Steam Next Fest June 2025

Demo demo pan! DEMOS EVERYWHERE!

DEMO-LITION MAN

The Steam Next Fest is here, but by the time you read this it will have already left. One week, thousands of demos and a lot of nonsense. I went waist-deep into the sea of roguelites, deckbuilders, Balatro-likes and fishing games to bring you any demos that seem interesting. Some were good, some were bad, but they’re all taking up space in my hard drive. As is tradition here, I’ll be giving you the good, the bad and the ugly; everything from AAA games trying to pass themselves off as indie, to disguised chinese gatchas all the way up to actually good games you should add to your wish list.

THE GOOD

Absolum

Absolum is a roguelite beat-em-up. Yeah, I know, it’s yet another roguelite. How original. Why’s this in good? Because it’s from the people who brought you Streets of Rage 4, a fantastic beat-em-up that excells in gameplay and presentation. They brought that same excellence to Absolum, along with some more new-school additions.

You pick a character, each with their own special ability, and you go through a set of stages beating the tar out of fantasy creatures. There’s the basic jab combo, a dash attack, air attacks, a special skill and your character’s signature move. It’s a simple, but effective move set that lets you handle any situation.

The base gameplay is solid. The hits feel nice, there’s a good amount of hitstun, you can throw enemies around to control them, that sort of thing. The skills, which are like your character’s strong attack, can armor through enemy attacks if timed correctly, which is a nice touch.

Where I think the gameplay starts to get a little murky is with the addition of all the new school stuff. Your character’s special move is tied to a mana bar, which replenishes as you attack. These special attacks aren’t particularly strong, so I don’t think they should be tied to a slowly refilling mana bar in the first place. Without this button, your character’s move set is a bit underwhelming. I said you have the tools for every situation, you do, but you don’t have multiple special moves like in Streets of Rage 4. You’ll be mashing the jab combo for 90% of the time. This is alright, but it makes the characters feel a bit samey, since they don’t have anything too unique about them other than their cooldown-limited special moves. This is something modern games do, where they tie your character’s identity to one limited attack and leave the rest of the kit bog-standard and generic. The characters in Streets of Rage 4 had more differentiation in their base moveset.

The roguelite elements are sort of just there. They don’t add much, in my opinion. Every now and then you have to stop what you’re doing to pick one of two options which improve your character. These are generally uninteresting stat upgrades. Do 30% more damage with throwables, do 20% more damage with air attacks, leave a trail of fire when you do anything. The fire trail really is “when you do anything”, since there seems to be one upgrade for every action. Leave fire when you dodge, leave fire when you use your special, when you use your skill it sets you on fire. It just adds a small amount of damage over time on your enemies. These upgrades are kinda boring, and having to stop every few screens to pick one gets old quick. After a few minutes, I started picking them at random to get it over with and didn’t notice any real difference.

Enemy variety is also lacking. You’ll find yourself fighting screens full of the same enemy, with no real mixups to keep you guessing. The enemy count is very low, too, at least when compared to other beat-em-ups.

If I have so much to say about it, then why did I put it in the good category? Well, I have a lot to say about it because I played it a lot, and I played it a lot because I thought it was good. These complaints come from a place of love; I like what I saw, I just think it could be a little better. I’m sure of this because these same people made Streets of Rage 4, which is one of my favorite beat-em-ups. They also made Streets of Fury, which is a masterpiece. Absolum shows their technical know-how and it’s extremely polished, but thanks to its new school additions it sands down the rough edges that made their other games more interesting.

That being said I still recommend Absolum, and it’s going into the wish list.

I didn’t mention it before, but I think I should: The game also looks incredible. The comic book styled illustrations look fantastic, excellent use of color and the characters are all nicely designed with readable silhouettes and nice animations.

Neon Inferno

Speaking of retro-styled games made by reputable studios, it’s Neon Inferno, a cyberpunk arcade shooter from the developers of the excellent Steel Assault. It’s a side-scrolling shooter that blends Contra-style run and gun action with the cover-based target shooting of Wild Guns. It sounds like it shouldn’t work, but it’s a great blend of styles that makes for an incredibly fun time.

