Steam Nextfest Feb 2022 impressions

Steam Nextfest Demos

tl;dr:
I'm gonna pay attention to:
- Neodash
- Outshine
- Souldiers
- Spirits of the Hellements (though maybe I just want any TD game ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
- Graze Counter
- Small Saga

Games that other people might want to look at:
- Roto Force
- Lunark
- Mandala
- Ignited Steel
- Imp of the Sun
- The Machine that Breathes

Neodash - Sci-fi racing obstacle course. Reminds me of RaceDieRun on Switch. I liked the level setup, where you're being chased by the end of the track, and the drifting felt pretty good. I think how good this will be is largely dependent on the difficulty curve, but the bones there right now are solid.

Outshine - Typing runner. The feedback on the typing is good, but there are a few too many non-typing things. One of the things I like about typing of the dead was that the main decision making was what to type, and managing threat priority. This has character movement, a shield, and a missile attack. That's just a bit too many things to interrupt the flow of typing.

Roto Force - A twinstick shmup where you move on the inside of a ring. It's fun, but it's really unclear what will hurt or just impede you when you move around the arena. The aiming being relative to your character threw me off a bunch in the square arena until I changed the rotation option.

Witchcrafty - Cute metroidvania, but two hit kills feel very punishing for what this game seems to be going for. Ran into a couple control bugs, like not being able to attack randomly

Lunark - Not for me, but it excudes immense Flashback vibes, so it's bound to be for someone

Bullet Casters - Shmup challenges (and a two player mode apparently). It just feels very amateurish. I'm not sure what the target price is, but with really good shmups already available like the mainline Touhou games, Jamestown, Blue Revolver ($17 CAD), Crimzon Clover, or CAVE shmups, I can't see myself getting it.

Alice Escaped! - Didn't work on a controller, only had controller prompts.

Souldiers - Fun metroidvania. I didn't play much of it, but the movement was good, and I can already tell it's up my alley. Kinda wish the counter had better feedback. The times I think I pulled it off, I either attacked normally afterwards, or I took extra damage from the attack.

Dandy & Randy - I guess it's something of a zeldalike. It seemed fine, but I didn't see a compelling reason to play it. From the 15 mins or so I played, combat was throwing pots at enemies, puzzles were just simple block pushing. I did appreciate that there was letter and pillar boxing to ensure perfect pixels. Funny bug, it would not let me exit. The option to exit the game was just broken.

Mandala - A chill colouring shmup. I look for challenge and this isn't that. It feels like it wants to be a shmup colouring book, even giving a lot of options after each level to make a nice picture of it.

Unwell Known - I couldn't play it. The camera movement is incredibly obnoxious, and for some, I'd expect nausiating.

Ignited Steel - I played the first two battles, and even though it's a completely different feel, I'd much rather play Into the Breach. The problem is that it gives you different weapons, with some stats, but nothing at all to show how they work. One weapon you start off with jumps your mech, and after the first battle, you are instructed to replace it with a flamethrower. The text description says nothing about the range of the attack of either, nor how far the pushback of the jump is. The tooltips also just run off the side of the screen sometimes.

Spirits of the Hellements - Silly name aside, there are a number of things I like here. It seems like there are a manageable number of towers, the upgrade paths are pretty interesting, and the bonuses you get to choose from after each major wave added some nice options. I don't know how much depth there is, but I like what I see. Also, we need more hex grids

Meteora - Buggy with a controller. Needed to start the game, then plug my controller in once in game. I can't play this game, because I can't tell the difference between health asteroid you need to collect, and damage asteroids that kill you.

Ninja Issen - This could be really good, but it needs some work. The feedback when you get hit is really lacking. The sound effects are way to similar to when you attack enemies, and there isn't a good visual indicator, if any. The jumping controls also are wonky. At the boss, there are platforms you can jump through, and holding a direction while jump attacking there resulted in really stuttery movement. The level is also not great. They tell you to use shuriken in two places. One where there's nothing to use it on, and the other on an elevator where you can't hit anything because it moves too fast.

Hailing from the Abyss - This is not a good rhythm game. The note charts were really out of sync with the song. Even ignoring the potentially bad calibration (which you can't adjust manually), the note charts would randomly be half a beat off from the music. The charts themselves were much harder than I expected, with even the easiest one having some eighth note sequences, and the hardest having some surprisingly long runs of 16ths. Combine that with half the note scroll getting covered randomly, and I think it'll be way too hard for someone new to rhythm games. Also, the game doesn't do full screen well, and changes the monitor resolution to 1920x1080, with no option to change it.

Jetman - Not bad, but not a game I'm excited by. For a one button game, it was decent. It certainly did a few neat things with the concept, where your jump and attacks are one in the same, so you have to charge it up accordingly. I got annoyed at the end of level rewards, because the game expects you to grind for specific end of level rewards, and it's basically random what you get.

Imp of the Sun - Incan (?) inspired metroidvania. I haven't played it, but it looks inspired by Hollow Knight in a number of ways. I didn't get very far before softlocking myself, presumably because I didn't do what the game said to.

Graze Counter - Bullet hell shmup with a strong emphasis on grazing bullets. It's a common scoring mechanic, but I don't think I've seen a game so directly turn grazing into a defensive/offensive tool. There's a lot of options they could add to the game between different characters, and skill cards. The pacifist mode is a cool addition too.

Solbane - Twinstick shmup without controller support. The game is very slow, which is fine but not my thing. The boss I fought has particle effects that telegraph its attacks, but only sometimes are they real. I attempted the boss several times, I died each time because I moved out of the telegraphed attack, and it attacked the other side of the screen. Total bs

Skeleton Crew - (coop?) adventure platformer. It kinda reminds me of Trine, with how it seems like they have character specific traversal abilities, and how floaty the platforming is. I ran into a bug where my controller would gently pulse a couple times a second, no matter what was going on, but it would stop on the pause screen.

The Machine that Breathes - 2d sci-fi horror(?) game. In what little I played of it, structurally it reminded me of the old Resident Evil games. It's not for me, but I think it's a game I'd enjoy watching an LP of.

Gatewalkers - Played several hands of Mahjong on my phone waiting in a loading screen before giving up on it.

Small Saga - Very cute jrpg. I really liked the lore they built up about people, but Verm's angst was offputting. I always apprecitate it when devs are willing to put in pillar and letter boxing to ensure uniform pixel size. As a side note, I liked how they did sprite scaling in scenes with depth. Environment is all made with their depth in mind, character sprites are just scaled, but their shadows seems to be recalculated with full sized pixels. Definitely looking forward to the full game.