chalcedony_starlings | [s0] A bunch of belated Next Fest first impressions

So like a week ago I wound up unexpectedly poking my head into some of the Steam Next Fest demos. Since the most recent stuff I've played through Steam has mostly been Enter the Gungeon and vivid/stasis, I wound up getting shown a lot of randrun action and rhythm stuff.

I'm not planning to actually buy anything, because for reasons some of you are aware of, I am very broke and will likely be for a while. Also, the computer I use for this is about ten years old, so performance is not going to be representative for people with reasonable hardware. Still, I thought I might write up a bunch of first impressions. I wind up spending a lot of words on flaws here, partly because there's more usable detail in those and because I think current attention/money tradeoff dynamics incentivize early discard from the consumer side; my overall impressions aren't as negative as they might seem if you key on that. Also, general bias abounds.

After the list of common problems, I've grouped these loosely by evaluation outcome.

Common problems

Problems with graphics options were the biggest set of presumptively fixable issues that either created unnecessary frustration or made it hard to get in at all:

Starting in fullscreen is forgivable, but not having a good way to switch to windowed mode early is awkward.
Starting in fullscreen and assuming my monitor is 16:9 can mean your viewport is not what you expect.
Even when you have graphics options for the overall display, an inflexible UI layout can push important stuff off the screen in non-default modes, including your tutorial text.
Providing graphics options but having them mysteriously reset when I enter some menu a second time happened in multiple games. That's a new one on me.
First-person 3D environment in forced fullscreen (or fixed window size) plus no FOV control means I have to contort things around avoiding motion sickness.

Other things:

It'd be nice of you to not assume my keyboard layout is QWERTY. Using QWERTY for visible input tips is forgivable but not ideal; a few games with a heavier keyboarding focus had further clashes.
When most of what I'm trying to find out is whether the core loop is appealing, long intros are not your friend.
Download size matters. When there's a lot of demos, the ones that are 3 GB rather than 0.1 GB are going to the back of the queue.

Technical issues likely attributable to my outdated hardware

Travel On, Pigeon!: Puzzle rhythm game about a tourist pigeon, which sounds cute. Sadly, low framerate and massive input lag starting from the menu screen meant I couldn't get through calibration. Incidentally, forced keysounds along with an awkward amount of audio latency is a bad combination; that's the same thing that made both Lovebirb and Unbeatable awkward for me.

Windblown: Randrun action-RPG sort of thing? From the makers of Dead Cells. Good that the controls are rebindable; I prefer weapons being on the triggers. The Ark reminds me of Lightning Returns in a good way, and the furries are good. Environmental design incorporating the dash as a way to get between places is a nice touch, a spin on a player's tendency to run everywhere. Sadly, it's got low inconsistent frame rate and occasional major hiccups on this machine, which is impractical in a timing-sensitive action game.

Technical issues likely attributable to the game

30 Birds: Narrative puzzle game. The stylized 2D art style here is intriguing. Mostly positive feelings about the spirit-holo-coyote creature who shows up immediately. Doing everything through your phone is very 2020s. Then I entered the save menu, in which none of the controls worked, including anything that would let me get out of the save menu. Oops.

Rogue Rhythm: Some kind of procedural dungeon thing with rhythmic movement between rooms? It started in fullscreen and probably assumed my monitor was 16:9, so some of the tutorial text clipped off the left side and I gave up early.

Unclear mechanics or got stuck

Card Weapon Shop: I feel like I've seen this before, but I don't remember where. Maybe it was just a different game with a similar base mechanic? Anyway, I like the overall flow of it, but the cost of random recipe unlocks followed by having to remember them for future runs is too much of a slog. Getting orders for materials I don't know how to produce and also don't know a less-random way of learning how to produce doesn't leave me with a clean way forward.

Hypno: Rotate your group of four squares to match the incoming colors, then do some kind of drop maneuver. I definitely prefer the second (“advanced”) control scheme with the angular configurations of analog sticks; it feels much more mnemonic. You're supposed to do rotation moves on every “odd beat”, which feels like it should mean beats 1 & 3 in 4/4 I guess?—but I didn't figure out how to make that line up with the incoming colors. More importantly, after you prepare a “drop”, you're supposed to execute it at the right time, but I didn't figure out how to determine when the right time was, so I always failed out of the first level.