It plays like a standard 2D shooter; you can run, jump and shoot in eight directions. Most enemies die in one hit, like in Metal Slug, but there are a few that are heartier than others. Every now and then there will be enemies in the background. By holding down the right bumper, you enter an aiming stance and you can shoot at them with a cursor. While in this mode you can take cover behind things like cars or other foreground elements.

The real magic comes from mixing the two modes. There will be times where you’ll have to fight enemies shooting at you from the background, while enemies spawn in the foreground. This multi-tasking can get intense. You can take multiple hits before dying, so it’s more forgiving than something like Contra, but it’s still tough. You can get overwhelmed easily if you’re not careful.

This mix of background and foreground shooting is expertly shown in a great bike chase sequence near the end of the stage. You hop on a stolen motorcyle and speed down a highway, dodging civilian cars while taking out enemies on bikes or flying on jet packs. You have to switch between two lanes of traffic to avoid cars and enemies, and when you switch, you can use the background shooting mode to shoot into the other lane. This leads to a really fun, frantic mess where you’re dodging cars and keeping an eye on the other lane so you don’t merge into another bike or into a loaded gun. It’s like driving in LA traffic.

The game looks fantastic, too. It has an extremely detailed pixel art style with a lot of modern touches like light effects. Its default presentation is under a few layers of simulated CRT decrosion, but it looks fantastic. You can disable it in the options if you want to look at the raw pixels, or you can increase the intensity of the CRT effects so it looks like you’re playing it on an old monitor you found in a dumpster for that authentic 90s experience. At least that’s how it was for me, when I used to play on an oldhand-me-down CRT from the 80s that I had to slap every few minutes.

I highly recommend Neon Inferno. It’s fun, difficult and it brings a new, fresh experience by remixing ancient gameplay styles. It even has an arcade mode where you have to beat the game in one life, so you know it’s made by hardcore maniacs. This one’s going in the wish list and it’s an easy day-one purchase.

Burning Sword: Death Sun

Burning Sword Death Sun. I can never remember the name right. It sounds like words thrown together. Man door hand hook car door. It’s a 3D action game from Thailand. Not a souls-like, not a roguelike, but a regular old action game. I was skeptical at first, since I played this after playing a similar-looking game and thought this would also be bad. Turns out, it’s pretty good, despite some jank here and there. Game good play fun have fun.

At first glance it looks like generic asian-themed action game #3682. It could be Wukong, or NIOH, or anything in between the two. Then the combat starts (eventually) and you realize that it doesn’t play like either of those games. It’s a more straight forward combat game. You attack with a light attack, a heavy attack, you can parry because of course you can, there’s a small dodge and some additional moves which I’ll get to in a bit. Moving around feels fine and the controls are responsive and easy to come to grips with, even with all the moves available.

The game has some tutorials, but it mostly tells you to look at the upgrades you have in the start menu, so you have to do your own homework with regards to what tools are available. You get a guard break attack, a counter, a weird move that can do more damage after a light attack and an area of effect that lights your sword on fire. That’s where the titular Burning Sword comes into play. There are some meters you can manage to go into a super powered burning state. You do more damage and… other things. I assume you do more than just damage, but it’s not very clear. Filling this gauge takes a while, too. I am willing to admit it’s user error on my part for not figuring out ways to fill it consistently, but I could only get a few activations out of it.

All these moves combine to give you a well-rounded arsenal that’s fun and effective. If only you had things to use it on. This is my biggest complaint about the game: The enemies are very passive. You don’t fight a lot of them, and when you do, they’re content with letting you live your life while they live theirs. They attack sometimes, but for the vast majority of the demo I felt like I was fighting training dummies.
The action ramps up significantly in the boss fights, which is something a lot of these modern souls-inspired games do. They make the fodder enemies complete pushovers and give all the interesting stuff to the bosses, which to the game’s credit, are interesting. There are three bosses in the demo and they each present a nice challenge, with some tricky reaction checks.

