This is another metroidvania but compared to the one above it’s rough in many spots, with clunky animations, tutorialization that’s made confusing by the lack of proper mouse/keyboard support, and the parts of its aesthetics that are inspired by Castlevania don’t mesh well with the unique things it brings, giving the impression that the latter were tacked onto the former. It’s neat, but there are too many better metroidvanias you could play.

My almost favorite demo in this event, this is the game that closest felt to me like Return of the Obra Dinn ever since its release in 2018, and that should be enough to tell you if you should play it. Just like that game, in The Case of the Golden Idol each level is a scene, containing numerous clues and living or dead characters, and your goal is to identify every person in the scene and what crime was committed in it leaving no detail untouched. While each level happens in a different place and time, they together tell a story of generational greed and the occult.

Even Obra Dinn’s own creator praised the game, please go play it!

I love when any monster raising sim isn’t just Pokémon and stands out on its own, and luckily Cassette Beasts is unique and refreshing. Honestly, when I got to combat and saw how a cassette player and its buttons are used as a metaphor for the user interface I was convinced I’d already like the game and closed the demo, so I have no idea what’s after that but I’m buying this game for sure.

Hidden object games! I am glad they keep existing no matter what happens to the world. On this one you’re tasked to find hundreds of big and small cats in a castle, visiting all of its rooms and interacting with the scenario to uncover secret kittens. The description mentions it’s also a metroidvania, and while that aspect wasn’t shown in the demo I am so curious to see what that’s about.

A VS-like! That game blew up at the start of this year, so naturally many games replicating its gameplay have come out already, and more are coming soon, and this is one of those.

The twist here is that every character, including you, move like chess pieces, and you can temporarily gain the movements from a different chess piece. This tickles my brain in the same way Crypt of the Necrodancer did, where you needed some hours to instinctively understand how each enemy moves and how to get around them to attack them without getting hit first. A different way of saying that is that I died too quickly in any run I attempted in Chess Survivors. I could use a slower start to better grasp the fundamentals before I start dancing on the grid as a knight.

Curse Crackers is not on Next Fest but I found out about it this week so I decided to play its demo as well. It’s a solid and adorable 2D platformer, with fast-paced movement and many optional and difficult to reach paths from the get-go. I recommend at least watching the trailer because the screenshots aren’t enough to show how tight and fun the platforming can be here.

DoubleShake is a charming 2.5D platformer, with a gorgeous low-poly look and charismatic characters. I’m just now going through Klonoa for the first time and I can see the similarities already, and if those other games are as fun as this one I should probably get to Tomba! and Mischief Makers at some point…

What if you grabbed Sunless Sea, took a tiny bit of gothic horror out, and added a lot of fishing? That’s this game. Oh, it has inventory tetris as well, and I missed that dearly.

The Entropy Centre is a game that tries to imitate everything Portal does: you’re a female character holding a weird sci-fi gun, going through elaborate large-scale puzzles in a secret and rundown facility that mostly evolve handling cubes and dropping them on buttons, guided by a seemingly friendly AI that, if we’re following the patterns here, will eventually try to kill you.

The main gimmick is that you can advance and rewind objects through time, restoring broken bridges or returning blocks to their previous position so you can move forward. Everything else reminds me so much of Portal that between this and that I’d rather replay Portal instead or anything that tries to do its own thing, even if it fails at that, but if you’re not like me this is here for you.

After a Pachinko RPG early this year, we now have a perfectly normal JRPG except for the fact that all battles happen as Tetris matches. I am by no means a Tetris expert, probably played 2 full hours of it in total in my life, so I can’t comment on how accurately it implements its mechanics, but the novel way of doing battles totally clicked with me. You also play Tetris for different reasons during the game, solving environmental puzzles or gathering materials through it, and I’m sure the game will keep finding new ways to keep the mechanic fresh.

Most of us probably saw this game first earlier this year during a Nintendo showcase, and hopefully loved how silly the concept is here.

Every time you get to the main menu you can hear an announcer whisper “Gunbrella…” and that’s already great, but the umbrella part of your tool lets you perform incredible stunts to cross the screen in seconds and dodge enemies or get close to them to land a perfect shot. Super looking forward to this.

Apparently JETT is a game that came out in 2021 that I missed, and it’ll receive a free additional campaign next year. To promote it, the first chapter of the original game was released as a demo here. I’ll say that the premise here completely fascinated me, but the gameplay itself was quite boring, with you navigating a ship across a planet’s surface and feathering the throttle to avoid overheating for a handful of minutes as characters talk and guide you to new destinations.

It made me think of Exo One, a game with a very similar premise but a gameplay that was exhilarating as you used gravity to launch yourself to the skies and away from danger. I need to watch some footage from later levels to see if the ship maneuvering becomes something more involved and something I’d enjoy it or not.

