Steam Next Fest demo impressions

StoryArcana - An anime-styled Harry-Potter-'em-up. Great presentation but terrible combat. I posted on the Steam discussion page thing about it.

Kingdom Gun - Risk of Rain meets Enter The Gungeon with *gorgeous* pixel art. Choose from one of three characters, each with their own unique starting gun and special skills. Explore massive levels to collect guns (unfortunately you can only hold 2 at once) and upgrades, find an artifact, then activate a teleporter and battle an enormous boss.

Plague Breaker - pretty fun little Dead Cells-alike. You can choose between 5 pre made classes (only 2 in the demo) or build a custom class from every item and ability you've found in previous runs, but you have to stay within a pre-set gold budget.

IRA - A fun Hades-alike with gorgeous hand-drawn art. Unlike Hades, combat is exclusively ranged, with your character using an assortment of different bows that fire different kinds of arrows - hints of Enter the Gungeon. Also, your character levels up and unlocks perks, and as they do, a "chaos gauge" builds up, giving every enemy a permanent buff when it's completely filled, a la Curse of the Dead Gods.

Unsighted - A fun top-down-view Metroidvania with Soulslike combat and extremely detailed and gorgeous pixel art. You control an amnesiac gynoid who explores a ruined high-tech city in search of her lost memories, battling rogue robots. You rescue a dog who you take as a pet. They assist you in combat, but also need to be fed (thankfully food for them drops constantly from everything) and to take naps occasionally.

Frontier Hunter: Erza's Wheel of Fortune - a gorgeous looking 2.5D Metroidvania. Takes strong inspiration from Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. Fun combat, kind of a goofy story and neat character enhancement mechanics. You play as the kingdom's top explorer on board a state of the art airship, flying into uncharted territory. Team up with 2 other playable characters, with their own unique equipment and skills, who you can switch between at any time.

Abomi Nation - a pretty neat monster collecting RPG with a good amount of mechanical depth. It's basically Nuzlocke: The Game, but you can turn permadeath off, which is nice. (The dev says that permadeath is "the intended way to play" but nuts to that.)

Super Dungeon Maker - An attempt at a "Mario Maker"-style combination of creation toolset and game, but for Legend of Zelda dungeons (featuring original characters of course). Gameplay is pretty solid, though some of the animations look incomplete. I haven't messed around much with the dungeon building toolset yet.

Pinku Kult: Hex Mortis - A fun "modern fantasy" RPG with a great art style and an intriguing story. People are disappearing left and right in the neon-lit metropolis of Razore City, and a shady corporation hires you to find out why. Spoilers: It's demons! (Don't worry, that's not actually a spoiler.)

Sanctuary Saga Prelude - An interesting turn-based RPG with an "argument" meter that you have to manage, lest your heroes spend more time yelling at each other than fighting the enemy.

Glitched - A strongly Earthbound-inspired turn-based RPG with neat combat mechanics and an intriguing story. The main character of the game gets corrupted by glitches and vanishes, so you, the player, lend your power to the hero's unambitious fry-cook friend, Gus, as he goes on a journey to rescue the former main character, and possibly discover the reason behind the glitches.