The thing that pushed this game from okay to pretty good was its laissez-faire approach to hitboxes. In most modern action games, attacks, whether they be from the player or the enemy, have homing properties. It’s like they have magnets stuck to their weapons; with every attack they come together like fated lovers. This makes it so the player never has to feel bad for missing an attack, but it removes any consideration for spacing and makes dodging/parrying a very binary mechanic.

In Sword Fire Man Die, attacks have very small, precise hitboxes. This means you can miss your attacks if you’re not careful, but it also means you can dodge around your enemies’ strikes naturally. I had several moments where, instead of dodging, I attacked to the side, which moved me out of the way of an attack, and then I redirected and kept attacking. There’s also a parry you can use, but it’s not the end-all-be-all of techniques. If you sit around fishing for one, you’re not going to get much of a reward.

The game even has enemy step! You can jump on an enemy’s head and stun them for a bit, helping you reposition and attack from a different angle. There are a lot of games that claim to be inspired by Devil May Cry that lack this essential mechanic.

The game’s presentation is alright. It looks nice, but it has this very Unreal Engine look to it, with its blurry anti-aliasing and overly shiny surfaces. It still looks fine. What I really liked about it, and this may come as a shock, were the cutscenes. I always skip them, but this game has some really well choreographed wire-fu in its cutscenes, with great directing, clear camera angles that frame the action well, fun techniques and great pacing.

I recommend Burning Sword: Death Sun. It’s fun, and it has a surprisingly competent understanding of fundamentals that a lot of modern action games lack (like Morbid Metal).

Captain Wayne – Vacation Desperation

Duke Nukem is now a pirate, and he’s here to kick ass and drink rum out of a coconut.

Play as the titular Captain Wayne in this 2D/3D retro-inspired boomer shooter that plays like a cross between an ambitious DOOM wad and Duke Nukem 3D.

In standard boom-shoot fare you have a shotgun, a machine gun, a melee weapon, a chain gun and a grenade launcher, with more to come in the future. These are all fired from Captain Wayne’s robotic arm. The inclusion of a robotic arm isn’t just for the sake of presentation, it also has gameplay implications, too. Thanks to his metal arm, Captain Wayne has access to powerful melee attacks he can charge to deliver massive damage to any seadog unfortunate enough to stand in his way.

The game plays like a good boomer shooter. The action is fast and fun, the gunplay is loud and satisfying and the level in the demo was well made, with good enemy placement. It’s refreshing to see a shooter where enemies don’t teleport in only during bespoke battle arenas.

The only real nitpicks I have about the game are the enemies. They behave as they should, but their silhouetting is a bit odd. It’s not too easy to tell them apart at a glance. There’s something about their saturation that doesn’t let them stand out too much from the background at times.

I recommend Captain Wayne. If you like games like Duke Nukem 3D, or Shadow Warrior, you’re gonna feel right at home here. The presentation is fun, too. It looks like a deranged old school anime drawn by an Adult Swim animator who played too much Wario Ware (in the best way possible).

JETRUNNER

Do you like going fast? Then Jetrunner is the game for you. It’s a first person speedrunning platformer with some light shooting elements. Run, jump and wall run through futuristic obstacle courses in pursuit of a platinum medal.

The movement feels smooth, wall running is responsive and the levels are fun to navigate and laid out clearly. Platforming in first person can be a little awkward sometimes, but JETRUNNER manages to make it feel natural, with most of the challenge coming from managing your movement angles in mid-air and wallrunning, with not much in the way of tricky precision platforming. The kind that leads to frustration when you can’t really see where you’re landing.

I was going to give the game a somewhat middling recommendation, but its level design pushed it into a more enthusiastic approval. Each stage has several time goals to reach: the usual bronze, silver, gold and platinum. The interesting part comes in the platinum medals, where the times get kind of screwy. Sometimes you do the level perfectly and find yourself a few milliseconds off from the fastest time, while in others you could be fifteen whole seconds off. This then encourages you to sequence break and find huge shortcuts while still meeting the stage’s target requirements. Finding these more esoteric solutions to each track is a lot of fun, and optimizing your movement to shave off extra seconds feels rewarding.