Liminal Exit: Walking simulator? Not enough frames until I lowered the graphics settings, after which it was workable but a slog. They raised themselves back to the default when I reëntered the menu later, and the resolution setting didn't seem to work. Then I wandered into a pool, after which I saw no way to leave; among other things, trying to interact with or move into the ladders did nothing.

Oratorio: Create the soundtrack with the way you deliver your shots in a pixel rail shooter… there were some things that looked like rhythm indicators that I wasn't sure how to interpret, and I created nonsense. I couldn't get my head around the way it was trying to translate my timing, so I didn't even properly get into a level.

Wrong mood or got overwhelmed

Call of Boba: Help run a milk tea shop. I liked what seems to be genre-blending here with shoot-'em-up dream sequences including random level-ups of your tapioca-shooting self in the dream world being how you get more ingredients. I wasn't in the right mood to get into this, and the shop management might be too hectic for me. The long intro cutscenes didn't exactly help, but I did also like what I saw of cozy story beats, so… eh?

Primordialis: Nearly bounced off the tutorial; it said to use a certain thing to attack, but it wasn't at all clear that that thing was already part of the player character and you only needed to collide with the enemy to “use” it. The existence of an ability control which I think is not immediately usable acted as a decoy there. Tank controls were a bit of a surprise, but reasonable in context. The idea here of being able to design your body with different cell types seems like it could get really intricate later on depending on how the environments evolve, but I didn't have the mindset for that kind of depth in the moment. Also, even on my outdated hardware, this type of 2D graphics style should not run at sub-30 FPS; I realize it likely has to be a lot more dynamic than most 2D stuff, but I'd bet there's some major low-hanging optimization fruit. (If you're not batching your drawing, do!)

STARDUSTER: Music arcade game. Instant death on failing a single note—which is sort of appropriate, but that being the only mode is too unforgiving, especially since it's analog spin control and the spatial tolerances on the “accept” notes are pretty tight, so you can't feel confidently in the right place the way you can in a rhythm game with lanes. Thankfully analog stick control is supported and worked way better than mouse control for me, but it wasn't enough.

Playable but didn't click with it

KKCKC: You are a keyswitch with a keycap, and I can hear the people from /r/MechanicalKeyboards approaching already. Not a bad aesthetic! I'm not sure how to feel about the keyboard parts being a fallen-from-grace faction in electronics-land, but the full-size SD card enemy losing its armor to become a microSD card when shot is great. The “push a key that corresponds to the specific area of the screen to get an accuracy bonus” is a neat novel control idea, but sadly the on-screen underlay assuming QWERTY was disorienting. It'd be nice if it were dynamically generated based on the current keymap, but I realize that could be a lot more design work in a game like this, especially depending on how that gets used later.

Wilmot Works It Out: Receive jumbled picture pieces in the mail, put them together, hang them on the wall. Compact and sensible, but assuming it's only what it appears to be after the tutorial, too simplistic for me.

Temtem: Swarm: Randrun swarm survival. Cute aesthetic, I like the music even if the non-lexical vocals are a bit heavy, and there's a 'mon-reminiscent evolution mechanic which I'm not sure does as much as it could since it's only within a run. But—well, I haven't played a lot of this subgenre of game, but it seems to me like dual-stick controls are almost a requirement, one that was missed here? Doesn't only being able to aim where you're moving toward render directed weapons nearly useless if you need the usual survival strategy of kiting everything around all the time? I don't know.

To Kill a God: Randrun RPG where you choose waves to encounter and the room map is also your skill tree. Novel core idea, to me, and I like that part. The “spreadsheet of stats” part feels appropriately Western-RPG, but I don't think it's the kind of thing I would enjoy in practice; if you can get into minmaxing in that kind of environment, then maybe you'll like it better. The aesthetic is not terrible but could use a lot of work; the art style isn't well-integrated overall, and especially the typography in the hub/tree screen rubs me weirdly. Also, a hoard is the pile of wonderfully glittering coins or other riches that I, as a dragon, should have (but currently do not, grr). Waves of monsters are a horde. Eminently fixable, but distracting when it's up front in most of the node descriptions.

