Croak
Extreme frog platforming for the modern age.
Croak is a 2D platformer. You play as a little green frog with a crown. Your job is to get to the end of the level, as is tradition in these games. You do this by jumping and using your tongue as a kind of grappling hook. Master all sorts of puzzling platforming challenges in this fun little game.
The game’s star mechanic is the tongue. You press a button, and the frog sticks out his tongue, and it looks funny. It’s also great for platforming. You can latch onto walls with it, and pull yourself towards them at high speed. Then you bounce off the wall. You can bounce in the direction of the wall to go forward, or you can keep the tongue button pressed to keep pinballing off walls. It’s a very intuitive mechanic that gets put to good use here.
The tongue’s platforming potential is on full display thanks to this game’s level design. Each stage is a series of interconnected platforming challenges. You first need to figure how you’re going to do what you need to do, in a bit of a puzzle platformer sort of way. Then, once you figure it out, execute using the game’s tight controls.
The levels are full of creative gimmicks. There’s a block that looks like a square hedge, which you can bonk with your head to make it slide. You can ride it as it’s moving to slide over spikes or other hazards. Some of the challenges have you making big leaps onto moving blocks, which is satisfying and cool to see. There’s another gimmick with some birds that act as platforms. When you press the jump button, they phase in and out of existence. You need to figure out the correct number of jumps you need to make to get them in their platform state as you jump. Then they combine the hedge block and the birds in a cool sequence where you have to jump to activate and deactivate the birds to let the hedge pass, while avoiding the spiked floor beneath you.
The game’s cool gimmicks, tight controls, and neat tongue mechanic all add up to a great platformer. The levels are very tight, too. Zero downtime. You’re constantly pressing forward and jumping on stuff.
There are also a ton of secret areas with optional challenges. It reminds me a lot of Celeste. Even the way you get the hidden coins is similar to how you get the strawberries in Celeste, where the collectible follows you until you exit the challenge area, and then it goes into your inventory.
The presentation is a clear highlight here. Beautiful hand-drawn animations that are fluid, bouncy and with a lot of personality. The frog’s design is adorable, and all his animations look fantastic. My only complaint with the visuals is that the pink spike hazards could be a little more vibrant, so they’d be easier to see. I’m a little colorblind, so that might be contributing to my inability to see them well, but they could use a bit more contrast.
Overall, a great time. It’s easy to pick up, full of cool little tricks, and it gets to the action instantly. It doesn’t waste your time onboarding you. It explains the basic mechanics and then throws you into some tricky platforming. There’s a medal system, too, which tracks your performance in a level and awards you a medal. I can see myself replaying these over and over for those medals. Highly recommended.
You can download the demo for Croak here.
Firestarters
It’s like that other rollerskating shooter, but faster.
Firestarters is a score-based first person shooter. You skate around an arena, shooting at enemies to get points. Fly around at ludicrous speed, grind rails and ride half-pipes to gain momentum. It has a neat resource system that feeds into itself, which I always like.
Your objective is to survive multiple rounds in an arena, and get a good score. You get points by shooting enemies, and doing it in style. You can press the right mouse button to skate, which makes you go insanely fast, and changes how your momentum works. You can also use the skates to grind on rails. Kill enemies while grinding, going fast or jumping to get a better score.
You get a few weapons to help you dispatch your enemies. There’s the basic dual pistols, a baseball bat, and a mining laser that fires a heat beam. You can pick up other weapons, like a shotgun, between rounds.
These three weapons have their own use. The pistols do damage, but have limited ammo. The bat has unlimited ammo, as bats tend to do, but it’s melee ranged. The mining laser sets enemies on fire, but it overheats quickly. The bat and the pistols interact with each other. The pistols need ammo, and you get ammo by killing enemies with the bat. Hitting enemies with a bat also resets your skate meter and your other air moves; the double jump and ground stomp (which sends enemies flying like the one in ULTRAKILL).
