6 months ago, the lighthouse/sun exploded, and the city/world collapsed. And yet, life limps on. The spotty electricity still flows and the local station still broadcasts. But everyone knows its already over. At any day now, the explosion will happen again, and reality itself will shatter. So they live in the moment, either trying to pretend everything is normal, freely indulging in all their vices, or ending it all themselves. All while they try not to look as every dead body turns into a wooden doll.
That isn't enough for Fran and Mario. The former had been wasting their days away in bed until the latter called, and introduced him to the wonderful world of playing chicken with an oncoming train or blowing up long abandoned cars. And over their day together, they decide that they're tired of waiting. They're going to go to the lighthouse and end the world themselves.
It's a classic adventure game as presented through the lens of RPGmaker. Go to places and do dialogue and item based puzzles. The puzzles themselves were pretty simple. Less brainbusters and more excuses to get our protagonists into Situations.
The pixel art is passable, but the hand drawn animation sections are fantastic. That and the expressive character portraits give the game a real specific visual identity.
I enjoy the game's attention to detail, with a LOT of enjoyable flavor text. The dialogue is also top notch. Fran and Mario have a great rapport, and the weirdos you talk to have some lines that had me crack up.
Your enjoyment does hinge on being able to stomach a tone of everyone being passively or manically suicidal. Or both at the same time.
Helix: Descent N Ascent
Wordless Cryptic Puzzle World.
For unknown reasons, you awaken in a stark and forgotten world, filled with nothing but ruins. The only other living beings are a scant few animals, and your mysterious scarred doppleganger, who seems to want nothing but to impede your journey. Explore the world and discover its secrets.
As mentioned earlier, this is a puzzle game that tries to communicate everything using nothing but implied visuals and animations. It's the kind of game where intuiting the rules of the game and how your tools work is half the puzzle.
It wasn't that hard in the demo. Each area gives you a new power, and so far there are only two. The first spawns a block and is used for weight switch and bridge building puzzles, the second spawns a copy of your head that you can fly remotely to get through small passages. Each one is self explanatory, although the way these two interplay later are interesting.
I'm confident that this will be a deep rabbit hole. First, it looks like there's spaces for 25 different powers. You can't choose them freely, but that's still a lot of possible interactions and permutations. Second, I'm finding a lot of stuff for secret hunter perverts like myself. Hidden areas, secret codes, a cipher numerical system, some implications of a deeper lore. I can see the depths beneath the water's surface.
The visual style is strong, and I'm not getting any issues with readability. There is an issue with animations, however. With the block power, there's a short animation of you summoning it, and you'll have to see it over and over. The floating head power was faster, but if this problem repeats elsewhere, I can see it being an annoying time sink.
Another highlight of the fest.