Maybe interesting

Elite Exorcist Miko: Side-scrolling flying danmaku sort of thing—there has to be a name for this genre, but I don't know what it is. I didn't realize at first that this was one of those games based on hololive personalities; I'm not a hololive fan, so I'm not attuned to the lore, but as a combat game it looks nicely executed from the first few tidbits of it. Ran really smoothly, which is important here. I'm not sure my brain can get into the whole switching-fighting-styles thing, but if it did I think this would be pretty compelling. The aesthetic skims the edge of being my thing; I'd take it if the mechanics continue to hold up.

Munch: Randrun isometric-view hack'n'slash. Aesthetic feels coherent and compelling: you're playing as a creature of heavy metal chaos fighting the forces of order, personified by the god Ördo with the obligatory heavy metal umlaut (the game's name is also rendered “Münch” in logo form). The art style and typography and music all play into that well. Evolution mechanic is kinda fun, but the aesthetic is the main draw, and I'm not sure that's enough for me; it depends on where the rest of it goes.

Ô: Choose an instrument of the mix to synchronize your player character's motions to so that you can fight the arcade enemies and make it through the rooms. I didn't get into all the mechanics here, as some of them seemed awkwardly motivated in the limited context of the tutorial levels, but the execution seems pretty good and I could see this having a lot of potential. My experience was probably sabotaged substantially by not being able to rebind the track switch control away from the flaky left bumper button on my controller; the mechanic is described in-game as using both the left and right bumpers, which made me think it was a two-way cycling thing, but that didn't seem to work in practice. But flaky button is not the game's fault.

Polylylyrhythm: (That's three “ly”.) Minimalistic rhythm practice game, even tagged “Educational”, and I can see it being that. I might even suggest this to a friend of mine who's had trouble with rhythm synchronization in the past. You get an increasing number of simultaneous regular beat patterns to track that show up in increasingly tricky ratios and try to keep your combo going. Minor fixable problem: if you set your trigger inputs to the keys of the digit row, their displayed names are long, something like “Alpha1” through “Alpha5”, which then all get truncated to the same thing during gameplay.

Proverbs: This is a compact idea extended in scope, and from the few squares I did of the puzzle, if it stays like that, it will be great in its core aspects. I really love this idea of all the sub-puzzles combining into a single enormous puzzle inspired by a specific Dutch painting of proverbs from 1559. There was one disproportionately impactful flaw, which is that the reverberating click sound effects grate terribly on me, especially given the otherwise relaxing atmosphere. This would be avoidable by setting the sound effect volume to zero, except that exiting the options menu doesn't actually save that setting. So really they just need to fix the options menu.

Touch Type Tale: “The keyboard to the kingdom is yours.” in the store text. Cute. Also cute: that the “type words to interact with stuff” core mechanic also operates in the menu screens. Not as cute: there are a few less-critical (I think?) places that use an entirely separate style of single-letter bindings with the Control key down, where the visual legends assume QWERTY—but maybe that's because this is Windows, and Windows 10 already does some kind of QWERTY-on-Control thing? I'm not sure how to attribute that, and it's not necessarily the game's fault if they're flowing with what the OS does already, but it's jarring. Nor can you use the mental split of single letter versus whole word, because other actions that take single letters expect the letter to be typed according to the ambient layout. Also, this would be much more compelling if the different types of actions you can take had some kind of separate theming to the words they require, rather than the words being scattered randomly about, but maybe that'd run counter to purpose depending on whether they're trying to lean into this as educational? Overall I could see maybe getting into this. Huge download size.

Distinctly interesting

Birds Organized Neatly: Avian-themed polyomino packing puzzle book. Great aesthetic and very much my jam, though maybe not something I'd play on PC as such. This is the kind of thing I'd love to play on my handset, and it's got the mobile-centric casual design to go with it: in particular, the full-window transitions when switching levels are of a kind that are probably nice on a handset but are pretty distracting on a monitor. Not a fatal flaw. (I was hoping the animations toggle would turn those off, but that didn't happen, and I didn't notice what else that button did if anything.)

Nientum – Op.ZERO: This was the one that impressed me enough to get its own writeup.