The game’s presentation is fine. It looks a little unfinished, but everything is clear and readable, even at 88 miles per hour. Except for that one part where it puts you in a sand storm, cutting off your visibility. That one sucks. Hopefully it’s a one-off thing. The game has a style of its own, which is nice. When you hit an enemy, a short phrase pops up on screen, and some of them are a bit cringey, but it’s manageable.
Firestarters shows a lot of promise. It’s a great movement-based shooter with great speed and cool ideas. The only nitpicks I have with it are the roguelite elements, which are kind of out of place, and the grinds. In games like these, with grinds, you usually snap to the rail when you initiate a grind. Here, you snap to it if you land on the rail with pin-point accuracy. I wish it would have more leniency, because there were times when I tried to grind, but missed the rail by half a pixel and killed my momentum.
Either way, I recommend Firestarters. Download the demo here.
Hotwing Hellions
>Looking for a new shmup
>Ask gamers if it’s euroshmup or bullet kino.
>They don’t understand
>Pull out illustrated diagram explaining what is a euroshmup and what is bullet kino.
>they laugh and say “it’s just a bullet hell, sir”
>Download demo
>it’s euroshmup
Hotwing Hellions is a 1v1 vertical shooter. You pilot a ship and dodge bullets. Reach the end of the stage before your opponent, and you win.
Before I get to the game, I have to define a “euroshmup”. It’s a term I first heard from Mark of The Electric Underground. It refers to a shmup that has a set of mechanical quirks: Inertia, big ships, weak weapons/tanky enemies, few enemies, progression, and an unsatisfying presentation. Negative connotation. It’s a derogatory term. It specifies “euro” because these types of shooters were typically made in Europe, in contrast to the more polished Japanese games.
Hotwing Hellions isn’t a full-on euroshmup, but it’s uncomfortably close. It doesn’t have inertia, thank goodness, but it has some other stuff. Most notably, the weak guns. Either your cannons were loaded with mashed potatoes or every enemy is plated in adamantium. Whatever the cause, enemies take too long to kill. They linger on screen while you plip away at them.
The demo level is pretty bad. It’s a long stretch of seemingly random enemies flying in with no real sense of pacing. Enemy formations fly in, and they shoot at you. They feel haphazardly thrown in. There isn’t any real synergy between the enemy types. Their shot patterns don’t make you move around the screen, nor do they try to trap you in any way. They come in, fire in your general direction, and that’s it.
The movement is alright, the shooting feels limp and the enemies stink. You have two little bits (things that float near your ship) that can shoot, but their main feature is that they block enemy fire. You can position them in front of you and camp behind them for most of the stage. Like I said, it doesn’t encourage you to move around much.
I mentioned that the level is long, but did I really emphasize it? It’s long. Noticeably long. It might appear longer because of how boring it is, but it’s a slog. I don’t remember the first level of Dodonpachi or any other shmup taking this long.
The game is not awful, but not good. It’s dull, which is arguably worse. Everything about it feels basic, and random at worst. Enemy placement and patterns are uninspired. There aren’t any clever bullet patterns that test your skills. It’s very underwhelming. Hard 4.5/10 vibes. Juuuust below average, but not in an interesting way, much like how my teachers described me.
I think I’d be able to tolerate the game more if it had a better presentation. The graphics in this one are ugly. It looks like the post pixel art Cave games mixed with a more decroded Akiragoya game, if it were made in Flash (back when it was still called Macroemedia Flash). If you understood any of that, I invite you to come to therapy with me next week. It’s hideous. It has this high-contrast pre-rendered look to it that is equal parts uncanny and off-putting, but not in a cool horror way, like Angel at Dusk (Akiragoya’s most decroded game).
The demo stage is a perfect showcase of this game’s lack of aesthetics. The background is one continuous rock texture. Noisy, overly detailed, and like most other things here, thrown in without much rhyme or reason. It distracts from the already hard to read action in the foreground. There’s an option to turn it off, which I appreciate. Staring at that background for so long was giving me pink eye.
Overall, I didn’t like this. It’s just kind of boring. The only really notable part about it is its horrible visual design. It’s grimey, ugly and unappealing. It also affects the gameplay, since it makes keeping track of all the projectiles and other nonsense needlessly difficult. An easy skip.