I recommend JETRUNNER. It’s a fun, colorful speedrunning game with good movement and smooth controls. The only thing I didn’t like about it was the constant back-and-forth yammering between the player character and her off-screen handler. Apologies to the voice actors, who do a good job, but it’s too much. I ended up muting the dialogue. It was like listening to a podcast against my will.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound

Yet another retro-styled throwback, this time with a big name attached to it. It’s a AAA game in disguise, from the developers of Blasphemous, which I have not played. It’s a modern take on Ninja Gaiden, with some amazing sprite work.

You run around as Ryu Hay- wait, no. You don’t play as Ryu in Ninja Gaiden anymore. You play as some guy, and you slash demons and climb walls in an action-platforming adventure. It’s nowhere near as tough or unforgiving as the original Ninja Gaiden games on the NES, but it’s still a fun time.

There’s an emphasis on Ki charge, where you defeat certain enemies with a specific weapon and become “charged” for a bit, which empowers your next attack, letting you destroy obstacles and kill tough enemies in one shot. Managing this resource is interesting, but since it gives you a charge based on what weapon you killed an enemy with, it starts to feel a bit like Simon Says. It’s not a terrible addition, but I don’t think it does much to improve on the already excellent base gameplay.

Don’t have much else to say because you’ve probably already heard of this thanks to its marketing. I recommend you check it out, and not just because I am a Ninja Gaiden fanboy. Ninja Gaiden 4 looks kinda lame, in all honesty.

TEXNOPLAZM

TEXNOPLAZM (the game’s the one yelling, not me) is a first person shooter where you use fists, melee weapons and guns to dispatch enemies. I call it a first person shooter, but it’s more along the lines of Hotline Miami or I Am Your Beast, a Highspeed Improvisational Violence game, where you are constantly picking up weapons with limited ammo and durability, thinking on the fly and speeding through various methods of murder.

The only weapon you can always count on are your fists. They’re relatively weak, at least when compared to a shotgun, but they are great for managing crowds. There’s a light punch, which can be chained for a combo, and a charged heavy punch, which charges up and unleashes a flying Superman punch that sends enemies flying. Along with those there’s a dash and a flying ground strike that creates a shockwave. This basic tool set is strong, and really fun to use. Sliding into an enemy, knocking them in the air then Superman punching them into a wall like a ripe tomato is always a blast.

Along with your fists, there are melee weapons and guns. The melee weapons aren’t as interesting as the fists in terms of move set. You can strike with them, dash through enemies and throw them to stun a target. The guns have very limited ammo, but they’re guns. They can kill most enemies in one shot. Very powerful, but very limited.

These techniques mesh perfectly with the movement. There’s the standard slide, wall jumps, dashes and the aforementioned Superman punch that sends your enemies flying but also sends you flying forward, as well. Movement is fast and intuitive, letting you fly around arenas like it’s nothing, but with enough nuance and tactility to make it feel technical and satisfying.

I do have a few nitpicks. One is the map design. I found myself getting turned around often in the demo level. There isn’t much in the way of signposting and differentiation between sections in the level. This is most likely a problem on my end, since I have the sense of direction of a dry sponge, but this shouldn’t be happening in levels this simple. There are some rare moments where you’re left to your own devices and need to find where to go next, and finding where to go isn’t exactly interesting or intuitive. Another is the complete lack of hit stun when punching enemies. You can do a four-hit combo that launches enemies, but most of the time the enemy you’re punching will interrupt your combo because of the lack of hit stun.

I still recommend TEXNOPLAZM. The game overall is a lot of fun. It offers a challenging, satisfying high-speed combat experience that will have you making constant, meaningful decisions.

Bloodthief

Another first person speedrun game. This one plays like if one of the Knights from Quake saw the main character rocket jumping around and thought “I want that for me”.

In Bloodthief, you slide around at high speeds, jumping off walls, running along them, ground bouncing and stealing enemies’ blood to power your speed.

