Reviews Steam Next Fest - June 2025

Virtual Ruminant

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May 21, 2020
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How to Next Fest:


Play Demos:
Hover over any game on the Steam Store Next Fest Page and you'll immediately find a button to install the playable demo. Try one! Or try a dozen.

Wishlist Your Favorites: Find a game you want to hear about when it launches? Hover over any game and click the star icon in the upper-right corner to add it to your Steam wishlist. You'll get a spiffy email notification when that game releases.

Check The Current Charts: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/nextfest?tab=23

Post Your Impressions / Opinions / Reviews: In this thread!
 
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So many demos to try I'm just lacking the proper time, but I'll try a few and post some short opinions as the festival goes.
 
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Stuff I can recommend so far:

Really short demo but it's adorable.


It's a one button mobile game but it's a relaxing low stakes precision platformer and the demo is huge. I played over 50 levels, unlocked a bunch of modes and still wasn't done.


I was very skeptical of this one prior to trying it but it's pretty well written and actually funny.


You have to request access to play this one but I got it instantly so I assume everyone's welcome. It's Sid Meier's SimGolf, there's nothing else to say really. If you miss SimGolf try this.
 



Extremely charming and polished 3D platformers with excellent movement mechanics; Big Hops looks to be more of a traditional 3D platformer, whereas Gecko Gods has more of an exploration/puzzle focus.



Vampire Survivors meets a vertically scrolling shooter meets Breakout, with light base-building mechanics in between rounds. Not usually my cup of tea but I can see how this one could become pretty addictive.



Cinematic 3D puzzle/adventure about herding animals, from the developers of the FAR duology. I'm not sold on how herding works and the very limited control you have over the herd's movement (you can either stop their movement entirely or push them away from you, and those seem to be your only options), but might grow on me.



3D platformer with origami art style and where you can fold your character into different shapes. Shows some promise, but the movement of the default character is way too slow, and the level design isn't doing anything particularly exciting.



Walking sim/investigation game with static 3D models of real people scanned in via photogrammetry, about "diving" into people's minds to piece together their memories. Very cool premise (the "diving" is visualized as an underwater mindscape), art style, and simple puzzle mechanics, though had some significant optimization issues.



Metroidvania from the Hyper Light/Solar Ash devs. Very promising and I liked the feel of movement and combat, but some of the platforming doesn't work as well as it should and there are serious optimization issues.



Sci-fi open-world adventure with great-feeling hoverboard traversal. More demanding on my GPU than a game with simple visuals that had Switch as its lead platform should be, but what I played seemed encouraging even though the Switch version got mixed reviews.



2.5D Metroidvania with fantastic movement mechanics and a lovely watercolor art style. Undermined by the demo being capped at 1080p and some questionable design decisions (checkpoints are too far apart, and you need to spend in-game currency to acquire access to the map, but the game doesn't bother to explain how much currency you need or exactly how this system works), which will hopefully be fixed in the the full release.
 
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One of those intentionally Lo-Fi horror games that make up 50% of all games on itch.io now, but this one has anthro (as in furry) NPCs and at least gets straight to the point (which is: being weird) and doesn't waste your time.




Since "Space Tail: Every Journey leads Home" was unpublished on every platform, the sub-genre of hand-painted four-legged-animal-protagonist 2D platformer needs a a new champion and this game might become it. The player controls a cat this time and while it's not as mechanically ambitious as Space Tail was, the quality of the artwork is up there and the platforming is pretty decent as well.




This one also has a cat protagonist (walking on two legs however), but with much fewer pixels to its sprite. This game goes hard for a classic gameboy aesthetic and pretty much nails it - and it's also really fun to play.




Bennett Foddy going Epic Bacon on poor old QWOP. Less hard to play than I imagined and way, way less funny than I ever expected. And harder on the GPU than it has any right to.




The other rage game with surprisingly high demands on the computer it's running on, but at least the protagonist in this one is silent and the narrator does not have an annoying Aussie accent (he has an annoying European accent instead).




Style over substance.


'

This game recently got a shoutout from Second Wind and I have no idea what Nick Calandra was smoking that day. It's ok until the combat starts.




Incredibly polished. The animation and voice acting are premium streaming show quality and the gameplay ... well, there isn't too much of it, but it fits in really smoothly with the narrative. And even though the writing is full of MCU-style quippy dialogue (not surprising given the scenario), normally an absolute showstopper for me, I found myself enjoying it.