You can download the demo for Hotwing Hellions here. I’d rather just get real hotwings.
Turleon
That’s it. You’re all banned from making beat-’em-ups. No more of these until you go and play Streets of Rage. You don’t even have to beat the whole game, just play one level and get a feel for what this kind of game should play like, at the minimum.
Turleon is a 2D beat-’em-up. You walk right and fight cops. You have a basic combo, some heavy attacks and specials. You’re going to need all of them to take enemies down, because you do no damage.
The demo starts with a long tutorial that presents the information in the least intuitive way possible. It shows you different button combinations you can press, just floating in the air, with a transparent animation of what it’s supposed to do. No real indication as to what the move does. The prompts also use the worst font ever conceived by man (or animal).
The game has a jump button. Why do I mention that like it’s a feature? Well, because the game has wall jumping. Guess which button you press to do it. It’s not the jump button. It’s the attack button… AND the dodge. Both. You hit the wall, then dodge off it to wall jump. You need to do this multiple times in a row to get up a building. It’s incredibly unintuitive, and it requires a precise rhythm to pull off, otherwise you’ll jump off the wall before your air attack’s secret cooldown is still going and you’ll press the button and nothing will happen. Then you drop like a rock.
I soldiered on and managed to clear the wall jumps, only to get rushed by enemies. Tanky enemies that take forever to die. I smacked them with my little arms for what felt like hours.
As a beat-’em-up, it’s very bad. Your range is low, your attacks affect a small area, and it’s focused on doing combos, which translates to tanky enemies that you have to punch forever. There aren’t any cool moves to do, either, so your combos are just mashing on one button.
The presentation is off. It has 2D sprites on a 3D background. The retro styling extends to the UI, where it has an unreadable pixel font that makes your eyes bleed. There’s also a bright green scale pattern over most UI elements that squeezes lemon juice into your already bleeding eyes.
The camera is also pulled back really far from the action. It’s like playing a game from a spy satellite.
Overall, don’t recommend. D- see me after class. Homework: the entirety of Streets of Rage 2. I am also patting myself on the back because I made it through this entire section without calling the game Turd leon. Wait, I just did. Damn. Oh well.
Scott Pilgrim EX
Not this guy again!
Somehow, Scott Pilgrim returned. Scott PilgrimEX is yet another beat-’em-up. This one has more of an adventure theme going, like River City Ransom. You walk around the town, complete quests, get money, buy items and get some light RPG progression.
You have a basic light combo, a two-hit heavy combo that sends enemies flying, a knockdown attack and a special. It’s a competent arsenal, perfect to deal with any situation. The controls feel responsive, punches come out when you press the button and they feel powerful.
This level of competence shouldn’t be surprising, given the developer’s previous work, but it’s surprising to me… given the developer’s previous work. They made the previous Scott Pilgrim game, which I didn’t like. I wrote an entire review pointing out its many, many flaws. The fact that they could turn around and make a decent game is impressive. They learned something in the decade or so after the first game.
The presentation is great, the art is fantastic, the animations are delightful, the colors are wonderful. It looks amazing, even better than the first one, and the graphics were that game’s only redeeming quality. The music in this one isn’t as good, but it’s alright. It gets the job done.
It’s a decent casual beat-’em-up. I think it needs a few tweaks, but that’s because I’m an annoying elitist. Enemies should have get-up attacks to stop you from camping, the levels are a bit too big, there’s a lot of wandering and downtime between objectives. There should be more enemies in each encounter, and the fights should have fewer interruptions. Other than that, it’s fine.
I recommend it to anyone looking for a casual beat-’em-up similar to Shredder’s Revenge. Not really something for enthusiasts. It’s still miles better than the original Scott Pilgrim game, and immeasurably better than any of the other slop brawlers I’ve tried in this Next Fest.
Download the demo for Scott Pilgrim EX here.
Gambonanza
Balatro, but chess.