Combat is melee focused. You use a sword to slice at enemies, which die in one hit. You can air dash at enemies and parry (of course) projectiles. Managing the blood resource is tricky, but it’s plentiful enough to not feel too limiting.
The game is all about movement. Going fast, preserving your momentum and pulling off precise maneuvers. The comparison to rocket jumping earlier wasn’t just for a joke. The movement is heavily inspired by the advanced movement techniques in Quake. You can air strafe and bounce around, with heavy momentum but with good mobility. Chaining techniques together is intuitive, but no easy. It’s simplified compared to high-level movement in Quake, but it’s still tough to pull off. It still requires some dexterity and timing. Each level has the customary medals for quick times, and they’re not easy to get.

It’s an accessible, simplified take on Quake’s movement that introduces its own unique quirks, like sliding, ground-bounces and air dashes, with some genuinely tricky and satisfying air movement and momentum conservation. Speeding through each level is a ton of fun, and it has a lot to sink your teeth into if you want to delve deeper into its mechanics. An easy recommendation.

Brebe Man

Use the power of breakbeat to save music. It’s a third person shoot-em-up where you throw records at enemies. You have two which you can launch at your foes, and you can hold the button down to keep the disks inside the enemies, causing more damage.

The downside to this is that, while your disks are out damaging enemies, they can’t be used until they return, which leaves you open to projectiles, which you can knock away with the disks. It’s a constant weighing of risk and reward on when and how to use your projectiles and switching from defense to offense when the situation calls for it.

The presentation is impressive. The game has a really nice, unique style that stands out among the crowd, and is the main reason why I checked this game out. The music is nice, too, with your attacks altering the breakbeat in the song. This matches well most of the time, but sometimes it can get a little chaotic and overbearing for my tastes. It’s a constant, sonic assault.

The gameplay itself is enjoyable. Simple arcade action that offers up a decent level of challenge. I had fun with it, but it’s a little niche. Will keep an eye on it when it releases, and will look out for any other release from this developer.

Kaizen: A Factory Story

Zachtronics is back, under a new name, bringing you more programming-adjacent games that play like homework. This time, it’s a more simplified, toned-down version of their other games. In Kaizen, you work in a factory in Japan in 1986. You make little gadgets, doohickeys and toys using pushing arms, rotators and welders. It’s a lot more approachable (read: easier) than their other games like Spacehem or Opus Magnum, but it’s still fun and offers some of that same replayability, even if the puzzles are a lot more simple. It’s a great jumping-in point for anyone who isn’t sure if they might like these kinds of difficult, homework-style games. If you like it, check out their other games like Last Call BBS. They also have some that are just straight-up Computer Science homework, like Shenzhen I/O and TIS-100.

If for some strange reason anyone from Zachtronics is reading this: Please make a sequel to 20^th Century Food Court. I really liked that one.

The Bad

Morbid Metal

What sounds like an awesome sub-genre of metal is actually a painfully mediocre action game. It’s all style and zero substance.

Morbid Metal is a third person hack n’ slash action game. That’s right, folks! We’re going back to the TRUE action games of the past like DEVIL MAY CRY. This is all about style and action and combos and style and combos and cool and action. Did we mention actions, and combos? We got those. We got combos.

This might be an unpopular opinion, since a lot of people seem to be excited over this, but I just don’t see it. This is a terrible game. It’s focused on the action, but it’s all superficial. There is nothing backing up its ostentatious animations. There is no hitstun when you hit an enemy; they just stand there as if they weren’t getting smacked by a dozen stabs. This means they can attack whenever they want, and you can’t do anything to prevent it. Even if they do, it doesn’t matter because you have a dodge with ample invincibility frames. This leads to the combat devolving into a boring Simon Says slog where you mash your attack button and dodge when the enemy glows red. You don’t even have to move. I got through the fights using one hand and two buttons.

It’s the ultimate in style over substance. The combat is paper thin and as deep as a puddle. It’s key jingling. You press the dodge button when the big red dodge button indicator comes up. You put the square peg in the square hole. I love matching colors. I am three years old and still drink from a bottle.