Okomotive of Far: Lone Sails and Far: Changing Tides fame does it again with a slow-burn, low-intensity-big-mood puzzling game, this time in third person 3D. You herd a bunch of very big and very fuzzy cow-like creatures through a changing landscape and have to take care of their well-being as well as open up the way ahead to progress. The game feels like a throwback to a particular kind of early 2010s indie that Sony featured a lot when they tried to position the PS3 as a platform to play offbeat, narrative-focused indie games on, like Rain or Papo Y Yo. Enjoyed this one a lot.




This one feels more like a game that would show up as a PS+ freebie on PS4 ca. 2014-2016. The styling is impeccable, but the gameplay, at least the one level the demo lets you play, is quite basic and not very exciting. Could be a case of a badly cut demo that just shows off a tutorial.
 
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This is a nice little puzzle game where you record your movements and play them back. I thought the recording mechanic get stale pretty quickly but they add enough new interactions to keep it interesting.



Alright a little bias here but I was looking forward to this one for ages and it did not disappoint. One thing I enjoyed during the demo was there was a lot of dialogue flow between the characters during the dispatch part of the gameplay. Made that whole aspect of that gameplay much more enjoyable.



Played 1 round of this. Did not impress at all. Looks like it was aiming for a MMO-ish Hades and it feels like one of those live service games and I'd rather just a complete singleplayer experience.



This impressed me a lot. Roguelike breakout and I can see this getting very addicting. Bonus points because I decided load this up on my steam deck to get a few runs in bed and noticed that it had cloud saves for the demo.



I liked the demo for this. Seems to be a 2D souls with it's rest and co-op + invade mechanics. The combat system is pretty interesting with light/heavy/feints there is also a block and dodge. You can also combine directionals with light/heavy/feints to do different moves.



Got mad. Quit. They have options for making the game easier such as checkpoints and egg modifiers (I didn't dabble in these options).
 


This got funded via kickstarter and so far was a fun 3D platformer, from the demo it seems that some levels may be very open.



Tried a bit of it but I quickly noticed I'm not in the mood to play a strategy game, so it's a pass for me after some minutes.
 


Classic arcade-style vertical-scrolling sh'mup. It's arcade-style hard as well (you die in one hit, three lifes, no continues), however, there's a training mode with infinite lifes. In story mode, you get to read a partially animated digital manga between levels. The quality here is impeccable, anybody who's into this genre should enjoy this.




From classic arcade to Apple Arcade, here comes the Steam port of Sping (previously called Sp!ng). One button, physics, 2D, super easy to pickup but surprising variety in the level design and challenges and super polished. Perfect breaktime game.




Anybody who's seen my reviews of point-and-clicks knows that I'm incredibly burned out on the genre and have zero patience left for obtuse puzzle designs and bad imitations of LucasArts classics from the 90s, so when I saw "fast-paced point'n click thrill-ride" in the game's description on Steam, I downloaded it purely driven by spite. "Let's see how much of a lie that claim is", I thought. Turns out: It's not a lie at all! This game really wants you to experience a story rather than get you stuck and I'm here for it. Definitely will buy this on release.




And, surprise upon surprise, I found ANOTHER point and click-style game that's really well-made and I REALLY want to play more of RIGHT NOW. This one however is more of a mood-piece (- what mood? The game's title says it all -) and, at least as far as the demo goes, there's zero puzzling involved. It's purely an exploration / narrative experience, but made entirely in gorgeous pixel-art that is somewhat retro-styled, but not so much that the game's whole identity becomes nostalgia-centric.




Incredibly well made stop-motion animated puzzle game, unfortunately one of the kind that is intentionally obtuse - there's zero instructions, zero hints, and after about 10 minutes of being stuck right away, the fantastic artwork on display turns from awesome into annoying. Real shame.




Side-scrolling sh'mup somewhat reminiscent of the 8/16-bit home computer classic "Wings of Fury", mixed with the arcade classic "Defender", plus a modern rogue-lite-ish semi-random ability/power-up system. Quite hard to describe since any game you could reference to describe it is 30-40 years old, give it a download if it looks interesting, it's only 250 megabytes.




Looks and plays like a prototype of a game, not sure putting this out as a demo was a good idea.




This looked so much like Golf With Your Friends, I only downloaded it to see if it did anything notably different from Golf With Your Friends. Turns out: It does not.
 