Gambonanza is a chess puzzle roguelike. Balatro, but with chess. You play out small chess puzzles, buy pieces, get modifiers that affect how you play, modify your board’s tiles and fight devious bosses. Your goal is to finish 5 rounds, like in Balatro. Each round consists of two challenges and a boss. Like in Balatro.
Between each blind you can visit the store to buy stuff to improve your run. You can buy card packs- I mean- piece packs? They give you a random piece. Just like in Balatro, they’re randomly selected. It made sense in that game because of the trading card pack themeing, but here it’s kind of weird. It’s not themed around anything, you just buy chess booster packs. Why? Because Balatro did it.
Each round you win gives you money. Money accrues interest over time. Like in that other game.
The puzzles range from 200 ELO chess against a toaster, to “oh the other guy has an indestructible Queen. I guess I’ll go shove my pieces up my rectum”. You’re winning, until you’re not.
Unlike Balatro, your pieces can be destroyed. If you sacrifice a piece, a move which is extremely common in chess, you lose it. You need to replace it by buying them in the shop. This leads to moments where you enter a puzzle with three bishops. Stalemates can, and do, occur.
The game’s presentation is Balatro. Literally just Balatro. From the wavy tie-dye background, to the UI elements, the music, the effects, the shop. There’s even a little Jimbo character that talks to you every now and then. It’s so blatant that it crosses into being a rip-off.
The thing is that, the presentation is nowhere near as good as Balatro’s. That game was a masterclass of tactile UI/UX design. Every little detail in how the game worked, was geared towards making the experience as engaging and addictive as possible. It made playing digital cards feel good. The interface was clicky, lively, interesting. The one in Gambonanza is like the diet version. Wait, that’s too much of a compliment. Diet Balatro would imply it’s still good. This is Diet store-brand Balatro, room temperature and flat.
The game itself has some interesting concepts, but some weirdness. I’m a lousy chess player, and I found some of the puzzles to be insultingly easy, but then I came across one where the opponent had a queen I couldn’t capture, and it just flew across my army, committing war crimes against each one of my pieces, while I sat in the cuck chair and watched.
You are the white pieces, so you move first. In chess this gives you the advantage, you can take offensive positions. In this game, it means you have to jump into the enemy’s formation. That’s what the game tells you at first, and what it heavily implies. In practice, you can wait or move a random piece, and the enemy will be forced to move. This leads to situations where you wait in your side of the board while the enemy marches a pawn down in a straight line directly into your line of fire.
This is the kind of game that needs a few dozen hours to see if it’s solid or not, or at least a good chess player. I’m bad at chess, and I don’t have dozens of hours to stress test this. All I have are my mixed initial impressions.
All I know is that, I think it feels a bit lopsided. What makes Balatro work is that you have all your cards in your deck at all times, but they’re limited to your hand. If you have a joker that gives you bonus points for playing club cards, you can use it. You might draw a hand or two without clubs, but they’re in your deck, so they’ll come up eventually, and you can use them.
In Gambonanza, there are piece-specific modifiers. Things that affect pawns specifically, or rooks. That’s all fine and dandy, if you have that piece. You start with three random pieces, then buy random pieces in the shop, one at a time, with your limited money. You don’t have a full board of pieces to work with. You don’t start the round and pick from every piece, deciding on what to put on the board to maximize your modifiers while limiting risk. It’s random.
I thought it worked different than that. You get a modifier that skips an enemy’s turn if you capture a unit with a pawn. You enter the round, you set up your board and weigh your options. Sure, you could do all pawns, but maybe you’d want to play a knight, because that’s what the enemy board would be weak to.
That’s not how it works. You enter the round, you sacrificed your pawn in the last round to prevent a stalemate, so now you have a pawn modifier and nothing to use it with. You’re stuck with three bishops. It’s like if in Balatro all your cards were destroyed when you played them. It’s like if every boss was The Pillar.
Then again, if you could build your own board, you could break the game by always playing the same optimal set-up, but hey. I’m not the game designer. Balatro solved this with randomness. Maybe go one step further and copy Balatro in that, too. Have all 16 pieces available, but each move is a hand, and you have to make a winning chess hand at random, and play that.