You have a variety of options to use at any moment and they all suck because they don’t offer anything your regular light attack combo can’t already do. The extra moves are there to look cool with zero consideration as to how you’d use them in game. All they do is do damage. Everything does that, it’s just different colored ways to do damage. Do you like green damage or red damage? Do you like doing the big slashies or the little slashies? It’s all the same. It’s like the illusion of free will. It made me existential.

These abilities are also on a cooldown, because there’s nothing more stylish than artificially limiting your options. I remember when Devil May Cry had cooldowns. Stinger had a 30 second cooldown because it was too powerful. It’s a great way to balance a game. It makes sure the player runs out of options and has to putter around doing nothing waiting for them to be available again. That sure is some high-octane action! This party’s getting crazy! Wait, I just realized… cooldown… COOL down. It even has the word cool in it! How awesome is that?

Morbid Metal even has a style meter! Devil May Cry-riffic! Getting an S rank is as easy as mashing the attack button over and over again. It has the style meter with none of the mechanics that make it work in the first place. It’s just there because it’s in DMC.

On top of that, it’s a roguelite. A roguelite? WOW HOW ORIGINAL. That means that every now and then you can pick between doing 5% more damage, or having your attacks be 4% more blue! WOW! Meaningless decisions that grant minuscule stat upgrades! I love inconsequential things! I buy things off Temu just to throw them away!

This is garbage. I don’t recommend this to anyone, but a lot of people seem to be excited for it. They yearn for the Devil May Cry inspired action. Maybe they like having keys jingled in their face. May I interest you in some baby sensory videos?

This is my problem with these DMC-inspired games. They see the flash but don’t understand why it’s there. A flashy combo in DMC3 is hard to do. You’re not just pressing one button over and over again, you have to manually time your cancels with enemy step to keep them afloat, you have to be conscious of stun values and bunch of other variables to know what to do and when. Your options in combat have different uses, and you can use your skills to create situations for these options to shine. Nothing is gated behind a cooldown, it’s all tied to how long your animations take to execute, which leads to real-time decision making based on things that are easily observable and intuitive. Not to mention the fact that Devil May Cry is on the more difficult side of things, so you’re forced to move around during fights and try to survive.

Sure, you can get through most of the game using your sword’s basic three hit combo, but it’s very inefficient and not very interesting. The other tools are there to be used as you see fit. In Morbid Metal, the default is king. You can switch characters, but the one you start with can do everything. He can teleport to enemies, his attacks are really fast and can be interrupted at any point, he does okay damage. The other character you get is a slow guy with a massive sword that does big damage. He can’t teleport. If his only thing is “does more damage”, why would I pick him when he’s the inferior choice? Sure, he hits harder. That means enemies die in 3 seconds instead of 3.4 seconds.

Maybe this is some ultra-advanced game that only opens up to those with an IQ above 150 and it’s the most rewarding combat experience ever, and I’m too dumb to see it, but I’m not going to bother with it.

The Ugly

This is where I put demos that weren’t great and miscellaneous thoughts on other things.

Metal Eden

Metal Eden is a medium-paced first person shooter that tries to pass itself off as fast-paced. You run around bland, futuristic levels fighting off mechanic enemies that do stuff every now and then.

You have a trusty gun, which has infinite ammo and fires like a machine gun, but it over heats if used for too long. It takes a while to cool down. Other than that there’s a pistol shotgun with very limited ammo. You switch between them to shoot.

Other than the guns, there’s a melee attack and an execution move that rips out an enemy’s core. This is also on a cooldown. Once you have a core, you can throw it as an explosive or absorb it to gain a temporary power up. Your melee attack is used to make some enemies vulnerable to this core absorption technique.

The thing I didn’t like about this game was its constant limitations. Your guns have very little ammo, your primary has infinite ammo, but it overheats at the slightest provocation, your abilities have cooldowns. There are times where you’re a sitting duck just waiting for your opportunity to do something.

This is also why I say it’s a medium-paced game trying to come off as fast-paced. It tries to be all “WOAH DUDE CHECK IT OUT! RADICAL!” but then everything is on cooldown or out of ammo, and you can’t be hardcore.