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Microids steps in on Frogwares territory and brings a Sherlock Holmes game of their own, but it's not Sherlock Holmes, it's Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. High quality all around, fans of the genre will love it.




This game clearly is the (solo) developer's realization of a quite intricate and pretty strange original fantasy world of theirs, so it feels almost mean to criticize it, but underneath the bombastic presentation and pretty underwater graphics, it's just a pretty generic hack'n'slash and the "vast ocean" is just quite old-school-ish narrow corridor-style levels.




Another prototype of a game (it even opens a python debug console window in the background when you launch it), which really should not be in Next Fest at all.




The art-style and post-apocalyptic scenario of this game really intrigued me and I wanted to like it, but the core gameplay just isn't there, the controls are imprecise and the difficulty is high and I quickly got frustrated. Apparently this is slated to release next week, so there's little hope of the final product being any better either.




The game's description reads like it might finally be a continuation of the brilliant 2012 student game "Perspective" (which is free on Steam and everyone should play), but it's actually more similar to "The Pedestrian", but with awkward controls and pretty generic level design.




An endless-driving game. Well, barely a game. I got bored with it after 10 minutes. Looks worse in motion than on the screenshots, too.




The ambition with this one clearly is to make the next big scifi-horror third person action game, but the actual product feels more like a generic Half Life 2 mod. The demo hilariously ends after about 20 minutes of slowly trudging through snowly paths and empty rooms, just after you finally pick up a gun, but before you get a chance to shoot at anything other than an electrical closet.
 


This starts out like a friendly, lovely looking platformer that's mostly about appreciating how nice it is - you know, one of those cozy games that they have now - and about ten minutes in you realize - oh no, this is a mean game in disguise, because screen by screen, the little challenges become timed more tightly and less obviously telegraphed. Really liked this one.




Complete garbage at this point in time, save yourself the download.




This is the most fascinating demo I've played so far this fest - I never heard of this game at all before now and the demo (which seems to be the game's quite expansive combined intro / tutorial section) is incredibly polished - the presentation is bombastic, the voice acting is on point, the fantasy swashbuckling story is immediately intriguing and the game is looking very good (however, it will happily jolly-roger your GPU in order to deliver the eyecandy).

But.

It"s a first person shooter and the gun, yes, THE ONE AND ONLY GUN you have throughout the demo, is just terrible. Shooting in this game not fun or satisfying whatsoever. To make that even worse, the game often insists that the player clears an area of all enemies before allowing them to move on, even though it:s often much quicker and easier to just run past most of the NPCs. The demo ends soon after a first mini-boss battle, which also isn't exactly thrilling to play.

I'll keep following this game to see if the developers manage to improve the core gameplay, because if they do, this is going to be pretty great.




Purist parkour game. The level design looks good, however, I'm a controller player and the controller controls are not customizable in this demo and they have sprint hard-mapped to clicking in the left stick, which is obviously a terrible default layout for a parkour game that requires you to switch between sprinting and running precisely and quickly. Hopefully a future demo in a future fest will have that fixed.




Good-looking puzzle adventure, but the controls are quite awkward - very mouse/keyboard centric, which is already unfortunate for a controller player like me, but even with mouse and keyboard things are somewhat awkward because the game's physics aren't quite tuned right yet. Needs work, but has potential.




Very well made open-world action adventure that is all about zooming around a desert planet on a hoverboard. It's not quite for me personally because I like my action adventures a little more directed and less open, but anybody who thinks that this game looks interesting should definitely have a look. I think the elevator pitch for this game might have been "SciFi Zelda on a Hoverboard" and it pulls that off quite nicely.




Another all around well-made action-adventure, just not quite for me because, apologies in advance for upcoming rant, I have a fundamental problem with all of the Tron sequels and spin-offs.

The original movie and its story works for me because it has a real person more or less magically transported into a computer where all the programs look like people, which is a very silly high-concept premise, but it works because it's ultimately a big escape story. Real person needs to defeat evil computer people with the help of good computer people to make it back into the real world. Why anybody thought it would be a good idea to go back to the goofy world inside the computer where programs look like people and fight each other with glowing frisbees is beyond me.

So this game is once more all contained inside this goofy world and I just can't find it in me to care about the story and characters at all because it's all so silly. On top of that, the level design is just not very visually interesting because it tries to stick to the classc Tron style, which is lots of flat surfaces and glowy lights, a computer-futurist aesthetic that is now more than 40 years out of date.