Sure, you can stock up on pieces and not sacrifice them, but come on. Good luck playing chess without gambling a piece or two.
What really sours me about this game is how blatant it’s trying to be Balatro. It comes off as a coat-tail rider. Sure, there are a ton of Balatro clones, and they’re deservedly mocked and derided for being Temu rip-offs, and I think Gambonanza should be, too. It takes more work to try to imitate Balatro than to make your own thing. This game is like vegan bacon. No, it doesn’t taste anything like bacon, it’s a lot of work to make, and if you really want me to try vegan food, just give me a slice of eggplant. The slice of eggplant in this strained metaphor is something that isn’t trying to replicate Balatro.
Also, making the game so similar to Balatro seems like an easy marketing tactic, but it also opens it up to getting compared directly to Balatro. That’s not a favorable comparison. Bacon versus vegan bacon, again. Dr. Pepper versus Diet Professor Spice.
This is what they look like side-by-side in my Steam library.
You can download Balatro here.
I mean- download the Gambonanza demo here. Try it out for yourself and see if I’m being too rough on it for no reason. I’m open to opposing viewpoints on this one.
Super Meat Boy 3D
Time to play with my meat… in 3D!
Super Meat Boy 3D is a 3D precision platformer. Run across multiple miniature stages packed with platforming challenges that will test your skills, and patience. It’s Super Meat Boy, but with a whole new axis to misalign your jumps.
It does a great job of translating Super Meat Boy into 3D. The movement feels good. Fast and nearly unwieldy, but still manageable if you know what you’re doing. The levels are quick, short bursts of platforming. It’s still a save-state game where you retry the same three seconds over until you get it right, with very little downtime or consequence.
The only thing that got lost in the transition to 3D was the style. I’m going to use the dreaded S-word: the 3D version has a lot less soul than the crude flash-animated graphics of the first game. It’s also made in Unreal Engine 5, the anti-soul engine, and it shows. There’s volumetric fog (anti-soul gas) everywhere, it looks upscaled even at 100% resolution scaling, there’s weird aliasing and everything looks semi-realistic but also like it’s made of the wax they put on the outside of cheese. The intro cutscene looks like one of those “X game, in Unreal Engine” videos. The kind that have people ironically chanting “Nintendo, hire this man!”. In fact, the whole game looks like that. “Super Meat Boy, but realistic”. Dr. Fetus’ animations at the end of the level are incredibly stiff and charmless. The game doesn’t look bad, it’s just very bland.
If you like 3D platformers, but haven’t found one to really test your skill like the 2D ones do, give Super Meat Boy 3D a shot. It’s tough, but fair, and it manages to feel like the original. Now cue someone with 6,000 hours in Super Meat Boy telling me about how the acceleration formula is slightly different, and how that affects the rest of the game, and it’s in fact NOTHING like the original.
Download the Super Meat Boy 3D demo here.
Divinum
If I had a nickel for every 2D Devil May Cry inspired game with a female protagonist, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.
Divinum is a 2D hack and slash. You go around levels and get put into combat arenas, where you fight a variety of monsters using your sword. Slash at them with combos, send them flying with an uppercut and keep hitting them in mid-air, use magic attacks and anything else you can think of to style on your enemies.
You have a wide variety of attacks. There’s a basic sword combo. Mash the attack button for a combo. If you pause after the first hit, you get an alternate combo. Send enemies flying with an uppercut, follow them with an air combo and slam them down with a helm breaker. There’s a lot of them, and they feel great to use. They have large hitboxes, which lets you smack a lot of enemies at once, making them feel powerful, and you can combo from one into the other as you’d expect from this kind of game.
Along with your sword, you have some magic attacks. You start with a flame shot and a healing ability, but you can swap them out. Me being the combat goblin I am, I got rid of the healing spell the first chance I could and replaced it with one that erupts spikes from the ground and sends people flying. Much better than a healing spell. The magics are basic, but fun to use, and they complement the fighting well.