The main reason why I didn’t really gel with this game, despite it having some interesting ideas, is that it just feels like a worse version of Deadlink. Deadlink has a lot of similar systems, but it’s a lot faster, your resources replenish by your own actions, and enemies actually try to kill you. Deadlink is also already out and probably way cheaper than Metal Eden. It looks and runs a lot better, too.

I don’t recommend Metal Eden. It’s not a bad game, but it’s not very good. Instead, I recommend Deadlink. It rules.

AI-deal-Rays

From the screenshots, AI-Deal-Rays looked like it was inspired by Zone of the Enders, of all things, so I had to check it out. Zone of the Enders with cute anime girls. Nice. Then I booted up the demo and was thrown into a fight with no indication as to what was going on. The camera was swinging around wildly, things were flashing on screen, there were readouts everywhere. I was in Single Intercept mode, and was apparently in danger. In danger of what? Of having an epileptic episode? There were two anime girls on screen floating around, doing something. Every now and then the camera changed angles abruptly like it was being handled by a drunken pirate on a rickety old boat. The music was blaring at me like I was in a Japanese dance club from hell. Throughout the whole mess I could hear what sounded like someone speaking. It was some anime girl giving me instructions in Japanese. I could understand “WASD”, it was telling me to move, and I thought I was already moving. I was pressing WASD, as is tradition in PC gaming, but I didn’t see much movement other than the camera’s earthquake-like motions.

I paused the game to look at the controls and, surely enough, WASD to move, the mouse to attack, short click to do one thing, long press to do another thing. I mashed on the mouse for a bit to see if anything happened then I realized I had no idea which of the two anime girls I was supposed to be controlling. I assumed I was the blue one, which had her back to the camera most of the time, but none of my inputs seemed to do anything and I couldn’t even tell who the focus was most of the time thanks to the aforementioned schizophrenic camera.

After the most baffling 5 minutes of gameplay, I somehow managed to get to another boss-type fight against another girl. She kept shooting massive lasers at me from the other side of the planet. Each laser kept me stunned for around seven seconds. Then she readied another one and repeated the process. This was pissing me off. I already had a headache from the sensory overload, the camera was giving me vertigo and now when I think I might start to understand what’s going on there’s some girl shooting lasers at me for hours on end.

Then she zoomed forward and molested my character.

This isn’t me trying to be funny, she literally zoomed forward and groped me with two other girls who I didn’t even know where in the arena. That’s when I realized something.

Oh. This is porn. This isn’t Zone of the Enders, it’s Zone of the Edgers.

Then I did some googling and it turns out that, yes, this is in fact porn. It’s a porn game, with the adult content removed. Why? Why would you pay for a porn game without the porn? It’s not for the gameplay. That I’m certain of. This plays like a nightmare. The game is old, too. It’s being put here in the demo fest as a new thing, but it’s a toned-down version of a hentai game. Maybe there’s a large market out there who wanted to have a seizure while playing their gooner game, but thought “You know, maybe there’s too much porn in my adult game. I would buy this if they re-released it in one year with less content.”

Also, according to the game’s Steam page, this game features simple controls, and I quote:

We've eliminated the complex operations typical of 3D action games, optimizing for smooth playability for everyone. At the same time, you can enjoy a variety of combat actions:​

Oh, of course. It’s perfectly simple and understandable. I’m just an idiot.

This demo is in the ugly section because it got me absolutely confused and suddenly threw porn at me. I spent half an hour trying to understand a hentai game. Wait, it’s technically not a hentai game, since it had all the nudity removed. I think. I don’t know what’s going on anymore.

Balatro

Wait, what? Balatro? In the Ugly section? Roger, didn’t you write an entire review praising it? Saying it was a fun game with clever ideas and a great UI?

Yeah, I did. You can go read the review here. It’s a good game. Balatro was a very neat concept for a game. The kind that makes you go “why didn’t I think of that?”. Now, a lot of indie developers had that thought, and they made their own Balatros.