But to repeat, the game itself is quite good. Do check out that demo.
 
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Late to the Next Fest, but managed to squeeze out a batch of demos. There sure are a lot of metroidvanias and cat hidden object games...

Some of the ones I tried:
  • Ritual of Raven - A farming sim... with programming? It's giving me Autonauts flashbacks. For some reason these games turn you into a errand boy with tenuous fetch quests from villagers. I'm not too convinced by the narrative and quest design... but I'll keep on eye on this because the automation part could expand to something interesting.
  • Öoo - Yet another Metroidbrainia but it stands out with an elegant tutorial which bodes well for the level design. I'm curious how far they can push this bomb-pooping concept.
  • LAN Party Adventures - I love games where you mess around with pseudo operating systems. In addition to the puzzle adventure-style this has some job sim elements where you have to actually hook up cables to computers. It promises mystery... I'd love to see where this goes.
  • Pixel P.I. - A detective game with an intriguing concept of asking questions to unlock facts but the UI is rough.
  • Abra-Cooking-Dabra - Stacklands + cooking seems to be a popular combination nowadays. This is one of the more polished takes out there.
  • Possessor - Super slick presentation but I couldn't figure out to progress after the first 15 minutes, so I can't say much about how combat and platforming feels.
  • Organized Inside - Satisfying little Unpacking clone.
  • Danchi Days - An casual adventure game full of Japanese charm. Normally I wouldn't have the patience for awkward minigames but something about this just works.
My top picks:





 


Early preview of a metroidvania, plays well, but has performance issues. Concept art and character designs look very cool, wishlisted to keep track of.




The No. 1 find for me in this Next Fest. A third-person stealth adventure with an incredibly detailed game world and a couple of cool tweaks to the stealth-action formula, such as a free camera that the player can rotate 360 degrees and fly anywhere in the current map (and re-center on the player character at the push of a button), which adds a whole new feel to exploration and tactical gameplay. The game also looks and sounds fantastic, the voice acting is great and the world-building immediately drew me in. The demo is generously long and supposedly progress in the demo can be carried over into the final release (scheduled in exactly one month from today).




The No. 2 find for me in this Next Fest. Super-polished metroidvania with roguelike elements, which seems to have been designed precisely to my (not very high) tolerance threshold for roguelike stuff - yes, I was annoyed every time I died and was put back to the same checkpoint, but the new possibilities that opened up kept me going. I predict that this game will be the next big indie metroidvania hit game since Nine Sols.




What if Twelve Minutes looked and played like Disco Elysium? Answer: Brilliant?!? Just like with Disco Elysium, the sheer verbosity of the game's dialogue might not be for everyone, but if reading a lot in a game is not a concern, definitely worth a look.




This game seems slightly cursed. The original game had a lot of hype behind it and then was a disappointment for many - and Playtonic clearly considers it unfinished business, so here's the remake, which does overhaul the game considerably - but, oh no, the demo has severe performance issues and the Steam community forum is not happy about it. Will Playtonic get it right in time for the final release? I wishlisted to stay tuned (the original game is in my library, but unplayed to this day).




This game wants to be a lush looking fantasy action adventure AND a base/city building simulation game and the small team behind it is throwing the whole might of Unreal 5 at the task ... and UE5 passes the burden on the player's GPU. And CPU, since the game compiles its considerable amount of shaders on first launch. Wow, my PC's fans are pretty clean now!
You can see the cut corners at every turn in this game - the characters all wear animal masks, so faces don't have to be animated, all the posing in cut-scenes is clearly done manually with no motion capture and there's a lot of UE5 stock assets on display. But: The game already does deliver quite well on both the action-adventure and base/city building, even though it's not due to be released before 2026.




It's more Monument Valley. I'd pre-order if Steam would let me.




I almost did not check out this VR-only game because of the "From the makers of The Room" bit in the description, but contrary to my expectations, this is not about endlessy messing around with overly complicated puzzle boxes at all - and it's not a jump-scare horror game either. Or at least the demo isn't. Instead, there are some really great, atmospheric locations with great detail to explore and some very intruiguing world building, too. The only gripe I had with this game is that there are too few interactable objects, like in most VR games (at least when held up to the standard set by Half Life: Alyx). I really wanted to keep playing when the demo ended.
 
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