There’s defense, too. You can parry, and roll. The parry is useful, but you’re not required to use it. It’s there to take your turn in specific situations, but it’s not a “my turn, your turn” parry game. You can move out of an attack’s way to dodge. You can also roll, which is good to roll past enemies, since you don’t have the benefit of a third dimension here. The defensive options work well, are useful and they don’t feel like they stop the flow of combat like they do in a lot of parry-focused games.
The presentation is great. Simple, low detail pixel art that looks clean and readable. The animations are buttery smooth, with tons of frames, but they don’t feel slow or overdone. The music and sound design are also very good.
I recommend Divinum. It has a fun combat system with good combos, solid fundamentals and a defense system that doesn’t make you stop dead in your tracks whenever an enemy’s eyes glow red.
Download Divinum’s demo here.
Underkeep
Under where?
Underkeep is a first-person dungeon crawling RPG. You grab a party of four adventurers and go exploring. Complete quests, explore dank dungeons and fight monsters.
There are the usual classes to choose from: Warrior, archer, wizard, etc. You can pick from different races, each with their own innate stats, and give them an active ability. Solid party building.
Combat is turn-based. You explore in real time, but when you run into an enemy you go into a turn-based mode. Each hero gets a turn to attack, then the enemy. Repeat until someone dies. Preferably the monster. It works fine, and the abilities available at the start are useful.
The presentation is nice. Detailed pixel art, interesting monsters, and a good sense of atmosphere. It has a very classic retro look, which fits the retro wizardry/DnD game it’s going for.
The demo is very short, but it shows what the game’s going for. You only have one basic quest to complete, but you can finish it in two ways, which is cool. I hope the other quests have that level of freedom. It’s not much, but it’s more than what other games give you.
These games are all about long, arduous journeys into hostile labyrinths, so I’d have to see a real, proper dungeon before casting full judgement. Fifteen minutes isn’t enough to see the progression. Can’t tell if the classes evolve in interesting ways, or if they gain any noteworthy skills, or if it’s just numbers going up.
From what little I saw in the demo, it looks promising. A simple, solid dungeon crawler for all the uncs out there who mapped their own dungeons. It’s not as tough as the old games (for now, at least), but if it delivers on what it promises, it’ll scratch that dungeon diving itch well.
Download the demo for Underkeep here.
Conclusion
That was the Next Fest for February 2026. Lots of demos played, not very many good ones. The ones I did play that were good, were pretty great. Divinum, Soul Quest, Denshattack! and Don’t Kill Them All were my favorites. The others I recommended, I’ll keep an eye out for, and the ones I bashed can stay buried in the backpages of Steam.
This Next Fest had a lot of multiplayer demos I ignored. A lot of open world survival craft stuff. Not for me, sadly. Same with the dozens and dozens of Vampire Survivors clones. I can’t believe we’re still copying Vampire Survivors, and at such an insane rate.
I keep telling people indie games is where the creativity is at, then I see the new section in Steam, and it’s full of Vampire Survivors clones. Or “X game, but other thing”. Makes my arguments hard to defend.
Not to mention all the AI garbage. I don’t care if you only use it for your game’s cover, I don’t like it. It’s lazy. That’s the first thing people see, and if I see it’s AI generated, I’ll assume the rest of your game is just as lazy.
Despite all this, and my negativity, I’d say I enjoyed this Next Fest. Finding games like Denshattack! And Croak made the whole thing feel worth it. That’s how it is with gaming, in general. There’s a sea of garbage, with one or two diamonds hiding in it. You just need to put in the work to dig through it and sort out all the slop. There’s a fortune that’s yours for the taking, but you’ll have to find it first. I left everything I own in One Piece.
In this case One Piece is any game that doesn’t make you feel like shit while playing it.
Now, join me in a celebratory sea shanty to close out the day’s events!
YAYO YA-YO! DREAMIN! DONT GIVE IT UP GAMER.
Man, what's wrong with the beat'em-upers? lol
Yo hang on what's that cyborg Raiden from Mortal Kombat game tho?