I’m not going to name and shame, because I don’t necessarily think they’re bad games, but come on, man. Do they have to copy Balatro down to the T? They do the wavy background, the trippy music, the twitchy UI with the rising multiplier, the greenish color palette. You can’t not see the game as anything other than “Thing… but Balatro!”. It’s too blatant for me to think it’s cute. There’s inspiration, then there’s wholesale copying.

I have some ideas for the less scrupulous developers out there. These are free; all I ask is that you give me credit… and 2% of all royalties.

• Driving… but Balatro! You drive down a high way and get points for reckless driving. You get parts for your car which increase the points you get for certain actions, like wheels that gain points when you turn left, or a spoiler that gives you a multiplier every time you pass a car.

• Farming… but Balatro! You get seeds and plant them, and the fertilizer you add to them is the joker, and you get points for growing tomatoes in specific plots. You get more money for more produce.

• Fishing… but Balatro! You get points for fish and the different kinds of bobbers and hooks are like the jokers, and they give you multipliers based on what kinds of fish you get. The bait are like the consumable tarot cards. Woah! You caugh a largemouth bass with the bass hook! That’s a 25 times multiplier for all freshwater fish! And oh shit, is that a loach!?

I had a few more ideas, like Chess… but Balatro! Or Stock Market… but Balatro! But those are already real games. You see what I mean? The well is running dry already.

Fishing

Speaking of fish, every game has a fishing mini-game, or is just a glorified fishing mini-game. I get it. Those were fun when they were in other games. They were a nice little activity that let you take a break from the rest of the game and relax, you could catch fish and there was some slight skill involved to keep things interesting. Collecting stuff is fun, and catching that one rare fish is always a dopamine rush. A desire to fish is encoded into our DNA. I’ve felt it, too, and enjoy fishing in Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley.

Then, one day, a bunch of zoomers on social media latched on to fishing mini games, and like everything they get their hands on, made it their personality. Now everything is fishing mini games, fishing this, fishing that. It’s like the Balatro craze, or the cozy farming game craze.

It stopped being a fun little distraction to add in a game and became a whole thing. Now it’s everywhere. It’s no longer quirky or fun. It’s played out. Find something else to base your entire persona around, like an actual personality.

I’m just a grumpy old man. You can enjoy your cozy fishing games all you want. It’s just that after seeing twelve of them in a row, it gets me a bit miffed. Indie games are supposed to be where original ideas and innovation thrive. Not where there’s one fad every few months and you get 90 games based off it. We make fun of mainstream games for taking one idea and beating it into the ground, like they did with Battle Royales or open world slop games, yet here we are making the twelvth hundred Balatro clone with a fishing mini game. I don’t know how many more quirky, magenta-tinged cozy life sims I can take before my sanity unravels.

As of writing this, the Steam Next Fest ended and the Steam Fishing Fest started. Yipee.

Conclusion

I recommend the Steam Next Fest. At least the demos I recommended. If I didn’t mention one, it’s because I didn’t play it. I saw that one Trolley simulator, which looked fun, but my list was already full and I saw some streamers cover it, so it should be fine without me advertising it to my four readers. I tried to avoid playing demos for big or triple-A games, even though I did end up playing Ninja Gaiden: We Have A Massive Budget. I like Ninja Gaiden. Sue me.

The quality of the games was pleasantly high. Got to play some pretty dang good stuff, and with the exception of Morbid Metal, I’d say it was an overwhelmingly positive experience. Better than some of the previous fests. I even enjoyed the weird robot girl gooner game. Not because I’m a degenerate, that’s only partially why, but because it’s some of the hardest I’ve laughed at a game in a while. The sheer confusion and borderline seizure I had trying to understand the game, then suddenly a groping scene, was such an abrupt change of tone that it gave me actual, physical whiplash. I was streaming the game to a few friends on Discord, and we were all trying to figure the game out, and when the gooner stuff started everyone went wild. “ROGER YOU GOONER WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DOWNLOAD!?”. It was fun.

I look forward to playing more of these games when they release. Except for Morbid Metal. I won’t be playing any of that.