The Knight Witch is an incredible metroidvania, with shmup combat and a little bit of deckbuilding that decides which special abilities you can use during fights, all in a stunningly detailed art style, I strongly recommend it.

In Path of Ra, you’re given puzzle blocks that contain certain scenes and places in them, and you’re tasked to display them in a certain order so that your character can move through them and reach an exit. It is a very unique puzzle that broke my brain way too early as I struggled to fit the pieces in the desired order, and I fear I don’t have enough spatial awareness to beat this game, but I do respect it.

House Flipper was one of my favorite games in 2018, and since then I have tried other “waste hours performing relaxing chores” games to find one that would spark the same flame but no luck so far, and sadly Plow the Snow! wasn’t the one either.

It’s a meditative experience where you clear pathways, parks and more from snow in this little town, taking care not to damage anything with your car. It is fun, but also very monotonous as you only do the one thing, while in House Flipper you had a dozen different and intricate ways to restore a home, and I wish there was more to do here.

My almost almost favorite demo, if you played and liked Recettear then like me you’re cursed to eternally want more games like it. This is like that and it’s checking all the boxes for me… but there’s a slightly long loading time between nearly every little thing you do, not too long on its own but over the course of an entire playthrough will certainly add up and start annoying me, and that puts a hamper on things. Many people are complaining about this same issue on the Steam forums, but with the game so close to launch I don’t believe it’s possible they can fix it in time.

I will be paying close attention to it, hoping that in a future patch that gets fixed so I can lose myself in it.

Maybe my favorite demo in this event, Rhythm Sprout is, in theory, a simple rhythm game controlled with mostly two buttons representing left and right, with a third one to dodge certain notes that appear rarely, with a flow similar to games like Muse Dash and Unbeatable.

But it is very challenging, with the “Normal” difficulty in later levels being harder than “Hard” difficulties in other rhythm games, and it’s one of the reasons I fell in love with it. I’m not that good of a player that I get Perfect in songs all the time in rhythm games, but I do get bored with how some of them take hours to ramp up to a level I can have fun with, so this game seems made for me. It also has a very diverse song list, crossing many different genres and never becoming stale, which I appreciate dearly because there are so many rhythm games I wish I could get into but can’t because their prevalent genre is one I’m not a fan of.

The only thing that bothered me was a level by the end being dedicated to “sugar daddy” jokes, and I worry it’ll delve more into that type of humor detracting from the experience, but I’d still recommend it to any fan of rhythm games.

Minutes into playing this demo I thought of a game I’d played years ago that had the same structure, you searching through news articles and other documents to learn more about bands and their members from a music scene. Looking into that one, called Family, I learned they were made by the same person, and that in between these two they released a third game just like those called Rivals, and it’s amazing to see how the developer’s skills improved from game to game as they realize with more and more accuracy their vision. This type of investigative game is up my alley, so I’m definitely playing this soon.

This is a game that’s been in development for the last 4 years or so. Back in 2021 it got a separate, free demo called Skald: Against the Black Priory - The Prologue and this is a new one, showing updates in gameplay and UI albeit with the same story portion. My experience with old-school CRPGs is very small, but I do know it’s easy for me to get sucked into them and this is no different; the dark writing is incredible and the little the demo shows of encounter design is impressive.

Storyteller is a wonderful game in which you are asked to create tales, using a given title as a prompt and characters and scenes as puzzle pieces to be put together in a logical way that agrees to the prompt. While the starting puzzles are simple as they teach you how to play it, it quickly lets go of your hand and allows you to complete the puzzles in many different ways. In that regard I was reminded of Scribblenauts while I was playing it, in how you could try almost anything you could think of and the game would recognize and accept it; I hope the full game goes deep into that aspect.

In Tentacle Typer you’re a lovecraftian being with a typewriter, and by typing words on it you manifest magic on the real world. When I read its description and saw “text editor RPG” I was immediately drawn to it, but after playing it there doesn’t seem to be much of a purpose to anything you write? The description implies certain words used in the text have different effects, but during the entire demo everything I typed caused the same reaction, which was to simply interact with an object in front of you and do some gag comedy.

As you type more you level up and gain new skills, and near the end you have to fight enemies using your spells as bullets as if the game was a shooter, and maybe that’s where it will all come together in the full release, but if so very little of it will be about the act of writing and it will mostly be a satirical FPS which is not my thing.

Another VS-like, so you know what you’re going to get. I thought the ship movement was a little too fast, accidentally touching enemies many times, so I wish the game was a bit slower. Also, the enemy drops aren’t very noticeable in the middle of the chaos, and often I’d forget they were there so it would be nice if they were larger or had a different color.